>> Wisconsin Vietnam War Stories is a partnership
of the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs,
the Wisconsin Historical Society and Wisconsin Public Television.
>> James Daley: I just remember the first time we got assigned
to B Company. I was convinced that
they were all criminals. Just the way they acted,
just the things they were doing. I wasn't in contact
with anybody I served with until about 1990.
I got a call from a fellow. He was one of my former
lieutenants. I asked what he was doing.
He told me. He said, "Well, what are you
doing now?" And I said, "Well,
I'm circuit court judge." He said, "Oh, that's--
I wouldn't have thought that." I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "I would've thought you'd be in prison."
He got there late in my tour. ( laughs )
>> Larry Miller: You might have to ask 15 people what day it is.
You just don't know. You lose track of that.
So I called back to the ship and said, "What's the date today?"
They said like August 16. "Lt. Cole," I said,
"I have to be back in the states August 20."
"Holy(--)! Okay." Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh.
I flew back to the ship, grabbed my gear.
Flew to Danang. I grabbed a flight, come home.
In a matter of three days, I'm sitting at home
with my mom and dad. Three days.
They should've never turned me loose on the civilian population
in three days from when I left there.
You just can't. You know.
It'd take the rest of your life to even try to come to terms
with this, let alone, here you go.
You're gone. That's a bite.
>> Narrator: Their country asked them to serve,
and they answered the call. But when the men and women
of Wisconsin went to fight in Southeast Asia,
they had no idea that the Vietnam War
would be part of them for the rest of their lives.
"Wisconsin Vietnam War Stories."
>> Wisconsin Vietnam War Stories was made possible by lead gifts
from Don and Roxanne Weber and from Associated Bank;
with major support from the Ho-Chunk Nation and
the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation;
and from Wisconsin Public Service Foundation,
Kwik Trip, the Forest County
Potawatomi Foundation, Oshkosh Defense,
the General Motors Dealers of Northeastern Wisconsin,
the Oneida Nation; and these Wisconsin individuals
and companies who believe that it is long overdue,
but never too late to honor the service and sacrifice
of our Vietnam Veterans; with additional support
from the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
>> I was drafted in 1954. And I wound up being,
for the better part of a year, assigned to Phnom Penh,
Cambodia, in 1955. And it was an interesting time
in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which were the three
constituent nations that made up French IndoChina in 1950.
We were providing military assistance, and supplies,
and arms, and training to the French Army, already
at war with the Communists in the north.
By 1954, they were good and truly equipped in Dien Bien Phu.
>> I was in the reserve military, rather than the
regular Army, as a physician. Then one day,
I got the information that I was going to Vietnam.
And I was going to take care of helicopter pilots.
In 1962, we didn't have any military over in Vietnam at that
time, other than the MAAG units, Military Assistance
and Advisory Group, that took over when the French
were defeated. >> Dien Bien Phu was more
than just a major defeat. It was a major wake-up call
to the West. The Vietnamese captured
the fire base, the best troops the French Army had.
Then they let them go. And the pictures of these
French soldiers and the nurses that came out of Vietnam
were just horrendous. You have to look at it
like this. The world, at that time,
had certain images of people of color.
It came as a terrible cultural shock to see all these
little North Vietnamese as the victors, against this
bunch of mechanized Westerners. And within a short period
of time, we had taken over the colonial cloak
that the French had dropped on the ground.
>> We sailed up the Saigon River, and we hit Saigon about
6:00 at night. I'll never forget the view.
It was absolutely gorgeous, this French city,
with its wide boulevards. And to add to the beauty of it
was the Vietnam women. This is my first experience
of the military not knowing what they're doing.
These guys have been on the ship for 24 days.
They gave them all $75 and let them go.
I'll tell you who knew what to do.
It was those girls down there. They had it all figured out,
and the taxi drivers, and they just cleaned them out
of their money. These guys came back, and drunk,
and every other which way. I thought that was kind of sad.
How were we supposed to act in their country, that we
didn't know anything about? >> I got in and out of Saigon
regularly, carrying messages and communications.
We were out one night to a night club.
And the place erupted. It was like a movie set.
Boom! Bang! Dancing, argument, wham!
The first thing I see is somebody takes one of these
things, smashes it on a table, and slices the guy
across from him. And the only guy who knew
just exactly what to do, said "Run!"
He jumped up, smashed a beer bottle to get himself armed,
and then ran through a window! ( laughs )
Retreating as fast as we could. I wrote home to my mom
and said, "Boy, wow!" 20 years old, DePere, Wisconsin,
and wow! ( laughs )
>> And our job was to transport Vietnamese soldiers,
to transport them out into the field, or wherever
they were going to fight, or what needed to be done.
It was between the Communists and the non-Communists.
We chose one side in a civil war.
>> At the end of Peace Treaty of Paris, after Dien Bien Phu,
they separated Vietnam, North and South.
Ho Chi Minh was running the North.
And Diem was running the South, and we were backing him.
We picked a guy and we got him elected.
And then he did what we told him to do.
And then, we couldn't understand why everybody else hated us.
>> The warrant officers who flew these helicopters
were very worried. They had no machine guns.
And the first couple weeks of their flying,
the Vietnamese weren't shooting them down.
Well, they weren't leading them enough.
Then they were taking a few hits.
I remember when the machine guns went in.
The crew of the helicopters were really happy.
But then one day, toward the end of my stay,
they said that the Signal Corps was coming in,
and the engineers. Then you knew that we were
going to escalate big time. I can't believe the amount of
equipment and men that came in. They replaced
my little quarters with a field hospital.
>> The French were sour. They were bitter
about the Americans, with all this hubris, coming in
to take up where they failed. Twenty years later,
we failed. They had Dien Bien Phu
and we had the helicopters off the Embassy.
>> A buddy of mine came over and said, "Wow, we can get
all this good schooling by going in the Navy."
I still have the flyer, showing the outline of the Nautilus,
which was the cutting edge nuclear submarine back then.
And I got a hold of a recruiter. August 8, 1961,
we went like this, and off we went for our Navy career.
I wanted to get into submarines, obviously,
so that was the whole deal. >> I had just finished
my junior year in high school when I turned 17.
And I always felt that I wanted to make a career of the Navy.
I remember it well, because my mom and dad
got into a big argument. My mom didn't want me
going in the service. The deciding factor
was my dad telling her, look, he's going to go when he's 18,
and he's going to be bitter at you for the year
that you wasted of his life. So she finally consented.
>> I'd been in college, and I joined the Navy.
They were looking at my records, and they thought I should go
to electronics school. My dad was a mechanic,
and I'd worked in a garage in high school, you know,
in a service station. I didn't really know
electronics, but I learned. I found out I had a pretty good
affinity for learning that and working with it.
I can't remember if I knew about Vietnam at the time or not.
>> I came on board the Perch over in Subic Bay,
in the Philippines. Come along around the month
of August, 1964, everything kind of changed.
They were coming down the middle of the streets
in Olongapo, shagging everybody back to the base,
that war had broken out. We didn't know
what they were talking about. "War?"
They said, "Yeah, the Viet Cong fired on the Maddox."
And we said, "Who are the Viet Cong
and what's the Maddox?" >> I remember it was at night,
off the coast of Vietnam. I was a radarman at that time,
on watch, in what they called CIC, Combat Information Center.
So we had about seven different radio frequencies
that we would be monitoring at any time.
And I do recall pandemonium. Turner Joy and Maddox,
the North Vietnamese gunboats were attacking them, and they
were taking them under fire. Hectic.
Everybody went to general quarters.
But so far as being the catalyst for our active involvement
in Vietnam, the conspiracy theories
as to whether or not they were actually attacked,
I don't know to this day. >> So that was
the beginning of it. We went right over to
the fuel piers, and once again, bullets, beans and black oil.
We took on fuel, food, and ammunition, and headed over.
We started operating with a SEAL Team,
Green Berets, UDT, Frogmen, ROK Special Forces.
>> We started doing surveillance and electronic counter measures.
It was basically receivers that were picking up radars,
and track radars in Russia and Red China.
They'd fly off of carriers. We had a twin engine
Douglas A-3. And in the back
was electronic equipment and the seats for four of us.
When we were flying up along Russia, you know,
we'd come right up alongside of a MiG-21, which was
their best fighter aircraft at the time.
They'd have their missiles. We could see them.
You'd sit and go up there and wave at 'em.
Once in a while, one of the guys would give them
the international signal, you know.
>> The operations with the Special Forces is what we did.
Those were our torpedoes, so to speak.
And what these guys would do, beach recon, sabotage,
whatever their mission was, our job was to get 'em there.
Of course, we were hoping there wasn't anybody there
waiting for us. I was bridge phone talker with
a lot of the battle stations, so I was very fortunate
to be up there. The enginemen, and a lot of the
guys that never got topside, would not get a chance
to see anything. >> There was a lot of accidents,
you know, in the couple years I was over there
onboard carriers, too. In fact, I sat up front once,
just for one landing on the carriers.
And you come in, looking at it, and it looks so much like
a postage stamp there. And you wonder how in the world
can a guy be trained to land on that thing.
As soon as you touched down, you gave it full speed,
because if the cable snapped, you wanted to have the power
to get back off again. Usually, you didn't find people
when they went over. You did it so much, twice a day,
for a long period of time. And you always thought that,
my goodness, that next time, it might be your time.
>> All of a sudden one morning, I got a shoe thrown at my head.
I woke up, and I was ranting and raving,
"What the heck was going on?" And I looked over and
there my younger brother was. I walked into the barracks,
just as Reveille was going off. And the first guy that woke up,
I asked him, "Can you tell me where I can find Jensen?"
He says, "Well, hand me my shoes."
So I gave him his shoes. And he turned around
and he whipped one of 'em, and he hit Wayne in the head.
( laughs ) That was Wayne's first idea
that I was going to be stationed with him.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
I said, "Well, we got duty together."
>> Bruce and I, we reported down to San Diego.
We picked up the 3rd Marines, spent two or three trips going
back and forth into Vietnam. The first, and it was
the biggest amphibious operation since the Korean War.
And my term of enlistment was due to come up.
So Bruce carried my sea bag off. And I watched the ship
pull out with my brother, going to Vietnam.
>> Several of the guys that we did operate
had gotten killed over there. And it just brought it home
that it was a real war. You're with 'em.
You're out drinking with them on the beach.
You're having fun. You're out there
going to war with 'em. And they are my closest friends.
Sorry. Gosh.
Oh. >> I think that's the way
most people in the service get through it,
by joking around, by doing stupid things, you know,
to take your mind off of the real.
And what was real was that you had a chance to die any time
you went on one of those. We knew it.
We all knew that. We were very young.
But after you'd been flying there for a year, you know,
you feel like an old man.
>> We were actually the first troops that went to Vietnam
as combat. March 10, 1965, in the middle
of the night, they woke us up and said we had two hours
to pack up our things, and we had to be on the parade ground
at 3:00 in the morning. They put us in the trucks.
Never told us where we were going.
Took us to Pearl Harbor and put us on a troop carrier.
And 15 days later, we were in Okinawa.
Then we went to Vietnam. We went down the nets
on the side of the ship. We had all of our gear.
We got off of the landing craft. When we got on the beach,
there was all kinds of women and kids there.
They had bottles of Coca-Cola for us, and flowers.
It was, "Where are we?" We didn't know where we were.
>> The first full unit went ashore at Red Beach,
just north of Danang. And I followed
shortly after that in April. For three or four months,
all we did was expand the perimeter, you know.
And yeah, we would take a little sniper fire here and there,
but it really wasn't a full fledged combat situation
when we first got there. First, you had to find them
before you could fight them. That's what the sweeping
operations were. That you would go through
the valleys, hoping to find a unit large enough.
>> Our motto with Recon: Swift, Silent and Deadly.
And I chose that over being in the regular infantry, just
because it was a lead outfit. I thought I would enjoy it more.
And I did. I don't regret that decision.
I met some really hardcore soldiers, guys
that knew why they were there, and knew what to do.
I had that John Wayne syndrome. I wanted to get out
and stop 'em right there. Fight like a man.
It didn't happen. You didn't see 'em.
You walked into traps, and you were fired on by snipers
that you didn't see. It was a completely different
mind-set then. And it took us quite a while
to learn to fight them, to give 'em back
some of what they gave us. >> My father sent me over
a 16mm camera. And I hung that around my neck
with a shoestring and carried it around.
And one of the things I filmed was kind of like
a play-acting firefight on top of one of the hills
with a fox hole. They made believe they were shot
and falling back. You know, this was
pretty early in the time that we were over there,
so it was easy to play-act. Now I see the films,
and it bothers me, because it wasn't funny anymore after
I realized what it was like. >> I mean, we were with
the same unit, the same people now for a year,
year and a half. These were the closest people
you knew in the world. And all of a sudden,
they started to take injuries and deaths.
That was really hard. So I had a great deal of anger.
And eventually, it would subside.
And then you would just realize that fear and anger,
neither one of those were going to help you
in the situation. Somewhere in the middle of it,
you'd lose track of what day it is, or what month it is.
You really don't care. But you resign yourself.
I had never thought, after maybe that six or seven months,
that I was ever going to come out of that country alive.
You pretty well knew that. Every second, every day,
every night, back-to-back. Doc Nichol, he and I sat
back-to-back many a night. When he first
came to my platoon, we didn't want to take him.
I told him I wouldn't go on patrol with no green corpsman.
And he told me, if he could whip my butt,
then would I let him go? I said, "Sure, come on,"
you know. We went around and around.
We rolled around the concertina and down the ditches.
After that little fight, I said, "Okay, Doc,
you can go with us." I gave in.
He says, "Well, you're a tough little 17-year-old punk,"
he says, 'cause he was 20, an old man.
"Come on, old man, I'll kill ya."
We were Siamese twins after that.
We stuck together. >> Four days before I was due
to be sent home to the states, I volunteered
to go out on patrol. I was singing a song,
"Handy-Man," I think. I was weaving back and forth.
And all of a sudden, there was a big explosion.
I looked down and there was blood shooting out of my hand,
just like a bubbler. Then someone was yelling,
"Corpsman!" >> Of the original unit,
or at least our platoon, three of us that either
hadn't been killed or wounded. We were coming down
out of the mountains. I rounded a building
and stepped on a landmine, and went 50-60 feet in the air.
Then, you know, the right leg went one way,
the left leg went the other way. I got a little bit charred.
The first thing I thought when I came back down,
"Where's my rifle?" You know,
crawling for your rifle. I moved a little bit, then
a corpsman came and stopped me. I had brought the unit
partially into a landmine area. But the corpsman stayed with me.
>> Under fire, Doc was tough. He was quite the guy.
We were patching up our platoon sergeant,
wrapping around his chest, because he'd been shot
in the chest. And he was sitting up on a log.
There was fire going everywhere. He handed me the bandage,
and I saw the round hit him in the hand, and the bones
came right out of the palm of his hand, and then it hit--
The sarge somehow got his arm, he had his arm up here,
hit his arm. And he fell on the ground,
he's holding it. And he's hollering,
and cussing and carrying on. I told him, "Well, I suppose
you're done now, right?" "No, I ain't done!" he says.
And he jumps up and tries to finish with one hand.
And I wrapped him up. And we moved up the hill,
trying to get everybody out of the ambush we were in.
>> When I was wounded, I figured God had a reason
for me to live, 'cause the Bouncing Betty that I stepped on
is meant to make a wishbone out of you.
But my rifle took the blunt of the force of the explosion.
They tell me they never found any of my rifle.
They couldn't put me back together like Humpty Dumpty, but
they did the best they could. >> I didn't think I was
going to live anyway, 'cause I could look down.
I could see the mess I was. Almost everything was black.
And I was kind of happy, because they had morphine,
and they put tourniquets on the legs, and stuff like that.
They put me on a stretcher and this guy's running alongside
of me, saying, "Can I say a few words for you, son?"
And I said, "Yeah, but hurry up!"
I mean, I was hedging my bets at that time.
I mean, I didn't think there was any way as heck
I was going to make it. And I never did figure out
what he was. >> I was covered in blood,
head to toe. It wasn't mine.
It was the guys that were bleeding.
And the helicopter prop wash is blowing it down on me.
And I was the last guy off. When I got back to the back area
by the helicopter after getting everybody evacuated,
they said, "Oh, he's dead. He went in a body bag
back to Danang. He went in a body bag
to Danang." I said, "Oh, my God," you know,
"Doc was only shot in the hand." And they said,
"Well, he must've got hit going up to the helicopter."
I had a hard time coping with those losses.
These guys were the toughest of my outfit.
They were the best. And I lost 'em all in one shot.
And you didn't want to get close to 'em.
You get too tight with a guy and you lose 'em.
It hurts every time, you know.
Excuse me.
>> There was a draft program for doctors.
You either had to go in after your training was over,
or risk that you were going to be drafted.
I decided I didn't want to be drafted into the Army,
and I liked to fly. So, I signed up
for the Air Force. I went to Flight Surgeon School.
They tried to teach a bunch of dumb doctors how to march.
We took turns marching the squad around.
I marched my squad right into a fence.
( laughs ) >> My dad was a Tuskegee Airman.
And my earliest recollections are of being at and on airbases
and around airplanes. And the only thing I ever wanted
to do was to fly airplanes, and fly in the Air Force,
and to fly fighters. That was my one goal in life.
And it turned out that I'm heterozygous
for the sickle cell. That eliminated me
from the program to become an Air Force pilot.
But I knew about Vietnam. I can recall listening to
reports about the domino effect, that we had to stop
the Communists. And that if we didn't,
the North would sweep down and engulf the South,
and the South would fall. I bought it.
Tradition of service, the country calls you,
you respond, so I joined. >> President Johnson decided
he needed to eliminate some of the flow of supplies
from North Vietnam to South Vietnam.
He decided to start a bombing campaign against the North,
Operation Rolling Thunder. But it was done with the pilot's
hands tied behind their back, in that they were limited
as to what they could hit and what they couldn't.
There were airfields full of MiG fighters
sitting in North Vietnam that were off limits.
We might hit a Russian and drag the Russians into the war.
But nevertheless, they still sent my pilots up there
to bomb and get shot at. >> I personally never dropped
a bomb. But I was dedicated
to doing everything I could to keep the weapons systems going,
which I did. The unit went on Temporary Duty
to Thailand, the Royal Thai airbase at Korat.
So I volunteered to go. And this was a time when
we were not officially there. We were not allowed to take any
photographs in the flightline. We were not allowed to talk
about what was going on. "Training missions."
These training missions were anything but.
We were bombing as early as the spring of 1965.
Meanwhile, the Chinese and the Soviets helped the Vietnamese
put together very good defenses. >> A flight of four
F4-C fighters had been attacked by a SAM missile
for the first time. Knocked two of them
out of the sky, damaged the third one severely,
and the fourth one was able to return to base.
Well, when this happened, President Johnson and
Secretary of Defense, McNamara-- Johnson said, "Bob,
can we get rid of those?" McNamara said,
"Sure, we can get rid of them." So what they did was programmed
a mass gaggle, 48 airplanes, to go after one SAM missile site,
and show the North Vietnamese that, you know, who was boss.
>> 1965, we had a lot of losses, just a lot of losses.
I mean, the pilots' situation involved flying 100 missions,
or a year, whichever came first, then rotating.
And I can remember one friend, Carl Richter.
Carl completed his 100 missions, and he volunteered
to go a second 100. Volunteered.
Didn't have to. >> All the airplanes we had
were in the air. As it turned out,
it was a sting operation by the North Vietnamese.
They set up a bunch of white painted telephone poles,
and an active radar site, and that's what we sent
48 airplanes after. They had every gun
in North Vietnam pointed at us. One of my pilots said
it looked like a Fourth of July celebration gone bad.
We only lost six airplanes. But six airplanes
is six airplanes. And it's six pilots.
>> It's kind of difficult, 'cause it brings--
( sighs heavily ) It was when Carl Richter
was lost. And I can remember,
we were in the shack. And we were getting reports
on the radio, because he was shot down.
And they were trying to hold off the Vietnamese soldiers
while they tried to pick him up. And they did pick him up.
I can remember we were just elated.
Everybody just went crazy. Unfortunately, he had suffered
really severe injuries. He had ejected at very a high
speed, and he went into shock and died in the helicopter
on the way back.
>> Frank Tullo was shot down that day,
and was able to be extracted from the jungle, picked up by
a Jolly Green Giant helicopter. They got out of there
while they were being shot at. He came back to Korat
the next day. The whole squadron
was out there to meet him. I took him to my dispensary.
He had a laceration over his eye.
And I sewed that up for him, and examined him, and
didn't find anything else other than a whole lot
of North Vietnamese sweat and dirt.
I sent him to the Officer's Club.
Everybody got drunk that night.
>> Coming out of Mississippi, I was prepared, anyway,
for survival. When I started getting
higher in school and learning about the Constitution,
the Declaration of Independence, I couldn't square it.
I couldn't understand how this could be true.
We're created equal, and I'm seeing people being lynched.
But it was easier for me to fight.
And on January 3, we boarded ship and left for Vietnam.
>> But the people who went as replacements went by air.
We flew directly to Vietnam and to Tan-Son-Nhut, which is
the main airport in Saigon. The plane lands and
they open the door up. And it was just like
walking into a blast furnace. This was at 3:00 in the morning.
It was probably about 90 or so. And then, the tremendous noise
of aircraft taking off on missions, helicopters
going all over the place. And the smell.
It just knocked your socks off. Well, I go down the steps, and
there's a sergeant down there with a clipboard.
And he said, "All the lieutenants
but Lt. Kurtz, follow me." And I said to him,
"What did I do wrong?" >> I landed at Ton-Son-Nhut,
got off the airplane, and went to 90th replacement depot.
Within a half an hour, I was assigned
to the 4th Infantry Division. The next day, I was on a chopper
and we flew out to the base camp.
I was assigned to a company and given a platoon.
I was in-country 48 hours, and I was
an Infantry Platoon Leader with a combat mission.
Thirty days after I arrived, I was crawling through tunnels
in Cu Chi-- with a flashlight and a .45,
and I didn't care. >> In Cu Chi,
we built our base camp, right above the tunnels.
I don't know why the military didn't know they were there.
They had intelligence people, and those tunnels were old.
People within the perimeter was getting wounded or killed,
and the perimeter hadn't been breached.
No one had gotten in. We couldn't understand it.
We took a lot of casualties from people in the tunnels.
>> The tunnels were already in place,
way before we got there. They were used
against the French. There was entire little
communities down underground, ammunition storage,
food storage, hospitals,
and hundreds of firing perches. >> We had what we called
tunnel rats. They're usually the smallest
people in the outfit, were the ones that would go
into the tunnels and search. Johnny H. Johnson
was our tunnel rat. And he had gotten shot.
I went in and brought him out. And my curiosity
made me go back in to see what's beyond where he was hit.
When you first go in, you would go around the corner
or down and up again. And it protected them
from explosives and from bombs. They had kitchens there
where they cooked. It's basically
where they lived and fought, right beneath us.
That was their staging area. >> Later, I was up at a place
called Loc Ninh, which is an old rubber plantation.
And it turned out that we were up there to provide security
for the French, so that they could make some money.
>> It was the heart of the rubber plantations.
We saw the Firestone, Michelin, and GoodYear plantations.
The rubber trees, you know, that we were fighting for,
I think. That's part of why I was there,
was protecting our corporate interests.
>> And I was in a mechanized battalion.
So we had tanks and armored personnel carriers.
The thunder of us moving, you could hear it for miles.
There were things that fell by the wayside, like trees.
We had a representative, a Frenchman, attached to
the battalion that would follow along behind us and count
the number of rubber trees, so the United States
could reimburse these people for the trees we destroyed.
>> The rubber plantations that were still operating,
they were paying off the VC to not bother them.
Then, when we'd come in there, if we got into a firefight,
we would have to pay for any tree that we shot.
After I got promoted to Captain, and they didn't really know
what to do with me, one of my jobs would be to go
out with the plantation manager, and we would count trees
with bullets in them. I had taken some French
in college. I knew a little French,
but not much. And I never made an effort
to communicate with him. I mean, if they wanted
Uncle Sam's money, they could talk in Uncle Sam's language,
as far as I was concerned. >> At times, we did get hit
pretty hard. I know right outside
our base camp, at Ho Bo Woods, I couldn't understand
why we kept going in there. We would go this week,
lose a lot of people. A week or two later,
we would go right back, and the same thing would happen.
We would take the same ground, over and over and over.
And I didn't know until 20 years later
that it was a war of attrition. Isn't that a term?
A war of attrition. It's acceptable to us if we
only lose one guy to your six. Our victory
amounts to a body count. >> I was in a G-1 Section,
and one of my jobs was to deal with body count.
And this General walks in, and he says, "Captain, uh,
I don't like these numbers." And then I said,
"Sir, I agree with you." We'd had a bad day that day.
The 1st Division had a bad day. We took some bad casualties.
He said, "I don't think you understand.
I don't like these numbers." And what he was suggesting
was that the body count wasn't high enough.
And I said, "Sir, here's a grease pencil and a rag.
You do what you want to do." And then he blew up.
And he said, "Captain, you're insubordinate,
and your career is over." And I said, "I'm not
going to do anything like that, because it's wrong."
And he stormed out of there. He was really, really
very unhappy with me. >> I don't know.
I don't know how you can make anyone understand it,
what it means to lose someone, if it's not you getting hit,
but someone you've known, to see them die.
>> I got wounded, right about Christmas and New Year's.
I was reassigned, because I wasn't able to continue
as a platoon leader. I went from tunnels
in the jungle to having a hot meal
in the Officer's Club at Ton-Son-Nhut Airbase.
Two or three days later, my platoon was caught in an ambush.
I should've been there. ( sobs )
>> Flying with the 1st Cav Division, we were
the first Airmobile Division in the Army, a wholly new concept.
Here we had the capability with this Huey, UH-1,
to completely support a soldier with aircraft.
Put soldiers in by air. Supply 'em by air.
Reinforce 'em by air. Medevac 'em by air.
Give 'em fire support. Close air support by air.
And the stars just lined up for that type of warfare.
>> I was not much for flying. I didn't like heights.
When I went over in a boat, I said to myself, "Self, you've
never really committed yourself, and the Army wants you to be
a helicopter mechanic, and a crew chief
that flies all the time. You've got to get your butt off
of this being afraid of heights stuff and stick it out."
That's kind of what I did. >> Some people told me
I was the number one gunner in the outfit.
I was flattered about that. but it was scary to me
up and to the point, it's like when I would
pull that trigger. Then it's like, when you pull
that trigger, that fear would kind of go out of you.
Then when you come back in and you're picking up the wounded,
some guys are holding their guts inside, or some guy is hanging
onto his leg, because he doesn't want to leave his leg in the LZ.
And you try to not let that interfere with what your job is,
or what you're trying to do. War is horrifying.
It's not glorifying. >> I was flying the UH-1, the
Huey, and we had a crew of four, a pilot in command, a co-pilot,
a crew chief and a gunner. Armament, all we carried was
an M-60 machine gun on each side that the crew chief and
the gunner each had to keep everybody's head down
while we inserted our infantry. They liked
riding in a helicopter. Sat with legs dangling
out the side of the aircraft, completely unrestrained,
flying along at 1500 feet and 90-100 knots.
I don't ever recall, ever, anybody falling out.
Getting in close, they were standing on the skid.
As soon as we got close enough, they were on the ground
and gone. This thing
was a well-oiled machine. It's just unbelievable.
Everybody knew what to do, and did it.
>> We usually went in from 1500 feet,
and went into the LZ, ten of us. And ahead of us,
the gun ships were shooting. And ahead of them,
the artillery was hitting, trying to soften up
the landing zone for us. Usually, we tried to land
all ten of us at the same time. And the faster you can get down,
the harder it is for them to hit you.
It was a wild ride. Coming off of 1500 feet is
like riding a roller coaster. We came in at about a couple
hundred feet, they would say, "Door gunners, open up!"
So we would just, whatever looked like would hide somebody,
we shot at. >> We just hit the treetops
and then we got nailed with an RPG, just blew
the front of the ship apart. And we kind of come to
a skidding halt. And the crossfire
was horrendous. The first 30 seconds,
like 50 of the guys got killed. Just so bad.
They were waiting for us. All this banging,
and yelling and screaming. And I've got to get Timmy out,
my pilot. Damn near ripped the door off.
And I just kind of lift him up, and then I had my hand, which is
on the airframe over here, but then all this got blown out.
I took my arm here, and tucked it inside my pants.
And then I got the Thompson and then skid
around the chin of the chopper. And you can hear 'em chattering.
They're trying to take my 60 off.
I yelled at them. They looked at me, and--
end of that story. I went back by Timmy.
He said, "Tell Jane I love her," which is his wife.
I go, "Shut up," you know. "You tell your old lady
you love her." That was the third time
him and I got shot down. >> You could look out there,
and you could just see a sea of red tracers.
The sergeant running the pad, he says, we've got a couple guys
out there that are hit, and we're not getting ammunition to
the guys out there on the end. "Would you hover out there
and kick off ammunition?" I says, "Let me talk
to the crew." I told them
what they asked us to do. The crew chief
made the decision. He said, "Well, if I was out
there, not getting ammunition, and some candy ass helicopter
pilot wouldn't bring it out, I'd be pretty pissed.
Saddle up, boys." >> Then I turned and
looked over, and I could see the pilot
was looking back at me. I could see the red dots
on the visor. And he finally said
the door gunner's hit. I unhooked my belt
and climbed over the seat. He had a field jacket on,
and the blood was coming out of the field jacket,
out of the cuff on the bottom. We've got to get out of here.
He's hit pretty good. And there was blood
all over the helicopter. The blood comes from the back
and flies forward. >> That's when I got hit
in the leg. And there was a period from when
I went down to the one knee, till I got back in the gunwell.
How I got there, I have no idea. I knew I had to
get back to my 60. Then you could see the VC
were kind of gathering up, making a human wave attack.
They started coming, raking back and forth.
They were dropping four or five feet, right in front.
They'd do that a couple times. They couldn't penetrate.
I ran out of ammo. I had my .45.
Just then something out of my peripheral, I jumped back.
I go, whoo, you know. So instead of sticking me in the
guts, he stuck me in the leg. I eliminated the elements
and had to pull a bayonet out. Then finally,
they dropped troops about half a click from us.
They worked their way towards us, then to one side.
That's how we got help. >> And we took ground fire,
small arms. It shot the engine out,
came up through the floor and hit me in the leg.
We were going down. The aircraft
tumbled through the trees. And luckily,
it landed right side up. But we were all in bad shape.
I remember very little of this, but I jettisoned my door.
I jumped out and I fell down. And I don't remember anything
after that. And they said when I jumped out,
the bones of my left leg were sticking through my flight suit.
That was the last time I saw Vietnam.
>> I remember one time we called out into the jungle.
We got there and there was seven bodies laying out there.
Ponchos don't like to stay closed in the air
at 100 miles an hour. There were a lot of gray faces
and blue faces. They don't really teach you
much about that in helicopter school.
The worst one for me, KIA picking up.
It was the first one. A. Gonzalez, his name was.
Never forgot it. I forgot my roommate's name,
the pilots' names, all that. But I never forgot his name.
>> Should I have been dead? Probably.
That's what they tell me. And here I am.
You know, just blown to smithereens, and shot,
and stabbed, and bayoneted. I still function.
Guys I fought with, some of them, I don't know who they are,
are the ones that put me in for this.
I wear it for the guys that aren't here.
I wear it for you. I'm just a caretaker,
that's all I am. I'm just a soldier
trying to do a job.
>> I went to UW-Whitewater for a year,
majoring in football and beer. As a result,
they invited me to leave. In those years,
not a whole lot of options. I figured I'd enlist in the
one service that would get me out of the country quicker,
before my dad found out. So I joined the Marine Corps.
And they're the only ones that promised they'd have me
out of town the next day. >> I got in a little trouble
when I was a youth. And my probation officer
was a Naval Reserve Officer. And he thought it would
make a man out of me if I joined the Navy Reserves.
So I thought I'd fool him, and instead of getting a tan
in the Gulf of Tonkin on a two-year Navy stint,
I joined the Marine Corps for four years.
>> I had a hard time in school. I was always the one
that got the lowest score on any spelling test, or math.
And I grew up thinking that, just, I'm a loser.
I'd been told that. And you know,
you're not a good student. You're not going to make it.
And so, you know, I would get in fights.
The Marine Corps turned my life around.
>> My older brother was in the Marine Corps
right after Korea. And I had an uncle that was
World War II Marines, you know, the islands, Guadalcanal,
Palalua, and Okinawa. So I just figured,
it's the thing to do. So I joined.
Then after that, it was Vietnam. Naval Gunfire Forward Observer.
We went out with the battalion search and destroys.
They put us on OPs at night, just me and the radio operator.
Whenever we really got up against the enemy,
I had a ship on call, and I'd call in Naval gunfire
and try to take care of them, get 'em off us, kill 'em.
Basically, that's what we did. >> Our job was essentially
to respond to where the North Vietnamese would make
an assault on one battalion. You'd stick a battalion out
in a field someplace, as bait. Their job was to engage
and stay engaged. And we'd come in behind them
and squeeze in between the two of them.
Hammer and anvil tactics, they called it in those years.
The Marines were in the north. Marine Infantrymen
were assigned to a line company. Your chance was one in one
to be killed or wounded. That was the statistics.
And they were pretty accurate. >> Quang Tri, Phu Bai,
Dong Ha. Everything was just thrown
together into one mass blur, which was 90% boring
and 10% chaotic. I guess chaotic might be
putting it a little blandly.
>> Gosh, you know, here you are. You're trained,
but this is for real. They came and said you're
going to be reporting up on an outpost called Con Thien.
I wasn't quite sure where that was.
But it was the very northern tip of South Vietnam,
the demilitarized zone. >> There was no color.
Everything was blown apart, because they had
Agent Oranged it all. They had burnt it all.
I mean, we walked out of this greenery, and your whole world
went black and white. I remember it just like
we're sitting there today. I went, what is this about.
>> The DMZ was a line on a map, six miles south
of the Ben Hai River and six miles north
of the Ben Hai River. It's six miles on their side
of the line, six miles on our side of the line,
which were demilitarized. ( laughs )
>> They kept dropping mortar rounds.
That went on for hours. And we knew we were in
for a long night. Then they started
with the ground forces. They just kept coming
and coming. >> That's when it turned into
a different war. Because the North Vietnamese,
they basically wanted to come down across the DMZ.
They did not want to do the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
And the Marine Corps wasn't going to let 'em.
You know, it was multi, multi troops.
I mean, 4,000 or 5,000 at a time would come down
across the river. And we were up there
trying to stop 'em. >> My squad leader,
he'd been there for almost ten months.
I made up my mind when I got over there,
to do whatever he told me, because he had survived.
We called him Sergeant Rock. He came out to get me
out of my fox hole, because they were going
to be over-running the area. And as we were running back
inside the perimeter, you know, a mortar round came in--
( voice breaking ) And killed him.
>> When you're in a firefight, and someone is injured or
killed, you don't have the time or the capacity to grieve,
or to cradle them, or give comfort.
But then when it's over, is when everything hits you.
The adrenaline starts to wear off,
and the reality sets in. The pain that you've seen
on your fellow Marine's face, or the vision of
a Vietnamese's head exploding, because you shot him in the eye.
No time during the firefight, but afterwards, much reflection.
Much reflection. >> I survived the night.
Most of the rest didn't. I have no idea why.
You know, those things change you forever.
>> Uh, that was it. That was the real stuff
up there. It was just horrific.
If that's a word that even describes it.
It had every aspect that there was to have.
The body mutilation, the trench warfare,
the artillery. It had it all.
Thousands against thousands. You know, it was just.
>> We got over-run. It was an interesting night.
But it's the next morning, where you,
I just remember sitting there having a cigarette,
and the sun was coming up. And I had a C-ration can,
made a cup of coffee, instant coffee.
I just remember, I started to pick up the coffee
and my hand was shaking so bad it splashed.
I put the other hand up to take a drag off the cigarette,
and I could hardly find the cigarette.
I still have this dream about that morning,
smoking that first cigarette and that first cup of coffee,
and how it felt so good to be alive.
It was-- It's one of those things
that will always be with me, and will come back
at the strangest of times.
>> Narrator: They had gone through hell and survived.
But they had lost too many along the way,
along with a part of themselves.
And what they received for their sacrifice
was a nation that had turned its back on them.
>> Most of those men and women were pretty healthy,
physically and mentally, before they went through this.
And when they came back, and particularly
the time we came back, it was really sad.
I remember when I landed, coming home,
I had to take my uniform off in the airport, because
people would spit at you. That's the thing that
I find really hard to cope with. >> Still a lot of guys
that haven't found their way home, I don't think.
A lot of Vets try to justify, rationalize,
for all the death and dying. But there's really
no explanation to it. Figuring it out
is a waste of time. It's just another war
that's started by old men and fought by young boys.
>> I thought he was killed in, you know, one of our ambushes.
I never saw him again. And the service never tells you
where these guys go or what happens to 'em.
Nobody knows where they're at. Someone called me
and I answered the phone. "Yeah?"
He says, "Erck, you know who this is?"
And that voice sent chills, you know.
"Doc?" "Yeah!"
He says, "You knew it was me?" I said, "Yeah."
You never forget that voice, you know.
And you know, the tears flow. I said, "They told me you got
killed up there at Phu Bai." He said, "They told me
you went, too." And then he told me that
Sergeant Meyers had survived, too, and he was in Minnesota.
The guy had been driving past my house, within a mile,
to go fishing on Lake Michigan, every year.
And I had thought he was dead all these years.
In my mind, they were all dead. We get together every year,
or even more than once a year, we get together.
But, you form a bond that's tighter than brothers.
They had my back for me.
>> Wisconsin Vietnam War Stories was made possible by lead gifts
from Don and Roxanne Weber and from Associated Bank;
with major support from the Ho-Chunk Nation and
the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation;
and from Wisconsin Public Service Foundation,
Kwik Trip, the Forest County
Potawatomi Foundation, Oshkosh Defense,
the General Motors Dealers of Northeastern Wisconsin,
the Oneida Nation; and these Wisconsin individuals
and companies who believe that it is long overdue,
but never too late to honor the service and sacrifice
of our Vietnam Veterans; with additional support
from the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.