Month: June 2019

“I was a pilot for Operation Ranch Hand, the 12th Air Commando Squadron, stationed at Bien Hoa. We did the defoliation work spraying Agent Orange with C-123’s. The C-123 was a great airplane for the job because the fuel tanks were right behind the engines and you could salvo them. You could eliminate a burning tank in a second and there were very few fuel lines. This wouldn’t always save you, but it surely helped.

We would typically fly two sorties per day. We would get up in the wee hours of the morning, have a quick breakfast, and go to our preflight briefing. We would then take off in formation and hit the first target exactly at daylight. The theory was that the enemy would still be sleeping and we would get through the first target without any shooting. It was a great theory; however, it just didn’t seem to work. We would fly to the target area at 5,000 feet, and contact a Forward Air Controller who would ‘Smoke’ the start of the target run. Then we would make a really steep descent and start the target run. We were supposed to spray at 100 feet off the tree tops in order to get maximum coverage; but, when the shooting started you had a tendency to really get down on the deck because the lower you were, the safer you were. We expended our 1,000 gallons of defoliant during a four-minute run, and then try to get to a safe area to climb out. That was the longest, most exciting four minutes in the world. Then we would return to Base and do it all over again; we would usually be done for the day before noon.

They were always saying that we were the most shot at, and hit, operation in the history of air war. I don’t know how true that was, but it seemed pretty accurate to me. Nobody ever got through an assignment without their plane taking hits, and at least half the guys had Purple Hearts and not from scratches. We couldn’t bail out because we were too low while the shooting was going on and the plane had spray booms across the back that you would hit if you did jump. As a result we didn’t even carry parachutes. You just had to fly whatever was left of the plane as long as it would fly. My plane got hit on 35 missions and a few of them were pretty bad.

Most of the fire was from small arms; we wore body armor and our seats were armored to protect us. When the enemy would open up with the .50 caliber and other big stuff, it would get real serious. The heavy caliber bullets would go right through anything. They would even shoot rocket-propelled grenades, and one guy came back with a Montagnard arrow out of a crossbow stuck in his airplane. We might be the last military outfit that took hits from a crossbow. You took a lot of hits—that’s all there was to it. I took my first hit on my first mission, and got my last hit on my last mission.

When the shooting started you would really get low because they would have less time to fire at you. I’m sure I was frequently only 25 feet off the treetops. Some of the airplanes had marks where guys hit the top of trees. I was always surprised that no one ever crashed because of getting too low. We were low enough that you could get a real good look at the enemy and see if they were shooting at you or someone else—you would even see kids and women shooting. All of them seemed to be pretty bad shots. We would drop smoke grenades when we took fire and then the fighter escorts would hose down the area with some really bad stuff. It would sometimes look like the Fourth of July with everything going off. You could sometimes see the concussion when the ordnance would go off. If the women and kids were shooting they usually got it too. That bothered me at first. Should you shoot at kids? No. If the kids are shooting at you, should you shoot at them? Yeah, I think so.

The day my Flight Commander got shot down you could see the gun emplacement that fired at him—it looked like a doughnut. They dug a round hole with a quad-mounted .50 caliber in the middle so they could shoot in any direction while standing in the hole. I was on Emmett’s wing when they got him. They hosed him down really good and then turned on me, but the gun must have jammed because they started fiddling with it. Emmett’s plane was burning like crazy—his right wing tank was on fire. I was screaming at him over the radio, ‘Do This and Do That’ and finally his tank dropped off. We were making an escape over the South China Sea and that tank dropped like a huge ball of fire. Then his airplane slowly rolled over and went straight down into the sea.

There were always a few of us whom they kept qualified to carry cargo—we called it trash hauling. When the regular trash haulers got overloaded, we would remove the spray tanks from a few aircraft and install rollers on the floor so you could move pallets in and out easily. I didn’t like the job because it was usually a bad mission. One time I was tasked to haul the explosive charges that they load behind the projectiles in the big guns. The Base was under siege so our procedure was to land, roll to the end of the runway, immediately turn around and take off. The crew slid the cargo out on the take off run. I also hauled some supplies to Khe Sahn during their siege. The place looked like the surface of the moon—the troops lived underground. We just made a touch and go there and the crew pushed the cargo out during the touch. I don’t think any aircraft would have lasted very long on that runway.

I was never wounded, but I surely got scared occasionally. I know a couple of guys that said they were never scared and acted pretty casual about things, but its awfully hard for me to believe that there was no fear in anyone. I would get extremely scared. I felt really bad about the fact that I might not get back to see my kids and not watch them grow up and not get back to my wife and parents.

I don’t know of anybody that was having a great time over there. We would all have rather been somewhere else. I didn’t want to go to Vietnam, didn’t like it when I got there and was happy to leave. But I was a career officer and it was our job and our duty, so I went and I made the best of it.”

“We bombed Hanoi with B-52’s for the first time in December 1972. It was called, Operation Linebacker II and it was eleven days of bombing. I led the third attack. A lot of people, me included, think that’s what basically ended the war because up until then the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese were dragging their feet. They had been arguing in Paris over the size of the table and all this kind of crap but a few days into the bombing of Hanoi, North Vietnam finally agreed to get together and talk.

We took off from Guam after the usual pre-takeoff briefings. We went northwest up through South Vietnam off into Laos until we were due west of Hanoi then we cut east and ran down Thud Ridge. From the time we took off from Guam until we were over Hanoi was about 5 hours. I started off from Guam with maybe thirty B-52’s and I picked up twenty more based in Thailand after refueling off the coast of Vietnam. So by the time we got up to Hanoi we had fifty-some birds, plus fighter support and such like. As Airborne Commander I was in charge of all that.

It was a night mission. It was black-all you could see were a few lights on the ground. We came in at 35000 feet. There was a hell of a tail wind. We were going lickity-split down Thud Ridge into downtown Hanoi then releasing and making a hard right, turning southwest into Laos. We believed that Hanoi was the best-defended city in the world at that time.

We weren’t sure how many MiG fighters were going to be attacking and how many were measuring our altitude. We were doing a good job jamming the command and control of the Surface-to-Air Missiles. Normally SAM’s have a proximity fuse so when the warhead goes by at a certain distance it’s programmed to go off-it has it’s own radar. But we had them jammed so they didn’t go off. Then the North Vietnamese set them to go off at a certain altitude. I counted thirty of these SAM’s fired just at our cell. They were coming up all over the place. The idea was to be in the lethal SAM ring for the minimum amount of time. A lot of guys would get hit in that post-target turn. I lost one B-52 on my mission. We lost a total of thirteen or fifteen B-52’s during Linebacker II.

Our targets were railroads, military installations like army bases, radar sites, airfields and so forth. The enemy was running out of SAM’s. By the last night of the eleven-night operation it was damn near a milk run.

After eleven days of this, the North Vietnamese told the U.S. they wanted to resume the peace negotiations. Linebacker II gave everybody a good excuse to restart the talks. It was obvious that Hanoi was on its knees militarily. After the third or fourth night things were looking pretty good for us. One of our guys called the B-52, ‘God’s avenging dump truck.’ I think it’s a pretty good label.”

“I am proud to have served my country in Vietnam and the 20 years, 3 months and 9 days that I served in the military. I’m proud to have been a little part of attempting to give an entire country its freedom because while we were there they did have elections and there was more than one person on the ballot. So they did get a little taste of democracy. And through aid we did build schools, hospitals, orphanages-there was a lot of good done, at least we were attempting to. And if the politicians would have let the military run the war, I think it would have been a different world today. We could have won if our hands hadn’t been tied.

Americans have always been one step away from doing what’s supposed to be done and they’re doing it right now. I’m not going to compare Iraq to Vietnam. I’m going to compare the politics. Americans are always, ‘We don’t want to do that because we’re going to hurt somebody.’ What the hell is war? That little town over there in Iraq that’s giving us all that trouble, Falluja-let’s just go in one side and when we get to the other side there’s nobody left. I mean, nobody left.

Do you know what General Pershing did in the Philippines? He took a few Muslims and killed them; put them in a hole in the ground. Cut up two pigs, poured blood all over the corpses, put the pigs on top and buried them. He never had any more trouble because in the Muslim religion you can’t meet Allah if you’ve been in contact with pork without purificationÉ

A lot of us, including myself, came back from Vietnam as alcoholics. This may be hard to believe but in the time period I was over there, I don’t remember one person taking drugs. That was later in the ’70’s. Our problem was alcohol.

You know when it’s 110 degrees in the shade you’ve got to have some kind of liquid. Our water there was treated with bleach. It tasted exactly the way it smelled-I’ll guarantee it. So you could drink this water that smells like bleach or you could have beer. We would get beer in by the pallets. This was American beer they brought us when I was stationed on the island of Phu Quac off the coast of Cambodia. After you’ve been there for a while you learn not to drink anything cold. That puts your body in shock. We drank warm beer. By the time I got back home, I wanted cold beer. I also drank Jim Beam and scotch.

After Vietnam, I was sent to Korea. I was spending my entire military paycheck at the NCO club, plus maximum credit. I had one pair of civilian pants, one pair of civilian shoes, one civilian shirt. Everything else was military. I mean I was drinking everything. One day my First Sergeant came in and told me he was going to put me in the stockade if I didn’t straighten up. This was in Chun Chon, eight minutes from the DMZ-I went from one combat situation right into the next one. Plus I had transferred from the Navy to the Army. I decided that I had to do something because I knew I wanted a military career.

People realize today that alcoholism is a problem with all the homeless Vietnam veterans. They couldn’t lick it. But I can tell you how I did: my late wife helped me. When I met her in Korea-we got married in 1969-she helped me out by offering companionship, and by asking, ‘Do you really need that drink right now? Let me get you a coke instead.’ And by substituting beer for the hard liquor; plus I wanted to quit. I stopped drinking completely. Maybe on New Year’s Eve we’d pop the cork on a bottle of champagne and have one glass. Other than that I don’t drink. If I hadn’t stopped then professionally I was finished. If I had gone to the stockade, I was out. That First Sergeant did me a favor. His name was A. D. Pridgen and if I knew where he was today I’d hug him and kiss him. I’ll never forget him as long as I live.

Anyone with a drinking problem they’ve got to want to do something about it. You can’t force someone to do something they don’t want to do. If I see someone at a bar that’s got a drinking problem, I don’t try to put my views upon him. That’s one thing that everybody has fought for in this country-the right to make choices in your own life. You may not be right in what you want to do, but you’ve got the freedom to do it.”

“I spent my entire year in Vietnam as the Assistant Battalion Advisor to the 4th Battalion, 48th Infantry regiment, 18th ARVN Division-Army of the Republic of Vietnam. I could have rotated back to a safer job at Xuan Loc after six or seven months, but chose to stay with 4/48th.

While with my unit I went on hundreds of company and battalion-sized operations. I was under sniper, small arms, machine gun, mortar and rocket fire from the enemy. I operated in booby-trap infested areas, leech-filled swamps, triple canopy mountain jungle and muddy rice fields. I called in supporting fire of artillery and helicopter gun ships. I coordinated evacuation of the wounded. I was getting supplies and ammunition to the unit while its battalion commander was selling them on the black market or worse. I found the job to be stressful and traumatic, especially the five months of Dai-uy Diew’s command.

The Vietnamese commander of the 18th ARVN Division was corrupt. He had a core cadre of cohorts who went back together since the mid-1950’s when they had all been in an elite airborne battalion together with him as commander. It was rumored that he ran a vast criminal enterprise.

Tieu-ta Tan was not part of this clique. He was Battalion Commander of 4/48th when I first arrived in June 1968. He was a superb tactician and beloved leader who cherished his men. He had spent six months in Ft. Benning, Georgia, attending the Infantry Officer’s Career Course and spoke excellent English. He was a senior major in the division. In order to get rid of Tieu-ta Tan and put in their own guy, a new position was created. Tan was put in charge of getting the railroad running from Bien Hoa to Xuan Loc.

With a senior Major out of the way, Dai-uy Diew was made Commander of the 4th Battalion, 48th Infantry. Diew was evil incarnate. As Captain Dexter C. Newman later said, ‘I knew something was up when the guy showed up for war with his wife, driving in a 1937 Packard.’ He did ghost payrolling, taking the pay of soldiers on the rolls who did not exist. He did double payrolling, having everyone paid twice, one of which he kept. He sold food, medical supplies and gasoline on the black market. Even ammunition would be siphoned off and sold before it got down to his soldiers. He would keep the bonus money that was supposed to go to the men for capturing weapons or killing enemy. And, as commander, he had total life and death dictatorial power and control over the entire battalion. We were all afraid of him.

After being in combat with them five months, I had an excellent relationship with the Vietnamese junior officers of the battalion, especially the 1st Company Commander. The Vietnamese soldiers knew I would risk my life for them. They trusted me with their lives.

About three weeks after Diew took over, the 1st Company Commander came to me and laid it all out. He was requesting our intercession. The effectiveness of the battalion as a fighting force had already deteriorated and he foresaw its only getting worse.

Right at that time, we had a new Senior Battalion Advisor, Captain William Stoner. I relayed the information I had received to him. Since he was so new to the battalion, whereas I was more familiar with the situation, he had me go to Xuan Loc, 18th Division headquarters and report to Col. Walter E. Coleman, Advisor Team 87 Commander and the counterpart to the Vietnamese commanding General.

Col. Coleman listened to all I had to report then questioned me as to my evaluation of the new battalion commander’s ‘competency in the field.’ I replied that I could not tell. We had not gone on many battalion-size operations. They were mostly company-sized ones where he would stay behind. I asked the Colonel why he brought up the issue of ‘competency in the field.’ He replied that it was US policy to not interfere with the internal affairs of the Vietnamese unless they proved themselves incompetent in the field. I asked him what ‘incompetent in the field’ meant. He replied that if the Vietnamese battalion commander were to have a platoon or company be ‘wiped out,’ that would constitute being ‘incompetent in the field.’ I asked him if that might mean a company or platoon I might be with. He said, ‘That’s right, Lieutenant.’ There was nothing more to say. I said, ‘Yes Sir,’ saluted him and left.

With regards to the duration of the event, my dialogue with Col. Coleman lasted about ten minutes. The duration of Dai’uy Diew’s raping and looting of the battalion lasted until mid-May 1969, over five months. I was afraid of him the whole time. I often thought about killing him but could never come up with a feasible plan. He did more destruction to that battalion than any enemy could. If anyone’s death would shorten the war, it would be his. To this day, I think I would have killed him, given the opportunity.”

“After my first tour of duty in Vietnam I had orders for Fort Bragg. I got back to the states and at that time my family was in Baltimore. I was walking up Howard Street in downtown Baltimore-I was still in uniform. A truck backfired about two blocks behind me. I just yelled, ‘Incoming!’ and hit the pavement. It just freaked everybody out. I said, ‘To hell with this.’ Next morning I took the bus, went down to the Pentagon and had orders changed to go back to ‘Nam-just wasn’t ready to come back to what we like to call ‘civilization.’ I wasn’t done fighting my war-there was still a cause to be fought for.

I enjoyed the combat-the adrenalin. Don’t mistake that. Don’t mistake the love of combat for the lack of fear. We were all scared-just some of us got off on the adrenaline…

As far as getting orders changed, it was no problem. I just went down there, told them I wanted a change to go back to ‘Nam. Eighteen days later I was back in country. I went through Rangers school-we had our own school in Vietnam. It was ten days of sheer hell. Our training was geared to guerilla fighting. I was stationed in the same area as my first tour, Central Highlands. The company was based in An Khe.

I loved being with the Rangers. We were a six-man hunter-killer team. Our mission was to go out and kill. Go in, strike, get out-covert. Sometimes if there were too many NVA we had to call in air strikes. Sometimes we had to call them in a lot closer than was allowed by military regs. In some cases it was do that or die anyway.

War just leaves scars that will never heal up in your head because of the overall trauma. The first person I ever had to kill was an eight-year old boy. We were escorting the 101st Airborne in the A Shau Valley. A little boy ran out of the village with a grenade in his hand heading straight for a truckload of GI’s-kind of hard to balance that one out. The grenade was in his hand. We tried to get him to stop-‘Dong Lai!’ ‘Stop!’ He just kept running with that Chi Com in his hand-it’s a Chinese Communist grenade with a string fuse. We didn’t have a choice. If we hadn’t killed him he would have ended up throwing it in a truckload of GI’s. He was about 25 yards away. There are too many other instances like this to list and I say that in all sincerity. I just can’t talk about them.

They deactivated my company just a few months after I left when they started the withdrawal. A lot of guys who stayed went to either Special Forces or went to work for the CIA as black ops in Cambodia. The time I served with the Rangers was the pinnacle of everything I’d ever wanted to be. And when I lost that, I couldn’t see past the war.

They sent me to Germany to an artillery unit as a mechanic and four months later I was out. A couple of Puerto Rican guys from New York were having some kind of big war among themselves and they made the mistake of coming through my room in the middle of the night. You don’t just take somebody fresh out of combat and startle him in the middle of the night because he ain’t going to hide his head under the covers-he’s coming out attacking. And that’s what I did. The first I threw out the window; the other I pinned up against a locker and stuck a bayonet right up against his throat. I almost killed two of our guys-four months later I was out. There’s a lot of stuff especially with the Rangers that’s still classified and I can’t talk about.

I have plenty of firepower. I stay pretty heavily armed at home and everybody that knows me knows better than just to drop in-I’m in my bunker. The woman I was married to for fourteen years was scared to death of me the whole time we were married because of the nightmares-wake up in the middle of the night crying, screaming, roaming around.

You know, because of my background in Vietnam, we had to watch our tempers more than anyone else. Society did not give us the right to get angry and shout. If we did that we were considered lethal. I got fired more than once just for doing nothing more than anybody else would have done-got mad at somebody for doing something really stupid. Yelled at him. The reason I was given was because when I get mad, all people see in my eyes is death.”

“On October 30, 1965, early in the morning those gooks down in the village had set up a 75 mm French recoilless rifle. On the hill we had a tank and an Ontos, which looked sort of like a tank but had 6-106mm recoilless rifles mounted on it—a pretty deadly weapon. Those gooks had already zeroed in on the tank and that Ontos, and the first two rounds out of that 75 knocked them both out, knocked the track off the tank. They couldn’t maneuver to fire down the hill. Anyway, all hell broke loose. We estimated there were about 200 VC. They came up the hill and actually overran our position. They blew up the command post and got into our ammo bunker and got grenades and ammo, rockets and mortars. And it was pretty much hand-to-hand combat for probably an hour before we could push them back off the hill.

There were about 120 Marines there, a pretty full rifle company, which is three platoons. Of course, the Viet Cong had the element of surprise. It was raining like hell anyway. They approached, cut the wire, came right on up through the hill there. We were set up in a perimeter on this hill, which was about three acres on top. It was 22 feet elevation, so it wasn’t that high. They came up on the side of the hill opposite to where I was at and, normally, when you’re in a defensive position like that, you are firing outward. But they were coming up to our backside and anyone who was standing up in the middle of the perimeter was fair game—you just turned around and fired into them. You could hardly see anything—it was very dark and raining. About 2:30 a.m. that night we had medevacs flying in and out. We had 19 Marines killed and 47 wounded, so it damned near cleaned out half the company. I thought, ‘Hell, man. I’ve got 40 more weeks to serve in country—what’s that going to be like?’

The next morning what was left of us did a sweep around the perimeter of this hill—we got 43 Viet Cong KIA. We gathered them up and had a tank come in with a blade on the front and dug a ditch and threw those VC in the ditch and covered them over. I went out around the hill, and I was looking at the different kinds of ammo lying on the ground there from the previous assault. They had a lot of old French weapons left over from when the French were there in ’53. They had the old grease guns with the big banana clips on them. They had some old M-1 rifles they had collected that the U. S. government gave to the Vietnamese in the ’40’s to fight the Japanese; mostly automatic assault weapons, a lot of different weapons&mdahs;whatever they could pick up here and there.

We stayed on that hill for about another week. Like I say, we had the hell shot out of us up there. The VC were a pretty well-organized fighting force and they were pretty damn formidable too. Those guys came down there to kick our ass and they did kick our ass pretty good…

When I came back from Vietnam, the students were having a demonstration over on the Indiana University campus and they had these jerks out there in Dunn Meadow running around with North Vietnamese flags. I parked my motorcycle, ran down the bank and cracked a few heads. Off they took me to jail for disorderly conduct. That’s when I was still pumped up about the war being the right thing in 1966. After a while the war seemed to be so useless and futile. I kind of changed and I lost track of the war. I didn’t read about it and I didn’t watch the news. I felt like we should never have been there to begin with. What the hell for? Were we going to save the Philippines from Communism?…

I was lucky to get back without any physical injuries. I started having problems with PTSD about 10 years after I got out of Vietnam and then about 10 years after that was when I really started having some problems with flashbacks. I was having nightmares about Vietnam. The VA diagnosed me with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder related to combat trauma. In World War II they called it ‘Shell Shock.’ You don’t ever really outlive that—it’s baggage you carry with you your whole life. It’s just knowing the next minute you could be dead. When you get into a firefight, it’s organized chaos. You’re shooting at them; they’re shooting at you. You got people getting hit. It just absolutely scares the shit out of you. Witnessing those traumatic events forever changes you, and you can’t ever forget that—it’s a horrible thing to have to go through.

I’ve scared the hell out of my wife more than once when I wake up screaming in bed. One nightmare I have more than others is, we’re on patrol and somehow I get either left behind or I lose my way and the patrol leaves and goes on without me and I’m left there by myself knowing full well the enemy is right around there someplace. The next thing, I’m hiding beneath this big bush and I hear Viet Cong coming down the trail and then they stop right in front of where I’m hiding and raise the branches up and there I am. And it just scares the shit out of me. That’s when I start screaming.

I have that dream frequently. I probably have nightmares four, five times a month. It didn’t start right away because I was so involved with raising a family and working but I’d had some psychological problems involving my service in Vietnam. Anybody who has ever come out of heavy combat has got a bit of baggage to carry. When I look across this field at home here today and I see that tree line over there—that’s the things you look for while you’re on patrol. You scan those tree lines for snipers or any kind of activity.

You just deal with it the best you can—take your medication. It helps some with the nightmares and helps you sleep. We’re going to see people coming back from Iraq with these same problems. It can’t be helped. It’s just so frightening to be in a situation you have no control over where you can die at any moment.”

“On New Year’s Eve we started getting radio messages from LP’s in the woods-three-man listening posts, ‘Something’s happening! Something’s happening! Something’s happening!’ The fighting started about 11 o’clock at night and went steady, on and off, until the next morning, until it got light enough to see-then it stopped.

I will never forget this. I know I didn’t dream it. I haven’t imagined it. The sun came up and the smoke cleared and the dew burned off. There was meat all over everything. All around the perimeter it was meat. And the wood line, which was maybe fifteen or twenty meters away looked like ruined drapes. It was a mess.

One thing that Oliver Stone, who described this battle in Platoon, got right-at the end of the firefight in the film the planes come in and drop napalm, which didn’t happen; they didn’t drop anything on us. The next morning when the kid wakes up there’s white powder all over everything. Everything sort of looked antique-I remember that distinctly. It was dust and junk all over everything. Everybody was covered with dust and sweat. And the bodies and the body parts, the meat, looked antique. Not fun. I never want to go through something like that ever again.

One of the things I did at the beginning of the battle: my track had been on the perimeter and then they moved us to a new spot on the perimeter. I parked the track in such a way that the gas tank was as far away from a direct shot as possible. There were some tracks that got blown up and burned to the ground. The gasoline fire melted the metal armor-around a couple of the tracks you’d have this huge puddle of aluminum alloy. One of the tracks in our platoon got hit and burned and the driver’s body was simply incinerated. All we found of him was a bit of his backbone, his pelvis and his skull.

As drivers we were sitting in the track from the neck down so you can see; everyone else is sitting on top. If an RPG hit the track, the driver has the gas tank right behind and the drivers always got fucked. If I ever meet the bonehead who sent gasoline powered Armored Personnel Carriers to Vietnam instead of diesel, which is less flammable, he and I are going to have a real serious conversation. I would gladly do time in prison for the privilege of beating the shit out of the guy…

It’s a true fact if ever there was: I became a writer because of the war and not the other way around. It’s one of the great ironies of my life and it’s an irony I share with a number of writers who came out of Vietnam. Bruce Weigl would be working in a mill around Lorain, Ohio. Probably the only writer I know who would have been a writer regardless of the war is Robert Olen Butler.

My old man drove a bus and had four sons. Word in the house was: finish high school and get a job. I’m the only one of the brothers who finished college. Becoming a writer was the farthest thing from my mind. I came back from Vietnam in early spring of 1968. Three weeks later Martin Luther King was murdered. Then in June, Bobby Kennedy was murdered. I got a job that summer driving a Chicago city bus and literally drove through the big doings at the Democratic National Convention in August. I thought the war had followed me home.

I wanted to go back to school. I took a writing class because I thought it was going to be a snap ‘A’ and I wouldn’t have to work. I got fooled. The second night of class the teacher comes up to me and says, ‘If you want to write war stories, here, read these two books.’ And he hands me The Iliad and War and Peace; it took a year to read those books. The Iliad is a paradigm for a lot of things but it’s a war story so it’s a paradigm for war stories.

I became a writer because I had a story that would not be denied. I was talking about this the other day with my editor and I said, ‘For 35 years I’ve been thinking about the war every day.’ The war had a tremendous impact on my life. When my kids were old enough I had to teach them not to come up behind me and give me a hug around my throat. Don’t make a loud, sudden noise behind me. I’ve always had a kind of tic and I went to the VA and the shrink said it was some kind of seizure. It’s a flashback. It only lasts an instant but you get a full image of an event.

As a writer Vietnam is my subject. Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County and he had that in his head all his life. All he had to do was dip in this story or that story and the characters were all right there. Garrison Keillor had Lake Wobegone-what a remarkable discovery! I used to be embarrassed to write about the war-not so much now. I’ve been blessed with a source. I know for a fact that as a writer I can reach around and touch the war and always find a story. The war really did give me something that I love-writing is a craft that I love.”

(Larry Heinemann received the National Book Award for Fiction for Paco’s Story, based on his Vietnam War experiences.)

“I’m a native American, Ho Chunk Nation, from Wisconsin. Above everything I accept my own death as a destiny. It’s a great honor to die as a warrior on the battlegrounds. Summer of 1968, I got in-country. I was assigned to the 3rd Marine Division, which was located by Quang Tri city up in the northern I Corps. My first assignment was with the H/S Company 3/9 in communication. I talked to my CO, told him, I’m an American Indian. I came here to fight a war. I want to be with an infantry company. I was then transferred to I Company, 3/9.

On or about Christmas time 1968, I experienced my very first firefight-it was terrifying. Before the Dewey Canyon operation in A Shau Valley, one of my closest friends was killed while walking point; I volunteered to take over his job. It’s nerve-racking and tiresome to walk alone far up in front of my platoon and my company. Walking point, life expectancy is very short; usually the first contact with the enemy you were killed or wounded. I was good and became a deadly killer and hunted for the enemy and did my job well. I was never scared. The only fear I had was the fear of being captured.

One operation that I didn’t walk point we got hit. The enemy was shooting at us from the top of this mountain. As we all started to run up a sergeant from another platoon was hit! He was screaming for help. I ran up towards where he was lying. He was hit in the arm; his bone was sticking out.

I cut up his flak jacket and his jungle shirt and used the shirt and his first aid kit to stop the bleeding. Carefully I pulled his arm bone back then tied it with the cloths that I had cut up, using the flak jacket armor to keep the bone in place to prevent further injury. I stayed and protected him until a corpsman came. I left them to find my squad; probably saved his life.

There was an Army unit in Laos; they were getting hit bad. We were not supposed to be there when we flew in. Early in the morning it was still dark. I was on guard duty when a blue flare exploded above us. Suddenly the enemy attacked us in waves. We held our positions and fought them off until the sun came up when it was over.

We captured an enemy soldier. I wanted to kill him but I chose not to because he was not on equal terms with me. We went out on patrols to look for more. With my platoon I came upon an enemy soldier, shot a whole clip of rounds in him and killed him.

In fall 1969 they started pulling some of the 3rd Marines Division out of Vietnam-my tour had ended. I left Vietnam and flew to Okinawa. I left there and landed at Travis Air Force Base in California. March of 1970 it was cold; the snow was flying when I finally made it home to Wisconsin where my journey had all started.

I was discharged from the U. S. Marine Corps on September 1971. Memories still haunt me when I was a young Ho Chunk Marine that went to war and survived through many firefights on the battlegrounds from A Shau Valley, to Laos, the DMZ and the jungles of Vietnam.

To all my Marines that gave their ultimate sacrifice for me, thank you! To be where I am today, I have never forgotten you. Your sacrifice was not in vain but with Valor and Honor, Semper Fidelis.”

“I remember before we went to Bo Tuc they had us set up for about a week in an area near the Cambodia border. We set up a battalion-size perimeter and we put out barbed wire and rigged up the whole perimeter with Claymore mines. They never attacked us there because they saw us setting all this up. They waited until the next night when we went to Bo Tuc and that night at two in the morning we got overrun by North Vietnamese.

All of a sudden mortar rounds started coming in. I was in a foxhole with two other guys, black guys, one named Jameson and the other named Walker. We’d sleep three in a hole. We were supposed to be a reserve support position, not a line position, and being in a reserve position we were able to all three of us sleep. So the mortar attack woke us up and all of a sudden we could hear someone about 30 meters in front of us yelling orders in Vietnamese. They were attacking the position next to us. They overran that position and one of them started running toward our hole. It was two in the morning so you couldn’t tell if he was an American or Vietnamese.

I was sitting cross-legged with my rifle pointed up at the entrance to the hole. We always put a sand bag cover on our foxholes so if we got mortared we’d have some protection from the shrapnel. All of a sudden this guy came up behind my hole and he stuck in his rifle. I saw the front side of an AK-47 and then a muzzle flash and I pulled my trigger. The bullet hit me in the knee and I blacked out from the impact. When I came to a few minutes later my weapon was jammed and my knee was shattered. Walker-who we used to call ‘Thump’ because he had the M-79 grenade launcher and that’s the sound it made-started shooting and Jameson pulled me out of the hole and lifted me on his back. We pulled back to the platoon CP which was a hole even further back and they stuck me in the foxhole with a bottle of Darvans and I lay there eating them Darvans all night to kill the pain.

That night the NVA overran a lot of our positions. We had flown in artillery and they overran the artillery, set the artillery rounds on fire. So they were blowing up and they’d cook off-a dull thud-type of explosion. It was the only night in Vietnam I thought I was dead for sure because the Vietnamese were all over the place charging and at night you couldn’t tell who was who. The fight went on all night. They were not able to kill us all and take over our positions so they withdrew before the sun came up. We took a lot of casualties. I’m sure they took a lot of casualties too.

In the morning they took me out of the foxhole and put me on a stretcher to medevac me out. They carried me over to my position and the guy who had shot me was dead. He was sitting up against a tree stump and he had his AK-47 across his lap and a couple of bullet holes up his chest. The sergeant started patting me on the shoulder. ‘Here’s this gook you killed. You did a good job.’

They used to have a big thing; first off it was a racial thing: they weren’t people; they were ‘gooks’. How you get people to kill people, you dehumanize them-make them less than human. They also used to have a big thing in my unit about Individual Confirmed Kills. You know, a lot of times we’d get into a firefight and everyone would start shooting and then you’d find some bodies later and you weren’t sure who individually shot them-you all did. But if you had an Individual Confirmed Kill and the person you killed was carrying an automatic weapon-not a semi-automatic-you would get a three-day in-country pass.

Sounds bizarre when you think about it. Sounds like hunting, But when we were fighting the Vietnamese, they were putting a high priority on capturing AK’s. So this sergeant is telling me, ‘Here’s the gook you killed.’ I looked at this guy; he was about my age and I started thinking, ‘Why is he dead and I’m alive?’ It was pure luck that I had my rifle aimed at his chest while his was aimed at my knee-not anything to do with being a better soldier or fighting for a better cause.

Then I started thinking, ‘I wonder if he had a girlfriend? How will his mother find out her son is dead?’ What I didn’t realize at the time, but did later, was that I was refusing to give up on his humanity. And that’s what a lot of war is about: denying your enemy’s humanity. That’s where a lot of guys came back and still had a lot of hatred and anger. That was the point at which I felt I had to do more than go back home and try to pretend I wasn’t in the war zone. The senselessness of the whole thing was right in front of me. And if you asked me about what I thought about at that moment I would have said, ‘Old men send young men to wars, so why doesn’t Lyndon Johnson and Ho Chi Minh fight it out and let us all go home.'”

“On that mountaintop one of the first things the captain said to me was, ‘You’re walking the point.’ And I said, ‘You know, I’m not transferring in from another company. I’m brand new.’ And he goes, ‘That’s why you’re walking the point. We don’t want to do it. Don’t worry. We’ll teach you.’ So I walked point for seven months. I was lucky. Very, very lucky. So many things happened. We were mostly in the jungles, a lot in the mountains. We were doing search and destroy; ambushes at night. We worked the river a lot.

When I walked point, I looked for booby traps. Our area was so booby-trapped it was crazy. The first booby trap I found was a 500 pound bomb. We were on a three or four man patrol trying to get back to our fire support base, pick up something and come back out. We were near My Lai-our brigade had Lt. Calley. I just happened to glance over as we were crossing a trail, because you could never walk on them and I saw a hole in the sand. What they had done was put thatching and covered it with sand on this big trail. What they were doing, we figured, was trying to get a tank. But it was 500 pounds and we came back to blow it up and we didn’t bother digging it up. We just put a Claymore mine on it and crawled back a certain range and boom! It lifted in the air-stuff falling all over us. We were laughing; we were cussing. Had no idea how big it was. We started digging stuff up after that.

But that was luck. So many things were just luck. I glanced and happened to see the right spot. Sometimes you’d see trip wires glistening in the sun. They actually took me off the point for a little while because, you know, you go through periods of depression. I didn’t know it then. But you think if only I’d hit that little bitty booby trap they’d be sending me home in a body bag.

The very first time we were out, the guy that took my place came into a tunnel complex. So they called me up to check it out and as I came up he’s got the end of his rifle under a big rice shaker and he’s getting ready to flip it over which you don’t ever do-you got to check it for booby traps. So I just start backing up. I’m going, ‘No, no,’ and I stepped right on a booby trap, a hole the size of a shoe box they’d strung a wire across-staked it. It was hooked up to an RPG round, rocket-propelled grenade, which if it went off we wouldn’t be having this conversation-I’d be dead. And I hit it so hard that it snapped the wire instead of pulling the wire. It was down on this riverbed so it could have been rusty. It was just pure luck, pure luck. We dug that one up-we were kind of amazed. But after that happened I decided, you know, put me back on point. I’d rather die from something I did wrong, my own mistake, and you’re out far enough so no one else gets involved. I was lucky and I could tell it so I didn’t mind walking the point, until I got hit.

We were on this real big push. The area I was in was strictly VC unless we’d go outside our area of operation then we’d start running into NVA, like up in the mountains. So the first time there was a big push of NVA coming in, they brought our whole brigade-company after company coming in all night long. We were sitting on the side of this hill watching all these choppers coming into this big valley.

I was walking point for our company at the time. We were kind of pinned down. My squad was hanging out and they sent a new squad up this trench line where you have bamboo and trees growing. Their point man got pinned down and I went up to take his spot and one of our helicopters almost shot me-they mistook me for NVA. I looked up and here’s this machine gunner in a Huey and I heard the rounds hit in the dirt around me but he missed me. We got on the radio and they called in jets, called in gun ships. We had tracks coming in because we had trapped a big NVA force.

I’d blown an ambush the day or two before where they were setting us up with .51 caliber machine guns which you didn’t run into with the VC-it was all small arms. It was a daylong firefight with things hitting all day here and there. So it was active; it was active. I wound up trading grenades with this guy and I ran out of grenades. I turned to my friend behind me and right then I heard ‘pop’ but I just thought someone was taking a shot. I saw my friend’s eyes get big and he started to yell, ‘Chi Com’ and I already knew it. I don’t know if I could feel it or not. I knew the thing fell between my legs and I looked down and I saw it and I remember vividly the weed I grabbed onto by the side of this trench to yank myself up to get away from this blast and the thing went off and I just sailed out in the middle of this rice paddy.

I’m lying there and the first thing I remember is can I move my toes? Because I knew I shouldn’t have legs and I said, ‘Ok. I can move my toes.’ But then I remembered the syndrome where you still feel the limb you lost. I didn’t want to look down. I thought, ‘Oh shit! No one is coming to get me at all.’ All the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I realized I didn’t have my M-16 any more. I didn’t have any weapons on me at all. I thought the NVA would come up and grab me so I started crawling back to the trench line and I see my friend. Well, he’d taken the explosion up his leg. I said, ‘Can you walk?’ He goes, ‘I think so.’ So I got up and realized I could see the blood and stuff but I was ok. And I actually walked out of there.

They put me on the first dust-off-it’s a special chopper with the red cross on it. I’ve still got four chunks of metal in my legs that they just left. I had Love Story in my pocket. When I was in the first hospital they came up to me and they said, ‘Do you want this?’ The book was shredded in half but also had my blood and body pieces. I’m going, ‘No. I don’t want that. Jeez!’ I don’t think it protected me but it was in my pants pocket just out from my leg and that’s where the big part of the blast went. It was pure luck the way it went off; the way it landed. But then it was severe enough that I never had to go back out to the bush.”

“The first time I saw a dead American, there were three of them-their heads were up on stakes. It was in ‘D’ zone, not too far from Bien Hoa. The enemy was doing that to scare us. Of course, it didn’t scare us; it made us angry. It made me angry. By this time I was lost in the jungle. I was alone. I was AWOL-I weighed 112 pounds; they wanted me to hump a spare barrel of an M60 machine gun. I had just gotten out of the hospital two weeks before with appendicitis. I’m thinking, ‘I’m not in shape. I can’t do this job. I’m leaving!’

I ran off and then I stopped. ‘What in the hell are you doing? You’ve never been in the jungle before!’ By this time it was too late. I was lost, separated from my unit. That’s when I ran across the heads. I found the individuals that did it. I heard them down the hill by the river and there was one over where the heads were and he was masturbating. I was going to try to take him prisoner but I stumbled and I stabbed him accidentally with the bayonet. Once I did that I had to kill him. And when the other two came up I shot them both and I cut off their heads. Some of the guys from the 101st Airborne used to call me ‘headhunter.’

At first I did it because I was enraged but then it was a way to score points-that’s how you were esteemed by your peers. It didn’t bother me back then. But now I don’t sleep more than 15-20 minutes at a time and then I wake up with nightmares and chills and sweats. I walk the perimeter at night. But that’s my cross to bear. I see children when you’ve killed their parents-you hear them crying.

I proudly endured that I stood my post; I did what was expected of me. My fellow paratroopers respected me despite the fact that I was a fuck-up in the rear. In the boonies I did my job. Today I have to suffer with that. No big deal. Thank you very much for your tax dollars-the VA pays for it. Georgie-boy, when he came in as president, they started cutting our benefits. I’m at 150% disability: 100% for PTSD; 30% for diabetes; 10% for erectile dysfunction and 10% for organic brain damage. I’m in pain all the time but you get used to it. They give me medication but it doesn’t work. What does help is marijuana but the sons of bitches won’t let me have it. I don’t want no more drugs. They want to give me codeine, heavy narcotics, but that counteracts the Viagra and I’d rather have a hard-on and endure the pain than just be a fucking zombie…

Here we are in the middle of the night-it’s drizzling-me, Doc Wheatfield, a guy we called Cherry, John Wekerly, and some others. We go and there’s a girl lying under a huge banyan tree. The only other one there is a little boy. She’s pregnant, about to deliver a baby. We break out our ponchos and Doc Wheatfield gets underneath and delivers the baby. We felt responsible for the baby. Doc asks one of the guys to get some fruit from the C-rations. I said, ‘Doc, no one’s going to give up their fruit.’ Doc was a Christian man. He said, ‘Oh, ye of little faith.’

The guys came back with a big sack full of canned fruits. We gave her whatever we had in money and fruit. And then a mama-san arrived and first she looked at us real mean like ‘you murdering bastards.’ But then she saw the food, money, the baby was fine, the little shelter we had built and she came and stood in front of us and she bowed.

It was raining, like I said, but when the baby came out there was a clap of thunder and it stopped raining and the baby cried out. You could hear it in the whole valley. We were so proud and so happy and some of us were crying. As soon as we started to leave, here comes the rain again. We were walking along a rice paddy, standing out like a sore thumb if there was a sniper on the hill, especially when the lightning flashed. There was a herd of water buffalo and someone says, ‘Look at that deformed cow!’ It was a cow having a calf. People from ranches will tell you this: a bull knows its babies and will allow the mother to have a calf but other bulls don’t give a damn. So here we are in the middle of the rain holding hands in a circle around this cow while Doc Wheatfield is helping deliver that calf.

We went over there as regular kids doing a tough job. Some of us lost our way. We did bad things when we were required to but at the same time when it came to helping the innocent, we helped. We were noble. Our hearts were good and those good hearts got wounded.

After the war we were treated disrespectfully. We were persecuted. In the ’70’s over 30% of federal prison inmates were Vietnam veterans. I was one of them. On Mother’s Day, my father, Benito Garcia, a police officer, arrested me for robbing banks. In 18 days I robbed 6 banks in Chicago. I’d go in with a .25 automatic pistol with .22 ammunition-I didn’t even have a gun that shot. I was not very good at it. Then I hung up my guns and picked up the books while in prison. In 16 months I received my Associates degree in Secondary Education from Vincennes University. I earned enough credits for a Bachelors degree from Indiana University in Sociology.

In prison I felt comfortable because I know how to be in a society of macho men. I was always alert, always tense. I could deal with that environment-it was the jungle with steel bars. I could function there; I couldn’t function out here-it’s still difficult. I served 6 years, 1 week active military service and 6 years, 3 months in prison. I got my degree; I was released and I was everybody’s success story. Harry Porterfield did a 30 minute segment on me for the CBS Chicago affiliate.

I was successful for a while but then the nightmares about ‘Nam started and I had to drink. The only way I can get through the night without getting up is when I’m passed-out drunk. But I haven’t had a drink since ’95 when I got in trouble again. An east Texas judge wouldn’t believe that I was a thrifty shopper and that the 320 pounds of marijuana in the trunk were all for me. I wound up in a Texas prison. I served 3 years, 3 months. I am presently on parole for that offense-possession of marijuana, not distribution. When I got out I had 89 months of parole-I’ve got 14 months left. I successfully completed the parole for my bank robberies and I expect to successfully finish this one. I won’t smoke now, but come December 27, 2005, I am going to roll a fucking joint the size of a bus and I’ll kill it in one drag.”