3 24 1541 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/04bd778bf8d3ffa35b076661b707433f.mp4 5c35bf301a3d884b94747080ecb258d9 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/01002baffc3296bcd24735a65601216c.pdf 787386436d37731f17e40e9ec600193a PDF Text Text Koehl, Phil Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Vietnam Era Interviewee’s Name: Phil Koehl Length of Interview: (56:37) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Lyndsay Curatolo Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Phil Koehl of Hoffman Estates, Illinois. The interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Phil, to begin with give us some background on yourself. Start out [with] where and when were you born?” I was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1953. The only reason it was Oak Park–– I lived in Chicago–– was because the hospital was across the street from Chicago. Interviewer: “Now, did you grow up in Chicago or did you move around?” Yeah, in Chicago. The Northwest side. Interviewer: “What did your family do for a living when you were a kid?” My dad was a truck driver. Then, my parents got divorced and my stepfather was a carpenter. Then, eventually my mother bought a pet store so I got a job at the pet store. Interviewer: “Was your dad in the service in World War II?” No, after that I think. I’m not very good at this. Interviewer: “Because you have an interesting picture of it––” Yes. He was in Malta and it had to be in the 40s. So, yeah I guess at the end of World War II. He got injured and Princess Elizabeth, at that point, visited him in the hospital. Interviewer: “That might possibly have been a little bit after the war ended–– or at least when it got safe to go travel down the Mediterranean for her.” �I think so, yeah. Interviewer: “That’s a little bit unusual there. Where did you go to high school?” I went to Lane Tech High School. 5,000 guys. My class was 1,100. People who went to Lane go, “I had a dad who went to Lane. Did you know him?” I’m like, “I got 1,100 guys in my class. I didn’t even know all of them.” (1:54). Interviewer: “What year did you graduate?” 1971. Interviewer: “So you’re in high school while the Vietnam War is sort of ebbing and flowing a little bit. How aware were you of all that?” Very aware because I was in ROTC in high school. It was very odd–– every Wednesday we had uniform inspections, so we had to wear our uniform on the bus, all the way to school, and it was very odd. Interviewer: “What kind of responses do you get on the bus or elsewhere?” Both positive and negative. You know, some people were like, “Good for you.” Other people were like, “Baby killer.” It’s like I’m ROTC, I’m a high school student, you know, so it was very odd. At one point we had–– as ROTC the school asked us to stand by all of the fire alarms for the day because this SDS was supposed to come and “free us” from the tyranny of education. Interviewer: “So how did you wind up in ROTC?” It was either that or P.E., and my thought was that I’d rather march around than do push-ups and pull-ups and things like that. Interviewer: “What did the ROTC high school curriculum consist of?” Marching around. We actually had a gun range in the basement of the high school so we–– we had M1s that we took apart and put back together again and things like that. Cleaned them. Knew how to do the nomenclature of guns and things like that. Interviewer: “What sort of people were instructing you?” Current NCOs. We had a couple NCOs who were in charge–– Army. (3:48). �Interviewer: “Did they say anything about anywhere they’d been or what they’d done?” They talked a little bit about it. I mean most of the classes were like 50 guys, so a lot of it was student leaders–– student officers–– who would run us through drills and stuff like that. Occasionally, as I got to be a senior, I got to spend more time with them and would hear stories about where they’d been. I don’t remember them being real proactive about trying to enlist us into the service. Interviewer: “Once you graduated, what did you do?” I went to work and went to work for 70 hours a week at a steel training plant. I learned quickly that I didn’t want to work that hard the rest of my life. I would rather work smart than hard. Interviewer: “70 hours a week?” Yeah. Interviewer: “How was that even legal?” I don’t know. Interviewer: “Did you get overtime?” I did. I did, but you know, I needed the money. I had moved out when I graduated into my own apartment, so I needed the money for rent and everything. Like I said, I soon learned [that] I needed to go to college. (5:12). Interviewer: “Was the draft still going on at the point when you graduated?” I got a number, yeah. Fortunately I never got called up–– I had a fairly high number. Interviewer: “It didn’t last too much longer after ‘71.” It didn’t, yeah. Although, I enlisted in ‘73 and it was still going on. Interviewer: “I think that was right about just at the end because it was something that Nixon did before he went out of office in ‘74, was to end the draft. So the draft was out there but you were not at risk on a level you would have been a couple of years earlier.” �That may be true, but we still got a number. I remember going with a friend and going, “This could be bad.” You didn’t want a real low number even if you weren’t going to go. (6:01). Interviewer: “Now by this time they have the regular lottery in place, it was just done by birthday?” Yes. Interviewer: “In the meantime though, off to college. Where did you go to school or did you go to school?” No I didn’t because I couldn’t. I couldn’t afford it. So, I decided I needed to go to college and I ended up enlisting. Interviewer: “What branch of the service did you choose?” Air Force. Interviewer: “Why the Air Force?” Because their uniforms are blue like my eyes. Honestly, that’s mostly true. I went to one of those recruiting offices that had all of the services and I interviewed all of them. The Army would give me the best deal because I had four years of high school ROTC and they would give me two stripes. [But] I just like the Air Force. [The] Navy, I can’t swim and the Army seemed like walking around a lot and the Air Force seemed kind of cool, so I went with that. They gave me one stripe the moment I came in. Interviewer: “So when do you actually enlist?” I have an odd sense of humor–– I wanted to go in April 1st, but that wasn’t available. I took April 2, 1973. Interviewer: “Then once you enlisted, what happens to you after that?” Apparently–– because I had one stripe–– I had to carry all the documents for all the guys going from Chicago down to Texas where we were getting basic training. At one point we stopped–– I remember this vividly–– we stopped and we were told to stay on the plane and don’t get out, you know. I got these documents and you don’t know what’s going on. One kid got out and he goes, “I gotta go get something to eat.” I go, “No. You can’t. I got your stuff.” He goes, “I’ll be back.” �I sweated the whole time. He finally got back just at the last moment and I’m thinking, “I would have gotten in trouble if he had not come back because I had all of these documents.” (8:15). Interviewer: “Yeah. You would have lost him already.” Yes. It was horrible. I had one day in–– an hour in–– and I’m already losing people. That’s not a good thing. Interviewer: “Where are they doing the training?” Down in Texas at Lackland. Interviewer: “So Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio?” San Antonio, yeah. Interviewer: “What sort of reception do you get when you arrive at Lackland?” Everybody’s on the bus, everybody goes into a classroom, nobody knows what-the-heck is going on. They talk to us, yell at us, and everything else. I don’t think it was like until two-in-themorning or something before we finally got to bed. You know, to our dorm or barracks and got into bed. It was not a good day. Interviewer: “Now, were you being processed or were you just being lectured to?” Lectured too, I think. Yeah, because we didn’t even get uniforms or anything until the next couple days. So it was just them telling us what we need to do, what we’re supposed to do, blah blah blah. All the rules and I’m like, “Okay.” We’re all sitting there–– one, very tired and two, kind of scared because it’s the unknown. Interviewer: “In the Army and the Marines they would do a variety of unpleasant things to people when they first got there. Including [putting] them in bed at four and getting them up at six or something like that. So, what happens to you in the next couple of days?” From my experience, and the people I know, the Air Force is a little milder than the Army and the Marines. We went to bed at about two and then we got up at six. Interviewer: “Then you get haircuts, uniforms?” (10:03). Oh, yes. Haircuts. Haircuts and then uniforms. �Interviewer: “1973 haircuts–– that might have generated a lot of hair.” Most of the guys had hair until they got through the barbershop. Then it was just bald and I don’t think that’s a good look for anybody. We were not a pretty group. Interviewer: “Yeah, but you all kind of look alike at that point.” We did. Well, now that’s the point, I guess. Everybody’s supposed to look alike, you know? Interviewer: “Now, when you’re there did they do any kind of aptitude testing or had that all been done ahead of time?” That had been done ahead of time. Interviewer: “When you enlisted were you allowed to pick any kind of training specializations or––” Yeah. After the aptitude tests they said, “Here’s your areas that you’re strong in.” I have to admit, my recruiter lied to me. I’m probably the only one that's ever happened too. But he said, “Yeah. Pick anything you want.” I go, “This radio communications analysis specialist sounds kind of cool, but I’ve got family in Arizona. Are the bases in Arizona?” “Oh yeah. We have a lot of Air Force Bases in Arizona.” Well, if you’re a radio communications analysis specialist there’s no bases in Arizona that you’re going to go to. So, oh well. Interviewer: “Now what is the actual basic training for the Air Force like at that point?” Up at six, go to breakfast and then do exercises or marching or classes. You know, military customs, military courtesies, those kinds of things. Then lunch, then dinner, and then after dinner we spent most of the time polishing our shoes and making sure everything was straight in our locker. (12:07). Interviewer: “Do they come and inspect the barracks and your cots and all of that?” Yes, they did. Unbeknownst to my drill instructor, he didn’t know–– training instructor is what we called them–– he didn’t know that I had one stripe. I wasn’t going to say anything because I assumed they know everything and they know what’s going on, so I didn’t say a word. But, I did end up being assigned as squad leader and so I was kind of responsible for helping the eight or ten guys in my squad make sure everything was okay. One of the biggest things was when you buy clothes, you get those little “inspected by” tags. Well, uniforms are the same way. They have those in there and we were told specifically you had to get all of those out, you know. One day I �went through the whole squad–– and they kept finding these things, the training instructors. Every time they went through they found these things and I’m like, “This is crazy.” So, I specifically went through every guy’s stuff–– every pocket–– and there was none. The training instructor comes in [and on] the first guy they find six and I’m going, “No. They weren’t there before.” He goes, “What are you saying? Are you calling me a liar?” I go, “No. I’m just saying they weren’t there before because I checked them all.” I was a bit of a challenge during the training instruction. Interviewer: “Now do you get any instruction that really has anything to do with the Air Force in terms of flying and aircraft?” No. It’s basically just customs and traditions and the “rules of the road” kind of thing. Nothing related to flying and/or our job–– at that point in basic training. (14:02). Interviewer: “What did they do with people when they screwed up?” They’d have to do extra drill or they’d get extra KP. They’d have to work in the kitchen more, things like that. Like I said, the Air Force was absolutely mild compared to everything else. I might have screwed up once–– kind of. There was another squadron that was next to us and they were our “sister squadron.” There was always a competition between us and them–– who was the best. You had to put your shoes below your bunk and they had to be in a perfect line with the post of the bunk, so that if you put a board at the corner of the bunk, all of the toes of the shoes had to touch. But, allegedly, we weren’t supposed to have a board–– but we did because that’s how we lined up our shoes. We had to hide it whenever the other inspector came in. Well one day, unfortunately, he showed up a little earlier than I expected. I was holding this eight-foot, one-by-four, board in the middle of the room and I knew I was going to get in trouble if he saw me with it, so I ran out the fire door and went running down the stairs–– not knowing what I was going to do with this board. Right at the bottom of the stairs was our “sister’s” squad leader and he’s like, “Where are you going with that?” So, they yelled at me. I think they thought it was funny more than anything else, although they didn’t let that on to me. But, I just got yelled at. Interviewer: “How long did basic last?” It was eight weeks. Is that right? Interviewer: “That was standard in the Army at that point.” Six weeks. It was shorter than everything else, and I think that’s part of the reason I picked the Air Force too. They have the shortest basic training [so] I’m thinking that’s a good deal. (16:15). �Interviewer: “Once you complete basic training, what do they do with you?” Again, probably I’m atypical, but I waited around before I could go to tech school. I was on my way to tech school but tech school wasn’t ready yet for me. I ended up cleaning and painting and doing other tasks that needed to be done on the base for about two or three weeks, then I went to my tech school. Interviewer: “And where was that?” Goodfellow, Texas. Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. Interviewer: “Where in the state is San Angelo?” It’s the heart of West Texas. Interviewer: “So pretty much in the middle of nowhere?” The middle of nowhere. Maybe about two hours from Mexico. Interviewer: “Okay. How big was the base in terms of how many people do you think were there?” I’d be surprised [if] it were more than a thousand. I mean, it was small. Interviewer: “What kind of technical training were you getting there?” Our training was broken up into a nine-week section and a twelve-week section for a total of 21weeks. The first section was basic stuff because what they were doing at that point was doing our security clearances. What happened is–– they were doing our security clearances–– so it gave the FBI, or whoever was doing those, time to figure that out. At the end of nine-weeks, if you passed, then you went on to the next section. If you didn’t [in] the middle of the night you were gone. (18:04). Interviewer: “How are they actually filling the nine-weeks?” Really basic stuff. It’s just basic stuff, I don’t know. It was confidential but one of the things was typing. We had to type, and I didn’t know how to type, and the way the Air Force teaches you how to type is the keys on the typewriter had no letters and there’s a chart up on the wall. All you can do is just put your fingers on there and look up at the chart and hope your fingers are going where the chart is telling you they’re supposed to go. �Interviewer: “Did that work?” Yes. No, clearly it did. Yeah. It worked really well because I learned how to type. The other thing that happened too is–– typing was at the end of the day, so if you knew how to type you got to go drinking with everybody else. If you didn’t know how to type, you sat there for as many weeks as it took you before you could get 60-words a minute. Interviewer: “Aside from typing, were they teaching you sort of technical things relating to radios or communications or that kind of stuff?” Sure. Honestly, I don’t even remember what they thought of–– they taught us code and things like that. We had to learn morse code and things like that, so some of that was the basic stuff, you know. Of course, I had been a boy scout so I knew some of those already. Some are like, “SOS,” at least I knew it. We learned some of those kinds of things. (20:06). Interviewer: “Was there ever actually an occasion to use morse code once you were on duty anywhere?” What I did was top-secret, so I don’t know. I know it’s probably declassified at this point but it makes me uncomfortable talking about it and being specific. Interviewer: “That’s still a fairly broad kind of question.” Well, I can tell you–– and this tells you a little bit about the service–– I can tell you to this day verbatim, exactly what my job description was. The unclassified version. I would bet that if you look back 48-years or whatever it was and look it up, I’ll get it word for word. I monitored Air Force communications to ensure that there were no security leaks or compromises with the enemy. That’s not what I did, but that’s the story. Interviewer: “You basically spend nine-weeks of what is sort-of warm-up and basic skills and waiting you out. Now, you move onto your twelve weeks. Is this stuff that is gearing you toward that very specific job?” Yes. Yeah. That very specific job. By the time you get out of that 21-weeks, you’re ready to go. Interviewer: “What would you do when you were not training?” There was a lot of drinking. The nice thing about Texas is there’s some really great steakhouses. We loved going into the steakhouses. There was a lake nearby that we went too. One time a couple guys and I went down to Mexico for some souvenirs. Well one guy wanted to get–– �wanted to be in a relationship with a young lady for a short period of time. We also went camping, things like that, as a group. (22:18). Interviewer: “How did the people in the community view the servicemen on the base?” I think they liked us because we had money–– a lot of disposable income–– and we spent it. Because we had a place to live and we had food, so it's okay. Interviewer: “So whatever else you had you just spent––” Well then we were young and stupid and it’s like, “Yeah. Let’s go.” Interviewer: “Did some of the guys have cars?” I did. Yeah, some guys did and most didn’t. My roommate had a motorcycle. Interviewer: “Now if you think back at the time you spent in the various stages of training, are there other things that kind of stand out in your memory about those experiences?” To be honest, other than typing, I don’t even remember what they taught us. I do know that, as much as the 21-weeks were supposed to get you ready, you got to the job on your first base and you’re like, “They didn’t teach me this.” It’s like, “Okay.” You had to learn stuff but I got a basic understanding of what I was supposed to do. Interviewer: “In your case, you finish the twelve-week cycle–– where do they send you?” Well–– I’m gonna brag a little bit–– for the 21-weeks, we had a test every Friday. My average at the end of the 21-weeks was 98.54, so I was top of the class. Because I was top of the class, I got my choice. They did say, “You could go to Vietnam or you could go to Alaska or you could go to Florida or England.” I was like, “This is a no-brainer. I’m taking England.” They speak our language, it’s a foreign country–– you’re going to pay to fly me over? Party on. Let’s go. (24:25). Interviewer: “Can you say where in England you were based?” I was based at RAF Chicksands, which is in Chicksands–– which is near Shefford–– which is about 50 miles north of London. Interviewer: “Is this an area that–– a place that–– had been an air base during World War II or was it a newer facility?” �Okay. I was in the Air Force. In the four bases I was at, only one had a plane and that was a Cessna that the base commander used. I was in intelligence and so where I was wasn’t where the planes were. Interviewer: “What kind of living quarters and facilities did you have there?” We had barracks. Two guys to a room–– it had to be ten-by-ten. It couldn’t have been much more than that. Interviewer: “What was the routine like there?” The worst schedule I’ve ever had. Because we were intelligence and we had to man the base 24hours a day, 365–– we were on a rotating schedule. We worked four swing shifts. Took 24-hours off, then four midnight shifts, took 24-hours off. Then did four day shifts and then had 96 hours off. Repeat. Interviewer: “How many people were working a shift or to what extent were you on your own?” No. There were four flights–– Air Force flights–– abel, baker, charlie, and dog. One of them was doing one of each one of the three shifts and then one was off. I was on baker flight. (26:22). Interviewer: “When you were off, what did you do?” There might have been some drinking. We did a lot of things. The base was really good because it was just intelligence–– I mean that was our main focus and so they fed us incredibly well. Because we were on such a weird shift schedule, the mess hall was open all of the time. You could go at midnight and get like an omelette bar. Or if you wanted a steak, you could get a steak. It was just really good food–– and always available. The base would open things up like the movie theater because we’d get off at midnight–– especially that last one where you got 24hours to go. You don’t want to go to sleep right away because then you’re going to wake up at eight in the morning and then have to go to work at midnight–– that didn’t work out well. What we did was–– they would open up the theater [so] we could go watch movies. The bowling alley was open and there was a wreck hall–– all sorts of things like that on base that we could do. Interviewer: “Was this an all American base?” Yes. �Interviewer: “But there must have been a fair number of you there if they had all those kinds of facilities.” Yes. Interviewer: “Well there are no planes so you think, ‘Okay.’ Alright, that’s just a big operation.” Yeah. I would bet there were probably 300 people just on my flight. Then you’ve got a lot of support people as well, so. Interviewer: “Now would you, on the time off, was that–– would you get enough time off to go into London or anything like that?” Yeah. We did. Especially because we had that 96-hours off at the end, we had a chance to do a lot of stuff. Plus, we had our regular leave–– about 30 days of leave. You could take that in one big chunk–– which one year I did and two buddies and I rented a VW Bus/Camper and drove throughout Europe. (28:39). Interviewer: “So did you rent it in England and have to drive on the wrong side and then have to take it out of Europe with you?” Yeah. The hardest part of driving on the wrong side, which I had a car on base as well, the hardest part for me at least was backing out of a parking space and making sure I was in the right lane. Other than that, you kind of get used to it. Interviewer: “Then [you] go over to Europe and they’re driving on the right side of the road again.” It’s very complicated. There might have been one time when–– I think we were in Brussels or something–– that maybe I went in the tram lane rather than a car lane because I didn’t read the signs and I didn’t know. Maybe one time I was in a bike lane–– you know, there were a lot of things. Interviewer: “But did you hit anybody?” I did not hit anybody. Interviewer: “There you go. So how long were you based in England?” �I was there for three years. Interviewer: “Did you stay on that same base time or did you move around?” I did. The same base. In fact, it was a two-year assignment and then I just extended it because I was having such a great time. I got to know a lot of the locals, you know. We could go to the pubs and stuff in the town around us, so I got to know a lot of people. Interviewer: “What are the dates for when you go to England and when you leave?” It would have been December of ‘73 through December of ‘76. (30:11). Interviewer: “A bunch of different things are going on in our country–– in the world–– at that time. There’s the end of the Vietnam War, there’s all the Watergate and Nixon stuff, and all of that kind of thing. Then you get the bicentennial in 1976. To what extent did any of that stuff resonate with where you were?” I think they tried to make things as normal as possible. I mean, it’s a military base, so the Watergate thing, it was like, “Let’s not deal with that.” But the bicentennial–– we had a big celebration. It was kind of interesting because then the town people love to come on the base and see the fireworks and see us playing baseball and those kinds of things. Interviewer: “Of course, you were celebrating independence from England–– but they’ve gotten over it?” Yes. Yes. In fact, one time I was in Ireland in this little pub and there had to be maybe, at most, 20 people could have been in this pub. My two buddies and I were there and we were talking and as soon as we started talking the Irish guys were like, “Oh, Yanks.” We’re going, “Yeah we are.” He goes, “Because you guys are the greatest.” I go, “What made us the greatest that goes on during the Great War?” “You guys would go over and fly and bomb in the middle of the day. You didn’t care, but those damn English, they’d sneak over there at night.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” I don’t think I had any responsibility for that but “Go Yanks.” Interviewer: “You’re there on a Cold War mission, essentially?” Yes. Interviewer: “Did you have any actual alerts or did you run drills periodically for what would happen if X or Y was going on?” �Yeah. It was the military, you’ve got to have drills. I think that’s the reason I didn’t re-enlist. There was nothing worse than getting off a day shift, maybe going into the pub and having more than a few pints of beer–– and they had really good beer–– and then coming back, going to sleep at midnight, and then [at] 2a.m. the alarms go off and you have to go up to the compound for an inspection and a drill–– but it was really just a uniform inspection. Then you’re up there from like two until like four or four-thirty, and you have to go back to work at eight. It’s like, “Now what?” [You’d] just go over to the mess hall and have something to eat and hang around. So, yeah. We had a lot of drills. (33:02). Interviewer: “Were there any situations where you really didn’t know what was going on or thought this might be something bigger?” We always thought it was something, but after a while–– I guess in the beginning we did–– [but] after a while you go, “Okay. Another uniform inspection.” But, the military trained you that we’re practicing because it could happen, so you’re always like maybe this is a drill and maybe not. You just never knew. Interviewer: “During the course of time you were there, did you get any promotions?” Yes. I ended up being a Sergeant. Interviewer: “For what grade of Sergeant? Just the lowest level––” E3. I came in as an E1 but see–– and here’s a problem–– at that point, because Vietnam was ending promotions were slowing down. So, it took longer for you to get them. I got it as quick as I could. I don’t think I was behind, but I wasn’t really motivated to do anything special. Interviewer: “Did you work with officers much at all or were you largely with a small group of enlisted?” Mostly enlisted. For our baker flight, we had a flight commander who was a second Lieutenant. [That] was interesting because he was almost as young as we were, so it was interesting. But we had to deal with the base commander because he was a weirdo. He would sit in his office with binoculars and watch people going up to the compound–– going up to work–– and if he thought your hair was too long, he would send the SPs to go get you and take you to the barbershop. (35:05). Interviewer: “The SPs–– that’s security police?” Security police, yeah. MPs–– �Interviewer: “MPs is the Army––” Yeah. We changed names. Interviewer: “Do you remember what rank he was?” He was a Colonel–– Colonel George. I don’t know his last name but Colonel George was his name and he was a haircut fanatic. Interviewer: “Well, he may not have had that much else to do.” That could be true. I mean, we did what we were supposed to do and so I don’t know that he really had much to do. Interviewer: “Did you have a group of more senior NCOs who were kind of almost permanent staff there or were most of you rotating in-and-out like you?” Mostly everybody was rotating into them. There were some day-shift people, but even they rotated in-and-out. We called them “day ladies.” Interviewer: “Were there any women personnel in the base?” Yes. Yeah. Not a lot. On our flight of 300 I would say maybe 40/50. Interviewer: “Did they limit what kinds of jobs they could have?” No. They were the same as us at that point. Interviewer: “Do you have any sense of how they were treated or how they got along with the male personnel?” [They] got along very well with me. No, they got along really well with everybody. I think it still was a pretty sexist environment, and maybe they got harassed a little bit more than the guys did. I was thinking of one example about it. If they were new and stuff, one of the NCOs would have them do the EMHo report. It’s like, “Hey, go around and check with all the guys what the EMHO status is.” [They’re] like, “Okay.” So they’d go around and have everybody give them what was “Early Morning Hard-On.” That was the report. So, you’d get things like, “Fine” or “hard today” or “six and going.” Everyone would give different things, and we could just be laughing. We did a lot of goofy things–– not just to the girls because in an eight-hour shift, there was not always eight-hours of activity. Especially midnight. Especially midnight on Christmas or �New Year’s, when the world is kind of sleeping. There’s not a lot going on. So we would do all sorts of goofy things. We had printer paper–– back in the old days–– with the edges with the holes in them that you could rip off. So, you rip those off and you get about 20 feet of that. Then you put a paperclip in one of the holes and make a hook out of the paperclip. Then, when somebody is walking by, you clip it in the back of their belt loop and then they go walking away with 30 feet of paper following them. It’s that kind of stuff that we just tried to entertain ourselves with. (38:39). Interviewer: “Did you ever do anything working with any of the NATO allies at all or the British?” Yes. We were good with the Brits mostly–– we were in their country. I don’t know if anybody else did anything else–– again being [in] security, you only did what you needed to know, so they weren’t going to tell you anything else. I dealt with the Brits, that’s what I know. I don’t know if we dealt with everyone else. Interviewer: “To think back about that time that you spent in England, are there other particular memories that stand out for you–– that you’re allowed to share?” I remember–– one of the things we had to do on midnight shifts is people had burn detail. Everything in that building got burned, nothing went out. Every piece of paper. If you had a Kleenex, it would get burned. So, one of the things midnight shift did was all these bags of accumulated paper and we would have to burn them. Then, not only burn them, but then clean out the furnace and make sure there were no scraps of paper that might have had some code or some magic message on it. That was annoying. Some of the things on the base were kind of normal. I ended up getting involved with the boy scouts and I was the boy scout leader for the troop on base. Then, one of the guys from the town, who was the scout master of the English troop, was my assistant. I was his assistant for [his] troop in town. It was nice, we had an exchange and stuff. It was nice. I learned how to ski in Scotland–– you know, one of those 96hour days or 96-hour periods. 30 of us from the same flight took a bus up to Scotland and would learn how to ski. So, we did a lot of traveling and stuff–– it was nice. (41:03). Interviewer: “And the British people generally liked you or?” They liked their income. The guys did not like the fact that some of their women liked us and wanted to get married to us so we could bring them back here. There was a little bit of grief there. I was telling a friend of mine a story last night. I went to this one pub–– always went to this one pub–– and back in those days they were on World War II hours where they would open up for lunch, eleven to two, and then they would close so the factory workers would go back, and then they’d open back up again seven to ten–– and then they were done. I spent a lot of time �there from seven to ten when I could during days. I got to know a bunch of the guys and it wasn’t until a year after I'd been going there, that ten o’clock came and the pub owner, Mike, is like, “Everybody hussle out.” He turns to me and goes, “Kid,”–– they’d called me the Chicago kid because I was from Chicago–– he goes, “Kid. Just sit there and drink your drink.” I go, “Okay” and I’m thinking there’s some weird tradition or something and I’m going to get in trouble here. He shuffles everybody out except for like three of the local guys–– regulars–– turns the lights off, locks the door, and goes, “If the bobby’s come just tell him you’re finishing that one up.” I go, “Oh, okay.” Well, we sat there until three o’clock in the morning, and that happened all the time–- if you were “okay.” It took me a year before they accepted me and said [I] can hang around. I mean it was a great experience. If I was the ruler of the world, I think every kid who graduates high school should have to go to a foreign country for a year. I don’t care if it’s Peace Corps or religious event or service or whatever, just to get that exposure. I think it’s a good experience. (43:20). Interviewer: “At what point–– I mean, did you ever consider actually staying in?” No. I think it was those goofy drills that just drove me crazy. It’s just like I don’t care if my shoes are shined or not, you know? Interviewer: “Was that still an issue on that base? Did you still have to go through all that spit and polish stuff?” A little bit, but because we were intelligence they were pretty lax. We didn’t have a lot of inspections. In fact, I remember in our dorm we could hire a maid, so the whole floor hired this maid and she came and cleaned our rooms. Interviewer: “But you did extend for a year?” Well yes–– at that base. Yeah, because it was like why do I want to go somewhere else? I’m having a good time here. Interviewer: “Since you still had time left on your enlistment, it was just a question of staying there or going somewhere else.” Yeah. In fact, I actually got out four months early because I should have gone till April but I got out in December because I got there in December. I stayed for two years and then extended for one year. Rather than extending me for four months they said, “See you later.” Interviewer: “Did you go back to the States at all during your time over there?” �I did not. A lot of the guys did. They’d go home for Christmas or whatever, but my attitude was I’m in England. I don’t know when I’m ever going to come back here. Chicago is always going to be there–– I’m going to go back and live there. So, I took the time–– all of the leave–– and traveled; Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, wherever. Any chance I could get. One time–– a friend and I had the same birthday–– and he goes, “Where do you want to go for our birthday?” I go, “Brussels.” He goes, “Okay.” So, we took the weekend and went to Brussels for our birthday. It was just that easy. (45:35). Interviewer: “How good was the dollar at that point? I mean how far did your money go?” Far enough. I think the pound was about two bucks. I think when I first got there it was about two-fifty per pound, and then I think it got down to less than two bucks by the time I left. Interviewer: “And as you went to different countries could they usually tell you were U.S. Military with haircuts and all of that?” Yes. Yeah, generally they could. Although, we had to be careful while traveling. Especially because of our clearance. We couldn’t go over or into any country that was hostile to the United States–– we had to be real careful. Interviewer: “So you’re basically in Western Europe–– but did you get to Switzerland?” Yeah. We went to Switzerland. I went to Switzerland [and] Austria. Interviewer: “Did you get to Berlin?” No–– couldn’t. Interviewer: “Well, you could go to West Berlin but that would get more complicated.” Yeah, no. Berlin was off the list. Interviewer: “Now, you kind of get to 1976––” In fact, I remember this. We could travel on our military ID and we didn’t need a passport, but we were highly encouraged to get a passport so that people couldn’t tell that we were military. One time, I was going to take a picture in my uniform for the passport and they were like, “Nope. Not happening. Put on civilian clothes.” So, we did. (47:29). �Interviewer: “Did you notice at any place, any kind of leftover counterculture hostility to military or anti-war stuff?” No. I don’t remember any of that. Interviewer: “Well it didn’t affect Europeans the way it did us to begin with–– it wasn’t their war.” No. Most everybody was pretty friendly and helpful. I remember in France with the VW Bus–– this was just towards the end of the trip, you know we had made a great circle, we were coming back. We’re in the middle of France somewhere and the engine blew. Of course, the other two guys and I didn’t speak that much French–– none, we’re just ugly Americans. So we’re at the side of the road in this VW Bus and there’s oil all over the place and this one couple stopped and the guy came out. My two friends are trying to explain to him that they think we blew a rod or something in the engine. He’s looking at it and he goes, “Oh, oui-oui oil.” They’re going, “No. No, I don’t think it’s oil.” I was talking to the wife and I was trying to figure out how to tell her it was the engine instead. Finally, I said, “Engine kapu.” She goes, “Oh. Oui-oui kaput.” Then she explained to her husband what had happened–– the engine ca-put. The weird thing was, they spoke English. I mean, they knew English but they didn’t feel comfortable speaking it. I asked him, “Would you take me to a phone so we could get a tow-truck?” You know, “Oui-oui.” I sat in the back of their car and they would talk to each other in French and confer, and then they would ask me a question in English. Then I’d give them a question and they’d confer again and so they were really nice. They took me to a pub–– or a bar–– and we got a tow-truck to come. Then, they found us a bed-and-breakfast to stay at. The people at the bread-and-breakfast were incredibly helpful, you know, calling the repair shop, calling the automobile club to say we need another vehicle. I mean so yeah, I think people were really friendly towards us. (50:03). Interviewer: “Because they were also in the French provinces and in the provinces they’re often nicer than they are in Paris.” Yes. I got stuck in an elevator in Paris once, but people there were friendly, although they did say it would take three hours for somebody to come and repair the elevator. I don’t think that was hostility, I think it was just the repair guy lived out in the suburbs or something. Interviewer: “Anything else from the European trip here that you can throw in?” I have many stories–– most of them–– you know, it was just such a great time traveling with the friends and experiences that I’ll remember forever. �Interviewer: “So, you get finished. Were you able to negotiate the four-months early out or did they just offer that?” That’s pretty standard. Interviewer: “Then when you get out, what do you do?” A couple of the guys said, “When you get out, you can apply for unemployment.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” They’re like, “You can get unemployment because you’re––” I go, “Really? Okay.” So I applied for unemployment and it bothered me that I was doing it, but at the same time I was like I can sit around and watch TV at home and you’re going to send me a check for doing nothing? I mean it was really hard to say that [it] doesn’t make sense. I did that for a while, but in the meantime I was really waiting for college to start. I ended up going to college then. Interviewer: “Where did you go to college?” I started at University of Illinois - Chicago [and] hated it. It was way too big, a lecture hall with 300 people with a professor about that size at the bottom of the hall. I always felt that you could have died and nobody would have noticed you, unless you actually slumped over into the aisle. I didn’t like that. I went there for a year and then I transferred to George Williams College which is a smaller university. In the meantime I had no clue what I wanted to do, so I went to the VA because I knew they had career counseling. They go, “You should be an outdoor recreation guy.” I go, “Oh, okay.” I started kind of doing that and I was thinking that I don’t know I want to be outdoors when it’s 30 degrees. So, I ended up moving into social work. (52:55). Interviewer: “Did you wind up with a career as a social worker?” Yes. Yes, and the VA helped me with my tuition and books and all that kind of stuff. I ended up graduating with a master’s degree in social work and I became a school social worker and had a career doing that. Interviewer: “Are you with Chicago Public Schools?” No. Suburban high schools. Interviewer: “And which suburbs were you in?” I was in Roselle, Wilmette, Wheeling, Mount. Prospect. �Interviewer: “And when do you retire?” I retired in 2010. Interviewer: “These days, you spend a lot of time on a boat?” I do. Yeah. I retired early because I had just had it. I was done. I retired earlier than I should have. Retirement is such a weird thing because it’s like why are you retiring when you’re too old and not in the shape you were in when you were eighteen to do stuff. I retired early thinking I would maximize my time. Ended up–– a couple years ago–– I bought a boat, so I spend a lot of time on my boat now. (54:19). Interviewer: “At the beginning of the interview you said something about not being able to swim.” Yes. Interviewer: “How do you go from not being able to swim to living on a boat?” Yeah–– a good point. My previous boat was a sixteen-foot canoe with a trolling motor, and so I had a farm that I used as a getaway when I was working. Then, when I retired I didn’t have any reason to get away and so I sold the farm and I had this chunk of money. I thought, I could do the adult thing and invest it or I could buy a winter house, or I could buy a lake house. I couldn’t find any lake houses that I liked and so–– because I’m not a morning person and I don’t like sunrises, I like sunsets–– I couldn’t find anything on the right side of the lake that I could do. One guy had a boat and I thought, “Ta-da.” If I had a boat I could go see the sunset anywhere and so I bought a boat. Before I did it, I called my two best friends and I went, “Yeah. I can’t swim–– 16 foot canoe. Thinking about buying a big boat, what do you think?” They’re going, “Yeah, good idea.” I was hoping my friends would have better sense than I did but really they know me well. Interviewer: “But you still don’t swim?” No. I’m like a rock, you know. I mean I have taken swimming lessons and it’s like, “Okay. Just grab your knees and we’ll do the jellyfish float and you’ll just float up to the top.” Well after about three or four minutes on the bottom I’m going, “This ain’t working. I’m done with this.” Interviewer: “But no fear of water in the meantime?” Well–– no. Not if I got a boat around. No, I tend to wear my life jacket all the time, just because. �Interviewer: “While you could not devote state secrets, you could tell us quite a bit about what your life in the military was like and that’s really what we’re doing these things for. So, I would like to thank you for sharing the story today.” You’re welcome. (56:37). � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KoehlP2327V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Koehl, Philip C. II Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-08 Title A name given to the resource Koehl, Philip (Interview transcript and video), 2019 Description An account of the resource Philip Koehl was born in 1953 in Oak Park, Illinois. Koehl grew up with his family in the Northwest side of Chicago. Koehl’s father was a truck driver, his stepfather a carpenter, and his mother owned a pet store which Koehl eventually got a job at. After graduating from Lane Tech High School, where he participated in ROTC, in 1971, Koehl then got a job working at a steel training plant. However, Koehl eventually enlisted in the Air Force April 2, 1973. Basic training took place at Lackland air base in San Antonio, Texas. It was after this training when Koehl went down to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas and began receiving specialized training for his position as a radio communications analysis specialist. After finishing technical training Koehl was given the opportunity to travel to a variety of different locations and ended up at Chicksand Air Force Base in England. Koehl stayed here until April of 1974 when he was discharged from the service. Upon his leave, Koehl returned to school and got his Master of Social Work. He then worked as a social worker for his career up until his retirement in 2010. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5cf34ddb3b011bea52c5511a67db511d.mp4 aec15bb9a4892b3ff6a7bf9419473905 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b4595ee4512d7f0846da4f96f7f90bcf.pdf 9d866f0def68f3cbe9713cef131759b6 PDF Text Text Kenyon, Steve Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Gulf War/ Bosnia/ Afghanistan Interviewee’s Name: Steve Kenyon Length of Interview: (1:01:32) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “We’re on.” I should be looking at you right, not the camera? Okay. Interviewer: “Okay, we’re talking today with Steve Kenyon of Grand Rapids, Michigan. We are at the 2017 LZ Michigan event sponsored by WGVU here in Grand Rapids, and Steve, start us off with some background on yourself ,and to begin with, where and when were you born?” (00:20) Sure, sure Jim hey and thank you for allowing me to talk about such a wonderful subject because it’s, you know, love of God, family, friends, neighbors and the United States of America those of us who served. So Jim I’m a Butterworth Hospital baby here in Grand Rapids, Michigan born in 1960 and went to Ottawa Hills High School, one of the City League high schools, wonderful wonderful great Grand Rapids experience. Went to Grand Rapids Junior College, got an associates degree there then onto Michigan State for a couple of degrees, couple of bachelor’s degrees, did a little bit of law school, natural gas business, military 34 years in the United States Army reserves and active, been blessed. Interviewer: “Okay so to back up a little bit, when did you initially enter the military?” Sure, you know it’s interesting my father– I grew up my dad retired as an Army colonel and he was logistics, armor, and medical service and my dad– Again, my hero, wonderful guy– He, let’s see in February of 1980 I’m a sophomore at Grand Rapids Junior College and dad works �Kenyon, Steve downtown at Michigan Consolidated gas company, happens to be commander of the 394 Station Hospital here in Grand Rapids as a Cold War hospital, 500 beds which is a huge activity– Cold War mobilization they would move to Heidelberg or Frankfurt, Germany take over facility. So you know growing up admiring my dad in the military, took us to summer camps with him. So I just always loved the military but, you know it’s interesting I never really thought of joining and again that’s an area when military is not very popular to a lot of other people and just one morning– A lot of times my dad he would drive me to school, drop me off because his office was close, JC right downtown here now Grand Rapids Community College, and just one morning he just said to me, you know “Steve have you ever thought about the military? You’ve got leadership qualities.” “Alright, well interesting Dad.” I didn’t really respond to him, well one week later I was in the recruiters office. Can still remember to this day Staff Sergeant Jerry– Sergeant 1st Class Jerry DeKulp, and within, you know an hour later I signed an eight year service obligation as an enlistment as a medic, an Army medic and you know. So I start, one month later I’m in uniform as an E1, that’s as low as you can be on the totem pole, with the 394 station hospital I haven’t gone to my basic training yet but so a unit of about 450 soldiers I was 450. (3:10) Now coincidentally my dad was number one he was commander of the O-6 and you know it was just a wonderful experience, loved it, so many great friends and I went on enlisted then for about eight months and then enrolled in the Army ROTC at Michigan State University, graduated distinguished military and got commissioned. Interviewer: “So they did not send you off anywhere for basic training along the way?” Yeah I did, yeah I went to Fort Knox Kentucky, yes sir I sure as heck did Fort Knox and– Interviewer: “When were you there?” That was July of 1980. Interviewer: “Okay, summer in Kentucky okay.” �Kenyon, Steve And yes boy oh boy still taste that combination, kind of like the day here we’re having in Grand Rapids, high humidity and hot but there’s that red clay dust that gets into your mouth and you just can’t get rid of that taste. There’s three hills, misery, agony, and I forget the other, everybody’s who’s done basic– At that time that’s when it was the Fort Knox was the armor school, now that has moved to Fort Benning since but you know General Patton’s museum, all of the wonderful things. Great experience, it was tough and loved it. Interviewer: “Okay, now do you think you went in there with a little bit better idea of what to expect than a lot of other guys did?” Yes sir I do, I sure did and I was motivated, you know mostly just that attitude of the finish line. I knew I was gonna get there and I was prepared, it was an exciting adventure to me, it is interesting and that’s a whole different conversation in itself, you know essentially you arrive on a Greyhound bus with 40 other guys, you get off the bus and different hair, certainly different clothing and 40 different guys. (4:57) Well about three hours later you walk out of the building with the same haircut wearing OD green, we’re still wearing fatigues back then and you know the shock starts and then you know then those first couple of nights sleeping in open bay barracks with 40 guys who snore and sleepwalk and on and on and on and we didn’t– We lost a couple of guys but we all made it, great experience you know those drill sergeants who were tough as can be but you know they’ve got such tremendous– They’re some of the most loving people in the world, they love the United States of America, they know that our military needs tough competent good soldiers and you know a few times those guys would break character. You’d see them, they– You know, it was fun, it was fun. Interviewer: “They’d show they actually did care about people?” They would never tell you that, you know we were scum but you know at graduation, and I was blessed I was the number one– I was the platoon leader for my platoon so a combination of peer ratings and then this cadre, and let me tell you that competition was tough. So yeah at the end you know our last– They broke character when we left, one time and you know we saw a smile, �Kenyon, Steve we saw that firm handshake and that pat on the back but then their faces got stern and they’d say “You go on and you do what you’re supposed to do or I’ll be on your ass.” Interviewer: “Did you get a chance to find out at all why the other guys were there, what motivated them to join or did you not talk to them enough to know?” You know it– On the one hand there’s a little bit of you’re still kind of independent, guys don’t talk a lot initially but then the force of the experience, we shared our lives very quickly because we succeeded in becoming a very well met, strong team and yeah combination of some guys just not having anything else better to do. Other guys there were a lot of– Not a lot but I would say maybe 10-15% of the other troops were military dependents and that was expected of them. You know interesting, back to my dad, it wasn’t– It was expected but it was only just one little hint and then I did it and then, you know a lot of other people in the middle– Including there were some guys that were– Just such an interesting group, there were some guys that, you know had trouble with the law and otherwise just trying to find direction. We also had an interesting group of guys who were Mormons and about a half dozen of them they were all from the University of Utah and they had done– I learned so much about– They were just phenomenally tremendous guys. (7:48) They had already done, which I had no idea, in their faith they did two years of missionary duty overseas and boy they were tough. Most of the group I went through basic training went on to become commissioned officers. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now were you a– Was this a class of people who were all slated to be medics or could you just be anything?” Yeah everything, yeah when you’re on that we have what’s called one station unit training, didn’t have that at that time but that’s where for instance the second level of basic training called advanced individual where you get your specialty. So we do that now so infantry OSUT in fact I was battalion commander of a related at Fort Benning– Related unit, but anyways so infantry soldiers do their basic and their advanced individual training Fort Benning, go to Fort Leonard Wood to become an engineer or military police Fort Sam Houstan, actually no basic training there, there’s only a couple of basic training bases, but yeah so our guys did everything. That was �Kenyon, Steve one of the few and I was commissioned initially infantry medical service, there were a couple– One of my good friends in University of Utah became a medical service officer, we crossed paths later. Interviewer: “Okay so we’re gonna back up here, so summer of 1980 you do your basic training at Fort Knox, now from there do you go back to Grand Rapids again for a while or what comes next?” Yeah I sure did. Yup back to GR back to reserve status and then I had graduated from Grand Rapids Junior College and I actually become– I was advanced to PFC part of my enlistment, bonus, enlistment no bonus money wise but because if I got my associates degree then I did become a PFC and then that fall enrolled at Michigan State. Stayed as a medic, stayed enlisted PFC until about November and as I say it that’s the other thing, my plan was to seek officer commissioning I wanted to be enlisted for a number of years and then no guarantee about becoming an officer but then some good guidance, and it was the right guidance– Enrolled in ROTC cadet leadership training and it was, it was thrilling. (10:06) So at that time we had what was called the simultaneous membership program, that’s where a soldier, if affiliated as a contracted ROTC cadet, administratively advanced to E5 pay, cadet rank not enlisted, not an officer and I happened to be the first one in the state of Michigan in the Army reserves, there were some others Army guard– What’s really interesting about that though is the enlistment contract continued in the background while you’re going through ROTC. So if– And we had one guy at Michigan State that washed out, he reverted back to his enlistment contract and became– You know he went from doing pretty well as a cadet to suddenly an E3 again and eight years is an event. Interviewer: “So you are basically accumulating time in service that way, whereas you’re ROTC you’re not officially in the service yet so there’s a difference in terms of your seniority.” Yeah, so other ROTC cadets their situation was they were not members of the military until they commissioned and they could either be kicked out or that was their decision point, my decision �Kenyon, Steve point was already made and again in the military talk about volunteering, you never volunteer, in reality we do volunteer a lot for tough assignments but ultimately there’s– We’re volunteers until we enlist or accept the oath of office as an officer and now we’re no longer volunteers, we’re obligated and it’s, you know it’s a sense of responsibility and it’s a good thing, it’s a good thing. Interviewer: “Alright, so when do you graduate from Michigan State?” 1982, June of ‘82 and I, again I was fortunate a distinguished military graduate and this isn’t about me as much as it is the things that these programs provide. So I was offered a regular Army commission and go on active duty as regular Army and I decided I wanted to get some more school so I stuck around I was gonna get an MBA, I ended up getting another bachelor’s degree and then I did a year and a half of law school but what I was gonna say– Oh final semester at Michigan State I was the cadet battalion commander which was just a thrilling– You know and at the end of the school year and you know leading that corp of cadets which was about 150 strong at Michigan State in 1982. (12:40) It was just really fun, in fact current president Louanna Simon, she presented me the award from the university actually it is a saber for the cadet battalion commander. So I had my saber etched with my name and Michigan State, my cavalry saber from Dr.Louanna Simon. She was the provost at that time and now she’s the president, I’ve seen her a few times since, she doesn’t remember me but I sure remember her. Interviewer: “Okay, now at the time you’re going through in the 80s here was there any kind of residual Vietnam stuff in terms of how people view people in the service or did your fellow students and everyone else just kind of view it as no big deal?” Yeah that’s interesting Jim, it was a little bit of a confusing– People didn’t generally know how to treat the military, we’re far enough after the Vietnam war that a lot of the misconceptions and the tragedy is far away but you know I served with a lot of non comms, noncommissioned officers who were Vietnam veterans and again the experience and these guys were a wealth of information and experience, they were great. On that though the world has always been an unsafe place so we had, very quickly after I got commissioned and I was actually at Fort Sam Houston, Texas in ‘83 when Grenada comes off and in fact we had– One of my fellow cadets �Kenyon, Steve graduated a year earlier was involved in that operation and then of course we have Panama not too much later but one of the remarkable things, before Sam Houston is the medical command for the Army now it’s medical command for all services and the Brookes Army Medical Center is the medcen and the burn center for the world is right there. Well I’m in my officer basic— Officer basic course there OVC and the casualties came back from Panama including, you know there was a young lieutenant who had in a helicopter crash and his legs were severed just below the hips, and we’re officers in training and giving blood and then going and seeing those soldiers. There were about 13 soldiers that came to Brooke, and you know that was my first contact with a fellow– They were all my age and you know seeing how life changes, yeah still remember that. Interviewer: “Okay, alright so you think it’s– Now so what you’ve been doing then you complete Michigan State, you stay on for more education so you still remain at that point on reserve duty then?” Yes. Interviewer: “With the Army and still at enlisted rank at than point you haven’t taken commission yet?” (15:41) Oh yeah, my commission 12 June, 1980 that is my commission date, 2nd Lieutenant Butter Bar and again– Interviewer: “ ‘80 or ‘82?” ‘82, I’m sorry ‘82. Interviewer: “Just so we have dates.” Yes indeed, well I’m a chronological guy too, very important. So yeah then I– Back to the 394 Station Hospital and I initially started as the– As a commissioned officer then as the S1. S1 is personnel, I move through logistics and operations, I was the medical– The patient �Kenyon, Steve administration officer, did a whole lot of interesting things there and then I transferred to the field artillery. We had at that time eight inch self propelled howitzers, 4th Battalion 20th Field Artillery in fact Lieutenant Colonel Alan West, who’s a wonderful nationally recognized person in his own right, he and I were in the same regiment. We crossed Frontlines of Freedom if I can say that now, we interviewed him on Frontlines of Freedom so same regiment 20th infantry– Or artillery regiment, he was 1st Battalion I was 4th Battalion. So that was the M110 we don’t have weapons system in the inventory now but a phenomenal eight inch self propelled howitzer so we could kick that 250 pound round out some 18 miles, 100 meter kill radius, we were a nuclear capable unit, half a kiloton nuclear round. I was the S2 security intelligence staff officer for a year and then I was the headquarters battery commander. Through all my experience in 34 years in the Army, you know the two most hardest working soldiers I’ve ever seen are field artillery men and then infantry soldiers, I was an infantry battalion commander too, and you know they worked the longest hours, the toughest duty, and they had the highest morale. They were just– Boy they were terrific, loved it. Interviewer: “Okay, now where does the Fort Sam Houston officer basic training fit into your timeline here?” (17:47) Okay that was– That was the fall of 1983 so I had my second bachelor’s degree in June of ‘83. That was about three months at Fort Sam Houston, Texas so then I’m officially– I’ve done my basic course. Now I return to Fort Sam Houston a dozen times in my career for officer advanced course, medical service, a medical logistics officer course, and other– Interviewer: “Now the officer basic course then what does that actually consist of?” That is– And at that time we had the allied Army medical department or A-Med, it is the largest collection of branches in the Army and that so the hard skills are Army Nurse Corps, Medical Corps doctors, Dental Corps dentist, Veterinary Corp vets, Army Specialist Corps those were physician assistants or dieticians and our physical therapists, those are the hard stripes then we had– Or the hard professionals. We had all of our allied scientists and then medical service administrative operations is my– So we had a collection of those in my officer basic course, �Kenyon, Steve again I was on the side of I was already infantry, I was already field, you know training guys. So you know those who weren’t as experienced sleeping in tents and getting shot at and otherwise we helped them through and they taught us a lot too. They were smart and we were tough, we were a good team. Interviewer: “Alright, so when you complete that do you go back to school again or now are you going on for regular active duty?” I didn’t have active duty required at that time, so I did actually I went back to Cooley Law School in Lansing and did a year and a half there working and so forth and then continued on reserve duty until I mobilized a couple of times, mobilized three times. So Operation Joint Endeavor Bosnia that is April of 1996 and fascinating that is a story in itself. The Balkan the Yugoslav– Far Yugoslavian you know ethnic cleansing with the Serbians and you know I mean there’s hundreds of years of ethnic rivalry. We didn’t have the mass casualties, we went in there with a strong force, I mobilized as the operations officer, officer in charge if you will of about 370 medical personnel from the midwest and a fascinating group of which about 70 physicians Army Medical Corps and then Dental Corps and we backfilled all of the– First of all at that time 1996 we’re down to about three hospitals in Europe. (20:46) The medical centers at Landstuhl co-located with Ramstein Air Base it’s the European Regional Medical Command and the medical center. We have a combat support hospital in Wurzburg near Leighton barracks where the 1st Infantry Division had its flag at that time and then in beautiful Heidelberg we had the last MASH hospital 212 MASH, beautiful place to go and visit, and then we had 17 medical clinics and dispensaries all over Europe, I got to travel. So I went there and coincidentally the G3, general staff, General Kevin Kiley was our commander, phenomenal he went on to become the surgeon general of the Army and his staff G3’s operations that officer has rotated out while I went in as an Army reserve liaison but I got to sit in that seat essentially co-head. So I saw a bunch, traveled, and you know some of the highlights there and this gets back to the integration the corp competencies are twice the citizen Army reservist who are you in the civilian sector in for profit facilities, universities. We had the Mayo Clinic we actually had two department heads from the Mayo Clinic, we had the chief nurse from the University of Michigan phenomenal people– Two things, the three hospitals were going through their joint accreditation that summer, �Kenyon, Steve the active duty folks were scared of– It’s not nice to say they were scared but they were apprehensive that is a huge thing to go through. Our Army reservist crew, piece of cake, they took them through that– Again our op tempo wasn’t anywhere near where we thought it would be, we didn’t have the mass casualties coming out of Bosnia. We go through all three hospitals past the joint accreditation, it was a huge victory and a lot of medals came out of that. 25 June 1996 02 in the morning I’m in my hooch sleeping and I was the officer in charge of the critical action center at 02 I get a call in my hooch from the operations NCO and this gets back to those non comms, those sergeants again these officers– Officers lead units, non commissioned officer, sergeants lead men, they were sergeants. So I get this call, there’s been a bombing and we shoot up the critcial action, the command center immediately. So I’m there about an hour later “What’s going on?” Well the Khobar towers Riyadh, Saudi Arabia has been bomber, 19 American servicemen Air Force pretty much killed instantly. Medical care in Saudi Arabia at that time is really good, most of the people that staff those hospitals are American civilians. They go to Saudi Arabia for a couple of years, make a boatload of money– They had great medical care, their initial stabilization was fantastic. We kicked it– And I’ll tell you what then and it is the example of drilling, that entire medical command just kicked in including a 0-6 that morning, the dependent community– We have an Army reserve medical blood unit from Provo, Utah, remember the staff sergeant, and they kick in place. (24:24) We are drawing blood and again these Americans are just jumping in, civilians and all of us we all got poked, we didn’t have a choice if we were in uniform but the civilians, the dependents they did. So we established an enormous blood bank, within four hours of notification of that bombing we had our command teams heading out. So those were– They were chaplains, psychologists, and social workers, their job is to get down there and stabilize the force, everything’s okay. Eight hours we had our first medical and these were– It was an eight hour flight, not quite that long but our first responders– Again if this were any other place we would need medical capability, the stabilization was done with the military there. So within about 16 hours we started bringing stabilized casualties back to Landstuhl, my recollection is about 350 wounded– Again 19 wonderful Americans were killed by those Islamic bastards. We brought about 240 back to Landstuhl and again these are young most– A lot of females, Air Force, most of them are 19, 20, 21, traumatic blast injuries their faces, traumatic amputations. They were stabilized, we didn’t lose a single patient, and returned to duty– About half of them returned to duty within 30 days and the rest of them came back to �Kenyon, Steve CONUS, contiguous United States, to our medical centers. Eisenhower at Fort Knox, Bethesda, and Watler Reed at that time– Walter Reed and Bethesda are now one facility, they all survived they all– It was a tremendous sense of accomplishment and doing what we’re paid to do or trained to do or wanted to do, it was a great experience. Americans– We were joint service by the way there at Landstuhl so we were Air Force, Navy, Army and wow they did good, I was proud of them. Interviewer: “Now how long did you wind up staying in Germany?” That ended up again we got cut loose early, we were about five months because again things stabilized we, you know the commander in chief– European command, front loaded that mission and that’s the way to do it, go in with overwhelming force you can always scale back. I was mobilized again for Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan and then– Actually located at Sheridan, Illinois it’s some good stuff. Interviewer: “Okay, so again we kind of back up here, ‘86 you’re over in Germany did you ever get–” (27:07) ‘96. Interviewer: “ ‘96–” Yes sir. Interviewer: “And then did you ever get to Bosnia itself or did you just stay in Germany and things came to you?” The latter, yeah again we were forward– Our assignment was to move into Bosnia, I would’ve moved in there as the medical OIC and delays and delays and delays, there were choke points, we had our logistical tail, is what we call it, the tooth to tail ratio. The tooth being the warfighters and the trigger pullers, and the tail is everybody else supporting that literally got bogged down so �Kenyon, Steve we kept getting delays on our line of demarcation, I’m missing some of the acronyms. Eventually got to the point not necessary, not necessary so we stayed back and did a lot of good and then released early. Interviewer: “And you were essentially replacing people who had been stationed there who had been sent forward.” Exactly, active duty. Interviewer: “So you’re seeing how that whole sequence goes basically, okay.” You know we had another at that time, coincidentally to today, we had another series of events with North Korea where we had response forces– As I recall some of our forces were heading to North– Or South Korea and Vietnam we were staffing up medical there because it looked like something could pop, interesting yeah. Interviewer: “Okay and then what does your unit do or not do at the time of the Gulf War?” (28:40) Yeah time of the Gulf War, okay so I’m in medical group is right here in Grand Rapids, Michigan 334th Medical Group so we had– That’s a command control by an O6, I was the– Became the executive officer who’s the number two guy, I was also logistics before the S4 and S3. Gulf war, I was detachment commander at that time so I had a lower rank, I was a captain– No, I was a major but anyways we had four combat support hospitals and 13 other units, air ambulance, ground ambulance, preventative medicine, catch the control, all allied units. So we had to spin up three of those combat support hospitals from one in Michigan, one in Ohio, one in Wisconsin, one in Indiana. We spun them up to head to the Persian Gulf War along with a lot of the– So about a third of all of our troops got spun up, almost half. Most backfilled facilities in the U.S– We took the combat support hospitals and the deployed as one unit to the Persian Gulf, and again I would’ve headed forward too we had all of our contingency plans, we never got to that point cause 100 hours that ground war was done. So you know everybody starts moving back but �Kenyon, Steve again a good experience, we really saw– We actually saw some negative things during that period of time too and I should reflect on that. Most of it was positive but we did see– There’s all the positive things and of course the Persian Gulf War long long overdue with welcoming those troops back with victory and my goodness our Vietnam war veterans that was the parade it was more of them then it was for– I mean it felt good and we have done such good things since all the way to today. On the lessons learned side we did go through a period there where we had certain officers in the– And with all due respect, largely in the medical side we had reserve forces, again our bang for the buck with reserve forces about 11% of the budget, the defense budget, but 50% of the capability. When we look at medical 80% of our medical capability is in reserve and guard. So we had– We called up a lot of physicians and said “Okay, Uncle Sam needs you.” We had pushback to a certain extent, and this happened in other branches too, but we had others say “Woah woah woah, I like the weekend pay, I like doing something exciting but I didn’t sign up to go to war.” You know the rest of us are saying this is– We’ve been scrimmaging forever we want to get in the game, we want to do what we’ve been trained to do. So there were individuals who truly at a minimum I would say were disgraceful, and the Army dealt with that in a good way just let others go and but we reformed things after that an reinforced and that’s when our Army reserve and our guard, so our seven reserve– Five reserve forces and two guard, air guard and Army guard. (32:15) We became, and wonderful thing, we are a strategic reserve, we were operational reserve during the Cold War, you know we could slowly get back into backfill, we had a year to get geared up. Operational, or strategic reserve now, there are things– Military police, 98% of our– Or not military police, civil affairs 98% of the capability is in reserve and guard staffs and those are American men and women in uniform that sometimes get two days notice and they go and they’re ready to go. It’s a huge success story, fun to be part of it. Interviewer: I think in some ways what you have going on is a long period when you weren’t doing a whole lot or deploying people and so forth and you can get that kind of peacetime military mindset and people can go in only with only for the personal reasons maybe and not really thinking about actually having to go someplace.” Yes. �Kenyon, Steve Interviewer: “And since much more recently there has been more activity, more deployments, more people sent more places it’s more part of the package.” It’s a mindset. Interviewer: “And you also learn the ropes and you learn from experience and so got that there.” Yeah, you know it gets back to volunteers, we’re volunteers in the military and again prior to 1972 when we had the draft and the same Americans, the most courageous and honorable, best and brightest were the force– Have always been the force, they are today and by the grace of God and our inspiration I’m very confident they will be going forward but the mindset now, and some of things I’m involved in too, to get off not on a sale pitch here but, employers part of the guards reserve, DOD committee again a culture where American– All American employers understand and support and value the military service of their civilian employees. (34:10) Prior service veterans, current service members of guard and reserve units, future members who may say “I want to join because I can protect America.” So the mindset that we have now for instance in the Army reserve is, you come in the Army reserve plan on it one year out of five you are in– It’s called Army reserve force generation, we are in the box and every unit in a perfect rotation. You start out in year one crawling, you’re getting your individual education starting to assemble the team, you get into year three and you start scrimmaging, go through all your battle drills and so forth, become a team, year four you’re validated you can do your job. Year five you are the quick reaction force so employers– And literally for our guard, our Michigan guard right now, guard members from all over the United State helping Americans in Florida and very soon, and boy I’ll tell you talk about good soldiers, I worked with them, The Puerto Rican Army National Guard there’s two brigades there, those are some of America’s finest, we’re deploying people to go down there to help Americans– So as I say with the Army reserve force generation model when you’re in year five you tell your family, you tell your employer “We are the only ones standing between the enemy hurting you, it’s us.” So boss, honey, kids any day now I’m– If the balloon goes up, so to speak, I’m going. I’m trained, my team’s trained, we’re ready, we’re the �Kenyon, Steve quick reaction force and we will go get through that fifth year, now you’re in your one of that cycle which means unlikely and you work on all the skill building again but reality is anybody can go at any time, wars are short. Interviewer: “Well you can have [overlapping chatter] and you can have extended conflicts in certain corners of the world and maybe you need more people.” Yeah, exactly and again back to these skills, these skills sets that we bring to the act of force with our reserve and guard we’re tough, and we’re good, and we love America and we’re ready to go and you know it’s pride, it’s pride from the inside not– And a lot of values with the sad things going on in America today, those that, you know that don’t respect the flag, that don’t understand what you and I know. American blood is red, and it’s a deep color of red it’s American red and 99% of the DNA in that blood is the exact same. We’re brothers and sisters in arms and, you know God you think of the sacrifices and heroes don’t talk, any blabbermouth talks about how great they are, heroes no. Those that didn’t come back and those that came back with casualties they’re the heroes. So to disrespect our flag it’s just a sad thing and it drains energy, to be respectful and part of this force, realizing the blessings of liberty, justice, honor, opportunity that have been earned by the blood sweat and tears of America’s most courageous and honorable, best and brightest. (37:35) Being earned today must be earned in the future, we’re a force for good. Interviewer: “Okay, let’s steer ourselves back now into your own service career here. So you’ve been out to Germany to support Bosnia, you have been organizing units and so forth to go into the Gulf War and then you get– We talked about that was before Bosnia and so we’re–” I got a couple other, other good things. Yeah, you know for me Jim I actually– And it’s a blessing, my experience as an enlisted soldier and as a commissioned officer pretty unique, in the old days we used to categorize our Army units as combat, those are the trigger pullers that’s our Special Forces, our infantry, our armor. Combat support, military police, engineers on and on. Combat service support, logistics, now we call that sustainment, we use some different terms �Kenyon, Steve now but for me actually very unique, I’ve been in all three categories. So I’ve been medical, I’ve been infantry battalion commander, the 1st Battalion 339 Infantry Regiment, polar bears, American North Russian Expeditionary Force World War I, World War II part of General Mark Clark’s 5th Army, deployed my troop– My troop is deployed to Iraq, two soldiers and they have moms they have families. Specialist Donald R McCune, 20 years old from Chelsea, Michigan killed in action in Iraq– Presenting the flag to his mother and his brother and sister. Staff Sergeant Todd Cornell from Chippewa Falls outside of Milwaukee, in fact Fort McCoy the noncommissioned officer academy of Fort McCoy the building is named after Staff Sergeant Cornell, he was killed in action in Fallujah, seven of my troops wounded there. So I had the infantry experience, Army commander general staff college is post graduate education for us. That’s the major school so I went through it at Fort Leavenworth and then I was selected to become an instructor so I taught fundamentals of warfare, leadership– I’m a student of leadership, servant leadership, and then history, military history World War II to present which you and I have a love of history. So I did that and then mission command– I do wanna talk about one other very exciting medical mission, but a battle command and mission command the 75th Division out of Houston Texas, the Great Lakes division at Fort Sheridan, Illinois just south of Great Lakes Naval Air Station or Naval Station I should say and north of Chicago. (40:25) By the way for everybody who wants to watch this the history, the beauty of Fort Sheridan which is now demobilized– Interviewer: “Or deactivated, whatever you call it.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Decommissioned maybe.” Yeah BRAC, base realignment and closing, so what started as 700 acres is now the Sheridan Army reserve center which is Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine corps, Guard about 150 acres including very uniquely the AFRICOM– It’s the security, intelligence security, I’ll think of the acronym here in a minute but they had uniquely it’s right there at Fort Sheridan but the old base is now the town of Fort Sheridan, it’s a national historic landmark absolutely gorgeous, beautiful. �Kenyon, Steve The general’s homes there they’re $8 million homes in the civilian sector right on Lake Michigan, it’s pretty. So I did those things but I wanted to get back to one other medical mission in 2000, I was the OIC for what was called medical readiness training exercise med-red 0-2-5-26 six months of planning, we deployed to Honduras in September and I was advanced party I did about five weeks there but Hurricane Mitch went through the peninsula in 1996, wiped out Honduras about 60,000 people killed the rivers, the infrastructure wiped it out. American military comes through the Army National Guard engineering they rebuilt the highways, they rebuilt the schools, they do all these other things and then we have a series of medical missions, these medical readiness training missions scattered mostly Army reserve units across the United states one month at a time. We deployed there and so we had a medical team, a dental team, and a veterinary team and again moved into– Well Soto Cano Air Base which my good friend Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was stationed there previously, Comayagua was the town and right in central Honduras. Soto Cano Air Base Drunk Task Force Bravo we’re the medical element of Drunk Task Force Bravo so we went, over that period of time we did eight missions with– We were truck born with our humvees and our five tons– Seven tons, let me tell you what the humvee can do, man we went across rivers that were three feet deep and over rocks and sand and on and on and then we were airlifted active duty chinook CH-47s took us into remote Indian villages to provide care. Again, fascinating, dangerous place dramatically more dangerous now sadly. (43:20) We had good old United States Marines as our security force, eight good marines led by a staff sergeant but the key thing there we went in there and these beautiful Hondurans and you know we go over there thinking we’re these great American professionals vets, docs, medics and we’re gonna– We’re coming down there to take care of you and you know we were humbled pretty darn quickly, those beautiful people who live simple and God fearing wonderful folks, we all came out of there– And by the way and so I had to link this all together, we linked up with American Peace Corps volunteers in these villages several church relief groups because we needed language skills and all of the logistical which we sent that up ahead of time but it was a fascinating sense of accomplishment. We all came back humbled, we’re the ones that were blessed by that experience and we did do good too and then we passed the flag to the next unit and you know it’s sad what’s going on in Venezuela since and so forth, and again Hondura, narcotics it’s just it’s a dangerous damn place and that’s sad because those people are good people. So that was great experience, loved it, saw people perform. �Kenyon, Steve Interviewer: “Where were you when 9/11 happened?” Yes sir, I was…2011 Interviewer: “Well 2001 we hope.” 2001 rather, yeah 2001 we think– You know it’s funny I remember exactly where I was as a civilian, I was in a meeting with a customer and happened to have that– You know for a break here let me think real quick, yeah. Yeah I was back to the medical group in Grand Rapids and now I’m the executive officer of the medical group. So again we’re spinning up units, very quickly after that I moved into the– Like 2004 I’m infantry and then we start sending troops but 2001 yeah I was– Or 2001 rather, with a medical group so we didn’t send any units overseas cause Afghanistan is pretty much quick reaction force, you know it takes a while. Of course we have nothing in Iraq until 2003, 2004 I’m an infantry commander 339th and then, you know, we are sending. I had, yeah 60 troops forwards and then– No, let me take that back, about 25 troops forward during those two years, another 60 troops mobilize across the united states and we actually we were the round out battalion for the 29th Infantry Division which was the school, the infantry school at Fort Benning. (46:30) There’s three battalions active duty, we were the reserve last battalion, the interesting thing and those who, you know listening to this who have experience in the military, we were a very rank heavy unit at 293 soldiers in fours states. So Five companies, headquarters, and Alpha Company in Fraser, Michigan near Warren, Bravo Company was in Richmond, Indiana an hour east of Indianapolis, Charlie Company was Milkwaukee and Delta Company was Waukegan, Illinois and as a battalion commander lieutenant colonel I had my command sergeant major and my staff, I had 14 full time personnel, active guards observe in uniform and a couple of– One civilian and I had 18 master sergeants, E8s, that’s huge. I had 105 sergeants first class and you know 80 or so 70 assists had forced I think 11 specialists– That is an upside down unit and the reason was we were the committee battalion so all of my troops moved to Fort Benning and they were committee chiefs. Everything from United States minds to basic rifle marksmanship, medical training, fuel navigation, mortars, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. So they were the committee chiefs that moved down there and �Kenyon, Steve then they actually had active duty subordinate training, it’s a fascinating mission and as I say then two killed in action in Iraq and seven wounded so we were part of the force and we did good. Interviewer: “When you made the transition into infantry did you have to do an infantry school at some point or had you done that earlier?” I had, yeah I already had infantry basic done yeah. So it was actually– Again for those who may be informed more than the common duck on this subject, it was called a branch in material, we were an infantry battalion, training battalion ITB technically, infantry training battalion. Not a go to war infantry unit– We did go to war as, in pieces not as an entire unit but again what was supposed to– So many times happened to me and happened to other units there’s plans– Worst case scenario, plan on this and then things don’t happen. So we initially were going to deploy to Iraq, train in the Iraqi infantry as a unit and quite frankly, you know I mean there was a lot of disappointment we wanted to do that, I sure as heck wanted to do it we were ready. Then the next base was we were going to deploy to Fort Benning as a battalion, truly rounding out. Fort Benning’s mission didn’t expand as quickly as they thought so we did deploy a company there and then some of our troops went to Fort Bliss to Fort Hood, had some at Fort Jackson, all doing infantry training in subsets at those. (49:40) A lot to watch, a lot to watch over and I had just a fantastic staff and Command Sergeant Major Paul Bianco, I will throw his name out he was phenomenal. He went on– Actually was the youngest command sergeant major in the Army reserve at the time, he went on to the 84th– 85th Division, Custer Division, he went from battalion command sergeant major to the command sergeant major for a two star general. He mad a jump I don’t think has ever happened before he was a heck of a– Interviewer: “Okay so he started at brigade level and went up to division level.” Sure did, police officer in Kalamazoo, phenomenal guy, love Paul haven’t seen him in a couple years he’s now retired. Wonderful mentor, he went on and, you know, just he molded good troops and good men and there was a whole lot of others I could talk about, let me tell you good people. �Kenyon, Steve Interviewer: “Okay, alright so to kind of go back in your own career so during what period of time were you the infantry battalion commander?” That was 2004 to 2006 June of ‘04 to February of 2000– August of 2006. Interviewer: “And then what did you do after that?” Then I went into retired reserves actually, combination of things, job heavy duty and again this isn’t a theme you know these twice the citizen, these members of our garden reserve, one of our examples is a three legged stool, you know we all– For most good people family comes first and then who puts bread on the table? Civilian employer and then affiliation with Army reserve, Army Guard, Air Guard, Air reserve, Naval reserve, Coast Guard reserve, Marine Corps reserve, you know that’s our– That fills out our extra 20 hours on a 70 hour work week and we miss weddings and we miss mother’s day and we miss children’s birthdays and all those other things, it’s tough. So when push comes to shove if family says “Make a decision.” Most of us say “Okay family, I love you.” It’s family. When an employer, either based on ignorance or worse, says “Make a decision.” Well, okay and you know we can’t afford to do that, we can’t because the same stellar performance in the civilian sector the same stellar performance in uniform, the occasional dead wood, poor performers that we have in the civilian sector if they’re in uniform we try to get rid of them as soon as possible cause they’re the same dead wood. (52:17) Most are in that higher third band where they’re trying hard and they’re doing well so yeah I had that happening, had lost– My daughter Elizabeth had died, that was a tough thing to go through, company knew I was in the natural gas business working for a wonderful company called Charlevoix Energy Trading Company which has since been bought out, I was a natural gas wellhead gas sales and fastenall the big industry institutions in Michigan but boy I’ll tell you it was tough, I was the senior guy, I had to give up. So I went into retired reserve and wanted to come back and certain things happened and I came back in then in 2010 and right into the 75th Division battle command and that’s where I finished off those last four years, loved it. Interviewer: “So you were basically a staff officer with them?” �Kenyon, Steve I was the deputy branch chief for what the–Again the military we’re always changing designations and acronym and things like that but we were battle command training division with five brigades in the United States. My brigade was at Fort Sheridan with a branch in Livonia, that term changed from battle command to mission command, the brigade changed to Great Lakes Division but what we essentially did, 75th Division is the executive agency for this training which is best thought of as scrimmaging. Before units deployed to Kosovo, Afghan– We had Kosovo missions, Afghanistan , AFRICOM missions, military– Or multinational peacekeeping Sinai, so we have a variety and then Kosovo, big, Afghanistan Iraq. So what we would do before a unit deployed back to this process of validating, it’s like getting your driver’s test for a unit and we would work with staff at our level and then below battalion they’d be in the field but what we’d do is we’d take them through what was called command posts, culminating training exercises, Kosovo as an example and I headed up a lot of those. They would see in 14 days of heavy duty training– Did a lot of it at camp Atterbury, very historic base south of Indianapolis, Fort McCoy, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Texas and El Paso. We would take a unit through 14 days of stress, so they would be deployed into Kosovo in this one example a 12 month rotation to Kosovo, in 14 days of simulation they would see six months of activity to stress them out, to see that that staff could use muscle memory to do their jobs and they came out sweating, and so did we because we were exhausted, and so I was the deputy branch chief for– During those four years, for most of those four years. (55:25) So I wasn’t the commander, I was the commander’s executive officer, and again fascinating, in charge of everything and I did both active duty mobilized I was mobilized in 2010 through 2011 and then back in reserve duty. Again you know common themes here Jim, just good people working hard for a great cause and you know the camaraderie, the sense of satisfaction, just you know when we see old glory flying we– There’s reverence, we just think “Wow, that means a lot.” Interviewer: “And what you’re doing with a unit like this a lot of the times you hear from the people who do deploy and go overseas and so they talk about the training sessions and programs they go through and the places they go and of course somebody’s got to be there on those bases doing those things and running the programs they’re actually in as you’re �Kenyon, Steve filling in actually a lot for a lot of these other stories in terms of how that larger system works and you tend to talk about the size of the tail versus–” The tooth, exactly yes indeed. Interviewer: “The tooth and that’s really all part of this big picture so that helps us to get a lot of that. Now today you’re kind of retired reserves so there’s still the remote possibility you could be called up for the next couple of years?” Well yes some of us think it is the hopeful call, I mean we want– I’m ready to go. So on this subject just real quick and this kind of gets into other less known realities for civilians and even people in uniform. Active duty retirement, 20 years of active federal service, a sailor, soldier, or marine, can start drawing retired pay right away and they are then of course, well they’re coming out at 20 years old, the actuary tables say they don’t get much because they’d be drawing forever. So similarly with reserve, and of course it’s one military whether you’re Navy, Army it’s all the same thing so reserve retirements likewise earned at 20 years– Oh and by the way this kind of gets back to again respecting, understanding, saluting those who served, 18 years of active federal service is zero retirement, 18 and a half years and there’s a couple of things, there’s– And again part of our job is– And I’ve experienced this one time, one of the toughest things I ever had to do when I was an infantry battalion commander is I had to– And this is a hell of a long, grinding, tough process but I had to kick a soldier out of the unit at 18 years, out of the United States Army and deny that female soldier a retirement cause it was necessary based on a whole lot of insubordination and all kinds of problem but likewise Army reserves that duty. (58:22) 16 years of 20 if you work for a corporation 16 years of a 20 year retirement or 30 year retirement is still worth some money that you can get and put into a 401k. That’s not the case in the military, you gotta cross the finish line that’s 20 years and you get something, all of us in the military, special it’s called the 20 year letter. As a kid I remember my dad talking about it “What? 20 year letter?” It’s that document, it's like a diploma that says you’ve got it, you’ve got it. Now do you keep on serving, do you add to that value, yes or no? So with– So again the difference between active duty and reserve for our reservist– And this kind of gets also back into respecting what they do and Army reservists who serve for 25 years or Naval reservist whatever, �Kenyon, Steve 25 years and then decide, you know if they’re enlisted they don’t get to just say goodbye until that enlistment contract anniversary, if you’re an officer you request retirement– Another thing with an officer we have– If we resign our commission we cut the strings, we also cut cost of living advance, but we cut the strings Uncle Sam cannot call us back. Most of us do not do that we go into retired reserve activity which means we will go if necessary and there’s a benefit to that. So a reservist though normally does not get to start drawing their retired pay until age 60, so there’s a lot of Navy reservists who retired at the age of 40 and they have to wait 20 years and guess what? They may not make that 20 years, there’s a survivor benefit program where a survivor’s spouse can get 55% but a lot of people don’t. So in my case now– And this is another really good thing that President Bush, George W. President Bush initiated changing our retirement system and now President Donald Trump is doing wonderful, wonderful things for the military and for America in furthering this but allowing active duty service mobilizations to provide a potential earlier retirement date gets into also the post 9/11 G.I bill where we can give our benefits to our children or our spouse, good, good things, long overdue. President Trump just recently enhanced this wonderfully, it’s good. So in my case to make a long story short I will, and there’s technical dating in there but, I’ll be able to start drawing retirement at age 59 versus 60. Benefits don’t hit until age 60, medical benefits along with some of those other things but– Oh no we don’t do it for the money Jim, we do not do it for the money, but that’s kind of nice we do get a little money out of it. (1:01:18) Interviewer: “We’re just to the very end of the particular tape which is about to shut off–” Yes sir. Interviewer: “But I think we managed to get you right down to the end of your career so thank you very much for taking the time to share the story.” It’s a pleasure. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KenyonS2154V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kenyon, Steven P. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-09 Title A name given to the resource Kenyon, Steven (Interview transcript and video), 2028 Description An account of the resource Steve Kenyon was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1960 where he graduated high school and attended Grand Rapids Community College. Kenyon then went onto Michigan State University before attending law school. He also went into the natural gas business before enlisting into the Army. He agreed to an eight-year service obligation as an Army medic with the 394th Station Hospital in Grand Rapids. For Basic Training, he was sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, in July of 1980 during which he became a Platoon Leader for his training platoon. After Basic, Kenyon was transferred back to Grand Rapids where he graduated from community college and went onto Michigan State University and its Army Reserve Officer Training Course. Kenyon graduated from Michigan State in 1982 before attending Cooley Law School. Furthermore, he previously underwent Officer Basic Training Course at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. At the 394th Station Hospital, he served as a Commissioned Officer, and later as the S1 Personnel Officer, before transferring to the Army Field Artillery. He was reassigned and briefly served with the 4th Battalion, 20th Field Artillery Regiment. For his first mobilization, Kenyon deployed to Germany during the conflict in Bosnia in April of 1996 as the Operations Officer for 370 medical personnel. His men also assisted medical efforts following the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. For his second mobilization, Kenyon deployed to Afghanistan with the 334th Medical Group as an Executive Officer during the Persian Gulf War. During one Medical Readiness Training Exercise in 2000, Kenyon was sent to Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras following the destruction of Hurricane Mitch where his unit participated in aid parties sent to remote villages. Kenyon later transferred to the infantry between 2004 and 2006 where he became a Battalion Commander for the reserve 339th Regiment, 29th Infantry Division. While he never deployed to Iraq, he did undergo training in an Infantry Training Battalion and organized the deployments of several companies overseas, as well as to other training centers. From there, he entered the Army Retired Reserve so he could be closer to his family while also resuming work within Michigan’s energy industry. However, wanting back into the military in 2010, Kenyon completed his last four years of service with the 75th Innovation Command as the Deputy Branch Chief, or the Commander’s Executive Officer. After leaving the Active Duty, he remained in the Retired Reserves. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Other veterans & civilians—Personal narratives, American Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/59c690c567d3212017a84c97c897dc9d.mp4 cea5fad8c006e5b5347931e22d7f3b78 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/cc79b17246b3657b57dd4594299b2206.pdf babd53aa782af21e5a538e8478a82b0d PDF Text Text 1 Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Oral History Interview Veteran: William Johnson Interviewed by James Smither Transcribed by Grace Balog Interviewer: We are talking today with William Johnson of Holland, Michigan, and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay, so Mr. Johnson, start out with some background on yourself. And to begin with, where and when were you born? Veteran: Well, I was born in Union, Mississippi, September 14th, 1936. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: I’ve lived there until probably 9…Between 9 and 11 years. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: It’s been such a long time I can’t remember exactly how old I was. Interviewer: Okay. So, what was your family doing for a living in Mississippi? Veteran: We had a—first, when my mom and dad got married, they stayed on my grandparents’ farm and farmed there for a couple years. And my dad worked during the winter at a sawmill to save money because his stepdad was—gave him 20—each child got 20 acres of land to farm. And he, being the stepchild, got the worst part of the land to farm. So, he worked during the winter to get fertilizer to use on the farm when he started planting. And so, it ended up he was �2 the best farmer out of the group because he was smart enough to use fertilizer. And he did that for a couple years. And then his real father helped them to buy his own farm. Started out with 30-40 acres and then each year—each 4 or 5 years—added 10, 20, 30, 40…Up to—ended up with 200 acres of land. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: We raised corn, cotton, lots of vegetables. Truck farming, primarily. By that time, he had bought a little truck. So… Interviewer: So, as I was saying—200 acres is—it would sound to me like a lot for an African American family to have. (00:02:41) Veteran: Yes. Definitely. Interviewer: Do you think 20-40 acres— Veteran: Most black people in that time—and I say black now—but during that time, they were known as negroes, but the white folks would call them niggras. And it finally got around to instead of niggras, it was nigger. So anyway, yeah it was a large farm for a family like that. You know? Most of them are sharecroppers. And come to think of it, I think we were the only one in the immediate area that had—that owned the farm land. Interviewer: Okay. And what were relations like between your father and the white farmers or the suppliers or people he dealt with? Veteran: It was very difficult. There was no financial assistance if they needed to buy a piece of equipment. Couldn’t get a loan. So, most farmers—and my dad was included—used horse and mules to plow and had a wooden wagon to haul stuff. And if you had a piece of equipment that �3 broke, you’d go down, go to the nearest town, to pick it up. And he was waited on at the last person to get waited on. I remember as a kid about probably 9 or 10, I went to town with him and he was standing at the counter waiting to get ordered his—what he wanted, get what he wanted—and a white person walks in and the clerk says, “Nigger, stand over there. Wait until I take care of him.” You know, I don’t remember how long he waited, but it could have been—he could have been there all day waiting if someone else kept coming in, a new customer kept coming in. But that was the way things were back in…you know? Interviewer: Yep. (00:04:46) Veteran: Late 40s. Interviewer: Right. Okay. And so, eventually your family leaves Mississippi. So, how does that come about and what happens? Veteran: Well…I am not sure exactly what the thought process was for my dad, but you know, later on I kind of figured out that he probably thought that he wasn’t going to be very successful doing what he was doing because of the, you know, animosity. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And the difficulty they had to—that he had getting support. So, he decided to sell the farm and move to Michigan. We moved to Detroit in phases. I guess my mom and 2 daughters and 2 little brothers caught the train. And myself and my dad and 2 other brothers and came up by pickup truck. It was probably mid to late September. And by the time we got to Kentucky area it started getting cold. You know, you’d hit the top of the truck and get the attention and say, “Let’s switch. Cold—it’s too cold back here.” So, we got to Michigan and by that time my dad had came up, you know, 6 months or 4-5 months earlier and bought a house. So, we were �4 immediately housed. And my brothers and I and sisters went and started school. And because of the school situation in Mississippi, we were all far behind. So, by the time I turned 18, I was still trying to get out of high school. I mean, get out of 9th grade. (00:06:40) Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And so, I decided heck with this. I will never graduate. So, I joined the military. Interviewer: Okay. Let’s fill in a little bit here of the family story. Why did your father pick Michigan? Veteran: He had a couple—3 brothers—already in Michigan. And of course, they had come back down to visit and he liked what they were saying, you know? About life in Michigan. Interviewer: Okay. And what kind of work did your father find when he got there? Veteran: When he got here, he started working for one of them auto manufacturers. He and my two older brothers—they all worked at the…I forget the name of the company but they no longer exist out in southeast Michigan. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Detroit. South of Detroit. Interviewer: Alright. Okay so when do you actually enter the military then? What year? Veteran: 1955. March 28th, 1955. In Detroit there is a little Army base: Fort Wayne in Fort Wayne, Michigan. And I caught the bus from my house and went to Fort Wayne and spent the first night there. And they process you in and send you off to another processing station, which was Fort Knox, Kentucky. Two days later we were in Fort Knox. That’s where you get all of �5 your equipment issued, clothing. Get your hair cut. No hair on your head pretty much. From there, I took my first plane ride to Fort Carson, Colorado. Took basic training. Interviewer: Okay. Now, why did you choose the Army? (00:08:31) Veteran: Well, I had 2 brothers that had been in the Korean War. They were home. And my older brother was in World War 2. He was on a ship going to Japan and he was part of the occupation force. And he spent a couple years over there and then he got out. So, you know, Army was…I didn’t know anybody that had been in the Navy or the Air Force. Interviewer: Okay, so that was what you knew. Veteran: So, that’s what I knew about the service. Interviewer: Alright. And did your brothers have basically a positive view of the service? Or…? Veteran: Yeah, they did. They did. One was a tanker and one was a truck driver. Pickup—I mean, a two and a half ton. Interviewer: Deuce and a half. Veteran: Yeah, deuce and a half. And yeah, they had a good experience in the Army. They both were drafted so they spent two years and they both went to Korea. Interviewer: Alright. Then, so you go now—okay, Fort Carson, Colorado is where you do your basic training. Okay, describe that experience. What was that like? Veteran: That was exciting to me. Because before I went in, I had—you know, I figured that whatever I faced, I was going to do exactly in my best. You know? And so, it was exciting. And everything that we were taught, you know, I was pretty well successful doing. And following �6 instructions and…I didn’t make honor graduate at the end of the training, but I was up there. And pleased with my accomplishments, really. Interviewer: Alright. Now, how did— (00:10:21) Veteran: Because you do things—you do stuff that you didn’t think you would ever be able to do. Interviewer: Okay. Were you in pretty good physical shape when you went in? Veteran: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, before I went in? Eh, I wasn’t in very good shape. I was weighing 136 pounds. And I don’t know. But I did all that physical training that they required and I was well trained. Interviewer: Okay. And in general, how did the drill sergeants treat you? Veteran: Well, at Fort Carson, the drill sergeants were very good. And they treated us all equal and no real problems with anyone. And you got to know a lot of guys and where they were from. And the one thing that got me was a lot of them would talk about their father had been in the World War 2 or in the military. And of course, my father never was in the military. And I kind of felt lost, you know? Wasn’t part of that. But then I knew I had brothers that was in Korea, so you know. It was good. Interviewer: Alright. Now, how much emphasis was there on discipline, following orders? Veteran: Oh, very much so. Very much so. And you know, the drill sergeant would tell you something and he’d say, “Everybody understand that?” and everybody would yell, “Yes, sergeant.” So, it was—he was requiring you to understand what he was saying and express that to him. �7 Interviewer: Right. Veteran: That you understood. Interviewer: Okay. And did you have—get into trouble yourself? Veteran: In basic? Not really. I had one—another soldier, as we would say, picking on me. And one evening, I caught him in the latrine—that’s the restroom, you know. And he and I was the only one in there. And I attacked him and knocked him down. And I had no more trouble with that guy. So, he didn’t bother me anymore after that. (00:12:47) Interviewer: Alright. But you didn’t get in trouble with the sergeants or anything like that? Veteran: No. No, he didn’t tell and I didn’t tell. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: That was the first case of don’t tell. Interviewer: Don’t ask, don’t tell. Veteran: Don’t ask, don’t tell. Interviewer: There you go. Yeah. Okay, so how long was basic training? Veteran: 8 weeks. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: At Fort Carson. Then I went to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for another 8 weeks of training—advanced training. Interviewer: Okay. And what kind of training were you getting there? �8 Veteran: At Fort Leonard Wood, we was getting trained on how to lay mines, how to build bridges. It was the engineer outfit. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And the word got out that we were getting to—close to the end of the 8 weeks training and the word was passed that the whole outfit was going to be staying at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, joining the 18th Engineer Brigade. And nobody wanted to stay at Fort Leonard Wood because they had one little town with one stop sign. So, most of us volunteered to go to airborne training. There was a recruiter up there; came in and we were all sitting in the theater listening to his spiel and watching some films. And by the time he finished the film session and talking, half of the class signed up to go to airborne training. Interviewer: Okay. (00:14:12) Veteran: So, we went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky and joined the 11th Airborne Division and went to jump school right there at Fort Campbell. Interviewer: Okay. And now I want to back up again just a little bit. They—the Army sorts out where they want to send people. And usually if they are sending you to the engineers, they are assuming you have a certain level of aptitude or something for that. Do you have any idea why they sent you to the engineers rather than just infantry? Veteran: No, I don’t because I didn’t know anything. No, no, nothing about engineering. I guess they send you where they need you. Interviewer: Yeah. Well, you had…You—I guess like even the farm equipment you worked with— �9 Veteran: Well yeah. Interviewer: --would have been something. So, you have— Veteran: Some basic knowledge of tools and stuff so… Interviewer: Okay. But they must have thought something good about you if they are sending you there because they don’t send stupid people there. Veteran: Right. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. So, you go—okay, but then you decide that life at Fort Leonard Wood is not for you so off to airborne. So, how did the jump school work? Veteran: You had three weeks of jump school. First week was basically physical training and training about the parachute ad how you put it on, how you jump out the door. And but most of it was physical training because you need to be in good physical condition. The parachute was pretty heavy. You had two on: one on your back and one in the front, a reserve. So, the first week was—like I say—physical training mostly and introduction to the techniques that they were going to use to train you. Second week, you started jumping out of a tower with a parachute on, hooked to a cable that ran down 100 yards, 200 yards, to a mound. It gives you an idea of coming down through the air with the parachute on. And so, you did that for two weeks—I mean, one week. And the next week you are jumping out of an airplane. (00:16:32) Veteran: You know, by that time, they have taught you all the techniques to use, how to jump out, how to—what you do when you do jump out. You look up at your canopy as it opens after you count to 4000: 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, then you look up and if your parachute is open, you reach up and grab the lines and help guide it to where you want to go. And so, that went well. �10 The first—we always say the first jump, you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. You are just there. And you jump out and hope that everything goes well. By the time the fifth jump, you know, you think you’re expert at it. But my fifth jump—and the fifth jump mostly is—most of the time—is at night. I jumped and my parachute opened partially. I look up and it’s what we call a Mae West. The line is over in the middle of the parachute so it is divided in two bubbles. So, I pulled my—I started looking around and I think I said something vulgar: “Oh shit.” And so, I pulled the parachute, the reserve. By the time the reserve opened up well, it slowed me down. I hit the ground. You know? But after that, that was the only incident I ever had making a parachute jump. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I made a total of probably 260 total. Interviewer: Wow. Veteran: Through my career. Interviewer: Alright. So, you finished jump school. And then what happens to you? (00:18:14) Veteran: This was—I finished in late September/October. And December, the entire 11th Airborne Division went to Germany on different increments. Got on a plane—a train rather—and went to New York, got on a boat. It took nine days to cross the ocean. And went to Germany. On the ship, a lot of troops got sick—seasick. So, when I went on, I knew that people would get seasick. I asked one of the crew members, I said, “What can you do to keep from getting seasick?” he says, “When the ship’s store opens, go down and get you a box of saltine crackers.” He said, “When your stomach starts feeling a little lousy, eat a few crackers.” So, that’s what I �11 did. I didn’t get sick. Most people did. You go to a dining hall and you got long tables and everybody would sit down with their tray. And if you don’t hold onto your tray when the ship rocks, your tray is going to go down and when it comes back you don’t know what’s going to be on it. You know? Could be some of your food or all of your food or all of your food and somebody else’s food and where he got sick. Interviewer: Yep. Veteran: So, after we got to Germany—landed at Bremerhaven, Germany and went to Munich, Germany. Part of the division was in Augsburg, part in Munich and a couple other small towns around that area. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: We were in—the 11th airborne division was training, always training and having a good time. At some point, too much of a good time. So, the division got deactivated and we became part of the 24th infantry division. Interviewer: Okay. Can you explain the good—too much of a good time part? (00:20:17) Veteran: Oh…Well, we liked the good German beer too much and the good German fräuleins. And some got—well, a lot of fights between different groups. Different groups—I mean, regular airborne unit and non-airborne unit. The non-airbornes were called legs. Airborne unit didn’t like legs because during the basic—during jump school, they told you an air—a trooper—a paratrooper could beat any legs anywhere in the world. You could take on 5 and come out ahead. And a lot of the guys believed that. So, we got people that would go to training, live fire training. In one case, a kid brought a hand grenade back and threw it in a bar. So, after that we—the division was deactivated. �12 Interviewer: Okay, so you were just a little too—their training worked too well. Veteran: Yes. The training was too good. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: In some instances. Interviewer: Okay. What was the racial climate like at that point in the Army units? Veteran: Well…In the Army—in the unit, it was okay. You know, no real problems. But when you left the base, going downtown anywhere, it was segregated, you know? Where even the bars in town you got to know where you could go. And if you went to the wrong place, you might get beat up. You know? So, because we all come from back here in the States and we had different ideas about things. Interviewer: So, you brought that with you. Did the Germans seem to care or did they treat you all pretty much the same? (00:22:20) Veteran: Oh, they treated us pretty much the same. But they had names for us, you know. And they would call—they said I was like an Oreo. You know, black on the outside but white on the inside. You know? I don’t know why they called me that, you know? I am sure it was more than just me. Interviewer: Yeah, in the more recent American sense, there’s different views of that. But part of it was I get the impression you could probably work with or get along with pretty much anybody. Veteran: Yeah. Yeah, I— Interviewer: You might not have fit the stereotype so well. �13 Veteran: Right. That’s probably it. Interviewer: That confused them a little bit. Veteran: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so they didn’t know where I was, you know. Interviewer: Alright. Now, how long did you stay in Germany? Veteran: I stayed in Germany from…We left the Campbell—Fort Campbell—end of December. Got to Germany mid/late January. The entire division, we stayed there until December ’58. Interviewer: Yeah. And then the latter part of it now, your unit has become part of the 24th Division. Veteran: Right. Interviewer: 8th division, 24th regiment—yeah—instead. Okay. Veteran: Then I go to Fort Bragg from there. Interviewer: Now, once you switch to the other unit, did you lose your airborne designation? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Yes. Veteran: Yes. They would say when you are an airborne unit, you are paid $55 a month and you had to jump every 3 months. But after the 11th was deactivated, the airborne status discontinued. Interviewer: Yep. Veteran: Until you join another airborne unit. �14 Interviewer: Right. So, for the time being, you were a leg. (00:24:12) Veteran: Yeah, I was a leg. Interviewer: Right after all of that. Now, while you were in Germany, did you get to travel around at all or see much of Europe? Veteran: Well, I went to Paris a couple of times. After I was there for a year and a half, maybe two, I bought a car. I was the only lower enlisted person with a car. And it was a 1953 Mercedes. Nice car. Nice car. And we—I drove to Paris twice with another friend of mine—a guy. He and I was pretty good friends so…And we went there once with a tour group of guys and their wives. And while there, well, he and I kind of split away from the group and went down to Rue Pigalle, you know? And enjoyed that scenery. Anyway, the day we were leaving, we all got on the bus. Well, we came home—we came to the hotel late. He and I were sitting out on the sidewalk having a last beer. And we all got on the bus and the driver was going to leave and the manager of the hotel came out and said, “Okay, I need to know who was in room blah blah?” Sims and I raised our hand. He said, “Can we see your luggage?” He goes out, opened the luggage. He opens his, no problem. I open mine: there are all the towels from the hotel in my luggage. Yep. So, they took the towels and… Interviewer: Now, did you put the towels in your luggage? Veteran: No, I didn’t put the towels in my luggage. Interviewer: Okay, your roommate did. Veteran: My roommate did. But you know, we didn’t get too upset about that. They took the towels and we were on our way. �15 Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: The next time we went to Paris, we drove my car. And we were having a good time and I lost my wallet somewhere. My legal driver’s license, my leave papers. And so, we went to the embassy and they said, “Well, maybe you better stop at the local police department and let them know what happened.” And so, they said—the police said, “Well, the thing you have to do now is go back to Germany.” So, we left a little sooner than we wanted to, but everything worked out. (00:26:49) Interviewer: Alright. Well yeah, Paris is known to have pickpockets then and now. Veteran: Oh yeah. During that time, there was a war going on between the French and the Algerians. And a lot of Algerian nationals would be out on the street and they wanted to buy anything you had. They could buy your dirty clothes, whatever, because they were supplying their people back home. But yeah. Interviewer: Alright. So, now are there other things from that tour in Germany that stand out for you? Or things that happened with you? Veteran: Yeah. We were—since we were an airborne unit, near the barracks we were living in was a large open field. So, we had about 500—maybe 600—troops out spread out across the beginning of this open area double arm length apart. And we walked for about a mile looking for big rocks; anything dangerous that a trooper might make a jump and land on, fall. One of the guys found an old German—part of an old German rifle. Just the metal—the barrel—and some of the mechanisms. Anyway, we took it back to the barracks. And he was down—we had a work room downstairs in the basement and he was down there. And I walk in and he says, “Bill Johnson,” he was from Memphis, Tennessee, “Bill Johnson, would you take this cleaning rod? �16 You see that cleaning rod I stuck in the rifle?” He had it in a vise, right? He says, “I am going to put my hand here and see if when you hit it, I am going to see if whatever is stuck in there was going to come out.” I hit it one time and bam! There was a round. He lost his middle finger. (00:28:51) Interviewer: Oh… Veteran: So, Walter Jones—from that point on we called him Four Fingers, you know. But yeah, that was a—it was a good tour. A lot of good training. A lot of good training. Sometimes we had to go 80 miles away for a training facility. There was a placed called Hohenfels and it was a real muddy place, you know. But had a lot of good training. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, how long was your original enlistment for? Veteran: Original enlistment was for four years. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Because when I took the exam, I scored lower than average. So, in order to be—to enter the service, they tack on an extra year. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know? Interviewer: So, there were— Veteran: To give you the time to train you. Interviewer: Or something like that. Veteran: You know? �17 Interviewer: But you seemed to have trained pretty well pretty quickly so that worked well. Veteran: Yeah, that worked out okay. Interviewer: Now, at what—now when you first enlisted, were you thinking of making a career in the Army or just doing one hitch and then going on to something else? Veteran: After basic training, you know, I was so indoctrinated into the discipline and the surrounding of the—you know—camaraderie. I thought about staying more than just one tour, even that early. Interviewer: Alright. And now, at what point then did you decide to re-enlist? Was that while you were still in Germany or…? (00:30:31) Veteran: No, after I got back to Fort Bragg in ’59, I re-enlisted. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Alright. So, at Fort Bragg what unit were you with? Veteran: I was with the 504 [504th Regiment], 82nd Airborne Division. And once again, training was the word, you know? Always training. And…And then I—okay yeah, in—at one point, the Cuban Missile Crisis was going on, happening. By that time, I was married, I had one child and I was living on base in quarters. So, President Kennedy was making a speech about the missile crisis. The Cuban—the Russians had missiles in Cuba and we were going to quarantine the island, right? So, I told my wife, I said, “I am going upstairs to put my clothes on because the—I will be going to the unit any minute.” And before the president got off the TV, the phone rang and says report to the unit, you know? So, we—the next day, we organized and got on planes and �18 went to Eglin Air Force base in Florida. And we were ready. You know, they issued us ammunition, gave us shots, and we sat under the wing of the aircraft in the shade for a couple of days. You know? Until they—the Cubans—I mean, the Russians—decided to take the missiles out. Before that or after that, the 82nd was involved in a domestic problem in Mississippi. (00:32:33) Veteran: So, we went to Mississippi to check—there was an individual from the Air Force, a retired veteran, wanted to go to University of Mississippi: Old Miss. And then people didn’t want him there and the governor—Ralph Barnett, the governor, said he couldn’t attend the university. So, the 82nd and the 101st plus a couple of military units in the 2nd Infantry Division out of Fort Benning—a part of it went to Mississippi. And there, the federal government got involved and decided that if the—we were—I was on the Columbus Air Force base reservation. And they were going to send troops into town into the university. And at one point they said, you know, commanded the captain. Our captain says, “Okay, Sergeant Johnson, Sergeant such and such, I want you to tell all your black troops that they are not going to be involved in this operation.” And you talk about a bunch of pissed off people. I said, “Wait a minute…” You know, in a lot of units, most of the leadership is two leaders. Platoon sergeants, squad leaders were black soldiers, you know. So, they were going off with half of their leadership. And there is a book I have that a guy wrote later on about that and I didn’t know—nobody knew why. Who gave the word? Well, it was the division commander there on the ground in Columbus—I mean, Mississippi or from the Pentagon. But later on, found out that it was the president and the chief of staff decided that they didn’t want to have black guys out there with long guns facing the white guys. (00:34:43) �19 Veteran: So, anyway but really that was a sad case, you know? For most of the—well, for most of the people in the division because they didn’t want to be split up like that, you know. But so, it only lasted about 5-6 days and we started withdrawing back to Fort Bragg. Interviewer: Right. Yeah, because it was James Meredith who had— Veteran: James Meredith was the individual’s name, yeah. Interviewer: Yep. Okay, so you were a distant witness to that event. Veteran: Oh yeah. Interviewer: They didn’t let you go. Veteran: Yeah. Yeah, we went. I was in Mississippi, but once we were there, you know, we couldn’t participate. Except at the end, you know, they finally reneged up in Washington and said okay, disregard that. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know? But by that time, things were quieting down you know. A lot of folks were arrested and so we left there and came back to Fort Bragg. Interviewer: Alright. And so now how long then do you stay at Fort Bragg? Veteran: I left Fort Bragg sometime in December, I think it was, of ’59. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: No, ’63. Interviewer: Yeah. �20 Veteran: Yeah, ’63. Interviewer: Yeah, because you are still at Fort Bragg at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in ’62. Veteran: Yeah. Yeah. Interviewer: You’d be there for that. Alright. Okay. And then, what unit do you go to next? (00:36:13) Veteran: I go to—I get an assignment to go to Germany. The 8th infantry division, 509th airborne infantry brigade. And so, I go there and I stay until ’66. Part way—partly—part of my assignment was to go from the 509th—I went to the division headquarters as part of the inspector general team, where a group of individuals that are trained in certain fields go out to inspect all of the other units within the division. My job was to—for physical security and classified documents. Physical security would mean that I checked on the security of all the weapons, ammunition, storage units. And at that time, there was a new directive out that we had to check on this particular type of weapon that they called a COFRAM, which was—meant that—a COFRAM was Controlled Fragmentation Ammunition. And we saw the results of that during the Iraqi war, where the planes dropped little cluster bombs and they burst out, you know. One bomb, it contains many, many mini bombs. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: You know? So, that was the beginning of that exercise, you know. And I didn’t know what it was totally, what it was about, until the Iraq war. And I said, “Oh crap, that’s what that is.” Anyway, so I did that until 1966 and then I got ordered to go to Fort Benning, Georgia. �21 Interviewer: Okay. So, in this tour in Germany, where were you based? Veteran: I was in Mainz, Germany, and then I went to Bad Kreuznach, which was about 25 miles away. That was the division headquarters. Interviewer: Okay. Did you have your family with you? Veteran: I did. I had 3 kids by then. (00:38:18) Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Two girls—no, a girl and a boy and a girl. A set of twins. Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Okay, so how did your family like being in Germany? Veteran: They liked it. I am sure, you know, they missed their—the kids missed their friends, the wife missed the relatives. And—but she had—she got a job over there and worked for the base that I was working on for a non-profit organization that ran clubs and stuff like that. But it was interesting. Interviewer: And did they have American schools on the base? Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: That kind of thing. Veteran: Right, right. Interviewer: So, there were American kids at least to hang out with. Veteran: Right. Oh yeah, yeah. �22 Interviewer: And that kind of thing. Alright, now by this time now we are getting into the mid- ‘60s. Veteran: Right. Interviewer: The Vietnam War is— Veteran: ’66. Interviewer: --is heating up and all of this. Were men starting to switch out and go to Vietnam? Veteran: Oh yeah. Yeah, a lot of the guys left Germany and went directly to Vietnam. You know, I had three friends I know of, three—two guys that worked for me over there. Two of them got killed after being there less than a month. You know? And so, when I left Germany, I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, knowing that I was going to be going to Vietnam. I am starting taking some Vietnamese language training. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know? And I got to be pretty good, to understand and to speak. You know, ask the questions that I needed to ask. You know? Except when I got to Vietnam, I was interviewing a prisoner and I come up against the word that I wanted to use and I couldn’t think of it Vietnamese-wise. I started speaking German. He looked at me like totally puzzled. I thought— later I thought I should have been speaking French, you know? Because the French had been there and he may have understood French better than Germany. Interviewer: Right, but you can have that instinct where you are speaking in a foreign language just—and so, you just shift into the foreign language you know best. (00:40:30) �23 Veteran: Right. Interviewer: Yep. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: That kind of thing can happen to you. Alright. Now, what did your wife and family think about your going to Vietnam? Veteran: Well, they were a little…Well, expected it, you know? Because I—everyone around me was coming and going in and coming back from Vietnam. Some coming, some not coming back. So, we were in Georgia. My wife was going to school, a business school. And before we left— before I left Fort Bragg—Fort Benning—she was going downtown to this business school. And more than once, she would call me and say, “I got a flat tire.” So, come to find out, there were some young white boys, I guess, going to that school and didn’t like the idea that she was going to the school also. They would prop nails behind the tire and in front of the tire. You know? Just jam it in there where it wouldn’t fall. Didn’t matter which was she went, she was going to get a flat tire. You know, so that happened a couple times. And finally—I had to go down and change the tire. Either get it repaired or…So, finally I went in and talked to the school people and told them what was going on. And but they found out who was doing it and eventually, you know kicked them out of school. But she wanted to stay there. So, I made arrangement—well, first of all, after I got orders, family could stay on the base in the quarters they were in. Because two doors down there was a family with three kids. I got to know them and her—the wife and the kids—but I never did see the husband. I asked her one day, I said, “So, where is your husband? You know, where does he work? You know, what outfit is he in?” (00:42:32) �24 Veteran: She said, “Oh, he—two years ago he went to Ohio to see his kids and while he was up there, he killed his ex-wife and he’s in prison.” You know? And I am thinking I should be able to keep my family on the base if they have been here for two years and he’s in prison. I requested through the base to allow my family to remain there while I was in Vietnam for a year. And of course, they came back and said, “No.” And I said, “Wait a minute, this is what’s happening: this family is here, been here for two years. I know because I have been here almost two years.” And they said, “Well, no, that can’t happen. That can’t happen.” I said, “It’s happening.” So, they called back. The colonel called me and says, “Would you come up and let me—I need to talk to you.” He said, “Yeah, I guess that’s going on. Somebody messed up.” They didn’t catch it. Because he wasn’t in the military anymore. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: You know? But they still can’t keep your wife, keep your family there. So, we—I found an apartment off base. And she wanted to stay on base for 30 days. I said, “Okay.” And then she was going to move to the apartment later after I left. I get to Vietnam; three or four weeks later, maybe a month, six weeks, I get a letter and she’s—instead of going to the apartment, she goes to a dealer and buys a mobile home, puts it in this park. And everything was going okay until three or four more weeks, two months or so, get a letter that said the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in our yard. You know? And I am thinking…By this time, I am the platoon sergeant of a recon platoon with 42-44 people. And I am thinking: why the hell am I over here with this going on with my family? You know. (00:44:34) Veteran: And so, I called her and talked to her and she said, “You know, we are okay but the— you know, that’s what happened. And nothing since then.” Anyway, during this next 2-3 weeks, I started getting terrible headaches. And what reason—from what, I don’t know. The doctor says, �25 “Well, maybe it’s something out in the jungle that makes your sinuses swell and you can’t get any relief.” You know? So, one day I just about passed out and they evacuated me to the hospital and ran a bunch of tests. And they said, “Yeah, your sinuses are totally swollen and lots of pressure.” You know? And I am in the hospital one morning—about 4 o’clock in the morning, the nurse wakes me up. You know, says, “Sergeant Johnson, wake up! Wake up!” I said, “Well, what?” She said, “I got to give you a sleeping pill.” I said, “Damn! I am already asleep. Why are you waking me? I don’t need a sleeping pill. I am asleep. The best sleep I have had in 4 months.” You know, so she was just—she was upset because I was yelling at her, you know. But that’s the way I felt. You know? Interviewer: Alright. Now, we are a little bit ahead of ourselves here in the story. When you were—you had come back from Germany, you go to Fort Benning. Were you getting additional training or preparation to go to Vietnam? Or what was happening there? (00:46:10) Veteran: Yeah, I was—well, at that point, I was the operation sergeant at the airborne training school. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And our job was to process and care for the students that were coming in to go to the school. And so, I was the operation sergeant. I did training, scheduled the write-ins, scheduling units where to go where and when. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: You know? �26 Interviewer: And what rank did you have at that point? Veteran: At that time, I got promoted there to an E-7. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Sergeant first class, E-7. And there was a lot of guys that had been at that school for 67, 8 years. And when I got promoted, they were upset because here I am a newcomer and I get promoted ahead of them. But I had been in assignments that, you know, I performed well in. And by this time, the promotion system was such that you as a commander submit people to the Pentagon to be promoted. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And where you have to write the reason why you think that this person needs to be promoted immediately, as soon as possible, you know. So, that’s the way the system was working. And you know, and they gave you the history of your service, the background: where you have been, what you have done. And these guys had been in the school doing the same thing… Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. Veteran: You know? Not doing anything different. Interviewer: And you had had some pretty important assignments. You had been overseas for two tours and all of that kind of stuff so there was a lot that went into that at that point. But now, did you have the option to stay at the school? Or did you know that that was just temporary? Veteran: I knew it was temporary. I didn’t particularly want to stay there. No. �27 Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: So, I went to Vietnam and the colonel talked to us and says—there was two of us E7s—he said, “Well, you are going to the recon platoon, and so are you, you are going.” We had two separate platoons, right. One with 42 men, 44 men, you know. Interviewer: That’s over in Vietnam once you— Veteran: In Vietnam. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yeah. (00:48:27) Interviewer: But let’s back up a little bit now. When do you get orders to go to Vietnam? Veteran: Well…In…Let me see, early—mid March/April, I think. Probably April/May. Interviewer: Okay. Of ’67? Veteran: ’67, yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And then, what’s the process to get you to Vietnam? Veteran: Well, you—you know, you take care of your family, you sign the necessary paperwork so she can act in your absence in any way, shape or form. And then, you clear the post and away you go. Catch a plane and go to—in my case, I went to my—I had two brothers—3 brothers living in the San Francisco area. So, I go to San Francisco for two days and see my brothers and then go to Seattle, Washington. And that’s where I catch a plane and go to Vietnam. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: We land in Clark Air Force base in the Philippines and from there to Vietnam. �28 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Cam Ranh Bay. Interviewer: Okay, you land at Cam Ranh Bay. Alright. And do you come in during the day or at night? Veteran: During the day. Early morning. Well, mid-morning. Interviewer: Okay. And what’s your first impression of Vietnam? Veteran: Hot, hot, hot. Hot, hot. Interviewer: And you are from Mississippi… Veteran: Yeah, and I am from Mississippi. But it was hot. Hot and humid, you know. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: And you see troops, soldiers, walking, doing their job. You know? And I am thinking well, they can do it, I can. You know? Interviewer: Alright. So, you land. And do they give you any kind of orientation for Vietnam once you arrive? Veteran: No, they send us to wherever you were going. I went to Cam Ranh—Phan Rang— which was north of Saigon, about a couple hundred miles, or maybe; I don’t know for sure. But anyway, I went to Phan Rang and that’s where the headquarters for the 101st was. (00:50:22) Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know? And they give you a week and a half of training. You even go out on patrol so they teach you about the surrounding areas: how the jungle is and how you can walk and not �29 be able to see 5 yards off the trail. You know? And so, you had a week of that. And using— firing a weapon. They train you on a weapon because that was around the time where the M-16 was introduced to Vietnam and a lot of folks were having a problem. Even before I went, they were reporting problems with the M-16 jamming during the—inappropriate times. Interviewer: Yes. Veteran: You know, when you are firing at someone. So, after that you catch—you now where you are going, what unit. And they send you out by helicopter in the jungle to the unit. I get off the helicopter and the rest of the platoon is about 100 yards away. And somebody had come over to the helicopter and gets me and they escort me over to the company, or the commander. And on the way over there, some sniper up in the hills is firing at me. I said, “Damn, these guys are trying to kill me already.” I just got off the helicopter. Anyway, I joined the unit and the captain of the company was running the platoon that I was in. Interviewer: And which battalion were you joining? (00:52:02) Veteran: It was 2nd battalion, 502nd. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And so, now you are coming into this, you have had a lot of experience in the Army, but none in Vietnam. And none with jungle warfare or anything else like this. Veteran: Well, I went to jungle warfare training school in Panama. Interviewer: Okay, so you did do those. Veteran: For two weeks. Interviewer: Okay. �30 Veteran: You know? And… Interviewer: So, what were— Veteran: You learn how to survive in the jungle. You know, things that you can find to eat if you get separated from yourself, you know, people. Interviewer: But you hadn’t been in Vietnam. Veteran: No. I hadn’t been to Vietnam. Hadn’t had anybody shooting real bullets at me. Interviewer: Okay. Now you are a platoon sergeant for the recon platoon… Veteran: Right. Interviewer: And a reconnaissance platoon—so, basically, that’s for the whole battalion, essentially. Veteran: Right, right. Interviewer: And they operate pretty much independently. Veteran: Independent of the companies. Any of the other companies. Interviewer: Yeah. And they work in small groups? Veteran: Well, we…Under normal circumstances, we’d be small groups. But in this case, because you are operating out away independent of the company, they kept us together for the most part. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: 30-40, 35 people. �31 Interviewer: Alright. And you are going in here, you don’t have any experience. How did you approach your job, or how did you—did you try to learn from the other guys? Veteran: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the sergeants that were squad leaders, you know, I talked to them when opportunity came in the evening when we stopped to set up a defensive position, you know. And find out how things have been going and what techniques—special techniques—that you use to stay safe. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: It—during the darkness. And one of the things that we would do is in the evening, just before dark, we’d stop if we got a resupply of supplies, rations. That particular time, we’d stop, break down all the rations issued out to the individuals. And stack the boxes up and burn them or sometimes leave them there and leave that position just before—right at dark—and go down 200 yards away and set up position. (00:54:34) Veteran: Because eventually, I mean, you have spent enough time there that anybody around, they know you are there. So, when it gets a little dark when he can’t see very good, you know, in the distance, you can move. That prevents you being ambushed at night in that position. And a lot of times you leave a squad where you got resupplied and if the VC comes scrambling or running through your leftovers, you know, you take care of them. You know? Interviewer: Right. Veteran: So, stuff like that— Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: --you’d learn from the individuals that had already been there. �32 Interviewer: Okay. Now, did you have a platoon—an officer as platoon leader? Veteran: Off and on. Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Most of the time, I was the guy. Interviewer: You were in charge. Veteran: One time, I mean, we got a call—I got a call that says you’re having an O-6—not an O6, but…I forget what they called them—going to be landing, taking over. I said, “Okay.” So anyway, we got the lieutenant in and he—I introduced myself. And I says, “Did they give you a map, lieutenant, when you left CP?” “No, sergeant.” I says, “Okay, I have the map. When I give you the map—when I give you the map, you’re in charge. Otherwise, you just stick with me.” Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know? Because you don’t want to introduce him to the action right away; let him get his feet on the ground. Interviewer: Okay. Now, what kind of terrain were you operating in? Was it mountains, jungles…? (00:56:12) Veteran: Mountain. Interviewer: Swampy? Okay, yeah. Veteran: Mountains. Mountainous. Nothing real mountainous but hills and anywhere you went was pretty much jungle because—I mean, but on the other hand, you had trails. No roads to �33 speak of, but trails where the local VC or the local population used as a way to get around. They’d go from point to point through a trail. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: There was no roads. Interviewer: Now, would you use the trails yourself or stay off them? Veteran: Yeah, we tried—we used the trails. Yeah. And the most of the time, the VC would make a signal and use the little rocks or sticks, tie them up together, have one pointing in a particular direction. You know, that’s where it tells the guy when you get to this point, go that way. You know? And so, we’d pick up on that and, you know, you find information on the trails. So, that’s why we used the trail. But sometimes you have to go right straight through the jungle. And in order to do that, you got to have a couple people up front with machetes whacking your way through. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And that’s so noisy. Interviewer: I guess sometimes though, in some areas, trails would be booby trapped. Veteran: Oh yeah. Interviewer: Or you could be ambushed there. Veteran: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, so you have a point man. Every time you move, you have a point man and a slack man—that means a guy that is covering the point man. But the point man is quite a ways out and he’d see anything. And the saying was: point man better be alive or he is dead. You know? So, we had this one kid that was a point man. We called him �34 Tennessee. He—every time we moved, he wanted to be the point. We get to a location and we had to go to where the battalion…Yeah, battalion headquarters was. So, when we got there, the colonel is wanting me to send three people with the radio relay station up on the mountain up there to increase the radio communication. So, I thought Tennessee been out on the point so long, he needs the break. You know? So, I told him that he and two other guys were going on the radio relay station. So, they get up there and a big storm—a couple days later there is a big storm that comes through. And they were I guess apparently too close to the antenna. Lighting strike kills Tennessee. (00:58:52) Interviewer: Oh wow. Veteran: So…You blame yourself in a way. But on the other hand, you are thinking you are giving the guy a break, getting a relief from doing what he normally does. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: You know? Interviewer: Yeah. There are just some things you simply can’t control. Veteran: Yeah. Right, right, right. Interviewer: And it would have been somebody. Veteran: Oh yeah, it didn’t matter—it wouldn’t have made any difference who it was. Somebody was going to be there, you know. And that was the same time these news people came by and wanted to talk to me and interview me. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And what we were doing. And I just basically ignored them, you know. �35 Interviewer: Okay, now had they come because of the lighting strike or did— Veteran: I don’t know. That’s why I didn’t want to talk to them about it, you know. Interviewer: Alright. Now, you did not spend—how long do you think you spent actually in the field with your unit? Veteran: With the unit, probably two months. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: At the most. Interviewer: And then at that point, you had the other problems with the— Veteran: Yeah, the problem with the home—back home. And headaches. My medic was feeding me Darvons, which was a painkiller— Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: --that we used over there. And at one point it just got to the point where I couldn’t function. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: You know? (01:00:27) Interviewer: Okay, so once you get through that, where were you—when you were in the hospital, where were you? Veteran: I was in Quy… Interviewer: Quy Nhon? �36 Veteran: I was in Tam Ky. Interviewer: Tam Ky, okay. Veteran: Yeah, Tam Ky. And either Tam Ky or Chu Lai. Interviewer: It might have been Chu Lai because Chu Lai was a bigger base. Veteran: Right. Right. Well, I was in Tam Ky first and then went to Chu Lai after that because at Tam—at Chu Lai is where the colonel decided I wouldn’t go back out to the recon platoon. I would stay at the battalion as the S-2 sergeant because the S-2 sergeant was getting ready to leave to rotate. He was a friend of mine. We had known each other for many years, you know. So, he was going to go back home and I was going to take his place. Interviewer: Okay. Explain what an S-2 does. Veteran: An S-2 is the—he gathers the intelligence information from the units out in the field and try to evaluate and determine exactly what’s—what the enemy is doing. And posts that and briefs the colonel, the commander. And whether he takes actions… Interviewer: Right. Okay, so you are— Veteran: Giving the information. Interviewer: You are the intelligence officer. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Right. Okay. Or sergeant, in this case. Veteran: Right. Interviewer: Alright. Now—and was that at Chu Lai or was that somewhere else? �37 Veteran: That was Chu Lai. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Now, and this is now the fall of ’67 when you had gotten into— Veteran: Yeah, in probably…No, early April/March. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: No—yeah, fall. Fall—November, yeah, because we left Chu Lai and went back to Phan Rang. Interviewer: Okay. (01:02:17) Veteran: And for Thanksgiving. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And from Phan Rang we spent 4 or 5 days there. And at that time, the S-2 officer— Captain Anderson was his name. We had the officers—well, we had Quonset huts, you know. Wooden buildings where the troops would have to sleep and, you know, live. Anyway, Captain Anderson was cleaning his weapon. In a room next to him was two communications officers. So, he takes his 45 out, right? Pulls the slide to the rear, let it go forward, and takes the clip out, pulls the trigger, goes through the wall, hits the intel—I mean, communications officer in the chest and kills him. Interviewer: Wow. �38 Veteran: You know? No problem. He was the S-2 officer. And after that standdown, you know, we had an investigation and determined it was just a freaking accident. And so, they took Captain Anderson out of the S-2 and made him the company commander of Charlie Company. So, we went from Phan Rang to Song Be, which was south, just north of Saigon. This is just before the Tet Offensive. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: You know, so while we were still in Song Be and Captain Anderson was approaching his DEROS—date of rotation back to the States—he was walking around the perimeter saying goodbye to his troops. And there was—he walked across the trail. Down the trail was a VC. Saw him, shot him, killed him right there. You know, I thought man how crazy is that? (01:04:17) Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: You know, he accidentally kills a guy and the last day he is in the field, he gets killed. Interviewer: Okay. Now, during this time when you with the 101st and before the Tet Offensive, how common was contact with the enemy? Veteran: Quite frequently. Small, small contact. You know, a squad maybe now and then. Interviewer: Okay. And were those Viet Cong at this point or were you seeing North Vietnamese regulars? Veteran: VC. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Mostly VC. �39 Interviewer: Alright. Now, as the Tet Offensive approached, were you getting any indications that there was more enemy activity or something might be happening? Veteran: No. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: No, nothing. Interviewer: Not where you were. Veteran: No. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: Because at that time, things were pretty quiet. I think the NVA was back over by Laos and Cambodia. You know? Because they used the Ho Chi Minh Trail. That’s the way they came down. Interviewer: Yep. Veteran: And but—and made their way inland without being discovered. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: So, when the Tet Offensive started, we left Song Be and went to Saigon, got on the LST—something…a transported boat. Interviewer: Yep. Landing Ship Tank. Veteran: Yeah, right. Interviewer: A big, big flat-bottomed transport. �40 Veteran: Right. Interviewer: Old World War 2 things. Veteran: So, we go to Da Nang. All the way up the coast to Da Nang, which was quite a trip. Anyway, while we were waiting to load the LST, we were sitting—guys were sitting on the— with their rucksacks on against a bunch of Conex containers—you know, big metal containers that they used to send supplies overseas. Interviewer: Right. (01:06:03) Veteran: And one of the guys got up when he was getting ready to leave and when he got up, the pressure off the Conex container opened—the door flew open. And it was filled with Johnnie Walker whiskey. Interviewer: Oops! Veteran: And I didn’t know it until later, you know? So, half the guys was half way drunk by the time we got midway between Saigon—I mean, the Saigon and Da Nang. Interviewer: Da Nang. Veteran: And so, the word was out: anybody that had alcohol better throw it overboard. You know? Interviewer: Okay. Now, when the Tet Offensive first began, did your unit or base get attacked or was it quiet where you were? Veteran: It was attacked. We went from Song Be to Bien Hoa, which was the original home base for the 101st. And that’s not too far from Saigon. �41 Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: So, we got word that there was action west of Saigon. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: So, we went down and got on the LST and went north. They already had enough troops in Saigon. Interviewer: Right. Okay. But at Song Be, you didn’t get attacked? Veteran: No, we didn’t. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: No. Interviewer: Alright. So, you have been— Veteran: So, we go to Da Nang and stay at Da Nang a couple or three days. My wife’s boyfriend at that time was stationed in Da Nang. She keeps asking me did I see such and such? I said, “No. If I did, I wouldn’t have known him in the first place.” Anyway, we stayed there and we started sending out patrols. There was a Marble Mountain? Yeah, I guess there was. Interviewer: Marble Mountain was there, yep. Veteran: Yeah, and there was the Hai Van Pass and every time the Marine tried to send a convoy to Phu Bai or Hue, they’d get attacked. So, we were operating out of there for a while. A couple—3-4 weeks. And then we moved from there to just south of Hue. Interviewer: Okay. (01:08:14) �42 Veteran: And from there, we went out west towards A Shau Valley. We started moving that way. And the Marine Corps was—the Marines were pretty much taken Hue on the—you know— under control. And finding so many dead bodies in a huge mass grave just west of Hue. You know? So… Interviewer: And that was the place where the local Viet Cong had rounded up various people they did not like. Veteran: Right, right. Everybody they didn’t like— Interviewer: And killed them. Yep. Veteran: --and didn’t know, you know, that knew that—where they were and what they did. Anyway, so, we were out about 15 miles west of Hue at a Marine—we relieved a Marine unit that was operating in that area. But they left and we went and took up the same position. And every position—it was just left as the old Vietnamese say, beaucoup. So much ammunition, grenades and small arms ammunition. You know? And mud. And we cleaned that up. So, I was with the colonel one day and we went down to the helipad to meet a helicopter coming in; the division commander was coming in. So, we go down and meet the division commander and the sergeant major. And the sergeant major was talking to me, he says, “Sergeant Johnson,” he says, “can’t you get starched fatigues out here?” I said, “Sergeant Major, I am glad to get clean fatigues.” You know, I mean this was a guy that’s been in a garrison forever. Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. Veteran: You know? Thought I had starched fatigues. But anyway, about a week later a fire base about 5 miles away gets bombed. Aircraft—some of the aircraft had come in from the north. They had certain places that they would drop their ammunition. They didn’t want to land with it, �43 right? And nobody told them there was a fire base there. So, they lost the…a handful of people killed. And some wounded. More wounded. So, the colonel and I go get in a helicopter and go down there and see if we could do help in any way, shape or form. So, we sent some communications equipment to reestablish, you know, communications there. (01:10:40) Interviewer: So, this was the North Vietnamese resupplying their units in the field? Veteran: No. Interviewer: Or you were—your own people were dropping resupply? Veteran: Right, right. They were—had been bombing up north and on their way back they would take—pick a place to drop their whatever was left. Interviewer: Right. Okay. So, it’s the leftover bombs. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Yeah, okay. Veteran: Yeah. And so, somebody forgot to inform them that there was an Army unit there, you know. So… Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: Things happen. Interviewer: That would be— Veteran: Shit happens, as they say. Excuse me. Interviewer: It certainly does. Okay. �44 Veteran: So, from there we go from the rock pile I think they called it. We go from there west toward A Shau Valley and set up Firebase Bastogne. You have probably heard of Bastogne. Interviewer: I have heard of it, yes. Veteran: Yeah. So, Bastogne—we were there and then we went to Veghel, which was even further west into the A Shau, near the A Shau. And we stayed there a couple—4 weeks or so. By this time, we were in April. Maybe May. And from there we went up back northeast to another firebase. And I didn’t particularly like being on the firebase because the VC knew where we were. When you are out in the recon platoon, they don’t know where you are because you don’t know where they are and they don’t know where you are. But that’s where they get the opportunity to lob those 132 [122 mm] rockets. Interviewer: Right. (01:12:25) Veteran: You know? And so, every place we went, you know, we got rocketed pretty much. Interviewer: Would you get mortar fire too or mostly— Veteran: Mortar—oh yeah, mortar fire. Yeah. Yep. Interviewer: I think the closer you were to the DMZ, the more likely you were to be in trouble too. Veteran: Yeah. Right. Yeah, you didn’t have too far to carry those rockets. Interviewer: Okay. Now, was there less combat on the ground as you got farther into the year or was…Or were things still pretty hot? Veteran: Oh yeah, it was hot. It was hot. �45 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yeah. Yeah, because you see after Tet, these—a lot of the VC and the NVA units pulled back, but they didn’t disappear. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: You know? One of the—we had a battalion from the 82nd attached to us. Maybe a company. Anyway, they were out in our area of operation. And I was on the radio talking to the guy, one of the radio operators. And he said, “We are receiving small arms fire.” And all of a sudden, he started yelling, “They are coming out of a tunnel!” And that was the last time I heard from him. You know? So, they lost a bunch of folks during that time. So, the—you know, the NVA didn’t disappear, they just moved away and hid. Interviewer: Yeah, because it was a lot of fighting in that year following the start of Tet. Veteran: Right. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yep. Interviewer: That all kept on going. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Now, did you have any close calls yourself? (01:14:14) Veteran: Some dumb close calls. I—when I was still with the recon platoon, I—we were giving instructions to go to a certain point up on the hill. There was a hospital, a VC hospital, up there. So, we were making our way up the hill. Every now and then, we would come up against a wooden—looked like an outhouse, but no entry. Totally enclosed all the way around. You know? Because we were so close, I didn’t want to blow it up. But that still puzzles me today what it was. It was probably a storage place for weapons. But anyway, so we were making our way up �46 the mountain, up to the side of this hill, to check out this hospital. We got there. On the way up, I am walking behind 3 or 4 troops and I see a M-26 grenade, and it’s our grenade. I pick it up, put it on my belt. Yep. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. Put it on my belt and I keep it, you know? But it could have been a booby trap. Interviewer: Sure. Veteran: Very easily. And I would have been gone. And along with my radio operator, you know. But anyway, we get to the hospital. Most of the patients were gone. The doctors, a couple of nurses there and—with the kids. Probably some people that lived in the local area and that was forced to work up there. Interviewer: Right. (01:16:02) Veteran: So, that’s about the only thing we found. And we destroyed the hut and the equipment that they had. And so, our guys carried 3 or 4 kids on their shoulder back down the mountain and brought the women down and hauled them in a helicopter and had them evacuated, you know. Because what are you going to do with them? You know. But you know, that’s—those are the kind of close calls you—dumb. Dumb calls. One—at one point we were at a fire base and the recon platoon that came up was going to be resting a couple of days. The helicopter pad was down below. And it was dug out along the side of a hill where there would be flat for the helicopter landing. But so up here, you know, it gets higher. And but the recon platoon people were down there, sitting. And I said to make sure you sit down, do not get up. You know? Because when helicopters take off, sometimes they tilt one way or the other. So, the—one of the best recon platoon sergeants we—platoon squad leader we had was sitting there. The helicopter take off and it tilt; took his head right across the top. I called the helicopter back and the medic �47 got on the helicopter with the kid, with the sergeant, and took him back. Before we got to the hospital, he was dead of course. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: You know? A lot of crazy accidents killed people. Well, you know there’s 500… Interviewer: Talking about sort of different experiences in Vietnam. Now, I know at one point you got wounded. Can you talk about that? Veteran: Yeah. Yeah, we were at a—I was on a firebase at that time and the VC broke into the perimeter. And you know, on the firebase we have the artillery batteries; it is located there. And the mortar platoon. Mortar platoon is located there. And we gave a medical staff there. So, all of a sudden, I am sleeping. And we build our own little hooch or a bunker. Interviewer: You’re in a bunker. Yeah. (01:18:31) Veteran: Yeah. And I am sleeping with the company commander of the headquarters company; he’s in the same hooch. And explosion starts going off. And I mean different locations. I jump up and I—you sleep with your shoes on, your weapon is right next to you. I jump up and I look out and I see the cap—the colonel—standing, staggering around. And his—where he was sleeping was covered—I mean, a pile of rocks to keep from small arms fire hitting him. But the VC had broken into the perimeter and apparently knew where he was. They threw grenades right on the tent. You know, which was just a little pup tent. And he got wounded. He was standing around, staggering. I ran over and grabbed him and escorted him to the medical tent. And from there I go—they took care of him. From there I go check the perimeter, make sure all the troops are okay. And I was leaving one position, talking to the guy. He was okay, no problem, hadn’t seen anything. And go to the next place down: there’s a guy laying on his back. The medic was �48 already there. Laying on—yeah, on his stomach. He was already back there. And he got a bunch of shrapnel in his butt. And you know, and this…Why did it—I think the other guy was—came up walking up to the location and looked down. He said—I think he was a medic, and I think he said—I know he said, “Oh my god!” I said, “Get the hell away from here!” I said, “You’re going to cause the guy to go into shock.” I mean, blood was just oozing out of him, you know. (01:20:27) Veteran: And so, the medics were there taking care of him. And the mortars were firing off around the perimeter outside of, you know, our perimeter. By this time, the VC had pulled back. And so, I was making my way around to check on each position. And some small arms fire was coming up the hill, and also a grenade. And that’s when I got injured in the cheek. And I thought well, man if it was a bullet, I am glad I had my mouth open. You know? Because it came from on an angle like that. And anyway, so I—everything by this time, the Spooky was up dropping flares so we could see. You know, turning the night into daylight. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And the colonel was in the tent by the morning. And what do you call that? Mini guns were circling, firing all around. We sent out patrols the next day and found quite a few bodies. You know, the mini guns must have got them. But the colonel didn’t come back to the battalion because he was wounded. The next time I saw the colonel was in 1990-something. And he was introducing his wife to me. He says, “And I think this is the guy that probably saved my life.” You know? I said, “No, you were okay.” I said, “I just got you to the—made sure I got you to the medics.” You know? But he was just—the same guy that just got awarded the Medal of Honor for a Korean War action. �49 Interviewer: Wow. (01:22:16) Veteran: Korean War action back in the Korean War. That was just the war he was upgraded from, you know. Interviewer: Right. Yeah, they are doing some of that now. Veteran: Yeah. Yeah, so he is 95 now. Interviewer: Okay. And what’s his name? Veteran: Puckett—Colonel Puckett. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: Ralph Puckett. I think his first name is Ralph. I didn’t even call him Ralph. You know? Interviewer: No. You would not at that point. Okay. And then I think you also at some point received a Bronze Star. What was that for? Veteran: Yeah, that was after I even got back from Vietnam. I was at Fort Bragg by this time, you know. And they had an awards ceremony; presented a Bronze Star to me. And I guess the sergeant major from that action put me in, you know, I guess. Interviewer: Okay, yeah. That would make sense. Alright. Now…As we move on in ’68, you are getting close to a year in Vietnam. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: So, under what circumstances do you leave or how does that process work? Veteran: Well, I was—during the whole time, I kept telling the colonel—asking the colonel: when can I go on R and R? I was thinking about having my wife meet me in Hawaii. �50 Interviewer: Right. Veteran: A lot of married guys were doing that. And he said, “Well, wait until the next—the end of the next operation to get started.” You know? And that next operation gets started. So, finally I says, “Colonel, I am going to take 3 or 4 days off and go down to Saigon—Da Nang, rather.” They had a China Beach down there. You could spend—get a little hooch on the beach and spend time down there. But at the same time, my wife’s brother was in the Marine Corps, stationed in Da Nang. And I located him and I met him and talked to him. And he says—he says, “Oh, by the way, my mother is down in Georgia taking care of your kids.” He says, “Carol is in the hospital.” You know? So, I said, “Well, cripes. I guess I better get back up to the unit. They’ve been probably trying to contact me.” By the time I get back up there, the officer in the rear, in charge of the rear area, said, “When are you supposed to rotate? DEROS?” I said, “Around the 1st week of July.” He said, “Well, get your stuff together. We are going to send you out now because—” it was—must’ve been around the 20th of June. (01:24:52) Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: Or at least something like that. So, I packed up. I had a couple—I had an SKS weapon that I wanted to bring back with me. In order to do that, you have to go to Saigon to get it approved to bring it back. So, I said, “Forget about that.” You know? So, 3 days later I was on the plane coming back to the good old U.S. of A. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: Went back down to Fort Benning, Georgia. My wife was…She was out of the hospital by then. So, I sent my mother-in-law away. And then I got—I knew where I was going: to Fort Bragg. So, we packed up and went to Fort Bragg. Before we left Fort Benning, I had this—she �51 bought this trailer where you could fold it up to a single wide, right? So, I had to get equipment to do that and I did that, contacted an outfit to move it to North Carolina. And we drove to North Carolina and I got an assignment to the S-2 sergeant of the 505 infantry brigade. Interviewer: Regiment. (01:26:16) Veteran: Regiment. Yeah, at that point, yeah. Anyway, so I stayed there and I went to Puerto Rico once or twice for training. And that’s—about a year later I got orders to go to England. Interviewer: Okay. And what was that assignment? Veteran: Well, that assignment was a—I was assigned to the SILK PURSE Control Group, which was controlled by the USEUCOM—U.S. European Command. And—which was in Stuttgart at the time, the headquarters was. But we were in England. And the purpose of that mission or that outfit was to provide a survivable command post for the U.S. military in Europe in case of a nuclear war. So, we had 6 KC-135 aircraft, which was an old model of the Boeing 707. It had all the equipment that you’d need to communicate with anybody in the world pretty much. And we had equipment onboard where in case of a war, you needed to get down—not the aircraft itself, but it had cable that dropped down to a couple hundred feet off the ground where you could communicate through that cable to the military in the command JCS—Joint Service Command. And so, we did practice that once or twice. And each time, you had to cut it before it could get back into the aircraft. And we also had guys—an Air Force guy onboard our aircraft, and I think each one of the aircraft because you’d fly 8 hours flight after you’d get level—flying level—you’d go x number of feet high. (01:28:24) Veteran: And you’d contact the aircraft that’s already on station, and relieve them, and you’d take charge of the operation from that point until 8 hours later, and then another one would �52 come. Sometimes, because we were in Germany—England—sometimes we couldn’t land back in England because a lot of fog during that particular time of year. So, we’d land in…At first, we could land in... Well, Qaddafi—where is Qaddafi from? Interviewer: Libya. Veteran: Libya, yep. We had a base in Libya that we could land. We had a base in France we could land, but France kicked us out, so did Qaddafi. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: So, Scotland—we had a base in Scotland we could land. We had a base in Madrid, Spain, so we would land in Madrid, Spain most of the time and spend the night and then take up a position the next day, whatever, the hour we started a new mission—started the next mission. That lasted…Let me see, I got there in ’69 and we left in ’72. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And very enjoyable assignment. Interviewer: Okay. I mean, did the—did you again have—did you have base schools there? Did your kids go— Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Yep. Veteran: Kids had the school that they could attend. Just walked right down the street to the school. And… �53 Interviewer: Now, would you travel at all with your family or do any tourism? Or just in England or…? Veteran: In England, let me see…No, we didn’t because my wife’s—it all started, her illness— she had a diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenic. You know? So, she was in the hospital at Fort Bragg a couple of times. And we got to England and she was in the hospital quite often. So, at the point where it got—had to get a…someone to come in and watch the kids when I am off flying. Interviewer: Right. (01:30:26) Veteran: On duty. And so, that was pretty hectic at times. And sometimes, you know, she’d stay at the hospital 3-4 weeks and then come home and be fine. And before you knew it, things turned sour again. So, yeah, the kids went to school and did very well. Met a lot of friends—I mean, acquaintances that they got to know and enjoyed the stay. We didn’t do much traveling. We did a lot of local travel. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And go to local towns and that, you know. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah. Veteran: Went to London and I saw Hair, and that was the first time I saw a crew onstage butt naked. Interviewer: Yep. Probably true for many people in Europe. Veteran: Yeah, yeah. I thought what the heck? Interviewer: Okay. �54 Veteran: So, we came back from England. I wanted to stay longer in England, but they said— this was in ’72 so the war was still going on in Vietnam. They said, “Well no, you can’t stay because you will probably be going back to Vietnam.” You know, so I got an assignment to— before I got the assignment, they contacted me and said I wouldn’t be going to Vietnam but I was going to Michigan to work with the Michigan National Guard Advisory group. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I spent 4 years doing that: from ’72 to ’76. That meant going from Wisconsin to Indiana to Grayling, Michigan…Anywhere where the National Guard was training. You know, particularly during the summer. You know, two weeks in Minnesota, Wisconsin—sometimes spend six weeks in Wisconsin because one unit would come for two weeks and the next unit would come. You know, so the same thing with Grayling, but it was close enough where I could come home. You know? I was still living in the Selfridge Air Force Base in Mount Clemens area at the time. (01:32:39) Interviewer: Alright. And that’s the whole period—I mean, now Vietnam is really winding down. Vietnam actually ends. Veteran: Yeah. Yeah, Vietnam was winding down. I didn’t have to think about having to go back there. Because when I was there, when I left Vietnam, I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going back. I had been in service 12 years when I went to Vietnam. And I decided, if necessary, I’d give them my 12 years and get out because it seemed to me that the Americans were doing most of the fighting and the VC—I had to—interpreters with every company on the ground. And one time, the—all of the interpreters all of a sudden showed up at the firebase. And I see them getting off the helicopter. I go out, I said, “What’s going on? You can’t be leaving your �55 company.” “Well, it’s a holiday. We go home for the holiday.” I said, “You get your butts back on that helicopter and get back out there with that unit.” I said, “All those guys out there? They would like to go home for the holiday too.” You know? So, they all reluctantly got back on the helicopter, you know. Interviewer: Did you have much contact with the Vietnamese civilians? Veteran: No. Not at all, pretty much. I visited a—what do you call it? A massage parlor one time. And I said, “I don’t need to go back there.” You know, they wanted—they would give you a massage and they wanted to go more than a massage. Interviewer: Right. (01:34:18) Veteran: And I said, “No thank you.” And that was the only contact I had with—and I could— you know, I saw civilians walking down the street. Interviewer: Right. And there were the ones who were in the hospital that you had to remove and that kind of thing. Veteran: Right, right. Interviewer: Now, did you have civilians who would work on any of the bases? Veteran: Yeah. Oh yeah. A lot of civilians that worked on the base: laundry, barber shop, BX. You know? And when the Tet Offensive happened and tour—why, on that tour, Phan Rang and a couple of the other bases—you know, when the Tet Offensive happened, they found most of them killed on the perimeter. Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. �56 Veteran: Because they were working but they were VC also. You know, you never—you can’t tell. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: You know, no background investigation takes place. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. So, you—now you have this assignment in Michigan. I mean, and what—and that’s your last assignment. At what point— Veteran: That wasn’t my last assignment. Interviewer: How did you—did you decide to leave the service or were you told it was time to go? Veteran: Well, I was going to try to go back to Europe someplace. I said, “I’d like to get a—” I called the Pentagon, talked to my guy up there—I said, “I’d like to go back to Germany or England, you know.” He said, “No problem, no problem.” He promised me that I would be—this was in the early 70— Interviewer: ’76 now? Veteran: ’76, yeah. early ’76. He said, “No problem. We will have you there back by September.” I said, “Good, because I have kids still in school and they need to get back in school in September if we are going to be moving.” And about a month or two later, I get orders to go to Korea. Interviewer: Oh… (01:36:11) Veteran: And I called the guy back. I said, “What’s going on with this?” I said, “You said you were going to be able to get me back to Europe someplace.” He said, “Well, we see you have �57 never been to Korea and you got to go to Korea before you go back to Europe.” I says, “You’re right, you are absolutely right. I have never been to Korea, and guess what? I am not going. I am going to retire.” And that was the day that I made up my mind to retire. Now, I should have thought a little bit more about this because I had 21 years and 5 months and a few days. If you go 21 years and 6 months and 1 day, you get additional money. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know? So, I cut myself short by a week or two. You know? So… Interviewer: Alright. So, once you left the service, then what did you do? Veteran: Well, I was going to take 6 months off and do nothing. You know? That lasted about 4 weeks. And I moved to Holland, Michigan. My folks left Detroit in ’62 or ‘3, something like that, and moved to Holland. They had bought—my dad bought about 26 acres of land and was out in the country, farming and selling vegetables. Anyway, I decided that we’d go over there to visit. And I decided that’s where I would like to raise my kids because I could have had a job just out of Mount Clemens, working for Ford Motor Company and making good money. But that was too close to Detroit, as far as I was concerned. Because my kids had been kind of isolated their whole life, you know, living on military bases and not exposed to a lot of nonsense. So, that’s why I moved to Holland. (01:38:12) Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And that’s where all of the kids have graduated from high school. Interviewer: Now, did you find a job there? �58 Veteran: I did. I worked…Well, I went—I decided I was going to do just about anything to keep busy. So, I went to this outfit that take rows of aluminum and make different stuff, you know. So, I went over there and I knew—my wife knew the family that was—the lady was the secretary in that office. So, I stopped by one day and I says, “I’d like to see about getting a job.” I forget her name; she says, “Sure! No problem. Fill this—just put your name and phone number and address and the sales officer will call you.” He called me and I go in and for the interview. And he asked me what I’d been doing for all these years, you know. And I started talking about my military career and my service and my experience and what I did. And when I got to the point of the airborne command post in Germany—I mean, England—he was very interested in that. And the next day he called me, says, “Go see this doctor and get a physical and you can start Monday.” You know? And he says—when I come back Monday, he wanted to see me—he says, “And what do you have in mind for the future?” I said, “well, I’d like to take your job.” But I worked there about 6 months and maybe a little longer. And a prison opened about—opened up about 12 miles south of Saugatuck area, you know. So, I went down there and I put in an application. I worked there for a couple—well, ’78 we got inmates in. ’79, I moved from there, went to Muskegon because I could get a promotion. Well, it was set as a temporary promotion. I thought, well you know, temporary? When I get there, I am going to make it a permanent promotion. They are going to have to hire me on a permanent basis once I work for a while. And they did. You know, and the next thing I knew, I make lieutenant and the shift commander. And I worked there for about 9 years. (01:40:41) Veteran: And I was outside during a snowstorm, and there’s a guy running what we call the port where trucks come through. We had to inspect them and go down underneath where you’re looking, going to do an oil change, to check for drugs. And I was down there. I started going �59 down and I hit a piece of ice I guess and slipped down and hurt my back, and end up in back surgery. It never got much better so they medically retired me. So, I did Mr. Mom for 3 or 4 years until all the kids got out of high school. And that’s my story. Interviewer: Alright. Now, to look back at the time that you spent in the Army, are there other particular memories or things that stand out for you that you haven’t talked about yet? Veteran: I am sure there is some things that I didn’t talk about that…But I can’t think of anything now. Interviewer: Yeah, you’ll remember them after we stop, because that is how that works. Veteran: I am sure! Interviewer: Okay. But then to think back on your time in the service, in what ways do you think that affected you, or what did you take out of it? (01:42:06) Veteran: Well, I took out of it the fact that I think I can do just about anything I put my mind to. And I learned a lot about myself, about people’s behaviors, people…You know? When I was in—when I was still working at the prison, I went to school at night at Grand—well, I started at Muskegon Community College. Got an associate degree at the community college and then went to—from there to Grand Valley. In the meantime, I had been divorced and so I was living up in Muskegon area and driving to Grand—after associate degree at Muskegon, I went to Grand Valley. And a year or so later, I got married—remarried. And my wife lived in Holland and I moved to Holland. And so, I still was working in Muskegon. I’d go to school—work 6 o’clock in the morning, get off at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and go to Grand Valley and go to the library and study for 2-3 hours, every now and then maybe get a couple hours sleep, and go to class and �60 get home at 10 o’clock at night. Then get up the next morning and do it all over again. So, I ended up with getting my bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. And all the inmates wanted to know, “Sergeant—Lieutenant Johnson—why are you going to school?” I said, “So I can figure out what makes you freaking idiots tick so that you don’t come back here.” You know? But the recidivism rate was very high. You know, you send people out and 3-4 weeks, sometimes months later, there they are, right back. So, I used to tell guys that were going to get out, I says, “Don’t go back and hang out with the same crowd.” I says, “Find a new place to live, if possible. But don’t hang out with—if you got to go back to the same town, don’t hang out with the same people. Those are the people that got you here in the first place.” But you know, didn’t help much. Interviewer: Yeah. Well, you can’t fix everything. Veteran: No. You can’t fix it. You know, they have to fix it themselves. Interviewer: Alright. Well, you’ve got a remarkable story, so I would just like to thank you for coming in and sharing it with us today. Veteran: Thank you very much. (01:44:43) � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context JohnsonW2358V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Johnson, William Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-06 Title A name given to the resource Johnson, William (Interview transcript and video), 2021 Description An account of the resource William Johnson was born in Union, Mississippi, on September 14th, 1936. He enlisted in the Army in 1955. He was processed in Fort Wayne, Michigan, issued his equipment in Fort Knox, Kentucky, and attended basic training in Fort Carson, Colorado. He then went to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for advanced training. Johnson was originally to join the 18th Engineer Brigade, but later decided to go to Fort Campbell, Kentucky for airborne training and joined the 11th Airborne Division. After that, his unit was deployed to Munich, Germany. Due to fights between units, the 11th Airborne Division was deactivated and Johnson joined the 24th Regiment, 8th Infantry Division. He stayed in Germany until December 1958 before going to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he reenlisted and was assigned to the 504th Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. While at Fort Bragg, his unit went to Mississippi to respond to the conflict that occurred when James Meredith was not allowed to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1962. Later that year, his unit was flown to Eglin Airforce Base in Florida to respond to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Johnson left Fort Bragg in 1963, after which he was assigned to go to Mainz and Bad Kreuznach, Germany as a part of the 8th Infantry Division, 509th Airborne Infantry Brigade. He stayed in Germany until 1966, then went to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was the operation sergeant at the airborne training school. In 1967, he was flown to Clark Air Force base in the Philippines before arriving in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. He then went to Phan Rang where he joined the 101st Airborne Division, 2nd Batallion, 502nd Infantry Regiment. Later, he went to Tam Ky, then Chu Lai where he was assigned to be an S-2 sergeant. After that, he went back to Phan Rang and then to Song Be. When the Tet Offensive began, his unit left for Da Nang. From there, they went towards A Shau Valley and set up Firebase Bastogne. Then, they went to Veghel and another firebase, where they were fired at, and Johnson got injured in the cheek. In 1968, Johnson flew back home where he was assigned to the 505th Infantry Regiment. In 1969, he was assigned to the SILK PURSE Control Group in England and returned home in 1972 to work with the Michigan National Guard Advisory group until he retired in 1976. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) WKTV (Wyoming, Mich.) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/656d13b9f68da0ee992bf884e0a3b6d6.mp4 cc7e478c462cb0335841f7562628ced8 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d9e7176d12bdc0a326eca6ff16ec2085.pdf 22e342e01a6c5e83741e2b59aa2bfad5 PDF Text Text 1 Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Oral History Interview Veteran: Chester Johnson Interviewed by James Smither Transcribed by Grace Balog Interview Length: 1:47:41 Interviewer: We are talking today with Chester Johnson of Grand Junction, Michigan, and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay Chester, start us off with some background on yourself. And to begin with, where and when were you born? Veteran: I was born in South Haven, Michigan in 1949. I lived in Grand Junction out there. Went to our little 4 room schoolhouse thing until 8th grade. And I went from Grand Junction and moved to Benton Harbor downtown and what a—kind of a—education that was, going to a big school with over 500 kids in my class. So, going from knowing nothing to being in the action was pretty rough to watch. Interviewer: Okay. So, what years were you in high school? Veteran: I graduated in 1967, so all those. And I kind of had a job in high school so it kept me…I had my afternoon schedule, and it was pretty neat. Independent, you might say. Interviewer: Okay. Now, what was your family doing for a living when you were a kid? �2 Veteran: Well, my dad was a tool and die maker. He had his own little shop and had the family working with everybody. And he was sort of in charge of that deal. Johnson Tool and Die. And it is very hard to have your family work for you when—well, we always thought he was the only one that really knew what he was doing. But they were—demanded equal pay, of course. Bridgeville, Michigan. Interviewer: Okay, so did you work for the family business then? Or did you do something else? Veteran: I was 5 years old, like in 1960, or 10 years old when we got out of that. It was just too hard on my dad. And he was kind of a lifelong drinker. It seemed like he was never home. And big family and all but yet I always seemed like I was in—running the streets by myself sort of; behaving and, you know, going to the school and playing ball and the whole thing but… Interviewer: Okay. Now, Benton Harbor, ’67. So, was that…did you have a lot of black kids there? (00:02:41) Veteran: Oh yeah, it was like 50/50 blacks in the high school. And very good…I think it was sort of what I thought was high end of education thing. The state champion basketball thing was going real good. The sports is an indication of everything. And one of the things we were most proud of is like they were national champion band. The orchestra and things like that. And I always sort of—like, when they went to Chicago for the competition, they had won for thirty years or something and finally they said, “Don’t ever come back.” But… Interviewer: Alright. And so— Veteran: Nice school. �3 Interviewer: Okay. Alright, now when you graduated from high school, then what did you do? Veteran: Well, I was working at the—for the South Bend Tribune. Just part of the delivery system around there but I was kind of a boss or something so that was nice. And could have been into the office business thing from that but I went to work. Worked for them a couple years in high school and everything. That worked real good. And then I think after high school, about 1968, I got a job at Avion Coach Corporation. And it was a nice little family outfit: 100 people or something. And in was thinking the other day that over 100 people worked there but there was only one other Vietnam veteran that I could remember ever being there. It is kind of unusual but we just—we didn’t talk about stuff like that. Interviewer: Okay. But you were working there before you went into the Army? (00:04:20) Veteran: Yes, I did. Very important to have a job waiting for you. Interviewer: Alright. So, now you graduated from high school in ’67 and you are not going to college. Were you—did you figure that sooner or later you were going to get drafted? Or did you not— Veteran: I think I kind of was. We were, you know, ready sort of but I still was working and having a good time. And so, when I got drafted, I was kind of ready for that. Interviewer: Okay. So, when do you get drafted? Veteran: I got drafted…say January of 1969 it was. And so, and then I went in in mid-February of ’69. �4 Interviewer: Okay. Now, when you are getting processed in, now where do you go first? What do you—where do you report initially? Veteran: Well, I am not—I guess we had just an office thing about the appointment and everything, but we went on a Greyhound bus and started there in Benton Harbor and that’s where that office was. And as we come across the state, we’d stop at different places. Oddly enough, you’d remember this guy getting on and then months later he’s a pal, you know. It’s kind of funny they are Michigan guys. But as we went across the state to Detroit to Fort Peck, that was the hotel there, but that’s where you went to have your physical and, you know, check you out and everything the first time. Interviewer: Okay. Now, how rigorous was the physical? Veteran: Well, this was heart rate and that kind of thing. Nothing lifting weights or not that type of a physical. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I am sure they did a mental test thing on it. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: At the time. Interviewer: Now, did you notice anybody trying to beat the system or get funny heart rates? Or…? (00:06:18) Veteran: Well, the physical part not necessarily. But you know, the mental part—all of a sudden, they started wearing glasses or something. And I know guys that did that, but they were deathly afraid of going. �5 Interviewer: Alright. And so, you get through that. After the physical and stuff, then what happens? Veteran: Well, you go back home. And so, on their three months or something, and you get the second notice. Uncle Sam says, you know, come on in, you are drafted. But you do the same thing again: go back to Detroit to that place, on the bus. And then it is just an overnight. They are going to check you again. And it was the first time I ever flew in an airplane. It was normal for people from Michigan—going to Fort Knox, Kentucky was just the way it was done. But like right out of the blue, we were the first group to go to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Or I mean— yeah, Fort Bragg it was. And so, that was very different. Interviewer: Okay. And what kind of reception do you have at Fort Bragg? Veteran: Well, nothing big particular except that Fort Bragg was like an airborne—101st airborne, I believe—home or something. Interviewer: 82nd airborne, probably. Veteran: Was it? I— Interviewer: 101st is Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Veteran: Okay. But— Interviewer: But it’s a big airborne base? Veteran: Yeah, it was an airborne—the point is, instead of when you do your basic training and everything you do, you didn’t go anywhere unless you ran there. And if you are going to lunch and back, you had to—you were—it was okay to walk. But every step—if you got caught not �6 running to where you were going, you got in trouble. And as a whole company we ran. So…And I enjoyed that forever. I did 10Ks and all that. 20 years later, I enjoyed that. It’s not easy. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And how much emphasis was there on discipline? (00:08:25) Veteran: We were very disciplined at the time, I think. And especially there, the airborne, you know, sharp dressed and all that. It was basic where you would go, you know, learn gun techniques and some marching and just real let’s see what these guys are like thing. And… Interviewer: Okay. And how easy or hard was it for you to adjust to life in the Army? Veteran: Well, I was ready. I knew that, you know, this had to be done sort of. serve your country I guess, or something. I didn’t know hardly anybody else that was doing this. And even though I was from a very large class and everything, you know, just didn’t know the other people doing this. So… Interviewer: Okay. But…And how did the drill instructors treat you? Veteran: They were, you know, mean and all that on everybody. But its part of what you are doing and, you know, you learn to push the extra push ups or something. And well, part of what I remember doing is they had a little bar and you had to crawl under that through the mud and dirt and everything. One guy went through that and because this stuff was happening if you weren’t doing a good job. And he got through it and too slow. But it didn’t matter how fast and hard he did, he says, “You do it again.” And he went through it the second time, and when he come out of there, his chin was almost gone because he scraped it on the ground. But this is the craziness to please. There was a lot of that there, but you learned to put that extra out, I guess, the airborne way. �7 Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And when you went in, did you have any idea of what kind of assignment you were going to get? Or…? (00:10:17) Veteran: You know, kind of fear the worst or whatever but the—Vietnam was all part of that deal. I mean anything else is a vacation while you are in there. I had friends that had been places already in Germany and all that. But you screw that up and wind up in Vietnam. Interviewer: Alright. But you just kind of expected you were going to go to Vietnam? Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: And be infantry or…? Veteran: Most likely. Interviewer: Okay. Alright, now— Veteran: And I liked—I liked the hunting and shooting and gun thing. That was in the family. So, I knew my way around that. Interviewer: Okay. And so, at what point do you find out where you are going next? Veteran: Well, at the end of basic training they wait like this 8 weeks. You are in there. You’ll know 3 or 4 days before or something and here’s you guys and there is a list out and you go, “Oh, Jim is going with me.” Or you know that kind of thing. And we went to Fort McClellan, Alabama, which is the home of the Women’s Army Corps. Not that that ever did us any good. But it was a different thing. You are thinking oh, the ladies thing. But it wasn’t like that. The men are very, very dedicated to being in. And you had the returning Vietnam veterans that were usually your instructors and they wanted to see you be smart and do a good job and protecting you. To learn this, it’s going to protect your life. �8 Interviewer: So, this is your advanced individual training? Veteran: Yes, it is. Interviewer: Okay. And what was—what were you being trained to do at that point? Veteran: Well, I don’t know. Somehow that—I think, like I say, Benton Harbor was a higher…all the other kids were getting As. I got a C. I still got a good education there, I’d say, because I was doing mortars. And I guess that’s classroom work a lot. So, we were more so in a classroom now all of a sudden. And you had to dress nice. But and my other friends were dragging through the dirt and doing the real rifle every day while we are sitting in the classroom quite a bit. (00:12:22) Interviewer: Okay. So, at Fort McClellan, how large of a group were you training with? Veteran: That was only like 30 men in our…we had a company that would have been 100 people and there were other little buildings, but our building had like 25 or 30 bunks in it, double bed bunks. And so, we operated with like 30 in that group right there. Interviewer: Okay. So, you are not at one of these really big infantry training bases. You are at something that is more specialized than other parts of the base or for other things. Veteran: Yeah, and it—the whole fort was a lot smaller. So…There was these other places. Interviewer: And when you are at Fort McClellan, I mean, do you get to go off base at all? Veteran: It was pretty reasonable that we got off eventually after a couple weeks. But every weekend you would get off Friday or Saturday night. So, I went to the stock car races and stuff like that. And so, that was pretty good. Interviewer: Okay. �9 Veteran: And part of what my group was there, I thought was interesting, is almost all these other 30 men in my outfit there were college educated degrees. But it was the end of the college deferment a lot and so you had these people with two and three years of college or something, but they still had to be the smarter guys though. I didn’t feel to be the real bright guy in the group. And but they were all, you know, way smart guys. So…I still prided myself a little. Interviewer: Okay. So, it’s a little but different group. Now, were most of them white? Veteran: Yes, I would say at that time. Basic training was sort of 50/50 and that was kind of rough getting together but eventually, the southern boys and us, we became a group. In this, there was…I don’t know if you’d say like 10ish percent or 10—out of 30 guys, probably 3 or 4. I can only remember a couple but… Interviewer: The 3 or 4 were black and the rest— Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Alright, and so if they were in college, you have a higher percentage probably that more will be white. (00:14:31) Veteran: I imagine, yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, is that another 8 weeks? Veteran: Well, 8 weeks in basic and then this is 8 weeks in AIT. Yeah. In Fort McClellan, Alabama, which is the—right the back door to Atlanta. So, we had brand new kids from Chicago, “Hey, let’s go see the Cubs.” I had never been to a ballgame really and so we saw them a couple times. The ’69 Cubs were almost world champions. Interviewer: Yeah, I know. �10 Veteran: And but that was pretty easy going and no stress or anything. Interviewer: Okay. Now, you mentioned you had returning Vietnam veterans as some instructors. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Did they talk to you much about Vietnam or what to expect there? Veteran: We weren’t really around them at that time but when they did their classes where they were teaching you how to clean a rifle or whatever, it was part of that. And nice fellows, really. I mean, to be picked most of them were sergeants, to be in charge of this kind of thing. So, that’s a particular thing in itself, you know, I thought. Interviewer: Okay. Now, what did they do with you after AIT? Veteran: Well, after AIT, they do the same thing right at the end of that deal. Real big surprise: they don’t give you the list of all these guys that—and you know all the smart college guys and everything? Well, I am picked to go to NCO school at Fort Bragg, which was— Interviewer: Fort Benning? Veteran: Fort Benning, yeah right there. So, it isn’t—that’s the…where the airborne trains and everything. So, to go there was really off the wall. And that’s just three months at least. And so, I was like starstruck after that. For me to be with that outfit? Interviewer: Okay, so most of the other guys that you were training with just went on to regular assignments, then? (00:16:25) Veteran: Yeah. I’d say…well, 9 out of 10 or more. �11 Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, you—now, you are going to NCO school. And can you describe that? What was that like? Veteran: Well, again, that odd group was—the other guys were in…learning the battlefield techniques and building bunkers and that kind of—again, we were in a classroom. And I am not a college kid. This is kind of unusual for…Gee, how many of these figures here are you using? But by golly, they kept us busy. Firing the mortars, learning those, you know, from the little to the big ones, and maintenance and the whole deal. So, it was pretty unusual to be in a group like that. And boy is that different. This ain’t the Army. And I was having a great time. Interviewer: Okay, so you weren’t doing a lot of extended field exercises or things like that? Veteran: A bit but I knew what the other infantry was doing. And I couldn’t complain any. And actually, here is another thing that happened after the first…well, two months. Yeah, yeah, two months in basic, two months in AIT. We went from that and probably an E-2 I might have been, but they give you E-4 pay, a corporal, immediately. So, that’s like a shot in the arm. They actually pay you and they expect you to buy better clothes, and this is what it’s about. Now, you are this corporal and if you are successful, they will give you the E-5 and you get that money right away. And everybody else in the Army—that was a big thing for people to go from Vietnam and back. They never made any money. You know? Unless they were a good card player. (00:18:13) Interviewer: Yeah, well it would take them longer to get promotions. I guess you make normally E-3 when you go overseas. Veteran: Well, that is mandatory. �12 Interviewer: Yeah, that’s mandatory. But then still, it takes them sometime to get to E-4 and then 5. So, if you start at E-5, then that’s better. Okay. Veteran: Well, the rank thing I found that during my year in Vietnam that it was nonexistent. The E-3 there? Man, I never saw anybody get specialists. Like, it was rare. The rank thing was for the people in the rear. I think it was not fair. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, you basically—you spend three months then training at Fort Benning? Veteran: It was…if I remember the dates exactly right, but I was there for…okay, if I was there three months training, then once I got my E-5, part of what they wanted to do is see if you are worthy of being a leader then. So, they sent me from Fort Benning then to Fort Polk, Louisiana. And as it was, there was quite a few of us and they just pick, you know, these different guys and all of a sudden these are your friends. We teamed up and drove over there in two cars. These young guys and all that. Staying in motels and everything. That was a big deal, you know. And once you get there, they assign me to a group where I had like 100 men in a building all by myself. And here I am a kid. You know, I know what really…you know, but those 100 guys…Sergeant Johnson and it, you know, you fall in line. That’s—he expects this so… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: I was devoted. Interviewer: Alright. So, what was your actual function there? What part of the training were you in charge of or…? Veteran: Well… �13 Interviewer: Or what did you do? (00:20:06) Veteran: We had this large building with as many as 100 kids in my building. And there was lines of them there and all my other friends were in this other building. I had a nice little room there, but I had the tiny little bunk just like the rest of the guys did. And a footlocker. I mean, I was just like them except I was Sergeant Johnson there by myself. And oh, a kid had a radio stereo we wound up having in my room because he couldn’t have it. And but basically what I did was make them behave and everything. I couldn’t hardly leave or go out of my room 24 hours a day unless what we did is in the morning, we got together in our big groups. And you know and they might have done some exercise or something but basically went to breakfast together as a group. And they’d have breakfast. We’d come back and gather up and they had classes to go to. And what we would do is march them around the fort to different classes. And that was my job is to be in charge of them right there and then they were in that class right there. A lot of times— well, this is mortar people too. Again. And a lot of them. And me and my friends were—I don’t know if I got pictures of that, but you know, 4 or 5 of us laying out there. I don’t even remember us smoking and stuff much because I certainly didn’t like the cigarette thing and never did. But you could have just kicked back and waiting for them to be done with their classes. And maybe they would come out at lunch; you’d march them to lunch. You know? Interviewer: Alright. So, you weren’t expected to do any of the, you know, longer marching with them or the training out in the field? Veteran: Well, we did part of that too. I remember, like, in the NCO school, part of what we did is the—you do the mortar but part of it was is learning the 45 and how to tear it apart and do the whole thing. And very hard to master that. I think you are supposed to have three days on it. The guy says, “Well, you are going to have to do this this morning,” kind of thing. But we did do a �14 job where we took them out into the field. I was telling a friend of mine this yesterday. And the mortar group again, the other guys are crawling through the bushes and doing…they were making stuff for them, but we dug a—about a 4 foot by 8-foot-long hole in the ground about 8 foot deep. (00:22:41) Veteran: And then you had to cover it with sticks over the top and they had stairways going down in it. And then from there it was like 3 trenches out in a circle. And great big circles out there with mortars in them. And it’s kind of funny that oh yeah, you do that. We are out there four days or something, digging these holes, probably with a little shovel too, in Louisiana dirt. And I guess it was funny but the other sergeant—E-6 or lieutenant or somebody—come over there and he comes over there and looks at it. “Nice job, guys. Fill it in.” I mean, it was—we had dug it probably a couple hours before. And but what are you going to do? That’s what we are doing. Nobody is shooting at us yet so… Interviewer: Alright. Now, did you have to do any sort of bivouacs or be out overnight with the men in the field? Or…? Veteran: Well, that was—part of that was 3 or 4 days or so. And so, they had their backpack stuff. They brought our food and stuff like that in them, sure. But yeah, we stayed out there overnight a few times. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And when do you finish that? Veteran: Well, I could—by the months, I could figure that out. I finished in early December, I think it was, or mid-December. And they give us a—very unusual that I come in the Army a couple months after Christmas. Well then, there I was there and had a 30-day leave of absence at �15 Christmas and New Year’s again. So again, I wasn’t in there then. I thought that was kind of funny. Interviewer: Well, you normally get—you get a leave after you go through all that training and before you go overseas. (00:24:35) Veteran: Right. Definitely. But I was in almost a year before I got that. Interviewer: Right. Between the different trainings as they had the training and then the stuff. Veteran: Yep. We got a week or two and sometimes they sent you straight there. Interviewer: Okay. So, once you have—you get your leave over the holidays basically. Now, do you report back to Fort Polk? Or are you heading off to Vietnam? Or what’s next? Veteran: Well, I would have been home and from there we went to I think Chicago airport and I had a local fellow that we trained together in my…And I never knew him from these little towns but wound up knowing him and the family took us to Chicago in their GTO. And we flew from Chicago to Fort Lewis, Washington. And that’s where we departed from there, so you didn’t go back to a fort necessarily. Interviewer: Okay. So, you are basically—your next assignment basically is going to be Vietnam? Veteran: Yeah, yeah. That’s—I mean, I already know that. I probably had the orders already from there. And went over there and did another physical, I am sure. Really, they don’t send you over there without that kind of stuff. Interviewer: Do they give you shots and things before you go to Vietnam? �16 Veteran: I am sure; you got them all the time. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And then how did they get you to Vietnam? You leave Fort Lewis and…? Veteran: I left Fort Lewis and we went to Anchorage, Alaska. And I remember getting there and it probably being zero out there and ran out there and running around the—in freezing, you know, zero or something out there. But hey, what do we care? Could get worse. Maybe I will break my leg and kind of funny—joking with that kind of stuff. But so then from Anchorage, real quick stop you know. I don’t know, 30 minutes or an hour or something. And I don’t even know if we left the plane. Probably. But then from there we went through Tokyo real quick. And walking through the airport there somehow. Maybe taking a break again but you know the little—the Japanese dudes ain’t quite up to your shoulder. But I know they were bad dudes. The whole Army walking through the airports and stuff. But you got to respect them. What the heck. (00:26:49) Interviewer: Alright. And then is Vietnam the next stop? Veteran: Yes, it is. Interviewer: Okay. And where do you land in Vietnam? Veteran: Well, I think it was China beach, if I remember right. Interviewer: Well, so Da Nang, basically? Veteran: Um… Interviewer: Or…? Veteran: Not Da Nang. I think we were down south when we come in if I remember right. �17 Interviewer: Well, okay you have a different route. Were you on the coast or were you inland? Because— Veteran: Well, we started on the coast. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Chu Lai is my home base. Interviewer: Chu Lai is your base. A lot of times you might land at Cam Ranh Bay. Veteran: It was Cam Ranh Bay. Interviewer: Yeah. And then they come in— Veteran: Which is down south. Interviewer: That’s right. Veteran: Down south. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: Right. I forget. Interviewer: Okay. Now, did you show up during the day or at night? Veteran: Well, it was another little—I always thought I was lucky doing these things. Gee, I went through, you know, NCO school. Where did that come in and everything? And they go, “Well, here we are, and we are coming to Vietnam.” And you had the American stewardesses and the pilots and all that was American stuff. They go—and we kind of knew it was—February 1st it was going to be that day—you were in over enemy territory, the sea, on January 30 or 31st or something. So, you get combat pay for January. So, oh boy, 60 bucks extra. 65 a month you �18 only got. And then landed February 1st in that morning. It was daytime in the morning I am pretty sure. Interviewer: Alright. And what is your first impression of Vietnam when you get there? (00:28:24) Veteran: I am sure the air and everything was real different, you know. But no big deal. I had been in by a year by that time. And I had a couple people that recognized me or something so it kind of—you got something different on your mind there. And well, I had to be in charge of people. I am kind of eyeballing that thing. Not yet but I didn’t have an assignment, but it probably stunk or something. But what the heck you going to do? Interviewer: Alright. So, once you land there, what do they do with you? Veteran: Well, we were there a couple days. And if I remember right, probably…was it another jet or a C-130? I don’t—I can’t remember how we got to Chu Lai from there. But we were only in Cam Ranh Bay, that’s right there, for a couple days. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And then went up to Chu Lai. And the same thing: they hadn’t assigned us to this company yet. And so, you get there for—I think we were there two or three days. Same kind of thing. You—they are not necessarily have you assigned yet. They figure they might even evaluate you and send you out or something. Who knows? Interviewer: Okay. So, how did you spend your time while you were on these bases? Veteran: Well, these other ones…there wasn’t a lot going on there. You might have some free time. I don’t remember. I am sure I found the EM club, which facing over the China Sea right �19 there. And I mean, who has that view? You know, in our—some of our bunkers there were—I mean, you could throw a rock into the ocean right there. It was kind of who needs to guard this? But hey, there you go. (00:30:13) Interviewer: Alright. And what did the base look like? What was the terrain like around Chu Lai? Veteran: It was mild hilly there because actually, like I say, we were right next to the ocean which was a couple hundred feet down to the water there. And just pure dirt. There wasn’t a blade of grass or a tree or anything because they bulldozed stuff clean when they get the place. And put these little buildings. Those places had like a wooden deck for a floor, and you were on this—the cheapest 18-inch-wide single bed that there is in existence with a 2-inch mattress and things. But really, if you had that in the jungle, you would have thought you were in heaven. You know? Interviewer: Okay. So, you are just there, okay, and then you get assigned to a unit? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: And for the record, what unit were you assigned to? Veteran: I was assigned for the B company, 1st of the 46th. Americal. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: 196th. �20 Interviewer: So, basically you had B company, 1st battalion, 46th regiment, which is part of the 96th—is it Light Infantry Brigade? Veteran: 196th. Interviewer: Or 196th. Veteran: Light infantry brigade, yes. Interviewer: Okay, which in turn is part of the 23rd division which is known as the Americal? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Yeah. So, we are just lining up all of that stuff for the record there. Yep. Okay. And were they—where were they when you joined them? Veteran: Well, my first assignment was to go out to LZ Professional. And your group lands there. And this is another thing about a lot of this stuff: most of it you did by yourself. It was almost never have somebody you would know going back and forth. And that goes from the minute you are there. It is kind of a different thing there. Interviewer: Okay. So, when did you actually arrive in Vietnam? (00:32:06) Veteran: Well… Interviewer: February? Veteran: Yeah, it actually was my 21st— Interviewer: That’s right, that’s right. So, it was 1970 because the February 1st, 1970 is when you land. �21 Veteran: Oddly enough that—and I was—it took that long between, now that I think about it, February 1st kind of that morning when I got there and my first day in the field on LZ Professional there. It was February—my birthday—February 18th. So, that took 18 days of this jockeying and goofing around. I really can’t remember exactly what we were doing. I remember getting mortared a few times. You had to go on guard duty and some things but there was going to be a lot worse things there than having hot food and the whole deal. That was pretty good living. Interviewer: So, probably most of the time you spent at Chu Lai waiting to get sent out. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. But now you join in. Now, where was LZ Professional? Veteran: LZ Professional was…about 30 or 40 kilometers—we always thought it was way out there—from straight west of Chu Lai, which is a very large air base there. They have jets and everything land there. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay so around Professional, were you in the mountains now or foothills? Or…? Veteran: When you get there, you are on this huge base that probably holds 6 or 800 people and a lot of them are in mortars and or somebody would be in charge of the helicopter pad and you know, on and on. And then you always have like 3 companies. That’s maybe 2 to 300 men that are just—that’s all they do is guard duty around there. And we would take turns to do our patrols off into the mountains around there. And it—our patrols were anywhere from usually 3 weeks to maybe even a month long. You’d be out there, and the helicopters would resupply you and you’d be usually about an 80-man group out there, so… �22 Interviewer: Okay, so the—basically, so they would patrol in company sized units? (00:34:11) Veteran: Our outfit? That’s the way we did. Right around 70 to 80 men. Interviewer: Alright. Now, when you got there were you just an infantryman? Or were you already—did you have part of a mortar crew? Veteran: Well, you are still a beginner when you get there so they assign you to…you know, you don’t have anybody assigned to you yet. So, I am in somebody else’s deal and I always prided myself with being, well, a country kid. A point man and cutting trails all the time? I loved that. Everybody, they wouldn’t carry a pencil if they had to, but I had them: the great big machete and, you know, a buck knife and nobody was getting me without, you know. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, when you join the unit, how are you received? Veteran: They are pretty busy in their own thing, and they have the individual come and go all the time. And there was a whole flock of us sergeants at the time. The training thing was in high gear and I thought we were received well. and they’d joke or they might play a card game here and there, although that was very rare, I found out later. But on the firebases, that’s part of what—you’d have this extra little time there, you would dig trenches or… Interviewer: Okay, because you are coming in as what they would call shake and bake sergeant— Veteran: Sure. Interviewer: You’re the new guy. Veteran: There was a lot of us, though. �23 Interviewer: Yeah, at that point. And so, what approach did you take? Did you just try to learn from your squad leader or anybody around you? Veteran: Kind of...but I probably thought I was a wise guy. I was a sergeant then see. They had to do what I said. Interviewer: But initially you were assigned to somebody else’s squad? Veteran: Oh yeah. Definitely. Interviewer: And then how quickly did you feel like you were starting to catch on to what was going on or what they were doing? (00:36:11) Veteran: I felt good immediately. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know, I…maybe I had issues before I went in that I was glad to get in there and with this group and camaraderie. I didn’t go to college and pal up and all that. You know? Individual, I felt real good at the time. Interviewer: Okay. And how quickly did you start doing things like walking point and that sort of thing? Veteran: Immediately. Yeah, there’s one picture in there, me and my pal there, and that was part of—and then again, taking pictures. I never seen anybody with a camera. Nobody wanted to wait and also your camera got wet all the time. Interviewer: Okay. So, how did you wind up taking a camera with you? �24 Veteran: Well, I always loved photography and my dad was real big on every little stereo camera and Kodaks and you know the slide thing? And so, I was into that from way, way back. And I just had like an ammo thing and just the junk old camera. And my mother, that’s part of what she would do for me is send me a package every month of everything I asked for. And part of it was film or maybe some Hav-A-Tampa cigars. And another one I did that I just thought why am I doing this? Nobody else does. But I had a 30-caliber ammo can and that was waterproof. So, I would carry paper tablets and when the ink pens and stuff—this is like a stupid thing, but I’d say, “Here, give me all them. 10 ink pens? Here, I got them. If you want one, come and get it.” And then I would—they would write letters on my pad and I was kind of the postman I thought. I thought I was brilliant. I had a radio; I had the camera and all in there and I never seen anybody else carry the ammo can thing. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: Keeps stuff dry. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah. Okay, you said a radio. So, like a little transistor radio? (00:38:15) Veteran: I had about as big as a cigarette pack with the earplug thing. Completely not authorized. Interviewer: Yeah. And was there any radio that you could pick up? Veteran: Oh yeah. There was. Pat Sajak was a Vietnam announcer, I understand. And there was two stations. Same thing but they had music on there and news and I am sure they did sports broadcasting and that. And yeah, they had real good radio and jeez, I mean you could put a hat over the whole country, so to speak. And yeah, I had radio all the time. �25 Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And okay, so the—you go out, you join the unit. And so now the…the LZ where you are at…again, is that up in hill country now? Veteran: Yes. Definitely. That’s where it began there: LZ Professional. Interviewer: Right. Okay. And as you are patrolling around there, was there much enemy activity at that point? Veteran: Not too bad right around there. And that was an older firebase. In fact, it was the home of the 101st Airborne. They called it part of the hill on LZ Professional. And you know, the bad guys were there; nobody wanted to mess with them. And near the big firebases, everybody just learned to move away from that. They—not enemy. We had mountain people that were living up there. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And we went to Dragon Valley though and that was high activity there of Viet Cong and this kind of stuff. And just learning some of that. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And even took the little 60 mortar there and there I went from my regular group and I got put with the command center with the…you know… Interviewer: Company commander? Veteran: Company commander and the mortar—the guy that was in charge of all our artillery was one guy that did all that to break—and that helped us. That’s the way our unit worked. But we were them with our little, tiny mortar and you’re going oh, that’s not much. But I learned that when we got attacked and we’d set our mortar up, usually the first round that went off? I noticed �26 there was never another shot at us. And they feared that as much as we did. It’s terrifying to see a sky full of mortars. (00:40:47) Interviewer: Okay. So, you had a 60-millimeter mortar. And about how much did the parts of that weigh? Veteran: The—you have already got 40 pounds of food—ammunition and all that. That’s—and then you have 40 pounds like of personal: your gear and if I remember right, you had about 80 pounds, that’s water too and bullets and everything. But then that one base plate was 30 pounds. Very awkward. No handles on it, you got to carry it on your shoulder or something. So, a big guy, I get to do that. And to—this mortar was only 2 feet high. It is a tiny thing. And but everybody had to carry mortar rounds for us. They sort of resented having that around. And that was pretty—pretty heavy deal. Interviewer: Okay. So— Veteran: Three sergeants it takes to carry the little mortar. Interviewer: Okay. So, one of you has the base plate, one has the tube? Veteran: The tube and then you have a fork thing. And the tube and the forks for the tube is— that’s very—three very heavy pieces. But the base plate? Crazy to carry that. And your gun and ammo. Interviewer: Alright. And you would basically—would you hump through the jungle that way? (00:42:08) �27 Veteran: Oh yeah. We were right with everybody else but kind of protected. I didn’t have to do point; I didn’t have to worry about who was in front of me or back. We were sort of up there with the main command group. Interviewer: Right. Of course, wouldn’t the command group be a target? Veteran: Oh, of course. But part of having 70 or 80 men out there…it’s hard to believe but you had the captain or something over there, he might come and go, “You see the helicopter going in over there?” But you’re out front doing point up there and at night, because we stayed out there every night for weeks and months at a time, you do a giant circle around the top of the hill. And when we got back: okay, there’s that guy there. Now we are in a complete circle. The guys in the middle? They were so secluded that sometimes I didn’t see them for it seems like a week or two at a time. That—that’s how thick the jungle is and that’s how big of an area we’d be out there. It’s kind of crazy to think that they were back there. But here—now we are out there with our mortar and everything. We were with the command group. We are protected now. Kind of funny. Interviewer: Okay. Now, how long—how much of the time, your Vietnam tour, did you spend with the mortar? Was that your main job? Veteran: Well, that’s another thing. We had a captain. Lieutenants usually run our company, normally. But we had Captain Meyer, I think it was. Bradley. Captain Bradley. And he was notorious when you went up to the A Shau Valley and things like that. They would—he would be in charge of that outfit. And the captain decides to take the mortar. So, it was like 2 or 3 different—a week at a time or even less. So, but normally I was back with the regular platoon and had my own squad too. That come and went but eventually I was just a squad leader. �28 Interviewer: Okay. Alright and what kind of men did you have in your squad and platoon? What did you learn about them or what kind of guys were they? (00:44:23) Veteran: Well…you all had your shoot the breeze at night thing. You—really, the radio was like—nobody had that kind of thing. Or…you know, and I had a little ear plug for it. If I let anybody use it, jeez, if it come undone, it started blasting. That happened once. But or like I always thought we’d be sitting around playing cards and everything. That was unusual. Nobody wanted to have any of that. Or not like you saw somebody shooting dice or something. Not there, back when you are partying or something. But yeah, you’d…and it was another thing about being there where we were is you would be talking real—I mean, you’d get, you know, and these guys right here and…So…and you might know their voice. And it—you can’t see them. It’s pitch black, you know. And you learn to—you got your little match pack because we wound up having to do our own food every day. What a drag that is. These trashy little meals that they had. But I guess eventually, you know, existence is all you ask for. If you had peaches in that home made coffee for breakfast, you—wow—you were cool. Interviewer: Alright, so you are basically living on C-rations most of the time? Veteran: Oh, completely. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: Completely. I bargained my way into the LRP, a couple of them. And to me—I put that in the bottom of the pack and that was my extra food for emergency because it was lightweight. I always had food. Interviewer: Okay, so that’s sort of the freeze-dried stuff, kind of the ancestor of the MRE? �29 Veteran: Yeah. I had—I might have had a half a dozen of them and I probably had to pay for them. We were in that kind of outfit. Interviewer: Alright. Now, do you spend most of your time when you are in the field kind of out in the hill country? Or did you also patrol the areas closer to Chu Lai? (00:46:25) Veteran: No, we were never by Chu Lai. That was completely in the mountains. And we went from LZ Professional, and you’d operate off there. And I think we went on—we called them missions and they—as one of the sergeants, I would get in on that deal and okay, we are doing this. And they’d tell you kind of, “Tell the guys we are going to this place.” It didn’t mean anything anyway; you didn’t know what you were doing. But we went to Mary Ann briefly for a week. And then a month later we weren’t—we moved there sort of permanently where you had to help develop the base. And that’s where Agent Orange come in. I think they blasted it with Agent Orange to kill all the vegetation. And then they’d drop a couple dozers in there. I mean like I say, there wasn’t a blade of grass in any of those. And then when you put the soldiers in there, you sort of had to dig the trenches by hand around there. And the toilets, the latrines, were…We didn’t like it because of the toilet was terrible. In the jungle, you are sort of in charge of your own. And you didn’t have much, believe me. Interviewer: Alright. Now, did you encounter civilians much? Veteran: Well, at first when we were on the LZ—we moved. Was there 4 months or something on LZ Professional and then went to LZ Mary Ann, which was another 30 kilometers or more out in the jungle too. Way out there, like I thought we were near Laos, where there would be no sign of other firebases. Or if you got up in the air on LZ Professional, you could see the ocean �30 over there. Well, this was—that was gone. You were totally in the jungle out there. And we were mixed with the Southern Vietnamese armies. Interviewer: Okay. (00:48:29) Veteran: And that was quite a group, but you learned soon that they were kind of going downhill. And it was bad to be there at the end of the war knowing what’s coming up. And but civilians, oddly enough, we were on Mary Ann a week or something, patrolling all around there. Well, come to find out you, had these Montagnards we call them. I have a pretty good picture in there. I don’t know if I showed you that big one because I don’t remember explaining that. It was very unusual. But come to find out, here we got this firebase and we been there for a month off and on and there they are 500 yards from right there and they are in those bushes right there. Twenty people live right there? And but that was no—never had weapons, they never did booby traps and all that monkey business for us. And but the one picture I showed you is one of those groups on the firebase. And very unfortunately they lost their homes and villages and were shipped back to what is known as civilization to live with—in the villages. They wouldn’t let them be out there. We were in a free fire zone. There wasn’t supposed to be anybody there. Interviewer: Right. Or at least if there was anyone up there, you could shoot them. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Yes, so they were moved—trying to move a lot of the civilian population into areas that the South Vietnamese controlled. At least that was the— Veteran: 1970. They should have been done by then, but we ran into a lot of Montagnards. They weren’t civilians at all. That’s a completely different… �31 Interviewer: Yeah, because they weren’t Vietnamese, they were a different ethnic group and— Veteran: Definitely. Interviewer: And the Vietnamese didn’t like them. (00:50:15) Veteran: They were mountain people. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: Kind of. Interviewer: Yeah. And sometimes in some areas they would actually help the Americans and do different things. Veteran: Oh, they were wonderful. Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, how long was it once you were out there before you actually kind of got into combat? Or…beyond having the mortar round fall on you somewhere? Veteran: Well, yeah, jeez, I was there 3 or 4 days the first time. You are back there on that base. The mortar, they—you know, it ain’t apologizing whether you are in a bush or not. You know, we got mortared there and that was pretty exciting. The old barber shop guy that maybe trimmed your hair? By golly, they caught him in the wire there all shot up and killed him. This nice guy. That story, that’s one that happened. And I forget where I am going so often. Interviewer: I was just asking but I guess out on the field, how long did it take you to kind of get into a combat situation? �32 Veteran: Out there? When I got to Mary Ann again, my group is already out in the field that time. And we got mortared on the base right there. So, when you get out in the field, you might be out there 5 days or a week or something. These periods come and go. But the combat is pretty hot. You got something to think about for a while. But its so erratic that you might get it 3 or 4 days in a row, or you might not hit it for…I had a tiny little diary but it’s microscopic sort of thing that I almost can’t read. And I made notes. If you ever made abbreviations on your own and don’t know what that stuff means anymore. I mean, I guess being addled or something. Interviewer: Alright. Well, if you did encounter the enemy out in the field, I mean, would it be like a single sniper? Or would they ambush you or what would happen? (00:52:11) Veteran: It was kind of normal that we’d get attacked maybe but more likely than not, even as our large 70- and 80-man unit going down through the trails, very quiet the whole thing. And we’d be so far out there, they had no idea anybody was out there. We always thought we were the…yeah, we were B Company. Kind of the lead of the whole people out there. If anything was happening, B Company did it. You know? And you go out there and find it. And we’d run into people on the trail and surprise them. And they might shoot you, shoot at you, but they were running. And a lot of them were younger kids, teenagers. Interviewer: Now, were they in North Vietnamese uniforms? Or do you think they were Viet Cong? Veteran: No, no, rarely. Rarely. Yeah. Although later I got a real good map of Vietnam and I mean the whole country. If you look right where Mary Ann was, it says Viet Cong stronghold. And the—now, they are telling me where I was right there? You bet. �33 Interviewer: Okay. So, you’re located—yeah, if they are not in conventional military uniforms then they are Viet Cong. You know, that’s pretty standard there. Okay. Now, you…I guess I was trying to sort of get you to kind of just explain a little bit about what can happen if you encounter. So, sometimes you might just—you meet somebody on the trail and it’s just an accident? Veteran: Lots of times, yep. Interviewer: And would you ever get ambushed or hit mines or things like that? Veteran: The booby traps. Our own hand grenades and stuff. More likely than not it was stuff that was if our guys didn’t want to carry things, they might throw hand grenades off the trail there that we get attacked by later. I mean, I hate to say anything about these but that was the case a lot of times. We carried a great deal of weight. You know, and like I said, I carried 8 quarts of water at one time. That’s 20 pounds of water, kind of, you know. But we went on long, long trips at times and we’d be in the bad guy neighborhood in a night laager. (00:54:31) Veteran: And I remember one time where you had to put people way out away from your main group and be there all night out there, 2 or 3 of you. And when we got back to the main group, at, you know, 7 in the morning, getting ready to go, and we got attacked from all sides. And the main thing: the jungle is so thick. It was very unusual to see anybody, but you’d see over there a couple hundred feet or meters or something just a wall of flame from their guns. And that was usually how we fought is shoot kind of at the base of that fire right there. And it’s not like you found a body count or anything much because they were hauling each other off and trying to get away. But it’s quite exciting. �34 Interviewer: So, sometimes they would figure out where you were camped and then that’s what— Veteran: They could follow you. Interviewer: Yeah, and then just open up. But then would they move off quickly? Would they break contact pretty quickly? Veteran: Usually. Yeah. It wasn’t an extended battle with us. And they could do their damage to us and we were out of business. We had to take care of our wounded, have them shipped off, and then you are in a different plan when you have been attacked out there. And we got supplied every three days with the C-ration deal and our mail, usually. And so, they could figure—you know, they see that helicopter over there in the middle of nowhere, they are going to have a pretty good idea where and say, “Oh yeah, that’s B Company? Don’t go there.” You know, in the other ones, we had another company that was attacked so much, and it is unfortunate the way they did it is they just re-put the new individuals in there. And they never had a group that got together. There was people there that knew people that were only a month or two old. And over half of them like that. You just can’t. They are afraid of doing anything. They don’t know anything. And that’s the way it was done. (00:56:42) Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, so sometimes the company will have either good leadership or there will be some of the NCOs, experienced soldiers, know what to do. And if a company knows how to operate, the North Vietnamese maybe stay away from it. And if they are not as good, then they are targeted? Veteran: I…you know, people brag but our outfit was the best. I was proud to be around that outfit. And some of these other ones, if you get back to my battalion and everything here, if you �35 look in the book in the Mary Ann book [Keith Nolan, Sappers in the Wire], if I am not mistaken, Charlie Company was on the hill. And the great big NVA forces, they knew that we were being deployed away from that area and everything. Okay, let’s go clean it up and we don’t have to put up with that anymore. I think…well, I was home a couple months but and I never heard anything about it. A friend of mine knew that I had been there, and he told me at work. That guy. Interviewer: Alright. Now, you mentioned at one point before the interview that at some point you actually went into Laos. Veteran: Yeah. As this progresses, we—our group of the real good guys—and you had these groups that got together and learned from each other and all that—but this whole group wound up being ready to go home. And this is some of the things that the big shots can do is they go hey, these guys are really good. Let’s go use them one more time. Let’s take them to the A Shau Valley. And I mean, go get your clock cleaned. (00:58:29) Veteran: And to get into the Laos thing. And so, we went there for a couple weeks at a time. Nobody else wanted to go down in the valley but we were damn fools and wound up going there by ourselves. And got attacked pretty bad. One time there was a—in my platoon, there was a— you know, it’s just numbers but I think there was 28 of us. And at the end of the day, there was 7 left that weren’t wounded or…We didn’t have many causalities. Interviewer: At least, not many killed. Veteran: Right. But they all got wounded in one way or the other. And helicopters crashing right over there. And wow. This week was more traumatic than the rest of the whole tour, kind of thing. Interviewer: And what month was that? �36 Veteran: Well, it’s sort of a traditional Army thing. Early June, like the 6th of June, they do stuff like that. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: It’s a history. Interviewer: Yeah, it’s to commemorate D-Day or something along those lines. But okay. So, you have that kind of thing but then—because the A Shau—that’s where the Hamburger Hill fight had been the year before. And there was a lot of hard fighting and then after that— Veteran: I have a friend that was there. My brother-in-law. Interviewer: Okay. Now along the way as you go, the area that you were, when was the monsoon? When was the bad weather? Veteran: Well, that’s like our northern winter. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: More or less. And we—and that come and gone when we were there. Interviewer: Yeah. (01:00:03) Veteran: At times. Or you’d be wet for a month, and you might have to have this big clunky…like a little poncho that only covered down to your waist kind of thing. And I am pretty sure most of us had it. It was almost like you have to have this; you have to have a hard hat. Sometimes I didn’t care to wear it. But you know, and that—you had to have the poncho. And we slept on a real clunky old fashioned water mattress. You know the one about as big as the thing here? And what a piece of junk. I mean, it was so heavy and so hard. It would be filthy. �37 You know, and you’d be—then you’d lay on it, you’d wake up in the morning, you felt like somebody rubbed dirt in your face. I mean, and it was normal to just be dirty and feel it. I got a picture that it just looks like I crawled through the mud. I probably did at the time. You know, if you got clothes once a month or something, you got them because they ripped or something. You didn’t get them because they were dirty. Interviewer: Okay. But when they did resupplies for you in the field, they weren’t bringing in new uniforms or things like that? Veteran: Never. If you wanted to request a pair of boots, it’s up to you to ask for that or you might get a few pair of shoestrings or something. But you kind of like your boots if you could keep them. And if you wanted a shirt, you could get one. But that wasn’t normal. And you probably feel a luck thing. I got a feeling you might want to just hey, nope, didn’t take any bullets last time. Or something. Didn’t think about that part, I guess. Interviewer: Alright. Okay, so you basically—so, by June of 1970, you have gotten to the A Shau and there are North Vietnamese there who don’t like you. But then from there you keep—you move around and change positions? (01:02:03) Veteran: Well, after the A Shau Valley, it was kind of this mission, we called it, you know. And we are there for a couple weeks. And oh boy, like I say, the sky full of mortars and that kind of a deal? They had this: a 51 caliber. We never saw that kind of stuff. And we had the jets right there where you’d be on a little hill the size of this building and that jet would disappear down below the hilltop thing there. It was kind of exciting from a mechanical nutcase and him bombing the 51 cal over there. It’s really goofy what you see. But… Interviewer: Now, do you have any idea what you were doing in Laos? �38 Veteran: Well, after we left the A Shau Valley and went over there and lost all these people…So, you’ve got all these new recruits and everything. So, they are going to send you over there. We only were as a platoon. So, say there was 30 of us. And that’s—we weren’t used to having a small group. But very good NCO in charge of the group. And so, we were over there patrolling around, looking for what’s over there. We weren’t attacking anything with that small of a group. And… Interviewer: And did you find anything? Veteran: Well, one time…Boy, I’d love to find that spot. We were in a…and nothing is happening out there. And had that other occasion of all that violence and everything. So, this is just heaven, you know. And taking a break, we found a giant waterfall and coming down the side of the mountain with the pool and everything. We all, “Okay, you guys don’t want to take a bath here? Guard us.” And I am jumping in there and getting clean. I’ve got one that I am sitting in there like the castle crown thing. And boy, everybody loved that. I wish I had that picture of myself. But so, we were there and one of our guys come over and he goes, “Hey, there’s a guy over there.” You know. And he was a new guy. And “Oh well, what did you do?” “Well, oh you know…” like he was afraid. Anybody else would have shot the guy or something but…So, we kind of calling in, telling the guys way back. Okay, hey this happened, and somebody is over there. And so, the guys that are 50 miles away or something make the decision of what you are going to do. And they say, “Alright, get your stuff together here.” Because we are having a break out there. (01:04:46) Veteran: And they have got a map of course. They know what is next to you more than you do there. So, they said, “Okay, go on up there.” And we are going up this big side of this big hill. And then we get up there and jeez, we are not very far away. Usually, you see people over there �39 and you’re—you think you are in another country. You’re just going to keep going. But we get to the top of the hill…oh, maybe it was about a quarter mile away or something over there, where that waterfall was right there. Okay, stop there and circle up and just a minute here. So, we are up there on the top wondering what is going on. And we look at rolling hills by us. We are way up. And kind of cleared for a long ways but this rolling hill. We had come through the jungle and we had come down this path over the open field-like. I mean, this is a huge valley. And we are looking over there and a line of guys come over there, about 6 guys. And we are going wow. These guys—they are six foot, something. And they all had hard hats on. Steel helmets. Kind of even made—probably American. And we are going well, they are Americans. But wait a minute, we are the only ones within 20 miles. I mean, this is the only time you are like that. But this happened to us. (01:06:19) Veteran: And they are going like, “Okay, line up in a row and as they come over…” this happens within seconds. They are making the other thing: here, line up like this. Like an execution on these guys. And you’d be surprised how guys can get away in wide open fields that maybe you only got 2 or 3 out of 6 of them or something. But yeah, them guys we figured was there Chinese there? Or…and we always thought Russian. What was that—heard that Russian MIG thing? Interviewer: Well, there were a lot of Chinese aiding the Vietnamese in different ways. And if you were not actually in Vietnam at the time, who knows what was there? But there would have been Eastern European advisors and things too. So, anything is possible. Veteran: But Eastern advisors were with the North Vietnamese? Interviewer: Well, you could have had Russians or Poles or Eastern— Veteran: We also had the story of the American whatever he was. �40 Interviewer: A deserter or something. Veteran: Yeah, and he was fighting with the guys and they were right in our neighborhood, supposedly. You know? Interviewer: But you saw a group who did not look like the usual Vietnamese. Veteran: It was real different, you know. And then just a unique experience to have a field, you know, these 6 or 8 guys coming after you and wow. Interviewer: Yeah. Now, when you were in the A Shau or when you went over to Laos and those areas, did you encounter—did you find enemy, large enemy, trails? Like the kinds that they could move a lot of stuff on? Veteran: Well, the NVA had attacked us in the A Shau there and we…Well, we always had the thing, you know, what is happening here? Well, it was in the morning and we had been moving like more than 24 hours. That was unusual. We usually stopped every night but this time we just kept going. Well, that’s the way you disappear out there. And the— Interviewer: Was there signs of big trails or things that the NVA used a lot? Veteran: Oh, this was huge by the A Shau Valley and that. That’s LZ West and LZ Siberia. You know, the whole thing is through there. But oh yeah, this is good. I was just getting to that too is when we were near Mary Ann, which isn’t much furth—different—than you get into Laos. We were in the high mountains. Super difficult. They couldn’t resupply you and everything, so it was hard to have you out there in the first place. (01:08:54) Veteran: You had to blow up the trees or something to get a helicopter down in there. Stuff like that. But we were on top of a pretty good size mountain as a company size. And then they go oh, �41 you are going way out there? Okay, Joe is sick and doesn’t feel good. Get him out here. And you were full strength when you went out there. But we were marching back and forth around there and by golly we come to this one spot. I don’t think I was dreaming but it was like a small highway in the enclosed jungle where a deuce and a half could cruise through there. And it seems like that we just come to that, and you’d think you’d make a big deal or…You didn’t follow trails; that was forbidden also. And nobody said a word. Like you crossed it? Maybe they knew you were going to go across it. But you just kept going and well you didn’t want that kind of NVA on your back. So, it was something to be fearful really. But I never saw it. Only once. But in Laos it was pure rolling mountain. Interviewer: Okay. Now, you mentioned you’d be out on these patrols, and they’d last a couple of weeks or whatever. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Now, do you go back to a firebase then? (01:10:19) Veteran: Well, when you went back to the firebase you had to dig the ditches and do that, and they were real bitchy at you and you had this and that. In the jungle, call it more dangerous or not, probably wasn’t any more dangerous than being on that base there. And we didn’t like that. So, we tended to stay in the jungle. Interviewer: Yeah, but you would periodically—you’d go back to the firebase. If you go back to the firebase, could you replace your uniform or anything like that? Veteran: It was easier, yeah, but you always had that—probably not much easier though. It was just if you needed one, you’d get it kind of thing. �42 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know? Interviewer: Alright. Now, did you get any kind of R and R or real time out of the field? Veteran: It—the R and R—the standdowns, we called them—every two or three months we would get three days off. And they sent lock, stock, and barrel of us back to the rear. You, you know, can go get your wounds checked and…and you actually had a shower. And on this every two-to-three-month thing, it—you could get all the clothes you wanted. There is the new boots. So, every two or three months, new shoes or whatever. Some people did not want to change their boots. If you got good feet, they are comfortable. But I got a picture of me standing on the porch there with all new clothes. So, you did have that all new clothes deal, and you learned to keep it clean deal. Interviewer: Yep. And where would you go for the standdown? Veteran: Well, that was back to Chu Lai to our big base there. We didn’t have a lot of guard duty. Some would get attached to that, but a lot of the guys were pretty much beer. You had to be 21 years old and an E-6 to buy liquor. But I was an E-5 and 21 and I’d usually roll up my sleeves and when you walk in there in Vietnam and a guy asks for a bottle of liquor? You’re going to tell him no. You know? Interviewer: Alright. Now, were there guys who were smoking pot too? (01:12:30) Veteran: I have a picture there too of a guy that was. And again, I had been there 6 months. I was over 20 years old and never smoked weed. Southwestern Michigan was, you know, a gust…whatever it was, it was backwards or…we weren’t doing that. But this guy goes— �43 California kid—he goes, “You…you what? You never smoked weed?” and well a few minutes later, there is a picture of us three standing there and it’s just after I smoked my first joint. So…But it was only back at our party place. Usually in the field it was…I never smelled anything or… Interviewer: Yeah. Did people smoke cigarettes in the field? Veteran: We got them regularly in a great big box. We got an SP pack, and it was real common for them to get that. And sometimes you’d, even in the field, you got this huge box that had the different cigarettes, even Kents, and they were—you’d throw them away. So, all the Vietnamese were smoking Kent’s and, you know, and you’d throw them away and your enemy was getting everything that was left. And I would always say, “Hey, I am not smoking cigarettes.” And everybody wanted cigarettes; you never got enough. And I’d say—I’d get the Hav-A-Tampa cigars because I would still smoke one of them once in a while. I kind of like them but I try not to. And I’d say, “Well, gather these cigarettes. I’ll get some for me too and give them to you guys but,” I’d say, “I get first pick out of there.” And nobody was having any issues with that, you know. Interviewer: Now, did you get an out of country R and R? (01:14:17) Veteran: Well, I liked saving the best for—like being old now—I hope I save the best for last. And I was there from February or even January and I saved it for November. And everybody else was let’s get out of here and, you know, but to me it was still like having something saved just before I went home. So, in late November I wound up going to Australia, to Sydney, Australia. Never left town hardly. Goofing around at all the bars and everything. And had about 400 bucks on me. That was a lot of money in 1970. And but so I did have like a 6 day—they flew you to �44 Australia and the whole deal and you cleaned it all up. But that’s something funny. In the airport, when you are in there, you got that group of people and they go, “Okay,” like you’re a classroom thing, “before you leave the airport here, you will buy two brand new suits and ties and matching shirts.” I still have all of that. And they say, “When you buy your stuff here and when you are done, you can go to town.” But that’s the kind of stuff…they were making us have these nice clothes and all that. Interviewer: Okay. And how did the Australians treat you? Veteran: Well, here we are in their bars. Mostly I was probably dealing with their girls a lot. And they were friendly enough. I mean, we were on the same side in all that. And I think it was just a rock band place that we went to all the time. Seems like the hotel bill for 5 or 6 days, and this is luxurious place, and you know, I don’t think—I don’t know if they had a pool. I wouldn’t have even known where that was. But I think it was $56 for 5 or 6 days. Interviewer: Wow. (01:16:19) Veteran: You know? So, I guess I spent it in the bar. Interviewer: Well yeah, got to buy the suits too. Veteran: Oh, well that was almost 100 bucks for the…and…but the first day I got there kind of—these girls know what the story is on these guys there. So, let’s say we hooked up for the week kind of thing. And I always said that I didn’t know that there was hillbillies in Australia because she was…wow. So much. It was hard to believe. You would think you was in Michigan. Interviewer: Alright. Okay, so was it harder to go back to Vietnam? Or was it just…? Veteran: From there? �45 Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: Well, this was late November again. I was going home in a couple months. You know, I was confident enough. I had no issues about that. Let’s go, let’s get this done, you know. And I get back there December 1st or something. And I had less than two months to go before I went home. And it was happening that different people were going home a month or two early. But you didn’t hold your breath for that normally. Interviewer: Right. Okay. Now, do you go—when you go back, do you go back out in the field again? Veteran: Oh yeah, immediately. Yeah. Interviewer: Alright. Now, was it difficult when your unit took casualties and took losses? Because you mentioned a little bit off camera about being right next to somebody who gets killed or having been friends with somebody for a month and then they are gone. (01:18:05) Veteran: Yeah, it was kind of—but I always seemed like that being a point man never really hit any issues or landmines or nobody attacked me up there. And what happens a lot is once you get by or something, they might attack the back of your outfit or the middle. And it seems like…and they would come in and take a helicopter, but I am up there guarding the front trail. Or something like that that it was right there but that I didn’t necessarily—I wasn’t exposed to it. It seems. But… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: There was plenty there. �46 Interviewer: So, you seemed to be usually in the right place at the right time. Veteran: I think I am a lucky fellow. Sort of, for some reason. Interviewer: Alright. Now, you think back about your—across your tour in Vietnam. Are there other particular memories that kind of stand out for you? Veteran: Well, when again—after the big battle and depleted outfit—we had a leader that we weren’t going to do anything particular going in any battles, so you wind up getting this guy. I guess he was a ranger or something, but we never understood how he got that. And we—super hot in the summer. June—July it would have been, and I don’t know why, and I am handing out the malaria pills and that. You take one every day I think it was and you take one a month kind of. And I wind up getting malaria. So, I wound up going really bad. You don’t want to do that. My temperature was as high as 103. I think it gave me mental health problems the rest of my life, probably. But so, I got shipped from Chu Lai down to China Beach. China Beach is the big hospital. Interviewer: Right. (01:20:16) Veteran: So, I am there for a while. And it’s a normal thing; you are supposed to be there 10 days. And they said, you know, they are going to tell you what is happening here, and you are going back. So, you know, get used to that. Well, I think in my deal where it was unusual: when you are in the hospital, you have your top on and you have pajama bottoms that separates you from the other soldiers because you were in the hospital, you know. And I am shooting the breeze with a guy in one of the offices and I won’t say why but he says, “You know something?” he says, “We are looking for a sergeant here and…” kind of like he was a clerk. But he says, “We need the sergeant for some duties. If you want to volunteer for this, you get—you’ll be here �47 a month.” And you know, did I owe anybody anything? I was having a pretty good time there and so I accepted this job that they had there. And basically, it was after breakfast, you had 100 men or something and they had a giant outdoor theater with the benches and had a huge screen in front. But it was all in the sand and everything and they had a regular projector that did Bullitt and all these cool movies every night. They did them twice a night in case you were on guard duty or something. But in the morning the place would be a disaster. That was my job to take these 100 Vietnam veterans, you know, out of the hospital and everything. They get done with breakfast, okay you guys: we got to clean this up. And they did what I told them. And I’d usually—could have had them do every sliver of it but I’d try to get them to do a pretty good job. Come on, let’s get this done because you ain’t leaving until I tell you. And I suppose they resented it but by golly, we got together and cleaned that theater out there and I’d kind of go okay, go ahead. You can leave, you know. If you want to stay and help…usually nobody ever did. And I would finish by myself but what the heck? I had 10 o’clock in the morning. I was there, you know, I had a great time of it. I don’t know about the bar and everything. The important thing is I had my teeth all done. And the average Vietnam soldier didn’t have that access. Yeah. I’d love to find that guy’s name, the dentist. (01:22:57) Interviewer: Alright. So, your unit didn’t mind that you were gone? Or did no one notice? Veteran: You are an individual out there. You get back…the times were changing so much, you know? The big battle, all them guys went. We were getting so many new guys in there. And I come back. I was already a squad leader and that. Well, you get back, okay, we need a squad leader here. You take these guys; I got that pitcher. And it was no big deal. Interviewer: You were commenting before we kind of got into that story about your new company commander and this guy you thought—was there a problem with him? Or…? �48 Veteran: Well, you know like one day I was…and I tried to be—things were pretty cool. I’d take the camera out, if you see the pictures, and I was taking a picture. He says, “You put that away.” Well, nobody ever said—nobody ever said anything like that. You know? And I had a little ammo pouch there for it, but we put it away. But he was just this way. An actual ranger too. But he—how the heck he made it as a ranger? Wow. He was little, short, scrunty. Wow. I just couldn’t get over what he must have been doing. But he was only out there a week. And as a force, people complained. He was gone. Interviewer: Okay. Was he just too much of a stickler for the rules? Or just trying to throw his weight around too much? Or…? (01:24:28) Veteran: I guess you would call it stickler for the rules. It’s—it wasn’t what we were doing out there, you know. And…I don’t know. It was a rare occasion where—if you got assigned to something, usually you did that. Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah, you didn’t rotate officers out that quickly. Alright. Veteran: Oh never. They usually lasted. A 6-months tour was an officer’s tour and a lot of times they would stick around with their group for maybe the whole year. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Other particular incidents or things that stand out for you? Veteran: Well, at the end of that when I did come back and I had a…I had my squad and that’s a big thing, to have these. Well, only 5 or 6 guys there and you’re cutting point and that’s your little group you are with all the time. But the lieutenant in charge of the platoon and the big shot sergeant were different in there. And I think they were really, really party thing. And it was a different air of what was happening. Vietnam was. And we felt that too. It was…what do you call the de-escalation? People are— �49 Interviewer: Yeah, Vietnamization and all of that. Yep. Veteran: Definitely. And we are going home and so you get a different attitude. And we didn’t have most of that one platoon, or it was the company, that was wiped out quite a bit. And that’s something too. We went down into the valley, we wondered later oh, we heard we got attacked. 100 men got attacked by two battalions of the NVA, which later they commented they couldn’t believe that we were such a small outfit and put that much. And come to find out when we got back up on the hill, we had two companies behind us, and we went down in the hill. The first group? They never come off the hill. Lock, stock, and barrel at a time. So… My one friend was a little hostile when he got up there and found that out. Knocked somebody out. But that was very—that was Bob again. You know, the one with relatives? (01:26:55) Interviewer: Alright. Well, to follow up on that, kind of a couple of different things that you sort of mentioned in passing here. One of them was you were talking about when you rejoined the unit after time at China Beach and you had a new command team there and so forth. You said something about the partying? Or…? Veteran: Well, it seemed to be a different kind of thing out there. You could only do so much in the jungle. It ain’t like you had alcohol or— Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And the weed thing, you didn’t see that. Interviewer: Okay, but I guess they weren’t as good as some of the leaders you had had earlier? Veteran: Not at all. And here I was really the lead person in the platoon by far. �50 Interviewer: Oh yeah. Veteran: You know, there was no NCO in the platoon that I mean even had a minute in country. And then these two guys would not let me try to advise them or…I usually just would say this is how we do things here and this and this and this. Not trying to be a real, you know, stickler. I didn’t want to insult anybody but this, oh yeah this, we do this and this. And but they were really bad to the point that they took one of these guys that—the one that wouldn’t fire on the guy that snuck up on us. I mean, he was still only there a couple months and they replaced me. And then here I am kind of displaced. I think also too a real—it seems like a small part of the story—but October 1st, into this, and I am, you know, I am going to go home in a few months, but I got a letter. I wrote to a friend of mine that I went to basic training. And he was from Chelsea, Michigan. (01:28:46) Veteran: And wrote a letter to his—to him. Well, where is Hank and wanted to know where he was because I lost track of him in Vietnam, I believe it was. And didn’t write back and forth to most, just my mom I wrote to. Nobody else wrote to me. And she wrote a letter to me and, well, we were real sad. Hank got home the other—you know, like October 1st, and he got killed in a car accident the first day he was home. And here he is—served in Vietnam for a year. My best friend ever at the time. And I was looking forward to being—having a friend there. And I think that took a lot of gas out of me. And it was kind of around the time where I didn’t have my squad anymore, you know. And I think I went to the—maybe the command center. It might have been, you know, with them guys and their security or something. And it wasn’t the same though. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. You also mentioned this fellow Bob. What was he like or what was his story? �51 Veteran: Oh, he was fun. He was a real partier and, you know, drinking and the whole deal. And like I said, he claimed, well, to be a relative of the Kennedys or something. Some of the stuff he pulled? Never seen anything like that. Or they had a guy that was—oh, escaped. An American solider that was the bad guy. Going to our jail over there or something. And wow. And Bob gets to be the one, “Here’s a 45, Bob. You got a 3-day leave of absence. Kill this guy if he blinks,” kind of thing. But Bob got to go. You know? And you’d kind of believe people sort of. Or the guy that said his uncle was a, you know, a Wisconsin politician of some kind. And oh yeah, sure. But gee, he disappeared in a couple weeks. (01:30:56) Interviewer: Alright. And so, for you basically…Now as your—as you get short, do your duties change at all? Or do you just keep just doing— Veteran: Well, I had my platoon. I had my squad there and kind of, you know, one of the leaders in the whole platoon. And then was going into just being with the command center as their security. So, that’s basically nothing. I don’t think I—rarely did point or anything after that. Interviewer: Okay, so you are kind of with the command post rather than… Veteran: They actually sent me away from my platoon too, which was unusual. And we are out there in the middle of nowhere and back to those guys not following the rules. They said, “Well, okay. We are here and we are going to send you over there.” And you had to have a radio on you, and you had to have a…what was it? Three key things. Big deal is you had to have a radio with you and like there was three of us they sent over there. Interviewer: This was like a listening post? Or…? Veteran: When you are going over there, and you are going to get a couple miles through the jungle and you are coming on your own people, what if something happens? What if somebody �52 fires at me? Nobody has any idea. So, that’s the big deal about everybody has a radio, a fullfledged PRC 25. And but see those guys did that kind of thing. And I am going—I am really aggravated. I am afraid of going by myself. (01:32:34) Interviewer: Okay. But what was the point of having you that far out? Was that just to let them know if somebody was coming? Veteran: Well, we were in one platoon and operating, you know, in a mile or two or away from the main group here and there. And then never happens that you send this little group but and that’s one of—I am one of the guys. Kind of they are getting rid of me, I guess. Maybe I was a little vocal. Interviewer: There you go. Veteran: Saying how I thought it should be done and by golly you get going over there. I think— I think we had some real fire activity here or there at the end of the tour. And I am going like, you know, I don’t—I hear this firing going on up front but what do we do now? You can’t ask anybody any questions. But we did make it there okay. Interviewer: Alright. So, you are…now, how do you—how does your tour kind of wind up? How do you find out you are leaving and when and that kind of thing? Veteran: Well, it was…I guess I tried to be—I probably walked point or cut trail a little and some because I wasn’t completely doing nothing, but we were ready to go on, like we called these things, missions for a three week until who knows. Six weeks thing. And we were on Mary Ann there. And where you got all your supplies together to go on. You get your C-rations and make sure you got all your bullets and everything. And we were getting on a—the helicopters would come on there and they go, “Hey Johnson, get over here!” You know, it’s December 15th �53 or something. I got two—a month and a half to go. You know? And “Here. Go home.” So, November or December 16th or 17th or something, I am in the jungle and I was home the 20th. So, from eek to oh. Wow. Interviewer: Okay, so physically, how did they get you home? So, you get your orders, you are not going on a mission. So, now what? (01:34:43) Veteran: Well, you’re so far out there, it is only flying back to Chu Lai. And doing your orders over there and maybe you’ll be able to take a bath again. We never, never took a bath out there unless you’d sluice off in a stream, you’d say. But we went back to Chu Lai and I was only there a day or two and then they flew me from there. I just can’t remember how we went back and forth there. I flew in a 1—a C-130 before, which is like being in the back of a flatbed truck. Interviewer: Yeah, it’s a cargo plane. Veteran: Yeah. And went back to China… Interviewer: To…? Veteran: Cam Ranh Bay, yeah. Back there. And that was the main place where the jets come and go, the civilian jets. And I have the picture of the airplane that come and get me. I thought that’s kind of unusual for a person to actually—no big deal unless it was me. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Kind of thing but…and they put you all together. I did bring home an SKS that we captured in a large group of weapons and I guess it was probably my turn. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I brought that home. �54 Interviewer: Alright. And then how did—what’s the route flying back? (01:36:07) Veteran: Well, same as before: going from Cam Ranh Bay to—through Tokyo again. And back through Alaska; never been there before, you know, but…And then from there back to… Interviewer: Probably Fort Lewis. Veteran: Well yeah, Fort Lewis of course. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. Veteran: And… Interviewer: When you get off the plane at Fort Lewis, what kind of processing do you get? Veteran: Well, it was the same thing of physical. You know, they always check you and I have that, of course, record of you know I should see—I think I was 185. I think I am the same weight as I come home. I am kind of—I was 21 when I come home. And I showed you the picture of me coming off the plane. That’s kind of unusual. Cold as hell there and guys are getting off in jungle clothes, but I had a coat. And you go there, and you take your physical and all that and soon as you can, you are processed out there. And then I flew from Fort Lewis, Washington to Chicago. And it was very unusual. A couple guys that had been in NCO school with and they were very close friends. So, how the heck is this? I hadn’t seen them in over a year, and we are flying on that same flight. So, when we get to Chicago, we go in the bar and we still had our uniform. In fact, they—at that time, they required you to have your uniform on, dress uniform, to fly on the planes. Interviewer: Well, if you were going to fly standby, if you were going to fly the cheapest fare, you had to have the uniform. Because a lot of guys talk about how they would be told �55 to switch to civilian clothes. But if you had the uniform on, you could get the really cheap tickets. Veteran: To me it was if you didn’t have it, you weren’t getting on there kind of thing. And hey, I just wanted to get home. Interviewer: Right. Okay, so anyway, so you are in the bar with these guys, and you got your uniforms on. Veteran: Yep. Had a couple drinks. No big deal. We… Interviewer: So, you didn’t see any protesters or…? Veteran: No, no, never did. Never had that kind of an issue. Interviewer: Okay. And then, now you have been discharged at this point, right? Because— Veteran: Oh yeah. Interviewer: Yeah, because you got drunk. Veteran: You are out. I could have went to California if I would have wanted to. Interviewer: Okay. So, you get as far as Chicago and then what? (01:38:28) Veteran: What was kind of odd that it cost 13 bucks to fly from Chicago to Benton Harbor. I lived in Benton Harbor at the time. I—probably military discount or something. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: So, it wasn’t that odd. So, I put my duffel bag there which I hadn’t seen in a year either. When you get to Vietnam they say here, take this. And there is nothing you want in there. And �56 like you don’t need anything. And so, I got that back for going home. And I checked that into the airport. So, I am going to walk over to the plane, and it is only Chicago and I live, you know, I lived in Benton Harbor. And I see these people coming through the airport there and come to find out, it’s my sister’s best friend and her sister and her hus—they were picking up her husband. And I get a ride in a brand-new Thunderbird home with a very—I mean, that’s off the wall there. Interviewer: Did you get your bag back? Veteran: I went to Benton Harbor the next day and they flew it over there and I just picked it up. It was easier that way but how off the wall was that? Interviewer: Alright. So, you get back home. You are out of the Army. Do you go back to work right away or what do you do? Veteran: Well, when I got home, it was December 20th or something. And my ma’s ’63 Chevy hardtop was sitting there in the driveway. I am freezing but I think I had a coat on. And I—she wasn’t home kind of in the evenings for some reason. So, I sat down in the car and for a while until she got home later. But the rest of that is you had—to me it was—maybe it was my company, or some people say they have a year to go back to work. But they told us 90 days. I guess I believe a lot of these things. (01:40:23) Veteran: And I bought a car within 5 days: a ’66 Chevelle. I loved that car. And then I had over $3000 cash, that was a lot of money, being a sergeant over there. And there was a lot of people that got home without—with less than 1000. So, they went there in the war and the whole thing, they come back without a dime. Well, I thought I better spend the rest of this money. And I bought a ’59 Corvette a month after I got home. So, I kind of patched that up and everything. �57 And I had a friend in Florida that was living down there and he wrote me a couple times. He was my friend before I went in and I went to visit him. I had three months before I had to report in and so I went and stayed with him. He was a tree trimmer and doing stuff like that, which was really—that was my cup of tea. I still like that stuff. And so, I visited with him for a while, but I had to be at work at a certain day to get my seniority and all that back. So, I wanted to go back to Avion Coach and so I went to Florida for…oh, a month and a half or something. And I really enjoyed it down there. And I probably could have stayed I guess but what the heck? I had a job and everything in Michigan. So, I was glad I came back. Interviewer: Alright. Now, how easy or hard was it to adjust to civilian life again? Veteran: I guess I was probably proud of myself, all by myself. I had a good job, I had sort of a family outfit that I worked for. I worked in a woodshop too at that place and I kind of liked that kind of a deal. And I thought they treated me pretty fair. And so, that was pretty easy. And it wasn’t very much longer I wound up getting a brand-new double-wide next to the factory where I walked to work every day. So, and I come home for lunch. So, that was, you know, easy going, I guess. Interviewer: Okay. So, a lot of guys talk about how they had to learn a different vocabulary when they got back or that kind of thing. Did you have to? Or did you never get much into swearing a lot when you were in Vietnam and…? (01:42:51) Veteran: I am bad now. Interviewer: Okay. �58 Veteran: I am really bad. I wish I could get away from that. I don’t think we really got into that. I think…or even about every time you spoke to somebody, you never spoke more than you had to. And at night it was really toned down. You know? And it maybe cools you out a little bit but… Interviewer: Okay. And did you have any of the kind of PTSD reactions where you are startled by loud noises, or you are suspicious of different things or— Veteran: Yeah, that’s… Interviewer: --things or…? Veteran: Yeah, that’s—I think I always did that. Just eventually shrug it off but I know. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, I guess as you look over the time you spend in the service, what do you think you took out of that or how did that effect you? Veteran: Well, other than kind of doing a good job for our country, that was part of the idea. And what did I take out of it? I—like I say, there was a lot of camaraderie during that couple years and I was with large groups at a time and that was…what do you call? A civil thing, interacting with people and all that. And now I live in a little county town—tiny town that you could put in this building here. You know, and…I don’t know what I learned much. (01:44:33) Interviewer: Okay. I mean, do you think—were you any different when you got home than when you left? Veteran: I didn’t think so, but our reaction is—weren’t talking to anybody about it. Didn’t have anybody to talk about it and especially family never ask. And to this day still, you know, and I don’t bring it up. Interviewer: Alright. But have you— �59 Veteran: They have never seen those pictures. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, because you have got a—you have got those pictures that you took. And I guess but you are involved with some veterans’ groups? Or you—at least with your own unit? Veteran: Well, the last 20 years I have been going to the Battle Creek veterans for my own health thing but and kind of surprised me for different reasons. This group that called me, they were there before I was. But they still invited this—it was just the platoon together. Like 20 to 30 guys. And so, I started going to that at about, oh, 15 years ago. And I go most every year. We are going to Branson, Missouri this year. And one of the things I noticed about that is let’s say there is 20 of us in the group that—I think there was one or two bachelors that ever come to the thing. They were in bad shape. I drank way too much but some of these guys, like this one that—he doesn’t come anymore but I am the only bachelor. And that’s why these guys are still there and healthy is they have a bunch of original wives that have taken good care of each other and everything and I think I am kind of a different person in the group. And I am not afraid to go talk to the ladies and how you doing, and, you know, and they know who I am enough that…some of the guys knew me. (01:46:41) Interviewer: Okay. So, basically this is sort of—you were kind of maybe there at the end of the time when a lot of that group was there? Veteran: Yes. Yeah. And…one—well, like when I was introduced to the—those guys—and somebody said, “Oh yeah, this is Sergeant Johnson,” the guy—and I think I was actually going to shake his hand or something, which would have been forbidden in the jungle. You didn’t do �60 that kind of thing, or you can salute or anything. But he goes, he looks at me, he goes, “I know who he is.” You know? And there, that’s my welcome to the outfit. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And never another word said about it. You know? Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yeah, but a real good group of guys. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Alright. Well, you certainly have got an interesting story. Veteran: Oh boy. Interviewer: It winds up in a lot of different places but that’s what we are here for. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: So, I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to share it. Veteran: Okay, good. Interviewer: Alright. (01:47:40) � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context JohnsonC2339V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Johnson, Chester Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-11 Title A name given to the resource Johnson, Chester (Interview transcript and video), 2019 Description An account of the resource Chester Johnson was born in South Haven, Michigan, in 1949. He attended high school in Benton Harbor and graduated in 1967. Chester was drafted into the Army in January 1969. He completed basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He did his advanced individual training at Fort McClellan, Alabama. Chester then went to non-commissioned officer (NCO) school at Fort Benning, Georgia. He was sent to Vietnam in early 1970, where he was assigned to B company, 1st battalion, 196th regiment of the light infantry brigade. During his time in Vietnam, Chester was involved in various skirmishes. He was part of a group that was sent into Laos on a patrol mission. He went on R and R in Australia in November 1970. He returned home from Vietnam in December 1970. Chester is currently involved with a veterans’ group in Battle Creek, Michigan. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) WKTV (Wyoming, Mich.) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f60478ed28c483a4fd7e8bd72306c978.mp4 a1fd3aa1e6f707b099bc1318cdb0657c https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/007f755410111ad46080ff9fb90ad0c5.pdf 49d1d3906c686f098297897a44053cb8 PDF Text Text Jamieson, Jimmy Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Vietnam War Interviewee’s Name: Jimmy Jamieson Length of Interview: (2:11:08) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Jimmy Jamieson of Kentwood, Michigan and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay Jimmy start us off with some background on yourself and to begin with, where and when were you born?” I was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1946, my dad was in the service, he got back from the war and we lived there. Moved to Michigan, that’s where he’s from and went to four schools here, ended up graduating from Rogers High School, went to Grand Rapids junior college. Interviewer: “So Rogers is in Wyoming, Michigan which is a Grand Rapids suburb, yeah.” Correct, yeah. Interviewer: “And what was your father doing for work then once you’re up in Michigan?” (1:18) He was a- He worked for Johnson’s Furniture he was a foreman in the yard there, yard foreman, and then he ended up working for Erb Lumber and it became Carlisle Lumber and stuff like that, so I went to Lee, Grandville, Newaygo, and then Rogers which is, there was a Wyoming Park High School and then a Rogers High School and they combined the two a few years ago, couple years ago, and that’s where I went. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Okay, so as you grew up in west Michigan- Alright, and then when did you finish high school?” I graduated in ‘65 and then I went to Grand Rapids junior college then, we nicknamed it “Raider High” of course, and wanted to be a school teacher. I wanted to do industrial arts, shop teacher, and so I was taking engineering classes there, and then I got drafted in February andInterviewer: “Okay, now if you’re in college did you not have a deferment or?” No, back then if you were single and over 18 they didn’t care what your grade point was, they didn’t care what you were doing. I went to the draft board and they gave me an extension so that I finally got drafted in July, they let me finish the semester. Interviewer: “Right, well how many credit hours were you taking?” (2:42) I was going full time, I had 12, I mean that’s full. Interviewer: “Yeah, I mean because that was cause I’ve interviewed other people who get drafted around the time you did and as long as they had a full load then they didn’t get drafted, but they didn’t do that for you. No, they- Myself, a couple of my high school buddies we were all going to J.C we all got drafted at the same time and he ended up going to Korea and another one went to Germany andInterviewer: “So you go in, in July of ‘66 then where do they send you for basic training?” Well I guess I was kind of important because they sent me to Fort Knox in Kentucky, which is armor, Hell on Wheels, and I was there for 13 days and that didn’t work out so they sent me down to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the 101st Airborne, I took my basic training there. Interviewer: “Okay but when you’re in basic, I mean Fort Knox is sort of the standard �Jamieson, Jimmy place for guys from Michigan to go for army basic training or pretty much anything, and then same with Fort Campbell at that point it was setting up to do the same thing and they took the overflow from other places. So what did your basic training consist of?” At Fort Campbell, Kentucky they trained us as airborne, hopefully they could- Cause airborne is volunteer only and so our instructors were all rangers, our captain, company commander was a green beret guy so you didn’t walk on base, you ran. Airborne ran everywhere and so that’s how we were trained on Paul Bunyan’s gym stuff, that was- We stayed in barracks that hadn’t been used since 1951, no windows in them, no doors are on them, we had to nail doors up with two by fours and, you know it’s just old stuff and that was our basic. So they pretty much convinced us that we were indestructible, I mean the bullets would bound off our chest they had us so convinced. Interviewer: “Okay, so at this stage it’s still the hundred and first guys who were doing a lot of the actual training, you haven’t yet created a conventional training cadre for larger numbers of guys, and they’re just opening this up for basic. Okay, so you get the benefit of that I guess. How much of an emphasis was there on discipline, following orders, that kind of thing?” (5:08) Very much so, then they could hit you over the head with a nightstick, you know if you’re marching you’re out of step, call you names of course, it was- They really couldn’t hit you, but if you were out of step they’d reach in with a night stick and rap you on the- Cause you wore a helmet liner- Pardon me, and if you were out of step they’d put the stick in between your legs and of course you’d fall, then the next guy would fall, and then the next guy would fall, and as far as the discipline went if you were screwing up they would make the whole squad, platoon, do push-ups while you stood there and watched. So they created teamwork, they wanted you to depend on each other and protect each other, and so that was real mind opening, that was an experience that I had never experienced before is learning to depend on somebody. Interviewer: “Okay, now how long did it take you to kind of adjust to that, or adjust to life in the army?” �Jamieson, Jimmy You gotta remember I’m from a military family so about three weeks once you get over the being homesick and you learned to meet your fellow troopers, and that was the heart- In my case, I stuttered, I could hardly get a word out sometimes. I had a hard time in high school, I went to four different speech schools because I stuttered so bad- Man, so when you take harassment from your friends supposedly and guys in the Army would pick on you, the bullying affect you know, and so I wouldn’t talk much but when your platoon sergeant or your squad leader heard what was going on he would jump all over them because he’s your fellow teammate, you don’t pick on your teammate. So that was learned by the company, the squad, the platoon, that even though I stuttered you didn’t make fun of them. So you worked as a team, you learned that real quick. Interviewer: “Okay, now was following orders something that came fairly naturally?” (7:44) Yeah, I had no problem following orders. Interviewer: “Now were there some other guys that you were training with who had more trouble with that?” Oh yeah, you know they’re the alpha male, I say the “alpha male” and I was all- I turned 21 in Vietnam, so I was older than a lot of the folks in our outfit so- And coming from a military family I learned not to volunteer for anything and it was- That was, I’m not gonna say easy for me, but I knew how to play the game if that’s what you wanna call it. Interviewer: “Right, and were you in good physical shape when you went in?” Yes, in high school I wrestled for four years and played tennis, ran track, played one year of football. I was too small so I did the other stuff, but I was in pretty good shape yeah, it didn’t take long for me to- You know, on your marches and your runs, here again in airborne,you know, I say airborne. I was not in airborne but I was trained by airborne so. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “So they just took the kind of had-nosed approach that we associate with Airborne training.” Yep, you run in place or you do a double time thing, you didn’t- Once we learned how to march that was fine, but then if you were gonna go to the rifle range or you was gonna go you had to go get your shots, you didn’t march you double time jog in place, and you better be in step. So the airborne runs no matter where they go. Interviewer: “Alright, now how long did the basic last?” (9:25) Eight weeks I believe it was. Interviewer: “And where do they send you next?” Fort Meade, Maryland. Interviewer: “Okay, what were you doing there?” Field artillery- No, scratch that. Fort Sill, I’m ahead of myself, Fort Sill, Oklahoma and there I was trained on the 105 howitzer, and that was- Here again we stayed in barracks that were used in 1950, old, wooden barracks, nothing new, all Vietnam instructors. At the end we were- They put up on a board, you know like Germany, Korea, here and here, and Hawaii, and Vietnam and so I looked at all that- Now this is where you guys are gonna go, they didn’t know who was gonna go but this is where this unit is gonna send troops. So I had heard stories about Korea is 13 months, Germany is 18 months, and they only wanted like five people to go to Hawaii, and that was like 13 or 18 months. So I didn’t- So a whole bunch of us guys said- Of course you gotta remember now, we’re invincible okay, the bullets are gonna bounce off his chest and blah blah blah blah blah. So we volunteered for Vietnam. Interviewer: “Okay, now before we move forward let’s go back, what does the artillery training consist of?” �Jamieson, Jimmy The artillery? Interviewer: “Artillery training, so what are you doing while you’re at Fort Sill?” Oh, you’re learning the velocities of the 105 howitzer, how it works, what the projectile, you know, how all that is put together. The projectile is 33 pounds it’s a semi fixed, in other words it comes in a wooden box and then your powder charge is there, your projectile, and your brass. So whatever the fire mission is, whatever the F.D.C Fire Direction Control and wherever the mission is. They will tell you how far, what elevation, it’s deflection quadrant, then you would pick the right powder charge, or they’d tell you what powder charge, and then you would put that in the canister and then affix the projectile to it, and then the fuse whatever fuse that they wanted, impact fuse, HE explosive round and so on. A delayed fuse or if you’re gonna shoot white phosphorus, you know, Willie P we call it. (12:00) So you learn all that and how to lay the guns depending on how you want the rounds to hit, you would lay the gun in that fashion. One gun in base piece, so in other words that’s the most accurate gun, of the six guns base piece is the most accurate, and then- So then they would lay the gun in a lazy W if they wanted the rounds to hit like that, or straight line effect, or in behind each other. So you learn all that and then you would go out into the prairie and the airborne was to infiltrate us, and that was one of their night jumps they had to do, and so you could see these guys falling out of the sky, and we would break up into three and four man teams and we’d go out and capture them. Now they were supposed to infiltrate us, but we captured most of them. Interviewer: “Okay, the parachute is a little bit of a giveaway.” Well it was supposed to be a night jump but it really wasn’t a night jump so we could see them and we knew where they landed and stuff like that so yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, now did you learn all the different jobs on a gun?” Yes, there’s a powder man, and a gunner, and a radio man, and because I stuttered I couldn’t be a �Jamieson, Jimmy radio man, because you have to repeat deflection and quadrants and if you’re- I have trouble with like nines, and you don’t say nine you say niner or n-n-n-niner, s-s-seven, you know. So they kept me off the radio, I could answer the radio and say “Fire mission, fire mission.” So I can do radio watch, you’d stand watch and that kind of thing, but yeah they kept me off the radio because we didn’t want to blow somebody else up. Interviewer: “Alright, now was this a towed weapon, something you’d pull behind a vehicle?” The 105 is a towed vehicle- Or a towed howitzer, yes. Interviewer: “And it was with that, the variety, they had a split trail where you open up the two-” (14:15) Yep, the trail split up and then they had spades on the back and they would hog into the ground, and you would put it up on a jack and set on a pedestal, so the wheels were off the ground. Same thing with the 155 howitzer, towed vehicle, you had a deuce and a half truck that towed it and that’s what I had in Vietnam, started out on. Interviewer: “Alright, okay and with the- How many men would normally be on a gun crew, or what’s the official number?” Seven on a 105, 11 on a 155, but in Vietnam the most we ever had was six if you include the sergeant, or the chief, the gun chief. He made seven but he was the talley and we’re the dewey so. Interviewer: “Right, and then did you have- Would you have a machine gun with the gun or any kind of defensive weapons or just what your personal weapons would be?” Once I got to Vietnam- Now I really don’t know what’s in a 105 gun battery, because I was never sent to one of them in Vietnam, but when I got to Vietnam and we had the one pipe I’d- �Jamieson, Jimmy You’d have the 50 caliber mounted on a tripod, and then each gun section has a 50, an M60 which is the 308 M60 machine gun, and then you have a M79 grenade launcher which is called a thump gun, we called it that, or a blooper infantry calls it a blooper, and then you had your individual rifle, which then was an m14, and mine was an m14 with a selector switch on it. So we also had a full automatic, and each gun section has a 12 gauge shotgun and mine happened to be a Stevens. Interviewer: “So in Vietnam you had a lot of firepower with you, which you enabled but we’re not all the way there yet. Okay, but basically you’re training only on 105’s at Fort Sill?” Yes, yep. Interviewer: “Okay and how long does that training last?” (16:20) Eight to ten weeks I believe how long- I think that’s about how long. Interviewer: “The standard is eight weeks. Okay, now once you’ve completed that now what do you do?” Well the last two weeks that I- They asked for people who wanted to be rangers, and there’s ranger airborne and then there’s straight rangers back then. So, I thought “Oh what the heck.” you know, so I volunteered rangers. So we’d get up at 4:30 in the morning, before everybody else gets up, and you’re in your green t-shirt, your green boxer shorts, and your black combat boots, and you’re running, and you run, and you do ranger training for a couple three hours and then you go do your stuff and that went on for two weeks, and then I got sent to- I don’t know if we’re that far yet or not, but I got sent to- After I volunteered and home on leave I got sent to Pleiku, which is up in the northern part of Vietnam, but the 75th Rangers. Interviewer: “So you did your- So the only ranger training you had in the states was actually at Fort Sill?” �Jamieson, Jimmy Correct. Interviewer: “As part of your A.I.T okay, and then how long a leave do they give you home, was that a month?” I had 30 days. Interviewer: “Okay, and then how do they actually get you to Vietnam?” On a C-141 troop transport, there was 150 of us in there and then jeeps, they had jeeps in there, and then pallets of duffle bags. So you marched in you had rows and rows and rows of seats and then you’re looking, you’re sitting backwards and you’re looking, at duffle bags and a couple of jeeps they had sideways and wooden skids or metal skids and that’s the whole flight. Interviewer: “Alright, so no chartered commercial plane for you, you get- Where did you fly out of?” (18:15) California- What is that, right out of Los Angeles, not Clark Air Force Base what- I can’t remember the name of that base. Interviewer: “Let’s see, Edwards or El Toro, El toro’s marines.” No, San FranciscoInterviewer: “San Francisco is Travis-” Travis! Travis Air Force Base, there you are, yep. Interviewer: “Okay, and then did you stop any place on the way?” �Jamieson, Jimmy Guam, to refuel, we got out, stretched our legs, a couple hours dilly-dallying around and then get back on and flew. Interviewer: “Okay, and then you landed in Pleiku.” Pleiku, yup, and there- I was there for just a short time did some ranger training, we- The chinook helicopter and they would drop the cargo net out the back, and you’re loaded up with your rucksack and your rifle and you’d climb down this net. Then you’d run along the ground for 50 yards and then you’d climb back up and practice your compasses. Basic infantry stuff, and that didn’t last because I was going to be in field artillery attached to the 75th ranger battalion. Interviewer: “Okay, so you did a little bit of what the rangers do but the expectation is that you’re not really running around in the jungle with them.” Right, I’m not gonna be a ranger, wear ranger tabs, and stuff like that so, lurps or whatever they call them now. Interviewer: “Alright, so now you do the training with the unit and then now what do they do with you?” (19:57) Well they were getting ready to assign me to a unit, well then somehow somebody got a call that said “1st infantry division needs replacements.” So they loaded up 18 of us on a Caribou 16 and flew us down to Dĩ An, or actually it’s camp alpha in Saigon, and then I got assigned to the 8th Battalion, 6th Artillery in Vietnam, 1st Infantry Division. Interviewer: “Okay, and now this was gonna be- And then what kind of guns do you have there now?” There they flew me out in the field cause they were out in the field, they weren’t in a base camp, and I’m on a towed 155 howitzer, and I was assigned to the base piece number four gun. Sergeant Morgan was our gun chief, section leader, and so that was my home for the next year �Jamieson, Jimmy and three days so. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you join that gun crew, what role do you have on the crew?” I was considered- They just assigned me a number, I was a number two man which is the powder man, but an 11 man crew there’s six of us so you’re the powder man, you’re the projectile man, you’re the truck driver, you’re the machine gunner on top, you’re- You do everything, the radio man, everybody does everything, and so numbers didn’t mean anything. Interviewer: “Alright, and what’s your- When they first, when they fly you out, you’re going out in a helicopter to join the unit in the field?” Yup, on a huey. Interviewer: “Okay and when you kind of first come in and join what is your impression or what do you see when you land?” (21:47) Holy- What am I getting into. The helicopter ride was kind of cool, you know you take off from a base camp and it’s just really nice but when you go out into the field because of these snipers and what not. Now you gotta remember this is not a- There’s no- The perimeter is not much there’s no concertina wire, very seldom concertina wire. It’s just- Oh geez, there’s howitzers there and what not, you know and holy crap, but they come in and they go around and they land like right now. It’s just like you’re a rock falling right out of the sky because they don’t want to get shot at, and yeah so when they come in, they come in fast, tail down, set it down. When they take off the nose drops and man they’re gone, they’re- Yeah it’s like riding in an elevator about twice as fast, you know. Interviewer: “Alright, and so they just get you off the helicopter and then what kind of reception do you get when you join the unit?” �Jamieson, Jimmy “Oh are you the new grunt? Are you the new guy?” Alright where’s the C.P? “Over there” and “Go report in.” So you’d go report in to the first sergeant and tell them who you are and they welcome you into the beautiful southern vacation land, you know and blah blah blah blah blah, grab your blankity blank and come with me, and you know. So the first sergeant took me down there, he introduced me to Sergeant Morgan and that was it, and then he did the rest. Interviewer: “Alright, so did Sergeant Morgan and the other people in the crew, did they actually try to orient you and tell you what to do?” Oh yeah, yep they were very friendly “Where are you from?” You know, “What do you do?” Blah blah blah blah blah so you know it’s like reading a- “Oh we finally got something to read, we got a new guy we’ll ask him questions.” Interviewer: “Alright so you’re not being shut out by the group or anything else like that, you’re right in there.” (24:00) Nope, they were very friendly guys, got to know them a lot yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, and so now- And how many guns were in the battery?” Six. Interviewer: “Okay and were they all together at the time you joined them?” Yeah, we were- Of course they’re all laid out and what we- Usually we use what they call a lazy W, and the bursting radius of a 155 howitzer is 65 meters, so they’re laid out in a lazy W like this and then back and then like this, and we’re base piece we’re number four gun here. So everything overlapped, so the guns are like 30 yards- 30 meters apart, so that when the shells land they overlap and anything in that bursting radius is dead. If the shrapnel doesn’t get you, the concussion will, it’ll blow your eyeballs right out of your head. So yeah that’s how you laid the guns, and they weren’t GPS like they are now, this was aiming stakes so you’d have to put �Jamieson, Jimmy aiming stakes out and stuff like that. So yeah it was really interesting to- And here again the 155’s, they’re up on a pedestal too just like the 105’s with the spades, and so you hope you don’t end up in a base camp someplace where they’ll fall through, which ours did, but anyway yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, and now in the field like would they dig gun pits that the guns would go in, or were they just sitting up there on the ground?” Just sitting up in the air. Interviewer: “So high profile and people could see it?” Very high profile. Interviewer: “Okay, and what was the first night like?” (25:43) Scary, very scary. It’s- On my part, the guys had been there for a while were old hat, you know, and you keep score. Well “I’m a short timer.” or “I’m a long timer” You know, and you keep calendar and- But, jumpy, very jumpy “What’s this noise? What’s that?” Oh that’s just somebody over there, a sniper or guns would go off and you’d come up off the floor, and very nerve wracking which didn’t help my stuttering any, and you know “Fire mission! Fire mission!” Well then okay now what- You know, I’ve never trained on a 155. So they didn’t put me on powder right away because putting the proper powder charge in there, I was a loader for quite a while, you just picked the round up and threw it, and now you have loaders but they’re too slow. So you gotta remember I’m like 118 pounds, and I’m picking up a 97 pound projectile, and you put on a three pound fuse so it’s basically 100 pounds, and I’m picking it up and putting it into the tube and then launching it, loading it with– And you gotta jam it into the lands and grooves so it doesn’t fall back out, then put your powder charge in, then close the breach block, and then you’ve gotta put a primer in there, which is actually a blank of a 38 special. So you put that in there, close the primer thing, and then there’s a lanyard, and then the gunner would, you know, if they say “Fire!” then you’d pull the lanyard and the gun recoils back. So I did– I was a loader and I’d pull– I’d fire the gun, stuff that didn’t have a whole lot of responsibility to it because I �Jamieson, Jimmy was the newbie. Interviewer: “Right, did you have fire missions that first night?” Oh absolutely, almost every night you’re shooting H & I’s, harassment and interdiction. Interviewer: “Interdiction, yeah. What’s the purpose of that?” Suspected BC concentrations, whether the bird dog or a patrol had seen a Viet Cong patrol out some place or N.V.A and so you would just shoot out and hopefully there’s somebody still there yet or stop them from coming in. So you would shoot– Each gun was assigned, and whether you shoot two rounds, three rounds, if there was a fort observer out there and if he noticed some action during the day and all of a sudden there was more action then they would plan– And it wouldn’t be like nine o’clock at night or at ten o’clock we’re gonna shoot. It’d be some weird “At 11:37 we’re gonna shoot three rounds.” or it was at 2:18 in the morning, I mean. So you just never knew, and then if you get a fire mission in between there then you’re up, so it was not at all uncommon for us to go a couple days without sleep. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you join the unit what area are you operating in?” (29:13) I believe then I was around Quan Loi up by the Black Virgin Mountain, Tay Ninh, Quan Loi. Interviewer: “Okay, so you’re kind of to north and a little bit maybe west of Saigon?” Yeah, 40, 50 miles north of Saigon. Interviewer: “Okay, about how far from the Cambodian border do you think you were?” We were east of the border probably about the same, 40, 50, 60 miles. Interviewer: “Alright, and what kind of activity was going on or what sort of enemy �Jamieson, Jimmy presence was there?” Our job was to– Amongst different specific operations, our job was to kind of keep the supply line on Highway One, Thunder Road, Highway 13, Ho Chi Minh Trail, it has many names, but our job with the– For quite a while we were attached to the special forces guys, or they attached to us. Our battery commander, Captain Pierpoint wanted to skip major and go right to lieutenant colonel, and so he volunteered us to be their main gun support. So wherever those folks went looking for trouble, and they usually found it, that was our job and they would attack supply routes or they had to go get some N.V.A person or whatever, and try to get some prisoners and so a lot of times they would fly into us and then go out in the field for a couple days or they’d be dropped off out in a field and then come into us. So I’ve got pictures of an A team or a B team marching off into the– They would follow our night patrols out, ambush patrols out, and then once they get into the jungle– I mean it looks like holy cow look at all these guys going out there, you know. Well they would break off and go on their mission but if there was people watching, Viet Cong watching, it’s just one group going out and so you’ve got to be careful because you really didn’t know a lot of time who was where, and so if we got hit you just kind of spray and pray out there and hopefully you don’t hit your own folks, you know. Interviewer: “Alright, now you’re talking about patrols going out so would you have infantry that were with you that would be going out?” (31:44) Yeah, when we got our– Once we get rid of the toads, in April of ‘67 they gave us M-109 or 155 propelled howitzers, self propelled, they’re now called the paladin and they’re GPS oriented, but anyways, we had the CAB with us the quarter CAB, and they would go out on ambush patrol when we had the towed howitzers, the commo section or the ammo group, you know. Those guys would go out on patrol, it’s more of a listening post an L.P Interviewer: “Okay, so you’re not– You basically, so the people who are part of the artillery would be going out doing small patrols as opposed to the larger–” Yeah the CAB, sometimes the CAB would go out with an 8 man patrol, 10 man, 12 man �Jamieson, Jimmy depending on what kind of ambush it was, and how much activity there was in the area, as to how many men went, and they would let us volunteer to go with them. Just to get off the guns, so we could get some sleep because ambush patrol they get more sleep than we do. So it was an experience, the CAB guys couldn’t figure out why we wanted to go on ambush, you know because they thought we had it made and you know tell them “How much sleep do you get?” Interviewer: “So we’re looking at your year in Vietnam so you have about a four month period when you got the towed 155 howitzers and so at that point is this before you start supporting the Special Forces, or do the Special Forces connect with you while you still have those?” The Special Forces guys we got connected with them with the self propelled howitzers. Interviewer: “Okay, so initially you’re supporting those regular line infantry units that are up kind of patrolling. Okay, and then do they get, during that first four months there, do they get involved in any kind of large operations or sweeps?” (33:45) Yeah we got– Just before we got our self propelled they were danger close and so they wanted one gun to fire. So they called on us, our base piece, and we fired 120 continuous rounds just as fast as we could fire them. Once we had zeroed in on them– And that was quite a mission, 120 rounds you’re hustling, and so that’s when I got my first Army combat/ACM it’s called Army Commendation Medal. One of the brigadier generals came to our gun club, or gun camp battery and each one of the guys in the gun section got one, so all six of us got a– Interviewer: “So why were they using just one gun?” Because of the area they were in, if you got– Remember the bursting radius, so we were danger close so they wanted the rounds danger close. So if you get six guns firing now you’re– It’s too much. Interviewer: “It’s a bigger area you’re blanketing.” �Jamieson, Jimmy So one gun is what they wanted and so they would give us the corrections either bring it in, left, right, you know out, back, but we just keep firing. Once we were on, keep them coming, so apparently we had a bunch of them in the open or something and so that was probably one of the hardest missions that we had to do. Interviewer: “Okay, now with the towed guns did you have trucks that would pull them or track vehicles?” The deuce and a half Army trucks. Interviewer: “Okay, and then how easy or hard was it to move around with those? Was there a decent road network there?” (35:33) No, gravel roads the– What we could tell was the Corps of Engineers, combat engineers. A lot of the times the mine sweeper would go out ahead of us because of the land mines, now they call them IEDs or something so, but they’d sometimes put a tank out in front of us on a convoy, and if the land mines weren’t large enough to take out a tank that’s fine but they’d take out our deuce and a half’s and stuff like that. So armored personnel characters, but then when we got the self propelled– Now you gotta remember we’re only 27 tons as opposed to 60 ton tank. So with two inches of aluminum armor, it opened us up like a sardine can. So we had two layers of sandbags on the floor and we would alternate, Jerry Putnam and I would alternate being the driver because if one driver all the time, well chances of him getting killed so we alternated. So if you’re not driving then you’re the machine gunner on top, so that 50 became–My deuce and I became real good friends. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you have the towed guns, in that period, you’re maybe not as close to the Cambodian border as you would be later?” Right, yep. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Okay, now did you normally have any infantry that stayed with you or do you provide your own security?” Yep, that was the 2nd Infantry, there was a unit called Light Horse which was a mortar platoon, they were with us but when you get attacked from the rear the mortars aren’t much good up close. So then they sent up a couple of armored personnel carriers, and then they gave up a couple of jeeps with M-60’s on them. So we were just kind of a– Whatever our commander could grab, you know, and we spent most of our time up around the Michelin Rubber Tree Plantations along the Cambodian border keeping that open, trying to– Cause we owned it during the day and the Viet Cong and NVA owned it at night, and so we had a lot of fire missions all along there and at that point with the towed vehicles we didn’t have any need to go into Cambodia so to speak. Interviewer: “Yeah, so you were– But now while you were with the towed vehicles, would your camps get attacked at night?” (38:20) Oh yeah, we– There we did have concertina wire, you would put– You would put claymores out, guys would hang stuff on the wire, you know empty pop cans with stones in them, you know stuff like that. So we put out an LP, we call it a listening post, and then we’d put other guys way out and there’s other stories that when we got self propelleds other things that we had done with the Cav, but yeah with the towed vehicles and then you gotta remember to that when you have to really swing guns around you gotta lift those spades up, and then twist the gun, and then relay it again. So you gotta run these flashlights out and so that the gunner can lay out– Line the sights up on the two flashlights. Well I was running the back one out and there was some concertina wire back there that I had forgotten about and I got tangled up in it, you know, and the flashlight goes flying and that’s how I got all these scars on my face and so they literally had to cut me, the more I thrashed around the more I got tangled up in it. So you’re of course just sweating the adrenaline, it’s hot, it’s at night, and they were cutting me out of it because I’m just full of blood. They thought I got hit by something and so they cut me out of it and the medic he’s wiping me off and he’s “Awe Jesus Jamie,” He says, “You know you just got puncture wounds, get out.” You know, no big deal. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Now, so again– Well in that first phase there while you’re still with artillery, did you face any serious attacks or just very stray sniper fire or mortars?” Oh yeah, we would have mortars, rockets come in. They would come in danger close where you would actually have to open up with an M-60,guys would come up and lay between the guns and it– Usually we were firing over a ravine, so you can see the flashes from the mortars and then you hear the shh-tump! You know and then you could see the rocket taking off and so you’d duck, you know and I’m not one much to duck, I’d go for the gun. Interviewer: “Okay, but would they actually make any ground attacks, would you get people trying to infiltrate the wire and getting through?” (40:50) Yeah, we never had anybody with the towed vehicles come in that close, which is good for me because it acclimated me into Vietnam. Your body has to get acclimated to the humidity and the heat and the monsoon seasons, and so of course you’re spitting tacks because, you know, “What the hell we just get here we gotta fill all these damn–” You know with the towed vehicles, the howitzers, you have to fill a lot of sandbags, and then when you get marching orders to move out you can’t leave them sandbags. So somebody else would come in and pick them up, or they’d say “Just take a machete and slice them up.” and some of the stuff, flashlight batteries was one of them, we change flashlight batteries and just throw them away, well come to find out flashlight batteries the Viet Cong would pick them up and then solder them together and then use it because in the sunlight they would recharge a little bit, enough to ignite a landmine or a booby trap. So we had to take a machete or a knife and cut the batteries up so they couldn’t be used, I mean– And the brass sometimes with the 105 guys they would leave their brass, well they would take that brass and cut it up and use it for shrapnel. Interviewer: “So every time you move you’ve got to police the area and clean everything up.” Yup. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Okay, alright and now you then make the switch– I guess, now while you were again with the towed unit and you’re kind of more in the middle of the country, were there a lot of civilians around?” Yes, sometimes just set up alongside the road, sometimes you’re out adjacent to the rice paddies, you could generally tell if you were gonna be hit at night because the civilians– There wouldn’t be any, they’d be gone, and then usually during the day “Okay it’s gonna be a good night, we’re not gonna get hit tonight.” Because the civilians and their oxes, you know, and their water buffalo– But if you didn’t see anybody, you knew you were gonna get hit. Interviewer: “Okay, now did the civilians make any effort to interact with you, either sell you things or anything else like that?” (43:07) Oh my goodness, yeah pineapples. It got to the point where they would inject pineapples with formaldehyde or battery acid, try to sell you beer, the tiger 33 beer because we didn’t have any ice, you had to drink it warm but what we ended having to do is take the beer bottle and tip it upside down and then watch the glass go to the neck before you bought it, because what they would do is pop the top on it, and then take a clear like– I’m just gonna use like a mayonnaise jar cause it’s clear glass, and pulverize it to a powder and pour that in your Coca-Cola or whatever and then you would think it’s sand. “God I’m so thirsty” You know, and what do you do you’re drinking that glass and it gets into your intestines and then it lacerates your intestines and your bowels and all that kind of stuff. So now you’ve gotta get out of the field, so we learned that real quick and eating pineapples and you know you just didn’t buy it. They’d give you sugar cane, you’d buy short stocks of sugar cane that had glass in it and of course you’re chewing on it you’re thinking “God it’s sand.” Well we learned otherwise. So now we can’t– We couldn’t buy anything from anybody. Interviewer: “And were there– Was there other kinds of stuff available and would prostitutes try to approach you?” �Jamieson, Jimmy Yeah, yeah that was– $5, $5 you know, G.I number one girl and G.I number one– No you’re number 10, $5, you tried to chew them down and once the battery commander found out about them coming in then of course that stopped real quick, but we had a few guys that caught VD, thankfully I– That’s not worth it for me but yeah. We’d have a barber come in, cut your hair, you’d stand there with a rifle while he cuts your buddy’s hair, and I got a picture of Tom Novickus getting his haircut and then it was my turn. So I’d give him the rifle and then he’d stand there and watch him because they use these hand clippers and then they take a razor to trim around and they didn’t want you to slit your neck– Throat. So you’d make sure that he didn’t do that. Interviewer: “And was this a period where they were also selling drugs and that sort of thing?” (45:40) They tried to sell us drugs, you could get a bag of marijuana about that big around, about that tall for a dollar and a half, and I was talking this with another fella yesterday on the radio, on these T.V shows I don’t know where they get that from– This guy I was talking to was a colonel and he was a– You know who he is, but he was a battery commander or company commander and he was a brigade commander and– With the big red one, and we never saw that, we weren’t allowed to smoke it in the first place, but you had to be on your toes. I mean you had to be alert 100% of the time, and you had to depend on your partner, your buddy, and other guys in the gun crew. I mean if they needed help you went over there and helped them, if our gun wasn’t picked for the fire mission then you helped them. I mean that was– So you had to be alert you had to be in touch with all your faculties. Interviewer: “And that’s pretty consistent and even in periods where drug use got a lot worse the units that were actually out in the field, and you’re out in the field you’re not in some big base camp, there you had relatively low amounts of that sort of thing and not when anybody needed to be on. So anyway, but I can ask these questions in part because they’re part of the stereotype and so forth and I don’t know well okay do you see that or not see that and so forth. Okay, so are there other things that happened while you were �Jamieson, Jimmy with the towed unit or other impressions from that period that kind of stand out in your mind?” Yeah, when you’d move into an area we would try to have the combat engineers go in, because you don’t know what you’re moving into because you’ve got to lay these guns and sometimes there’d be a 105 unit with us, sometimes the eight inchers would be with us or the 175s the long toms. So you had to be real careful of what you’re moving into, one time we moved into an area that was a Viet Cong base camp, and so we set the guns all up and we’re in fire mission and our right spade fell through a tunnel and– The spade broke through the tunnel unbeknownst to us, you know, the gun tipped over and went “Oh my God!” So of course now everybody’s grabbing their rifle, they ceased the fire mission, they sent the infantry out the tunnel rats, you know, just maybe 40, 50 yards away and there’s a tunnel right there that was missed. So now the tunnel rats are going in there with their flashlights and their 45s and you’d hear a thunk! You know there was actually BC in the tunnels yet. So that was one of the more hair raising– You know a howitzer tips over, I mean you know, we broke through the tunnel we’re right on top of them after we’d blown it– You know, that’s kind of what you did you just blow the hell out of an area and then move in there, well it got missed. Interviewer: “If they’re underground then they may still be there, okay. Alright, now you make the switch over now and you start– And now you get self propelled guns, now they’re on– You have tracked vehicles with the guns mounted on them and you can kind of drive around more and– Initially did the battery, when you first started supporting the Special Forces, was the battery kind of on its own?” (49:16) Yeah, we were– Here again you gotta remember who our battery commander was, was Captain Pierpoint who through ranks– This is a– I don’t wanna say a pilot program because I don’t know how long it had been going on whether they were using the gun’s other units, but he volunteered us to do this one. So it was probably three months and so we would go on what they called S&D’s, search and destroy, recon missions where you just go through a village and sometimes are 85% VC sympathizers or maybe they’re on our side sympathizing. You could pretty much tell if they were a VC sympathizer, you would see male, guys, boys around. If they were �Jamieson, Jimmy sympathizers for the United States there wouldn’t be any males around because the VC would either kill them or draft them into their– So there’d just be a bunch of women around. So you learn these little things but yeah when you’re going through with the self propelled and then they put the CABs with us because we were getting hit from the rear a lot. Interviewer: “Okay, and you’ve heard of them as the Quarter CABs, 1st Battalion, 4th Cavalry Regiment, but an armored cavalry unit so they–” Armored cavalry unit, yep. Interviewer: “So they have tanks and armored personnel carriers.” (50:50) Yep and– Yeah you don’t mess with those boys, we have them– They shoot first, ask questions later, we like them, they– We didn’t have to pull any night guard, they did everything, they would lead the convoy. Yeah we got in trouble on a convoy, Captain Pierpoint was leading the convoy in a jeep and he was shooting monkeys with his personal– We could carry personal sidearms then, shooting at monkeys with a 38 special snub nose, and so when you hear that you recon by fire. So this one shoots this way and every– You know, so the command and control chopper had a colonel in it up above, over seeing the convoy, and so he stopped the convoy. Wanted to know what the hell was going on and of course everybody opened up, you know the CABs opened up with the 50s and the 60s and we opened up with the 50s and so on, and come to find out he was just shooting at monkeys as we were going. Interviewer: “I take it he only did that once?” Yes, yeah he was– He got his butt reamed right in front of us so they– I got pictures of the chopper landing cause we’re like the 2nd vehicle back and– But we had no clue what was going on, I mean. Interviewer: “Alright, was there a period there where you were operating with Special Forces before you had the CAB attached to you?” �Jamieson, Jimmy Yeah, that’s where we got the CAB, we had a mortar platoon and some infantry guys but when you’re shooting support for the CAB– Or for the Special Forces guys then the Viet Cong surmise that if we take a small contingency and attack the howitzer unit from the back, they’d have to swing tubes around to protect themselves. So that would draw the fire away from the Green Berets and then they figured that they could get the Green Berets. Well sometimes we were in Cambodia and sometimes we weren’t, but try to find another artillery unit that would relieve us takes time, and then they gotta get acclimated to shooting over there too. So in the meantime we’ve got a fire fight going behind us because we can’t swing tubes around so you take your M60 or whatever and your thump-gun and you’d go help the infantry out and then now that’s reducing the amount of folks we have to run our guns. So somebody- Apparently Captain Pierpoint got the idea that maybe we should have a CAB unit, something that’s mobile. Interviewer: “Alright, now you got involved at a time that isn’t actually using machine guns and so forth to defend your position with him. You’ve got some pictures that we were looking at before the session started, can you talk about that incident and what happened there?” (54:00) Well we had been hit several times as you saw in the pictures. So the rockets and mortars started coming in and the guys were going towards the mortar holes, well I was pretty cocky back then, well I still am but– I wasn’t gonna die in a mortar hole. So I ran towards the gun and I got into the gun and I was loading it up and then in ours you can– The turret on the 50 goes all the way around and then the hatch cover flops up and you can put the gun on either side of the hatch cover, and since I’m right handed I had the hatch on this side to the left of the gun in case they’re shooting at me. So I went in there, and each gun carries 1500 rounds of 50 cal, so I was splicing you pick a cartridge out and put the next link in there and put it in. So I was hooking up a couple of machine gun belts, and then I took off the top. Well then here comes Sergeant Morgan our staff sergeant and he’s just “What blankity blank are you doing?” I said “I’m not dying in a fox hole, so he says “I’ll feed you.” So he’s linking belts together while I’m firing, and I’m strafing that jungle that you saw there, and the bodies are coming, cause there’s no concertina wire. We pulled our listening posts in, so they’re coming in and we’re spraying. Well once I started firing �Jamieson, Jimmy then other guns, guys went to the 50s and they were close where you couldn’t drop tubes down and shoot. So now we’ve got M-60’s going, we've got thump-guns going, gun personnel are now infantry, and so I fired all 1500 rounds of my 50, burnt the barrel up, changed barrels out, and got sick as a goat. You saw the thing that I– This was part of my PTSD, the nightmares and flashbacks and through counseling and other things that I’ve done I can talk about it. Humans, animals period, are not designed to kill their own if you look at two rams battering their heads and then two deer– Two bucks fighting, they don’t kill each other they just wear each other out and the strongest survives. Humans are the same way, we are not designed to kill our species. So when you do that, in my case, I got sick I mean over the side of the gun. Interviewer: “And did that happen at the time of the fight or was it the next day?” (57:07) Right the minute I saw that body, and the adrenaline is going and you’re shooting and– Here I am I’m still shooting, see that’s part of it, I puked all over the side of the gun and what not and then daylight came and you see the carnage out there– Now this is field artillery, according to the psychiatrist I talked to that I’m not supposed to see that because I’m artillery, you know. You put guys' intestines in because they got hit by shrapnel so they’re laying there and you put it in, but anyways so Captain Pierpoint came over and asked me if I had hit anything and I said “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I did.” And so you can see the puke on the side of the gun and he says “Well, when you calm down” He said “Clean the gun up, pick up your brass.” You know but he was a– Anyways, that’s where I got my first Bronze Star. Interviewer: “Right, and that was when you– One of the pictures you have shows this big swatch of cloth that someone’s holding up and there’s a bunch of rows, parallel lines, of bullet holes and that was from one of these guys you hit.” Yes. Interviewer: “Can you explain what that was or what the cloth was?” �Jamieson, Jimmy The Viet Cong and NVA, NVA have you know, Viet Cong don’t but they wear like a cumberbund, a sash, and they normally carried two, three days of rice and then this sauce called nuoc cham or something like that and it stinks it’s just fish, ground up fish and it stinks, and then they carry water and then on the back of the cumberbund they have have like a poncho liner, about the same size. That’s something that they wrap up in when they sleep and it’s folded all up and then folded in half and it’s– The cumberbund sash holds it on their back and it comes around. (59:09) Well I had raked this guy with the 50 and literally cut him in half and so when you went out to do the body count, you’re again– Say what you want about body counts, either they’re inflated or deflated, they took a few of us from each gun section and you’d go out and do a body count, and so the guys took this off and then we picked up all the grenades and machine guns and everything that was there and we put it on a couple of big mortar holes and took photographs of it to show what we had captured, and it’s in the 1st Infantry Division yearbook, it’s in there and so, not that I’m making this stuff up but they– I had a couple of the fellas open it up so I could take a picture of it and so that’s kind of the proof that I have and other pictures were confiscated because they could be used for, you know, body counts and you can’t show them so. Interviewer: “Yeah, but you basically have the cloth where you have these lines of bullets because the cloth was folded over on itself and the bullet just went through the fabric multiple times and made that bizarre kind of pattern. Yeah, so that is something that’s not what we associate with artillery units but one thing about Vietnam is different people do different things at different times, and in your case you had a battery that was pretty much on its own out in the field and it came under enemy attack, but the other thing then is one thing the Army did more of then it gets credit for is it adjusted. So now you’ve got some armored cavalry supporting you and they’re providing security and they let you kind of go where you need to go.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, now when you had the cavalry unit with you did the enemy make further attempts to attack you?” �Jamieson, Jimmy Oh sure, they– At one point the Cav guys, now I don’t know where they got this stuff from, but they brought in a twin 40. Interviewer: “Which is?” Off the anti-aircraft, off a ship. Interviewer: “So a 40 millimeter had anti-aircraft cannons that could be repeating fire.” Right and this– It was on a– It was a twin 40 off a ship and they mounted it in an M-48 tankInterviewer: “Chassis.” (1:01:35) Chassis, okay they brought in a quad 50. Interviewer: “So a 50 caliber machine gun, four of them.” Four of the 50 cals and so– Because we were getting hit so much, apparently we had pissed off somebody and so when we get hit they’d open up with those twin 40s and the quad 50s, and it was interesting. At night you never knew what was gonna happen, very seldom did we ge hit during the day so– And the armament that came in to protect us was– And then there’s a thing called a mad minute and we got to go online with the twin 40 and shoot at trees out there and that was just– It was a relaxing time, just before dark you’d do a mad minute. Interviewer: “And that’s when everybody fires at the same time?” Everybody fires whatever you wanna bring up and shoot and then we had a competition between the twin 40 and our 155 howitzer shooting at a tree, a big tree out there in the jungle and you could see when the twin 40s would hit it [shooting noise] but when we hit it, now you got about �Jamieson, Jimmy a seven inch 100 round going through this tree, the tree just literally exploded, I mean– So that kind of shut the guys up on the– “You guys can’t hit that” Oh yeah? Interviewer: “Alright, now what sort of impression did you have of the Special Forces people?” Respect the hell out of them, we didn’t get a chance to talk to them, they were in and gone or they’re in us and gone but they just looked like people you didn’t want to mess with. I mean they were– They were proudly off duty, they were kindest people you ever wanna meet, but when they came into us either from the jungle or– And then going to the jungle, they didn’t associate with us, we had no idea what their mission was, they weren’t there just but a few minutes and if they were there for say an hour or more they were up by the CP, the command post. So as an individual on the gun sections we had no idea what they were doing, we had, you know we had no idea what their mission was. Interviewer: “Now you mentioned at times operating around the rubber plantation, were there rules about what you could do or not do because those were still functioning plantations sometimes?” (1:04:20) They had little white signs, stakes in the ground like that, that said “U.S government do not destroy rubber trees.” Yeah right, you know, okay fine you know. So we’d– The CAB wanted to get into a particular place where they thought they might get ambushed, so they would try to get a tank in there. Well you can’t, you know, get in and then maneuver around and turn the tubes and so on, well a couple of rubber trees were in the way, they had to back up, drop the tube that 90 millimeter, and blow the tree right out of the ground, you know. “There, okay now we’re good.” I mean they didn’t give a real– I mean. Interviewer: “Would the enemy use the plantations as places to recover or have bases in them?” �Jamieson, Jimmy Yeah, you would normally– Rubber trees are, because the ground is kind of cleared and it’s single canopy, and so in our case we can’t be near the rubber trees because you can’t– We gotta be able to back off so we can shoot over them, okay. So the CAB guys would get in by the rubber trees, and then we’re more out in the open. So we could protect anything in the open here but not coming out of the rubber trees so that’s where they were and they would move their tanks and APs around every night, you know, if we’re there for a week on a mission then they would tank here tonight, well they’d be over there or be further in or be back out and APCs would be over here maybe and they were never in the same place twice. Interviewer: “Okay, do they not want the enemy to mark their positions was that the–” Right, right we– One night we got rocketed and a tank probably 40 yards behind us, seven guys got killed, they were sleeping on and around the tank and they took a rocket right in the turret. Never knew it was coming and the turret came off and that was– That’s another time, you know you see flashbacks, but you know just unexpected all of a sudden here’s this big explosion. Interviewer: “Okay, now you’re in Vietnam basically, what end of ‘66 to end of ‘67? Is that–” (1:06:40) Right, just before the Tet I left. Interviewer: “Okay, now was there any kind of rhythm or pattern to the amount of activity? Were there phases? Was there some chunk of that time where it was busier or it was all pretty much the same?” Yeah, let’s see Tet was January 31st, probably around October when the build up started. They were probing the weak spots and pretty much every other night we’d get hit, and they were– Because the supply work– They were coming in and so for the build up for the Tet in January, January 31st was Tet, and I was supposed to leave the field December 9th and we got hit December 8th just after midnight, and we lost three howitzers. I mean they hit us hard, and that’s when I got my second Bronze Star, so they extended me three days. Only choppers in and out �Jamieson, Jimmy was for ammo and water and we were eating MREs–Well they’re not MREs it was K rations then, so– And Captain Palmer was our battery commander then, and he said “If you want out” You know, if you want out “The only way you’re gonna get outta here Jamie is if you’re the gunner on-” Our ammo tracks then was an Amtrak was a track vehicle, so I’ve got pictures of me sitting up there. I’ve got to be a machine gunner on a convoy, I can't take a helicopter outta there so I’m a machine gunner on a 50 on an ammo– Going to get ammo, and that’s how I got out. I was three days late getting home. Interviewer: “Okay, and then what did you get the Bronze Star for?” (1:08:30) Basically killing people, I mean that’s what they give medals for. Interviewer: “But was it working the artillery piece or was it for working the machine guns?” It was the machine guns on the 50 and the ACM was working the artillery with the towed vehicles. So it wasn’t for valor or anything I didn’t do anything that heroic, I was just doing my job and I kind of initiated– Okay, I shoot first, ask questions later I learned that from the CAB, you know it’s better to– Instead of asking permission to ask for forgiveness. So, what are you gonna do, send me to Vietnam? I’m already here. What are you gonna give me an article 15? At least I’m alive, so that was my whole deal. Interviewer: “So you basically started shooting on your own and it turned out to be a good idea?” Yep, and the company commander, battery commander, would say– You know because I’d start where I could see and then work my way up into the tree for snipers, and then every gun has a field of fire– And I equate this when I teach my hunter safety classes that if you’re hunting with people you have a field of fire, you don’t overlap– You know, so when you lay the gun and you get in a position every– Myself and a couple other guys we’d all talk about “Okay, I’m gonna cover from here to here, and you’re gonna cover overlapping from there to here.” And so if we �Jamieson, Jimmy get hit you’re not gonna be, you know, and then you’re supposed to know where the listening posts are and stuff like that but the battery commander says “Well what happens if we had listening posts out?” I said “Well I had hoped that by the time this ruckus started that you had called them in already.” And with the CAB– What CAB would do is they would send out their LPs and then put claymores out. You did that every night, put claymores out, well then what they would do is after dark they’d call them back in, and what happened is the Viet Cong would go out there and turn the claymores around, so that if you heard a ruckus and you fired the claymore you’d blow yourself up. Well the CAB they’d bring the listening posts back in and then they had infrared, so they could see them out there. So they’d take the tube and they’d get three or four of them lined up and they’d cut loose with that 90 and blow them all, you know that you’re engaged, rules of engagement you know you gotta be fired upon–No, no. Interviewer: “Not out there.” (1:11:30) No, so they just– Interviewer: “Now you mentioned going into Cambodia, do you know that your own unit actually went into Cambodia and did you know that at the time?” We did not know it, Captain Pierpoint might have, but how we found out is that Fire Direction Control, you know they know where they are in order to give you the inflection and quadrant but as being on the gun we did not know that until afterwards. They would tell us, I mean, “Well we’re in Cambodia now.” You know five clicks, ten clicks, half mile, two miles, five miles that’s about as far as we ever got, but see that’s where the Green Beret guys were and Johnson is telling everybody that there's nobody in Cambodia. Yeah, okay. Interviewer: “Now you’ve mentioned here a couple of different battery commanders, a Captain Pierpoint and a Captain Palmer, was there a changeover then while you were with the unit?” �Jamieson, Jimmy Yeah there was in ‘67 they split the batteries up so that when people rotated in and out of the battery that you wouldn’t have a whole battery of young people. So they split us up but apparently when I came there they served a year tour like I did but their tour ended. So then we got a new battery commander, we got a new executive officer, new first sergeant, all that kind of stuff. So Captain Palmer was West Point and– Or Captain Pierpoint was West Point, Captain Palmer was OCS and– Difference, big difference in commanders, battery commanders, Captain Pierpoint is one of those guys where you would like to salute out in the field, he wanted to do the field inspections, he– You know, and field inspection on what I have a mess kit, a couple of canteens, a bayonet, you know backpack– And I don’t have any of that stuff, we didn’t have any trenching tools, we didn’t– We don’t have enough to have an inspection, you know, but what are you gonna lay it out on a sleeping bag? I mean– Interviewer: “Would he actually do this or was it–” (1:13:50) Oh yeah, you know “Clean it” Clean it with what? You know we haven’t had a shower in a week I mean what do– You know that dust and dirt gets in your pistol belt and your canteen cover, you know cleaning rifles, we’re always cleaning our rifles– Oh geez, so– No way to stop that either. Interviewer: “Well it’s not that loud so–” Okay, so anyways they– We’d do an inspection and what I did is the VFW would send me cans– You can edit this out. Interviewer: “Oh yeah.” They would send me cans of Dri-Slide– There, so it’s like a little can of three in one oil and what it is, is liquid graphite. Okay and so it’s got a long needle on it, well they would send me that and I would clean my M-14 with it and when you stood inspection the guy– All we had to clean stuff with is fuel oil. So put your rifle in the fuel oil and you clean it and of course then the flash suppressor would rust and that sort of thing. Well mine didn’t have any rust on it, so I’m standing in inspection and Lieutenant Eckert who was the new– He was ROTC, reserve officer– �Jamieson, Jimmy So he’d look at my rifle and said “Jamie that’s dirty.” and I said “No sir, that's Dri-Slide.” “That’s what?” and I said “Liquid graphite.” And he says “Well you see me after formation.” Now we’re out in the field, so okay he had come down to the gun battery and he says “I wanna see this Dri-Slide.” So I took out this little can, black and white can that says Dri-Slide on it, so he says “Well I’m gonna have to confiscate that.” So okay he takes it, goes up to the CP, you know, and he’s cleaning his side arm with it and stuff, you put it on, wipe it off and it’s just slippery– You can’t wipe it, it just spreads. So here comes Captain Palmer, he says “Lieutenant Eckert said you had this Dri-Slide.” “Well, no sir, he has it.” “Oh, okay.” So unbeknownst to them the VFW sent me a box and there’s six cans in a box, so I’m– You know, our gun section is cleaning it, so now we’re inspection again and all our weapons are all clean, and so Captain Palmer wanted to know if I had more of that, I said “Yeah.” He says “Well that’s not authorized, I’m gonna have to confiscate that.” So now he has a can, Lieutenant Eckert has a can, so I’m passing stuff out so I get another box at mail call. So they wanna know if that’s Dri-Slide, rattle rattle, open it up, yup. He made me give each gun section a can of Dri-Slide, so there went my six cans. So that’s the kind of stuff– You know depending on who– Interviewer: “Okay, well you had said initially Pierpoint was the one that was a stickler for this stuff, but now you’re mentioning Palmer.” (1:17:20) Captain Pierpoint would– If you had a little bit of rust on your bayonet, I mean he would– And we had our own personal knives too that we carried cause I mean it’s pretty hard to throw a bayonet but we could carry our personal knives, boot knives and stuff, some guys had throwing knives. We would practice throwing, here to the curtain we could throw knives, we put a Lucky Strike package up on a target, sliding board, and I got real– Most of us got real good at throwing knives and so– But Captain Pierpoint was, you know, “Polish your boots.” With what? You know, “Wipe the dust off them.” Jungle boots, you’d wear the same boots for so long that your feet would bleed and crack and you very seldom took your boots off, but he was a stickler he wanted, not so much clean uniforms, but boy you better be shaven and you know, if nothing else wash your face. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Now was he good at his job? I mean in terms of actually commanding a battery.” Yeah, he was good at that cause he volunteered us for everything, well then we would get guests and other commanders, you know, and so that’s how he wanted to skip major and go right to lieutenant colonel and so we had to be sharp. I mean, you know blouse your pants, you know don’t roll them up and fold them up, you know. Yeah it was– Interviewer: “So was it a relief to get Captain Palmer instead?” Yes, he ran a tight ship but somehow we got a volleyball net and a volleyball and so we could play volleyball, no baseball, no softball, none of that stuff because we just didn’t have the room for it, but we could put a volleyball net up and play volleyball and we’d have little competitions between the gun sections or if there happened to be another unit like with the CAB guys. Lieutenant Eckert must’ve got that cause he spiked the ball and drove a guy’s two fingers over their knuckles and that guy went to Japan, never heard from him again. So yeah there was a big difference in commanders and an old Apache saying “There’s many roads to the same–” I guess that’s Apache, I don’t know I heard that some place but you can– So he got– Captain Palmer got just as much work and stuff out of us but not the animosity. (1:20:00) I mean if we could’ve saluted Pierpoint in the field we threatened to do it many times because you don’t wear rank, nobody wore rank, and Captain Pierpoint didn’t even like to have a radio man follow him around because that means you’re a person of interest, you know, of command if you have a radio man. So a lot of times he’d leave the radio man back at the CP and he’d just walk around like– But he strutted, he was tall and skinny and you just wanted to throw him a salute, you know, when you’re out in the boonies, you know. Sergeant Morgan would say “Don’t you even think about it.” You know. Interviewer: “Alright, so he fits at least some part of the West Point stereotype at that point.” Yep, yep. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Fortunately they didn’t all.” No because Colonel Gillem, that we both know, he’s a West Point-er and he’s a great guy, I mean he is super. Interviewer: “He’s somebody who learned from the people around him and understood when he came in he didn’t know anything.” Yeah, yeah he was one “Okay I’m the platoon leader but I don’t squat so you continue running the ‘ploon. Interviewer: “Platoon, yep.” And so Captain Palmer was like that, he would let the first sergeant run or the XO if the XO was here before he was, you know. So he would just wander around and Captain Palmer would take his– Well you saw him, he had his t-shirt on and the first sergeant had his blouse on or his jungle shirt on, but you’d never know Captain Palmer was a captain. I mean he was– You know didn’t wear a cover, didn’t wear a hat most of the time. Interviewer: “Okay, say a little bit more about just living conditions in the field, on a day to day basis you’re with the battery, you know not a big thing happening. What’s going on, what are you doing?” (1:21:56) We had– They gave us tents for a while, these little umbrella type tents, you needed sandbags around them. Here again, military not thinking, howitzers have concussion, concussion blows things apart. So the tents didn’t last very long either the mortars would blow them apart, rockets, or a concussion of our guns was always ripping them wouldn’t blow them down but just ripping them, and so they took those away from us and then we ended up living in bomb craters or shell craters. You’d kind of flatten them out and then– We carried PSP or PT–PSP it’s what they build runways out of. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Yeah, steel matting, yeah.” And so we carried that on trucks and what we would do is drive steel fence posts in the ground and laid that stuff on the roof and then put a tarp over it, and then two layers of sandbags and then– We had a cot, and then you put your cot in there, and then that’s where you slept. So now you gotta contend with snakes and scorpions and all that stuff cause it’s a shady spot and you didn’t like taking your boots off cause scorpions would go in your boots and sometimes people would forget to empty them out, but that’s how we lived whenever we were out in the field. One fella didn’t want to do that, he just put two sandbags around him and he got stung by a scorpion on his testicle and so his swelled– I kid you not they were black and this big, and they put him in a chopper and flew him off to Japan, never saw him again don’t know if he lived or died, but yeah if you’re not looking out for Viet Cong you’re looking out for bamboo vipers or we call them a two step, scorpions, snakes, cobras– King cobras, cobras you’d try to capture and then the medic would milk them and then use that for snake venom the HID sent it to the hospital on a helicopter and they’d make snake venom out of it– Or, you know. Interviewer: “Anti-venom, yeah the serum. Let’s see, now were there rats out in the field?” (1:24:24) Not with us, we weren’t in one place long enough for the rats to find out we were there. Here again we talked to folks that are in a base camp where there’s rats in the guard stations and conex buildings and all that kind of– No, we never encountered rats, that was– Interviewer: “Alright, and what were you eating?” If we were long enough in a place they would bring a mess hall out, so we did eat pretty good. A lot of times they would fly us out meals in those thermal– Interviewer: “Yeah marmite cans.” �Jamieson, Jimmy Marmite cans and so– Or if it’s monsoon season they had chinooks or huey’s would fly out food for us and if we’re only gonna be in a place a day, day and a half, then we would eat the K rations and stuff like that so– Or if you’re on convoy you ate K rations. Interviewer: “Alright, and then where did you get your fresh water from?” They would fly it out, you’d get a lister bag or a water trailer, they’d bring it out in a water trailer, a 200 gallon trailer, you know, it’s a trailer and it looked like a sprinkler sometimes. So you’re finding sticks to poke in the holes so the water doesn’t, you know, sniper shooting up at them as you’re bringing it in– Awe geez, sorry about that guys– [shuffling] (1:25:55) So, anyways. Interviewer: “Okay so we were talking about the– People would shoot up the water containers and so forth, and you hear stories about how bad the water tasted, would you put things in it to make it taste better?” (1:27:05) Yeah, iodine tablets, this is another thing where if you’re talking to a psychiatrist and you’re trying to get your PTSD and all this other kind of stuff is that sometimes you’d come to a stream and you’d think it’s fresh water so you’d put your canteen in there and put in iodine tablets and drink it, well unbeknownst to the medics and the doctors or a lot of people that Agent Orange had been sprayed, and it’s in the water so you’re drinking Agent Orange now okay. It’s just not only in the trees but it’s also in the water, or if you come to a pond and clear the– And get some fresh water. I had prostate cancer at the age of 56, which is real young for prostate cancer, and they took 12 biopsies they were positive and the government admitted that it was from Agent Orange and we were in Agent Orange, I mean they sprayed that whole area where we were in several times so– But they never thought about the water apparently, you can drink that stuff let alone just being on the foliage so– Interviewer: “But then when you got the stuff out of the water tanks or the bags and things like that, did that have a bad taste to it?” �Jamieson, Jimmy Yeah it tasted– Sometimes they put it in a lister bag and brought it out and it tasted like canvas, you know like drinking out of a garden hose, don’t know where they got their potable water from, who knows what chemicals they put in it. Some of the problems we had too is that the indigenous people would sell ice, we could buy ice okay, so we had no ice so we would get cokes or pops and you’d lay it on that ice and spin it. Well what you’d do is you'd take your canteen cup and knock off a chunk of ice and put it in your canteen cup and pour coke over it so you drink it. Well, here again unbeknownst to us they had put glass in that ice, so now you’re drinking it and you’re chewing on that ice, crunch, crunch, crunch “Oh God.” you know you don’t understand it, well now you’re eating glass again, so it got to the point where you could buy ice but don’t– Just put your can on in and spin it to get it cool– You never get it cold but you get it cool, and drink your pop. So that’s– I mean they was always trying to poison you somehow, you know, and there’s razor blades and booby traps and– Interviewer: “Okay, now did you spend any time out of the field?” (1:29:48) Geez, I say in the field for 11 and half months because I went to Hawaii for R&R for a week, and then you get to– If we’re in sympathetic towards us town where you could get a half a day pass, where you’d jump on a chopper and they take you in, drop you off and then at dusk you had to get back on the chopper because at night that town belonged to the Viet Cong. So you could do that once and a while and that’s the only time that I ever– If you went to a base camp like on an ammo run, they would put ammo guys on your gun and then you would go in on an ammo truck and you had a list for the guys, you wanted stamps, writing paper, if you could get batteries for your radio, or shaving, whatever you had a big list and so here again I got in trouble there for steel pot, black vest, personal sidearm, my pants were rolled up, black vest on. I mean just– In a base camp you don’t carry weapons and, you know, that kind of stuff. So I was smoking a cigar, rifle slung on my right shoulder, and me and another fella, Larry Martin walking into the PX, and a warrant officer and a lieutenant came walking by us and they probably went eight, ten feet and they stopped and yelled at us “Hey trooper, don’t you know how to salute!” So we turned around and I saluted with my left hand with a cigar in my mouth, that’s a no-no, you know, and of course there’s no rank, no names, no nothing on your– and “What are you doing with those arms?” And blah blah I mean they just gave us a rough day and we weren’t even standing at �Jamieson, Jimmy attention and so they wanted to know what unit we were with, and he says “Oh, you those guys up north?” “Yes sir.” “Ah, get out of here.” Apparently our reputation preceded us, they know– So that was, I thought “Oh boy, here we go a bunch of snobs, rear echelon people you know. They might have been pilots for all I know. Interviewer: “Pilots probably wouldn’t have done that.” No, one was a warrant officer and one was a lieutenant so– But because I got a cigar in my mouth– So, but you know I was probably older than they were, I turned 21 in Vietnam so they called me Pappy. Interviewer: “Right, now one of the other stereotypes about Vietnam is issues with race and so forth, I mean what was the ethnic mix of your battery? Did you have black guys there or Spanish?” (1:32:46) Yeah, Guadalupe Tobias was– He was in our gun battery and him and I got along poking fun at each other all the time. Washington, George, Alexander, he had about five president’s names after his last name was Washington and we made fun of him. I got a picture of him where if he wasn’t smiling you wouldn’t see him, it was a black and white picture and– George Washington. We had a good time, we had a lot of– We had quite a few blacks, Hispanics in our outfit and we had a couple blacks in our gun battery and we had a ball, and here again I– Here again it’s trust, you know, and we associate with them they didn’t do their black thing, white thing I mean it was– You know like on full metal– Not so much on full metal jacket. Interviewer: “But it is you know again it’s the stereotype or the assumption, and there were times and places where there were racial issues but usually in base camps or rear areas and more often later in the war than when you were there.” Yeah, maybe in the 70’s when they were dialing down but, no we didn’t see any of that even with the Cav guys. No one even really hardly smoked cause you didn’t have cigarettes a lot, when you did get a care package I didn’t smoke I like to chew on a cigar– Well I had a pipe but �Jamieson, Jimmy that got blown up, my uncle Bill sent me a pipe and that got blown up and my writing material– Everything, my radio, everything got blown up. Yeah that was the other thing if you had a record player or a transistor radio, if it lasted a month cause of the concussions of the gun would blow the speakers all apart, you know. So it was just pretty quiet out there. Interviewer: “Alright, now did you get hurt yourself?” I broke my shoulder, I fell in a ditch and broke my right shoulder unbeknownst to me, I didn’t know it was broke they just tied it to my– And put me on light duty until I can move it but I found out it was broke when they did– I had elbow surgery on it a few years back. I had bone on bone on this side and it was because this didn’t heal but they showed me right on the x-ray where I broke it and they had to grind all the scar tissue off. He said “Oh you must have broke this years ago.” And I said “Well it had to been in Vietnam.” So– But that’s minor stuff, you know. Interviewer: “Yeah, and then did your ears get affected?” (1:35:35) I got caught under the muzzle of the 155, the self propelled, in a fire mission and it blew my eardrums out and here again it knocked– It ripped the shirts– Myself and another guy, actually it was Larry Martin, we were getting ammo and running it– Because we were shooting over the back of the gun, so turn tubes around and shooting over the back of the gun, and so the ammo was there. So we’d run around, grab it and then throw it in the door and then run around to the front of the gun and “Ammo! Ammo!” So we’d run around and we got caught, boom! Interviewer: “So somebody pulled the lanyard at the wrong time.” Well it was the right time for them and wrong time for us. We got caught and the tube was almost perfectly flat, so instead of being up like this the tube was like this, of course we’re maybe four feet from the end of the gun and that muzzle blast goes this way but it also goes like that, and it just ripped– It’s like hitting yourself in the back as hard as you can and it just ripped our shirt and it just basically knocked us out and they drug us out of there and medic came over �Jamieson, Jimmy and wiped the blood off. So, you know it’s like you I could sit there and watch and I could see your mouth move but I couldn’t hear anything until it grew back so it’s… Interviewer: “Okay, now as you got towards the end of your tours you got short, did your– Either your duties change or your own attitude change at all?” You just get more conscious, you try to do things that won’t get you hurt. In our unit they did not send you out of the field, some units if you had 30 days left they sent you back, our unit you went full bore until– Like I told you I was supposed to leave December 9th, December the 8th we got hit and it didn’t matter, you know, you ain’t going anywhere until it’s your time. So nothing changed that was just day after day after day, but consciously yourself you start thinking “Okay now.” You’re just more and more– Instead of doing it automatically you have more of a tendency to stop and think about it. “Okay now, what happens if–” You know, “Okay it’s getting dark– Okay well, oh boy where’s the most likely spot–” Usually you just wait for it to happen, so now you think “Well, okay last night we got hit from over there and they won’t do that again.” You know, you’re just– You’re overly conscious and sometimes that’s not good either because then you’re not thinking about– Interviewer: “Or you’re thinking too much.” (1:38:30) Yeah. Interviewer: “Yeah, okay now how much contact did you have with people back home while you were in Vietnam?” Just letters, I went to Hawaii for R&R and I called my– I had gotten, like a lot of guys, I got a dear John while I was there and so I went with this other girl in highschool I ended up– We ended up getting married– My high school sweetheart, she just called me, and so I called her from Hawaii instead of my ex-girlfriend and we chit chatted but then we started writing letters and– But other than that I had no contact, I couldn’t call home like the folks can now. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Yeah, well did your parents send you things?” Yes, mom course the baked goods but Kool-aid and Jiffy Pop popcorn were the big things. I would get Jiffy Pop popcorn and you take some C-4 and throw it in a cup, canteen cup or if you could get a can, and pop the Jiffy Pop. Okay well the XO came down and he says, you know “What are you doing?” And I said “Popping popcorn.” “Well don’t you know we’re on light restriction, noise restriction, you know they can smell that popcorn.” I says “Yeah.” He says “Well, you know you’re giving our position away.” and I said “LT” I says “Six howitzers, four tanks, four or five armored personnel carriers, all this vehicles here. You don’t think they know we’re here?” I mean, you know, all these– This popcorn is gonna make squat difference. “Ah, give me some of that.” So he takes a handful and walks away, but mom was sending me six Jiffy Pop popcorns in a box, so I’d give one to the CO and so I could get away with being really mouthy because you know– And Kool-aid the guys liked Kool-aid we would put it in our water. Interviewer: “Yeah that kind of thing. Alright, are there other particular memories or impressions from the Vietnam tour that you haven’t brought into the story here yet that you want to add?” (1:41:05) Other than the fact that the camaraderie was great, certain officers were like enlisted folks, I had a lot of good times there, a lot of fun, sometime you’re scared crap outta ya but– To say I was glad I did it, yeah I would do it again if you know. I feel sorry for the folks that are in Afghanistan, who volunteered to go there and don’t have the respect of the people that are there, like we didn’t have respect in Vietnam, but rules of engagement are different there, we had rules of engagement that we didn’t necessarily abide by all the time but we wouldn’t get in trouble like they would now. It’s more of a political scuffle and I call it a scuffle because it’s not a war, we didn’t declare war since World War II. I talked to the Vietnam folks and some of the state representatives that I have talked through LZ Michigan and stuff, that I have talked with ask them why we do not declare war and I asked this because does it change the benefits, if you declare war on somebody would it change the benefits that the service men get even though they call it a conflict, and it’s a war basically but it’s not a war war. So what’s the change in benefits �Jamieson, Jimmy maybe and is that political and stuff like that, so it’s– And then of course they way you’re treated when you get back, they put me in the riots in ‘68 when I got back– Interviewer: “Yeah, well we’ll get to that, I’ve been trying to sort of close out– There’s a part where you’re actually in Vietnam and you mentioned to get out of the field you basically had to go out in a convoy rather than a helicopter. Now once you’re out of the field how do they get you back home?” I was in a base camp at Dĩ An and then– Now it’s spit and polish time, so you’ve gotta be shaved, hair cut, clean pressed clothes, and you have to make the rounds– If you’re gonna ETS out you’ve gotta go to the chaplain, and I’ve never been to the chaplain but you’ve got to go there, and you have a card, he’s gotta sign it, you gotta go to the PX in case you owe them some money, they gotta sign it. You go to the NCO club and they have to sign off, you gotta go to the doctor and they give you a physical and they signed it, and there is where I run into another problem is that– Of course my eardrums were blown out, that’s not on my record, they flew me in from the field into Lai Khê, pulled a tooth, never put it on my record. So that’s not on my record, so now when I get home I got to go to the dentist, I gotta get a bridge made, well “It’s not on your record.” Well I’m sorry but they put me on a helicopter and Norm Chapin who was a family friend of ours was the adjutant at Lai Khê and so I went in and talked with him cause he’s a friend of my dads and blah blah blah blah blah, but they pulled my tooth and I got back to the helicopter and the blades were still going around it so that’s how long it took. (1:44:53) Give me a shot, pulled the tooth and I really didn’t get numb yet until I got to the field so I mean, you know record keeping was terrible. Interviewer: “Alright, but anyway so you’re making the– You’re at Dĩ An the division’s main base and you’re processed? Okay, and then what happens after that?” You have to turn in your equipment, this is another farce, they have a checklist just about canteen, helmet, helmet liner, weapons, poncho liner, and sleeping bag, and cot, and all this stuff– I– Cot, hell that’s out in the field yeah, my sleeping bag that’s out in the field yeah, “Well where is it?” Well it’s out in the field! Call the battery commander, have him ship it, call the first �Jamieson, Jimmy sergeant you know. “Well you, you gotta turn this stuff in.” Bayonet, bayonet sheet, I mean are you kidding me, you know then I had an M-16 supposedly “Well, where’s your rifle?” “Combat loss.” “What do you mean combat loss?” “Well it got blown up.” Or “It got thrown in the swamp.” “Well what’d you use?” “Well I had a 12 gauge shotgun.” “Where’s that?” “Well it’s in the field I left it with the gun section, you know it stays with the gun section.” The battery commander didn’t do any paperwork, you know it’s combat loss it’s wrote off as a combat loss, well it doesn’t follow you, you know so. Interviewer: “Well did they eventually let you go?” Oh yeah, they “Well alright.” So they just sing it, you know it’s not like I’m the first one that said that I mean– But they’ve got it– You know it’s some sergeant and he’s gotta give you a wrap, the BS, you know make it look like he’s doing his job and, you know everybody’s got their job but don’t take it out on us if you’ve never been to the field. I mean just like cleaning kits, one in five people get a cleaning kit with an M-16, well rear echelon people all have cleaning kits but the people in the field that need them don’t. That’s how so many guys get killed trying to fix the jams in their rifles cause they don’t have a cleaning kit. So– But anyways they basically got it out, or got me out, I flew out on another C-141 troop transport, five of them flew in they unloaded the whole company of 101 Airborne, the commander that was a colonel a full bird, a light colonel, and a major, and I don’t know what– Those were the officers that flew the plane, they were turning around and going back. (1:47:35) So they put 14 of us on this C-141 and we’re flying home okay. Big airplane, completely empty, and we sat on web seats that folded down okay, that’s where you slept too. So we’re going to San Bernardino is where we’re flying into. So we’re flying in– Well we stopped at Okinawa to refuel, landed, refueled, go to take off, landing gear doesn’t lock up, lights don’t come on. So we do a fly by, “Yeah your gears up.” So they put them down, bring them back up, doesn’t look like they’re– “Well you better land, we'll check it out.” Okay, so they just took 8000 pounds of fuel or whatever, 8000 gallons, we’re spraying it over the ocean, foaming the runway in case the landing gear doesn’t lock. Oh my god, a year and three days in Vietnam and I’m gonna die in Okinawa, so we’re sitting in our seats and we’re strapped in and– You know, and we land, foam all over everything, you know. “Well it’s gonna be a while for us to check it out.” So they put us up in a hotel in Okinawa, my �Jamieson, Jimmy first bath in a year and of course they’re little baths but oh my God that felt so good, hot water and you know and the red clay just comes out of you– It looks like you’re bleeding the water has a tinge of red to it. Get back on the plane, it was a couple on sensor, one on the landing gear and then the light, a couple faulty switches and stuff. So we take off, we land at San Bernardino, what the hell am I doing in San Bernardino and I gotta be way up here in California. So Red Cross gets me a flight, free, up to Travis Air Force Base so now I’m held up there 12 hours. Why? Well this is December, it’s seven below in Michigan, all I have on are my summer khakis, no winter clothes at all. So they take all that crap and they give me all brand new dress greens, I had no dress greens I had, you know, whole new shoes cause mine were moldy and everything. So they tailor fit your dress greens and then I had to go to debriefing on what I can and can’t talk about, how to talk at the table, you know it’s not “Pass the effin’ butter” So I’m going through a debriefing, acclimating back into social life and getting all new clothes and everything and so– And now I’ve caught a cold, I’ve got this cold, okay so now I get on my– And your leave doesn’t start until you get home. So I’m already 12 hours or more late, I was extended three days, that put me three days behind, now I’m late leaving Travis. (1:51:00) So okay now I’m on this flight and I’m flying home, Grand Rapids is snowed in, so they send us up to Muskegon. Well they had called my folks to tell them that our flight was being delayed, okay I’m gonna take a bus or a taxi– Bus from Muskegon. So okay, well we get up to Muskegon, and the storm quit in Grand Rapids so they turn around fly us back to Grand Rapids. So now we land in Grand Rapids and I got a call home “Hey Pops, I’m home.” “Well where’s that?” “Well I’m at the airport.” So you know back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, so I was three or four days late getting home and what a fiasco that was. I mean just one problem after another. Interviewer: “Okay, and now you’re not done with your enlistment yet either.” Oh no. Interviewer: “Okay so you get leave home, how long were you sick you had your cold?” I had a cold I could not– My eyes were watering so bad but I bought some contacts– �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Cold medicine yeah.” I took a couple– Now they’re 12 hour right, so I pop a couple of them and my eyes finally dried up. Well I happened to be sitting next to a fella that owned the Ford tractor place in Grandville, Michigan, they sold Ford tractors and he happened to know my dad because my dad’s from Grandville the Jamieson homestead is there and everything. I had to be sitting right next to him and we got to talking and I couldn’t buy a drink. I mean they were buying me drinks I got– Couse I’m in uniform, and I– I wouldn’t say I was drunk but with the cold I wasn’t feeling any pain when I got home and so that was– That made it a nice flight. You know I think– You know everybody says that, you know, you’re treated like crap while on the airplane and in the airport, I was treated pretty good, people were buying– Of course there’s a lot of service men in there but people were buying me a drink and stuff, thought “Hell this ain’t gonna be bad.” Until I got home, even in the Grand Rapids area here it was not good but– So I’m home on leave for 30 days and I already know where I’m going, I’m going to Fort Meade, Maryland 6th Armored Cav, so that’s after my leave. We had a good time at home I got re-hooked up again with my girlfriend and bought a snowmobile, and I had them paint “Cong Chaser” on it, I don’t know if you wanna get into this or not– Interviewer: “Oh yeah.” (1:53:43) So I don’t know if you know of Michigan Out of Doors with Mort Neff, Bruce Grant on the radio, well those are friends of my dad’s they’re all from Grandville, and so Roger Perrin owned a snowmobile dealership in Grandville, Perrin’s Marina, my dad knew him. So I worked for him the 30 days I was home just putting snowmobiles together, you know a couple hours here a couple hours– It wasn’t never a job he would pay me spending money. So on Sundays Bruce Grant would come to Roger Perrin’s and bring a bottle and my dad would have coffee, and well I bought a snowmobile and had them paint “Cong Chaser” on it, then I had it hopped up a little bit. So Roger would use my snowmobile as a demo and people thinking the snowmobile they buy like this is gonna be as fast as mine was, well it wasn’t of course. So anyway Mort Neff had a safari between Croton and Hardy Dam in the winter time and he landed in his ski plane and the camera crew got out and they’re taking pictures and well they happen to look at my snowmobile �Jamieson, Jimmy and it says “Cong Chaser” on it, well that was the name of our howitzer. He didn’t know what that meant so I explained to him so I ended up on Michigan Out of Doors– Morton Neff, they were doing a show of the safari. They had hot dogs and snowmobiling and then one of the segments was on my snowmobile. So that– So I got to go on– But yeah, so home was fun. Interviewer: “Okay and now off to Fort Meade.” Off to Fort Meade, I get there at night and that’s fine, they stick me in the 6th Armored Cav, nobody there I got there on a Friday night. Cool, okay so no duties, no nothing. I’m assigned to the gun battery, the howitzer battery, so I got the whole weekend to screw off. Well my cousin Chuck Devries lived in Chevy Chase, so I called him up. So I took a cab over to his house, so I actually spent the weekend with my cousin at Chevy Chase and he took me all around and everything, and then I reported back– I had to sign out, and I reported back in again. Well then on Monday morning then you get assigned where you’re gonna be and what gun battery you’re on– Or gun crew and all that kind of stuff and so I was there for a while. (1:56:18) Well then the 1st Army is there also, and they wanted recruits for the rifle team, so hell I’ll sign up– I’ll try out for it, so there’s like 200 of us trying out for the rifle team, and you have to shoot expert every time you shoot and they needed eight slots filled. So I kept shooting expert, expert, until they wittled us down to eight. So by the end of the day I was on the 1st Army national rifle pistol team, if my battery commander would release me, and he did. So I’d get up in the morning and go to chow and then I’d make the 0-600 formation, you know all present and accounted for, make up my bunk, and my reporting station was the 1st Army national rifle pistol team. So I’d get a ride and I’d spend all day on the rifle team shooting, shooting, shooting, and if you weren’t in a competition then you were an instructor. So the guys on AIT, when they’d have to march to the rifle range and learn how to shoot kadri, that was us. You’d wear the steel– Or the helmet liner that says “Kadri” on it and so– Or “Instructor” and that’s what I did when the rifle team people were the kadri, and so that’s what I did for the time that I was there. I traveled up and down the east coast, shooting rifle competitions. I had two match grade M-14s, instructing on the M-60, M-16, M-14, the thump-gun, demonstration on the 50 we didn’t teach the 50 just the demonstration. So that was fun until the riots started, Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April but it started out as a Vietnam protest and so the 101st Airborne I believe had the �Jamieson, Jimmy Capitol building, 82nd Airborne had the White House, or vice versa I can’t keep them straight, 6th Armored Cav had the surrounding area. Our unit had from Louisiana, and this is on Concord, the main street, Louisiana to Pennsylvania, that’s where I had to patrol, and different guys had different streets and we were all spread out. So for three days we would patrol that in rioting, people were throwing jars of urine at you, bags of feces, you know dog manure, human crap and stuff like that. You would form a V and then you had fixed bayonets and you just marched right into the crows and dispersed them if they would, but they had us– The 6th Armored Cav was in dress greens, now we weren’t Airborne but we were in dress greens with bloused pants, in other words you wore your combat boots with– Like the Airborne would. Black leather gloves, pistol belt, helmet liner, no steel pot helmet liner, and the Cav wore an ascot, like the Cav wore– The regular the 1st and the 4th wore a yellow ascot, ours was red, and so instead of wearing a shirt and a tie you wore your shirt- Khaki shirt under your greens but you wore a red ascot. It’s like a turtleneck thing, and then you wore your pistol belt and two ammo pouches with loaded magazines, we had 80 rounds, and then you wore your bayonet and two canteens of water and that’s what we wore, and so you were spit and polished. (2:00:30) They wanted the people to see that you weren’t a bunch of reserves– There was no national guard, no reserves, so you would– You wore all your medals, and you were dressed to the hilt, I mean. When we pulled up into the group we were on the back of a deuce and a half with a canvas off, and they’d have us stand up and then left and right detail, you know left turn, right turn whatever. So they’d have us take out our bayonets and that was, you know “On my command fix bayonets.” So you’d fix bayonet, you’d take your bayonet out and then you would mount it and they’d say “Fix bayonets!” You’d have like 20 some guys on the truck go chhh-kkk and there’s people all around you and they’re looking up at you watching, thinking “Okay now what are these guys gonna do?” “On my command load magazine.” So you’d undo your pouch, take out a loaded magazine and we’d wrap it on our heads to make sure the rounds were all in the back and they’d say “Load magazine!” And then you’d go chh-kk everybody would go chh-kk at the same time “On my command load one round.” So you’d put your hand up and they’d say “Load one round!” Chhkk! People could see that round going into the magazine. So then they’d have us exit the vehicle or the truck, demount they called it cause you’re in a cab, you mount your truck you don’t climb it. So and then we’d form the V and then there’d be guys in here with the thump-guns, with tear gas, and so whether they had us use tear gas or not you had your M-17 protective gas mask, but �Jamieson, Jimmy we would just march into the ground and if they wouldn’t move you’d put the bayonet right here and stand them up right on their tip toes and then if they came down, call an ambulance you know haul people away but, they would disperse and get out of our way but you know we didn’t put up with any bullshit, and that was the first three days. When the looting started- Now the police are with us okay, or actually we’re with them because we had rules that we had to abide by. So when the looting started, then now the police are with us cause Congress declares martial law, or somebody did usually it’s Congress cause they’re running- DC is run by Congress. So now they’re– We don’t need search warrants, so when you see a car loaded with stereos and TVs, or a quarter of a cow sticking out frozen, you’d just point the rifle at them at an intersection, they’d stop, jerk them out, put handcuffs on them. They’d put them in a paddy wagon that had 10 or 12 people, hands over the bar, they’d drive away, empty them out then come back. (2:03:30) So we did that for eight days, and throwing tear gas, we had CS1 riot teargas grenades. We’d go through buildings cause they’re block-long apartment buildings and you would just start at one end, pull the pin and throw it– Cause they’re fiberglass, they would break, and then people were putting towels under the cracks of the doors, and we got credited for saving a baby. The tear gas came through it, and CS1 riot it’s a tear gas but it also cause nausea and vomiting and dry heaves, and now your stomach ruptures now you’re vomiting up blood, I mean it could kill you. So they handed this baby out and one of our sergeants laid the baby on the hood of the car and started doing CPR and supposedly saves this baby life and of course he gets accolades mades for it, but we didn’t put up with that crap I mean– We were in Arlington Cemetery in tents for 11 days and the rioting and yeah it was not fun, I mean here you go through a year of Vietnam and this is how you’re treated? What a rude awakening that is and you get– This is part of my PTSD I can’t stand guys with ponytails, it just drives me absolutely nuts, and it’s taken me a long time to get over that and Asians– It’s just the flower power people, the hippies, it just– Interviewer: “You associate that with that experience.” With the riots, yup. It’s just– Yeah I don’t get nightmares over that it just pisses me off, it upsets me. �Jamieson, Jimmy Interviewer: “Alright, now before that happened were you giving any thought to staying in the Army?” Yeah, in the meantime I had taken an OCS test, three hours and something long, and I passed it. So you’ve got like 30 days or whatever to make up your mind if you wanna enlist, so my wife now her and I were talking, we weren’t engaged or anything but yeah talking marriage and stuff like that and she says “Well if we’re ever thinking about marriage–” She says “You and Vietnam was too hard, you barely made it through the first year–” And I told her I was guaranteed one more year because once you become an officer you gotta serve three more years, I was guaranteed one more year in Vietnam, maybe two and she says “You barely made it through the first one.” She says “So if you’re thinking about getting the service then there’s no chance of us getting married.” and “Aww geez, what do I, what do I, what do I?” And the thought of still being a school teacher that came into mind, so I elected not to go back into the service, and as it is the girlfriend then we’ve been married 48 years now and so she’s put up with a lot of stuff from me, the counseling and what not. So as it is I ended up with a good job at the– I ended up being an engineer anyways. Interviewer: “Yeah so what kind of job did you get then when you get out?” (2:07:17) I bounced around, I was a mechanic, I was– Worked in the septic tank business with my cousin, the Plummer’s Septic Tank Service. Millionaire now, the boys are, but anyway I bounced around being a truck mechanic and a car mechanic and finally got a job with the phone company in 1974 and I worked as a top craft splicer and then a crew leader, it’s called a technical leader, I did that for five years and then they promoted me to an engineer. I was still taking classes, I never did get a degree but they would hire engineers out of college and put them with me for two or three weeks to teach them the ropes and so finally Dorothy Debane the fourth level over in engineering she said “We just might as well make you an engineer.” So even without a degree– And then they needed an engineer in Marquette in the Upper Peninsula, so– This is back in ‘93, and my wife said “Yeah, sure we’ll go to Marquette.” So I was up there for eight years and then I came back down here, and I was an engineer and then a training development manager, I hired 25 splicers they were starting up a new construction department and I hired two first level managers �Jamieson, Jimmy and got them trained and equipped. Went back to being an engineer and then I ended up being an air pressure manager and I says “I’ll do it for two years, then I’m gonna retire.” So I retired at age 57, after I got over my prostate cancer I said “Life’s too short.” I put my 30 years in and so I retired at 57. Interviewer: “Okay, but you’re still a busy man. What are you doing now?” I’m volunteering for LZ Michigan, that’s got me quite busy, I do a lot with schools; my grandson is going into 9th grade but I was his daycare person when he was a year and a half old, he was high end autistic I had to take him to Mary Free Bed five days a week for two hours for oral, motor skills, and speech therapy. So him and I are, I mean we’re really close and that was my wife calling to say that Travis won’t be over till 4:30, him and I are gonna make a platform for a shed, but he’s a big boy, big kid, 15, he’s in what they call Peaks Class so he’s been taking– In the 8th grade he took 9th grade classes and now he’s in 9th grade he’s taking 10th grade classes. He was in the Grand Rapids Youth Symphony, he’s in orchestra, and symphony, and jazz band at Kentwood. He’s hoping to get a scholarship, he plays the stand up bass, electric bass, and guitar. So I do a lot of volunteer work at school, I go on field trips, I help the orchestra, I also teach gun safety, hunter safety for the DNR, I’ve done that for 38 years. So I do instructional shooting, rifle shooting, I’ve worked with some SWAT folks on their rifle shooting and people they just want to learn to shoot their rifles better so I am with a gun club here in town. I have a fifth wheeler at Selkirk Lake so I fish, I hunt all the time, I go out west, I shoot prairie dogs, the wife and I both ride motorcycles, she rides a three wheeler and I ride a motorcycle so I’m not home much. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context JamiesonJ2143V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jamieson, Jimmy Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-07 Title A name given to the resource Jamieson, Jimmy (Interview transcript and video), 2025 Description An account of the resource Jimmy Jamieson was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1946. He graduated high school in 1965 and began college classes. He was drafted in the Army in February of 1966 but was allowed to finish the semester before being sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky in July. Shortly after, he was moved to Fort Campbell, Kentucky for basic training, where he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. After basic, he was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for artillery training and ranger training. He then had 30 days of leave before flying out of Travis Air Force Base to Vietnam. The plane stopped in Guam for a couple hours to refuel, and then landed in Pleiku, Vietnam. Originally assigned to field artillery for the 75th Ranger Battalion, he was instead flown to Camp Alpha near Saigon and assigned to the 8th Battalion, 6th Artillery in Vietnam, 1st Infantry Division. Nearly every night he had fire missions known as harassment and interdiction, where they fired at suspected Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army at random times. After he joined the unit, they moved to Quan Loi Base Camp. There, his main job was to keep the supply line on track, but he also provided the Special Forces with gun support. Being close to the Cambodian border, Jamieson’s unit would sometimes cross into Cambodia. While on deployment, Jamieson visited Hawaii for a week for R&R. In late 1967, he finished his deployment and was processed at Dĩ An, the division’s main base camp, before being flown back to the U.S., stopping in Okinawa to refuel. He arrived in San Bernardino and took another flight to Travis Air Force Base, then another flight to Grand Rapids. After 30 days of leave, he went to Fort Meade, Maryland. Originally assigned to gun battery for the 6th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Jamieson took a shooting test and landed a spot on the 1st Army National Rifle Pistol Team. During the Vietnam protests, his unit patrolled the area surrounding the White House and Capitol. At the end of his service, he decided not to enlist. Instead, he got married and worked several odd jobs before becoming an engineer. He also worked as a training development manager and an air pressure manager. After he retired, he took up volunteer work for LZ Michigan and his son’s high school as well as teaching gun safety for the DNR. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) WKTV (Wyoming, Mich.) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/75871852da12a24507e7300a349d17b0.mp4 64d9d5db5d4ca585b6086770bbc3654b https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6ca74fed78420d91dd86aeea2a87fcfb.pdf 0673d95bf3295d17702c4e714688fb67 PDF Text Text Jackson, Elmer Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: World War II Interviewee’s Name: Elmer Jackson Length of Interview: (1:37:50) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Elmer Jackson of Decatur, Michigan and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay now Mr.Jackson begin with some background on yourself, to begin with where and when were you born?” I was a farm boy, born in the house that we lived in back in the day when they had midwives and that kind of thing and went to school– Country school, one room school that they taught eight grades and you walked to school and back home because we didn’t have buses then. (00:58) Interviewer: “In what year were you born?” In 1925. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and how far away from school did you live?” One and a quarter mile. Interviewer: “Okay, and did your family own a farm?” They were buying it, they owned it. Interviewer: “Okay, and now you’re growing up during the depression, were they able to keep the farm in the 30s?” �Jackson, Elmer It was tough going, I know about that, farm boys and there were three of us and yes it was tough. You had good days and bad days and when you had a thousand pigs and horses and ducks and chickens and they all gotta be taken care of day and night– Morning and night, and I then graduated from eighth grade in that school and went to Decatur high school and– For four years. Interviewer: “Okay, now were you in high school when Pearl Harbor happened?” Yes. Interviewer: “And how did you learn about Pearl Harbor?” It was on a Sunday that it was on the radio, and we had a poor excuse for radio at that time, and then when I went to school the next day it was like it was eerie because everybody was aware. Interviewer: “Now before Pearl Harbor were you paying attention to the news from the world and the war in Europe, that kind of thing?” (3:02) No. Interviewer: “Okay, so it’s a pretty big shock when we–” Yeah I’d say so. Interviewer: “Alright, now at that point you weren’t old enough to serve.” Not at that– ‘41, 1941 no. Interviewer: “Okay, and then did– Now how did– Did the war change things in Decatur?” �Jackson, Elmer During the war no one on Earth would know what this country did to win this war, everybody– With few exceptions, and every– We were talking about this yesterday, piece of scrap in the country was saved and even little kids were saving the foil off their chewing gum and everybody was determined they were going to win this war, period, and then didn’t matter what they had to do. Interviewer: “Okay, now your family had a farm, did you get extra gas for the farm?” It was rationed. Interviewer: “Yeah.” I’ve got some coupons at home and everything was rationed, sugar, it was– Even tires were recapped, you couldn’t buy a new one and you did what you had to do, everybody did. Interviewer: “Okay, now did farmers swap with each other? Would they trade meat for vegetables or things like that?” (4:44) Everybody did whatever that needed to be done, didn’t matter a darn thing it was that way. Interviewer: “Alright, now did you want to enlist in the military at some point?” In the senior year I tried to enlist in the Air Force, because I was 50% colorblind they wouldn’t take me. So when I graduated I just, instead of enlisting or being drafted at that time my dad wanted me to help that summer on the farm. So I did and it was a year later when they drafted me. Interviewer: “Okay, so when did they draft you?” That was on August the 30th in ‘44. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Alright and after you got the draft notice did you have to report right away or did you wait till after the harvest?” I don’t remember exactly but it wasn’t very long after I was– That I got the notice and seven of us left this town on the same day. Interviewer: “Did you need to deal with them or– Alright, and now where did they send you for basic training?” Texas, Camp Wood. Interviewer: “Camp Wood, Texas. Alright, how did they get you there?” Well first of all I was inducted in Detroit, from Paw Paw to Detroit, from Detroit where they told you to take one step forward and you were in the Army and they put us on a train and sent us back to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, went right back through this town and we stayed in Sheridan for two weeks doing some basics and everything till they put us on a train and sent us to Texas. (7:00) Interviewer: “Okay, how long did it take to get from Fort Sheridan to Texas?” I’ll tell you what it seemed like Arkansas was the biggest state in the United States because we went from one corner to the other and it was slow, slow, slow, I don’t know how long it took it took it was just agonizing going. Interviewer: “Alright, and was it hot too?” And? Interviewer: “Was it hot, was the weather hot?” �Jackson, Elmer When we got down there yes it was hot, in fact during basic there was even– I remember one or two that dropped out of march because they were passed out. Yes it was very, very hot and we marched in the hot. Interviewer: “Alright, and then what else did you do in basic training, you did marching and what else?” You did a lot of things, the most memorable was towards the end of basics was the infiltration course and that was the most miserable. They had a wire web over a– Well it ended up being a crawl space and it was rainy, muddy, and you crawled up under that wire and under the wire on your belly and they were firing blanks I’m sure but supposedly right over your head. Interviewer: “Now did they have tracers so you could see the fire going over?” It was at night, there was enough light to see, that was all. (8:55) When I got out of there, there was a creek not far away and I jumped in the creek clothes and all because I was a filthy muddy mess. Interviewer: “Alright, and then how much emphasis was there on discipline, on following orders?” Oh boy, you had no choice, if he said “Do this.” Do it, and anybody that was not obeying did 50 push ups or marched another ten miles or whatever they could think of to– Yes. Interviewer: “Okay, now how easy was it for you to adjust to being in the Army?” I can’t say it was ever easy, again you just did what you were told period, or else you ended up on KP or– Interviewer: “Okay, so you learned that pretty fast?” �Jackson, Elmer Well you learn faster when you’re the one in trouble. Interviewer: “Okay, now how long did the basic training last?”] It was supposed to be three months, August, September– I think it was three months or fours months, I don’t know now and they took– Because of the Battle of the Bulge they took us out of basic a week early and told us we had ten days to get out to the east coast, I can’t think of the camp out there. Interviewer: “Did you– Well you–” From there to Camp Shanks, New York. Interviewer: “Okay, did you go to Fort Meade, Maryland?”] That’s what it was. (10:45) Interviewer: “That was in your article yeah.” That’s where it was, went from Texas to Meade to– Interviewer: “Camp Shanks?” Shanks, thank you. Interviewer: “Yeah, did you do any training at Fort Meade or did you just wait?” I wasn’t there, I had a pass I remember, that’s about all. It was awful short cause that Battle of the Bulge was pushing everything. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Alright, okay and then when you get to Camp Shanks do you remember how long you stayed there?” I think about overnight or something like that because I remember with the thing we stayed in there were half a dozen other guys or something like that. I wanted a pass I remember, down to the city, and they told me I couldn’t have it because they were moving us out soon, I think I was there one night or something like that. Interviewer: “Okay, and then what ship did they put you on?” The Queen Mary, second biggest ship in the world. Interviewer: “Okay, and what kind of accommodations did they have on that ship?” I always heard there was 18,000 men on that ship, they had stripped that ship bare and promenade which is practically outdoors in January as it leaves New York. (12:25) We had a room a little bit bigger– Little bigger than that office, with nine men in it, I was on promenade and we were supposed to trade off with third deck down every other night. Well it was so cold on promenade you didn’t sleep much so the guys who were supposed to be on third deck traded with us every other night. Then we thought we were smart and we tried to put us all on third deck and that didn’t work very well but the ship, and the first two three days started down south ways and it got so it wasn’t so uncomfortable on promenade but– And it normally took that ship five days to get to Europe– To England, and because they were changing course every four minutes to miss the submarines, the submarines were out there but we changed course every four minutes so that we wouldn’t run into them, and so it took seven days and we ended up landed in Glasgow, Scotland. Interviewer: “Okay, now did your ship sail by itself or did you have escorts?” Or what? �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Did you have escorts with you or was the ship by itself?” The Queen Mary didn’t use escorts, I understand the other ships that were smaller did but not the Queen Mary. Interviewer: “It was supposed to be fast enough that the subs couldn’t catch it.” Yes, faster than the submarines. Interviewer: “And I guess it worked because they didn’t sink it.” They didn’t run into them but guess they knew what they were doing. Interviewer: “Alright, okay so what happens when you get to Scotland?” There was a great big warehouse or something that all the men, after we got off the ship, the men all got in this big warehouse and then it wasn’t very long, I don’t know if it was– I don’t think we even stayed there overnight but we were put on train down to Southampton. (14:40) Interviewer: “And then did you stay in Southampton or did they just put you on ships and– ” We were– It was very, very soon, I don’t think I even slept there, they put us on landing craft of some kind. I know the front drops and then you walked in water and then you got up on land finally and– And we ended up on train again, I don’t know– That escapes me a little bit. Interviewer: “Well if you landed on a beach you probably landed on Omaha beach because we used that as–” No that was– Went across the English channel. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Yeah.” I never knew what beach. Interviewer: “Cause that was a regular place for us to land people long after D-Day so you might have been there. Other places– If you went to Le Havre you might have gone into the harbor.” It didn’t look like anything. Interviewer: “Yeah, okay but they built rail lines right out there so.” And part of the time there wasn’t enough light, daylight or otherwise, to see where you were going or what you were doing. You just did what you’re told, that's what I keep saying. Interviewer: “Alright, now according to your records you crossed the Atlantic at the end of January 1945. So this is gonna be now beginning of February that they’re shipping you towards the front lines.” (16:16) Well we were up– I joined the outfit on the Maas river. Interviewer: “Okay and what outfit did you join, what unit?” Well it was the 75th and the regiment I told you. Interviewer: “Yeah but that’s– You didn’t tell me on camera, so.” 75th division. Interviewer: “Right, and what regiment?” �Jackson, Elmer 291st Infantry Regiment and it was– They took us to the front in trucks with those little tiny lights on them and I can remember because there were big guns going off and the flashes were showing the men all over the acreage and I was put to a house on the beach on the Maas River. There was a house there that the outfit had been badly shot up and they put me on guard there on the first night, enough to scare you to death, and here I am out there all night standing in the dark, had a password, that was my first night. Interviewer: “Now did you have any trouble that first night?” No, as it happened I didn’t. Interviewer: “Okay, and then in the morning what do they do with you?” We started down some path, I don’t know where, and went into some Dutch home or something and those people were so appreciative of us being there they fell all over. (18:25) They insisted we sleep in their beds even, they’d been freed from the Germans and they’d do anything, nicest people, and then of course the next day we’re back going on the road and again and out there marching or whatever, just go, go, go. Interviewer: “Okay, now at this point were you– Did you have any fighting or was it just marching?” I don’t remember that there was any fighting at that time. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and what was the weather like?” It had been snow but I think the snow had just melted, it was still cold, awful cold. The beginning of the bulge was snow but I was at the last half or something, last– Maybe third, I don’t know. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Yeah, well as part of all the counter attacking, because in January and February we were pushing them back and attacking, by February when you got there we’re advancing pretty much all up and down the line, so it’s part of a big movement by a lot of units.” One of these things has a map, I didn’t fully understand it me myself because they never told us where we were going but we went, first one and then the other. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you joined your company did anybody try to show you the ropes or explain how things worked or were you on your own?” Practically on your own, one thing that I missed– Way back at somewhere, I don’t know where, was where they issued the weapons. Mine was an M-1 and you had to clean them in practically boiling water, they had a big tank in the campfire under it and they had– These weapons were covered with cosmoline I guess is the name, and you had to wash all that off and clean it up so you had your weapon working and that was premature to that other stuff that you’ve been telling. (21:05) I don’t know if it was right after we got into France or if was after we– Seemed like it was after we got into France but then back to Holland and through France and I thought by the looks of that map that I probably was through Luxembourg which I didn’t realize before, and you’d take one town and then another and that book– One of them, has that, in one of those pages has a name of a city that we took and I didn’t know it was in there until here about three, four weeks ago when I had time to read it and it tells about the city’s name and everything. I was there, there wasn’t any questions about it. Did you find it? Interviewer: “Yeah, well I’m looking– Basically you were, your division fought mostly on the north side of the bulge originally and then they moved them south. So you would have gone through Luxembourg just like you said and then you get to a place called Adelsheim on first of February and–” A lot of those pictures you saw were taken during the pauses between battles. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “And then you’re now– Your division supported the French at a certain point in the Colmar pocket area and then went on to the Rhine from there. Do you ever remember meeting any French troops or seeing any of them?” That was always a sore point because you never knew or understood why they didn’t try harder to protect themselves and keep it from– Keep the Germans from– Interviewer: “Well, yeah well the historians have figured out they actually did try pretty hard they just did it badly.” Well the French mostly were underground or many of them were killed because they were spies for the allies. Interviewer: “Yeah, that was– Well that’s sort of later on but at the beginning of the war the French did fight they just got beat, and then during the war some of them collaborated, some of them helped the allies, some of them didn’t do anything but I was asking about the French army, the free French army.” (23:58) I don’t know anything about them. Interviewer: “Okay, you didn’t see them. Okay, alright but you were noting– You said you thought you moved through Luxembourg and it looks like you did so you did a lot of moving.” Yes. Interviewer: “And then as you get into February and then you start to fight and eventually move towards the Rhine River.” Took them, had those battles and moved on and then we ended up down to the Rhine River. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Right, now before you got to the Rhine River did you see any combat yourself?” Well that one in there is on paper, it’s in there, no question about it. Interviewer: “Okay, but what do you remember about that?” I remember that one so well and apparently there were several others but the only two that I know about are that one and probably another one that was at Dortmund and then we moved up on the other side of where we– At the river after the crossing, but they started crossing 36 hours before we did. Interviewer: “Okay, well let’s back up a little bit, before you cross the Rhine what do you remember about– Do you remember being in one particular battle before you went to Germany?” (25:25) I don’t remember. Interviewer: “Okay, you were telling me you were–” That was so confusing, as far as I was concerned all I know is I followed the rules and we took one town and then another and you couldn’t even give all the names. Interviewer: “Alright, now within your unit what was your job, were you just a rifleman at that point?” That’s all. Interviewer: “Okay, and–” Foot soldier. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Yeah, now do you remember the first time you got shot at?” Yeah, the first time was when we were crossing an open field, it was kind of getting it dark it was probably six or seven o’clock at night and it was– Had started to get dark and we had an open field to go to to get to a barn on the other side, and here’s a whole company. Gotta get over there quick while it’s daylight enough to see and we were running across the field and there was another guy that was about as close to me as you are to me, and we were running side by side and he got shot through the hand and I hit the ground and so did he. He went into shock there, no question, and it was getting, like I said, getting dark and I got up and beat it to the barn and a couple of guys went out and got this guy and I never saw him again, I don’t know what ever happened to him. Went back I’m sure, but that was how close I come– I never knew for sure if the guy was aiming at me or this guy because here we are side by side. Interviewer: “May have just been shooting in your general direction.” Yeah. (27:22) Interviewer: “Okay, and when you were in some of these actions I mean could you see the enemy or just hear the gunshots?” We knew they were out there because they were shooting at us, I didn’t see them at that time, no. Interviewer: “Okay, and when you’re going through Belgium and France and Luxembourg and so forth what did the towns or the buildings look like?” Well those pictures that are in that album shows you homes and places over there, and they didn’t build them like we do and many of them are brick and stone and what have you anyway but at some point they had to use some other means to build this house and so many of them were blown to shreds anyway but– Interviewer: “Okay, and did you see many civilians or were they out of sight?” �Jackson, Elmer The one place that we crossed another opening and it was like Benton Harbor, St.Joe but they were separated by a– Probably from here to the Dollar General over there, and you had to go across there. I never could figure out why they made us go across there, there was the woods over there and a bunch of other stuff over here but go. Well you got about halfway and then the Germans opened up, grenades and rifle fire, and of course you hit the ground as fast as you can, or faster and you finally got up and got over to the other side. There was an embankment and I was down on the ground before that embankment and I could look over and see that there was a house over there and every once and a while a G.I would go out there and there’s a table sitting out there below a window. I don’t know why the window was so high but I guess it’s the way it was built, anyway I did what I saw the others do, I went over, jumped up on the table and dove through the window. The guy inside says “You wanna kill yourself?” I said “I’d rather die that way.” And yes there were civilians in that house in the basement, I briefly saw them, then the sergeant– It was dark now, then the sergeant picked two to go make contact with some other group. (30:27) Fine, but they picked me and another guy, I had no more idea where I was going, what I was doing and it was pitch dark out there. Scared? Yes, the other guy went out the window and I never saw him again, I don’t know where he went, but I didn’t know what direction to go or anything. So I went back down over that embankment that I just come up over anyway and just followed as best I could in the dark and I must have gone a quarter of a mile or something before I could see– Make the outline of a house or something, and I started using the password thinking someone was gonna challenge me somewhere, and I kept saying it and no one would answer I didn’t know what the devil, I figured well maybe it was Germans. So I kept going and went up to the house even and started to open the door and I can see there was candles burning inside. I open the door a little more and here’s G.Is laying all over the floor, they were sleeping, there wasn’t even room for me. So there was a table over there, somewhere, wasn’t very big at least half as big as this one, and I went over and got up on that table and went to sleep, I’d had enough for one day, but they got us out and the whole gang we went right back by the house that I was in the night before and I– When we got to the front of the house there were two G.Is dead on the ground, one was Melnick and one was Wynn, I don’t know which way, because I went over and looked at their dog tags while we were pacing off to the next whatever, and there was a big hole in the front of that house. It wasn’t there last night, I’m lucky I might �Jackson, Elmer have been and I assume some German sent a missile or something right into the front of that house. I don’t know if it killed anybody else but it killed those two without a doubt, I think they said they were from headquarters or something but that was war. Then I remember another– Dortmund I guess it was when you went into that and I remember going over a railroad track and moving on– I don’t know where we’re headed, there’s too much to remember I don’t know. Interviewer: “Okay, well let’s– To back up a little bit, so you were– Do you remember crossing the Rhine River?” Yeah that was the dark and what I thought was a huge row boat but it was a motor boat of some kind but it might have had, eight, ten men in it or something and you can hear the Germans sending shells out over the window trying to keep us from getting over there I guess, and you sweat it out because you– And here it’s dark because the only thing that was keeping us from somebody aiming at us. Interviewer: “When you got to the other side were there already Americans there?” (34:28) Well let’s see, 36 hours later? Interviewer: “Yeah” Yes there were Americans there, I don’t know if they were very far away. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and then did you go into combat from there or–” There was– I would consider combat any of this because you’re sweating, if there’s any sweat– One, this was interesting, one town that we were taking, it was probably three o’clock in the morning it was pitch dark and most of the night was gone and they had picked a whole lotta men and they put a bunch of men on one side of the road and a bunch of men on the other side and I don’t know why they picked me again to lead this group on this left side and it’s dark and you’re just taking short steps and listening, don’t make any noise and we got a little ways down the road �Jackson, Elmer and you could hear something coming. It’s dark and it sounded like steel wheels on a cart or wagon or something, and it certainly was, two Germans. I have to say they were– Must have been the dumbest Germans in the German army, brought this steel wheel cart with a machine gun on it, apparently out to watch the men coming in or something and the guy on the other side knew a little German, I didn’t but at night he says “Halt!” Which was German and of course they stopped, they were prisoners right now and I’d hate to have been in their shoes that’s all, and they signed a couple of our guys to take them back. That steel wheel cart was sure foolish I mean they had to know it was gonna be picked out quick. Interviewer: “Well they might not have known you were as close as you were.” I guess not, I don’t know but anyway we went on in and took that down and you just go you don’t get to say “I don't wanna.” You go, if they shoot you that’s your trouble, tough luck. Interviewer: “Alright, now as you’re advancing into Germany are you encountering any German tanks?” (37:31) There were German tanks shot up or destroyed alongside the roads from time to time and American tanks. Interviewer: “And then did you ever have tanks or tank destroyers that supported you?” No, I rode on one of the American tanks from one place to another once but that was the closest I even come to a tank that I can remember. Interviewer: “Alright, now there’s some point in your story when you were talking about digging emplacements for tank destroyers.” That was at the Rhine river. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Okay, can you describe that? I mean what you were doing, what the things looked like?” Well first of all we had to go down the river to where the next hole had to be dug, which was maybe from here to across the street even or wherever they had to have a hole for tank destroyers, and it’s dark and you’re digging a hole in the dark for a dang tank destroyer and it’s not a bicycle, it’s big. Interviewer: “Yeah, well is this the kind of thing it’s like a Sherman tank chassis with a big gun on top of it?” I couldn’t see it in the dark, anyway the tank destroyers weren’t there yet, we were getting ready for them. Interviewer: “Alright, now when you were fighting did you have artillery support?” (39:13) There were times we had artillery support, in fact I thought they were sending out artillery too close to us. Yes they go over and hit the Germans on the other side but you had to appreciate them because they were softening up the Germans on the other– And another thing that when we were crossing the land here’s these airplanes, B-17s going over by the hundreds and you couldn’t do anything, only appreciate them because they were bombing ahead of us and you felt pretty good they were up there I’ll tell you. Interviewer: “Okay, now did you have air support from fighter bombers or planes that were helping you, or did you just see the big high level bombers?” Maybe I didn’t understand. Interviewer: “Okay, were there aircraft that helped you directly like attacking like artillery did?” �Jackson, Elmer The closest that that ever came was a German plane was– I don’t know if he was looking for somebody or what but he flew over us and we jumped out of a troop truck of some kind that was moving us and run off the road and down the embankment to– But he never did anything. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now as you move into Germany you’re there sort of it’s March and April, spring now of ‘45 getting to the end of the war. Does the German resistance lighten up at all, does it get easier?” Well I’m sure they began to understand that it was a losing battle and yes I think it was a little bit softer war by that time than it was before. Interviewer: “Okay, and did your unit capture– Did you capture many prisoners?” When I was coming back to sleep in the daytime after being down at the river the prisoners would come up the road along by the house by the hundreds. (41:30) They were about four or five wide and as far as you could see there were German prisoners, yes. Interviewer: “Alright, and what did they look like, like how old were they, what kind of shape were they in?” I wasn’t paying attention, all I knew was they were German and I didn’t care what happened to them at that time. Interviewer: “Alright, and what kind of losses did your company take, did a lot of your men get killed or wounded or just a few?” Oh, far more of them did before I got into it because those outfits had like 12 men in a squad when they were full and maybe only five or six left in squad, this is the way it was when I went. Interviewer: “And then when you joined them then did you get back to full strength or were you under strength?” �Jackson, Elmer No, never got– As far as I know, now there’s pictures of the men from our squad and our company in there, and I don’t think we ever got back to full but the war didn’t last that much longer anyway but– Because it didn’t end until May. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and then do you know where your unit was– Where were you when the war ended?” I don’t know. Interviewer: “You were still in Germany.” I don’t know, yeah it would’ve been still Germany, yes. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and how did you learn about the German surrender?” (43:05) Hey as soon as one man knows that everybody else does, it’s like– Interviewer: “Okay, alright and then once the Germans surrendered now what do you do?” We were moved to occupation and the first bunch of us who ended up at a little town, or maybe it wasn’t so little I don’t know, that was called Bad Boll and that was a place where SS troops were trained. There’s a picture in one of these albums of the swimming pool was in there for SS troops, we got to stay there one or two nights that’s all then we were moved to the– Oh I thought that it looked like mountains but they’re probably just huge hills and I– This was a squad I guess was moved to town which wasn’t as big as this one called Fischerbach and we could sleep in those houses and occupy them, and that’s where others were going the towns around them like Decatur and Paw Paw and Lawrence and they got so they were playing ball with– Like you would here and the trouble was we won, and that was trouble then– �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Now so were you–” Because the winnings were schnapps and the mails and the schnapps came at the same time, those men– I didn’t drink and one guy from Pennsylvania didn’t drink but all the rest were so drunk in such a short time that they didn’t even all of them finish their mail or anything. They were just all out of it, there were two of them laying on cots or something downstairs throwing up all over themselves and one guy upstairs– I was upstairs that was supposed to be where I was staying, he was going throw me downstairs and I said– And he was called Big Stoop so he was big, I said “If I go, you’re going to.” But he never did. Interviewer: “Alright, how long did you stay there do you think?” Maybe a month, I don’t know, I [unintelligible] Interviewer: “And did you see much of the Germans, were the civilians around?” (46:22) There were civilians but they never saw war in the whole– Because it was way out away from the war, but they never saw war a minute I’m sure and they were friendly and nice but I don’t think they appreciated the fact that these drunks were out there using their weapons and we still had our weapons with us, shooting up and down– Excuse me, up and down the streets and acting like crazy, they had a couple of guys that were outside of town, I remember I and one other guy were in a jeep and went out around looking for the man, two of them were taking this town they were down on the ground in the grass, the war was over but they were taking this town. Just wild and they were so out of the war that anything went, that’s all. Interviewer: “Who was in charge of you, I mean did you have a squad leader or–” I don’t know, the– Johnson was the name of the one that was head of our squad but I don’t know anymore than that. Interviewer: “Okay, but he didn’t have very good control?” �Jackson, Elmer I don’t know, he might’ve been drunk too, I’m not sure. Interviewer: “Alright, and then you think that you stayed in that area about a month. Now did they have any rules for you about fraternizing with the Germans?” It was always don’t fraternize but after the war ended they got pretty careless, but I don’t remember anything going on at that place. Interviewer: “Okay, now you think you stayed in that place about a month, what happens after that?” We were transferred to, a camp I guess, Camp Baltimore? And they made me an MP, that’s in there and I wasn’t very happy being an MP I was out there giving tickets to men doing things that I would’ve done. (48:48) So I darn soon got moved and they put me in the office and I wasn’t very good at typing in high school so I was using the eraser a lot, and then they moved us– Moved me anyway, to must have been graves registration. Interviewer: “Okay, explain what that was.” Well first of all when I got there I didn’t even know what the outfit was, I didn’t know what they did or anything, I was as dumb as they could be and I was watching the guys playing cards in one of the buildings, down on the floor playing cards, and I’m listening to them talk and I’m getting the idea this is not a very good place to be and I went right out– While they were still talking, I went right out and went to headquarters, what they considered headquarters, looking for a bulletin board cause I wanna do something wildly different than what they’re talking about and on the bulletin board was a job for a driver. Oh boy, I gotta try, and I got the job there’s pictures in there of the weapons carrier I drove and I had a German build a cab on it, cause there was nothing over you, for two cartons of cigarettes that I didn’t smoke either. They were issued to us, wouldn’t they like to know how many of them died because of lung cancer that they issued the cigarettes, and the job was you had a driver, you had an interpreter, and the man that went �Jackson, Elmer with us was doing the job and one of the places they sent us– I don’t even remember all of them, was the British zone and we had a week to do our job and we’d go to this town and this town and that town, there’s a city whatever they happened to be, and you looked for the– What we would call the mayor they called them Bürgermeister for mayors, and you’d ask him if he knew of any place so that Americans might be buried, and he’d tell us where this and that might have Americans buried. In the first place we were just locating these things, not processing or anything but locating, and so they tell us where to go and look and we go and look and I remember one that was way out in the woods and apparently the G.I that was there was sitting in a foxhole and there was some kind of shell went off right in front of him and he just laid right back down and was dead, and they ended up digging him up but that other guy wasn’t doing anything like that. I wasn’t, I stood around and watched many times and I saw all kinds, most of them would be just buried in the ground, some of them died and Germans put them in graves and one of them in particular we went to where they thought there was an American and we found out from the civilians that they had put him in their cemetery and apparently they befriended him before he died. Probably an airplane and parachuted and hurt bad or something and died, and they befriended him they were angered with us because we took him out of his– Out of their cemetery back to be processed and put in cemetery where they belong but it was not unusual to see the darndest things and how people reacted. (53:32) They were driven and they were angry but they knew they didn’t have any choice so they let us go and if we had just called back and told them we needed they’d have all died, but anyway and there’s some that I just walked away from while they were digging them up or something cause I’d had enough, I’d seen enough, Interviewer: “So your seeing body parts and decomposed bodies–” I remember one that was buried in a homemade casket of sorts and them taking the cover off and it was just watery, messy bones and what have you, yeah I’d seen enough of it. Interviewer: “Alright, now when you were in Germany especially right at the end of the war, did you see any of the displaced persons, the people who had been forced laborers or German refugees moving around?” �Jackson, Elmer Well they would have been with the Germans because they were working for Germans, we didn’t have anybody. Interviewer: “Right, but then once the war was over they would try to get home and so they might– Sometimes some of them talk about running into American units or Americans see them. Okay, but you don’t remember anything like that?” Not in particular, no. Interviewer: “Did you see any of the prison camps or concentration camps?” The Americans had a prisoner of war camp and they had towers around it with guards, that’s another place I got told to go and stand guard on that one and here you are out there eight, ten, 12 hours standing guard and you get pretty tired of that. I know I went to sleep a couple of times and I was afraid I’d fall off the darn tower but the Germans were inside this camp that you were watching over and living in pup tents mostly. (56:00) Interviewer: “Did you see any of the camps that the Germans had run?” Not that I remember, no. Interviewer: “Alright, and how long do you think you did the graves registration work?” I figured that was probably close to six months, I don’t know something like that. Interviewer: “Okay, and then while you were doing that where did you go in Europe before you went home? You were in Germany where else did–” I was still in graves registration and it would’ve been in Germany. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “But did you get any time off, could you do some touring? Cause you’ve got pictures of Switzerland and France.” I never figured it out– I should say I don’t remember, somewhere in the middle was where we got a pass to Switzerland, I’m not exactly sure which part and I never understood why I got a pass. There were three of us, there were hundreds of other men out there why me, but it didn’t matter. I went to Switzerland for two weeks and those people loved us, just– The three of us were walking down a street in one city, I don’t know what it was now might tell in there, and a man stopped us. Very nice man, very friendly, and he asked us questions and we told him what he asked and he went on to say that he was from another town in Switzerland and he wanted to know if we were gonna be there in our tour, and we said yes and he said “I’ve got an office at such and such place upstairs.” He was a doctor, and he said “Please stop in when you’re there.” We stopped when we got there, went upstairs to where his office was, and he made us sit down and talk to us for half an hour I guess and then gave us a book– I haven’t been able to find it, that I think he wrote, very nice man and I regretted I didn’t find out more about him but– And that was typical of the people in Switzerland and we slept in Switzerland then. (59:05) They always talked about the Swiss army because it was close enough to war but it– At least at that time they said everybody is training for war and they started I think it was five o’clock in the morning or something, and I know they did because I woke up and heard them marching right by the place I was sleeping. Interviewer: “Now you also– Did you go to Paris at some point?” Did what? Interviewer: “Did you go to Paris in France?” Oh what? Interviewer: “Did you go to Paris?” �Jackson, Elmer Yes, I had a pass to Paris too, one of the things I loved about that was you could get on a subway. You could go from one end of the city to the other, free as G.Is, and I did that a couple times just to see and I went to some of these places like the Arc de Triomphe and that Paris cathedral. Interviewer: “Yeah, Notre Dame, yeah.” I got out and, I don’t know if I got out and walked over to it or something because it was right by the river and walked into that place, I must have taken half a dozen steps and I’m awestruck at what you have to believe was built even before electricity, everything was done by hand. How did those people do that? And now you find out it was built 800 years ago, even more crude but it’s beautiful, but then I saw the Reims cathedral which was not much different than the one at Paris except it might have been a little bit– Somewhere it was supposed to be less than the one in Paris, that’s all I know, and it was beautiful but I wasn’t going to go in and examine everything. I just took enough to see it and it looked a whole lot like that picture in there. Interviewer: “Alright, well now while you were living in Germany did you make friends with any of the people there?” (1:01:50) You could befriend anybody that wanted to be friends, yes. There was some– In fact that picture is in that album too, there’s some– There was some German woman that we talked– Interviewer: “Alright, now we had been talking about what you were doing in Europe after the war ended and my next question is, did you make friends with any of the Germans or get to know any of them?” There were some occasionally, I remember one party, I don’t know whether there was three or something like that, invited us in the house and they were gonna give us each a drink and I took one sip and I didn’t want any ever anymore. I told them I could feel every drop all the way down and another one we visited with outside their house, I don’t remember the conversation but it was probably about the war or something and then there was a woman that wanted to know all �Jackson, Elmer about this country and I even got a letter from her after I got home, one letter and I don’t know anymore what it even said but she– Maybe she liked me, I don’t know, but anyway. Interviewer: “Alright, now you’ve got pictures and you’ve got some pictures of a family who were from Argentina.” Yes. Interviewer: “Who were they, but why were they there?” Why? Interviewer: “Yeah.” Apparently they’d gone to Germany to visit or tour or whatever, I don’t know, they were in Germany that’s all I know. (1:03:58) Interviewer: “And so– But I mean had they been forced to stay in Germany?” Well yes, when the war got going yes, they were interned, they were– They had no choice there was no way for them to go home. Interviewer: “And did they live in a camp or did you not know?” They had a home that they lived in at that time, yeah, that was the British zone. I didn’t know much about them other than we sat down and visited for a while and they were nice people. Interviewer: “Did many of the people there speak English?” Not many, I got so I could communicate before I left but not because I knew German but I could communicate one way or the other. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Okay, yeah I guess when you were doing the graves registration work you had a translator with you.” An interpreter. Interviewer: “Interpreter, now was that an American soldier or a German civilian?” That was a German, yeah. Interviewer: “A man or a woman?” Men, yeah. Interviewer: “And was he a young guy like you or was he older?” (1:05:18) Probably about– Maybe a little older than I was, I don’t know. Interviewer: “Okay, but you really didn’t know anything about him. Did you ever talk to him very much or learn anything about him?” No, we had a job to do. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you were doing this job would you stay away from camp for days at a time?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, and then where would you stay when you’re traveling around?” �Jackson, Elmer I don’t remember I just know we did, I remember when we got the job done we decided he we are in a British zone and we wanted to go back over the border to Holland and get a meal but we didn’t know if we could go over the border or not, I said “Let’s try.” So we got to the border and they stopped us, asked what we were doing and all that stuff, we told them that we were going to eat at a restaurant or something and “Go.” They were friendly too. Interviewer: “Alright, was the food better in the Netherlands?” What? Interviewer: “Was the food better in the Netherlands or just different?” I think it was just different more than anything but it was good, that’s all I know, all I remember. Interviewer: “Now when you were moving around in the British zone did you deal much with the British military?” (1:06:45) Did I? Interviewer: “Did you see British soldiers or Canadians?” Not in particular, no I think a lot of them had already gone home, I don’t know I don’t remember. Interviewer: “But you wouldn’t stay with them on their bases or anything like that?” The only time we got together with one of the other country men was after– Was not long after I had joined that division and we had gone to some building for the night or something and it had been separated or something but anyway there were a whole lot of British soldiers in there, even had a tank or two or something in there and I remember us conversing with them but that’s about the only time I remember. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Okay, now while you were in Europe did you have much contact with people back home? Did you write letters home or did people write to you?” I’ve got a box at home that I sent letters to my mother and dad and everything was censored at that time, you couldn’t say anything other than hello and goodbye, that’s all but they knew I was around yet, and yes I got a whole box of letters. I said I never even looked at one, it’s at home and I should take it down and look at it because I might find something interesting, I don’t know. Interviewer: “You should do that. Now did they write to you?” Oh yeah, I had letters from them. Interviewer: “Did you save those or did they get lost? Did you save those letters?” I don’t think so, I don’t remember doing it if I did. (1:08:57) Interviewer: “Alright, now I guess– And when do they let you go home?” When? Interviewer: “Yeah, kind of middle of–” The backend of that album shows us going home on the victory ship, what a difference. Going over was doing this and I didn’t even get sick, I was comfortable all the way but coming back that ship did this and I fought it for three days and then gave up. They had 50 gallon drums sitting here and there around the ship, that was what they expected anyway. Interviewer: “Alright, okay this is kind of now in like the summer of ‘46 by this time?” Well it was July 6th that I got– Six? No, 3rd I guess I got out. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Right, okay alright and now once you get back to the states do you get discharged right away?” Not immediately, I don’t remember that I did that, we got out at Sheridan. Interviewer: “Well they might have processed you at Fort Sheridan.” Might have what? Interviewer: “They might have processed you at Fort Sheridan when you got there.” Yeah, probably. Interviewer: “Cause they did a lot of that. Okay now what port did you come home to, did you go to New York or somewhere else?” (1:10:40) I don’t know, I was just glad to be home. I remember on a train that came to Chicago I guess and they got us up to Sheridan and I don’t remember, I don’t remember much about that I just was glad to be home, period. Interviewer: “Okay, but now– You don’t remember seeing the Statue of Liberty or anything like that coming into New York Harbor?” There’s a picture in there of it and I can see it from a great distance but they took us out somewhere where you couldn’t see the statue. Interviewer: “Yeah, well probably back to New Jersey again.” Might be, I don’t think I knew. �Jackson, Elmer Interviewer: “Yeah, but if you saw it at all that’s where you were okay.” I don’t think I knew really. Interviewer: “Okay, alright so now once you get back home it’s 1946 you’re out of the Army, what do you do next?” Well first of all to get back home I hitchhiked, well what I did, I did find a train that came to Niles and then, and it was like midnight and I got off the train to Niles and I’m thinking “Now what do I do?” So I wasn’t gonna quit, I just got out on the road and started walking, just a lone G.I. So I hitch hiked, I got a ride but somewhere– It must have been in Niles, I had a made a call home and I guess we didn’t even have a phone yet at that time, and had told the folks I was gonna be there– Be home, meet me at the Four Corners in town. So they met me at the Four Corners here when I got into Decatur, I remember that much. Interviewer: “Okay, and now once you got back home did you just work on the farm or get a job?” (1:13:22) When I got home the first thing I did– It was the 3rd I think because on the 4th of July I– Crazy, I wanted to go watch the fireworks in Paw Paw that was popular at that time and I went over and I stayed there for the first third or quarter of it I guess and I decided why did I want to hear all that after all I’ve been through and I turned around and went home. After I got home I– You had so many weeks of checks of labor, I can’t remember how many but anyway I used that first the first two or three weeks and then I decided I couldn’t stand that any longer, I wasn’t going to just do nothing. So I went out and got a job and– I know I went back and tried to work where I worked at the hardware down here before I was– Because when I was a senior in the last half of the year I had enough credits that I could work afternoons which I did right down here at the hardware store and I worked there until I went into the service. Then when I got home I went back there because I thought they’d maybe want me back, and they gave me my job back then it was only two or three months or so and I got sick and I was so sick, this I had done in Germany too. I was up north in Germany during something and I got so sick I couldn’t even swallow �Jackson, Elmer anymore and I had to go to a hospital in Germany but I had to get there on my own and I couldn’t even drink water anymore, and I was able to hitch hike with one of the jeeps or something that went about halfway and then I had to stay in that place overnight because there wasn’t anybody else going at that time. So the next morning I was able to hitch a ride into Wiesbaden to the hospital, just how I got there I don’t know now. Anyway I was so sick and I was in a line of sick people and when I got up to the doctor I said “I hope you’re not gonna send me back cause I was just about done.” And after he checked me he said “You’re not going back.” So I was in a hospital over there for over a week, then when I got home and worked at this hardware again for a short time got sick again. Over there I had Sulfa, which was popular at that time, over here I just went to the family doctor which was treating me and I wasn’t the only sicker and of course I was still living at home at that time with the folks, upstairs in the bedroom, and I was so sick that they knew I was sick and they went to the neighbors and called the doctor’s office and that was close to midnight, and he says– He told them to take me to the Borgess Hospital right away. Interviewer: “And that’s in Kalamazoo right?” Yes. (1:17:30) Interviewer: “So that’s not that close.” And then I was quarantined there for 11 days I think it was or 13, I don’t know, because they thought I had diphtheria which they never could prove but that’s what they thought, but then is when penicillin got popular and they gave me a shot every four hours around the clock and I didn’t even care if I died I wanted to just get it over with, I was so sick. Then I started to get better and I have to give penicillin the credit and after 11 days I think I was quarantined there, my parents couldn’t even come and talk to me, they let me go back home. Well then the hardware didn’t want me back, I think it was a case of they needed an excuse but they didn’t dare say anything while I was just coming home but– So I had to look for another job and I found one at Paw Paw in a grocery store, Simcox Super Food and I worked there for most of two years, in the meantime I had got a job with– Or gotten admittance I guess you’d call it, to MSU I was �Jackson, Elmer going to be civil engineer and after the first year I could see that probably is a little more than I should be doing. So I got another job– Or another course, that was a one year course and it was called “Farm Buildings” but they did a lot of other things. So there was only four mind you in the class and so the first six months it was what they could teach us in college at that time and then the last six months was on the job and I figured well they’re probably gonna send me up north somewhere where I’m miles from home, but that was in Dowagiac, I was dumbfounded but I got the job in Dowagiac and worked through this contract from that time on until– Well it was February, and of course in better weather why you was working every day of the week. Well in February before salamanders and tarps and all that stuff you couldn’t work out doors. So we were doing what we could do around the city or in homes around the country, I like the work. Beautiful, it was a nice man I was working for and I’ve told those guys he had a temper but he didn’t bother me, and I finally told him I was gonna have to go and see if I couldn’t get a more steady job cause the check was getting smaller and smaller, and he didn’t mind. He said okay he understood and I came back to Decatur because where do you start, and I started right here at this corner and I went in and asked for work, no, came in here and asked for work, no but there were two other guys in here at the time talking to the owner which I didn’t know. I didn’t know he knew me and I went to every place in town, doesn’t matter what kind of work I’d had done anything, and I went to Paw Paw, I even went up the Kalamazoo way and back Marcellus way I remember and I’d about decided I was probably gonna be working a couple days a week and that was gonna be it. (1:22:24) That same night, and I didn’t know he knew me, he came out to the house and wanted to know if I wanted to go to work the next morning and he says “The men are going to drive right by your house.” I said “Fine.” And I’ve been here ever since that day. Interviewer: “Okay, this is a plumbing contractor– This is a plumber that you work for then?” He was in the plumbing and hardware and a little bit of heating but it was nothing like this today, that was in ‘49, in ‘51 I got married to a women I met in a grocery store and in ‘53 this owner wanted to know– Came out the house where we were living then, wanted to know if I didn’t want to buy the place, I was getting a check once a week why would I want to– all of this, but my wife thought we better do that. So then we had to find money to do it, the year before this �Jackson, Elmer owner had gone down to this local bank and wanted to know if he would get us going if we asked for money to buy it and he told the owner yes. So when this came to my turn to go to the bank and ask he said no, so we went around looking for money and went to Lawton and there’d been some banking in the family done there before and my wife went in there and asked and he took us into his office and we got a real lecture, I think it took an hour, about business and what not, what we were gonna do. He said okay and it was set up with the previous owner to pay him every six months, he died before he got his first check. Interviewer: “Oh my.” He had an adopted son who worked here, I learned a lot from him but he didn’t want the business. So it was my wife and I, partners all those years and then she got Parkinson’s and it was 20 plus years I guess before she finally passed away, and now I have it and I don’t know what to do with it but it’s up to the two sons that are still doing the work, they’re doing fine and my youngest son and I come to town every day and keep the business doors open and he answers phones and I do some paperwork and the others are out doing the job and fixing this and fixing that. Interviewer: “Yeah, well the world will always need plumbers.” (1:25:48) Oh yes, always something broke or needs replacing, it never quits and I’ll have to say there were bad times and there were good times but I never quit, I never thought about even. Interviewer: “Sure, okay now to go back to the time when you were in the Army.” Yeah. Interviewer: “What do you think you learned from that or did that affect you?” I learned not to go in the Army again if I can help it, they knew what I knew I learned, I learned to be a father– Well, alright I met the wife in ‘49, got married in ‘51 and after we’d gone together �Jackson, Elmer for some time she inferred she’d like to get married and I said “Not until I get place to live in where I don’t have to pay rent or something like that, or live with the folks or anything else. So I started to build a house in 1950 and it was another story but I had made up my mind that’s gonna be, I’m gonna do this and then we’ll get married. So in December of ‘53 we’d got enough of the house and clothes, that’s about all I can call it because we’d had– I had so much trouble getting that house built you wouldn’t believe, they think we had a lot of rain this year, I don’t think it rained any more this year than it did that year and every time I moved it was raining and I was rained off of that how many times I have no idea but I was determined it was going to be or else. So I finally got my friend and his wife and my girlfriend at the time and we– I had the trench all dug for ready mix— Or it was mix that you made, gravel and Portland, and this owner had a cement mixer that wasn’t in very good shape but we used it pour the footing for this house, and it rained and it rained and I had dug this trench– Beautiful trench, it had been a dry spring, and it rained and it rained and the sides started to fall in on the trench now that’s a first. Well I knew there were some old boards down at the house I lived in, the parents, so I went down and got some old boards and came back and I boarded up these places that had caved in and got the friend out and his wife and my girlfriend and I had the man [unintelligible] the Dillard gravel and he dumped gravel and I’d had a temporary electric pole put up and had Portland and one morning we started mixing cement. (1:29:40) This trench had that much water in it all the way around,we’re gonna do something so we start at one corner, put his wife and my girlfriend over in the far corner with buckets and poured cement at this corner, pushed the water around to them and they bail it out and dumped it out in the field, now tell me if you’ve ever heard one worse, but we got a footing and surprisingly it turned out great, but it was still raining about every time you took a breath and then I had to lay blocks, I did that all by myself. I’d learned a lot of this from the contractor I worked for in Dowagiac and started to frame it, hey. I had the plan that I had made up myself and started to frame it, got Celotex on the outside so you covered the walls, and it was still raining every other day. I had put asphalt felt paper on the floor and it was still raining off and on and it got so there there was water on the asphalt felt that wouldn’t go away and I went down there with a brace and a bit, I don’t know if you know what that is, it makes a hole in the floor and let the water out. I got a roof over it finally, not without more problems along the way, and I got the inside– Got it all enclosed, but nothing on the walls but I decided I’m gonna do something with the walls so I put plasterboard on the kitchen, the living room, and �Jackson, Elmer the bathroom, three rooms that’s enough to live in and I had worked here and he sold appliances too, Bendix Walker, and I got a used one that he didn’t know what to do with and took it home and repaired it and put it in use and that first Bendix Walker had to be bolted to the floor because that’s the only way you can keep it from walking away, and I bought a dryer from a used place in Kalamazoo for $10 which was unbelievable, and I knew how to fix it so I fixed it and we had a dryer. I had put up a temporary counter for the kitchen sink and put a sink in it and we had dug in a well outside by hand for the cement anyway so I got that piped into a centrifugal pump at that time, not a jet, and I had water, got it piped into that kitchen sink and the bathroom and we got married and if you don’t think I had fun getting to that part. Interviewer: “Alright, now of course all of that came out of the question I asked you, did you think that you learned anything from being in the Army or if it changed you at all or was it just a couple years out of your life?” The G.I bill first is what I appreciated immensely cause what we got coming out of the Army was $200 for having Germans shoot at you, and the G.I bill put me in MSU and I had tried to enlist in the Air Force anyway and I wanted to fly but I didn’t know how I was gonna but I got acquainted with the guy who was teaching flying over at Lawton and he taught me how to fly. (1:34:21) I had quite an– Two experiences there that I shouldn’t even be here but anyway one of them– This was a tailor craft, I don’t expect you to know, anyway a side by side and after eight hours just getting trained I had no idea that that was the point I was going to be on my own but he got out one day and says “Go!” And I was scared to death, I didn’t know I was gonna do this all by myself, and I went up and around and came back down and I have to say I was successful but then I flew a few more hours and I was taking off one day by myself and I got up 400 feet, at 500 feet you’d go and turn and do whatever, I don’t know, and at 400 feet something went “Bang!” I’m there by myself, the plane did something, I don’t know what, what do I do now? Well I could look out the window and the Welch's grape juice factory was underneath so I didn’t think that was a very good place to set it down, but I found out the engine was still running, not very well but it was running. So I made a left turn and every time I’d make a turn I’d lose another 100 feet, and I was only up 400. Another turn and went the other end, and the last turn got me back on the field and I thought “Son of a gun.” And I know they knew something went �Jackson, Elmer wrong because they were out to meet me and the one guy, I don’t know if he was a mechanic or not, raised the hood on that thing, it had blown a spark plug right out of the engine. Whether it didn’t get turned in all the way or– I have no idea but I got out and left, but I went back I’m not a quitter and I flew a total of 60 plus hours but it was costing a lot of money to fly and I thought “I can’t do this and something else I want to do too.” About that time I wanted to build this darn house so I had to quit flying and that was what that– Interviewer: “You got a certificate there, yep alright.” What did I learn? I guess mostly that I could do about anything I wanted to if I just made up my mind to do it and I did. What else could I learn, I don’t know. Interviewer: “I just ask the question to see what people say. So alright, well the whole thing makes for a pretty good story so I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to share it today.” There’s so much more to show you but if you don’t wanna look that’s alright too. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context JacksonE2312V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jackson, Elmer Jr. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-07 Title A name given to the resource Jackson, Elmer (Interview transcript and video), 20519 Description An account of the resource Elmer Jackson was born in 1925 in southwestern Michigan. Jackson was in high school when he heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor over the radio. Jackson was later drafted into the Army in August of 1944 and was sent to Camp Wood, Texas, for three months of Basic Training. He was then shipped to Scotland aboard the SS Queen Mary and was quickly transferred to South Hampton, shipped across the English Channel to the Normandy beachfront, and trained up to the frontlines. He was assigned as a replacement rifleman to the 291st Regiment, 75th Infantry Division on the Meuse River. After moving south through Luxembourg, Jackson’s company took the fight eastward toward the Rhine River. Once across the Rhine, he saw more combat and observed several high-altitude bombing missions, which he was grateful for. His Division had advanced well into Germany by the end of the war in Europe and he was quickly transferred to the occupational forces in Bad Tölz and Fischbach. Jackson was then transferred to Camp Baltimore where he worked as a Military Policeman, then as an office assistant, and finally in Graves Registration. He applied and was accepted as a driver of a weapons carrier, driving through the postwar Allied occupation zones and questioning local mayors on the locations of possible American gravesites. He also spent some time in Switzerland and Paris, France, and in July of 1946, he was shipped back to the United States and was officially discharged from the Army at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. Jackson then traveled back home and resumed work at a local hardware store. After being fired due to a long period of being sick he eventually went to work for a local grocery store and attended Michigan State University where he pursued a degree in civil engineering. He then traveled around Michigan attempting to find steady work and was denied several times before acquiring a job with a local hardware and plumbing business in 1949, which he later purchased in 1953. Reflecting upon his time in the service, Jackson believed the Army instilled in him the mentality that he could achieve anything he set his mind to. He also greatly appreciated the support of the GI Bill, which helped him achieve admission into MSU. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/29312cf47cfc019d01819361104f7f4b.mp4 0531884c66a6fb8a58a1a11f868a7dae https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4d544660c4bff6458c6fe931d7cfb2c0.pdf 374fafa8486622cb46af8de2d4ebc93b PDF Text Text Hills, Frank Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Vietnam War Interviewee’s Name: Frank Hills Length of Interview: (1:12:28) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Hokulani Buhlman Interviewer: We’re at the 2018 Ripcord Reunion and talking with Frank Hills of Suwanee, Georgia. Okay now to begin with give us some background on yourself and where and when were you born? I was born in Hartford, Connecticut, 1943. Interviewer: Okay, now did you grow up there or did you move around? I grew up through my senior year in college, I went– Excuse me, my senior year in high school, I went to the University of Iowa and people say “Why’d you go from Connecticut to Iowa?” Because I had an athletic scholarship and was about as far away from home as I could get. Interviewer: Okay, and what was your family doing for a living when you were a kid? (00:48) My mom was a school teacher, my dad was an engineer at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft in east Hartford, Connecticut. Interviewer: Okay, was he doing that during World War II or was he in service? No, he was in the good war, the big one, he was in the Pacific with the 11th Airborne Division. Interviewer: Okay, did he drop in the Philippines with them? He jumped on Corregidor. Interviewer: Okay, well people often don’t know we get a little bit of parachute work there, over there and he’s part of that. Alright, did he talk about that at all when you were a kid? �Hills, Frank Not much, in those days my parents were depression people who grew up in that time and when the war was over my dad came home and went to work. Interviewer: Okay, alright so what sport did you have a scholarship in? Football. Interviewer: Okay, Iowa football, alright and I don’t know was there kind of a culture shock going out to Iowa from Connecticut? In 1961 Connecticut was far different than it is today, very far different. I never had a car in high school and you never traveled too far from home, when you’re 18 years old it’s not too much of a culture shock cause there’s a lot of other 18 year old kids that are there in school. Interviewer: Alright, and so did you graduate on schedule in ‘65? I graduated in ‘66, playing sports. I didn't always take a full load so it took me an extra two semesters to get out. Interviewer: Alright, so did you actually play on Iowa’s football team? (2:34) Yes. Interviewer: Okay, and what position did you play? Defensive back. Interviewer: Okay, and how’d that go? I played, I didn’t go as a defensive back I went as a quarterback, but coach saw things different said “I’m gonna– I want to make you a defensive back.” So, that was fine. Interviewer: Alright, so you graduate in ‘66? Yeah. Interviewer: Now by this time there’s a war going on in Vietnam and the draft is ramping up quite a bit. Did you consider enlisting or did you have other plans? �Hills, Frank I went to law school and my dad called me, I had been in law school– My second semester and I got a phone call from my father and said “I’ve got a letter here from Selective Service.” I said “Well open it up.” Well that was my draft notice, what I did is I called the board and I asked them to give me an extension so I could finish the semester and they did. So when I got that I knew I was gonna go in the Army, I went down to a recruiter and I said “Look it, I got drafted but I have an extension. I want to enlist because I want to go to officer candidate school.” So– And this was Chicago– Interviewer: Where were you going to law school? I was going to Kent College of Law, part of Illinois Institute of Technology. So I took the tests, had an interview and they said “Okay when do you want to go in?” I said “Well I’ll go in in January as soon as I finish this semester.” And one thing led to another and I went in the Army in 1968. Interviewer: Okay, now at this point in time how much did you know about Vietnam? I knew some things, I knew where it was, I knew what was going on. The protests had not really started that much, I think you know what I’m talking about but it got ramped up after, I think it got ramped up about 1969. Interviewer: Well they were certainly in 1968, that’s the King and Kennedy assassinations and it’s the Democratic Convention if you were in Chicago at that point you’d have known that. (5:18) I was in Chicago when his honor was. Interviewer: Yes the mayor of– Yeah but then of course when they get the Democratic Convention in Chicago in the summer of ‘68, then things got pretty crazy as well but by then you’re on, you’re going off to training and elsewhere and Kent College of Law I mean that would– And I.I.T that would not be a place that would have been a real hot bed probably event of activity. No. Interviewer: Yeah and Iowa at that time when you were there probably not so much either. No. �Hills, Frank Interviewer: Yeah, okay so– Alright so you go, you had your year of law school now and now do you go through– You’ve enlisted in the Army, initially are you going in as an enlisted man at this point? I’m going in as an enlisted man, what it did when I enlisted and was accepted into OCS there was no break in service. So I went in, I went to Fort Polk, Louisiana for basic training, Fort Leonard Wood for advanced individual training, and then Fort Benning for six months of OCS training. Interviewer: Okay, so what was basic at Fort Polk like? The reason I went– I had a choice of where I wanted to go and I went in I could’ve gone to Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Dix, or Fort Polk. Well this was Chicago, it was winter time, I went to Fort Polk cause it was Louisiana it was a little warmer. So then when I was done with that they shipped me to Fort Leonard Wood. Interviewer: Right, okay but– Okay but what actually happens in basic down there when you were there? Usual basic, nothing of any significance I was just one of the, you know many people going through. Interviewer: Okay but physically what do you have to do? (7:05) I was in pretty good shape when I got there so there was nothing that I couldn’t handle. Interviewer: Okay so there’s physical training that you do, you’re marching around and that kind of stuff. What about– I mean a lot of people when they talk about basic they talk about the emphasis on discipline and on obeying orders and all that kind of thing. Now you were a little bit older going into that than a lot of the other guys. How did you deal with or handle that or how did the drill instructors deal with you? Well they made me a squad leader so since I had some training in college, you know they made me a squad leader since I was like three years older. I’d already graduated from college and there was a lot of 18 or 19 year old kids coming in, just the wet behind the ears, so they thought I could help them out a little. Interviewer: Okay, and basically how did the drill instructors treat the trainees? �Hills, Frank Probably wouldn’t– Probably they wouldn’t be able to do what they did at the time today, you know today it’s touchy-feely we don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings and times have changed. We’re talking 1968 and what are we? 2018? A long time ago, we don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings today. Interviewer: Alright, so there’s verbal abuse, I don’t know– Oh verbal abuse, yeah that was just normal depending upon your make up– Just rolled off my back, you know you have to know what they’re trying to do, don’t take it personally. Interviewer: Yeah, so did you have a little better feel for that than the younger guys? I think I did. Interviewer: Okay, alright but you were in good physical shape going in given your background and the rest of this, you can handle that kind of thing and you understood the game but– And the instructors didn’t get too perverse then? No. Interviewer: Sort of break people down, build them back up, that kind of thing. (9:05) They did that mostly yes. Interviewer: “That’s another level, okay alright now when you went to Fort Leonard Wood what was the focus of the AIT there? Engineering. We built bridges, we built a lot of bridges and we did a lot of that type of work, it– Harassment was not there, there was always some harassment but we worked every day. We went out in the field we did this, and we did that but a lot of engineering work so there was no harassment. You came in, you were tired and they left us alone, was completely different. Interviewer: Right, okay now how long did those training sessions go? Eight weeks for both. Interviewer: Okay, yeah that’s pretty much the standard at that point. Alright, and then go on then and you go directly from AIT then in OCS? I had a week off. �Hills, Frank Interviewer: A week off, okay. Then I showed up Fort Benning in June and it was hot. Interviewer: Alright, so describe what the OCS program consisted of. 26 weeks, you signed up for 26 weeks at a double time, you were always running. We started with about 235 candidates and I think we graduated anywhere from 155 to 160, a lot of drop outs, a lot of people quit but just the nature of the beast they couldn’t– The optic was to get rid of people if you couldn’t cut it, you’re out. I don’t– I mean I just went along with the, you know the system, don’t take anything serious. Interviewer: Alright, what specific skill set did they try to give you? At that time there was various OCS classes, there was artillery OCS at Fort Sill, engineering OCS at Fort Belvoir, Virginia– Let’s see, armored OCS at Fort Knox, infantry OCS at Fort Benning etc, etc. As we speak today there is one OCS it’s branch and material, when you’re done with OCS then you go to your basic branch, whatever that branch may be. So this was pretty much strictly infantry and that’s what we did, tactics, mortars, all types of weapons, a lot of field exercises. Interviewer: Okay, so map reading and that kind of thing. (11:57) Map reading, day, night, what have you. Interviewer: Okay, did they give you much by way of weapons training or did they leave that for the early levels? The 45 which was in, we fired that, we fired M-14s, we fired M-16s, we fired machine guns from the M-60 to the 50 cal. We fired mortars, we had to know how to adjust fire, we fired artillery pieces, know how to adjust fire. Interviewer: Okay, so you’re trained to call in artillery fire and that kind of thing? Yes. Interviewer: Okay, alright and what kinds of people did you have as instructors in Fort Benning? �Hills, Frank Most officers, captains– A lot of captains who had come back from Vietnam, they were the primary instructors. Interviewer: And how much of their experience in Vietnam did they share with you, not directly or? Not much, you know as far as one on one conversation, not much at all. Interviewer: Okay, so this is still kind of– It’s generic training on some level. It’s generic, there’s classroom and there’s field work every week. Interviewer: Okay, now you’re doing this in 1968 there was a reasonable expectation that most of the officers who got through that would go to Vietnam. Infantry OCS you’re going. Interviewer: Yeah, so did they have exercises specifically geared to Vietnam? (13:25) No– I don’t want to be emphatic on that, they did not have a lot but they said “This is what you need to know.” and they gave you small hints, but once you graduated you would’ve been assigned to some form of a division in the United States and you would’ve gone through various Vietnam scenarios. Interviewer: Okay, so somewhere along the line in principle somebody gets the training, it sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t. Okay, alright so you make it through the 26 weeks, so now we’ve gotten basically to the end of ‘68 pretty much? Alright, so what’s your next step from there? Well what happened was I want to say maybe there was three weeks to go, a couple lieutenants came over with some dogs and they said “We’re looking for volunteers to join this program, Scout Dogs.” Now people say “Well what do scout dogs do?” The Scout Dog program they walk point for infantry units at the lowest level of the platoon and you had to go to jump school, you had to go to ranger school and then you had to go to scout dog school and if I’m not mistaken there was four of us in my class that put their hands up in the air. I said “I’m gonna try this.” You know they say don’t volunteer for anything, well I volunteered. �Hills, Frank Interviewer: Okay, so when do you start– So now you’ve gotta, it was jump school first then ranger school? Yup and then I signed in–-the Scout Dogs training was right there at Fort Benning so I never left. Interviewer: So you did jump school there, and a lot of Ranger schools there anyways. How long was the jump school? Three weeks. Interviewer: Okay, and what basically did that consist of? You’ve got Ground Week, you have Tower Week and then you jump out of an airplane. You make five jumps. Interviewer: Okay, explain what Tower Week is. Hopefully a lot of people have seen it on TV or some of the old shows; they have these towers that are 250 feet high, they bring you up in a parachute and they cut you loose, and parachute comes to the ground and you practice your parachute landing fall and you’re good to go. Interviewer: Now are you attached to anything from the tower that will catch you and keep you from… The parachute is. The parachute is attached. You know it’s–if I can describe it, it’s like an upside down calendar, you know? It’s upside down, the parachute goes up and then they cut you loose and you drift to the ground. Interviewer: So it’s about as safe as they can make it at that point. Yes. Not that you can’t get hurt, but during Ground Week you’re over and over and over again practicing parachute landing falls. Interviewer: Kind of jumping off of platforms or things like that? Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Now, when you got to the actual jumping out of airplanes part, did you enjoy that? (16:45) �Hills, Frank Yeah, as a matter of fact I did. There was nothing to it after–the army teaches you by rope, over and over and over again, so you know what’s gonna happen. It’s not like, I think, if you went to a skydiving club they’d give you an hour of instructions then send you up in an airplane. Well, I have two weeks of instruction. Interviewer: So by then you were ready to get it over with. Absolutely. Interviewer: Okay. Now, Ranger School is a little more elaborate than that, right? Yeah, it’s an endurance course. No sleep, small unit tactics, it just prepares you. Probably the best course there is. Prepares you for what to expect in Vietnam, it’s a great course. Interviewer: So you’re doing escape and evasion things, or just trying to operate? Given a mission and you’re just trying to operate? You’re given scenarios. Everyone is in charge at one time or another and that’s what they give you: practical, tactical exercises. Small unit. Interviewer: Now, do they do all of that in Benning or do they move you around? You got Fort Benning, you have Dahlonega—the mountain course, then Eglin Air Force Base, the wet course. Interviewer: The swamp course, okay. And all of those potentially resemble parts of what you might get in Vietnam depending on where you were. Absolutely. Interviewer: Okay, and the instructors there, were they rangers themselves? All of them. Interviewer: And how long was that? 12 weeks or? 8 weeks. Interviewer: 8 weeks, okay. �Hills, Frank Maybe nine, I mean, eight weeks is the course, I think maybe we were there maybe four days early. Interviewer: Okay, so through all of that and then Scout Dog School next? Then I was there at Fort Benning and came back and I went over to the Scout Dog School, where it was located. Interviewer: Now, the Scout Dog Program is something that people might have vaguely heard about but are not gonna know a whole lot about, so when you went to that training kind of take us through that, what you were doing there. Well first of all, as an officer I had a class—I was the class leader. But I did what the class did: I had a dog that was assigned to me, every student in the class had a dog assigned to them, and it takes a few days to get acclimated to the dog. And it was approximately 8 weeks, you go through and you just—the instructors were great. Most of them were all Vietnam veterans that came back. The Scout Dog Program, there were three kinds of dogs: scout dogs walked point for infantry units. There was a phrase that scout dogs had, “Early, silent warning.” They would let you know that something was not right. And when we got there—I’m jumping ahead—when we got to Vietnam we still trained over there, but we used Vietnamese. We would put them out and we’d take the dogs out and let them alert on the Vietnamese. That’s one type of dog program. We also had mine dogs that could detect explosives. We practiced with that all the time. And then I had tracker teams. They were assigned to me, I think I had 3 tracker teams, that’s three guys and a labrador. For instance, if there was an ambush and there was a blood trail, you wanted to follow it, bring in a tracker team. That’s how that worked. But the primary requirements for use were for scout dogs. (20:53) Interviewer: So when you were doing your training in the states was that for all kinds or was that just for the scout dogs? That was just for the scout dogs. Interviewer: Alright. So, were most of the trainees enlisted, then? All of them were. �Hills, Frank Interviewer: Okay, so they recruited you guys out of your OCS class basically to be leaders for these units. And then, did you go with the men you trained to Vietnam or did they reassign you at that point? Originally… Originally, when the scout dog platoons deployed, they deployed lock, stock and barrel. Handlers, dogs, company commander, what have you. They went lock, stock and barrel. But as you know, during the Vietnam War continued replacements were coming in, so to answer your question: no, I went over as a replacement. And the soldiers who were the dog handlers all volunteered for it. They weren’t drafted into that program, they had to volunteer for it. (22:00) Interviewer: Now, when did you actually then go to Vietnam? I went over in 1970. Interviewer: Roughly what month or time of year? I wanna say March, 1970. Interviewer: Okay, and did you stay in Vietnam a full year or did you come back early? I stayed a full year. Interviewer: Okay. Make sure I have that in notes. Okay, so early 1970, you’ve now been in the army for some time training, various kinds of places, now during all this training how much attention were you paying to the course of the Vietnam War? Well. I knew it was there, I knew I was going.You know, it was a foregone conclusion. If you were an infantry officer, graduated from OCS, you were going. Interviewer: Now, did you think about it politically at all? Whether or not it was a good idea or did you just stay out of that? Kinda stayed out. You know, TV at that time was not the way it is today, so you—what was it, the 6 o’clock news or 5 o’clock news? That was what you got. It’s not like 24/7 that we have today. Different time, different era. Interviewer: So, you could really kind of tune it out if you had other things to do. Absolutely. �Hills, Frank Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, now you get to early 1970, you’re going to Vietnam, do you get a leave after dog school? Um… I had a two week leave. Now, I went over—I knew I was going—I went over specifically. I flew out of Travis Air Force Base, so I flew from Hartford, Connecticut to Travis Air Force Base in the San Francisco area. So, I got there and I spent a day there, and then they told me to “Come back at 5 o’clock tomorrow afternoon, your flight’s gonna go.” I came back and I remember it was Braniff, remember Braniff airlines? Well this was a nice big orange airplane, you can’t miss it, so. Anyway, flew to Vietnam, landed at Tan Son Nhut airport that was in Saigon and they took us to… I think it was the 90th replacement company, well when I got there I had a phone number to call. So I called the USRV dog detachment—United States and Republic of Vietnam dog detachment—I said, ‘Hey this is Lieutenant Hills, I’m here.” they said “We’ll be over in a couple hours to get’cha.” So I never really spent a night in the 90th replacement. They picked me up, I spent a week in Long Binh just getting somewhat acclimated to the climate. Interviewer: What was your first impression of Vietnam when you got there? Well… kinda smelled. There’s a smell about it, there’s a smell. It was hot, and it smelled. Not being derogatory, but there was a—I know you probably heard that from other people. Interviewer: Yeah. But I always ask, cause you never know. Alright, now, while you’re first there, I mean going from Tan Son Nhut to Long Binh or whatever did you pay any attention to the scenery or what the place looked like? Yes… I had see that—now, I’m gonna… a little sidelight. All the press—UPI, API, all the news people—hung around Saigon. So what you saw is they’d go out in the rice patties with the first cavalry division or what have you, they never wanted to venture too far out. So I think the American public had the perception that Vietnam was all rice paddies, which it wasn’t. It’s a beautiful country. But they just saw that Saigon area, and I think the first CAB was there and there was a couple other units that were there. Interviewer: Yeah, First Infantry Division, Ninth Division, things like that. CAB was off in some place else but, yeah. Well after a week at the dog training detachment, and just getting somewhat brought into the picture, they said “Okay, we’ve got an assignment for you.” I said okay, where is it? They said “You’re going to the 101st Airborne Division, third brigade.” That’s great, where is it? So, it couldn't get any farther north, if I got any farther north I would have been in North Vietnam. Took me to the airport, took me three changes of aircraft to get there, and I got there and �Hills, Frank somebody from the 58th Scout Dog Platoon picked me up. I never had to go through the Screaming Eagle Replacement Training School, they brought me right to the unit and I started from there. Interviewer: Alright, now what was home base for the unit? Camp Evans. That was pretty far north, just south of the DMZ. Interviewer: It’s not all the way up the country but it’s north of way. Yeah. Interviewer: Yeah, and that was the Third Brigade’s one and so forth. Okay, what sort of reception do you get when you join a unit? Or what happens when you get there? Well, I got there, I just—you know, the typical signing in, make sure I sign the orders and what have ya. And then I was replacing a platoon leader who was rotating out, so I spent a week with him. And then he rotated out and there I was. I had a good First Sergeant, so it takes time. It takes time to get your feet wet and what have you. Interviewer: Now how helpful was that first week with the old guy there? You know it’s—it was somebody to turn to if you have questions. He was there to take my hand, how’s that sound? Lead me around. My boss was the S3 of the Third Brigade 101st Airborne Division. That was my boss. Interviewer: Now explain for a general audience, what does S3 refer to? S3 of a brigade, he was a brigade 3, he was a major. He was in charge of operations. S2 is intelligence, S3 does the operations. I, 58th Platoon, was one of his assets. He had the 58th Scout Dog Platoon, he had a Range Platoon that did the long range reconnaissance, he had a Rate of Reaction Force. These units all reported to him, of course he reported to the Brigade Commander. Interviewer: And who was the Brigade Commander at that point? There was a… well you’re asking me, I think it was Harrison. Interviewer: Probably not yet. There was a Colonel Bradley… �Hills, Frank No no, Colonel Bradley was a battalion commander. Interviewer: No, he was a brigade commander. Military historian, I’m sorry, but Bradley didn’t make a particular impression on you or he wasn’t there—you weren’t overlapping with him long enough for that to register? No, no, because Harrison… Interviewer: Because Harrison comes in not too long after you did. Because I had two, two brigade commanders. I had Ben Harrison and David Grange. David Grange went on to get 3 stars. I kind of—I think I was a Lieutenant when I met him. I just kind of stayed in the background, you know? Didn’t wanna open my mouth and put my foot in it. Interviewer: So when you get there, so March, 1970, April… What’s going on in the brigade at that point? What do they have you doing? Well, okay, now, to get a scout dog team they just have to request it, so every day myself or my platoon sergeant, if I wasn’t out in the field with one of my dog handlers and a dog, I had to go up to the brigade. I had to let the brigade 3 know how many teams I had out in the field and how many I had in waiting, and he wanted to know this. It also forced me to go to the—every day they had a brigade meeting and it let you know what was going on on the whole AO. I knew what was happening even though I stood in the back of the room, I got the big picture, which a lot of these platoon leaders in the field didn’t know what was going on. They were told “You go here or “You go there”, “This is what you’re gonna do, you’re gonna search this area.” I knew what was going on. I knew who was out there, I knew who was in contact. So, looking back it’s something that I was thankful for. Interviewer: Alright. Now, the point when you come in, this is the point when the operations that sort of become the Ripcord Campaign started to happen, the firebase is established in April and you have fighting in the area around that until the siege in July. Now, that kind of period—March, April, May—what kind of things would the scout dog units be doing and what were they finding? Well… They weren’t finding anything, but they were gonna. Lemme rephrase that: they were alerting on what was out there, the dogs don’t find anything but the platoons are out there maneuvering whatever AO that company is in. And again, as I’ve said before the dogs would give early silent warning there’s something there. Different terrain, very mountainous terrain I was in. Uphill, downhill, nothing was open. Was really tough terrain to operate in, not like the �Hills, Frank Delta, not like the troops sloshing through the waters. The mountains, very beautiful area—I don’t have any desire to go back but it’s picturesque. Interviewer: Now how soon before you were going out with the dog teams? Or were you doing that even in the first week? Probably about a month. Interviewer: And why did you go with them? Just to… One I’s felt as though I had to, Two I wanted to see what was going on out there. I wanted to see the actual dogs in operation. Different operating in the United States, different operating in training in Vietnam, so you’re out there. Where I was there was no good guys, there was all bad guys. It was Indian country1. Interviewer: So if they…That was pretty much anything that could be serious. If they threw an alert, normally there was something out there. There was an enemy soldier, or more than one. Interviewer: Now how dangerous was scout dog duty? Not the best position, that’s why it was all volunteer for these guys, they had to walk point. They’re out there in front of everybody and when a dog threw an alert, if you looked at the dog you could tell how strong it was. You better hit the ground. Don’t stand there and look around because something’s out there, you just learn from experience. Get down, get behind something. A lot of times—now, it's possible it could have been a boobie-trap out there—there’s a scent that remains. A dog could hit a boobie-trap accidentally, and that has happened too. But usually it's an asset for the platoons, so if you have the opportunity use it, use the dogs. You know, you hate to lose a dog but use it. It’ll save your life. Interviewer: Now, did you have a sense that the Vietnamese took the dogs seriously or would try to shoot them, or? Yeah. To answer your question, yeah. If they could shoot the dogs they would, they knew what they were doing. They knew what the dogs would do, so it’s not like it was a surprise to them. (35:22) 1 In the Vietnam war, a term used to describe unknown and dangerous territory inhabited by the Viet Cong or NVA. �Hills, Frank Interviewer: I guess some infantry guys will talk about how North Vietnamese will have priorities. You know you pick off the Officer, the Radioman, the Medic or Machinegunner and so forth. Were dogs particular targets or were they just big ‘might get shot at’ if they’re in the wrong place? You have to consider the type of terrain that you’re in. Again, if you’re down south and you’re out in the open, different story. Up in the northern part of south Vietnam on I Corps? Very mountainous. So, the troops weren’t necessarily out in the open all the time. They were fighting going uphill, downhill and what have ya. If the enemy had an ambush, a dog could usually alert on an ambush. Immediately you would know just by looking at the dog what type of alert it was, and if it was a strong alert, hit the ground. I’ll give you an example: I happened to be with a dog handler and we were out there and the dog threw an alert. I hit the ground, the dog handler hit the ground, grabbed his dog. The platoon leader came up and said “What the hell is going on?” and got shot. They opened up on him, just… I’m sorry about that. Don’t ask what’s goin’ on, if you get my point as far as things like that can happen. Interviewer: Okay. Now, how far afield would you wind up going? I mean, you’re not spending all your time at Camp Evans? Would you go out to fire bases? Yes. I wouldn’t stay on the firebase but I’ll just give an example: when it came to Ripcord the battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Lucas sent word back that he wanted to see me. He wanted myself and a sergeant to come out and talk to him. What he wanted to do was he wanted to put dogs on the firebase and that’s not the dog’s mission, the dogs are not gonna tell you that. And I was a Lieutenant at the time and I basically told him in a nice way that “The dog is not gonna help you on the fire base. You’re in Indian Country and there’s smells all over the place, so the dog really not gonna be an asset to you because you know what’s out there. But your line units can have the dogs, your platoons and your companies can have the dogs, all I have to do is request them.” And he acquiesced. He was happy I came out and told him what they can do and can’t do. Interviewer: And was he expecting them to kind of just be on the perimeter of the fire base? Yeah. And that’s the last thing you needed was a dog running around out there. Interviewer: Did you form any particular impression of Lucas one way or another as an officer? �Hills, Frank He listened to me, but he asked for my opinion. I mean it’s not that I said “You can’t have it” I just told him it’s not gonna help him out. But it’s gonna help his units out there around Ripcord and the other hills over there. (39:05) Interviewer: Okay, now is this a period before the heavy bombardment on that hilltop? Because July was when it was really bad. Yeah, this was in June. Interviewer: Okay. And then all hell broke loose in July. Interviewer: Alright, now, when you start, you get some more intense firefights and things like that around Ripcord in July and different companies run into different kinds of problems. Were you sending dogs to them at that point or were they going to other places instead? I was sending the dogs to whoever requested them. Interviewer: Right. Now, they all had to be part of the third brigade, I wasn’t gonna necessarily send dogs to the first brigade because they had a scout dog platoon down there. So whoever wanted them, they could have them. And the teams normally went out for five days, dogs get tired. Interviewer: What did dog maintenance consist of? What do you have to do to look after the dogs? Well, we had—you’ve heard of army medics? We had vet techs. They were pretty good. We had a veterinarian in Phu Bai, we had in fact a couple veterinarians in Phu Bai. Now, the veterinarians, not only did they take care of our dogs which was a small part of their job, they were in charge of inspection of all food stuffs coming in and made sure that drinking water was okay. Like, today if you saw a TV and you saw Desert Storm or what have you and you saw the cases and cases of water that came in, well we didn’t have that. I don’t think we had designer water. Interviewer: No. �Hills, Frank Evian wasn’t developed then. So, they were responsible for water purification, they were responsible for anything that came in as far as food stuffs go. Interviewer: And Phu Bai is where the division headquarters was. You’ve got brigade headquarters, Camp Evans, and then Phu Bai is closer to Hue and— Camp Eagle. Interviewer: And Camp Eagle, yeah, and that’s where they are. But in the meantime you got enlisted men, vet techs who were actually taking care of the dogs. The dogs, yeah. Interviewer: Okay. What do they feed the dogs? Well, lemme tell you this, when a guy goes out in the field he’s carrying not only his own rations, he’s carrying dog food. And he’s carrying water. He’s carrying a load of stuff. We had— the dogs had, when they were in the rear, they had dry food. But out there they had little patties, little like hamburger patties, but you had—the dog had to have water too. Interviewer: Yeah. And that was very important, so these handlers are carrying a lot of water. A lot of water and dog food. And that’s five days worth of stuff, plus his stuff that he’s carrying. Interviewer: Did the dogs get tropical diseases? They could get heat stroke. You could tell, I mean the dogs, I’m gettin’ stopped. Sometimes the dog is worn out. He’s scrambling the way the soldiers are scrambling: if you’re going up a hill, he’s going up the hill, and the tireder he gets the less alert he’s gonna be. Just like a soldier, the tireder a soldier the less alert he is. Interviewer: Yeah. Alright, now, how long did you stay doing that? Did you spend a whole year in Vietnam doing that? (42:39) A whole year. A whole year. Interviewer: Okay, and then did the—different things happen sort of militarily in that period, you had intense fighting kind of through Ripcord and then it’s kind of quieter in a �Hills, Frank lot of the brigade area, and then after that a monsoon sets in other things. Was there a rhythm or a pattern to what you did with the dogs, or did it always seem the same? The monsoon season, when it’s… if my mind is correct, when you saw the monsoon season of Saigon, it rained every afternoon. When you’re in the mountains? All day long. It was a mist, it would rain. You’d get socked in. It was miserable, you never dried out, you know? You were always wet. Just a different—even though the country’s not that big, I Corps is completely different than 2 Corps. Or 3 Corps or 4 Corps, completely different. Interviewer: And then how did the monsoon then affect what you were doing? Well, didn’t affect me. I just did the same thing. As far as the units go, same thing. Out looking for the enemy. But Vietnamization was coming up—that word, you know, we were turning everything over to the south Vietnamese as fast as we could. Didn’t work out so good in the long run but that was the plan, let them take the bull by the horns. Interviewer: Okay, now did the south Vietnamese have dog units? Yes. There was one in fact, I had to go down there a number of times to help them out. They were located in the old capital way, in the inside… I guess they were okay, you know? I went down there, I watched them train. I don’t know how much they used them. You know, as I said the Vietnamization was taking place, the United States was pulling out and they were trying to turn over as much of the combat operations as they could to the Vietnamese. Interviewer: Yeah, so sort of less in the way for the American units to be doing in the field at that point. Well there aren’t big American offenses after that. No, after Ripcord—Ripcord was the biggest. I think you know, and I didn’t know it at the time, but they wanted to keep it quiet. They didn’t want this publicized cause we lost a lot of soldiers. 247 in a four month period, is that a correct number? Interviewer: I suspect that’s about right, yeah. I mean, the Cambodian operation which was started a little bit earlier but it was over a little bit earlier was a bigger thing and that got a lot of the news, but that was the one where they could present it as being essentially successful and Ripcord you couldn’t quite do that with. Right. Ripcord never made the papers. —Actually, it did. Interviewer: It did a little bit. (46:00) �Hills, Frank Cause my mother sent me a clipping saying, in fact this was the paper in Connecticut saying that the 101st abandoned a firebase, and that’s about all they said. Interviewer: Yeah, and that’s actually how it, to the extent that it appears in a lot of books about Vietnam, that’s about as much as most know of it. Yeah. Interviewer: Okay, now, so the… Now, what was your daily life like in Vietnam? How would you describe that? Because if you’re on the base, what happens day to day? Well, we had—breakfast was, if you’re on Camp Evans, we were not self-sufficient. One of the aviation units had to feed us, which was fine. And we would trudge over there and they would feed us, and then we came back and almost like stateside police call. Make sure, you know, clean the place up. I didn’t care whether the guys made their beds or not, isn’t like there’s bunk beds or cots, you know, that didn’t bother me, but if there’s trash pick it up. Then you take care of the dogs. Fresh water—most of the guys would take their dog and take them for a walk, groom them a little, what have you. I’d wait for the calls that come in, say “Hey, 1st of the 506 needs a dog team” or “They need two teams” and then I had a roster, or my first sergeant had a roster, who was up. Guy goes out in the field for five or six days, he goes to the bottom of the list. Just like anything was run, pretty uniform. (47:44) Interviewer: Alright. Now, did you—on the base, you’re there… was life on a base fundamentally different from being in the field? Yeah… when a guy came in, the next day he had to clean his equipment. He’d have to clean everything, he’d have to repack his rucksack, clean his weapon, get cleaned up himself. It was probably no different—the best thing about this was the guys got to come in. They didn’t have to spend 30 to 40 days out there. So they’re out five or six days, they’re coming in. The dog needed a break, and then they go to the bottom of the list and then the next guy up, the next team would go up and they’d call him in, and they’d go out. Interviewer: There are assorted stereotypes or things about kind of life on bases in Vietnam and a lot of them have to do with drug use, and were you aware of any of that going on around you or was it more noticeable there? It was there, I didn’t look for it. One of my sergeants, he got caught coming in with…I wanna say heroine? �Hills, Frank Interviewer: Could have been. Well first of all, I’m in my office, if you wanna call it an office, I’m just in there and CID comes in and they ask “Do we have your permission?” Of course I said yeah. You know, do what you need to do. Long story short? It cost him 6 months in a Long Binh jail. He didn’t get a dishonorable discharge but yeah, it was there. Interviewer: Okay. Were you aware of racial tensions? I was aware of it but I didn’t have any. There was no problem where I was, I didn’t have any. I wasn’t around any units that had it but it was there. (50:00) Interviewer: Well sometimes there’s stories about things going on, on bases where you have kind of groups of black soldiers who will take over certain areas or things like this, and that kind of thing. But that wasn’t something that you sort of witnessed? That wasn’t. I—If my recollection is correct, it really wasn’t a major problem with 3rd brigade 101st airborne division. Interviewer: Alright. Part of why I asked. Okay. Interviewer: Find out what happens there, okay. So you now, you’re getting—let’s see now, did you get an R&R while you were in Vietnam? I did. Interviewer: Okay. Where’d you go? Hawai’i. Interviewer: Okay. Mostly married guys went there. Yeah. Interviewer: Were you married at the time? �Hills, Frank At the time. Interviewer: Okay. And what was it like to be in Hawai’i after X amount of time in Vietnam? Well you knew you were goin’ back. So it took you a couple—you’re only gone for a week. So you just get acclimated and then its time to go back, so it’s… I don’t know if it was good or bad, you know? (51:01) Interviewer: How far into your tour had you gotten at that point? I wanna say six months. Interviewer: Okay. Six or seven months in I thought it was time to go. Interviewer: Alright. Now as your time in Vietnam wound down, did your duties change at all or did you just stay doing the same thing all the time? Nope, same. Interviewer: And then when it was time to go did you break in the new guy, or? I had a new guy come in. He was with me a couple weeks, didn’t take him long to get, you know, get his feet on the ground. Things were slowin’ down, though. Things were slowin’ down, he was only there a couple months when they closed everything down. Interviewer: Okay. Now, what kind of casualties did your unit take while you were leading it? When I was there I had a number of people wounded, one guy killed. And, uhm… Interviewer: And how many dog handlers did you have at the time? 28 to 32. Somewhere in that range. Interviewer: And how many might be out in the field at the same time? �Hills, Frank Let’s see… Normally? Maybe I had 10 to 12 teams out. Interviewer: Okay. Alright, now, for a lot of people who wind up, kind of accidentally, even becoming officers in the Vietnam era—they do their tour, they do the minimum number of years they’re supposed to serve and then they’re out. When you got to the end of Vietnam, what did you do? I went back to the states. I stayed in, and actually I think it was a blessing that I stayed in. I could blend back into society gradually—that’s the problem with the Vietnam War in that they just turned people loose to go on home. Where you been a year? Go back to work, if that’s possible. Interviewer: At what point did you decide to re-up and stay in? I think when I got back I said “I’m gonna stay in.” (53:23) Interviewer: What assignment did you get when you came back? I actually got assigned—I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey. It was fine. It’s not the garden spot but it was fine. I was an instructor and it was enjoyable. Interviewer: Was it a drill instructor or we talkin scout dog instructor? No, no, I was an instructor in the weapons committee. Interviewer: Okay. Don’t ask. That’s just what the army saw fit having me do. Interviewer: Okay, and was the army encouraging you to stay in at that point? They weren’t discouraging me. But the army had—there was a lot of officers, so they were looking for ways to cut ‘em, and the best way was education. A lot of good people who didn’t have a college degree were rifted for no other works, huge reduction in force, but that was a criteria. Interviewer: So where in some officers, including some very good ones who were in the Ripcord campaign, were mustangs, they were meant to come up in the ranks. And they were actually gonna get demoted to Sergeant at that point, regardless of what they had done, and that sort of thing. And that happened to a lot of, a lot of captains— wound up �Hills, Frank being, Sergeants. Now you were a little different in the sense that you had the college degree, so do you think that separated you from that group? Put me in a different class. I mean, they were lookin’---you have to have criteria. How are we gonna separate this person from that person? And that was one of the criteria: education. Armys always been big in education, you gotta have the schools—you gotta punch your school ticket or education ticket. Interviewer: Okay. And so, how long did you have that assignment at Fort Dix? A year. Interviewer: When you come back, and now you’re at Fort Dix, when you’re in New Jersey, so you’re not far from New York, Philadelphia and things like that. And now the Vietnam war, the anti-war movement has certainly gotten big and kind of taken over, and things were getting kinda crazy. Were you more aware of that now than you had been before? Or was that still outside of your world? I paid attention to it. I’m trying to think of when, of course, Kissinger was going to Paris, that’s where they had the peace talks set up. When did the—When did Saigon fall? Interviewer: Saigon fell in ‘75. ‘75. Interviewer: April ‘75. Nixon announced ‘Peace with Honor’ in January of ‘73 but you had some varied bombing campaigns and things in ‘72 before that. And then when Nixon resigned, what, Ford’s hands were tied. He couldn’t supply them with aircraft or anything, we were done. Interviewer: Yup. Over with. Interviewer: Okay. Did you encounter any kind of hostility from civilians when you got back? People treating you differently because you were in Vietnam? No, no I was fortunate. My family, uncles and what have you, were all World War II veterans you know, the good war. I mean, I didn’t have any choice. I wasn't gonna go to Canada or �Hills, Frank anything, like that was never on my list. But I think a lot of people went… when, in the late 60’s they went? When the war—in 1965 who would have thought the war would have gone on that long? Interviewer: Yeah. Or gone the way that it did. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of that is really kind of on the fringes of your experience, you’ve got a job to do and you’re going and you’re doing it. Yeah, yeah. Interviewer: Okay, and now by this time are you living in Fort Dix, for instance are you living on base, off base? No, no, I had an apartment off base. But that’s a military town. I can’t even think of the town Fort Dix was in, do you happen to know? Interviewer: No, I just think of it as Fort Dix, yeah. It wasn’t Bordentown was it? I don’t know. But it was a military town so, you know, there was acceptance. Interviewer: Mkay. No hostilities, it wasn’t San Francisco. Interviewer: Okay. And then what was your next assignment after Fort Dix? I went to the Special Forces Officer Course. Interviewer: And where was that done? Bragg. Interviewer: Okay, so Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And how does that compare with the Officer Infantry Training or the Ranger Training you had before? …A thinking man’s course. A thinking man’s course. You had to know what Special Forces did and John Wayne didn’t do them justice during his movie making, so. But uh, Special Forces— When we think of Special Forces today there’s so many: There’s Rangers, there’s SEALs… I can’t—I think the marines have a Special Forces course. It’s different, the Special Forces was set �Hills, Frank up to train indigenious personnel. Now can they fight? They can fight, but they need help. 12 people aren’t gonna fight anybody. Navy SEALs mission is a lot different than what a Special Forces A Team, and if you’re watching this tape get a book out and read what the Special Forces A Teams do. The best example was the movie that just came out this past year: the twelve men on horses? That’s what they do. They’re there to assist and train indigenous personnel. Not that they can’t fight, but they’re not gonna go kill Osama Bin Laden. Let the SEALs do that. Interviewer: And I think a lot of people tend to kind of think, you hear Special Forces, you tend to confuse that with a Navy SEAL type operations, of a commando operation where you’re sneaking in some places behind enemy lines. Special Forces, they lump it all together. They lump it all together. Part of Special Forces is Operational Detachment Delta. That’s equal to the SEAL Team 6. And of course Hollywood’s got ahold of that, too. Interviewer: But certainly in Vietnam there’s a lot of training indigenous people and they did it Laos as well, as of course since then they’ve done it a lot of different places, including Afghanistan and Iraq, so particularly in Afghanistan I expect but, yeah. Okay. And so, your job was essentially—were you training people or were you simply just part of an active unit or what were you doing? I was, well… I was part of an A Team for awhile. Which is probably the best assignment in the army. Then… you have to move on. You get promoted out and you could still be in Special Forces but you’re more in headquarters and what have ya. Interviewer: Did you go out in the field any place or did you do all your work in the US? I was mostly in the US. Interviewer: Okay. I mean, did you visit any place else that you’re gonna talk about? No, no, no. I didn’t personally. I didn’t go to South America, my time was pretty much in the US. Training, a lot of training, various scenarios that you run through but it was all in the US. I wish I could have gone but I didn’t, I just happened—that’s just the way the nature of the beast was. Interviewer: Okay. Alright, and how long did you do that work? (1:01:17) 9 to 10 years in Special Forces Assignment, where I branch transferred SF from Infantry. �Hills, Frank Interviewer: Okay, now this—I’m just old-fashioned enough to be using tape and this tape is about up. (Screen fades to black while tape is replaced.) Okay, so you kept making out about 1983, you’ve kind of put in about 10 years with the Special Forces, how and why do you move on from there? At the time, promotion. You make Major—the slots for Major in SF are very small so, but I’m speaking about that time and era, now I’m not so sure. It’s a completely different—Special Operations is completely different. But at that time, Major, I was promoted out. I didn’t have a job, there was no slot for me, so I went back into the regular infantry. A lot of staff work. Interviewer: Okay. Now do you get, as you go through different rank levels you get army schooling of one kind or the other, right? Right. Advanced course, in fact I took the Infantry Advanced Course and then I did the Armor Advanced Course Correspondence, so I got those two advanced courses out of the way, then Command and General Staff College… and I did not do the War College, which I’m not sorry I didn’t do it. Interviewer: Right. Okay. So, the—so talk a little bit then about the assignments when it happened. So you go from Special Forces, you get your training stuff, and then what assignment do you get after that? Well then I went back into the Infantry branch. From there I became an instructor at the Command and General Staff college. They had a new course called CASCU for Captains. Great course, like everything it fell by the wayside and they had something else that came up. Interviewer: Well what did that course consist of? A lot of practical, the practical work for Captains, male and female. And that’s when we had a lot of integration between the sexes, we didn’t separate. It was just a good, it was a course to teach you to do staff work. You know, not everyone is gonna lead the horses in the charge, somebody’s gotta take care of those horses. Somebody’s gotta buy ‘em food, make sure they’re well taken care of, and that’s what CASCU—preparing Captains for staff work. Interviewer: Okay. Alright, you mentioned having women officers in there. In the 70’s when they started opening more positions for women officers, opening up the surface academies and things like that, I mean, there was a lot of debate back and forth about the value of all that and in general as more women got integrated you got problems eventually with sexual harassment and other kinds of things happening. And different people having �Hills, Frank different views of that. From your perspective, how well did the integration in women work, or what were the ups and downs of that? I didn’t see a problem, but then I respected the women. Takes a special female person to make a career out of the military. I had all the respect in the world for them. There’s some smart women out there, they can do anything that the men can do, and I think that’s proven today. Sexual harrasment, I don’t recall it being prevalent. It probably was there, it probably was there, more so maybe in the enlisted ranks. (1:05:39) Interviewer: I think officers would sometimes, will report kinds, sometimes discrimination or prejudice. Some male officers would have a problem with it, others wouldn’t and so it just kinda depends on where you are. I think it depends upon your makeup, you know there was… I was a battalion commander and you know there’s always—I’d always have my head NCO which was a female, she’d come into my office and I’d say “Close the door,” you know, “Lets talk about this.” Well people say don’t do that, you’d better have somebody else in there. Well, I really wasn’t concerned. Maybe I should have been, but sometimes you wanna talk and you didn’t want other people to know what you’re talking about. Normally it was about soldiers, that’s what we’re talking about. And she was comfortable, good person, but that’s how I am. But other people, they'd have the door open, they’d have somebody sitting in there, so. I’m here, I’m not in jail. Interviewer: Yup, yup. Just behave like a civilized human being and it took care of itself. Okay, alright, and so, I guess, where were you stationed then after you did some—you taught your course for a while, and? Fort Bragg. Interviewer: Yeah, you were in Fort Bragg. Fort Jackson. Force Combat Quarters in Atlanta which doesn’t exist anymore, that’s Fort McPherson. That headquarters has moved to Fort Bragg, it’s there. Interviewer: So what does Force Com consist of, what was that? That’s Continental Forces of the United States. That’s a 4-star slot. My boss happened to be— my rater happened to be a civilian, but he was equal to a 3-start. It was a good assignment. Interviewer: Is a lot of that really sort of administrative and logistical? �Hills, Frank Yes. It was more staff. Or not more, 100% staff work. We staffed—when Desert Storm, the first, one?, we staffed that. We staffed that whole… all units were looking for bodies to fill, they were not rounded-out so we had to come up with all those bodies whether they came from the guard or the reserve or what have you. We had our hands full. Interviewer: Cause you’re having to mobilize units and send them overseas, and typically in peace time units are not kept at full strength. Yeah. Interviewer: And so now they need people in these slots if they’re going to function properly, so you not only take guard and reserve people, but then do you have to backfill some of them and replace some of them? Or does someone else do that? No, we didn’t backfill the guard and reserve cause they were going back to the guard and reserve. Temporary assignment for them. (1:08:48) Interviewer: Or rather, did you have guard and reserve people come in and replace fulltime, active duty people? Yes. Yes. Interviewer: Okay, alright. Now, so how far do you get in terms of advancing in rank? Colonel. Interviewer: Colonel. And when did you make Colonel? When? Interviewer: Yeah. Well I got out in ‘98… Not ‘98, I mean, I said ‘96. Interviewer: Alright, now why did you retire in ‘98? 30 years that’s, you know, that’s a young man’s game. �Hills, Frank Interviewer: Yeah. And I had some opportunities. Wasn’t gonna be a General, I never set out to be a General but I wasn’t gonna be a General, well that’s fine. But I had some business opportunities, so… and they worked out. Interviewer: So what did you wind up doing when you got out? I had a partner—I have a manufacturer’s rep firm. I’m in the oil and gas business. He retired four years ago so I have the business now. My wife wants me to retire but I don’t wanna retire (Hills laughs) I wanna work. I’m 75. I don’t wanna sit at home, I don’t wanna play golf every day. I mean I-- and I enjoy what I do, so that’s the reason I work. I don’t have to work but I enjoy it. Interviewer: And you wound up settling in North Georgia just cause you like that area? We always came back to Georgia, yeah. It’s just a good area. I’m in North Georgias, it could be anywhere. It could be Pennsylvania, it’s that nice, so you know I’m happy with Georgia. Do I wanna stay there the rest of my life? Eh. I don’t know. People say “Why don’t you go to Florida?” I wanna change my clothes. I wanna change my—you go to Florida, you don’t change your clothes. I think you know what I mean. I like—We have three seasons. We’ve got days of winter but we have 3 seasons, so. (1:11:00) Interviewer: Okay. Now, to look back now at that time that you spent in the service: what basic way—how do you really think that affected you or what did you take out of it? I think it was. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I wouldn’t trade Vietnam for anything. I wouldn’t wish it on…a lot a lot of people were affected by it. And… I didn’t expect this, but what has been so good about Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq, people respect the soldiers. When they came back from Vietnam they were looked down upon. Didn’t bother me, there’s things that bother me and things that don’t bother me, but I felt sorry for some of those guys. They couldn’t adjust in the society. Maybe we all had PTSD. Probably all of us did, but I was able to assimilate back into society without any problem whatsoever. I didn’t need a parade but a parade probably would have helped. It's been so long, you know. But, you know, so be it. You can’t turn back the clock. Interviewer: Alright. Well the whole thing makes for pretty good story, and certainly an unusual one. Yeah. �Hills, Frank Interviewer: So thank you very much for taking the time to share it with me. Thank you Interviewer: Alright. (1:12:25) � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HillsF2276V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hills, Frank Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-10 Title A name given to the resource Hills, Francis (Interview transcript and video), 2018 Description An account of the resource Frank Hills was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1943. Hills attended schooling in Connecticut through high school before graduating in 1961 and leaving for Iowa on a football scholarship, where he played as a defensive back on the college football team before graduating 2 semesters late in 1966. Following undergraduate school Hills attended Kent College of Law, a part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, before receiving his draft notice the second semester for the Vietnam War. After being granted an extension, he went to a recruiter to enlist and attend Officer Candidate School. Following the end of the semester, he was sent to Fort Polk, Louisiana to complete basic training, and then to Fort Leonard Wood for Advanced Individual Training in engineering for eight weeks. After a week off, Hills was then moved to Fort Bennington for Officer Candidate School: 26 weeks of infantry classes including map reading, tactics, mortars, artillery fire and field exercises. Three weeks before the end of the OCS program, Hills volunteered to be part of the Scout Dog Program, requiring him to attend Jump School, Ranger School, and Scout Dog School. In March 1970, Hills flew over to Vietnam, landing at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon and staying for a full year as part of the 58th Scout Dog Platoon in the 101st Airborne Division, 3rd Brigade at Camp Evans. He recalls scout dogs being imperative to detecting early signs of danger and giving ‘strong, silent warnings.’ Hills was aware of some racial tensions among units but had no issues himself. After a year of service, Hills returned from Vietnam and stayed in the military, taking on a new assignment in Fort Dix as an instructor on the Weapons Committee. Shortly after. he went to the Special Forces Officer Course and spent 10 years in Special Forces Assignment before transferring to Infantry and attending Command and General Staff College. During the integration of women officers in the 70’s, Hills was aware of tensions but had no issues with female officers. Hills was transferred to Force Combat Quarters in Atlanta where he helped staff Desert Storm with temporary-assignment reserve and guard, and in 1996 achieved the rank of Colonel. He retired in 1998 and started a manufacturer’s rep firm and says he has no plans to retire. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8c5d9036f59080e9f9c1b53214bd939d.mp4 bfc8fd9f15206231f48fe8ed4882fa6c https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d7bfbf0ce86168ada3906d7c0a9d5bd9.pdf debda57b4a8b34098e96d92e4110bc23 PDF Text Text Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Oral History Interview Veteran: Barry Hillmer Vietnam War Interview Length: (1:24:48) Interviewed by James Smither Transcribed by Chloe Dingens Interviewer: We're talking today with Barry Hillmer of Caledonia, Michigan and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veteran’s History Project. Okay Barry start off with some background on yourself and to begin with where and when were you born? I was born in Flushing Queens May 3rd, 1946. That's New York. Interviewer: New York City, alright and now did you grow up there or did you move around? Grew up on Long Island, Nassau County, New Hyde Park. Interviewer: Okay. And lived there until I went off to college. (1:00) Interviewer: Okay now what was your family doing for a living when you were a kid? My mother was a schoolteacher, elementary school teacher. My dad worked for Bell Telephone in New York City. Interviewer: Okay now was, had he served in the war or was he a civilian? �He was in the second World War in New Guinea in Australia. Interviewer: Okay and what service branch or what was he doing? He was in the Air Force he was a crew chief. Interviewer: Okay, alright I’ve interviewed a fair number of people who were in New Guinea, World War II. Oh, yeah. Interviewer: So I hear that and I always wanna go okay. Alright and as you're, so you're born and okay so ’46, so when do you finish high school? 1964. Interviewer: Okay and then where did you go to college? Lafayette College in eastern Pennsylvania. Interviewer: Alright and what was that school like at that point in time? It was all male, 1700 guys and what motivated me it had a very good educational rating, and it had an ROTC program at one point in high school I thought I might want to make the military a career, I thought about going to West Point and this was a nice alternative. Interviewer: Okay. (2:16) Without making that much of a military commitment. �Interviewer: Alright and of course you were thinking about that, I mean that's the point before Vietnam heated up and we didn't have a lot of people going over there. Well, we did. Interviewer: Well, we had some people, but we didn't have them like we had them later. Well, the- the draft and at the time pretty much you made the assumption that you most likely would be going to Vietnam if you got drafted. Interviewer: Okay. So, I made- made the decision with ROTC, it was the first two years were mandatory, the second two years were voluntary, but I liked- I liked the format, I liked the training that I was getting and decided alright if I have to go in the Army, I want to have some control over my destiny. Interviewer: Right. And ROTC allowed me that. (3:08) Interviewer: Yeah, because in ‘64 we didn't have ground troops. Well, this was, it was ‘68 when I got out. Interviewer: Well, you got out and ‘66 is the point when you make the commitment to do the- the second, next two years. Yes. Interviewer: And by ‘66. �Yeah. Interviewer: The draft was really going. Yes, yeah. Interviewer: So- so there's the, when you initially go in it would have been a possibility there was a draft at the time, but there were, they were not taking huge numbers of people then. Yes. Interviewer: But very quickly it ramps up. Ramped up. Interviewer: During those first two years when you're in college. Yes. Interviewer: At that point. Yes. Interviewer: Alright so while you were in college how much did you learn about what was going on in Vietnam? Quite a bit, we because you were going to class every day and ROTC you had that instruction that was part of the curriculum, regular part of the curriculum. So, you were kept pretty well informed about what was going on and again at the end of the first two years I just came to the conclusion alright if I’m going to Vietnam number one, I want to go as an officer and second of �all if I have some choice about branch or MOS and what area of specialization I was going into then I wanted to be able to do that. ROTC allowed you, they gave you three options: first, second, third choice and fortunately I got my first choice which was intelligence. (4:30) Interviewer: Okay now was this a point when the third choice had to be infantry? No. Interviewer: Okay. No, but as the, if there was a drawback to going in as an intelligence your primary was intelligence 9301 MOS, your secondary was infantry that was required so you had to go through infantry basic. Interviewer: Alright so what did the ROTC program consist of? It was the, you had classroom work and- and then at the end of your junior year you had to go through eight weeks of summer camp which was essentially basic training, eight weeks of basic training. Interviewer: And where did… Infantry. Interviewer: Where did you do that? Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. Interviewer: Okay and what was that like? �That was- that was brutal, that was pushing the limits, I mean that was going through basic training and- and so here you are you're giving your summer up and eight weeks they pushed you to the limits. I mean you were in barracks, you were, at that point we weren't officers we- we hadn't been commissioned and we had a staff sergeant that was our platoon, oversaw the platoon and so you were Grunt and you were running around there and- and eight weeks of some pretty intense infantry training. Interviewer: So, what were they actually teaching you? Everything. Interviewer: What’s the curriculum? (5:57) Every aspect of what they- they'd run you through with basic training as an inventory, infantryman. Interviewer: Okay what I’m getting at is most people today don't go in the service and don't even know what that involves, so just day to day there what are you doing? Well every, they'd have these different segments so you'd have a marksman- marksmanship segment, working with rifles, you did mortars, you did all weaponry, you did map reading orientation, there was a week of hand-to-hand combat, I mean and each one was a segment so it might be a week or two depending upon the how much was required. Interviewer: Was there a lot of close order drill? Yes. (6:47) Interviewer: Okay now had you learned some of that already from… �Yes. Interviewer: ROTC? Yes, yes, we did that every day. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah. Interviewer: Alright and then what did they do when people messed up? In, at Indiantown Gap? Interviewer: Yeah. Well, I actually, we in our barracks we had four squads it was a platoon- platoon barracks four squads so you had ten men. Every one of us made it through that. So, there weren't many thatthat did not, I think under those circumstances you had already committed, you went through the freshman and sophomore year, you had completed your junior year and it was then that you went to summer camp, you were pretty dedicated. Interviewer: Yeah. And committed to Military. Interviewer: So nobody's washing out? Not really. Interviewer: But then I guess but you would do things wrong. �Yeah. Interviewer: On occasions. Yeah. Interviewer: And normally I guess in regular basic training there's an awful lot of discipline and punishment and stuff if people screw up in one way or another. Push-ups. (7:47) Interviewer: Okay. I was doing 100/ 150 push-ups a day, that was the way you got through it. I- I mean you just, because some of it was just ridiculous and some of the things that you were being asked to do and everything else and the way you- you kind of got through it was you’d would say alright you know I’ll do this, but you know alright so okay. Interviewer: Okay and did you understand what they were doing and why they were doing it? To some degree yeah, I mean some of it seemed excessive, some of it seemed absurd but youyou realized in the end it was, they were trying to form a cohesive unit and- and ultimately you know it was bringing a group of individuals that didn't know one another together as a- as a team. Interviewer: And so you could function automatically. Yes. �Interviewer: And do what you had to do. Yes. Interviewer: Okay now did, when you were going through that, did any of the instructors make any reference to what was happening in Vietnam or was this more general? (8:48) Not really, no that was- that was pretty much just foc- that part was just focused on the physical preparation training. Interviewer: Okay, okay so when do you graduate from college? 1968. Interviewer: Alright and now at this point you've completed ROTC. Right. Interviewer: Okay so what happens to you now with the military? The, I had a commitment from Sears Roebuck a management training position with them and the military gave you up to a year before you had to go on active duty. So, I was able to get a year extension from my graduation, completed a year and the beauty at that time was the company that you went to work for had to give you a commitment that when you completed the two years that you would return to the same position that you- you had when you left. (9:42) Interviewer: Alright so when do you actually receive your commission? As soon as we finished, as soon as we had graduation the next step was commissioning. �Interviewer: Okay so now at this point you're a second lieutenant? Yes. Interviewer: But now do you go from there now to work for Sears for a year? Yes. Interviewer: Okay so you do that before you get any more officer training with the Army? Exactly, yes. Interviewer: Okay alright and so where were you living for that year? Pittsburgh. Interviewer: Okay alright and so where then do you go once you finish that I guess- I guess, first of all I guess that's a pretty interesting year because ‘68 into ‘69. Yes. Interviewer: I mean you would have, Martin Luther King had already been assassinated. Yes. Interviewer: In the spring, which might not have had too much of a repercussion in eastern Pennsylvania I don’t know. Yeah, that’s correct. �Interviewer: But then you had you know Johnson had announced he wasn't running, you had the presidential election going on, then you had democratic convention and the riots in Chicago. Yes. Interviewer: You had Bobby Kennedy getting assassinated, a lot of stuff was going on. Absolutely. Interviewer: In that period. Yes. Interviewer: And so you're watching this as a temporary civilian. Yeah. (10:46) Interviewer: Knowing you're going in the Army. Right. Interviewer: So what's going through your head at that point? Yeah, I initially I was supposed to go in in January and so I graduated in May and actually started for Sears in September and then I worked, I worked at a pool, lifeguard through the summer. So, I realized this is it, this is going to be my last hurrah, went to work for Sears in September and it was a much more enjoyable, much more rewarding experience than I was expecting. So I- I wrote and the- the Army gave me an extension then so rather than going in in January which I was supposed to do, they extended me out a year was the longest that you could �delay going in on active duty. So, they extended that until June, and I was- I was happy, I think it gave me an opportunity to mature, gave me a lot of training, management training and other experience prior to actually just rather than just going from college into the military so. (11:48) Interviewer: Alright so now you get to June of ’69, now you're going in you know for real so what do you do next? Fort Benning, Georgia and again it was, I don't want to say it was an exact repeat but again it was infantry that was infantry officer basic training and so I had eight weeks of a repeat to some degree of what I had had at Indiantown Gap. Interviewer: Okay now this time around is there more directly relating to Vietnam? Not really. Interviewer: Okay. I mean there's- there's more because number one the time factor and Tet of ‘68 had occurred so yeah I mean it was, as a matter of fact I didn't realize it but by requesting intelligence you were essentially asking to go to Vietnam because at the time that I arrived in ‘69 there were more intelligence officers in Vietnam than there were infantry officers in Vietnam. So, it yeah, the training was- was more geared to southeast Asia that experience what that preparation was going to be, but it wasn't until my next until the intelligence training in Fort Holabird where they really started focusing on Vietnam. (13:05) Interviewer: Okay now while you were at Fort Benning let's see did they- did they take you into swamps or did you just stay? Yeah. �Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, I- I mean the areas now that was the summer in Georgia but yeah, the issues that we had were the temperatures, they would shut down training exercises when the temperature would hit 95 degrees and it quite often hit 95 in the afternoon and we were getting up at 4, 4:30 in the morning to be able to do calisthenics and exercises in the dark just so that they could get that in prior to the temperature rising it'd be in the 80’s. Interviewer: Of course, if they were gonna send you to Vietnam. Yes. Interviewer: You'll want to get used to that kind of thing. Exactly why not. Interviewer: Alright. Yeah. Interviewer: And then so but did they do it all kind of at the facilities at Fort Benning or did they take you off? It was all Fort Benning. Interviewer: Okay so they weren't taking ‘em into the Okefenokee Swamp or up to Delano. No but there were- there were enough areas that you know were somewhat indicative of what I, not where I was in the Delta but certainly indicative of areas of Vietnam. (14:10) �Interviewer: Alright and then how long was that at Fort Benning? Eight weeks. Interviewer: It's still just eight weeks, okay not a not a six-month school or anything like that. No, no. Interviewer: Okay now how long was your actual active-duty commitment? It was a two-year commitment. Interviewer: Okay alright so yeah, they need to move you through pretty quickly. Yes. Interviewer: So they can use you. So you do your eight weeks at Fort Benning and then Fort Holabird, Maryland is the next stop? Yes. Interviewer: Okay and what are you getting there? It's the intelligence training there were two, two, it was eight weeks, but it was two four-week segments one was specifically focused on- on MACV and all the elements of intelligence and preparing you to be an intelligence officer as far as briefings and gathering intelligence and everything that you would do and then it was preparing it for Vietnam so. Interviewer: Okay explain what MACV is. �(15:02) Military advice- Assistance Command, Vietnam and so we were advisors so and- and it's kind of a- a dubious term because the reality was I had a counterpart, a Vietnamese counterpart, each one of us on our, we were a three-man team was a captain, supposedly a captain slot, but for most of my time in Vietnam it was a lieutenant. And so there were two lieutenants and an NCO and then at times we would have a- an enlisted man that would- would do a lot of the recording of the data and intelligence but essentially we were a three-man team and- and then there was the, we were directly associated with a Vietnamese intelligence group team so I had a counterpart and… Interviewer: Okay we'll get into that more later once we get you over to Vietnam but basically, but you were basically, but you were being prepared to work in that kind of slot or assignment. Yes. (16:04) Interviewer: With that. Well to some degree, it- it was I think each one of us we- we had individual experiences and you had no idea exactly what you’re… Interviewer: Right. What your responsibility was gonna be. Interviewer: Okay and then you said the- the sort of that second phase you're kind of learning about Vietnam. What are you learning there? Yes, yes it was about everything from the government to the enemy situation, to what particular positions, or possible positions we might actually have to assume. So, it was rather extensive. �Interviewer: Okay. It was a daily, it was six days a week and we, they- they were pumping us through at that time, so my session was from six in the morning until noon and then there was another group that started at one in the afternoon and went until seven. And we did that six days a week for two months. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, that was rather intense. Interviewer: Alright so once you get through that now what happens? (17:03) Then you had- you had a month of leave and then- then you got on a plane, and you flew to Vietnam. Interviewer: Okay so when did they send you to Vietnam? It was November, I arrived in about a week before, not even, a few days before Thanksgiving. Interviewer: Okay of 1969? ‘69. Interviewer: Okay alright now how do they get you physically to Vietnam? Well, you got orders and requisitions to be able to fly. I flew commercially to San Francisco and then flew- flew out- outside of San Francisco, we had a flight that went over. Interviewer: Okay and were you in a chartered civilian aircraft or? �It was. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, yeah Pan Am. Interviewer: Alright and do you remember where you stopped on the way over? Yeah, we went to Anchorage, Alaska. Interviewer: Okay. And then- and then into Yokota, Japan and then Japan Yokota to Saigon. Interviewer: Okay so did you land a Tan Son Nhut? The big airport there. Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Yes. Interviewer: Did you come in during the day or at night. (18:04) During the day. Interviewer: Okay so what's your first impression of Vietnam when you get there? You- you know have all this anticipation, you're on a- on a commercial airline a Pan Am as if you're going on vacation or you're- you're going on a trip and they open the door and the last �thing you say to the flight attendant “see in a year.” You're trying to think of something you know from an amusing standpoint, a light- light. And you walk down the steps and it's you know they didn't have ramps, so you walk down the steps and the first thing you notice are coffins, all these wooden coffins in the plane next to you that they're loading up, that's your first reality check that okay I’m in Vietnam I’m in a war zone and okay so. (18:54) Interviewer: Alright and then so you get off the plane now what do they do with you? Well you get, you go through the in processing and- and then I was, it was my roommate and myself and it turned out that in his processing the assignment that he got he went as far north as you could go in Vietnam and I was assigned to go as far south as you could go in Vietnam. So I was in Saigon maybe a day or two and then and then they found I- I flew to, they put me on military aircraft, flew down to Can Tho which is the capital of Delta spent two/ three days there with processing and then it wasn't until I got to Can Tho that I found out specifically what mywhat my assignment was going to be. (19:41) Interviewer: Okay so what was the assignment? Well I was- I was going to An Xuyen Province, Cà Mau and they didn't exactly say because atat Province level and then you had at An Xuyen we had six districts and a district team, which was a 10-man team and- and so I could have, initially I was assigned to be in one of these district teams but I got to Cà Mau and one of the lieutenants in the S2 shop at Province had only a month or two to go and I hit it off with the- the S3 and so he said, “you know what I think we could use you here, I think we're going to keep you here.” Interviewer: Okay explain what S2 and S3 are. Well, S2, in the Army breaks it down, S1 essentially is personnel that that officer oversees, personnel and manages that. S2 manage the intelligence aspect, the intelligence gathering and �dissemination of information. S3 is pretty much operations, runs the operations make sure that this advisory team is well coordinated. And then there's S4 which is supply. (20:56) Interviewer: Right. And so yeah it was. Interviewer: Okay so you were assigned to a specific unit or something with a number or designation? Advisory Team 80. Interviewer: Okay Was the team. Interviewer: Okay and describe a little bit just that physical area that you're in, what kind of landscape is there? It's- it's rice paddies I mean you're when I- when I was told where I was going of course you have no idea and so when I went out to the airfield in Can Tho and I flew down on a Caribou and the pilot said to me, “so where are we leaving you?” I said, “Cà Mau.” He said, “well, good luck buddy.” It was- it was known as a you know a hot area, hot sector. So, you fly down there and you make a number of different stops in these different provinces and then they finally get to Cà Mau and the ramp comes down and you walk out and all you see is one little- one little building with some Vietnamese running around, no Americans, no anything. You don't whether to take a prone position with your rifle, you don't know what to do honestly. The ramp goes up, the plane takes off and there you are wondering, alright where do I go now? What happens next? So I went up to the building and of course they're all Vietnamese and nobody spoke English so I thought alright I’ll just bide my time here and within about 10 or 15 minutes all of a sudden a Jeep �comes- comes out and it was from the orderly room and they were picking up the mail, the sacks of mail, whatever had been dropped off. So I introduced myself, said, “jump in.” So, and it was about a 10-minute ride from there to- to the compound that we were. (22:53) Interviewer: Okay. Living in. Interviewer: Alright and describe the compound, how big was it? What did it look like? It was- it was cement and cement walls, at one time it was a- a French resort, which it must have been many, many years ago because you could not see that so that there were some buildings and some rooms but yeah it was and then you had pill boxes and bunkers and it was completely surrounded by a wall with barbed wire and it was just all rice paddies, so that's all you saw, rice paddies everywhere. Interviewer: Kind of an odd place for a resort at that point. Exactly, you wonder what- what were people doing down there, I have no idea. Interviewer: Maybe the beach was closer in those days but, yeah. Okay so was this mainly a Vietnamese base? (23:45) No this was American, this was U.S. Interviewer: Okay, alright and so what was there? I mean was there an infantry unit there? No, it was just our advisory team. �Interviewer: Okay. And it comprised about the- the team itself was total personnel was about 120 and we had a SEAL Team attached to us as well. 10-man SEAL Team so and- and as I described the S1, S2 shop, S3, S4, and then but essentially we were just supporting and providing support to the Vietnamese and so we're an advisory team so each one of those different shops had a comparable Vietnamese shop so they worked with. Interviewer: Okay, alright so were there any Vietnamese personnel on your base or were they all somewhere else? Just a couple interpreters, that was it. Interviewer: Okay, alright now were there American units in the province in other places? No. (24:45) Interviewer: So this is pretty much all at this point South Vietnamese? At that- at that point this was, the term was Vietnamization and yeah, I think a year or two before there were probably Marines, you had Navy patrol boats running through there when I first arrived I actually roomed with a, the NILO, the Naval Intelligence Liaison Officer he was primarily gathering intelligence for the SEAL Team so that they could run their- their discrete operations. Interviewer: Alright so you- you get there, you meet people, so what's your job? I would every, probably just to give you chronologically, every afternoon I would get from the Vietnamese agent reports of enemy units where they were located and activity movements. And the, after about a month, I arrived there in November in December it was more gathering �information, finding out about my counterpart and learning about the area. Initially every morning I would, we had a CIA officer, Australian in- in Cà Mau itself and I would drive to hishis home and gather some intelligence from him and get the intelligence that I could get from the Vietnamese, and we had a map with overlays and every day we would plot the enemy units, their locations on the map, every day looking for patterns and trends. And then after a month I was asked if I wanted to go on a, what they called a phantom mission which was they'll give you a Huey helicopter and two Cobra Gunships and I’d take my unit sightings and we'd fly, we essentially go over the Province and go from- go from coordinate to coordinate wherever these units were and whatever we found we put ordinance in and that was essentially my- my job and we were fairly successful, we were very successful with that. It was impressive how accurate the agent reports were that we were receiving and- and so they expanded the number of missions that I would run so rather than one or two a week, I was running them almost daily or every other day running those missions and they could arrive typically they'd come twice a day, could be first thing in the morning they'd be out there in the dark we'd take off and then in the afternoon we'd go up. And so whenever I wasn't flying in the Huey directing those- those phantom missions then starting in January I flew in an O-1 Bird Dog observer and so we had a, we had a Bird Dog and a CW, a Chief Warrant officer stationed at our team also and so he and I would fly every day also. (28:10) Interviewer: Okay and so this is just a little propeller plane, so. Yeah, a single engine. Interviewer: Right okay and so was that simply observer or did you have ordinance to? Yeah we had- we had four rocket pods on each wing and those- those- the rockets that we would use you had white phosphorus so we could mark targets if we were directing in airstrikes or if we were directing other helicopters, Cobras or whatever it would take. And- and then we also had VT which were variable time so the pilot could adjust if he wanted that to explode before it actually detonated on the ground. And we had four different- four different rockets that we could utilize and used them all, we used them all. �Interviewer: Alright now okay so the- there was the Bird Dog, was that based on your base? Yes. (29:12) Interviewer: Okay now what, did the helicopters come from somewhere else? They came from Can Tho it was a aviation unit that was headquartered based in Can Tho. Interviewer: Okay. And so we had and- and I- I think one of the reasons I’m here today is because two- two primary reasons, one that we had that SEAL Team. And number two that we had Cobras that were with us every night shut down on the airfield, stayed all night long and then at daylight they would fly back to Can Tho. So, the enemy knew that if- if there was any activity anywhere in the province those choppers were up, and they were directed in on those. So that was our security. Interviewer: Okay now did you have people who did perimeter securities? Yes, yes that was, those were the locals, the Indigenous. Interviewer: Okay. And so we had some we had some local, actually there were civilians that- that actually trained and worked with the Indigenous Vietnamese and so they set up perimeters, they set up security force. (30:21) Interviewer: Okay so, the Vietnamese were these regional forces or? �Yeah, yeah they used to, we referred to them as Ruff Puffs. Interviewer: Yes. Regional Provincial. Interviewer: Right. Regional Forces, Provincial Forces. Interviewer: And how reliable were they? They were, they initially it was, they were suspect but- but they got into, in the tenure of my time in Cà Mau and in An Xuyen those forces went up against some NVA so which were the North Vietnamese which were regulars. Interviewer: Yeah. And they held their own and of course we- we were able to give them air support which the NVA didn't have but still they were, they really became a an effective fighting machine. Interviewer: Okay and then you were paired with a Vietnamese officer. Right. (31:15) Interviewer: Or did you get a rotation of those going through or? No. Interviewer: Okay so talk about the guy you worked with then. �Oh he was, he'd be, he was, he became one of my closest friends if I have no idea if he's alive today but, yeah we would, we were very close. Early on we, he and I typically on a Saturday morning we could, Saturday- Sunday morning more typically. We jump in the Jeep the two of us put our weapons in the back seat and just take off into the countryside. And you look back on it and you think about you know these are some foolish things that we did but we were both so comfortable and I was comfortable with him and with his relationships and what he knew and people he knew and so, yeah we were- we were really close. Interviewer: So what was there to do when you were, just looking at stuff or would you visit people or? Yeah, yeah we would visit people, we would stop and have coffee, it was socializing and- and the- the people were very, very in that immediate area were very friendly and the children loved us being there so, it was a wonderful experience. (32:23) Interviewer: Okay were there, I mean did the Viet Cong retaliate against people like that? Were there problems with them? The one thing you did not do was you did it sporadically, there was no routine in what you did because I mean there was one time not me personally but some others that I associated with actually water skied on the river and you could go one way but you didn't want to come back because as soon as you- you did something and they knew that there was a routine to what you were doing they would take advantage of that. We would, again for some cooperation locally we played some volleyball games, we played some basketball games with the Vietnamese in Cà Mau, and we always got warnings that, okay you better not do this a second time or a third time because they're going to set up, they're going to ambush, they're going to, they're going to create some havoc here. So it had to be spontaneous when you did things like that. Interviewer: Now but with the civilians that you were associating with. �Yeah. Interviewer: Would they face retaliation, or the Viet Cong stay away from them? (33:27) Not that I’m aware of yeah not, not in Cà Mau I think there was, when I first arrived to put it in perspective, when I first arrived I could go straight up and I had clearance to fire rockets 360 degrees we didn't have to get clearance, after I’d been there four months I had to clear with the Vietnamese before I would go out with any of these missions and I’d have to identify exactly where we were going. So, so if you want to say Vietnamization was- was fairly successful in the immediate area of Cà Mau I think so, I would say so, I felt pretty safe driving around. It was- it was very rural, very but… Interviewer: Now did you go anywhere at night or only in the day? It was in day, during daylight. Interviewer: Okay and but basically, you're, so you have to for- for much the time you're there you have to let the Vietnamese know ahead of time where you're going. Yeah, after about four or five months. Interviewer: But once you got there but the targets were still there. (34:32) That was part of, part of the challenge I had after, the reason we were so successful initially was because I'd have those agent sightings, I could go out either with a- with a Cobra package, or I could go out with- with the warrant officer… Interviewer: Right. �And the Bird Dog and we could go after those targets. Nobody- nobody knew where we were going other than the fact that I had all these agent reports and I just, as a matter of fact, we had, just in that plane we had more of everything, more sampans, more- more KIAs, more everything than all the Vietnamese units on the ground and we couldn't report it because you're not supposed to be able to do that from a single engine Bird Dog. Interviewer: Right. Okay but, yeah we were extremely successful. And then at the end of about four or five months then before I could go up and do anything they required me to have clearance from the Vietnamese and- and so I unfortunately though when you're over a target and now we had to call in to get clearance before we could go in on the target even though we were in a, you know absolutely enemy area, enemy patrolled area. It, we’d lose the spontaneity, the ability and so then they decided okay we'll put a Vietnamese in the helicopter with you and- and he can make on onsite determinations, and he still was not successful in doing that for me because you had to react. And so I put him on the opposite side of the helicopter from where I was observing the action, I was making decisions which I had always done and then we report to him what had just taken place and then he could report it back. So, I mean there's no point in- in doing this if you can't be, the immediacy of the action requires that. (36:28) Interviewer: So, he either couldn't spot the things or just wouldn't- didn't want to give an order. Exactly, would not- would not confirm, yeah you can- you can put those, you can put those Cobras on that target. No, he didn't want that responsibility. Interviewer: Okay. And so, I was like that's why we're here, that's why I’m, that's why I’m up here, that's why I’m putting these guys in on these targets. �Interviewer: Now because I guess one of the standard assumptions in a lot of cases is that if we were alerting the Vietnamese to what we were doing… Yes. Interviewer: Then the enemy always knew. Yes. Interviewer: And could be somewhere else. Yes. Interviewer: But at least when you, what it sounds like when you were flying these missions even, I guess now at the point during the period when you were telling them at clearing ahead of time would you go out there and there wouldn't be anybody there? Not really because I would- I would only give them a certain amount of time. Yeah, there's no doubt in my mind that- that the enemy had agents within the intel shop, the Vietnamese intel shop not my counterpart, not the captain, but some of the enlisted people because there were some operations that we had that were rather sophisticated and when we actually went out to- to move on the target, target was gone and we knew- we knew it had been there the day before and it was gone. And so that convinced me now we- we there's only a certain amount, and that was one of the reasons why the- the NILO, the naval intelligence, he would not share intelligence information with me because he was concerned it would get back to the Vietnamese and then it would not be successful for them. (38:08) Interviewer: Alright now did the SEAL Team operate out of the base the whole time you were there or did… �Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Yes. Interviewer: Alright. Yeah. Interviewer: And do you have any idea what they were doing? It was primarily, I mean specifically no, but their- their function was to more take out individual leadership targets in these units and so they weren't daily doing this, and they were typically running operations at night. They might run one a week, but interestingly the entire time I was there, we had two different SEAL Teams, time I was there- there was only one casualty and that was a fellow was wounded from Air Support, from U.S. Air Support, that was the only casualty in the entire year I was there, and they went into some bad areas and some rather delicate operations. (39:12) Interviewer: Okay alright because by then we had things like the Phoenix Program and so forth where we were… That's exactly what they were, that was their primary function. Interviewer: We were basically trying to take out enemy leadership Yes. Interviewer: And so forth at that point. �Yes. Interviewer: Alright now the base itself did that ever get targeted by the enemy? Yes. Interviewer: Okay what… And I, it- it was second night I was there actually, it was about two in the morning and- and all of a sudden, I wake up and I hear the shrapnel hitting off the- the shutters of the room that I was in, and it was like okay, that's probably the most scared I’ve been in my life. And that was my first realization, okay you know I’ve been there two days and- and we got mortared so, yeah and then we couldn't- we couldn't get to the bunkers we couldn't get anywhere to protect ourselves. You don't know if this is- if this is an all-out attack or what they're doing. Well, it turned out that we had a resupply convoy that would come down once a month, convoy had come down and they would stay that at night and drive back the next day. So, they were actually targeting that convoy, not us and- and so but I- I made a point I knew exactly, determined pretty quickly where that mortar position was, who the unit was, plotted that on the map and so the last thing I would do every, when we flew at night, late afternoon, early evening, last thing I would do would for some of those units and the coordinates when I knew they moved into areas where they would, they had hit us before or where we knew that they were in attack position then the last thing I would do would be fly over that and just to confirm that okay you know they're not mounting an attack on us and we never got hit again. They, there were harassing things that were done but we never got mortared again in the year I was there so. (41:14) Interviewer: Okay and the perimeter didn't get probed by anybody? No. Interviewer: Okay. �No, we had, again those Cobras, they knew they had the Cobras. I mean there are things I look back on it now why didn't they do there, there were things that I had- I had to do and I’m thinking why didn't anybody try and take me out? I have no explanation for that but having those Cobras there and having that SEAL Team right there, right immediately attached to us they knew the kind of firepower that we had and so no we didn't, yeah, we were fortunate. Interviewer: Alright now did you go, did you pretty much stay within that, that province the whole year that you were there? Yes, well I yes, I mean as far as my function I- I would have to go up to Can Tho to get the- the funds for the agents and but as far as running operations it was strictly in the province. Interviewer: Okay getting funds for the agents, talk a little bit about your relationship with the agents and what you're doing with them. (42:16) It was all done through the Vietnamese so I would- I would go to Can Tho which was the capital of Delta, go to a- an office and they would give me a briefcase with a certain amount of money I’d have to sign for in piastres, Vietnamese currency and then bring that back to- bring that back to Cà Mau and give that to the Vietnamese. Did that every month. Interviewer: Okay and would you go to them, or did they come to the base or? No, no they it was right in the shop right there. Interviewer: Okay, okay. That we- we shared together. Interviewer: Okay. �So, I’d bring it right to them but, I mean the absurdity, the one aspect of it the absurdity of it was it was not in a good area, it was of Can Tho where we would go to get these funds. And here's an officer with no, no weapon nope, no security, no ability to provide security and handed a briefcase with thousands of dollars of piastres and I had to get, I had when I first got there I had a 45 that they had issued me but with the Vietnamization they needed- they needed that, they needed so many other things to- to provide the support to the Vietnamese so I had to give my weapon up, I had to get my 45 up and so I had no sidearm and- and so there were- there were other like myself that resorted to the these what they call Saigon cowboys, these guys would come up on their motorbikes and just grab the- grab the briefcase and then just shfff drive off and there were- there were other guys that I knew, officers that ended up throwing rocks at these guys anything they could just try and stop them. I mean it was just… (44:04) Interviewer: Okay but you managed not to be harassed. I don’t know it was my size, I don't know. I might, yeah no they- they never tried it with me. Interviewer: Alright and do you have vacation ever to go up to Saigon or anything like that? Yes we, my- my roommate was the- was the S3 and he was captain and so the nice thing about his- his rank and his responsibility and then my rank as an intelligence officer was nobody could really question where we were, what we were doing and so he would write us orders at a period of time and we'd jump on a plane and go up to Saigon spent some time there, went to Vung Tau, which was the in-country R & R, spent a few days there and so I had some flexibility. Traveled somewhat through Vietnam went up to Dalat, which is where the- the Vietnamese officer candidate school was, training and Cam Ranh Bay and- and so we- we had some flexibility to be able to do that and which was nice just to be able to get a little diversion from the day-to-day but the one thing I would say is you know as much as we were in the boondocks, there was no saluting and you know when I went back up to Saigon and you realize you might as well be on a U.S. base you know it was all the saluting and everything else that was going on it's like, I like- I �like and- and the guys that had actually been initially assigned there and thought okay this is a cake job for us, they all regret it, by when I would see them I’d say, “hey can I switch? We, can I swap jobs with you?” You know but, so I’m, you know I look back on it and I’m happy I was where I was. (46:03) Interviewer: Alright well who was in charge of your base? It was a Lieutenant Colonel Sawyer, he was the Province Senior Advisor: PSA. Interviewer: Was he there the full year or did he rotate out? Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, he was there, he had, he was there when I got there, and he was there when I left although I understand from the fellow that replaced me in a letter that was maybe two or three months after I left that- that he was reassigned. Interviewer: Okay because normally you assigned, I mean people are there for a year and they move on. Yes. Interviewer: But it may be that in certain capacities they either stay… I think so and I think it was his choice, so yeah, he had a pretty, I don't know it was a good job, yeah. �Interviewer: Alright now you were there during the period of the Cambodian incursion in 1970. Yeah. Interviewer: Now you’re at the far southern tip of South Vietnam which is away from the actual Cambodian border. Yes. Interviewer: But were there ripple effects or things that you saw relating to that? (47:02) When, even before the- the actual invasion took place we were, Ralph and myself were flying and just for our own curiosity we thought let's just go up a little further north outside of our province and we did and we saw- we saw these regular troops, regular NVA just in formation, just moving away from the border, moving going west and- and there was such intensity and you could see the intent that the- the motivation on their part just to go. They- they could have cared less that we were flying over them and observing them, and they just kept marching, and it was… Interviewer: So, they're marching you said, away from the- away from the province border? Yes. Interviewer: But toward the Cambodian border? Yes, into Cambodia, they were marching into Cambodia yeah, yeah. So whether or not they were being moved to provide support for that invasion that was about to begin I don't know, but yeah but that was quite a sight because most of, anytime I would have these- these phantom missions or these helicopters would come down inevitably they'd always say to me, “lieutenant can you �find us troops on the ground? We want troops on the ground.” And because they wanted, knowing that they were going in on so many targets they wanted to be able to record it so they could have some confirmation of exactly what they were accomplishing and- and it was always a challenge, yeah there were many times that we would find that, but you might find four, six, eight, ten that would be max. In this case you're looking at hundreds if not thousands and it was like I’d never seen anything like that you know. And it corroborated all the intelligence that we've been gathering about the numbers… Interviewer: Right. (49:03) …we had, not only in our province but the numbers that were along the border coming down that Ho Chi Minh trail. Interviewer: Yeah, and you've got North Vietnamese regulars down there. Yes. Interviewer: And they're not just- not just Viet Cong or whatever, yeah and now when you saw that did you call in anything on them or did you… Yeah, yeah we did yeah, yeah we reported what we saw but I think at that point it was, that was later in my tour and so it was more the responsibility of the Vietnamese to react to that. Interviewer: Okay. And it wasn't like we were putting in U.S. airstrikes or U.S. helicopters at that point it was Vietnamese. Interviewer: Okay. �The Vietnamese had taken over that function. Interviewer: Alright so you have no idea what happened after that? I do not know, no, no, no. Interviewer: Alright I guess how much confidence did you have in the ability of the Vietnamese to be able to kind of take over the war? (50:02) Where I was the, it was a very, very competent the S2 that S2 shop that Vietnamese S2 shop as they say, I was an advisor, but the reality was I was- I was really liaison providing funding for them and them and then reporting what in our missions that we were running with the Cobras, or I was running with the Bird Dog. Reporting what we found but no, they were- they were extremely competent in the- in the province where I was, yeah. Interviewer: But there was still a substantial enemy presence there? Yes, yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Much more so than- than either that PSA, that Lieutenant Colonel wanted me to admit in, or communicate in intelligence briefings. We would have pacification conferences every month and it was like my second month and the- the S2 was, I was the assistant S2 when I first got there. The S2 was had gone I- I either on leave or on R&R, so I was the one providing the intelligence situation and we could have, we one of those conferences we had the ambassador to Vietnam, you'd have newspaper people, you'd have government people that would come down, and so each- each the S1, S2, S3, S4, each one of us would have a certain period of time that we would provide you know the state of the state essentially and the colonel and I never really saw eye to eye because I- I told it the way it was. I, you know I’m flying over this province every day I �know what the state of the enemy situation is and it didn't coincide with what the Vietnamization communication that was- was being provided back to the States. It didn't corroborate what I really found and so at one point one of those conferences he said- said to me, “Lieutenant,” I was the second lieutenant at that point, he said, “Lieutenant, remember your rank, sit down.” He sat me down that was the last time I briefed in one of those conferences because he just didn't trust that I was going to give the policy briefing that- that they wanted. (52:26) Interviewer: Okay so explain a little bit kind of what the context of this is going on, I mean a pacification conference what, what is, what are you trying to establish? Essentially, it's again the- the state of- of what the situation is as far as our ability to have trained the Vietnamese in taking over responsibility for the war. And in anticipation of you and I getting together I- I read through some of my letters and the letter that I wrote the second day I was in the country, I was still in Saigon and I must have gone to a briefing and- and in that letter I was writing this to my folks and I pretty much said, “yeah we're probably going to be here longer than we think but this whole policy seems to be working and the training of the Vietnamese to take over this it's just it's probably going to be longer than we thought.” Well a letter that I wrote six months later in May pretty much said, “this is ludicrous, the amount of money that we're spending, it's not happening, we're training peasants, we're training people that have been working with water buffalos, we're putting them in planes giving them all kinds of weaponry. They have no responsibility for it, no accountability for it and we’re- we're wasting our time.” So that was a six months and my comment was, “I don't want you to think I’m going to come back home and I’m going to be marching in parades but it's just this is- this is not a worthwhile endeavor.” (54:02) Interviewer: Okay so what would have needed to be done differently to make it work better? Well I think what we, Ralph and I in our- in our plane were waging war as it was I think intended �to be, okay you find out where the enemy is and you go after him and you eliminate him before he eliminates you. As opposed to after as I said four to five months, now I have to get clearance these targets are still enemy targets, they haven't changed, we haven't done anything out there inin some of those rural areas to convert these people to you know their loyalty to the Vietnamese. I mean they're still, you know if the- if the Vietcong or The North Vietnamese are paying them more money and are providing the support that they think is more important for their lives then that's who they're gonna, they will support. Until you have control and- and they did not have control in those rural areas, you know it still was going to be a long, long way off. So, and I’m sure that that was fairly typical of every province in the country. (55:20) Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. Interviewer: I mean you're actually given a sort of more positive assessment of what the Vietnamese were capable of than some other people have from other places. Because I guess at least your- your local forces in your area were able to provide security, you could drive on the roads during the day and… Yes. Interviewer: You could carry your money around and nobody took it Yes. Interviewer: So that was… Yes. �Interviewer: On some level it was functioning as far as you can tell the civilian population wasn't really being intimidated too badly by the Viet Cong. Right. Interviewer: Or there weren't people getting executed or things like that. Yes. Interviewer: In that area. Now, okay so did you leave the country on R&R or did? Yes, I, the fellows that I was in training with we all decided that we were gonna save our leave and R&R until the very end of the tour. Let's- let's survive this thing, let's endure this and then it'll make the end of go much more quickly for us. Interview: Okay. So, we went to Thailand in August of ’69. Interviewer: Or ‘70 probably. Excuse me ’70. August of ‘70 and then Australia in October. (56:36) Interviewer: So you got two R&R’s. Yeah, my again, the advantage I had was that you- you got an R&R which was compliments of the Army. Interviewer: Yeah. �And I took a week's leave for my second trip, vacation to Australia and because my roommate was an S3 he said, “Barry I’m not going to charge you for this,” so this one, so- so I was able to get essentially two R&R's. Interviewer: So what was it like to leave Vietnam for a while and go off on these trips? I, one thing to put it in perspective and I thought about this because again you- you fly out of Saigon and we flew at night and we were coming from all areas of Vietnam and- and I coordinated with the guys that, that I got through basic with so, so we all went together but we all got in that airplane, civilian airplane probably about 9/ 10 o'clock at night. As the plane was rolling down the runway and it's at night so you've got your lights on and you've got the shades on the windows, all of a sudden we had started at some point in the plane where the shade on the window they started coming down, okay everybody just, all of us we all thought yep the last thing we want to do we're about to have a vacation, the last thing we want to do is provide a target for any- any enemy that might be out there and so here we are we're flying at night everybody's bringing in there, the window shades, so that kind of put it in perspective. You, the time that you're there there's an underlying, there's an anxiety, underlying anxiety. You- you can't totally relax, yeah, I mean you have some light moments and, but the reality is you're, you know there is that underlying anxiety. Not until you get in that plane, until that plane is out of Vietnam airspace, when that pilot made that, cheer went up. And then it's probably the first time you can say “okay, safe.” Yeah so. (59:07) Interviewer: Alright which trip did you like better? The Thailand. Bangkok was without a doubt, it was I love I- I love Asia, I love Asians, I love the food, I love the culture. And- and that was- that was quite an experience and then when we went to Australia, it was to some degree anti-climactic, you know because it was only a month later that I was… Interviewer: Yeah. �…going home but also very special, but certainly Thailand was a beautiful country, beautiful experience, wonderful experience. Interviewer: Okay alright now talk a little bit about I mean there's this fellow Ralph that you mentioned. Ralph. (59:53) Interviewer: Okay he's the warrant officer. Yes. Interviewer: Who was flying the bird dog? Yes. Interviewer: Describe him a little bit. He was Mormon and in the Mormon religion you can't smoke or drink but didn't prevent him from being able to kill. And the one thing I found when I first started flying there were two bird dog pilots, one was a lieutenant, army lieutenant and then Ralph who was a chief warrant. And the one thing you realize quickly is if you're going in on an enemy target, you're diving in on that target and if you don't put that ordinance on the target so you're- you're coming, you're starting at 2000 feet you're diving in on the target. It's like coming in on a roller coaster, coming over the top of a roller coaster, when you're diving in from 2000 feet you're going probably about 120 miles an hour, when you pull out you're going about 60 miles an hour. If you haven't put that ordinance on that target, you're probably gonna- you're probably gonna get shot. So, the, my realization was Ralph was just he had- he had and- and here's a guy flying a Bird Dog won two distinguished flying crosses, two at DFC’s, flying a bird dog. �Interviewer: Yeah. (1:01:22) I mean that's pretty unusual and one of them when I was flying with him and he was, I mean the things and- and I never knew, I mean he would pretty much be spontaneous I’d- I’d put him out to certain coordinates and if he saw something he didn't say “okay we're going in,” it was all of a sudden chhhuu the front end of the plane just drops and he's- he's diving in on a target. And so I would lift myself out of the chair like that, I’m not going to get shot in my butt whatever's going to go here but, yeah and that was every day we were pretty much doing that, that you never getyou never get comfortable with that knowing when we're diving in on something, something's gonna probably gonna be shooting back at us. Interviewer: Alright did your plane ever get hit? Six times. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, yeah and early on one of them, one of the rounds when we got back, we looked at it and the round had hit a strut or it would have, an engine strut, or it would have gone right through his head. So, he said to me, “I think- I think we better instruct you how to bring this plane in if something happens to me.” So, for about a week we- we, I took flying lessons from him. Interviewer: Okay. (1:02:41) Now I wasn't going to take off, I probably would have crash-landed but at least I could have brought the plane back to the- the airfield. But, yeah. Interviewer: Alright now did the other plane have, I mean did that ever get- get hit worse or you were worried that if you weren't with Ralph you might get hit. �Well the other pilot he was- he was having marital problems and he went back to Texas to try and resolve it and it was not able to do that and so he- he just was not taking precautions, supposed to fly at 2000 feet we'd be flying at 1000 feet, he's going in on targets at a much lower level. And- and actually it wasn't me but he got reported and so he lost his wings and they- they brought him back to Saigon. So rather than having two planes we only had one plane. Interviewer: Okay so they didn't replace him. (1:03:44) They didn't replace him no. Interviewer: Alright and then did you have a helicopter pilot you flew with regularly or were they, did they rotate? Companies they- they rotated those, yeah they'd come down they said every, you know every day, every other day we'd have and- and so usually the duration was about two- two and a half hours and then they'd have to go back and refuel so usually it was first thing in the morning and then midafternoon into the early evening. And they couldn't refuel, we didn't have a fuel option for them at Cà Mau so they'd have to go back to Can Tho. Interviewer: Alright so thinking back over that year that you spent in Vietnam are there other particular incidents or impressions that kind of stand out in your memory that we haven't talked about yet? The, just a couple things, one of which is I probably, when I heard about this opportunity I- I don't know a year or two ago I probably would not have pursued this, the opportunity to speak with you but and- and I think for a number of reasons. I think you hear often that if you've been in the combat that you're reluctant to talk about it, you know talk about it with your family. And I think- I think and I really came to this I think it's my own personal belief, but I think it applies to more, is that you internalize so much of that that, and- and there's this macho male image and you, when you start talking about certain things you just become emotional, and you start crying. �And so, it's a- it's a real challenge to talk about some of the, I mean there's a lot that you could talk about, but you don't, you try and remember the lighter moments. So that's one aspect of this, the other is I’m 73, 72 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My roommate, matter of fact four of, four of the five guys that I was closest to we get to, still get together every year. Every one of us has come down with cancer at this point in our lives. And the Army has me on permanent disability or the government has me on permanent disability. And so, you become an advocate because I think the reality is in the province where I was with those base areas, the foliage was so dense that they used agent orange rather extensively and whether or not you were direct contact with it, food sources and everything else, any- any number of ways that you did come in contact with it. And- and I think they've come to the conclusion that if we were in Vietnam, you probably had exposure and you're probably gonna be susceptible to having some kind of cancer so… Interviewer: Alright. Yeah. Interviewer: How would you characterize morale among the people in your unit? (1:06:44) The highlight of the day, the highlight of my day was putting an “x” on the calendar it was one last day that I had to spend there. You- you know fortunately I, because I was an officer and because of my ability to get on a plane and fly somewhere I could you know I- I had some control of it. It was, unless you were career Military and I was ROTC, you know you- you when people say to me “thanks- thanks for your service,” quite honestly my- my response has always been, “you know it was my job,” right. I- I was going to be drafted, I was told I had to go, I had to do it, I was gonna do it to the best of my ability which is what I think I did. But it was, yeah it was- it was difficult- it was difficult almost that's- that's the longest, it's the longest year of your life. �Interviewer: Yeah, and did you have enlisted personnel on the base who really couldn't go anywhere or? Pardon Interviewer: Did you have enlisted personnel on the base who really couldn't go anywhere? You- you could get up and fly. Yeah. Interviewer: Alright. Yeah, we did. (1:07:56) Interviewer: And- and I don't know what was their attitude? Well, we were a small team, I mean 100 might not seem that way, 120 but we were a small team and so and drugs were not really a problem there were a few- there were a few enlisted that got into some heavy drugs. Heroin and cocaine but we all knew that we were dependent upon one another so… Interviewer: Right. You know and relying on one another so you couldn't let your buddy down and so it was you got through it the best you could and you just, it was survival, that's what you did, you just- you just got through that year. Interviewer: Okay and what was the ethnic mix of the unit were you pretty much all white or did you have… �Primarily, yeah it was primarily we had a few minorities but for the most part it was all white and when we would travel to other areas especially at that time there was a lot of racial tension. There wasn't a lot of respect for officers, white officers and so but not where I was, not in the small team that I was on and, but it was pretty apparent when we would travel to Can Tho or travel to certainly Saigon, yeah was not a not a good situation. (1:09:17) Interviewer: Alright so you get to the end now of that year, we get to the end of 1970 now it's time for you to go back to the States, so what's the process for getting you out? You get your, you get the orders and actually I had- I had about a week or two less than the year which was kind of a bonus when I got my orders and so you- you just as you would come down from Saigon to Can Tho to Cà Mau, I and went back the same way Can Tho to Saigon and- and then well I had received my order saying that I would be, when I left Vietnam I was to report to Fort Bragg, special forces Fort Bragg, North Carolina and be assigned to a special forces unit as an intel shop. Interviewer: Okay alright and then do you fly commercial again when you leave or? It was charter. (1:10:21) Interviewer: Yeah. And again, it was same, Yokota to Anchorage to- to… Interviewer: Did you go to San Francisco or Seattle? No, San Francisco. Interviewer: Okay. �Yeah. Interviewer: Alright do you get to go home for a while before you go to Fort Bragg? Yeah fortunately I got home in about the middle of like the 10th or 11th of November and didn't have to report until after the first of January. Interviewer: Okay. So I actually had about six weeks off. Interviewer: Alright and now you're kind of back in the States, you're not out of the Army yet. Right. Interviewer: For a while there you're kind of back home you don't have to be in uniform or whatever and what was that experience like? (1:11:06) It- it, you know they talk about, of course here I am you know my hair's still short even though I was in civilian- civies- civilian clothes, it's pretty apparent that I’m Military. And my roommate at Sears was in a graduate program at CW Post College in Nassau County and so we went on campus, took me on campus I had somebody walk up to me and spit at me so when you talk about that experience, yeah, I did have that one scenario where just out of the absolute blue just walks up to me just spits at me and walks on. That was it, no comment, nothing was said just yeah. But no other than that it was you know I knew that the length of my commitment was two years, so you know I was very comfortable. It was just, I can remember the one emotional think about it, what your parents go through. And my folks when they met me at Kennedy, I came off the plane and I can remember my mother saying, “it's finally over, finally over.” So that you know that whole year you're, you know you're surviving and you're trying to communicate with them and yeah and then so just as you have that anxiety level, that is the same for them you �know. So, but then you know you pretty much get back into your normal routine and- and you, then I went back I reported the guys that I was with we all were assigned to my- my closest friends to Fort Bragg so we all were down there. (1:13:11) Interviewer: Alright, okay so there's still, you're not going to in a way it's not totally new, at least you know some of the people who are there along with you. Yes. Interviewer: Okay so what- what did you actually do at Fort Bragg while you were there? It was a, believe it or not it was a- an intelligence, so it's special forces, Army special forces but we were gathering intelligence for this unit their area of specialization was the Middle East and of course the Middle East there was nothing going on in the Middle East at that time. So here we are most of our day is trying to gather intel, where do you get it? You get it from Time Magazine you get it from news articles and everything else. So that's- that's where we're gathering all this information. So it was really just marking time, putting time in and so at the end of, pretty much the end I had about a month left and the Captain who was a regular Army, great guy and not college, I mean just a- just regular Army captain. Calls us in my roommate, myself he says, “Lieutenant what are your thoughts towards your time is coming up,” he says, “what would it take to keep you in? You're the kind of guys…” Because we I think my- my buddies and I going through ROTC not so gung-ho Military as let's say West Point or OCS, and- and- and he said, “you're the kind of guys we need to stay in,” he said, “what would it take?” And I said, “well if you could guarantee me a year or so in Thailand, I might consider that.” And he said, “are you serious?” And I said, and I thought about it, I said, “yeah I think I might be serious.” Right, so came back to me about a week or two later and he said, “I don't have good news.” I said, “what's that?” He said, “well the best I can do it's guarantee you another year here at Fort Bragg and then you're going back to Vietnam.” So, I said, “I’m not taking that, I’m not rolling those dice again I, you know so I, that was- that was it. But yeah, it was pretty much, the ROTC it was a six-year commitment, two years of active duty and then four years of reserve. But at that time between �the downsizing of the requirement, the troop requirement of Vietnam they pretty much whenwhen you were finished if you were combat, if you had been in a combat zone when you were finished, they pretty much waived that four-year reserve commitment. If I wanted to report to a reserve unit, that was fine, if I didn't that was fine too, so. (1:16:02) Interviewer: Yeah, because in general at that point I mean they were, did you get promoted to captain right as you left? Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah. Interviewer: And basically, they had- they had way too many captains in the early 70’s, a lot of them got rifted anyway. Yeah, yeah. Interviewer: And so, unless you were really well connected you might not have lasted anyway. I, quite honestly Jim I have no idea why they gave me that- that promotion. it came up, they sent me this letter and said okay you know whatever they, maybe they looked at my records I don't know. But they said you know “you're- you qualify for a promotion to the grade of captain. Would you accept it?” Interviewer: Okay. �And I thought, okay who knows at some point in the future for retirement purposes or whatever you know if I, yeah. So I- so I acknowledge that and yeah. Came though, so. Interviewer: Alright so now we get into middle of ’71, you're right, you're out of the Army. Yeah. Interviewer: Okay so do you go back to Sears or what do you do? We, the four that I was closest to, we took leave and R & R together we decided okay we've seen the United States because when we were going through Basic and that we had done some travel in the United States. We'd seen Asia, we said alright before we go back to, I was going back to Sears and each one of them had a job they were going back to, we thought all right let's go to Europe. So, we took two months and went to Europe, traveled through Europe for two months. (1:17:24) Interviewer: What countries did you go to? Started in Germany, Austria, Italy came back up through France, the Netherlands, and- and then England. Interviewer: Okay so at- at this point did you still look kind of Military or at least people could look at you and figure you were probably… Probably not. Interviewer: Okay. No, the sideburns had come down significantly. Interviewer: Okay so you could go out then. �The hair was growing and- and yeah, so. Interviewer: And how did, were people treating Americans at that point? Military? Oh, you mean in- in… Interviewer: Just generally, you were a tourist now but. Okay while we were traveling through Europe, we one of the reasons I- I went for the intelligence branch was my language in high school and college was German, I spoke fairly decent German. Interviewer: Okay. (1:18:12) And so, when we were traveling through Europe I used German, my other, there were four of us two of us spoke pretty good, pretty fluent German. And so if we were going for a pension or we were looking for anything we would ask in German first before we would acknowledge that we were Americans and they never really knew whether we were Canadians or Americans but- but I never really was too, too awkward or too difficult other than that. Just doing some of the negotiating so… Interviewer: Yeah alright. If we had to. Interviewer: Okay, so now you do that and then you come back, so you go back to Sears in Pittsburgh? Yes. �Interviewer: Okay and how long did you stay with him? Probably in total about a year and a half. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, I found it I think the experience I had in the Military influenced me to some degree in a number of ways. One of which was all the travel I’d done, all the independence I had, and Sears was so structured at that point. And I just found it the structural part of Sears in comparison to the Military was not something I really enjoyed. And it just was not, it was not something that was meant to be, so it was about a year and a half, two years and then about a year later I found the position with Stanley Tools, sales. So that- that really started my career, my civilian career. (1:19:46) Interviewer: Okay and then did you stay in sales, or did you move on to other things? I have, yeah, I did sales I went into sales management with them I was with Stanley about eight years and then started my own company and this manufacturer's rep agency, so I’ve been doing that for 30 years. Interviewer: Okay, alright and how did you wind up in West Michigan? I was with Stanley I was headquartered, well I started in Pittsburgh with Sears and they transStanley transferred me to Philly, transferred me to Indianapolis, and then Chicago. And at one point I was actually had responsibility for people working for me in Michigan and I met a fellow that had a manufacturer's rep agency and he said, “if you ever decide that corporate life isn't for you, and you want to give something else a shot contact me.” And in the mid 80’s when the last major recession took place, I was a district manager in middle management one day they let 13 of us go and so I contacted him and I said, “hey if that opportunity still exists, I’d be interested in,” so that's what brought me over here. (1:20:50) �Interviewer: Alright now you’d mentioned that you know you've got what is likely some effects of Agent Orange. Yeah. Interviewer: Do you think that you have any sort of the psychological carry over from Vietnam? I don't think so I- I can tell you this, that when I first got there I- I slept with a sidearm, a revolver by my bed and- and there were a number of incidents that we had when I was using that machine, that machine gun and I can't- I can't fire a weapon anymore. I have no interest, I can't even shoot skeet, I really can't watch combat movies. I’m- I- I have nightmares and so yeah, it's, there's- there as I said there are things you internalize. Interviewer: Right. (1:21:51) And it's not, my son and his girlfriend came in for Thanksgiving and- and we were watching a segment with the Food Network, and they were doing something in North Vietnam and my son even said to me, “Dad do you want us to turn it to something else?” And I said, “nah it's fine.” You know it's essentially just a travelogue. Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah, that night I was I woke up and I was like pwhooo, I was almost in a sweat. it was like, it was ridiculous, you know these little triggers or little things that- that still occur it’s like… Interviewer: Yeah, I mean anything, an experience like that doesn't- doesn't go away. �No, no that's quite apparent. So yeah, I try and avoid those things people will say to me like that Vietnam series that came on, “did you watch that?” I said, “no I really didn't,” you know I really, even- even books and things like that it's just, I just try and avoid that so. (1:22:53) Interviewer: Okay so what made you decide to come to an interview then? Well two things, number one this is the 50th anniversary of my being there and so I started reading my letters. I wrote about 50 letters home, my mother kept all my letters and I had, I started reading them and- and I just thought when I- when I received that communication, I thought you know what, I think maybe if there's something that I can share maybe there are others but this- this with the cancer is the other thing. That if there's any way that I think whenwhen this occurs you realize I’ve got to be an advocate, got to communicate, anybody that spent any time or associated with Vietnam at that time, that you need to be very diligent, you need to be making sure that you're- you're getting physicals and when you're getting that physical that you're having that PSA checked and in my case I had my physical a year ago in like June, July and there was early detection that there might be some issues, my PSA was somewhat elevated but we, everybody always assumes ah, you know, you're going to die from something else. And I went back six months later, and it had, I have the aggressive form. So you can never make an assumption and I just keep saying you know if you've had it and if your PSA number is just don't assume, just make sure you're getting it, and it can move that quickly in six months as mine did. So, that's- that's probably the primary motivation here is just anyone that's been there and that we're really all advocates for the safety and security. We survived that. Interviewer: Yeah. (1:24:38) So, it's like okay. Interviewer: Alright well the whole thing makes for a pretty good story so thank you very much for coming in and sharing it. Thank you, Jim it's been a pleasure meeting you in this experience. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HillmerB2353V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hillmer, Barry Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02 Title A name given to the resource Hillmer, Barry (Interview transcript and video), 2020 Description An account of the resource Barry Hillmer was born in Flushing, Queens, New York City, on May 3rd, 1946. He graduated high school in 1964 before beginning the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program at Lafayette College. After graduating and completing the ROTC program in 1968, he went to Pittsburgh to work for Sears for a year. In June 1969, he was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia for infantry officer basic training. After that, he went to Fort Holabird, Maryland for intelligence training. In November 1969, he received orders to go to Vietnam, flying out of San Francisco and stopping in Anchorage, Alaska and Yokota, Japan before arriving in Saigon. He spent a few days in Saigon before being flown to Can Tho to receive his assignment. He was to go to Cà Mau in An Xuyen Province and assigned to Advisory Team 80. His job was to gather intelligence about the enemy units and their activity. While on deployment, he traveled to many cities in Vietnam, including Vung Tau for in-country R&R. He also traveled outside of the country for R&R: Thailand in August 1970 and Australia in October 1970. Nearing the end of the year, he received orders to go back to the U.S. He went back the same way he came: first to Can Tho, then Saigon, Yokota, Anchorage, and finally San Francisco. After six weeks of leave, he reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina and was assigned to a special forces unit where he gathered intelligence for a unit whose area of specialization was the Middle East. Hillmer finished his service in 1971. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) WKTV (Wyoming, Mich.) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/1b84852d72fa340d6d47d6b4f54160c6.mp4 ceb5bb49a1869e6c14db2dd07a81e414 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2eec87443ff48dbe5c96cf44c77c720b.pdf 0fb38c81bbdec31aa6a54cd8fe5a3d95 PDF Text Text Hedrick, John Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Cold War Interviewee’s Name: John Hedrick Length of Interview: (52:36) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “We are talking today with John Hedrick of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State Veterans History Project. Okay, John start us off with some background on yourself and to begin with, where and when were you born?” Well I was born in Wichita, Kansas, but I grew up in Newton, Kansas which is 18 miles north of Wichita. Interviewer: “What year were you born?” 1930 Interviewer: “Okay you grew up in Newton, and what did your family do for a living when you were growing up?” My grandfather was an inventor, and he had I think 17 basic patents on various devices for poultry, and hogs, and farm products in other words. And so we sold, our big item was cardboard baby chick feeders, because during the war steel was not available for the feeders and so the cardboard, we sold over a million one year, which is a lot, lot of cardboard. But they were, this was made for us or the feeders were made in Saint Joe, Michigan, by a paper box company and I �Hedrick, John worked after school, folding and mailing $1 orders for baby chick feeders. We’d sell four for a dollar, and that would feed a hundred little baby chicks during their gestation period. So my dad was into businessInterviewer: “Just to back up a little bit, so you’re born in 1930 and that’s during the depression-” Yes Interviewer: “Now in the 30’s were you living with your grandfather as well as with- or how did that work?” Yeah good question, we moved in with my grandparents in about 1929, about a year before I was born and I remember, I have a brother who’s six years older and he recalls the phone ringing at two o’clock in the morning, and Grandad answered it and then he said “Mercy! Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!” He got off the phone and said “Florence has had twins” so I had a twin sister. We lived with my grandparents for probably close to a year, and then bought a house in Newton and lived there the rest of our lives. Interviewer: “So basically the inventing business it went well enough that they could support the family during the 30’s” Yeah, very well, very very well. Interviewer: “Alright, now do you remember hearing about Pearl Harbor?” (2:57) Oh yes. Interviewer: “How did you learn about that?” �Hedrick, John Heard it on the radio, of course everything was radio in those days but yeah that was a pretty dramatic time. Probably didn't realize the full impact of that attack that it would lead right into war, but certainly remember it. Interviewer: “Now did the oncoming of the war, I mean it generated more business, but otherwise did that change the way of life in Newton or did things stay pretty much the same when you were growing up?” A lot of young men were called into service, in ‘41 I was only eleven so I had to wait until I actually went to college and graduated from college, and then went into the navy. Interviewer: “Where did you go to college?” University of Kansas, Jayhawk! Interviewer: “Now land grant schools had an ROTC requirement, so Kansas State had one. Did you do ROTC at Kansas or did you just decide to volunteer after you finished?” That’s exactly right, they had ROTC but I didn’t join it at Kansas. Seven of us, from our fraternity went over to Kansas City, we had heard that they had reopened the naval officer procurement. The OCS school, 16 weeks of school to get an officer, become an officer, so seven of us went over and applied, all passed, all went back to Newport, Rhode Island. Interviewer: “Now what year was that, that you did this?” ‘52 Interviewer: “Ok so the Korean war was on at this time?” I apologize Jim, that was ‘51, yeah the Korean war was pretty hot at that time. I was number one on the draft list so Carrie Nation was our draft officer, and I said “Well what do I do?” and she �Hedrick, John said, “Well you better enlist or I’ll have to pull you into the army” I said “Okay, I’ll enlist” So I enlisted in the navy and went back to San Diego for boot camp for about seven weeks, awaiting orders to go to Newport, Rhode Island where the school was. Interviewer: “Alright, talk about boot camp what did you do there?” A whole lot of exercises, it was a great experience really because I learned a lot of fundamental things about naval protocol and it stood me in very good stead for becoming an officer. Interviewer: “When you were doing your boot camp the unit you were training with, were you all officer candidates or were you in with the ordinary guys?” No, in with ordinary guys. I remember one young man came from Arkansas, didn’t have a suitcase, didn’t have anything, didn’t have a toothbrush. And he just arrived so they gave him a toothbrush and cut his hair, and fixed his teeth, he had terrible dental problems. But that was typical, we had an awful lot of, you know, young men from the hinterlands at boot camp. Interviewer: “Were there any black recruits in that class, or were you all white?” (6:22) Jim, that’s a wonderful question. We had no blacks in our squadron, and I was, they made me squadron commander because I had a college degree. Later on, on ship of course we had blacks, and I became good friends with a lot of them. But not withInterviewer: “But not with the training group?” Not in the boot camp. Interviewer: “The military was still sort of transitioning into being integrated, the order came out a few years earlier, Truman had desegregated the military officially but it took a while for that to kind of filter through.” �Hedrick, John It sure did. Interviewer: “Okay so you do your seven weeks of boot camp, and then Newport, Rhode Island is the next stop?” Yes Interviewer: “Okay what do you do there?” 16 weeks of very intense schooling and training, we studied the, all of the naval information that people at- Oh I’m trying to think here, oh shoot what’s the school, the navy school, Annapolis! We studied the same curriculum in 16 weeks that they studied in four years, as far as the navy’s concerned, so it was very intense and a great experience. Interviewer: “And what time of year were you there?” March. Interviewer: “Okay that could be interesting in Rhode Island.” Yeah we had some snow, but we graduated in… let’s see March, April, May, 16 weeks would be June Interviewer: “Now, how easy or hard was it for you to adjust to being in the military? Did you adapt to military life quickly or was it a challenge?” (8:40) No, I think I adapted very quickly. I tell you, living in a fraternity at Kansas was a good background for going into the military because I’d learned to live with other guys and sleep in dorms, that sort of thing. So it was a good background. �Hedrick, John Interviewer: “What kinds of people were training you at Newport, were these old veterans or?” Mostly Navy chiefs. Yeah older guys, they seemed older at the time they were probably in their late 20’s, early 30’s, but we had wonderful training. Gosh, I just really treasure what we learned back there. Interviewer: “Now once you complete this what do they do with you?” When I graduated from OCS they assigned me to the AGC 12, the USS Estes, which is an amphibious group command ship and it was based in the Pacific. I requested Pacific duty so I got the AGC. Interviewer: “Describe the AGC as a ship, how big is it? What does it look like?” 368 feet long, 60 feet wide, it's a converted A.P.A which is a cargo ship or troop carrying. They made me assistant gunnery officer, we only had one gunman on this ship, and assistant navigator, and the first thing we did when I went aboard I said “What’s up?” and they said “Well we’re going out to Eniwetok” for some kind of a bomb test, and none of us knew very much about it at the time. It was really top secret, we were in a race with Russia in the Cold War. So we went out to Eniwetok, we sit in the atoll for about six weeks, I went scuba diving and snorkeling everyday, waiting for the scientific test of the H-bomb. The morning of the test we were 38 miles upwind from the bomb site which was in a shack on an island [unintelligble] or something like that was a weird name, which ceased to exist after the test, the island just disappeared. [Note: Bombs were tested on the islets of Bokonijien, Aerokojlil and Namu. The Namu bomb was tested on the surface, but the island was large enough that it was not obliterated. The Namu test was later than the other two, one of which detonated in the air and the other underwater, and these are likely the ones he is referring to.] Interviewer: “So this is a coral atoll so this is a bunch of small islets and kind of a ring around it.” �Hedrick, John Exactly. Interviewer: “So this is on one of them so it didn’t destroy the entire atoll, but it blew up that island.” Oh no. It blew up that island right, because the atoll is made up of all coral reefs and islands periodically. Interviewer: “Now when they actually set off the bomb, do they allow people to watch it, or do you have to look in a different direction while the blast happens or?” I had to look in a different direction, I was assistant navigator on that AGC so I was up on the bridge, but they didn’t have enough high density goggles to give me a pair. So I had to stand there with my head in my elbow, until they said you can look now. It was incredible the fireball went 50,000 feet high and it was a mile wide, three times as hot as the center of the sun, and it literally vaporized everything for one mile of width and 175 feet of depth. Which, you know, if we took right here that would be almost to Burton Street, on the north, and Division on the west. So that’s how big the fireball was, just gigantic it was much larger than they anticipated. Actually tested out they wanted about six or seven megatons of explosive, they got about 13 megatons. Interviewer: “Was this the first hydrogen bomb test?” (13:26) Yes. Interviewer: “So they really didn’t know what was going to happen” Absolutely not. It was all calculated, I don’t wanna say guesswork but it was, some of their instruments were actually destroyed by the severity of the blast. �Hedrick, John Interviewer: “Did you feel the shock itself when the bomb went off?” No. Interviewer: “Did the water absorb that or?” Probably Jim about two minutes after the thing went off a shock wave came across the surface, but it was very mild by then. 38 miles you know, it had dissipated a whole lot thank goodness. Interviewer: “Alright, so you join the navy and walk into a little piece of history right away” Oh, it was amazing. Then a week later, they set off a smaller nuclear bomb, only about two miles from us and that really rocked the ship and did some damage and got us quite a few roentgens of, what do we call that? Interviewer: “Radiation” Radiation, that’s correct. Interviewer: “So why were they doing that?” They detonated the hydrogen bomb, with a small nuclear bomb, they needed the nuclear bomb to get hot enough to detonate the nitrogen, so they were experimenting. It wasn’t that big of a gamble I guess, they kind of knew what they had. Interviewer: “But, so it sounds like it was bigger than it should’ve been if you were that close to it. Or in those days did they just not think that much about safety?” We didn’t, nuh-uh I remember seeing the plane and hearing bombs away and watching, and watching, and suddenly the thing exploded probably 2000 feet up in the air. Showered us with a �Hedrick, John lot of radiation and broke some antennas and that kind of surface damage. One young man, unfortunately, was going through a hatch when the thing went off and the hatch broke his arm, slammed it shut, but that was a fascinating experience. Here I was just a green young ensign, but got to be up on the bridge with officers and congressmen, generals. We had a real entourage of people out there to observe that test. Interviewer: “Now what did the- How long did you stay on that ship?” (16:32) Well that’s a good question, from there we went right back to Mare Island, which is just north of San Francisco, it’s a big Navy shipyard to repair some of the damage that had been done to the ship and we got involved with some Stanford girls and one of our, one of my shipmates lined up these girls that take us skiing at Squaw Valley. One of the girls’ folks had a cottage up there, so I learned to ski rudimentary. I'm very- from being from Kansas we didn’t have any hills in Kansas but it was a great experience. We would go almost every weekend, go up and ski and then I got emergency orders to report to the LST 914, which was down in Long Beach, California. Interviewer: “Okay, so roughly when was it that you changed ships?” In January of ‘52, yeah ‘52 Interviewer: “So how long in total were you with your first ship, was that just a few months then?” Yeah less than a year, about nine months. Interviewer: “Alright but before we move onto the LST let’s talk a little bit more about life on an AGC. What was- When you were out at sea what was the daily routine?” Well I was assistant gunnery officer and assistant officer of the deck or first lieutenant, which is in charge of the deck and the painting and all of those things. And it was really a good experience, I had a division of workers that I was supervising, and we played a lot of bridge and �Hedrick, John had a lot of fun on that ship. Interviewer: “Were there rules about the kinds of interactions you could have between officers and enlisted?” Not really. Interviewer: “So you could play bridge with enlisted personnel?” Didn’t matter no, I played with the dentist and the navigator and another guy. Interviewer: “Alright, so the officers on some level will still sort of stay together.” Yeah, we had a boardroom where we ate and kind of lounged. No we didn’t have a lot of contact other than, once you got out of the boardroom and out on the ship, then you had a lot of contact. Interviewer: “Okay you had mentioned before you had black sailors in the crew, did you have black sailors doing anything other than working as cooks or stewards?” (19:30) We had a couple in our deck game doing chipping, and painting, and so forth. We had a couple in the kitchen as we call it, we had one, in our little ward room which was where our officers hang out. We had one assigned to us daily, to prepare meals and serve us and do all of that. So it was a good experience. Interviewer: “So that was the traditional role for black sailors but the ones who were in the deck gang, that was actually something relatively new.” Yeah, it was. We had one by the name of Sap S.A.P, who I always say he looked like Stepin Fetchit, real loose limbed. We had a collision with another ship, and the bow of that ship penetrated ours, came right into the guy- the head as we call it, the bathroom and Sap had just gone off duty and was sitting on the john when the bow of that ship came, penetrated broke a �Hedrick, John steam line- now I betcha he’s still telling that story today. Yeah he’s a great, great guy. Interviewer: “Alright what kind of a, what was the work routine for you in terms of how long do shifts last, or when are you on or off duty?” Yeah I stood watches as an officer of the deck, we had six officers so we rotated. Stood watch about every two days, would stand for four hours, and of course we were there all through the night. During the day just kind of supervised the deck gang, and then our executive officer who was a full lieutenant left the ship, and they made me the executive officer. Which was wonderful because then I stood no watches of any kind. It really was a great experience. Interviewer: “Did the, did that ship have any other missions or things that it did while you were on except the trip to Eniwetok?” (22:15) Yeah, we would go out on training cruises, do mock invasions, go up and hit the beach and open our bow doors and lower the ramp. The protocol for that as you went into the beach was to drop the stern anchor, which you could then use to help pull you off of the beach. Interviewer: “Now did the AGC have doors in front of it like an LST or a ramp that came down?” No, the AGC was just a ship. Interviewer: “Okay so you would stay off shore-” I’m on the LST now. Interviewer: “Okay I was still asking about the AGC.” Oh, I’m sorry Jim. �Hedrick, John Interviewer: “While you were on it because we could cover that then move onto life on the LST. Okay so with the AGC, now the AGC was a command ship for amphibious operations?” That is correct. Interviewer: “Now while you’re with the AGC did you do any exercises, or was the only thing you did with them was go to Eniwetok and then come back?” That was basically it, because by the time we got there we were out there about three months, came back in the shipyard and I left the AGC while it was still in the shipyard. Interviewer: “Right now that gets us- where was the LST when you joined it?” It was at Long Beach, California when I went down there, then they sent me right to San Diego, to a couple of schools really. One was on ice navigation, what do you do when you’re in the ice because we were going to the arctic for a resupply expedition of the dew line defense bases, all around the northern coast of Alaska and clear over into Canada. But we were in the ice for 17 days, as I mentioned they had reinforced our bow doors and the stern so we could actually push the ice. We operated with two ice breakers, the Burton sounds and…can’t even think of the name of the other one, but they were our protection in case we got in real trouble. North wind was the other one. Interviewer: “Now when they put you on the LST, I mean what is your assignment on that, what’s your job?” First lieutenant, which means I was in charge of the whole deck force, also navigator. Interviewer: “And how many officers did they have on an LST?” Six officers, 120 men. �Hedrick, John Interviewer: “So you talked about getting ice training, what did that involve?” Really very very little, we were testing some foul weather gear because Korea was still on at the time, and we had a lot of suffering in Korea from the freezing, so we were testing alpaca lined coats, and that was about it. It was a very easy duty, just sailed up, stopped at Port Hueneme, stopped in Seattle to take on supplies and then went up to the arctic, Point Barrow. And who is at Point Barrow? The USS Estes was waiting there in charge of that group. Interviewer: “Alright so your old ship was up there waiting for you” (26:06) My old ship was there, yep. Interviewer: “Okay, now I guess describe a little bit, you’re up there the resupply missions, how does that work or what do you do?” Well, basically we took on about 50 stevedores at Port Hueneme and they rode up with us into the arctic, and they basically did the unloading of everything at the sight of a new dew line base. We carried a high octane fuel, a lot of electronic gear, our main deck was just covered with supplies for that. We were on the beach as it is, we roll up to the beach and open the bow doors and lower the ramp, and then they took the supplies out through the tank deck and left them there. We were, I think, three or four days during the unloading process, had a lot of stuff to unload. Interviewer: “So how do you spend your time, all that’s going on?” Fishing, I did an awful lot of fishing and hunting when I grew up in Kansas, and I had a fly rod I probably hiked up about a mile on this little stream, and never caught a fish. Never saw one, got back to the ship and they said “Boy you should see the fish those guys caught out in the bay!” Big silver fish, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. My dad had given me about a dozen rolls of film, he was quite a photographer, and I took a lot of pictures. Got home, had them developed, didn’t have single picture, the film was all out of date. A bad experience because I really had some �Hedrick, John treasures as far as photography. We saw a herd of caribou, probably a thousand caribou in this big herd. We watched them and I photographed them you know, I was really excited to get home and show everyone those, but not to be. Interviewer: “Were there any people up there?” Yes, we pulled up to this one site and pulled up to the beach, didn’t open our bow doors or lower the ramp, we just sort of sit there on the sand, and there was probably a 25, 30 foot high cliff right in front of us. So cliff and then down to the water. There were dozens of dogs lining the bank up on there, which was pretty exciting. We didn’t want any part of those dogs, so we ultimately backed off and went down to our site. That was the Eskimo village, we were on the north shore of Alaska at that time. We got as far east as the Mackenzie River, which would have been in Canada rather than Alaska, so we went around quite a ways. Interviewer: “So you’re part way through the north-west passage” (29:58) Yes we were. Yeah that was a fascinating experience to go up there, I really treasure my time. Interviewer: “Now once that mission is complete, what do you do next?” Went back down to San Diego for a little R&R, and then went to Japan and spent a year out in Japan. Interviewer: “Alright, now where were you based in Japan?” Yokosuka. Interviewer: “It’s a major naval base, is that Tokyo Bay or that area?” That is correct. That’s exactly right, I was navigator and it took us 32 days to get there, but we hit Tokyo Bay right on the nose. �Hedrick, John Interviewer: “So did you spend- Did you stay on the ship, did you go ashore much? What did you do in Japan?” Well I went ashore, I took two automobiles, took a Chevy and a Ford out to Japan aboard the ship. Sold the Chevy the day after we got there for exactly double what I paid for it in San Diego. I was gonna sell the ford and then I thought “No, I’ll do some driving” so I drove over 2000 miles, in Japan over the period of the next ten or eleven months. Interviewer: “Alright so where did you go, what did you see?” A whole lot, went up to Mount Fuji, went down the coast to Nagoya which is the big pottery place. I was, I had my shotgun with me as well as my fishing tackle so I went out pheasant hunting. I didn’t get one but I saw an old Japanese guy with a shotgun and he got one. But it was fun, I went out into the countryside which I would never had had a chance to do if I would not have had the car. Interviewer: “Now do the Japanese drive on the wrong side of the road?” (32:20) Yes. Oh sure, and that’s an exercise to reorient your thinking, particularly when you’re making a left turn or a right turn, that’s where you get disoriented. Interviewer: “Did you hit anything?” Never did, no. Interviewer: “Okay now what kind of condition was Japan in? Towns, countryside, X number of years after the war.” Well that would have been in ‘54, so nine years after the war. Yokohama was still devastated, awful lot of rubble, and they just hadn’t rebuilt it in nine years. Tokyo, pretty decent shape. It �Hedrick, John was, the attitude of the Japanese towards us, it was just remarkable. They were extremely warm and friendly, and just couldn’t have been better. I learned a little Japanese, enough to be gracious. That was a great experience. Interviewer: “So how much time did you spend in port as opposed to being out at sea during that year?” We probably spent about 80% of our time in port, we did a couple of operations. One was down right at the foot of Mount Fuji, did a mock invasion there we had Marines on board, and did a mock landing and mock invasion there. Which was very interesting, we were pulled in there when it was dark, and then watched the sun hit the top of Mount Fuji, and then work its way down, down the mountainside. It was just a beautiful sight so that was very special. Interviewer: “Now when you’re an officer on a ship like that, I mean do officers have to do shore patrol or are they responsible for men who go ashore and get in trouble, or do the officers do that? No we didn’t do any of that, later on in the reserves I acted as a shore patrol in Jamaica, that was interesting, but we didn’t do any of that type of thing. Interviewer: “Alright now if you’re spending a lot of time in port in a place like Japan and have a bunch of 19, 20 year old guys aboard, did some of them get in trouble while you were there or was everyone well behaved?” Some of them got in trouble. Our captain required every returning sailor to take a penicillin, he said “I don’t want any VD on our ship” He was quite a guy, our skipper, hopeless alcoholic, but a great ship handler and became a good friend. Interviewer: “Was he a World War II veteran?” Yes, yeah he was and, Lou Stilwell… often thought of him, he was married and had a nice wife, �Hedrick, John he’d been in about 20 years at that time. Interviewer: “So then, do you know what he did during the war or did he not tell you that?” You know I don’t have any idea, I should know but I don’t. Interviewer: “Alright now when you did go to sea was it just for training exercises like that invasion or did you transport things back and forth?” No, we had two different operations, one was the Mount Fuji experience. The other one was we were down on the inland sea of Japan, which is a very interesting and beautiful area, we went down there and went to a town called Kure, which no one’s heard of. When we left there we went up to Buckner Bay, for the invasion…come on Interviewer: “Okinawa” Okinawa that’s exactly right Jim thank you. We were a steaming darkened ship so no lights, no transmissions I mean really just trying to be stealthy, we were with six other LST’s and our squadron commander issued an order to turn “Abel, Oval, Zulu” and that’s a shackle code which they change every day. So our first lieutenant looked it up and said “Well that’s turning zero, zero, one” or turning just one degree, and none of us gave it a thought but the first letter of the alpha was not a one, it was a nine. So we really should’ve turned 90 degrees, and the LST that was on our port stern, broadsided us. That’s where Sap got involved with his famous incident, but we took on quite a bit of water and we limped all the way back to Japan to Yokosuka to a shipyard there and got patched up, but that was an interesting experience. The bow where there, the bow of that LST came in was through the stateroom behind mine, and that particular officer had come off duty and he was not in his stateroom at the time or he could have really been seriously injured because it went right through his bunk. But we got patched up enough we could limp back to Japan and spent about six weeks in the shipyard. �Hedrick, John Interviewer: “Alright now on the different ships that you’re with when you’re out to sea, did you ever get into any bad storms or anything like that or was the weather always okay?” We never had a typhoon, it really was alright for us. We hit- the worst weather we ever hit was in the Farallones, which is water just north of San Francisco. There we broke our bow, our deck, main deck. We spent about 24 hours going three miles at flank speed, as fast as we could go, and we couldn’t move. The winds were so strong they just held us stationary, but nothing out in the Pacific we were very fortunate. Interviewer: “Alright so when does the visit to Japan end?” When does what? Interviewer: “When do you finish in Japan?” Finished in Japan in 1955. Interviewer: “Was that sort of the end of your enlistment at that point?” (40:47) It really was, yeah in fact I had a date. Yeah we were in Japan from ‘54 to ‘55 got back to San Diego and I was discharged in March of ‘55. Interviewer: “Okay now did they make an effort to encourage you to reenlist?” Oh yes, oh sure. Interviewer: “Well what do they offer?” I was very very tempted, I love the Navy, enjoyed every minute of that experience. They didn’t offer really any incentives other than “hey it’s a great life and stay with it” but right about that time I met and then married a girl in San Diego. Bad mistake- so that made the decision easy as �Hedrick, John far as not staying in the Navy. Her father was a career naval officer and she never saw him, you know for years it seemed, one or two months of the year, and she said “I don’t want that kind of a life” and I didn’t either at that point. Interviewer: “Okay now did you go find a job someplace or what did you do once you got out?” Went back to Newton, Kansas, joined my brother who was in the oil business with his father-inlaw, and we spent, I spent just about six months there, where my wife had her first child. And then left my brother, just wasn’t enough room for three of us in that business, so then I moved up to Kansas City and joined the Marley Cooling Tower company. A water cooling towers have you ever heard of them? Interviewer: “No.” You remember Three Mile island? Those were Marley towers. Interviewer: “Oh okay so cooling towers for nuclear reactors.” Before any process that generated heat they would cool with water, and then we would cool the water enough that it could be recirculated rather than wasted. We were basically water conservation devices. Interviewer: “How long did you stay with them?” About 20 years, I thought I’d be with them my whole career but just wasn’t. Interviewer: “Did they run out, did they go out of business or did you just move on?” I moved on. I moved, we moved from Kansas City where Marley headquartered, I got orders to go to our Chicago office as a salesman, which is a good deal because that’s where the money �Hedrick, John was, was in sales. So it worked out very well, but it also meant I moved to Chicago from Kansas City, which we loved Kansas City. It was a tough move, but then I spent 13 years in Chicago, and then was going through a divorce, and came to Grand Rapids one night to have dinner with our distributor and met my wife. Just instant, instant chemistry it was really really amazing, so I’ve been in Grand Rapids ever since. Still representing Marley, we got into the- I started my own company and we got into the computer room, air conditioning, and cabling business along with the cooling towers. Two very diverse products but both very successful, so I was really blessed. Interviewer: “Now to look back at the time you spent in the Navy, what do you think you took out of that or how did that affect you?” (45:13) I matured a whole lot, I was kind of a wiseass I guess, smart aleck. I was always very young for my class and age, went to school when I was four and graduated when I was 19. So I just wasn’t real mature, and I think I compensated for that by, you know trying to be kind of a smart aleck. So I felt that the navy really was a time of maturing for me. Interviewer: “Okay well did you take the smart aleck thing with you into bootcamp? I mean did you act like that-” Probably not, I don’t recall that at all, because I was trying to earn some respect at that time, and I was an older person coming out of college. Interviewer: “That’s true, so by then you kind of figured out okay I have to do things differently” Yup, that’s right, take some responsibility. Interviewer: “Okay now to think back at the, about the time you spent in the Navy, are there other particular memories that stand out for you that you haven’t brought into the story yet, or anything you’ve got in your notes that we haven’t covered.” �Hedrick, John Yeah my reserve time. Interviewer: “Oh okay yes let’s talk about that.” I went into the reserves as soon as I graduated, or was discharged, went to a naval reserve battalion down in Wichita, Kansas, moved back to Newton in the oil business, went to Wichita when I moved to Kansas City then I transferred to a reserve base up there. I was there for six years came to, well let me think, yeah boy I’m fumbling. Wichita, Kansas City, in Chicago! Yeah, when I was in Chicago we cruised, went to a drill once a month, at the foot of Randolph street in the naval armory, and then went out for two weeks active duty for training, every year on different ships. So I was on carriers and cruisers, just all kinds of ships, great experiences. Interviewer: “Now you were in the reserves throughout the Vietnam era.” Yes. Interviewer: “Was there ever any of being called up?” Not really, nope. I felt very secure during that time. Interviewer: “Were there people in the naval reserve at that point, who were younger ones who were there to stay out of Vietnam that you noticed? It’s a standard dodge that people would have to avoid the draft if they could get into a reserve unit or a guard unit, then they wouldn’t go.” Jim I suppose there was some of that I wasn’t really aware of it but I’m sure there was some draft dodging. Yeah, bad time during it. Interviewer: “Okay now, which of the through your training stints kind of stand out for you, because you mentioned going to Jamaica once?” �Hedrick, John Yeah, that was a wonderful trip. We picked up a ship in New Orleans, and then took it to Jamaica and spent a week there, and then back to New Orleans again. Had some very interesting cruises, several of them were off San Diego because of my wife and being from San Diego she wanted to be out near her folks and take the kids out there, but those were great experiences, and our company had to give me the time off, that was a requirement. So I had kind of double vacation, it was a good experience. I probably took a dozen different active duty for training cruises, all of them different, all of them fun. Several in the San Diego area, New Orleans to Jamaica, that was a highlight. Interviewer: “Were they all working out of ports in the U.S?” (50:08) Yes. Interviewer: “Okay so they didn’t send you to the Mediterranean or something like that.” No, no they were all out of the U.S, and we really didn’t have much to do on those cruises, I’m- I can express disappointment at our lack of creating valuable time or using the time well. It was just kind of a vacation. Interviewer: “Alright, well I think that then probably finishes out the story here.” Yeah, kind of brings us up to date. When I married Birdie, my wife in ‘74 and moved from Chicago to Grand Rapids, then I dropped out of the reserves. I just felt like I had had enough, by then I was a full commander, and the jobs were very limited so I decided to get out of the Navy. Interviewer: “Okay, well alright makes for a good story so thanks for taking the time to share it.” Oh you’re welcome, I have made a calculation this morning just for the heck of it, of how much I’ve made in the reserves, and when I first joined the reserves it was partly because I just needed �Hedrick, John the money badly. We got one full day’s pay for every drill you attended, every reserve drill, but I figured that I had 18 years of that reserve at about $700 a month, that was for the cruisers about $700, and then I had, I’ve had a total of 52 years of Navy retirement. At about $1200 a month so that’s another $81,000 so it’s been very, very attractive and rewarding. Interviewer: “Alright well we won’t tell the budget hawks then that we’re spending all his money on you.” Alright well I appreciate it Jim, very much. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HedrickJ2102V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hedrick, John Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-02 Title A name given to the resource Hedrick, John (Interview transcript and video), 2017 Description An account of the resource John Hedrick was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1930. In 1951, he applied and was accepted into the Navy’s Naval Officer Procurement program, which would lead to him becoming an officer. He received basic training in San Diego, California, then reported to Newport, Rhode Island for officer training. He was commissioned in June 1952 and reported to the USS Estes (AGC-12). While aboard the Estes, he witnessed Operation Ivy nuclear tests at Eniwetok, specifically the testing of the first hydrogen bomb in November 1952 and the subsequent test of a smaller nuclear bomb. John was then reassigned to the USS Mahoning County (LST-914), most likely sometime in the spring of 1953. Aboard that ship he went up to Alaska for a resupply mission of bases on the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. In 1954, he was stationed in Yokosuka, Japan, and left Japan in early 1955. He was discharged in San Diego in March 1955. He joined the Navy Reserve and served with units in Newton, Kansas, Kansas City, and Chicago until he retired in 1974 as a commander. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/395f146c2e577d64f9af845ca9155286.mp4 6bc47e46ddb822b2e7f6117523adc8f2 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ebd560f5d257f57cd0f72372dd4b133c.pdf 414e899a9d29bf231d2d60ca29cacdd4 PDF Text Text Heath, Robert Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Afghanistan War Interviewee’s Name: Robert Heath Sr. Length of Interview: (2:28:57) Interviewed by: Koty Leroy Rollins Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “Hello my name is Koty Leroy Rollins of the Grand Valley State Veterans History Project, I’m here with Robert Heath of Allendale, Michigan and let’s go ahead and jump into it. So we’ll start off easy, where and when were you born?” So I was born September 18th, 1979 in Chicago, Illinois. Interviewer: “Alright, what was your early life like?” (00:51) Lot of moving around, my father was in the Army and so we moved to Germany, we moved to South Carolina, then we wound back in the Chicagoland, northwest Indiana area, and that’s where I graduated high school, in Merrillville. Interviewer: “Okay, when you were a military brat you lived in Germany, how old were you?” So we moved to Germany when I was seven, almost eight and then we lived there for about three, three and a half years from ‘87 to summer of ‘90. Interviewer: “Were you living on a base or were you living out in town?” Yeah we did a little bit of both, when we first got over there there wasn't base housing available so we lived in Hamburg, my dad was stationed in Vilseck so we lived in Hamburg for about six months and that was a really interesting experience because I spoke no German when I went and �Heath, Robert so learned how to play with the kids and go out and everything but it was a lot of fun, learned how to play games. Got some friends who spoke enough English and then I learned enough German so that we can make it happen and so we spent about six months on the economy and then we moved back in– On to base in, I want to say, about the winter of that year. Interviewer: “Okay, and was that a huge culture shock going from that life on the town to like the more structured military base life?” It wasn’t so much of a culture shock there just because as a kid it’s not that structured right, like you go to school, you come home, you live in a neighborhood, it’s the same idea. It was actually cool because my parents, when we lived in Hamburg it was about a half hour drive back and forth so they had a half hour commute, whereas now it was like five minutes from dad getting off to dad getting home so it was a lot cooler because we got to see him a lot more. Interviewer: “That’s pretty awesome. Do you know what your dad did in the Army?” (2:35) Yeah he was a supply sergeant so he, he did a lot of– I remember one of the things that he talked about was, because we left right in June, July time frame of 1990 which was the run up to Desert Storm and so he was sitting there and he’s like “Why are we sending all these tanks to, you know Saudi Arabia? What’s the point in that?” Because all of that was going through EUCOM and going through Germany and so he was like, he was in charge of a whole bunch of Abrams tanks and then– I can’t remember the second one, the second something with a bravo in it. Anyway, he was in charge of all of those and one of the cool things growing up as a kid was he could get us into– You know like I remember he got access for my class and my teachers and everything we took a field trip to the simulator so all of our classmates got to go and run through the simulators and be, you know the captain and all the rest of that type of stuff and the gunner and we got to simulate fire and on targets and all the rest of that type of stuff, it was a lot of fun. Interviewer: “That’s pretty awesome. How long was your dad in the Army?” �Heath, Robert He stayed in for 11 years, he wound up being a drill sergeant down in Fort Jackson and we wound up getting out a little shortly after that. Interviewer: “Okay, and then did you– Was that when you moved to Chicago?” That was when we moved back home, yeah and then my dad he got into trucking, he actually owned a trucking business for a while and wound up getting out of that when the downturn happened in the late 90s, mid 90s. Interviewer: “Okay, yeah so did that have a big impact on your life, the military?” The military was a– Was a tremendous impact on my life, I remember looking back at my kind of my childhood years. That was the time that I felt kind of most– It was the best group of years when I look back at my childhood and I think a lot of it had to with the fact that there was kind of a homogenous community of not necessarily races or you know ethnicities, but because of the fact that everybody was moving towards the same target. (4:42) You had a group of Army spouses, Army soldiers and then Army kids so we all knew what– We lived the same life and had the same experiences. Interviewer: “Yeah, and I guess that was pretty different once you were going to high school.” Yeah it was a completely different thing and high school was interesting too because like I said I’m from Chicago, all my family’s in Chicago, we lived in Merrillville which is about 30 minutes outside Chicago just across the Indiana border but all of my social life was Chicago so high school was kind of a split experience. Interviewer: “Yeah, so what’d you do after high school?” So then I went to college at the University of Illinois down in Champaign Urbana and I graduated a little bit early. So I graduated when I was 16 so I went down to college at Chambana �Heath, Robert and then I studied and got my degrees in economics and speech communications with a minor in Spanish. Interviewer: “Okay, so when did you decide you wanted to join the Marines?” That came a lot later actually, I had always wanted to serve in the military but always tell everybody when I graduated college I was not military material, I was not in the place where anybody was going to be telling me to do anything and so I graduated in 2001 and I wanted to impact and be able to have an impact on community– On my community and to give back. So I went and got a master’s degree in teaching, I taught Spanish and coached basketball for six years and really the Marine Corps came about, as I call it, during my quarter life crisis period. I went through and I was looking at some of the things that I had wanted to do in my youth, I was about 27 when I decided to join and things that I had wanted to do and that I wasn’t able to do or that I didn’t complete for whatever reason because I wasn’t disciplined enough, because I didn’t care enough, because I didn’t want to go through all the red tape to do whatever it was and I decided that wasn’t going to be the case anymore and I had always wanted to serve in the military but like I said I had to become ready to serve in the military. (6:40) Interviewer: “Yeah, you weren’t quite up to taking orders yet.” Yeah you can’t really be anti-authoritarian and serve in an organization where you gotta follow orders, it just doesn’t work. So at that point in time I looked at my life and I said, you know there were a couple things I had always wanted to do that I hadn’t done yet. I’d always wanted to go to law school, I’d always wanted to– And to become a lawyer and I’d always wanted to be in the military and so I went and I saw a recruiter and it was actually happenstance I was– I had a bit of bronchitis, I was at a clinic getting checked out and there’s a recruit office right next to that office and I was in this moment. So I was like “Hey let me go and walk over and see what the Marines got to say.” So I walked over and this was actually an enlisted recruitment station but the RS just happened to be there so he came in and he talked to me about the officer programs and he was like “Oh you’re interested in law and you want to be a Marine Corp officer? We’ve got a program for that.” And so he got me set up with the OSO out in Murfreesboro, this is when �Heath, Robert I was living down in Memphis, Tennessee and so he got me set up with the OSO officer selection officer down in Murfreesboro and we started the work to become a Marine Corps officer and it took a while because I was not in the shape I needed to be in to be a Marine. Interviewer: “So did they have to put you in like a special program for that because I know for the enlisted they have the delayed entry program where they sort of fine tune you into– ” Yeah, no there’s not a– You’re called a pool lee, so you’re in the pool of people who are thinking about being officers and I stayed in that pool for the better part of a year but it’s really you doing the work because on the officer side a lot of it is them– The whole goal is it’s a screening process until you get designated as someone who can actually be an officer. So all the way before officer candidate school and through officer candidate school the concept is not we’re gonna make you into a Marine the concept is are you good enough to lead Marines, and so there’s programs or there’s groups, like there’s group runs, there’s workout programs and all the rest of that type of stuff that the officer selection office will attach you to. (8:57) One of the things that I did that was extremely helpful to me and I appreciated the camaraderie and the help that I got, the University of Memphis has a Navy ROTC program and so they do, you know workouts in the mornings, PT just like any other unit and so they allowed those of us who were part of the pool who were wanting to become officers to go and work out with the ROTC group so I was able to get in shape and work out with those groups and then I did workouts on my own as well to just kind of improve and get better. Interviewer: “That’s actually kind of funny because when I was going through my A school I was in the Navy and I worked out with the Marines because they were the ones that were actually working out whereas the Navy guys were just kind of like lazy, that is pretty funny though.” It was interesting because there were four ability groups and what you saw– Because it’s a Navy ROTC program so you got the Marines and the Navy all together in the ROTC program but what you would generally see is that ability group one, ability group two was full of Marines and then �Heath, Robert there were the Navy guys who wanted to be SEALs or wanted to be submariners or wanted to be a nuclear tech, and then ability group three, and ability group four were full of a lot of the Navy ROTC regulars and so it was interesting because I started out, when I first went there they were like “Here run with ability group four we’ll see where you are.” And then I moved to ability group three and then I was making my way up to ability group two when I was getting ready to go to officer candidate school because just the standards are so much different. In the Marine Corps like for officer candidate school in order to get in to get selected you have to run three miles in less than 24 minutes. Now that’s just to get there, what you see is most of the people that are there run it in 18, 19, 20 minutes, you might have a 21. I was the guy that was still bottom of the barrel pushing it because I was doing, I think my best time pre-ship was 22:46, 22:45 so like I was under the 24 minute mark but I was still not fast and my best time ever was 22 minutes so I never really got fast in long distance, but I was really good like I could do my pullups, I could do crunches, I could do anything short distance and I could carry a pack a long way so I was good that way. Interviewer: “So before we jump into your OCS experience I do have to ask, why the Marines, why not the Army?” (11:13) That’s a great question, I actually sat down with my dad and part of what led me into revisiting serving in the military is I wanted to be a better leader. As a teacher one of the things that I saw that really bothered me was the high attrition rate in the teaching profession and when you think about it right we’ve got these people who have a passion for helping young people and helping young people to grow. Most teachers I knew had grown up their entire lives wanting to be teachers, that was what they wanted to do any they wanted to, you know help their society, help their community, and the attrition rates were, you know 50% of teachers leave before five years, 80% of teachers leave before ten years and what I noticed was a lack of leadership. It wasn’t that the teachers weren’t good in their professions, that they weren’t good at dealing with the kids, but what you saw was from the administrative perspective administrators in our schools across the country really struggle because normally you’ve got an administrative staff of about four or five administrators tops that are running a hundred teachers. So you know if you break that down you’re looking at 20 personnel per administrator right and so they’re overwhelmed and they’re �Heath, Robert not really taught a lot how to deal with– How to deal with their peers, how to lead those people, and how to lead them effectively and something that I’ve noticed and now with what I do I see it everywhere but at the time I saw it and I was like if this profession where you’ve got people who love the work, who are comfortable taking a sacrifice in how much money they can make and all the rest of this type stuff to do this work and they’re leaving at such crazy rates right, what does the rest of the country look like, what does the rest of you know the things that we’re doing for societal good what does that look like and what does leadership look like, and I knew if I wanted to be able to have the type of impact in society that I wanted to have, because I wanted to be– Eventually I was on the track to becoming the superintendent because I thought that, you know schools were a place where we can make a positive impact in society, and what I saw was the school system in general didn’t have the infrastructure that it needed to be as good as it could be and to impact society. So that was kind of how I went and realized I needed to first understand how the systems work, how we decided our laws, how we design these systems, where our levels of power are in society, and then I also need to be a better leader and the Marine Corps is the greatest leadership academy in the history of the world and that was one of the things, interestingly enough my father was the person who recommended me going to the Marine Corps. (13:50) Story that went behind that he was like “So what do you want from your service? You want to join the military, what do you want to do?” And I told him, I was like “I want to be challenged physically, I want to be challenged mentally, and I want to learn how to lead people, large groups of people, to do great things.” And so he, you know he looked he said “Son here’s the deal, you want to be taken care of, your family taken care of, and have a good life, the Navy and the Air Force they take care of their officers, they have really great experiences, it’ll be great you can join those. If you want, you know to be able to see the world and go lots of different places the Army is an awesome place, I mean it’s got lots of bases and you’ll get promoted pretty– Relatively quickly and you’ll get a decent challenge as an Army officer, you know physically and all the rest that type stuff, but if you want to walk into a room full of service people and everybody in the room know that you’ve done some stuff and know that you earned your title, you want to join the Marine Corps.” And that was it, I was sold. Interviewer: “Alright, so what was OCS like?” �Heath, Robert Oh wow, yeah so by the time I got to OCS I was 29 years old, so I– Interviewer: “What year was that?” This was 2009, I was almost 30 so my birthday’s in September, I was going to turn 30 that September. I got selected for officer candidate school in March of 2009 and I shipped at the end of May 2009 and so that was an interesting ten weeks. It was by far the hardest thing that I had ever done physically but what was more difficult I think was the mental strain, because the way OCS or officer candidate school is set up is it’s a screening and evaluating school. Their job is to train you but also to screen and evaluate whether or not you can lead Marines, whether or not you can be trusted with the privilege of leading Marines and so the entire time you’re aware of the fact that you can go home at any time. If at any point in time they feel like you’re not good enough or you don’t cut it, you’re not ready, whatever the case may be you can go home and that’s the way they do it and so every day you’re under that constant kind of pressure. Which for me right, I was as old as I could be in the program that I was in, so I didn’t have a come back next year type of attitude or idea. (16:10) I would age out and so then I would have to go into– I’d have to wait till I got out of law school and then I’d have to go back after I graduated law school and then I would have to get an age waiver and some other stuff, like there was a lot of paperwork and it was basically I was either making it this summer or I wasn’t making it and so that coupled with the fact that I was in a, what they called a platoon leaders course. So the majority of people in my platoon were 18,19, 20 year old sophomores, juniors in college who the reason that they do this course is because they can get through and get screened and then when they graduate they can commission, it’s almost like a delayed entry program and so I’m in the age cohort of some of the most in shape people but I’m on the upper end of that cohort and I’m not great at distance running. Now I was in shape for every– Like I was in the top of my platoon in everything we did that was short, so if it was the obstacle course, you know if it was the short martial art stuff all the rest of that type stuff, I had been a martial artist for, at that time, about ten years. So anything that we were doing in those realms I was good, but all of the stuff that was distance and endurance I wasn’t, like I said I ran a 22 to 46, not super fast, like don’t get me wrong we’re running 7–7:15 mile pace but nonetheless when you got guys that are running 19 minute three miles and 18 minute– One guy in our platoon used to run cross country in college �Heath, Robert and he ran like a 16:20 three mile, it was just stupid. Right so you’ve got that big a gap so OCS was a lot of– For me it was physically challenging and the physical challenge of it and the fact that it wasn’t easy physically for me created more of a mental challenge. Interviewer: “Yeah, and did you feel like pressured to perform well with all these, I mean relative kids?” Yeah, it was– There was definitely a lot of kind of Malcolm Gladwell and David and Goliath calls it relative deprivation right. So even though I was fast comparatively to the other 29 year olds my age right or in the country, in this group I was one of the worst runners. Now interestingly enough I wasn’t the worst runner, I was one of the worst runners, but what it did is it put me into a position where I wasn’t assured of victory, quote unquote, I wasn’t assured I didn’t know that I was gonna make it, I actually had to work to make it, I had to earn it and that was something that was new to me from the perspective because I had never challenged myself up until that point at that level right. I had done martial arts, I had been a national champion in martial arts, but in my arena generally it was one of those types of things where I was more athletic, more coordinated, better situated than a lot of the people I went up against. (19:09) So I went into it knowing I was good and I was going to make it, and what was interesting here was I knew how to lead, I knew how to be successful at doing things so all of the– Like I had one of the highest GPAs in the platoon because we took– You got graded on academics, on leadership, and on physical fitness right, leadership and academics I never had a problem about, never had to think about but there were some physical fitness challenges that I wasn’t sure I was gonna make like and that was one of the things that was interesting and that was the first time that I had been involved in something where I wasn’t sure if I was good enough, and so you know that was stressful but it was, on the flip side of it, it was one of the best things that happened to me because going through that experience right it shows you what you can do and how you can dig deep and how you can work harder and to be better and that’s what I was able to do. Interviewer: “Yeah, so what all does OCS consist of? Is it– Are you staying in a barracks while you’re doing this? Are you–” �Heath, Robert Yeah OCS is basically– A lot of people when you look at recruit training right OCS is a little bit different than recruit training in that every weekend after the first three weeks you get one– You get 24 hour period of liberty whereas in recruit training there’s no liberty for the entire 13 weeks that they’re in right, but the interesting thing about that is that’s a test. It’s not designed as free time, it's actually a test and there’s a number of people who got sent home because they would go out and get drunk on liberty and then come back later. They would do all the stuff that– And so the liberal period is actually a test to see how you handle freedom right, and it’s so crazy how everything is set up. So you stay in a barrack, you have squad bay with your platoon and you have to field day every Sunday when you come back from libo just like, you know everything else and we clean everything, you wake up, you muster just like everybody, get online and do your accountability, everybody gets out the door, it’s the same thing I was actually in charge of– My squad was in charge of the head so every night, basically every morning, 04:30 right muscle is at 05:00 so 04:00-04:30 we were up cleaning the head making sure it looked good, making sure it was clean and getting everybody through and then when we left the house we’d have to make sure that nobody had left anything as well. (21:30) So we did that every day for the entire time and you go– You’ve got classes during the day so you’re marching to class and taking classes, learning how to be like learning the basics of what it is to be a marine, learning the basics of the M-4– I’m sorry the M-16, A-4 service weapon and you’re doing everything to learn how to be a Marine but then you’re also going through and we’ve got PT multiple times a day, you’ve got field ops so we would go out to the field a number a various times throughout the ten week period. You’ve got humps so we had, I want to say three or four humps that we had to do throughout the time so you build progressively, we did a three mile, six mile, nine mile and then I think we finished up with a 12 mile. Interviewer: “So a hump that’s a backpacking–” Right so you got a pack and I think in OCS it was 45 to 75 pounds or something like that and you go on these excursions where you’re walking through the woods, up hills, and all the rest of that type of stuff. What else did we do? You learn martial arts, the Marine Corps martial arts program, you wind up learning the beginning phases of that, it’s just basic training to see how you do throughout the training but there’s also a lot of tests that are out there. So there’s �Heath, Robert leadership exams so after you’ve done, you know a march or after you’ve gone out and done PT and things of that nature then you’re tested on how you lead a group of people through certain things, you’re given billets or jobs during that time so everything from platoon sergeant on down in a platoon. So you rotate through being fire team leaders, you rotate through being squad leaders and you’re evaluated on your leadership in those roles during that period of time, like I said it’s a great– The way the Marine Corps has it set up is phenomenal for being able to spot and evaluate those people who have the talents to become Marine Corps officers, but the funny part about it is a lot of people don’t realize that’s the first part. So you go through ten weeks of screening and evaluation and once you make it then you commission, or you know if you haven’t graduated college you wait until you graduate college and then you commission, but then the Marine Corps actually trains you how to be an officer and that’s the basic school which is six months of similarly styled training where you get a bunch of lieutenants in a company and we’re in Quantico, Virginia again and you’re going through and you’re learning everything that it is to be a Marine Corps officer. It’s not like a lot– A number of the other different branches have you go straight to your kind of– (24:07) You go through like in the Navy they have what’s called officer development school which is about six weeks, I believe, of learning how to be an officer, understanding what it is to be an officer and then they go straight to naval justice school which is their job specific thing if you’re in the legal profession and so the Marine Corps is different, the idea in the Marine Corps is you’re an officer first. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a pilot, if you’re a lawyer, if you’re a supply guy, if you’re logistician, whatever your job is gonna be in the Marine Corps that’s great, you’re an officer, you’re a platoon commander and so for the first nine months if you go through for the first nine months of your training you’re not doing anything job specific, you’re doing Marine Corps platoon commander specific training and so that’s the ten weeks you’re doing the initial portion and then you go through six months of going to class, learning how to do everything from calling a cav evac to set up a defense to offensive structures to learning how to flank an enemy to all the different things that we do, attack an objective, call in calls for fire and everything that a Marine Corps platoon commander would need to do in the field of battle. �Heath, Robert Interviewer: “So even though you weren’t, you know logically you were probably never gonna see the field going into the legal profession that you did, they still wanted to train you to be able to do it if you needed to.” Exactly, exactly because the ethos of the Marine Corps is every Marine is rifleman, every Marine Corps officer is a platoon commander, in the Army and the Navy and the Air Force they have what’s called the Jag Corps and so that’s really a professional designation, it’s separate and it’s a different type of an officer. In the Marine Corps you have the legal support services section and you have judge advocates who are Marine Corps officers but they’re also lawyers, so for example during my Marine Corps career I was able to be a company commander, but I was a lawyer and that’s because as a lawyer I can do any billet, any job that’s an open source job or a job that’s for any officer in the Marine Corps then we’re able to do that because we have the same training, because we have the same background, because the way the Marine Corps looks at it is, it doesn’t matter what your job is, this is what your real job is. Interviewer: “Yeah, that’s a good way to do things honestly.” (26:28) Yeah I loved it, that was another reason why I joined the Marine Corps– Why I picked the Marine Corps as the branch to serve in because what I didn’t want was to just be a lawyer in a uniform. The reason I wanted to serve in the military I also wanted the knowledge and understanding of how to defend my– How to defend my neighborhood, how to defend my family, how to defend and be part of, right if anything was to ever happen and someone was invading over here I didn’t want to be like “I was in the military but I don’t know how to–” That wouldn’t– Interviewer: “I’m a lawyer!” Exactly, right like that wasn’t my goal and so joining the Marine Corps and going through that training like I know how to dig a fighting hole, I’m an expert on the rifle and on the pistol like I can shoot and I can do those things, I understand all the mechanisms of war to the level that, you know a Marine Corps officer needs to understand them. Now as I’m not anywhere near as skilled �Heath, Robert as my infantry officer brethren who go through another nine weeks of super grueling training to learn how to truly lead an infantry platoon in some of the worst things that you can think of right, but the one the thing that I love about Marine Corps training is you don’t get to say “I’m just a lawyer.” Right they’re like “So? Get your pack on and let’s go.” Interviewer: “So those six months did you also have to struggle physically or were you sort of catching up at that point?” It was less of a struggle physically, I won’t say that it wasn’t a struggle physically but it was one of those things where– And it was interesting because this was actually– Mine was split because basically the way the contract works is I was going into law school when I commissioned, so I would go on active duty during the summers but I was in law school during the years. So I was three years later, and one knee surgery later, when I went to the basic school and so there were thing that I had to deal with because I was getting older so like I had achilles tendonitis while I was there, like I had rolled an ankle so I had some injuries to deal with but what was interesting was everybody wound up getting injured sometime over that six month period. (28:37) Everybody had to deal with injuries, everybody had to deal with being tired, pulling muscles, all the rest that type of stuff. So physically I knew I could do the work and it wasn’t something where I was ever worried about not passing anymore, I knew that I could do it. What was interesting about it was TBS, whereas OCS is really a sprint you just go go go go go go go go go, the basic school is more a marathon and so you’re really trying to figure out how to make it through this entire period. So you can’t just go as hard as you can go, you have to take care of your body, you have to learn when to give, when to relax, when to kind of let other people lead, when you’ve gotta step up and when you’ve got to lead and so the basic school was a– It was a physical test but it was a different test because, you know I had a wife and I had two kids at the time so you’re living a little bit of a different life than the single bachelor Marines who were there just– Right cause you’re living in the barrack but then you also have your family and they want to see you but then we go, you know we’re in the field for a week at a time, so no communication, no talking, no texting, no any of the rest of that and so you gotta deal with it. Then when you come back there are people that are wanting to talk to you, and they’re missing you and all the rest of that type stuff so you get the experience. It was a very interesting �Heath, Robert experience because again being older you’re at a different life experience than a lot of the people that you’re going through with even though you’re having the same kind of curricular experiences that they’re having. Interviewer: “Yeah, so jumping back a little bit you said you were active duty during the summers while you were in school?” Mhmm. Interviewer: “What were you doing during those summers?” I would go and I was basically high profile internships– Or low profile internships, I would work in– For two years I worked in the legal support services section at Quantico and so I was at the University of Illinois for law school but we would go out to Quantico, Virginia and we would work. The first year I worked in the staff judge advocate's office and so staff judge advocate is the– Basically the lawyer for the base. (30:50) He does– He or she does consultations with the base commander and writes a lot of– Does the rewrites for any of the base orders that are going out and all those different types of things make sure everything’s good but then they also run the litigation shop so criminal defense and– At least at that time there was a reorganization in 2010 so this is 2009, 2010, after my summer in 2010 there was a reorganization and they changed a little bit how things work but at that time the base SJA owned, litigation owned, civil law. So understanding, you know administrative stuff, ethics stuff, all the rest of that, long story short I did my internship there, I spent a little time doing civil law work so I did a lot of researching and writing briefs, right. One of the things that I did a brief on, which was really interesting at the time, was the Posse Comitatus law and for those that don’t know Posse Comitatus is the law that talks about what the U.S military can do on U.S soil, because the idea is that the military is created to defend America against foreign enemies right and that policing powers are not relegated to the military, policing powers are designated to the FBI, the Coast Guard, the local municipalities for policing and so one of the things that’s interesting is you have military bases on federal land but in the middle of the United States and the continental U.S. So what are the rights and what are the– Where does the line end between what a base commander can do to �Heath, Robert defend his base and the people that live on the base and things like that and where does the jurisdiction begin for whatever the municipality is because at the time we had a shooter– Or a potential shooter there was a guy that had been spotted kind of scoping in around the housing area who had a rifle but he was outside the gate so technically he was not on the base and so there was a question of what can we do, can the MPs go and detain him and then wait for local law enforcement officers to come in, what was that and so I wound up doing the research on that and sending that up through the chain to the base commander. Interviewer: “Out of curiosity are you able to talk about what could you guys do in that situation?” Yeah, well I can talk about– Now I’ll caveat that with, this was almost ten years ago so laws have changed, things are different. At the time what we came down to was the self-defense powers allowed for the base commander and basically the extension of the base commander, the provost marshal's office, the military police to go and to act in defense. (33:40) So if they think that there’s a threat or something like that, they have a reasonable threat they can go ahead and detain. They can’t arrest the person but they can work with local law enforcement to then call local law enforcement in and then they would take jurisdiction of that person and do whatever needs to happen with that but if there’s an imminent threat then you don’t have to like call the police and wait for them to get there before you do anything, that’s the idea. Interviewer: “That’s good.” Yeah, it made me feel a lot safer cause we were actually, we weren’t living on base during the time but we were– My wife was always on base going to the commissary and working out at the gym, doing stuff like that with the kids and so it was something that it was definitely affecting me plus when I lived on base when we were stationed in Camp Lejeune we lived on base the entire time and so that was really important to know. Interviewer: “Yeah, so when you were going to law school were you receiving BAH, were you receiving a paycheck?” �Heath, Robert Okay so no, the way that the system was set up was I was basically inactive ready reserve during the year and so it was just like any reservist that once you get out and you execute EAS orders you’re technically still in the Marine Corps for– And still in the Navy, the Army for whatever the length of your contract is. So if we go to war you can get called back, all the rest of that, but you’re not receiving any benefits, any services, anything like that. So while I was in law school I basically, I paid for law school the Marine Corps didn’t pay for it, and I did, you know I was a law student basically by day. I still worked out with and helped out with the local OSO’s office, the officer selection officer and you know I would run morning workouts for the pool lees, people who wanted to become Marines and I would help them with different local events but for the most part I was a law student during the year and then during the summer I would execute orders, we would move out to Quantico, I would go and do the work that I was gonna be doing, basically it was pre-training, on the job training so that when you get to the fleet you actually hit the ground running and during that period of time I was getting paid. Interviewer: “Okay, so that must have been kind of a strain on your family?” (35:52) Yeah it was definitely– It was one of those things that we had prepared for but it was– I can– Looking back I can see a number of different ways that I could have done it differently which would have been better financially for my family. Interviewer: “Yeah, especially the moving back and forth had to be kind of rough.” Oh yeah, it was– Well, it was rough but at the same time it was an adventure so it was cool, my kids got to– Because my son was born he actually never made those trips but my daughter she got to live in Virginia, she got to– It was basically a vacation right, it was a two month vacation. It was a real strain for my wife because we would move and we were up and then we would go for two months and then we moved back and so she would lose touch with friends and all the rest of those things and plus basically we would move so that I could go to work all day and she could be at home with my daughter. So she had to basically figure out what she was gonna do for �Heath, Robert the day, which is a lot easier around where you’re living than it is when you move to this new place where you don’t know anybody. Interviewer: “Yeah, so you did that for three years and then what was your first full time station?” Right so when– After we did that for law school I got orders to the basic school so that was the six months and that’s Quantico and that’s when we moved to Quantico, Virginia for six months and went through the whole basic school process. After that we went to Norfolk, Virginia– Not Norfolk, Virginia we went to Newport, Rhode Island for naval justice school and then after that we were stationed permanently in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina right outside of Wilmington. Interviewer: “Okay so what was– How long was naval justice school and what was that like?” (37:40) Okay, so naval justice school was about nine weeks and it was actually, it was a great time just because like when you go through six months of Marine Corps training like naval justice school was like professional school. There was a couple of things we did, a morning run, everything Thursday morning it’s called pain before breakfast which was fun. It’s a five mile run, you go out and you run along the coast line and then we double back and come back to base. The big thing about that run if it was– Like when it was warm it was great but of course when I went to naval justice school we started in October, finished in December. So toward the end of the nine weeks it was crazy, you’d have to bundle up and have your gloves and your hat and your gator and everything. Interviewer: “Especially in Rhode Island.” Yeah, in Rhode Island it was– And you’re right off the water so like wind and there were time where you literally were just like kind of trying to see the person in front of you to figure out where you were running, but that was pretty much the extent of physical grulieness of naval justice school. A lot of it is really teaching you how to go through all the facets of being a lawyer �Heath, Robert in the naval services. So we had Coast Guard lawyers there, we had Navy lawyers, and then we had– Excuse me, we had a contingent of Marine lawyers there as well and that was where you really got to see the difference between kind of what it’s like to be a lawyer in the Marine Corps and what it’s like to be a lawyer in other services, like I said for the Navy the people that we were in class with had been in, I want to say, maybe ten weeks and then they were in naval justice school and then they were getting ready to go and get assigned to wherever they were assigned. The people that were in the Coast Guard with us had been in maybe six months and many of them less than that, and then they were doing the same thing and the average time in service for the people that were in the Marine cohort was like 18 months. Interviewer: “Wow, that’s a big difference.” Right, and all of us had been on active duty at least six months, some were kind of like mustangs, me-steps, people who had been enlisted, gone to college, and then joined the officer corps. We also had a major who was an aviator who was changing over to his designation to become a lawyer now and so he was– He has been in the Marine Corps for already ten years before he made that change and so the Marine cohort was definitely– Had done a lot– Not done a lot more, had been in a lot longer and so it was an interesting dynamic. (40:20) Interviewer: “So this was 2012 right?” This was 2013, that’s the end of 2013 so I spent– This is the other thing about the basic school, because of the way that everything works you’ve got to get a spot in a class and those spots fill up and so because as a lawyer in order to get– To earn your spot in the class you have to pass the bar, otherwise you don’t get your law designation you then just go in as kind of general population. So graduate in May of 2012, take the bar in October of 20– No take the bar in August of 2012 and then you get your results in October. So you’re not eligible for a slot until October so there’s four months after I graduated, five months after I graduated where you’re kind of in limbo, luckily I wound up getting selected as the dean’s fellow at the college. So basically I graduated and worked directly for the dean for the college of law and basically worked on a lot of special projects, we worked to develop a mentorship program between senior alumni, people �Heath, Robert who had graduated six or more years ago and had been practicing law for that time, and then recent graduated those who had three or less years out of school. So we developed that program while I was there, I did a number of research projects, I did some work on how to make college recruiting– College of law recruiting process more attractive for diverse applicants and then I did some work as well doing– Helping 1L students, beginning law students to figure out what it is they want to do and helping with their path so that was some work I did with the career development office as well. Interviewer: “Yeah, did you see a lot of diversity in the officer programs or was that really something that you wanted to jumpstart?” Right, well so this was for law school but one of the things that you see generally in these– In programs that are of higher quality or that have high screening processes right. The legal profession in order to get into law school it’s a very high bar, you gotta have good grades, you gotta have a good LSAT score, legal scholastic aptitude test score. (42:38) Same thing with the Marine Corps there’s high standards and so getting there is difficult and one of the things that is interesting when you look at the dynamics of our society right, because of the fact that you don’t have a lot of people who make it through right, I’m an African American male, there’s not a lot of African American males that graduate college, there’s a chunk but proportionately not a tremendous amount right. So once you can make– Once you can reach that level, once I can graduate college as an African American male what I represent to organizations who are looking for the perspective of African American males is considerably as an– You know vis-a-vis individual to individual than my counterparts, caucasian males, women, etc and the main reason why is because I’m so much less likely to be there. So if you want the African American male perspective there’s a smaller pool of people that you can go to that are qualified to be where you’re– Doing what you’re doing and they can do it and so what that does is it means that you actually have to, and I’ll use the term pay more but it’s not really pay more, but there has to be more value, there has to be more welcomingness, there has to be more where I can see myself being welcomed into that society, like as an African American male graduating high school or with my– When I had my credentials having a master’s degree and going to college I wasn’t going go some place where I feel like I needed to struggle to fit in. I wasn’t going to go some �Heath, Robert place where I felt like I was going to have to do work, more work than I had already done, to get to the place where I was because that was work that you have to do in every step along the way because it’s like college isn’t set up where it’s basically it’s a play– College isn’t set up in way that says, you know “We understand your experience and come on it’s gonna be just like everybody else’s experience here.” You go to a lot of these places and I mean I’ve had this experience all growing up and it’s not a bad thing, it’s not a complaint thing, it’s just a reality thing right. If you’re– And you’ve been stationed overseas you know how it is, when you’re an American in Japan there’s a different feeling, you don’t feel less than, but you know that it’s different. Interviewer: “Yeah you stick out.” Right, you stick out and people speak a language that you don’t speak and they understand things and can tell jokes and laugh and there’s a different sense of ease they have with belonging, and that’s the thing it’s not that– They treat you nice, they say hello like it’s not that they treat you bad, but you understand that you don’t– That it’s not necessarily your group, and so that was one of the things that I understood. (45:20) Growing up I was, if not a couple, generally I was the one black kid in my class, in every AP class in high school, in college, in graduate school going through and so you start to understand that experience and so that’s something where you get to a point where you’re like “I want to have an experience where I don’t have to feel like the odd person out, I don’t have to feel like this.” And the schools that are– That create that type of an environment, that can be more diverse and the programs that create those types of environments are more appealing to that small group of people who are now qualified to go there, and so you see a lot of schools really clamoring for the small groups of people who are there because it’s a perspective that’s needed, and that goes with any minority. When you look at Native Americans, again another minority that is disproportionately represented on the low end in higher education, women used to be and has now in just the last, you know 20 years really gotten back, gotten to the point where women are represented and ever over represented in higher education but for so long women were underrepresented in professions and professional education. So anyway that whole study I was doing was really on how do we show people and how do we make ourselves more welcoming, more appealing to those groups we want to attract, because the idea is that– All �Heath, Robert the studies have shown that the more diverse opinions you have in an educational setting the better the educational experience, and that’s not diversity just on the basis of color that’s diversity of experiences, that’s diversity of life challenges, that’s the diversity of how people have built up their resiliency to be where they are, and being able to do that and understand that you have to learn to attract those people who have diverse experiences but there’s an interesting thing, when you’re looking for diverse experiences you’re looking for things that are outside of the norm but if you’re presenting everything that is the norm you’re not attracting people that are outside of the norm and so there’s this kind of dichotomy that goes on there and that’s what I worked on during that kind of inter period while I was dean’s fellow. Interviewer: “Yeah, okay.” And so we used to have a lot of talks about this in the Marine Corps as well when I was in the basic school 275 officers, eight black officers, right and you would see– And it was interesting we knew, we were aware, you’d see just different things like we’d get together and there’d be the eight black– Maybe it’d be six of us, or five of us, but there would be a group of black officers talking and then you know you’d get looks like “What they talking about? What’s going on?” (48:10) Right and so every once and a while we’d do stuff just for fun, we’d grab somebody like “Hey you come here, we need to integrate this circle so people stop looking at us.” So we grab some of our friends because it was never that we got together and were like “We’re gonna exclude people.” But we would just get together, start talking and one of the things we got to see was we had to make it more comfortable for our white friends to be part of the group as well. So that’s what we would– We would intentionally pull people over and be like “Hey! Come here, let’s talk, let’s be over here to integrate it.” Because it looks weird and– Not weird, you would feel the eyes go to the one group, now there’d be a group of all white people standing over here and a group of all white people standing over here, nobody’s paying attention but when the group of all black people got together it was like “Hmm, I wonder what they’re talking about?” Interviewer: “Did you see that with any other ethnicities, were there like groups of Filipinos?” �Heath, Robert There were groups of– There were other ethnicities but there were a lot less so normally– Like there were some Latinos that were in our group and there were some descendants, Middle Eastern descendants that were in our group, there were some Asian descendants that were in our group as well but they were onesies and twosies kind of and normally what was interesting was that minority group would be all of the above, but we would– You would just notice the difference in how those groups– Any time if it was a group of minorities that were together you would just– You could see the difference and sometimes it was just pure curiosity, but nonetheless it was interesting to see that because you’d see a group of 15 white people talking and the curiosity wasn’t the same, the interest, none of that was the same and it wasn’t– Again, it wasn’t nefarious, it wasn’t anything malicious, it wasn’t anything bad, it was just different and you could notice it and those were the types of things, those are subtle cues that you notice about not being part of the norm, not being part of the regular and I mean I think the numbers right now African American officers make up, I want to say, about 2% of the Marine Corps officer corps and the numbers are a lot higher in the enlisted ranks but a lot of the reason for African Americans not making up a large portion of the Marine Corps is– (50:24) I mean the Marine Corps officer corps has nothing to do with kind of traditional discrimination or anything like that but if you look at the system for recruitment of officers in the Marine Corps what you see is that there are no, like one of my– Case and point one of the guys that was in my platoon was a former Marine, he had been in the Marine Corps ten years he was a staff sergeant, he went to Howard historically black college and university, in order to be part of his officer selection office pool he had to go and travel over to Georgetown because that’s where the office was and that’s where the majority of everybody worked and so there was no officer selection effort at Howard University. Which if you think about it right if you’re recruiting African American males you’re going to have higher propensity to get African American males who are qualified to become Marine Corps officers at Howard university which is a historically black college and university than at Georgetown university, right but at the end of the day that was one of the things that he had to deal with and if you look in Atlanta there isn’t an officer selection office that caters specifically to Morehouse and you know Atlanta, all of the different historically black colleges and universities in that area. In the recruiting mindset they’ll recruit an area and generally right if you look at the system people recruit where they’re comfortable. If the majority of officer selection officers are white then they’re gonna recruit in areas where they’re comfortable with the people, �Heath, Robert which are majorly white and once and a while you’ll get a black person that’ll trickle through whereas– So there’s a whole bunch of kind of that process in the system and don’t get me wrong like the Marine Corps is doing a good job at moving it forward. One of my friends, a former middle linebacker at Marshall University, infantry officer, African American male infantry officer, was an officer selection officer for three years and he was in the Kent State Ohio region and so you know he was doing more to do that and just having more diverse faces and all those different types of things but it’s– Ultimately I think the diversity is a lot more difficult than people give it credit for and because what it requires is for people to do and to step outside of their comfort zone on the regular which is not a normal behavior. Interviewer: “Yeah, so did you ever have a lot of struggles with that or did you sort of, because of your background, fit in so to speak?” Yeah, fitting in was easy and that’s one of the things that I love about the Marine Corps, race, color, all that rest of type stuff doesn’t really matter, it’s not– Even with those subtleties and those things that we talked about everybody was awesome, amazing. (53:15) You got people from the north, you got people from the south, you got people from the west and the east and it didn’t matter we were all Marines right. We all bleed green and so that was the basic idea and so there’s a camaraderie and there’s an esprit de corps that is developed through that training, through that time that you spend in the field with each other and learning about each other, and so I want to be clear in that description. One of the reasons the Marine Corps is so amazing is because of the fact that in the culture it’s not allowed for you to be thought of based off of where you come from. Right, like where you come from is a component of who you are as a Marine but you’re a Marine, that’s the most important component of who you are and that’s the thing that you remember that we follow. When you pay attention to honor, courage, and commitment that we are this group, semper fidelis right always faithful to one another and that’s more important than any of the other stuff and that was one of the things that is so– Was so liberating about being a Marine Corps officer that you never had to really overcome racism and those things like you would literally be laughed at if you harbored those kind of– People like “What are you talking about?” Like it’s Marines, like are you a Marine or are you not a Marine, like you want to be a racist go ahead and be a racist but like are you gonna be a Marine, you gonna not be a �Heath, Robert Marine– That was the thing that for me was– And that was the experience I had with my– You know even 20 years before with my dad in the Army it was the same thing. A lot of his best friends were white and we used to hang out and he played semi-pro football when we were in Germany it was a lot of fun and you didn’t get a sense of you’re different, you got a sense of soldier, soldier that was the way that it worked and so– But coming from society that’s one of the things that you always notice the subtleties but I love the fact that in the Marine Corps what I got to see often was what society looks like when people don’t pay attention to that. Interviewer: “That’s awesome, that’s a really good thing to hear. I'm glad that that’s true for all the branches and you know that definitely holds true with the Navy too. So you do your naval justice school and then you got sent back to Quantico you said?” Yeah– Well no,after naval justice school I went down to Camp Lejeune so then I linked up and I was attached to the defense services office east, which is the eastern region. (55:48) So legal support section east which is basically the legal support services are broken up into four regions in the Marine Corps You’ve got the national capital region which deals with headquarters of the Marine Corps, Quantico, and everything and kind of the DMV if you would and then you’ve got legal support service section east which is headquartered at Camp Lejeune but deals with Parris Island and Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany and everything– All the little kind of detachments and everything we’ve got in the southern and the southeastern region and then you’ve got Marine Corps L triple S west which deals with everything kind of west of the Mississippi and then you’ve got the Pacific region L triple S that deals with everything that is Japan, Iwakuni, Camp Butler and all of the detachments that are out in the Pacific region. Interviewer: “So did you choose this station or were you given this station?” Yes, so I was voluntold so I went and actually my first choice was to be stationed in Japan, so kind of I went Japan, Pendleton, Hawaii, and then Lejeune was my number four but I got Lejeune and I think one of the main reasons my daughter has asthma and one of the things that they look at when they’re deciding where they’re gonna station you is with your dependents they have to station you somewhere your dependents can get care and in Iwakuni there is an asthma �Heath, Robert care facility that’s feasible and so I couldn’t get stationed there so they sent me to Camp Lejeune and when I was there– And I loved it, it was a great experience and it’s interesting because although I had wanted other experience this is one of the experiences that for me really solidified what the Marine Corps means and being able to see the camaraderie because one of the things about Camp Lejeune specifically is the surrounding community has so many veterans and so many people who still love the Marine Corps, have retired, or have served and just stayed around and plus also Camp Johnson, which when I was a company commander a couple of my units were on Camp Johnson, was the site of the Montford Point Marines which were the first African American Marines to train in the Marine Corps so it was– From a historical perspective it was a really cool moment. Interviewer: “I’ll bet, did you have– How long were you there?” So I was there from December of 2013 to October of 2017 so almost a full four years. Interviewer: “Okay, and what were you doing at that time?” (58:39) Okay so the first thing– First billet that I had I was a defense counsel, so in the Marine Corps if you’re– If you’re alleged to have committed a crime if you’re indicted of anything you get access to a Marine Corps lawyer, one of the things that we pride ourselves on is the fact that Marines are defended by Marines and because the whole– We believe the idea that you’re innocent until proven guilty and the allegations are just that, they’re what people think may have happened they’re not what exactly happened and so the defense services office and actually that defense services office, defense services office east is the busiest defense shop in the Marine Corps, we run through more cases than any other defense shop in the Marine Corps and that was– At least for the three years– For the three, four years I was there that was the busiest shop during the time and I spent two years in that post and we defended Marines and sailors from allegations of wrongdoing. There are a number– And I always look at it as we didn’t just defend people and say “Okay, well you’re definitely innocent, that’s definitely the case.” We also helped to broker the deals that were in the best interest of both parties, of the service member and of the Marine Corps because there were some– There were a number of my clients, I had over, you know 200 �Heath, Robert clients that I– That I advised while I was a defense counsel, I had over 70 that were my individual clients ranging from everything from administrative separation or being fired from the Marine Corps if you would, all the way up to general court martial felony level offenses and so throughout the time that I was there there was a number of my clients that were guilty of what they had been accused of, and in those cases what I did is I helped them to navigate the process to get them the best situation for them so that they were able to admit their guilt, to deal with the consequences thereof but then also move on with their lives and be reentered back into society as productive, contributing citizens. I took that role very seriously as well because like you said I’m a Marine Corps officer first right and as a Marine Corps officer my job is to support and defend the constitution of the United States. The goal is to make sure that our systems are working so that our citizens can be as productive as possible right so as defense council one of the things that I was able to do, and you get a special kind of place and role because you’re the person people can talk to and tell you all their dirt, everything that they did. So I got to know where my clients were and what they were struggling with so I would be able to give them recommendations for help, I would be able to give them recommendations for how to move on with their lives after the fact. (1:01:17) A lot of my clients, you know especially the ones that were dealing with getting fired not so much on the criminal side, they were getting fired because of behavioral issues right, some of them were getting fired because– Like I had one client who was in a drug rehab program, he had been doing drugs and– But he had been doing drugs because of the fact that he was dealing with PTSD and he having trouble sleeping and all the rest of it. So it was he was self diagnosing and self medicating which wasn’t the system that he should’ve followed but everything about his performance as a Marine, everything about what he did was honorable, he had served, served in combat and so it was trying to figure out how to deal with these people who like– The thing that I always prided myself on and the thing that I always remembered was every one of my clients had stood on the yellow footprints, raised their right hand, and said “I swear to defend and protect the constitution of the United States.” And were even willing to give their lives to do so. So it wasn’t– We weren’t dealing with people who were morally, you know decrepit, corrupt, we were dealing with people who were good people who made bad choices, who were good people who were dealing with bad– Dealing with some demons, and so that was something that I liked about the job is that we got to work. I was an attorney and counselor at law and I got to help people to make the transition that they needed to make, maybe you don’t �Heath, Robert need to be a Marine that’s true but you’re not a horrible person, let’s get you back into society so that you’re not, you know continuing to do the same things that you’re doing but then I also prided myself on the fact that I got to protect a number of people who were innocent and who had been accused of horrible things who– They hadn’t done it so one of the things that I love about that time, I held– It was 70% and it dropped in the end of my career but when I left defense I was at 70% acquittal so I took 11– I took ten cases to trial at the time and seven of them wound up with acquittals. That turned into I got pulled onto another case later on in my career and so that wound up being a guilty verdict but even with the four that were guilty they were necessarily guilty like that case I– The last case that I took he had already admitted to one of the crimes on the charge sheet it was the other five that they had put on there that we were like “Nah, he didn’t do that.” And they were trying to end his career and send him to jail for nine years and all the rest this type of stuff and it was like that’s– No, he did this, he said he did this, we’re gonna go ahead and defend all this other stuff cause that’s crazy and at the end of the day he got convicted for what we said he did, he wound up being reduced in rank from an E6 to an E5, and he got a reprimand. Interviewer: “Wow, that’s a very drastic difference there.” (1:04:08) Right, because we were at felony level criminal court, like I said they were trying to put him away for nine years. Interviewer: “Wow, so you said you also defended sailors? Was that–” Yeah, I defended sailors, I had a couple of sailors that I defended. One was a felony case actually and this was a– This was a case that was really tough for me because it was a sexual assault case, and one of the interesting things about the case was there were problems with the case from the beginning, the NCIS went back an reinterviewed the alleged– The complaining witness to see, you know because there was text messages and there were communications back and forth between them that didn’t jive with the story that she had told and there were already problems that were, you know she had told this story a year after the alleged incident and then we went to trial a year after that, and there were a number of different issues that went to do with that and I �Heath, Robert won’t go into all of the issues but one of the things that was really difficult for me in this trial was like, and with sexual assault trials in general, I’m a martial artist instructor as well I teach women– Empowered women self defense classes, I work with a lot of survivors of sexual assault, I consider myself an advocate and an ally for women who have had to deal with sexual assault. One of the interesting things about being on the defense side is you get to see the problems that go into this area and you know I’ve talked a lot in my legal circles about the fact that I don’t think that– In most cases when were dealing with sexual assault I don’t think the criminal court is the appropriate forum to deal with the issue and one of the main reasons why is because the nature of the facts and the nature of the cases, it’s a very hard case– Even if you have a legitimate sexual assault, it’s a very hard case to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law because there’s so much that had to do with sexual assault that is– You’re listening to two people who are in a situation tell different stories about what happened in the situation, and as a third party who wasn’t there you have to make judgements about what happened and what didn’t happened and credibility determinations are very difficult, it just it puts us in a place that makes it very difficult for the third party to move forward and so what you wind up is having this skewed perception where women have actually been violated, women have actually had– (1:06:34) Women and men have actually had things happen to them that they didn’t want to happen to them but because of the fact that the bar is so high for them to be able to convince a third party, they generally wind up– I mean the success rate in sexual assualt cases– The convinction rates are something like 6 or 7% right and it’s because it’s such a difficult inquiry, not because– And I’ve been on both sides of it, like I said I was a defense counselor, I was also a company commander and sat in conversations where we had to decide whether or not to prosecute sexual assault allegations and how those case were gonna go, I’ve been on both sides of that table, I’ve dealt with– As an ally with assault survivors and so I’ve always been more of the opinion that in cases like that the court system of criminal court is not a great place to try those cases because the system isn’t set up for it. The system is set up– And intentionally so right? We as a society say “We’re gonna take away your freedom, we’re gonna take away your– Possibly, potentially we might take away your life, we’ll definitely take away your liberty and your right to pursue happiness.” Right, that– We put a high bar on that because those are enshrined in our constitution and the level of credibility and the level of evidence we need to say “Yes, we’re gonna do that.” is relatively high. We have another court system which is a tort court �Heath, Robert system which basically is a person to person, you have wronged me and I want redress of that wrong I’ve been damaged, that has a lower bar in most states it’s a preponderance of the evidence it’s 51% to 50%-- I mean 49%, if we think you did it then you can be convicted or not convicted, you can– The plaintiff can win and be awarded damages and that way they can have that kind of vindication from society saying “Yes, you’ve done this and I can now get monetary recompense from you in that vein.” But I think that one of the other things we need to do in our system is focus a lot more on support and aiding survivors in overcoming the incident. When I say all that it’s kind of prologue to– I look at this issue from a lot of different angles, and when– As a defense counsel however I was in a situation where my client had been accused, and in my opinion had been falsely accused, of sexually assaulting someone and the crazy thing about that case was, like I said everything in the system. The prosecution team was coming to me with deals trying to get us to just agree that he was in the barracks when he shouldn’t have been in the barracks so it could be something easy to get away because they weren’t wanting to prosecute this case because they were like “We don’t even believe that it happened but we have to prosecute it.” Because the way that the laws had changed and the way that things went, it had to go forward, and so it was really difficult cause basically my client was facing sexual assault charges, being a registered sex offender for the rest of his life right. (1:09:38) All of those different types of things and he was maintaining his innocence, I believed he was innocent, but we had gotten it to the point where he could’ve gotten a slap on the wrist for something that didn’t have anything to do with sexual assault and it wouldn’t even really be on his record, but he was like “No, I want to go to court, she’s lying on me, she’s besmirched me, I want vindication.” And so now I’m in a place where I’m taking a case to trial that could go the wrong way and like, so it was– I mean the level of stress was crazy because you never know what somebody– What might happen, what people might say and I’ve seen cases that should’ve been won get lost over and over and over again right. So ultimately we wound up and he wound up being acquitted of all charges but that was possibly one of the most stressful things that I had to do as a defense counsel because you have somebody who’s legitimately innocent who’s facing tremendous consequences and– Cause the conviction alone, like triggers all of these things. Even if he serves no jail time he’s a registered sex offender, there’s certain places he can’t live, certain things he can’t do, all the rest of the, but we wound up– He wound up being acquitted so that was a really good experience. I had a number of other cases kind of that were of that level. I had one �Heath, Robert Marine who had been accused of being part of a conspiracy to sell weaponry, he was stationed in Afghanistan, long story really short there was one guy who was doing a lot of bad stuff and he has some issues as well. His wife was leaving him and she was cheating and she was taking the kids and all this type stuff while he’s deployed so– She’s spending up all his money so now he’s got creditors, there’s– None of the situations are ever like “Ah you’re a bad guy, you’re just evil.” There’s always stuff that’s behind it but nonetheless he was doing some things he shouldn’t have been doing, and when he gets caught he’s facing, you know 130 years in federal prison, and he just starts naming, naming, naming everybody he could think of and the interesting thing about my client’s case was like my client went in, talked to the officers, he had never done– He had never done anything wrong so he was like “I’ll talk, I’ll say whatever you need me to say, everything’s fine.” They go and they check and the conspirator kept telling different stories about my client and it’s just like– Interviewer: “It’s not tracking.” It’s not tracking not only do you tell different stories about my client– (1:12:08) There were some people he told the truth about and they got convicted and they went through that but my client was that one that it was just like they threw him in and there were a couple other people that he named and they wound up getting kind of exonerated and they never even had charges brought against them but my client wound up having charges brought against him because there was a money transfer, but the interesting thing about the money transfer right the things that he was selling he was selling for about $200-$300 a piece. These were consistent transfers from everybody that was involved in it, my client gave him $600 right and so I was like “Hmm?” So either he was really good and duped my client into buying this thing for way more than he was selling to everybody else or the story that my client had tracks out. Now what everybody else didn’t know but what we knew was not only did my client– So the guy who came to my client right before he went on R&R so when he was getting leave to go back home to the states and he had talked about his sob story, his wife was doing the things that she was doing, he needed money and one of the reasons why he was doing all this dirty stuff is because he needed money. So he came to my client “Hey can I borrow anything, can you give me any money to take back?” What everybody else including this guy doesn’t know is that my client didn’t manage his money, �Heath, Robert his wife did. So he calls home and says “Hey babe, can we give him any money, what can we do?” She sets the standard and her number– I mean her name, is on the account that the money’s coming from. So this transfer didn’t come directly from my client to him and so in the case, long story like I said less long, what you got to see was the guy who was making up the stories didn’t know any of this background so he made up all types of “Oh we were in my room and we did this transfer and he did it right on my computer.” Etc, and it was like “Really, that’s interesting cause do you know the transfer didn’t actually happen in Afghanistan, the transfer happened from the United States to Afghanistan? Oh and did you also know it wasn’t from my client's account?” And you know the NCIS agent hadn’t done his research and so he didn’t know this either and he was trying to act like this was and open and shut case and I was like “You all have the ability to track where transfers come from like that’s a pretty standard ability for NCIS isn’t it?” And he was like “Of course, yeah.” I was like “So at any point in time in your investigation did you come upon the fact that this didn’t come from my client’s bank account but it came from his wife’s bank account?” So “Well, I’m not really sure.” “Exactly, and did you check and see that the transfer actually happened from the U.S to Afghanistan, not Afghanistan to Afghanistan right, the transfer online?” “Well I don’t know.” Long story short this kid had spent a year and a half– He was about to get promoted to sergeant, he’s about to reenlist. (1:14:52) All of that was on hold, he was getting corporal pay still and there was a number of different things that happened with his life but he was so dedicated to the Marine Corps, that all he wanted to do was stay in the Marine Corps and this was after, you know they had been threatening him and all the rest of this type stuff and it was so painful for me when I was dealing with this and one of the main reasons like the kid came to me and he was like “Sir” because at the time they were giving out deals for like three months to four months and his wife had just gotten pregnant, they had been trying to get pregnant for three years, she had just gotten pregnant and so he was like “Sir, can I just plead guilty so that I can be out by the time my baby is born?” Like I– And of course as the lawyer I’m like “Did you do it? Like because that’s different than what everything else you told me so talk to me like tell me how you did it if you did it.” He’s like “I didn’t do it but if it means that I can just get out and be there for my child then I’ll be cool.” And I’m like “But I can’t let you plead guilty to something you didn’t do. So if you can tell me you did then we good but if you can’t tell me you did it we can’t do that.” He’s like “Well I didn’t do it sir, I didn’t do anything wrong but like can I just tell them I did something wrong so I can get out?” And like �Heath, Robert that conversation was so difficult and then the second conversation which was like after he was going through all of this bad stuff. He had gotten hurt and they wouldn’t let him get surgery for his shoulder, he– Like there were so many things that he was getting denied because he was this bad guy now right and there were so many of us that were like “Hey, like we get you got out, when you get finished like we’re pretty sure that you’re gonna get acquitted, we’re gonna make that happen.” I had to work hard to do it but I figured we had this case in the bag, but it was like you might want to think about doing something different just going and– Cause you know it might not go well for you if you get acquitted of this and keep going but his love for the Marine Corps was so– He was like “Nah this is all I’ve ever wanted to do sir, I want to be a Marine.” So he stayed, I saw him a year and half after the trial he was still in the Marine Corps, still doing the thing and he loved the Marine Corps and it just– It was amazing but that was another case that really emotionally for me right– Because it’d be different if I thought that he had did something wrong, it’d be a completely different story but like I get to grill them, I get to ask the questions that nobody else gets to ask, I get to say “That doesn’t make sense, tell me again.” And over and over and over again so most of my clients, right I had a very good understanding of whether they did it, whether they didn’t. (1:17:20) This kid I know didn’t do it and to see the trauma like he wound up getting sick and gaining weight and all types of other stuff and then he wound up getting back in shape after, but you just saw like I got him acquitted but I couldn’t give him a year and a half of his life back. So that was really trying, but anyways that was my defense career. Interviewer: “So you said you advised 200 cases, you took 70, and only 10 went to trial?” Yeah, 11 over the course of time, only because like I said a number of them– So of the 70 cases I had probably about 40 of them, 35 to 40 of them were cases where they were going to get fired from the Marine Corps. So technically there were trials but there were hearings, so I did about 25 of those that wound up being hearings that I was also kind of in trial but those were– The stakes were a lot lower on those like at worst case scenario you lose your job, right like you’re not– It wasn’t– And for the person don’t get me wrong it was still bad but it wasn’t the horrific scenario of you’re a criminal when we get finished and so that was probably about a good 35 to 40 of the cases that I had and then 30 of the cases that I had were criminal cases and in those cases, like I �Heath, Robert said, 11 of them went to trial the others we either were able to get them dismissed before we even hit a trial, so there were a number of cases where they thought my client did something and then they found out that they didn’t, right. A lot of them sometimes there would be you pop onto your analysis test and they think that you did something so they charged you with unlawful use of drugs and they find out you had a prescription for the medication and they didn’t know you had a prescription so the charges go away or somebody says that you did something and then it comes out that somebody else did it, those types of things. So those cases will go away so of the 30 or so that I had we had some guilties as well, some people that were guilty and what we did is we had them plead guilty and we worked out the sentencing structure with the cases. I had a couple of cases like that, most of them involving drug use or something like that where the people were guilty and so we went and took them to plead out, to plead to their guilt and to work on what was a good sentence and their rehabilitation. So that was we– Over the course of that two years I did a lot of different work, the trials were the ones that were– That stick out the most mainly because they were the most high stakes. Interviewer: “About how long did these trials take, do they have like an average time?” (1:19:52) Yeah, so normal trial like– I want to say I did six of those or seven those those trials which are special court martials which are basically misdemeanor court, you could serve it most the year, and in those trials it’s normally about three days and then in those federal felony level courts the general court martials those are about five days and so in those trials you’re in court, you know the majority of the bulk of the day nine to five and later and you’re calling witnesses, going through testimony, doing all the rest that type of stuff and then the jury is deliberating and you’re waiting. That experience, I mean it’s interesting because it’s what I had trained for, was what I wanted, I wanted to be a litigator that was– I was on the mock trial team when I was in undergrad at U of I, we were nationally ranked, I was on the mock trial team when I was in law school so this is what I had been doing. The interesting thing about litigation is once you’re doing it for real there’s real people’s stories, real people’s lives and so it’s not– At least for me, there’s some people that can still do it and it’s just a game, it’s just, you know it’s the thrill of the battle right. For me I always got locked into the reality of my clients lives and that was one of the �Heath, Robert things that was difficult for me, it’s one of the reasons I’m not a– I don’t practice law now because the problems that they were dealing with and the things that I was dealing with, like I said, even when I won and I won 70% of the time I wasn’t able to give them back the time that they had lost by being accused and by everybody around you thinking that you’ve done something that is outside of your character and outside of the person that you are and that was something that was really difficult for me as an attorney and it was one of the reasons why I decided to request command right after that because I saw so much in the system that we were quick to say “He did something wrong, let’s send him through the system.” And a lot of that is because people were trying not the lose their jobs, they’re worried about if I let this go, if this doesn’t– Right it makes perfect sense why they would do it that way so I didn’t hold it against them but the place where I could be of most service was not kind of outside of the system railing against the machine but more as a commander and that was– Because I spoke to a lot of commanders and a lot of times I helped them to come to solutions where they didn’t have to– Where, like perfect case I had one case where there was a kid, he was a bad egg right, he was not– He didn’t need to be in the Marine Corps, he already been busted down from lance corporal to PSC or private, he was already getting ready to get kicked out, and he had popped on your analysis for oxycontin which is a narcotic. (1:22:56) Problem is, again the systems that we had didn’t show that he had a prescription for this drug and like literally I had the prescription paperwork, you know like it’s obvious that– And once you have a prescription it’s no longer a crime you’re completely doing what you’re supposed to be doing and so this was an administrative error where we just didn’t know, we his command just didn’t know that he had a prescription, perfectly fine but they were gonna try to send him to trial for this issue and it’s like, okay let’s pause for a second because I– And the kid didn’t even want to be there he wanted to get out, he was like “Just fire me, kick me out of the Marine Corps that’s fine but I didn’t do this so I’m gonna fight this because I didn’t do–” Right, there’s that argument of I’m not gonna get in trouble for something I didn’t do. Interviewer: “Yeah, he’ll take the other than honorable discharge over the dishonorable discharge.” �Heath, Robert Exactly, right and so– And being a criminal right, and so at the end of the day– Because all the stuff that he had gotten in trouble for before was like not coming back from leave on time, like a whole bunch of ne’er-do-well, you don’t need to be in the military type of stuff but not– Interviewer: “But not crimes.” Exactly, and so I helped the command to figure out okay, here’s the deal and I went in– This is towards the end of my career in defense, I’m like “Here’s two things”Number one I’m about to be a company commander so I’m thinking, and I’ve always been thinking about this, from the position of being a command, second thing I’ve won three cases like this already. It’s a really easy case to win, here’s the deal he didn’t do the crime, you’re gonna send this to trial, you’re gonna spend a whole bunch of money, we’re gonna call a whole bunch of witnesses and at the end of the day you’re gonna find out that he didn’t do the crime which I’m telling you right now like there’s no– The elements are not met, you can’t beat it, but here’s the other thing that you need to realize, we have a point of meeting. He wants to get out of the Marine Corps, he wants to go home, he wants to be back with his friends doing 18 to 22 year old stuff. You want him out of the Marine Corps and he’s already done enough stuff for you to ADSEP him, you’ve already done the paperwork. (1:24:47) So we worked it out, so it was like send that paperwork up, get it done, he can be out of the Marine Corps in two months– Or two weeks rather, and you can be getting another Marine to fill his spot, whereas if we go through this process of trying to take it to trial just administratively the trial is gonna be three or four months from now, then he’s gonna get acquitted, then you’re gonna try to ADSEP him later cause you can’t ADSEP him while he’s going to trial. So all that paperwork has to restart three to four months from now, you’re six, eight months later before this kid is out. So which one are we gonna do, and easily enough the trial goes away, the kid get ADSEPed he’s out of the Marine Corps in two weeks and the unit gets another Marine so now the unit’s better, like it was about helping to create a solution where everybody wins and that’s the thing that I think being in defense before I was in command or any other type of unit really helped me to see there are a number of solutions that work because at the end of the day even if we have these criminals right, they have done something that the majority of Americans haven’t done, which is they have stepped up and taken the oath, right. So at some point in time in their lives they had some semblance of this is bigger than me and I want to do �Heath, Robert something better than myself and if we can keep that in mind like what we were able to do like was to make solutions that work better for everybody and that was really my goal, especially towards the end of my defense career once I had seen the system in action and then once I became a company commander it was the same thing. My goal was to figure out– We had to kick two Marines out while I was company commander but those Marines left thanking me and prepared for the next chapter of their lives instead of disgruntled and thinking that the Marine Corps sucks and hating everything. Interviewer: “Yeah, so before we move too much forward into your time as a company commander, what were the trials like? Just like the bare bones of the trial, who was the judge, who was the jury?” Right, so all of those– Generally you have a jury of members that can be Navy or Marine Corps, members they’re whatever unit is conducting the trial. So for example if it’s 2nd Maintenance Battalion or if it’s headquarters regiment which is a logistic element right, they would source the members for that trial. So you’re judged not by just your peers Marine Corps wide but by your peers in your unit and then we would do jury selection and we would generally wind up with a panel of anywhere between three and ten members, sometimes there were panels even bigger 12 or 15 members but those are– (1:27:39) It’s normally not that many people and then you’d have a judge who was part of another section that’s not technically part of legal support services section it’s another administrative distinction. So you’d have a judge that would preside over the case and that was a Marine Corps officer generally or a naval officer but all of my cases were presided over by Marine Corps judges, and then you would have a prosecution team which was from the trial shop and that was just like I got assigned to defense there were people that got assigned to trial and sometimes you would go back and forth and so like a friend of mine who was a defensive counsel for his first two years at Camp Lejeune, left from defense and went to trial and became a trial counsel the next two years. So those are– It’s not as if you have a defense brain in your only defense, I had another colleague who had been a trial counsel at Parris Island and came and got transferred to Camp Lejeune and she was a defense counsel at Camp Lejeune. So if you’ve ever seen the T.V show Jag it’s not as fluid as they make it where you can be on trial one day and you can be on defense the next day but it is– It’s not one of those things where �Heath, Robert you’re a defense counsel and you’re always a defense counselor, you’re on trial you’re a trial counselor. So that’s the way the court was set up, generally there will be two attorneys on each case so I was lead attorney on a number of the cases that I did but I was also second chair and generally you’ll break the case up and you’ll do certain things depending on what your specialties are. So I was really good at cross examination I would cross examine a lot of witnesses, I would do closings because I was also good at that and ultimately you prosecute the trial, you bring people on, you have them tell their stories and oftentimes what would happen in my cases was the story that gets told in paperwork is a lot less robust and realistic than the story that actually exists and so when you get people on the stand and you actually tell– Get them telling what they know, and then you get them talking about what they just conjecture or what they just speculate about or what they just think might possibly be the case, then you start to see that the story that’s on paper sounded a lot more confident than the real story and so that was what happened in the majority of my cases, I mean even the cases that when my clients got convicted like I said I had one client that got convicted of drunk and disorderly conduct which is what we said at the beginning he was guilt of and we had been willing to do an NJP but the command thought that he was guilty of assault and hazing and all these other things, which we were like “We’ve done the investigation, we’ve talked to people like nobody says that he did this! Your witnesses–” (1:30:31) And so that was a fun case because literally the prosecution’s witnesses came on and they said– The prosecution asked them questions and then we asked them questions we were like “So the prosecution says he assaulted you, did he assault you?” “No.” “Did he ever haze you? Did you ever feel threatened? Did you ever feel in danger?” “No, no, no, actually I wanted him to be my– To be the person that pinned me on when I picked up corporal but the command wouldn’t let me because he was charged and they didn’t want it to happen. I think that he’s an amazing Marine.” That was the kind of case that that was so it was easy, basically their case made our case and so at the end of the trial we were like “So jury like we said, at the end of the day when you hear all of the witnesses you’re gonna come to the same conclusion we came to, which is why why are we here.” And they did and they had to convict him of drunk and disorderly conduct, he was drunk and disorderly, it was completely stupid they were all just rough housing and playing around. They were all drunk and disorderly though, he was just the only one that got charged and so he got convicted and he got a reprimand and it was �Heath, Robert like yay we spent three days of everybody’s life to do what we could have done in the CO’s office. Interviewer: “So these were different from NJP, non-judicial punishment, it’s more of like a captain’s mass, this is a real criminal case.” Exactly, this is a real criminal case that should have been a captain’s mass or an office hours or an NJP right but at the end of– And this was the thing that I saw over and over and over again which is why I wanted to be a company commander like I wanted to be the person making those decisions or recommending to my battalion commander what we should in those situations. I want to be in those legal meetings because a lot of times what happens is– It’s incomplete information going through the chain and so of course if I’ve got 70 problems and I’ve got something that looks a little bit like a problem I’m gonna run it through the system because I’m getting incomplete information and so I can’t rely on you’ve looked at this, you’ve thought about this, you know about this and so I can say “Nah we don’t need to do that.” Normally by the time it gets to the battalion commander he’s the person– Or she’s the person that’s having to stop the train because everybody else is just passing it along, it’s not my job, it’s not my job. (1:32:30) Hey they did something wrong, how do I cover my butt? I make sure I pass it up, never be the highest ranking person with a secret right. Right and so there’s this idea of just pass it through and let the system do it, the system will work it out, but that’s not what’s best for the Marine or sailor that’s in your charge, that you’re charged with taking care of, just because you think they might have done something wrong doesn’t mean they’re not your sailor or your Marine and that’s the thing that was so problematic for me, and so as a company commander that was what I really focused on. There were a number of times– I mean I had Marines that did stupid stuff, I had a Marine that got a speeding ticket going 75 in a 35 right. Interviewer: “Sounds like a Marine.” Right, and then– He was on a motorcycle and it was a stretch of road at 10:30 at night, what’s the harm right, that was his thought. Now we could have run him up the mast and gotten him in a whole bunch of trouble, put a 6105 on his record, all the rest that type stuff but we looked at the �Heath, Robert Marine right. Who was he, had he been in trouble, he wasn’t a troublemaker he just got promoted to sergeant, which you could look at at it one way, he should be a better example, or you can look at it like he’s 23 and he has a motorcycle and it’s Camp Lejeune at ten o’clock at night, like any single– Like these are the types of things that they do, we don’t catch them hardly anywhere near as much as it happens and so how do we make an example? We had him teach about how stupid of an idea that was and why he shouldn’t do it and what he could’ve done, we used him as a tool to make the entire unit better and at the same time we made him a better leader. Interviewer: “Yeah and you taught him a lesson, you taught him you know this could’ve been much worse if we decided to send it up but instead we’re making it better for you and the Marines.” Exactly, because my job as a company commander was to develop you into a better leader right and I don’t do that by just slapping your hand all the time, right especially at the end of the day he got a ticket, like there’s not a whole bunch we’re gonna be able to do. All the administrative stuff that we would’ve done would not have taught him the lesson that the sit down, the conversation, and the making him teach what he learned did for him and did for them. I didn’t have another speeding ticket the entire time I was commanding. Interviewer: “There you go, so what years were you commander?” (1:34:47) So I was company commander from June of 2015 to July of 2016. Interviewer: “Okay, and in the hierarchy where exactly does company commander sit?” Okay, so in the unit that I was commander of I was bravo company commander for headquarters support battalion Marine Corps installations, Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, Marine Corps installations east. So basically if you look at the entirety of the base of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina there’s a commanding general that’s over the base and he runs all of the different sections. The G4 which is logistics, the G6 which is communications right, the G1 which is admin, all of those sections he has all of the civilians and all of the– All of the military personnel �Heath, Robert that are involved in that, and then they have– There’s a number of tenant commands like the two MEFis on– The 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force is a tenant of Camp Lejeune, 2nd Marine Division is a tenant of Camp Lejeune, there’s a number of different tenants that he works in kind of cohort with to be the support of those units and what they’re doing. Underneath the general is headquarters and support battalion for Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, and that’s my boss who was the colonel at the time, Colonel Seagraves was my boss and during that his purview is all of the administrative work that is kind of below the colonel level or at the same level– He was peers with everybody that was– So the G4, the senior logistics person on the base or the senior kind of transportation, logistics, food services, management, all that type stuff, that person he was a peer with but he was also positionally superior to. So all of those people and all of their subordinate commands were underneath headquarters and support battalion and we were in charge of them administratively and any disciplinary, any issues like that we took care of. Anybody needed to get court martialed if anybody got in trouble, if anybody needed to get training, if anybody needed all the basic things for the upkeep and the care of the Marines we were the high point of that chain. So that was headquarter and support battalion, I was bravo company, there were four companies: Alpha company, bravo company, India company, and security company. (1:37:20) Alpha company had a number of different units and we did a reorganization during that year so that’s the reason why I’m trying to remember what it was like when I first started. Alpha company had kind of like the post office and the postal Marines were under alpha company–And this is the base post office now, Camp Lejeune had about 45 to 50,000 personnel aboard the base so the base post office was a big concern to a number of Marines. They had– Alpha company also had legal support services section east originally, and that was another 200 or so Marines, about 40 officers and then alpha company had a number of other smaller units that were part of it. The whole company I wanna say was about 230, 240 Marines when it first started, maybe 270 Marines. Bravo company I had about 25 different sections that were kind of hodge podged– A collection right. So I had the combat camera Marines, I had the G6 Marines which was the communications branch, communications arm, I had the phas-mo Marines, which phas-mo is they go and do inspections to make sure inventories are kept up, that we know where all the weapons are, that we know where all the equipment is. They go and inspect the units to make sure they’re doing the systems the right way. I had the EOD Marines, so the explosive ordnance demolition and disposal Marines, that was a unit I had �Heath, Robert that was aboard Camp Geiger, I had mizzou which was an administrative section, it was aboard Camp Johnson and then I had, like I said the G4 Marines so the food service Marines, DMO which was the transportation management and dependent management arm of the wing. So anything that got moved from Camp Lejeune somewhere else, when people PCS and everything those Marines, those were my Marines and I had a number of other different sections, like I said there were about 18 to 20 different sections that I owned across the base. We did the reorganization I also wound up getting the legal support service section that came underneath my purview and there were a couple of other sections that we added as well the– Not personnel, the base PAO office which is the public affairs office, came under my purview as well so we went from being the smallest company in the battalion, we had about 220 sailors and Marines to start off with, we had the boat crew, the Navy boat crew that was on the base. So they patrolled all the waterways and make sure there was nobody doing anything they shouldn’t be doing on the waterways aboard Camp Lejeune because there’s a number of rivers and inlets that run through the base, that was part of my group as well. When we did the reorganization we went from 220 to about 385 Marines and sailors that were part of my organization. (1:40:20) Now when I started I had a staff of five, when we did the reorganization I had a staff of five so. It was good though because my staff they were a well oiled machine, they were running it, they did phenomenal things and we actually did a great job. So we went from being the smallest company in the battalion to one of the largest companies in the entire Marine Corps, and it was a wild ride, it was a lot of fun. Camp Lejeune has a beach, we own the beach debt so I had the baywatch crew, that was my– They were my Marines as well and then we housed a number of different units, kind of the RBE, remain behind elements, for a number of different units that would– When they were deploying we were in charge of them and responsible for them as well. Interviewer: “Okay, what rank were you at this point?” Okay, so I was a captain at this time, I pinned on captain cause one of the– One of the benefits of the program that I was in was even though I didn’t wind up getting paid while I was in law school I was picking up time and service, time and grade. So I picked up captain, I want to say it was November of 2013 so while I was at naval justice school I picked up captain and so I was a captain for the majority of my active duty service in the Marine Corps. So my first year I was a �Heath, Robert butter bar when I went on eight-OS orders during the summer and then the second year I was a butter bar and then I got promoted to 1st lieutenant and I spent all of training as 1st lieutenant and then I picked up captain just as I was finishing up naval justice school training. Interviewer: “Okay, and you just stayed captain until you got out?” Yeah I stayed captain until I got out and interestingly enough like I was telling you before we started talking I got notified because I’m still in the reserves technically, like I’m on the roles in the reserves, and my wife and I talked back and forth about whether or not I’ll pick up a reserve billet here but I just got selected for major. Interviewer: “Congratulations.” Oh thank you. Interviewer: “That’s a heck of an honor for a reservist to get right?” (1:42:25) Yeah it was– Definitely I didn’t expect it and I mean I felt like my career and the things that I had done while I was in Marine Corps because– I was company commander and I received Marine Corps commendation medal for my time there and the things that we did, I also– Because– And then I went and I picked up a billet, I was the regional civil law officer so that was a major’s billet that I held after I went into– And I was still a junior captain at the time. I did that billet for six months and transitioned it over to a major but during that period of time I also revamped how we did the work that we did and shrunk our lead time on the request for information and request for documents that we would get from 14 days to about five days external, three days internal and during that period of time I ran– So the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society does an active duty fund drive every year and technically the coordination of that committee and the coordination of that event is another major’s billet that I held concurrently with the other major’s billet that I had and so I ran that and we actually were able to raise over $230,000 that year aboard Camp Lejeune and so while I was in I felt like did– I had a pretty good career, I always got good marks and I wanted to be in career designated while I was in the �Heath, Robert Marine Corps and so that kind of distinction as an officer what they do is they look at your first tour and they say, okay when you’re about two and a half, three years in they say okay they put everybody on a panel and who are we going to select that we think should remain in the Marine Corps, should be able to go basically to 20 years and so once you go through that board, you get selected, your career designate candidate it basically says that the Marine Corps thinks that you can remain a Marine Corps officer, you’ve been pretty good while you were there. Interviewer: “Yeah I can see why they’d want to keep you.” Well thank you I appreciate it, but yes I’m really excited about– Like I love my Marine Corps experience, I love the Marine Corps and I think that getting out was more, it was a family decision. It was interesting because I didn’t wind up deploying and one of the things that I realized over the time that I was there was how much anxiety that like, that possibility caused my wife. I would be remiss if I didn’t– Or I would be less than honest if I said that she was excited about me joining the Marine Corps when I joined at 27 and we had a two year old baby. She was supportive but she was definitely not excited and I think I didn’t realize how much stress and anxiety the service takes on the spouses and I learned that over the course of my time in the Marine Corps. (1:45:29) We did a lot of– I did a lot of retirements as a company commander and a lot of ceremonies for Marines and you– One of the things that always struck me was the comments from the family and there’s so many times where it was, you know we missed you a lot, we loved you a lot and one of the things we tried to do is we always gave– We always gave certificates of appreciation to the family members at the retirement because of the sacrifices they made and just hearing all those stories over and over again really put into kind of context what my wife was doing and what she was going through and so that is something that when I made the decision not to continue my career in the Marine Corps it was in large part because of the fact that my family really wanted me at home and even though I was stateside I remember it was a time period– Especially because I did defense which was lots of hours, lots of times. I was visiting my clients in the brig, I was staying up late and coming home at, you know 11, 12 o’clock cause I had these cases that were really important and the stress of it was always on my mind so– And then I went to company command, you’re 24/7 commander it’s not like oh nine o’clock to five o’clock and then I don’t got to worry about it. I get, you know messages in the �Heath, Robert middle of the night, all those types things, so even though I was home my wife would talk about I wasn’t home, I wasn’t present and that was something that she really wanted and so I kind of made the decision for my family that I’m not going to continue pursuing that track because I wanted to be home and to be available for them especially because what my wife started to realize was over the years that we didn’t deploy then the– And if it was that hard when we didn’t deploy what was it gonna be like when I’m gone for six, seven, ten months, twelve months and so I really applaud the families that have endured deployment and the spouses that you know held the home front home and those Marines and sailors that have had to do it. It’s been– It was definitely an eye opening experience to me for the tremendous toll that it takes on the family. Interviewer: “Yeah, that’s one of the driving factors for a lot of people that get out of the military is they want– They want a solid family and yeah. So when you were, just to jump back just a little bit, when you were a company commander was there any– Other than the restructuring, was there any big things that you think are noteworthy?” (1:47:55) Well I mean as far as accomplishments or anything like that one of the big things that I was proud of is our battalion in general had had a readiness rating that was relatively low and these are mainly administrative issues, number that we get from the Navy docks, numbers that we get from here and the way that things need to work. We wanted to have 85% readiness because what 85% readiness says is that 85% of the battalion at any time if we needed to go and send people to deploy is ready to go and we were consistently hovering, you know as a battalion somewhere around 82 to 86% but in my company when I took over we were at 74% and one of the things that I was struggling with was in the two months from the time I took over until I started figuring out how to get my head screwed on right we were– We dropped from 70%-- 74% to 70% and what was hardest about that was, you know I’m putting in hours, I’m doing– I’m there seven in the morning I don’t leave till seven, eight at night and like trying to figure out all these things and trying to get people to do stuff they need to do, we gotta get people to range, we got to get people to the doctor, we gotta get people taking classes, we gotta get all this stuff done and ultimately what I learned was– And this is a really important leadership point for me, I learned that, you know I’m good and I can work hard but at the end of the day leadership is about getting other people to do great things and getting other people to manifest or to bring forward the �Heath, Robert greatness that’s within them and so it didn’t really matter how hard I worked, it mattered how effective I was at bringing out the best in my people, and so when I started changing my focus and really started focusing more on putting people in positions to be successful and setting up systems that worked for my people instead of systems that worked intellectually in my head and were great for me to do, then we were able to do tremendous things. We actually increased our readiness from 70% to 90% over the course of about four months and consistently stayed above 87% and that was with an upper cap of 93%. So 7% of my company at no point in time was going to be ready because of, you know, administrative barriers. So some people were, you know hurt, they were still eligible for state side service but they could never deploy, some people were on maternity leave so they just had a baby and there’s mandatory 240 days that you had to wait before you were eligible to deploy because you have to get cleared by all the medical docs and all the rest that type stuff, you had other people who were getting ready to retire and so they’re nondeployable because they don’t have enough time left on service, that type of thing. So 7% of my company was never going to be in that administratively ready to deploy and so to get to 90% out of 93% was a tremendous accomplishment for us and especially coming from where we were at 70, so that was kind of a cool experience. (1:50:54) One of the things that happened while we were there, and there was this big push to really– To have better security around the bases. I don’t know if you remember that was when there was some of the random shooter attacks at Marine Corps recruiting stations and Navy recruiting stations and things like that so there was this big push all over the country to really reevaluate our security posture and so there was a lot of training that we did to get increased support personnel, especially when we would raise the defcon levels and force protection levels and so we were instrumental in getting people trained and figuring out how we were gonna do that and everything because being the second largest Marine Corps base there’s a lot of kind of eyes focused on what we did and so getting our people trained and going through those courses was important. There was a lot of active shooter training that we wound up doing as well and then, like I said, I got to be involved in a lot of kind of conversations about legal procedure with Marines because every meeting– Every commander’s meeting, every staff meeting that we had we had a legal meeting and what I got to see was the number of those cases that we were really struggling with start to decrease because we started learning and becoming a lot better at dealing with it at lower levels and that was something I felt really happy about being instrumental in. �Heath, Robert Interviewer: “Okay, so you said you had five support people with you as like your core group, were they all officers?” No, no I had– It was I was the only officer, normally in a company you have an executive officer as well who’s normally a first lieutenant or second lieutenant that’s working there but my company was set up it was me, my first sergeant, my company gunnery sergeant, I had my barracks sergeant– Barracks manager and then I had a clerk that was in my office and then for about the first half of that year I had a staff sergeant who was my company gunnery sergeant who was also getting ready to get out and get medically separated and so there was a little bit of an overlap with my staff sergeant when we got a company gunnery sergeant that came in and so we had– We had the six personnel for a little bit but with my staff sergeant that was– He was kind of transitioning out so we didn’t give him a lot of stuff to do because he was hitting medical appointments and doing stuff like that so. Interviewer: “Yeah, did you ever have any pushback from your enlisted guys cause I know a lot of senior enlisted don’t have the best view of junior officers? I know at that point you weren’t really a junior officer but you’d only been in like eight years.” (1:53:30) Yeah, right and at that time I had only been in five years and I had been active for three and a half– Two and half, three years, so what was interesting about it– And this is where my father being a staff NCO was really helpful to me, I always grew up everybody I knew were enlisted and staff NCOs and my father always told me, you know from the beginning whenever I thought about going to military he was like “Hey son here’s the deal, as an officer you need to go in and find the saltiest, longest standing, crustiest staff NCO that you can think of and sit at their knee and learning everything you can about leading from them.” So that was the kind of approach that I took to it, the other part that was really cool was even though I was junior in Marine Corps years to all of my staff, I was– My first sergeant I think was a year older than me and my company gunnery sergeant we were the same age and everybody else was younger than me so I still had age maturity and I also had a respect for their knowledge and their experience so I didn’t lead from a position of, alright here’s what we’re gonna do, ready go do it. I led from a position �Heath, Robert of here’s what the problem is talk to me about the solutions you’re aware of, what have you tried, what have you seen, teach me what you know and then ultimately the decision is mine to make but I loved leading by consensus because I wanted them to be invested in what we were doing. I didn’t want it to just be my plan that they were trying to carry out because that doesn’t allow them– Like I said, that doesn’t allow them to bring their genius and their greatness to the table and so the conversation that I had with my staff often times I would ask them, you know I would have them push back I would say “Okay this is what I’m thinking about doing, why is it stupid?” Right like that was a normal conversation that we would have, what’s wrong with it, what problems do you see? I didn’t want to walk around like the emperor with no clothes on, I wanted to be the type of leader that my people could feel comfortable following because they knew I wasn’t going to lead them into anything bad. I remember we watched a lot of Band of Brothers when I was in officer candidate school, in the basic school, and David Schwimmer’s character, right getting lost on maneuvers and “This fence shouldn’t be here!” And like you never want to be that guy and so I was always comfortable, I didn’t need to be the smartest guy in the room, I didn’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. (1:55:52) I was confident that I was smart and I was confident that I was surrounded by a lot of other smart guys, let’s use our intelligence and do the best thing and I feel like that’s what we did and you know my company gunnery sergeant got promoted, he’s a first sergeant now, my first sergeant is now a sergeant major and they’re leading and working with Marines and advising and helping and I’m still friend with those guys to this day. Interviewer: “That’s awesome. So that’s what you did right up until you decided to get out?” So no, after I left command I transitioned command in 2016 so I had another year, year and a half that I was in and I spent six months and it was interesting because it was about that time that I was making– That I was looking at what my decision was going to be and so I wound up getting career designated shortly thereafter and then my wife and I talked and we decided to leave the Marine Corps. So I was in legal support– Legal service I was basically, I did a lot of divorce counseling, I wound up becoming the mediator for Camp Lejeune. So there was a new pilot program we were working on to help married couples deal with their problems and instead �Heath, Robert of having to go and do, you know a divorce where both sides are kind of against each other and adversarial we started a mediation group where you could come in and we could help you to divvy all that stuff up and do a lot of stuff that you would pay a civilian lawyer to do and it would cost a lot of money on both sides, and we set up offices to do that directly inside– In the office, so I did that work, I did a lot of work with junior Marines who had kind of issues with credit card companies coming after them or you know just contracts with their lease and their tenant or their landlord and stuff like that and then we did a lot of the pre-deployment brief. So I would go to the units that were getting ready to deploy and we would give them all the information that they needed so they could be ready to deploy, how to deal with your cell phone, how to deal with your car insurance, how to deal with you know bills and all these different types of things. We would teach them about the service member civil relief act and so we had a lot of reservist units that would come in and get ready to get deployed, so they need to know can they fire me, can this happen, can that happen. We would help them and brief them on that, we would do a lot of powers of attorneys for them and so they could set up their spouses or their parents or whoever was going to take care of their estate while they’re deployed, we make sure they get will and all the rest of that type of stuff. (1:58:25) So we basically it was a lot of services and we did– I mean I briefed over 2,000 people in the six months that I was– That I was in legal support services, just getting them ready to get deployed because, like I said, the deployment rates were really high. They were– They had shrunk for lawyers but they went up for everybody else and so I was dealing with a lot of people who were getting deployed and then I got tapped. There was a major who was the civil law regional solo officer, he wound up getting deployed because at this point in time only majors were getting deployed on muse and attaching to units and so he wound up getting deployed. The colonel who was the officer in charge came to me and said “Hey look, I need somebody to do this job we don’t have any other majors that you know they can be pulled from what they’re doing and so you’re one of my senior captains, you’ve had command experience, this is an important job I need you to do it.” So I went ahead and I took that role and, you know we set about really restructuring that office to be better at what it did, do be more efficient at what it did because a lot of the weight of that– The regional civil law officer sends opinions to you know colonels, to lieutenant colonels, to generals, things that you’re going to be advising, commands out in the field and so one of the issues with that was the way that it was set up was that the officer had to do all of that work or had to at least be �Heath, Robert responsible for all of that work and because of that, like I said, system idea of thinking you know my name is on it so I have to do all of the work. That creates a funnel and it creates a choke point where that person had to do so much work, and we would have people come through the office who– You know I supervise anywhere from two to seven different attorneys at any point in time in that office and the crazy thing was these attorneys were attorneys who were coming out of law school, who were great at research, great at writing, right they were coming from some of the top law schools in the country. So they could do the work that wasn’t the question, but we didn’t have a system that was set up that allowed the officer in charge to do the part that they needed to, which is really proofreading and making sure that it was– That it was sound legal logic, we didn’t have that. So what I did is I wound up revamping the system, like I said it used to take about 14 days on some of our larger projects to get stuff out and we were able to cut that down to five days externally, three days internally where we would be able to get the work turned around, and what was even more important was I was able to remove a lot of what the officer in charge had to do so that it didn’t slow down the process as much because a lot of the slowing down of process, the old processes was they still did all the research and did everything but then they would bring it and the person would have to read through everything and decide and do all the rest of type stuff and so we created a process that was a lot more efficient so that while I was officer in charge I also wound up becoming and being chairperson of that committee where we were doing the fundraiser. (2:01:45) So I was running a fundraiser for the entire base and then I wound up getting that 11th case that I told you about, I wound up getting requested to be on another case which was a high profile case that was in Quantico. It was being tried in Quantico and it was about– It was one of the Parris Island cases during that period of time where there was a number of recruit mistreatment allegations that were going on. My case was not attached to the death of the recruit, it was not– It was in the same company not in the same platoon as the recruit that died, different staff, different people, everything else and there were no– The charges were nowhere near as severe but there was this kind of spotlight and catch all everything that’s bad and so they were trying to throw the hammer at some behavior that was really not anywhere near that level. Interviewer: “Not as bad as someone dying but still less than acceptable so to speak.” �Heath, Robert Less than acceptable but not as– Not even close to someone dying right like and so the thing that was going on and one of the things we dealt with in the case was the reality of the situation is they were trying to get people for violating the recruit training order, but when you read the recruit training order it’s so ambiguous in a lot of areas about what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable, how you do this and where. So there’s a lot of room for discretion right, inherently when you get a lot of room for discretion what you also have is a lot of room for people to make mistakes. Now the question about your discretion and your bad judgment is not whether the judgment was bad, like we can all agree the judgment was bad, the question was is it due to recklessness, is it due to negligence, or is it just due to you making a mistake. When you look at those questions a lot of times people are making mistakes, they’re stupid actions but it’s not criminal, it’s not like you were trying to mess something up and that’s what we were dealing with in that case like there was– And my, like i said, in that case my client had already admitted in the investigation he was like “Yeah we were doing, incentive training that was illegal. We were doing incentive training that wasn’t according to the specs.” So we had him for that but that’s an NJPable offense, that’s one of those types of things where you don’t do that anymore.(2:04:07) It wasn’t anything where they were putting people’s lives in danger or anything like that so when you look at what was going on, and I want to be clear here, it’s not to minimize the behavior, the behavior was wrong admittedly by the person that was doing the behavior it wasn’t like we had to convince people that this behavior was wrong. The issue was there were a number of other things that were alleged that just didn’t happen, and there was a number of other factors that were involved like there were a couple of parents that like the reason this became a big issue was because there was a parent that wrote a red dot letter to the president. If you know anything about how that works, president gets a letter, immediately there’s an investigation right, and once there’s an investigation now everybody’s eyes is on it and immediately what starts to happen in the apparatus right is everybody starts trying to cover for themselves to make sure that they don’t get in trouble for whatever's going on. So this was an issue that I mean so much stuff happened and so many things went wrong in the administration of this because there were a lot of people who were just trying to to cover up. Understandably so like I don’t wanna– I don’t wanna act like the people who were trying to cover up were doing something bad, they were trying to make sure that they weren’t in trouble which it makes sense right, but again when you look at leadership, and this is the thing that’s so important and it’s the �Heath, Robert thing that I learned and I loved, my friends, my peers right, one of my neighbors, one of my best friends was an infantry commander, took his group, his company you know to Iraq and Afghanistan served and did things and we would talk all the time about the way that he was conflicted between what he could do for his men and what he couldn’t do for his troops and what he couldn’t do because of the fact that right you have to be worried about this constant, what if somebody thinks I should’ve done something different right, even if I’m doing what’s best for my people, even though nobody’s dying, even though all the rest of that stuff if I do it wrong I could get in trouble. There’s that part about it that makes it really difficult for a lot of people in leadership in the Marine Corps and in any large organization because you’re always– You’re held to the court of, you know subjective opinion as well as you know actual what happens. So anyway this case was a big sense of that like there was a Marine recruit that died so– Interviewer: “Big thing.” Big thing right, so these things are happening kind of concurrently in the same sequence but the way that we kind of had these knee jerk reactions like the pendulum swings all the way back to the end, that’s not rational and so anyway the basic thing that happened with the case we wound up my client got convicted for the things that he admitted that he had done and we told the story. (2:06:50) We told the story of who he was as a Marine, we told the story of what happened, like we allowed the jury to learn and we also dealt with the people who were there because there were a couple of people that the prosecution brought in who wound up– Who didn’t make it through recruit training who wound up quitting and not become Marines and let me just say that their stories were a little bit less than factually accurate right, as indicated by the other Marines who did wind up becoming Marines who were part of the unit who came on the stand and said “Nah, he’s lying. That dude he never liked him and he was always trying to make–” Like we had this stuff that happened and I mean that was one of those cases I was– We were frustrated about it a lot because it was another one of those why are we here cases, government probably spent $100,000 on that case because we had to fly people in from all over the country, I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, my co-counsel was stationed at Camp Lejeune, we had to fly to Quantico and stay in Quantico for a week to prosecute the case. All of this stuff that happened and again my client was willing to admit to what he did wrong but he wasn’t willing to admit to all the stuff �Heath, Robert they were charging him with that he didn’t do wrong and they were trying to kill his career and all this– You know in order to become a drill instructor, this is the thing a lot of people don’t realize, in order to become a drill instructor you are already one of the top 10% of Marines, enlisted Marines, like they get selected it’s not something where you just get to apply and people are like “Oh okay, sure you applied.” They’re not struggling for applications to be a drill instructor so you’re talking about very good Marines who have already demonstrated a career of service, who are sergeants or above and have demonstrated a career of service, who have already gotten reenlisted twice– You know reenlisted once and all those types of things, the Marine Corps has already said you’re good to go. Now when they get there, there are some Marines that do things that they shouldn’t do, there are people– There are things like that that happen I’m not going to act like that’s not the case but the fact that the presumption is that somebody’s doing something they shouldn’t do is the thing that bothers me because it speaks poorly about what we think about those of our service members who step up and say “I’m gonna do the hard job, I’m gonna go and do the hard thing.” And that’s what really frustrated me and that’s what frustrated me with that case and so it was really– We were really happy you know at the end when we got the verdict that we got and then we got the sentence that we got which was basically he got reduced in rank for doing something he should– (2:09:17) Right, shouldn’t have done that, that was not smart, and then he got a reprimand which said “Yeah you shouldn’t have done that, that was not smart, now go back and continue being a good Marine, learn your lesson.” Interviewer: “That’s good. Out of curiosity you mentioned incentive training, I don’t actually know what that is.” Great question, so incentive training is basically disciplinary training but it’s given a euphemistic name right. So when you’re in boot camp, and it’s changed years over years, my father-in-law was a Marine, infantryman from ‘78 to ‘82 and he came in and he talks about the differences and there’s differences even from when I went in in 2009 to now, etc, but the basic idea is when Marine recruits are not stepping up, not learning, not doing what they’re supposed to be doing there are certain approved physical punishments, for lack of a better word, that you can do. You can make them do squat thrusts, you can make them do push ups, you can make them do certain things, there are specific time frames that you can have them do those and there’s a whole �Heath, Robert procedure for it right. Now again there’s a lot of ambiguity in the procedure so I don’t want to make it seem like this is what you can do, this is what you can’t do, it’s not like that but it’s one of those things where there’s certain things that you know are acceptable or certain things that you know aren’t acceptable. That line does get blurred and– Or there are people that do things that they think are okay that aren’t okay and etcetera because I’m a lawyer I know how to read the law, they get trained in it by non lawyers and so, you ever played the game of telephone? Exactly, right but at the end of the day they were doing some training and they had been doing it long was the issue and he realized he had been doing it too long and that– So therefore they shouldn’t have done it that way and that was what he admitted to and that was the issue and the reason that it became an issue was because there was a Marine recruit who– And to spare all the details, he had wound up having a heart condition. This was a heart condition and this is the thing that is where the case became really problematic, his staff– My client and his staff were unaware of the heart condition however everybody outside of the platoon was aware of the heart condition, as a matter of fact he had gotten a waiver for the heart condition largely because his father was a sailor, was part of the– And knew how to go around the administrative tape to get him in because he had been denied to get into the Marine Corps and then they had went and went around and he had been approved. (2:11:57) So there was all of this stuff that was going on there and so normal class with normal information if he had known he had somebody with a heart condition or whatever would he have been doing that? Probably not, was it still out of the bounds, should he still not have done it? Yes he still shouldn’t have done it but this is– And this is the reason why we have rules right because you don’t necessarily know everything that can happen if you break the rules but you just need to understand that there’s a rule. That was where his judgment was problematic because if he had stayed within the bounds of what was acceptable then everything would’ve been fine, he stepped outside of the bounds and now you wind up having this kid that has a heart issue that passed out, came back everything was fine he wound up continuing, he didn’t wind up continuing training– He wound up continuing training after that but he wound up falling out because his heart condition was problematic and what it actually did interestingly enough is it put him on the radar screens because, like I said, at the base they didn’t know. So MEPS knew, MEPS is the screening organization for people to come through, MEPS knew but– �Heath, Robert Interviewer: “Boot camp didn’t.” Boot camp didn’t and so now he was on the radar and so now they watched him and they were like “Let’s do some more tests.” And he wound up getting processed out as well because he shouldn’t have been a Marine but he had been able to get through that process, but I say all that to say, again I never want to make any of this sound like these people did the right thing. Right any of my clients that were guilty were guilty, they were guilty of doing something they weren’t supposed to do, they were guilty of breaking the law, they were guilty and they should’ve been in– They should’ve had to deal with that that wasn’t my issue, my issue is always our job is not just judge, jury, and executioner, our job is leaders. We are to lead these Marines and you know there’s a letter that gets read every year from General Lejeune on the Marine Corps birthdays when we do our Marine Corps birthday balls and there’s a part of– And there’s another letter he put in the Marine Corps manual which is an officer training manual where he talked about our job as Marine Corps officers is to send back to society better citizens then they sent to us. Society sends their sons and daughters to us to train and to lead and to take care of and my big thing is when somebody does something they’re not supposed to do and they’re under my command, my job isn’t just to notice that they did something they weren’t supposed to do my job is to make sure that they leave– (2:14:20) If they wind up leaving my command, my job is to make sure that they leave my command a better person then they came to my command as and that’s something that I think a lot of people kind of shrug their shoulders at or abdicate because well we have to keep– Maintain the integrity of the unit, I’m like “Yeah we do.” But those two things are not mutually exclusive, you can take care of the troops and accomplish the mission and that was always my goal in everything I did as a Marine Corps officer. Interviewer: “That’s a good goal. So after that six month stint you processed out right?” Yeah, I finished out so I did six months in legal support and then the last eight months or so in the billet of regional law officer and then I left the Marine Corps in October of 2017. Interviewer: “Was it a difficult transition?” �Heath, Robert Yeah, interestingly enough yes and I think it was difficult for a couple of reasons, number one because I was still– I didn’t want to leave the Marine Corps, there was– And let me rephrase that. I was torn, there was a part of me that wanted to stay, there was a part of me that wanted to deploy like right I joined the Marine Corp, one of the other reasons I joined the Marine Corps was because the Marine Corps was tip of the spear, they were in the areas that we were engaged in. I joined at a time of war intentionally and it wasn’t something where– That was something that I wanted to be part of, I wanted to be part of the groups that went and to be at least supporting those people who were literally going, you know forward deployed, being the tip of the spear and one of the things that I prided myself on as a lawyer and what I wanted to was to be able to be a battalion judge advocate to talk about rules of engagement, talk about how to keep our Marines safe, how to make sure that we can take care of, you know doing our civil duties and following all of the laws and the rules of engagement but also making sure that we bring everybody back. That was an important thing all during my training, that was something that I focused on, really understanding how to have the discussion with people where they didn’t feel– Because there was so many– Like one of the cool things about Marine Corps training is every one of our enlisted advisors, every one of our officer advisors, all of them had been combat veterans they had come back. (2:16:40) You weren’t able to be in the school unless you had been over there and so a lot of the stories and a lot of the things I learned from them was, you know how difficult it was and how upsetting it was when you were in a situation and you didn’t know whether you could shoot, whether you couldn’t shoot, whether you could take care of yourself, whether you could defend yourself or whether you were just really a sitting duck and so something that was important to me and something I really focused on was understanding the rules of engagement and understand the way to teach the Marines and sailors how to keep themselves safe while still following the rules and that was something that I mean whenever I talked to people, whenever I worked with people when we had units that were getting ready to deploy, any of the rest of that, that was something I really prided myself on because a lot of people again feel like you have to toe this line and you gotta– This is how you must do it otherwise you get in trouble and I’m like alright, you’ve heard a lot of people say “Rather be judged by 12 than carried by six.” Right there’s an aspect of it that looks that way but there’s also this area where you have to be able to understand what the law says and what the law is and a lot of times there are people who are explaining the law who are explaining it to keep �Heath, Robert themselves out of trouble, to make sure they don’t get in trouble for saying something and that was something that I took pride on. I was very good at understanding the law, at reading the law right, I graduated from law school with honors, I was a dean’s fellow, I was a pretty good lawyer right, I was– During that period of time my 70% win rate was the highest win rate in the history of Camp Lejeune. So I was proud of what I did and so I wanted to make sure that I was the person that was giving that advice and I was always going to give that advice in a way that was going to keep people safe while they were in country and when they came home. So that was– So to your question that was something that I wanted to do that I didn’t get to do so getting out I was really looking at– This is when me and my wife really started having a lot of conversations because I was looking at going into the reserves, joining a civil affairs group unit, getting cross designated as a CAG officer, I had done the training I already had a seat locked in and my wife came to me and she was like “I’m just now getting my husband back like you can’t be doing this right now.” Cause I was like yeah, you know we’ll get out, I’ll be in the reserves, I’ll get a job but then I’ll be able to deploy because they deploy like every six months or so and so I’ll be able to deploy and she was like “No, like I don’t think you understand this. You just gave me the news that we’re getting out, that I’m gonna have my life back, that I’m actually gonna have my husband at home and now you’re talking about trying to leave again.” (2:19:16) And that was a really tough conversation, that was a really tough time because it was something that I really wanted to do in my Marine Corps career but I could see the pain in her eyes and I could see and hear in her voice like just it wasn’t that she didn’t want me to do it, it was that she really feared what happened and her becoming one of those– Like you talked about your father doing Caico work right? Casualty affairs counselors right and– Interviewer: “No one wants that knock on the door.” Exactly, and for her– This is what I didn’t realize, like I’m a Marine this is– I stood on the yellow footprints, I accept that possibility, for her what she saw was the light at the end of the tunnel where that wasn’t a possibility anymore when we get out and for me I’m like nah we need to make that possibility keep going because I don’t really, you know I don’t believe it’s gonna happen to me anyway like that’s the mentality. You don’t go out there like I think I’m gonna get shot or blown up or whatever and so you know you don’t process it but I could see the fear and �Heath, Robert anxiety that it brought her. So that’s kind of– Transitioning was, that was where the difficulty came in because I still was wanting to stay attached and involved and my wife was in the opposite direction and then also I wasn’t wanting to go and be a lawyer anymore like I’ve been a lawyer for four and a half, five years really and I did work in law school as a lawyer as well so really I’ve been practicing law for five and half, six years, I was– And I didn’t like the process of– For me the problems that I was solving were not actually giving relief to the people that I was solving them for. So it was a criminal law attorney right, like I said, I literally was– Seven out of the 11 people that I defended got their lives back but I couldn’t give them the time back that they had lost. Similarly the people, the other four who got convicted, all but one of them remained Marine Corps– Remained in the Marine Corps because they got convicted of the crime that they had committed, or you know whatever the infraction that they had committed, right but because it was at a criminal court then they were– They were convicted of crime, they could’ve been at NJP or office mass, any of the things that they got convicted for they could’ve been in those forms as well and so we basically got them sentences that were commensurate with that right. We got one with the reprimand, we got another he got reduced in rank one rank and was on restriction for 60 days, the other guy got reduced in rank one rank and was a reprimand, like nothing, nothing crazy but I didn’t have a passion for going out and trying to do legal work, especially for profit and I didn’t want to work in– (2:22:24) I didn’t have the emotional capacity to do any of the non profit work, like I have friends that are public defenders and like their stories are always sad and dejected because again you got people, like we got people that my friends– My wife has friends who, you know they got convicted of doing something that they didn’t do but because you don’t have enough money for bail and you’ll be in jail for two months until your trial, you plead guilty to a lesser charge so you can get back to society and still go to work and keep a roof over your head cause you got kids right and so you get a lot of people that go into the system that way and just different things that, that was something I didn’t want to be involved in and so I started a company, my company Legacy Leadership Consulting to focus on creating more leaders and building and developing more leaders in society, specifically in businesses and one of the reasons I love this focus is because the problems that I’m solving are not only helping today, they’re helping tomorrow. When I teach people and I help them to overcome the obstacles that they have to being a better leader, to manifesting, like I said, the greatness that they have within themselves and also to then teach them how to help the people �Heath, Robert that they lead to do the same. It’s so amazing because I get them past what has been plaguing them and I make their future better and the past is not really anything that we have to be concerned with, and so that has been tremendously, tremendously helpful and I always like to use the old adage right, you give a person a fish you feed them for a day, you teach a person to fish you feed them for a lifetime, and what I do with Legacy Leadership Consulting is taking that even a step further because if you teach a person to teach a person to fish you can feed the whole world, and so a lot of the problems that I saw in education, a lot of the problems that I saw good leaders dealing with in the Marine Corps by really focusing on helping people to be the best leaders that they can be and to develop systems that develop leaders we can solve all those problems because when you create a leader, when you develop a leader you don’t just transform their lives, you transform the lives of everybody that they touch for the rest of their lives. Their families, theirs spouses, their friends, their subordinates, their community because they then shine that light of leadership, they embody good leadership everywhere they go and so people get to see a different style of leadership, they get to see leadership that takes care of the person and accomplishes the mission, and that’s really– That’s the journey that we’re on now and I credit so much to the lessons that I learned in that great leadership academy, the United States Marine Corps. (2:25:13) Interviewer: “So that’s definitely had a huge impact on your life.” Oh yeah, tremendously like I cannot say enough positive about my time in the Marine Corps and how it’s affected me, how it’s affected my family, how it’s affected my outlook, serving with some of the most honorable people that walk the face of the Earth and being able to be part of that organization and the legacy that the Marine Corps has is I’m still always kind of in awe still that I’m a Marine. Interviewer: “Yeah, and once a Marine, always a Marine.” Hoorah. Interviewer: “So just a few more questions to wrap it up.” �Heath, Robert No problem. Interviewer: “I think I already know the answer to this one but I always like to ask it. If you could do it all over again would you, would you change anything?” I wouldn’t change anything, and normally I would say I would change that I would get in younger and do different things but I don’t say that because I know that I wasn’t ready younger. I would’ve washed out, I wouldn’t have been as committed, I wouldn’t have been the person that I was that needed to be– That I needed to be to become a Marine Corps officer if I had done it younger and so I wouldn’t change anything. Interviewer: “Okay, and a question I always love to ask parents. If one of your kids came to you when they were 18 and said “Dad, I want to join the Marines.” What would you say to them?” I would tell them you need to make sure that you’re serious about this and that, you know I’m all for it but you’re gonna– (2:26:42) If you’re gonna join the Marines we’re gonna make sure you’re ready to join the Marines because it’s not just a question of do you want this it’s are you ready for it are you, and I say this in all sincerity I talk to people about the Marine Corps it’s not just a job it’s a lifestyle, it’s a culture, it’s a brotherhood, it’s a sister, it’s a family and it you’re gonna be part of that family understand the role and responsibility. You’re not just taking from that family you are expected to give to that family as well, and are you ready to give what is necessary to give, and if they’re there then I’m all for it. I think the Marine Corps is a great organization I think that– I’m one of those people that’s a proponent for mandatory national service so I think that everybody should have to, at some point in time between the time that they’re 18 or 24, give two years of their life to something that is bigger than them, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be a service member, you know like we’ve got people who can’t do it physically I understand that but in some sort of form or fashion that you are doing something and operating in service to something greater than yourself because what it shows you and what it teaches you about who you are, about how your role interacts with the rest of society �Heath, Robert and about the inter-connectedness and the interdependence of society I think is really important so I’m a big proponent of national service in general, so if my kids wanted to go and serve in the military, I’m all for it. Interviewer: “Alright, anything else you want to talk about?” I mean I just really appreciate the opportunity to do this and what you all do with the project here I think is phenomenal and so thank you for inviting me to come and speak about my story and to all of the veterans out there especially those of you, all that have served in– The veteran of foreign wars and the veterans who have served overseas, just thank you for the legacy that you leave and I’m so proud and humbled to be part of that organization, so thank you tremendously. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HeathR2334V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Heath, Robert Sr. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-08 Title A name given to the resource Heath, Robert (Interview transcript and video), 2019 Description An account of the resource Robert Heath Sr. was born on September 18, 1979 in Chicago, Illinois. While living in Germany as a ‘Military Brat,’ Heath enjoyed life in Hamburg while his father worked for the Army as a supply route manager. After high school, he attended the University of Illinois where he graduated in 2001 with degrees in economics and speech communications. He joined the Marine Corps at age twenty-seven and slowly worked his way into the Officer Candidate School by 2009. While he was attending the University of Illinois Law School, Heath simultaneously worked in Quantico, Virginia, as the lawyer for the base. After graduating OCS and all additional military legal courses, Heath was stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Over his career, Heath advised over 200 cases, taking on seventy of which twenty-five were job hearings, thirty criminal cases, and only took eleven of those to trial. Heath then served as Company Commander for B Company, Headquarters and Support Battalion, Marine Corps Installations out of Camp Lejeune from June of 2015 to July of 2016. He and his five staff members directly administered the Combat Camera Marines, Communications Marines, FSMAO (military supply) Marines, Explosive Ordnance Demolition Marines, MISO (administrative) Marines, Food Service Marines, DMO (transportation management) Marines, and several other smaller sections. By 2015, Heath held the rank of Captain since he graduated from Naval Justice School. He was later given the opportunity to rank up to Major in the Marine Reserves, but ultimately decided to leave the service due to family concerns since his wife was constantly worried about the possibility of his deployment and separation from the family. His final high-profile court case sent him back to Quantico where he worked one of the less severe Parris Island cases. Heath officially left the service in October of 2017 and found the transition back into civilian life difficult since he deeply missed the service and eventually wanted to deploy with the Corps. However, his wife ultimately persuaded him to choose family over service. He then started his own firm, Legacy Leadership Consulting. Reflecting upon his service in the Corps, Heath firmly believed great leadership takes care of both the individual and the mission at hand. He also believed that, in order to become a good Marine, one must be willing to commit as well as prepare themselves for challenge and a change in lifestyle. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Other veterans & civilians—Personal narratives, American Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0951ecf3d3be47f371e30bb278526f13.mp4 06582e6e9926cbcf057a2e755c521a89 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c798b0c59c8d9427fcf98bc25acb6160.pdf 8f58ca9f2c6a6deb9e3b2949266caa2f PDF Text Text 1 Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Oral History Interview Veteran: Roger Healy Interviewed by James Smither Transcribed by Grace Balog Interviewer: We are talking today with Roger Healy of Gobles, Michigan, and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay Roger, begin with some background on yourself, and to begin with, where and when were you born? Veteran: I was born in Allegan, Michigan. We lived in Bloomingdale my first 5 years of my life. Interviewer: And what year were you born? Veteran: 1949. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: I was put into school at 4 years old. I was next to the youngest person in there. But I went to kindergarten in Bloomingdale and then we moved to a farm in Gobles. And I lived there on that 5-acre farm for 10 years until I was 14. Graduated from Gobles. Interviewer: Okay, high school? Veteran: Mhmm. Interviewer: Okay. And what year did you graduate from high school? �2 Veteran: ’67. Interviewer: Okay. And what did you do after you got out of high school? Veteran: I went to one year college at Southwestern Michigan in Dowagiac. I was 17 when I got in and there is no way I should have been. I always felt that I have been one step behind and trying to catch up. I was the biggest. That’s why they put me in there, at 4. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: But I wasn’t up to speed on things and that. I never had a brother. I had 2 sisters. So, I never was able to experience that. So, I have a lot of brothers that they don’t know that they are my brothers, but I don’t have a lot that many anymore. But my best brother is right over there and that. [referring to fellow Vietnam vet Chester Johnson, who sat in on the interview session] He’s here right now. But… Interviewer: Okay. So— Veteran: Drafted on July 15th, ’69. Interviewer: Okay. So, you had basically about a year between when you left school and when you got drafted? (00:02:23) Veteran: No, I went to school for a year and decided that it wasn’t for me. So, I went to work for an electrical company, IBW, building steel towers and streetlights. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Different things like that when I was drafted. �3 Interviewer: Alright. Now, this is a point when you are—you have finished high school in ’67 and then you try college, and you go to work. That’s when Vietnam—the Vietnam War—has really heated up and the draft is going full blast. Were you basically expecting that you were going to get drafted at some point? Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. And what was your attitude toward that? Were you just going to take it when it came? Or…? Veteran: I didn’t necessarily come from a military family, but I grew up knowing the system and knowing, you know, you enlist—or not enlist, when you turn 18 you… Interviewer: Register for the draft. Veteran: Register, yeah. And I just rode the wave, you know? I just did what I was told. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I had planned for it, I guess, my whole life more or less. Interviewer: Okay, so you just kind of expected that was something you were going to do at that time. Okay, did you pay any attention to the news before you went in? Did you follow the stuff about what was happening in Vietnam? Veteran: Not a lot. One—you only needed to see it once. You knew what, you know, you kind of knew what was going on and just prayed to God and crosses your fingers and all that stuff. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, you get drafted in the middle of ’69. What’s the process now? You get the draft notice. What do you do next? (00:04:13) �4 Veteran: Well, a friend of mine got his notice—in school, a classmate of mine—and he had 30 days. And so, we were doing a normal riding around out on the back roads, feeling sorry for him and all that. Well, 2 weeks later, Nixon gave me a letter for the same day. So, those two weeks we are going, “Oh man,” and this and that. So…And when the time came, we…at least I had a friend, a classmate, that we were good friends. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And we went through basic training at Fort Knox. Interviewer: Where did you report to first? Veteran: Paw Paw, Michigan. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: A small house that had the office and a… Interviewer: Just like a— Veteran: Still there. Just went by it yesterday. Interviewer: Was that like a recruiter’s office? Or…? Veteran: Yeah, I guess it probably was. Interviewer: Yeah. Or an armory or something. Veteran: No, just a small stucco house. Interviewer: Not an armory. Okay. Alright. And then they send you then to Fort Knox? Veteran: Well, we went to Detroit. �5 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And that is where we were inducted and then we went by bus down to Fort Knox. Interviewer: Did you get a physical at Detroit? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Now, sometimes you hear stories about people trying to game the system and do things to— Veteran: All around you. Interviewer: Okay, so did you observe any of that? What were people doing? Veteran: Yeah. Sleeping with bars of soap in their armpits so their temperature would be raised so that they would just say, you know…Simple as that, they were doing you know. Interviewer: Okay. Did that fool anybody? Veteran: I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention. I was just…just kind of doing my own, you know, in my own world. Interviewer: Alright. Alright, so that— Veteran: We did do—we did go to Canada. About 8 of us. Max and I, my buddy. We got on a bus and went through the tunnel. Went to Canada because you could drink at 18, I guess or something there, at that time. And so, we went over there and had a pitcher of beer. Pass it around and this and that. We looked around and we go, “Oh, what are we going to do now?” We looked at each other and we just got up and went back to the bus station and…And we just did— and you know, none of us were going to stay. We just went because we could. (00:06:46) �6 Interviewer: Sure. Okay, well that’s— Veteran: Last bit of freedom kind of. Interviewer: Alright. Well, had you reported in by then? Or did you do that kind of on the way over there? Veteran: It was after the physical and things like that. Interviewer: Okay. So, they actually let you out? Veteran: It was overnight. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And we stayed in the Ford Hotel, I think they called it. And they were throwing televisions out. I mean it was…I mean it was chaos all around us but… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: We were hometown, you know, back country boys. We just watched them. Interviewer: Okay, so there were a lot of people there who were not happy to be there? Veteran: Probably, yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. But now you take a bus down to Fort Knox? Or do they fly you down? Veteran: Yeah, we took a bus down to Fort Knox. Interviewer: Okay. And what kind of reception do you get at Fort Knox? �7 Veteran: Well, I am pretty sure it was dark. And we were tired and just wanted a place to sleep. And that’s what we was was given quarters and a place to sleep. Interviewer: Okay, so they didn’t start yelling at you right away? Veteran: I don’t think so. Interviewer: Okay. Because the Army varies with that kind of thing. The Marines always yell at you. Veteran: Back then it was kind of trying—it was being phased out a little bit. But they still got in your face a lot. Interviewer: Okay. But that didn’t start the night you got there? (00:08:14) Veteran: No. Interviewer: Okay. Now, did they process you for a couple days? Or what happens then? Veteran: Yeah. Yeah, processing and then they tested us. Aptitude or whatever to see what our background had been. And heck, I didn’t know what to fill in on that. I would have done it differently if I had known. But our past skills and things that, you know, I had driven truck and farm machinery and all that stuff, but I never wrote it down. When we were into firing range, I was hiding from the silhouettes and just shooting at the top instead of doing what I should have, or I probably would have been a sniper. Or they would have wanted me for a sniper because I deer hunted. I had killed 5 deer by the time I, you know, starting at 14 and that. And with one shot. And but I am glad that I didn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to do that I don’t think. I don’t think. �8 Interviewer: So, what designation do you get? Do they just—they make you an infantryman? Or something else? Veteran: Well, it was…Fort Knox is infantry but the second day, they marched us down to another company area or whatever and this and that. They marched us through. And we went in and got our—I think we got our clothes and stuff like that or whatever. But anyway, we got back into formation. And they called my name. They said, “Fall out.” I am going, what did I do wrong? Well, they said, “You are the platoon guide.” They put sergeant stripes on me and said, “Take them back to the company area.” And I am going, what?? So, somehow, I—you know, I just kind of did what the drill sergeants had been doing. You know? And so, I took them back and I was given my own room in the barracks. And I lasted…I don’t know how I lasted, how long it was….14—or a month or so, 4 weeks or something—but I had to get up before everybody else and go around and take sick call and do all this stuff and get down there. Well, I was never a morning person. (00:10:38) Veteran: Never, still haven’t—aren’t. So, I came home probably after 4 weeks, 5 weeks, I don’t know, into it. And my—it was a daily basis that my footlocker was upside down and my standup locker was…They just came in because it was—I didn’t do the right things, place my stuff right. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: If I would have been smart, I would have employed some of the other people. Max would have been a perfect one to have—he would have done that for me, and I would have, you know. And but I was back in the ranks with the rest of them. And just went along with it because �9 I, you know, I wasn’t—I am not—I wasn’t a leader. Never was. I was the, you know, I was the youngest one in every group, so I was just floating around and following everybody. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: All of a sudden, here I am leading 32 people and keeping them in line and this and that and whatever. And I didn’t do it right. Interviewer: Okay. Now, physically, was the training very demanding? Or could you handle that? Veteran: Yeah, I—it was—once we got in shape. But I was a farm—I worked on the farm. We baled hay and this and that. And when I worked, it was physical. So, yeah that worked out pretty good, I guess. Interviewer: Okay. And could you adjust to just following orders? Was that…? Veteran: Oh yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: I had readied myself for, you know…there has got to be a top of the pyramid and, you know, right there. And our main thing is the DI and the rest of us went down from there. But… Interviewer: So, you just kind of did what they told you to do when—and got through it. (00:12:28) Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. So, how long was basic? �10 Veteran: You know, I have never really paid attention to that because I was in—it’s hard to because what happened after that. I was in country longer than I would have if I had just gone through basic AIT and then shipped out. But I lost track of things when they…Again, when we were in AIT, I don’t know if you want to skip forward to that? Interviewer: Oh yeah. Well, we wanted it to be—so, basic training is normally at that point about 8 weeks. At least, that’s the standard course. Unless you get hurt or something and stay longer. And then from there— Veteran: Okay, that’s about right. Interviewer: Okay. And then you get the Advanced Individual Training, AIT. And where did you do that? Veteran: Fort Polk, Louisiana. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: I believe we flew down there. Might have been a bus but I think we—I think that was the first time I had flown on an airplane. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: So, we went down, and we went through that. Interviewer: And what kind of training was that? Veteran: Infantry. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Combat, Vietnam. �11 Interviewer: Alright. And what kinds of things did they do there to try to prepare you for Vietnam? Veteran: Well, the terrain and the climate kind of like that has was similar to Vietnam except for in the wintertime. When I was there, it was 17 degrees down there. When the monsoons in there in Vietnam, you felt like it was 17 degrees when the monsoon is—if you got wet. I mean, it was…You had to take care of yourself. But they had the Heartbreak Hill and several different pretty tall…. not mountains but… Interviewer: But hills or ridges or whatever? Veteran: Pretty good ones, yeah. And we did full pack and just a lot of training and more of the same. (00:14:26) Interviewer: Okay. Was there a difference in terms of how you were treated in AIT as opposed to how you were treated in basic? Or was it still pretty much the same? Veteran: It was probably about the same. It was—I think it was starting to ease up from what previous soldiers or whatever had to deal with. But I—it didn’t bother me that much. So…I just got through it somehow. Interviewer: Alright. Now, did they try to teach you anything about Vietnam in terms of the people, or the society or dealing with civilians or anything like that? Veteran: Mostly weapons. Just getting to know the weapons and that stuff. Now, I don’t really think that there was that much going on about what was there, what the people were there doing. Interviewer: Okay. Were your—any of your instructors people who had been to Vietnam? Veteran: Probably. I really couldn’t tell you. �12 Interviewer: Okay. Because if they are not telling you things about Vietnam then you might well not know. Veteran: Well, they were kind of private. There was one where—sergeant I remember that got busted to an E-1 because he borrowed money from some of us and they found out about it and that. So, they didn’t kick him out, they just busted him from an E-5 to an E-1. And so, he was back on the ladder. But he was someone who couldn’t survive on the out, you know. He had to— better than prison, he was in the service. He was able to be, you know, but he was the type of person that just wouldn’t have made it on the outside. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Back in those days you know, that was what I figured, you know. (00:16:23) Interviewer: Alright. So, the AIT is also normally about 8 weeks. Do you think that’s what—about how long? Veteran: Mhmm. Interviewer: Okay, so what happens to you after AIT? Veteran: We were standing in formation again and they are passing out—or calling names—and passing out orders. And the next thing we knew, they called 8 of us out of the formation. And they said, “We didn’t get enough volunteers for NCO school so you 8 are going to NCO school.” So, we got orders. We went home for 30 days and then reported to Fort Benning, Georgia, for NCO school. Interviewer: Okay, that is Non-Commissioned Officer school, for people who don’t really know. �13 Veteran: Right. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, alright. And so, what was that program like? Veteran: Well, there wasn’t as much people being in your face more. It was a little bit more mature and, you know, we more or less knew what to do. We knew what was going on and things like that. So, it went a little bit smoother and that. Interviewer: Okay. And physically, what did they make you do? Veteran: The obstacle courses were somewhat more. We would, you know, using a rope to get across water. You know, and just a little bit more intense than what the basic…You know, just went up a little bit more. And then we knew, you know, it was all infantry training. So, we knew… Interviewer: Okay. And did they give you any training in leadership or in tactics or anything like that? Veteran: Yeah. Yeah, but I don’t know how far along into that was that I decided that I wasn’t going to—I didn’t want to tell anybody what to do. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: They can tell me what to do and I will decide how I am going to do it. I will get the job done. But I am not going to be stupid about it. (00:18:20) Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And about the same time, a buddy that had been in basic and AIT, another Michigan guy, we sat down one day, and he was married and had two kids and stuff. And he said, “Man,” he says, “I want to get this over with.” And he had more or less made up his mind that he was �14 going to go home. We dropped out, is what we did. And he went home, and I went home. And we’d keep in contact, and he said, “I am not ready.” He says, “I am not ready to go.” And I said, “Well, just call me when you are.” Well, 8 days later we finally reported. Interviewer: Okay. So, were you AWOL? Or you were talking— Veteran: It was like 8 days AWOL. Interviewer: Okay. And that—was that before you went to Fort Benning? Or was it after you got there, and you did it for a while and then went away? Veteran: This is when we—after we got our orders for Vietnam, after we quit Fort Benning and NCO school. Interviewer: Okay. Okay. I am just trying to shore up this scene. So, basically you go a certain—you go through part of NCO school, but you don’t finish. And then you are able to tell the Army, basically, “I don’t want to do this.” And then they say, “Okay, you are going to go to Vietnam now.” Was that—so, you get orders for Vietnam, and you have some time before you have to report. Veteran: We had 30 days legally and then we were about 38 days when we ended up reporting to—in Oakland. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: California. Interviewer: Alright. Now, did you—when you got there, were you in any trouble for being 8 days late? �15 Veteran: We got busted to E-1s and spent two weeks in a barracks. And then we got on a plane and went to Vietnam. Interviewer: Alright. Remember, was it a—like a chartered civilian plane? Or military— Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And do you remember if you stopped anywhere? (00:20:20) Veteran: Yeah, we stopped in Hawaii. We stopped in Wake Island. We stopped in Guam. And then I think it was…and I don’t know because I actually did the whole thing twice. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I might tell you that later. But because going over there and coming back once, and then going back over and coming back, they took different routes that it was different. One time we went through Alaska. I think that is when I came home though. We came through Alaska. But… Interviewer: Okay. Alright. But Wake Island would have been on the way from Hawaii because that’s a natural kind of jump and so was Guam. So, and if the plane wasn’t big enough to fly the whole distance, then you refuel. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. So, where did you land in Vietnam? Veteran: Probably…Well, we got—I got assigned to the 25th infantry, which was in Cu Chi but I don’t know if it would have been… Interviewer: Probably Tan Son Nhut because that is— �16 Veteran: I was going to say Tan Son Nhut or Cam Ranh Bay but that was—I had malaria twice, so I was there for two weeks a couple times. But it was probably Tan Son Nhut. Interviewer: Okay. Now, when you were going to Vietnam, did you know what unit you were joining? Or…? Veteran: No. Interviewer: Okay, so you are just a general replacement at that point. Okay. When did you arrive in Vietnam? Veteran: That was February… Interviewer: 1970 now. Veteran: Right. I was there 11 months and 19 days. So, I was never very good at math. So… Interviewer: Okay. So, basically the early 1970 is when you arrived there. Okay. And what was your first impression of Vietnam when you go there? Veteran: The smell. Interviewer: Can you describe it? Veteran: It was—I never smelled anything like it. It was, I guess, a conglomeration of gunpowder and latrines and…incense probably, smoke and different things. It was just hard to…it almost—it was just to the point of making you nauseous, you know, making you sick. But you sooner or later got used to it. (00:22:44) Interviewer: Okay. Now, did you land during the day or at night? �17 Veteran: I believe it was nighttime. Most every time we got transported it seemed like it was nighttime. So, I didn’t really get a good look at things coming in. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Get a lay of the land or anything like that. Interviewer: Alright. So, once you land, what happens to you? Veteran: I guess they probably issued us uniforms and some equipment. No weapons at that time. And I don’t know how long I kicked around before I reported, because I ran into people that I knew, people that had been in basic or AIT or something, and they had been there for a while because I spent the 5 weeks or whatever in NCO school. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: So, I was behind again. No, kind of, but it worked out. But 2 of the guys that I remembered their names and faces but I saw them coming. I was like oh man, cool, there is somebody that I can get some information on what to do here. And they, “Hey, how you doing?” and just kept on. I was like what the heck? They turn around. Well, they had been on an ambush, and they were on a poncho line, and they are in rice paddies, and everything was flying and that. And a ChiComm grenade got tossed in and they tossed—I guess they split, and they left their M60 machine gun there. And they got out of there and they weren’t injured. (00:24:33) Veteran: But they came to the rear, and they said, “We are reenlisting. We are going to Japan.” And that’s…And I am going wait a minute…I don’t know if that’s what I want to do. And then I ran into them, a buddy from high school, and this and that. And he was just about ready to ETS. He was going home. And but he let me camp out there in his hooch for a few days and that. And �18 I finally got homesick and wanted to get some mail. And I don’t know if it was a week or a month or whatever, but I finally went and reported. Interviewer: Okay, so you basically were just kind of there… Veteran: I was shooting pool, going from an NCO—or a… Interviewer: Club to another? Veteran: …club to another. And just feeling the place out and that. Interviewer: Okay. So, now you show up and they have orders for you? Veteran: They assign me to the 25th Infantry Division, 1st of the 5th Mechanized [Infantry Regiment], which I wasn’t going to kick there. So, we were able to ride to our ambush points and that. Rift during the day and then they would drop us off and we’d set up and ambush, they’d go back to the night logger. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Come back in a day, two days, a week, or whatever. You know, however long we were out there. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And what kind if vehicles did you have? Veteran: Armored personnel carriers. Interviewer: So, that is like the M113 mostly? Or…? Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Okay, so standard. Like a big box on a tank chassis? �19 Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Okay. Alright, and that—but you still fight normally as infantry? You would dismount and—if you were going to go out and engage? Veteran: If and when we ran into it. Interviewer: Yeah. (00:26:17) Veteran: Thankfully, we didn’t get a lot of it. Towards the end but… Interviewer: Okay. So, that’s the unit you were assigned to. Now, where was the unit at that time? Veteran: Cu Chi. Interviewer: Okay. And explain a little bit about where Cu Chi was and what sort of place it was. Veteran: Well, it seems like every time I look at a map of Vietnam, it was near Saigon, but it seems like—I thought it was in one spot and it was—it is in a different one or whatever. But…And what they know about Cu Chi now is crazy. But I don’t know. I don’t really know what happened between there and the next thing I knew I was on top of an APC, and we are going out in the jungles, rice paddies, rubber plantations. We went from there towards Cambodia, Tay Giang, Dau Tieng, Camp Frenzell, Firebase Frenzell-Jones, and back to Cu Chi, which is where the 25th was based at. Interviewer: Yeah. That was their headquarters area. Okay. Now, when you—so, are you joining basically an infantry squad that has its own armored personnel carrier? Is that…? Veteran: No, it was a whole company. �20 Interviewer: Okay. So, you have a company and then—but a company isn’t going to all fit in one carrier. So, you have to have multiple vehicles. Veteran: Well, a squad was—it was a 10 man. Driver, 50 gunner, and then 8 personnel so there was 10 altogether is what the vehicle was designed for to get inside. Interviewer: Right. (00:28:06) Veteran: And…which was a no-no, we rode on top. Interviewer: Okay. So, why would you ride on top rather than inside? Veteran: Because of landmines. The concussion that would…it was better to be on top, sitting on ammo boxes full of grenades and ammos and whatever you could find to sit on for a seat. Interviewer: Okay. And were there roads and trails to drive on or did you just… Veteran: Most of the time, we’d have—we had two trackers. We were in the Michelin Rubber Plantation and BF Goodrich. We were there a lot. And surrounding areas. We’d go out on rifts; they’d call it rift. And kind of like recon or something like that. But we would all ride on the vehicle and tell the guys, “Okay, here is where you are going to…” and we’d get off just before dark and set up the ambush and just pull guard duty and… Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, you are sort of there for several—a period of 2-3 months or whatever before the invasion of Cambodia happens. Because the Americans officially start going in— Veteran: Well, that was in May. Interviewer: That’s in May. �21 Veteran: May 7th. Interviewer: But you were there a couple months before that gets going. So, was that time mostly one of just sort of driving around and going back and forth? Veteran: Well, they had gone into Vietnamization. They had—instead of going out in a company, we were going out in squads. It was broken down into squads. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: We didn’t—and it was a whole different ball game, and nobody really knew what was going on; even the guys that were—had seen, you know, had been in country for a while. So, we were all…We counted on our Chieu Hoi Scouts, which were—they surrendered and came over to our side and we—they were Kit Carsons. Interviewer: Yeah. (00:30:20) Veteran: Chieu Hoi. They were Chieu Hoi, which is…but we relied on them quite a bit. You just watch their eyes. If they…you know, you grabbed your weapons. And just watch that true or low, one of the two, because we trusted them. They were good kids, or good guys. They were probably older. They were older than us but… Interviewer: Alright. So, you are just going out with an individual squad with one armored personnel carrier, just going out someplace by yourselves? Veteran: Yeah. I think we probably traveled in what we had left. There was usually four armored personnel carriers to a platoon. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: A squad needs one. �22 Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And when you look—when one got destroyed, you—we jumped in, you know. Interviewer Yeah. Were your squads full strength? Or were you usually missing some people? Veteran: The squads, I guess, were—we got resupplied, you know, as far as that. But E-6s, E-5s, and E-6s and their—I’ve got a thing I printed out that we were very low in a lot of places in…as far as officers. Interviewer: Okay. So, you don’t have enough sergeants of the right rank and you don’t have enough lieutenants to lead the platoons and— Veteran: No. Spec-4s were brought up to take care of it, you know, to fill the spot and stuff like that. Interviewer: Okay. Well, was there much actual fighting going on at this point? Or just IEDs or…? Veteran: We were—the Vietnamization was for us to go out and find it. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: We were in a no-fire zone that you couldn’t fire unless fired upon. And then you were supposed to get, you know, clearance. But you know that didn’t happen. We could see the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I remember watching it with the naked eye. I could—we could see them and there wasn’t a thing we could do. Interviewer: Okay, so you are kind of getting up to the Cambodian border at that point? (00:32:27) �23 Veteran: We were back and forth. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: The two months before we went in or the three months that I was there. And in the meantime, the track that I was on, 32 track, with 3rd platoon or 3rd squad, the driver said, “Man, I am done. I am leaving.” Well, we says, “Well, who is going to drive this rig?” And I was the FNG. I was the… Interviewer: You’re the new guy. Veteran: And looked around and nobody is saying anything. I am going well hell, I’ll drive this thing. I’d seen what, you know, and I had had enough farm life and stuff like that. So, they said, “There it is.” So, I was assigned to the—me and the 50 gunner were assigned to the APC. We’d take—we’d rift all day long and then drop everybody else off and then we’d go back to the night laager and then pull guard. There was just the two of us so we would have to pull guard ourselves at night. Interviewer: Okay. So, the night laagers were a bunch—a group of the vehicles will be together kind of in a circle? Veteran: I call it a wagon wheel. We’d pull in and just follow the lead all the way around so that—and then we’d do a 90 degree, so we were all facing out. And go out and set our trip flares and Claymores and put our RPG screens up at front. And… Interviewer: Alright. Now, when you were in that kind of situation, would the Vietnamese—would they probe you or attack you? Or did they leave you alone? (00:34:05) �24 Veteran: No, they would—they would…Well, they had the bomb craters. A 10,000-pound bomb leaves a big hole and that. Well, they would hide in those and then just hold their AKs and fire above us over the top. Well, it was a diversion. They’d—on the other side of the night logger, they would crawl in and turn the Claymores around and things like that so when you hit the clacker, it would blow 100,000 BBs at us instead of them. And they would do things like that. I got to say the only one I guess that we got in was…pulled into the night logger one night, or one afternoon, and I just got off and everybody had to haul the duffel bags and everything on a litter just so, you know, all their belongings, everything and that. And I went over and laid down on them and I fell asleep. And I dreamt that there were Cobra jets and… gunships. I mean, I dreamt that all this…I woke up in the morning and looked around and it had actually happened, and I slept through it. I was so tired that I slept through that. But the—I was actually… Interviewer: You dreamed a fire fight and there was one. Veteran: Yep. Which would have been a nightmare. Interviewer: Yeah. Now, so did they—did that do much damage to your unit? Or…? did you— Veteran: There were some people missing and it was all small arms. Well, it must have been more than just small arms fire from the NVA or VC whichever it was. We—I don’t know if we ever found out. Excuse me. But I was very lucky I didn’t have—we didn’t have a whole lot of contact. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: We did a lot of time guarding things. Like I say, the rubber plantations and things like that. We went out one time at night. We had never—nobody had ever done that before. You �25 know, black light, dark, and that was a trip. But I was—I got to say that it could have been a whole lot worse. (00:36:42) Interviewer: Okay. Now, did you—aside from the Kit Carson Scouts—I mean, did you work with any of the South Vietnamese military? Veteran: ARVN. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: I am…Now, did you work with them before the Cambodian incursion or only after that started? Veteran: I think we probably worked with them. We were—it was a—the whole year I was there, it was off and on. but they just didn’t want to. You know, they…when something happened, they’d go the other way. And 100 yards or something where they were safe, and they would be just sitting there going oh man. And you couldn’t blame them. I mean for crying out loud, it was…it was, you know. Interviewer: Yeah, I know a lot of—most of them would have been draftees and probably didn’t want to be there either. And then, didn’t necessarily have the level of training that you did or anything else. But so, they were there but you didn’t see them as a particularly effective fighting force at that point. Veteran: They had brand new M-16s. They had brand new fatigues, they had brand new armored personnel carriers that had never been off the road. Ours were—we had busted jungles. You could pull up on a tree that big around and knock it down. �26 Interviewer: Alright. So, how—what’s it like to drive an armored personnel carrier? (00:38:06) Veteran: It’s like driving a bulldozer, somewhat, only you are in the front left-hand corner instead of in the middle of it. But just laterals. We had extended laterals to ride on top. They had the motor pool made extended laterals so we could sit up. Interviewer: So, you could sort of basically stick your head out of the top and look around rather than just being out of sight? Veteran: Well, there is a round manhole cover that flips over to the rear. Interviewer: Yep. Veteran: And I put a cushion or whatever on top of that. So, I was actually—had my feet on that and I went and had a long pole for the accelerator, with our 350 diesel Oldsmobile’s, I guess. I thought they were Chevys. That’s all that was moving that 13-ton vehicle. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, basically, if possible, you preferred to be up top driving rather than buttoned up inside the vehicle. Veteran: It was required. If…One time, one of my laterals broke so I had to leave them behind and I had to ride in the—down inside. But what—the first day in Cambodia I hit a landmine, a 70-pound landmine. It was right—took out the drive sprocket on my side. So, I was 5 feet above that. And it rocked us up, took my track off and everything. It knocked a couple of guys off. Everybody’s ears were bleeding but mine. I still have perfect hearing. Probably more than perfect. But I was back on the ground then. Interviewer: Okay. So, if you had been in the original driver’s seat down inside— �27 Veteran: If I had been in there, I would have…I don’t know. Interviewer: Have been killed or badly wounded. Yeah. Veteran: Probably. The closeness of it and everything, there is no place to go. Interviewer: Yep. (00:40:16) Veteran: But that’s why we were up on top. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, in the—so the big operation or whatever that you are involved in initially is that incursion into Cambodia that starts at the beginning of May. Now, did you have any kind of build-up or preparation for it? Did you have any idea that you were going to be doing it until the day it happened? Veteran: Maybe a day or so. Something like that. Interviewer: Okay. And did they tell you what you were doing or why you were doing it? Veteran: Well, we pretty much knew. We were still in the no-fire. I think it was still a no-fire zone. I remember the night before; it was dark when we got there. And they had us—they’d walk us, and they’d say, “Okay, 90 degrees. That’s Cambodia across that river.” So, we are sitting side by side like that and somebody said, “Well, there is…” “Well, no, they didn’t tell us.” But anyway, we heard movement. They said, “There is a little bridge out there, a footbridge, and it’s right out there.” I don’t know how far they said. Whatever and this and that and they said, “But that’s the only thing.” Well, there were Marines out there. And we heard the Marines and I guess I gave the command to open up with the 50. And of course, we were shooting through the Constantine wire that we had for protection on the front for RPGs. And one of them did catch a �28 fragment of the wire. One of them had to be dusted off anyway. We didn’t know they were out there. Interviewer: So, there were actually U.S. Marines there? (00:42:12) Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay because I thought the Marines were normally up north and not down in the Saigon area. But that’s where they told you they were? Veteran: It was dark and never saw anybody. It was just firing at the sound because they said there was a little bridge and that’s where it looked like they pointed from. But it was a—I don’t know how many down there, but they were U.S. Marines there, yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, then do you go forward at daybreak? Or…? Veteran: Well, they were still putting the bridge together. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: A floating bridge. And I think it was about noon we started crossing that bridge. And I, at that time, I had—I was driving at that time. The 32-track. And I was the 5th one across that bridge that day. Interviewer: And how long was it before you hit the mine? Veteran: It was near the end of the day. We split up. I think half the battalion went south and half of us went north. And we would go through villages, and they were coming with arm loads of bananas and, I don’t know, anything that they had indigenous to them. They were just piling it up on the track. Just…it was crazy. �29 Interviewer: So, they were happy to see you? Veteran: Oh, it was just like it was like oh my word. Look at this and look at that. Smiling and the whole nine yards. And when we came back out two weeks later, our unit actually—we were there for two weeks. And you couldn’t give them a case of C-rations for a banana. It was—I mean, it was the Garden of Eden. When we went into Cambodia was what Vietnam used to look like. It was just like there’s a place in Arizona, Cave Creek. Up in that area there is like a mist. It’s like you’re just in someplace that you had never been before. And that’s the way Cambodia was when we went in there. Interviewer: Okay. (00:44:39) Veteran: But after the airstrikes and the B-52s, it was just bomb craters and it was just…it was hard to be in the skin. Interviewer: Okay. So, on that first day, was there any opposition, aside from the mines? Veteran: Oh yeah, there was all kinds of a lot of stuff going around. There was VC and NVA both encamped in those. And you didn’t know so everything was just being leveled. And there were a few that popped out and were killed. I only actually saw one U.S. casualty that day. But you are busy driving, you know, and you are trying to maneuver and this and that and stuff. You can’t really take in a lot of the other stuff. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. So, after you hit the mine, now what happens? Your vehicle is disabled. So, what happens to you when you and your squad then? Veteran: Well, I want to go back a little bit. Interviewer: Okay. �30 Veteran: Going to it, I was the 22nd vehicle in line. We were going down a two-track road. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And like I say, I was the 22nd one in line and there was one APC behind me. And I hit the mine. And Ron Siefer from Ohio was behind me, and he knew he was good, but he immediately pulled around us. And they said I was tracking. I was tracking like, you know, it wasn’t like I had drifted off, so it had to be either a step-down mine, which it clicks down so many times and then blows, or they detonated it. (00:46:42) Interviewer: Command detonated mine. Veteran: We never knew. Interviewer: So, you were tracking. It means you were following I exactly the tracks of the one in front of you. Veteran: Yeah. Yeah, people behind, everybody, and the guys on it, they said I was doing the right thing. Well, the whole company just kept on going. Our battalion. It would have been the battalion. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And Ron just pulled around and he says, “Here, let’s get the cables hooked up.” And he started hooking the cables up proper to tow me. And my track was blown apart, so it was—and it hung up on the rear bogie wheel and was dragging behind us, 10 or 15 feet beside us. So, that was like…And we are sitting on top. He’s towing us. And I am going if that thing hits a mine…and this and that. But we are following the…Well, actually, when he was driving it, we’d look—I looked back—and I saw deuce and a halfs. There was 4, 5, I didn’t know. It was so far �31 back. The doors came open and there were stars on the side. There was not supposed to be anything but mechanized armored vehicles. Interviewer: Okay. But the deuce and a half is just regular trucks. Veteran: Deuce and a halfs are not armored. And we didn’t know if an RPG was going to come our way. Turned out, I am reading—I found out in the last—actually, the last year—that there were actually retired rubbered vehicles that were there. But we didn’t know. But we just got in there and hauled ass. And finally got to the night laager where we were at. And the next day, they brought a sky hook. One of the big choppers brought that over into Cambodia and they picked my APC up and I watched it. Interviewer: Okay. So now what do you do? You lost your vehicle. (00:48:40) Veteran: Well, I had to go get on another one. And I remember we—they had a partially bombed out bridge over a river. And I have never really figured out where that was at yet. But we were left behind, I guess, because there were too many of us to go out or something. But we guarded that bridge. And the rest of them went out and they caught [unintelligible]. They were—it was some bad news that they got into that day. But I think we guarded that bridge. It must have been the two weeks that we were there. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And set up ambushes. That’s the first ambush. Well, it was the second one. I popped one. Somehow one of Papasan’s pigs had swum across the river and came and tripped one of our trip flares. And I don’t know. Well, I actually blew a Claymore on the pig. And the next morning, a hunter found it—or the farmer—found it on the other side of the river. And well, he ended up cooking it and invited us. �32 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know, we killed his pig. I don’t know if we, if anybody, ever paid for it or not but… Interviewer: So, aside from the pig, were you left alone while you were there? (00:50:16) Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. So, kind of a quiet way to spend an invasion. Veteran: A 6 toed South Vietnamese general. He had 6 toes on each foot because they wore flip flops. And we had heard about him. And he come walking across that bridge one day. We just all kept looking at his toes. But we were just grunts, you know. It was…I don’t know what happened then. Interviewer: Okay. So, you are basically parked there for a couple of weeks and the rest of the battalion has moved on. Veteran: Well, they would go out on rifts and get into trouble and then come back. Interviewer: Okay, so they were still using the bridge? Or…? Veteran: We were on one side and the platoon was on the other. Interviewer: Okay. So, they are still kind of operating in that area at that point. Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Okay. And did you have any idea what was going on elsewhere? Veteran: We’d get bits and pieces when they’d get back in. They came back in. one they came back in firing. They were coming back from that bad and we were getting ricochet. We were �33 getting it friendly fire. And we hid behind the APC until they came and then turned into the night laager and that. But they were—one of the APCs hit a mine that took it up in the air and flipped it over and came down on its top. And I know the 50 gunner never got out. But we just didn’t talk about it… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: …that much. Interviewer: Alright. And so, you think you spent a couple of weeks there. And at that point, do you move on and advance farther into Cambodia? Or…? Veteran: We were only allowed 30 kilometers, I guess, or 30 miles or something. That’s all we could go in. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: They stopped us before we could have really made a difference. But at the end of two weeks, we just went back to Camp Frenzell-Jones, I think. Firebase Frenzell-Jones. Interviewer: Okay. Alright, now having done that, do you go back to just patrolling the area? Or what do you do next? (00:52:31) Veteran: Rubber plantations in the surrounding areas. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, were there particular rules and regulations for what you could do and not do on a rubber plantation? Veteran: Well, you weren’t supposed to damage any of the trees for sure. Because I found out, I don’t know if its true or not, Lady Bird Johnson owned those two plantations. �34 Interviewer: I don’t think she owned those. Veteran: That’s what I heard. Interviewer: Yeah. That might well have been the kind of thing somebody would say. Veteran: We didn’t know while we were there. I found—I heard it after I got home and that. But we’d go from Dau Tieng to Tay Ninh to one of the rubber plantations or whatever. We just moved around. We would have a cache of weapons and food. We had I don’t know how many tons of rice we captured. Nine-millimeter machine guns and things like that. But… Interviewer: So, you have—well, you are basically—you are patrolling, you are finding plenty of signs that there are enemy around. They have got all their caches, all their stores of stuff. But for the most part, were they not trying to fight you? Veteran: They’d take pot shots. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: You know, just to make us think or whatever. And now and then, I don’t…I can’t say that I—I through a lot of ordnance down range. We had a mini gun mounted on our 50 turret. Interviewer: Okay, explain what the mini gun is. (00:54:14) Veteran: A mini gun is a top speed of 7000 rounds a minute. Run off batteries. It is a continuous belt. Every 7th round is a red tracer. Communists had green tracers, so we knew who was fighting—who was shooting at us. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And they knew who we were too by our tracers. �35 Interviewer: But a mini gun can put out a lot of lead fast. Veteran: We were called to the front to mow some brush down quite a few times. But being driving in this, you know, a majority of my time, I was driving. Because I eventually got another APC when a driver went home. I never took a bead on anything. I…it plague—I don’t know if it’s a plague or not but I don’t know if I ever killed anybody. I don’t know. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Like I say, I threw a lot of ordnance. I had an M-79 grenade launcher. On night laager, I’d—I kept them thinking. If there was anything out there, I kept them thinking. And nobody ever said anything. I’d shoot a case of grenades in a night, you know, while I was on guard duty and that. I don’t know, what was your question? Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Okay, and now do you basically stay with that unit your whole time in Vietnam? Or— Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Now, did you spend much time on the base at Cu Chi? Veteran: Near the end, I did. We did in—you say, some of the things we transported a lot. We— The Big Red One, 1st Air Cav…I can’t remember but we would transport units from one part of South Vietnam to others. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And then come back and that. Had a lot of ARVNs. We would give them rides to different places and this and that. �36 Interviewer: Okay. And then, would you go in and out of Cu Chi when you are doing that? Or…? (00:56:21) Veteran: We’d most generally be out in the field when they came walking in and… Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: Gave them a chance to rest or whatever and that and then…We were in a—just—even though there was all this going on around. I just had tunnel vision, I guess. Interviewer: Yeah, you had a very small world that you were part of. Veteran: I—yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Did you see much of the Vietnamese civilians? Veteran: Oh yeah. When we went through the villages and that. They’d get on the back, open the back door and try and get stuff out and things like that. I remembered one time we stopped and chased them down a side street and thought what are we doing? This is stupid. So, we went back but… Interviewer: Alright. Sometimes people talk about people—are they trying to sell you things? Or prostitutes kind of following along and are getting in the vehicles. Any of those kinds of things happen? Veteran: Probably but not a lot. We were moving on. We did night laager at times near villages and that. And we’d sneak out to all the two-tracks, you know. We are going into the village, you know. So, they’d say, “Okay.” You know, they’d watch for us and stuff, whatever. But that was there, it was around, but I don’t…I don’t know much about it. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And were there drugs around? �37 Veteran: Yeah. Not out in the field so much. I mean, I know—I remember we’d smoke some marijuana, and they’d tell us—when they’d come around, the top would come around. We got some intel, you know, hold it down tonight. Yeah, okay. (00:58:27) Interviewer: Okay. So, would you sometimes do that in a night laager position or only when you— Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. But not if you are out on an ambush patrol or something else like that? Veteran: No, not that I know of. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: But I mean, it’s…well. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Your awareness is…you get really aware when you are doing that. And it was I think somewhat of an advantage. Because it doesn’t mess you up, you know, other ways than that. Your awareness, like you know, even now shooting pool or doing some things like that, I mean you are—you just get tuned into it and it’s…I don’t know. Interviewer: Okay. So, in—because usually the assumption is that it can make you less prepared or less sensitive to things. Veteran: Probably could in civilian life, but when you are on—when you are on top of things, if you are not, you are… �38 Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, did you ever get an R and R while you were in Vietnam? Veteran: No. Interviewer: Okay. Did you know that that was a possibility? Veteran: I knew that we had a leave and that we had an R and R coming. And came up somehow a buddy of mine from New Jersey, we each got a leave, one week leave, so we says, “Okay.” So, we go to…I don’t even remember if that was Cam Ranh Bay where they flew out of there for that or not. But we were on leave. And we were in line, and they came up and they said, “We got two seats for Hawaii.” And we just stood there because that was for married. And they said, “We got two seats for Hawaii.” And we said, “Well hell, we’ll go.” Interviewer: Okay. (01:00:30) Veteran: Because we didn’t know where we was going to go. We didn’t know if we were going to Japan or Bangkok or—we had no idea where we were going. But we knew we weren’t going to Hawaii. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: But next thing we know, we are on a plane for Hawaii. And he says, “If they’ve got a flight going to New Jersey, I am going home.” We got in the terminal, and he said, “There it is.” And he went and got a ticket, and they actually stopped the plane on the tarmac and took a set of stairs out there and he got on the plane. And I watched him. I am going well, okay. And I look around: Detroit, nonstop. So, I bought a ticket. Called my sister, “Pick me up in Detroit.” “You are coming home?” “Yeah.” Well, everybody thought I was home for good. Interviewer: Yeah. �39 Veteran: I was only home for 5 days. They said, “Well, how long are you home? What are you doing now?” I said, “Well, I am going back to Vietnam.” They go, “What?!” I am going, “Well, I am AWOL right now.” I said, “You know, I could be in big trouble. I might not ever see Vietnam again if they put in brig or something like that.” But anyway, we met back up at the end of the time and I rented a motel, or a hotel room, and…Well no, I had rented a motel. I guess that’s when I got back. I rented a hotel because I remember that. But yeah, I was back on the block for—and that was around Halloween time because I brought a pumpkin back. And set it in the seat next to me and put the seatbelt around it. On everything, you know, from civilian, from Detroit, Michigan to… Interviewer: Maybe Seattle or someplace if you went by Alaska to go back? Or…? (01:02:29) Veteran: I don’t know. It might have been a nonstop to—I think it was a nonstop to Hawaii. Interviewer: Yep. Veteran: I could be wrong but— Interviewer: But you mentioned that you flew through Alaska at some point. Veteran: That was on my final trip when I finally came home. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: We came in that way. Interviewer: But anyway, so you have gone and so you basically make it back to Vietnam pretty much on schedule? Veteran: Yep. �40 Interviewer: Okay. Alright, now how much time do you have left on your tour at that point? Veteran: That was around this time, and I left in February 15th so… Interviewer: About 4 months. Okay. Alright. Now, I don’t know, what was it like to go back to Vietnam after having been home? Veteran: Nothing. It was just—I—just going through the motions. Like I said, tunnel vision. I am doing what I am supposed to do and… Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: Just being a good soldier. Interviewer: Okay. Now, were those last few months any different from what you had experienced before? Veteran: Yeah. August 31st I was…actually, that would have been before I went back home. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. Veteran: But I put that out of my mind. But that was the worst day of my life, was August 31st of ’70. And we rifted probably half the day, the whole company, for some reason. We were—we did a rift and that’s just traveling around, trying to kick up some incoming and… Interviewer: Yeah. (01:04:08) Veteran: …deal with it. And we had pulled up in this big wide space. It was bulldozed. You know, it was just—you could see for a long ways. And they pulled us online, all on one point, and we sat there, and I remember “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was playing on the bridge track �41 because we had a 60-foot bridge that traveled with us. And everybody is just kicked back, enjoying the song and this and that. And all of a sudden, they got a—we got a call that they wanted the lieutenant at headquarters. And they picked 33. At this time, I was driving 33 Track. And they wanted two and there was only two left out of our platoon or our squad. And so, I was leading, and they just told us, they said, “Well, you go down here,” because we had never been in that territory before; didn’t know where it was. It was pretty wide open and this and that, but some brush burns and stuff. And I remember I made a left-hand turn because the road took a 90. And as soon as I got my turn complete and started forward, I thought I had hit another landmine. Now, this is where my laterals were broken like 6 inches, so I was down inside driving off the actual gas pedal and all that stuff. And I thought I hit a—the explosion, I thought I hit another mine. So, I got up and started to come out of the turret or whatever the…I don’t even know what we called it. Interviewer: Oh, a hatch or whatever. (01:06:04) Veteran: But Sergeant Gilbert was right behind me, and he said, “Go!” so I went back down. So, when that RPG hit, there is two straps that run along each side of the—I got a bad shoulder here—each side that—you pull a lever, and the back tailgate falls down. Well, those straps are about this thick and that wide and whatever around. Well, we would take a case of each colored smoke grenades and slide the spoon into that behind that and then bend it down. So, up on top, guys could reach down and grab a color of whatever we needed. They were all there. And I would say there was about 100-150 grenades. When that RPG went through, the concussion set all of those grenades off at once. And I am down here. I was driving with my periscopes. When he said, “Go!” I still had my tracks. I didn’t, you know, I thought I hit a mine and I was dead in the water. Well, I wasn’t. I think those smoke grenades lasted for 7 minutes. I think. And when I �42 finally quit driving, they were done. And I stopped and I put it in park, turned the key off, and got up out of there and there was nobody there. There wasn’t a—nobody in sight. And I could see for a long way. I had no—I had—where in the hell am I going to go? I am out here in the middle of nowhere. My armored personnel carrier is on fire. Interviewer: So, when the smoke grenades went off inside it, were you separated from that? Or did you have smoke in there with you while you are still driving? (01:08:06) Veteran: I had to use the periscopes to drive. Interviewer: Alright. So, you are surrounded by smoke inside of this thing and you are just using periscopes to look outside to see where you are going? Because you can fit the periscope to your eyes, basically? Veteran: Well, it was a manual. It was there, stationary. It was just a square and… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And so, I am standing there, and I have got my—I didn’t have a shirt on. I am all—my weapons were—I had an M-60 mounted on my—in front of me. But you know, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I got off there anyway and I am thinking maybe I can get my duffel bag out of this thing. Because there is nobody around. Interviewer: So, the men who were on the APC, they are gone? Veteran: Some of them, a couple of them, got blown off. They—one got burnt pretty good. But— Interviewer: But nobody had ridden out there with you? Veteran: I assumed they were all there. I don’t know… �43 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: I never did find out what happened to all of them. But I got—I guess I got greedy or whatever. I thought I could—I knew where my duffel bag is, so I climbed up on the track, on the—and looked over because we had the 4 by 4—I guess you would call it a…a sunroof or something. And that was always open when we were traveling and that. But I got up there and climbed up there and I looked down there and here was my 50 gunner, laying down there. And he was looking up at me. He was on his stomach, looking up at me. Just—he had been in all that smoke. And did not—had no idea what was going on with him. But he was mortally wounded. I knew he was a dead man. But I knew I had to get him out. And so, my duffel bag got—I was able to get him out. The hand grenades were starting to go off and, you know, and blasting caps. I don’t—it was just… (01:10:41) Interviewer: So, there was—okay, so the vehicle was still on fire at this point? Veteran: It burned to the ground. It burned down to the chassis. Well, they got the other, the one that was following me, before he made that 90-degree turn, they hit 50—an RPG hit the 50-turret dead on, and Jimmy Hepler was in that. And he didn’t make it. Interviewer: Okay. So, both vehicles got hit with RPGs there? Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. So, now what happens to you? How do you get out of there? Veteran: I got Phil on the ground and his leg was just hanging on by his kneecap, one of his legs. And I tried to get him—because I got him in a bear hug. His entire back from his neck down to his belt, his organs, everything, were right there. And I got him in a bear hug, facing me, and got �44 him up and got him up over the side and I said, “If I can just get his leg…” You know, because he is in shock. He doesn’t know anything, I don’t think. And just as I got that, his leg got up there, he somehow turned around and saw it. He said, “Oh, my leg.” And this guy had two kids, he was married, is what he told me because we got a lot of time when we were at the night laager, just him and I pulling guard at night. He was an eccentric. Didn’t have a lot of things going on. Never knew that his first name was Charles. He went by his middle name Phil because he didn’t want them—because Charlie, Chuck, you know, that was the enemy. Interviewer: Yeah. (01:12:42) Veteran: Never knew that until about 5 years ago when I got some information off of a computer and it had his full name on there. I am going whoa, I didn’t—never knew that. But I turned coward that day. Because it wasn’t long but the company—or somebody from the company or platoon had—or battalion—had come and they stopped about 300 yards away because all they could see was wreckage and I was behind. And I heard them, I guess, but they stopped, and they are just going, you know, what are we going to do? And I says, “You get your—get over here.” And when Doc Dixon got there, I said, “Give him as much morphine as you can.” Because I had—I think he was on his back so the injuries other than his leg weren’t visible and that. But I didn’t stay with him. And I didn’t help go and put him on the Dustoff. I didn’t—I was afraid. I didn’t want to go. Even though my personnel carrier was on fire, and everything was going on, I was—I didn’t want to leave that spot. And somehow, I got on to another APC. I don’t know anybody on there or what, but I got a ride back to the rear, but I should have gotten onto that chopper with him. I should have been there. (01:14:31) Interviewer: You got him out of the vehicle, so that was the most important thing to do. And the doc was there. �45 Veteran: And that gives me a lot of relief. But I should have stayed with him because I don’t know if he was still alive when they got him onto the chopper or not. How he was even…how he was even alive, how he was like, I don’t know how. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. So, after that, was it not too long after that event—I guess it was a little while before you actually got to leave. Do you just—do they give you any kind of break after that? Or you just go to another APC and just go back to your usual business? Veteran: Business as usual. You just—so, you didn’t really try and get close to anybody because of that. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And I blocked that out of my mind for a long time, a lot of years. But see everything that I owned was in that duffel bag. My photo albums especially. When I came home, I had no— nothing to show anybody. Well, if they had—nobody ever asked me. My father. Nobody asked me anything about anything. Interviewer: Now had you been taking pictures in Vietnam? Or did you just bring stuff from home when you went over? Veteran: No, it was pictures that other guys—I didn’t do a whole lot of photography. But somebody took them and then they would have copies and pass them around and that. So, we had albums. I sent one picture—I was going to bring it today. But I got one picture standing beside my armored personnel carrier at Frenzell-Jones about two weeks before we went into Cambodia. And but I have nothing to reminisce. I have nothing. It’s an empty feeling because it was a very big part of my life, when it boils down to it. And I am an emotional basket [case] most of the time so… (01:16:52) �46 Interviewer: Alright. So, you got through that. And now, and basic—and then you basically go back to the regular business. You get your leave, you go to—you get home briefly, you come back. So, now after you are back, after you get back and you brought your pumpkin back, do you just go back to driving a track again? Veteran: I didn’t—that was a—the only two that I—I hit a landmine and then got ambushed. And I was a grunt back on the ground again. Interviewer: Okay. So, now you are just an infantryman again? Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. And still basically in the same area, conducting the same kinds of patrols? Veteran: Well, I didn’t find out until years later that my unit was being phased out. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: We were starting to de-escalate. Because they weren’t replacing. We weren’t getting new equipment, this and that. They were just letting it—and actually, they decommissioned in…I spent more time in the rear. For some reason, I know I get up in the morning, go to morning formation, go to the motor pool, we’d get a deuce and a half full of empty barrels. And we would drive around the company area, kicking them empty barrels off and putting loaded ones on and then shuffling them up to the front and this and that. (01:18:24) Veteran: And that was our—by 10 o’clock, we were done. And we had inhabited some bunkers for hooches or something. We were living in those. I don’t remember how long. Things get fuzzy and that. We were in that position for a while. But it just really pissed me off because Phil, the �47 guy that was mortally wounded there…man, my head is going in so many different directions right now, I can’t pull one thought out of… Interviewer: Okay. Basically, you— Veteran: But…man, I can’t remember. Interviewer: Okay. Well, you were upset about something relating to what happened to Phil? Or…? Veteran: Oh. The day we went out, Phil had 6 days to go. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And he asked them if he could stay behind. And they said, “No. You are not only going out, but you are not the 50 gunner anymore. You’re on the 60 gun that had been mounted on a pole on the right side.” We were de-escalating. We were standing down, to a certain extent because of my unit—the 1st of the 5th Mechanized was being disbanded. Interviewer: You weren’t really even trying to win a war anymore, at that point. You are kind of— Veteran: We didn’t know. Interviewer: --killing time. Veteran: I didn’t know that until 4, 5 years ago, that I have gotten this information that has been on a computer of what my unit did that month. I have got it out in the vehicle. Interviewer: Yep. (01:20:34) �48 Veteran: They never should have sent him out there. Another one of my friends would have died but they put him in the 50 turret and put Phil out on the out. And especially finding out that they didn’t need him. They could have left him behind, you know. Six days. Interviewer: Alright. So, who is giving that kind of order? Is that the sergeant or is that an officer or do you not know? Veteran: Officers, I am pretty sure. I don’t think it was—I don’t know if it was talked about or not but when he came and—to join us—we were getting ready to go and he climbed on top and I think Dennis probably started to get out of the turret and he said, “No,” he says, “I am demoted. I’ve got to be over here.” Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: And he was the only one on my track that was…basically the only one that was wounded. And Jimmy was cut in half. And Sergeant Robinson was trying to get him out and he couldn’t because he was still alive too and that armored personnel carrier was burning to the ground. Interviewer: Okay, so that was the other carrier? Yeah. Alright. Okay, what impression did you have of the officers that you dealt with? (01:22:11) Veteran: LT Decker was a piece of work. But he was doing the same thing because Sergeant Robinson hadn’t seen him going through the burn line. He wouldn’t have known where to go either because he was trying to rescue somebody. And everybody split. And they knew that Phil was down there. They had to have known he was down there. Because when I looked in there, I was being greedy. I was trying to get my stuff. And that…it… �49 Interviewer: Well…Alright. Okay, so I guess to back up a little bit kind of to look over this now, is there anything else that went on in the last few months there that kind of stands out in your memory? Or did you do anything that was different? I mean, or did you mostly now drive people around different places? Or did you— Veteran: No, I was doing the garbage. We were doing the company area garbage detail. And we would go to the dump, which was outside of Cu Chi. I did take a Jeep and take officers out in the bush a little bit. There is no escort. It was just me and the Jeep and him. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: So, there was not a threat. I don’t even know if I had a—I probably had a 45 with me and that would have been probably the only thing because my M-16, I threw that on a shelf in the APC and covered it up, because you had to turn it back in and I—it was a Mattel toy gun to me. It jammed in basic training. Well, we had it in basic and IT both. And with that spring going back and forth in there, I am going no, this is not a weapon that I have ever had. So, I had an M1, I had a M-60, I had an M-79 grenade launcher, and a 45 is what I relied on. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, as you get toward the end of your tour, are you kind of counting days or do you not really know when you are going to leave? (01:24:44) Veteran: I knew when I was leaving. I did not know anything about the early out. And when I got in line to come home, they told me I had to go get a haircut. I said, “Screw you.” Well, they weren’t going to let me on the plane, so I had to get a haircut and catch the next flight. And I don’t even remember what you asked me. �50 Interviewer: Alright. Well, I was—basically, I was just asking about that process for getting you home and how that worked. So, you basically have a date, and you get to go back to— Veteran: Yeah, I think I found—well, if I had gone back the day before, I would have had 150 days. But having to wait, get a haircut and wait for the next day, I had 149 days. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And that was a definite ETS as soon as I hit Fort Dix. And… Interviewer: So, explain a little bit just—so basically, you are going to get—be able to get— out of the Army early? And so, why was that possible? Or what was going on then? Veteran: I don’t know. Anybody that had 150 days or less was in the jungle one day, on the block the next. No debriefing, no…not a damn thing. Interviewer: Okay, because normally if you had gone back the day earlier, you would have been sent to some base in the U.S. to kind of finish out your time? Veteran: I don’t—I might have, I might not have. But I think 150 days was it and I would have been right on the… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: …right on it at that time there. But… Interviewer: Alright. So, at what point do you find out you just get to leave the Army? Was that when you got to Fort Dix? Or…? (01:26:40) �51 Veteran: I knew it, I think, before we left Vietnam, but not very far. Because that would have meant—you wouldn’t want to know that because that would have been even more of a bad luck charm on your or something like that. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. So, this was—so, when you are flying home, this was the time that you think that you go through Alaska and then come back? Veteran: I think we went to Japan. Interviewer: Yep. Veteran: And then Alaska, and I think we went straight to Fort Dix. And that was weird because coming from that way, whatever, people wonder why I went to Fort Dix but that’s just where we went. Interviewer: Well, a great circle route. You fly over Canada. Veteran: And then the buddy that had jumped ship in Hawaii and went home lived there. He actually came and picked me up. He had gotten home a month earlier and he came, him and his girlfriend, came and picked me up. I had fallen asleep. There was nobody in the room. Everybody had disembarked; they were gone. And he had to come and find me, wake me up and say, you know, “Here we go.” And I ended up spending a week there, trying to, I guess, debrief. Because I was—I am, you know, had to get that haircut. So, I am sticking out like a sore thumb. I didn’t have anybody—well, I was in civilian clothes. So, I didn’t get any of the spitting and things like that. But people looked at me and they could probably tell by my haircut. But I hung out there for a few days, a week it was. My parents had saved Christmas for me when I got home. (01:28:35) �52 Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And I told them I wasn’t going to be there for another week and oh, they were mad. They were—I don’t know if they ever forgave me for that, but it was February 15th. And I just knew that I needed some time. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: I needed to do something. So, I did. And I don’t know if it helped or not. Didn’t really but… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Went back and of course they wanted me to go to work. Go back to work. My family was…They had bought the old feed mill in town and put a hardware store in there and a lumberyard out back. And—well, they wrote me and had written me in Vietnam and wanted to know if I wanted to be a part of it. I thought hell yeah, we’d been doing that for—home improvements—for some—from the time I was 14 or less until the time I went in. I, you know, and I said, “Well yeah. I want to see that grow and that.” Interviewer: So, is that what you did then when you got back is you went to work for the family? Veteran: I drew unemployment for a couple of months. I was…I don’t know. I have always been weird and doing my own—doing different things and whatever. But I finally went to work and a year and a half later, I had worked for the IBW before I got drafted. And you have a year to reclaim your job before—after you get back. I think it’s a year. But about a year and a half into it, I plumbed a new house that we had built, and my uncle praised my—a friend of mine, who �53 was a co-worker—he said, “Hey, you did a nice job on that.” You know, he says, “I didn’t do the plumbing,” he says, “I did the electrical.” He said, “Well, who did the plumbing?” and he said, “Well, Roger.” Well, a couple of hours later, my uncle came on the job site because my uncle and my dad went together in this whole venture. And he came in and did a walk through to see how we were doing because we were doing the drywall. I mean, we were—we built the houses from… Interviewer: Yeah. (01:30:56) Veteran: …the basement up. And he started to leave. Went out and he was going through the garage, and I went out and said, “Hey Uncle Les. How come you didn’t give me an atta boy pat on the back, you know, for that?” “You’re family. You’re expected to do that.” Interviewer: Oh. Veteran: And he fired me. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: He fired me for doing a good job and me just saying, hey, you know. Two weeks ago, he had told Chuck this and…But he fired me. And I lost out on my seniority for the IBW because I could have gone—that first year, I could have gone and had four years. It basically would have been four years of…But that was gone. And I just dropped out. I dropped out. My dad said, “Well, we can go back to insulating and roofing and windows and siding.” And I did that for a while, but I said, “I am crawling around in 100, 150-year-old houses in the attics and that’s not a fun thing, you know, and then all of a sudden here we are building brand new houses.” And I said…And a group of us, four of us, just went to Colorado. Stayed there for six weeks or so and in the meantime, I had went to Arizona to visit my sister. We spent Christmas in Arizona, came �54 back to Colorado and my buddy’s wife was going to take the kids away from him if he didn’t come back home. So, I rode back with him, got my car, went back out there. Blew my engine going into Boulder. They replaced the engine, because it was under the warranty, and made it back down to Phoenix and spent New Year’s in Phoenix again. Christmas in Phoenix— Interviewer: Yep. (01:32:58) Veteran: --New Year’s in Phoenix but…But why am I talking about that? Interviewer: Well, basically we just kind of followed up. Now, did you have kind of a long—a longer career doing something? Did you find regular work for a while that you liked? Or…? Veteran: I had 23 jobs from the time I got out of ‘Nam until they took me out of the truck for sleep apnea, which I don’t have. But in 2006, I was 56, or—I was 56 years old. I haven’t worked since then. Interviewer: Okay. So, you were a truck driver for a while? That was the last thing you did? Veteran: I was driving truck. Michigan trained. Best job I ever had. Driving doubles and that. But I kicked around for several years, and I had driven truck. I started driving truck at 14 with a moving van, all around. I had been in 37 states—38 states since before I graduated high school. So, I kind of got back into that and then I don’t know if you have heard of a company in Allegan, they do health and beauty aids. I had gotten married and got a job working there. (01:34:22) Veteran: So, I drove truck for them for 8 years and then I went into management in the warehouse. They had a bid and I said—and I thought I could change things and make things �55 better, which I did, but they didn’t like that. I didn’t do it right. I was just a truck driver. I didn’t know how to do all that whatever. But I was there 14 years all together. And then they started getting crappy and I just said, “I am not putting up with this.” Come to find out, I was the second one of 100 supervisors that they got rid of that year because they were downsizing. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I didn’t know that for two years because I was the second one and I was in a satellite warehouse, away from the main stuff. So, we were kind of out of it. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: So, I went back to driving truck. And mostly, but companies would sell and get rid of everybody or they—different things and that. But I had 23 taxable jobs after I got out of Vietnam. Interviewer: Alright. And this is the kind of thing where you look back. I mean, the time in your service, clearly there were a lot of negative consequences of that. I mean, you got sort of the PTSD type issues and— Veteran: That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Interviewer: Yeah, and the jobs— Veteran: I would have paid to get out of Vietnam. Interviewer: --and the rest of it and that kind. Do you think there was anything positive for you, in terms of your service time? Did you take anything good out of it? Veteran: Well, the problem is is I took too many things from it and applied it to daily life, not knowing it really but there are things that work that can be done in civilian life that if you do it, �56 like washing dishes and this and that, the procedure that we went through, it was, you know. Well, I would try to help with housework. I had two sisters and I was the youngest and I did the outside work. I never was—I never made a bed, I never did anything like that in the house. I did the—fed the animals and all that. So, I didn’t know too much about that stuff. I knew about it, but I didn’t physically know how to do it or whatever. Didn’t desire to do it. (01:36:56) Interviewer: And did you learn some of that kind of thing in the Army? Or the Army way of doing those things? Veteran: Yep. Well see, I didn’t—I lost my job as platoon guide because of my lack of, you know, not straight enough. You know, I just didn’t do stuff. I lived on a farm for crying out loud. When you unhooked a piece of machinery, you left it there until you needed it the next season almost. You know? There was no order. You just grease it up and go. Yeah, I am just… Interviewer: Okay. Well, I did ask you was there a positive element to the service time for you or in the— Veteran: Yeah. These days, what’s going on these days, I don’t know if I would have gone. I don’t agree with a lot of things that are going on. And—but yes, there’s a lot of things that they teach you in the military. I mean, if it’s not—it’s got to be right. You know, they can’t be doing things wrong and be—excuse me. Yeah. And I think I carried that into—I lost my family. I got married a second time. I had two daughters with the first marriage and two with the second. Raised a stepdaughter. And I thought all these years, I thought I was doing good. (01:38:35) Veteran: But in fact, my stepdaughter, shortly after she—or about a year—after she graduated high school, because she moved out the next day. And she called me, and she brought chills to my spine. I actually started—I teared up. She said, “Dad,” she says, “we didn’t really care for the �57 way you raised us.” She said, “But you did a good job.” She says, “I know now.” You know? And it just like…wow. That’s—that kept me going for quite a while, to have her say that. Because we weren’t all that close or anything. But I appreciated that. But I just thought, you know, things worked. But in the military, you told somebody to do something, and they did it. You know, and the girls were just—had their heels dug in. Interviewer: Yeah. Mine were the same way. Veteran: And it caused friction and right now, to this day, I haven’t talked—I live within 10 miles of 4 of them. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: And the other one is in North Carolina, but she is the only one I talk to, because she needs help. But the other ones… Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: They don’t want to run into me. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. To kind of look back over the—your military history or career, is there anything else you want to add on the record before we close out the interview? (01:40:16) Veteran: Well, I had an issue with payroll. Three months after I was in ‘Nam, they started paying me as an E-2. I wasn’t even supposed to be in the field. E-1s weren’t supposed to be in country to start with, I believe. Interviewer: Yeah. You are supposed to be an E-2 automatically once you go over. Veteran: Well, I had been busted to E-1 in Oakland. �58 Interviewer: Yeah. Right. Veteran: So, when I go there, they paid me as an E-1. Three months later they started paying me as an E-2 and I went to top. We were out in the night laager, and I says, “Top,” I says, “I haven’t—I didn’t get any orders for this.” He said, “Well, you better go back, go to the rear and get it straightened out.” So, the next chopper, I went back to the rear. And I went in and said, “Hey,” you know, I went to the finance clerk. “I didn’t get any orders for this.” He said, “Oh,” he said, “They’ll catch up with you. You are an E-2. Go back out in the field.” Okay. I go back to the field, and I look around and there is not as many carriers around and there is people missing. They got into a big one. Three months later, they started paying me as an E-3. I went to top. I says, “Top, I haven’t even gotten my E-1’s yet.” “Well, you better go to the rear and straighten it out.” So, I go to the rear, clerk tells me the same damn thing. “You’re an E-3. An E-2—or an E-3 now—go back out in the field.” So, back out in the field I go. Three months later, they start paying me as an E-4. And I still haven’t gotten any orders. I go to top. Oh, when I got back the second time, less armored personnel carriers, different people. They had gotten hit—they had got into some scunion. The fourth, I says, “I didn’t get orders.” He said, “We’re going back.” He pulled the whole company up. We went back to the rear. He said, “We are not—every time you leave, we catch hell.” I didn’t do anything. (01:42:36) Interviewer: Well… Veteran: Well anyway, next payday, and we got paid in cash out in the field, they gave me $13 and a note. “Come to finance.” And that’s—that was—and I don’t know if they pulled up then or not. Maybe I was in the rear. So, I go in there and they said, “You are a private E-1. You owe the government $1200. And until you pay that money, you will not get out of Vietnam.” And I am going, what the hell? Well, the JAG office was one hooch over. But they had boardwalks about �59 like this. And it was monsoon time. Well, I came out and went to the end, got on this sidewalk to head over and go to the JAG office. There’s a 4-star general walking. The only one around is a 4star general walking down. And he was on his tiptoes on the side of that when I walked past him. And he said, “You don’t salute an officer, troop?” and I said, “Not anymore.” And he says, “Well, what’s the matter?” he says, “Wait a minute. What’s going on?” I said, “Well…” I told him the story. He said, “I’ll fix…” Well, he ended up getting me an E-3 but I still had to write home and get six—because I had sent my money home, most of it. I had to get $600 sent to me in the mail and pay that $600 back before they would—or they wouldn’t have let me out of Vietnam. I should have tell them to take it out of my hide if you want it or whatever, and this and that, because I was going to buy a stereo, you know. I had that money that I was going to do something with. And that turned me about as bitter as anything there. (01:44:33) Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: It’s just money but… Interviewer: Yeah. But they mess up your life in enough other ways, and then they want you to pay them for it. Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Alright. Well, the whole thing makes for a pretty remarkable story. And I appreciate your willingness to share that. It is part of why we do this, to understand what actually happens to ordinary people who wind up in these places. And you have done a good job telling it at the end so thank you very much. Veteran: Thank you. I…I am doing anything and anything to get—I am being greedy again because I am trying to heal myself. After all these years, you know, 50 years…It took 46 years �60 for me to find out that I even had benefits coming. They don’t tell you if you don’t ask, or if we don’t tell each other… Interviewer: Yeah. Right. Veteran: So… Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And they haven’t done anything I don’t think for PTSD or Agent Orange in the last 50 years. Interviewer: Well… Veteran: I am putting myself out there and going to groups. I have been in, I think, 12 group therapy sessions. I spent 6 weeks in Battle Creek. One of the last classes they had for PC— PTC—PCT… Interviewer: PTSD, yep. Veteran: Well, they have a PCT clinic. I think it is PCT clinic. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: For PTSD but I spent 6 weeks there, just trying to fit in or whatever, and this and that. Being around other veterans is just a natural calming. Interviewer: Yeah. (01:46:17) Veteran: For that, but I have said—I don’t know how many psychologists I have seen. Psychiatrists kick me out. So, I have seen many psychologists. I am seeing one once a month now. Two of them actually. And anything I can get, anything I can grab. I have lost everything in �61 my life. I have been a failure in everything in my life. And being in the military, that has been the most constant. That’s an everyday thing. I am constantly back and forth from Vietnam. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And places in between. And… Interviewer: Yep. Veteran: I don’t think I would have ever enlisted. If I hadn’t been drafted, I doubt that I would have enlisted. But I did what they wanted me to do and… Interviewer: You are doing what you can now to get some control over it, which is a legitimate thing to do. Alright then… Veteran: And Vietnam veterans were committing suicide at 70 a day back in—when I did that clinic thing. Now it is down to I think 30-something. I don’t understand that. I mean, I can. I can. If it doesn’t go through our minds once a day or more, it’s…it is just—it’s always right there. Interviewer: It’s a reminder on some level that war is a bad business. And it does bad things to people. (01:48:04) Veteran: Yes. But we have got to revisit it. We have got to go in and hash it over because each time I do it, I don’t know if I feel better or not, but I have been able to help other veterans in the group because we will sit around there and look at each other for…and I just start talking. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: I say, “You know, if we are here…and I apologize, tell me to—” and they say, “No, go for it. Go for it.” �62 Interviewer: And you can also help ones who are younger than you are, because they are actually—I will bring the younger veterans together with the Vietnam guys and, you know, you have a lot in common with them. And they know enough to respect you, take you seriously. Veteran: It was a strange enough war that it stands out and it always will. Things were different for…on almost every plane, everything that was going on. Interviewer: Yeah. And I mean— Veteran: And…yeah. But I bend over backwards for these guys that are stepping up. When the veterans quit coming home, this country is already in deep doodoo. We have got a window right here with the president that is going on. I believe it is the only window that we had to keep our country somewhat sane. And it is being done. And yeah, I am afraid how it is going to go if we don’t get a handle on it right now. We got very few years left to get the train back on track as much as we can. Interviewer: Alright. Alright, I think that makes for a pretty good closing statement so thank you. Veteran: You’re welcome. (01:50:06) � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HealyR2338V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Healy, Roger Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-10 Title A name given to the resource Healy, Roger (Interview transcript and video), 2019 Description An account of the resource Roger Healy was born in Allegan, Michigan in 1949. He attended high school in Gobles, Michigan and graduated in 1967. Roger was drafted into the Army on July 15th, 1969. He completed his basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He did his advanced individual training at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Roger became a part of the infantry and attended part of non-commissioned officer (NCO) school at Fort Benning, Georgia, before deciding that it was not for him and leaving NCO school. After quitting NCO school, Roger was sent to Vietnam in February 1970. He was assigned to the 25th infantry division, 1st of the 5th mechanized, based out of Cu Chi, Vietnam. Roger drove armored personnel carriers in his unit. His first armored personnel carrier was destroyed after hitting a landmine and his second was hit with an RPG and burned to the ground. He was part of the incursion into Cambodia. During his time in Vietnam, Roger was involved in various skirmishes. He returned home from Vietnam in February 1971. Roger is currently involved in a Vietnam veterans’ group in Michigan. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) WKTV (Wyoming, Mich.) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Iraq War, 2003-2011—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/98d4c011387b89363e9b775ce4dee83e.mp4 a600b7110b25adf10bccc1e249a061d3 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/af1c7a6917f1049a7430f4f2d8f2763e.pdf 022494108f7cd560f473c253360977ab PDF Text Text Haywood, Breyound Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Iraq War Interviewee’s Name: Breyound Haywood Length of Interview: (1:23:23) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Lyndsay Curatolo Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Breyound Haywood of Lowell, Michigan, and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. We’d like to begin at the beginning, so let’s start with where and when were you born?” I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, February 28, 1973. Interviewer: “Did you grow up in Grand Rapids or did you move around?” For a few years I lived in [the] East Kentwood area, and then I moved to Ada when I was about four. Then I grew up, went to high school when I lived in Ada. Interviewer: “And, what did your family do for a living while you were growing up?” My mom was a stay-at-home mom. My father worked at Georgia-Pacific as a laborer and that was out in Walker. He worked there with his dad, so that was a nice, steady place to work. Interviewer: “And then, did you finish high school?” Yes, I did. I graduated from Grand Rapids Christian in 1991. Interviewer: “And what did you do after you got out?” When I first got done with high school I was going to go to Grand Rapids Junior College, but I signed up for classes and I never went. So, I worked at Brandywine Restaurant in East Grand Rapids for a little while, and then I decided that I really didn’t want to do that. So, a few of my friends were fans of the Grateful Dead and a couple of us bought an RV and before they left, were like, “Hey, put in $1500. We’re gonna go follow around the Grateful Dead for a while.” And I kind of went the opposite direction and joined the Marine Corps later. (2:01). �Interviewer: “So, when do you join the Marine Corps?” I left for boot camp in January of ‘93, but I joined about six months earlier–– the Delayed Entry Program. Interviewer: “And why did you select the Marine Corps?” You know, they had some commercials. I was into athletics. I had an uncle that was in the Marine Corps–– I also had a grandfather in the Army Air Corps. But, it just intrigued me as being a little bit like a challenge. It’s a challenging thing. As my uncle might have said, more people could make it through the Army than in the Marine Corps. It just appealed to me and the bases were on the coast of California [and] North Carolina, so I’d thought I’d give it a shot. Interviewer: “So, where do you go for boot camp?” I went to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. Usually, this side of the Mississippi we would have gone to North Carolina–– Interviewer: “Parris Island, South Carolina.” Yes. Parris Island, right. But, I went to–– probably a numbers thing–– and so I went in January to Southern California. Interviewer: “Now, when I talk to people who went out there in the Vietnam Era, there’s a particular pattern or sequence that normally happens with what time of day they arrive and showing up at boot camp, and so forth. So, take us basically from Michigan to San Diego. How do you get out there?” Well, we took a bus to Lansing where they had the military and processing station. We stayed the night there and the next morning–– provided you passed all your physicals and all that–– got on a plane and flew out to the San Diego Airport. (4:06). Interviewer: “So, were you on a regular commercial flight at that point?” Yes. It was a regular commercial flight and I remember I had the envelope with all the people’s names in it. I had to take a roll call on the plane. Interviewer: “How do you figure you got that job?” �You know, I don’t remember. I think it just got handed to me. I might have been the older one because I was like 19. Interviewer: “So what time of day do you show up in San Diego?” It was daylight. I know they were three hours behind us. It would probably be the mid-afternoon. Interviewer: “Did they take you right to the Depot from there?” You know, that’s a little blurred. I remember–– yes–– getting on the bus. At first, everybody was very cordial and then once you got on the bus [it] started boot camp. Interviewer: “So what happens then?” Well, the voice gets elevated a little bit and the sense of urgency starts to get installed in you then. Interviewer: “My understanding is that the Depot is pretty close to the airport.” It is. Interviewer: “Yeah. In the Vietnam Era they drove you around in circles at night for a while before they took you there, but did you get to go straight there?” Yeah we went straight there. One thing I will remember is while at basic training, any time a plane took off–– if you were outside–– they would make you stop, they would make you scream out so you couldn’t hear the airplane. Interviewer: “Now, what kind of reception do you get at the Depot?” You know, it was very fast. It was like, “Here’s this, here’s that.” We went to a reception area for a few days–– waiting for probably enough people to form a platoon. And there was a bunch of instruction going on there, but it seemed like there was always some manual labor that needed to be done. (6:13). Interviewer: “Now, the guys in here earlier talked about coming out and they’re rushed off a bus and they stand on yellow footprints.” Yes. They did that then and that was kind of an intense thing that was like, “Yeah, okay. I’m really here. I’m really doing it now. This is it.” �Interviewer: “And, are they yelling at you the whole time?” I do not remember yelling when you’re on the footprints, but before and after absolutely. Interviewer: “But how many days do you think you’re hanging around before training actually starts?” It was probably about four days, I think, for us. Like I said, I think they just had to get enough people for a platoon. Interviewer: “So, once things start, now what happens?” Well, I mean, first thing is you have to learn how to get up right when the light comes on. You know, as a teenager, making your bed is not a big priority and I just remember that was one of the things–– one of the first things they did–– is teach you how to make your bed. And if you didn’t do it right, they would tear it apart and you would start over. And you never wanted to be the last one finished. Interviewer: “And what kinds of things are they actually teaching you when you’re first there?” When you’re first there they teach you about the rank structure. They teach you a bunch of acronyms. They teach you how to march, how to properly do a pull-up and sit-ups and how to properly wear a uniform and shave and those sorts of things. Interviewer: “And what happens when you mess up?” When I was in boot camp, you got extra physical fitness things to do. They would yell at you to reinforce whatever they were telling you–– try and instill that in there. But, most of the time it was push-ups and those sorts of things. (8:27). Interviewer: “What kind of people were training you? In terms of how old they were, what kind of backgrounds did they have, the extent that you knew anything about them?” In the Marine Corps they were fairly young drill instructors. They ranged in ranks from E4 to E6 mainly. There were some more senior people there, but I would have to say that everybody–– all the drill instructors in my platoon–– were under 30. Interviewer: “And did they have a kinder and gentler approach than what you saw in the movies?” �No. No. Full Metal Jacket would probably be an accurate representation–– only there would have been four of them instead of one you see primarily. They see-saw a couple others, but from day-to-day you would have three to four and then the senior drill instructor. They made it plain to you that you didn’t want to see him actually out there, starting to train, because that meant you guys were messing up. Interviewer: “Now, how long is the basic training?” It’s about three months. Interviewer: “Now, does it get more sophisticated as you go on? Do you get into weapons training or other things?” Well, the first month was a lot of physical fitness, marching, just basic instruction, first-aid. Second phase was weapons qualifications and you go out and do field exercises, stay in the tent, do the marching up the hills. So, there was a lot. The second phase was a lot more hands-on and outside. (10:21). Interviewer: “And there’s a third phase after that?” So, the first phase is at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. The second phase is at Camp Pendleton for us. Interviewer: “And where is Camp Pendleton relative to the depot?” It’s about 50-miles north. So, you got to take a bus and see people on your way up which was–– you know. Interviewer: “Alright. So you have four weeks at Camp Pendleton and then the last part. Is that back at the Depot again?” It was back at the Depot. That was more like polishing up the skills that we learned and graduation. Interviewer: “Now, how easy or hard was it for you to adjust to life in the Marine Corps?” It was fairly easy. Like I said, some people didn’t have an athletic background [and] maybe had a disadvantage because that was probably the hardest thing that people had to adjust to, was being able to be physically fit. Once you got that out of the way, it was easier to work on the other things. �Interviewer: “And did people have trouble with the discipline? Following orders?” There would be. But, they were trained really well. I mean, we had, I don’t know, out of 50 or so, we maybe had one that just couldn’t cut it because [they] just couldn’t handle that. People telling you what to do all the time. Interviewer: “And were there people who dropped out or got hurt because of the physical stuff?” There was. I had a friend of mine I later met–– he actually went in a month before I did–– and the guy was injured for about a month and then ended up joining us in the end. I got injured for a couple of weeks, but I was retained so I didn’t get recycled which was great. (12:21). Interviewer: “So you were far enough along that they’d thought you’d be okay or you had time to catch up?” Yeah. I don’t know exactly why they spared me. During the first phase they have a platoon guide–– which I got the job. It’s kind of like a platoon leader sort of thing, and the first thing when we went to Camp Pendleton was I got injured. So, I was the guide for the first phase and then got there–– and I think the position I had made them retain me. Interviewer: “So, you kind of got through all of that. You have… I mean, had you picked a specialization for yourself or do you wait for them to tell you what you’re going to do?” Right. When I went in, you had to pick three things. I–– despite the advice of the recruiters–– I wanted to really be in the infantry. So, I picked all three as infantry tech jobs. But, when you go into boot camp they also test you for special skills and they found out that I played an instrument. Perhaps the first mistake I made in the military was when I–– they didn’t force me to try out–– but they convinced me it was in my best interest to try out. And after the tryout, I declined to go to the concert band. I played the piano from when I was five until I left my parents house. Interviewer: “So, the Marines were upset that you don’t want to be a piano player?” They were. Interviewer: “So basically, you were gonna get assigned to the infantry at that point?” Yes. Interviewer: “So after those 12 weeks were up, now what happens to you?” �You’d get about a week off. And then for the Marines–– all Marines regardless of your MOS–– had to go to Marine Combat Training which was about a month long. Interviewer: “And where was that?” That was back at Camp Pendleton. So, that was less intense as far as having drill instructors. You got Saturday off, which was a big deal–– [and] half of Sunday. So, that was good training. (14:43). Interviewer: “And what were you actually doing?” You polish up on the small arms. Learn how to use the heavier weapons–– the Mark-19–– which was a machine gun for grenades, basically, and those types of weapons systems. We just learned a little bit of team and squad tactics. Interviewer: “And what was the standard infantry weapon at that point?” It was the M16A2. Interviewer: “So, slightly improved from Vietnam.” Yeah, a little bit. It’s really–– I had that for a long time. It was very reliable. I mean, they were trained–– you know, the average Marine could hit a person from 500-yards away without any assistance devices on the weapon itself. So, that’s pretty good–– I think. Interviewer: “And how long does the combat training go on?” It’s about 4 weeks. Interviewer: “And then do you get assigned to a unit from there?” You do not because everybody has to do the combat training and then after the combat training you go to your specific school. In my case, it was across the street at the infantry school which is basically the same thing as Marine Combat Training, but twice as long. (16:08). Interviewer: “Do you have more extended periods out in the field or things like that?” Yes. Instead of maybe going for two-days, you go for the whole week. Or, just more times with the weapons, more drilling with the squad, and team tactics. �Interviewer: “And are you being trained by anybody who has any practical combat experience, or is the timing wrong for that? It’s after Desert Storm at that point, but that was pretty short.” Yeah. I don’t remember. Most of the guys were fairly young, so if I look at their rank I would probably say they probably had not had much combat experience. Interviewer: “So, when do you actually finish all of the training? So you’re back–– you have your infantry school. When are you done with that?” So infantry school was about eight weeks long, and then towards the end–– when you’re going to graduate–– you get your unit assignment. And mine happened to be three miles down the road. Interviewer: “Okay, and what unit did you join?” I joined the 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment right there at Camp Pendleton. Interviewer: “And you know what Marine Division that was a part of?” 1st Marine Division. Interviewer: “And what were they doing at that point?” That particular regiment that was in–– we had four battalions and they would train through a cycle. So, we would be deployed to the Pacific Ocean area of the Middle East. So, while one unit was going out, one was coming back. One was in a full training cycle, and the other was maybe in a recovery cycle. Between the four units, one of us was always deployed. (18:25). Interviewer: “So, where was your battalion in the sequence when you joined it?” I got there in 1993, so it was probably six months before I deployed for the first time. So, they were in the “train-up” cycle. Interviewer: “For clarification purposes, you said you enlisted in June of ‘93––” January. Interviewer: “January. That was it. There we go, that works better. So that time there, when you’re on the base, what’s daily life like?” �Daily life is [you] wake up about six, go to breakfast, you come back and do physical fitness. And from there, depending on if there’s any administrative requirements for the company that you’re in, you’re going to start working on that. But, being in the infantry, a lot of the time you’re going to go and you’re going to do physical training twice a day. Or, you’re going to go work on cleaning your weapons or you’re going to go out for the day in a squad and try to find the other squad to practice tactics and stuff. Interviewer: “Do you ever participate in anything that the trainees are going through? Or is that a separate cadre that does all of that?” It is separate. At the time when I was [there], they didn’t like to mix recruits with Marines. Interviewer: “Is there a point in the process where you go from being a recruit to a Marine?” Yes, and that would have been in the third phase of boot camp. They made a big thing about, “This recruit requests permission to do this.” When you’re in the third phase, you’re not doing that any longer. (20:25). Interviewer: “Now, you are there with them for a certain chunk and then basically–– then you’re living on the base. Do you get liberty or whatever? Can you go off base?” So, unless you’re going out in the field overnight, then it’s almost a six-to-six job. So, by dinner time, usually, you wouldn’t have anything else you’d have to do–– unless you had to stand watch somewhere. So, yes. You would have liberty everyday and usually on the weekends, unless there was training that had to be done. Interviewer: “Now, are you far enough away from things at Camp Pendleton that it would take some effort to find something to do if you left the base?” No. Oceanside–– they had a bus system. A lot of the guys didn’t buy cars when we were there, but they had a bus that would go to Oceanside in San Clemente and then you could take the train to San Diego if you wanted to–– the Amtrak train. Interviewer: “Which I guess would work on the weekend, not so much overnight.” Right. Yeah, absolutely. Interviewer: “Now, did you go on deployment with your unit?” �I did. Interviewer: “And what was that like? Or what happened?” It [was] probably two months before the whole battalion got deployed. They were trying to start a new concept for a new platoon. They had the–– there’s a lot of specialized forces. They got the Army Rangers and the unit I was in was a Zodiac Assault Company and they wanted to come up with another specialized platoon. So, they basically drafted a few of the Zodiac guys and–– the other unit was like helicopter trained troops–– and then the other part was amphibious tracked troops. The last ones were like the heavier weapons with the mortars and the heavy machine guns and stuff. (22:40). Interviewer: “Now Zodiac, that is referring to the inflatable rubber boats?” Yes. Interviewer: “Okay. So, small motor boats––” Small motor boats. So, the primary goal for that would’ve been to assault a beach objective or like an oil platform or something like that. Interviewer: “So, they’re pulling guys out of the different companies and trying to create this other platoon. So you’re a part of that?” Right. Yes. So, they wanted to do that so that the platoon had all four of the elements within just one platoon rather than having to pull… Interviewer: “And what’s the point of doing that?” You know, I don’t know. They called it Special Operations K-Pool Platoon and we also–– and we had our name for it. We called it the “slaves on call platoon.” It seems like we had a lot of extra duty because we were no longer affiliated with a company. We were a detachment, so were really, like, kind of, on our own. Interviewer: “So where would your orders come from?” In a battalion they would have–– it would have come from the operations who we were actually under–– the S3. So the S3 had the Scout Sniper Platoon and then they had us. Interviewer: “When the deployment starts–– what actually happens to you? You get on ships?” �We get on the ship and once you get on the ship, it’s hard to do a lot of training. So, there’s a lot of weapons cleaning–– like all the time. There’s a little bit of reading. I remember we had to do book reports on famous battles–– which I did not anticipate having to do when I first wanted to join the infantry. But, we would eventually end up on an island or Tinian and then we’d go do some training, come back. Go to Singapore, do some training. So, we kind of bounced around from place to place like that, going out to train three, four, five [days], a week at a time. (24:54). Interviewer: “And what kind of ship were you on?” I was on a–– it was the USS Tripoli and the USS Tarawa. Tripoli was a ship that had a helicopter squadron on it and also, at the time, had Harriers, which was a big deal at the time because they could take off vertically from the ship. Interviewer: “They’re jet-fighter aircraft, but they can take off by going straight up and don’t need a long runway.” Right. Yeah. Interviewer: “And the Tarawa–– was that a helicopter carrier?” Yes it was. Interviewer: “How long was this tour?” This tour is about six-months long. We stopped in a lot of places: Saudi Arabia, Kenya. We stopped in Somalia, which was the first time we had to land and perhaps perform for real. Interviewer: “What’s the context of that? Or what actually happens?” We went to Somalia in early ‘94 and it was sometime after they had the event–– the Black Hawk Down thing–– but they were relocating the embassy that was in Somalia to Mombasa in Kenya. So, we were there to help cover that movement. So we went ashore–– and it was kind of like a show for us–– “Hey, we’re here. Don’t mess with the guys that are leaving.” (26:33). Interviewer: “What do you remember about that, or what did you see there?” I remember that we were instructed that the bandits–– the Somali bandits are what they called them–– would likely try to use civilians as shields. And we had specific rules and engagement then. I also remember we went to a place–– I don’t remember exactly where it was now–– and �we had to dig in, anticipating seeing some of these guys. Ultimately, we never did, but digging in and making a fighting hole for the first time for real was pretty intimidating. Interviewer: “And then did you get to go ashore any place where you were on your own? So, did you get to tour anything?” Oh, absolutely. We got time off in Singapore and Phuket, Thailand–– United Arab Emirates. We stayed in Mombasa for about a month and so it was almost everyday for a month. We went to Saudi Arabia, Jordan. Interviewer: “Were there rules that you’re told what you can and can’t do when you go into these places?” Oh, absolutely. A lot of the Middle East countries–– they talked about [how] they were dry as in no alcohol. If you wanted to drink beers and stuff, you could do that right in front of the ship. They had–– they called it a beer garden–– and you could just stay there. But, they said when you had drinks like that they didn’t want you to leave. They didn’t want you to go into the town. And they didn’t want you to develop pictures in town either. (28:37). Interviewer: “Did they tell you not to talk to their women or anything like that?” I know that that would’ve been in something, especially in the Middle Eastern countries. Yeah. The other countries–– Thailand, Singapore, Kenya, no. Interviewer: “Now, are there any other particular things that happened in that tour that stand out in your memory.” We went to Hong Kong when it was still occupied by the British and we had a friendly game of rugby with the Royal Black Watch which was from Scotland. And that stood out to me because they were stationed there, they had their families there, and halfway through the game I remember we had to–– because they were so much better than we were–– we integrated the teams half and half. Then after the game, the person that played your position on the opposite team, they paired you up and they took you and showed you town. So, I thought that was pretty cool. Interviewer: “And when do you get back from that trip?” So, it would have been about six-months later. And they actually produce sort-of a yearbook for that, and it had the whole timeline. I can’t recall what month we got back. (30:06). �Interviewer: “Now, you don’t actually stay in the Marine Corps too much longer after that.” Right. I do one more deployment with the Marine Corps, so in 1996. Interviewer: “I guess, in the original clock you said it was through 03/94 or was it 03/96?” The deployment was through ‘94. But, I got out of the Marine Corps in March of ‘97. Interviewer: “‘97. Okay. Let me make sure I have my numbers there right. So, basically, you’re doing the whole hitch you signed up for.” Right. I did like three extra months. They kept firing my replacement. And when you get towards the end of your enlistment, you can take what they call terminal leave, which is you sign-out on vacation and you never come back. Well, in my case I put in [for] it, got approved, they fired my replacement, and then they would cancel my vacation. Interviewer: “Now, fired your replacement. So you’ve got a particular position now?” Right. Later on, I ended up–– the infantry battalions are always short on administrative and logistical personnel so I ended up doing mail, which was a really good job for me. I got my own office as a very young Marine. Interviewer: “What rank were you at that point?” I was an E3, so I was a Lance Corporal. So, I had that and I had one other guy that worked for me and we did the mail. It was all hand-sorted at that point. Interviewer: “And when did you get that job?” I got that, probably, on my way back from deployment. I, kind of, got marked for that job. So, it’d have been probably early ‘95. Interviewer: “So coming back from the second deployment.” No. Coming back from the first deployment. During the second deployment I did mail during that deployment. Interviewer: “Now, between deployments are you just back at Camp Pendleton again?” �Yeah. You go back to Camp Pendleton and when you first get back you’re kind of in a–– a lot of people take vacation, a lot of people will actually move around to different units/different jobs, you start getting a lot of the new people and then before you know it, you’re back into a training cycle to get ready to get deployed again. (32:41). Interviewer: “And is there any difference–– aside from having you get the mail job–– in terms of otherwise, your daily life for your second stint there at Camp Pendleton as opposed to the first? Do you see things any differently than you did before?” Yeah. It was a very big difference from being in the infantry than to be in one of the staff sections. It was a lot less intense. Especially with the training because the infantry guys were out doing training–– I was just doing the mail that way. So, my job got more monotonous–– more predictable, you know. I had a very set schedule where the other guys had more training and spur-of-the-moment lifestyle. Interviewer: “So, were you happy with this change or did you miss the rest of it?” I actually did–– I liked the change. I liked having a more predictable schedule. I like taking a shower every night. Interviewer: “So that was alright with you at that point. Then, now you get a second deployment. Does that follow pretty much the same system as the first or are there things that stand out that are different?” It’s pretty much the same. I mean, we had some interesting layovers with some operations that we had to do. Also, on my second deployment we were supposed to go to Australia but we ended up getting diverted to go to the Philippines–– which worked out for me because my uncle lived there. So, halfway around the world, at a last-minute stop, I was able to say, “Hey. I’m going to go to my uncle’s house.” So, that was really big for me–– being away from home for so long and then just happening to go someplace where I have relatives. It’s pretty cool. (34:56). Interviewer: “Where else did you stop on that tour?” A lot of it was the same, so Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, the East Coast of Africa, Bahrain, a lot of countries in the gulf again. Oman and Thailand again, Singapore. The ones that stood out right now. Interviewer: “Now, when you go ashore in different places, how do the civilians or the people around seem to view you or treat you?” �Well, most of it was actually pretty good because we were restricted to certain areas. And they treated us well because we always were cooped up and a lot of people wanted to spend a lot of money. So, they treated you very well. Interviewer: “Were there some places where you’d kind of go off on your own or be less restricted?” Pretty much when you get outside of the Persian Gulf, just about any other countries we went to. China–– we went to Hong Kong–– and Singapore, Thailand. We still had a zone, you know, we could go in, but as long as you could say, “Hey. I’m going to the Holiday Inn in Phuket, Thailand.” They’ll say okay. (36:21). Interviewer: “So when do you come back from that?” So that would have been–– I don’t remember the date, but I remember a football season was still in effect. Because that was one of the first things I did when I came back from that second deployment–– was went and saw a football game in San Diego. Interviewer: “Now, at this point, have you basically decided to leave the Marine Corps?” I did. I decided that I was probably going to go in the Reserves afterwards because you always had a commitment of up to eight years, and I felt like if they could call me back, then I might as well practice the skill they’re going to call me back for. So, I decided that I was probably going to join the Marine Corps Reserve–– probably back in [the] Grand Rapids area. Interviewer: “Now, when do you actually get discharged from the Marine Corps?” So, I think it was March of ‘97. Interviewer: “Then, so what do you wind up doing at that point?” Well, a few months before that I actually met my wife in Long Beach, California. So, I ended up joining the Army National Guard in California. The Marine Reserve was too stringent as far as the annual training period–– I had gotten a job and was selling pools and pool supplies and of course during the summer is when you’re going to do most of your work. And I remember the Army National Guard was going to be more flexible with the summer training, saying [I] could do it in the spring, [I] can do it in the winter. (38:14). Interviewer: “So, you join the Army National Guard–– do you have to now get Army training?” �No, but I should have. There’s a lot of terminology and customs and–– just, it’s different. There’s some similarities, but it was a learning curve. They were used to that because the Army Guard is made up of all kinds of different people–– from the Navy Guard people, Army, Marine Corps, whatever. It’s mixed so, I think, they have a better understanding of it. Unlike when I went to active duty for the Army a few years later. It was a bit–– that terminology block manifested itself pretty much there. Interviewer: “So where were you living in California at that point?” I was living south of Camp Pendleton. Interviewer: “But still in the San Diego area?” Yes. Interviewer: “So, how long do you stay with the guard unit then?” So that was probably about a year. And then, when I was getting married, I needed to get a better job so I ended up–– I was looking for jobs and I ended up coming back to Holland, Michigan to work for Prince Corporation. So, I transferred to the Michigan Army Guard–– back to the infantry. (40:02). Interviewer: “And so when do you get back there?” Let’s see–– I got married in ‘98, so I would have to say it would have been about September of ‘98. Interviewer: “And then it’s not too long after that that you wind up active duty in the Army. So, how does that happen?” Well, it happened a couple of ways. One, my wife got homesick for California and when I was looking to get jobs out there, I really didn’t know where to look as far as getting a decent job. But, I knew they had some Army bases around, so I went and I looked and they had one that was in Fort Irwin, which was about two hours from where my wife’s family lived. So I said, “Well, if you want to go out to Fort Irwin in the desert, I’ll do an enlistment there.” And so that’s what I did. Interviewer: “Now, when you go out there are you infantry or something else?” �I am in transportation now. So, I had to go back through Army training–– and this is where the terminology difficulties came into play. Interviewer: “So what happened?” My first day that I showed up for Army training–– in the Marine Corps they did not have drill instructors at schools. The Army at the time had drill sergeants at basic training and at the schools. So, when I got there, I walked up to–– what I later found out was a drill sergeant–– I told him, “Hey. I’m looking for Alpha Company. Can you help me out? Where is it at?” I’m in my uniform [and] he was in a physical fitness uniform, so I couldn’t tell what rank he was or anything. And he looks at me and he tells me to “beat my face,” which is a thing that they said at basic training in the Army. It means do push-ups, because, you know, you do push-ups till you touch your nose. I guess that’d be “beat your face.” So I told him, “Look man, if you don’t want to help me out just say it.” So, I didn’t know he was a drill sergeant and I walked away from him and that led to some further instruction. (42:40). Interviewer: “So, how quickly did you adjust, I guess?” Probably–– it was like that for the first few days and finally I spoke to the senior enlisted person, the First Sergeant, and then I said, “Look, I was in the Marine Corps. I’m in the Army now. Is there a book or something? Is there something that I can get because there’s all these terms [and] I just don’t know what they are.” And when I asked, most people looked at me like I’m retarted or something because they see that I have a certain rank. And they say, “There’s no way you can get that rank and not know these terms.” So, he worked with me for about a day or so and gave me a list of terms, and from then on it got better. Interviewer: “Did you make peace with the original drill instructor or just not see him anymore?” Yeah. I just didn’t really see him that much anymore. But, I’m sure he found out, you know, the whole story there–– or the rest of the story. Interviewer: “Yeah, because you were really the new guy, but not a kid.” Right. Interviewer: “So, what rank are you at this point?” I was a specialist–– an E4. So, when I was in the Marine Corps I was a Corporal–– which, you know, was considered an NCO–– and in the Army E4 is not. So, it was a little bit of a pride thing �to take the step down, even though it was the same pay. Then, when you switch over like that, you kind of start from day one as being an E4 again. Now you’re E4 with one day of service. But, it was still all right. (44:33). Interviewer: “Now, what unit were you with now that you’re on active duty?” I was with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and I was in the Supply and Transportation Platoon. So, we had vehicles and supplies that we would take out to the troops that were training. Interviewer: “And what kind of vehicles did you have?” They were like the military’s version of semi-trucks. They would haul tanks. We had a platoon that would haul tanks, we had a platoon that hauled water and fuel, and ones that had these trailers that had showers. It was like the whole trailer had eight showers in it. Interviewer: “And this was at Fort Irwin.” Fort Irwin is the National Training Center. It’s in the desert. Units would come out there for about a month at a time and the training unit there–– we would do ten training cycles a year and then we’d get Christmas time off and one month in the summer where you wouldn’t have any units in for training. Interviewer: “But is your regiment based there?” Yes. Interviewer: “So, that is your permanent base and other people come through and train there?” Yes. Interviewer: “And, how did that assignment work out?” It was okay. The job wasn’t bad. Once again, because I was in a transportation unit this time, they were also short on administrative people, so they found my background and I was with the transportation unit for like two weeks and then they put me in the orderly room where they did administrative stuff. (46:29). Interviewer: “So your mail clerk time came back to haunt you?” �It did. It did. Once again though, this was better for me because I wasn’t doing the grunt work anymore. Interviewer: “So you’re not going out and doing as many exercises anymore. Do you have a regular, daily schedule?” Right. Absolutely. Interviewer: “So you had like a grown-up job type of thing.” Yeah. Interviewer: “All right. Now, you’re doing this when 9/11 happens?” Yes. Interviewer: “So, tell me what happens that day and afterward?” So, the day before 9/11–– two days before 9/11 I was on leave. My wife had to have surgery so I was taking care of my wife. She’s on medication, she’s been up half the night. So, in the morning she’s out on the couch and she said, “The Pentagon’s on fire.” And I said, “That’s nice honey. Let me turn the TV off.” Because at that point, I hadn’t heard anything yet. But, it was about half-an-hour after that I got a phone call saying, “I know you’re on leave, but you can’t leave the base.” Then, that’s when we found out what was happening. Interviewer: “So were you living on base?” We were. We were living on base and they closed it down so anybody that was off-base could not get on, and anybody that was on base could not get off. Very quickly–– I think the next day or two–– I don’t know if they canceled school for a day or not, but I remember when the kids went back to school they were being escorted by soldiers–– like with weapons systems. They were doing extra patrols in the streets of the neighborhoods we lived in. They doubled or tripled the guards on the perimeters of the base. So, it was an intense time. (48:41). Interviewer: “Now, does the operation of your unit change at all after that or do you keep doing what you’ve been doing?” Well, we kept doing what we were doing. But, shortly after that–– when we started to go to Iraq a platoon of mine got pieced together with some other transportation units, and then we went to Iraq. �Interviewer: “So, did you go to Iraq with them or did you send them and stay?” I went with them. Before I got sent, one of my jobs was [that] I was the nuclear biological chemical advisor. Everybody hated that guy. Nobody wanted to do the training with the gas and this and that and the other thing. But instantly, overnight, I became the most popular guy there. “Hey man, can you take a look at my mask? I just want to make sure it’s working properly.” “Am I doing this right?” But, I got reassigned to transportation to be like a driver, and that’s when I went over to Iraq. Interviewer: “Now, what kind of preparation do they put you through before they send you to Iraq?” Well for us, our whole training at the National Training Center was prepared for something like that. That’s why you’re in desert conditions and you’re preparing. You’re fighting a simulation war, so, in retrospect, our units would have been the best units to send because we’ve been training for this ten months out of the year for every year. (50:22). Interviewer: “Now, do you go straight from Fort Irwin out to the Middle East? Or do you join other units somewhere else?” We did. We joined three other platoons in Colorado for about a month/month-and-a-half and then we arrived in Kuwait on April Fool’s Day, 2003. Then, shortly after that we were running back and forth in Iraq and Kuwait and other places. Interviewer: “So, by the time you got there, the invasion had already started, right? You were already––” Right. And our equipment–– we were supposed to be there earlier. We were supposed to go through Turkey and somehow that deal didn’t go through and then they rerouted our stuff to Kuwait. So, we had to fly to Kuwait and catch up to our equipment there. Interviewer: “And then do you leave Kuwait right away or do you stay and train there for a while?” We were there–– maybe–– not more than a week. And we were going, taking tanks and moving equipment. When we got there it was–– I considered it to be a little disorganized because they would send us out with some tanks to go somewhere and then when we’d get there somebody in a position of authority would say, “Hey. Can you help us out with this?” And then we’d do that and then we’d get to another place and the person with some authority would say, “Can you do �this?” So, it was kind of that whole deployment–– it was pretty much like that, where you’d get somewhere and you were just–– I mean, it could have been Marines, it could have been anybody–– and you would help [with] whatever they needed and then when nobody asked you for anymore, you went back to your original base or wherever we came from originally. Sometimes that would be a week, sometimes that would be like a month. (52:26). Interviewer: “Did you have a permanent base?” We did, and probably two-to-three months in we had a–– yes, we had a base that was Camp Speicher in Iraq. And what we did [was], the stuff that we didn’t take–– [or] absolutely need–– we kept there. But, we really didn’t spend much time there because we were mostly on the road. Interviewer: “And so were you up in the area around Baghdad or were you farther south?” We went all the way from the port in Kuwait all the way up to Tikrit, and we even went up to Mosul. And we went all the way up to–– pretty much, I’m sure–– the border with Syria. Interviewer: “So, you’re back and forth. Now, during the time frame that you’re doing this– – it’s gotta be mostly in 2003? How dangerous was that job?” It was pretty dangerous. Our unit was pretty fortunate as far as suffering casualties. But, it was really stressful because we were going through–– a lot of the time we’re going through cities and you don’t know–– you don’t know where the next guy is going to take a shot at you from. You’re going down a little street and there’s buildings on either side–– you’re like, “Okay. A bad guy could be in any one of those windows.” So, it was a little stressful that way. (54:07). Interviewer: “So, you’re worried at that point about snipers. Were there IEDs yet or does that come later?” We didn’t really encounter very much of the IEDs, but what we encountered were small groups– – just kind of out of nowhere–– trying to take shots at you. But, yeah, the IEDs were not big for us when I was there. Interviewer: “So, if somebody does shoot at you, do you have a response or protocols to follow?” Yeah. For us, the detained crews manned their weapon systems–– not the big gun–– but they had machine guns and stuff like that. We, halfway through our deployment, had infantry reinforcements that would ride with us. But, our primary job was just to navigate through and not to return fire. Which is kind of like, counterintuitive sometimes. You’re starting to get shot at �and the first thing you want to do is fire back, but for us our job was not to do that. It was to get the equipment to its needed position. Interviewer: “What does Iraq look like to you?” Well, you know, first coming to Iraq through Kuwait is [it] looked like Fort Irwin–– desert, a bunch of nothingness. Then, you start getting towards some of the cities and the first thing I notice is the signs on the highway are in Arabic and they’re in English. And that striked me because I thought they hated English/Western civilization. But, all of their signs are in English and Arabic. (56:20). Interviewer: “Because those were things that were left over from the Saddam regime–– not just new things we put up since we got there.” Right. Absolutely. Interviewer: “Now, were you pretty much at a distance from the Iraqi people just because of the nature of your job?” No. I mean, you’re going through towns and unfortunately, sometimes, they would try to interfere with operations. When I first got there, people would see kids in tattered clothes and be like, “Oh my god, slow down.” [And] would slow down their convoys and once you slow down, the adults would jump out from somewhere and jump on the back of your truck and try to steal anything that wasn’t ratcheted down properly. That was hard for a lot of us to get over because it was a tactic they were using to just try to steal stuff. There were some people that would cheer when we would come and there were some people that would gesture whatever they were gesturing–– I’m guessing they didn’t like us for whatever reason. But, yes. We did have some interactions–– some of those good and some that weren't. Interviewer: “Now, did you have vehicles that would break down on these convoys?” We did. Interviewer: “And what do you do when that happens?” So, on a convoy we would–– if you had eight pieces of equipment, you’d have maybe two or three extra that were empty to, what we call, “self-recover.” Say my truck broke down, they would haul it up on the trailer–– the empty trailer–– and then that truck that didn’t have a trailer on it would come take our trailer. So, we had a lot of that. Now, the only problem with that is the first safe place they would find, they would stick to it and just say, “We’ll report your location, �try to get it fixed, and we’ll pick you up on the way back.” So, one time that happened on our way down to Kuwait, when we were going to pick up some stuff and my truck broke down. They put us up on the trailer, took our trailer, and we got to Kuwait and they said, “We’ll be back.” [It] turned out to be about three weeks. (58:51). Interviewer: “But at least they left you in Kuwait, not on some small operating base in the middle of Iraq.” Right. But we did get left in a small operating base in Iraq though too, which was–– it’s like you felt by yourself but there were other US forces there–– different from our unit, but they still took care of you, they still fed you, and helped to get your vehicle going again. Interviewer: “And how long do you think you were in Iraq?” I was there for about six-months. Interviewer: “Now, did the situation seem to change at all while you were there or were you just doing the same thing at the end as you were at the beginning?” I was doing the same thing. When I first got there, my contract was coming up to be done in early 2004 and they instituted the Stop-Loss meaning your contract got up in March, but we’re extending that indefinitely because we need you. About five-months into my time in Iraq they said, “You can leave now.” So, I was there for about another month and then I came back home. (1:00:10). Interviewer: “And then when you got back home, did you change your position?” When I got back home I basically was getting ready to be discharged. So, there’s a lot of medical stuff that we had to go through from being overseas. So, that took–– actually–– a few months and then I had two months of vacation that I had saved up. So, I went and got my job back in Holland, Michigan–– although it wasn’t Prince Corporation anymore it was Johnson Controls–– and I ended up coming home. Interviewer: “Okay, we’ve taken your story to the point where you’ve come back from Iraq in 2004 and you’re going off to active duty. Now, when you get back from Iraq–– does the Army do anything to help you kind of reprocess or reorient out adjusting to civilian life?” At that point, I came back individually, so in my experience there wasn’t anything set up. I was just–– it was just time for my contract to end. So, when I first came back from Kuwait I landed in Fort Hood, Texas and didn’t have my records. I was like “Yes. Just because I’m from Fort Irwin �in California.” They’re like, “Well, we’re going to send you to [Fort Carson]. We’re gonna go to Fort Carson, we’re going to send you to Fort Carson because that’s where you deployed from.” I’m like, “Okay.” I wasn’t from there. So, when I got to the airport with my ticket to Fort Carson–– the airline that I was on was gonna charge me for my excess baggage. It’s like all my combat/deployment stuff. Well, I had been gone so long my ATM card expired and I wasn’t able to get anything. So, I missed the flight and long story short I ended up–– couldn’t get ahold of my wife initially–– [and] I got ahold of my mom and I got a flight on Southwest Airlines and I didn’t go to Fort Carson–– I flew to Las Vegas and had my wife pick me up. So, I went straight back to Fort Irwin. So, talk about reintegration again–– no. They were not ready for anything for me. I mean, they wanted me to go to a place I wasn’t even stationed at. So, I came back to Fort Irwin and I was there for a few months and then I checked out. (1:02:59). Interviewer: “So, now you’re going back to Michigan again?” Yes. Interviewer: “Is that basically because that’s where a good job was?” Yes. With the–– I forgot the particular law, but I had not quit my job. I [had] said I am going on active duty. So, they, by law, have to give you your job back within a certain number of years. What was nice about that was I got all of the raises that I would’ve gotten if I was there–– you know, seniority and all of that. So, that was nice. So, we moved back, I took a break for about six-months–– from the military–– then I was like, “You know what? I’m almost halfway through.” Let me at least go into the Reserve or the Guard or something to get the 20-year retirement. So, I did that. I went in the Michigan Army National Guard as a paralegal, working in the JAG Department, and about six-months/eight-months or so after that, I got asked to apply for a full-time position. I said, “This sounds like a good idea.” So, I did it. And then I spent about the next eleven-years as an AGR–– Active Guard Reserve–– which was pretty interesting. (1:04:27). Interviewer: “And where did you work out of?” For about the first four years I was in Wyoming on 44th Street with the 126th Armored Battalion. I did various assignments there working in operations and administration. And then I went and worked at the joint force headquarters in Lansing. [I] did that for about four years or so. That was a unique assignment as well. Then, after–– I’m gonna back up a little bit–– about my third year with the 126th Armored, we got deployed to Iraq again. Interviewer: “Did you go with them?” I did, yeah. �Interviewer: “Yeah. We should be talking about that.” And that was–– I went to a staff position. I worked with safety. I was like the safety noncommissioned officer, so I worked with an officer and his job was to–– because the IEDs now were big–– and his job was all the convoys going out, he was checking the electronics, making sure. Basically, they had devices that if you were going over an IED and they were trying to remote detonate it with like phones, it jammed all of that stuff so that it wouldn’t explode when you got past it. So, his job was to make sure the electronics were working. And part of my job was to make sure that the soldiers would actually wear their protective gear. So, how could I do that if I didn’t go with them? It was really hard. So, sometimes I did what I called “ride-alongs.” Just as, “Okay. Here’s the guy that’s going to tell on you if you’re not wearing your stuff. He’s here with us, so everybody wear your stuff.” (1:06:34). Interviewer: “So, where did you spend most of your time on that tour?” I spent most of my time in Kuwait. We were a few miles from the border and our guys were going back and forth all of the time. Interviewer: “So you basically have kind of a permanent base camp there?” Yes. Interviewer: “And do you have buildings or connexes or tents?” Yeah, we had all of that. Initially when we got there I was in a tent with a wood floor. Then, we got the connexes [where] if you were a certain rank you could use that. I also worked with some logistics guys and in our logistics building we actually had a refrigerator and a microwave–– which was pretty nice to have in the middle of the desert. Interviewer: “Then, how often would you actually go with the convoys?” Not that often because I had a meeting I had to do every week at Camp Arifjan which was the big, permanent base in Kuwait. But, I would go. Either when the boss said or I wanted to get out. Interviewer: “And then how far afield would you go?” You know, I couldn’t tell because when I went I had to sit in the back. Interviewer: “So you didn’t know where you were.” �I didn’t know where we were, where we were really going. I mean, I would kind of listen in on the headset, but we weren’t going that far. I mean, we’re going a couple of hours and a lot of the time we were escorting supplies. So, we had to escort them from Kuwait, you know, [a] safe area–– somewhat–– then we would escort them into Iraq and then somebody else would take them to where their final destination was. (1:08:37). Interviewer: “Now, were IEDs a problem on the stretches of road that you covered?” Yeah–– sometimes. I don’t recall–– maybe a couple of times our guys were involved in that. But, once again, we were pretty fortunate in that area. Interviewer: “Okay. And it was probably less activity in that sector than there were in some of the others. You didn’t have a lot of population around.” Right. Yeah. But, sometimes, you know, they had to go to the airport in Iraq–– Baghdad Airport. Those were some of the longer ones. Interviewer: “While you’re out there in Iraq, or Kuwait for that matter, how much contact did you have with home?” So, the last deployment–– 2008–– it was remarkably different than the other ones because I actually bought a cell phone and I could call home when I wanted to. It was expensive, but they also had–– at Kuwait–– they had a phone center. They also had email. That was something we used. Interviewer: “How much did you use that yourself? Was it better not to talk to home too much?” Yeah. I mean, I probably called home once a week [and] maybe email once or twice a week. But, yeah, you didn’t want to get like–– you kind of wanted to keep it separate because if you start talking to home too much, the kid misses you, you miss the kid and that sort of thing. So, it’s kind of tough to walk that line, I guess. (1:10:42). Interviewer: “Because you still got to keep your head in your own business over there.” Absolutely. Interviewer: “Now, in total, how many times did you go to Iraq then?” �I went to Iraq twice. Interviewer: “So one tour regular and one with the Guard Unit?” Yes. Interviewer: “Now the second tour, I mean, now you're getting into a period [where] you had more IEDs, you had more insurgency–– the surge thing had started or whatever. So, there’s a lot of news back home about people blowing up and getting killed and that sort of thing–– casualties being taken. Did your family worry about that or did you have to reassure them that that’s exaggerated?” Yeah. You know, I kind of downplayed my level of activity or the unit's level of activity. You kind of really didn’t talk about what you were doing but I kind of said this is what my job is, this is what I’m doing most of the time, and I wouldn’t necessarily say, “Hey, I just got back from Iraq” or “I’m leaving tomorrow.” Interviewer: “Yeah. ‘Hey, don’t worry. I’m in Kuwait.’ Now, how well did you understand at that point–– in that second tour–– how much understanding did you have of what was actually going on in Iraq, or what the bigger picture was?” To me, it was actually irrelevant because at my level I wasn’t concerned with that. I was just concerned with what my job was and just doing that properly. And I’m sure I watched the news or whatever when I could, but yeah. Whatever was going on, it just really didn’t matter because it wasn’t–– as far as I looked at it, it wasn’t gonna affect what I was going to do day-to-day until I was done. (1:12:40). Interviewer: “And are there other particular things that happened in that second deployment? Or impressions you’ve got that sort of stand out for you?” I remember there was a big push for people to get people to vote and a lot of that didn’t work out, just because we didn’t prepare for it properly and people [were] trying to get absentee ballots–– it was a mess. Interviewer: “So they’re not really coordinated for that.” Right. Now, we have–– since then–– the unit I was in instituted an additional job for somebody as a voting officer. And it’s their job–– if the unit gets identified to be deployed–– to figure all of that out we leave. �Interviewer: “So they made, at least, that much of an adjustment. So, you come back in 2008 or was it 2009?” Yes. Interviewer: “Now this time when you come back, are you going back with the whole unit?” The whole unit. Interviewer: “Now, do they get any kind of reorientation when they come back?” It was minimal at that point. I left a few days before the rest of the guys did, but, I mean, we all went to Kuwait for like a week or something and then went back to our mobilization center–– Fort Hood–– again. But, I don’t think we were there for more than a week. (1:14:24). Interviewer: “But, do they give you any lectures or information––” They did. They did present information–– I don’t know how much we really listened, you know. For us–– you know–– for me, it was my fourth time coming back and forth. I did go home during the middle of the deployment once for a couple of weeks. Interviewer: “How does that work?” It’s strange to do that. Yeah–– it was just strange. Interviewer: “Do you put in a request to do that or [do] they put your name in a hat somewhere and then say it’s your turn?” Well, it kind of goes on how long you’re projected to be deployed. So, they’ll say it’s supposed to be eight months, so then starting within the third month there, the third through the fifth month they try to say, “Anybody that wants to go home, we’re going to send all the people that want to go home, home.” But, they had to do it at like five percent of people at a time. So that was strange. I was out of the first one that would go and you kind of think you want to break it up, like you want to go halfway through or something like that. But, yeah. I didn’t really have control of that. Interviewer: “And so once they tell you [that] you get to go, what’s the process to get you home?” �At that point they would fly you, basically, anywhere you wanted to go. So, you fly out of Kuwait and it's, “Where do you want to go?” Of course, I went home because I had family but some people went to other places. They didn’t have family and they went to Ireland or wherever. (1:16:25). Interviewer: “So an R&R kind of thing. Now, are you flying in uniform?” We did. Interviewer: “And how were people treating you? If they see you in uniform, what do they do?” Well, during the initial flight, everybody was in uniform. But, like when I got–– I flew into Atlanta. You know, I don’t really remember people at that point interacting with me–– probably just because I want to go home. But, other times I would fly for training and stuff, you know, [and] people would talk to you, offer to buy you a drink, you know, that sort of thing. But, definitely [a] much different experience than my father-in-law had [as a] Vietnam vet. I did not ever have someone, you know, come up and be negative towards me–– at least to me. Interviewer: “So, it’s not an uncomfortable thing to do–– to have to travel around in uniform?” It’s not uncomfortable, some people just don’t like talking to people and if you’re wearing a uniform–– at a time like that, you know, war time–– people are gonna want to talk to you. And sometimes that bothers people. They’re like, “I just want to go get a coffee, leave me alone.” Interviewer: “And how many kids did you have at that point?” So, at that point I had three. My youngest one was–– he had turned one during that 2008 deployment. And I talked to him on the phone and that’s how he knew my voice–– was on the phone. And when they came to pick me up from the airport, I got in a van and I sat next to him and when I started talking to him and was just freaking out, looking at me. So, I took the cell phone, gave him the cell phone, went in the back, and I just started talking to him. And I just remember doing that. (1:18:36). Interviewer: “The other ones were old enough to remember you?” Yeah. The other ones were old enough to remember me. �Interviewer: “So, now you’re back and then how long do you stay in your job with the Guard after that?” So, when I got back I stayed all the way up till retirement. So, I retired December 31st, 2016. Interviewer: “And that’s how many total years in?” It was 23 in total. Interviewer: “Since then what have you been doing?” Well, I’ve actually been recovering–– physically–– and had a few surgeries right after I retired, so that’s been taking up a lot of time. Interviewer: “Did any of those relate to the military service?” Yeah, all of them. Interviewer: “Okay. So, what happened to you?” So, my last couple of years, you know, with being in my middle 40s–– it’s kind of a bit older to be out with the troops doing training and everything. So, I tore my achilles tendon and I broke my ankle. I tore my rotator cuff and bicep muscle. So, subsequent surgeries to follow up on those. Interviewer: “But you changed your assignment though, with the Guard, because you were with the Armored Battalion first and then you kind of moved on to more conventional staff positions.” Right. But after that, I decided that I wanted to go back out with the troops and that’s what I did. I came back to the transportation unit. And that–– in hindsight–– was a mistake on my part. (1:20:23). Interviewer: “Found out you were too old, after all. So, basically, you had to get put back together after all of that stuff. And then [do] you have a job now?” I do not. I had a job, initially, at the post office. But, after a few months of doing that is when I realized that my shoulder was messed up, so I was on medical leave for like a year/year-and-ahalf and they’re like “Hey. You know, it’s been a year-and-a-half. We’re not firing you, but we need to hire somebody.” So, I decided last January–– I started going to college. �Interviewer: “And where are you going to school?” GRCC. Interviewer: “Back where you didn’t quite start.” Yeah, that’s right. Interviewer: “So, to look back on it now, after all this time you spent in the service, what do you think you’ve really taken out of that or how did that affect you?” Yeah. You know, I thought about that when I was getting ready to be finished–– before I retired. You know, it was a unique experience and I know that we need people to do that. You look back like, “Did you influence anybody” and “yes” and “no” and “I’m sure you did.” But, that’s what people always ask. They say, “Would you do it again?” And I am like, I would probably do the first 18 years. And then if I probably wouldn’t have gone back into the field, maybe just stayed at headquarters after that because that last couple of years really took a toll as it turned out. But, yeah. I don’t know if I really answered your question on that one. (1:22:25). Interviewer: “Yeah. Well, that’s a very open-ended question, people say all sorts of stuff. The thing is, this was your career. So, it’s not like you had this two-years out of your life that marks you in this way and then you go on, you know? That’s been your adult life.” Yeah. It was interesting when I was coming upon retirement just thinking about [how] now my time is my own, you know? Every weekend, if I want to do something, I get it. One thing I found interesting is having to pick clothes to wear. I didn’t have to do that. I had the same kind of thing to wear all of the time. And I remember the months up to my retirement, going and buying different things of clothes–– regular clothes. Interviewer: “All right. Well, you’ve done a good job for us. So, thank you very much for coming in and sharing your story today.” Oh, thank you. (1:23:23). � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HaywoodB2299V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Haywood, Breyound Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-04 Title A name given to the resource Haywood, Breyound (Interview transcript and video), 2019 Description An account of the resource Breyound Haywood was born on February 28, 1973 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Haywood graduated high school in 1991 and enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1992. In January of 1993, he was flown to Marine Boot Camp for three months in San Diego, California. He then moved onto rifle training and field exercises at Camp Pendleton, California. After attending Marine Combat Training and then Infantry School back at Camp Pendleton, Haywood was assigned to a Zodiac Assault Company in the 1st Battalion, 4th Regiment, 1st Marine Division. On his first deployment, Haywood was redirected into a detached Special Operation Capable Platoon and was shipped around the Pacific and Middle East on the USS Tripoli and USS Tarawa for six months. His Company was also deployed to Somalia and stopped at various Middle Eastern ports as well as British Hong-Kong. He ended up staying in the Corps for longer than his tour, so he was assigned to the mail department in early 1995. On his second deployment, Haywood was sent to the Philippines as well as other stops in Africa, the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and Asia. After that, Haywood decided to leave the Corps, was discharged in March of 1997 in California, and joined the California Army National Guard. In 1998, he married and later enlisted in the Army Infantry out of Fort Irwin, California. On active duty, he was assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry Unit, Supply and Transportation Platoon based out of Fort Irwin before being transferred to the Orderly Room, administrating the platoon. He was then deployed to Iraq and Kuwait, stationed at Camp Spiker with his Transportation Platoon and ran supply routes throughout Iraq. After five months on active duty, Haywood was allowed to return to the United States in 2004 and was discharged from the Army at Fort Irwin. He then returned to Michigan where he resumed his work for Johnson Controls and joined the Michigan Army National Guard. He later applied for a full-time position within the Active Guard Reserve, working out of Wyoming, Michigan, in the 126th Armored Battalion. With this Battalion, Haywood was again deployed to Iraq and Kuwait in a staff position. In 2008, he and his unit returned to the United States where he stayed with the Michigan National Guard until his retirement in December of 2016, totaling twenty-three years with the Guard. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/58f8a93d5fd03cf65b38ae2662e2c1cd.mp4 1b6201a66426978816e8ddc0a5c1bf37 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c2f0330218d0ae3f596495232d21d39e.pdf 9e1132e0c9f89298cf15e751ea7256c6 PDF Text Text ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW Born: Chicago, Illinois in 1919 Resides: Battle Creek, Michigan Interviewed by: Frank Boring, GVSU Veterans History Project, Transcribed by: Joan Raymer, December 26, 2011 Interviewer: Bob, if we could start out with what is your name and where and when were you born? I’m Bob Hartman and I was born in Chicago, Illinois. Interviewer: What year were you born? 1919 Interviewer: Can you tell us what your early schooling was like? Well, I went to school in Muskegon through the kindergarten and stuff like that, and the Hall School here in Grand Rapids, and I wound up at South High School where I graduated from in 1937. Interviewer: How did you first hear about the Guards? My brother talked me into it. He was in the Guards, and he said it’s a good way to make a buck or two a night, so—things were tough back there, so—I’d been in a CCC camp for six months, so later on, in 1938, I joined the Guards with him. Interviewer: What is a CCC camp? Civilian Conservation Corps Interviewer: For those of us that don’t know what that is, what is that? Well, it’s a group and they take you up in the forest up here and you plant trees. 1:28 That was our main objective, planting trees. We got thirty dollars a month for going to 1 �camp, and they sent twenty-five of it home to our parents, so we lived on five dollars a month, and we enjoyed it. Interviewer: What was the appeal of the National Guard? Just being there with all the guys, talking and learning things. You start right from the beginning, you learn how to take a rifle apart and put it back together, and drill, and march in step, and obey commands. One of the bad parts of it was that we use to wear the old wrap leggings in those days, and they were from WWI. They were wide bandages that you wrapped around your legs all the way up to the knee, and then you tied them and tucked them, which is fine, but when you were in a parade, and you were scared they were going to come unwrapped. That was the worst part of it, when you’re marching down Monroe Avenue, and you’re so afraid that thing was going to come loose, and they did if you didn’t do it right. 2:38 Interviewer: How old were you when you joined the guards? Eighteen. Interviewer: Tell us a little bit more about you experience with the National Guards. This was seven days a week or was it four days? One weekend a month, and other times they would call us up and we would report, and go on maneuvers like down in Holland, which is thirty miles away, or to Muskegon, and we would interact with the troops from down there, and be gone for the week-end, and we enjoyed it because that meant extra money for every day you were gone. 3:21 Interviewer: Was there a sense of danger going on in Europe? Did you have any feeling there was a war coming on? 2 �Not that we thought much about, and being that age we didn’t think much about it, and we didn’t read the paper. We didn’t get the coverage, you know, like they do now. We had radios, of course, but most people read the paper. Interviewer: What was the training it’s self like? You mentioned the leggings from WWI, was this more of a training for WWI type tactics? Yes, they trained us to fight like they did in WWI, trench warfare, and that was the idea, if we ever got into combat we would fight in Europe like they did in WWI. Interviewer: When did things change for you in terms of the actual war starting in Europe? What was your reaction to that? 4:24 Well, when they started things in Germany they said we were going to go away, we had our choice. We could go away, and they were going to draft everybody for a year, and they told us if we wanted to go now and get our year in we could go for a year and come back and evade the draft this way, so most of us said, “we’ll go now”, and in fact, I planned on getting married, so I said to my wife to be, “I’ll go and put my year in now, and after I come back we can get married”, and she said, “ok”, so I went for the year, we thought, and it was five years later that we came back. 5:14 Interviewer: Let me ask you about—at this point were you formed into companies yet? Yes, we were all in companies. Interviewer: Could you tell us, before you were telling us about the individual companies and where they came from? That was wonderful, and I wonder if you could go through that again? 3 �Well, in the 126 we had three battalions and ABCD were the first battalion, EFGH was the second battalion, and the milk battalion was MILK. A Company was from Coldwater, B Company was from Adrian, C Company was from Kalamazoo, D Company was from Holland, E Company was from Big Rapids, G Company was Muskegon, F Company was Grand Haven, H Company was Ionia, and MILK Companies were from Grand Rapids, plus Service Company, the band, and the medics were all from Grand Rapids. 6:19 Interviewer: What Company were you with? I was with Service Company to start with. Interviewer: What was the Service Company? Well, they had the trucks, most of the trucks, and they moved troops around, and they also furnished all the clothing. They we like a small quartermaster outfit only in the regiment, and we supplied the ammunition and the food, clothing, and everything else that was needed. Interviewer: What did you do specifically? I drove a truck part of the time and part of the time I was Supply Sergeant. Interviewer: So, you had already achieved the rank of sergeant by this time? Oh yes, when I got married I was a sergeant; a year later, I was made sergeant. Interviewer: Well, this might sound like a stupid question, but what were your duties as a sergeant? At that time, I just handed out supplies from the supply tent and that was mainly clothing and ammunition, and rifles. We took care of all the rifles and all the armament. 7:19 The only armament we had in the Supply Company was rifles. Some companies had 4 �machine guns and mortars, but we didn’t have any, and we had side arms, a lot of us had side arms. Interviewer: Try to give us an idea of what daily life was like at this particular time. You got up in the morning, you went to breakfast, tell us a little bit about that. Well, if you were in a line company, you got up in the morning, stood in line for breakfast, and depending on how long you might be in line, anywhere from ten minutes, to forty-five minutes, depending on the amount of time it took you, and then after breakfast you got in line and you marched out in the field and you went through a lot of training. It was basically a round of fire, and fall down like they did in WWI. 8:17 Interviewer: Give us an idea of what the food was like at this particular place. In Louisiana? Interviewer: Yeah The food was pretty good, and it depended on your cooks. The meat they served was good meat and it depended on what the cooks did with it, and we had men that went to baker’s school and could bake bread, and pastries, cake and doenuts. If you had good bakers and good cooks, you got good food. Ours would vary depending on the mess sergeant and the cooks. We would go from poor to good, but most of the time it was fairly good, and we didn’t have very many complaints. Interviewer: Was there any kind of schooling going on besides the training? Was there any kind of training about where you were going? No, never a word, never a word, except for the training. 9:16 We went out on maneuvers, and that lasted a month or two, and we ranged over in Texas, Louisiana, and as far over as Alabama and back. It was truck movements and you had the red army and 5 �the blue army fighting each other. Out of this came a lot of good officers that went to Europe, like Patton was in the maneuvers, Bradley was in the maneuver, Eisenhower was part of the maneuvers, and I can’t think of all of them, but it helped these officers, plus we had a lot of officers from WWI. We had, our company commander at that time was Captain Henry D. McNaughton who was the principal at Ottawa High School here. Our Chaplain happened to be Reverend Dorr, who was the principal at South High School when I went there. 10:25 We had Colonel Howe, who was a teacher over at Union High School, and we had a lot of other men that were involved in the city of Grand Rapids that went with the Guards. Interviewer: Just so people have a better understanding of the guys that you were with, were some of these people you knew or at least you knew their families? No, I didn’t know anybody or any families. Well, I had a friend that I met his family, and I knew his family. His name was Clayton, Clayton Van Amberg when he was drafted. Our first draftees came in April, and we were there in October and our first bunch of draftees happened to come from the Grand Rapids area, and we were lucky there because a lot of guys met their friends. I was told that Clayton was going to be in the draft, so I went over and saw him, and I got him transferred to my company, so we became buddies. 11:25 Interviewer: When did things change for you in terms of the training and all that, now that you got the word that you’re going to go to war? Right, and that was December 7th of Pearl Harbor day and Clayton and I were up in Jackson, Mississippi to they use to come by and give us free ticket to go to different places, so we got some tickets to go up to, and another fried of ours had a car, and so the 6 �three of us went up to Jackson, Mississippi, which was a hundred miles away, and we saw, in Jackson, “Old Miss” play football. We came out of there and later we found out they had bombed Pearl Harbor, and for everybody to get back to camp as soon as they could. 12:18 Interviewer: What was your reaction? The same as everyone else, “oh, oh, we’re in for it now”, so we headed back to camp, and they just scattered us around. A lot of troops were put guarding various bridges and water supplies and things like that. We stayed there for a few months and then they shipped us up to Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Interviewer: What happened at Fort Devens, Massachusetts? Well, we were there for about a month and then they turned around and put us all on a train and sent us back to Frisco. This was a fiasco because we landed in Frisco and they had no place to bunk us, so they had the Cow Palace, which was an arena where they have rodeos. It’s all dirt floor and seats all around, and it’s all cement. 13:24 They said, “you’re going to stay here for a while”, so the troops that were lucky got set down on the floor, some were in the aisles around there where the refreshment stands use to be, and our company was told we were taking the seats. They gave us folding cots and said, “spread them across these seats”. Now if you’ve ever been in a place where you sat down in these folding seats and tried to put an army cot across them, it’s impossible, so we tried it and it was just ridiculous because they stick up and there was no place for the legs, so we would up sleeping sitting up in the seats for the ten days we were there. Interviewer: Give us an idea of the number of people that were at this Cow Palace. Probably five thousand, that was our regimental strength, roughly. 14:17 7 �Interviewer: So this is a lot of people in a Cow Palace basically? Right, and some were in the dog track, which was next door, and they only housed about three or four hundred people. I don’t know what the dog track was, just a building where they raced dogs, I guess. Interviewer: What was the “scuttlebutt” going around during this time? You were anticipating getting into war, but what were you guys talking about? There was not much that we could talk about, we were just waiting our time and wondering when we were going to go. We knew we weren’t going over to England like they planned and we had never heard of Australia, much less New Guinea. Then they took us over to Angel Island, which is an embarkation point, and we were loaded on the Lurline there. 15:18 Interviewer: What were you told before you got onto the Lurline? Were you told where you were going? No, we had no idea, they told us part of the time over there, and I think it was quite a ways out before we ever found out we were going to Australia. Interviewer: So lets talk about getting on this Lurline. Describe what this Lurline was. Well, the Lurline was a luxury liner like they have today; only it was not as high class. The cabins were small, and they had two bunks in them, and they had a small bathroom and a sink, and that was about it. I was lucky, my company, we were put up in the ballroom, and they were making the ballroom into a first aid room to bring back wounded, so they had double bunks, which were nice hospital type bunks that were stacked two high. We had huge windows which you could look out during the day, and 8 �the floor was magnificent, it was a dance floor that we were setting on, and it was nice during the day, but at night they had the windows all painted and you had to pull it up, and you couldn’t see anything out. 16:32 the only thing is, most of us were seasick. I got on board and by the time we had gone under the Golden Gate Bridge, I was seasick. I was seasick almost all the trip over, and the only thing I could keep down was bread and coffee. They steamed the food in this place, and just the smell of steamed food made me sick, but I wasn’t alone, and my CO said, it’s just in your mind, and you guys just think you’re seasick, but two days later he was leaning over the rail just like the rest of us, so we had no problem there. 17:16 Interviewer: There was an understanding that a buddy of yours decided that he thought he had a cure for it and it was called “lemon drops”? Oh yes, that was Ed Szudzick thought lemon drops—and the Purser, I think, was making money off of selling lemon drops because they were a good deal, and they would sell you a jar of lemon drops for a buck and a half, and I put down four or five of them and just got sick on lemon drops, and I’m heaving up lemon drops instead of everything else, but Ed swore by them, and they helped him, so there must be something in the lemon drops. They had no Dramamine, they had no Dramamine in those days, in fact, we had very little supplies like they have now, and so we were not too lucky there. Interviewer: When you crossed the Equator, and you had not crossed it before, there’s a ceremony that goes on, an infamous ceremony, and I wonder if you can tell us about the King Neptune ceremony? 18:16 They shave your head and you’re a Pollywog until you get your head shaved, and all this, and then you became a, what is it, I forget the term now, but it’s quite a ceremony 9 �and one of the sailors dresses up like Father Neptune, and he has a spear and a thing and they go around and they drag people out of the crowd and they shave their heads, and I didn’t get my head shaved then, but I liked it so well that I had my head shaved and I kept it shaved ever sense. Interviewer: So, the trip over is quite difficult because of the seasickness and all. Where did you land finally? We landed in Adelaide, and it was thirty one or thirty two days for this trip because we had to detour out around, way out around, and don’t ask me how, but we detoured way out around and came in at Adelaide, which is at the other end of Australia, because the battle of the Coral Sea was going on with the Navy. 19:24 Thank God we had a Navy out there to stop them because we’d have probably been torpedoed. Then you zigzagged every day. They had two or three ships carrying troops. The 126 was on one troop ship I know, the 127 was on another, and the 128 was on the other one, so there were three ships all from the Matson Line carrying troops and later on they took these same ships and practically dismantled them and put on these old, these standby things where you bunk five or six deep, one on top of the other, but we were lucky there. Coming back the troops slept like that, but I came back on a hospital ship. Interviewer: We’ll get into that later. When you arrived in Australia did you have any interaction with the Australians? Not too much, we landed and we were dressed up in our full wool uniforms, we had these old army coats that hung down to your ankles, we had army wools on, we had winter underwear even, that they issued us in Massachusetts because we planned on going over to England. 20:38 It was going to be cold over there and we got to Adelaide and it was 10 �like eighty-five or ninety degrees in Adelaide because you’re close to the equator. It took us a few days before we could get the regular type of uniforms. We liked the Aussies, the men, the Aussies, were real good fighters and they were good friends to us. Interviewer: Is this the group that came from Tobruk? Yes, they called them “the rats of Tobruk”, and they fought in Africa. For a couple of years they had been fighting the Germans, and they stopped Rommel, and they were practically wiped out. They came back to Australia and reorganized, and then they were sent up to New Guinea. 21:29 They were up to New Guinea ahead of us. We were not the first troops in New Guinea, the Aussies were there and they went over the Owen Stanleys ahead of us, and they also helped—we used them as guides over the Owen Stanley. Interviewer: Now did you go through any kind of training or maneuvers at this time? Not very much—we trained a little bit, but not too much because I don’t think they knew what to train for. They had no idea—they would go out in the morning and train, but the training was minimal. Interviewer: The interesting point here is, the actual training you had was WWI trench style warfare and here you are about to embark in the jungles. Right, and then when we moved from Adelaide, we went by train up to Brisbane, which is on the other side of Australia, and they had—the trouble there is they have different gauges of trains, so you have to unload everything. 22:34 You go so far—they have five states in Australia, and you go to one state and you have to unload because the tracks were a different gauge. You would have to take everything off and go around and carry 11 �it, put it on another train, go so far, and we had three stops like that going to Brisbane. Now I understand it’s all one gauge they had the same problem here, back in the 1800’s. Interviewer: So, in Brisbane then—I have a note here about the uniforms and the camouflage. What kind of camouflage did you have or what did you do? Well, we had no camouflage, just old green fatigues they didn’t want us to wear dress khakis, of course, so we wore our green fatigues, and somebody came up with the fright idea, this came down from headquarters, they brought down some paint. 23:34 What kind of paint it was, I don’t know, but they made us stand in line with our fatigues on and they took brushes and they would dip them into the red, and they would splash some here, and they would splash it around, green, blue, yellow, just enough to make us camouflage. The only thing is that is you get paint on cloth it just stiffens, and then later on when you sweat, the paint goes through and winds up on your skin and itches. It drives you crazy. There were one or two companies that did that, and my company was one of the ones that had to go through this painting thing. We finally dumped all these old things and went back to wearing our old green fatigues in the jungle. 24:25 Interviewer: So you’re now in Australia, you still don’t know where you’re going, when was the turning point? When did you start to get into battle? When they took us up to Port Moresby. We landed at Port Moresby, which is just a couple of shacks, and one of them was a hotel, and a bar, the hotel had a bar in it, and the other was a small grocery store. I think there were three buildings there, and now they’ve got motels ten stories high and everything else. Interviewer: Well, lets get an idea of the numbers here. This is still the entire regiment arriving here, five thousand of us? 12 �Yes, it was the entire division, but the 127 and the 128 came up behind us, the spearhead of the spearhead. They picked the 32nd—let’s see—there were three outfits that were picked to go. 25:23 The 32nd, the 41st, and the 37th, three divisions, and they made the 32nd the spearhead of the three, and then they came along and said, “ we’ll pick the 126 to be the spearhead of the division”, and then they came along and they said, “we’ll pick the 2nd Battalion to be the spearhead of the battalion”, and then they came along and said, “we’ll pick E Company to be the spearhead of the battalion”, and it wound up like that, so we were the spearhead of the spearhead, of the spearhead. Interviewer: We had talked before about your being a sergeant and involved with trucks. What was your rank at this point and what was your responsibility? Platoon sergeant, which was a staff sergeant in those days, and then they elevated it to tech sergeant. Staff sergeant had one stripe underneath, and a platoon sergeant had two. 26:18 Interviewer: So, you have a lieutenant above you? Yes Interviewer: A captain above that? Half of the time Interviewer: Let’s get back to you then, what were your specific responsibilities? To make sure my platoon did everything right, and I looked after them like you would anybody that you’re in charge of. You are in command of the platoon and the lieutenant gives you the orders. I had buck sergeants underneath me and they each had a squad and I had four squads when we were full strength. We would up with—my platoon, at one time, was a total of twenty men, and three of them were sergeants, you know. My buddy 13 �that was killed was a sergeant at the time, and he was a squad leader, but we had no squads really, we were just fighting men. 27:17 Interviewer: We’ll get to that as well, I’m trying to get an understanding of what the whole structure was before you actually went into battle. So, you arrived at this small little island [town] with a couple of shacks and that. I’m just trying to get a vision in my own mind of five thousand plus men arriving at this place. How did you actually get to the beach? It was the beach. Interviewer: Right, but how did you actually get there? Oh, E Company flew, and they were the first company. They would fly into combat, and of any company during WWII, they never heard of it, but they needed somebody in a hurry, so they flew us up to Port Moresby, and then we moved over to, we called it Kalamazoo because we couldn’t pronounce the name. That was our base camp going over the Owen Stanley, was Kalamazoo. 28:18 At that time the tune that was popular was Kalamazoo, “I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo”, and that’s why they picked it. Another reason we picked it was—see we picked all code names for passwords with an L in them because the Japanese could not pronounce L’s. I don’t think it did us any good, but we used the word “Roosevelt” more than we did any other word for a password. Interviewer: Now that you’ve arrived with this whole group of people on this beach, where did you go? We went five miles—we were just—there was an airport there that the Aussies had, and then of course the Americans took it over, and it was called “a five mile strip”, and from 14 �there we had a base down at the end of it, and we started walking over the Owen Stanley Mountains. 29:17 Interviewer: So, you’re literally getting off an airplane and starting a march. Yes, that’s about it Interviewer: So, tell us about the walk across the Owen Stanley. Well, it was a nightmare, and it’s like climbing up a steep mountain. It was just a trail that was probably made by the natives for years, for the thousands of years that the natives were there. They had one place there at Kalamazoo; they had a mission there, a small mission and a couple Aussie missionaries, and they started us out. We had native guides and a couple Aussies leading us, but you clawed your way up this thing and you would slide back down. Three steps forward, two stops back, and it took us thirty some days just to travel this distance. 30:22 Interviewer: Let’s give an idea to people who have never been there. First of all, when you started the trip was it in the morning, the afternoon, the night? When did you actually start? About noon when we first started going because we landed and then we started right away. Interviewer: What was the weather like? Well, when we first started it wasn’t too bad; it was rainy because we were on that side of the cliff, but the higher up you got it rained all the time. You couldn’t even light a fire to warm your food, so you ate it cold. We ran out of food—they used to drop C rations, and they would drop them out of the sides of these planes, but they would crash and break. Then they tried parachutes, and we lost a colonel who was on a plane like that because 15 �the parachute got wrapped around the tail fin, so then they came and asked if anybody knew how to pack a parachute, and it turned out that we had—in our company we had a fellow named Doc Slaughter, and his father and him use to have the balloon ascensions out at Reeds Lake here in the summer when I was a kid. 31:37 Doc was probably in his thirties at this time, but he knew how to—his dad use to take this balloon and these hot air balloons would go up and his dad would parachute out in the water or on the land. So, doc was promoted to sergeant and all he did the rest of the time was pack parachutes for the air corps, and they dropped them out of the parachutes, which was a lot better. Interviewer: What was the terrain like? Oh, jungle types all the way up and down, and you just grabbed a tree and pulled yourself up, and just kept on going. You slung your rifle across back and you kept your cartridge, but you threw away everything you didn’t need. 32:22 Interviewer: Let’s get into that—you’re fully packed when you actually get off the airplane, so give us an idea of what started to happen as you go through the jungle with a full pack. The first thing to go was our gas masks because they were useless, and the next things to go were your blankets. We had what they called a shelter half, and maybe some of the guys held on to them, but I threw mine away because I was wet all day long and you couldn’t sleep hardly at night anyway, so we threw away our shelter half’s, we threw away our tent stakes, we threw away everything but our ammunition and our rifles. We even threw away—they use to give us big Machetes, and those were cumbersome, so I threw mine away and kept my bayonet, and I sharpened that in case I wanted to cut my way through and cut something, I could use my bayonet, and that’s all I used my bayonet 16 �for. I don’t think I ever put it on my rifle like we were taught back in the states. Put it on your rifle and charge forward with the bayonet. 33:32 We had to go through bayonet drills, stabbing and thing like that, we didn’t use them for that. Interviewer: We’re still looking at thousands of men going through this. Try to give us an idea of—can you see the people around you? You could see the guys ahead of you and behind you, and that’s about it, that’s about all. It wasn’t thousands, it was just one battalion—the rest of them flew up. When we got over there we took the airstrip, the old airstrip that they had over there, and fixed it so that they could land planes on it, and they started flying in the rest of the outfits. Interviewer: Were there any casualties or skirmishes or anything as you were--? No, the bad part was—I was lucky I didn’t get—some of the guys got malaria and they just suffered along with the rest of us going over. 34:34 But, there was no way to evacuate them; there was no way to evacuate anybody. If anybody had broken a leg, I don’t know what they would have done, but as far as I know, nobody was—we had a lot of small injuries where the guys would fall and hurt themselves, but as far as—climbing up was—once you got to the other side you kind of slid down on your rump. Interviewer: What happened after you got to the bottom? Well, then we got—some of the companies got into combat, but the Aussies had kind of cleared out most of it, and then a couple days later we were taken over to the Bloody Triangle. 35:22 There was a pillbox there, and we were supposed to take this pillbox. Interviewer: Before we get into that, let’s back up just a little bit. You said some of the companies got into battle. Did you actually hear the sounds of battle? 17 �Oh yes, we weren’t that far apart. We couldn’t see each other, but you could hear gunfire all the time practically. Interviewer: So, this might sound like a stupid question, but what did you hear? I know this was many, many years ago, but do you remember the first time you heard gunshots, and the sounds of battle knowing you were literally about to get into battle? Probably about that time, and that’s when your stomach starts to knot up, and if anybody thinks they weren’t scared, they’re crazy. We were all scared, but the way I looked at it—I was scared just as well as anybody else, and most of us were, but most of us hid it. We acted like, “what the heck, this is nothing”, you know, and especially being in the position of platoon sergeant, I had to let my men know that I was their leader and I wasn’t scared. 36:30 If they only know how scared I was we’d of all ran, you know, you just hide it and you act as if this is an everyday thing, you know, and you cuss, and things go on as normal. Interviewer: So, as you’re approaching the battle—the thing that I think is really important for people to realize is this is dense jungle. Dense, you couldn’t see twenty or thirty feet ahead of you. There were times when you could see—there would be patches of Kunai Grass where you could see across them, but you never knew what was on the other side of that. See that was—what we found at the Triangle. There was a Kunai patch there and right at the other end of it was a pillbox and we’re trying to take it. 37:22 Interviewer: For people who don’t know, what’s Kunai Grass? 18 �It’s a grass that grows anywhere from two feet to twelve feet high, and it’s sharp as a razor. If you don’t watch yourself you can cut yourself and make you bleed. I mean, it can make you bleed, and sometimes if you went through there fast you come out of there with cuts all over your hands and face, and most of the time they show pictures of these men in the jungle without shirts and bare to the waist, and it’s just the opposite, we covered ourselves up for that simple reason that we kept the bugs and everything off of us, and it was as warm with a wet thing on as it was with nothing. We’d go through this Kunai Grass and we’d have scars all over our body from it. Interviewer: So, you’re now approaching this pillbox. Now, you were told to take the pillbox or did you just come upon it? 38:26 No, I was told to take it. “Sergeant, there’s a pillbox out there, go get it”, so I went out there with my men, and I’m leading them, and I come across—they pointed in the general direction, and I came across a path that was cut. It was cut way down low, and I said, “Why am I going through this tall grass? Now I can see where I’m going”, so I started crawling down this path that had been cut like it had been mowed, and all of a sudden it dawned on me that this is not a path, this is a precut path. It’s a fire lane, and at the other end of it is a machine gun trained on me. 39:26 The minute this thought hit me I just instinctively dove for the other side, and as I did they cut loose with their machine gun, and I got hit in the arm, but they clipped my bandolier and knocked that off. Luckily I had my rifle like that, and they hit the stock of the rifle, and that might have been dangerous. I got to the other side, and I knew I was hit. I’m laying on my arm, and all I could think of is, “How bad am I hit?” I knew I was hit, and it turned out it was just a minor flesh wound, and I’ve still got it right there. [points to his forearm] It’s scary, you 19 �lay there and you’re afraid to look. So, finally I lay there, and I hollered at my men, “don’t come out here, don’t come out here, it isn’t safe, for Christ's sake, don’t come out here”. So, finally I made a mad dash across, and I got across before they could fire again. Then we went up through the tall grass, but it got so bad we had to pull back, and we lost a couple men there. 40:26 Interviewer: From the gunfire? From the machine gun, so we pulled back. Interviewer: What happens to the guys that get shot in a situation like that? We dragged them back, and then the burial unit took over. Interviewer: This group that you were leading, approximately how many men? Started out with about thirty Interviewer: At the pillbox there were thirty guys? Yeah, I had no lieutenant at that time either. Interviewer: Why not? Well, they put him somewhere else. I mean, they were so short on officers, the officers— when we first got up there the officers use to wear their badges and insignias, there second lieutenant bars, and their captains and all that, and finally everybody smartened up, and they took these off and dressed like the regular men because the Japanese were told to pick off the officers first. 41:30 That’s what we tried to do, to get their officers first because when we got their officers they were disorganized, and they didn’t realize that in the American army, you might get an officer, but you have men qualified and we could think for ourselves. The Japanese were not allowed to think for themselves, and I think that made a big difference, plus out firepower was greater than theirs. We only had 20 �the M-1 rifle, which fired eight rounds at a time, one shot at a time, and they had—we trained with the old 03 where you pulled the bolt back and slammed it in, fired again, and pulled the bolt back, which was a fine rifle for target practice, but it was no good in combat because it was too slow. 42:23 Just before we got to Australia they issued us the M-1’s, which were—one clip held eight shots, and you could pull off eight shots without doing anything, and then the clip would fly out, and you would throw another one in, and you were all set. The M-1 never jammed either it was a good gun. Ed Szudzick, my friend, carried a Tommy gun and we wouldn’t carry one because they jammed. Ed said that one time his jammed when he needed it bad because—they were the old Tommy guns that the “G Men” use to carry, and that type of thing, that’s what we had, and they weren’t too good for jungle warfare. Interviewer: We’re not talking just hours, we’re talking days that this is going on, give us an idea of—it wasn’t constant battle every single moment, there were moments you could sit down to eat. What were you eating? 43:26 Three months it went on, and we ate C-Rations, which was, one can of beans, one can of stew, and another small can that had three or four hard cookies, plus a can of instant coffee. It wasn’t as good as the instant coffee today, and pieces of sugar, and a couple pieces of candy. We got to the point where we were living on one can of C-Rations a day, which was four ounces, but we couldn’t carry more, and we didn’t want to carry more. When you dive for the— when we were out on patrol, or something, and all of a sudden they cut loose, you want to hit the ground, and you don’t want anything between you and the ground. In fact, there were times when you didn’t even want to carry a pack 21 �of cigarettes because it kept you away from the ground. 44:22 It might sound silly, but not when you got bullets flying at you. Interviewer: So, there were several skirmishes throughout this period of time? Oh yes, we were in combat all the time. We would go back maybe a day—one guy would go back, and this is another thing we did—I did it a couple times myself, we’d pick one guy and take his helmet, and we’d go back and get some canned heat, it was hard to get, otherwise if we could build a fire with something we would, and we’d use his helmet for a cooking pot. The first thing you had to do was cook all the paint off the inside of the helmet, because you didn’t want to eat that. Then we would throw in a handful of rice and a can of beans and mix them up and four or five guys would share it. one time I went back and I was going to really do something good. 45:26 I took a can of beans, I got one guy to give a can of stew, and a can of hash from another, and two handfuls of rice. It was all over the place, but it was a mixture of all these things with rice, and we ate it. Anybody told me today that I would eat that I would tell them they were crazy, but when you’re hungry you eat what you get. Interviewer: Where did you get water? Oh, out of the streams, out of the rivers, out of anything. We had canteens, of course, and we would fill our canteen, and we had chlorine tablets we put in there about—if you got a chance, or got any time off, you would knock the mud out of the bottom of your canteen because you would probably get a half inch of mud in the bottom of the canteen. One time , and this wasn’t the only time, we were drinking this water, and come to find out there were some dead Japs in the stream up ahead of us, but this wasn’t isolated, this was common. 46:24 We drank any water we could, no water was carried in, we drank the 22 �water that was there, and most of the time it was pretty good. You got to hate the taste of the chlorine in it, but you weren’t going to take any chances. Interviewer: Now, what about change of clothes, socks, boots? You took them down to the local Laundromat? We stayed with the same clothes all the time, and we didn’t bathe, we didn’t shave, we didn’t—I didn’t shave for almost three months. Everybody grew a beard because they kept the mosquitoes and that off your face, and that helped with malaria. I didn’t get malaria until almost towards the end of the campaign. Interviewer: Let’s go into that, in addition to the danger of fighting the Japanese, and in addition to just getting through the jungle, infections, diseases, and all that, tell us about the effect of malaria and dysentery on your group. 47:33 Dysentery, you just put up with. You just had it, and with malaria, at first they were just sending them home with a 98, 99, or 100 fever, and then it got up to 102, and they were sending them back to Australia. Some of the guys we got our worst casualties from was malaria, and I got up to a fever of 103, and by that time they just took me to the first aid tent, it was a canopy, and laid me down, and gave me 25 grains of quinine. I took that and I was practically delirious from the quinine and the fever, and I was there for twentyfour hours and the fever broke, and I went back to the line. 48:27 We all did this, that were left, because they couldn’t afford to send us back. If they had sent everybody back we would have been over run and been annihilated. We were told, in fact General Harding, who was out first general, wanted to pull the 32nd Division out, and he told McArthur, these men have gone through too much to stay here. McArthur pulled Harding back off the line and sent up Robert L. Eichelberger, who was a three star 23 �general, and he told Eichelberger, and I found this out later because I was at the hearing. Eichelberger was told to either keep going or don’t come back, and Eichelberger had no choice, but we realized it later, anybody that had any sense realized it later, that if we’d have stopped fighting, and waited for reinforcements, that the Japs would have overcome us. 49:29 We just kept pushing, pushing, pushing, and that’s the only thing that saved us, because we were outnumbered about seven to one [the Allied forces at Buna actually outnumbered the Japanese], but like I say, our firepower was better than theirs. Interviewer: But, you didn’t know you were out powered seven to one. We knew we were out powered, we didn’t know what the number was. We just knew there were more Japs there than there was of us. Interviewer: What is it like to have malaria in battle? Oh, your ears ring, and your eyes water and you just keep going. It’s like having the flu or something, you just keep going, but it’s worse than the flu. I had reoccurring malaria after the war, and for every thirty days I would come down with malaria, and I had that for about five years, and it decreased every year until finally it went away. 50:22 Interviewer: Now, I’ve talked to some of your fellow Red Arrows who talk about the heaviness of the rifle when you’re sick like that, it’s so heavy. Oh yes, but it only weighted –was it seven pounds or something like that, I forget what it was now, and it seemed a lot heavier, but still you hung onto it, that was—that was your bread and butter, you didn’t get rid of your rifle, and that’s one thing we liked about the M-1, you didn’t have to clean them very often, you could drop them in the mud and pick them up, wipe them off, and they would still keep firing. I didn’t hear of a one that stopped, and even some of the marines used the M-1, and they swore by it too. 24 �Interviewer: In your opinion, how did you adapt to jungle fighting when your entire training has been trench WWI type warfare? It’s either you adapt or die, it was that simple. 51:34 You make up your mind you’re going to do it, so you do it. Interviewer: Did you see a lot of men around you getting killed? Not too many because you’re in your own little battle, and it’s that way though Vietnam and all those other wars. There might be a huge—for instance, Normandy, these men don’t see all these men down the beach dying, they see just this group that’s ten feet on either side. You lose your peripheral vision, you just focus on going ahead and doing what you please, you watch the guys on this side, and you watch the guys on that side. You don’t have time to look around and see what the other guys are doing. And that’s the way it was, but I saw a few men dying, too many. 52:24 Interviewer: In terms of this jungle warfare, you’ve got the guy on the right, you’ve got the guy on the left, and you can hardly see anything in front of you, what was the sound like? I’m picturing bullets whizzing through the leaves. I mean, what was the sound of the battle like? There was a lot of noise, and the Japanese rifle, they shot a 25 caliber, and it was faster than ours, it moved faster, which didn’t make any difference, but it cracked, it made a cracking sound almost like a firecracker, and it wasn’t a loud sound, but we could tell. We could tell when the machine guns were firing, just from hearing them, which machine gun was the Japanese, and which was our 50 caliber, and which was our 30 caliber. They had a little thing there they called the knee mortar, NEI was printed on this thing, and it was a little mortar about eighteen inches high with a little tube like that. 53:34 We 25 �overtook some Japanese that had these mortars and they had the shells in there, and somebody was looking at these and said it’s a knee mortar. On the base, it’s oval shaped on the base like that, and somebody thought a knee mortar you could put on your knee and fire, but I think somebody did try to fire it like that and broke their leg, but it was just the manufactures name was NEI. You could put them against a tree, is what it was, they put them against a tree and fire the mortar shells. They used--their hand grenades were not as good as ours, they were just as dangerous, but they had a wooden plug in their hand grenade, and they had a pin through it with a string around it. They would take and unwind the string and pull the pin out, and they had to turn the hand grenade over and hit it on something hard, and drive that pin on the end of that wooden plug into the explosive to set it off, and then they had about three seconds to get rid of it. 54:39 Where ours, we just pulled the pin and let the handle fly, and threw it, but we liked the Aussies' better than ours because the Aussies'—our grenades were five second grenades, and if you pulled the pin and threw it, sometimes the Japanese would pick it up and throw it back, so we used the Aussies', which was another three second grenade, and you pulled the pin on theirs and threw it, and it went off when it hit. With things like that you learned to count, but most of the time when you pull that pin you don’t want count. You don’t want to take time to say one thousand one, one thousand two, you’re afraid it will go off in your hand because some of them would premature. 55:26 The same with our mortar shells, our mortar shells had little packets that you dropped down in there and they ignited and shot the mortar fires up. Those things got damp in the jungle and half the time they would only go half as far as they were supposed to, which was the only heavy weapon we had in the jungle was the mortar. We had machineguns, 30 calibers, and 50 calibers, but 26 �no cannon or anything else like that, mostly just rifle. One time up there— I went up there one time we got a shipment in, where it came—I think it was supposed to be for the MP’s—they got in some crates of rifles, but they weren’t rifles, they were shotguns, and we thought, “this is the best weapon they ever came out with”, and the minute they found out they came and took them right away, and took them back because it was against the Geneva Conference. 56:25 Can you imagine what a shotgun would have done in a jungle compared—it would have been ten times better than a rifle. Interviewer: You were injured the first time with superficial wounds, which I assume they just patched you up and they had to heal by themselves, what was the next incident? It was when we made a beach landing at Aitape. First we made a landing at Saidor, and our beach landings were nothing like Normandy. The navy came in and shelled the beaches, and the planes came in and dropped bombs on the beaches and that, at points where the Japs had congregated. The Japs, they didn’t know any more than we did, they were waiting to be picked up by the Japanese navy, and the Japanese navy was not around to pick them up, and they weren’t going to. As far as the Japanese were concerned, these were all dead men on the—but the Japanese didn’t know they were dead until—they were left there and finally surrendered. 57:35 There were too many of them at Saidor, so when we landed there was some skirmishing and some fighting, and a few guys got killed, but mostly Japanese. We pushed them right back, and then a month or two later we landed at Aitape. I was behind the lines then, I was walking up, and all of a sudden I got hit, and I think it was a sniper, I’m not sure if it was a ricochet or what, but it went through my cartridge belt, and it’s lucky it didn’t set off any of the ammunition in 27 �there, went through my web belt, my cartridge belt, my regular belt, and my clothing, and lodged in my stomach, right in here. 58:23 They took me out on a stretcher and took me to the hospital, the base hospital there, and they operated on me. They took the bullet out, and apparently it hadn’t gone in too far, or something, and then they took me back to Australia, and from there I went back to the United States, and I was in the hospital for various times at various camps. I started at Brooks General in San Antonio, I was in the hospital up in Illinois, and I wound up spending about six months down here in Percy Jones, which is here in Battle Creek. Interviewer: Now, when you returned back to the sates, your family was informed that you were ok? Oh yeah Interviewer: So, there was no worry that you were dead or anything like that? No Interviewer: When did you first see your family again? When I got back—when they let me out of—they let me go home, I was able to go right back home, and I had to report right back to Brooks General in San Antonio. 59:30 Interviewer: What was the reaction of your family when you came home? I guess they were glad to see me, but we had no brass bands or anything like we have now. The only ones that met me at the depot were my mother and father, and my wife and her mother and father. It was that way with all of us, and we didn’t care, we were back and we didn’t care. It was two and a half years later. 28 �Interviewer: There are a couple more questions I wanted to ask you. What is the distinction of the Red Arrow compared to any other battle unit? What is the one big distinction? 0:10 We put in more combat time than almost any other outfit in combat, and we went through some of the toughest of the fighting without any experience at all. We were green troops, and I heard a commentator say one time on the radio that the troops are green and going over to Iraq, and what they need is experienced troops. That’s not true, you’re going to fight, just to save your own life, you’re going to learn and adapt. Steve Janicki and I both agree that you’re not fighting for your country, you’re fighting for yourself, is what it comes down to. If somebody had come up to me halfway through Buna and said, “hey Bob, you can leave here now and go home”, I’d have gone home, so would everybody else. You stay because you have to stay; nobody’s going to say you can go home. You adapt, I mean, and we got some time off in Australia, and we learned to make beach landings in Australia 1:18. Then we went up, we landed at Milne Bay, and then we went over to Goodenough Island. There was a little set to on Goodenough Island. I was in charge of, and I knew the colonel, Colonel Schnepke, and we were there at Thanksgiving in 1943, and we had just landed there and it was a couple days before Thanksgiving, so we went back to the quartermaster because we heard they were giving out turkeys, and the quartermaster said, “you guys can’t get turkeys because these are for the base people here, and you guys are going to be leaving in a few days”. I went back and told the colonel, and he was furious. He went to General Harding, and General Harding blew his stack. It wasn’t General Harding, but it was the general, and they went back down there and we got the turkeys that were meant for the base people. 2:17 We 29 �had turkeys up the kazoo. We had cooks—everybody was cooking turkey, and there was like a turkey for every two men. They gave us every turkey they had on hand. That was before we made our beach landing at Saidor. Interviewer: Bob, to wrap up here I just wanted to ask you a question. It’s more of a personal question. What do you feel personally, what was the effect of your being in the Red Arrow, the battle experience you had, the experience you had in the military, how did that affect the rest of your life? Oh, it didn’t affect it much except I found a lot of buddies, we all had the same thing in common, and we had a kinship that nobody else can have, and that’s why--we’re a dying outfit, you know, and we don’t want to bring in anybody else. 3:15 They talk about bringing in our sons and that, and I have a son, but I’m not going to ask him to become a member of this because we have something that even by son could not achieve, you know. I have a son-in-law that was in Vietnam, and I lost a brother in Korea, and he was in the infantry. He wasn’t in the infantry, he was in the combat engineers, and I lost him in Korea, and it’s been tough on my mother. Interviewer: I have been very honored to meet all of you when you got together the first time, and I was very pleased the museum was able to put on that symposium that all of you were at. I am very honored sir that we are here and that your family, and your future family, is going to be able to have the same kind of joy of saying that I had a chance to know you. I appreciate it 30 � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HartmanR0341V2 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hartman, Robert Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003-12 Title A name given to the resource Hartman, Robert (Interview transcript and video), 2003 Description An account of the resource Bob Hartman was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1919. He graduated high school in 1937 and joined the Michigan Army National Guard in 1938, assigned to the 126th Infantry Regiment, Service Company. His company’s task was to transport troops and provide them with ammunition, food, and clothing. He began as a truck driver and later became a Supply Sergeant. His regiment went on maneuvers that lasted up to two months, traveling to places such as Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Hartman was in Jackson, Mississippi to see a football game and was ordered to go back to camp immediately. He was then shipped to Fort Devens, Massachusetts for about a month before taking a train back to Frisco, Texas. After that, he was shipped to Angel Island and boarded the Lurline to head for Australia. He landed in Adelaide and then took a train to Brisbane. Later, he flew to Port Moresby where he marched across the Owen Stanley Mountains and saw jungle combat as a platoon sergeant. Hartman suffered from malaria during battle, and the sickness continued to recur every month for about five years. Hartman later was flown to Papua New Guinea. He made a beach landing in Saidor, where he experienced a few skirmishes before arriving at Aitape a month or two later. At Aitape, he was shot in the stomach presumably by a sniper. He was hospitalized on base before being shipped back to Australia and eventually the United States, where he spent time at several hospitals in San Antonio, Illinois, and finally back home in Battle Creek, Michigan. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Brockschmidt, Kelli (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e3fcccf6093c01a5ff01c67092a480fb.mp4 8a58335356923d36ba66d5542d09fde3 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e133845a074cc5da7d8063328d6154aa.pdf 396d1ef255c607af871381ab5909b9f7 PDF Text Text Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Conflicts Served In: Iraq War, Operation Spartan Shield, Operation Inherent Resolve Interviewee’s Name: Philip Grant Length of Interview: 49:37 Interviewed by: Elle Griffiths Transcribed by: Sam Noonan Interviewer: “My name is Elle Griffiths from Drexel University, I am interviewing Phil Grant on June 2nd, 2021, in a Drexel studio. Also present with us is Caroline Cottmeyer operating the camera and Kate Wagner. This interview is being conducted for the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. So what is your full name?” My name is Philip Ryan Grant. Interviewer: “What is your date of birth?” November 18th, 1986. Interviewer: “And what is your branch of service?” Pennsylvania Army National Guard. Interviewer: “And your highest rank attained?” Sergeant 1st Class, E-7. Interviewer: “And what is your war or conflict that you served in?” I was in Iraq in 2009 and I was in Jordan in 2018 for Operation Spartan Shield and Operation Inherent Resolve. Interviewer: “Okay great. So let’s get started with talking about your childhood - so where did you grow up and what was your childhood like?” (00:55) So I grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, and I had a very fortunate childhood – so I grew up in a rural home in Reading to an intact family, my mom and dad were both present, still married. Had an older brother, and went through the Reading public school system, 13th and Green, Northeast Elementary and Reading High School, graduated in 2005. And by and large, it was a very positive childhood experience. It was a city, so just like any other city there are challenges, there are considerations in the city regarding safety and opportunity. So we didn’t have much growing up, but we did have a really supportive family and network of friends. So yeah, it was a decent childhood overall, and sprinkled in some interesting experiences with various issues with crime throughout my childhood, so yeah. �Interviewer: “And what led you to join the military?” Biggest reason was 9/11. I was in ninth grade on September 11th, 2001, and I remember being in my Spanish class in the morning and the principal came over the loudspeaker and said, ‘Teachers, turn on your televisions,’ they each had a – they don’t exist anymore, the box televisions – on a mount in the corner of the room, and I’m sitting there and we’re watching. The first tower had already been hit, and they were replaying some footage and as the newscasters were talking the second tower got hit, so we watched that all unfold. And while I was still in Spanish class, which would’ve been second period, second or third period, one of the towers had fallen – I think maybe both of them had fallen before we left. So they actually kept that on the entire day. Each of the classes we went into, we were watching over and over again the towers get hit, and then the Pentagon, and then just outside of Somerset, Pennsylvania. So that was my biggest motivator for joining the military, I remember going to my last class of the day and walking with a friend of mine Jimmy, and we were talking about what had just happened and I said, ‘I’m gonna join the military, I want to get these guys back.’ And so my initial motivation for joining was revenge. I also realized that being in the situation we were as a family, I wouldn’t have [the] opportunity to go to college unless I got scholarships or loans or.. did something else. So I picked something else. (laughter) (3:41) Interviewer: “And once you joined, what was basic training like?” So I went to basic training between my junior and senior year of high school. They have a program called the Split Op Program, so I joined up, I was seventeen years old, my parents had to co-sign. We sat at the dining room table in my house in Reading, and it was – I’m smiling because the dining room table, the house, if you’ve ever been [in] a rowhome it’s kinda, you open the front door and then you can see straight back through to the kitchen and out the back door. And along the way there’s a hallway with some rooms – so our dining room was one of those hallway rooms, and the table sat out pretty far so you had to kinda turn sideways to get by. And so the recruiter’s sitting there, I’m sitting there, my mom’s crying behind me and my dad is just looking, observing. And I signed, they signed, and that summer I went to basic training, Fort Jackson, South Carolina – at seventeen years old, knowing that I would have to go home and finish high school. It was interesting, it was surreal. You would see movies with basic training experiences and it was – it was a positive experience because it gave me confidence and it helped me feel like part of a team, but at the same time I had never been away from home for that long and I had never had that experience, so it was very unique and it was also – it prepped me for what [lay] ahead. I remember on one particular occasion one of our drill sergeants had just gotten home from Iraq and at the time she went, everyone was issued a body bag. So the idea was – and I know that sounds morbid - but the idea was you would keep your body bag on you so when whomever came across you – wouldn’t have to use their own body bag, they would take it out of your cargo pocket and then they would place the remains in the body bag. So she would carry it around with her, and anytime we messed up she would throw it at us, and she would say ‘You’re dead, you’re dead,’ kinda to help you understand the severity of what they’re training you for. So there was a lot of little experiences like that that were very interesting. And you came home – and again, I had to go through my senior year. I was – I missed the entire summer camp for the football season, I was on the football team – and I missed the entire summer training camp. So we had a new coaching staff that year for my senior year, and they tried to start me on JV since I had missed the entire summer camp, and I wasn’t a big fan of that. So I didn’t play that year, and I worked full-time – well, after school I �worked for Subway as a sandwich artist. And then experienced my senior year as a member of the Army National Guard waiting to go to my advanced training the following season. Interviewer: “And what about your deployment? So where did you serve and what was it like?” (6:49) So my first deployment was in Iraq in 2009, we were based out of Camp Taji, Iraq. So Camp Taji – named because it sits next to the village of Taji – is not too far from Baghdad. So if you’re looking at a map and Baghdad’s in Eastern Central Iraq, northwest of that is Taji. There’s a main road that goes through there into Taji called MSR Tampa so we were there as part of the 56th Stryker Brigade combat team and I was with the 2nd 104th Cavalry. I was the chaplain assistant and what we did over there, we actually experienced multiple transitions throughout the conflict. So we were there and they were still kicking down doors, we transitioned to join operations with the Iraqi army and Iraqi police, and then we transitioned to beginning the process of handing over bases and areas of operation to the Iraqi army and Iraqi police. I was part of Task Force Raven, and in Task Force Raven we had what they call an operating environment, or an area of operations that was primarily rural, but then it’s relatively ‘cause there’s towns within rural areas there. So our Charlie troop was at Falahat, our Bravo troop was at Saab Al Bour, and our headquarters troop was out of Taji. Alpha troop fell under different command while we were there, but we were still.. difficult to explain. They were still part of us, but.. operated under another command, and they were at … our Delta troop were the UAV, or the unmanned aerial vehicles, they were operating out of Camp Taji as well. (8:47) Interviewer: “So do any stories stick out in your memory from your first deployment?” Oh sure. (laughter) A lot. So one of my favorite stories to tell is getting there at first. So we flew from Fort Dix, New Jersey, over to Kuwait. We stopped somewhere in between, I think it was – you know what, I don’t remember. We stopped over at some place in Europe to refuel, and we were flying – when we were flying we had our weapons with us, we didn’t have ammunition on us, but we had weapons with us. And so we landed and.. I want to say it was Amsterdam but I’m not a hundred percent sure, so we landed in Amsterdam, and we had an opportunity – well, we had to get off the plane so they could refuel, and as we’re getting off the plane there’s a specific holding area where we had to stay, we weren’t allowed to venture outside of this holding area. And so left our weapons on the plane, and we left a guard behind to watch the weapons so everyone could go off, use the restroom, smoke break. And we were greeted by their military as we got off the plane, and they were holding – I think they were holding MP5s, their service weapon, guarding us, making sure that we weren’t secretly invading the country. So it was entertaining, but it was eye-opening, you know, I’d never been through something like that. So we flew from there to Kuwait, and we got to Kuwait, stayed at Camp Buehring for a few days, did some training. The first time I ever saw wild camels, when we got there we re-zeroed our weapons because the change in humidity, change in temperature, can adjust the zero on your weapon. And so we got there and we re-zeroed our weapons a couple days in, and we actually had to call a ceasefire to the range because there was a herd of camels crossing behind the berm, and certainly don’t wanna shoot anything that you’re not intending to shoot, but especially in that area there are Bedouins, and sometimes those camels are – they do belong to somebody. You don’t necessarily know that though, so we took extra precautions, but that was an interesting cultural shift for me. Eventually we flew up to Taji, but before we got to Taji we �landed in, it’s called BIAP – Baghdad International Airport. And prior to us arriving in 2009, BIAP was, in an earlier campaign in the Iraq War, BIAP was taken by coalition forces – so U.S., Britain, and so on – as a strategic location, and so we took over that airport, and that became an entry and exit point out of the country. So we flew in there, we stayed a couple of days. We got there, and we immediately got separated onto this base, and we stayed in what were called transitory tents. So it’s a big tent, with cots and you have your one duffel bag that you live out of for a few weeks on your way to Iraq. So I have my duffel bag and my body armor, and this is over the course of about seventy-two hours, and you’re not getting sleep – you’re just up and napping when you can. So we get there, and staying on these tents, or in the tents, in the cots, and all you need to know is where the chow hall is and where the latrine facility is, the trailer – latrine trailer. (12:23) So we get there and immediately we heard similar to an emergency vehicle, type of sirens. And that was our – we didn’t know what was going on, no one told us, we assume that there was some type of IED strike or some injury or something, but that was our introduction to – welcome to Iraq. Ooh – forgot a big transition there. We flew from Kuwait to BIAP in I believe it was a C17 aircraft, Air Force plane. I was – I was in the jump seats alongside the side, and there’s no.. I don’t think there’s any – you know, commercial planes have pressurized cabins? This didn’t, I don’t think. Whatever it was, I fell asleep and I woke up to – you ever see a movie where a plane’s nosediving and it makes that sound like it’s about to crash? Yeah. So I woke up to that sound, and us descending very rapidly and I was like, ‘Oh my god, we’re hit,’ so I panicked, and I slapped to the left and right – I don’t know who was sitting next to me, but I hit ‘em both. And they were doing what’s called a combat dive, so those planes move very slowly and [it’s] not necessarily difficult to hit ‘em with [an] RPG or air defense missiles. So they do what’s called a combat dive, so they descend faster than you’re used to as a way to divert getting hit. So I woke up to that, so my heart was already pumping, I was – you know, ‘Here we are, we’re in combat,’ turns out it was just standard procedure. So fast forward, we leave BIAP on a Chinook and we go to Taji, where we’re gonna be stationed for the next year or so. When they took off, again, the crew didn’t share this with anybody, but we grabbed all our gear, we ran onto the Chinook, we strapped in, and as we ascended – and this is all done at nighttime. But as we ascended, they shot off flares out of the back of the Chinook, because if there’s any type of heat-seeking round those flares will take care of that and they won’t hit the aircraft. So again they didn’t tell us that, and so I’m sitting in the seat you know, ready to go, and I see these flares go out the back and you know there’s a sound to ‘em, there’s a pop to ‘em, and so I was like ‘Here we go again, we’re getting shot at.’ Nope. Not at all. They were just sending the flares out. (15:00) So we land at Taji, and we’re all wearing all of our full battle gear, body armor, and we’re like, we’re ready to go, coming off the ramp just ready for combat. And our company commander who was on the torch party, meaning he was in a couple days ahead of us, he greeted us at the flight line with no body armor, no cover, and a big smile and he said, ‘Hey guys!’ Like nah, nah, this isn’t what I saw in the movies. So we got settled in, we got out room assignments and we got a chance to finally get some sleep. So that transition in the country is significant because in my twenty – how old was I then? I had just turned twenty-two. In my twenty-two-year-old brain, I’m ready for what they taught me in basic training, I’m ready for what I’ve seen in the movies, I’m ready for all the combat they promised me in the train-up period. That didn’t happen, but I was still at a very elevated state. I was still at a very – my adrenaline was pumping, I was looking for something to happen, and it just never happened. So it never really came down off of �that. It was always waiting for something to happen. We didn’t have – I personally did not have a lot of action in Iraq, I was very fortunate. I went on a lot of missions with the chaplain, we went to visit our soldiers, we had our fair share of time outside of the wire but I never had any type of significant engagement at all, I was very fortunate. But I was always looking for it, I was always waiting for it to happen. Cause in my training, they promised me it was gonna happen. So the – lot of those types of stories, just being out on a mission, getting ready to go, waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to shoot at you, waiting for someone to try to blow you up, everything is suspicious, everyone is suspicious, you assume that everybody’s the enemy. Again, it’s part of how they train you but you also don’t know. So there was a lot of that. (17:16) For me, my most significant experience in Iraq was on Easter Sunday. In 2009 it was April 12th, 2009. For the chaplain and I, that’s like our big day. Easter and Christmas, it’s like, you know, it’s our time to shine. So we had all these events planned for Easter Sunday, we were gonna do what’s called a sunrise service, meaning that you literally are having your service was the sun is coming up behind you. So we did our sunrise service on base there, on Camp Taji. And everything went well, it was very nice, and our next stop was gonna be Charlie troop to offer the Easter message and communion. So we moved back to our office area, we got our gear on, we got ready to go. And we go to the motorpool where the Strykers are, the Strykers were the vehicles that we travelled in. And the operating procedure every time you go out on a mission is you have to do what’s called a ramp brief. And a ramp brief is an operational brief for the troops leaving the wire. In this brief you talk about things like reaction to contact, so if we get contact this is our course of action. If there’s a casualty, this is our course of action. Here’s your radio frequencies, here’s the order of the vehicles. Ramp briefs take a while, they can take up to an hour, usually not. About a half hour or so. And the whole time you’re getting briefs on what to expect and how to prepare for all the what ifs. Part of that brief usually includes a brief from the S2, the intelligence section, and they tell you what the potential threats are in the area you’re traveling [in]. You have a main route, you have an alternative route, and you have a couple of other – ‘it got really bad’ routes, this is how we’re going. So we did that, we’re ready to load the vehicles, we started to load the vehicles I should say, the chaplain and I were heading into one of the vehicles with red platoon Charlie troop, and they affectionately called people like us strap hangers, there’s literal straps that you hang on to like a subway when you’re just the passenger, you’re not part of the platoon. So they like to joke with us and it was, it really was a term of endearment. They liked having us on the vehicles with them because the thought was, ‘Well if the chaplain’s with us then we’re safe.’ Well, we’re loading up on the vehicles and we get a notification that the command sergeant major, command sergeant major White, he wanted to go with us when we visited Charlie troop, and there was another convoy heading out in just a couple of hours. So we sent a message that myself, and chaplain Myers should stay behind, and wait for the next convoy out so that he could go with us. (20:08) So we got off, we went back to our office, we unloaded our gear, and no sooner did we get our gear down, then we got a call over the radio that red platoon had been hit. And the air was red, which means that helicopters can’t fly, so our primary mode of medical evacuation when there is a casualty is [a] Blackhawk helicopter called a medevac. And they come to the site, they pick up the casualties, and they take ‘em back to the – whatever base is closest that can handle their level of care. So on Taji, we were a level two trauma facility. Which at the time, meant that we could handle most things minus major surgery. So what they did was they casevaced the casualties back to the base, and what that means is they just took a truck on scene, turned it �into an ambulance, and sent ‘em back to base. So chaplain Myers went right away to the level two facility, I went up to the CQ or the orderly building for headquarters troop to give accountability to the first sergeant and the XO. And so I said, ‘Sir, this happened, we’re going to go check it out.’ So in the chaplain corps we have, I’ll call it a motto for lack of a better term, and our motto, our mantra is to nurture the living, care for the wounded, and honor the dead. The way we do that is when there is an injury or someone is expectant, meaning that they’re presumed to be dead soon, it’s our job to be there with that soldier, to provide them with comfort so that they’re not dying alone. So this happened, we went to the level two facility, and I got to the parking lot of the level two facility and the medic there, PFC Mayo, he was I think maybe nineteen at the time and he was holding – the ramp to the Stryker was down – he was holding a ball of gauze in his hands, and there was blood dripping out of the back of the Stryker, and the gauze he was holding was bloody. I ran up to the ramp and I looked at everything, I looked up at him, he was crying and trying to – he was shaking. And he was trying to clean up, get ready for the next one, you know, I would imagine that he really wasn’t sure what to do at that moment, neither was I. So I wanted to say something to him, I couldn’t talk. I just couldn’t talk. So I ran into the trauma facility, soon as I walked into the door I could hear screams. It’s hard to describe the scream, it was a moan and a scream all at once. I still had no idea what was going on at this point, and I had to drop [my] weapon off at the check-in, and then I’m getting closer and closer and I run back to the room and then I get to the room they’re being worked on, and I see everything. It’s almost like a faucet, the flow of blood coming from – the primary casualty was Miller. He was the gunner on the truck, and his legs were really banged up. His legs were mangled pretty badly, there was a steady stream of blood coming out of his leg dripping onto the floor, and it was a linoleum floor kind of like this, and next to him, on the bed next to him was Baldwin, the driver. Baldwin had taken a very significant laceration to his back from a piece of shrapnel. Miller had a bolt sticking out of his leg in addition to the other part of his other leg pretty much just hanging on. It was pretty gruesome, I had never seen anything like that – again, I was twenty-two years old. It was the first time I had ever been exposed to anything like that. And the medics are there working on him, and just – everything they could think of to try to stop the bleeding, there were already two torniquets on his leg, he was still bleeding. They were shoving gauze into the wound… how graphic am I allowed to get? (24:46) Interviewer: “As much as you’re comfortable with.” Alright. They were literally, their hand was inside of his leg trying to pack it with gauze to get it to stop, the type of gauze they have is called combat gauze and it has QuikClot in it, which is a compound that helps congeal the blood, and try to get it to stop bleeding to keep him alive. He was combat stripped, which means that he was on the table, he was nude, and he was just getting worked on. Finally they got the bleeding to stop a little bit, they had already given him a ton of morphine and he of course was asking for more, he was in a lot of pain. Couldn’t do it, and so he was still screaming. I’m standing outside of the room still at this point, I’m just, you know, mouth open just watching. Trying not to get in the way. And then a medic just kind of slaps a clipboard on my chest and says, ‘Help us fill this out.’ I look at it, it’s his casualty feeder card. What that is — demographics and point of injury, and extent of injury. Information you get on the casualty because the assumption is by the time they get onto the medevac they may not be conscious and the people on the medevac, the flight crew, flight surgeon, needs to have that information to keep them alive in transit to the bigger hospital. So I walk up to Miller’s head and I start to tell him, ‘Hey, this is Specialist Grant, I’m really sorry I have to ask you these questions,’ cause it was like, you know, his social, date of birth, name, things that he really wasn’t concerned about answering at that time. So he did, to the best of his ability, and I filled it out and �I left. And there, you know there’s a cleaning crew in there trying to mop up the blood so no one slips on it and falls — things that I still think about today that I can’t really forget are the smell that I walked [into] there. It was a very, it was a very interesting smell. Combination of iodine and other stuff. But the scream, it was — it wasn’t like you see in the movies, it wasn’t a scream of terror or wasn’t… it was just unique. And I can recall it in my head, I can’t replicate it. But at some point, the air cleared and they were able to bring a medevac onto the base, there was a helicopter pad right outside of the hospital. So we got the notification they were ready to go, and I was responsible for helping carry Baldwin the driver onto the medevac, and chaplain helped carry Miller onto the medevac — that was the last time I saw either of them. They’re both alive, thank god, Miller ended up — through multiple surgeries and over the course of his healing journey — he ended up getting a leg amputated as a result. (27:48) And then there were other injuries from that truck, the platoon leader, Lieutenant …, he and his brother are twins and they’re probably the… some of the best soldiers I’ve ever interacted with. The one brother had taken shrapnel to his neck, and just to tell a little bit about their character, he took shrapnel to his neck and he refused to leave the scene where the explosion was because he wanted to stay there with the rest of his platoon. I believe he got out, but his brother’s still serving. But hell of a leader, and a great man. And so we caught up with him later that day, you know he downplayed it and he said, ‘I’m fine,’ he ended up getting awarded a bronze star with a V device for valor for that day. So that was my ‘big T’ trauma in Iraq, and again I didn’t get shot at, I didn’t get blown up, thank god I didn’t have to deal with that stuff. But that was very profound for me, there were other events throughout the course of that day, later that night our base got mortared. I was nowhere near it so again, no big deal. But the most profound impact of that for me was it happened on Easter Sunday, and that it was really a… it was the point in the mission where things got real. Like, you know, ‘we could die.’ And so come to find out later that the truck that got hit was actually the truck that chaplain Myers and I were supposed to be on, and that was a very sobering experience to think that.. cause there’s picture of the vehicle after the aftermath, and all you see is a ball of flame and black smoke — there’s nothing left. So to think that we barely missed that explosion, remember, the convoy was about to take off just as we got taken off the mission, and so I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to think that within a window of about a minute or so, either direction, we were either on that truck and dead or not on that truck and safe. So those are two very profound thoughts that I had after the fact — Easter Sunday and near death. After that things got a little more serious, our posture changed in our area, meaning that we took a more defensive — well, offensive posture. So that was probably the most interesting experience… interesting is the wrong word, that was the most traumatic experience for me in Iraq. But there were also a lot of really entertaining experiences, there were also a lot of really funny stories and lifelong friendships that you know, nothing can break. So I’m grateful for the experience, I wasn’t back then. I am now. And just cause I don’t want to be too depressing I’ll end on a funny story. (31:13) So we — there’s a lot of dust in Iraq, just everywhere. Everywhere there’s dust. So it’s really hard to keep your things clean, and one of the biggest basic soldier tasks is to keep your weapon clean at all times because if the time comes ever, god forbid, that you have to use your weapon, you want it to be functioning. And when there’s dirt in your weapon it does not function properly, it malfunctions. So I had just finished detailing my weapon, I had completely field stripped it, had finished cleaning my weapon, it was pristine. I had put on a new uniform that day and the reason that’s significant is because we didn’t typically change our uniforms for weeks or �so. For me at Taji it wasn’t that bad, I could wear – I could wear a uniform for like four or five days and send it to get washed and I was fine. For the guys out in the field, they didn’t have a choice. They had to wear the same crusty uniform day after day after day until they could come back in. So I had just put on a new uniform after about a week of wearing the same old uniform, and in 130°F heat [it] gets pretty disgusting after a while. So I was clean, my weapon was clean, I was feeling really good, and my chaplain and our S4 – Captain Harry Diaz – also very good friend of mine. The three of us, we called ourselves the three amigos, we were heading over to have lunch together. Now to get to the dining facility where lunch was it was about a half a mile walk each way, right. Really not that big of a deal, but… it’s significant, cause sometimes you weren’t that hungry, so you didn’t [want] to walk for a half mile to get food. Today was the day, I was clean, my weapon was clean, we were going to get chow. Now outside of each of the buildings was an air compression unit. Saying that wrong, condenser I think it’s called. Anyway, the box outside of the house for your central air system, they had those over there. But how they would clean those is they would come up alongside ‘em and they would hit the side of the box and it would shoot out all the dust that collected in there. So my chaplain thought it would be funny — and it was, just not for me at the time — my chaplain thought it would be funny to kick it at the right time as I was walking by to get it to cover me in dust. So we’re walking by, he kicks it, and unbeknownst to us they hadn’t cleaned these things in a while so there was a lot of dust. I – they said they looked back, I literally disappeared. The dust was so thick and so heavy they could not see me anymore. And as soon as the dust settled, if you’ve ever seen the movie The Sandlot and the vacuum cleaner blows up as they’re trying to retrieve the ball, and the engineer brothers — the dust, he gets covered and caked in that dust — that’s kinda what I looked like. All of me was caked in dust. I was so angry (laughter) that he had done that I… we went to the dfac and like, you know like a child I got my food and I sat on the other side of the dfac, I refused to sit with them and I ate with my head down the whole time cause I thought he was such a jerk for doing that. And the funny thing was, he couldn’t stop laughing. He couldn’t even stop laughing long enough to apologize, so they got a big kick out of it and that’s a positive memory that I have from that, not to mention again the friends and the experiences overall. So lot more stories, but I’ll leave it at that. (35:00) Interviewer: “Okay, what about your second deployment, so where was that and do you have any stories you’d like to share?” Sure, Jordan was a lot different, Jordan was a beautiful country, what I like to tell people is Jordan is just a great place and has some interesting neighbors. So we were really blessed to be there, had an opportunity to interact with the Jordanians, not just their military and their police but also the citizens and it was just a really positive experience overall. We had a chance to be out in the economy and to interact with people, and it was very… very different deployments, two very different experiences, and so it was almost redeeming in a way because it helped us understand that not everybody in that part of the world is trying to kill you, not everybody in that part of the world is a bad guy, far from it — very few people in that part of the world are involved in those types of activities, and by and large the rest of the community is just trying to do what we do, make a living, provide for their family. Sense of mission, task, and purpose, and that’s just where they are in the world. So yeah, really positive experience, got to see a lot of really great things. There’s a lot of biblical history in Jordan — it sits right next to Israel. And so for the chaplain and chaplain assistant it’s like a dream come true, you’re literally visiting sites that are talked about in the Bible, and because of the history of that region, talked about… throughout the tour talked about… throughout the Quran, there’s just so much, and it’s all happening at the same time, so it’s beautiful. I had deployed again with chaplain Myers — �now he and I have a history, and this is probably the best story of all the stories. He was the pastor at my church when I was growing up, and so we go back farther than the military. So ever since I was ten years old, Schaun was the pastor at my church and our families know each other well, we’re good friends, and he’s — he and I have been on two deployments together, we’ve worked together professionally in the military but more importantly we’re great friends. And being able to experience that with him was fantastic because you could really appreciate it a little bit more as you’re sharing the experience with somebody. So we got to see the Jordan River, we got to see Jericho from across the Jordan River, we got to see Mount Nebo which is where Moses stood and overlooked the promised land, we got to go to some towns that had Roman ruins. Some of the most comprehensive or eclectic Roman ruins outside of Rome. There’s a town called Jerash, and Jerash actually has the most well-preserved Roman ruins in the world outside of Rome. So it was just [an] incredible experience, interesting is.. the city of Amman, the capital city in Jordan used to be called Philadelphia and it was the original Philadelphia. But stuff like that, the amphitheaters… they have clay pots, broken shards of clay pots laying on the ground like we have gravel in the States, it’s just — it’s there from the Byzantine era. And so a lot of history there, and I won’t say that the deployment was easy, far from it. Again we were in a peaceful place, with an ally of ours. And we were supporting operations in other parts of the world, so there were things that were happening around us but again, nothing ‘big T’ traumatic. So yeah, really overall just a really great experience in Jordan for the second deployment. Interviewer: “And what about when you got back from your deployment, so how did you adjust to life at home?” (39:12) For the first one not well. (laughter) Yeah. There are a few folks that had to experience me after I got home from my first deployment that didn’t get the best version of me. It was hard to come home, coming home was bittersweet. At first it was just a celebration, it was euphoric, I saw grass again for the first time in a year. It was gorgeous. Everyone was excited to see me, all my friends who were still going to college while I was deployed, wrapping up their college careers and were just all really excited to see each other, and rightfully so. I would go out, we would go out and party, we’d go out and tell stories, people would ask me about my deployment, you know, ‘What was it like?’ At first I started to tell them stories, I started to tell them things that I saw, things that I did. And I watched their face as I was telling these stories, and I watched them slowly detach. It was not as interesting to them as it was to me, maybe it was… too much, I don’t know. But what that did for me, again, at the age of twenty-two, was that made me feel like… you know, life for me stopped for a year. For, when I was continued. And it should not have stopped for them — I chose this, they didn’t. But in my head I’m thinking, ‘I feel really alone.’ And that was the most prevalent theme when I got home, is I felt really alone. And that loneliness turned into anger, and I struggled with anger for a long time, I ended up going to therapy for over two years to try to figure out how to make sense of what just happened. I was engaged during the deployment, we ended up getting married and unfortunately — in large part because of my difficult transition home and you know, life happens and people grow apart, we were both very young — it did not work out, we ended up getting a divorce. And there was again, you know, she had to deal with the worst parts of me coming home, there was a culminating incident where the SWAT team came to my house to pick me up and that… that’s about the point where we both agreed that it’s time for us to move in different directions. She was concerned for my safety, she thought that I was going to kill myself, and I’ll spare you the details but that’s what she felt at the time and based on how I was described to the local police department I think maybe they thought they were coming to pick up Chuck Norris or something. �I’m not that serious of a guy, but… they rolled in deep, they rolled in with their whole SWAT team and they came, picked me up and that was difficult for me for a number of reasons. But the biggest reason is because one of the SWAT officers that was putting me in cuffs was a soldier that I had deployed with to Iraq just a few years prior. And I remember very vividly he came up to the porch — there was a team of four of them, now I was flanked, they had very good tactics. I was flanked on either side, there were some in my neighbor’s yard and I lived in a cul-de-sac so you know, even though it was midnight everyone was watching and curious what was happening in their peaceful neighborhood. (42:56) So the team of four in front of me were pointing their ARs right at my chest and they were approaching me, I had my hands up in surrender, and they put the cuffs on me and turned me around and one of the SWAT officers rolled his mask up and said, ‘Sergeant Grant are you okay?’ And I smiled, cause I didn’t know what else to do. But we were fighting the same enemy just a few years ago and now all of a sudden I felt like I was the enemy. Now this isn’t his fault at all, he was just doing his job. And thankfully he was there because he helped tell the other folks that ‘Hey, this doesn’t sound like him, I think this is you know, let’s—’ so they took it easy on me. But that was very surreal, and reflecting on it after the fact it was very… very painful to deal with. That was the point after my Iraq deployment where I lost my last shred of dignity and pride in wearing the uniform. I literally pulled my uniform out of my closet and I put it in a box and I just remember saying, ‘I don’t even want to look at this thing anymore.’ I just, I felt so ashamed because it had turned into service in Iraq, and in my own head I was you know, doing a noble thing, serving my country… to being arrested and taken to a psych hospital for evaluation. I felt like I… I didn’t think I could fall any further than that, and so I was very, very impacted by that experience. But again, grateful for it because it helped motivate me to get to where I eventually got to, and during that time the SWAT officers came to me in late April of 2013, and it was the four-year — just after the four-year anniversary of the Easter Sunday trauma, and it was two weeks before my finals — excuse me, two weeks before graduation. The week of my finals at Temple University, so there was a lot of stress in my life at that point, and that just kind of added to it a little bit. (laughter) But we made it, graduated, and thankfully all is well. (45:33) So that was my initial transition. Eventually it turned into me recognizing and me coming to terms with the idea that I can find life, and I can find purpose after Iraq — I don’t have to just be the Iraq war veteran, I don’t just have to be the guy who served, I can be Phil and that can be a part of who I am. And that’s where it is, it’s a part of who I am, it’s a very important part of who I am — but it’s not all of who I am. And so throughout the journey of getting my undergraduate degree and my graduate degree, becoming a professional, having a new family — my wife who’s also a veteran, we met in the Army. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet her had none of this happened, and so [I’m] very grateful for that. Her and I have three beautiful daughters together, and I have what I have today because of what I went through. And so I’m so grateful for those experiences and now I can sit back and say the transition went exactly how it was supposed to go. If you would’ve asked me about five years ago I might’ve had a different story for you. Interviewer: “Yeah, so overall how would you describe your experience with the military, do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to share?” �Love it. Absolutely love it. I’ve been afforded so many opportunities because of the military, because of the Army. I’ve been able to see things and do things that I couldn’t have even dreamed of — again, I met my wife in the military, I got to — for the last seventeen years of my time in the military I’ve gotten to meet some incredible people and do some really cool things. And I’m so glad that I made that decision. I was able to go to college, I was able to get my master’s degree because of the military. I don’t believe that if I would’ve gone to college right out of high school I would’ve done very well, I was too immature. I needed the military to prepare me to be a good student, to prepare me for that journey. So I’m so grateful that everything worked out the way it did, and after Easter Sunday I was really angry at God for what happened. You know, as a Christian Easter Sunday is the holiday that legitimizes our faith, if that didn’t exist there wouldn’t be Christianity. And so I was very upset with God that that terrible thing happened on Easter Sunday, you know, of all the days it could’ve happened why then? But one of the most beneficial things that happened to me because of the military was after that event I realized that you know, I came very close to dying that day — or at least seriously injured, I don’t know what would’ve happened. But that was an example of you know, that one minute window where things could’ve turned out very differently, where the series of events happened the way that they did, I mean in my mind there’s no other way to explain that other than divine intervention, right. And so in my mind I was pulled from that vehicle, the chaplain was pulled from that vehicle because it wasn’t our time. After I came to realize that a few years after coming home, the impact of that was that it strengthened my faith and it improved my spiritual health significantly. Had I not had that experience, I wouldn’t have had that growth. And so I thank the military for a lot of things, but that’s probably the most important thing that’s happened to me in the last seventeen years. Yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, thank you!” Thanks so much for doing this, I appreciate it. Interviewer: “Thanks for coming in, thanks for sharing your stories.” Thanks for letting me! Appreciate it. [END] � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GrantP2377V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Grant, Philip R. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-06 Title A name given to the resource Grant, Philip (Interview transcript and video), 2021 Description An account of the resource Philip Grant was born on November 18th, 1986, and grew up in rural Reading, Pennsylvania. He attended basic training for the Army National Guard between his junior and senior year of high school, completed his advanced training afterward, and was first deployed to Iraq in 2009. He belonged to the 56th Stryker Brigade, 2nd 104th Cavalry as a chaplain assistant, and was based out of Camp Taji during his Iraq service. On April 12th, 2009, Easter Sunday, Grant and the chaplain were busy attending to religious services and were intending on visiting their Charlie troop to offer the Easter message and communion. Just before they left, they received a message that the platoon they would have been traveling with had been hit. As part of their chaplain corps duties the two went to help attend to the casualties, Grant witnessed his first gruesome combat injuries when helping the wounded soldiers and considers this incident to be the most traumatic event he experienced during his service. Despite this traumatic event, Grant still made many meaningful friendships during this time and maintained a positive outlook overall. After returning from service, however, Grant struggled with feelings of disconnection from the life he had before, which turned into a sense of deep loneliness and anger. His personal life and relationships were negatively affected by this, and Grant reached his lowest point when a SWAT team came to his house in order to be admitted to a psychological hospital for evaluation. After struggling with the role the military played in his life, learning how to live with it, and recognizing it as an integral part of who he was, Grant was able to attend therapy and come to terms with both his identity and the future he wanted for himself. His second deployment was spent in Jordan, which proved to be an overwhelmingly positive experience for Grant. He was able to interact with the locals and experience many of the significant historical sites within the country, which held even more significance considering his faith and role as a chaplain’s assistant in the Army. Grant met his wife in the military, graduated with his master’s degree, and is raising three daughters. Grant is incredibly thankful for the time he spent in the military, and believes that both the positive and negative experiences were worth it and a necessary part of his development as a person. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Griffiths, Elle (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/91aa62f3f40bcc75310a5834ebdb59a6.mp4 2e265651c6d80f3372956ffafbb2ff80 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6642921ba39e3fa84227de5b861be8cd.pdf 5e992f76c8c18166876153794fc02be4 PDF Text Text Goodman, Donald Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: World War II Interviewee’s Name: Donald Goodman Length of Interview: (1:12:55) Interviewed by: Koty Leroy Rollins Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “Hello this is a joint production between the Grand Valley State Veterans History Program, WK T.V voices, and the U.S.S Silversides Museum. My name is Koty Leroy Rollins and I’m here with Donald Goodman of Muskegon, Michigan. So let’s start off early I guess, your childhood, what made you sort of want to join the military?” Well I not only remember Pearl Harbor, I remember when Hitler invaded Poland but I didn’t want to join then I was only six years old then but as far as– I grew up in World War II and I had an uncle who went in but even then I didn’t have any enormous desire to go in. (1:18) I went to school to graduate– Oh, if I can wander from that for a minute– I’m gonna– Interviewer: “That’s okay, go ahead.” I was going to say my overall impression in the Army, when I go see people now and I wear my shirt or I wear the hat and they say “Thank you for your service.” I want to say “Thank you for your Army.” Because the Army did far more for me than I ever did for it and when I joined– Why did I join? You know I’m not even sure why I joined, the Korean war started in summer of 1950, I graduated from high school in 1949 and I went on to Navy Pier which is the University of Illinois, Chicago branch. I was there that was supposed to be a two year college I actually got three years out of it, in the summer I was working in a chemical factory, in the control lab of a chemical factory otherwise I had been working, I’ve been working since I was about 12. So I was going to finish– I was ready to join the Air Force when I was just ready to turn 20 in 1950 and I’d gone there to the Air Force, signed the papers, ready to leave the next week, got appendicitis. They took the appendix and then the Air Force came and said “Where’s little �Goodman, Donald Donnie?” “Well just had the appendix–” “Well we don’t want him for six months.” Said “Okay.” So I thought I might as well go for another semester, amazingly just then in January on my birthday I met this cute little gal, I said “You know I can’t go in the military, I might as well finish up my third year.” And in the meantime– This is in Chicago Heights, Illinois and she was from Chicago, so we dated and through that winter, that was the first part of 1952 and I got to thinking you know the Air Force is four years and the Army’s only two. So I walked into the Army and it wasn’t hard for them to talk me into it, so I joined, left, and then in June the Air Force came and knocked on my door again and my mother was there and they said, you know “Does Donnie want to come out and play?” And well no, she said “He’s in the Army.” They said “Well we’re not gonna go and get him.” As far as why did I join I think I joined, well for one thing I didn’t want to waste any more money for college, it was my money, it was my dad’s money but also because everybody’s gone. My mother said “Do you wanna have a going away party?” I said “Who would come? Everybody I know, Skerwanski’s in the Air Force, Van Buskert’s in the Army, Otto Bomberg is in the Air Force.” Everybody I could name was gone and they either dodged the draft by enlisting in something or else they were drafted. So I went in– Interviewer: “Okay, so–” (4:54) But so I went in and to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri and that’s where I went through basic training, I said in the beginning that I owe the Army much more than anybody owes me, if you went through my high school yearbook, end of high school– After four years, let’s see what did I do? Was I on the football team? Well not likely. Was I in basketball? No, in fact the only thing behind my name after four years, I belong to the auto bond club and I wrote for the college– Or for the high school newspaper. If you looked at what they did when I finished 40 years of teaching I was– I had been chief negotiator, contract negotiator for year after year after year for two different schools, for a public school system and for the college, I was grievance chairman over and over, they elected me or appointed, whatever they did, the distinguished faculty and as a matter of fact in 75 years of college they had only bestowed that on like six other people, I think I was number seven and Jack Branch was number eight. So why? Because the Army, they helped me find who I was and they did it, well the way they usually do things. When I got in in �Goodman, Donald the beginning for some reason I had it in my mind I’m gonna teach you people how to soldier, although I didn’t, I knew how to shoot a rifle that’s all and I thought “I am gonna be the best soldier.” At the end of 16 weeks of basic with eight weeks infantry and eight weeks engineering, the training sergeants picked out four trainees to compete for best trainee, I had no idea they were looking at me. So there I was, but I never made better than four so I thought later, I really ought to have a pin made that says “I’m number four!” Out of 250 that wasn’t bad. Interviewer: “That’s pretty high.” So they– There’s one thing that was surprise– If you look at the pictures and find pictures of our outfits this is 1952, they look totally different from anything four years before or in World War II because when Truman took over– Truman became president in 1945 April when FDR died and in 1948 he integrated the Army’s– All of the armed forces, so you see pictures of all these trainees together in the barracks, scrubbing down and doing all that and there’s blacks all over the place, they were coloreds in those days but when I got on permanent duty, permanent cadre as a company clerk, we had some strange here and there. (8:27) Some of the southerners “I aint taking a shower with him.” Or “I ain’t sleeping next to him.” You wanna bet? They– So some of them had a hard bringing up to get used to that. Anyway in basic training there was one night that kind of stuck– It does stick in my mind and I can’t imagine how some of these guys underwent real combat, in this basic training thing what we did we were– It was supposed to be a commando raid and we were supposed to cross the big piney and take a hill. Well we got eight blanks in our M-1s and we’re supposed to be quietly paddling these boats that held about a dozen guys across the river and then sneak up the hill side and not bother– Of course the first person to– First boat made enough noise that the machine guns up on top were going full blast by the time we got there and you were supposed to push this boat, it held about ten people– Ten guys, push it out into the water and then pile in and paddle across, we had no training in paddling, there was no instruction on paddling at all, we were supposed there, land the boat, they had one person in charge of piloting– In charge of the boat to steer it I guess and he was going to stay with the boat and we were supposed to run up this hill and shoot eight shots to show our good intentions and then turn around and run back and get in the same boat. Well you got in any boat you could, after that– To make it more realistic they were using quarter pound blocks of nitrous �Goodman, Donald starch and they would cap the fuse, and fuses work well even under the water, this is like– Probably has the same speed as dynamite, I don’t know maybe 13,000, 13,000 feet per second. Anyway it was not as fun– Anyway these were little blocks, they looked like– Kind of looked like a stick of butter and they– Then they throw it, they were out there in the water and go boom! Whoosh! And boom! Whoosh! All around and with the machine guns up there [machine gun noises] and all the noise and so we heard boom! Whoosh! Boom! Whoosh! And then we heard Womp! And what was that, well it seems the boat in front of us, that’s supposed to cross in front of us, the guys had hauled it out into the water, piled in but they piled in too soon and it went down and dragged on the river bottom and so they could– Half of them jumped out and tried to pull it, the commanding– The sergeant who was running these things and throwing the nitrous starch in the water he grabbed them and pulled them and they turned the boat so it was all cockamamie– Yeah that’s what it sounded like. Anyway– I didn’t know we had sound effects here. They got turned around and they’re paddling, some are paddling this side and that side and I think some were paddling in the air and they twisted around and went right over one of those charges. Interviewer: “Oh no.” (12:00) So instead of boom! Whoosh! It womp! Cause it blew the bottom out, and there they are screaming cause I imagine some of them had broken legs by that time, and the motor is there we can see it not that far ahead of us, floating, twisting around, and they’re screaming cause they’re hurt and some of them are still paddling and the boat is sinking because it’s got a big hole blown in it and I just remember the insanity. Oh I know we were gonna stop and help them and the sergeant is yelling to us “You’re on a mission, you don’t stop you’re on a mission!” So the whole insanity of the reality of the high explosives and the reality of these guys hurt and the insanity of the shots, blanks. It’s stuck in my mind, I still think of it, I can’t imagine what these guys who have been through real combat are like because that’s the one night in basic training I remember. Interviewer: “They didn’t–” �Goodman, Donald So I don’t– Oh we got back, we went up and shot our eight and [gun noises] and then came back and when we got back they were already there was an officer standing on top of some platform and he was saying “We have never had an accident in this operation before.” But they did, people did get hurt, they– And one thing that ticked me off about the Korean– The records of the Korean War, they tell you– And I don’t want to downplay Vietnam, Vietnam they said they had killed 58,000, in the Korean war they’re divided, they’re still arguing about how many got killed in accidents and maneuvers. They say “Yeah 36,000 got killed in Korea.” But there’s arguments about whether there was actually 18,000 killed in maneuvers. I, as company clerk, I can’t remember ever filling out a death certificate, I sent a lot of people to the hospital mostly with ammonia but I ran into a couple of other accidents when I was a company clerk, they bring people in. Oh my God, a friend of ours had the craziest kind of accident imaginable, he must have been one of the last people who suffered from a poison gas. So what had happened was this, he was– Ellsworth was his name, great guy, he lived– Later on when Betty and I were living on the coast, I got married in the Army, and we– I think his trailer was right down from ours, anyway or poor Dan Ellsworth, he’d been through Korea and he has a number of medals, he wanted to make– Wanted to make the Army a career, fine. (14:53) Then he went to skip troops and learned to ski, and then he came to– They shipped him to Fort Leonard Wood, God knows why, and okay he wanted to be in the training part and wanted to teach, and they put him in CBR, chemical, biological and radiological training. Okay, we had to go– Besides going through the gas chamber, tear gas chamber which everybody remembers real well, they also took the trainees and ran them through light concentrations of other poison gas and I think a phosgene and mustard and I don’t know what other one. Okay, his job was to set one of these off, he had a tomb of– And I think it was Phosgene, I’m not sure, and then he had two blasting caps taped to it and they were wired to each other and then the long wires– And I think they were maybe 15 feet long and he was supposed to put that out there where– Set it off and as soon as– While the stuff was still in the air they’d run the trainees through this so they could smell poison gas and see what it was like. He pulled the shunt on the caps, the– Do you know anything about explosives? Interviewer: “Not much.” �Goodman, Donald Okay they’ve got the blasting– Got a blasting cap, looks like about half of a wooden pencil, then it got– And that’s a high explosive and when you– And what– And it’s got two wires and of course the wire when electricity comes it will spark and set off the pin and so you should never pull that shunt until you’re just about ready. Well he was in a hurry and he was carrying this tube of poison gas with two blasting caps, fortunately he wasn’t pinching it he was just holding it lightly, he pulled the shunt and walked across the field and must have picked up static electricity because all of a sudden bam! There he is with his fingers blown back and flopping and he squatted down then and actually sat on his heel, which was smeared with mustard gas that had been there from whatever the last one was. So he went into the hospital as a victim of poison gas and they had to fix his– Try and save his fingers, which they did, and then take care of this thing back here and every lieutenant around would come there and say “Half mass soldier, I want to see it, I’ve never seen a mustard gas blister.” So have to pull his skivvies down, and so I talked to him, went to visit him in the hospital and I said “Is that embarrassing?” “Nah.” He said “It could be but I like to shove my but in the face of those damned officers.” He said “I’m hoping for a major.” But he never got one. Interviewer: “The best out of a bad situation right?” (18:08) I never did know what happened because I got graduated, yeah I got discharged before. Interviewer: “So you were in Fort Leonard Wood from what dates?” From June 1952 to June 1954 and after basic they sent me to Company C’s headquarters, and I was like– The time they because the time they had me opening there I was a company clerk, their company clerk had been promoted to first sergeant, and then we got another first sergeant. What happens– I don’t know if you’ve talked to anybody in a training outfit but by the time you get through, with most training outfits the way they change personnel so fast, you should really read Catch-22 because if you read Catch-22 you find that the one who’s running the entire war is PFC Wintergreen and so much– So many of our outfits were run by the company clerk and the supply sergeant and that’s what happened, you wound up– Even if you only had one strike, you wound up taking on jobs, answering questions, filling out forms, signing form and in effect– �Goodman, Donald Interviewer: “You were running it.” I looked at– With my first we had– But I had a really good company commander at first, then he got transferred to someplace else, then I can’t remember who followed up but we had– He had brought in this big World War II hero who was one nasty– So God he was mean and you could see he had ghost stripes, in other words he had been sergeant at one time and he was no more so he got busted for something and we– Captain Gollenstein got him another stripe, so he’s there, we always call him sergeant. He gave me stories of World War II like I don’t want this guy on my side but I don’t want him on the other side either and so he was– He’d come in drunk, really drunk, and the meet up troops– Meet up trainees, we got 250– When I got assigned there as company clerk we had 250 civilians every eight weeks and run them through, teach them infantry basics and how to salute and march and so on and then the next– Then we’d get– They’d be gone and we’d have the next bunch the next day and so I was processing a lot of that stuff but I remember this one sergeant, our first sergeant, and he was standing in front of me just like you’re right there and I was doing whatever and I look at him and he says “I hear you’re gonna testify against me at my court martial.” (21:20) I said “Those are my orders sergeant.” And he leaned forward and he said “Make it good I want to get out of this fucking Army anyway I can.” Well I didn’t have to tell them much, I could testify to his being AWOL, I could’ve cover it up, the AWOL I’d done that for people before but he didn’t want that. I didn’t have to say anything, the trainees that testified against him were enough, he got a less than honorable discharge and away he went, and he was replaced by a friend of mine who was a full time pistol shooter. He was on I don’t know how many teams and he was always gone so company clerk takes over his job, then the next– Then he was transferred someplace else, I forget who came in after he did, and then some place in there as I say we had– The Army was– All of the colored troop organizations were dissolved, they were spread out and reassigned and we got this one sergeant who had been– He might have been in World War II, anyway he was a full sergeant and he came in but he didn’t– What, not Gonzalez, Lee Gonzalez was the supply sergeant, and what he and I wanted was a company commander who just let us do things, let us take care of things, and as first sergeant it didn’t matter, that didn’t get into our way because we had a nice running. �Goodman, Donald Interviewer: “Yeah, it was a smooth operation.” Yeah, it was going well and there was Sergeant– I don’t want to slip and tell his name, let me call him Jones. So Gonzalez, Lee Gonzalez was the supply sergeant he and I were close and he said, middle of summer, he said “You know where Jones is?” And I said “No I haven’t seen him, I mean they come and go and come and go.” And he said he’s over there in the captain’s office, sitting behind the stove, it’s a coal stove in the summer and he’s just sitting there with his hands folded and he’s looking off like that and then he’s looking over here, and that’s what he’s doing for a couple of hours at a time. Said “Well what do you think?” He said “Well you can try and talk to Cunningham.” Who was next door in battalion and he said “You know what are you gonna do? Call up the regiment and say ‘I think my first sergeant is crazy’ do you have any idea how many company clerks think their first sergeant is crazy, what’s it gonna– Is he bothering you?” “No.” “Well leave him then.” I said “What the heck?” He doesn’t need anything to be gone for hours and then he’d come back, he never did do– So but one time he, this was one of the scariest nights I had, he went on leave to East St. Louis and came back with a social disease after a while he discovered he had so he went in to the medics and talked to them. (25:00) While he was there he was explaining to the doctor exactly how the world operated and instead of how you think it is and so they just kind of kept him and the next thing we know well we’re getting orders that he’s being transferred to some hospital out east and we should box up his foot locker stuff and they’d come and store it someplace. We said “What about his car?” Because there was a number of times on Monday morning where I’d round up the jeeps and he couldn’t remember where he’d left his car and he’d have parked it God knows out in some rain in someplace and Leonard Wood is a big place and how he made it back I don’t know or where he spent the– But he’d be there Monday morning, couldn’t find his car. So I ask what about his car and they said they don’t know so somebody found it out there and stick– Yeah I don’t know, I called the motor and said winter was coming, I said “I don’t know what shape this thing is, it’s got no business being there so better tow it and take it to motor pool to store.” They have storage, so but that’s the end of it, check the end of that, and it was months later I was going to the movies and I came bouncing back in and the CQ– I had a– I was supposed to point people to BCQ, you know charge a quarter at night to be supposed to answer the one phone we had on the company, and he was sitting back there and he had this funny look on his face and I came up and I thought “What–” �Goodman, Donald And I could see from his eyes and he looked over “Oh well, Sergeant Jones!” There he was, full uniform, medals, all that “How are you doing?” Well what do you say, you know I did think “Yeah you were crazy, did they fix that or what?” You know. Interviewer: “That feels like not a very good opening line.” No it’s not the way to go. Interviewer: “You’re crazy, did they fix that?” I said “Oh!” Interviewer: “Did you escape?” Said “You’re back?” “Yeah.” But we got no paperwork he wasn’t back to us because by then we had a different– I had a different first sergeant who was well into booze and he was just as useless as anybody else which was fine as far as we’re concerned. (27:28) So [unintelligible] “Oh good to see you” And he said “Goodman you know what happened to my car?” I said “Yeah we finally found it out there.” He said “Where is it?” And I said “It’s in storage, bought it.” He said, I forget the order anyway he asked me “What’d you do?” I said “We had it towed back.” He said “How did you do that, wasn’t it locked up?” And I said “Yeah I had to break a window, broke my way in, unlocked it, had it towed away, and then we had– I had them drain the radiator and the battery there.” He said “Who broke the window?” “I broke it.” Because I’m not gonna lie and he stood up, patted me on the shoulder “You’re a good man Goodman.” And walked out the door. I was– Interviewer: “What a crazy individual. I guess you got–” Never know what happened to him, we gave– We had no paperwork, no way for me to check up on anything, why should I check up on his car, but that was one of the weirdest nights. Anyway when– Yeah, his successor was– Then we had, oh we had a first lieutenant who was just– �Goodman, Donald Screwed up one way or another. I got the phone call and the phone said, they said “You’re due for prisoner chase in company C.” “Okay, we need a name.” Well I’m tired of being in here anyway, said “Corporal–” I was corporal by then “Donald J. Goodman RN 1-6-4-1-5-6-0-9.” “Okay.” And didn’t think any more about it and then got the order and the company commander lieutenant there he– A couple of weeks he said “Goodman! You’re on prisoner chase.” I said “Geez how did that happen? But– Must’ve been random or something.” Okay so I was assigned, I was assigned and I can’t remember, I keep trying to remember this, memory doesn’t work all that– If there were three of us then we had to pick up five prisoners, if there was five of us then we had to pick up seven prisoners. I’m pretty sure that it was just three of us that what we had to do was take the train and wear class B uniform which was all dress, tie the whole bit but combat boots and of course we had to pick up pistols, we had to pick up our 45 Colts. Anway, so we went to– I didn’t know these other guys and two of us were corporals, the other one I forget what, so we got up there and I had already been read the orders for a prisoner chase from the same sort of thing. Go to Sheraton, pick up your prisoners, handcuff them, bring them back through Chicago and deliver them to such and such, takes two days okay. When we got there to check out our pistols in the ordinance they said “You guys are all qualified with a 45 aren’t you?” (30:55) No, nobody was, he said “Anybody ever shoot a 45?” I said “Yeah I’ve shot targets.” “Okay, you’re in charge.” “That’s good, I like that.” Because I had plans and they– So we got our pistols, can’t put your clip in until you get your prisoner, well we got our pistols and our handcuffs and we’re off– Oh. Interviewer: “Must be a boat.” Yeah we never had those down in Fort Leonard Wood. So we got out and I had all the chips for meals and the orders and the whole bit and my wife doesn’t like me to tell this story but I’ll tell it. So we were on the train going from St. Louis up to Chicago and I said “How’d you guys– I know they’re expecting us at Sheraton, how’d you like to spend the night in Chicago?” And they said “Can we do that?” And I said “Well I’m in charge, I say you can.” Never give a guy two stripes God knows what he’ll do with the power, we got there in Chicago to the Randolph Street Station and I said “We’ll have to find a place for you to stay and you gotta pay for it.” “Okay.” So in those days they had a monstrous Chicago telephone directory but the truth was for a guy in �Goodman, Donald uniform all he had to do was ask any cop “Hey is there a hotel I can stay at here a while?” So they decided– I think they asked a cop and they went to the YMCA and stayed there, said “Well– ” Said “I’m not staying there.” “Okay.” And I said “I’ll meet you tomorrow morning seven o’clock at the Randall Street Station we’ll take that up to Sheraton, pick up our prisoners, bring them back, walk them through the loop, and to change stations we had to walk from Randall Street Station to the Union Station, yeah and then catch that to St. Louis so I said “We gotta do something with these pistols, why don’t you check– They probably have a safe there at the Y, why don’t you just check them in there? Whatever you do, don’t get arrested, whatever you do don’t get drunk, no drinking.” “Okay, fine.” They said “Where are you going?” I said “Oh I know where I’m going.” Well nine four– I left them there and set off praying that they wouldn’t get drunk or arrested or into trouble there in Chicago while I took the I.C down to 63rd street I think and then took a trolley down to 85th cause I was going to 914 West 85th Street where this cute little gal that I married two months before was waiting. Mind you this is long before there’s any cell phones so everything we had arranged we’d done by writing or by plain telephone. (34:17) So that’s where I headed walking through Chicago with my big pistol on my hip and taking the– So stayed there, that was better than the Y, got up in the morning and cleaned up and took the trolley and took the I.C train back and prayed that these guys would– Interviewer: “Didn’t do anything stupid.” Meet me at the Randall Street Station. Interviewer: “Did they get there?” They were there bright and chipper, I said “Did you have a good time?” “Oh yeah!” I said “What’d you do?” They said “We went to the movies.” “Okay.” I said “Where’d you eat?” “Wimpy’s” You got this Chicago cuisine in front of you and you eat at Wimpy’s? Yeah, it was better than the mess hall, so we went and picked up our five prisoners, yeah five prisoners, two of them together and then I picked the biggest guard I had and fastened him to the other oddball, and we’d been warned don’t let them– The last prisoner chases, prick chasers, lost one, you don’t want to lose one because– No we don’t because we got our old handcuffs there, I don’t want to �Goodman, Donald be wearing them. We got them back just fine, we got the [unintelligible] walked down through the loop from station to station, so it was kind of fun. Interviewer: “So what were you getting these prisoners for?” I don’t know, I don’t remember what they were, I doubt that they were desperate murdering criminals or mass murderers, my guess is they were guys who got home sick and ran away to home and then they let them– And MDs let them sit there for 30 days and if they still had their uniform then they charged them with AWOL, if they destroyed their uniform desertion, and this was war time you didn’t want to be charged with desertion. So they were probably heading for Korea, after they finished they’d go– They’d finish basic training under the gun, we had a number of guys who went through our basic training outfit with guards right behind them and I’m sure they got shipped off to Korea. So I can’t believe that these guys were anybody that was that dangerous, I don’t remember. Interviewer: “So these were like Army guys that ran away?” (36:36) Yeah they were just Army guys yeah, they were just trainees. Interviewer: “Okay, I didn’t know if you were just like picking up random prisoners to draft into the Army.” No they’d been in and I’m sure they just got home sick and ran away home and so the MPs came and knocked on their door and said “Can Bobby come out and play?” And then they took them to Sheraton, so they never asked us as Sheraton where we spent the night before, I was glad about that. Interviewer: “It’s probably a good thing.” �Goodman, Donald But the Army did that for me, I belong to the Autobahn club in high school but I was– They had taught me this is your mission, that one awful night that blew things up, and if you got a job to do you do it and so I had in mind that I had a job to do and it’s too late to court martial me now. Interviewer: “There you go. You mind if I ask a few questions about basics?” No go ahead, I’m sorry I knew I’d ramble. Interviewer: “No it’s okay, it’s interesting stuff I never even knew we did that but so one thing that was really sort of outline in my historical background in classes on this is that the training for Korea and Vietnam, like the basic training, had nothing to do with what the combat was actually like there.” I will tell you, I think now looking back over it, when we had cities and training and shoot ‘em up training in town and villages, there were no hooches there, they didn’t teach– We weren’t shooting up Korean hooches those were European towns that we were– I think they were preparing us to fight Europe– In Europe. (38:20) That was what– And our chant– I don’t know how much you’re going to do about editing this but besides chant we’d learn to march. G.I beans and G.I gravy gee I wish I know and anyway it was a hup, two, three, four, you had a good home and you left your right, you wouldn’t go back if you could you’re wrong so [humming] If I die in a combat zone, box me up and ship me home, sound off– One, two. Sound off– Three, four— And then it was, if I die in a Russian front bury me with a Russian cunt, sound off– One, two. Sound off– They didn’t sound like [unintelligible] to me and we saw films of the Russians in World War II and we knew about that little Tommy gun, the little burp gun they had with a drum and on a ventilated barrel and there was– Rifles, well I think that we were gearing up to go to war with Russia at that time in ‘52, I didn’t think about it at the time but– Interviewer: “Oh yeah.” They were. �Goodman, Donald Interviewer: “That’s what they were training you for if the Soviets attacked.” I think it must have been. An interesting thing, while I did graduate my oldest son was born the day I was discharged and if she hadn’t come through with that they wouldn’t have let her in the base hospital, I don’t know what we would have done but took her in and so she was– I was getting processed out of the Army, she was over in the base hospital and I came back from processing and I– Another Sergeant Jones let’s say, this was the boozer and “Oh Goodman your wife had a baby.” Said “What’d she have?” “I don’t know, babies are babies.” What the hell, so I scooted off to the hospital to see my son, my oldest and we stayed there, I think we just stayed there a week, and then my mother came to– We were living in a 28 foot trailer at the time, it was service, it was an Army trailer and they– I got– I managed to get one in January of ‘54, maybe it was February, and so we lived there until June and then packed up and headed for– Back home to Chicago Heights where I found my folks had sold their house and they were building another one and we were planning– Three of us, were planning to stay there at their house so it was an interesting time, right after that they– I know what I wanted to tell you, aside from doing– I became a teacher. (41:27) At that time teachers, especially men teachers, were held in high esteem. That’s not like today, today they just treat them like dirt but in those days– “In those–” God that makes me sound old, in those days, in the 50s when I started and the 60s even into the 70s, if you saw a guy teaching in an elementary school or high school and he wasn’t real old, he probably was a vet and he probably would not put up with a whole lot of crap from anybody. There were guys who did and later on when Jack Brice and I wrote– Oh in 30 years later, 1990s we were talking to the vets who had come in on the G.I bill from World War II, yeah it was cool, anyway– Wow were they a nutty bunch, and they were so gutsy they– Well one group the school they were in was that old Hackley building that looks like a castle and they had one teacher who– The teachers didn’t know how to handle these guys either I mean holy mackerel, but you’ve got these 17 year olds in with these guys who have been 50 bombing missions over Germany and whatever else they’d been through, they didn’t know how to handle them and this one– They told me about this one teacher in English, she hated– It was the second floor, she hated the pigeons that gathered at the top of the window. So she had some kind of long pole that– I guess to open and unlock the window, anyway she’d get up there and tap the window and chase them away so they just– I forget what she– She had some other peculiar thing. So they got up there, second �Goodman, Donald floor, got out one window, crept along the windowsill, unscrewed the screws that, held that window up, and then went back down and the next day when she went tap the whole window went down and she about had a heart attack. They did worse than that, they decided they’re in the middle of Muskegon, there was big talk they were gonna change– They were gonna move community– It wasn’t even community college it was a junior college, they were gonna move it out to where it is now over the banks of Four Mile Creek and a couple of them who were apparently old engineers, Army engineers, “You know what, they don’t have a bridge there.” “Nope, don’t have a bridge.” So a couple of them, I can imagine it took a few six packs to get them into this, “Well bring them a bridge.” “Okay, where are we gonna–” “Well we’re not gonna build one.” “Well no.” “Just find one, we’ll move it.” Interviewer: “They stole the bridge?” Okay, so that was– The bridge they picked was not– It was just a regular city street that had two lanes, and it was not far from where the old farmer’s market Muskegon is now, I’ve driven over that bridge. (44:50) So they got– They prepared ahead of time, they spent weeks squirting oil WD-40 or whatever they had then on the bolts and planning so this was the big night they were gonna– I bet they were well oiled then not only the bridge but then too, they had a flatbed truck, they had a crane, and they were under there unscrewing and they heard the train come. So the guy underneath figures if this is a steam engine he’s about to become barbequed, barbequed by bridge. So he’s yelling “Take me up! Take me up!” And they’re down there playing the game “What’s the password?” Finally they helped him up and decided, you know this isn’t the night to move the bridge, so away they went and took the truck back to wherever it had been and took the crane back wherever they got it, wherever they got the tools they took that back but as– I started as a teacher in 1956 we were treated really well, they were– People were on our side and nobody tried this crap that these teachers are undergoing now where you got a bunch of checklists, you got somebody come in and decide what good teachers do and what good teaching is and these are guys who couldn’t teach a puppy to poop on a paper and they’re running the schools. Interviewer: “Yeah, so what grade were you teaching?” �Goodman, Donald Oh I taught sixth grade for 13 years and in a ghetto school, I never had less than 36 kids, their average reading level was four but I didn’t have discipline problems, partly because they didn’t– I never sent a kid to the principal, I didn’t have to, on the other hand they didn’t come in and tell me what I could do and couldn’t do. I never had a– I never had a charge leveled against me and I show people pictures of my last sixth grade class– Mind you these are all black kids so if you’re wondering about that, there’s a picture of them when I take them to– On a field trip to Grand Rapids Museum. So I had to do– Overnight I got the bus figured out, these kids are dressed up really nice like it’s Sunday and they’re– And I was taking their picture and they don’t look like they’re beat up or they don’t look like they– And they don’t look like they’re wild either, they’re just kids and people look at the picture and say “My God.” But I had the one kid, I can’t make up a name for her, her name is Theresa, anyways she was always a bit of a devil and got into things. One time we were playing cage ball, I don’t know do you know what cage ball is? You do crab running and you have this giant ball and you kick it with your feet, you can’t have shoes on, and there’s this– It’s kind of like soccer if anybody makes a point it’s a miracle, and they’re kicking it back and forth and there was the backstop for the basket, well they crank it up if you’re not going to be using it because we use this gym for everything. (48:26) The way you crank it up there is a cast iron crank, okay you’ve got this big box on the wall and that’s what you put that thing into and turn it and it winds up cranking the thing up and down. Alright what do you do with the cast iron thing? Custodians put it on top, fine so I was standing under it doing whatever refereeing you can do in this melee and all a sudden wham! I feel this thing that all but knocked me out and I could feel blood, I sat down and I could feel the blood up there but the kids are dead silent and my God what and I gonna do here. So I gotta get somebody in here to take the class and the principal was there so I did go down there and I said “You gotta take over the class.” She said “What do you want me to do?” I said “Give them spelling, tell them to write their words down ten times, whatever take them back to the room.” Because that’s all they had left for time, so she did so I get after– And I went and did a dumb thing, I laid down, I mean it’s a wonder and afterwards I got up, she dismissed the class and I got up to get these sheets of paper with their names on them and this one Theresa, angel, she had filled up four pages with “I hope he doesn’t die. I hope he doesn’t die.” Wow, I saw her after she left and from then on we had looks because I knew how she felt, for all the hell she’d given me. �Goodman, Donald Interviewer: “That’s good.” Years later, I’m trying to think how many years that would’ve been, maybe ten or 12, I’d gone through the high school, I was with the college, I set up a program in the prison. I was always doing something or other extra and I was– I had to go into the prison and I think give a test or something, anyways I supervised reading, writing, math classes in the prison besides the– When you get into the prison you gotta empty your pockets, put them in a locker and then you could have this big key. Okay you had to stand in front of this iron barred gate slid open, sprang, you stepped into a room– It wasn’t too different, a room about this size, and you stood there, the gate slid behind you, clang, oh God what a creepy feeling that is cause you’re locked in there, and then that one is supposed to slide open, sprang, and you go out and you could go– You’re free to go into the prison then carry whatever you got with you, tests or whatever there. So I’d been doing that a number of times and I got in there one time and the gate slid behind me, clang, I paused, waited, and I’m a little claustrophobic anyway I don’t even like elevators, and the gate didn’t open– Interviewer: “Oh no.” (51:55) And I “Oh my God.” And then I hear this cackling from up in the control booth and I recognize her. Interviewer: “It was her?” I said “Theresa you devil!” And she said, I’ll never forget this, “Mr.Goodman I finally got you where I want you.” Interviewer: “That’s wonderful.” I said “At least you’re on the right side of the bars.” She said “I am but you aren’t.” So we had a nice talk there and she finally let me out to go in the prison and I never saw her again, but that was so funny. �Goodman, Donald Interviewer: “That is really– It’s really nice getting to see a former student like that.” Well I’ve seen– Oh I’ve had– There– Funny I was there the second year there and I was teaching second grade and I ran into– I had one kid but I thought at that time– This is maybe my fourth year teaching and I thought if I teach for 40 years I’ll never teach a smarter kid than that. I’ve taught for 40 years and never did teach anybody smarter than that, I went to– Unfortunately I went to his funeral about three years ago, he had gone on to become a lawyer, so had his sister who was very very smart too, and I felt so good– He had a heart attack, he’d been busy with that I don’t know what or how many things, I felt so good his mother remembered me cause I talked to her then, but he was just one of those no matter– You just know this is the smartest person I’m ever gonna know just how fast they pick things up and he was, that was a Lindberg school and he was with one of the classes of 36, 37. My average was 36 and if he taught– If they had more than 38 they did their best to try to move somebody out into somebody else’s class and we didn’t have that many classes and we had– Teachers did have real discipline problems, a lot of them did there, there were a lot of– There were good teachers who flat out couldn’t teach, back then you needed a steady hand, but there were also teachers who weren’t [unintelligible] (54:17) I had two student teachers there and one was so good I said “I’ll recommend you for any place, even here.” And they did teach there, the other one I said “You know you’ll be a good teacher but you can’t handle this kind of stuff, so I’ll write you a good recommendation provided you promise me you will not apply for this for at least five years.” And he said “Okay, that sounds good.” And he turned out, I’ve heard later he was a good teacher in a different school. Interviewer: “That’s good.” Different system. Interviewer: “So your Army training definitely helped you maintain discipline.” Oh yes it did, what the Army training did was open me up to myself and like I say when people say “Thank you for your service.” I think “No, I should thank the Army.” Because I didn’t learn �Goodman, Donald all that stuff by belonging to the autobahn club and I didn’t find me belonging to the autobahn club. I was– I didn’t know I could organize things and I did and I was– When I was grievance chairman they said “Will you be–” At the college this was “Would you volunteer for grievance chairman?” I said “Only if I run things and I choose my grievances.” They said “You can’t do that.” I said “Then forget it.” Then they came back and said “Let’s see if we can play your game.” So I said “Alright what I’m looking for, the only grievance I’ll take right now is one that involves big bucks and that when I look it over I’m pretty sure I can win it at arbitration.” They said “We’ve never taken a grievance to arbitration.” I said “That’s what I do.” So I did have a couple people come and say “You gotta take my grievance!” And I’d say “Nope, you just became the grievance chairman, bye.” And then forget it, so I finally got 10,000 bucks out of a grievance and it was– I was real sure I could take it to arbitration and we did and later on– And yeah it went to arbitration, they paid. Later on I had good and bad, winners and losers in the grievances but this one I have read– I learned to read real closely, that’s why I knew on that prisoner chase that I could get away with this because of the faulty rating that they did. I won one grievance based on one word in the table of contents and it was worth 3,000 bucks to a psychology instructor because the board had said there is no– It was double overload, there’s no such thing as double overload, you can’t file a grievance against something that doesn’t exist in the contract. (57:14) They said “Go through the whole contract and see no place does it, use the term double overload.” And I already knew what they was up to I said “Look at the table to contents it says double overload page 33 that means on 33 whatever they say is double overload.” And won this guy 3,000 bucks, he bought me two bottles of whiskey and I thought that was kind of nice. Interviewer: “That’s a good repayment, was it good whiskey though?” You know I think it must have been I don’t remember, I can’t– I really liked my 40 years, I really liked teaching sixth grade but I was– I got this one opportunity, they came along, Bill Murry who was the assistant superintendent, see I’d been teaching sixth grade there for– I don’t– Ten years maybe, knocking on the door– This is when Lyndon Johnson took over presidency and he opened up– He poured money and we got bushel baskets of money and all of a sudden when he had none before because we– It was a great society and the schools just all of a sudden we got �Goodman, Donald we got all kind of program we can do and so nine o’clock in the morning get a knock from the assistant suit and he says “Don, we got money enough to set up a reading program in the high school would you give it some thought?” I said “Sure Bob, yeah let me think about it.” He said “Okay I’ll be back at 11 you tell me yes or no.” He was back at 11, I hadn’t had any time to talk to my wife or anything, I said “Go.” He said “Okay, show up at the high school at like 3:30 on Wednesday and talk to Al.” Who had already set up a reading program like that in the junior high and so I went there and sat down to him, and we knew each other and he had these catalogs in front of him and he said “There they are Don we got an– You got an hour and a half to spend $4,000.” I said “I’ve never taught a high school student in my life I don’t know what kind of stuff I ought to be–” He said “We gotta turn the order in now.” So I went through and I had never even seen the room that I was supposed to be assigned, that’s how goofy it was under the great society. All of a sudden bushels baskets of money in there “Spend it now.” And so we did, some of it we spent well, some of we didn’t know what we were doing but it was a good program I set up, and then I got the call from the college saying they are going to set up a reading, writing, and math program, are you interested in being in on the ground floor of that? (1:00:10) I thought “God yes, you bet I am.” I am tired because we had learned– I’ll tell you another thing, sort of thing, I’m running– I’m rambling here. Interviewer: “That’s okay.” Anyway I had just got assigned to the high school and to set everything up and found out that they locked the doors at noon time, and I went– I liked to go out for lunch, didn’t want to bring sack all the time, I went to the principal said “Can I have a key to that one door?” He said “Gee Don I don’t have any spare keys at all.” He said “Can’t you just coordinate your coming and going with some other teacher?” So I was talking and complaining, pissing and moaning at one of my classes, I had a class of like eight, and one of my students “Mr.Goodman you want a key to that door?” I said “Yeah.” He said “Give me 50 cents.” I gave him 50 cents the next day I had a key that opened every door in that high school including the principal’s office. This is the ghetto, this is the way you do things, my Army training– Interviewer: “So I’m gonna go ahead and jump us back a little bit.” �Goodman, Donald Sure, jump back. Interviewer: “Back to the Army, you mentioned working or at least being there when integration started happening and African Americans started melding into units. Was there a lot of tension or was it just–” No, no it went a whole lot smoother than you might have thought, there were a few guys from the south who couldn’t get by but our battalion commander– Name was Green, Major Green, was black and we had– And we made– Oh when I went in my first platoon sergeant who was– Everybody was working above rank, whose corporal, Corporal Summers, and I remember him big, tall dude and I was kind of surprised, I don’t know why I thought “Fine.” No, we didn’t have– And in fact two of my good friends in the Army– This is advice for anybody that’s gonna be stationed anyplace, were cooks and one was– One’s name was slaughter, he was– I thought “Okay.” Interviewer: “It’s a fitting name.” (1:02:49) The other one was Makita and they were– Yeah they were drinking buddies but “Wanna grab a steak?” It’s after the movies, “Sure.” I mean they open up the mess hall, gotta start the fire with butter and coals– All our stills were coal, and then get out the steaks and fry them in butter and I remember the one time I had my own room in the– When I was permanent party in the barracks and it’s like six o’clock in the morning and somebody knocks on my door and I didn’t usually show up orderly room until seven. Knock on the door, “Yeah?” Open the door there’s three trainees, each one had a tray full of– They had oatmeal, they had cold cereal, they had juice, they had pancakes, they had SOS, they had– You name it and I thought “Yeah, one of the cooks is up for a promotion and they want me to write because I wrote all the recommendations for promotion.” I never had any turned down and that was actually the first time I had experience with creative fiction, in fact it bordered on fantasy for some of those but they all got promoted when I wrote it. �Goodman, Donald Interviewer: “Hey gotta be good at what you do right?” There they were– Interviewer: “So they were just bribing you with food?” That’s it, reminding me. Interviewer: “Just a friendly reminder.” No that was Slaughter, he was– Slaughter, Makita and I hung out a lot together, I’d never had a black friend my God, and I remember one time I was so surprised, we were out someplace or other and said “How about we go to the movies?” And he said “They don’t want me in that movie” And I said “What?” That was the first time I’d ever heard– This was Missouri, he said “They won’t let me in there.” Okay, we’re not going to the movies then but it was still– Segregation was still hot and heavy in the 1950’s down south, not in the Army, no. (1:05:04) Interviewer: “That’s good.” It was, and it was absolutely– They integrated– Yeah it was only the trainees, a few trainees from someplace or other who started this crap “Well I’m not gonna–” Interviewer: “One interesting thing that I just thought of, did you ever work with any Japanese or German troops?” No. Interviewer: “When you were in training?” Nope, never did anything like that but one time I remember I was at my desk and these people came in and they had brownish uniforms and stars, like two or three stars like holy cross mother �Goodman, Donald I’ve never seen a– So I jumped up and the American who was with them said they were from Thailand and they were lieutenants something or other and I said “Oh, okay then.” They pass out thinking “My God, here’s two or three generals coming.” No never worked with– We had no foreign troops, we had 250 brand new troops come in as civilians and we taught them to do shoot and salute and polish a boot, that’s what– And they were gone and they could go– They’ll find out after they left us, go into engineering basic, I liked engineering– I liked explosives, you show me a bridge, you show me a steel girder bridge today and I’ll tell you exactly where to place the charges and what size they ought to be, how much TNT– I don’t know if we use TNT anymore, what to do but I still have that mind, the formula– If anybody’s checking, is still P=⅜ A and nobody knows what that means except old timers. Interviewer: “Well now I know.” It means pounds of TNT, the number of pounds TNT time ⅜ of the the area, the surface area, and most I beams– That’s for I beams, you get the web and the– Where’d it go? Web in the something else, I forget what it is. (1:07:20) Anyway you measured and then you multiply that times ⅜ and that tells you how much TNT– Interviewer: “Interesting.” You need to cut that, so I never got to blow a bridge but I still know how, that’s a lot of stuff. Interviewer: “Hey at least you learned.” Do you wanna know anything else? Because I’ve just been running my– Interviewer: “I guess we can start moving towards the end of it. We’ve already touched a lot on your life after the military and how it really set you up for success.” Absolutely. �Goodman, Donald Interviewer: “Did you keep in touch with anybody from the Army?” My first, first sergeant yes and they moved to Florida– He got out before I did of course, and he went to Florida and we went down there to visit him, the wives did keep in touch by way of Christmas cards and he was a twin and they had– He and his twin had twin cars, one was a Chrysler and the other was a DeSoto, I forget what year they were but I remember those two cars. They had fluid drive which meant you could shift or you didn’t have to on the car, I don’t know how many years they actually did that but we kept track of John Nelson until a few years back and then kind of faded away. We went down to them to visit them, I’m not coming through, someplace down in Florida, he was an engineer, he knew– Oh we went to school together, after the Army he has signed up to go to the University of Illinois Champaign and that’s where I finished up my thing in education and he finished– He did his in engineering and so yeah I went to– When we were going to Champaign we had the one child Brian and I was working, full time student I had one job at the film library and had another working for ptomaine Tom, what he did– Isn’t that a great name, wouldn’t you buy from him? (1:09:40) He hired a bunch of us and we went around to fraternity and sorority houses, we had a route we took our own– We carried a big pot– Excuse me, of hot dogs, boiled hot dogs, and we– Excuse me, milk cartons, we had little pies, we had sandwiches, and we had the original– Well I always said we had the original Subway sandwiches but we didn’t call them that, we called them big mothers. So– And we always said that, they were made on a big loaf, you know Subway loafs big mother. Yeah it was so funny to go into a sorority house and these sweet little girls go “I want one of those big mothers!” And the joke we had with that was that– His name was Bill Sleicher, I still remember his name, anyway that Bill had the sharpest meat cutter in the world and we advertised this thing has three kinds of meat and two kinds of cheese on it, which it did but among ourselves we said “Yeah, three kinds of meat, two kinds of cheese, and you can read a newspaper through all five layers.” Which, yeah you don’t know how thin meat bologna and cheese can get sliced till you had a big mother. Interviewer: “That’s funny, so it was mostly just bread?” �Goodman, Donald It was, yeah just what it was, you’re gonna waste a lot of money on stuff, and I remember– I don’t know how much that cost but I remember a braunschweiger was 40 cents, 40 cent sandwich for a braunschweiger and we had a number of different kinds of sandwiches. God that thing was heavy, that was a gut buster but in those days I was in good shape, came out of the Army. Interviewer: “Yeah you were ready to go, so–” Go ahead. Interviewer: “Would you do it all over again?” Well not that I’m 87 years old now I think. Interviewer: “If you could–” (1:11:42) Am I sorry? Oh hell no, but I didn’t get hurt, there was no time when I was close to getting hurt and it didn’t screw up my mind in anyway, I learned to accept authority then but I learned to deliver authority too and I learned to assign– Assume authority, it was no question “Thank you for your service.” Thank you for your Army. Interviewer: “Well now I have a good response for when people tell me thank you for my service I can be thank you for your Navy, they’re paying for my college.” Yeah paid for– Finished up mine too yeah. Anything else comes to mind? Jesus, I've been talking for two hours. Interviewer: “Has it been two hours?” I don’t know, how long? �Goodman, Donald Interviewer: “I don’t think it’s been quite two hours.” Been a long time. Interviewer: “Unless you have any other interesting stories you’d like to tell us about your time in the military or something to do with afterwards.” No I can’t– Well I can’t think of anything else, I’m sure I’ll get out in the car and of course I will, a whole bunch of stuff but– Interviewer: “We could always do another interview if it comes to that. So I guess we’ll wrap it up here.” Fair enough. Interviewer: “Sounds good.” Thank you. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GoodmanD2311V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Goodman, Donald J. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-06 Title A name given to the resource Goodman, Donald (Interview transcript and video), 2019 Description An account of the resource Donald Goodman was born on January 12, 1932, in Chicago Heights, Illinois. Goodman graduated high school in 1949 and went on to attend the University of Illinois Chicago, which at the time had a campus at Navy Pier, for three years. In 1950, he rejected his admission into the Air Force and enlisted into the Army due to the shorter tours of duty offered by the latter service branch. For Basic Training, he was sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for three years where he participated in rigorous practice drills of combat scenarios which he described as overly chaotic and nerve racking. He also recalled how the racial integration of the Armed Forces was difficult for some recruits to mentally overcome and how the Army was subtly preparing its recruits, mentally, for a potential war with the Soviet Union. After Basic, Goodman was promoted to Corporal and became a Company Clerk. At one point, Goodman was assigned to lead a ‘Prison Chase’ job with two other soldiers to retrieve five prisoners who were being held on charges of going AWOL near Chicago. He and his two men enjoyed a night in Chicago before retrieving and delivering the Army prisoners to Fort Sheridan the next day. During his service on the base, he lived with his wife in an Army trailer and his son was also born in the base’s hospital. In June of 1954, Goodman was discharged from the Army and moved his new family back to Chicago Heights where he became a middle school teacher in 1956 and later a high school teacher. During President Johnson’s Great Society initiative, his school district received large sums of money from the federal government which he used to help establish a reading, writing, and math program at a local college. Reflecting upon his service in the Army, Goodman believed his military training, in both recognizing and assuming authority, allowed him to control his classes by maintaining discipline. He owed a great amount of gratitude to the Army for helping him grow mentally into the ambitious person he is today. Goodman also kept in touch with one of his old Sergeants, was ultimately glad he enlisted into the Army, and was grateful he was never injured during his time in service. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) WKTV (Wyoming, Mich.) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Other veterans & civilians—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d30107e7563b6200303a1fb087df9c14.mp4 1a527d25f28c44525c442b9495b5f234 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/1fec8aa0e012664da2eded20f4f88a7b.pdf 32af0fe98f7add5945cd0ac2c2276d9f PDF Text Text George, Al Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: World War II Interviewee’s Name: Al George Length of Interview: (56:52) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Al George of Grand Rapids, Michigan and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay Al, being with some background on yourself and to begin with, where and when were you born?” In Muskegon Heights. Interviewer: “In what year?” (00:24) August 19th, 1925. Interviewer: “Okay, so that’s Muskegon Heights, Michigan.” Muskegon. Interviewer: “Alright, did you grow up there or did you move around?” I was there basically until I moved to Grand Rapids in 1954. Interviewer: “Okay, so you grew up basically– So you grew up in Muskegon Heights.” Right. �George, Al Interviewer: “What was your family doing for a living when you were a kid?” Well my dad was in the moving business, he was in World War I, when he came out he and another fellow started the business and it was moving into storage. Interviewer: “Okay, now was he able to keep that business during the depression?” He kept the business but didn’t make money on it. He had about three people working for him and we– My uncle became sheriff in 1936 and when that happened he had a little store out in the country. We went out and ran the little country store, lived in his house and we kept the business. Dad kept the business going but the family ran with the little country store. Interviewer: “Okay, so you kinda got by, now what town was the store in?” Just north of Muskegon in the M-20. (1:53) Interviewer: “Alright, okay so you found different ways of getting by. How many kids were in your family?” I had two brothers and a sister. Interviewer: “Okay and where were you in that order?” I was the third, my older brother, older sister, and a younger brother by ten years. Interviewer: “Okay, so now– And then how long did you stay in school?” I was in through high school. Interviewer: “Okay so you graduated from high school.” �George, Al I graduated from high school on a Thursday– On a Friday, on one day they sent me– My folks were able to send me to Michigan State College to wait to be drafted. I tried to join the Navy during my stay in high school, five of us went to Detroit and I couldn’t pass it because I was sick, color blind, and I went a term and a half at Michigan State until they drafted me and I fooled my way to get into the Navy because I wanted to be in the Navy. Interviewer: “Okay, how do you get past a color blindness test?” I was the first one through on Saturday morning with our group and I got to the first line of the test for eyes and he paid no attention because he was getting his stamp credits and all that stuff out, and he said “Read this line.” And I wrote what I could read and bluffed the rest of it and he stamped it normal and when I got through they said “What do you want, Army, Navy, or Marines.” I said “Navy.” They sent me to Great Lakes. Interviewer: “Okay, I want to back up a little bit, do you remember how you heard about Pearl Harbor?” (4:18) Oh yeah, we were in the country running the store, it was a Sunday afternoon and we heard it on the radio and I was 16 years old and I said “I’m too young to fight.” Interviewer: “Alright, now before that happened were you paying attention to the news at all?” Oh yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, so you knew there was a war going on in Europe and all that kind of thing?” Yes, yes. Interviewer: “And were you thinking that at some point we were going to get into it?” �George, Al Well I thought some– They were drafting people at that time but they had to be 21 or older, it was just a matter of time. My brother was in Michigan State, he was, I think a junior. Interviewer: “Okay so something was coming and now it does happen but then initially you’re too young and now were you 17 when you tried to enlist?” Yeah. Interviewer: “You could do that if your parents let you.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, but they rejected you but then the second time when you get drafted– Once they draft you they’re gonna use you someplace and they would’ve put you in the Army maybe if they found out you were color blind. Okay, so you made it to the Navy, you go to Great Lakes, Illinois for your boot camp. Now what was the boot camp like?” (5:52) It was great, actually I only weighed 150 when I went in and I came out at 180, I did move a lot, I liked it, it was good. When I didn’t know what they would do with me because of my color blindness, when I came back from leave it said “Construction.” And that meant they were gonna send me to Seabees. Interviewer: “Okay, how did you gain so much weight while you were there?” I ate good, I was one of the top runners, and it just was healthy for me. Interviewer: “Okay, so they fed you well and you got a lot of exercise, so that work was good. Now how much emphasis was there on discipline?” Well I felt the discipline was fine I didn’t reject it. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, but were they really careful about all the spit and polish stuff?” Kind of made me not like the fact that some guys would not do what they’re supposed to be doing and that bothered me. Interviewer: “Okay, now would they punish all the men in the unit if some of them didn’t do their job?” We’re supposed to sweep down every night and they just wouldn’t do it and it bugged me things like that. Interviewer: “Okay, so it wasn’t so much that the instructors were punishing you.” No. Interviewer: “It was just that some of the guys weren’t doing their job.” Yeah. (8:00) Interviewer: “Okay, alright now how long did the boot camp last?” I think about a month, I can’t remember exactly. Interviewer: “Okay, so pretty short.” Yeah it was short. Interviewer: “Okay, and then you said– Did they give you a leave after that?” Yeah. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, and then do you come back again to Great Lakes to get your assignment?” Right. Interviewer: “Alright and so they put you in the Seabees and the naval construction battalions.” Right. Interviewer: “Okay, now did they send you for training next?” Yes, they asked me what I wanted, of course I wanted– I like the water I wanted to boat and learn how to handle– Well be in the boat or a portion of it. Interviewer: “Yeah, so be on a ship rather, yeah.” (8:48) Well I learned how to operate a landing craft. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now where were you doing your Seabees training?” On Rhode Island. Interviewer: “Okay, I think your notes talk about going to Virginia first?” Yeah, that’s where I came– I went to Virginia and then they sent me up to Rhode Island and assigned me to Seabees unit number 65. Interviewer: “64” �George, Al 64. Interviewer: “Yeah, okay but did you do any training in Virginia or did you just get processed?” Mostly processed, they like to put me in the…cut that out. Interviewer: “That’s okay. Alright, okay so you went to Camp Perry there’s a Seabees center there but just then on to Rhode Island the 64th Battalion, and so your training is really going on in Rhode Island.” Rhode Island, right. Oh, what do you call it, when you feed people? Interviewer: “Okay so you’re doing KP?” KP, and I had too much of it and when we left Rhode Island I told the officer I wanted to be off for a month, he said “How long you been on?” And I told him, he says “You’re not gonna be on at all from here on out.” (10:57) Interviewer: “Okay, did you have any idea why you were stuck on KP for so long?” It bothered me, yeah. Interviewer: “But do you know why you were stuck with that?” It’s because it was easy for them to not have a complainer. Interviewer: “Okay, so you would do the job.” I’d do the job. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, so they’d just have you keep doing the job, yeah. Alright, now when you were training in Rhode Island what kinds of things you were learning, you were learning how–” I learned seamanship and studied it. Interviewer: “Okay, so would that involve navigation or?” And learn how to handle the– What do you call it? Interviewer: “The landing craft?” Landing craft, yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, were these the little Higgins boats, the small landing craft?” (11:58) Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, now did you have any–” I would’ve had that duty when we left– When the war ended, at that time we were going to go to Japan– Or– Interviewer: “China?” China. Interviewer: “Okay, that gets a little bit farther along. Now aside from the learning how to pilot a landing craft, did you get any weapons training?” Some, just practicing with small arms. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, did you fire machine guns or just rifles and pistols?” No, just rifles. Interviewer: “Okay, basic rifle training.” Seabees didn’t have that much. Interviewer: “Okay, now did you learn to operate any equipment?” No. Interviewer: “Okay, so then anything like that maybe comes later?” Yeah. (12:59) Interviewer: “Okay, okay so this is really pretty basic training–” Well, including the 90 I did operate– Telephone operation, I learned that when we were in Hawaii. Interviewer: “Okay, but that’s later as well, that’s after Rhode Island, okay.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, now do you have an idea about how long you were in Rhode Island?” From the fall– Oh yeah, about two or three months. Interviewer: “Okay, so not too long, did you ever go off the base?” �George, Al Yeah. Interviewer: “Where did you go?” I went to New York when I could get away. Interviewer: “Okay, and how would– Now where in Rhode Island were you, were you at Quonset Point or somewhere else?” I think it was Quonset Point, it was– Interviewer: “It was kind of on the bay?” We were right on the bay, we used to go swimming in the bay. Interviewer: “Okay, and you could take a train into New York?” (14:13) Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now once you finish up at Rhode Island where do you go next?” We headed for the Pacific. Interviewer: “Okay, now how did you from Rhode Island–” Train. Interviewer: “Okay, so you cross the country, now did you go all the way to the west coast?” �George, Al All the way to San Francisco. Interviewer: “Okay, and what do you remember about that train ride?” Oh all the places kind of followed the map where we were and it was a good nice trip. Interviewer: “Okay, how long did it take?” It probably took about three or four days. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now would they let you get off the train at different places?” No, not much, we just stayed on the same train. Interviewer: “Okay, and so what port did you sail out of?” San Francisco is where we leave, yeah San Francisco. (15:15) Interviewer: “Okay, alright and what kind of ship do they put you on?” From there to Hawaii was a regular passenger ship. Interviewer: “Okay, so like a converted ocean liner with a lot of bunks in it?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you left San Francisco–” Yeah. �George, Al Interviewer: “A lot of times people talk about the waves and rolling seas and people getting seasick.” No problem. Interviewer: “Okay.” Never had a problem with it, seasick. Interviewer: “Alright, now did other people on the ship have trouble?” Yeah, we got pictures of them in our picture book. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you went to Hawaii did the ship sail by itself or were you in a convoy?” (16:08) No, we were by itself. Interviewer: “Okay, do you remember if the ship zigzagged at all or just went straight?” We just– It was like taking a tour. Interviewer: “Okay, so like a pleasure cruise.” Pleasure cruise. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now where did you go to in Hawaii?” To– In Hawaii? Come on. Interviewer: “Well did you go to Pearl Harbor or somewhere else?” �George, Al Pearl Harbor. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now when you got to Pearl Harbor could you see any signs of the attack, was there still–” We were doing some repair work, we spent about three months there I think just working on cleaning up and road work. Interviewer: “Alright, and now is this–” Oh I wasn’t working on that I got– They asked for somebody to operate the telephones and another fellow and I volunteered, we worked the whole time we were there. Interviewer: “Okay, and is this about the middle of 1944 now that–” Yeah. (17:30) Interviewer: “Yeah, okay alright so then were you actually based at Pearl Harbor?” Yeah, on Waimano Ridge. Interviewer: “Alright, and so what was it like living in Hawaii?” It was great, we had time where we could go swimming and every night we could go see the movie, outside movie, might be raining a little bit but that was all. Interviewer: “Okay, and would you go into Honolulu or places off base?” We could. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, did you do that very much or did you just stay on the base?” No, it was not much tourists at that time. Interviewer: “And you probably didn’t have a lot of money either.” No. Interviewer: “Alright, because in a place like that I mean the assumption is–” I can get along at $20 a month. Interviewer: “Okay, cause sometimes you have stories of people going into town, getting drunk and getting in trouble and stuff like that, did men in your unit do that?” I wasn’t involved with any of them. (18:55) Interviewer: “Yeah but were there other guys in your unit who would do that?” Yeah, it wasn’t bad. Interviewer: “Okay, alright so you’re there for a few months and then what happens next?” Then we were sent to the Pacific and it took us about 30 days to get there, we had– We were all in LSTs. Interviewer: “Okay, so what is it like to be sailing on an LST for a month?” [unintelligible] I was in the stern and it was quite rough and some of us would take a cot and put it on main deck underneath the equipment that was there and stay overnight. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, and that’d be more the middle of the ship, so you wouldn’t go up and down as much?” Yup. Interviewer: “Yeah, okay now was your whole battalion on one LST or were you on several of them?” There was several of them. Interviewer: “Okay, alright did you have–” I had all the equipment we needed to work what we were going to do, we were gonna build a base, Navy base. Interviewer: “Okay, alright yeah, so for that– Yeah I mean an LST is not really that big especially that’s full of equipment so for a full battalion you’d need several trips.” (20:40) Right, we were assigned to a ship after we were there. Interviewer: “Okay, but you spend about a month on an LST in transit basically.” Right. Interviewer: “Alright, now did you have any duties during that month?” No. Interviewer: “Okay, and they didn’t make up work for you to do?” �George, Al We played games. Interviewer: “Did they do a ceremony for crossing the international dateline or anything like that?” Didn’t go across the dateline. Interviewer: “Well eventually you’d have to, from Hawaii to the Philippines you cross the dateline, just not the equator, the dateline runs north, south.” Right. Interviewer: “Okay, but they didn’t–” Oh the dateline, I was thinking– Interviewer: “Yeah, I think the equator is that they have the weird stuff for.” (21:30) The equator, we didn’t go across the equator, dateline you know we kept track of the time. Interviewer: “Okay, now– And so you’re heading for the Philippines and what island did you go to?” The island that we ended up on was Tubabao, it was attached– Not attached but we made a road between Samar and Tubabao. Interviewer: “Okay, and Samar is a larger island kind of in the middle of the Philippines, it’s near Leyte which is where you landed.” It was the south end of Samar. �George, Al Interviewer: “Yeah, okay alright.” We had to clear the land to make the base there. Interviewer: “So what was there?” A, what did you call it, where you mix soap and so forth. Interviewer: “Okay, so there was a soap plant or something like that, do they have palm trees?” Yeah, raised palm trees. Interviewer: “Okay, so they make palm oil and make soap out of that, okay.” We took the palm trees all out. (23:12) Interviewer: “So it had been a plantation of some kind then?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now were there any civilians around?” Yes, had a little– On Samar, had a little village and what surprised me was they all had Singer sewing machines and they had stuff that they sold for us to send home. Interviewer: “Now were there any on Tubabao or just on Samar?” I don’t think they were on Tubabao, but they used to have natives come over and do your– Interviewer: “Your laundry?” �George, Al Laundry, if you wanted. Interviewer: “Okay, alright so how long did it take you do you think to clear off the trees to start building?” Oh that went pretty fast, time didn’t mean much. Interviewer: “Yeah, okay–” Wait, I helped in building the buildings at the time too, helped the carpenters and all the workmen. Was working with a fella that had the bulldozer, I worked with him a lot, quite a long time clearing the place. Interviewer: “Did you learn to operate the bulldozer, did you drive it?” Not officially. (25:05) Interviewer: “Okay, alright so when he’s using the bulldozer what are you doing?” Clinging, fastening on to the bell end equipment and the trees, dragging them off the side. Interviewer: “Alright, now once you’ve got the trees out of the way what kind of base were you building or what was it going to be used for?” Well the buildings were going to be for Navy personnel. Interviewer: “Okay, so just barracks or?” Yeah, we didn’t get a chance to use them, we had tents, we even made a baseball field for them. �George, Al Interviewer: “Alright, what was the weather like when you were there?” Minor to moderate, they kept the mosquitoes sprayed and the only thing that bothered me was that I might get some disease but we had no problem. Interviewer: “Okay, so you didn’t pick up any tropical diseases?” No. Interviewer: “Okay, now did they have you taking drugs to prevent malaria?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, did you take atabrine, was that–” I don’t know what exactly it just– It wasn’t a big deal. (26:42) Interviewer: “Okay, alright now did it rain a lot or was it–” No, but when it did rain it would rain hard and then it would– It was just wait for it to get away and it didn’t keep up. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now were some of the Seabees were they building harbor facilities or anything like that or an airstrip?” No, no airstrip. Interviewer: “Okay, but you were mostly just working on the buildings and the facilities for the personnel.” Yup. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, now is that what you were doing when the war ended?” Well yeah it was all complete. Interviewer: “Okay, and so and then while you were on the Philippines were you following the news of the war, keeping track of things?” Oh yeah, yeah we did a little– They had small printed things telling what was going on, it was a daily thing, we kept up. Interviewer: “Okay, alright so you kept track of– So were you there when Okinawa was going on and that kind of thing?” Oh yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, and so did you finish building the base before the war ended?” (28:08) It was about the same time. Interviewer: “Okay, okay do you remember hearing about the atomic bomb?” Oh yeah, oh yeah. Interviewer: “And when that news came out did you know what that meant?” Yeah, we were kept up on the news of it, yup. We were kept up real well with the news, it was written up. Interviewer: “Okay, now where you were, did you ever see anything of the Japanese?” �George, Al No. Interviewer: “Okay, so there were no Japanese aircraft going by or anything like that?” No. Interviewer: “Okay, and there weren’t any hiding out in the jungle anyplace?” No. Interviewer: “Okay, so it was really pretty quiet.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, now did you think that was a good thing?” (29:04) Well it was the proper thing I thought and the others we were not in any danger at all, didn’t even see a Japanese plane. Interviewer: “Okay, alright so now getting into August of ‘45 the Japanese surrender, what were you planning at that time or what was going on before that?” Well we were– We were gettin ready, prepared for the landing we’re gonna make and we’ve figured that they would be– We thought they were bringing the soldiers away from Europe and out and helping us and I didn’t have any qualms about what was going to happen except that because I hadn’t had any reason to worry. Interviewer: “Alright, okay now where was your unit supposed to go, most people were going to go to Japan?” Tubabao– I meant to Sing Tao, Sing Tao. �George, Al Interviewer: “Right, okay so you’re gonna go to lay support in North China. Yeah, okay so that was your goal but in the end you didn’t go there?” No, no they split us up and half of the unit went back to Truk and the Truk was like Hawaii to the Japanese, that was where they have all their power but we bypassed them and they lost all their ability to do anything from there. So when we got there we saw the Japanese were there and they looked like they were in good shape, had been– They were living off the land. Interviewer: “Yeah, and well Truk that was so they– That’s just a coral atoll isn’t it? It’s just a bunch of little islets around a big harbor.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, now were there sunken ships or things in the harbor?” (31:38) No, I didn’t– We didn’t see any ships in the harbor at all. Interviewer: “Well some of them were sunk but they were at the bottom, so you wouldn’t see those, we tapped it a lot.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, but you got a good look at the Japanese when you got there?” In fact we had some of the Japanese show us around the island, took us into their defense and was kind of– There was no unhappiness with the people at all. They were– I think they were just as happy to get up and get ready to go home. Interviewer: “Alright, now were you surprised at all by that?” �George, Al Surprised? Interviewer: “Yeah that the Japanese seemed like normal people.” Oh yeah, it was– Well yeah, it was kind of was a good thing to be around them and the Navy gave us some of the equipment like samurais swords, pistols, rifles and we could take them home. Interviewer: “Okay, now how long did the Japanese stay on the island, did they leave before you did?” Not very long, they got shipped home. Interviewer: “Okay, now what was your job on Truk, what were you doing?” About the same thing that I was doing when we were building the base I had telephone operation, that kind of stuff. (33:30) Interviewer: “Did the battalion have to do much construction?” Well yeah we were fixing the air base, the airfield was– When we landed on there we had to pitch our tents on the air base– On the airfield, it was a bunch of holes and they also started working on clearing it and making a big airplane– Airfield, a good airfield, and that’s what they were doing when I left. Interviewer: “Alright, how long do you think you stayed on Truk?” Well the war ended until May. Interviewer: “Okay, so about nine, ten months, something like that, not a long time.” �George, Al Yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, how did you spend your time when you were off duty?” One time we took a ride to some of the islands, we met some people who were from Germany who were missionaries and we couldn’t speak their language, they couldn’t speak ours, but we got somebody that could both speak Spanish and we visited with them for a while and they had some little kids. Interviewer: “Had they been there all through the war?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Yeah, just kind of trapped, but you didn’t get to go outside of the Truk atoll you were just going to the different islets in the area, now was there a native population there?” (35:25) Yeah but we didn’t see much of it, we saw they had a big place on the water and it was so smelly that we didn’t want to go around there anyhow, it was bad. Interviewer: “Okay, so they kind of had them all in one compound or one area, yeah at that point.” Yeah Interviewer: “Okay, alright now while you were overseas did you have much contact with the people back home?” No, just those people who want to sell us stuff, that was all. Interviewer: “Well did you write to your parents or anything like that?” �George, Al Oh yeah, no problem there. Interviewer: “Okay, but basically you’re pretty much just on your own.” Could take pictures too, didn’t have a very good camera but took some pictures. Interviewer: “Well what kind of camera did you have?” Box camera. Interviewer: “Okay, and could you develop things on the island or did you have to send the film somewhere else?” Yeah, we had that equipment. Interviewer: “Alright, now if you think back over the time that you spent on Tubabao and then on Truk are there any other particular incidents or things that happened that stand out for you?” (36:53) No, just happy the bomb was let so we could go home, we figured that we saved our lives, it saved our lives. Interviewer: “Quite possibly, alright so and basically you wind up staying until you accumulate enough points to go home, was that how that went?” Yup. Interviewer: “Okay, now had most of your battalion left before you did or were you in the middle of them?” �George, Al I don’t know, I didn’t really keep track. Interviewer: “Okay, but so you didn’t feel like you were the last guy left?” We just keep track of who is all able to go, had enough points. Interviewer: “Alright, now once you get enough points how do they get you back home?” It was a ship, passenger type. Interviewer: “Okay, and then did you have a good voyage back home?” Went back to Hawaii and flew out of it, I happened to get a flight out of there. Interviewer: “Okay, had you ever been on an airplane before?” (38:08) Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, so you had flown before?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, okay and then you fly from Hawaii. Where do you land in the continental U.S?” In San Francisco. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now do they discharge you there?” Yeah, flew home from there. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, because it was a little bit unusual to be flying in those days.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Mostly you take boats and trains but you did that, okay.” I didn’t fly, I came home by train. Interviewer: “Okay, once you got there.” My second time I did a lot of flying. Interviewer: “Right, okay now when you are discharged one of the things they did is they often asked you if you wanted to be in the reserves.” Yes. (39:06) Interviewer: “And they– Did they ask that of you?” Yes. Interviewer: “Okay, and what did you answer?” I figured I was single and if anything happened in four years I’d be called back in anyhow, I wanted to make sure to go back into the Navy so I joined the reserves. Interviewer: “Okay, now were there any benefits to joining the reserves?” Yeah, well if you’re active, I was active you get paid a little bit. I mean we had two weeks that we would be on a tour. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, so you still have the usual kind of reserve drill stuff.” Meetings. Interviewer: “Meetings and things.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now did you go back to Muskegon or somewhere else?” Yeah, I went back to Muskegon. Interviewer: “Okay, and then once you got back home what did you do?” I went to work for my dad, his business of course during the war was busy and nobody else in the family wanted anything to do with it. So I thought “Well, I’ll take over and but it from my dad.” So I started buying and working with moving into storage. (40:30) Interviewer: “Alright, now in the next few years did you get married or anything else like that?” Yup, I got married, had one child and in 1951 the Korean war came and they called me in right now. I had to go within a week and here I had a business and the funny thing is about three months before that happened there was a fella that wanted to buy my business. I had– There were about four moving companies and the other ones weren’t doing so well, I had most of the local work there and people wanted to buy it and I said “No, I’m not selling.” And when this happened I said “Wow, what can I do? I think I’ll call a guy and see if he wants it.” He did and I was gone in a week, I had leave– Emergency leave to get home to sign papers to finish that up, so they gave me a couple of days to go home. Interviewer: “Alright, now when they called you up where did you report to first?” �George, Al Great Lakes. Interviewer: “Okay, and was it from Great Lakes that you went home on emergency leave to sign the papers?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and then once you’ve joined them how long do you think you stay at Great Lakes?” Let’s see, not very long they sent me right away to San Francisco to assign me to a ship. Interviewer: “Okay, now what ship did they assign you to?” Sproston, the DDE. (42:34) Interviewer: “DDE, that’s 577 and from the information you’ve got here about the ship it looks like it was initially commissioned as a destroyer in World War II and then redesignated as a destroyer escort at the time of Korea when they un-moth balled it or whatever. So it’s DDE-577 when you’re on it, yeah. Okay, now describe the ship for people who don’t really know anything about Navy ships, about how big was it, what did it look like?” 300 feet long, it’s a small operation but they work with other ships like carriers for assistance and we got– We trained first weapons and so forth. Interviewer: “Okay, so basically it can be used as an escort or for scouting that kind of thing.” Escort for– Yeah. �George, Al Interviewer: “And what kind of weapons did it carry?” We used– Had, what do they call that now? The ones that they would drop for– Interviewer: “So depth charges for submarines?” Depth charges yeah, for submarines. Interviewer: “Right, so and did you carry torpedoes?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, and then just regular cannons and anti aircraft guns and things like that. Yeah so kind of a small all purpose Navy ship.” Small, yeah. (44:25) Interviewer: “Alright, so now you finally get to be on a ship.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, and then what did your ship wind up doing?” What did I do on the ship? Interviewer: “Yeah, well first of all what did you do on the ship yeah.” Yeah, I was a bosun mate at that time, that’s why they put me on ship because I was a bosun’s mate and I told them I was color blind, that didn’t make a difference and I was in charge of the fo’c’stle part of the ship and a crew of about six or seven. �George, Al Interviewer: “And was this just maintenance or cleaning?” Maintenance, cleaning, and of course we fired anti aircraft, that sort of thing. Interviewer: “Okay, and so your general quarters, your battle stations was with the anti aircraft gun?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and then once you went out to sea where did you go?” Hawaii, well it was a few months before we got to Hawaii and then they assigned us to working with the aircraft carriers. Interviewer: “Okay, and then where did the aircraft– Where did you sail then?” (46:02) Just around Hawaii. Interviewer: “Okay, so you didn’t actually go to Korea, you just stayed around Hawaii?” Yeah, right getting– Right that’s when we were assigned to go to a special place where nobody knew we were going and that was for the bomb test at Enitwetok. Interviewer: “Alright, but what kind of bomb was being tested?” The big one. Interviewer: “Okay so a hydrogen bomb? So the big, big one, so yeah okay. So one of the first tests of the hydrogen bomb.” Yeah. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, and what was your ship supposed to do during the tests?” Keep people away from them while we were getting with the preparations, you had to make sure no one was in the area. Interviewer: “Alright, so when your ship goes down there and you start patrolling did you know what the mission was or was it just keep people–” Yeah, we knew what it was going to be. Interviewer: “Alright, and now did you have to shoo anybody away or was it quiet up there?” We had one ship that we had to push them, they– It was Japanese, they wanted to fish, we got them out of there. (47:28) Interviewer: “Alright, now what do you remember about the test itself, what could you see or hear?” Well we were gonna see it actually happen and we knew about when it was going to be and then when it was ready we were about 65 miles away from it and they had to have black glasses or turn your back or things until the thing was fired and then as soon as it was fired they said “Okay, you can see it.” And we went into it. Interviewer: “So you went into the mushroom cloud?” Right to the cloud, right. We went into it and we saw where the dead fish and everything– The effect of it and then we had to clean the ship up, took us three times to get it all washed off. The water did the job but it was– Then after we got that cleaned off and we had to strip and we had to get cleaned off. They checked us with the geiger counter before we could eat. �George, Al Interviewer: “So they’re trying to clean off all the radiation.” Radiation, get rid of the radiation. Interviewer: “Alright, now how close to the atoll did you actually sail the ship, did you actually go into the atoll or just the areas outside?” Oh yeah, we were using the atoll for a place to go for when they were getting ready, so I don’t know, they just ruined the island [unintelligible] the atoll. Interviewer: “Yeah, I mean were the islands still there, was there still a reef?” It was already 15 feet above sea water. Interviewer: “Okay, so you’ve kind of blown the rest of it off?” Yeah. (49:47) Interviewer: “Alright, okay so the cleaning the hull is cleaning off the radiation not the dead fish?” Yeah, then we went back to Hawaii. Interviewer: “Alright, and was that really the only substantial mission you had or did you sail to other places?” Well they– My ship was going to go do– I thought was going to go right over to the war but I got points enough to get home. Interviewer: “Okay, so how long do you think you spent on the destroyer?” �George, Al On the what? Interviewer: “How long were you on the Preston, how long were you with them?” Well the whole time. Interviewer: “Okay, but was it– But were you on active duty for a full year or less than that?” We got it down there? Interviewer: “Not seeing it on there.” Well my whole time was about a year and a half, you know it was on board ship. Interviewer: “Alright, so it’s– That was a good amount of time. Alright, now did you write home regularly?” (51:17) Oh yeah, in fact one time there I had leave, a ten day leave, to go home. Interviewer: “And were you able to fly home and do that?” Yeah, flew home and back. Interviewer: “Alright, and again thinking about that time now are there anything else that went on on that ship or other things about that tour of duty that stand out for you?” Oh it was– I had about six or seven guys who were– In charge of and it was kind of fun to have that duty and working with them. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, now were there a lot of senior enlisted on that ship who had been in World War II?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, were there other guys who had been Seabees or were you the only one?” That were in Seabees? Interviewer: “Yeah.” Nobody that I know of, no. Interviewer: “Alright, now when you get back home the second time–” Yeah. (52:32) Interviewer: “You come back and now– You had sold your business.” Yup. Interviewer: “So now what do you do?” Well I had a little bit of money from selling the business, so I started looking for something to do and I went to different– Two different companies for a while and kept in touch with the moving business, I couldn’t go in competition there but my best competitor called me from Grand Rapids and they wanted somebody to do the kind of work that I was doing and so I went. They hired me and I was with them about 28 years. Interviewer: “Okay, now were you doing management or were you–” �George, Al Management, yeah and to the point where I ended up buying the– Moving into that company and doing some other work too. Interviewer: “Okay, alright now when you think back over the time you spent in the Navy what do you think you learned from it or how do you think that affected you?” Well I think it was the way it should’ve gone and the way I look back because the moving business changed a lot and the work that I was doing in Grand Rapids was at the right time because of the work that had to be done in the urban renewal and one time we had about 40 men working and– But that came and went, as long as– Like work with BM and companies like that that I had real good association with. Interviewer: “Okay, so you’re moving a lot of business stuff and commercial stuff not just family stuff.” Right and they had a time when they were big and then I got into the business of historic business records and that was great. So the way things went I think we couldn’t have had a better time. (55:23) Interviewer: “Alright I was gonna ask you though about how– What do you think you learned from being in the Navy or did it help you in any way those experiences?” Only the way it turned out coming and going, I think it helped me that way and I’m glad I was called in because the business that I got into after I came home worked out very well. Interviewer: “So you may have done better winding up in Grand Rapids that you would’ve been staying in Muskego.” Staying in Muskegon. �George, Al Interviewer: “Okay, alright and then when we think about those early atomic tests and that sort of stuff one of the concerns is that we exposed a lot of servicemen to radiation and this kind of thing and they can have health problems later, did you have any of that?” No problem. Interviewer: “Very good.” No problems, I had six children, 19 grandchildren, 32 great grandchildren and they’re all in good health. Interviewer: “Well very good then. Alright, I’d just like to close this by thanking you for taking the time to share the story today.” � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GeorgeA2317V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource George, Alfred Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-07 Title A name given to the resource George, Alfred (Interview transcript and video), 2019 Description An account of the resource Alfred George was born in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, on August 9, 1925 and moved to Grand Rapids in 1954. After graduating high school, George briefly attended Michigan State University before being drafted into the Navy. George was then sent to Great Lakes, Illinois, for Navy Boot Camp where he trained in construction. He was then assigned to Navy Seabees Construction Battalion 64 and was transferred to Camp Perry, Rhode Island, where he learned to operate small Higgins landing craft and underwent some basic rifle training. After Seabee training, George was sent to San Francisco and then was shipped on a converted passenger liner to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He and his Battalion were stationed for a few months at Pearl Harbor in mid-1944 repairing the damages of the 1941 Japanese attack. Then, George and his Battalion were transferred to the Philippines on LSTs and were stationed on Tubabao Island. They had orders to clear the local plantation forestry in order to construct Navy personnel barracks. While stationed in the Philippines, the war ended, and George read news pamphlets about the war’s final stages as well as the Atomic Bomb. His Battalion was then split up and he was sent to the Truk Atoll, in the Caroline Islands, where he operated phone lines while the rest of his Battalion worked to reconstruct the nearby air base over a ten-month period. Eventually, George accrued enough points to leave the service. He was shipped to Hawaii and then flown back to San Francisco where he was discharged. However, he opted to remain in the Navy Reserves. When he returned to Muskegon, George went to work for his father’s moving company and eventually bought the business from him. He also got married and had a child, but was soon called back into service in 1951 after the outbreak of the Korean War. From Great Lakes, Illinois, George was transferred back to San Francisco where he was assigned to the destroyer escort DDE 577, an old destroyer from the Second World War. He was assigned to an anti-aircraft battle station aboard the ship which sailed around Hawaii and was never fully deployed to Korea. George served on the destroyer escort for a year and a half before leaving the service again. George worked for several companies before being hired into a Grand Rapids based moving company as a part of its managerial staff for twenty-eight years. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f9f16e95264e8026733916c35eafbe69.mp4 fb90344576bfa145516dfc81d32903c1 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2d362ecf70ccb90bd22cbc2db8b8a5f7.pdf 353406c342c85332078e8065fddab536 PDF Text Text Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Conflicts Served In: Afghanistan War Interviewee’s Name: John Gellert Length of Interview: 55:46 Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Sam Noonan Interviewer: “This interview is a co-production of WKTV Voices and the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project, today we’re talking to John Gellert of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay, so John begin with some background on yourself, and to start with where and when were you born?” So I was born in 1988, October 20th, in Wurzburg, Germany, coming from a military family — so got to travel around east coast, west coast, went to Hawaii, my father served thirty years, so yeah, just traveled around a lot, every two to three years it seemed like we were moving, moving schools and everything. Interviewer: “Okay, where did you finish high school?” I finished high school in Virginia, northern Virginia area. Interviewer: “Alright, and then what did you do — what year did you finish high school?” That was 2006 that I graduated high school. Interviewer: “Okay, now you would’ve been in school when 9/11 happened, and what — and were you in Virginia or somewhere else —” No, at that point I was in Washington, actually my father was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, so that would’ve been eighth grade for me. Yeah, so being on the west coast it was interesting, kinda got to school and people didn’t know what was going on, I want to say the first tower had been hit, the homeroom teacher had kind of like put it on, but we were just watching it thinking it was [an] accident or something, and then yeah, like watching it live and ‘Oh,’ the second tower gets hit, that’s not an accident. And then I can vividly remember — cause my father was Army, when the Pentagon got hit, even in eight grade I thought, ‘That’s not an accident, there’s an attack going on, something else is going on,’ and then.. yeah, so I vividly remember that, that day. That was, will always be remembered. (2:07) Interviewer: “Okay, now were you living off-base at that point?” So at that point we were living off base. But we were right next to Fort Lewis, Washington, my father was stationed there but I was going to school on an off-base school. �Interviewer: “Okay, alright, and now when that happened was your father on the base at that point and then stuck there, or what happens?” I don’t remember exactly how that went, I do remember that there was definitely that heightened, escalated security — I remember even from the civilian side even, people were afraid that Seattle was gonna get attacked, which in retrospect it’s like, ‘Oh, obviously [it] wasn’t going to,’ but at that time people really thought that everything was going to get attacked, so yeah I don’t remember the exact run-up of how, with the military side with my father, where he was and how that all happened, but yeah I remember, definitely put people on edge. Interviewer: “Okay, now you go forward a little bit from there, at what point did you decide you wanted to go into the service?” So I was a little bit later, I didn’t enlist until 2011 so I was already twenty-two years old, my father kind of had pushed in high school, ‘Maybe you should go the academies and be an officer,’ cause he was an officer, but it just wasn’t what I wanted at the time. So I went to school, I went to Michigan State for a semester, got a minimum wage job after that, went back to community college, got my associate’s degree, but then it was at that point where I kinda realized like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ I [didn’t] know where I was going with it. I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided that time I wanted a challenge, I needed something else — I didn’t want the stereotypical desk job maybe, I wanted to challenge myself. Also there was sort of that thing in the back of my mind, I thought, ‘I could do that,’ you know? But I had to prove it to myself, I couldn’t just say that anymore, I needed to try. Interviewer: “Now what was the Michigan connection, how did you end up at Michigan State?” So my parents are both from Michigan, they’re both raised on the east side, Detroit, that’s where they met in school so I have family here. I’ve always kind of thought I wanted to come back to Michigan, I never got to really live in Michigan ‘til the six months, one semester at Michigan State, and now coming to Grand Valley for the past three semesters, so finally can now say I’m a Michigander. But yeah, that’s the connection. Interviewer: “Alright, and then where did you go to community college?” So community college was actually on Hawaii, it kind of worked out — was working in Virginia where my parents, my dad was stationed at the Pentagon at the time and then they were getting ready to move to Hawaii, and so they offered to, ‘Hey, if you want to continue school you can move with us.’ ‘Okay! I’ll go back to Hawaii for the second time.’ So yeah, worked out. Interviewer: “Alright, was Hawaii your favorite place to stay while you were going around, or?” I think you know, short answer it has to be. Just because you know, everybody — when they hear that they think I’m so lucky, like anywhere you live there for five years total it’s just the norm, you see the normal city life things that aren’t paradise, but no it was — Hawaii definitely ruins you to beaches, you know, I’ve lived on the east coast, the west coast, and people in California always talk about how great their beaches are, no, no, no, you gotta get out to Hawaii and then you’ll see a real beach, yeah. (laughter) �Interviewer: “Alright, so we go back.. 2011 you kind of got.. when you enlist did you pick a specialization at that point?” (5:14) I did. So again, what was — for me, my father — he had served in the infantry for the first half of his career, and then he made a change into force management, more of the ‘How to run the Army,’ kind of stuff. So I looked at it, if I was going to join each branch, what would I want to do? Looking at you know, the Air Force, you want to work with planes, you want to go into the Navy, you want to be on a boat, if you’re going to join the Marines or the Army then you should be infantry or something in that ground-fighting force, so for me personally I wanted that challenge, to go, so I decided to go in the infantry, so going into it I went to the recruiters, did all the testing, and then they asked me you know, ‘What MOS, what job do you want?’ And so I picked infantry. So yup, I knew going in what I wanted. Interviewer: “How did they respond to your wanting infantry?” There were definitely some jokes if you will, because I scored very highly on my testing, and I had a wide variety of jobs. And they were asking me, do I want to go for like military intelligence and that sort of stuff and I was like, ‘No, nah, you know what, I want to start with infantry.’ That it was I viewed, for me, as the right choice to go into. Interviewer: “Okay, so where do you go for basic training?” So we were at Fort Benning, Georgia, that is where all infantry goes to, we do a one-station unit training there. So a lot of places, you break up your basic and your actual AIT which is your specialty, for us AIT is just another five more weeks of infantry stuff, more basic. So yeah, I was there for fourteen weeks, I do believe it was, in 2011. Interviewer: “Okay, now describe sort of the process of going through basic, what kind of reception do you get when you arrive?” So you know, going into it there’s a lot of things you hear about or you think are going to happen, I didn’t think it was that bad and in retrospect I looked at it like, ‘Oh, that was easy,’ because I think I went in with this idea of what the old Army was maybe, or what the movies said, but no, it was definitely a challenge — they expect a lot out of you, the drill sergeants are tough, I don’t think there was ever any level — you know, the extremes that we see on movies, you know, the early Armies and Full Metal Jacket or anything like that, it’s nothing like that. But they push you, they really do push you to a level to make sure that you know you can overcome, that every day’s a challenge and when you look back at it you go, ‘Why was it so tough on that first day, that was easy compared to what we’re doing now at the end of it,’ but no in retrospect it was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. But they, they definitely — it’s you know, running and rocking every day, and just out — I was there in the summertime in Georgia, so it was just hot and muggy and kind of sucked a little bit, you know, some of those days are just, ‘Why am I doing this,’ but no, it was very well worth it in the end. Interviewer: “Okay, were you in good physical shape when you went in?” Short answer is no. So I had to lose, oh god, like sixty pounds just to get in the Army, took me about a year, I kind of made the choice in 2009 and then it wasn’t until about 2010 that I had lost the weight and then had to wait some time to actually get in, then 2011 I went to basic, so no I �was definitely not in good shape going in, and then basic definitely helped me lose more weight, get into better shape. But I would even say it wasn’t even until after deployment, so we were looking at the… 2012, 2013 timeframe in my career, two, three years in, that’s where I hit my peak of where I was really in shape and actually at that standard that I wanted to be. So it took time to get there. (8:33) Interviewer: “Okay, now aside from just the physical part of getting you into shape, what else do they have you do in basic training these days?” So it’s always learning the tactics, our battle drills — we have, I think there’s eight of them now, but you’re supposed to get these memorized, they’re supposed to be a gut reaction, you don’t even have to think about it, if something happens you already know what you’re supposed to do, where your guys are gonna go, but yeah it’s just kinda instilling the basic standards and disciplines, it was very basic, there’s a lot of stuff you have to extrapolate on when you get to your unit, you’re supposed to get there with a basic knowledge though, that when a new private shows up everybody expects them to be at a certain level because they’ve been to basic like everybody else has. But you still have to build them up once you get to an actual line unit as we call it, and yeah, so I mean it was all the basic stuff. Interviewer: “Okay, how much of kind of just sort of the spit and polish stuff was there?” For me, luckily, not as much cause I went in at a time where we were with the tan boots, the ACUs, that kinda — what color was it, the grey, not even the old BDUs with the camis where you had to spit-shine the black boots, so I got very lucky in that regard. I did not have to spend time like that, my father definitely did, I’ve seen him do it, I wasn’t in the airborne units, those guys still do it with their jump boots and stuff, so I lucked out with that level, that I didn’t have to do that. Interviewer: “Alright, now how large a company or platoon were you training with?” In basic I want to say there was maybe fifty people, it wasn’t a full platoon cause I remember there [was] space cause this is 2011, the Army wasn’t at its peak if I remember right, we were kind of on a draw-down, like maybe not — I want to say Afghanistan and Iraq were still open at the time, cause actually, oh jeez, the first month that I was in basic is when Osama Bin Laden was killed, so that was that time frame. But yeah, so there were still open spaces in the bay that we slept in, so I think it was about fifty people I want to say, per platoon, then you have four platoons per company that we were in in basic. (10:37) Interviewer: “Alright, now did everybody in the platoon make it through?” No, short answer is no. There was a few drop-outs in the beginning, it got to a point I do remember the company commander, the captain, at one point said that they were not gonna accept any more drop-outs, cause people — again, it was 2011 and I think people, for whatever reason were going in — we’re the infantry, so you should expect to deploy and to be in combat, especially at that time there was still two wars going on, but there were definitely guys that still were joining just for the benefits, they wanted to go to college, and I think maybe the culture �shock got to them and they realized, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be in the infantry,’ so there was a few that dropped out, not everybody made it through. Interviewer: “Did some of them get hurt?” There was a few, but those guys, the one I know of, he actually went home for maybe thirty days, sixty days, and came back to finish. He got something, like a stress fracture in the leg or something like that, but he did finish so — and actually a guy I was stationed with then, later in my career, was actually stationed with him at their first duty station so I was able to know that he made it through and made it to a unit and was, you know, progressing his career, so yeah. Interviewer: “Okay. Now were there women training on that base as well as men in other units, or?” So on the base there probably was, but at that time, 2011, there were no females in the infantry, so for us we were segregated, we weren’t intermixed with females, I don’t know what else — cause there [were] other jobs that do train at Fort Benning, Georgia, especially cause, oh, what else is there — the airborne stuff is there and females could do airborne, so there are females on base, but for me specifically at the four months that I was in training, really didn’t see many females. Interviewer: “Okay. Alright, now does the treatment of the recruits kind of change over the course of that time, I mean do they lighten up on you in some ways or give you a little more independence?” Sometimes. Again, for us because we’re one station unit training, you’re there with the same drill sergeants, it’s essentially fourteen weeks of basic training, yes — other jobs, when they move from basic and they go to their actual school for their job, it gets a lot more lenient usually. But no, you do still see, you know the beginning is called red phase, red phase you have no liberties, it is — you are strict there, on you for everything, and then you move to the next phase and by the end of it you get to your, oh, the last ones are gold and black and that’s like the last few weeks — they’re fairly lenient. Also again, I was very lucky, my drill sergeants were not the over-the-top sticklers, they were more laid-back, they were more realistic I like to think, they were actually telling us what the Army was like, it wasn’t just to yell at us, to yell at us it’s to make sure that we are learning from it and we’re becoming better soldiers. Interviewer: “Now were your instructors people who had been to Iraq or Afghanistan by then?” (13:31) Yes. I do believe all three, I had three drill sergeants, my senior drill sergeant was special forces, he had done a couple tours I know, then we had one that was actually infantry, was a mortarman, I know he was there for the actual initial invasion of Iraq to Baghdad, he did the whole push to Baghdad, and then we had another drill sergeant who, he was actually a 19 Delta, which is a [cavalry] scout. But I know he had done some deployments, I don’t know their exact numbers, but yes all three of them were combat deployed. Interviewer: “Okay. So when do you finish basic?” �So I finished, so we’re looking at end of July I think that was. Yeah, July 29th I feel like was when I graduated cause it was after July 4th, I do remember having July 4th liberties, but yeah so we did four months of training, you have a culminating event there, there’s this big multiple-mile ruck march where you’re having to do different activities throughout it, doing buddy carries, litter carries, ammo can carries, and it’s kind of through the night and at the end they go to this big pit-circle with like, they put the bonfire on and it’s kind of a big ceremony and they give you your… is it the crossed rifles at that point? I think it’s the crossed rifles we get at that point, but yeah so we have multiple different stages to kind of like earning, you’re in your blue cord for the infantry that goes on our dress uniform, you earn the crossed rifles, so different things that they give us throughout it. But yeah, it’s kind of a big culmination and then at the very end we have our actual graduation ceremony where the families get to come out and celebrate with us. Interviewer: “Alright, now once all that happens what happens to you next?” (15:00) Then I went right to Fort Lewis, Washington. So sometimes some people are able to get some actual leave time, so I think up to two weeks coming out of basic — our unit said, ‘Nope, you’re already getting close to Christmas so we’re going to help you by saving your leave days,’ which actually really did work out for me, because I deployed the next April and so I used my leave days then, leading up to – for Christmas leave, so I can go home then before deployment. But yeah, we went right to my unit and they were already in the field training, and so I showed up, got my equipment, a week later I was in the field with them already training. So yeah, it was real quick. Interviewer: “So what was that unit?” So Attack Company 2-1 Infantry out of Fort Lewis, Washington, so Legion. That was the unit that I went to originally and the unit that I ended up deploying with in 2012. Interviewer: “Alright. Now the — they’re already, they’re in the field, they’re gearing up for deployment, so what are you actually doing then when you joined them, what’s happening?” So that first initial training was out at Yakima, Washington which is the eastern side of Washington, that’s kind of our local place that we would go train for a month, but it’s just all the tactics at a company level normally. That time we weren’t doing the battalion level, that’s more company level so you’re starting with team lanes, where it’s four people, five people at a time, then you do squad lanes, you’re looking at up to eleven people, then you go to platoon lanes, and then you’re doing, that’s like your forty-man lane, then you go to company, 150 people at a time, doing different training events — and also with us I was a Stryker unit, which is our eightwheeled vehicle, so then you have to like integrate the vehicles into it, you’re learning how to use them, how to properly dismount and all of that. Then coming up that November we went down to Fort Irwin, California, which is where [the] national training center is for the Army, and that was our month-long training to kind of certify that yes, your unit is ready to deploy. So we did that, and that was a little more higher-level where we’re doing more of the battalion level, multiple companies at a time. You start small, still doing the platoon stuff there, but then you end up getting to brigade level sometimes where it’s multiple battalions at a time, pretty much everybody that’s deploying is out there in ‘the box,’ we call it, out in the sand, playing in the box and learning how to overcome the enemy out there. �Interviewer: “Okay, now describe the Stryker a little bit.” (17:14) So the Stryker is — it’s a eight-wheeled vehicle platform, it has — I think we’re up to ten variants now, they just introduced one actually after I got out, but I dealt with the infantry carrying vehicle, so you can fit eleven guys in it — that’s with the driver and the gunner, plus the… yeah it’s eleven. Yes, eleven guys. So with eight dismounts I believe it would be, nine dismounts then, two guys stay in the vehicle. Yup. You’ve got all the variants though, there’s a medical variant, there’s a tank variant, there’s 105mm cannon, there’s one with TOW missiles on it for anti-armor, there’s a command variant that has more radio stuff, there’s a nuclear-biological one that has all the kind of sensors in case there’s contamination, there’s an engineer one that has like a mine roller on the front and has systems that kind of help prevent IEDS, that sort of stuff. So yeah, I think they’re up to like ten variants now on the Stryker, but it allows us to have a lot of capabilities at a company level if you have all of them at once. Interviewer: “Okay, now and was it designed in part to be able to kind of deal with like the IED threat and that sort of thing?” At first it wasn’t, cause they came out early 2000s, right around — in fact, that’s why my dad was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, was that’s where the first Stryker brigade stood up, and I went then to Fort Lewis. So it was right around that time we were trying to get to like a new Army, I don’t know all the details, my father was dealing with all that stuff, but basically it was we were trying to get to a new style, faster, quicker Army, and that’s what it allowed us. The capabilities of the Stryker, it’s quick reaction, it’s very quiet compared to track, compared to a tank, light armor though — cause with the infantry we only had 50. Cal machine guns or the 40mm MK19 grenade launcher on top, so you don’t really have the fire capability, but speed and how quiet it is allows you to have some more capabilities. Interviewer: “Okay, and I guess my recollection was, it has a relatively narrow bottom and it gets wider as it goes up.” So that was one of the new variants, so when it first came out yeah, it had the flat bottom which obviously, when IEDS happened that was a big issue. Luckily around that 2008-2009 timeframe we did get the double v hull, when I deployed in 2012 we had those in Afghanistan, so yes. Those ones do have some blast capabilities and I don’t know if things have changed now, but back when we were in-country so 2012, no double v hull had been breached by an IED, other things happened that caused injuries just because it’s a blast, but the hull itself has never been breached that I know of — I don’t know if things have changed now, obviously the enemy adapts and makes bigger bombs, but… but yes, it does have some capabilities. We have learned and adapted throughout time, we’ve kept adding to it. Interviewer: “Alright, now would your entire company move around in the Strykers or?” (20:00) Yes. Yes, so especially on deployment we had all Strykers, we also had a couple of the MaxxPros and MATVS, some other vehicles that were kind of left there from the previous unit, so we got to use those. The MaxxPros we used as like the mine roller vehicles for in the lead, they just had ‘em on there already so it worked out. But no, as a Stryker unit everybody should be able to have a spot in the Stryker to go. �Interviewer: “Okay, alright. So basically you joined the unit, you prepare for x number of months, and then off you go.” Oh yes. Interviewer: “So how do they get you to Afghanistan?” So then a lot of flying. So the lead-up to it, it’s a couple months’ time because we had a few vehicles we shipped, we had all of our equipment we were shipping, we put ‘em on the boats, put ‘em on the containers, sent ‘em off to the Middle East, then for me I at least got lucky, I took the shorter route — cause from Washington we got to go through Alaska, over the ice caps into… where was that at, Manas Kurgistan. That’s where we landed first, so we go to Kurgistan, then from there we do some pre-deployment training still, get us some more equipment while we’re there, then we went to Kandahar airfield which is in regional command south of Afghanistan, that’s where we set up, we got all of our vehicles, maybe a week or so later we were driving out to our command outpost that we were going to be on. Interviewer: “Okay, what’s your first impression of Afghanistan when you get there?” I don’t know, you know. It was — I wanted to deploy, that was one of those things going in the Army, I looked at — I had a couple things I wanted to check off, and that was one of ‘em. I thought if I’m gonna do this I’m gonna deploy at some point. There’s two wars, I believe Iraq was closing while I was still in basic, we kind of like said we closed it, we were sending all of the equipment out, I think it was that time frame. But still Afghanistan was open, I got to my unit, there was two of the three brigades at Fort Lewis were already getting ready to deploy, the third brigade, which is fourth brigade, they deployed after we deployed. So everybody from Fort Lewis got to deploy right around that timeframe, so I knew I wanted to. I don’t know what my first impression was though, you know, it was kinda what I expected I guess. You know, you see it on TV. You have people, I had leadership that had deployed, they told us what to expect. You know, it’s your third-world country, it’s just, that’s what it is. Our area was — we were near Kandahar City, which is a little more modern. But we were out in the middle of the farmland you know, with the Arghandab river valley there, so there’s some desert, some mountains, some farmland, lot of… oh, pomegranates, so I don’t know, it wasn’t… it wasn’t too harsh I guess, I don’t know, it was what I expected honestly, it really was. (22:37) Interviewer: “Was it fairly open country as opposed to being really mountainous or?” Yes, so in RC south it was definitely more open, I think it’s more the north is where you get the mountains. But yeah, where we were — cause again, you had the river valley, so that was very flat, it had been irrigated so there was a lot of like crops and everything around that area, then when you spread out from the river it does get more open, more desert-type look to it, and there were some mountains north of us but we, me personally we didn’t interact with that area, that wasn’t our command. But no, it was nothing like the north where you know, climbing mountaintops to do your job no, it was more open. We could use our vehicles and drive most — most places we could drive. Interviewer: “Okay, and then what sort of base did you get to?” �So we were — first, we had two different ones, we moved areas on our deployment but the first one we were at was Terra Nova which was a … a command company level outpost. Well we actually replaced two companies that were living there at the time, and we replaced with just one company, and so that was interesting to take over such an area. But it worked out, it really did, we got very lucky I would say on deployment, the timeframe, we get there in April, go through the summer months, leave in January, we sort of managed to kind of miss the fighting season very luckily at least for me and my platoon especially. Some stuff did happen if we can get into.. on the other stuff, but no, for me personally and my platoon we got very lucky. So Terra Nova we start with, very small, I mean you — probably not even a mile, you know, around perimeter, you know, it’s [a] very small base, we were kind of north of a city, well, between two cities. Villages I guess we can call them, not really cities. Cause Kandahar City was big, we’re talking villages. Mud huts, little paths between ‘em that we’d patrol, and then halfway through deployment we ended up moving west to Zari, which is more close to where the Taliban started. And so when we got there again, it was fairly small, company outpost that my platoon was on, we were spread out, oh probably — maybe twelve kilometers it seemed like, as a company. I don’t know the exact details, but our little cop was on a hill, which was kind of nice, you could see everywhere around you, made you a target obviously, being in the middle of a village and up on the high ground, but things worked out I think fairly nicely on our deployment. Interviewer: “So gonna go back to the Terra Nova stage alright, what was your company’s purpose there?” So at the time we first got there we were starting that transition into partnering with the Afghan army, the police, we were still taking somewhat of the lead but especially by that summer things were transitioning where we were supposed to let them take the lead. Cause this is 2012 at the time, we’re starting to try to draw down Afghanistan. So we were trying to make them take the lead — at the beginning we got there we were kind of in charge of everything, we would just go do our patrols, we’re walking, talking to their — doing Shuras, talking to their leadership, talking to their religious leaders, trying to talk to their police, and their Army-type leadership and making sure that things are going right. But by that summer though we wanted them to take the lead, so there were times that.. if they couldn’t provide us with people to go on patrol with us, we just couldn’t patrol that day which was a very weird feeling, cause you’re there to do a job and then you’re told, ‘Well, you can’t even walk outside because you don’t have the partner,’ but obviously in the higher-up it makes sense cause we were trying to leave and we need them to take control of the situation, but yeah so every day, go on a patrol, whether it was driving somewhere or walking somewhere, yeah. Just trying to — presence patrol, make sure they knew we were there and we were attempting to help. (26:28) Interviewer: “Okay, and what kind of relationship did you have with the Afghans?” Overall I’d say it was good. Truly, for our area specifically — obviously different areas and different timeframes, different years you look at Afghanistan, things were worse in different areas. We got very lucky, I think the previous unit had it maybe a little worse than us, the next unit had [it] a little worse than us, and we got of got this nice middle-ground where for whatever reason things worked out. Truly I don’t think, especially at Terra Nova that first half, I don’t think there was a single IED that we found ourselves. It was usually a local would find it, call up the local police, they would call us, we would go out there, bring up the EOD, they would come out there and get rid of it. It wasn’t really until the second half of deployment to a new area where things got a little more.. kinetic if you will, and then we were having to find IEDS on our own, but �that first area, the people seemed to like us, seemed to respect us, there’s the stereotypes — kids might throw rocks at you or whatever, it happens, kids will be kids anywhere you go. But the people really wanted us to help out and I think it also showed we were building schools out there, we were helping some of the infrastructure, roads all the time were getting built around us, so… we were again — I think, I hope that in the end they knew we were there to help. Interviewer: “Right. Okay, and then you switched bases now, and so what’s changing then?” So we went more west. And as you get toward the west you get closer to where like the Taliban, Mullah Omar and all them kinda grew up, and so it’s a little more… I guess I’ll say militant, I didn’t see it personally — I got very, very lucky, I was actually the only person in my platoon that I know of who did not get my combat infantryman’s badge. I did not truly see combat, I got very lucky in this middle ground, when I’d go on patrol nothing happened. So I never had any true gunfire at me, I’ve had rounds go overhead but it was always — a wedding was going on or something, and they were celebrating, and then you realize, ‘Oh, okay, it’s not an enemy force,’ but yeah, just as you get out there it was a little more kinetic, the unit before us — I actually had a friend I went to basic with who was in the unit we replaced, he ended up getting shot through both calves actually, went to Germany for three weeks, got healed up, went back to Afghanistan. Got very lucky. Talking to him though, he was telling us what was going on and yeah, I expected it was gonna be worse. And it did, when we went over there as a company, we ended up having one guy, Tyler Jeffries, ended up stepping on an IED and losing both legs, and then … ended up stepping on one and got very lucky and only broke a bone in his heel if I remember right. So we had two guys [who] had to get medevaced, so again it got more kinetic. There was more, I don’t know if there was ever really a firefight, we didn’t really have that as a company, but there were some incidences, vehicles got shot at, some of the bases got shot at, so it was a little more kinetic out there when we got to Zari. (29:27) Interviewer: “And what impression did you have of the Afghan military or police forces?” So the first area it wasn’t as good. They… we were partnered with more of the police at that first place, and just who their leadership was, we didn’t have a great relationship with. You know, it was kind of that — these aren’t people who probably wanted to join, as a police force, they weren’t trained properly, they’re poor, they don’t have the… care probably, that they’re doing it. But when we went to Zari, actually to their credit their army that we partnered with were very good, their captain that we partnered with actually had been to university, during the initial invasion of Afghanistan he actually trained with the special forces, so he knew English, he spoke almost perfect English, he actually knew map-reading, he knew tactics, so when we got up there it was great, there was time that we could just point on the map and be like, ‘Hey, there’s apparently an IED out there,’ and he’d be like, ‘I got it,’ and him and his guys would go take care of it. That was very nice, that was a very good experience when we got to the second base. Interviewer: “Okay, now do you have a sense that he and his troops were from a different part of Afghanistan?” I don’t know, yeah, cause I know a lot of stuff obviously gets very tribal out there, I don’t know specifically where he was from. At that time, I want to say President Karzai was still in power, and yeah you’d hear all the time that Karzai was bad cause they were different tribes, he was in �the north by Kabul and down where we were in the south they didn’t necessarily care about what was going on in Kabul, cause it’s a tribal thing — they only care about their little section, their family. It’s not like [an] Afghanistan as a whole, it’s more of like ‘our people down here’ is what they cared about. Interviewer: “Okay, and I mean did you have a sense of how much of a Taliban presence there was in the area?” I — because again, I personally did not experience you know, true combat if you will, it didn’t manifest itself but it was always a threat. In our area we had like, Ranger battalion multiple times came in to go do a raid on a building and they would get some guy and take him to Kandahar, so there was always things going on, but very luckily, once in a while there’d be an IED go off, usually it was — it appeared to be trying to target to Afghan forces, it wasn’t usually at us. So sometimes that seemed more that it was more of a revenge thing, cause there was — we had stories of… one of the local leaders ended up going to a wedding and disrespected somebody and later that night they ambushed him, they came to our cop to get you know, medical, so it was things like that, it wasn’t usually focused at us. Yeah, things like that happened though. Interviewer: “Okay. Did you have a sense that there was kind of an ordinary daily life for the civilians, could they kind of go about their business?” (32:14) In our area yes, I really do. We’d go walk around and it was usually just farmers or they’d have their sheep — lot of sheep in our area, or even some type of like ox-type-cow-type thing. And we had camels in our area but no, the daily life didn’t seem to get interrupted cause we did our job and they would just… kind of line the streets sometimes, the kids loved us cause they knew they could get like pens or candy or something from us, so they’d come up to us, but the elders normally just kinda hung out and watched us go by, we’d been there for oh god, at that point we were looking at ten plus years and so they — they’re probably real used to us by then, yeah. Interviewer: “Okay. Did you have any sense of how the larger mission was going, were we making progress toward creating a normal society in Afghanistan or was that just hard to tell?” It was hard to tell. Cause I truly, you know I was in a bubble, I was a private on deployment, I was a PFC only an E3, but I would say knowing — we actually went to the same exact area that my unit deployed in 2009-2010, my leadership — like my squad leader and my team leader, they had deployed then, and it was a much worse deployment coming from the kinetic side, more casualties, lot more fighting, so we got there — again, I went into this expecting that, cause we’re going to the same area that they had been two years prior, and then we get there and not much happened. And our leadership told us like, this is crazy, because apparently things are getting better, just… or things moved away from that area you know, so apparently things were getting better, and from what I saw yes, it was, you could see there wasn’t much going on in our area, sadly still on our deployment there were things around us, some big bases got attacked, there was a couple green on blue attacks where an Afghan force, army or police attacked us, so probably an insider threat type thing, that did happen around us and it caused us to obviously have to adjust our security at the time, but our area specifically truly seemed like things were getting better, so yeah. �Interviewer: “Alright, now how long was the total deployment?” So nine months. So we went April 2012 to January 2013. Interviewer: “Alright. And are there any other kind of — I guess a couple things, while you’re out there how much contact do you have with people back home?” We had actually a really good opportunity to, cause like the infrastructure’s already set up, we had computers, some internet, basic internet. So I would try to call, personally, every seven to ten days I would call home. And actually for the first two months of my deployment my father overlapped, he was in Kabul while I was deployed in RC south, he ended up coming out to see me [at] one point, that was real fun having the colonel show up with all his friends and caused the dog-and-pony show, the circus came to town. But it was cool you know, it was a photo op, you know, me and my dad on deployment together. But yeah no, we were definitely able to call home fairly regularly. Internet never seemed to go down so yeah, it was easy. (35:09) Interviewer: “Alright. Now aside from the visit from your father are there other particular things that happened in that deployment that kind of stand out in your memory?” No, really cause for me it was… every day was, you know they sometimes blur but it was — we were doing our job, it’s what we expected, what we trained to do. Every day we’d go on one, sometimes two patrols a day, go walk to [an] area, talk to somebody, walk back, come back, then there has to be a driving patrol and cause I was a driver on deployment also I’d have to get my vehicle and take somebody somewhere, yeah so it was just all kind of the same day, there was no weekends, we worked for that one month of leave that we got after deployment, that was our vacation, but we didn’t really get weekends and so… I don’t know, it wasn’t anything big you know, there’s plenty of stories. Just this past Christmas I went down to one of my friends’ wedding, friend I deployed with, and there was four of us that came, three of us that came to fort, and yeah the whole like four days we’re just talking and reminiscing and laughing and just… remembering the good old days. Interviewer: “Alright, so you get back then to the States, now will you stay — I guess do you get your month off at that point?” Not exactly. I wish, no, we still had to wait for all our equipment to get back and clean everything and make sure we’re accountable for everything, maybe two months after we got back we got I think it was three or four weeks off. And then I was able to go home, see family, so yeah that was a good time. Interviewer: “Okay, what happens next?” Then… well, cause then you’re kind of off the deployment cycle for a little bit cause especially at that time we were trying to go you know, back in the day there was the stereotype that you could come back from deployment, six months later, a year later you’re going back. Where when I was in we were trying to keep it at a… for every month you were deployed you were back for two months, so we were supposed to have like two years off roughly. So yeah, we were kind of on this down cycle, so we went back to training, I mean jeez, 2013, that summer we were in the field again training right away, yeah just kinda getting back into the swing. We had maybe two-three months off if you will where things were a little more laid-back, easier, just kind �of like getting back in the swing of things, and then you hit it hard again. Just go right back into training. Interviewer: “Okay. Now does personnel rotate through the unit?” Oh yes, yeah, and that’s — those first few months [are] kind of the big shift, a lot of guys were on orders to go to another base or they were getting out of the Army, and then people then have to come in, so we got a big influx of guys who had also just deployed — we had a couple guys come from Italy I know, they had just deployed and they all came to Fort Lewis. So yes, we do have that turnover that happens after a deployment fairly — within that first few months, it happened. Interviewer: “Alright. And then now do you stay with that unit and go with them on the next deployment or do you…” So for us, so for me personally, cause they weren’t — they have not deployed since, I — I knew that I wanted to probably move bases, so I ended up reenlisting to go to Germany which is where I spent — so I spent three years at Fort Lewis, three years in Germany. Which I left in 2014 to go to Germany, but in that year that it took me to get there, yeah I went to the national training center one more time down in California, and went to Yakima again — actually twice, two more times out to eastern Washington for a month at a time, so yeah even though I was on orders to go to Germany, if you’re going to the field to train you’re gonna go with ‘em cause you’re.. gotta do your job, gotta make sure everybody else is getting their job done. Interviewer: “And that’s still your unit, and that’s what your unit is doing?” Yes. Interviewer: “Okay. Now what rank were you at this point?” (38:35) So when I got back from deployment I was still a PFC, I picked up Specialist pretty quickly after that, and then by the time I went to Germany I had gone to the board and got promoted to sergeant, and so June 1st of 2014 was my day to rank for sergeant. Interviewer: “Okay, and now do they give you any particular preparation for going to Germany or do they just load you on a plane and send you?” A little bit of load you on a plane, I had friends that had been there, stationed in the unit, so you — there’s some prep work, you have to go get some tests done to make sure that you’re healthy enough to go overseas, but no [there’s] not really any cultural stuff, that’s — when you get to the unit there was a little bit of that, and they offered some language classes, luckily I had taken three years of German in high school, wasn’t fluent or anything but it helped when I got there to kinda go interact if I wanted to go off base. Order some food or something, kinda break the ice when you’re talking to a local. Interviewer: “Okay, alright. And so where do they send you and to what unit?” �So I went to Vilseck, Germany, which is right next to Grafenwoehr which is our, the bigger base that was next to us. But I went to Fox troop of 22 cavalry regiment, so yeah Vilseck, Germany, it’s a real small base out there, kind of a Bavaria, so that eastern, southeast Germany. Interviewer: “Okay, and what was going on there?” So at that time that unit had actually just got back from their deployment… I feel like it was April of 2014, and then I show up in October of 2014, so we went onto this cycle of NATO missions actually, so we were partnering a lot with other countries. There was the normal days, the stuff that we could do locally in Germany with us, we had our own kind of national training center out in Hohenfels, Germany, we’d go there for a month, we would kinda train at our Grafenwoehr, Vilseck training ground, but then we ended up going real quick in 2015 we were already on orders to go to Romania. We went there for three months, so went, trained with, partnered with the Romanian army, oh jeez the British came, I think Ukraine was there, so like a lot of nations will come to these types of NATO-partnered missions where you’d go train for multiple months at a time. Then 2016 I did Latvia and Finland, Finland and then Latvia. That year, so yeah every year we went somewhere and then as I was leaving my unit went to Poland for seven months actually, that was a long one that they went for. Interviewer: “Okay, now what impression do you have of the military forces of these different countries? I mean the Romanians versus the British or whatever.” Yeah. So partnering with like the Germans, the British, they’re kinda what you expect, they’re sort of our level if you will, they put some money into their military, a lot of times they are professional armies I’ll call it where like us, they enlist: that’s their life then. Some of these other countries though, a lot of the smaller ones, because they just don’t have the funds like a Romanian army, these guys will stay for twenty years but it’s so much smaller and they don’t even have a base, they just live on the economy and then they show up for training if they need to, it’s a much different — you know, almost a culture shock, you show up to these places and it’s — you see ‘em in uniform cause we’re training at the time, and you think they must be the same, and then you start talking to them cause you’re there for three months and you want to know and interact with them, and you realize, ‘Oh no, this is [a] completely different lifestyle,’ they don’t even get medical through the military, they just go through the civilian side, you know just very, very different. Finland was the one too, cause they actually do kind of a mandatory service, when you’re eighteen you’re supposed to — there’s multiple things you can do, but one of the common ones is military service for six months minimum, sometimes to a year depending on your job. And then you go into their reserves in case something comes up, so again very different culture of how their military is run. But it was always a great learning experience, and actually some of the best training I did in my military career I think, even — you know, you train for Afghanistan, that’s very one-focus, very centralized, when you start training with these other nations you get to see a lot of other things, it was very cool. (42:32) Interviewer: “And what did Romania look like to you, was it just out in the country someplace or?” So we started on the eastern side which is over toward the Black Sea if I remember right, that was more open, a little more dry, these kind of rolling plains… some, I don’t want to say rundown but some — they had cities maybe not like to our level, but then we went to the west, which is the Transylvanian Alps, and that was just beautiful. I loved… if we had down time we’d �go run or something and we were just running through these kind of picturesque green fields with the mountains to our side and stuff, so yeah no it was… it was much smaller obviously than the states, it’s very open I think. There are… you know, the stereotypes of the gypsies, I’ve seen some like gypsy towns, I happened to be on the trains with our vehicles to Romania, and so I got to kind of see the countryside, and yeah, you go through some of these towns where they’re more… you know, the windows are out or it looks like dirt floors but it would always make me laugh, like they still come out with their camera phones, take pictures of our train with all the vehicles so… it looks poor on the outside but maybe not. Interviewer: “Alright, and then what about Latvia?” Latvia was, that’s another one, I really liked that place. We were near Riga the capital, maybe an hour away, very green where we were, there was a river so very green, Riga’s just a big city like you think of in most European cities I think of, yeah it was just a normal cityscape. People own a business and stuff, doing their job, and then we’re training out in the fields, out in the training ground we were at, but we got some opportunities to get on some busses, we’d rent a bus, get the interpreters that were there with us to call up a company, they’d bring the busses in, we got to go to Riga a couple times so we could do some sightseeing. Cause obviously we’re gonna to these places for multiple months, we want to at least see the culture too, we don’t want to just go there and say we were on the base the whole time — want to be able to say we did something. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you’re in some of these places, maybe especially in Latvia when you’re on the frontier with Russia, and the Russians have — they’re starting to get kind of aggressive toward their neighbors by that time — was there some sense of urgency or threat out there or was it just a vacation?” No, there… it’s kind of both in a way I guess, cause at some point you know, for our level, you know the presidents are doing their thing, the big armies are saying their thing, we’re moving armies around, we’re moving people around, but for us we’re going and interacting with their army. We’re training, we’re partnering, we’re seeing their people, but especially I would say Romania was actually the big one — we were in Romania when, it was that time frame when the Crimean Peninsula was a big talking point, and that was — like, I think they said 200 miles from us. I mean really, 200 miles in a vehicle, you can make that in a day, so it was right there. And talking to the locals, because Romania had been part of the — part of Russia after World War II, they got very lucky in a sense, they weren’t as militant there, they weren’t as oppressed, but I think it was like in the sixties the military moved out, but they were still under Russian control so talking to some of their older type people, they loved us being there because they were really still looking at Russia as this threat. We might not think of it but no, their history shows for them, so they look at us as this force that’s there for good, we’re kind of deterring the Russian aggression if you will, but for us specifically for me, yeah we were there just to kinda partner with their army and interact and train and see what they’re doing, and they can see what we’re doing. Interviewer: “Okay, and I think you mentioned there are some Ukrainians there as well?” Yup. At that point, I think it was Ukraine because I know oh, we had everybody, there was Lithuanians, Estonians I’ve seen out in those countries, even the Canadians came out in Romania, they came out there. Yeah, so everybody comes out to play. (46:17) �Interviewer: “Yeah. But you might have Ukrainians there when you’re in Romania and the crisis is going on in Crimea, that’s Russia taking stuff from Ukraine, and did any of them kind of say anything about that, … contact with them?” No, I didn’t have much contact with them. I just remember their flag, I just remember the yellow and blue there, cause at the base we were at they had all the flags of everybody who was onbase, so yeah I saw all of the different flags and everything, but I never partnered directly with them. Really in Romania, I think like it was the British, the Canadian[s], and the Romanians are pretty much all that I partnered with myself. Interviewer: “Okay, and at this point what is your job description?” So at that point in Romania I was a team leader on the ground, so as a sergeant I was in charge of — well for me personally it was two guys, so I was a fireteam leader, so in a squad you have two teams, so a staff sergeant usually is in charge of two sergeants, we have our guys, and so our job is to dismount out of the vehicles and go take the fight to whatever we’re fighting. Interviewer: “Mhm. Alright, and then to think about that… so how much time did you spend in Germany as opposed to on these exercises?” More time in Germany, but yeah, it gets to a point you realize, ‘I didn’t get much time to travel,’ because we went to Romania for three months, we went to Hohenfels for a month, we were in our own training ground for multiple weeks at a time, went to — I went to Hohenfels three times I think in three years, so then went for three months split between Finland and Latvia, yeah just seemed like we were always getting ready to go somewhere. But yeah, I did get to travel. I can’t say I didn’t, I can look back with fond memories, I got to go down to Switzerland, I’ve been to Lithuania, where else did we go… Belgium, and to France, I did get to go to Normandy — that was one of the big ones that I wanted to get to cause I had friends that were stationed in Germany before that did not get over there and they kinda told me that that was a regret, so I knew one of the first big trips I took was to get over to like Paris and Normandy. Interviewer: “Right, okay. Now in Germany, how did the Germans themselves seem to treat the American soldiers?” Overall good. It was actually really interesting cause I was born there, it was my dad’s first duty station so I knew stories back then, and I visited when I was maybe seven — I don’t really remember it, but there was a stereotype still back then that they maybe didn’t like us, they were a little more abrasive. Our generation though, most of us speak English, it actually was weird, I wanted to learn the language and interact and try to go back and you’d go out to a restaurant and you’d start to speak in German and they’d realize right away you’re not from around here, and they’re like, ‘Do you want an English menu?’ It’s like ah, okay, I’ll take an English menu. So no, like English is really prominent, they — the one thing that kinda surprised a little bit, they actually know our politics more than I think some of us know our politics, cause you don’t really know until you go overseas that the world does look at us as this overseeing entity, so yeah cause that was the time, you know when President Trump was coming into power, doing his campaign, and you know the Germans sometimes would start asking us like, ‘Oh, what do you think of that?’ It’s like I have no opinion! I don’t wanna go into this, our politics are not for me to discuss while I’m a soldier. But yeah no, so they follow us, they track, they know what we’re doing, and they like to talk to us actually from what I saw. �Interviewer: “And they spoke better English than you spoke German so?” Oh yes, very. Very much so, they spoke — most of them, and it was funny, they always — cause I think they are sometimes perfectionists, they would say like, ‘Oh I don’t speak very good English,’ and then you start talking and you’re like, ‘You speak better English than I know Americans speak English,’ so yeah, they knew a lot of English. (49:44) Interviewer: “Okay, alright, now are there other things about that tour in Germany that kind of stand out for you that you haven’t brought into the story yet?” Oh, I mean… just getting to travel, I mean especially Normandy, that was the big one that really sticks out to me, but even when we went to do these training exercises — so I was at Fort Lewis for three years, never partnered with another country, we were training just for Afghanistan, again it was very pinpoint what our mission was going to be. When I got out there to Germany, when we were in Romania for that first time, we got to do some air assault missions with helicopters, I had never got to actually ride [in] a helicopter before that — while doing a mission, I’d been in a helicopter in Afghanistan but never to like actually do a raid if you will, or take, assault a village or whatever, so we were training that type of stuff, and that was fun. You know, taking video of the takeoff and everything, it was an experience. And just getting to like… you know, we drove I think it was like 800 kilometers across Romania to move to the west and that was just fun, you know, all the people got to see us. We made a couple stops along the way, and there was one point we stopped in a little town that had a school and all these kids are coming out to see our vehicles, and they’re playing on them and so it was just — I always enjoyed that, getting to interact with the locals… but yeah, I don’t know, nothing really stuck out. Interviewer: “Okay, but you’re with a cavalry unit, so what kind of vehicles did you have?” So once again I was Stryker, so I did my whole six years with the Stryker infantry vehicle. Yeah, so 22 CR historically was an armored cavalry regiment so they used to have the tanks and the Bradley fighting vehicles, but they also transitioned to having the Strykers, so I was Strykers once again. Interviewer: “So you’re basically mechanized infantry at that point?” Yes and no. It depends who you talk to I guess. Interviewer: “Yeah, I guess. But not with the heavy tracks and all that.” Yeah, so we kinda went away from being mechanized, we’re still infantry but we’re dismounting from a vehicle so we ride the vehicle to our — to the place, then we dismount, and then do our job, so depending on who you ask some people might say we’re mechanized, some people might say we’re still infantry, you know it depends on the mindset, how do you want to look at it. Interviewer: “Yeah, I guess when there were horses you … mounted infantry.” Oh yes, and that was, 22 historically was, had the horsebacks — I’ve seen plenty of pictures around the battalion and everything showing that off. �(52:04) Interviewer: “Okay, now when you come back from Germany, are you basically done with your enlistment at that point?” So yes, so I ended up getting out while in Germany, I did all my transition stuff there, and then in 2017 got on a plane, went to Baltimore, my parents picked me up there and went home and then yeah I was out. So it was a... Interviewer: “Alright. Did you give any thought to staying in longer than you did?” I did, especially like I did that first reenlistment for three years to get me to Germany, and I knew that I could stay long-term, my father did thirty years. I grew up with this, I didn’t really know anything other than the military, but I kinda looked at it that I wanted something else, I had done — to my own fault, I kinda got stagnant in my job, I wasn’t progressing and so I kinda saw the writing on the wall and it was like, ‘You know what? Lemme go do something else, let me see about school or a job somewhere else, and so I kinda made the decision that I think I’ll transition out. Yeah, so I decided to not reenlist then. Interviewer: “Okay, so what do you do once you get out?” So for a few months I did nothing, just cause I’d been in the Army for six years, was in Germany and wanted to get home and just relax a little bit, little bit! But then I started looking at schools, looking at jobs, realized that I sort of fell into what I’m doing now, which is I’m going to school for the nursing program here at Grand Valley State University, wasn’t my first choice, it wasn’t like I knew going out of the Army that’s what I wanted, but I started kind of doing some research, sort of realized I wanted a job that… or if I was gonna go to school, I wanted it to be for a profession, for a career that’s very pinpoint, I didn’t want to just come for a degree just for the sake of getting a degree, so I made that decision that summer of 2017 that I was going to go back to school. Applied and got accepted, and yeah I’ve been here since. Interviewer: “Alright, now had you been a good student in high school or?” High school, yes. Michigan State no, that’s why I did not stay there. And then community college I was, I got my associate’s degree so I was able to transfer those to get rid of you know, most of the gen ed stuff. But no, I was — it became a running joke while I was in the Army that I was one of the smart infantrymen, cause I — I wasn’t somebody who knew right away I’m gonna join so I don’t need to care about school or something, I… I took my studies seriously at the time, and I like to think that things have been going good. I’m still in it, I’m in the nursing program, I’m still going strong, so things so far are good. Interviewer: “Alright, now to look back on it then, how do you think your time in the service affected you?” So for me specifically I know definitely in the beginning I needed… I needed the challenge, I really did, to kind of help… I was sort of floating, if you will, in life. I didn’t have an idea of what I wanted to do, I was going to school just kind of for the sake of going to school, living at my parents’ place you know, and like ‘eh I guess I’ll do this.’ So it really did help me sort of get that work ethic if you will, I like to think I had it back then but there was stuff before the Army that I can look back and be like, ‘Yeah, never really completed everything,’ I kind of just started and never finished it. And so the Army was sort of that first big goal that I set for myself, and I was �able to complete it and so it definitely helps with the work ethic, and just life experience and the friendship, I mean that’s like the main thing that I miss from it, and I knew I would getting out, it’s that brotherhood, it’s the comradery, I mean again I got to go to my friend’s wedding and that was the best four days I had in a while, just cause seeing those guys again. And you know we text message and see each other on Facebook or whatever, but you get back together, get to have a beer and relax and interact, it’s just a good time. Interviewer: “Alright, well the whole thing makes for [a] pretty good story, so thank you for taking the time to share it today.” Yeah! Oh, thank you. Interviewer: “Alright, and that’ll do it for us.” [END] � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GellertJ2301V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gellert, John Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-04 Title A name given to the resource Gellert, John (Interview transcript and video), 2019 Description An account of the resource John Gellert was born on October 20, 1988, in Würzburg, Germany, into a military family which constantly moved around. Gellert graduated high school in Virginia in 2006 and attended some college before deciding he wanted a more challenging career. He enlisted into the Army in 2011 to be an infantryman. Gellert was then sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for a collective fourteen weeks of basic and advanced basic training. After graduating basic training, he was immediately transferred to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he was assigned to a mechanized, light armored Striker Unit in Attack Company 21 Infantry Legion, which he later deployed to Afghanistan with in 2012. Stationed at Terranova Company Outpost near Kandahar City, his Company’s duties were to partner with the Afghani military and local police cells, guiding them to assume control of their local districts without American intervention. His Company was then stationed at Zari Company Outpost, nearer to the Taliban’s bases of operation, and his peers were more frequently shot at even though Gellert himself never experienced ground combat. This first deployment lasted nine months. For his second deployment in 2014, Gellert received promotion to Sergeant and spent the next three years in Germany with Fox Troop, 22 Cavalry Regiment, in Vilseck. His unit primarily participated in NATO and other international military training programs or maneuvers. While in Europe, Gellert did spend considerable time traveling the continent, conversing with local people, and observing historical sights, which he enjoyed greatly. By the time he returned from Germany, Gellert’s deployment had ended, and he left the service in 2017, despite giving some thought towards staying in the Army longer. Instead, he wanted to complete his college education and was soon admitted to Grand Valley State University for a degree in nursing. Reflecting upon his service, Gellert believed the Army instilled in him a persistent work ethic, coupled with a newfound inner drive. He was also fond of the supportive, brotherly relationships he built with the other soldiers of his former units, bonds which he still maintains and cherishes as a positive outcome of his service. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Iraq War, 2003-2011—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9e7910f4460bb6fd4003a9b07c428c9a.mp4 a92d025217987fc30732ed86708cfa56 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/830b9dd579916f53db45c5273e321c46.pdf f798b8f730e9d26222f84fa162d3d2b3 PDF Text Text Gautreau, Raymond Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Vietnam War Interviewee’s Name: Raymond Gautreau Length of Interview: (52:02) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Raymond Gautreau of Rockford, Michigan and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay, so start us off with some background on yourself and to begin with where and when were you born?” Whitinsville, Massachusetts January 12th, 1948. Interviewer: “Did you grow up there?” (00:22) Well, lived in Massachusetts for three and a half, four years then moved to upstate New York, Cornwall on the Hudson for just one year, then moved to Norwich, Connecticut and lived there from the time I was five until the time I was 12 then I moved to Keene, New Hampshire where I graduated high school and joined the Marine Corps. Interviewer: “Alright, what was your family doing for a living when you were growing up?” My father worked in factories, textile, you know New England before everything moved south, there were textiles and he was in textiles and my mom worked in a mill too but in the office. Interviewer: “So when did you graduate from high school?” 1965 June. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Alright and what motivated the decision to join the Marine Corps?” Well my family was fairly dysfunctional and they wanted me– I didn’t want to be there, they didn’t want me there and I knew that from the time I was like eight or nine years old. So the only thing they said was “you’re graduating high school.” and “Get out.” So I enlisted actually in April before I graduated, graduated in June and was in Marine Corps in July. Interviewer: “Okay, and why did you pick the Marine Corps?” Because it was the baddest of them, I don’t know, cause I don’t swim well I didn’t want to go in the Navy. Interviewer: “Well there you go, okay now at the time you enlisted were you paying much attention to the news or what was happening in the world?” (1:58) Oh we watched the Vietnam War on T.V it was just cranking up in 1965 so I thought “Oh yeah I’m gonna go to war.” Interviewer: “Okay, so at that age that didn’t really bother you?” No, politics or anything like that no, I had no idea. 17 years old when I graduated, 17 when I went into the Marine Corps. Interviewer: “Alright so you had to have your parents signature for that?” Oh yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, so where do they send you now for boot camp?” Parris Island. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Talk about Parris Island, what’s that like when you get there?” Hot, muggy, it was in August, yeah you know it was tough but I was in shape, I've always kind of been in shape, basketball, baseball, football. So you know all the physical stuff wasn’t too bad but the intimidation was eye opening for me at first, you know. Interviewer: “Okay, now how do they actually get you to the base, how do you get from home to Parris Island?” I took– From New Hampshire I took a bus to Boston from Boston I took a plane to– I don’t know, somewhere in South Carolina and then from there a bus to Parris Island. Interviewer: “Now what time of day do you go on the base?” I don’t know it was at night as I remember it, the bus is at night and the D.Is are screaming at you, you don’t know, you can’t see anything, you know that’s the first part of it the tearing down and intimidation. (3:30) Interviewer: “Alright now how long does it take them to process you before you start the regular training just overnight and then they do everything?” What do you mean regular training I mean boot camp is separate from everything, boot camp is just we’re gonna make you muscles and you’re gonna listen to and you’re gonna do everything we say and that’s what boot camp is and then you go to infantry training, the next set. In infantry training they’re gonna, you know, teach you about your pack and your underwear and how to fight and platoons and whatever, I don’t know, then you go to your base. Interviewer: “Alright now how long was the boot camp?” Boot camp I think was six weeks at that time– Or eight weeks. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Probably eight, most of them are eight and it’s longer earlier when they combined them with the infantry training, but anyway now what kind of people were going there at that time? Were they all like you or from different places?” Hard to say, ones I remember were mostly, well from the east coast from New England, Parris Island that’s where the east coast is. Maybe some southerners, Alabama, seems to me there was some Alabama people. Interviewer: “Okay, were there any black recruits?” Maybe one or two. Interviewer: “Okay, so not many.” No. Interviewer: “Alright and how long did it take you to adjust to the way they did things in boot camp?” (4:57) Not long because at home if I didn’t adjust I got my ass beat so I knew how to conform really quick, you know you do that to stay alive when you’re young it’s just something you learn. Interviewer: “So you had some survival skills coming in that happened to fit.” I think so. Interviewer: “Alright and you were in good physical shape so you can kind of handle the PT part of things.” Yeah. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Okay, and so you get through that eight weeks and then where do you go for your next stage of training?” Camp Geiger for infantry training and I don’t remember how long that was. Interviewer: “Now where is Camp Geiger?” And I couldn’t tell you where camp Gei– I’m gonna say it’s in South Carolina, it’s either in South Carolina or North Carolina, it might be next to Lejeune, it might be attached to Lejeune in North Carolina. Interviewer: “Yeah cause Camp Lejeune is a big base with a lot of subdivision and so forth so may well have been there, but you weren’ staying on Parris Island for that they moved you.” (5:43) No we moved, yeah we left Parris Island, graduated from Camp Geiger, yeah yeah. Interviewer: “So now you’re doing infantry training?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, and were the people who were training you had some of them already been overseas?” Yeah even in Parris Island some of them had been overseas I think. I’m thinking if I remember correctly one of my pistol 45 instructors has been. Interviewer: “Yeah cause the Marines went in in fours in marching ‘67 but you have people– Some were in for limited times and some were over there earlier.” �Gautreau, Raymond I’m sure that there were people there in ‘63, ‘64, whatever. Interviewer: “We had advisors and we had people who were on the air bases so yeah, anyway you’ll get more later but now your training itself to what extent was the infantry training geared for Vietnam?” The only thing I remember about it really is a 25 mile march in one day, you know full pack I mean we did it up at four don’t get back to, whatever midnight I don’t know what time it was, but yeah we did the march. That’s about the only thing I remember about ITR. Interviewer: “Okay, remember what kind of weapons you trained on?” M-14. Interviewer: “But did you also get to use a machine gun or a mortar or anything like that?” (7:13) No, boot camp– Well we might have had hand grenade training in ITR, that might have not been boot camp but boot camp was M-14, 45 caliber pistol, I don’t remember where hand grenade training– That was, no I think hand grenades was Parris Island also actually. Interviewer: “But then ITR–” But same thing M-14. Interviewer: “Alright but in ITR they’re not adding to the mix then?” I don’t remember that. Interviewer: “Okay, and how long did the ITR last?” �Gautreau, Raymond Maybe six weeks again, who could say. Interviewer: “Okay, alright once you complete that what do they do with you next?” Then you get assigned to your first unit, which mine was Foxtrot 210, 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune which is a 105 millimeter howitzer battery. That was my first real job, I was in artillery. Interviewer: “So now you’ve got your regular duty assignment.” My MOS, military occupational specialty 0811. Interviewer: “Was that just artillery?” That’s artillery man. Interviewer: “Okay now were you put on a gun crew right away?” (8:30) Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, and how many men would be on a 105 crew at least there?” I think there was supposed to be eight but there hardly ever was, maybe six or seven, or maybe there’s supposed to be six and there’s always five, I don’t know. Interviewer: “Okay, but you always had the sense that there weren’t as many people as there should be or at least officially?” Yeah, I guess so. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Well on a practical level how many men does it take to operate a 105 howitzer?” Oh boy two, four, you could do it with four. Well actually you could do it with one, I’ve done it myself. What they called H&I harassing and identifiers at night, you’re the only person on a gun you’ve got gun watch, and they say “Traverse right.” you pick up the whole gun by yourself, by the trails, and you traverse the gun to the right and aim it, do whatever you have to to fire it yourself. Set the– You know you make the round up, what charge at night it’s usually illumination round and then when they say “Fire!” you fire it, but usually there’s at least five people there. Interviewer: “Alright, now were you getting just on the job training at this point, were they showing you how to fire the gun or how to do the different jobs?” Well first of all they show us how to clean it for months just– We didn’t even fire it, no and then we took a float to Vieques Island as a matter of fact which was a firing area that the United States was using, I don’t think they’re using it anymore and that was– I think that was the first time I actually fired a howitzer. (10:18) Interviewer: “Okay, that’s an island near Puerto Rico and it got used a lot for Navy target practice–” And Marine Corps. Interviewer: “But you actually landed on the island–” Oh yeah. Interviewer: “And set up your guns and fired them?” Oh yeah, lived in tents, yeah it was a field exercise. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Okay, and about how long would you be there when you went there?” Ten days, floated– You know some type of troops ship, floated there and floated back. Interviewer: “And when you landed on the island did they put you in landing craft or just go up to a dock and get off?” I don’t– We might have used nets and landing craft at that time, I don’t recall. I know at one time I did use nets, but I'm not sure if it was there– It would’ve had– Yeah I think it would’ve been there. Interviewer: “Might’ve been it was kind of standard practice at that point, so–” Just to get us used to, you know– Interviewer: “[unintelligible] Now how long did you wind up spending at Camp Geiger?” (11:23) Camp Lejeune. Interviewer: “Lejeune now, yeah Geiger was training.” Till the next– June I guess and then I had my orders so I took 30 days leave in July and from there flew– Well from home flew to San Diego, Camp Pendleton, walked around the sand dunes and the hills up there for a couple of weeks then got on a ship again and floated to Vietnam. Interviewer: “Alright, now what was the sea voyage like?” �Gautreau, Raymond It was only a week I think or ten days, we were supposed to stop in Hawaii but we didn’t. Well that was the rumor anyway “Oh yeah we’re gonna stop in Hawaii, it’ll be fun!” No, didn’t happen we floated right by. Interviewer: “So what was the weather like on the way over?” Warm, hot, it’s summer. Interviewer: “So no big storms or anything like that.” No, nope big storms come later, I got a story about big storms you’ll see, that’s on a hospital ship. Yeah so destination, Da Nang South Vietnam. Interviewer: “Okay, and when you arrive at Da Nang were they using–” This is where we use the nets, because I remember going in on a Mike boat. So this is where– Yeah we use nets and we climbed onto the Mike boats. (12:40) Interviewer: “So what is a Mike boat?” Open personnel craft. Interviewer: “An LCM.” Yeah, smaller than LCT or LCUs whatever. Interviewer: “Yeah but basically just a landing craft and it’s the one with the door that goes down in the front.” That’s the way I remember it. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Okay, and do they have you go with full pack and charge out or were they not doing that anymore?” Okay, here’s something I know– Of course before we get there, the D.Is in Parris Island, the instructors in ITR, everyone at Pendleton is telling us even the little kids have grenades in their diapers and you can’t trust and Vietnamese so we’re going in a Mike boat and we didn’t have– “Don’t load your weapons, we’re going into Da Nang and we’re fine.” I said “Wait, wait what?” They tell us everybody's dangerous then tell us don’t load our weapons here, I was scared pretty much shitless right away and you go on land and it’s like right in the city and the war stays outside. There’s moms and kids and everybody else just walking around and you get on a truck and you go out to your position but yeah I was “Wait a minute, wait a minute what is this? Am I supposed to, you know shoot all these people or what?” And they said “No, no don’t worry about it.” So that was my introduction. Interviewer: “Okay, now what unit were you joining?” (14:08) Alpha Battery 1st Battalion 10th Marines, A-112, 12th unit sorry. Interviewer: “12th unit yeah, 10th Marines are back in the states. Okay and then which division was that a part of?” 3rd Marine Division. Interviewer: “3rd Marine Division, okay and where were you initially based?” It was outside of Da Nang and I keep thinking it wall Hill 81 or Hill 881 or something– Interviewer: “Probably 801, that’s close to Da Nang.” Oh do you know [unintelligible] 801? �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Well it’s a question of altitude cause it’s the meters of altitude above sea level, so close to Da Nang you have hills and then there’s like 55 so.” 55? We had to go to a little town we called Dogpatch before we could get to– Well Dogpatch was between Da Nang and our base, wherever the base was. The base had like three fingers to the hill and there was infantry auto five howitzers and 155 millimeter howitzers behind us about three or four fingers, whichever hill it was on. Interviewer: “Okay, and what sort of reception do you get when you show up to the base?” Oh you’re the new guy they’re gonna make fun of you, yeah oh yeah they did “Watch out for so and so he’s crazy.” Well you gotta wake him up now it’s his turn to go on guard duty, oh yeah now I gotta go wake up the guy that sleeps with his rifle. So yeah that stuff goes on until, you know you’ve been there for a while, you do your job, they know you can do your job and then you know it’s fine. Interviewer: “Now at the time that you joined them were they– I guess first of all chronologically when was this, when do you arrive in Vietnam?” (15:48) ‘66 it would’ve been I think August of ‘66. Interviewer: “Alright so summer of ‘66 and was there much activity at that time, were you firing very much?” Yeah we were firing quite a bit and there was just before that an attack on another artillery unit and I don’t remember anything other “Oh you guys just got here there was a huge” blah blah blah and yeah we were firing quite a bit we had some pretty big fire missions. I mean I don’t remember– Six guns, 20 rounds, that’s a lot to be throwing out there you know. Interviewer: “Now was your battery the only one on that base or was there a whole battalion there?” �Gautreau, Raymond Well there was 155 millimeter guns behind us– Interviewer: “Okay, so you’re 2nd Battery there.” Yeah and there was tanks and ontos with the infantry so they had, you know whatever [unintelligible] mortars I’m sure they had mortars and they might have even had four deuces, I’m not sure. Interviewer: “So it’s a pretty substantial base with a lot of fire power.” Oh yeah, it was yeah. Interviewer: “Alright now with an artillery unit like that did you ever have to do bunker duty or perimeter guard?” (16:59) Oh yeah, all the time. Interviewer: “Okay so what does that involve?” Okay, on Monday night you had guard duty on the– Sailing the gun. So it starts at eight o’clock at night, somebody’s on guard eight to 12, 12 to four, four till eight. On nights you don’t have guard duty on the gun there’s fox hole duty, same thing so many guys go in there four to eight, eight to 12, 12 to four, four to eight and if you don’t have that there is listening post which is outside the wire and that’s only two guys and you’re two guys with shotguns and grenades and scared shitless so you really don’t sleep, oh we’re— Yeah we get reports there, Vietnam out there, oh good I’m gonna go outside the wire. You’re only out there as an alarm anyway, you know if something happens you’re the first one that’s gonna shoot somebody and let everybody else know that yeah something’s coming. So that’s the mission, that’s the third– You were doing either one of those things every night. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Alright, now were the enemy making much effort to probe the base or harass you?” Not really, no most of the firing we did was, you know, miles away cause we could fire seven miles. Interviewer: “It would be when you’re on perimeter guard and so forth, was there anybody to shoot at?” No, not in that area, not on the base. Interviewer: “And then on the base at that point would you take occasional mortar rounds or snipers or things like that?” No, everything was outgoing at that point. Interviewer: “Alright, how long do you think you stayed on that base?” (18:45) We stayed there maybe, September, October, and into November. November I think we took trucks and went north, if I remember correctly it was by truck– Oh could’ve been by helicopter, I’ll bet it was by helicopter and we went to Con Thien, spent time in Con Thien, got wounded in Con Thien, December 10th, 1966… a mortar round after midnight blew up outside the hooch I was in and blew me all the way to the next guy’s thing, I got up right away, I knew I was hit, got my flak jacket and helmet and rifle together and cartridge belt, and made sure everybody else was out of the tent because I figured I was already hit so I’ll just make sure I’m not gonna get hit again. Everybody else got out, jumped in the fox hole, said “Come on, get in here!” And I said “No, I can’t jump in a fox hole.” So I laid down in front of it and waited for a corpsman and sat there– I don’t know, they took me into the exec pit, I was in shock, my whole body was just bouncing around on the floor. Interviewer: “Where were you hit?” �Gautreau, Raymond In the knee, in the groin, in the hip. Interviewer: “So just a bunch of shrapnel?” Yeah, which my body was doing what it was supposed to do I guess, and then they medevaced me out of there, went to Chu Lai– To the hospital in Chu Lai and they got the shrapnel out of my knee and out of my groin and in my hip they couldn’t get it out and they were trying to hold me down and this guy is poking around and I said “Now if you don’t have to, don’t do that. Not like that.” So he said “Okay, we can leave that in there.” I said “Okay, leave it in there.” Then went to the hospital for a week or so and just got shot up every day with, yeah I guess with painkillers and antibiotics, I don’t know. Then I went to hospital ship , was on hospital ship Repose for a while and this is where heavy rolls, on ships they have this gauge that hangs down and it’s 45 degrees especially [unintelligible] and we were on the deck of the hospital ship cause some of us finally were ambulatory and the ship would go like this and you’d see nothing but the sky and then the ship would go like this and you’d see nothing but the ocean way up here and they said “Okay everybody down below.” And we said “Good thinking.” And yeah that little gauge was going from one side to the other. (22:03) Interviewer: “Alright now let’s back up a little bit here, talk a little bit about Ban Pien, first of all where is that in Vietnam?” It’s further north, it’s north of Hue, Phu Bai. Interviewer: “Yeah, it’s almost at the DMZ.” Almost to the DMZ, rock pile, razorback, as a matter of fact– Oh I can’t remember where but one night we delivered ammo, I can’t remember where we delivered it to now, and that scared the heck out of me because we were just in trucks with no lights, jungle on both sides, you know are they gonna jump out of here or what I mean that was scary I would’ve shot anything that �Gautreau, Raymond moved that night, but yeah Con Thien, I don’t remember– You know we were there, we were firing again you know and I don’t remember how long we were there but yeah we didn’t get hit. Interviewer: “Now when you get out of– Well until you got hit, okay but was there more incoming fire though would the enemy shoot rockets or–” Mortars? Interviewer: “Mortars at you?” Well I don’t know after that night because– Interviewer: “Right but before that.” No, that was the first time I was ever mortared. Interviewer: “Wow, okay so just once.” (23:20) Just lucky. Interviewer: “Yeah that was something, okay about how long did that– When you’re on the hospital ship then did they send you back to your unit after that?” Yes. Interviewer: “So how long were you away from your unit do you think?” Long enough to lose 30 pounds, I don’t know, two months, maybe six weeks, I don’t know two months. Interviewer: “A lot of stuff took a long time.” �Gautreau, Raymond I know it was at least a week or ten days in Chu Lai, maybe– Oh I could tell you because it was after new years because we went to Hong Kong for new years. So it was after new years so it was at least– I’m gonna say at least a month before I was back. Interviewer: “We went to Hong Kong, did the hospital ship go?” The hospital ship. Interviewer: “Okay and then did you get to go on shore at that point?” Oh yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, so what was it like to go visit some place where there wasn’t the war?” (24:15) As an 18 year old idiot I got the clap and got rolled, got drunk, passed out, lost all my money but somebody– Luckily somebody put me back on a craft and got me back to the ship. Interviewer: “Alright, and how long did you stay there, was that just a couple of days?” Maybe just that one day. Interviewer: “Just that one day that was it huh, okay.” It was too much. Interviewer: “Okay so now you go back to your unit but when you get back to them have there been many changes in personnel or pretty much all the same guys?” No, pretty much all the same guys. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “So they hadn’t taken a lot of other casualties in the meantime.” No. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you’re on one of these bases what kind of accommodations for quarters do you have?” In Con Thien we had a plywood slab and we had I think a– I wanna say a ten man or a 12 man tent on that– Sitting on that slab and we had ammo boxes and ammo boxes were about this long– Can you see that? This long and they’re about this wide so you’d line up a bunch of empty ammo boxes, the rubber lady which is your air mattress goes on top of that and that’s your rack. You’re always in uniform, maybe take your boots and your flak jacket off and your helmet off to sleep but that’s about it, everything else you don’t take off. Interviewer: “Was there any protection, did you have sandbags or ammo boxes filled with dirt or anything like that?” (26:08) No, in Da Nang we had all that because we were there for so long but no, Con Thien the only thing we had was holes in the ground– Oh we had, you know built up walls where the gun pits were you know, CPs or somebody comes in with a bulldozer and just makes our gun pit. Interviewer: “But you’re not sleeping in a bunker?” No, no that was pretty much– Interviewer: “You don’t have sandbags, you just have tents.” It was a tent, that’s all it was,above ground. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Alright, now was your unit still at Con Thien when you went back or had they moved?” I think they were still at Con Thien when I got back, Cam Lo we went to– That might’ve been when we were in Cam Lo I don’t remember. Interviewer: “That’s another one of those bases that belonged to the NV.” Yeah it’s up there and then we also– Oh no I think this is after that we went into– Then I went into the special ending force, went into the DMZ and then came back to Camp J.J. Carroll but that was later on too. Interviewer: “Okay, you talk then, I guess about the landing force then what was going on there?” (27:10) That was after Con Thien, Cam Lo, we went on– I’m gonna say LPH Okinawa if I remember correctly and we were going to be in the first landing force to invade the DMZ in 1967, I don’t remember what month maybe April, maybe April I’m not sure. Interviewer: “That’s [unintelligible] so you were with them.” So yeah I’m with them, we were gonna have an amphibious landing, they had problems with helicopters so we went off and Amtracks amphibious track vehicles and we’ve got our 105 millimeter howitzer inside, and our ammo inside and they have sandbags and an M-60 up on top and an Amtrack crew and R-05 crew is up on top and they open up the back of the LPH we float out, we float in towards the DMZ and all of a sudden the Amtrack crew starts throwing sandbags off cause we’re sinking. So we all threw sandbags off, we made it, we got to shore and as soon as we got in we started to unload the guns and we got the guns off and dragging the guns in the sand– I can’t remember now exactly how we did that but just as we’re doing the F-4 phantoms come in and I’m thinking they were going faster than the speed of sound because they were gone and they were coming in at treetop level so it was just this super loud jet just there and then gone, �Gautreau, Raymond you know that’s gonna scare the hell out of the North Vietnamese, you know and that was pretty interesting the phantoms. So then we got set up in the DMZ and we had trouble, it was the whole special landing force there, there was infantry, there were artillery and we got a lot of rounds into opposition from North Vietnam, some say there were 1200 rounds a day, we had people killed, I just looked up the names on the wall and I’m not doing that again. So that was probably the hairiest time but the first time it’s incoming, you know it’s incoming, it doesn’t take long to figure it out, boy I’ll tell you. Interviewer: “Did you have holes?” Oh yeah we had holes, well that was sand so we had holes dug all over yeah, and one of the first times I jumped in a hole and I’m trying squeeze down in my boots and my helmet is all you can see and somebody jumped in next to me and they’re doing the same thing and we’re both going [heavy breathing] and there’s rounds landing all around us and pretty soon– As soon as the rounds stop coming in we have to get on the guns and shoot back. (30:38) So it’s an artillery group, as soon as the rounds stop coming in I get up to go and I look and it’s the captain of my unit who’s in the hole with me breathing just as hard as I was, I said “Okay, that’s good.” Yeah so that was– And then we had, I think it was the Missouri, the last time the Missouri, pretty sure Missouri was out and they fired a 16 inch white phosphorus round into our position, yeah that was a mistake, luckily nobody got hurt. By the time that that happened we all knew it was incoming, we were all in holes, you know by the time that round left the tube we were in holes, so yeah. Interviewer: “About how long do you think you were in the DMZ?” I don’t know, maybe a month, maybe three weeks, maybe a month. Interviewer: “So a little while, alright. As these things are going on do you have any knowledge really of what the bigger picture is or why you’re there or what’s happening or how things are going?” �Gautreau, Raymond No, I just want to get out of there alive and I just want to do my job, you know when it’s time to have a fire mission I want to be able to do what I’m supposed to do, you know that’s focusing I guess I don’t know. Interviewer: “Yeah, now did you have kind of regular jobs on the gun when you were in action?” Well I started out as a loader because I was, you know the first guy there, next I was ammo tech, then you go to gunner, and then assistant gunner which actually fires the weapon– You move up and you gotta know all the jobs, yeah when I was– I forget where we were I think it was Con Thien again, and I had to be section chief for a while cause we had nobody that was corporal or above so. Interviewer: “And is a section chief just in charge of your gun or–” Yeah, just one gun. (32:54) Interviewer: “But he’s above the level of the gunners.” Well he just happens to be the guy who has the headphones on and is connected to the– Yeah, I mean there were other guys that were E3s that were there so. Interviewer: “Alright, now did you get a set of information from Fire Direction Control or something like that to set the gun this way and then you just do what they tell you?” Yup, the guns oriented they know how it’s oriented with their maps so they could tell us angle of the barrel and deflection or to traverse left or right. Interviewer: “Yeah and then how much– What you could do to adjust the size of the charge, the range?” �Gautreau, Raymond Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and then so after the DMZ, you pull out, where do you go next?” Either after the DMZ we went to Con Thien or we went to Camp J.J. Carroll, I’m not really sure, I think it was– But I know Camp J.J. Carroll that was the last place that I remember being in Vietnam. Interviewer: “Okay, and was life any different at Camp Carroll then it was at Con Thien or Cam Lo or were they pretty much all the same?” First place I ever smoked marijuana was Camp J.J. Carroll, South Vietnam, 1967, been smoking ever since. Interviewer: “Was it– But was it any more or less safe than the other places?” (34:34) More safe, Camp J.J. Carroll, it was a big base. Interviewer: “Okay, and so there you had proper bunkers and things like that or at least more covering?” I don’t remember, we probably had the same thing, ammo boxes and rubber ladies, that was pretty much– In Da Nang we might’ve had cots, in Da Nang I think we had cots but after that I don’t remember being in a cot. Interviewer: “Right, okay now the places where you were did you ever see many of the South Vietnamese population, see civilians around?” Yeah, well Da Nang. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Da Nang you have, okay.” And occasionally you were chosen for a trip to go to Da Nang, I forget why pick up supplies or something, and you’d go through a Dogpatch, little town before Da Nang, and then you’d go into Da Nang again. So yeah we’d see– And there was a little village in, again on Da Nang where I was stationed on that hill, there was a little village next to the hill and they’d come in and get our garbage, so you know there was the barber and little kids, I’m sure I have pictures somewhere of me and some little kids, you know. Interviewer: “What impression did you have of them just in general?” Generally the older people just struggled to live and they smacked the kids around until the kids learned it. Interviewer: “Now did you find yourself not being scared by them after a while because when you first landed you were afraid they all had hand grenades?” (36:20) Yeah, you know I mean but again once I was there and in country and everything you know it was always round the clock weapons, always you know more ammo than you thought. When you first get there you’re supposed to have four ammo pouches or something but by the time you leave everybody’s got 19 ammo pouches hanging all over them so you’re never gonna run out of ammo, I don’t know. Interviewer: “Okay, well–” No, no after a while, you know I just– No I didn’t feel a threat I guess. Interviewer: “Okay, now as an artillerist would you still be carrying a lot of ammo around?” �Gautreau, Raymond Oh yeah, cause guerilla type war you never knew who and it was sometimes– Most of the time we were so close to an infantry unit anyway that, you know if they’re gonna attack they’d probably attack us before they attacked– Get the infantry through us or something, I don’t know their tactics. Interviewer: “But anyway you were close enough to–” Only one time though was I actually shot at that I know I was shot at and I shot back, other than that, you know I mean when we were in the DMZ I didn’t, you know I couldn’t see their artillery units and I’m sure they couldn’t see us but we kept firing back. Interviewer: “And so the incident when you actually didn’t have to fight with them can you talk about that or what happened?” Now we had gone, I forget why, we had taken two guns and we had gone into the field in choppers with these two guns, you know some type of operation and we were fine. (38:12) All we had was ourselves and the choppers and when we got there everything was fine, we fired some rounds and everything, fine, fine everything was okay, now let’s bug out we gotta get outta here. So we said– And that’s when we started taking rounds and everybody’s laying on the ground hiding, hiding, hiding, you know you can see the smoke or whatever so you shoot back but you don’t see anybody, and finally it stopped and we just got out of there. No one got hit, you know and we don’t know if we hit anybody but yeah. Interviewer: “Now were you– Did they give you M-16s by this time?” No, no. Interviewer: “You’re still on the M-14?” M-14. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Alright, now you had mentioned before that you had stops in Okinawa and the Philippines, where did those fit in your– Did those come later?” No, those were before– Well the Philippines– No, both of them were before SLF, special landing force. Interviewer: “Okay, alright so talk a little bit about those places.” They would’ve been before Con Thien too, if I remember correctly. We’ll be back after a short word from our sponsors. Interviewer: “Okay, so we were– Cause it was fairly common for a while for Marines to do some kind of jungle training before they went into Vietnam and do that either in the Philippines or Okinawa, but do you think you got that after you were in Vietnam for the while they pulled you out?” (39:50) Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, so then what happens or what do you do when you’re there?” Well Okinawa, again I might’ve only been 17 or just turned 18 in Okinawa, so again and I’m a– My dad was an alcoholic, I started drinking when I was like eight or nine or ten okay. So Okinawa was just drink and drink and drink at night and I forget what we did during the day, inspections, you know try and hide and sleep. The Philippines the only thing I remember about that is hiking in the jungles and firing. Yeah I don’t remember where we stayed or if we stayed on a ship, I’m thinking we stayed on the ship though in the Philippines. Interviewer: “And then you had your 13 months tour Vietnam, did you get an R&R?” No, I was supposed to go on R&R, when I got shot, blown up so. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “So the hospital ship was your R&R.” That was my R&R. Interviewer: “Alright, now as you started to get short, did that change the way you thought about things or what you did or did you just do the same thing till you left?” Well if I remember correctly we were in Camp Carroll at that time and there probably wasn’t much to do if I was short I’d probably let everybody know that I was short, but I really don’t remember much– I mean it was a huge base, I remember that. Interviewer: “Okay, now when the time comes for you to leave, what's the process now to get you out of Vietnam?” Well back to Da Nang, oh probably chopper, maybe C-130 to Da Nang then from Da Nang to Okinawa, from Okinawa fly back to– I’m gonna say San Diego but it could’ve been L.A, I’m not sure, went from there home for 30 days and then back to Quantico, Virginia. (42:20) I spent my last year schools demonstration troops in Quantico, Virginia, we showed officers training, what the O-5 is for. Interviewer: “Okay, let’s explain a little bit what you were doing there.” In Quantico? Interviewer: “Yeah.” Well that’s– I was– We fired no-fis, they had a range, I mean it was nothing far, you know half a mile to a mile maybe, you could see the truck out there the shell that we were aiming at, the tank or whatever it happened to be. So most of the firing was direct fire but there’d be bleachers in the back and officers just taking notes and we just brought fire. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Okay, alright–” And actually clinical was mostly veterans, people who knew what they were doing on a gun and could get it done really well. Interviewer: “So they had a lot of guys like yourself that had already been out in the field and they’re finishing out enlistments.” Yup. Interviewer: “Did you have a fair enough– Were there career guys there or were they all pretty much, at least the people you associated with, mostly like you?” Oh no there was some career guys, you know one of my best friends who actually wasn’t in the same unit as me but from boot camp on you’re told “Buddy, buddy, have a buddy.” And by the way when I got it ITR this guy, we wake up every morning “Hey buddy” “Hey buddy.” First thing. (44:00) Well then we got separated, I went to the O-5 Battery in Lejeune and he went somewhere else, I have no idea where he went, and I went to Vietnam– Oh no he was in the same unit as me at Lejeune so it was the same thing, wake up every morning “Hey buddy.” “Hey buddy.” I made weekends to his home in New Jersey, you know and then I went to Vietnam, and he wanted to go. He was signing lists but he didn’t go, he didn’t get assigned and I did, and I was over there until stationed us in the DMZ, and I’m in the DMZ one day and I’m cleaning the gun and all of a sudden I hear “Hey buddy.” And I just know immediately, and he’s just happy to be there “Oh yeah, look at all this we’re getting into man, is this great?” I go “No!” Yeah that was– And he stayed in the Marine Corps, you have to be a nob, he was a drill instructor, then he was a recruiting officer for a while and finally retired, he’s still in North Carolina. Interviewer: “Okay, now for you– You had what was basically a day job at that point now, just go out on the range and–” �Gautreau, Raymond Yeah, yeah, yeah plus everybody else– Well a lot of people are getting out of the Marine Corps, so yeah we pulled KT, we mowed the lawns, we all the– Yeah cause your guys are gone, see you later okay. Interviewer: “So how many months did you spend there?” Just about a year. Interviewer: “Yeah, about all you had left in those three years yeah.” Would’ve been September to the next– Or August or September to the next July. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you had off time did you go into Washington or other places?” Yeah I did, skating on the reflecting pool in the winter and I went to the museums and yeah on weekends we’d do that stuff but also– Was it the first year, ‘67 was the big peace march in Washington? (46:15) Interviewer: “There was one then, yeah and then more in ‘68.” Holy cow what are all– Look at the way these people are all dressed and let me take pictures of this and I went to– Okay, you know I was smoking pot, there were other Marines there smoking pot. So in Washington, D.C I went to Jefferson airplane country, holy cow what is going on here and oh boy everybody’s just tripping and stoned and drinking, I said “Oh wow, this is something I missed I guess.” Interviewer: “Now could they spot you as military because of the haircut?” Oh I’m sure, I’m sure. �Gautreau, Raymond Interviewer: “Now did you– To what extent, now that you’re back in the states, to what extent or how quickly do you become aware of the whole anti-war movement?” You know, not really while I’m still in, not really until I get out and I’m– I got married first time, might’ve been out of the Marine Corps in ‘68, I don’t remember, ‘69. No, ‘68 yeah I’m pretty sure I was married in ‘68 for the first time, but I just became a hippie and that marriage didn’t last just, you know– Who knows? Interviewer: “But basically while you were in even though you were based in the states it wasn’t making that much of an impression on you that there was an anti-war movement going?” No, I was just more of just let me get high, let me have fun. Interviewer: “Okay, alright so did the Marine Corps make an effort to encourage you to stay in?” (48:15) No I don’t think so, I don’t remember that just, you know “Okay, you’ve got three weeks left you staying or not?” “No, I'm going.” “Okay, go get your physicals and get out of here.” You know, if you stay you’re going back to Vietnam and I didn’t want to go back. Interviewer: “Okay, so now you get out 1968, you go find a job right away or do other things?” Well I had a fairly good job as an electrician’s assistant for a couple years and we were traveling and we’d get travel pay and so I did pretty good but then I quit that and went to school for electricity doing something, I forget but then I just dropped out and I was too stoned all the time. That’s what I wanted to do and, you know, lived in a commune for a year, couple years, that whole thing. Interviewer: “Alright, how did you wind up in Michigan?” �Gautreau, Raymond I had gone to Florida and met a woman in Florida who said “Oh come on to Michigan, my folks have a cottage on Lake Michigan, we can spend the summer there. Just smoke pot and have fun.” Yeah, well as soon as we got there her mother said “Oh what? You’re gonna what? You’re marrying my daughter.” So yeah, but never got along with the mother and the girl never left her mother so I ended up having to divorce her. Interviewer: “You wind up finding work here or?” Oh yeah, so I just stayed, I like Michigan. First of all Korea can’t touch us, we don’t get many hurricanes, we’re not getting a lot of– Interviewer: “Not a lot of earthquakes here.” Earthquakes, so Michigan yeah it’s not a bad place, worst thing we got to worry about is Asian carp, that’s fine. Interviewer: “Global warming can melt the snow, so yeah we’re good.” (50:20) Global warming, no I just– No. Interviewer: “Now if you look back now at the time that you spent in the Marine Corps, what do you think you took out of that, positive or negative?” I think I did a good job on what I was supposed to do and I’m, you know, proud of my service, you know on a whole it was a good experience I guess. I hope that my grandkids never have to go, you know but I’m just, you know I’m lucky I made it back, I’m still alive you know. Interviewer: “Alright, did you– I mean have you had any kinds of other issues whether issues PTSD kinds of things that you know of?” �Gautreau, Raymond Sure, I have therapy I take therapy, I’m 100% disabled, unemployable, wounds service connected, [unintelligible] So I do get coverage from the V.A and I appreciate that and they’ve gotten a lot better, there’s still room for improvement but– Interviewer: “Alright, so I appreciate you coming and sharing the story today so thank you very much.” You’re welcome. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GautreauR2155V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gautreau, Raymond J. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-09 Title A name given to the resource Gautreau, Raymond (Interview transcript and video), 2017 Description An account of the resource Raymond Gautreau was born on January 12, 1948 in Whitinsville, Massachusetts, and graduated high school in New Hampshire in 1965. Since his family lacked empathy, Gautreau decided to join the Marine Corps after high school despite news about the war in Vietnam. For Basic Training, he was sent to Parris Island, South Carolina. After Basic, Gautreau was transferred to Camp Geiger, North Carolina, for Infantry Training. After that, he was assigned the Military Occupational Specialty of artilleryman in a 105mm Howitzer Battery attached to the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Gautreau underwent artillery training with his new unit on Vieques Island near Puerto Rico before deploying to Da Nang, Vietnam. In Vietnam, he joined the A Battery, 1st Battalion, 12th Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division at a base outside Da Nang in 1966. His unit also spent some time closer to the Demilitarized Zone at Con Thien where, one night, Gautreau was thrown from his hooch by a nearby mortar explosion. He received shrapnel in the knee, groin, hip, and dropped in and out of consciousness as medics attended to his wounds. He was then medevacked to Chu Lai Air Base for proper medical attention before being transferred to a hospital ship en route to Hong Kong because of the severity of his injuries. After nearly two months, Gautreau returned to his artillery unit at Con Thien. His unit then participated in the nearly month-long amphibious invasion of the DMZ in April of 1967. For a short period, Gautreau served as his unit’s Section Chief in charge of their artillery cannon since there were few available Corporals and Noncommissioned Officers. After Con Thien, his unit transferred to Camp Carroll. At the end of his tour, Gautreau was flown back to Da Nang, then to Okinawa, Japan, before landing in California. For the rest of his deployment, he assisted the artillery range courses for the officer training at Quantico, Virginia. Gautreau was officially discharged from the Marines in 1968 and soon took up work as an electrician’s assistant before quitting, working several small jobs, and then moving to Michigan. Reflecting upon his time in the service, Gautreau was proud of his commitment and viewed it as an overall positive experience in his life. He is also appreciative of the benefits he received through the VA and hopes his grandchildren will never have to experience war in their lifetimes. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Other veterans & civilians—Personal narratives, American Afghan War, 2001-2021—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e9889f7e49ba7000a05a2ab4d339f9ad.mp4 2eca68f3cd043e7a883f73b16db30141 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7fa2312c87f610e2497ea82d10d88db8.pdf 1da96a0e9e1b15f94c9729283d7f9ecf PDF Text Text Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Vietnam Interviewee’s Name: Larry Fieser Length of Interview: 1:12:07 Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Sam Noonan Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Larry Fieser of Webster Groves, Missouri, interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University veteran’s history project. Okay, now Larry start us off with some background on yourself, and to begin with where and when were you born?” Yeah, I was born in St. Louis, 1950, basically I was born the day my mother’s father died. Which, for what that’s worth… Interviewer: “Now did you grow up there, or did you move around?” Yeah, I stayed there my whole life, stayed in the same house, [address.] Interviewer: “And what did your family do for a living when you were a kid?” My father was an auto mechanic, and my mother was a homemaker, went to Catholic school in the area. Interviewer: “Did you have relatives who were in the service before you?” Yeah, my father was a medic in World War 2 and he was in … and he received a medal for… purple heart and a bronze star, for duty there, and he had a brother that died at Anzio, Adolf – they used to tease him because Adolf and Herman, was my father’s name, goes back to the Hitler days. Interviewer: “Right, okay. Now did your father ever talk about his service?” Never talked about the service at all. The only thing I knew is that he had some pictures that he had of war experiences that my mother did not like, and she protested that he get rid of them, and he apparently never did. Since he’s passed now, we’ve found – my sister discovered, that he still [had] the pictures. Interviewer: “Alright. Let’s see now, did you finish high school?” �Yeah, I went to a Catholic high school, Bishop DuBourg in St. Louis, and then I went into going to Merrimack during drafting [times.] Interviewer: “What is Merrimack?” (2:16) Merrimack Community College. I did get about – I guess I’ve got maybe, well I was taking an engineering curriculum. I was doing alright, I just didn’t understand when I was gonna get to drive the train, so anyway I kinda got frustrated with all the stuff going with the Vietnam War and everything, and I figured I wasn’t that interested at the time, and I was kind of distracted with the war news, reports, and I just decided, you know, ‘let’s get it over with, then I’ll come back and live my life.’ Interviewer: “Okay, so school wasn’t really for you at that point in time and you knew if you leave that Uncle Sam will come calling anyway.” Right. I felt like it was inevitable, so I just volunteered for the draft. Interviewer: “Alright. Now for people who don’t know what that is, what’s the difference between volunteering for the draft and simply enlisting in a conventional sense?” Well, I believe there was some age restriction on when they could take you, you could get a student deferment and probably stay in school – which a lot of people did. I never bothered to put in for the deferment, so basically I just decided to – I went down to the draft board and said ‘go ahead and… I’m ready to go.’ Interviewer: “Okay. So rather than wait for them to eventually send you the notice, what you figure will happen – you just go ahead and sign up and get it over with.” Right, exactly and I – the prior year after that they went to the lottery and I think my number would’ve been [second.] Interviewer: “Yeah, okay, so you decided – so when is it that you decided to enter the service?” Well it was pretty much toward the end of ’68, I was working at Sears and you know, I just didn’t really have any future ambitions at the time because I had this cloud of Vietnam hanging over my head, and I’d seen guys that were – I was aware of what was going on. So I just decided, it’s either now or never, you know I [couldn’t] live in limbo. Interviewer: “Right. Okay, so do you report to St. Louis first for processing or..?” �Yeah, it was in Webster area, Webster Groves, we just went down there and told them – I guess I signed something — Interviewer: “Well once you sign up though, when you’re gonna head off for training, do they process you before sending you to where you go for basic, or did you have a physical someplace?” We went somewhere, I’m not sure exactly.. downtown St. Louis I think? And then I remember doing some test, I know they had some test that you had to go through, I know there was a colorblind test you had to take and a friend of mine was there from school, and I helped him to pass the colorblind test because he said, ‘well they had a party for me, you know I can’t go back,’ and I said ‘well I’m not colorblind’ and so anyway I helped him pass the colorblind test so he went in, eventually I found out that he went over for eight months and toward the end of his enlistment. (5:26) Interviewer: “Alright. Now, so did you notice anybody trying to sort of scam the system or – cause you have the physical, in some places people try to find interesting ways to…” Well I had some friends that actually had, they had relatives that were doctors that would certify that they were 4F (Disabled and Unfit for Military Service), or had flat feet, or whatever. You know, there were some ways to get around that. Interviewer: “Alright, so you’re aware of that kind of thing. So where did they send you now, —” Then I went to Fort Leonard Wood, that would’ve been in February, actually a friend of mine went in in January and didn’t tell me he went in, so that was pretty much my … to go in the service, cause I was like ‘why didn’t you tell me you were going?’ you know, and then so when I realized he went, then I said ‘well I might as well go too,’ so he was in a month earlier than me but we were at basic the same time but we never met, we were in different areas. Interviewer: “Yeah. Different companies, different stages of the training. Okay, so you go to Fort Leonard Wood, now what – what do you actually do in basic training?” (6:35) Well basically you just kind of go through a grueling physical, mostly physical and mental – I remember the first time I went up the stairs they called us to formation, I came down and I didn’t have my hat, and I turned around to go back up to get my hat and the drill sergeant goes, ‘where you going?’ I said I forgot my hat, and he walloped me across the face and said ‘you won’t forget it again, will you?’ and I never forgot my hat again. �Interviewer: “Alright, how hard was it for you to adjust to life in the Army?” It wasn’t really that hard in basic because I pretty much made my mind up that I didn’t have any other choice, so I was just gonna do what I had to do. You have to conform, we did have a couple other people that wouldn’t conform and they would say don’t bother going to the … they’d call them out and then they’d let the peer pressure determine… you know you wanna run another mile cause of this guy? Or you wanna fix it, so pretty much they used peer pressure to instill that it’s better for all of us to be on the same page. Interviewer: “Okay, so you learned to follow orders, you do a lot of physical training, do you get any weapons training at that point?” We got some weapon training and they had some live-fire simulations, in fact I learned later that a fellow I went to high school with got killed in the live training – but I didn’t know about that until recently. But yeah, not much – I didn’t really feel like I got an adequate amount of combat training. Interviewer: “Right, well that wasn’t really combat training per say, so much as orientation for the Army, if you needed advanced individual training you’d get more than that if you were going that way, now what time of year was it that you were in basic?” (8:55) It would’ve been like February to April. Interviewer: “Okay, so what was the weather like out there?” Well, we had one day we got in formation, we called it Little Korea, but we got in formation, it was snowing, three or four in the morning, by the end of the day it was like seventy degrees, and we were taking our, taking everything off, we were sweating, it was miserable. Interviewer: “Alright, okay. So how long did basic last?” Eight weeks. Interviewer: “Now, what happens to you next?” Then I was transferred for M.O.S., which was – is a medic, was my M.O.S., down to Fort Sam Houston, and that was a ten-week advanced training. Interviewer: “How did you get that M.O.S., did you request it or was it just assigned to you —“ �I didn’t request it, I assumed aptitude tests, a lot of the other tests, I even think maybe they researched prior history of military from maybe my father being a medic, and maybe that had something to do with it, but I really don’t know how I was designed to be [a medic.] Interviewer: “So you didn’t, you didn’t mark that off on a list someplace, they just put you there?” Right. Interviewer: “Alright. And then did your father have a response when he found out you were going to be a medic?” No. Interviewer: “Okay. Alright, so you got that assignment, you go to Fort Sam Houston in Texas now, describe the training program there.” (10:25) Well, we had a ten-week training and about half of it was for combat training, and [a lot of it was about] anatomics, you know, stuff that you had to learn, and then about the other five weeks would’ve been clinical, like if you were in a hospital. So it was pretty much half and half, we gave each other injections, you know we were pincushions and some people told me we were going to use oranges to practice, but I never saw an orange. Interviewer: “Okay. Alright, and what kinds of people were training you for this?” I’m not really sure, I’m imagining they were nurse-qualified or doctor-qualified. Interviewer: “But did any of them actually talk about having been in Vietnam, or was that—” No. I don’t remember any discussion of anybody with any type of military experience as far as that. Interviewer: “Okay, alright. And how long did that training session go?” It was a ten-week training. Interviewer: “Okay. Once you complete that, do you get assigned someplace in the States, or do you go to Vietnam, or what happens next?” Well, that’s the thing – I was assigned to an infantry unit, at the time I felt like – at least I wasn’t infantry, I’m a medic, but I don’t know what the percentage of people were, I do know there were �a couple people who had allocations for physical therapy, and I think one of them was a big football player from some college that maybe had some influence to get their son to that type of training. But I think most of them probably went to Vietnam, I would assume – I don’t know how they distinguished— (12:27) Interviewer: “Well, was that where you were sent after training?” Actually they gave me a thirty-day leave, and I went home for thirty days and watched a man land on the moon, and (laughter) got ready to go over to Vietnam. Interviewer: “Okay, and how much did you know about Vietnam at that point?” I didn’t know hardly anything, I mean I’d seen protesting the war, I’d seen, you know the pictures everybody saw. But pretty much I had, I mean I had a brother-in-law that had been there in ’65 but we never really talked about that. Interviewer: “Okay, so you really didn’t have much of any idea of what you were getting into at that point.” No, no. Interviewer: “Okay. So what’s the process for getting you to Vietnam?” Well, I flew out to Oakland and today, fifty years ago, got on a jet plane and headed over to Vietnam. Interviewer: “Alright, and was it a chartered commercial jet or military plane or—” I’m not sure the name of the plane, I’d never heard of the name before, it wasn’t like the old TWA and stuff. But yeah, we landed in Hawaii, Guam, and then to Vietnam. Interviewer: “Okay. And where did you land in Vietnam?” Bien Hoa. I think that was down south— Interviewer: “Yeah that’s outside of Saigon. Okay. And did you land in the day, or at night?” I believe it was during the day. Interviewer: “And what’s your first impression of Vietnam when you get there?” �Hot. (laughter) Hot, and there was kind of a smell, kind of an odor different than fresh air. Interviewer: “Yeah. Two most common responses, the heat and the smell. Okay, when you get off the plane what do they do with you?” (14:31) Well, we loaded up onto a truck I guess, a deuce-and-a-half? (CCKW 6x6) I’m not sure the size of the truck, and we just started driving north, and I just – I don’t know long it took for us to get up there but we just keep going and going and going.. [I was thinking] well North Vietnam, we’re gonna end somewhere! Interviewer: “Now did you have a unit assignment at this time?” I’m not sure. I don’t remember ever hearing any unit, I think they took me in, got to Camp Evans, and then the next thing within the day or so I guess we’re out in A Shau Valley. Interviewer: “Alright, okay – so yes, we’re at the very end of June here – did you get any kind of Vietnam orientation course or anything? Or just straight out in—” No, straight out. Interviewer: “Okay. Now you go to Camp Evans, and Camp Evans – now you’re up in the far northern section of South Vietnam, … and Camp Evans is one of the big bases for the 101st Airborne.” Right. Interviewer: “Okay. And now, what unit within the 101st are you assigned to?” It was the First of the 506. Interviewer: “Okay. Alright, and as a medic are you officially part of an individual right line company, or are you headquarters or what are you?” Well physically the medics all stayed in their own barracks and the units would stay in their barracks, I was assigned to Alpha company – they flew me out right away, I mean it was within a day or two from being in Vietnam I was in the A Shau Valley, there was a medic there, Doc Jones, that they introduced me to. He’d been there for a while, I think he’d been in the country maybe seven months. They called incoming, I didn’t know what that – first they were playing cards, everybody’s having a good time. Then the next thing they say incoming, hit the trench and everybody runs out, we jump in this trench in the floor of the A Shau Valley, and mortars are coming in. And apparently this was a daily thing, and I turned to my right and looked down in the trench after the mortar hit, and I couldn’t hear anything. People’s mouths were moving, I’m �not hearing anything, and I saw Doc Jones in a – like a fetal position in the trench, and I’m going ‘oh my god this guy’s been here seven months?’ And I kinda resolved, hey I’m gonna die, let’s make the best of it, you know? Do what you can. (17:13) Interviewer: “Okay, now after that attack did Jones or anybody else try to show you the ropes at all or tell you what to do?” No, no. Probably within, I’d say within the next day we were going on my first C.A. into an area… well I didn’t… a jungle. Interviewer: “So C.A. being combat assault?” Yeah, yeah. Combat assault. The … apparently set it up, we entered on this hill, I jumped out – we jumped out, we started heading down the ridgeline, they called back – the gunships were sailing, we see friendlies moving, we see enemies or someone moving along the ridgeline, they called back to the battalion, they asked them they said ‘is there any friendlies in the area?’ They said ‘no, there’s no friendlies.’ So my first experience was to be shot by a Cobra gunship. We had four guys died, I medevaced a few, I didn’t – I mean that’s probably the worst experience, and you never want to hear that sound. Interviewer: “Yeah, that’s a sort of welcome to Vietnam.” Yeah. Interviewer: “So basically you’re on your own and you have to figure out what to do?” Yeah pretty much, it was on the job, I mean I didn’t know what was going on to begin with and probably nobody else did, I don’t know how many people ever got shot by our own gunships, but— Interviewer: “It happened.” Yeah, and anyway we had a guy – had a tripod, guy had a head wound and I put him on the tripod, medevaced him out, couple other ones needed baskets, pretty much just scrambling and… Interviewer: “Okay, yeah. So how much did your actual medic training help you at this point?” I don’t – at that point I think it had more to with just instinct. You can’t, I don’t think the training even – I mean it was there, but the underlying need was just to be able to react. And the �spontaneity, and I still feel that way a lot, is – sometimes I’m in situations where just, I have to do something and I can’t explain it but.. you know. (19:47) Interviewer: “Okay, so after that first incident do you start to get to know the men in the company a little bit, or not really?” Actually I didn’t get to really know them, I didn’t know – it was more or less just a job at the time, I didn’t have any feelings – I was pretty much numb from the event. Interviewer: “Now were you basically sort of a company-level medic, or you’re—” Yes, I was with Alpha company, it was a company— Interviewer: “So would you normally be with a company command post wherever that went or did you go among the platoons, or?” No, I would be assigned to the company, I came in after Hamburger Hill so most of the units I was with were half the size of a normal platoon, so we – we did get to know each other then, because there was less people to know cause it was a smaller unit, and most of them would tell me their stories of Hamburger Hill and I would do – you know, I talk a lot now but I didn’t talk for probably about six months in Vietnam. I listened. Interviewer: “Alright. So now that you’re there and after that initial incident, what kind of things are you doing over the coming weeks?” Well I did general care for the troops in the field, we’d have rashes, we’d have infections, I’d carried an aid bag, I had … I would experiment… I would use arithromycin or tetracycline or penicillin, whatever didn’t work I’d try it a few days, if that didn’t work we’d try something else. There was all kinds of different unknowns at the time, so it was more trial and error and as a medic I wasn’t trained for that either, but you know I just deciphered, this is the course of action to take in certain cases. [It was] pretty much like I said, instinctual. Interviewer: “Okay, now were you dealing more with kind of tropical disease stuff and—” Yeah, we had I think cellulitis was pretty prevalent, they’d get a bruise on their arm and it would actually develop into the joint where they couldn’t move their joints, it’d swell up and there was like a core in there and you couldn’t – it was painful, they said, but you couldn’t get any progress unless you had antibiotics. And then you had to kinda debride the area that would form, try to debride that and gradually squeeze out the – I mean it’s pretty gross, but anyway I just had to learn to do that and the only way to do that was to follow a certain course [of action] that worked, you just kind of learned those things. �Interviewer: “So I mean did you observe other medics doing that or had you had some—” Yeah, we talked – medics would talk to each other, about experiences with certain things. We’d share information, we stayed in the same quarters as opposed to being with the unit we were with, and then a lot of that was – you know the medics benefitted from their knowledge that they could share and take back, but the troops didn’t really have the kind of relationship they would have with say, other troops that they’re with every day in the field. So it was kind of a different relationship. (23:28) Interviewer: “So how much time were you spending in the field as opposed to on a base camp?” Oh, probably my first six months I was probably in the field, I would say all but maybe a week or two when we’d get a stand-down or something. Interviewer: “Alright, now when you’re out in the field you are right there with the men, I mean you’re close quarters with them.” Yeah, they would see us in and we’d travel in a line, we never worked together – we’d keep separation from having multiple injuries if we were hit by a RPG or some kind of attack, so we’d try to spread out and that would limit the injuries and damage. So you really weren’t right there next to each other like you’d normally be. Interviewer: “And you wouldn’t be casually chatting as you’re walking through the jungle either, and at night if you set up a perimeter or whatever, you’re camping out there, are you again kind of all spread out over that area?” Yeah, mostly in the field we didn’t set up perimeters. We would walk a trail on the high ground usually, then we would get off the trail and set up an ambush from the area below the trail. It was pretty steep, and I learned to find a way to not slide down the hill at night was to put your two feet between a tree and then if your feet would – if you would slide, you would (laughter) you know, wake yourself up. And so there was little tricks you learn, you kind of sleep with one ear open, you learn the difference between an animal movement and a human movement, just – just things from living on the ground in the woods you know, jungle. Interviewer: “Okay. And how were you supplied or supported when you were out there?” Well we normally – we were out maybe, I would say a week at a time, so we normally had enough supplies to get us that far, sometime they’d drop supplies in and we’d stay out, other times they’d pick us up, we’d extract from one area, drop us in another, and – but normally, they would resupply us pretty good actually. �Interviewer: “Okay. So you go, initially you start in the A Shau Valley, that’s the area where the Hamburger Hill fight had taken [place,] were things a lot quieter by the time you got there? Was there much fighting going on?” (26:04) It – it had a certain quietness in the field as opposed to a firebase or anything else because mostly there wasn’t anybody else out there but you and if there was, it wasn’t [like] you were gonna engage something. So you didn’t, you didn’t really think you – it wasn’t like a conventional thing where they’re coming over the hill you know, ‘run for the hills’ or something. Interviewer: “But there, was there much enemy activity at that point?” There was. But it was usually like, they would have like three or four people – they’d never engage us on a massive level, like a regiment or a division or any large numbers – and it was usually like a three or four-man group. They would come in, try to create a little havoc, and then disappear into the jungle. So we were really kind of like troubleshooting, but it wasn’t really like the battles you would think of in a normal war. Interviewer: “Now, were they using booby traps or things like that?” There were booby traps, we learned how to walk without, you know, tripping the wires – we didn’t look for them. Normally too, [Vietnamese soldiers] would not travel the trails usually. We would travel the trails, therefore they knew where to set the booby traps. Interviewer: “Right, okay – cause some units in the 101st stayed off of trails, and they would operate – that was the only way to get through somewhere. But that seems to vary from company to company and commander to commander, but when you were with them using the trails was just standard?” Yeah, we would – we would go on the trails, some of them we’d cut, most of the time we’d cut our own trails. And there was less chance of a booby trap cause there’s no trail. Interviewer: “Right. So when you’re talking about using trails, some of those trails were your trails and not just old ones that were already there?” Yeah. (28:19) Interviewer: “And you said you were with Alpha company for about nine months, it that right?” Well, I would probably say more like about eight months. �Interviewer: “Okay. Now, you’re there, you get there, it’s summer – at least summer over here at that point, kind of July or whatever – now does the season change over the course of that time?” Yeah, it seemed like the monsoons – kind of at that time, kinda kicked in around I would say November-December, and then it would run through probably I would say ‘til February-March. And then we’d try to reenter the area that we were in before the monsoons. Interviewer: “Okay. So when the monsoons come in, you guys clear out and go somewhere else?” Yeah, being air-mobile the only way to survive was to have choppers in and out and that was our biggest problem was the weather cause we had to leave, we couldn’t stay in there without any support – supply support. Interviewer: “Okay, so when you pull out of the A Shau, do you just go back to Evans or you go somewhere else?” Well we went to the lowlands, it was just kinda outside of Evans, we did set up ambushes there, we had – there were people that would come in and – Viet Cong would come in from the mountains, across the lowlands into Phu Bai, they had girlfriends in there and they would resupply them and they’d go back out, so we would set up ambushes and we did have a few ambushes where we found love letters, and things from their visit to Phu Bai, so it was pretty much where your enemy was really all around you. You didn’t know where their support was coming from. Interviewer: “Alright, now would you still be in the field or on firebases in that area or would you spend a lot of time at Evans?” We spent a little time at Evans but really we were pretty much in the lowlands until we got back into the – into the better weather, and then we’d go right back out into the— Interviewer: “Back up into the hills and the mountains, yeah.” The hills, yeah. We’d try to get back into the A Shau again. Into the – got off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which.. we were in Laos, once. Even though it’s not our record. Interviewer: “Right, okay. So we’re kind of following here, the course of your career. So when do you think you left the A Shau Valley, would that have been November, or October?” (30:54) �Yeah I’m thinking probably November. Because we went to Firebase Rakkasan, I spent Christmas there in ’69, and Bob Hope was supposed to have a show – they couldn’t get us out cause the weather was so bad, so I know that was a pretty good monsoon, starting probably with the clouds and, you know. But I remember in November we would look and the sky would be beautiful, we said ‘it’s not going to rain today’ and four o’clock here come the clouds in, and boom it’d rain. And that was the beginning of the monsoons, cause you know, you get – daytime would be great until about four or five and then after that it was like [rain] all day long. Interviewer: “Alright. So how do you deal with that much rain?” Well we lived on the ground, so it wasn’t easy, we were wet most of the time. Up in the mountains sometimes it was – it felt pretty cold. And we’d use C4, we’d light C4 – you could take it off the back of a claymore mine and we would light that, and it would burn, kinda dry our clothes out a little bit. We used it for cooking and other things too, but yeah it was cold up in the mountains. Interviewer: “Now as a medic did you have supplies that you had to keep dry?” Yeah, I had an aid bag and I usually did have most of them wrapped in plastic, just in case. But being in the mountains wasn’t as bad as probably being down south in the swamps and areas like that, it was just cold, it wasn’t – it was wet [because of] laying on the ground. (32:33) Interviewer: “Alright, now in the time you spent with Alpha company and they were in the field, are there particular events or things you did that kinda stand out in your memory?” When we were in the field, we really didn’t – there really wasn’t much to do, we were pretty much just going day-to-do, and it was just so physical there really wasn’t any opportunity to relax. You sleep when you can, cause during the ambushes at night you’re really not getting very much sleep. So it was pretty much you know, you just think of the next day, think of the step, and just keep on going. Interviewer: “Okay, so how much contact do you think you had with the North Vietnamese?” We’ve had – we had a few firefights, like I said though they were limited, they were like maybe four people at a time. I would say most of what we met were maybe four. And we did have firefights, they would have a search and destroy where they would have a B-52 strike, they would ask us to come in to – to you know, explore the damage and think we did something, and they would be waiting for us. Because, I guess they figured lightning doesn’t strike twice or maybe it’s a psychological… way to, you know for them to fight the war. There was a lot of psychological— �Interviewer: “Of course, and if they observe the Americans had certain patterns, if they’re gonna send people in to investigate after a B-52 they know you’re coming.” Right. Right, and they wanted to demoralize us by thinking, ‘oh, their B-52 strikes don’t faze us a bit,’ so therefore we would go like, ‘what? I don’t want to go search and destroy!’ (laughter) (34:26) Interviewer: “Now when you did that, did you find evidence that the B-52s had been successful?” There were – there was a lot of physical damage, I can’t say that I actually witnessed, or saw a lot of human casualties. Interviewer: “Or were there like wrecked bunker complexes or things like that?” Yeah, we didn’t see much, and it was devastated if there were, it was buried. Interviewer: “Okay, and when you did get out of the field, what did you do?” Well, I didn’t get out of the field ‘til about eight months after I’d been there— Interviewer: “Wouldn’t there be an occasional day when you’d be someplace else?” Oh, we would have – occasionally they’d give us a week to go to Eagle Beach or in-country R&R. And I believe we had two of them that I remember, where we had a week to just blow off steam. Interviewer: “Okay, so would that be in a secure area where you’re not..?” Yeah, it was pretty secure, Eagle Beach, in fact they made us turn in our weapons and so there was no chance somebody else was gonna, you know we weren’t gonna have any problem, and then you know we’d have some drinks, we’d watch a movie, they had a band, you know just things kinda where we could all get together and actually kind of relax a little bit, get away from it. (36:01) Interviewer: “Eventually your assignment changes, so once you kinda complete that time that you spent with Alpha did you have an R&R or what came next?” Yeah, I went on R&R and it was almost eight months into my tour, and I was thinking, well, you know medics normally get out of the field about eight months, and they’ll put ‘em in the rear. So I had waited as long as I could to take my R&R. But anyway I took my R&R, I came back from �Thailand and the – the night I came back I was monitoring the horn they called it, the radio. And we were getting loss of signal from Alpha at my old company in the field, and I was notified that they apparently got attacked and they were hit. The next day a lieutenant – or lieutenant colonel picked me up in a Loach helicopter, which is what most of the upper officers used, and we flew out to the site and I got some information about a few of my buddies that’d got killed, they wanted me to identify a few of them before they took ‘em. The medic that had replaced me was one of the casualties. And so after that I went back to Camp Evans, I wasn’t assigned yet cause Charlie Company was – I was a battalion medic at the time, when I came back, so I was going to go out with Charlie company so I went from Alpha to Charlie after my R&R, so they sent me to Firebase Granite a week later after my unit had gotten into the conflict. And then the night I went out there they got attacked. They broke in – they broke, sappers got into the mortar pit, pretty much pulled the perimeter back behind the mortar crew so the perimeter was infiltrated. They woke me up and said, you know, ‘they’re down there Doc, that’s where they hit.’ Darkest day, night I’ve ever seen. I had a guy on a point up on a hill said, he said ‘go down there in the mortar pit,’ and so I crawled down the mortar pit, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, I think I lost my rifle cause I never found it. I crawled down there with my aid bag, found a guy blown into the ammo – the mortar bunker, guy must’ve weighed close to three hundred pounds, I mean I couldn’t get him out, I pulled, I pulled, I could hear him wheezing. I just, I didn’t know what – I just kept thinking I gotta find out if there’s others out there that I can help because I can’t, I can’t stay. This guy looked pretty bad, and so I crawled through the mortar pit and I saw a sapper jump up out of a foxhole about ten feet from me. And he didn’t have any weapons, cause he was a sapper, which – they used dynamite or whatever. And I’ll never forget the look on – he just ran toward the south end and into the woods, and I was there with no weapon, he had no weapon, it was… (39:57) Interviewer: “Well it was still pretty dark, wasn’t it?” It was very dark, I could barely make it out. But I did see the movement, and so I turned to go back through the mortar pit and there was a mortar tube with a decapitated G.I.’s head on the tube. And that, that’s what got me. And that… that was the worst. But this the kind of warfare we were in, it was psychological more than [anything.] Interviewer: “So basically the sappers broke in, they killed some people, and did they blow things up? Did they toss … charges?” They basically just wanted to disrupt the perimeter and then they had an NVA regiment out there, it was – if things worked the way they wanted, [they would] overrun the base. They did shoot rocket-propelled grenades and everything in from the low – it was actually a lower end of the firebase, so it was more susceptible to attack and I was originally up on the upper end with the artillery so I had to come all the way down around there. �Interviewer: “Now were there other American G.I.s in there chasing the enemy out or did you have no idea what anyone else was doing?” Yeah. I did not know, I read other articles of other medics that were on the base at the time, and I think a same medic had already been there earlier when that – the guy in the mortar pit was injured. And he – his description of it was he got blasted into the – he was there before that happened, and he got blasted into the pit, so we probably crossed tracks as medics in the same area. Interviewer: “But basically the enemy, so they broke in but then the regiment didn’t attack?” No. No, apparently we pulled the perimeter back and apparently it was secure, I mean we did get gun support, we did get artillery support from other areas, so they must’ve made a decision that, ‘we’d created enough problems.’ And in their regard, they would rather just disrupt and wound than to really overrun a base cause, you know, they can come back and do it tomorrow. They know where we’re gonna be. (42:35) Interviewer: “Yeah, so you kinda have, you come back from R&R and things are a whole lot different than you thought they were going to be. Now having now joined [Charlie Company,] basically do you stay with them for the rest of the tour or?” Yeah, I stayed with Charlie Company and we had commanding officer Zippo so basically Charlie company was designated as the battalion company, that’s who I was assigned to which was a battalion commander’s company, which is Charlie Company. And so we humped around, I guess I probably humped around for another, I guess another month, another month and a half with Zippo – which he’d been there for three tours, he was more gung-ho than most, and he basically said, you know don’t – we’re still at war. Interviewer: “Now, did he know his job?” Right. Interviewer: “Okay. So he would push you, but he wasn’t doing things that were stupid?” No. And he said in the field, you can do what you want in the field, but when you get back in the rear you’re shaving, you’re gonna look like soldiers you’re gonna act like soldiers. So he had a different philosophy than most of the companies I’d been with, especially Alpha but – totally different approach to fighting, he didn’t care if it was right or wrong he said it’s what we do. He said, ‘what are you gonna do if you see ‘em? You kill them.’ You know? �Interviewer: “Mhm. Alright, now while you were with that company after the attack on Granite, did you get into much by way of firefights or was it still the same kind of patrolling?” (44:20) No, most of the firefights were earlier in my tour, after that we didn’t experience firefights, it seemed like it did change to where it was more attacks on the firebase, it was more – they had really, I think they really sent more troops, more organized regiments than the original fighting where it was more hit-and-run. And that’s when it started getting more where they zeroed in on – they knew where we were, they zeroed in and decided since we had already declared that we were ending the war, that – you know, there was no reason for them to not take advantage of it, and so they attacked – they were more aggressive, they attacked on more of a massive scale. Interviewer: “But if you’re out in the – now in the Ripcord campaign itself, the companies of 2506 and some of the other ones that were sent in to support them as they were patrolling the area right around that firebase, they were getting into more and more trouble at times, and coming under attack. So where was your company operating?” Well basically I think Charlie – I went, I was going to the rear after that, and basically Charlie company from what I understand went to Firebase Bastogne, and they pretty much pulled them out of the area, Charlie company. So the only company left in the 1st Battalion was Delta, at that time. Interviewer: “And they got tossed into Ripcord at the very end, and they had more trouble back in May, as well so that’s their own story, so when did you go from being in the field with Charlie company to being back at Evans?” I would say probably around my birthday, I think I remember, probably around the end of April. Interviewer: “Okay, alright. So now you’re pretty much based at Camp Evans, how was life in Camp Evans different from life in the field?” Well, it was different – it was more, you know, you’d treat people in the rear more than wounded veterans, it was … stuff, just, you know, everyday stuff. Cuts, scrapes, not combat wounds. Interviewer: “But you’re still getting the infections and—” Yeah we’re still at activity, we’d go into the village, give vaccines to people in town, you know, Vietnamese people. We did certain medical things, but it was not really combat-related, more or less. (47:10) �Interviewer: “So these trips into the villages, they’re called MEDCAPS, (Medical Civic Action Programs) is that right?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Alright, so what would happen or how would those work?” Well we would go into the village and they – they coordinated with, I guess the village people, saying ‘we have vaccines for this,’ things that will help your, you know, children and stuff. And so we did have a program where we went in and you know, kind of worked with the citizens of Vietnam. Interviewer: “Would you have an interpreter with you, or?” I’m not sure – I believe some of them spoke English, and it was mostly children so they would direct them to what they needed to do, and I think they pretty much, they all spoke English I think. Interviewer: “And how did the – what kind of relationship was there between these Vietnamese civilians and you guys, I mean how did they treat you or view you?” Well they viewed us as helpful, they thought it was necessary that the Americans are benefitting their life at the time, and they – it wasn’t political, I don’t think there was any reason for them to think that we were their enemy, they didn’t – I didn’t perceive that. Interviewer: “So they were just sort of happy that you were doing that?” Right. They were happy and I was happy too, so— Interviewer: “Yeah, and did you have Vietnamese who worked on the base?” I didn’t work with any per se, but there were ARVNs – Zippo, who I humped with for a couple months, he spoke fluent Vietnamese and he had three tours in Vietnam, so he did understand the language. Interviewer: “Okay, and – now there are certain stereotypes about Vietnam and what went on there that I ask about just to see what you have to say about them, one of them is the assumption that there’s a lot of drug use. I mean, particularly in the base camps, did you see any of that or..?” (49:22) �In the field I didn’t see it, but as time changed in Vietnam I noticed like, when I went there we were more serious about survival, about staying alive, newer troops coming in to Vietnam were more drug-prone because I think they were doing drugs back here before they came over. So there was kind of like a change of people who just didn’t do it, the people who – well, why not? And when you’re seasoned in combat, your whole approach is you need to be aware of everything. And that did not play well in the field at all. I don’t – I don’t know of any heroin or anything, I know there was drugs around from the French – had left these pharmacies, and I was told that even some of the Americans didn’t know what some of these drugs were. And there was some experimentation in the rear on certain drugs, and we did have some casualties from certain drugs, they just didn’t wake up the next morning. So there – I can’t say there wasn’t in the rear, that would be considering Camp Evans, but on firebases and in the field, I didn’t see it with the troops I was with. Interviewer: “Okay, and the other area that comes up a lot is sort of race relations and racial tensions, and again you have stories about gangs of black soldiers together on the bases and all of this kind of stuff, did you see any evidence of—” That kind of changed a little bit too, because when I was first there you didn’t hear as much of this black power thing that was going on with the social change that was going on at home. Some of my best friends over there were African-American, the guy from Hamburger Hill that was from east St. Louis, which was near my house, he’s the one that showed me how to read a map and was teaching me all these things he learned from Hamburger Hill and it didn’t seem like it was – in his frame, he didn’t seem that way. But there was always the underlying feeling that they did feel like maybe they were more powerful together, but as far as me being a medic they didn’t look at me by color, and I didn’t look at them by color. To me it’s, everybody’s blood’s the same. (52:16) Interviewer: “Alright, so now you’re kind of – you were on Camp Evans then in July of 1970, and that’s when the Ripcord campaign itself was coming to a climax, the firebase was under siege and eventually it’s evacuated. But it’s not your unit that’s there, so how much of that were you even aware of while it was going on?” Well, it – in fact, I wasn’t aware too much until I mean, I think it was in July when it all started. And we would get little tidbits of information that’s going on out there, and it seemed like – you know, week after week it seemed to become more horrific. All of a sudden, ‘oh, they had this happen,’ then they had this happen, and then I was like, within a week or so of going home and that’s when I learned that Ranger was killed. And a medic that I knew had gotten killed, and that they used CS gas and every time I’d get information it kinda filtered down, I don’t know who was relaying it but you did have a rumor mill of sorts that everybody seemed to know what was going on. Interviewer: “Now explain who Ranger was.” �Ranger was, he was a commanding officer of Delta, first of the 506, and he’d come out to the field when I was with Zippo and he came out for about a week in the field with us. And they – Zippo was trying to mentor him to know that he was gonna take command somewhere, somehow, at some time. Ranger was very intelligent, he didn’t have the experience that Zippo had from three tours and he didn’t speak Vietnamese as far as I know, but Zippo was trying to mentor him – Zippo also felt that he wasn’t ready to take command and he did question a lot – cause Zippo realized you have to fight back to the superior support or you’re not gonna get it, and if you’re – if you say, ‘oh, they’re not giving me what I want,’ you gotta find a way to get it. He didn’t feel Ranger had the ability or the seasoning, or the relationship to tell the higher ups that this is mandatory, this is not up to you. Interviewer: “Now what about cases where the orders you’re getting bad, if you’re ordered to do something you know is stupid, would Zippo push back with that?” Oh Zippo pushed back, Zippo would do what he wanted to do. And Zippo was kind of like a maverick, he made up his mind a long time ago – he almost had like a sense of, like he hated authority – unless it was him! (laughter) He would talk back to these guys, ‘I’m here, you’re not, I need this support.’ And he ruffled people’s feathers, yeah. Interviewer: “Maybe while he was a captain.” Oh yeah. (55:40) Interviewer: “But you knew him from them, … workman is killed at the end of the Ripcord campaign and all of that and the company gets shot up pretty bad in the process, so there’s little bits and pieces of things that you’re aware of going [on,] and then right after that your tour is up.” Right. So then the long flight home with all these images of Ripcord in my mind, I mean it just played over and over, long flight. The guilt of not – ‘why me, why am I going home and you’re not?’ It all came over me and then you know, twenty-four hours later you’re home eating with your family, after a year living like an animal. Interviewer: “So where did you land in the States, where did you arrive first?” Came in Fort Lewis, Washington. Interviewer: “Okay, and how – what did they do with you once you arrived there, what’s the process?” �I think we processed – they gave us, I think we got uniforms cause the ones we had we, we didn’t have any Class A’s anymore. So we got fitted for uniforms, our boots got resupplied with our gear, and then basically we just flew right home. There was no debriefing, there was no discussion, there was no… Interviewer: “Right, yeah – did you have any trouble with the protestors on the way home or was it quiet?” I didn’t have any that I knew about, I really didn’t know there was much change until I was eating dinner with my family, then I realized that – I kept thinking, ‘they’ve all changed’ but I realize it was me, because my vocabulary shrunk to about twelve words and half of them were obscene, so…. (laughter) Interviewer: “So you had to kind of learn to correct yourself, did you have other ways in which your behavior had changed, or was there stuff you had to readjust [to?]” Yeah, you almost feel like if you say something once, they should respond, or something should happen. But when you say it twice, and three times, and you get no response, then you gotta find another way to communicate. And my communication skills were not – were very limited to say the least. Interviewer: “Now in your case, you’re back and you’re just home on leave, you still have time left on your enlistment?” (58:25) Right. So I went home, I believe I was home for thirty days, I think it was another thirty day leave, and then I went – I was sent back to Fort Sam Houston where I had my individual medic training, and they pretty much saw my record of combat and they perceived me to be – that I should inspire these other men to live up to certain expectations or something. Interviewer: “So what did they have you do?” Well, basically they invented a job for me to be a secretary – cause I knew some typing, I did typing in high school, to type reports, they pretty much fabricated a job for me cause they were trying to be nice, I guess. And make coffee for the first sergeant, and you know. So I pretty much just hung out with the guys at the motor pool cause they were more interesting. Interviewer: “So you didn’t really have a whole lot to do?” No. I just ghosted pretty much, we had to go on a couple bivouacs and then they’re asking me to, you know, ‘show these guys what you do!’ I said this is a joke, I said this is camping, I did this in the Boy Scouts, you know. And so I was just kinda disinterested. �Interviewer: “So you weren’t really going out of your way to impart your knowledge or whatever.” No, I just wanted to stay out of trouble and get out, that’s all. Interviewer: “So how long did you stay there?” It would’ve been about five months, I got out a month early to go on a G.I. bill back to college. Interviewer: “Now did the Army make any effort to get you to stay?” No they really didn’t, they gave me a bunch of fillings in my mouth, that was pretty much all I got (laughter) before I was discharged, you know, after not brushing your teeth and being in the field I had a few cavities, but outside of that they really didn’t pursue trying to keep me in. Interviewer: “So you get out, where do you go to school?” I went to Merrimack Community College, and I – I had a few credits already from before, and so I just tried to resume that. Mainly I just did it to get out early, and then I went on to – got a job at the V.A. working on a psychiatric ward, I worked there for about six years. I was a male ward secretary, the first male ward secretary they had – and we would, you know, work with the nurse and the doctor and a social worker and a psychologist, most of the guys were institutionalized World War 2 guys, and the medical thing had always been to take care of them, rather than try to put ‘em back out in society. Most of the Vietnam vets that came through wouldn’t stay more than a week and they’d say no, they were just resistant to being around seriously mentally ill people, you know. And at the time I’m assuming they didn’t have what – knew what PTSD was. (1:01:59) Interviewer: “Right. So did you have a lot of contact with the patients at that place, or?” Yeah I did, I started a team approach where I would – I put a sheet on the bulletin board in the hall, and I— [Recording cuts out.] Interviewer: “Alright, now you were explaining that you were working as a ward secretary for these medical patients for the V.A., and you were talking about creating teams – so explain that.” Yeah, I created the team approach where I realized a lot these patients hadn’t seen the doctor in like five years, they’d just wander around and you know, have problems. So I put a bulletin up there, it said ‘if you wish to see the team, sign your name’ and Wallace Connors, a patient that had been there for twenty-something years, signed his name on there and the doctor even says, ‘well what does Wallace want?” I don’t know, why don’t you ask him? So Wallace comes in there and the team’s there, the psychologist, social worker, nurse, everybody’s there, and doctor asks Wallace what’s going on, he goes, ‘I just wanted to see if there was still somebody here! I just wanted to know if there is a team.’ Because nobody goes to them, they have to come to you. So it worked out, and I think they still use the team concept at the V.A. in some areas now, cause you’re using all your disciplines in a different manner and even if you can’t cure, you can still help. �Interviewer: “Yeah, well you can find ways to treat people and make their lives better sure, alright. And what kind of conditions did these guys have?” (1:03:47) Well there were some that were lobotomized, one guy had syphilis that had destroyed his brain, he’d never been on an escalator before – we took him to a shopping center and he couldn’t go up the escalator cause he’d never seen one and he was scared to death. Lot of them were schizophrenics, but they had no social contact outside – they would have people visit them and then their condition would worsen. Their family members would come, they’d get worse. So it wasn’t really a – they weren’t working within the community in the bigger spectrum. They were institutionalized, basically, and that was the treatment plan, I guess back years ago. Now it’s totally changed. Interviewer: “Right, now you said you did that for six years, and then what led you to move on from there?” Well, basically it got to be pretty emotionally draining – you go to work and then you’re… same conditions, same person, you don’t see them changing, that’s what they’re gonna be for twenty years, you know. So you don’t really see, and – I didn’t really feel like I was getting the gratification of, ‘I’m helping.’ And so I pretty much just lost interest, plus emotionally like I said it was just – I think if somebody worked in that profession, six months there, move them somewhere for six months and give them a little break, because day after day you get too invested. Interviewer: “So what did you do after that?” Well, I bought a house, got married, had a child – bought a house, and the guy that did my homeowner’s insurance told me, ‘you talk a lot, you might be a good insurance guy’ so I went on to sell insurance for about twenty years, I worked with Farmer’s for ten years, I was with Prudential, Metropolitan, and a brokerage for about five years. And then again I kinda got bored and you know, I just said I just want to physically do a job without having to have, you know the mental responsibilities. I just - you know, lemme work, lemme go home and forget about work. So then I worked for Target for twenty-one years in the stockroom, and the physical work I loved. The physical work helped me mentally, I almost pushed myself to the level of ‘yeah, I like working,’ you know? But it never ends, you still have the mental relationship thing so you know, you never really – I’ve found that you never really get rid of that mental, emotional part. (1:07:00) Interviewer: “Yeah. And have you ever been diagnosed with PTSD or figure you got pieces of it or—” Yeah, I went to the V.A. in 2013 and I saw a psychologist and she was like nine months pregnant and I said, ‘I don’t know but I think I have ADHD, ADD, I don’t know what I got.’ And she asked me, she said, ‘you really don’t care about anybody, do you?’ And I said, ‘right now I don’t care about you!’ (laughter) And she said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you,’ so I went another two years without doing anything and then I finally realized I do have a problem, my second wife I mean, she told me – she had to live with me, and I probably wouldn’t be here without her, but I did finally get some help. I went into a group program and at that the time I still had never put in a … I put in ten percent for my hearing from when I – I believe I lost it when �Doc Jones was in the trench and a mortar hit, but they denied that. But I went to a class, stress management class and that was helping me learn different ways and I’d be with other guys that had similar problems, and it did help. And I did some meditation, tried to wrap my head around it, and a doctor told me says, ‘you need to visit people that are like you, you need to go to reunions, you need to tell your story.’ And so I’ve been working on that – then I broke my ribs, I fell and broke my ribs and then I was – for six weeks, I couldn’t do anything. Went to the doctor for my normal checkup, they said I had diabetes. Well I had already realized I had Agent Orange but it wasn’t on the list, nothing I had was on the list you know, the itching in my legs, the breaking out in hives, I mean all that Agent Orange stuff wasn’t even on the radar, far as the V.A. So once I got that I said ‘yeah good, I’m gonna file an Agent Orange claim.’ So they gave me ten percent for having diabetes, then they said well – I wasn’t on any medicine, I was trying to control it with diet and exercise, so then gradually I got to where I have to take medicine, so they bumped it up to thirty percent, still hadn’t put in any claim, I was in the group and talking and they said, ‘you haven’t put in for a PTSD?’ I said I feel validated with the Agent Orange! And they said, ‘well you should put in for the PTSD’ and I’m going like, ‘well…’ Everybody’s accepted me, and my family that mean anything, so I just figure, you know I’m just happy to be healthy as I am, so – but then I finally did realize, yeah I have [PTSD.] But I guess my knowledge and being a medic, and working at the V.A. – I guess I’m too proud, I don’t know what it was. But I didn’t feel like I wanted anything from anybody, I just wanted validation, knowledge and you know, a thank-you. (1:10:38) Interviewer: “And maybe a lot of what you can really gain, what they can do for you is what you’re getting out of being with the group. Alright, now on the positive side, do you think you learned anything from being in the service, or influenced you in a positive way?” Yeah, I think I learned that there are more important things than money, there’s more important things than your job, there are more important things in life and it’s not worth sweating the little stuff. And I’ve also gotten to where I’m finally realizing that I don’t – I don’t need to convince myself anymore. I mean, other people can say whatever they want, it doesn’t matter if I don’t feel it. I gotta start feeling, you know? And unless I believe I can - I still have something inside to feel, and I don’t wanna be numb anymore, I wanna express myself and know that I don’t have to defend myself. Interviewer: “Well you a good job of telling your story! And they’re certainly interesting ones, I’d just like to thank you very much for taking the time to share today.” ‘Preciate it. [END] � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context FieserL2320V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Fieser, Lawrence Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-07 Title A name given to the resource Fieser, Lawrence (Interview transcript and video), 2019 Description An account of the resource Larry Fieser was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1950. He joined thr Army while studying engineering at Merrimack Community College. After basic training, he trained to become an Army medic and was assigned to accompany an infantry unit. He was then flown to Bien Hoa, Vietnam, was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne at Camp Evans, and was deployed to A Shau Valley for combat assault missions. While on a period of Rest and Recovery in Thailand, Fieser’s unit was hit hard by enemy forces, killing a few of his friends, including the medic who replaced him during his absence. For the rest of his tour, Fieser remained with C “Charlie” Company where his interaction with Vietnamese civilians increased. When his tour was over, Fieser was flown into Fort Lewis, Washington, where he was resupplied with new gear and dress uniforms before being sent home. At home, he felt he had to readjust himself completely from the person he had been in Vietnam. People on the homefront were generally hostile towards veterans and the war effort, so he had to censor or reserve aspects of his speech and noted how American civilians were much less communicative than soldiers in the field. When he returned to Fort Sam Houston, Fieser became an unofficial secretary for the NCOs at the base for nearly five months, which he viewed as useless. Ultimately, he was no longer interested in continuing his military service and was soon discharged. From there, Fieser resumed attendance at Merrimack Community College and went to work in the Psychiatric Ward at a VA hospital, improving its efficiency and interaction with patients over his six-year tenure. His work at the VA was emotionally and psychologically draining, so he left, got married, bought a house, and began working as an insurance agent for twenty years with Farmers Insurance. However, he yet again became bored of this mundane work, so he left and began work at Target, enjoying the physical labor and lack of mental stress of working in a department store. Later, Fieser discovered he suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and pursued group therapy and meditation to quell the psychological strain. Reflecting upon his service, Fieser believed the Army taught him that there are more important things in life than material valuables and that he no longer needed to convince himself of validation or acceptance. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4b88c542402d60388e0a406683e751cc.mp4 04f1b21100bcb77f6b26fa0d1221d4fa https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0993a6ac77f7e63d735467a5dea01bd6.pdf d19651d821bf8ea10c27f63896057b27 PDF Text Text 1 Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Oral History Interview Veteran: Vern Erskine Interviewed by James Smither Transcribed by Grace Balog Interviewer: We are talking today with Vern Erskine of Moran, Michigan, and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay, Vern, start us off with some background on yourself. And to begin with, where and when were you born? Veteran: I was born in Allenville, Michigan in 1921. Interviewer: Alright. And what part of Michigan is that? Veteran: The southern Upper Peninsula. Interviewer: Okay, so the Upper Peninsula. You are up in the UP. Okay. Now, did you grow up there? Veteran: I grew up there except for the time I spent in the service. Interviewer: Alright. And what was your family doing for a living when you were a kid? Veteran: Farming. Interviewer: Okay. And what were you farming up here? Veteran: Oh, potatoes, all kinds of grain. �2 Interviewer: Okay. And did your family own the farm? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: And were you able to keep it during the Depression? Veteran: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Interviewer: Okay. Did things get difficult for a while in the ‘30s? Veteran: Yes. In the 1930s, it was very difficult. Interviewer: Okay. Now, and how many kids were in your family? Veteran: Four boys and a girl. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And were—and where were you in line? Were you— Veteran: I was the second. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And so, and how long did you go to school? Did you go through 8th grade or through high school? Veteran: Oh, I went through the 12th grade. Interviewer: Okay. And where were you going to high school? Veteran: In St. Ignace, Michigan. Interviewer: Okay. And how long did it take you to get to school? Veteran: Oh, in the morning, well, it would take about ¾ of an hour I’d say to drive. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And was that a problem in the winter? Veteran: Yes. Yes. �3 Interviewer: Okay. Now, did they—would they close school if it was really bad or…? Veteran: Oh, they had their snow days same as they have today. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, do you remember how you heard about Pearl Harbor? (00:02:22) Veteran: Yes. On the radio. Interviewer: Okay. Was that at home? Veteran: At home, yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And before Pearl Harbor happened, and because now you are—you are about 20 years old when that happens. Let’s see—had you been working by then? I mean, were you still living at home? Veteran: Gee… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: I was living at home I know but I… Interviewer: Okay. Well, were you working on the farm? Veteran: On the farm, yes. I think I had a part time in a garage gas station, just… Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, before Pearl Harbor happened, did you pay very much attention to the news? About the war that was already going on? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes. �4 Interviewer: Okay. And did you expect that at some point, we might get into it? Veteran: Not at that time. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, Pearl Harbor was something of a surprise then. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Alright. And then, after that happened, did you want to go enlist? Or did you get a deferment? Or what did you do? Or did you just wait for Uncle Sam to call you? Veteran: I waited for Uncle Sam to call. Interviewer: Alright. And so, so you—when did you get your draft notice? Veteran: Gee, I don’t know. Interviewer: Okay. Well, I guess you were—I think you signed papers on—like in September of ’42 and then reported to training a little bit after that? Because that’s what your— Veteran: I believe I did. Interviewer: Okay. So, fall of 1942 basically is when you go in. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: Yeah. �5 Interviewer: Okay. And now, once—and where is the first place that you report to? Did they say you have to go here? Veteran: Camp Grant. Interviewer: Camp Grant, that’s in Illinois. (00:04:19) Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Okay. And then how did you get down to Camp Grant? Veteran: Oh, we dragged Daddy’s [?] to Marquette. We went to Marquette. That’s the first place we were inducted. Interviewer Okay. Right. Okay. And then— Veteran: And then we went to Camp Grant. Interviewer: Okay. And could you take a train from there? Veteran: Train, yes. Interviewer: Alright. And then, was Camp Grant just processing? Veteran: Yes. Yes. Interviewer: Okay. And so, where did they send you for basic training? Veteran: Camp Livingston. Interviewer: Okay, and where is that? �6 Veteran: Louisiana. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Close to Shreveport. Interviewer: Alright. Camp Livingston. Louisiana. Alright. And then how did they get you from Camp Grant down to Camp Livingston? Was that another train ride? Veteran: Gee, Camp Grant…Yes, it was. I remember that. Yep. Interviewer: Okay. Did you remember about how long it took to get from Illinois to Louisiana on a train? Veteran: Gee, I know it was a long time. Everybody was very uneasy from being on the train so long. Interviewer: Alright. So, would they let you off the train at all? Veteran: I don’t remember them letting me off the train. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And then, did they just have you sitting in the regular seats? Or were there bunks that you could sleep in? Veteran: No, just regular seats. Interviewer: Okay. And so, it’s a whole bunch of new inductees being sent off to train together? Veteran: Right. �7 Interviewer: Okay. And then, when you get to Camp Livingston, then what happens? Veteran: Well, of course we went to the headquarters and—where everybody was interviewed. And they kind of chose people for the infantry and for artillery and the engineers. The artillery IQ kind of decided whether they would go in the infantry or artillery. And I had a pretty high IQ, so I went in the artillery. Interviewer: Okay. And were you perfectly happy to do that? (00:06:44) Veteran: After I was there, well, seeing what the infantry was doing, I was very happy. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, describe a little bit the kind of training that you got there. I mean, what were the first few weeks like? Veteran: The first few weeks was close order drill. Forward marching, learning the orders and signals of the Army. Interviewer: Okay. And was there a lot of emphasis on discipline? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, very much. Interviewer: What would happen if you messed up? Veteran: Go on KP. Interviewer: Okay. And what was KP? Veteran: Kitchen Police. Interviewer: Alright. So…? �8 Veteran: Clean up. Interviewer: So, you are washing pots and dishes and— Veteran: Yep, washing pots and dishes and pans. Interviewer: Alright. And…I guess, how easy or hard was it for you to adjust to being in the Army? Veteran: You know, I was quite young. And not too much experience. And it didn’t bother me much. Interviewer: Okay. So— Veteran: And more or less was something new to me and I kind of liked it. Interviewer: Okay. Alright, so just sort of a new adventure and so you—so, did you just— would you just do what they told you to do? (00:08:21) Veteran: Right. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And now what—when you got there, were you already training to become part of a unit? Or, I mean, were they forming a division there then? Veteran: Oh no, it was completely… Interviewer: Was just general at that point. Veteran: Yeah. �9 Interviewer: Okay. And then, how long did that first part of training take? Just sort of the basic training part. Veteran: Six weeks. Interviewer: Okay. And once you finished that, then did you get assigned to a— Veteran: I got assigned to—got assigned to the artillery. I did. Interviewer: Okay, now at that— Veteran: Before that time, we were with the infantry. Interviewer: Right. So, everybody gets the same training to start with and it’s— Veteran: Oh yeah. Interviewer: Now, with that infantry training, were you firing weapons and things like that? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes. Interviewer: Okay. And do you remember what kinds of weapons you trained on? Just the rifle or did you get a different— Veteran: Yeah, we had the old-fashioned rifle. Interviewer: Oh, like the old 303s. The World War 1 rifles? Veteran: Yeah. �10 Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. So, you had the C—you didn’t even have the M-1 yet? Veteran: We got the M-1 when we were at Livingston. Interviewer: Okay. So, you get that eventually but okay. So, you do that kind of thing. Now, when you are assigned to the artillery, did you have an artillery training that you had to go through? Or did you just go into a unit and start doing your job? Veteran: No, no. We trained. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: They had so many hours a day that they had to train me. Attend classes and… Interviewer: Okay. Now this is—there are a number of different jobs in the artillery. What kind of work were you trained for? Was it still—was it firing in the artillery or were you doing support? (00:10:10) Veteran: Firing. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And…Yeah, it would be firing and taking commands on—like they had—they called in ratio deflection when they knew that you had a change in direction. They’d tell you altitude when you knew you were changing the altitude. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And… �11 Interviewer: Okay. So, you are learning to adjust the gun to fire at different distances and that kind of thing. And did they teach you anything about the calculations to make? Or just how to operate the gun itself? Veteran: Oh no, no. You had to work on the sight. And they had classes on that, working the sight. Interviewer: Okay. And— Veteran: And also, they had an aiming circle. That was the main tool of the artillery was the aiming circle. Interviewer: And can you explain what that was? Veteran: It was an instrument similar to the sight on the gun. And the sight and the aiming circle had to be calibrated to each other, so they had both the same reading. And that way they got the direction of fire. Interviewer: Okay. Now, do you remember what kind of gun you were training on? Veteran: Oh yes, 105-millimeter Howitzer. Interviewer: Okay, so that’s the main artillery weapon really for most units that we had then. Okay. Now, was it a reasonably new weapon? I mean, it— Veteran: Yes, I say yes. Interviewer: Okay. So, it wasn’t leftover from World War 1 or anything like that. Veteran: Oh no, no, no. �12 Interviewer: Okay good. Alright, so you have got basically the kind of weapon that you will use in combat eventually. Veteran: Right. (00:12:19) Interviewer: Okay. Now, you started your training at Camp Livingston. Did you do all of your training there? Or did you move someplace else? Veteran: No, we’d take trips to different places. And where there was a firing range, we’d practice firing on the range. And even when we—when we were in the United States yet, we done that. And done the same thing when we were in Porthgain, in Wales. We whipped up a little firing range that was called Singing Bridge and we’d practice firing there. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. But those firing ranges were still kind of in the general area around your base? Veteran: Yes, yes. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: In driving distance, you know. Interviewer: Alright. Now, at what point do you join officially a unit? What division do you join and when do you join them? Veteran: I joined that artillery 107th Field Artillery, Battery B. Interviewer: Okay. And what division were they part of? Veteran: They were battery B of the 107th field artillery battalion. �13 Interviewer: Well, yeah, well that’s a—it would probably be 1st Battalion, 101st Regiment. [He was right the first time. The 107th Field Artillery Battalion was part of the 28th Division] Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: But then that regiment—was that attached to a division? Veteran: The 28th Division. Interviewer: 28th Division. Okay. Just wanted you to say that on camera for me. Good. Okay, so you are with the 28th infantry division. And so, was that forming at Camp Livingston? And so, they are bringing all the men in there and all the regiments and training them all there? Veteran: Yeah, the whole division was there. Interviewer: Okay. Now, you mentioned going different places for firing ranges. Did the division go on any big field exercises? Like would they do maneuvers some place with other divisions? (00:14:27) Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, yes. Interviewer: And do you remember anything about doing that? Like where you went or how long it took or what you were doing? Veteran: Well, when we were in Livingston, we made a trip to Georgia and another one to Virginia. And there was other numerous places that we went. �14 Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, you got around quite a bit because the Army was staging large maneuvers and trying to get ready to—fighting for real. So, you were doing some of that. Okay, now you were—and so, how long do you think did you stay at Camp Livingston? Or when did you ship out? Okay, because your discharge papers say you shipped out in October of ’43 so you’d have been at Livingston for about a year? Except for the side trips. Veteran: Yeah, a good year we would have been there. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, during that year when you are living in Louisiana, could you go off the base at all? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes. Interviewer: Alright. And where would you go? Veteran: I went on furlough once to Washington D.C. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I come home furlough one time, for a few days. For 10 days. Interviewer: Okay. And I guess and so basically were you able to travel on trains for free? Or did you have to pay your own fare? (00:16:24) Veteran: No, you had to pay your fare. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, would you ever go into town near the base? Would you go into Alexandria or whatever else was nearby? �15 Veteran: Oh yes. Yes. Interviewer: Okay. And what was there to do there? Veteran: There was stores. A lot of nice stores, Army stores and photography shops. Now, that’s where I got these pictures taken was at Alexandria. Interviewer: Okay. So, you actually had your own portrait made of yourself in uniform at that point. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, did some of the guys go there to go to bars or go to movies or things like that? Veteran: Oh yes, yes. Interviewer: Alright. Yeah, so and would there ever be problems in town with guys getting drunk or having fights? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, they had—their MPs were on duty all the time. Interviewer: Okay. Now, did you ever get in trouble? Or were you a good guy? Veteran: I was a pretty good guy, I guess. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, you know that’s a question you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. But okay. Alright. So, that kind of thing is going on. And now during that year when you are in Louisiana, are you following the news of the war and paying attention to what’s happening in the Pacific and in North Africa and stuff like that? �16 Veteran: Oh yes. We had the Stars and Stripes. And that kept us informed on how the war was going. Interviewer: Okay. And you were there for a year. Did you start to wonder if the war was going to be over before you got into it? Or…? Veteran: Oh no, no. Interviewer: Okay. So, it was still serious business. Okay. Now, we get to the fall off 1943. And now you are going to head over across the Atlantic. And did you get to go home first or did you just all leave together from Camp Livingston? Or…? (00:18:31) Veteran: No, no we didn’t go home. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Only had the one furlough. Interviewer: Right. Okay. So, you assemble at Camp Livingston. And then what’s the process for getting you over to Britain? Veteran: Well, they…I remember we crossed the Atlantic. Interviewer: Okay. And what port did you leave from? Did you go out of New York or Norfolk or New Orleans? Or where did you go from? Veteran: Gee, I can’t remember that right now. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Was it some place you hadn’t been before? �17 Veteran: No, no we had been there before. Interviewer: Okay. So, you might have gone to Virginia and gone out that way. Now, did you—what kind of ship were you sailing in? Veteran: It was…Oh, the ships were built for the war. They called them… Interviewer: Like the Victory ships or…? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Yeah, so okay. So, you were not going on a converted ocean liner or something like that. Veteran: No, no, no. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: We had a troop ship. Interviewer: A troop ship, okay. And then did you sail on a convoy? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. And what was the weather like when you were sailing across the Atlantic? Veteran: Some days it was pretty rocky. I can remember one day it was pretty bad, and everybody got seasick. It was all a terrible mess. Interviewer: Now, did you seasick? (00:20:22) �18 Veteran: No, I did not. Interviewer: Okay. Now, how did you avoid that? Veteran: I don’t know. It was just my mind; I didn’t get sick. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And did—you remember—do you know—you were in a convoy, so could you see the other ships when you were out on deck? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes. Interviewer: Alright. And were there any U boat scares? Veteran: Yes. Yes. They—numerous times, they had a destroyer as the escort. And the destroyer would drop depth bombs [charges]. And we could hear them going off and vibrating all night on our ship. Interviewer: Right. Okay. Do you know if any of the ships in your convoy got hit? Veteran: No, but one day we were—I am up on the top deck, and I am watching and all at once the gun crew went into action. And they manned their gun and started firing. And looked to the rear where they were firing and there’s a periscope sticking out of the water. Interviewer: Oh. Veteran: So, we fired on that periscope and riflemen were firing on it too and they never bombed us, never torpedoed us. So, we must have done something to the—to their periscope. Interviewer: Yeah, or they didn’t—they realized once they were spotted, they shouldn’t stay there. �19 Veteran: Right. Interviewer: Yeah, something. Okay. Now, that’s a little bit unusual. Most guys do not have that happen to them. So, alright. About how long did the trip across the Atlantic take do you think? Was it two weeks? (00:22:13) Veteran: 12 days. Interviewer: 12 days. Okay. That’s about right for a slower convoy. And then where did you land? What part of Britain did you land in? Veteran: It wasn’t…Gee… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: I really can’t remember where we landed. It has gone from my mind. Interviewer: Okay. Well, some people landed in Scotland and some of them landed at Liverpool. You could have gone to Bristol, I suppose. Veteran: I think if I am not mistaken now, I recall Liverpool. Interviewer: Okay. Yeah, because that was on the west side so that’s a good place to land. Okay. And then from there did they move you down to Wales? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yes. �20 Interviewer: Alright. And so no you get there. It is sort of late fall in 1943. Now did you stay there until it was time—in Wales—until it was time to ship over to France? Did you mostly do your training there? Veteran: Yes. Yes, except side trips we’d make. Interviewer: Right. Okay. Veteran: Like I said before, we went up to see the [London] bridge and different towns. Interviewer: Okay. Now did you ever go to London? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay, and so what was that like? Veteran: Very different. The people were all nice to us and everything, but they had a different way of living and that was very honorable that you could pick out the way they were living. Interviewer: Okay. Now, you were not— Veteran: The one thing—well, one thing they…they didn’t have bathrooms. All they had was a curtain hanging up and everybody would run to that bathroom, and it would just be running down the curb. And I couldn’t get over that because… Interviewer: Okay. You must not have been in the right neighborhood. But yeah, okay. But yeah, living in a city with all of those people and stuff, that was not what you were used to. Okay. Now, when you went to London, were there air raid scares? I mean, did the sirens go off? (00:24:38) �21 Veteran: Yes. Yes. Interviewer: Okay, and what did you do when that happened? Veteran: There wasn’t much we could do because London is a vast area. And we just would keep our heads low and… Interviewer: Okay. So, you didn’t go down into the subway system or underground or anything like that. Veteran: No. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, what was the area like in Wales around your base? What was that country like? Veteran: Sandy. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: A lot of sand everywhere. And in front of the hotel where we stayed in Porthgain was this—what they called the Esplanade. And it was solid concrete and they—all their—the doings of the city was held in that Esplanade. Well, we’d gather there when they had a formation. Well, they’d all let them out, you know, in formation. And we had to gather on the Esplanade. And you can imagine about 4 or 500 lined up on that Esplanade. Everybody had to cough and spit and it was a mess. Interviewer: Okay. �22 Veteran: And the city officials were complaining about it. And they tried to overcome them, you know, to refrain them. It didn’t do much good. Interviewer: Oh well. Alright now could you go into town kind of individually and in small groups and, you know, go to the pubs or…? (00:26:42) Veteran: Oh yes, yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And how did the people in the community treat you? Veteran: Very good. Very good. They were nice to us. Interviewer: Yeah. Alright. Now, did some of the guys there have girlfriends? Veteran: Oh yes. Always. Interviewer: Okay. I suppose there weren’t that many British men around. At least not young ones. Veteran: Maybe I’ve got one story I could tell you. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: From Porthgain, all the men that were a draftable age or Army age were shipped to India. And there was no men in the households. So, I won’t mention these guys names but this one guy, he took up with this woman and she had a bunch of kids but very little place to sleep. So, she went and made him a bed in the bathtub. And, of course, one of the—during the night, one of the kids had to get up and go to the bathroom. Well, they pee in the bathtub. Interviewer: Oh. �23 Veteran: And they really, really soaked him up. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Now, he deserved it though I bet. Interviewer: Yeah, well he would have been better off back at the base at that point. Okay. Alright. So, you were there. Now, do you remember hearing about the D-Day landings? (00:28:24) Veteran: About the what? Interviewer: D-Day. When D-Day happened, what do you remember about that? And did that get announced, “Okay, we have landed in France now,” or…? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, yes. But what I remember more than anything was the armada of airplanes that went over to bomb the beaches in France. And oh, there was all kinds of bombs. Just wave after wave of these bombers. And they were gone for a while and then they started coming back. And you could tell they had been in battle. Some of the wings were just flopping and the fabric was flopping away. Some of them didn’t have no but one engine running. It was a terrible sight when they come back. But they done a lot of good. Interviewer: Alright. And they also took the paratroopers over and gliders and all that too. Now, were you still in Wales at that point? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, do you have an idea or a general sense of how long it was before you went over to France? �24 Veteran: 12 days after D-Day. [The 28th Division landed on July 22, over a month later] Interviewer: Okay. So, you landed at D+12. Alright. And then how do they get you across the Channel? Veteran: Landing ship tank. Interviewer: Okay, so you were on an LST. Veteran: Right. Interviewer: Alright. And did you have any trouble going over? (00:30:14) Veteran: Not a bit. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And then what happens when you got to France? So, the ship pulls up— Veteran: Well, when we got close to France’s beach there, Omaha Beach, well…wreckage started showing up. And I know I couldn’t count all the bodies that were floating. Interviewer: Okay, so there are still bodies floating out there offshore 12 days later. Okay. Veteran: And the—they were recovering them, trying to recover them. But oh, it was a busy place at Omaha Beach. There was a steady stream of LCIs landing craft running back and forth to the ships, unloading the ships. But these were big ocean liners that they were unloading. But when we landed, we landed right on…Why, there wasn’t a foot of water to drive through. Interviewer: Okay, but you go right onto the sand? Right onto the beach? �25 Veteran: Yeah, set the ramp down. Interviewer: Okay. And get right off. Okay. And then once you are ashore, now what happens? Veteran: Well, we are unloading and of course our colonel come along, and he said he’s inspecting, you know, and looking at different trucks. And when I was on this ship going across the Channel, I made a good acquaintance with a master in arms. Well, the master in arms is in charge of supplies. (00:32:14) Veteran: So, you go down below decks and I’d just sit there and talk to him. And he was very concerned and interested. He said, “What do you think you will be short of,” he said, “when you get in France?” And I said, “I don’t know. You tell me: what do they need?” “Well,” he said, “you will need milk, powdered milk, coffee.” So, man, he gave me coffee and sugar and powdered milk and potatoes. Powdered potatoes. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And man, I had it all on top of our truck, in between the cover. It was loaded with all kinds of stuff. Well, we are coming off the ship and the colonel there, he is there to greet us. And he lifts one part up and he says, “What do we got here? A bunch of gypsies?” And I never said nothing. I thought it was best not to say nothing. So, we had gotten a little dog when we were in Porthgain. A little pup. And of course, it was still growing by the time we got—and when he is there bawling me out for looking like a bunch of gypsies, out sticks that dog and starts to bark. And he said, “I told you to get rid of that dog.” That’s the last he said. We kept the dog for a long time until we got into Luxembourg. In the name of—it almost died there—well, the dog run away on us. (00:34:26) �26 Interviewer: Okay. Alright now, did you get to keep the food? Veteran: Oh yes. Interviewer: Okay. So, he didn’t make you unload all the stuff that you put on you truck. Veteran: Oh no, no, no. He— Interviewer: He just called you gypsies. Veteran: I gave it all to the—we did run short of that stuff. And there was no delivery over there, especially then. And so, one thing I will add to the story was that the master in arms said, “Is there anything else you want?” I said, “Well, what have you got?” He said, “Well, I will tell you what,” he said, “I got cases of chicken. Canned chicken, all white meat and…” I said, “Would you give me a case of that?” And he said, “Yes.” So, he gave me a case of that white chicken. I took that and I put I up with the rest of the stuff. One time the colonel come down and he said, “What are we having for dinner?” And he was in a better mood that day and… “What are we having for dinner?” And I said, “Well I understand,” I said, “we are having pork.” “Oh,” he said, “that’s what every other battery is having too.” He said, “I got to find something else. I am tired of that.” So, I said to him—I said, “How would you like a nice chicken dinner?” And “Oh, where are you going to get a chicken dinner?” he said. So, I got out one of them cans of that chicken. Pretty good sized can, like a number 10 can. And I said, “Here you go.” I said, “Have dinner.” He thanked me and walked away. But he said, “Where did you get that?” and I said, “Remember that day when you said we looked like a bunch of gypsies up on the boat?” I said, “Well, that was part of the gypsy.” He never said nothing. (00:36:47) �27 Interviewer: Alright. Okay. So, once you land in Normandy then, how long before your battery starts to go into action? Veteran: Well, I will tell you we—like I said, we went ashore and oh, it was busy. There were just—and then up on top, when you got on top of the hill, they had these fences all built up and there were German prisoners of war. There were just thousands of them in that—behind that barbed wire. And well, while we were there on the beach getting ready to move out, well, over comes an ME-109 Messerschmitt. Right—it looked like you could reach up and touch him. And he’s coming at high speed. And everyone thought he was going straight for them. It was nothing but a scare mission. Down low, you know. Just revs the engine. He just revs it. But it only went over the once. ME-109. Interviewer: Okay. So, a single engine fighter plane? Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. Alright. But now did your battery—so you go up basically up the bluffs onto the regular level of the land in Normandy. Did you go very far inland, or did you set up pretty close to the shore? (00:38:24) Veteran: Well, they had taken Saint-Lo. Interviewer: Okay, well they take Saint-Lo—that’s later. Veteran: Yeah, down… Interviewer: But yeah, that’s some ways inland. Okay. �28 Veteran: Yeah. but they had taken Saint-Lo, the Americans did—had taken Saint-Lo. And we went down to Saint-Lo and there was bulldozers and tanks with bulldozer blades on, pushing junk out of the way so we could make it through. You know, this was still 12 days after. Interviewer: Well, there is—we didn’t get to Saint-Lo until latter part of July. But when Saint-Lo was taken, we carpet bombed it so there was just destruction all over the place. Veteran: Oh yes. Interviewer: And that’s what you are seeing with the bulldozers and all that. Veteran: Yeah, those bombers. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: They really made a mess there. Because Saint-Lo was really a stronghold. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And… Interviewer: Now, did you do any fighting before you went through Saint-Lo? Or did you— Veteran: No. No, we didn’t. Interviewer: Oh, okay. Alright. Veteran: But then they took us in there. We bivouacked overnight. And I can remember getting on—there was a stream running through—right through the—where we were camped. A nice �29 little stream. Kind of fast growing. So, me being the explorer, I had to find out what was up that crick. Went up that crick about oh, maybe 100 feet or so. And there I come across 3 dead Germans. And that’s one sight that I never get out of my mind. One guy’s head was blown right off and all that was sticking up was the neckbone. And he was laying in the water. And I was thinking boy, we have been using that water. But that was one of them times of relenting. (00:40:55) Interviewer: Right. Okay. Veteran: But… Interviewer: Okay, so this is going to be kind of more like late July of ’44 when that’s happening. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Yeah, okay. Now did you set up and shoot from there or did you just keep moving? Veteran: No, we moved out farther. And we are getting to the hedgerow country. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And so, they moved us into this area and that was the first time we put our guns in firing position. And we had everything all set. Camouflage nets up in hedgerows all around. And they told us if any airplanes come over, you know, not to shoot at them with a pistol or a rifle or anything because it would attract attention to them. Interviewer: Right. (00:42:06) �30 Veteran: And they would come and really work us over. Well, we spent that one night. Well, then they—the Germans, they started firing on us from higher land. We were down lower. And boy, there was—there wasn’t no guns firing. Everybody run because it’s the first battle and they were all scared, you know. And I—he done me good. We had this captain—I won’t mention the name—but he was a smart aleck, and you couldn’t talk to him or nothing. And I’ll never forget. It done me good to see him go running like a dog with a tail between his leg to the rear. All just the thought of that, him running like that, and then thinking about that—that fellow they took before the firing squad from Poland. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: He wasn’t from—he was from America but he— Interviewer: Right. Veteran: He was Polish. Interviewer: Was that Eddie Slovik? He was the deserter who got caught. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: And executed. I think he deserted twice or something. But yeah. Yeah, but okay. Now did the captain ever come back? Veteran: No. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: That’s the last time I ever seen him. �31 Interviewer: Okay, so you got a new captain after that? Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Okay. Now when this happened and everyone ran away, did you guys just wait for the firing to stop and then go back? Or did someone come and make you go back to the guns? (00:44:03) Veteran: I stayed on my gun. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I stayed right there, and I kept firing and firing. Interviewer: Did you have any orders coming into fire? Veteran: Oh yes. The firing direction was—they had protection. They weren’t under fire none. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. But so, there were some other men—were there other men who did stay with the guns? Veteran: Oh no. No, everybody… Interviewer: Just you by yourself? Veteran: That one gun out of 4 in my battery— Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: --was the only gun there. �32 Interviewer: Alright. Now— Veteran: And I was doing all the work by myself. Everything. And it’s a good thing I had the aiming stakes out or it wouldn’t have been operable. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Well, I kept firing. So, I am getting pretty tired and all at once I hear this voice say to me, “Do you need any help?” and already annoyed [I] thought who can that be? So, whenever I got a minute, I looked up and here was this redheaded fellow from Bowling Green, Kentucky. And he said, “Can I help you?” and I said, “Can you take care of that number one position on the gun?” “Yeah, that’s what I do in my gun,” he said. I said, “What happened to your crew?” “They are all gone,” he said. Well, him and I fired that gun. I don’t know how many rounds we fired but we had an awful pile of used ammunition anyway. Interviewer: Right. Because you have the shell casings left or the— Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Yeah, alright. Okay. Veteran: And so, finally the fire—the Germans quit firing on us, and it quieted down. Well, this guy—he took over for captain. Well, his name was Anderson. Well, when he come up that’s the first thing he said to me. He said, “You are going to get the Silver Star.” And I said, “Well, that would be good.” I said, “Don’t forget my redheaded buddy there too.” And “I won’t,” he said. Well, that’s the last I ever heard of that except there was another time he promised me the same thing. And that’s when I was firing a different gun. �33 Interviewer: Yeah. Well, it certainly sounds like you earned it. (00:46:47) Veteran: Well… Interviewer: You know, at that point— Veteran: I’d like to have got it but… Interviewer: Yeah. Alright. Okay. Veteran: I wasn’t medal happy. Interviewer: Okay, so after this happens, are you basically in charge of that gun now? Was that your gun already or were you just one of the crewmen? Veteran: Well, that’s another thing I wanted to tell you. My section chief was—I was the corporal. I was the gunner. That was my job on the gun was the gunner. And I operated the sight. And so, that guy that was the section chief, he was the biggest coward I ever seen in my life. Every time there was a fire that went on anywhere close, he was in his foxhole. And even the officers, they called him “The Mole” because he was always digging. Interviewer: Okay. So, you were basically in charge a lot. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now, so that was your first kind of actual experience in combat then, that day with the fire coming in after that. Now after that did you pack up and move someplace else? Or did you stay there for a while? (00:48:11) Veteran: No, no. We stayed there a while. �34 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And we fired because that was that hedgerow country. The Germans were—they could still be there, and you wouldn’t even know it. And we stayed there for quite a while. And I had my crew. They came back and—snuck back after it was over, but…Then they moved us up into the hedgerow country more. And I can remember yet along the edges of the roads that went through that hedgerow was a regular windrow empty cartridges from machine guns where they fired from tanks and…And I mean a regular windrow a foot high. Interviewer: Now, did you see places where the bulldozers had cut through hedgerows or anything like that? Veteran: What’s that? Interviewer: Did you see—because they had—eventually, the Americans had bulldozers on the front of tanks, and they cut into the hedgerows with those. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Now, did you see places where tanks did that? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Now at some point not too long after that, we do kind of start breaking out of the hedgerow country and you get into open country after that. Veteran: Yes. Yes. �35 Interviewer: Okay. And do you remember kind of where you went? I mean, did you go into Brittany, or did you go east kind of toward across France? Or what did you do next? (00:50:08) Veteran: I am trying to think of my—I am thinking that we left the hedgerow country. In my mind I am not too certain of that… Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: …right now. But anyway, we went to Hürtgen Forest. Interviewer: Okay. So, you—that—to get there, you’ve got to go across France. Did you go around Paris or through Paris or…? Veteran: No, we went around Paris. Interviewer: You went around there, okay. And then you have to get across northern France and go up into Belgium and then keep going to kind of get to the German frontier, which is where the Hürtgen Forest is. Veteran: Well, along the way I know that we had—we had battles along the way that we had a position in. Interviewer: Right. In those kinds of battles, what would happen? Veteran: Well…We’d usually fire on them, go into position on some town. And usually, those towns are always on a hill. Almost every town there is on a hill or… Interviewer: Right. �36 Veteran: There won’t be too big of a town but there would be a church and a school and farms. And one thing about…They kept the farm—the farmers kept their cattle right in the basement of the house they lived in. And it was kind of an odd situation but… Interviewer: Yeah. Would you sometimes sleep in the houses? (00:52:14) Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, sometimes. Interviewer: Okay. And would you sleep with the cows, or did you go upstairs? Veteran: Oh no, we’d always be upstairs. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: But the people would either be gone or… Interviewer: Okay, so basically you would go in and you’d set up in a town someplace because you had the— Veteran: On the outskirts of the town, yeah. Interviewer: Right. Okay, and then— Veteran: And we’d fire on that town on the—well, not on the town but on the Germans, you know. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: On their tanks. And I can remember one night we fired, well, all night long. And on the—just not too long a distance, a certain range—but we fired on that town. Well, in the �37 morning, it was quite early the sun was coming up. And they give us CSMO: CROWS Station March Order. Well, you’d pick up everything and your gun, you know. You’re moving. So, we picked up all our guns and everything, you know, and we moved, and we had to go right through that town that we had liberated, see, that night. Well, gee, the people were all out there to greet us. And I can remember it was just like yesterday it seemed…Well, these kids were all out asking me, “Have some gum?” Well, we’d always give them whatever gum, if we had any. So, this one girl come out and there was a guy on our crew, his name was Borovich. Well, he was throwing her sticks of gum and she was so busy picking them up that she forgot all she had on was a white negligée. White gown. Well, she’s running to pick up that gum and that come wide open. And Borovich was looking for gum all over the place. (00:54:59) Interviewer: Alright. So, a little bit of extra entertainment in that case. Okay. Alright, so this was not—so you were not actually bombarding the town itself with your guns, but your—but there had been fighting there. Veteran: The highway and… Interviewer: Yeah. But you had all chased the Germans off and they are all happy to see you at that point. Yeah. Okay. So, when you were going across France, would that be the kind of thing where you would set up and fire for a day or a few hours and then pack up and move again? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, yes. �38 Interviewer: Yep. Okay. And then you—France, end up crossing into Belgium and the Germans mostly at this point are retreating until they get pretty much up to the German frontier. And that’s where the Hürtgen Forest area is. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Alright. Now was the Hürtgen Forest kind of the next place where you fought a lot, as opposed to one day here, one day there? Veteran: We were stationed in the Hürtgen Forest for…Gee, I don’t know how long it was. Interviewer: Probably weeks at least. Veteran: At least. Interviewer: Yeah, and this is kind of now well into the fall. It’s getting colder and— Veteran: Yes. Yep. Interviewer: Okay. Now what was—describe what it was like to be in the Hürtgen Forest. What sort of place was that? (00:56:14) Veteran: Well, it had the nicest big beech trees you ever seen. Big beech, you know, like 3-foot on the stump or more. And but mud, oh, there was mud. The Germans were dug in. Man, they had all kinds of protection, and the Americans didn’t have none. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: Well, the 28th Division, the infantry and that, they just about got wiped out. Just about cleaned them right out. And… �39 Interviewer: Now, what was it like being in the artillery at that point? Did the Germans bombard your positions? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, yes, every night. And there was a—right behind me was an anti-aircraft gun. And the guy on the anti-aircraft gun, the sergeant in charge was a friend of mine. I mean, I made friends with him. We run across each other again. They were attached to us, and they all seemed to be close. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: Well, I went back the next day to see him and to see what he was doing, you know, now. Because I had heard some explosions back in the night. I got out there and they were cleaning stuff up. And the gun is just sitting there just a black skeleton. Burned. And he told me what happened. He took a direct hit right in the gun pit. And he said, “Lucky it was there was nobody on the gun.” He said, “We were all doing something else.” And so, the commander of this anti-aircraft, he come and bawled them out because nobody got hurt. That was a—there was nobody on—he told me there was nobody on the gun, you know. “Well, how come you left the gun alone?” (00:58:49) Interviewer: Well— Veteran: That—I believe that’s the last time that I ever run across that sergeant from the…antiaircraft. Interviewer: Okay. Well now, did German aircraft ever come over at night? Veteran: Oh yes, yes. �40 Interviewer: Okay. So, they should have been on the gun? Or somebody should have been. Veteran: Yep. Yep. Yeah, there’s no doubt about there should have been somebody on the gun. Interviewer: Okay. Now, when you were in the Hürtgen Forest, did you basically dig in in one place and stay there? Or did they move you to different positions? Veteran: No, we basically stayed right in this one position for the war. Interviewer: Okay. And did you dig in and make shelters for yourselves? Veteran: Oh yeah, we had shelters. We took over a German shelter and—made out of concrete. And we stayed in that shelter. It was kind of a good place to stay. But I often thought the Germans know where this is; I wonder if we are safe here? Interviewer: Yeah. But it had a concrete roof? Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: So, it is a proper bunker so that might have been hard to knock out even with the regular artillery. Veteran: Oh yes. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: A mortar wouldn’t hurt it. Interviewer: Right. Okay. Alright, now in your story we had gotten you into late in 1944. And your unit is in the Hürtgen Forest on the German frontier. And you were just talking �41 about the conditions there and you talked that you were in a German bunker, so you had a place to hide at least when you were under fire. Now what did they—how did they feed you when you were there? I mean, was there—did the regiment provide—have a field kitchen or did you just eat— (01:00:46) Veteran: Oh yes. Yes. Interviewer: Okay. And so, how would you get fed? I mean, you are at your firing positions so…? Veteran: No, we would go one or two at a time and eat. Interviewer: Okay, so there was a mess tent or something or…? Veteran: They had a— Interviewer: Or truck? Veteran: They had this trailer. Kitchen trailer. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: They had a fly up and then… Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: We’d go there. Interviewer: Yeah. Now, were there times when you couldn’t get back there and then you had to eat K-rations or…? �42 Veteran: Oh yes. Yeah, we had K-rations and C-rations. Interviewer: Alright. Now, a lot of people these days probably don’t even know what those are. What’s the difference between a K-ration and a C-ration? Veteran: A C-ration, the modern one, is the World War 2 ration. And the C-ration is the World War 1, and it is in cans. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And you’ve got to open the can. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: Whereas the K-ration is in a package. Interviewer: And was that mostly dry food or…? Veteran: There was gum in there, a stick of gum, cigarette for those that smoked them. I always gave mine away. And then there was a cold food, like some kind of sausage or meat or something like that. It was very good ration for being… Interviewer: Well, it had calories and salt and yeah, whatever. Okay. Alright. Now, did your own battery take casualties in the Hürtgen Forest? Or do the guys around you get hit? (01:02:47) Veteran: What’s that now? Interviewer: Did the men in your battery—did your battery take casualties in the Hürtgen Forest? Were there men who got killed or wounded there? �43 Veteran: Oh, a lot of men got trench foot. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Because of the wet weather in…We were in the Hürtgen Forest. I don’t know what time, what day it might have been. General Eisenhower was going around checking the troops and so he came to our battery. And he’s checking because everybody—they don’t have no boots or nothing, just shoes. And so, what I was going to say was I got to shake General Eisenhower’s hand. He congratulated us and said what a good job we were doing. Interviewer: Okay. But did he get you any new boots? Veteran: Well, he went back to Paris. And he took every pair of boots that they had in Paris and sent them to the front. Interviewer: Okay. (01:04:24) Veteran: Which I thought was…And he had a nice jacket on. And he took that jacket off and gave it to one of the soldiers. But he was a real nice man to talk to. Interviewer: Alright. Okay. Now, when you think about that period there when you are in the Hürtgen Forest, are there other particular things that you remember about being there? Veteran: Well, I am—what I would like to say is I mentioned about the wet weather and everybody having trench foot. And there was a lot of fellows. There was—one fellow’s name was…He was a Mexican man anyway, but a real nice guy. And he had the biggest scar on his face I have ever seen. Right down it. And he had been in North Africa and that’s where he got �44 wounded like that, but he wouldn’t talk about it. But I don’t know whatever happened to him. He and I took a liking to each other, and he said, “Can I stay? Can I bunk in with you guys?” And I said, “Yeah, sure.” So, he come, and he bunked with us. And he was there from—he was with the foreign observing crew. Interviewer: Okay. (01:06:11) Veteran: And so, he would go out on these missions. And he went on three or four of them. He’d come back and he’d always talk to me, tell me. So, this one time they were going out on this mission, they are just about ready to go, and he come over to me and he said—by that time, we were calling each other by first name. And he said, “Vern,” he said, “would you get my bedroll for me?” he said, “I don’t have time.” And I said, “Well, what do you want?” he said, “Everything.” He had everything in the bedroll, everything that he needed. So, I went, and I got his bedroll, took it out to him, and I said, “What’s the problem? Where are you going?” “I am going to the front,” he said. And I said, “Well, you’ll be coming back. Why don’t you leave your stuff here? I will take care of it for you.” “No,” he said, “I won’t be back.” I said, “Why not?” I said, “Getting transferred or something?” “No,” he said, “I just won’t be back.” So, he went to the front with a lieutenant and a crew. It’s a little while later and we get a telephone call from the front from the lieutenant: Perez had been killed. And that’s the man’s name. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: But there was a lot of happenings in the Hürtgen Forest. It was the 11th of November, Armistice Day. And we got up in the morning and oh, the weather had changed. You could see those—the sky was just as clear as could be. And everything was sparkling in the sunlight. (01:08:32) �45 Veteran: So, overhead there was a German plane circling around. You could see the insignia on his wings. He kept circling around pretty high altitude. I know he was taking pictures, is what he was doing. So, we watched him for quite a while and the anti-aircraft would fire and they wouldn’t come nowhere close to bursting him. You could see it burst into the plane he kept flying. Well then, he had gotten all his pictures he wanted. Well, all at once, down comes a regular snowstorm. A literature of papers. And it was—on it was: ‘We were about to die,’ ‘Give up now.’ Or words to that effect. Interviewer: So, he is dropping propaganda leaflets on you? Veteran: Yeah, a whole bunch of leaflets. They all dropped down. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: I gathered some of them, but I had them in my collection. But they got burned. But we didn’t stay in the Hürtgen Forest long after that because the…The infantry, if I remember right now, I think Bonn, Germany is kind of north of Hürtgen. These infantrymen were all coming back from Bonn. They had taken Bonn from the Germans. (01:10:50) Interviewer: They probably are coming from Aachen. Veteran: Aachen! Aachen, you’re right. Interviewer: Yeah. because first of all—because that— Veteran: Aachen, that’s what I was trying to think of. Interviewer: Right. Yeah, because that was sort of the first city in Germany that we captured. �46 Veteran: Yeah. I am glad you brought that up. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: But… Interviewer: So, they took your place in line? Veteran: No, no. They were just coming through. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: But man, they—every one of them that you talked to had just wads of big money, German money. I got some there yet. And they had robbed these banks in Aachen. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: And they brought that money back with them. It’s not worth anything anymore. Interviewer: Nope. And then is—and then you think you moved pretty soon after that? Veteran: Yes. Yes. Interviewer: Okay. And then where did they move you to? Did you go to the rear or just a new place in line? Veteran: From Hürtgen Forest, see that was in November. Interviewer: Yeah. And then in the middle of December, you are on the line in the Ardennes Forest. (01:12:09) �47 Veteran: The where? Interviewer: Well, the Ardennes Forest is where—for the Battle of the Bulge. Veteran: Yeah. Yeah. Interviewer: Is that the—did you just go straight from Hürtgen Forest down the line to the Ardennes? Veteran: I believe it, yes. Interviewer: Okay. Because they—did they tell you that you were moving to a quiet sector? Or did they just move you and not tell you anything? Veteran: Oh, they didn’t tell you, you know, much about where you are moving to or anything. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Now, I am trying to think. See, I am mixed up I believe. Bastogne. Interviewer: Well, Bastogne is late December. That’s in the Battle of the Bulge. Okay, now were you—now, when the 28th division goes down to the Ardennes Forest, they are stretched out in a pretty large area. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: And they’ve got two regiments kind of on the line, and then the 110th regiment is kind of in reserve behind them. Now, do you know which regiment you were stationed close to? Were you with the 110th or the 108th or 12th? �48 Veteran: 109th. Interviewer: 109th. 109th, okay. Alright. And was that regiment up on the front line when the Battle of the Bulge started? Or were they in the rear? Veteran: Oh no, they were…They were on— Interviewer: Yeah, I think they were on the front. Veteran: They were a fighting regiment. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: 109th. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, did you have a couple of weeks in the Ardennes where things were fairly quiet? Veteran: Yes; yes, we—except for just the regular roll of life, you know. In the Army, it’d be going on. But it was pretty quiet. But now…I just got that World War 2 magazine here this week or last week and it mentioned the Malmedy massacre. You recall that? From Bastogne, close to Bastogne. Interviewer: That was some ways north and east of Bastogne. (01:14:40) Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Yeah, and those were some of the men who were caught up in the area north of where you were. �49 Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Malmedy was north of where you were. Let’s go to—okay, so you were basically—you go and were you in—do you think you were in Luxembourg at this point? The northern part of Luxembourg or in Belgium or do you not know? Veteran: It was Luxembourg or Diekirch. Interviewer: Yeah, that [Diekirch]was in Luxembourg. I think Clervaux and Wiltz were in Luxembourg too and those were kind of behind your positions. Anyway, okay, so you have a fairly quiet time initially. And then middle of December, the Germans start attacking. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. And so, do you remember the beginning of that? Veteran: You know, that must have been when we were in Diekirch. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And Diekirch was kind of a—built on a hill like. And…The Germans were coming to take Diekirch back. They wanted to get it back for some reason I don’t know. Well…We fired on their equipment; you know. Got where we were busy. Well, man, they made a big attack and I mean they threw everything at us. (01:16:20) Veteran: And they had us surrounded. Well, all of a sudden, we get the order CSMO again. So, away we go. Well, like I said, the section chief we had wasn’t too sharp and was too scared to be—and especially like the battle we were having at Diekirch. Man…But anyway…We were �50 there, and we made a trip across this field. Walked across it. It was about a…oh, I’d say a couple miles. Interviewer: Was there snow on the field or was it clear? Was there— Veteran: Rain and mud and snow. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And we get up there and it’s right at the—a crossroads, the main crossroads. And the Germans had that zeroed in. So, went up there and they said they would give us a position to hold. I am along this highway. And oh, one time these machine gun bullets started popping right alongside me through the dust there. So, man, I took off on a run. I found a—underneath this road—I found a big culvert. You could stand up in it. (01:18:30) Veteran: And I got in that and boy that time there was quite a few other guys in there too. Well, I am in there and there is an apple tree right out from that end of that. And we are shooting at that apple tree, getting apples. Interviewer: How did you get out of there? Veteran: Well, this—the battle kind of stopped. Everybody was firing on that intersection. You know, all of the artillery. And so, I am in that—sitting in that culvert. And this guy comes up out of the woods there, and I know him. He was a Ranger from the Ranger battalion. So, I said to him—I said, “Where did you come from?” “Back in there,” he said. I said, “What’s it like back there?” he said, “There’s a dead German under every leaf.” He said, “We really wiped them out.” Interviewer: Alright, so— (01:20:11) �51 Veteran: Between the artillery fire and infantry and the stuff we sent, they were gone. Interviewer: Okay. So, the Germans—you though they had you surrounded? Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: But they left? Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Okay. So, you didn’t get captured or anything else like that? Veteran: No. Interviewer: Alright. Alright, and then did you—were you able to stay in that town? Or did they move you somewhere else? Veteran: We stayed—we went back to that town after that battle on that intersection. And that’s when we got into it. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: That night…Well, right where I had my gun set up, there was an orchard. Well, you got to find out the minimum and maximum elevation. So, I turned that in and recorded it, made sure I had it recorded. And so, gee, that night and day firing—holy mackerel, it was terrible. Just steady. I mean, oh… Interviewer: So, firing coming in at you? Veteran: Yeah. �52 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And so, we were looking for a place to stay, see, when…So, there was a nice house just down from our gunning there. And some of the guys went exploring. They went in that house. And oh, it was a beautiful place. A doctor owned it. And I went down there and went up. It was about 3 stories high house. I went up on the top story, up in the—what they called the attic. And there was big piles of apples up there. Each one had been individually wrapped. Man, we had apples. But that night, we went right back in. The Germans started firing on, so, gee, we—they knew that we were going to be captured, you know. Because we didn’t have nothing to stop them. (01:22:53) Veteran: So, they moved out. And they took everything, you know. The whole battery moved with a Close Station March Order. And so, we went out through Diekirch and that’s where I got hit with that shrapnel. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Into my back. Interviewer: Now, was that from shell fire or…? Veteran: Yeah, from— Interviewer: From mortars? Veteran: From German artillery. Interviewer: Okay. �53 Veteran: And now that—I had that belt and I wanted to keep it and I don’t know what happened to it. But anyway, it was just about—the shrapnel just about cut the belt in two. Well, man, we— finally it’s our turn to move out of there. And we get out and we go down to where they had set up on a firm—another position. And so, there was—we start checking the ammunition. And they found out that they had 12 rounds of white phosphorus was missing. (01:24:25) Veteran: So, the captain asked me if I knew where that 12 rounds was and I said, “Well Captain,” I said, “I think I know where I could find it,” I said. So, well my foreman, the coward, he said, “Yeah, he knows where it is.” Man, I wanted to say, “You’re coming with me.” So anyway, I went back up there and got that 12 rounds of… Interviewer: So, you had left that behind? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: In the previous position. Veteran: And forgot it. Interviewer: So, the Germans could have been there by the time you went back. Veteran: Oh yes. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Well, I get up there on that—where that position was with the jeep. And we were going to load those 12 rounds and take them back, see. Interviewer: Right. �54 Veteran: Well, we found the ambush. I knew right where it was. Found the…and I think you know what white phosphorus is. It’ll burn a hole right through you. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: Well, we are taking that white phosphorus back down to the gun, you know. Well, way down, I heard this—no, I am getting ahead of myself. I didn’t go. I stayed back. I had to stay back for some reason or another. And the rest of the men they took and went back down to the— to where the battery had set a position. And oh, were the Germans firing. Man, right in the bad part of that, all the people of that town were leaving. And it would bog the highway and oh, you couldn’t get through. (01:26:35) Veteran: So, another guy volunteered to stay with me. And I wish he wouldn’t because oh, he was just scared, you know. I didn’t blame him. But I heard this troop coming. I heard a guy giving commands, you know. So, I couldn’t tell whether it was Germans or…So, finally I decided that it was Americans. You know, I could understand. And I get out on that road from down the side hill and I said, when they get up the hill, I said, “Halt and be recognized.” So, this lieutenant, he come up and he said, “What are you doing here?” and I said, “I am waiting for a truck to come back and pick me up.” He said, “Well,” he said, “you see those lights around there?” and these flashlights were going on red, white, and blue. The Germans had a signal made up with us, see. And they were flashing them back and forth sending the signal. And he said, “You better get out of here,” he said. “Well, I am not up here because I want to be.” So, he got his men and they marched down. They took off the whole company. It was infantry. Interviewer: Did you go with them? (01:28:08) �55 Veteran: No, no I didn’t go because I had to wait for my…I am getting mixed up. That was before we picked up the ammunition. Interviewer: Oh okay. Veteran: And we picked up ammunition after I met him. Interviewer: Alright. So, then the—was it a jeep or a truck that…? Veteran: A jeep. Interviewer: Okay and so you get in the jeep and you get out of there? Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Well, the jeep was loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition. Interviewer: Right. Right. Veteran: So, we took off down through that town. Interviewer: Okay, so just to straighten out that story a little bit. So, you went back to the place where the ammunition was? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Did you help load the ammunition onto the jeep? Veteran: Yes. �56 Interviewer: And then did they go away with that and come back? Or why were you separated from them? Veteran: I really don’t know why I wasn’t. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: But I had—I was… Interviewer: But they had—but did they drive the shells off first or did you ride with the shells? Veteran: No, I rode with the shells. They were loaded. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: The driver and I—the driver of the jeep. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. But somewhere in the middle, you were out there by yourself waiting for the jeep. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: And that’s when that happened. Okay. Alright. Well, you get back out of that safely enough. Now, after you get back to the unit, does the unit retreat or…? Veteran: I was happy to get back. Well, that’s another time that Anderson, the captain, told me I was going to get the Silver Star. Interviewer: Yep. �57 Veteran: He said, “Do you know how many lives you saved?” he said, “That white phosphorus is deadly.” Well, that’s when we went back to that town. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And he was [unintelligible]. I can’t remember the name of it. Interviewer: Okay, well was it a town that you stayed in and then moved forward from? Or did you move back from there as well? Veteran: No, no we just…We went into another position after we got out of that town. Interviewer: Right. (01:30:14) Veteran: I can’t remember. Interviewer: And then do you think you stayed there for a while? Or…? Veteran: Yes, we stayed there for a short while. Interviewer: And did the Germans keep coming after you? Or did they leave you alone now? Veteran: They were—they kind of left us alone. As I remember, anyway. Interviewer: Yeah. Well, you were kind of south of where most of their advance was taking place. You were kind of at the south end of the Bulge. Kind of at the corner, where you were, that was—and so if they were mostly going forward, then they might not be trying to attack in your direction so much. So, it gets a little bit quieter at least for a while. �58 Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Now, then do you start counterattacking or do you just stay there? Or...? Veteran: We’d fire harassing fire. They—all night long, we’d—the gun would be in position, you know. And they’d give us these altitudes and ranges of—and we’d fire all night long at certain intervals. And I think we done that for oh, maybe 2 weeks or so. Interviewer: Yeah, because that would have been while a lot of the rest of the campaign was playing out around Bastogne and then pushing them back again. Veteran: Right. Interviewer: And you are kind of staying where you were. And then, do you start moving forward again at some point? Do you go into Germany now or…? Veteran: Yes. Yes. Now…time goes by and we were—we are moving towards them to the Rhine. And so, we kept going. Well, at that time, I might be—mine was—the infantry took the Remagen Bridge. Well, we get down to the Remagen Bridge and we go into position there. (01:32:50) Veteran: And in that area where we went into position was a landing and a take-off area for these bombs that the Germans were sending over to England. Interviewer: Let’s see, were those the— Veteran: Buzz bomb. Interviewer: The buzz bombs, the V-1s, yeah. Okay. �59 Veteran: And at that ramp that was there, oh that ramp was—must have been I’d say close to a mile. A half a mile at least. And those buzz bombs would take of up that, you know, and... So, the infantry really tore that ramp that—bomb up. It was not—I had some of the parts for it. But I couldn’t keep everything that I wanted. Interviewer: Right. I was going to ask: during that winter when you are in the Bulge and you’re fighting and it’s in December/January, did it get really cold? Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, yes. Interviewer: Did your unit have frostbite problems as well as trench foot? Veteran: I didn’t. I didn’t. The reason I didn’t was I had my mother and my dad send me a pair of sheepskin moccasins and I put them on inside of a pair of five buckle or four buckle arties [artillery boots] and oh, my feet were always warm. (01:34:26) Interviewer: Okay. Well, I guess if you come from the UP, you’d know something about cold. Veteran: I had to guard them boots with my life, though. Interviewer: I’ll bet. Alright. So, now you’ve made it—you’ve pushed forward to the Bulge, you have made it up to the Rhine River. Now, the position that you set up on, were you on the west bank of the Rhine? So, the launcher was kind of going up the side of the riverbank? Veteran: West bank. Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah, so the launcher for the missile would be like— �60 Veteran: The launcher was running— Interviewer: Going uphill, out of the riverbed. Yeah. It’s kind of like a reverse ski jump or something. Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. And then, at the time you got to Remagen, was the old bridge still standing or just pontoon bridges? Veteran: Oh, it was still standing. You could get across it. But you had to walk it, though. You couldn’t drive. Interviewer: Okay, and why was that? Veteran: Because it was bombed and that—there was beams laying across it and parts of it were—they didn’t trust it, you know? Interviewer: Right. Veteran: But you could walk. Well, the Americans were already—engineers were putting up a floating dock. Interviewer: Yeah, the pontoon bridges. Veteran: Pontoon bridge. Interviewer: Yep. �61 Veteran: They were already putting it up. Well, it was nice there. It was nice. There was no firing going. So, this pilot in this observer plane, a Taylorcraft—well, I knew him pretty well, talking to him and…different times. So, he come looking for me. And so, he found me finally and he said, “Vern,” he said, “you want to go up over the Remagen Bridge?” and I said, “Sure.” “Come on.” “Well,” I said, “I got to check with my captain first.” So, I went over to Captain Anderson and I said, “Captain Anderson, I got a chance to go over the Remagen Bridge.” “How are you going?” I said, “That Taylorcraft there.” (01:36:50) Veteran: “Well, what are you waiting for?” he said, “Get going.” So, I went with this pilot. We went up over the bridge. And oh, I wish I could see—know how—to tell you the sight that you’d see from up above there. Oh, you could see the Germans in one place and the Americans in another, you know, and…So…They said that they had guards on both ends of the bridge. And that night, after things quieted down a little bit again, the Germans retook Remagen Bridge yet. They retook it right at night. Interviewer: I don’t think so. They might have told you that, but there’s nothing—that’s not what the records indicate at all. Veteran: No. Interviewer: They did counterattack, though. Veteran: Yep, they did. They took the bridge back. Not…you know, I mean it was just—they had it for a short while. Interviewer: Now, did you see that? Did you see that or did you just hear about it? (01:38:18) �62 Veteran: Oh yes. Yes. Yes, we were right there. Interviewer: And the Germans came all the way across the river? Or…? Veteran: Oh yeah, they come back. And that was quite a sight. You know you can talk, but you can’t describe it, you know. But and then we—now, this is getting down into—it’s pretty cold, you know. And so, we are getting into—see, we had been—in November, we had been in Hürtgen Forest. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: And December we were in Belgium and… Interviewer: Belgium and Luxembourg, yep. Veteran: …Luxembourg. Interviewer: Okay. And— Veteran: And… Interviewer: Remagen is March now. So, in February/March, you are going into Germany. Veteran: So, the Germans are—they are fighting to get back across the Rhine to get to Germany; back into Germany. So, we have got the guns in position and all ready to fire and—because we had been getting reports about activity, you know. And so, my telephone rings. I am not supposed to be answering the telephone, see, but like I said, the section chief gave me one of those. I wouldn’t need to hide it all the time, you know. Taking care of number one. Well, I answered the phone. And, “Let me talk to Vern.” Well, I knew right away it was Lieutenant Katz �63 so I said, “You’ve got Vern on the phone, Lieutenant.” “Vern,” he said, “we don’t have much time. I can’t tell you nothing right now. Do what I tell you,” he said. (01:40:54) Veteran: And I said, “I’ll be ready in less than five minutes.” “Okay.” Man, I gave the commands he give me, relayed them. And he was on the phone and he said, “Give me so many rounds,” and I fired. And, “Vern,” he said, “Don’t change a thing. Keep them coming.” So, I fired again, you know. By that time, he’s got battery ten rounds. Each gun in the battery fired ten rounds. Well, I fired and I kept firing, you know. And so, finally he gave them fire. He gave them—one command he gave them was “Keep them coming,” he said. No—"just keep them coming,” he said. Well, I don’t know how many rounds between the battery that we fired. And it was right on a barge, a great big barge. Interviewer: Okay. (01:42:11) Veteran: That was trying to get across the Mississippi. Interviewer: Oh, the Rhine anyway. Veteran: Across the Rhine, I mean. Mississippi... Interviewer: Okay. Now, was Lieutenant Katz a forward observer? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yes, he was. And so, he come back and then he was telling me about it. And he— “Vern,” he said, “I never seen nothing like it.” He said, “Them rounds were falling right in that big barge,” he said. And he said, “That barge was just packed, just loaded with shelling and are �64 waiting…” Well, different ones ask me always, you know, how many Germans I killed. Well, in a case like that, you know, none. Interviewer: Yeah. You would have no idea. Veteran: But that’s getting pretty close to the end of the… Interviewer: Yes, it is. So, shortly after that did you cross the Rhine and then move into Germany? Veteran: Yep. Yep. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Alright. And in the last couple months of the war there, in April and May, did the fighting quiet down or were you in an area where the Germans were still fighting back? Veteran: No. They are still giving us resistance. They still give us resistance. Interviewer: Well, were you going into cities or were you in the countryside? Veteran: Come again? Interviewer: Were you fighting in cities or were you out in the country? (01:44:04) Veteran: No, we were out in the country. Interviewer: Okay. �65 Veteran: They got a notice that—this is getting pretty close to the end of the war. No treaty was signed or nothing yet but we had taken Paris. Paris fell; the Germans had moved out. Interviewer: Well, that was back in August of ’44. Paris is back in France. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: The German—the Russians are taking Berlin at that point. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: That’s the end, yeah. So, that may be what you heard about at that point? That Berlin fell. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. Veteran: But now, I know this story I am telling concerned Paris. Because—you’re right, that’s earlier. But anyway, they took us from Paris and marched—went through Paris, the 28th division. Paraded right through Paris, right down under the arch. And went right out into the outskirts where Eiffel Tower is. And they said for us not to go over the first level on the Eiffel Tower because the Germans were sniping. We stayed there overnight. And I can remember yet the Frenchmen were out and they were gathering this clover, alfalfa clover. They were gathering it. And we didn’t know what they were doing with it. Finally, we found out that they were gathering and they were roasting it over a fire. And that’s what they made coffee out of, was that alfalfa. But… �66 Interviewer: Alright. Okay, so you did—so that was on your way across France, that you went through that part, went through Paris? (01:46:36) Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. But now we kind of get to the end of the war, get to May of ’45 and you are in Germany. Do you know where you were when the war ended? Or when the war with Germany ended? What part of Germany you were in or…? What town you were close to? Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: So, where were you? Veteran: Lauterecken. Interviewer: Okay, and where is that? Veteran: It’s in Germany. Interviewer: Okay, is it kind of in southern Germany or middle? Veteran: I believe it is up towards the middle more. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And did the fighting just stop at that point or were there still people shooting after that? Veteran: Oh, there were still—they are still firing after that. But we stayed in Lauterecken. Lauterecken is a train station. �67 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I’d say there is maybe 20 to 40 railroads running through it. Tracks. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And a really busy place. Well, they put us on guard there and so we are right by the railroad. And we’d see these trains coming and of course those trains had nothing but a hotbox in them burning. Whenever we seen a hotbox, we’d stop the train. And—because we knew the car would be loaded. (01:48:18) Veteran: And we’d stop the train and go look at what they were loaded with. And almost every time it was either fish or beans. And to get from the railroad station where we were guarding, you went over the bridge and up in the—we stayed in this school. And it was a pretty good-sized school. But one night we stopped a train. Of course, it was loaded with beans. And so, Ackerman says, “Well, I am going to take a case of those beans to the kitchen for the mess sergeant.” Well, he puts the beans on his shoulder, he starts walking. He’s got to walk across this dam to get across that river. He slips and loses his beans. Interviewer: Oh… Veteran: Well, pretty outgoing fellow, Sergeant Ackerman was. Goes and takes the gates out of the dam to raise the dam. Well, there was dead Germans, all kinds of weapons, guns and everything, thrown in that dam. (01:50:08) Interviewer: Alright. Now, at the point when the Germans surrender and you are in this area, do you start to see the German civilians come out? �68 Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, yes. We couldn’t talk to them. Interviewer: Yeah, no fraternization. Veteran: No fraternization. Interviewer: Alright. What impression did you have of the German people at that point? Veteran: Well, I—the German people as a whole were good people. Almost every one of the civilians that you talked to—they didn’t want the war. But it was one thing they were forced, you know. Either do it or die. But as for the German people, they were good people. Interviewer: So, your guys got along with them pretty well? Veteran: Oh yes. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. Now, did you stay in that area until it was time for you to go home? Or did they move you around? Veteran: We moved around but that was kind of our headquarters, was Lauterecken. But we’d go up to Kaiserslautern quite a bit. That’s a pretty good-sized town. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: And we handed in our mail up there. And that’s where we got our mail was…And I remember yet, we’d take this tank and we’d go up to—up to Lauterecken from—go to Kaiserslautern from Lauterecken and we’d get our mail. And they just wanted us to move the 37caliber gun on the tank and, oh, they’d do about 70 miles an hour. And can you imagine just �69 going down the road with that wide open, you know. 70 miles an hour? Why, it’s a wonder we didn’t get killed but… Interviewer: Now, was this on a truck or…? (01:52:33) Veteran: No, on the big—it was a… Interviewer: Was it an armored car? Veteran: Armored truck. Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, okay because there were armored cars, there were scout cars that were armored. Basically, small armored trucks. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Yeah, okay. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Yeah, those could do 70 miles an hour probably. Veteran: Oh yeah. Interviewer: A tank couldn’t but that could. Alright. And once we got to the end of the war, then they started to send people home. And a lot of them went home when they had enough points to be able to go home. So—but sometimes they went as a whole unit. Now, did your unit come home together or did you go individually? Veteran: No, we came together. �70 Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Alright. And so, do you remember—and that was later in 1945? So, it’s still the same year? Because I think your discharge was October or something like that. Veteran: I believe it, yes. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Alright. So, how did they get you home? Veteran: Well, we went to this…Am I thinking right? Myles Standish. Camp Myles Standish. Interviewer: Well, Myles Standish—that would have been a camp back in Massachusetts that you might have landed at. Veteran: Yeah, that’s where we landed. Interviewer: Okay. Do you remember where you left from? Did you go out of Le Havre or somewhere else? Did you sail out of France or out of Germany? So, a lot of them went to camps that were named after different brands of cigarettes. (01:54:14) Veteran: Yes. Camp—I am trying to think of that cigarette. We were in a cigarette camp. Interviewer: Yeah, okay. So, like Lucky Strike or Marlboro or one of those? Veteran: Yeah… �71 Interviewer: Yeah. Okay. So, you go to north—you go to France and you sail out of Le Havre but you land at Boston, basically. So, you— Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: And they process you at Camp Myles Standish. Now, did they discharge you there or did they send you somewhere else to get discharged? Veteran: Camp Grant again. Interviewer: And back to Camp Grant. Alright. And then from there you get back up…Now, do you remember anything about the voyage back across the Atlantic? Was that better than the way over or worse? Veteran: Oh yeah, it was quiet. Interviewer: Okay. And were you still in a troop ship? Veteran: Yep. Yep, troop ship. Interviewer: Okay, so you do that again. Alright. And then you get home? Okay. So, you have gone off, you have been to war. So, you have just come back home again to where your parents are? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. And then after you got home, what kind of work did you do? Veteran: Well, I didn’t do much of anything for…They had that policy. What was it? �72 Interviewer: 52/20? Veteran: 52/20 or 52/50. Interviewer: Yeah, something like that. 52/50 yeah or—well, 20 maybe—might have been $20 dollars a week, 52 weeks or— Veteran: Yeah, something like that. Interviewer: But they gave you some money when you got home. Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Okay. And then, but eventually you had to get a job. Veteran: Well, I had a buddy. He had been in the Army or in the Air Corps. And he never left the states or nothing. And he was working for the state of Michigan. Michigan State Ferries. And he called me and asked me if I wanted to go to work. Well, I wasn’t quite ready yet, but anyway I went to work. Interviewer: Okay. (01:56:18) Veteran: Well, I have worked for the Michigan State Ferries. Interviewer: The Michigan State what? Veteran: State Ferries. Interviewer: So, ferries as in ferry boats? Veteran: Carried the cars across the… �73 Interviewer: Okay, car ferries. Alright. Veteran: And I worked for them for…gee, I’d say four or five years. And I—they were political. And so, the ones that were politicians, they had the good jobs. And I was rated as an A and I was getting B pay. So, I quit. I heard they were starting a causeway on the bridge. So, I quit. And I went to work for Johnson and Green on the causeway. Interviewer: Okay. So, is that the bridge across the Straits of Mackinac? Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay, so you helped build the Big Mac Bridge? Veteran: Yes, right from start to finish. Interviewer: Alright. Okay and then did you stay in engineering or construction work or did you do other things after that? Veteran: I worked on all the bridges. I worked on the bridge in the Sault. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And then I worked on the Mackinac Bridge of course, from start to finish. And…other than that… Interviewer: Well, but did you just— Veteran: And then now like in—later after the bridge was built— Interviewer: Yeah. �74 Veteran: I joined the ironwork. Well, I did belong with the ironworkers. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And I was an ironworker until I retired. Interviewer: Alright. Now, we are getting close to the end of this tape as well. I want to ask you sort of one last question and that is how do you think your time in the service affected you or what did you learn from it? (01:58:49) Veteran: I learned to take commands and that the time in the service affected me hearing-wise. Interviewer: Yes. Veteran: I can’t hear out of my left ear hardly at all. That’s why I keep asking what. Other than that, it was a good experience. It is something. But one thing that did bother me: I am still fighting that war at night when I go to bed. I remember when I first come back, well I was staying with my mother and daddy in their little farmhouse and the Germans were attacking that. So… Interviewer: So, it stays with you in some bad ways even though it was mostly a good thing. Veteran: Yes. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Well, this is—I feel very lucky to have the chance to meet you and record your story today, so thank you very much for sharing it. Veteran: Well, let’s hope it does some good; do something with it. �75 Interviewer: I think it will. Alright. Okay, so we are starting up again here. So, alright, now we are doing here an appendix to the interview with Vern Erskine because as we were here, the family members were here. They thought of different particular stories that he has told in the past that they want to get recorded here. You mentioned in your story that you had met General Eisenhower. Now, they also tell me that you met General Patton? (02:00:39) Veteran: Oh yes. I met General Patton. Twice. Both times he bawled me out. Interviewer: Okay…And why was that? Veteran: One time was in Wiltz, Luxembourg. I had taken my gun to ordinance because the recoil wasn’t working on it. So, I hopped into a truck and the driver of the truck and I took it to Wiltz. And got up there and of course we had to stay overnight. And so, the next day was about, oh, in the afternoon anyway. We started back to get connected back on my battery. And about halfway there, well, we met this jeep coming with 5 stars on it. Right away, I knew it was Patton. So, he stopped us and I jumped out quick, reported to him, and he said, with no other words, he said, “What in the hell are you doing out here,” he said, “with that gun?” He said, “Nobody around except Germans,” he said. He said, “Do you know you are surrounded by Germans?” And I wanted to say to him, well, how about you? Well, anyway, that was my one conversation with him. (02:02:29) Interviewer: Okay. So, was this during the early part—well, was this during the Battle of the Bulge? Veteran: Ahh, no… Interviewer: Was it after that or before it? �76 Veteran: It was after the Battle of the Bulge. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, that was—because the Germans had gone through Wiltz and they had pushed the 110th regiment of your division out of there. Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: But then we—but for Patton to be there, that would be later because he comes up later. So, you pushed back again but there were still Germans around? Veteran: Yep. Interviewer: Okay. Now, did you just keep going and go back to your battery anyway? Veteran: Yes. Yes, I went back and I reported to the captain, told him what happened. Interviewer: Okay, so what was the second example—time with Patton? Veteran: The second time the snipers were really working. And anybody that had any insignia on them, they would give them—they were in charge—they were a target. Well, this captain or this lieutenant—Lieutenant Taylor—he come in and he was talking to us. And he said he wanted to go and look at something, so he wanted to know who would go with him, just walking. And we started out walking. Didn’t get very far; we meet the jeep with the 5 stars. And of course, Lieutenant Taylor, he had his Army jacket turned wrong side out so no one would know his insignia on it. No identification. Had his hat, all the liner, on. And we met General Patton. And that time, he wasn’t very nice at all. He asked that lieutenant, “Are you ashamed of your service? Don’t you want to wear the uniform?” And oh, we raked us all over the coals. Finally, he left. But… (02:04:52) �77 Interviewer: Did anyone explain to him why he was doing that? Veteran: Well, I told him, you know. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: But then… Interviewer: But he didn’t care. Veteran: It didn’t do any good to tell him. Interviewer: Okay. Alright, now another thing that they told me is that there was a point when you saw a German pilot who was shot down? And parachuted into your position? Veteran: Oh…We were in a position on Christmas Day. And we have—and it’s a beautiful morning. The sun is shining but its colder than a son of a gun. So, overhead there is this German plane circling around. And he is circling around and, finally, we couldn’t figure out what he was looking for. Well, over comes two P-37s, Thunderbirds [P-47 Thunderbolts]. And they are loaded with 500-pound bombs, one under each wing. So, that German Messerschmitt—well, he took off after that. Them Thunderbirds—well, them Thunderbirds couldn’t stand a chance against—they couldn’t maneuver with them bombs. So, they set up a little defense by circling one another. They’d circle around that Me-109 and they killed time. (02:06:42) Veteran: In the meantime, they were calling for a pursuit ship to come. Well, just like an angel out on the sky and along comes this P-38 with a double fuselage on it. And he goes down and the Messerschmitt couldn’t outmaneuver him. And boy, he’d get on his tail and he’d fire and empty casings were landing right by us. We were picking them up. �78 Interviewer: So, he parachuted out of the plane or did he land the plane on the field? Veteran: Oh, easily. They were shooting at each other. Interviewer: Okay, but you said—but the Messerschmitt came down—the— Veteran: No, he didn’t come down. No, he stayed up there. Interviewer: Alright. Veteran: And he was circling around. Finally…Finally, that P-38 got onto his tail and they let drive with that fuselage and smoke poured out of that Messerschmitt. And out comes the parachute. So, when that parachute hit the ground, we were right there, right where he landed. And he was dressed, oh, immaculate. Oh, black polished boots on, just shining. Nice blue uniform, silk scarf. (02:08:33) Veteran: And so, by that time, the captain is over there with us. Captain Anderson is with us. And he questioned him, but he’d just spit. So, some of the guys said, “Let me take care of him,” you know. Well anyway, the MPs went up and got him and took him off. Interviewer: Okay. But basically, this pilot had an attitude. Veteran: Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. So, you had that. Now, you mentioned that was Christmas Day. Veteran: That was— Interviewer: But it also mentions where you were the previous night, on Christmas Eve. �79 Veteran: Yes, yes. Interviewer: What was—what happened then? Veteran: Well, that…Christmas Eve—I think that was a different Christmas though. Interviewer: Okay. Well, you only had one in Europe. I guess, they were talking about you being in a hayloft or something and some woman bringing you cookies? Veteran: Oh…That was in Luxembourg. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: And this woman—it was on Christmas, that’s right. She brought us big Saint Nick’s cookies. They were about 12 inches high. Really good cookie. Her name was Mrs. Ish: I-s-h. Interviewer: Okay, and were you just staying in her house or…? (02:10:18) Veteran: No, no. No, we were staying in the little barn out on the— Interviewer: Oh, you were in the barn. Okay. So, you let them have the house. Alright. Okay. Veteran: That was one instance but she had a sister in Chicago, she told us. Interviewer: Okay. And did she—so, she spoke some English or…? Veteran: Pardon? Interviewer: Did she speak some English? Or— �80 Veteran: Yeah, she could speak English. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. And then, I guess you also spent some time in a hospital? You had— Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, I got food poisoning from eating turkey salad out of an aluminum container. And the whole battery was laid out. The Germans could have walked in and just… Interviewer: Okay, so was this something supplied by your field kitchen or was this just coming out of cans? This turkey salad. Veteran: Out of our field kitchen. Interviewer: Okay. Oh well. Alright. Anything else? Did you ever encounter Audie Murphy? Veteran: Oh yes, yes. Yes. Yes, I went to a hospital for treatment for something or another. I don’t—it wasn’t for…And Audie Murphy was there. And I just talked to him just a couple minutes, you know. Interviewer: Was he a patient at the hospital or was he now a hero, already visiting people? (02:12:29) Veteran: He wasn’t a hero yet. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: But I didn’t know it was Audie Murphy, but after I got back to my battery and after, well, this—medics told me that that was Audie Murphy. �81 Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright…Oh wait a minute, there was one other thing they did tell me about and that was that at some point you saw a German boy, a civilian, get hit in the fighting. Veteran: Oh yes. Yes, I was in…It would have been Luxembourg again. Interviewer: Was that after Remagen? Or you’re still in Luxembourg. Okay. Veteran: And we had moved into this position. Now, this is quite a long story. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: But we fired on that town and finally they said, “See us at home.” We moved right up to the town. We get up to that town and all of the school children are all in their little black uniforms, long black socks. And they are all waving a little American flag. And they are waving an American flag. So, all at once, the Germans started shooting 88s and that little boy standing in line, waving a flag, was about like from here to you from me. (02:14:42) Veteran: And right before my eyes, shot his right leg right off. Just…tore it right off. Right just—I couldn’t believe it, you know. And so, we were still going up into position and they were firing those 88s. Oh man, and oh them things are terrible. They stood on flatbeds there just like a rifle. Interviewer: Yeah. Veteran: They can be on a hill a mile away and shoot like a rifle. Interviewer: Yeah. Well, they can shoot a very long distance. �82 Veteran: Yep. Well, they came after—that missed me, that shot missed me about…like just about 3 or 4 feet. Interviewer: Right. Veteran: Well… Interviewer: Did the shell explode or did it just go by and take the leg with it? Veteran: Well, it went—must—it didn’t explode. Interviewer: Okay. Veteran: It must have been shot with a regular round, you know, a heavy round. But anyway, they kept firing and they have the double barrel 88s, you know, firing. You’d duck down then get up and all at once there is another shot right behind it. Well, we were going up through this hedgerow, gunning behind. And all the guns in line were going into position by that other side of that town. Well, our gun got caught in that hedgerow. Well, the truck kept going and it rolled that hedgerow just like a coil until it let go. (02:16:51) Veteran: And but they kept firing. The Germans kept after us. Well, they had—they hit this next truck to me, this…I was number two gun and that gun was number three. And they hit the back end of number three gun and killed four or three guys and left I don’t know how many wounded. Well, and so, I am back behind this hedgerow. I just managed to get back there by the hedgerow. And I am looking out and there’s a guy laying in the bloodiest broken arm right here. Or bloodies—every time his heart beat, it would squirt up in the air. I knew that he couldn’t live very long. So, I didn’t know what I could use for a tourniquet. So, I thought well, I got my belt �83 on, I’ll get that. So, I put—I slipped my belt on that guy shot with a—almost cut in two. That’s where it went. But I run out there and I took my—that…everybody gets that’s sulfa to spread on wounds. Interviewer: Right. (02:18:41) Veteran: I don’t know what they call it but anyway, I took that and put it against that vein and then took my belt and wrapped it around and I got the blood to stop. And I grabbed him and picked him up. And he was a big man. And I brought him to the edge of the hedgerow anyway and I stayed there until the medics come and got him. And a few days later, we were still in the same position and the ambulance stopped and they are looking for me. So, somebody pointed out to a medic. The driver came over to me and he had my belt. Interviewer: Oh… Veteran: And he brought it back. This guy, his name was Lonnie Hughes. Well, he said, “Vern’s pants will be falling off,” he said. So, I had already got a rope and I had this rope tied around my pants. But… Interviewer: Okay. So, did that man survive? The man you helped; did he survive? (02:20:02) Veteran: Oh yes, he did. Yeah. Interviewer: Okay. Alright. Veteran: Yep. �84 Interviewer: Okay. I think now…I think that’s going to be a wrap. So, I am glad we were able to add those stories. (02:20:17) � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ErskineV2352V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Erskine, Vernon L. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02 Title A name given to the resource Erskine, Vernon (Interview transcript and video), 2020 Description An account of the resource Vern Erskine was born in Allenville, Michigan in 1921. He attended and graduated high school in St. Ignace, Michigan. He was drafted to the Army in the fall of 1942 and was required to report for duty at Camp Grant, Illinois. Vern completed his basic training at Camp Livingston, Louisiana. He became part of the artillery in the 1st battalion, 101st regiment, which was attached to the 28th division. Vern was sent overseas to Europe in the fall of 1943 to serve in World War 2. He landed in Normandy 12 days after D-Day. He spent time in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and Germany. He participated in the Battle of the Bulge. During his time serving in World War 2, he was involved in various skirmishes. Vern was able to meet both General Eisenhower and General Patton while in Europe. He left Europe in the fall of 1945 to return to the U.S. After discharging from the military, Vern returned home to Michigan where he currently lives with his family. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) WKTV (Wyoming, Mich.) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fac0054e05164ccfbde26b31a542c619.mp4 784ed7e89806f123684bcdfe96fa20e8 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/488c73d06d5468a300bd95d9c0314817.pdf a19f43432665dfefd936f151b02b4a13 PDF Text Text Erickson, Stanley Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: World War II Interviewee’s Name: Stanley Erickson Length of Interview: (37:52) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Stanley Erickson of Richmond, Michigan. The interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay Mr.Erickson start us off with some background on yourself and to begin with, where and when were you born?” I was born in Harris, Minnesota, farm kid. Interviewer: “What year?” (00:25) 19– What was it? Interviewer: “1919 wasn’t it?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Yeah, that’s what you told me. Okay 1919 alright and so did you grow up on a farm?” Right. Interviewer: “Okay, and how much education did you have?” At what point? �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “Well before going in the service.” Before going in the service? I had gone to– Interviewer: “Had you finished high school?” Oh yeah, yeah finished high school, Interviewer: “Okay, when did you graduate from high school?” 1936. Interviewer: “Okay, now was your family able to keep their farm during the depression?” Barely, barely. Interviewer: “Alright and what were you growing on the farm?” (1:20) Mostly corn. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and where did you go to high school?” Little town called Braham. Interviewer: “Okay, still in Minnesota?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, alright and then after you finished high school what did you do?” �Erickson, Stanley After I finished high school? Oh I had a brilliant career, a couple of characters in Minneapolis decided they needed a house boy, they run that in the paper and I answered it, well I’m sure they were a couple of queers but they were nice guys. Staff consisted of a housekeeper, an Irish guy and myself, and they loved to entertain. So I would wait there with my sleeve– Towel on my sleeve and that but a very educational experience I thought because they were– As I remember they had a polar exploration going on at the time and they had a lot of people Perrier, amongst others, as dinner guests, of course [unintelligible] interesting. Interviewer: “Alright now how long did you do that?” About a year and, let’s see it’s a three mile walk through the [unintelligible] for a teenager that’s not too good a life, I also had a contract and my Aunt Elizabeth in Chicago said “If you ever decide to come to Chicago just call me up, I’ll be there.” So one day I decided I’m going to improve myself from my $7 a week job to an $11 a week and I fry cook for White Castle. So I go down to downtown Minneapolis, get out of your street car and there’s about, oh 30 guys in front of White Castle and head back to the alley said “Oh that’s not too bad, I’ll get in line.” There was 200 back there, real honest guys, working people looking for the $11 job. I got right back in my streetcar, I went home, said “I guess I’ll go.”(3:35) So I came to Chicago then, spent most of my work life living there. Interviewer: “Okay, now when you got to Chicago did you find a job?” Oh there yeah, well I went to [unintelligible] the Swedish Covenant Hospital, oh by the way business is so bad, you wouldn’t think it possible, the first floor of the hospital was employee housing. We didn’t have real customers to fill it. Interviewer: “Mkay.” People couldn’t afford to go to the hospital. �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “Okay, and then how long did you stay at the hospital? Were you still there when the war started?” No. I roomed with some people down in the North Park neighborhood, put in high school down there and, uh… it was a painter. [He asked] Would I work for him? Well I had twice the wages if I was workin’ for over there, so I said fine. And why… why he offered me a union card I never knowed—a union card without knowing how to paint. I imagine I worked my way through college that way. Interviewer: “Okay. So did you start going to college then?” Well, I started in North Park and after a few years in high school I graduated and went to Northwestern. (5:09) Interviewer: “Okay. I guess I thought you said you had gone to high school in Minnesota?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, but now you went to high school again in Chicago, or you went to college in Chicago?” I went to college, yeah. Interviewer: “Okay it’s college, okay. All right and what were you doing when Pearl Harbor happened? Were you in school, or?” No, I was working those days as a painter. And I remember at a little restaurant—whatever breakfast, lunch, or whatever it was that day when Pearl Harbor was lost and I thought “Well, here we go.” Because it was inevitable, you could see anybody that age was gonna be in service. Interviewer: “Now, did you enlist or did you wait for them to come after you?” �Erickson, Stanley Well, no, they didn’t have to come after me. I registered the first draft of October 1940. I never saw active duty until 1943, if you can believe that. And still I’m just—well they had a list and I happened to be 3 from the bottom of the list, so the next 6 months they enrolled 100 new guys and they put them at the top of the list. And after 3 years they discovered “Hey, nobody at the end of that list is ever gonna come up!” so they turned it around. Interviewer: “Oh, so you got up there.” “We’ll take off the bottom of the list next!” Interviewer: “So what year did you get drafted?” That was about 1938, I think. Interviewer: “Well, to be drafted…” (7:15) Yeah? Interviewer: “The draft doesn’t start until 1940. So you got drafted in ‘43? Cause that was the day you gave me before. So when does Uncle Sam call you? Cause the war is already started, and you weren’t being drafted there for awhile. That’s right. Interviewer: “And so it’s after Pearl Harbor that you get drafted.” That’s right. Well… That’s kinda… I kinda flew to report for Florida. Country Club—been away to the Country Club for basic training. Interviewer: “Okay. Did you say in Florida?” �Erickson, Stanley Yeah. Interviewer: “Was that in Miami beach?” Boca Raton. Interviewer: “Boca Raton, yeah, okay. And the Army air forces were trading people down there.” Right. Interviewer: “So basically you were drafted into the Army Air Force and, okay—how did you get from Chicago to Florida?” (8:14) In Florida? Interviewer: “How did you get from Chicago to Florida?” I got orders to report down there, got a train and went down there. Interviewer: “Okay. Now did you just go as a private citizen or were you on a trip train?” A private citizen. Interviewer: “Okay. You just got on a train and went there.” Oh yeah, I got a little goodie bag with my stuff. Uncle Sam, here I am, how are ya doin? Interviewer: “Okay. And then when you got down to Florida, what did they do with you?” �Erickson, Stanley Did a lot of marching. A lot of marching. Physical training is what it was. Interviewer: “Okay. And what kind of accommodations did you have? Where were you staying?” Well we stayed right in a hotel. I remember my daughter coming down there later after when I’d been out of service, and visited the Boca Raton club, and she said “This is where you’ve been staying!” Yeah? “And this is where you ate?” And our dining room was looking out over the bay on three sides. Beautiful. But they had one embarrassment. And the military always comes and they always get themselves in trouble. They got the paid rations for seniors…and the guy they got, they charged for those rations. Ended up with more money than they know what to do with. Crazy! They had a table at the exit of the dining room: cigarettes, cigars, candy. Any kind, any time you wanted, help yourself; they had to get rid of their money. (10:02) Interviewer: “Okay.” Then from there to New Haven, Connecticut. Interviewer: “Okay, and what did you do there?” While I was there it was a Tech school. Had one of these things, we’re picking the wires apart and putting ‘em back together, why not. Interviewer: “Okay. So, were they training you to be like an aircraft mechanic, or?” I… assume that. Interviewer: “Okay.” I assume that. �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “And how long did you stay? Did you finish that program or did they move you to something else? No no no, that was a terminal program you may have got, you were assigned duty from there. I got my evaluation, see here’s how stupid the military can be. They’ve got several other guys graduating, they’re going somewhere but they won’t tell ‘em where they’re going. So where am I supposed to go? Then I go ahead, get suitcase packed, and I'm ready to go. Well, I find out then that I’m assigned to the Boeing School in Seattle—what base it is I don’t know. Interviewer: “Okay. So the Boeing School in Seattle, was that being run by Boeing aircraft?” Oh yeah. Interviewer: “Okay. And—” Right on their property. Interviewer: “Okay. So now when you go there what job do you have? Or do you go to school some more? I’m going to school there at Boeing. Interviewer: “And what were they teaching you?” Well there they were more concerned about the mechanics of the airplane, and the engine particularly. Interviewer: “And which aircraft were they training you for?” B-29. �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “Okay. And that’s a new bomber that’s coming in with a lot of new technology in it so it’s different from everything else.” It’s completely developed. Interviewer: “Not completely developed! They’re still working on it.” Oh yeah? (12:18) Interviewer: “Alright.” You would've been enjoying the assembly project. They were built in sections and you could see on the aircraft where the seams are. So one comes from Boeing, one comes from somewhere in California, and they all assemble that. And they’re put up pretty good there. There’s a big metal ring at the end of each compartment but somebody’s gotta be holding it. To assemble this thing, you gotta get four big black guys with sledgehammers and drop it. And it lines up, and they start hammering it until they could line it up and bolt it together. It was a scary process. Interviewer: “Okay, now once you—and what were they training you to do? Was that to work on the engines or?” Before I was an air crewmate. Interviewer: “Okay.” Cause that’s what they did with me. Interviewer: “Okay, so you were going to be air crew? What? �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “You were going to be air crew? You would work inside the aircraft.” Right, right. Interviewer: “Okay. And were you going to be there—what would your job inside the plane be? Because you’re not a pilot, so what—” No no no. I was set to be a flight engineer, so the training is best, you went along with that. Didn’t always fit. Interviewer: “Now the training to be a flight engineer while you’re in Seattle, did you go and fly in the B-29s there?” Actually I don’t know. That’s about when I’m twenty…four years old, and I report to Denver. First time I’ve ever been in an airplane. (14:06) Interviewer: “So were you testing the B-29s in Denver?” They were testing us. They had a [unintelligible] 14 consoles. Engineers control the station, these ships, and nobody knew which of the 14 guys was operating the ship. It was interesting. And you didn’t know yourself whether you were—It was simulating controls but you might actually be controlling. Interviewer: “So you’re working with simulators, you weren’t flying.” Oh we’re flying. The simulator’s in flight. Interviewer: “Okay. Now at what point did you finish all of your training? Did it take until 1945 or were you done in ‘44?” �Erickson, Stanley Our training, I figured, turned in abruptly one day. I failed and crashed. I was in one of the regular crews for that group… you are that crew, and we’re supposed to be meeting again in Kansas, before the end of that year. Interviewer: “Now once you get to Kansas now does your air crew now train together and do you?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay. And now you’re flying regularly, or?” Regularly, oh yeah. Interviewer: “Okay. Now did they have the whole crew together: the air officers and the enlisted men?” Yeah, oh yeah, they hold a whole crew there. Interviewer: “Alright. Now at that point what rank did you have? And were you still enlisted?” (15:57) No no, I got my commission in New Haven when I graduated from the airline. Interviewer: “Alright. So you’re a flight engineering officer, in effect.” Right. Interviewer: “Alright. And did you have your whole crew together or just the officer? Oh no, whole crew stayed. �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “Okay. Alright. Now what made a B-29 different from a B-24 or a B-17?” Much more automatic. Much more remote control. You didn’t—in a B-24 the gunner had to sit in the turret, the guns are right here. A B-29? You sat in an easy chair and [the placement of the guns] might be above his head, might be 60 feet away. Interviewer: “Okay. And so was there only one gunner?” (17:02) Oh no no no. The bomber was a gunner… the top gunner, and two side gunners, tail gunner. Interviewer: “Okay. Alright so you had different men operating different sets of guns, but doing it by remote control.” Right. Interviewer: “Okay. Alright and then did the plane fly higher than the other bombers?” Oh yeah. Interviewer: “Okay. Alright, it basically flies higher, has a longer range, a bigger bomb load. It’s the next generation.” Theoretically yes. Interviewer: “Okay, alright. Now, was Kansas—was that your final stage of training?” Yes, basically. Because there was the fatal crash at Wichita and another crew, cause this crew was going overseas in just weeks! We are. Interviewer: “Okay. So you had been a crew in training in Denver…” �Erickson, Stanley Oh yeah. Interviewer: “And then they moved you to Kansas to fill in for that crew that crashed. So you’re not really in Kansas for very long.” No, we had a foreshortened training. Interviewer: “Okay and then off you go with the rest of your unit and what squadron were you in?” …oh, what squadron were we? Interviewer: “The 487th squadron, was that right?” (18:25) 487? Sounds right. Interviewer: “Okay. That’s what you told me, so, alright. So do you know when you went overseas? Was it 1945 or still ‘44?” …Kinda cloudy isn’t it? Interviewer: “Well, were you in Kansas during the winter or the summer?” No, we got out of there by winter. Interviewer: “Okay, that’s probably the end of ‘44 or beginning of ‘45, somewhere in there. Okay, alright. Now once the squadron is ready to go, how do they get you to the Pacific? Do you fly out or do you take a boat?” It depended on what they drew straws. 10 crews got planes. �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “Okay.” Five crews were flown out there immediately and five others they just waited to see what they were gonna do with us. It’d been awhile but they did, they finally did get us planes. We were just waiting til the planes were built. Interviewer: “Okay. So you all basically flew your own planes over once you had a plane.” Yeah. Interviewer: “And then where were you flying to? Where was your base going to be?” Saipan. Interviewer: “Okay so the Mariana Islands, alright. And do you remember where you stopped on the way out?” (20:03) Honolulu and Kwajalein Interviewer: “Okay so you have to jump, refuel a couple times to get out to the Mariana Islands.” To refuel at one point, yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, now you get to Saipan and then—” What’s funny was, it was within our range but they didn’t trust us, you know but. Interviewer: “Okay so, then you get to Saipan and what kind of facilities did you have in Saipan, what was the base like?” �Erickson, Stanley Ten thousand, wooden for us, steel structure—tent structure. Oh, incidentally we got orders when we left Hawaii: shield word, you don’t know where you’re goin’, you take off but nobody’s supposed to know where we’re going so we landed in Kwajalein, stayed there over night and then go over to Saipan. At 6 o’clock, Tokyo Rose reads my name, rank and serial number. [unintelligible] A little unnerving to think that they knew exactly where you were. Well they set up a couple binoculars and they dropped you where they want, I guess. Interviewer: “Alright, welcome to the Marianas, now did you start flying missions right away or did that take a while? After you got to Saipan.” It didn’t take very long. I’m trying to think how long it… it was a few days in all. Interviewer: “Okay. And when you do start flying, where are you flying, what’s the mission?” (21:50) Anywhere in Japan, basically. Interviewer: “Okay.” Mostly the southern—that’s Industrial Japan, the southern half of it. The northern half is rice fields. Interviewer: “Alright. Now when you would go on these bombing missions, did you encounter Japanese fighter planes or anti-aircraft fire?” Yeah. Both at the time, to the greatest degrees imaginable. Interviewer: “And did your plane ever get hit?” A couple of times. �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “But not badly enough that you didn’t crash or had to crash land anywhere?” No, no no no. The last major repair [unintelligible] took up to more… 45 days to patch, 242 this side. 20 millimeters leave a nasty gap, which is what the Japs used—they didn’t have any 50s they had 20s. Interviewer: “Okay, so your plane did get hit pretty badly at one point.” Oh it sure as gosh did. Interviewer: “Okay, alright. And did you see any Japanese aircraft?” Quite frequently. (23:25) Interviewer: “Were they shooting down other planes in your squadron or in your group?” Yes and no, it depends on who's shooting who that day. They would attack us, we would… you knew where to fire, they’ve got a couple and they’re up here not right there. This side or other reasons. Interviewer: “Did you have fighter escorts?” After a while, not originally. They didn’t have any at first. Interviewer: “Now were you already flying missions when the battle was going on in Iwo Jima? Cause one of the reasons to take Iwo Jima was to use that as a fighter base.” Right. Interviewer: “So then they could give you escorts.” �Erickson, Stanley That’s right. Interviewer: “Okay. All right, but you were probably there pretty much from the beginning of the major bombing campaign against Japan cause that’s pretty much all ‘45.” Oh yeah, oh yeah. Interviewer: “All right. Then how many missions did you fly? 35. Interviewer: “Okay. And when did you fly your 35th mission? Did you keep flying until the end of the war or did they stop you after 35?” (24:50) No you stopped at 35. You were originally were supposed to fly 25, it kept getting stretched a wee bit as it went on. Interviewer: “Okay, Now did they do that because not enough of you were getting shot down?” They didn’t have replacements enough. Interviewer: “Oh, that too. Now did you have a sense that what you were doing was dangerous or did you not really expect to be hit?” I briefly said I was injured. Interviewer: “Now do you remember who your pilot was?” Yes, Ed Cutler. �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “And what did you think of him?” I was one man, an officer, and him. A good pilot. Interviewer: “And do you remember any of the other men in the crew?” Well I worked most closely with the Navigator, Don Julan. Back and forth, we kept marks on each other: I knew where he was and he knew how much gas I had. So if one of us is hit, the other had the basic information. In fact I kept in touch with him till well after the war. Interviewer: “All right. And did you have much of a sense of how the larger war was going? Did you think this was gonna go on forever or did you think sooner or later the Japanese had to give up?” (26:40) Well they would have had to, but thank God they didn’t have to. When we’re flying and when [unintelligible] we took fire paper and started burning the rice fields just before harvest. What were you gonna do if the paddies burned all their rice? What would you do? How would you have fed them? Thank goodness we didn’t, we finally had succeeded. Interviewer: “So burning the rice fields, is that the next thing you would have done?” That would have been the next—yeah. In fact our plan was already [unintelligible], the day before they scrubbed it. Interviewer: “Okay. So it sounds like you were still flying until the end of the war, and they didn’t stop you after… Did you get to 35 missions and then August or right at the end of the war? Or had they already stopped you from flying?” What day did I got my 35th… it was in the summer some time. �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “Yup. Cause you were talking about what the next mission was going to be, and that was sounding like you were still gonna fly.” Well we were. At that point we were still flying. Interviewer: “Okay. Alright, and do you remember hearing about the atomic bomb?” Oh yeah. Oh yeah, very much so. Very much, I knew. Interviewer: “And when that news came did you know what it meant? What it meant? Interviewer: “Yeah.” Oh yeah, yeah. Definitely. (28:30) Interviewer: “Did you think that was gonna end the war?” No. Interviewer: “It was just a bigger bomb.” It was just a bigger bomb, the Japanese would just fight harder. Interviewer: “But instead the Japanese surrendered.” Yeah. Interviewer: “All right. Do you remember when the news came about the Japanese surrendering?” �Erickson, Stanley Oh yeah. Interviewer: “And what kind of reaction was there on Saipan?” Well first of all, the other way, that means starving just as many Japs. There’s no way to feed them. Interviewer: “Okay but I guess I was asking once the Japanese did surrender then what was the reaction where you were, when you learned that news?” It was about time. Interviewer: “And how long did you stay on Saipan after the Japanese surrendered?” I don’t even remember the dates now. Yes, quite awhile, but I don’t remember the time. (30:25) Interviewer: “Okay, so you were just kinda stuck there and did they fly any of the B-29s up to Japan after the war was over for transport or anything else?” Oh we used them for transport yeah. Interviewer: “Okay and so did you fly to Japan yourself or no?” No. I’d been there enough. Interviewer: “Okay. All right, now at this point did you plan to stay in the military after the war or were you gonna go back home to civilian life?” No, I was gonna get out. Interesting, one Commander—[unintelligible] was well gosh the military life is pretty nice, when I get back home I’ll stay in the service. Let me tell you �Erickson, Stanley something: I wear a star here to run this place, but here on my uniform are two stripes. That’s my permanent rank when I go back: Officer. I start there. So, everybody’s on call. Nobody’s—I don’t think anybody’s [unintelligible] to say that. Interviewer: “Okay. So after the war what did you do? You come home and then what? Did you go back to Chicago or did you go somewhere else?” No I came back to Chicago, built a little basement apartment, built in return for a two-years rent so. Interviewer: “Okay.” (32:14) I got nothing else to do, so I’ll do that. I’ve been going to the North Park college in the neighborhood so I went back there for a while, then I went to Northwestern. Interviewer: “And what did you study at Northwestern?” Automatic control it was basically. Interviewer: “Okay, so kinda electrical engineering sorts of things?” Oh yeah, yeah. Interviewer: “Okay. All right and then did you go get a job in that field?” Yes. So I went out to work for Honeywell. Had some interesting projects for them. Interviewer: “Now did you stay in the International Guard at that time, or did you join the International Guard?” Why did I join that? �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “Had you been in the Reserves when you got out?” I served—I was in France and National Guard. Interviewer: “Right. I guess the question was—” When I came back from there I was separated from the National Guard temporarily. Interviewer: “Okay. So I guess, I think earlier before we started running camera you told me that you joined the International Guard because you didn’t want to go to Korea.” That’s right. (33:54) Interviewer: “So the Korean war started and you were afraid you were gonna be called back? Oh yeah, definitely. We couldn’t retire cause they wouldn’t accept our resignation, wouldn’t do anything. Interviewer: “Okay. So you still had a Reserve commission at that point?” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, there we go. So you’re still officially a Reserve Officer, they can call you if they want you.” That’s right. Interviewer: “And so you join the International Guard to get around that.” �Erickson, Stanley That’s right. Interviewer: “Okay. So tell me about France: what were you doing in France?” Locating dependent housing. Not an obvious career for that but that was something they needed, so I did that for quite awhile. Interviewer: “Okay.” Only there wasn’t any housing, that was the trouble. And you’d relocate—you had access to three or four places but they were from backyard farm houses to basement apartments in the city and… you tell the guys in advance, and note to the web, “This is all we’ve got, there ain’t any more.” Well they didn’t believe it, they came over anyways and went “Well, where’s the housing?” There it is. I didn’t like that too well. They were led to believe they were gonna get more than they got, or they convinced themselves that they were gonna get more. (35:30) Interviewer: “Do you remember how long you spent doing that? Was that just a year or?” About a year. Interviewer: “Okay.” Oh and the other thing was buying nails. Everywhere I went, every time we went to a hardware store we bought all the nails they had. For some reason Americans couldn’t make nails, and you needed nails. Well… goodbye. Ten kilos here, five kilos there, what the price? Doesn’t matter? Give us nails, papers, whatever you’ve got. They’re pricey where we’re from! Interviewer: “Were you doing that in France?” Yeah. �Erickson, Stanley Interviewer: “Okay. All right, I guess we were building a lot of things there and didn’t have enough supplies.” Right. Interviewer: “All right. So when you got back from France did you get out of the International Guard or did you stay in for a while?” I stayed in for a while. (36:52) Interviewer: “All right. Now if you think back to the time that you spent in the service, are there other stories or other memories that you’ve got that you haven’t talked about yet?” …No, not really. Interviewer: “Okay. You’ll remember after I finish.” Oh yeah, no, I’ll think over it. Interviewer: “Yeah.” Ask me an hour from now. Interviewer: “Okay, Well that’s sort of how this works. But in the meantime you actually have given us some pretty interesting material so I’d like to thank you for taking the time to share this story today.” � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EricksonS2163V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Erickson, Stanley Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-10 Title A name given to the resource Erickson, Stanley (Interview transcript and video), 2017 Description An account of the resource Stanley Erickson was born in Harris, Minnesota in 1919 and after high school worked his way through college as a painter in Chicago. Erickson was drafted into active duty in 1943 and went to Boca Raton, Florida for basic training and then went to a tech school in New Haven, Connecticut, where he trained to be an aircraft mechanic and was commissioned to be a flight engineering officer. After tech school, Erickson went to the Boeing School in Seattle where he learned to work on B-29s before briefly being sent to Kansas to continue his training. In 1945 Erickson left for Saipan, Japan and flew 35 missions while he was there, lasting until the end of the war. After the war Erickson joined the International Guard and served in France for a year before returning to Chicago to attend Northwestern and study and work in automatic control. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Lest We Forget Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/3596fd846b6a5d7d4b030d561945e9f9.mp4 8eb9f7f8747a368b2c92b64aefc8603c https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a506421f7ca8be0b831986a0760321a9.pdf 54b11677847c4ffbc692de2d439bb7da PDF Text Text Ellis, Roger Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Vietnam War Interviewee’s Name: Roger Ellis Length of Interview: (1:25:13) Interviewed by: Frank Boring Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman I’m Roger Ellis, I was born in Chicago, Illinois on the 18th of May in 1943. Interviewer: “What was your early childhood like in Chicago?” It was great until my dad passed away, that was when I was about nine years old. We grew up in a suburb there which was upscale I guess, river side, and a very nice neighborhood. Post war first thing I ever remember watching on T.V was the explosion at the nuclear bomb out in the Pacific, and of course that wasn’t until after World War II immediately after, and I guess you’d say it was pretty normal upbringing. I went through parochial schools there, and I was a fairly normal average kid I’d guess you say, nothing special to report there Mom and Dad and I only had one brother, older brother and we just lived a perfectly happy typical American life I guess. Interviewer: “What was high school like?” (1:43) Well, high school I experienced in California after my dad passed, my mom bundled my brother and me off and moved to California where she always wanted to live. So we ended up in a place called San Jose, California, and that’s- I finished school there, elementary you know, and then went right into prep school. I went to Bellarmine, that's a Jesuit prep school, for four years. The Jesuits beat the hell outta me cause they were pretty tough and pretty rigorous, rigor at that time spelling fists which I think no longer applies. So I learned classical Greek and Latin for four years, theology as well as all kinds of physics and chemistry, the literature and all that good stuff. Enjoyed it, I really did, a great bunch of friends I had and it was really nice, no problems at all I �Ellis, Roger loved it. My brother had a hard time, he went through Bellarmine too but he didn’t do as well as I did, he was always the athlete type, I always liked stuff like studies, and reading, and history, and literature, all that. So I didn’t mind it, I really kind of took to academics with them which please the Jesuits to no end you know. They kind of left me alone, except once in a while I gothow shall I say, naughty and since I was one of the smart ones when I got naughty they would have me push a penny with my nose around the cinder track out by the field house. The athletes when they got naughty they’d have to memorize 30 or 40 lines of Shakespeare right. So I got the cinder track nose but you know it was nothing, and back then of course there were no problems with drugs, with alcohol you know, and I never had a car in high school and I never was running around you know and that sort of thing. It was a whole different world as you probably remember back in the late 50’s and until the early 60’s when I started college. Interviewer: “Did you have any idea in high school what it is, cause you’re always being asked by teachers and what not what it is you’re going to do when you grow up. What were the kind of things you were interested in, that you thought you were going to be doing after high school so to speak? Go to college, become something else, what?” (4:23) I had two things I wanted to do more than anything, one was to be a writer, and the other was to join the foreign service. Most immediately I started as a writer, I was always good with writing so I wrote a whole bunch of short stories and things of that sort, but by the time I graduated I wanted to go onto college. It was not a question in my mind, and that would be somewhere back east I wanted one of the big ten I thought. So that I thought would help me because I liked, as I said, the notion of being overseas, traveling overseas, and I thought well foreign service sounds pretty good and I saw- I pursued that at the end of high school, as far as careers go that’s the main thing I was setting my sights on so when I got to college I chose a major in- I wanted to major in theater but the college I eventually chose they didn’t have that so I went to English, specialize in dramatic literature and that sort of thing. Interviewer: “And were you aware of what was going on in the world around that time? We’re talking about the early 60’s now that you were going to college?” �Ellis, Roger Yeah. yeah I mean I was aware, at that time I wasn’t aware of too many political things there was no, Vietnam conflict hadn’t started up yet, that didn’t start until Kennedy started heating things up. In fact when I started college I thought “Gee, it might be really fun to be an officer” you know, so at that time the university had these highly developed ROTC programs. So I went away, my first year went down to the University of Notre Dame down in Indiana and I thought “I’ll be a naval officer” just like all those movies I’d seen about World War II. It was a time when after World War II, Hollywood was cranking out a lot about everything that happened in World War II. So I thought it’d be great, I love to sail, I wasn’t very much in favor of walking around the world in the infantry and flying. So there I was, I enrolled in the naval ROTC, but then after I transferred from Notre Dame to another university the only ROTC program there was Army. So I continued in that for a year before I began to realize what the problems were around the world and especially Vietnam was starting to heat up then, I think that was about 1961, ‘62, ‘63, and then I lost interest in that and finished out my university years as an undergraduate getting more and more radicalized, and then of course that was the same time I became even more aware of the counterculture that was the early going into the mid 60’s. And through music, through pop arts, you know bands like the Beatles and others, I became aware of not just music but the social protest, the social issue. Things were heating up against the war in Asia, so that’s when I started down the road of being a lot more critical about like the war involvement and as you say becoming more and more aware of things around me. Interviewer: “Do you remember- Do you have any memory of the day Kennedy was shot?” (8:24) Yeah, I was studying overseas then, that was one of the reasons I left Notre Dame they didn’t allow any foreign studies and I knew I wanted to go overseas somewhere, so by that time- What was that ‘63? I was- spent a year in Rome the University of Loyola so I was, at that time I was in Paris on a vacation from school with my buddies there and I remember we were standing on a subway platform, metro, in Paris and a couple of French men came up and said “Hey you know your president’s just been assassinated.” I didn’t know nothing you know until we looked at a newspaper and realized, that’s how I learned about that. �Ellis, Roger Interviewer: “What was the reaction around you by the Parisians?” I don’t know, at that time I wasn’t speaking a whole heck of a lot of French, and I didn’t- I had no experience of what that meant to lose a president in mid term. I mean I hadn’t been aware of anything when FDR passed and Truman took over, but this one was pretty serious. I knew everyone thought they’re uptight and all this sort of thing, aside from that intellectual knowledge I didn’t feel anything. It wasn't any sort of anger, resentment or desire for vengeance or anything you know it was just a kind of shock. It was sort of my first big introduction to politics. Interviewer: “Yeah I was in Catholic school and like you I didn’t have any sense of- It’s the president okay I kind of get that part, but then when they had the high mass I mean it was just a huge thing.” (10:14) Oh yeah, cause he was a Catholic president we knew that but it didn’t really affect me. I was starting to get very critical of all the things the United States was involved in but- and then of course the president was assassinated following him the Southeast Asia theater started heating up. So it wasn’t really until after I graduated, about my senior year, that it became serious. Interviewer: “What did you graduate with, what was your B.A?” My B.A was in English and they called it dramatic literature. Interviewer: “So once you return back to the states, two questions: one- Returned? Interviewer: “Returned to the states.” After the Vietnam experience? Interviewer: “No, no, no, this is after you got back from Paris.” �Ellis, Roger Oh yeah, right. Interviewer: “Yeah okay so you return from back- now you’ve graduated and returned back to the states right? What were your immediate plans and then how did those plans get interfered?” (11:15) Well I wanted to keep involved with theater studies, especially theater performance, so I chose to stay at the University of Santa Clara. That’s where I earned my bachelor’s and decided to go to a master’s program in dramatic lit there which would allow me to work with some really creative people in the theater program, do plays, write plays, and do that. So I did that for two years and they wooed me by offering me a teaching assistantship for a couple years so I could actually earn money teaching in the English department, and go to school at the same time, and come out with a degree in theater. Which sounded great and that’s where I started to think “Well you know, I would kind of like that.” because in my senior year I had applied to Georgetown for the foreign service and they didn’t want me. So I figured “Ah well maybe I’m stupid.” or maybe I wasn’t groomed for this, not knowing of course that Georgetown raises all the foreign service officers to a large extent, you know if you didn’t have family connections that’s how you would- But they didn’t want a good guy from Santa Clara and all that way out west so, but as I said I was thinking “Hmm well that was a great disappointment.” and meanwhile my mother was working on me and got all her Jesuit friends working on me, “You don’t wanna go in the foreign service.” and “You don’t even want to go on to graduate school, what you want to do is you want to earn a lot of money. You want to be an attorney” You know you wanted to be a surgeon and I couldn’t see myself there because I had no head for chemistry or mathematics, all that scientific stuff the doctors did. So I finally you know just settled in Santa Clara with a master’s degree and finishing that up and then my point at the end of graduate school was “Hey, I’ll go on to big time stuff, I’ll go to Berkeley and I’ll get my doctorate in dramatic arts.” They’ve got a heck of a program up there. So that’s what I did was I applied, I was accepted and that’s when the draft caught me, and so- prior to that though was ‘67 when I was finished with my master and just ready to head out to Berkeley. By ‘67 the Vietnam conflict was really getting really stinking and there were protests all over and then as I became more politically aware as a graduate student I joined the protests, �Ellis, Roger and so it came as no great surprise that the draft would eventually enter my horizons, which it did, and it was peculiar because the friends I graduated with, from you know the university there, they all were left alone by the draft but for some reason they wouldn’t leave me alone. I think it was a lot because of my radical activity, I was involved in protests, marches there at the university and stuff like that. So anyhow I waited and tried to get free of it for a year and argued with them but that was no good. Finally I was faced with prison or the military so I said “Okay, time to, you know, go along with the United States Army.” So I did. That’s how I got in, there was additional radicalization, radical activities, after the Vietnam series but that’s how I was sort of prepared. I entered the military then in 1968, late ‘67, ‘68. Really critical of what the military was doing and so, although I took to basic training and learned a lot of skills there, at the same time I didn’t really want to be gung-ho and participate. At that point my mother would say “Oh you want to be an officer of course you do. You’ve got this college education, you’re perfect officer material.” but I didn’t want to go for that. It would’ve been extra time on my part and it would’ve meant taking a lot of responsibility for stuff that I thought was really pretty questionable, cause I had heard a lot of the horror stories coming out and all this and I don’t know that I would want to assume a leadership position once I got in the military. So I went in as a private E1, lowest on the totem pole and that’s where I started my basic training early ‘67 late ‘68. [actually late 68-early 69] Interviewer: “Where was the basic training and what was your early experience like? Walk us through getting there.” (16:28) Well it was awful, it was up in Fort Lewis, Washington, so after you know the usual, drop your shorts and bend over and get your medical stuff in Oakland, they shipped me up to Washington, and there I was at Fort Lewis and it was winter. Which was the worst time of Washington to go through basic training because it was cold, it was rainy and sometimes you’d get snow. So I had my eight weeks of basic training and another eight weeks of advanced infantry training, and we would be, you know, crawling through the mud and the rain and camping out in the woods up there freezing, and meanwhile learning a lot of the military skills. You know how to handle all the weapons, learning the military history, code of justice, you know and doing all the stuff that people do in boot camp you know. Where you peel potatoes for a while, you handle the garbage �Ellis, Roger truck, all kinds of different things you know, wax the floors of where you’re living and make sure your boots are spit-shined and all of that. It was bad you know but it was just- I didn’t mind the physical, it’s pretty rigorous you know, but it was something very new cause I had never closely associated with a lot of the people who were being drafted at the time, and you know I was- I come from an upper middle class family, I had all this elitist education for gosh sakes and suddenly there I was living around a group of folks who, for the most part, I’d say 80% of had never been to college in the inside of a classroom, and secondly they came from all over the country. We had hillbillies there, we had people from Florida, space cadets, California kids, it was you know way up in the boonies of the Dakota’s and all, and they were all young. You know in fact I was the oldest one there by the time I reached Vietnam I was like- the draft got me at 25 years old, so I was almost out of it but like I said they didn’t want to let me go I guess. Anyhow there I was, so I was older than these 18 year olds you know by about seven years, and so I mean I made friends there but you know that wasn’t part of the nonsense that 18 and 19 year olds always go through, that sort of stuff. So it was kind of alienating in that sense socially, but at the same time I- the Fort Lewis is like any other Army camp. It’s all nicely manicured, it’s sort of like middle class America with like little roads etc, and of course you do things like marching all over the place, and running, and that stuff, but up until I left for Vietnam it was a normal part of American life I would say. Except that it was uniquely devoted to training for military etc so. Interviewer: “So while you were on- during basic training did you have very much outside access to the radio, television?” (19:53) All the time, we had plenty of that, yeah. Interviewer: “So you knew things were really getting bad over there?” Things were heating up and I thought “Hmmm well I don’t have much control over where I’m going.” It was up to the gods of somewhere, the war department maybe, of where they’d sent me, and I knew we had bases overseas like I said I’d spent a year in Italy, I knew we had air bases in Italy. The fleet had come in and partied down in Naples, you know all over Germany and all of Europe was still a lot of American military bases. On the other hand there was Asia which was �Ellis, Roger getting to be a shooting war and getting much, much worse so I didn’t know where and you know, you don’t have any control over that, so yeah. Interviewer: “So when did you find out you were going somewhere?” Well at the end of basic training you get your marching orders and mine said “Okay! You’re gonna go to Asia now.” and even then I thought “Okay, the jungle is it.” I thought. Asia, I’d never been to Asia and all, the only thing I knew about Asia was some of the war movies from World War II, like I guess there’s a lot of jungle over there I don’t know, that certainly wasn’t desert, no it certainly- Wasn’t any cities, you know you see movies about Europe in World War II and stuff like that butInterviewer: “It certainly wasn’t like your training in Washington either.” (21:16) Like what? Interviewer: “Your training in Washington in the snow, and the woods, and all that.” No, no the weather was a big shocker when I got there, so okay over I went, and again I didn’t have much choice you know? Interviewer: “So where did you end up going?” Where did I end up going? They flew me to Saigon, they flew me- The air base there was Bien Hoa the big air base, and from there they put me in in-country training, as they called it, for a couple weeks so you got used to what to do about finding cobras in the jungle and keeping wounds clean, you know you’d cut yourself with a knife or something, and all the special equipment you had to know and then they assigned me to an infantry unit that was working out of Bien Hoa, and of couse we have a big air base there and it was all- That’s the flatlands of Vietnam, and we go out in the boonies and just largely secure all the area around. There were no big campaigns at that time in the southern part of the country, I got there at a time called �Ellis, Roger Hamburger Hill, which was taking place at another location in-country, and the horror stories coming out of there were pretty bad they even made films of that sort of thing but when I got in it was at the peak and starting to wind down. So I never got assigned to that fortunately because new people who come in and get thrown right into a meat grinder like that are the ones that were likely to be the first killed. It’s the people who knew what to do who’d been there a while were the ones who tended to survive. Fortunately while that was going on I didn’t have to be part of that and I stayed in the southern area of Bien Hoa for about two to three months as an infantryman, light weapons infantryman they called me. So that’s what I did, we’d just go out on foot patrols and then we’d come back, and it was mostly just boring. You spent most your time sitting around waiting for something to happen and in between the time you’re out in the field and not working in the base came, you know cleaning weapons, filling sandbags, all kinds of stuff, you were sitting around reading books, listening to the radio or the Armed Forces Network “Good morning Vietnam!” You know they always had that going on Interviewer: “Did you actually hear them?” (23:50) Oh yeah Interviewer: “Yeah, I did too.” We never got any stateside programs though, radio or T.V, they’d show the movies outside you know, we’d get those somewhat late, and of course the music coming in was always current. So we had the Beatles and the Stone and Country Joe and the Fish and all that you know, and we’d be sleeping in hooches as they called it, or in my case bunkers a lot of the time. Kind of cut off from things, but it wasn’t bad because one thing the Army learned was that if you wanted to keep up morale you fed people pretty regularly, you gave them enough down time, and you provide them with showers so you wouldn’t be living out in the field all the time you came back to a base came and the Corps of Engineers had tried to build up the base camps with a certain amount of civilized infrastructure, you had showers there, occasionally you had a mess hall. At least one hot meal a day, that sort of thing, and that’s when I would say one of the shockers, and not just the locale, but was the army that was in Vietnam, I mentioned when we in- up around Seattle and �Ellis, Roger Fort Lewis, I was exposed to a whole group of people I’d never been around before. When I got over to Vietnam I was exposed to an even more diverse group and there, that’s where I encountered people with hardly any education whatsoever. At that time, as you probably know, they were dragging the real bottom feeders of our society as much as possible. So who’s number would come up? Well that was the people of color, the kids off the street, and a lot of people who’d be in trouble with the law, which was serve time or head over to Vietnam and that was interesting because our top sergeant of my unit it was said that he was either going to life in prison from Louisiana or join the Army and become a top sergeant, and of course he chose to become a top sergeant, who wouldn’t? So that was a whole bunch of strange people, as well as a few people like me who had come through the system, somehow got snagged up in that, more or less educated and, you know but it was quite a contrast. It was a real challenge too because you had to merge, you know blend with those people if you were gonna be a military unit and I realized that pretty well because, you know you had to rely on the person next to you or behind you when things got difficult. So, but it was hard, it wasn't easy and of course I was always kind of suspect cause I was one of those elitist kids, “What are you doing here?” You know that sort of thing, but hey I was serving my time and counting my days just as much as the guy next to me so. Interviewer: “What were some of the incidents that caused you to realize that these guys maybe come from backgrounds that were…Well obviously different than yours, but some of these people may have been dangerous?” (27:25) Yeah, yeah very dangerous. Well soon as I got there the first incident, if you want, was the notion of looking out around the- where we, our base area was, all the times seeing about 30 or 40 people standing over there by the field and they’re all pretty well full armed, you know you carry a weapon everywhere, and they were mostly people of color and you know I would ask “Well what are they all doing out there?” and they were all smoking dope. You know it was opium or marijuana and the MP wouldn’t touch them, I mean you had people there who were, I mean I would wander over once and a while and see what’s going on have a smoke myself, and some of these guys were like really very strange guys and like I said they were all armed to the teeth, so the M.P’s would never touch them. If they wanted to go out in the field and get high, �Ellis, Roger okay let them do that, and you know if they cause any more trouble we’ll get them but when there’s 30 or 40 of them you’re not gonna send a bunch of M.P’s into stuff. So that was the first thing and like I said some of those guys were looking really heavy. We would also come into contact with a lot of veterans who’d been there in the field, and they had come back too, and they didn’t have much respect for anything. I mean they would wear their uniforms because you know you have to wear camo in the jungle you don’t- so you wouldn’t be seen very much, but they were pretty rancid you know, pretty raggedy. You know half the time they wouldn’t even salute because they’d been out there, and they’d come back, and they’d just be back long enough to you know get some hot chow, you know relax, and then they’d go out and they knew what they were going to. We hadn’t really done that, I mean these were the guys who they would air lift out there, they’d go on helicopters and they go way behind. I mean we’d only go out maybe five, six miles around the immediate Bien Hoa area, these guys would go 20,30,40 miles and be part of an assault force, and so they would see a heck of a lot more action then we did. For the first two or three months I was there in that role of infantry and those guys had a lot of horror stories that you couldn’t believe, but obviously they were true so you came around to believe them.” Interviewer: “What’s an example?” (30:05) Well there were stories of- the biggest horror story was a horror story that depicted your position being over run by the enemy, at which point you began to realize that yeah those things happen, and when your position got over run then it was every man for himself and usually this would occur at night, and it was hand to hand and it was not fun at all, and at times you heard that if a situation got so bad with a position they would call in air strikes, their own air strikes on the position and wipe everybody out. So I was, you know you’d say “Okay God help me if I ever get into that situation again” so that was one kind of thing. The other horror story was stories of, some of these guys who’d been out there you know longer than we had since we were relatively new in country, they would report doing things to civilians I mean sometimes they had to burn entire villages that were sympathetic to the Viet cause there was no way could separate the people, just took them out, threw them in a stockade somewhere and burned the whole village, and they would talk about- Some of them were, some of them quite honestly I thought were psychopaths. You know they would talk about torturing people to get information and stuff like �Ellis, Roger that, obviously I had never any experience with that and never any experience with civilian atrocities or what we now call collateral damage, “Well we gotta bomb this thing and geez we took out a school too.” or a hospital or whatever. That had never been part of my universe as a civilian growing up in the states I mean that, Hollywood never had any of that stuff shown and so my notion of the good, and pure, and noble, and all that aspect to the American military started to get very tarnished as I met these guys and they started talking about what went down out there, and they- but they did sober us up a lot, not so much say “Well we’re gonna be sloppy and lack discipline ourselves.” You know, but rather these guys- One of the things that struck me was these guys had weapons all over them you know, they’d have two or three combat knives, they’d have pistols you know, they’d have your standard issue assault rifle but they’d also have shotguns and all kinds of things and you know 40 pounds of grenades and different things strapped to their body. I’m thinking “Well, okay.” so that gradually as I went out more and more patrols I’d take more of that stuff with me because you never knew what would happen you know. We’d go walking through these villages where there were people all the time, I mean you never know who was inside you didn’t search every grass shack or whatever where these people live. More commonly we’d be walking along in the open cause around by Bien Hoa it’s all flat, it’s mostly a lot of rice paddy, and so you’d be walking along rice paddies and what they called little berms that divided up the paddies in the square plot and, there’d be people working out there but you’d heard the stories. (33:57) You know as soon as you pass by these simple harmless peasants who’d smile and wave at you, women and men, you’d go by and then they’d reach into the mud and pull out their assault rifle in a plastic bag and attack you from- You never knew, so I guess I just got a lot more wary, a lot more suspicious the more we went on patrol, but at that time, this was getting to be about 1968-69 they, I’d say the enemy were pretty cautious they limited, at least around where I was, they limited their attacks to night. So there are times when we would have to go out on night perimeter guard, and that continued after I got shifted out of a combat role where we went out looking for trouble, to assignment within the administrative core. Still with the infantry but you know now I was in charge of, I was put in charge of about four or five other clerks who were devoted to reporting, and that was another eye opener. I thought, before that happened, “Well, God help me I hope the bullet hasn’t been made with my name on it.” because a lot was up to chance, I mean I could dodge and duck like anybody else, but you never knew. So I wondered if I would actually make it through 12 months, �Ellis, Roger but then orders came down for me one days and sergeant said “Oh yeah you’re leaving here get your kit, take it back over to the new place.” I said “What for, what am I doing?” Says “Well you lucked out you’re gonna be administrative in the headquarters battalion.” I said “Okay.” so I went and that’s when I realized the perception of the war was a lot more important to the movers and shakers than the actual conduct of the war, and because my job was what they call a “morning report section” and in the morning report section the military got a morning report of every unit that they had in country, and that would show the number of people in your unit, the number of killed, the number of wounded, missing in action number, so they could get the numbers right, and they did this every day and we in the morning report section we typed these up, no more than three clerical errors to every form, and we had to get that information back down to Saigon to what's called Mac Five headquarters by four every afternoon. So that that could be telexed back to Arlington, and so every day they had an accurate report of how many men in the field and if they had too many they’d, you know, move an aircraft carrier out of the warzone and then say “Our numbers are down today.” you know and then they’d sail it back or whatever. So they knew who was wounded, who was not, and what the strength was of a field unit etc, and generally what was happening. So that’s what I was assigned to do for about another 11, 10, 11 months and that I was grateful for that. (37:25) They kept me at Bien Hoa for another four, five months and then they moved me up closer to the DMZ in a place called Phu Bai which was right by the DMZ, but that’s what I did. They were happy to have me because I had a, I guess you’d say a flair for paperwork, I had a master’s degree in English literature for God’s sake, but more than that I was a little bit older obviously, you know 25, 26, and I could supervise. I had some leadership there they put me in charge of three or four other clerks, young guys who also could type right and could take instruction and you know that was- So I guess you could say I ascended to a more cultivate certainly more educated class of people with job skills, skill sets than the ones out in the field, you know eating cockroaches any everything’s surviving and killing as many people as you can. So I- and so that’s what I did and that freed me up a little for doing a lot of other things. Although at night we also, we always had a full guard duty and there were, you know we were assaulted. A Charlie would be out there and then he’d try and get through your perimeter, you know cause we had helicopters there it was a full base, my particular section was in the adjutant general’s you know we were doing reports, but we were a huge base and there was a lot of firepower coming. So Charlie’d be coming you know, and so �Ellis, Roger we’d have to do perimeter stuff at night, which was the creepiest thing cause I never was one much for nights I always tended to get disoriented even in Washington and basic training that happens out on night maneuvers, and things like you know “Okay we’re gonna turn you loose now and let’s see how long it takes you to find your way back, here’s a compass.” God I would be lost in the Washington woods for God knows how long you know. So anyway I was no friend of night, I’d been out camping that’s nothing you know but now it was night and there’s people coming at you, now that’s a whole different thing. So it was quite a challenge at night, in the daytime things started to get more civilized cause yeah I had my duties, I had you know the stuff to take care of but usually we could knock out those morning reports by one o’clock or so and the rest of the day was all downtime. So I started developing other stuff I’d get some passes to go into Saigon, I would go out, I would teach orphans at one of the villages near the base, outside the wire, I would- I took up photography and learned, took a lot of photographs, you know learned how to use a dark room and so I had a lot of downtime and I wrote a lot there too. Of course at night you put it all down and you smeared your face with camouflage and got all the ammo you could carry and out you went. Sometimes you’d be out around the perimeter within a mile usually, other times- most of the time we were in bunker fortified positions waiting for bad guys to come through the wire you know. Anything outside the wire that was injun country. Interviewer: “Did you have any interactions with bad guys?” (40:58) Oh yes, we were assaulted several times and so there was that. They never got really close fortunately, I mean this was a big base so as soon as any trouble started you always had three or four helicopters in the air, and you always had all kinds tons of artillery support wherever anything was happening but nonetheless they’d come you know. Especially, the worst thing you always were afraid of was the one or two sneaking through, the guerillas you’d call them they were called sappers at the time and their main mission was to take about a 30 or 40 pound bag of explosives with them and spend three or four hours wiggling through the barbed wire. You know getting past the bunkers where the patrols were and finding your ammo dumps and your helicopters and blowing those up and that sort of thing. So we were out there watching for that every night, even when it sounded pretty peaceful you knew there were bad guys out there, and it was hard to tell cause you had you know mongeese out there running around, you had water �Ellis, Roger buffalo parading around, half the time people had opened fire on water buffalos and you know by the time the flares had come down from artillery say “Oh another water buffalo.” Okay better than Victor, Charlie, or something you know so, and there were times when there were ground assaults that we would have to- Yeah we were taking fire and we were giving fire back, but we always stopped them at the concertina wire somehow with one type of weapon or another, but the longer I stayed there by the time I got out in the 70’s it was winding down and big assaults on bases and the Vietcong and the N.V.A North Vietnamese Army they were concentrating their assaults in different ways. There were always you know those individuals, those individual assassins Warner and Ron, you’d go to Saigon for example there were always those VC on motorbikes coming around with pistols, find some G.I, shoot him up and roar off you know, but in terms of where I was stationed at the base we never had any big massive assaults by the time I got out of there, in 1970, early 1970. In fact it was alright because after finishing 12 months they said “Look, you wanna stay on for a couple more months then we’ll release you completely when you got out, otherwise you’ll have to go to army reserve meetings back in the states for two or three years.” Cause you know they wanted to keep you in country and get more work outta you so I ended up spending 14 and a half months there instead of a twelve month tour, and when I was done, I was done. No more duties to do, just benefits from military service, but I’m glad to get out. Interviewer: “So, try to give us an idea of what it felt like on the day you knew you were leaving finally.” (44:10) The day I was leaving- they would get you out of the base, whatever you were doing, about a week before to process you. You’d have to turn in your equipment, you have to get your health check, you’d have to, you know, get uniform, whatever, get to all your paperwork. God there’s always a lot of paperwork done, and they’d ship you to a holding place by the airfield, and at any one time there are about 500,000 guys just waiting for their plane. So that was your date of estimated returns from overseas service, when the plane became available you were told. So you were hanging out doing nothing for a week most- it was probably the most boring time I spent there just waiting for that airplane to reschedule. �Ellis, Roger Interviewer: “Did you talk to the other guys who were leaving?” I did, I don’t know what there wasInterviewer: “Anything to remember?” Nothing special, each of them were damn glad to get out. Interviewer: “[overlapping chatter]” I mean sure yeah, and all the way along even before that time the- probably the commonest subject of conversation was “How much time you got left?” You know and you could be either a long time you know, or you could be short time, real short time too, but the shorter time you had left in country the more nervous you got, you’re hoping “Oh I hope they don’t put me on this patrol.” or “Oh I hope I never go there again.” You know, you didn’t want to get shot in your last week or last two weeks in country that was awful, you know, but there was no particular subject of conversation about getting out on the day you got out. Except the talk was “Well what are you gonna do as soon as you get back?” and what about girlfriends right like “What happened-” “Oh well she’s no longer around.” you know or “I’m getting back to a girlfriend.” and they’d show you pictures and getting back to- get back to the world you know, no one ever knew what it would actually be like to get back to the world and that was another shock, or once it happened, but there was all the fantasy of “Oh I’m going back home, see my family, get back to my old job, well I’ll just find another girl. Boy when I see her I’m going up one side and down the other for running around with my friends.” You know, or whatever you know, just the thoughts already were kind of trying to envision what it would be like when I finally step back. (46:55) As for me I already had a plan of action because I was, like I said, I was accepted to graduate school just at the time they drafted me and I told the grad school I told Berkeley you know “Hey uncle Sam wants me can you put me on ice for a year and a half.” or whatever and they said “Sure, sure.” So I knew I was going back I’d probably, I would start the program at Berkeley in the fall and I had got out in, I think it was May or June so I you know, my path was pretty well defined. I had been married when I went in you know, which is another fun subject of conversation, so I was �Ellis, Roger going back to my wife. I’d seen her once on R&R and I was going back to a place I knew, and a program in the next couple years of grad school. I was back to the world again, I’d finally made it so in my case yeah, but at the same time it wasn’t anything you could talk about because like I say most of the enlisted men at that time they weren’t from my background, from my educational other stuff, so I wasn’t you know making a whole lot of friends and drinking buddies or anything like that, so yeah. Interviewer: “So what was the process of getting out?” Not much, they flew you back, I think it was a flying tiger and the liquor flowed on the plane, stewardesses were more than happy to, you know, cheer us up anyway they could. They landed, you got to choose where you wanted to go, now most of the time if you didn’t choose you’d go fly back and land in the same place that you flew out of the year before, so I went and chose to you know fly back to Chicago because that’s where my wife was living. So they dumped me in Chicago, that’s fine we got together and went out west again to where I was gonna go to school and see my family and all that good stuff but there was about, I would say no more than three or four days of processing. They just made sure your final papers were in order, you got your you know veterans card and all that stuff and then you were given a bit of parting cash and a bus ticket or something I guess and away you went and then that was it. Interviewer: “Was there any reaction, cause you hear stories about soldiers coming back from Vietnam-” (49:40) Well yeah that was a big one, that was a big shocker and I don’t think any of the guys I was with over there anticipated the disillusionment that would befall them when they got off because when I got off the plane there were protestors outside the airport and that was, you know 1970 and alland by then people were, you know, really getting violent and war protests all over the country so when these planes came back full of the veterans from the campaigns all those air ports there were people picketing, you know making fun of them, shouting nasty stuff, and there we were. Me, I’d come back with, even still, I had the notions in my head about World War II when they had ticker tape parades for the veterans, all the celebratory “Oh the victorious armies returned!” I �Ellis, Roger had not heard stories, I guess somehow military kept it from us I don’t know, but I wasn’t expecting all those people, you know, to be out there calling us murderers and all the rest so, and some of the guys I was with naturally they didn’t care they thought the protestors were wimpsOther “Okay, I’m just going back to be a normal person again.” In my face why, but there was a lot of that, yeah, and it was a lot of disillusion among the veterans who came back that they were greeted in such a way and I guess a lots been made of that since, there’s been a lot written about that. Interviewer: “So- but once you got out of your uniform they wouldn’t know you from-” (51:25) No they wouldn’t, especially after your hair grew back. Interviewer: “So you’re on your way to Berkley now with your wife, and you arrive in Berkley and what was Berkley like in 1970?” Well that was a cauldron of insurrection you might say, and especially with the- there were some anti war plays that they were staging also and every week there were protests and so it was like being subtly immersed in the counterculture, and the protest culture, and I confess you might say I fell victim to it, I felt very sympathetic to, I participated, and the main thing I wanted to do was, you know, do theater and do that but at the same time I was, you know, because I was a veteran and I was going to school on the G.I bill, you know, there was the, you know, I had kind of a foot in both camps. Not that I was sympathetic to the war but just that I felt really different from a lot of the protests, most of them had no military experience, and whenever there was a protest rally or march or something in San Francisco or Oakland or wherever, I’d be looking around for the grizzled guys, and they were always guys I don’t think there were any grizzled gals at that time. I guess there are now but back at that time there were no women in combat, they were all nurses. Interviewer: “Yeah they couldn’t draft them.” �Ellis, Roger No but there were volunteers over there the gals and they were in nursing for the most part. So I’d be looking at the ranks of all the protestors, and there’d be families as well as a lot of younger people, mostly younger people, but I’d be looking for the grizzled guys who look like they, you know, almost like hells angels but you could tell they were veterans because they’d be wearing parts of their uniforms, you know, like a camo hat or a uniform with the sleeves cut off, you know, and that sort of thing and just to see where they were coming from. So I didn’t feel kind of alone being a veteran but also in the protest march, there was a number of them, veterans that were just really unhappy with it looking to participate in that. Interviewer: “How did they react to you being a veteran?” (54:00) No problem they were veterans themselves, as long as you were in the march you were one of them, you know. I guess as a veteran I was a little more experienced, a little more savvy about what would happen when you were in a march because that was the time when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, and he was not hesitant at all to just send in National Guard at us and tear gas and all the rest the sheriff’s cars with tear gas. So, you know, when I could see that coming I knew I would wanna separate myself from where the action was which is something I probably learned over in Vietnam. So I didn’t get beat up, or walloped, or tossed in jail like a lot of the others did. Interviewer: “What was your attitude, here you are you didn’t want to go there to begin with, you realize actually- you come to realize that you didn’t really know why you were there and then you finally come home and you have something like the governor, Reagan, basically saying that you’re a horrible person and you should be proud to go out and do these. What was your attitude towards the government, so to speak, who was sending you there and then when you came back this is what they were treating you- this is how they were treating you.” Well at first I knew very much why we were there, as soon as I got drafted I was thinking. I started to learn all the different reasons why this might be so, you know. There was the old domino theory of “Oh well we can’t let Vietnam fall.” there was the patriotism theory, “We’re �Ellis, Roger doing this cause we never lost a war.” and then there- By the time I got out that all seemed pretty hollow and I was beginning to realize how crass it was, like for example when I was over in Vietnam, I noticed there was pretty much one or only two construction companies with contracts to do all the building and heavy lifting and all, and I’m think “Well why would just those construction companies get in this? Who’s-” and then I started asking “Who’s delivering all this oil?” It took fantastic amounts of oil, gasoline, aviation fuel to run that sort of thing and I’m thinking “Hmmm that’s probably getting to be expensive.” and of course while I was over there the notion was if you could, you know, drop a $5000 bomb on somebody that’s better than losing any life because you didn’t want to lose lives that always looked bad and so the amount of ammunition and ordinance that would, you know, blown up. Just that got to be, I got to realize that was a heck of a lot of money too, so I started to get more and more cynical about the economic underpinnings of the war and wondering who was benefiting by it. By the time I got back I started looking more into that, and of course lots had been done on that too. So when I did get back and, you know, there was all this, there was all this protests going on and all. I understood that whoever we were, we were protesting, we were going against the mainstream, and we were going against a really big mainstream and stopping the war was not very easy. (57:50) It took a number of years so, but I knew marches counted and I had no trouble benefitting from a lot of that as a veteran, like I said I got the G.I bill benefits. That’s fine I thought “Hey I’ve earned it.” If nothing else and so I wouldn’t say I was conflicted, I realized that I had participated in something because I had to, and now I had a choice that I could join in opposition with what looked to be millions of others and not just in the United States. So I knew this was a domestic conflict but I didn’t feel much personal conflict of that, it was just somebody from a different walk of life like a veteran protesting the veteran service and someone elseBecause a lot of people, as I said in these protest marches, were older, they were families, they may have had military service themselves and felt that the military had been betrayed and, you know, was doing terrible things now and that’s why they were in the protest. So in any case I was pretty much surrounded by fellow radicals like myself, so I didn’t worry too much about that. Interviewer: “As the war wound down, especially as the end of it was just a mess, did you have any thoughts about- I mean I remember seeing huge aircraft carriers where they were �Ellis, Roger just throwing helicopters off the side into the water. Of course the fall of Saigon, my father was actually part of the United Nations after he was out in that area, and we knew people who were actually walking up those stairs to get into the helicopter. What do those images do for you in particular or do they have any effect at all?” By that time they had no effect, that was about ‘73 and I understood everything that was happening. Yeah getting those people, the last ones, out of Saigon there was a big to-do about that, the helicopters landing on the embassy roof, the thousands of Vietnamese trying to grab on and get liberated, I understood where that was coming from.The Vietcong were not a bunch of nice people they weren’t going to be very fair when they took over, you knew there was going to be a lot of blood letting and people were just running for their lives wherever they could including trying to get into the American helicopters and other airplanes. That didn’t surprise me, the stuff of pushing airplanes off aircraft carriers well I understood that, you know, whatever could make the flight out of Saigon or wherever and get on an aircraft carrier, mostly helicopters, there were just too many of them you had to get rid of them, throw them over the side, and that was part of the overall waste which is something I began to see when I was over there. Like I said we were blowing off a lot of ammunition we- Any military base over there, it was incredible the amount of junk and garbage that had amassed by the time I got to see it, the war was going on five, six, seven years. There were barrels of Agent Orange that had been left there years ago leaking into the ground, there was all kinds of shipping containers, you know those things, trash heaps, immense stuff, and equipment, busted down equipment. (1:01:41) Trucks, tanks you name it, armored personnel carriers not to mention the weaponry around, you know, and you weren’t gonna take that with you. Especially at the end because everything came all at once at the end, relatively speaking, wasn’t like you could go in Kuwait and say “Okay we’re gonna gently wind down and get some of this stuff back.” No, we had a run from the enemy coming right into Saigon and running over anyway. We just left a lot of it. Interviewer: “Paid for by the tax dollars.” Oh yeah. �Ellis, Roger Interviewer: “That’s who made the money, that’s the people’s money that’s the thing.” Yeah it was the war material contractors right, the same way it is now, but it was true we left a lot of it behind and on our way out, and I was part of this too there were some things they knew they weren’t gonna leave and they weren’t gonna take with us so we just spiked them. We just, you know, burned them up, blew them up, burned them, whatever but when the very end came yeah it was just throw everything in the South China sea push it over, you know. Burn this down, explode everything, I could understand that yeah, tremendous waste not just of treasure but of blood, you know, that was the- That was even a worse thing he was shocked by the amount of dollars that had gone by the way but you stopped to think of the number of people killed. That was a lot of American lives, not to mention it was three or four times that amount of locals, I guess more or less civilians, there was that wasted you know, and on top of that were those who weren’t killed outright, who were suffering those war injuries. It’s like we have body counts of who’s dead in Afghanistan in this week, you know, but we never are aware of- Thousands of people who’ve lost their limbs or are just completely screwed up from combat, from our wars in the mideast now. (1:03:50) It was the same way then, I mean you had something like 50,000 service men, you know, who were killed but you probably had up to three quarters or a whole million of them who were suffering injuries, and many of them still suffering, you know now, the wounded and the cared for without a great veterans administration to take care of them. Interviewer: “Yeah that’s part of the project I’m involved with now is the aftermath of, not just here but also Vietnam.” Well you know I had seen the waste, a lot of people know the numbers but when you see the waste it’s something else and it’s just something you learn to live with. Hey, I had a ‘49 Ford I used to love to drive around but it got rusted out and had to go, and anyway there was nothing you could do about it you know. Sure, shove the plane off in the sea, that's it. Interviewer: “About a year ago, I have AAA, and so- for my car, and I get a AAA magazine.” �Ellis, Roger Okay. Interviewer: “And although I didn’t have to go to Vietnam, I think you and I have talked about this. I came that close, in ‘72 to the draft board and was told “Go home kid it’s all over with.” One of the lucky ones my birthdate just happened to coincide with [unintelligible] but I have to admit when I got this magazine in the mail it had a profound impact on me, and I’m sure it would have a bigger impact on somebody who was there, but the cover of this AAA was the joys of going to Saigon, this magazine-” When? After the war you mean? Interviewer: “I’m talking about a year ago, a year ago in the mail-” (1:05:38) 2016? Interviewer: “Yeah, I get the front cover of the AAA magazine which has-” Really post-war. Interviewer: “There’s obviously, you know, the joys of Paris one month, another month is go to- And this one was literally devoted to why you should go to Vietnam, and it had a profound effect on my because I looked at it and I thought all those lives and even the homeless people still wandering around and now after all these years, I can pay a couple thousand dollars, get on an airplane and go there. So what was the point of doing all that to begin with? I guess this was my reaction.” Well you want an answer? There’s no answer. I mean it is what it is, you know if history is a river Frank there’s a hell of a lot of blood gone under that bridge and seeps and just flows away, but at the same time you and I both know there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from the Vietnam experience or the Desert Storm experience or a lot of experiences They’re still making war movies about World War II, and they will continue to do so about Vietnam and Afghanistan and �Ellis, Roger Osama Bin Laden and the rest. War is a seductive and fascinating subject. Interviewer: “But the thing that bothers me Roger is, and I think your description of this river of blood, is the one sitting on the side that never had to experience that, they’re making the money out of that blood. They’re sitting back in their mansions and traveling in their private jets because they’re the ones selling the airplane, and selling the bombs, and selling the materials and chemicals that go into those bomb. They watch that river of blood go by and it just doesn’t seem to affect them at all.” You don’t want to waste your time on finger pointing, I mean you might point your finger at that arms broker if you want, but you might also point your finger at the guys who go and torture civilians for the hell of it because they knew they could get away from it and so who’s responsible for that. One thing I realized is that the war never made monsters of anybody, the war just allowed people to come out. Whatever was in them it would go to the surface. (1:08:03) If you were a good person to begin with you could remain a good person, you might even have some good influence I don’t know. Maybe I did some good with all these Vietnamese kids I was teaching there at the orphanage, what a trip that was. I don’t know but it gave me the opportunity to do that, and I think even the most violent and depraved people, that they had that in their nature before they came, it just- A lot of these young people 18, 19 year old were, like I said some were psychopathic, others were just completely amoral, and you get a person like that and give them an assault weapon and there’s no law around them. They’ll do their job and they’ll do more if they get a chance and you gonna point a finger at the war for doing that or you’re gonna point a finger at them or the person who made that rifle or…There’s enough guilt to go around if you want to do that, yeah somehow you learned to live with that. Interviewer: “I think we’d stop there except I have one other question. This is the big difference between, not difference but there’s something you said to me that just really struck me, my eagle scouts project, and you know what an eagle scout project is-” Oh yeah. �Ellis, Roger Interviewer: “Was raising funds for an orphanage in Taipei, but all I had to do was gather together a bunch of stubs, sell it, and then be able to donate to the orphanage, and I felt pretty good about it and that’s what got me my eagle medal. Tell me about your experience with the orphanage in Vietnam?” This was about three miles outside the base, outside the wire, engine country. Was all girls, it was like I’d say 11, 12 years old up to maybe 15, 16. It was a hangover from French days, the French had long been gone and now the Yanks kind of protected it, but you never knew out there. None of them spoke English but the top Sergeant the guy who, you know, from Louisiana and decided- He got the request for someone to help the orphanage out and his staff noticed I had French in my background so he said to me “Listen I want you to go out and they need a teach there they want to learn English.” I said “Well okay.” So he gave me a driver and a jeep, and three days a week I’d go out to this orphanage. It was a really unusual experience trying to teach English with someone only with school boy French and I’d have an assault rifle with me at all times in the classroom. I’d be lucky if I could find some chalk out there and we could do this, so I did that for about three or four months and those kids were great but they didn’t have anything. I remember once I got a trip organized, I don’t know why top sergeant let me do it but he said “Okay I’ll give you an effing bus.” you know. So I put all those kids on a bus and I went to Saigon to the zoo. (1:11:56) Well they’d never seen Saigon, they’d never seen a zoo, we spent the day at the Saigon Zoo, you know, and they were- It was run by some nuns, I don’t know what order they were, but they came along as, you know, chaperones to get the kids around “Kathy had ice cream! Oh look there’s an elephant!” you know, all this stuff. So that was fun too but I was just teaching them out there, three afternoons a week out in the orphanage until the V.C over ran that, I understand- Well I didn’t see it but I understood- Well we had to stop going out there because the place had been blown up, a lot of the girls had been shot up, orphans were killed and so end of teaching at the orphanage, but although I still have photographs of a lot of those young kids, you know, hanging around. I didn’t mind that cause, you know, I had been like a teaching assistant before I went in. I’d probably by that time, you know by the time I got out of the Army I’d end up being a teacher as I have been. So teaching is teaching, away I went it was kind of unusual trying to teach English [Speaking French] you know, with a machine gun over your shoulder all the time you’re teaching. You know they were very nice they’d bring me in and �Ellis, Roger give me tea afterwards, you know, and then we’d drive in the jeep back, you know I never knew when the road would blow up from a mine under us, fortunately it never did, but for three months that was really- I’ve never forgotten that, that’s a great experience, but I don’t know what eventual good it did and how many of those kids are still alive whatever happened to them. So it’s one of those things you do because it’s nice to do and you can’t follow the impact of it down the years you just hope and pray something remains. Interviewer: “Here’s a question Roger I ask every veteran towards the end: How do you look back on your experience in the military, not just Vietnam per se, but how do you look back on your experience in the military?” Well I think there’s several things there Frank, I’m glad I had it overall, at the time I wasn’t you know I just “I don’t want to be here oh. Anti war.” but I’m glad I had it because I feel now like I was part of a great historical incident, being part of history however insignificant. I mean I wasn’t general or an officer or anything like that but I was up close and personal with what that whole thing was, and I’ve come to realize how unique it was, because not only do many people not know about it at all, it’s impossible to talk about it with people who’ve never been in that situation. Nobody asked me, as though they’re kind of afraid, and I guess I’ve heard this is pretty common that nobody really asks veterans what it was like and veterans are not always talking about it, very reluctant to, but it was unique and I learned a lot about things. (1:15:06) About life, about other people, about my own limitations and self preservation and self confidence whatever you wanna call that, and also about, you know, you wanna get academic about it, the military industrial complex and that sort of thing. So today I think it’s given me a perspective on that same kind of situation which hasn’t changed me, there’s still, you know we’ve got conflicts, we’ve got the glorification of the military and now our present president is beefing up the defense for more involvement. It’s made me cynical about that, questionable, I think there are times really when we’re grateful we have some military ability but I’m really deeply suspicious about the uses to which it’s put by people. Particularly the people you mentioned, the weapons dealer and weapons merchants as well as investors and others, none of whom have had any experience with war. I would suggest too most of them have probably never had sons or daughters- And so they stand at a remove from it, they promote it, they talk about it abstractly, it �Ellis, Roger becomes another political strategy they could you without realizing a terrible cost in human suffering that it’s going to involve, because their eyes are fixed on the tremendous profit that can emerge. I mean look at Vietnam, what we did there say in just one place like Cam Ranh Bay, was to create a huge deep water port for a vast amount of shipping that had to come in there to support the war effort during the Vietnam years. We pulled out and we left Vietnam with that huge asset and they are, you know, they’re still using it to this day, air fields and everything else, and my son who’s a business man he goes over to Vietnam and Asia frequently, and he’s been to Vietnam and he likes it, Saigon is starting to be very vital again and of course it’s a lot more modernized I’m sure I wouldn’t recognize a lot of it 40 years later. When I was there it was still old France, it was still very French, you know, but yeah there’s that, I have a perspective on it, you know, that I can use to- as a filter to see what’s going on today. I certainly also, a third thing was, I certainly enjoyed the benefits, I used the veterans benefits for school and education, I used them for buying my house you know, and so there’s that, that certainly helped me out. I’m very grateful I wasn’t shot up, damaged, or killed certainly, and it’s made me very aware of the stories of others. I feel sort of camaraderie with that, with any veteran but especially Vietnam veterans although I’ve never kept in touch with any of the people there. I guess there were only three or four others that I had served with over there who didn’t get blown away by the time I left, so where their lives led I don’t know afterwards but I was never, like I said, I was never bonding with others over there out of some great need (1:18:35) While I was there I was always coming back to others that I wouldn’t, you know, so that’s what I did, as soon as I got back I was immersed in the university culture, theater culture, other new friends, etc and I never hung onto social attachments of others. So I guess in general I’m glad I did that, I probably would have lacked a lot if I’d never seen what goes on there. I don’t have any illusions, I probably did enter with a lot of illusions about being patriotic and how fun war is, you know you can be like John Wayne and all the other heroes you saw in the movies, I no longer have that. I certainly am, as I also said, very suspicious about, you know, people who support the war and the money it takes to support the war and all that good stuff. It certainly made me also very knowledgeable about what George Bush, Dow, Donald Trump, and others have done in applying military force around the world. I tend to know what’s going on when they, you know, bomb Tunisia or send some rockets in Syria and you know what these guys are going through in the Phillippines and that sort of stuff. I know what’s happening a little more I think, without having to rely on Hollywood to tell �Ellis, Roger me that or read a bunch of books. I’ve read a lot of book about Vietnam afterwards, helped to put it in perspective by a bunch of people, my favorite kinds are the stories of- Not so much the critical analyses and the political arguments but the stories of it, and I confess those are the mostMy favorite motion pictures are stuff, films that I feel really depict what was going on, what I saw going on. Interviewer: “Give me an example since we’re both in the art field, what kinds of movies are you talking about which ones in particular struck you?” There are probably four, the most important one was Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, there are many aspects of that that are just ultimately very very real. The one scene where in the middle of the jungle suddenly everything lights up cause they’re flying in a bunch of entertainers from Hollywood and there’s no light in the jungle, you know we’d go out on patrol there was nothing but star light you know, but in the movie you got that sense of suddenly that base, that landing pad, and the forward fire base lighted up and for an hour the helicopters would come in and the gals and guys would go out there and dance, you know etcetera, etcetera. Then they’d fly them right out or whatever but there’s a lot of scenes in that film that I think wereInterviewer: “It’s a scary film too.” (1:21:30) It is scary but nothing is unreal, the only thing that’s unreal is the notion of going way up a river like, what is it Martin Sheen trying to find Marlon Brando who some weird guy where they’re doing cannibalism and stuff that whole thing, well he had to do that because it was based on the Joseph Conrad novel but I don’t think anyone was really that psychopathic like Marlon Brando, however everything that happened around that was real. A second one was Platoon with William Dafoe and others, that was absolutely real, the combat sequences, the rivalry, and hatred, and people, and you know going on at your own people. You know the combat sequences were really accurate, really reflected what I knew and there was another one called steel- Full Metal Jacket, which it seemed to be a really brutal war film but they showed it the way it was and so those really impressed me. Well but it was probably Platoon, that had an ethical dimension to it like Apocalypse Now had an ethical dimension to it that put it into an accurate perspective. �Ellis, Roger Interviewer: “Yeah but we were talking about Hollywood, the interesting thing is how long it actually took Oliver Stone to get that made. He had to make a whole bunch of other ones, because no one wanted to make it.” The final film I’d mention is one that was made long after the war and it wasn’t about so much about combat at all it was swimming to Cambodia where they were talking about the killing fields. That motion picture was realInterviewer: “Spalding Gray” That was Spalding Gray yeah, God mercy on that guy, but he did a good job in that filmInterviewer: “Oh he did fantastic.” And you got the sense of panic of what it was like when the embassy staff had to get out of Saigon like now, and so that really was good for me yeah. Interviewer: “I don’t want to sound facetious because I love this movie, what did you think of Forrest Gump?” (1:23:44) I liked it, it was very playful. Interviewer: “It had its moments though where this person who really didn’t have any concept about what was going on around him but had this, somehow this moral compass, that “I gotta save Bubba” Bubba Hanks Interviewer: “Still brings tears to my eyes whenever I see that scene where he just goes running back and grabbing those people, cause he doesn’t know any better, I mean it’s just �Ellis, Roger the right thing to do.” There were a lot of Bubba’s who would make it through there and would be different Bubbas when they went back to Louisiana, Alabama, New York, wherever, but at the same time there were a lot of folks who went back to the streets who had been, especially the African Americans, Latinos, they went back toughened for a race war that’s still you know, pretty real to a lot of our cities nowadays and it was certainly real back then. The civil rights time coincided with all that so, but there were a lot of Bubbas in there and yeah he had a moral compass and all, it was a wonderful feeling good contrast between his buddy who got shot up and on and forced Gump who was just trying to do the right thing all the time. He took his chances and the roll of the dice was just he lived and the other guy got torn up, that’s what happens. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EllisR2119V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ellis, Roger Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-04 Title A name given to the resource Ellis, Roger (Interview transcript and video), 2017 Description An account of the resource Roger Ellis was born on May 18, 1943 in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in San Jose, California, where he graduated from a prep high school. Ellis then attended college for a bachelor’s degree in English and Dramatic Literature. He also participated in the Reserve Officer Training Courses for the Navy, and then the Army, but lost interest by 1963 due to conflict heating up overseas and the counterculture movement at home. In 1963, he studied abroad in Italy for a year. He then attended a master’s program in Dramatic Literature at the University of Santa Clara in California before the draft prevented him from moving onto achieve his Doctorate in 1967. Entering the Army in 1968, Ellis attended Basic Training as well as Advanced Individual Training at Fort Lewis, Washington. After training, he was deployed to Saigon, Vietnam, where he was assigned to an infantry unit at Bien Hoa Air Base. As a Light Weapons Infantryman, Ellis accompanied foot patrols that secured perimeters around Bien Hoa. Later, Ellis was reassigned as an administrative Clerk for the Morning Report Section of a Headquarters Battalion in Bien Hoa, and then in Phu Bai. He also took up photography and worked as an English teacher for orphan girls in a village near the base. At the end of his tour in 1970, Ellis was flown back to Chicago where he was officially discharged from the Army. Once back in the United States, he was surprised by the hostility of antiwar protests directed against Vietnam veterans. Ellis reunited with his wife and returned to his Doctorate program at the University of California, Berkeley where he also rejoined the antiwar protests. He grew critical of the military, economic, and human waste caused by the war, especially as the Armed Forces made their hasty retreat from Vietnam after 1973. Reflecting upon his time in the service, Ellis believed he was part of a great historical era since it was difficult to discuss his war experience with those who had not lived it. He also appreciated the Army’s veteran benefits and the greater military experience, which he used as a critical lens into contemporary American military politics. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) GHTV Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f94949b2c63810303f652fea19953a7e.mp4 48e47e374a6c61a53a318a135e472f5d https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e74be1fe71aad2fc953ab4341bd6eb6f.pdf 39fda051ba9071dabd8db7764cbd60d7 PDF Text Text Diephouse, Gary Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: Vietnam War Interviewee’s Name: Gary Diephouse Length of Interview: (56:53) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Gary Diephouse of Grand Rapids, Michigan and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. Okay, Gary start us off with some background on yourself and to begin with, where and when were you born?” I was born February 8th, 1943, and I was born here in Grand Rapids and southeast side, and so basically this is still kind of home for me. Interviewer: “Okay so you grew up in Grand Rapids, what did your family do for a living when you were growing up?” My father owned a hardware store close by and mom taught school, and so we- And actually taught school at the same school I went to when I was, you know, kindergarten and up. Interviewer: “Okay so what school was that?” (00:58) That was Seymour Christian School over on Eastern Avenue in Alger Heights, and we went to church there also our church was close by, so this is all very close. Interviewer: “Very much in the community, okay. How many kids were in the family?” Just my brother, he was about a year and a half younger than I was, and so just the two of us. �Diephouse, Gary Interviewer: “Alright, and then when did you finish high school?” I finished high school in 1961. Interviewer: “Okay, and what did you do after you graduated?” I went from there to Calvin College and attended there for about three years, and at the end of 1964 I decided that college probably wasn’t something that really suited me, and maybe I didn’t suit the college I don’t know. I quit and took up- A friend gave me some information about the United States Air Force, and I enlisted and three weeks later I was gone. Interviewer: “Okay, so when did you enlist?” I enlisted in the latter part of September of 1964, September 20. Interviewer: “Now at this point was there a substantial draft going on or was that still fairly minor?” (2:30) We were just beginning the draft and they kept- And the students who were in college realized that, you know, to stay away from the draft they had to stay in school. I hence also recognized that if I wanted to quit school, there was a real risk that me- That I was gonna get in the draft and probably be drafted into the Army, so I decided to look into the Air Force. Well a friend of mine gave me the information as I said before, and he- The thing with the Air Force was they let me know they would train me in any- Well not any but certainly in anything that I felt I wanted to get into, so it was- We were being trained to serve, and not have to wait for the draft to be done. Interviewer: “Okay, and was the- How long was the enlistment for?” The enlistment was for four years, was a standard four years for everybody, and so I knew right from the get go that that’s what was gonna be the deal. �Diephouse, Gary Interviewer: “Alright, now where did you go initially for training?” Went initially for training to a base down in San Antonio, Texas called Lackland Air Force Base, that’s pretty much where everybody went, that was the beginning for all Air Force enlisted people. Interviewer: “Right, what did the training there consist of?” I think it was mostly marching, that was primarily it but as I look back on it, it was a training in order to get you to understand and accept the fact that there was a method of how you acted in the Air Force, and so you had to understand that you were not in control, others were in control, mainly officers. Interviewer: “Okay, now how did they instill that in you?” (5:02) I think, you know most people would probably say that they broke you down to build you back up, and I won’t say that I broke mentally, physically, or anything but I, you know, I certainly came to understand that, look I’m not in control anymore my superior officer or my superior C.O was in control. Which was fine with me, you know that way I understood, you understood pretty much, you know, how things were written in the sand. Interviewer: “So was this things like you know, what your- How you wore your uniform or how you kept your things in your own area or made your bed?” Everything to perfection. Everything to perfection absolutely. Interviewer: “Alright, and how long were you there?” I was there for eight weeks, all the time continued training, well towards the end of the eight weeks it wasn’t as dedicated as it was in the beginning. They taught you how to wear your �Diephouse, Gary clothes, how to shine your shoes, and how to act in front of officers, etc, etc, but eight weeks was it and then I was sent to another place, another base. Interviewer: “Okay, and where’d you go next?” I went to- Let me backtrack a little bit because during my basic training they put you through a battery of tests, they tested you mainly in writing. They wanted to know about you and what your strengths were and what your abilities were, and what you wanted to do. They gave you some choice, and I could’ve been a cook but I ended up being an air traffic controller or at least training for that. So the training base for that was in Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi and so at the end of the eight weeks I went to Keesler, they flew us over there, and I went through air traffic control school for, let’s see, until March, March 23. So I went from, well let’s see that would’ve been November to March, so that’s about four months. Interviewer: “Okay, now what did the air traffic control training consist of? What were you learning?” (7:55) Mainly that was a series of courses dealing with things that you had to learn in order to control and take care of your job. We started off with learning how to recognize weather and how to state the weather to maybe an aircraft, and we got all the way down into how you could- What a control tower would look like, and also how a radar would look like, and so- Because radar was also a part of it we could recognize the scope and recognize aircraft on a scope and train for that so, but it was all training and phraseology. You learned how to state things so they were understood by an airplane, a pilot. So it was interesting, I really felt- I really loved it. Interviewer: “Alright, now at this point were they not using computers yet for this, this was all still by hand or otherwise?” You know what I went in thinking I was gonna- I wanted to be in computers, I didn’t see a computer the whole time. No, computers were cathode ray tubes and vacuum tubes, they just weren’t- Not what we think of in today’s day and age. �Diephouse, Gary Interviewer: “Okay, now what was life like at Keesler, how was that different from being in basic training?” Keesler we were a little bit more on our own, we weren’t under the thumb of an N.C.O so to speak, that’s a non commissioned officer. We weren’t- We had a little more freedom, you know, we went to school in the day and at night we were pretty much on our own. We could do what we wanted and you started turning things around from being under the thumb to semi freedom, you certainly- You learned how to act so therefore now you got to use it. Interviewer: “Okay, now would you go into town and go to bars or movies or things like that?” (10:25) Yeah there was- Biloxi at that time was a different place than it is today, Biloxi was very, quite racist then. A lot of the things that were true in the early 60’s, 50’s, 40’s were still true, bathrooms for coloreds etc, etc, you know. So I had to learn a little bit about that, I mean that was revelation, we didn’t have that in Grand Rapids when I was growing up. Interviewer: “Now were there black airmen on the base with you?” Yes. Interviewer: “Okay, and did they just not go to town or were they just careful?” I think they were careful, I think they were careful but I didn’t see much of that on the base, much of that type of thing. We were co-equals on base, you know you may have been your rack mate so to speak, or your bunk mate may have been a black airman, but it didn't make any difference to me. Interviewer: “So those are two different worlds on the base and off the base as far as that went, okay. Now once you’ve completed this air traffic control training what’s your next �Diephouse, Gary stop?” As part of the course they let us choose where we might want to go next, what area of the country, because the next assignment is going to be on-the-job training, and so I put in for a number of things but I was pretty much Grand Rapids raised, hadn’t been outside of town very much other than maybe somewhere in Michigan or Chicago or whatever but above that I had not been around so to speak. Anyway, one of the places that I put in for was the southwest of the country. They gave you some general localities, northeast, southwest-east, etc, etc and I did the southwest. I had never been to the southwest and it always had fascinated me, Arizona, etc, etc, California, and so I simply put in for the southwest and not knowing what was available or what I was gonna get, and just prior to the end of my training they gave me orders to go to New Mexico, the state of New Mexico, and the southern part of New Mexico all encompassed the places like White Sands Missile Range, a lot of desert down there, and the city close by the base was referred to as Alamogordo, New Mexico. Yeah, so that was my next place to go. Interviewer: “So what was the name of the base you were actually on?” (13:52) Should’ve said that, the next base’s name was Holloman Air Force Base. It was right next to the white sands- Excuse me, not the White Sands Missile Range but the White Sands National Monument, which was a national park. Interviewer: “Alright, so what was there at Holloman? What kinds of air units were there, what was going on?” There was several interesting forces of that, the biggest group that was on the base along with the rest of us was a unit of Air Force planes and pilots that were training to go over to Vietnam, and so they trained for quite a while. I was there for two years, they trained for about a year, and maybe a year and a half, and suddenly the whole aircraft squadron and I mean and the people, and every piece of whatever went to Vietnam, you didn’t see them again. Also there was a portion of the base that dealt with missiles. The range next door to the base, which was quite a ways away from the base, but the range it all dealt with firing missiles, maybe as part of the war �Diephouse, Gary effort, but also it was part of research and technology where it came to firing missiles into space. So there was a whole command of that type of thing there, also it was very interesting. North of the base was- There was a spot where they tested and shot off the first atomic bomb, called the Trinity site, it was up in the desert and the Trinity site is still there, you can still visit, you can visit once a year, they open it up and you can go there once a year and see it. So a lot of interesting things to see, different types of aircraft, all kinds of interesting- As best I can say is interesting aircraft, a lot of them I still see in various museums, which I go to. Interviewer: “What kinds of aircraft were there?” (16:40) One of the most fascinating ones that I had the ability- The privilege excuse me, to control was an aircraft called the SR-71. The SR-71 was- Turned out to be, and this was just in the developmental stage of that aircraft, but it ended up being the fastest aircraft in the world, and it was basically a spy plane. That’s all it really was, it flew out over Russia, came back, and took pictures, and so- But we had one coming into our base one day, it was in trouble because he had a in flight- What they called an in-flight emergency, and he just flew into our base, and we got to see it, and it was probably the only time I’ve seen one other than in museums. Now you can go there in fact I think they have one down here in Kalamazoo at the museum. Interviewer: “Okay, now the squadrons that were training there what were they- What kinds of planes were they training in?” They were training in what they called the F-4, the F-4C, or you know the C model of the F-4. It was a fairly new aircraft and it did the yeoman’s job in Vietnam. There were a lot of other ones but primarily it was the F-4C. Interviewer: “Alright, now how did- Now you’re going there you said that it’s essentially on-the-job training so how did they orient you into that or when you get there what kinds of things do you start doing?” Well you start at the, you know start with the menial stuff, making coffee and all that, and then �Diephouse, Gary they sit you down and- I mostly was in a control tower, they sit you down in a position that doesn’t include the primary stuff right away, not until you can train into it so, and then from there you go on you learn how but all with the idea- Excuse me not the idea, all with the idea that you had somebody standing over your shoulder, watching what you were doing and what you were saying, and that was just on the job training you learned how to control with aircraft that were okay. “Saw him.” and “Saw him.” okay, and you know from there you just, you learned, you learned how to put them in, you learned how to keep yourself out of trouble by not running two aircraft into each other, that you didn’t want to do. Interviewer: “Okay, now how did they treat you? Did they handle you well or effectively?” (19:46) Yes, you became a community, that’s a good way of putting it. There were other people on my level, there were other people above me and certainly the officers and NCOs who have been there longer, and it certainly wasn’t like basic training. It was- You were there to do a job, and that’s precisely what it was, you learned the job and you did it correctly and- If you did it correctly, if not they’d let you know. Interviewer: “So what would a typical day be like at that job?” Primarily, because air traffic control, there has to be somebody on duty all the time. We went into a- We were always on duty, but it was based on shift work, so there were four shifts a day. What they called a mid shift which was overnight, a swing shift which was the evening, morning which was primarily six o’clock to noon, in the afternoon it was a six hour time period all the way through, and so you didn’t work all afternoons or you didn’t work all mornings, you rotated these on a daily basis. So one day I started off as a swing shift, the very next day I worked in the afternoon, very next day I worked in the morning and from there you went right over into the mid shift and then it was just a constant rotation. Interviewer: “So how does that affect your sleep pattern?” �Diephouse, Gary Terrible but, you know, after we were done working the mid shift we had a whole ‘nother day before we started the swing shift again, so we had plenty of time to catch up on sleep if we needed it. Obviously you didn’t sleep on duty but it was okay, it was a job and it was a- It was something that you were there for to do and I enjoyed it. Interviewer: “Alright, and what do you do when you’re not on the shift?” Well there too, you’re on your own. We used to do a lot of traveling around the area, there was a lot of things to see, I used to go down to Mexico once and a while cause we were about 80 miles north of El Paso and- But for the first year that I was there I didn’t have a car I had a bike, and so I would bike from my barracks to the control tower and back and forth, and that was pretty much the extent for the first year. After that I went home and got the car that I had left there and drove it back down there and had a car for the final year. So we drove around and saw various things and by that time I had established some friendships with other men my age, my group and we would do things together, there were sports, unfortunately I think we saw a lot of drinking too you know, the Airmen’s club, the NCO club, etc, etc. Interviewer: “There wasn’t very much of a town to go into or anything was there?” (23:40) Yeah there was but it was 12, 15 miles away. I also got- I was also in- I enjoyed, how should I say this, I started worshiping in the church chapel, base chapel, and from there- Whoops I’ll let that go by. I worshiped in the base chapel but I also joined their choir, the base choir, chapel choir, me and a number of other people and we had a good group. So we sang at all the Sunday services and I got- Did that for the whole two years pretty much. Interviewer: “Alright, now at this point do you have a girlfriend or anything like that or were you on your own?” No, was on my own there but I was writing letters to a special gal that I’d left back in Grand Rapids and spent a lot of time writing throughout the whole time, in fact kept a lot of those letters too. �Diephouse, Gary Interviewer: “Now, you’ve gone and you’ve signed up for a four year hitch and it’s probably an expectation that you may wind up overseas, were you thinking you were gonna get sent to Vietnam or did you have enough control over assignments that you didn’t think that?” Good insight, there wasn’t much control over it, there was always the specter that yes, Vietnam was there, a number of the people who got reassigned while I was there certainly went to Vietnam but they also would go a lot of other places. It was a matter of timing, Vietnam and some of the other bases were considered remote assignments. Remote assignments were never more than a year at a time, if you didn’t do and get a remote assignment generally you went to like Germany or Europe or some other spots, those were always considered two year assignments and maybe even a three year assignment. Well here I was already two years into my four years and so those assignments were there but you never- Well I supposed I could’ve requested to go to Vietnam, and I chose not to do that. Anyway we- I’ll just carry that forward, I suddenly got an assignment and was not Vietnam but it was a remote site, it was considered remote. (26:50) It was in the island- Excuse me, on the island of Taiwan, which is off the coast of China at the time. Excuse me, it’s still called Taiwan but it was- At the time it was called Formosa, and so I got assigned to that and finally had to leave some good friends in New Mexico and they flew us out to Taiwan. Interviewer: “Did you get a leave home first or had you had leave earlier?” Yeah, there’s some leaves all in this. That’s good you got 30 days a year leave however you wanted to take them if you, you know, if you qualified for them. So yeah I took a 30 day leave back home in Michigan and then from there I made my way to the west coast up to Seattle and then flew over to Taiwan. Interviewer: “Okay, and so do you remember the route you took to get from Seattle to Taiwan?” �Diephouse, Gary Yeah, yeah I do, the Air Force started- Excuse me, I mean the military, let’s put it that way, started flying people over rather than- Because they needed people as much as possible, rather than putting them on ships and going that way. So they flew us from Seattle to- Stopped in Japan briefly, very briefly, didn’t even let us off the aircraft, fueled up and then they went down to Taipei which is the capital of Taiwan. Got off there, had to find a bus to go down to my base, which is about half way down the island in a small town called Taichung, and then outside of Taichung was the base, and we shortened the term to C.C.K, it was called Ching Chuan Kang Air Force Base, and it turned out to be a- We were coding systems on that base with the Chinese, excuse me the Taiwaineese, the Chinese. Interviewer: “Yeah Nationalist Chinese.” (29:20) Right, so but there was a huge American build up there on the base, primarily to support the war effort in Vietnam. So all of the aircraft that we controlled in C.C.K there, were transport aircraft, all with the idea of material movement and troop movement and everything into Vietnam and Thailand, so we went all different directions there, but never saw any combat or anything like that I just- Taiwan was it, closest I got to Vietnam, and met a number of people who did go there, and those stories are hard to get out of some of the people who went there, they still don’t talk about it very much. Interviewer: “Okay, now for you I guess they- So you said you were sharing a base with the Chinese, how much did you see of the Chinese Air Force or their personnel?” Good question. Yeah we controlled about, well I’d say about 20 or 30% of all the ins and outs of traffic into the base was Chinese, mostly fighter aircraft of theirs. They were continually trying to harass mainland China, so what they’d do is they’d fly out of our base and go over towards mainland China and drop pamphlets. Yeah, and the pamphlets were, you know, to get them- To egg them on I guess a little bit, you know to harass them but there was never anything that ever came of it, but they were- The aircraft, the fighter aircraft were there to protect their island from invasion by the Chinese. �Diephouse, Gary Interviewer: “Did you ever have a sense that they thought that was likely or did people assume it wasn’t going to happen?” No they- Looking back on that I can’t say is that they were setting themselves up to fend off invasion. I think that the fighter aircraft were there for that, there may have been some sites out along the water, along the coast, anti aircraft sites whatever, but didn’t see much of that. So we were just kind of living, they were just kind of living in equality, you know, you stay over there we’ll stay over here. Interviewer: “Okay, what kind of facilities did you have in that base, what were your own conditions like?” (32:48) Our own conditions were pretty much like any other aircraft- Excuse me, any other base that I had been on up to this point, it was barracks. Barracks with rooms in it, you had roommates and it was okay, but that was all the American side of the base. The Chinese airmen and Chinese workers lived in their own, if not in town because we were close to the Taichung city so, and we had all the comforts of home. We had a movie theater, and we had BX, PX, BX, we had a lot of the things that made life- They were still building it as I left they were still building a base pool, swimming pool, and a couple of other things that made life a little more bearable, rather than having to live in a tent or in a fox hole or something like that. We had life pretty good. Interviewer: “Yeah, okay did you go off the base much into town or around in Taiwan?” I did, I did. When I wasn’t on duty we could always catch a bus, Air Force bus or a, you know, let’s put it that was a Taiwanese bus or whatever, into town. A lot of things to see, nobody ever bothered you, Taichung was a city like any other big city, it had all its traffic problems and- But all the same stuff that everybody else had, you know all the schools and the railroad station. Oh boy, the list goes on forever you know, I would think that- We discussed this the other day, my wife and I, the only thing I never got used to was the open sewage, what we called benjo ditches, and the smell was always there it was always present and open sewage is exactly what it is, was. �Diephouse, Gary Interviewer: “And the climate is kind of warm and humid isn’t it?” Not too bad, not too bad, the city itself was relatively close to the coast line, and we had a hurricane come through one day and that was interesting but we had- Excuse me, not a hurricane. Interviewer: “A typhoon?” A typhoon, I misspoke there. That was a huge amount of rain, just huge, and wind and everything but we were confined to the base and confined to our rooms, we didn’t have any other cellars to go to or anything like that it was too many people for that, but we managed it. Interviewer: “So barracks didn’t blow apart in the wind or anything?” (36:24) No, no there was some damage though certainly, but now pin me down, that was 50 years ago. Interviewer: “Yeah, alright, how did the Chinese people seem to view you guys?” No different than anybody else I will say that, and we had a lot of friends but there was always the language, the language barrier. Although I think that a lot of them who wanted to deal with the Americans, who wanted to sell to the Americans, you know the tailors and the people like that who were trying to get your American business, they had a vested interest in learning some of the language so that they could speak, so that we could communicate. Interviewer: “So if you went into town, you went into a restaurant or something else like that, you could function?” Yes, although there were some things down there that I’m not sure I could look in the eye and eat. That was- Some of that was whatever but they had some places that catered to the Americans, so it was interesting. Interviewer: “Okay, this is also now- What year or what years were you actually in �Diephouse, Gary Taiwan?” That was 1967 for the most part, for the most part. Interviewer: “[overlapping chatter] Alright, and so that’s a time when a lot of young American men are interested a lot of things, including things like sex and drugs and rock and roll and so forth. Does that carry over when they’re in Taiwan?” Yes it did, a number of all the people who I served with all had their girlfriends, quote unquote, downtown. They lived downtown, they rented apartments down there even though they had a place in the barracks, so there was that. Most of them were married but they had that, you know, on the side. I had one gentleman one day who passed away, died, overdosed and so there was that but it wasn’t prevalent. I mean nobody tried to get me to take drugs, smoke weed, or you know whatever the case may be, maybe more of that went on in Taiwan- Or excuse me Vietnam, I don’t know. Interviewer: “A lot of it depended on where you were and when you were and what group you were with and so forth.” (39:30) It really did. Interviewer: “That’s why I asked, not because I have anything in particular I’m expecting to get but rather to find out, okay was that there or not, or did you notice that, and then I guess the same thing also goes with the question of racial tensions. Did you notice much of that where you were?” No, no I think that probably the most prevalent problem was alcohol, huge amount of it even in my own dorm room. Now that was with three other guys because we had four guys to a dorm room, and the bar was always open every day in our room for some reason, I don’t know why but it was in our room and there was a countertop there and you name it they had all of the various, the coercion you know. �Diephouse, Gary Interviewer: “Where would they get them from? Did you buy them on base or just go into town?” Oh you could buy that on base, yeah in the BX or you could go in downtown too, but there was, you know, you could buy beer, you could buy liquor, sure. It was all available, but drinking to excess was a problem, at least I wasn’t used to it certainly didn’t enjoy it terribly much but you know if I wanted to be part of the group you had to join in a little bit, you had to have a few beers here and there, nothing to excess. Interviewer: “Well I mean was that- Did that become a problem for any of the air traffic controllers? I mean, were there ones who couldn’t perform the job properly?” (41:34) Not that I know of, but yes you minded that a lot of guys “Okay I can’t drink today I’ve gotta go on duty” in three, four, six hours whatever the case may be. Interviewer: “Now did you mostly associate with the other controllers or was there a broader range of people that you were with?” Broader range, that’s good because I was part of the Air Force communication service that included a lot of things, not just air traffic control it also included- And in this case we were at a remote site so the Air Force was responsible for the telephones of all things. The telephone system, and they built this whole telephone system where, in those days why you didn’t have a punch button telephone you had a rotary dial, and so you go to this building and you could see all this equipment work as part of a rotary dial. I don’t want to get into that, but there was other things, there was radar we were responsible for, there was a number of- Oh boy it’s not coming to me right at the moment but yeah, communication services included a broad range of communications. Interviewer: “Now did you have officers you reported to or senior NCOs?” �Diephouse, Gary Certainly. Interviewer: “Okay, who would you mostly deal with or give you your assignments?” Mostly, I mostly dealt with- We coexisted in the control tower with the Chinese, actually the Chinese did all of the controlling, we were just advisory. Okay so this was, perhaps I should have said this earlier, but we were just advisory there I was the only American up there at the time in my shift and the Chinese were responsible they wouldn’t let the Americans control their own aircraft, their own jets, because we couldn’t talk to them anyway but they had a command, a small command, of English that they would control the American aircraft but you were there to help them if they got in trouble. If the English pilots or the American pilots say “I don’t understand.” then you got on and did your job. Interviewer: “Okay, was that a common occurrence?” (44:16) No, no it really went quite well, it really went quite well. As far as who we dealt with, why there was always the chain of command. Yeah you were a ship worker but, you know, you were responsible up the line to an NCO who was also responsible to a squadron commander, who was an officer. Interviewer: “And when you were on a shift and you’re the only American there with the Chinese, was there like one Chinese person you’d talk to and then he’d talk to other people or did you talk directly to the officer?” They pretty much all would communicate with us as Americans, in English, broken English. The strangest part of dealing with the Chinese is that they brought their own lunch but they cook their lunch in the tower, so I learned how to eat rice, like this, but I didn’t- I would eat in the mess hall before or after the shift or whatever. So a lot of interesting things to see, and one of the things we did, the squadron commander one day invited me into his office and asked me if I would set up something with our squadron with a local needy, well how should I put that, we adopted an orphanage, and it was all kids who had nowhere else to go. They were kept in the orphanage �Diephouse, Gary downtown and so we established a coordination between them, and I was given the job- Myself and another fella were given the job of heading that up and we would collect funds every once and a while and seek from them a need. Okay, what do you need? “Oh we could use this.” Okay, so we would buy it at the base, basic exchange, and give it to them and we’d have a little party, and the commander would come out and invite all of the squadron, as many who weren’t serving or weren’t on duty, to come out. Well that’s one of the little things underneath that I did, but I never got a ribbon for it or anything, which is okay I wasn’t doing it for that purpose. Interviewer: “And are there other aspects of that stay in Taiwan that kind of stand out in your memory?” (47:30) Not really, I think that we learned- Yeah, well it took a couple of leaves- No, excuse me, one leave. We flew to Japan and I got to spend a week up there on leave seeing what that was like. Tokyo was really fascinating with all the lights, pretty much still the same I guess. That’s pretty much it. Interviewer: “Alright, and now when you finish up at Taiwan, so you’re there for a year basically, you rotate back.” 13 months. Interviewer: “Okay, yeah well that’s how the Marine Corps did things, 13 months. Okay, you have that assignment and now you’ve still got about a year left on your enlistment then or how much time?” I had about six months left. Interviewer: “Alright, and so what do they do with you for that last part of your enlistment?” They reassign me to a base back in the United States, should- Stop that for just a second and just �Diephouse, Gary kind of relay a little bit, my girlfriend at the time and I were trying to decide whether we were gonna get married before I went over to Taiwan, or wait until after and the upshot of the whole thing was that we thought we would be better off if we waited, and so I had six months to do and so I came home and I walked into her kitchen, surprised her, and very soon thereafter we got married in Denver, Colorado and from there we took a little bit of leave time but then we drove all our possessions, lock, stock, and barrel we drove them down to Phoenix, Arizona, outside of Phoenix Arizona is Luke Air Force Base, is where I was assigned. Interviewer: “Okay, and what was going on down there?” (50:17) There too it was all aircraft training for the United States, fighter aircraft training, at Luke and I was in a squadron of radar assistance. It’s tough to explain but it was a unit set aside to train ourselves in how to control aircraft in a remote location, such as Vietnam, so it was training almost for Vietnam. Well I had just come back from a remote site, so they weren’t gonna send me back to Vietnam very quickly, in fact that was a promise they said “You’re next- You’ve done a remote assignment now we’re going to-” You know, your next assignment wherever that is whenever that is will probably be something longer, two year assignment or you know. Interviewer: “Assuming that you’re re-enlisted.” Assuming that I re-enlisted because I only had six months to do, and when it was kind of getting closer we looked at each other and said “Okay what do you wanna do because here’s where we're gonna go next.” The two of us we anticipated looking at that even though we’ve been home for six months- I’d been home for six months and we decided to get out, quit. So they called me in and said “So what are you gonna do?” and they dangled in front of me my next rank, an E4 rank- Excuse me an E5 rank, and they said “Ten days after you reenlist you’ll get this rank.” and- But that wasn’t enough to get, you know, we decided to get on with the rest of our lives, and subsequently we stayed in that area for another eight years, seven and a half years, lived there. Interviewer: “So what did you do there after you got out?” �Diephouse, Gary Well being in air traffic control I could’ve stayed in that type of job and gone to work for the F.A.A, Federal Aviation Administration, and got a job controlling aircraft or radar, etc, etc. I looked at that but nothing was available right at the moment and so I took a job with an insurance company and I thought it was pretty good $2.25 an hour, and then I got raised to $2.50 but yeah I went to work for them and worked for them for another eight years before we left. Interviewer: “And then did you come back to Michigan after that or?” (53:34) Yes, yes we did. We were trying to make a decision, by that time we had two kids, and we wanted the grandparent influence. So we had a choice to go to Denver, or go back to Michigan, and my father was smart enough, he says “Hey I know somebody who will give you a job.” So that was it, we went for the job and we moved back to Grand Rapids. Interviewer: “Did you stay in the insurance business or move onto something else?” No I didn’t, I didn’t, I went into sales and worked for a steel company, steel, yes raw steel, and then from there I went into tool and eye sales later on before I retired. Interviewer: “Alright now if you look back at the time that you spent in the Air Force, what do you think you learned from that or took out of it?” I think they, the Air Force, again wanted you to accept responsibility, accept, that’s the best word I can come up with for it there are other words but you know, that’s primarily- You acted and you accepted responsibility for what you did, but you knew that and so therefore you watched what you did, and did your job the best you could this way. Interviewer: “Does that then carry over into life after the Air Force?” Yeah, I’m too much of a perfectionist, I’m a perfectionist at everything, you know. That clock back of us here goes off at exactly the right minute, and a few other things. �Diephouse, Gary Interviewer: “I don’t think that’s a bad quality for an air traffic controller to have.” I don’t think so either, you bet, but I still admire the Air Force, I admire airplanes, all these things over here I admire. They don’t mean much, they're just ribbons denoting various types of service, this right here is the communications service badge, and a couple of other things which I didn’t know about until just a year or so ago. Interviewer: “You went and found out what medals you were owed.” Yeah, right, so and this is the various pieces of rank that I own. Interviewer: “Alright well it makes for a good story and a rather different one from normal so thank you very much for taking the time to share it today.” (56:48) You’re welcome. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DiephouseG2113V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Diephouse, Gary Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-03 Title A name given to the resource Diephouse, Gary (Interview transcript and video), 2017 Description An account of the resource Gary Diephouse was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on February 8, 1943. He enlisted in the Air Force on September 20, 1964. He received his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, then went to Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi, for Air Traffic Controller School. He reported to Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, in spring 1965 and was stationed there for two years. In 1967, he was sent to Taiwan and served in an advisory role to the Chinese Nationalists at Ching Chuan Kang Air Base near Taichung. After a year, there he returned to the United States and served at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, for the last six months of his enlistment. He was discharged in 1968. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings World War, 1939-1945—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf video/mp4 Language A language of the resource eng https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/32f1b94dd3969ddea1d56e0abc2180a3.mp4 7170f9b0aad4a327108e5eb52ec56b3f https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5e06805aa1679b4286e54465c0dedac3.pdf 018af134da437e26376356604e23d27e PDF Text Text Davelaar, Harvey Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project Interview Name of War: World War II Interviewee’s Name: Harvey Davelaar Length of Interview: (40:43) Interviewed by: James Smither Transcribed by: Maluhia Buhlman Interviewer: “We’re talking today with Harvey Davelaar of Grand Rapids, Michigan and the interviewer is James Smither of the Grand Valley State Veterans History Project. Ok now Harvey start us off with some background on yourself and to begin with, where and when were you born?” I was born in Wyoming Township, Michigan which was adjacent to Grand Rapids, Michigan December 23 1923, and I’ve lived in the Grand Rapids area all my life andInterviewer: “What did your family do for a living when you were a kid?” (00:38) My dad was a paper hanger and a painter, he was self employed Interviewer: “And so what was life like for your family during the depression then?” Well I actually had it quite good, my sister and I, my dad worked for the government for the…what do you call it, slips my mind, anyway work progress. Interviewer: “Yeah the W.P.A yeah.” W.P.A and he was fortunate in the fact that in the Godfrey school system where we lived had gotten a grant to repaint their schools but the school board had furnished the superintendent for the job, and he was the only contractor in the district and so they came to him and asked him if �Davelaar, Harvey he would run it, which he did and he did it through several years. So actually he was employed just about all the way through the depression. So we were, you might say quite well off actually. Interviewer: “Yeah, because I guess when we think of W.P.A work it’s usually the ordinary guys working in that would be doing, and they wouldn’t make very much money.” No. Interviewer: “No but he was management essentially?” He was management and he did not work for W.P.A he worked for the school board. So I don’t know what amount of money or anything but relatively to everybody else we were living pretty good. Interviewer: “Yeah alright, now did you finish high school?” I finished high school at Godfrey High School. Interviewer: “In what year did you graduate?” (2:30) I graduated in 1941, in a class of 83 which was the largest class ever graduated to that school at that time. Interviewer: “Now after you graduated from high school what did you do?” I, at the time of course their preparation for war so one of the local automobile plants had been converted into making dive bomber wings for the British and Dutch navies, and of course they were hiring everybody they could get, so we were training a few of us about one month as riveters and metal sheet workers and so I went to work there and I worked there until I was called up to the navy.” Interviewer: “Alright, and so when- Now do you remember how you heard about Pearl �Davelaar, Harvey Harbor?” Oh yes it was my family’s tradition on Sunday we would go to church in the morning and Sunday school afterwards and then come home and we would have the big dinner of the week and after that my parents always took a nap and- But we had a radio which was not too common and they got me to listen to the radio Sunday afternoon, but you do, in our strict Dutch neighbor family that was kind of unusual. So I was sitting there listening to the radio and they broke in and announced that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, and of course like everybody else I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was or where it was, but as afternoon goes on and more and more bulletins came through we started to figure it out. Interviewer: “Now before that happened, had you paid much attention to the news of the world with the war in Europe that kind of thing?” No, I was a typical high school kid. Interviewer: “Now did the work that you had, was there a deferment available for that?” (4:41) No, they tried to get us deferred but not allowed. I must say that they kept us as long as they could, they stalled off, but I did not want to get into the Army. Some of the fellas that I knew had been drafted, and had gone to basic training and came home for a short time afterwards and they said “Oh you don’t want to be in the Army” and I said “No I don’t want that” and besides I’m partial to the Navy anyway I always have been, and so I talked to my folks and I said “I’d like to enlist in the Navy.” of course I had to have their permission. I was only 17 years old and Interviewer: “Now you would’ve been, if you’re born in 20-” 1923 and this was in the summer of 1941, about 42. Interviewer: “42 you’re gonna be, you’re 18 then.” �Davelaar, Harvey Yep. Interviewer: “But anyway, but you still wanted their support regardless. Did they actually have to sign papers for you?” Oh yeah they had too, so anyway I went to- Another fellow classmate and I went to the Navy recruiters and enlisted and with permission of our parents. Interviewer: “Right, okay so then where do you go for your boot camp?” Well it was strange because so many of us didn’t want to deal with the Army, we overwhelmed the Navy recruitment programs. So we would go to Detroit and get a physical and when we passed our physical we would sign the date in the future when we would actually be called up and that happened. We enrolled in either July or August of that summer and it was not until the weekend after Thanksgiving that I was actually called up, and went to Detroit for a physical and from there we went to Great Lakes for basic training. Interviewer: “So where is Great Lakes?” (7:04) Great Lakes is north of Chicago, between Chicago and Milwaukee. Interviewer: “Alright, yeah very far northern end of Illinois there along the lake.” Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay, what did the training there consist of ?” Oh I guess the basic stuff, you learned what the Navy’s all about, the rudiment knots and so on, how to take orders and obey them, and I remember it was a bitter cold winter and we would march from class to class. Of course we took physical fitness and all that sort of thing but I guess �Davelaar, Harvey that’s mostly it. We slept in hammocks, we were still in the old barracks, and had to get used to that, not roll out during the night, but it went quite well. I rather enjoyed it, the discipline and so on kind of fit me. Interviewer: “Okay, well if you had a fairly strict family in your background anyway, following orders was normal.” Yeah, it was. Interviewer: “Alright, were there some other people who were training with you who were having some trouble?” Oh no, there was a whole company. I forget, a little over a hundred men in each class, we were called and we did all the paperwork, we were interviewed and so on. I was- I forget how many weeks, either 12 or 15 weeks of training, and during the interview process they of course knew that I had worked with aviation metal work. So when they assigned us where we were going to go, I was assigned to a Navy aviation metalsmith which took place in Navy Pier in Chicago. Navy Pier in Chicago at that time was completely made over into a school, with barracks and the whole thing were on a pier, and that’s where everybody from out Great Lakes area went for aviation training. Radios with engine hydraulics, whatever you were qualified for you were trained there and then that lasted until about June of ‘43. Interviewer: “Alright now while you’re there, particularly while you’re at Navy Pier, would you be able to get liberty? I mean, could you go into Chicago?” (9:46) Oh yes, every weekend we were, from Saturday noon until midnight Sunday we were given freedom, and Chicago was a wonderful place to go to because a service person could not pay for anything. Everything was free, all sports, movies, entertainment. All you had to do was go to the U.S.O and ask for a ticket and you would get one and that was it, and of course the museum and the other things there. So it was a wonderful place to be, to go to school. �Davelaar, Harvey Interviewer: “Alright, now what specifically did your training consist of? What were you physically learning to do?” Well I remember one was to read blueprints, and number two was we made different things that were learned, taught us how to bend metal, how to mark it, and then how to rivet it together, and then we also learned how to weld steel parts, and that was pretty much it. Interviewer: “Did you work mostly with steel or did you have aluminum?” All aluminum, the only steel I remember was in the class when we had to learn them, but yeah welding which we never used again, but anyway it was part of the basic training of course. Interviewer: “Alright, so now once you complete that training program what do they do with you?” (11:28) Well then we- the section on the pier was called outgoing unit O.G and we stayed there until we were assigned to a place. Which for me was Naval air station Quonset Point, Rhode Island, and arrived there- Six of us from our class were assigned there, the Navy transferred you that way individually. In our case it was six of us together and we were responsible to get ourselves there by X date and time. So we did that successfully. Interviewer: “Okay, did you go by train or?” Went by train, went by train from Chicago to Boston, Boston to Providence, where the Navy had a bus waiting for us and they took us down to the Naval air station in Quonset Point was down there against the bay, close to the ocean. Interviewer: “Alright, and then what was your job once you got there?” I was assigned to what was called the assembly and repair hanger, where I did just what the title said, they assembled aircraft that were shipped there and repaired those that were damaged, and �Davelaar, Harvey so that was mostly what we did, but then I wound up with a group that was brand new. Was installing rocket launchers underneath the wings of fighter planes and torpedo bombers, and that became my number one task while I was there. Interviewer: “Alright, now was there a larger command that you were part of, naval air transport, something like that?” No IInterviewer: “Or was that later?” That comes later. Interviewer: “So here you were just at the naval air station, so now was Quonset Point, was that a place that was used as a base for anti-submarine patrol?” (13:33) That was a permanent naval air station, all partnered structures as opposed to temporary. Yeah what we did that was the purpose of the rockets underneath the planes that was anti-submarine patrol, and they had large seaplanes and all the other stuff that goes with it, but our planes were beyond what we called many aircraft carriers, Small ships that were converted into aircraft carriers which did convoy duty to the- Through a [unintelligible] of course, but the object of the rockets was a group of planes who would go out, and one of them was equipped with a search light, a huge thing for our day, that took the places of bomb bays and tried to catch a German submarine that had surface to recharge their batteries, and once they saw water, found one, then the other planes equipped with a rocket would attack it, and hopefully do some damage and force to go home or sink it maybe. Well I think that was an outside chance but they would damage it anyway. Interviewer: “Okay, so how long were you at Quonset Point?” Was there about a year. �Davelaar, Harvey Interviewer: “Okay, and during that time I mean did you mostly just know other mechanics or did you get to talk to the pilot or aircrew?” No, nothing to do with the aircrew or any of the actual flying. It was just like working in a big factory. Interviewer: “And did you ever hear anything about what happened out there on the ocean, either with convoys or submarines?” No more than civilians did. Interviewer: “Okay, so you’re just in your own world. Alright, now did you spend most of your time just on the base or would you go into the smaller towns or Providence?” I did there because as a permanent base that had everything. Had, what’s it called, ship service was just like a store, and they had a restaurant that you could go to if you didn’t like the Navy furnished meals. In a sense we were isolated but on the weekend there would be buses going into Providence, but I was content just to stay on the base. Interviewer: “Alright, now were you communicating with people back home very often?” (16:06) By letter, that’s the only way. When we tried to call home on the long distance telephone we’d have to sign up, and so usually what we did, both the Atlantic and Pacific coast you would got to the AT&T place and you would sign up for a certain time, and they more or less guaranteed that your call would go through at that time, and that’s the only direct communication I had with my parents. Interviewer: “Alright, now were you disappointed or relieved that you weren’t being sent overseas?” �Davelaar, Harvey No, I was very happy because as a boy I was kind of an airplane nut. I used to make models and fly them and so on so I was in an area where I- Kind of a dreamland or something, what I really like to do work on actual airplanes, we’re actually contributing to the war. Interviewer: “Right, so that works- Did you ever get a chance to go up in any of the aircraft?” No. Interviewer: “We’re not giving out seaplane rides or anything.” No they weren’t giving out any, the one thing, which really was on the west coast, if you had a furlough home for any length of time there was the ability to go to a certain office on the edge of air station, and ask if there were transport flights going in your direction, and this is all by chance as I understood it, “Yes there is one going to Chicago or there is one going to Kansas City or St. Louis, we can fly you that far.” and then you’ll add the weight and say “Something close to Grand Rapids?” Chicago, Detroit or something, that I might get home from there, but that whole process could take a day or two sometimes to get to where you wanted to go so I never tried it. Interviewer: “Alright, now while you were out there in Rhode Island were you following the course of the news very carefully, or were you just doing your job?” (18:36) No, just doing my job. Interviewer: “Okay, so how is it then that you wound up in California?” Well as the submarine warfare was coming to an end, pretty well had the Atlantic to ourselves they started shipping everybody. Not to the west coast of course, and eventually it’s going to be the preparation to fight in the Pacific and end the war over there. So we once again went through the O.G unit, the outgoing unit, and barracks, and then we waited to be transferred wherever. We �Davelaar, Harvey didn’t know where, we had sealed orders but there was a chief petty officer that was in charge of us and he had the orders with- And he was not to tell us of course. So we were in the outgoing unit and I can remember very vividly, one morning we woke up after a couple weeks there, and there was a string of passenger cars in the sighting and he said “Yep, you’re shipping out, you’re on this train.” So we took that train all the way to Oakland California Interviewer: “Okay, how long did that take?” About four day. Interviewer: “Alright, did you have to stop much and let other trains go by?” Well supposedly we had priority, but once in a while from Chicago onto Oakland the only time we would pull off is when the streamliner, one of the fast passenger trains, was coming the other way. We would put on siding until it went past and then we would go again. Interviewer: “Right, and how did they feed you while you were on the train?” (20:37) Oh very good, we were in the dining car, each one of our passenger cars was assigned a time and you would go in and they would feed you. So we had it pretty good, not luxuriously but we had hot meals let’s put it that way. Interviewer: “Alright, and now once you get to Oakland then what happens?” Got to Oakland and there again you’re in the outgoing unit, and sat there for about two weeks wondering where we’re gonna go, and I was hoping to get on an aircraft carrier, that was my dream, but I didn’t and my name was called and I was given a time to meet. So I was put on a bus, and had no idea where I was going of course and we wound up on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay and said “Here’s where you’re gonna be stationed.” Well Treasure Island in those days was a great big outgoing unit, where people getting off ships were kept for a while, and people going on to the ship would get their assignments, but on that island was a huge aircraft �Davelaar, Harvey repairs facilities for Pan American Airways, we heard their seaplanes which were flying the Pacific at that time as passenger planes, the Navy took it over and made an overhaul base out of it and so we were assigned there, and once again we had very nice duty. We were kind of an independent unit from everything else going out on Treasure Island, though we ate at their dining halls and went to their movies and everything. We had all the privileges of the island, but otherwise we were pretty well restricted to our little area. Interviewer: “Alright and now what kinds of aircraft did you work on there?” Well yeah, a PBY2 which was a four engine seaplane which was designed and put into service in 1937 and it was already obsolete but it was a huge aircraft, I got pictures of it and so they decided that maybe it was still trying to get supplies off the Pacific every which way they could. So they took these aircrafts and took all the armaments off it, sealed up the bomb bays and put flat decks inside of them, and used them for cargo carriers. That’s how we got the naval air transport service, that’s the [unintelligible] and so our, or my responsibility as a metalsmith was to keep the metal parts of the aircraft repaired and functional and sometimes to put different brackets and so on when they modernized the radio equipment or navigating equipment. So anything to do with metal we were responsible for. Interviewer: “Okay, now were you just- Would these planes get wear and tear from extensive use or?” (24:14) Well yeah, the big problem with them was they were not- They were strictly a seaplane they had no wheels, like some others that had both wheels and floatation these were strictly seaplanes and so they landed and took off from water. Well our biggest amount of work is they would hit debris in the water and damage the hull and spring leaks and so forth, and that’s why we were called over all these. When they were damaged too much they would be brought over to us, and brought up on land and then we would recondition them and did this exactly like the word overhaul means. Put new engines on them and new radio equipment or bring them right up to date you might say. �Davelaar, Harvey Interviewer: “Alright, now did you have much communication at all with the other naval personnel or you just, you sat at your own table?” No, like I said we were an isolated group in the old Pan American facilities. Interviewer: “Okay, now did you go into the city of San Francisco?” Oh yes, Oakland and San Francisco were the places to go over the weekend, and our set up was you could do that two times a month, one time a month you would get what’s called a short leave to go into town, or you could go in Saturday and stay overnight Sunday, and as long as you were back and ready to work on Monday morning at seven o’clock, you had that privilege and what we called once a month was the long one you would go up and have both Friday and Saturday night to go in San Francisco, and like Chicago is the most wonderful place because everything was free, but in San Francisco I remember they had a multi story building of the U.S.O, that is United Service Organization, and the upper floors were- Had cots you could sleep overnight so that was the reason that like an overnight stay just to get off the base for a while. Interviewer: “And did they have, did the U.S.O provide entertainment, either on the base or in the town or did you just get tickets to go to things?” (27:00) No, now I don’t remember going to anything specific at the U.S.O, only at the same thing as in Chicago. I remember seeing my first hockey game, I saw a football game at the University of California in Berkeley, and the Seals hockey team. I didn’t know they had a baseball team at that time, and maybe they didn’t. Interviewer: “Not major league there yet, Giants were still in New York.” No that was way off, [unintelligible] yet. Interviewer: “Okay, now were there- During the time you were in whether Rhode Island or in California, were there particular news events or developments in the war that did get �Davelaar, Harvey your attention? Do you remember when Roosevelt died for instance?” Yeah, I remember when Roosevelt died. I remember we kind of, by that time, we were older and more curious about the war in Europe, and we knew that the war was ending down by just the activities on that base and transfer of people we knew that the Pacific was being built up, and we kind of figured that out ourselves, but we weren’t told it was happening. Interviewer: “Okay, and do you remember hearing about the atomic bomb?” Yeah, I remember hearing about that. That’s when I was waiting to be discharged out there, that’s when that occurred. Interviewer: “Okay so in August of ‘45?” I’m sorry? Interviewer: “August of ‘45 is when-” (28:46) Yeah. Interviewer: “Okay because I thought you weren’t discharged until ‘46.” I was, that’s true, the discharge system was based on points, maybe you’ve heard of that, and it was based on how many days you were in combat and all that sort of thing. Well having been stationed in the United States all my career I was real low on points, so I was one of the last ones to be discharged. Interviewer: “But when they dropped the bomb you were already starting to count your points?” Yeah. �Davelaar, Harvey Interviewer: “You were waiting for your chance, okay. Now when they announced the bomb did you have any idea what that meant really?” No, we just knew that it was something very powerful and the cause of the war’s end. Interviewer: “Because the Japanese surrender comes not very long after that.” Yeah, August 14th or 15th. Interviewer: “Alright, now once that happens does life on the base change at all once the war’s over?” (29:48) Well yeah because then the next thing was the highest point people were being sent home, so in every unit you are losing people. Like in our case we had, people had served on carriers and so or transferred one base to us and so they went first. The rest as your numbers came up you would be sent home so, but also on the atomic bomb you mentioned that they were recruiting people who would be willing to sign on for, I forget, a period of six or eight months extend their- Even though they were eligible for discharge but if they wanted to extend it and work on my set up for the test that were coming up. You could sign up for that for a certain period, six, eight months, or a year. I tried to sign up for that but they were giving aviation medals and I didn’t have anything to do with that kind of training so I didn’t get it. Interviewer: “Okay, did they make any effort to encourage you to reenlist or were they mostly just getting rid of people?” Mostly getting rid of people, in my case anyway. I remember the officer that was in charge of our group that went to a series of classes and so one of his first remarks was “I feel like I’m talking in vain because I’m sure none of you want to reenlist but if you do this is your option and what will happen.” Such as you’ll be automatically promoted one rank and of course you’d get more pay and so on and more leave time to go home and that sort of thing, but no one did �Davelaar, Harvey Interviewer: “Okay, now during the time while you were in, did you ever get a leave to go home?” I did because I accumulated leaves, I was never able to get a leave because of the activity and necessity of it, we didn’t get leaves but in August then they started opening it up, and that too was based on how long since you’ve been home, and of course I hadn’t been home since I left. So I applied and I was given one month leave, so at the time you had to go down to the station, railroad station, and you signed up for a train to take you home and on a given date and time and so on. So I went home for 30 days, I took my whole 30 days and went home in August. That’s some of what I don’t know about what really happened on the base and it happened the fifth on the calendar in August. Interviewer: “Okay and then- But then you have to go back to the base?” Oh yeah. Interviewer: “Alright and then when did they finally discharge you?” (33:19) That was a little different process too because these planes that we were serving were so obsolete and probably so beat up, that they immediately disbanded our squadron, and so I was transferred to Moffett Field, which is south of San Francisco and San Jose. Which is a big, primarily it’s a testing air station for new aircraft techniques and different things, and they naval air transport squadron but they’re all land based planes, four engine what would have been passenger planes, or seats taken out and flight decks put in and they used to transport; however they were kept as transport planes with seats but we maintained those, and then I was picked to be sent to gas tank school, because those planes didn’t suffer very much damage as far as the metal was concerned. So I was trained how to repair the gas tanks which were all inside the wings and that’s how I finished out my career in the Navy. Interviewer: “Okay, and so when do you get out?” �Davelaar, Harvey I got out March 2nd of ‘46. Interviewer: “Alright, and after you got out what did you do?” Well first thing I did is decided to just loaf around- Well a little different, I had an aunt and uncle that live in San Diego and it was March of course and I thought I didn’t want to go back to Michigan and bad weather and also I wrote my aunt and uncle, knowing the time I was going to be discharge, if I could stay with them for two weeks, and they said “Sure come on down.” I had two cousins there that weren’t home and so I did that and then I came home and had to make a decision. My training in the Navy qualified me to become a metal apprentice and- Or not and so seeing my dad starting back in his one man business, I took the easy way really to be honest and said “Okay let’s work together.” So I did and from there on of course construction and everything started building after World War II. So I met my sweetheart to be in April that year and eventually we married in ‘48. From 1950 my dad and I decided to form a partnership and create our own business, which we did, and we did that until my dad retired, and then after that I had it by myself. Interviewer: “Alright and was this all kinds of construction or still the painting and papering?” (36:54) This was all painting and papering, my dad worked strictly residential when he was alone, and we expanded into commercial construction. We did schools, we did churches, and we did new home construction, which like I said was just booming. If you had the manpower and time and could do it we were hired. I don’t ever remember bidding on a job and everything, it was a call and said “You have time, can you do such and such in the future?” or “Will you save time?” So it was really a great time to be in business. Interviewer: “Alright, now when you think back to the time that you spent in the Navy, what do you think you learned from that or took out of it?” �Davelaar, Harvey Well number one was discipline of course, how to discipline yourself, how to take care of yourself physically because otherwise you depended on your parents but how to budget time and do a good job, knowing that one way or another you’re judged by what quality of the work that you do. So I think those are the biggest things I took out, a lot of quote unquote good habits which stayed with me the rest of my life. Interviewer: “Okay and then just to think back to your time in the Navy are there other things that stand out in your memory about that, that you haven’t brought into the story yet?” (38:55) You mean unusual things? Interviewer: “Yeah.” Well back to Quonset Point, the unusual thing was putting these rocket brackets on knowing that that was something brand new, and so that kind of gave me a thrill I’d say, that I was on the forefront of something happening. Interviewer: “Do you know what kind of aircraft you were putting them on? I was putting them on, it was called a F4F fighter plane and a TBM, which is a torpedo bomber, and the f4f actually was a fighter that was- The Navy entered the war with but was soon obsolete, it was small and could land on small carriers and what we call, I should say a jeep carrier and so they were, of course they could build the carriers quickly and they were equipped with- And the TBM could land on a small area so they were the ones that were sent out on a convoy. You know we didn’t see these big aircraft carriers like the enterprise and some others that were actually fighting aircraft. Interviewer: “Alright so these were escort carriers and they could provide air protection for a convoy in the middle of the Atlantic, so they had a job to do.” �Davelaar, Harvey Number one of course, go after the submarines, German submarines. Interviewer: “Alright, well you’ve got kind of an unusual career so I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to share the story today.” You’re welcome. � 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 Information about rights held in and over the resource <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 A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RHC-27 Language A language of the resource 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 An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context DavelaarH2107V Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Davelaar, Harvey Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-03 Title A name given to the resource Davelaar, Harvey (Interview transcript and video), 2017 Description An account of the resource Harvey Davelaar was born in Wyoming Township, Michigan, on December 23, 1923. After graduating high school in June 1941, he worked in a war factory until he enlisted in the Navy in summer 1942. He reported for basic training at Great Lakes Naval Station, Illinois, in November 1942. He went to Naval Aviation Metalsmith School at Navy Pier in downtown Chicago and trained there until June 1943. From there, he went to Naval Air Station Quonset Point, Rhode Island, where he outfitted fighter planes and torpedo bombers with rocket racks to attack U-Boats as part of convoy escort. When the Battle of the Atlantic effectively came to an end he was sent to Naval Station Treasure Island, California, where he maintained seaplanes used for the transportation of troops and material. He was at Treasure Island until after the war’s end, then went to Moffett Field, California, as his final duty station. He was discharged on March 2, 1946. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smither, James (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Oral history Veterans History Project (U.S.) United States—History, Military Veterans Video recordings Other veterans & civilians—Personal narratives, American Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Veterans History Project collection, (RHC-27) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401. Relation A related resource Veterans History Project (U.S.) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng