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[audience laughter] Okay, if I may have your attention, we have another guest in the period. I'm sure the gentleman you recognize because they came in earlier this summer, Vietnam veterans.

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That's Mr. Thomas, who talked a little bit about his experiences in Puerto Rico and some of the Vietnam vets that he knew. And Mr. Wiginton, who told you stories about the experiences of the door-bender. The third guest today is Mr. John Kelly, who served in Country 65-66 in II Corps,

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United States Army. And you're going to hear a story from him a little bit different than what you heard before because he was an Army medic. And the medics saw a lot of the seamy side of the war in Vietnam.

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So I think collectively, he'll be able to give you all together, he'll be able to give you a little bit different viewpoint of what it was like over there during that time frame. Gentlemen. [indistinct chatter]

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That's great. We'll put that up right away. Okay, now. Oh, United States Navy, all right. Well, I've got the Ranger there and I've got Air Force, but no Navy.

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All right. Look at that. United States Navy. See that, guys? Look at this. Yeah, that's a beauty.

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Now, symbolic in the center there. Where's the--what is that in the background? Canoe. [laughter]

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Oh, that's great. That'll be good. Oh, look at this. On behalf of the Cook County Chapter of the SS, the United States Army,

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and the President of the United States, I present to you the United States Army flag. Great. I don't have an Army flag in there either. It's not as colorful as this one. Oh, my gosh, I don't think I've ever seen that.

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That's great. Official Army flag. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

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Okay, now we'll go over to the room, both of them. Thank you very, very much. Okay. Go ahead, John, ask you some questions.

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[laughter] Hi, ladies and gentlemen. I'm John Kelly. I was a medic in--and I know other than--

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my job was just to keep the guys alive and put them back together. Try to do that. I didn't try like some of the other guys in the infantry who were--they took people apart. We just tried to keep them alive.

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Started out on the ground, working in and out of the evac hospitals, then into the air. Basically, we were running ambulance service through here, just getting the guys out of the field and back to the evac hospitals. It was like medical school was fun.

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I guess I saw different parts of things than the guys that were doing the fighting. It was different. I don't know what else to tell you. I asked them some questions.

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What did you see? Did you carry any weapons at all? Were you out in the field? In the field when we hit the ground.

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That's right. I carried weapons. What they know about a medic is when they move to the CNA, somebody yells out, "Medic." And then the medic goes in.

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Now, what could you do for the fellow right off the bat? Right off the bat, as soon as we hit the ground, we know basically what we were going in for. And you were under fire most of the time you were going in?

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Most of the time it was pretty clear when you'd go down. It was very easy for you to go into. Sometimes there was fire, but most of the time where we were going to pick them up out of was fairly secure areas. Did you carry weapons with you?

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I carried a .45. That's all? Most of the time. Well, I had M14s on with us.

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Okay. Now, did you have insignia like Ray Cross or any identification? No. That would be too dangerous.

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Didn't they try to get the medics? They tried to eliminate the medics because if you didn't have a medic, the guys, they were wounded, they'd bleed to death or whatever. If you could eliminate a medic, you could eliminate a lot of wounded people, too.

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That would tie up more people than that would if you did it to the medic. What are some of the -- you might want to do this, and it's kind of probably gruesome, but what are some of the type of wounds that you saw? Did you get sulfur or what did you have with you to put into a right way?

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Morphine, sulfate. That was basically two basic ones and a whole bunch of bandages. A whole bunch of bandages. Now, were they primarily from shrapnel or were they from rifle fire?

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What do you think, George? I would say the majority is -- Landmine? The biggest part was shrapnel and shrapnel from mines.

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Mines and, well, a little bit of everything, mortars. Now, you would take these fellows from that area where the accident was to a medevac chopper? We would take them to a medevac hospital. Okay, but by chopper medevac, you'd have to fly back.

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Now, was that medevac? That medevac was armed. Right. So you could protect yourself coming in and going out, but -- okay.

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What was the -- on the medevac chopper, how many could you carry? How many wounded? Most of the time we only carried four. Okay, now, did they all fit inside?

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Did any of them have to fit on the struts? On stretchers. Okay, on stretchers, okay. Did you ever pick up any VC or any MBA?

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Yes. Did you ever have an incident in the chopper where they went to serve? No. Okay, because I've heard of stories that they had to throw them out sometimes.

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I've heard the same thing, but never had one. You would pick up -- you would pick up their wounded also? Or probably interrogation. We were able to pick up any VC that were wounded and try to keep them alive so they could interrogate them.

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Because they didn't leave any -- usually they didn't leave any on the battlefield that they carried their wounded. No, they carried them all. What corps were you in? Two corps.

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So you were Central Highlands then? Right. Now, did you have -- did you fight -- or were you with the Martinez? They were there.

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We were just talking about them earlier before we came in here. What type of people were they? They were mostly white people. I said they were like natives.

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Yeah. White class. And they were friendly toward Americans. Right.

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They didn't like the South or the North, did they, very much? No, they were people that just wanted to be left alone and stay neutral. But they didn't like the North and they didn't like the -- they just wanted to be left alone. They didn't like each other.

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But we were doing good, so they were friendly towards us. Do you think they survived the war? Yes. Do you think they're still in the mountains?

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No. So they're kind of like the American Indians. They can kind of hide and protect themselves that way. I was just wondering if there would be a campaign by the North to exterminate them.

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I don't think so. They were good. Okay. But they were good fighters, weren't they, and good scouts, and they knew their country.

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We were discussing earlier when we were going to set up in a back hospital up in Lekouf, we had gone out there in a convoy, taken a lot of equipment up there, and we were told we were going to spend the night there, and in the morning people would be up and then we'd be out of there.

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And I was only there two months then. And we set a perimeter up, guarded everything that we bought. Next thing I know there's these Indians standing next to us. Did they sneak right in?

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They walked right in. We never even knew they were there. They just walked past our guards and everything. So they could have been B.C. for all you knew.

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Well, that's right away we realized how quick we could be dead if they were against us. That's right. They were curious. They wanted to know what we were doing.

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Did you have a language problem with them to begin with? They probably didn't need to speak Vietnamese. They had their own hill tribe language. They had a language that was totally different than the Vietnamese.

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So did you have a problem at first? We never really were able to communicate too much with them. They were just, like I say, more curious than anything. And I didn't stay up there long enough to--

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There was probably a bit of great interpreters in and working with some of the leaders, and then that's when it would be a scout. But this was just by chance. This was the first night that we were up there, and they knew we were there.

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We didn't know where they came from. But they knew you were friendly. We didn't know that they weren't. No, we had no idea if they would have been the enemy.

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We were in big trouble. Did you feed them or anything? No, they just stayed there through the night just looking around at everything that we had. And when we left in the morning, it seemed like they were gone.

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They were gone. But they're prevalent. Well, aborigines. This is what we said they were aborigines.

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Were you drafted? Pardon me? Were you drafted or did you enlist? No, I joined.

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Enlisted in '64. That was very early. Very early on. Did you know you would be shipped to Vietnam?

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At that time you did. You were probably thinking Germany. I was in Germany and I volunteered. So you did enlist.

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You left that to Germany. Frankfurt? Augsburg. Okay.

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And then volunteered from Germany to go to Vietnam. Did you see a psychiatrist at any time? I should have. Were you married or anything like that?

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No, I was 18. Oh, well, okay. When you're 18, you got to walk on tail. So that's how I got in.

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I volunteered and then volunteered for Vietnam. But they were glad to have you. I bet they were happy to -- There were a lot of people who were happy to --

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You did somebody's place. That was probably '65. Is that when you went over to '66? I got there right at --

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I was home in December. I got there right in January. It was January of '66, the start of the year. Okay.

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That was just when they were beginning to really get desperate after the time of the Gulf crisis and so forth. So you were probably the first wave of the build-up to 500,000. When we were in Germany, it was, like I said, Augsburg,

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which is the 24th Infantry. And they came down with a DR asking for medics. Oh, you were a medic in Germany then, too. Right.

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Okay. Did they give you any kind of incentive to do this? Not like a bonus, like when you re-up the hill or whatever. No.

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Like I said, it was 18 and crazy. Yeah, heavy. It was like this was going on over there, and things were too quiet. That's right.

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It sounded like Pellis during World War II, if they served in the States, they wanted to get overseas as soon as possible. You probably felt the same way. The biggest incentive was that we got to go home for 30 days from Germany

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before we went there. Okay, 30 days. Okay. That was a little bit of an incentive.

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What did your mom say, though? She didn't know until the last week. Her little brother told her. Then she would be tired of you.

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She couldn't figure out how you could come home from Germany because normally once you got there, they were there until you got out. Sure.

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Stayed there until you were rotated out, possibly. So it was one way to come home. I got home the day before Christmas. Oh, that's nice.

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Now, did they give you any special training before you went to Vietnam during that 30 days? All my medical training was after basic. I went to Fort Sam Houston, Texas for medical school.

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I went to x-ray school and went through field medic training. But you had to go to jungle warfare school. No. So that was something brand new for you.

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The mountains or the jungle. I didn't start teaching anything but jungle warfare until '66. Oh, really? Except for maybe special forces.

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Special forces, but right here on the hill. Did you think at any time that you might make the Army a career? Possibly after maybe two years in, but the closer it got to getting out. I didn't know.

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Okay, you got to go. Now I wish I would have stayed. Oh, really? But you would have probably had to do more than one tour to get out of the state.

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I don't know. That would have been a lot more dangerous. Now these kids probably, the closest reference of what you did is they watched MASH. Now the MASH that they show is about Korea.

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It could have easily been Vietnam. Parts of something like MASH or-- Is that real? Field hospitals, oh, yeah.

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The field hospitals. They were few and far between. They were scattered. Basically the biggest thing in that was if you ran into the field hospital,

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it was all the medevacs that were the main thing that saved so many guys. You had to get a medevac and hop a chopper and get them to a field hospital or a base hospital? They'd get right to the evac hospitals most of the time. Some of them were shipped to on the--

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In some ways they would take them once they were at the evac hospitals. They moved them more serious ones that went to ship. Some of them, they'd go from there depending on the types of injuries. They'd go to Tokyo or depending on the type of--

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Did some send them here or send them back to Tripler? Pardon? The guys you were with at Tripler? No.

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In Honolulu, the big hospital there? Maybe some were more serious, but they'd send them to-- The majority of the guys, well, I knew were all-- Go to Tokyo, the guys talk about getting shipped up because the work was wrong.

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Now, did you-- Let's see, how-- S-I-W, self-inflicted wounds, did you ever see any of those? Yes.

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You might explain to me what that is and how you felt about it. Well, there was certain guys in the field that couldn't handle the pressure and would turn around and take the rifle and put it in their leg or put a bayonet in their leg or something just so they could get right out of the field

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and hopefully get shipped home. That's court martial defense. If they determine that you're doing it to get out. That's right.

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Some of the guys, I think, the wounds in the leg mostly, the bayonet in their thigh, but I only saw that twice, and those were guys that were in outfits to where they were just totally losing it. The one that was being chewed up immediately?

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They were--the outfits they were with, they were just getting ground up like hamburgers. These guys were-- And these were the few survivors-- They were just at a point where they couldn't handle it no more and they had to get out of there.

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So they needed not only medical but psychiatric help. Oh, definitely. A lot of guys needed psychiatric help. You can see that. You weren't trained in psychiatry, but you could see that. They were--

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Battle fatigue. They were hard to deal with because I wasn't trained to deal with it. All you could do was talk to them people and try and keep them as calm as you can until you get back to somebody else who can take care of them.

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Sure. Now, was your training pretty much like what a Navy corpsman would be? Yes, very similar. When you came back after you got out, did you think about maybe paramedics?

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I worked for a private ambulance company for a while, Heinz Hospital, when I got out, wanted me to go to work there. But I had enough of hospitals, enough to see if people messed up to where I didn't want to get into it. But you probably saw so much more of that year you were there than many interns

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in the first couple of years in the hospital saw. I didn't know about it. You probably did more than that. No doubt about it.

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I don't think they could intern the first two years in the hospital and see your type of injuries. That's a proper outcome, counting. And then some. You asked him some questions pertaining to what the duties were and so forth.

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Did you ever carry a pack and what was in it, if you cared? Most of the time we carried packs, but being in and out, you couldn't take too much with you. Most of the guys on the ground were--the infantry companies had medics on the ground with them. They basically did what they could for them.

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When we picked them up, they were bandaged most of the time. And basically what you tried to do was continue on. You were like the second step. They got them out of the field, and you were getting them from there into the hospital.

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Anything we had was on a helicopter. You had some stuff that you would go down and take, depending on who needed more of this and more of that. Like I say, you were a taxi service. You were the guys that had to get them to the hospital.

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The idea is a lot more were saved. I'd say in Korea a lot of them because of freezing and so forth. You used it in World War II. The use of the helicopter in Vietnam was responsible for saving so many lives because of the speed of getting a guy from the field to a doctor, to a nurse, to people that could really take care of them.

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It was just opposite for Vietnam. Right. They carried their wounded off where they took them. And they probably had medics like you, but that's very limited.

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Sometimes maybe down in those tunnels they had hospitals in. We've seen things to where they had basically field hospitals built underground. Right. They would take them down through the tunnels into those hospitals down there.

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And they had doctors and everything else. Right. I don't think there were... The casuarine rate was a lot higher as far as their...

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Their hospitals and stuff were nowhere near what ours were. It was primitive. It was. Excellent doctors and nurses.

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Anything else about this quiz? Go ahead. What rank were you? I was a spec four.

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A spec four would be... A specialist. And then like what side are you? Fourth floor.

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He was a spec five. He lost his stripe? He was a specialist. Oh, I see.

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Your stripe was in for that. Oh, okay. Was that over there or in Germany? That was over there.

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One of the questions that they always ask is this, and I don't know if you saw it, but you might have picked up victims of this, and that's fracking. I heard of it, but never... Never heard of it.

00:21:08.000 - 00:21:14.000

I was just wondering, you know, something. Maybe you could tell from the wound or something. I don't know. Can't tell.

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I heard of it, but I couldn't, you know, never was... Did you always find the same chopper, or did you have to rotate around? Stayed the same until something happened to it. Sure.

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Did you ever use your weapon or handgun? Your .45. Did I ever use it? Yeah.

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Just to keep some heads down so we could leave. Yeah, what was the life expectancy of the medics over there? When I left to go over there, they told us it was 30 seconds in the field. Oh, guys, that's almost as much as a doorman.

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I wasn't too happy. 30 seconds. What went through your mind right then? How do I get out of this outfit?

00:22:05.000 - 00:22:28.000

You better go back to Germany. But due to the people who were on the ground, people who were flying, it made it a lot safer. Their job was to protect you, and they wanted to get the wounded out,

00:22:28.000 - 00:22:36.000

and they wanted you to be able to get the wounded out, so they probably let you know. The medic was in good hands. Everybody liked you. Oh, sure they did.

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You were a friend. The Vietnamese called you "Boxy." I wonder what that would mean. That was like a doctor.

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Boxy, like a doctor? Boxy. How did you get along with the -- did you pick up any of the language at all with the Vietnamese? Did you converse with them?

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Or did they learn English? Some. I think I was probably just like everybody. Most of them, they could speak some, you know, and basically the language I picked up was the same thing.

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Most of the other guys, you tell them they're crazy. Were they pretty friendly? Pardon? The natives, were they pretty friendly?

00:23:20.000 - 00:23:36.000

The majority of them. We very rarely run into ones -- the only bad ones we've seen are the ones who try to get to hospitals to get a Muslim CDC to come in. They didn't follow the Geneva Code then, like you're not supposed to get hospitals. No, not at all.

00:23:36.000 - 00:23:49.000

They tried to rocket hospitals, didn't they? They tried to mortar hospitals. They would -- satchel charges, they'd sneak in, and they'd try and blow up the operating rooms. Were they successful sometimes?

00:23:49.000 - 00:24:04.000

Sometimes they were. I know they hit the -- they hit the back hospital and blew me on with satchel charges, and their whole intention was to eliminate the operating room so that the doctors couldn't -- Save lives.

00:24:04.000 - 00:24:16.000

Save lives. They had specific targets they knew exactly. They were quants of us, and they knew exactly where they were going. So they penetrated the security and got in?

00:24:16.000 - 00:24:24.000

No. They didn't get out? No, but now when you say satchel charges, do they leave them, then run, or do they explode? They leave them and run.

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Okay. And they go off. They didn't get out? No, that's the 85th -- they got hit once while I -- that I knew of, and three of them had come in with satchel charges.

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One quants of us was gone, but they got the other two before they could do anything. Were you ever shot down in a chopper? Had to go down in one? Had to go down once, but it was -- it was landed and then up again.

00:24:54.000 - 00:25:04.000

Okay. But when you were in the air, when you had to go down, was it kind of rotating? Did it not land? No, it was just something -- I don't know what they took inside of it.

00:25:04.000 - 00:25:22.000

It was just smoke. Oh, okay. I went down and figured out what it was. I had a speaker come in, and he talked about like once he saw a VC with like the vests, you know, all the bolsters on it,

00:25:22.000 - 00:25:37.000

kind of like the kamikaze, and he ran into a chopper, you know, and he like almost took out four Americans. Then it happened to you, like, have a VC like run into the chopper and try to knock out those inside? Because if the guys were on the ground, they never got that close to us. Okay.

00:25:37.000 - 00:25:57.000

Well, he said they had no doors on them, so you could enter on either side, right? So while they were bringing you in on one side, this guy sneaked you on the other side. Like I said, it never happened to me. You know, I heard of them going after choppers like that, but not -- you know, we're in the area.

00:25:57.000 - 00:26:05.000

Did you wear a vest in the chopper? I did. What about stuff on the floor? Did you have anything on the floor to prevent anything from coming up through?

00:26:05.000 - 00:26:11.000

Corrugated stuff. Yeah. No. Did you take rounds?

00:26:11.000 - 00:26:18.000

We took rounds a couple times. Yeah. Like a BB and a beer can. Or the Internet.

00:26:18.000 - 00:26:25.000

Yeah. Did you sit on your -- did you have a pile? Yeah. So I thought it might be good to sit on that.

00:26:25.000 - 00:26:46.000

[Laughter] Slow it down a little bit. But the best -- the other times in the hospitals, the clearing, going to a clearing hospital, stay there for, you know, a month or so. That's where you got everything brought in by ambulance.

00:26:46.000 - 00:27:04.000

A few helicopters would come in and out then, and that was -- those were easier wounds. Those were guys with maybe something through their arm or something that was life-threatening. Not the chest. Chest or worse ones?

00:27:04.000 - 00:27:15.000

Chest wounds, yeah. Chest and stomach. And stomach? Yeah, stomach's in trouble.

00:27:15.000 - 00:27:22.000

Worse ones than the chest? I think so. Well, it depends where the kitchen is, the chest. Yeah.

00:27:22.000 - 00:27:32.000

And stomach wounds from shrapnel and stuff. Tears them up and forth? That's -- you got so many internal organs that rip apart. Oh, the chest and stomach end there, yeah.

00:27:32.000 - 00:27:44.000

That's where you get back, hospitals and the doctors and those guys really handled it. Did you ever have a shortage of plasma? Pardon me? Did you ever have a shortage of plasma?

00:27:44.000 - 00:27:57.000

I didn't have to mess with it. I know there were -- oh, okay. Shortages, like I say, everything was basically back in hospitals. And I never heard of them running short.

00:27:57.000 - 00:28:10.000

They always were able to get plenty of blood from the guys if they needed it. How was the morale? Pardon me? How was the morale?

00:28:10.000 - 00:28:27.000

It was so bad. When I was there, our guys were -- for what was going on, everybody was taking care of each other. And we never -- the guys I was with out there, never a problem.

00:28:27.000 - 00:28:44.000

Fist fight here and there, the difference of opinion, but nothing to where anybody wanted to intentionally hurt the other guy. Just like you guys, you get into an argument over something silly, but the next day it's over.

00:28:44.000 - 00:29:02.000

Were you able to take any R&R in country? No, I was supposed to go to Bangkok for R&R, but at the last minute I wasn't able to go. It was due to somebody going in the field that was supposed to be going home, and the replacement wasn't there.

00:29:02.000 - 00:29:09.000

So if I went on R&R -- He wouldn't be replaced? He wouldn't be. So I didn't go on R&R, so he was able to get out.

00:29:09.000 - 00:29:19.000

And go home? Right. Because I still had time to do silly mis-R&R. Was there such a place on China Beach?

00:29:19.000 - 00:29:27.000

There was China Beach. I never got to -- Is that further in the south? Just outside of Da Nang.

00:29:27.000 - 00:29:35.000

Oh, okay. That's further up north than that's up north. They had -- It's further south.

00:29:35.000 - 00:29:46.000

Beach areas and everything. I saw it was in the port of Pyongyang. That's where you get to Bangkok. It was white sand beach and palm trees.

00:29:46.000 - 00:30:02.000

NBC? No, it was a pretty secure area. It was a big port, a lot of ships in and out of there, so it was a pretty secure area. What was the closest you ever got to buying a box?

00:30:02.000 - 00:30:16.000

Do you remember? Do you have any memory of the closest time? Probably the first night I was in country. Because you were just a green boy? All that.

00:30:16.000 - 00:30:23.000

We landed in Saigon at a place called Camp Alpha. New Jersey, it wasn't there? No, it was Saigon. Oh, okay.

00:30:23.000 - 00:30:37.000

And we were there the one night. We just got off the plane. They put you in tents and told you in the morning you'd be going out to wherever you were. And they got mortared the first night we were there.

00:30:37.000 - 00:30:45.000

Camped in? Camp Alpha got mortared. Six of the guys that were on the plane with us, they were killed the first day. Oh, gosh.

00:30:45.000 - 00:30:54.000

That's like that movie "Platoon." You know the guy, he's in charge, he's getting there, you see the body bags going out? That was your -- That just happened the first day we were there.

00:30:54.000 - 00:31:03.000

We don't even know what's going on. Six of them got killed. It's a terrible morale. I think that's why I wish that was in German.

00:31:03.000 - 00:31:16.000

[Laughter] Jen, I've got a question again. How much iron ore did you get? Or if you had some off time, what did you do?

00:31:16.000 - 00:31:26.000

Just back in base camp, just drank beer and relaxed. Did you get into town or anything? Pardon me? Didn't you get into any --

00:31:26.000 - 00:31:37.000

I got into town. The best town, like I say, was -- Ankay wasn't bad, not much going on. Queen Yon was a pretty town to go into.

00:31:37.000 - 00:31:54.000

You got to go into Cam Ranh Bay at once. Just all kind of shops and first aid and the 19th and just buy goofy stuff down there. Did you eat the food that they did for you at all? Once.

00:31:54.000 - 00:31:59.000

[Laughter] Once. Chicken. Got dysentery?

00:31:59.000 - 00:32:14.000

No. Got quills stuck in my teeth that don't pull out. They take it down to the skin line and whatever's left in there is in it. So that was the end of that.

00:32:14.000 - 00:32:29.000

So no more naked food. It's not that it smelled good. I assume it was chicken. Have you ever gone to, say, a Vietnamese restaurant here in the States?

00:32:29.000 - 00:32:41.000

No. What was your feeling about when you got over? You were probably pretty gutted that time, '66. Oh, yeah.

00:32:41.000 - 00:32:51.000

I was looking forward to it. How did you feel about the time? You were just one year, right? You felt like you couldn't walk, but at the time you were able to leave.

00:32:51.000 - 00:33:05.000

I was ready to leave. Yeah. I was like, "Let's go home." Now, in retrospect, now 20 years later, and, say, compared to this recent storm and so forth,

00:33:05.000 - 00:33:15.000

compared to Vietnam, what were your feelings like then pertaining to the whole situation? As far as Desert Storm goes? Yeah. How do you feel about those vets?

00:33:15.000 - 00:33:39.000

I'm glad they're back, and I'm happy that they went and did what they had to do. Do you feel that they had more chance to do what they had to do when you were--? I think they had more support from the government, but I also think the military was able to do more of what they wanted to do this time.

00:33:39.000 - 00:33:50.000

What did you say? The military was able to keep the charge in Vietnam. Their hands were tied. What about the idea of all the courage?

00:33:50.000 - 00:34:00.000

And they over-couraged their events? Like I said, I'm glad they're home. But you don't have--you have no animosity whatsoever. You're just glad they're home.

00:34:00.000 - 00:34:21.000

You made it. Right. When I look at the wall in Washington and I hear them saying that these guys are war heroes and everything, I have a hard time classifying them that way.

00:34:21.000 - 00:34:38.000

They did what they were sent over there to do. Fortunately, it was a short period of time, not 15 years. I put them in the same category as the guys out of now. From the last day in the country to when you got home, how long was it?

00:34:38.000 - 00:34:54.000

And when you didn't get home, what kind of stuff did you do? Well, I left out of Cam Ranh Bay. I had 45 minutes to catch a plane when it was time to go home. I believe I did this.

00:34:54.000 - 00:35:21.000

I left Cam Ranh Bay and took us 16 hours flying to get back and landed in Seattle, Tacoma Airport. I think it was right near Fort Lewis, Washington. And we got out of the airport, took it on buses, and there were all kinds of people out there with pickets and everything else, giving you a bunch of bull and ended up--

00:35:21.000 - 00:35:38.000

Did you have any guards or something? Yeah, a little bit of everything. And we ended up in a fight with a bunch of people out there. Thank God for the police department because they would pat us on the back and float down and haul them away

00:35:38.000 - 00:35:58.000

until we got on our buses and went to Fort Lewis so we could go home. From Fort Lewis, how long was it before you got back to your--back to your home? I don't know how long it was. You were 16 hours on the flight to Washington.

00:35:58.000 - 00:36:13.000

Right. Well, Fort Lewis, I mean, from Fort Lewis I went one day, next day I think, and I left to come back to Chicago the following day and come back here. So it was briefing? No debriefing?

00:36:13.000 - 00:36:31.000

No. One day you have a pistol on you, the next day nothing. Yeah, we just basically got back and they gave you dress greens and stuff so you could go home, change and go home because I didn't come back with anything. I just--I left.

00:36:31.000 - 00:36:39.000

How did your neighborhood treat you? Did you let anybody know you were over there? Now, where did you live, in Chicago? Burlington.

00:36:39.000 - 00:36:49.000

Burlington, okay. So when you got back home, they knew you were overseas, your neighbors and so forth, so now you walked back in. Did they know you were coming? Did your mom know you were coming?

00:36:49.000 - 00:37:04.000

They knew when I called from Fort Lewis and told them I was going to be in Chicago. Okay. But now, what about what he asked you? What about your neighbors? My word was-- So it was six or seven?

00:37:04.000 - 00:37:23.000

It wasn't like--not even-- How about your friends? Okay, you're back. You were somewhere, but nobody said nothing about it. Up until a couple years ago, I didn't talk--my parents never mentioned it either.

00:37:23.000 - 00:37:38.000

They didn't talk about it? Was it the grade in Chicago that helped change you? Definitely. I think that helped a whole bunch of guys. Did you go over to any of your friends, say, high school?

00:37:38.000 - 00:37:49.000

Everywhere I could feel it. Okay, so you had something in common with them. But the majority came back and they were all gone. They just--

00:37:49.000 - 00:37:58.000

They didn't stay with you? They moved. So basically, you didn't talk to anybody about it? You kept quiet? Yeah.

00:37:58.000 - 00:38:20.000

And when you went to get a job, did you mention that you were a veteran? Yeah, because it basically helped him get the job. Because at the time, the majority of the guys I worked with were general owners and property. And the majority of the guys I worked with were all veterans.

00:38:20.000 - 00:38:38.000

So a good part of that was the workforce. Those were the guys that were getting hired right at that time. But for all those years, and almost 15, 20 years, you didn't talk about it? No.

00:38:38.000 - 00:38:47.000

Was it hard not to see any of them? Or did you just feel comfortable and just want to forget? Just something. It was a part of your life.

00:38:47.000 - 00:39:00.000

It was there, and now it's done. But now, because of the craziness you're talking about now, how does that make you feel? Relieve some pressure? It relieved a lot of pressure.

00:39:00.000 - 00:39:26.000

It got me to a point where I knew of a lot of guys that they definitely needed to talk about it. Now those guys are with us helping others. So in the long run, it's been beneficial. A lot of vets out there need help.

00:39:26.000 - 00:39:35.000

They won't say nothing. You ever get flashbacks? Two times. What did you see?

00:39:35.000 - 00:39:58.000

A helicopter burn. It's tough because all of a sudden you try to make this go on, but it's in your subconscious. So just being able to talk about it. Like that fellow that was in the group before you, he was reading a poem about a nurse that her father was in the hospital.

00:39:58.000 - 00:40:05.000

She was the last one she felt the life going on in her hands. He read that poem. And he's got a tanker. Tough.

00:40:05.000 - 00:40:13.000

He came in first. Tough. He had a tear in his eye. No, it's just human emotion.

00:40:13.000 - 00:40:25.000

You got to deal with it. But I didn't want to teach a course like this. I had to get something else. Ever since the Vietnam War started, there was no one else ready to talk about it.

00:40:25.000 - 00:40:34.000

I had to wait 17 years. And all of a sudden, I was in Chicago. That's like, bingo, it opened up. And all of a sudden, you guys are coming out of Woodward Pike.

00:40:34.000 - 00:40:45.000

It's wonderful. I don't know why it did it. That was the turning point. Right.

00:40:45.000 - 00:41:09.000

That's a day to remember for a long time. Early in the morning until way late at night. It's like you didn't want to leave. People couldn't -- people that were there then,

00:41:09.000 - 00:41:24.000

it's like telling the rest of the people of the city, look at us. I mean, white guys, black guys, I mean, you're running around plugging and everything is fine. It's like, what the heck is wrong with these other people

00:41:24.000 - 00:41:41.000

if they've got to be fighting and they've got to do the junk they're doing? The guys from now on have been such a brotherhood. There ain't nobody like them. And you get a lot of help in that too.

00:41:41.000 - 00:42:03.000

I mean, the fact that you lived and experienced together and stayed together. Did you notice any -- you mentioned the black, white and so forth. Did you see any racial problems when you were there? You always had one or two guys that sort of maybe had an attitude problem

00:42:03.000 - 00:42:11.000

or felt they were getting picked on. But as far as -- When you're up in the line, you didn't see it. When you're back --

00:42:11.000 - 00:42:20.000

Back at base camp is where they were. That's where they had idle time, and that's when that stuff broke out, right? Right. But it was, like I say, maybe a fist fight, things would get broke up,

00:42:20.000 - 00:42:39.000

and then a half hour later everything was over. And the next day the two guys that were slugging each other are partying together. The thing is, your life depended on how you did it. You couldn't take too many chances.

00:42:39.000 - 00:43:01.000

How many medics were there in your -- you were with a platoon? Medical -- well, it's a medical company. So we had -- But you would follow another in the field; is that what you did?

00:43:01.000 - 00:43:07.000

Right. You were attached to that for your combat. Right. It was covered.

00:43:07.000 - 00:43:25.000

Different places. You go from the 542nd to turn around, and some guys go here, some guys go there. So you were very -- you never knew day one where you were going to be the next day. No, never.

00:43:25.000 - 00:43:39.000

All basically the same area. Right. Just one July body went to the fire. Some guys that did this, you know, they say you can't waste them before you're seen.

00:43:39.000 - 00:43:54.000

You didn't -- 20 years later. It's like if you want to think about it, you can. I guess I just look at the fourth. It was the fourth.

00:43:54.000 - 00:44:09.000

Did you ever run into any of your old friends that you were stationed with? Or hear from? Or you kind of all lost contact? One, in '86, at the Welcome Home parade,

00:44:09.000 - 00:44:37.000

I ran into one guy that was in the same company when I was over there. That's the only time I've ever met. And I get a Christmas card every year from one guy that we kept alive. Go back to that '85th and back and drop him, and we checked on him a couple times.

00:44:37.000 - 00:45:02.000

Found out he was alive there and had shipped to Tokyo and lived in California. How he got a hold of me and this other partner of mine, or I don't know, but made contact with -- his mother made contact with my parents, and I get a Christmas card from them every year.

00:45:02.000 - 00:45:07.000

Lives in Van Nuys, California. Makes you feel good though, doesn't it? Yeah, I want a Christmas card. Sure.

00:45:07.000 - 00:45:23.000

One guy still around? That was probably -- that probably made the whole time over there worthwhile. Here's what I'd like for you to do is tell the people at the registrar where they stand. [Laughter]

00:45:23.000 - 00:45:35.000

No way. I see the good conduct level and the tissue. This is the one. You said you only carried a .45, but this is -- it looks like a sharpshooter here.

00:45:35.000 - 00:45:44.000

Oh, this is the -- Okay, rifle and M16. Now, these are bronze stars. Those are battle stars, right?

00:45:44.000 - 00:45:54.000

Yeah. So you've got two of that one. And what's this one in the middle of this one? Okay.

00:45:54.000 - 00:46:07.000

This is basically made up of more of the colored guns. Oh, I see. Now, is this the Indian Medical Corps? [Unintelligible]

00:46:07.000 - 00:46:12.000

The blue rifle. Oh, yeah, combat infantry. Oh, is that equivalent to that? Oh, I see.

00:46:12.000 - 00:46:30.000

I didn't know the Medical Corps then had similar to what the Army has, combat infantry. Now, there are two types of combat infantry. There's the one -- then there's the cluster one or where they get it. I thought there was --

00:46:30.000 - 00:46:46.000

The plain one, just the blue background on the rifle, but then there's one that's got battle stars for it. The plain one, that I think is -- Okay, I think that's it probably. I have two more.

00:46:46.000 - 00:47:03.000

Okay. So you belong to a veterans organization that is strictly Vietnam veterans? Or is it like a VFW program? I belong to a VFW and I belong to Vietnam veterans.

00:47:03.000 - 00:47:07.000

Okay. When did you join the VFW? When did I join? What year?

00:47:07.000 - 00:47:19.000

'86. Okay, I see. Did you hear stories about guys that wanted to get in after that got back and were turned away? You weren't made very welcome.

00:47:19.000 - 00:47:24.000

See? Just like we don't need you. What do those guys say today? Some of those guys are still there.

00:47:24.000 - 00:47:33.000

They need you now. They're all too old. They can't run the show anymore. They need something to carry them on.

00:47:33.000 - 00:47:41.000

That's right. Because there's not that many career workers. Right. So you're the guy that's going to have to carry on, otherwise those folks are going to close up.

00:47:41.000 - 00:47:50.000

Has anyone ever apologized to you or treated you badly? Have you ever -- Is this a VFW for us? Yeah.

00:47:50.000 - 00:48:14.000

They still probably don't need Rick Rickman to realize they stoned you. No, I don't think they realize the things they did. We have another veteran from Vietnam with us this morning. His name is Lieutenant Rick Rickman.

00:48:14.000 - 00:48:28.000

He's going to tell you about his experiences that he spent in country, 1968-69, in what was called III Corps, which is in the southern part of Vietnam near Saigon, in that area. II Corps? II Corps.

00:48:29.000 - 00:48:33.000

I'm sorry. Okay. So he's in the Central Islands. I'm sorry.

00:48:33.000 - 00:48:37.000

That's right. He's in II Corps. And he flew intelligence missions. Now, he was a pilot of a C-47.

00:48:37.000 - 00:48:56.000

Now, the Air Force terminology for C-47 was called "goody bird." And it's probably one of the most reliable aircraft that the Air Force ever used, because very, very frequently they ever fall out of the sky. But he was in the area of Phu Quoc in the Central Islands.

00:48:56.000 - 00:49:06.000

And he's going to tell you about some of the intelligence missions that he flew and a little bit about what his background was. Now, you were with the Air Force, right? Okay.

00:49:06.000 - 00:49:21.000

He will probably mention -- I hope he mentions the Montagnards. And some of the other individuals there in the Central Islands. But this will be now from a different perspective. Most of the perspectives you've had so far this summer were from the ground.

00:49:21.000 - 00:49:33.000

This one's going to be from the air to give you an idea of what his mission was and how he helped to support the ground war. Mr. Whitman. Thank you.

00:49:33.000 - 00:49:43.000

Good morning. I'll have to kind of wing it. I had some notes I had taken down, but I brought a bunch of stuff and left the notes on my desk.

00:49:43.000 - 00:50:01.000

So this will kind of be informal without my little guide for what I wrote down. I spent about 13 months in Vietnam. I was in the Air Force. I went to flight school in Texas in 1967, 1968.

00:50:01.000 - 00:50:19.000

I arrived in Vietnam in August of 1968. I was 24 years old. And I was stationed at Plei Khu, which is here in the Central Highlands. You really can't see it on this map here, but it's in this area

00:50:19.000 - 00:50:35.000

very close to the Cambodian border. It is in the Central Highlands, but the climate there tended to be fairly nice. It was warm during the day, humid at night. It would get a little cool during the wintertime,

00:50:35.000 - 00:50:44.000

and it would be about like our winter and fall. It was actually cool. It rained a lot at night. You would need jackets and covers for sleeping at night.

00:50:44.000 - 00:50:57.000

Because it did get rather cool. If you were out in the jungle, which I really wasn't most of the time, you would definitely need some warmer clothes. I initially arrived down on the coast at Nha Trang,

00:50:57.000 - 00:51:06.000

and we were supposed to be stationed there. But at the last minute, they sent two or three of us up to Plei Khu. We spent a day or two in Nha Trang. It was actually kind of nice.

00:51:06.000 - 00:51:22.000

It was down on the ocean. We lived in an area right off the ocean in a little military compound. The second night there, we had an attack by--this was mortar fire. This was kind of my welcome to Vietnam thing.

00:51:22.000 - 00:51:36.000

I thought, well, even with that, it's still a nice place to be. Then they picked out three of us to go actually do straws, and they sent three of us up into Plei Khu. We loved the sun and sand and the rather pleasant weather, really, of Nha Trang.

00:51:36.000 - 00:51:47.000

We flew us to Plei Khu. They dropped us off in Plei Khu, and it was a rainstorm. It was cold, and they threw our bags off the side. We jumped out of the airplane into ankle-deep mud and water.

00:51:47.000 - 00:52:06.000

This was not exactly what I had in mind, but actually it did not rain all the time. It turned out the weather was really pretty nice up there. Now I consider what people had to put up with in the jungles down on the coast where it is very hot. I'm sure many of you have been to Florida or the southern United States and noticed like the sun was up.

00:52:06.000 - 00:52:22.000

That's what the coast was like. Up here in the mountains, it didn't turn out to be fairly decent. I flew Intel gathering missions in what was called the EC-47. It had a lot of electronic gear inside.

00:52:22.000 - 00:52:37.000

It did things like, well, it had linguists on board. The crew was like pilot, copilot, flight mech, navigator, and about 10, 12 radio operators. It had consoles in the back. Two or three of them were linguists.

00:52:37.000 - 00:52:58.000

They were fluent in the Vietnamese language, Cambodian language. So we would fly basically around these areas right here for seven hours, and then later or over into Laos, even though technically you weren't supposed to be there, I suppose. But a lot of things went on like that in Intel gathering.

00:52:58.000 - 00:53:14.000

So we would fly in Laos, this area, up in here, and the DMZ, over into Thailand sometimes, and then we would come back. We generally fly about seven hours. During this time, on the radios, you would pick up traffic on the ground.

00:53:14.000 - 00:53:32.000

It's called traffic radio transmissions, things like this, from the enemy. And it would either be like Morse code, or most of the time it was actually voice. It would be the enemy units of our Vietnamese Viet Cong giving directions to ground troops, and the linguists would pick this up.

00:53:32.000 - 00:53:55.000

They would translate these things, and then we had sophisticated radios. They would send it to our headquarters here at our base. And so it was important enough, they would send out airstrikes, army units on the ground, which would come out and go after the enemy.

00:53:55.000 - 00:54:11.000

Every once in a while, the radio operators would tell us to put on a monitor switch, and we would hear, sometimes in English, usually in Vietnamese, and we would just talk about troop movements, what the enemy was doing, where they were going, what they were going to do.

00:54:11.000 - 00:54:25.000

Did they know they were being monitored, do you think? Well, they kind of did, because sometimes you would be working a target, and you would be flying along a large circle. They were trying to triangulate to get an exact position,

00:54:25.000 - 00:54:35.000

because they didn't come right out and say where they are. So as they transmitted, they'd take triangulations, and after you got four or five of these, it would make an X, and you'd say, "Well, they're right in here."

00:54:35.000 - 00:54:53.000

So sometimes as we flew around, they would stop, and then they would come up, and they would stop, because they had kind of an idea after a while what was going on, but they weren't completely sure. So that's basically how it worked, or if you had someone actually talking on the air for a while, you could get fixes that way.

00:54:53.000 - 00:55:07.000

If someone was here and you flew by, each time you triangulated, of course, you would end up and say, "Well, they're right here." So that's basically what we did. We also did a little bit of psychological psy-op warfare.

00:55:07.000 - 00:55:25.000

We had speakers on the airplane, and we'd get on and give pep talks to the people on the ground. I don't know if that really did a lot of good, asking them to surrender, things like this. Was it effective? Well, sometimes it was. We dropped leaflets out saying, "If you'd like to surrender, come in, give yourself up."

00:55:25.000 - 00:55:45.000

Were some of these chihuahua leaflets? Chihuahua leaflets, yeah, I guess, good for open arms or something like that, as I recall. Yeah, that's what they were called. Mainly, like I said, we relied on the radio transmission, monitoring transmission, et cetera.

00:55:45.000 - 00:56:13.000

There was another unit that mainly did the psy-war stuff, but I think most of it was worthwhile doing. That was the operation there. Every once in a while, it was kind of interesting, we'd fly off the coast, off of Northgate, above the DMZ. We'd try to stay, I guess it was outside five miles, actually it was like five to ten miles out,

00:56:13.000 - 00:56:34.000

in order not to violate their airspace, territorial space. But we had a lot of interesting gear on the airplane. One of the fancy radars that we had was called the Bansong radar monitor. When this kicked in, it told you that you would be monitored by a surface-to-air missile site.

00:56:34.000 - 00:56:55.000

In other words, they would track you, and if you got too close or whatever, they would fire a surface-to-air missile out. Now, whenever this thing came on, the radar officer would say, "Lieutenant, Captain," and he'd say, "We're being monitored by Bansong. We probably should go out to sea." Because an old airplane like the C-47, if they fired a missile like that at you, you were probably gone,

00:56:55.000 - 00:57:14.000

because the space of the airplane only went about 150 knots anyway. So if a missile fired at you like that, you couldn't evade it. Not an airplane like that. A fighter could get away, but an airplane like that, they would have just been gone. So whenever we picked up that Bansong pattern on our screens, it would always start out at sea,

00:57:14.000 - 00:57:29.000

because there was no sense tempting the sea. Have we shot it? Did you ever see any actively? I saw a few of them not shot at us. They were shot at fighters. The Navy has a lot of ships off here, and the Navy would send air targets.

00:57:29.000 - 00:57:44.000

There probably would be better targets than fighters. I could see them. It looked like big telephone poles flying by. You could see them. And we could pick them up on radar, and I'm certainly glad they were never shooting at us, because, you know, it got down to that, we just left the area, because there's no way we wanted to be involved in that.

00:57:44.000 - 00:58:09.000

Do you know if any C-47s were hit? Oh, yeah. Yes. I was hit twice, actually. Once or twice. Actually, two or three times. It was small arms fire landing in places. You could hear it in the ground, hitting the airplane, shooting holes in it. Probably one of the scariest things that happened to me was we were about 8,000 feet flying over in Lao's area,

00:58:09.000 - 00:58:26.000

and we didn't hear anything until a huge jar shook the airplane, and a banging sound like that, and the airplane rocked. And we looked outside, and it shot a hole in the root of the wing out there, or the tip. Fortunately, there was nothing out there except cereal. Shot the wing tip off?

00:58:26.000 - 00:58:30.000

Shot a hole in the wing tip. Oh, a hole in the wing tip. It blasted a hole. It didn't hit your fuel lines?

00:58:30.000 - 00:58:35.000

No. The tanks? The tanks were all kind of inboard, in the roots of the wing. Oh, you're lucky.

00:58:35.000 - 00:59:02.000

That small arms fire, one incident that could have been disastrous, but it turned out all right, was on one of the missions, one of the radio operators, a young enlisted man, he got a little bored, and he took out his sidearm, which was a .38 pistol, and he was pulling the hammer back and flicking it down. Well, that's not exactly what you'd be doing in an airplane.

00:59:02.000 - 00:59:20.000

One of the times he did that, the hammer slipped out of his hand and fired a round into the floor, and it was like, boom, the airplane was on smoke. And geez, what happened now? One of the guys went back, and the lieutenant in charge of the ROs was addressing this guy,

00:59:20.000 - 00:59:35.000

"What's going on?" And there was a hole in the floor. We got back, and we brought the airplane up, and maintenance checked it out, and it turned out that when he fired this round, it went through the floor, hit a fuel tank, glanced off.

00:59:35.000 - 00:59:53.000

Oh, my God. And we found out when they did check his pistol out, not only that, but we were very lucky this day, and we're lucky stars, because it had creased the fuel tank, it hadn't entered the fuel tank, thank God, and it turned out that the other five shells left in the guy's pistol were tracer rounds,

00:59:53.000 - 01:00:05.000

which, you know, if one of these would have gone in the fuel tank, it would have blown the airplane up. But as it was, with the angle, well, that's a close-up of our commander being shot out of this cockpit. By your own men? It was our own men.

01:00:05.000 - 01:00:14.000

Did they confiscate his weapon after that, or did he control it? No, he was taken off flight status and the whole bit. He was a young enlisted guy. He was a little bored, for whatever reason.

01:00:14.000 - 01:00:29.000

You know, he just wasn't thinking. He didn't mean anything by it, but like I said, I'm glad I'm staying here today to tell you this, because if you found out later, it could have been a real disaster, because you're sure you've seen tracer rounds in the air, and they're hot, and they'll start a fire,

01:00:29.000 - 01:00:57.000

and so the fire didn't go in the fuel tank, but it got blown up. One of our airplanes, about my ninth month there, I flew a morning mission over Laos, straight to the west of my area, and--I'm sorry, I'm taking it back-- we flew the afternoon mission, and the same territory that this guy flew, we were flying the afternoon.

01:00:57.000 - 01:01:13.000

We came back late that night, and the crew chief told us that one of the airplanes had been taken back. I said, "And during the mission, we heard the GCI people, the radar sites, calling for our-- so they called and signed us CAP. They were calling for CAP 47 to come up such a frequency, sign in, whatever.

01:01:13.000 - 01:01:26.000

The guy never came up, so we called a few times and tried to locate this guy. We got back that night, and the crew chief said, "Well, you know, CAP 47 never came back, and we checked all the bases, and we can't find him." So he was gone.

01:01:26.000 - 01:01:40.000

Well, it turned out, of course, after you're gone so long, they start ground search. Well, we found out--of course, later we found out--the next day, the guy's gone, there's no record of what's going on. We found out, well, the guy's down.

01:01:40.000 - 01:01:55.000

There were, like, 15 people on the airplane. He flew the same mission that afternoon, and, you know, probably flew the same areas he did. We don't know what happened. About two months later, an Army ground team found the wreckage of the airplane in the jungle in Laos,

01:01:55.000 - 01:02:10.000

and there had been a fire, and whatever hit them probably--it was serious enough-- maybe hit the cockpit, maybe hit the pilots. I don't know what happened, but the airplane was relatively intact, except it was ripped apart partly when it hit the jungle floor,

01:02:10.000 - 01:02:29.000

and the bodies inside, fire, and the bad guys had gone on the ground. It got to the airplane eventually, but all the fancy gear and the radio controls and stuff pretty much was intact. Some of it was burned a little bit, but the fire hadn't been that bad.

01:02:29.000 - 01:02:44.000

But apparently they'd got hit so hard with, they speculated, maybe a 57-millimeter anti-aircraft, radar-guided shell that hit the airplane, and when they crashed, they didn't even have time to make a radio call to say if they'd been hit in general. No May Day or anything.

01:02:44.000 - 01:02:57.000

But there's no May Days whatsoever. So they found the airplane relatively intact. They found some of the crew were dead, and the enemy had taken, like, some typewriters and some meals, and they took--they used to carry a couple boxes of M16 rifles.

01:02:57.000 - 01:03:09.000

They took guns. But other than that, everything was still there--codebooks and everything. They didn't take any of the stuff. They'd take, like, frames, jewelry, watches, stuff like that.

01:03:09.000 - 01:03:16.000

So that was-- Did any of the crew survive? No, no one survived. They found bodies along there.

01:03:16.000 - 01:03:29.000

Radios could have been very advantageous. Yeah, they just, like I said, didn't take anything. I imagine that the people who found it had no idea the value of what they had there because it would have been a way to really get in and see what our mission was.

01:03:29.000 - 01:03:39.000

Do you think it was Laotian troops? I imagine it was. We kind of--they figured the army that found them, they knew the area. They claimed it was probably North Vietnamese or Viet Cong.

01:03:39.000 - 01:03:52.000

Well, we heard the Ho Chi Minh Trail probably, right? Yeah, that's where it was. Yeah, that was exactly it. So that was--like I said, I think there was 16 or 17 people, friends, on that airplane.

01:03:52.000 - 01:04:10.000

So just like that, they knocked off a fifth of our unit of personnel and were taken out. So that was probably the worst I saw. Another incident did not happen to me, but we had stopped in--

01:04:10.000 - 01:04:27.000

not really on the map, but across the river from Laos in the city of Ubon. I believe it is separated by the Viet Cong River. It separates Ubon from a town called Savanakhet in Laos. If you look on your map, it might be up there.

01:04:27.000 - 01:04:41.000

One of our airplanes took off after taking on fuel, and right after takeoff, lost an engine, and the engines failed. They were very low, and they were heavy, and for whatever reason, the airplane didn't fly, and they ditched very nicely in the river.

01:04:41.000 - 01:04:55.000

The airplane just settled in the water, and it was rather shallow, and all the bank began to settle. And about right after this happened, the bad guys on the other side started out in boats, and here they came.

01:04:55.000 - 01:05:07.000

Fortunately, the Thai Navy was based there, and they brought a patrol boat. So they had a real firefight going for a little bit, and they got all the crew off the airplane, and a lot of the guys took the airplane and flew it.

01:05:07.000 - 01:05:13.000

You encountered a lot of the other armed forces besides the Americans, like the Australians and the Thais. Did I? Yeah.

01:05:13.000 - 01:05:23.000

Yes, we worked with them. They were at our base, at Pleiku. The air base was a large base. It had some Army aviation, had a few Australian units,

01:05:23.000 - 01:05:39.000

probably could create an ROK Army units there, things like that. The air base itself would be, like, say, in the center, and it was pretty well protected. There were about five Army bases throughout the area around the base,

01:05:39.000 - 01:05:56.000

Camp Schmidt, Camp Inari. So the main danger to us on the ground, the air base, was fire from artillery and stuff, like mortars. The mortars were probably the rockets, the Chai-Kong-22,

01:05:56.000 - 01:06:08.000

the rocket, about this big, huge warhead. It would fire these in, and you would hear them coming, you could hear them and see them, and it was night, and there was a big trail. So you would see these coming in.

01:06:08.000 - 01:06:29.000

One night we were under attack, and we were more than 100 yards away from this, and they hit a living quarters area and killed a couple people, injured some people. It sounded like probably the worst thunderclap we'd ever been near when they hit. It was just so bad, when they went off, it was really devastating.

01:06:29.000 - 01:06:46.000

That was the main danger on the ground, the base, that sort of attack. Ground attack, we really didn't have anything like that happen because of the number of Army troops around that area. There were a few--a couple times the sappers got in, the saboteurs.

01:06:46.000 - 01:07:03.000

They broke through the wire and they blew up some stuff. But like I said, we had our own security, the security police, and the Army was all around. So if anything really big happened, like ground troops coming in, we always had a lot of help. Very easy attacks.

01:07:03.000 - 01:07:18.000

>>You were there in '68. Were you there after Tet? >>I was there after the Tet thing. The Tet thing was in like early '68. >>January '68. >>Yes, January '68. And then they had--following spring, they had a mini-Tet, they called it.

01:07:18.000 - 01:07:36.000

They had a big push similar to what happened here before, but not as bad. And then during that time, they blew up several airplanes. They blew up a couple of our hangars, things like that. Here again, this was from rocket fire and things like this.

01:07:36.000 - 01:07:54.000

I was going to the mail box, wanting to see if I'd gotten any mail. The base came under attack with mortars and rockets. The rockets, they blew up a hangar and then they hit a fuel bladder, which was a huge neoprene bladder, partly sunk in the earth, jet fuel, aviation fuel.

01:07:54.000 - 01:08:10.000

This thing burned. It burned all night. You could see it lighten up the sky on the base. This is when they only happened during the Tet thing. We were on alert all the time. During this time, we were getting ready to take off on a mission.

01:08:10.000 - 01:08:27.000

In the morning, the base came under attack, and the tower came on and said, "The air base is closed. Everybody--" We said, "Hey, let us take off. We don't want to sit here in this airplane when they're shooting at the tower and the runway and everything." They said, "Well, we really are in a better position to go than to sit here because you know the airplane's on."

01:08:27.000 - 01:08:34.000

So we went ahead and took off. >>Without permission? >>Without the authority of the cable areas? >>Do whatever you want. The tower is closed.

01:08:34.000 - 01:08:44.000

They got out of the tower, and they're standing up there in this little tower, and they hit the runway while people were shooting at them. So they said, "We can do what we want to." >>Did they try to shoot at you as you took off, did they?

01:08:44.000 - 01:08:57.000

>>No. We don't know. I think what did happen is they hit the runway with some mortars in front of us, down the other end. So that's why we wanted to get off the ground because, in fact, you can see this-- >>It could mortar it. You might not be able to take off later.

01:08:57.000 - 01:09:15.000

>>Yeah. So we took off. The attack lasted 15, 20 minutes at the most, and high alert troops came out and chased the bad guys away, I guess. >>So did you return back to the base, then, the same base? >>We did. We went ahead and flew our mission.

01:09:15.000 - 01:09:35.000

There was no coming back because of the fact that it was under attack. We said, "Well, let's get out of here because we don't really want to come back here and stay here." We found out later that the attack was over. They fixed the runway. We came back. That was the type of flying we did.

01:09:35.000 - 01:09:51.000

I know, I want to see another time. I told you we got shot. We hit some wings. They blew up a couple of our airplanes on the ground. Several of the buildings were blown up at times, fires, this sort of thing.

01:09:51.000 - 01:10:12.000

It was a little easier being on the base and being a pilot, flying like I did, than being, you know, like the ground troops. I guess you talk to the guys at ground and the jungle also. I did a little bit of flying in the 123s also. The 123, I don't know if you've seen one. I just thought I had some pictures, but I couldn't find them.

01:10:12.000 - 01:10:23.000

You've seen the movie Air America, it's not through the video. There was a lot of those type of airplanes. This was the airplane they used for spray operation. They sprayed the jungle with defoliation. Agent Orange?

01:10:23.000 - 01:10:43.000

They sprayed Agent Orange to defoliate the area, to deny the enemy the cover of the jungle. They did a lot of this. I did not have to do much of this. I was mainly a--I hold cargo sometimes with the airplane, and I mainly flew the C-47. I didn't do a lot of the 123 operation.

01:10:43.000 - 01:11:05.000

Did you also have anything to do with Air America? No, I really didn't, although they did offer me a job right before I got out of the Air Force. I was--one of my last things I did, late '70s, August of '72, I was over in-- Well, let's see. I was in Wake Island. I was in Wake Island.

01:11:05.000 - 01:11:24.000

I was taking a 123 back to Vietnam, to the Vietnamese Air Force. This was part of the Vietnamization under President Nixon. I was taking the airplane back over here. We were at Wake Island, and the airplane was parked in the transit area, and we were doing some flight plans and things, and a guy walked up to me and said, "Excuse me, I'm the captain."

01:11:24.000 - 01:11:44.000

My dad said, "Excuse me, Captain, is that your airplane?" I said, "Yes, it is." He was just dressed, you know, civilian, but he had ID tags and everything on. So he said, "Well, my name is whatever," and he said, "I'm with C-I-N-E." And it was the CIA operative for that area at the time. We knew that.

01:11:44.000 - 01:12:03.000

He said, "We're looking for 123 pilots. Would you be interested in helping us out?" I said, "What do you want me to do?" He said, "Well," he said, "you'll be going back over and working for us, flying around here and there in Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera." I said, "Well," I said, "you didn't want to come out and say CIA, but," I said, "well, in other words, you're with CIA, right?"

01:12:03.000 - 01:12:18.000

He said, "You're with Air America." That was the name. And he said, "Well, yeah, I represent that this is the pace, very good." I told him I was getting out of the service. This was a couple months before I got out of the service. And he said, "Well, we certainly can hire you, and the money's going to be good, and you can live in Vietnam."

01:12:18.000 - 01:12:40.000

I said, "Well, that's what I had in mind." I had seen these gentlemen operate when I was flying in Vietnam. They would go into an area, especially these little isolated camps on hilltops and things with little small runways. When you flew over, you'd go in real slow, over, look around, circle around and around to make sure who was in possession of the camp,

01:12:40.000 - 01:12:54.000

because sometimes these places changed hands. You didn't want to come in there and land if the bad guys had the territory. So, that 123 was silver, and you could see it fly around. The airplane was camouflaged with desert camel, or I'm sorry, jungle camel.

01:12:54.000 - 01:13:08.000

But the airplanes were silver, so they would fly around. I declined. He said, "Well, it pays very good, etc." I said, "Well, I don't think so." I passed on that, but I did. I got out and got a good job, so he declined.

01:13:08.000 - 01:13:22.000

There was a lot of that operation. They had C-123s, various other airplanes. They did a lot of things, but it just wasn't what I wanted to do. Questions?

01:13:22.000 - 01:13:41.000

That's pretty much what I was doing over there. As far as the area, ground things, Pleiku City is a pretty good-sized city. The capital of Central Highlands area, Tukor, is a big city.

01:13:41.000 - 01:14:00.000

We used to go downtown sometimes during the day. It was not particularly really safe because of all the activity. It was actually off-limits from 6 in the evening until noon the next day, 11 o'clock. We were supposed to be on the streets, military-less cheap, going someplace else

01:14:00.000 - 01:14:21.000

because there were a number of bases around there you could actually drive through. I never felt comfortable there anyway, so I didn't make a point of going down into the city that much because it seemed like every other day somebody was getting shot or something like this. It just wasn't really that pleasant of a place to be.

01:14:21.000 - 01:14:36.000

I did go down there, but I didn't stay long. I just didn't feel that safe. That was one of the things that the whole time I was there, I didn't notice it at first, but after I'd been there for a few months, anything to do with civilians in the cities, things like this,

01:14:36.000 - 01:14:45.000

you're never quite sure who your friends were. You just never felt comfortable. On the base, it was different. You didn't have to go to the city, things like this.

01:14:45.000 - 01:15:11.000

Any time you were downtown, I know some Army friends one time who parked a jeep, and as soon as they got out of the jeep, they were Viet Cong parrots. They ran out, they took a shot at the guys, they jumped down, they had arms with them, sidearms, and they had a little firefight going, and the bad guys got away before they threw a hand grenade at the jeep

01:15:11.000 - 01:15:33.000

So, you know, I just--as I say, I never really felt comfortable being down in that environment. It would be like going down somewhere in Central America now where you have problems with terrorists and things like this. You never can really relax. So I spent 13 months there.

01:15:33.000 - 01:15:49.000

Why 13? That's just what it was. I was with the Army people for a little bit longer, or nearly a year, and it worked out that I was there about 13 months. And I was a lieutenant, first and second lieutenant, when I went there.

01:15:49.000 - 01:16:05.000

I made first lieutenant while I was there. I consider myself very lucky. I got back relatively unscathed, uninjured. A friend of mine was hurt during an attack on the base, but I was with him,

01:16:05.000 - 01:16:28.000

and he exploded his group on our way back to our area, and he got hit by a little piece of shrapnel. And he got a purple heart, and he got knocked on the ground. That's fine with me because he wasn't really hurt bad. So a lot of people that have been there didn't really compare as well, but like I said, I came out of it all right.

01:16:28.000 - 01:16:52.000

It was an experience I'll never forget. Hopefully, he had a deal with that. Did you ever have any dealings with the Montagnards? I did for very little, but I was in a little civic action work that I did through the 71st Havana Hospital Mass Unit.

01:16:52.000 - 01:17:14.000

They were supporting Montagnard Hospital, and a lot of these people are in the Highland area. We would work with them. We'd help fix up their hospitals, some of their schools, things like this. We did this through the hospital. It was an Army hospital. We knew some of the nurses and doctors that were in the unit, so they'd ask for some help.

01:17:14.000 - 01:17:31.000

So we went over and this little camp picks up things like this. We didn't work with them all that much, but they were a little different than the normal Vietnamese. I'm sure you've studied probably some of their people in Southeast Asia. They were like the aboriginal hill people. They were pretty nice people.

01:17:31.000 - 01:17:51.000

We didn't work with them that much, but I was familiar with their operations. But they were friendly toward you, and they liked Americans. Well, they really did. The Vietnamese often tended to treat them kind of shabbily. They were a minority in that area, and they weren't always well looked upon or liked by the Vietnamese Army.

01:17:51.000 - 01:18:10.000

But they did like the Americans. They had a lot of--some of them lived on base and provided security. And did you use them as scouts sometimes? They were used mainly by the Army as scouts and things like this. Did you find that the facilities you had were better than, say, what the Army had?

01:18:10.000 - 01:18:23.000

I mean, as far as because you're Air Force. Your child was better, say, for instance? I think it was. I guess I was fortunate for being in the Air Force. Our base was in the center of a big military complex.

01:18:23.000 - 01:18:31.000

There was some relative security there. Was it an Army base, though, or an Air Force base? Pleiku itself was an Air Force base. But like I say, it was ringed with Army bases.

01:18:31.000 - 01:18:44.000

All right, so Pleiku itself-- It was all around. Pleiku itself was an air base. I would say two-thirds of the base itself was really inside of an Army perimeter. It was a complete Army base, not surrounded.

01:18:44.000 - 01:18:54.000

But you had a lot of bases around there, so maybe it really got hot. There were plenty of Army troops there. And the Army had helicopters and things there, so they would-- Did it ever get close to being taken?

01:18:54.000 - 01:19:08.000

Not really. We had some ground attacks, various machete things. Mainly it was the artillery threat, the rockets, hop mortars, things like this. Once in a while you would have them sappering into an attack.

01:19:08.000 - 01:19:23.000

But we never really had any problems. I followed the war after I left. This is the news we covered, April 28, 1975. This was like the beginning of the end, if you will.

01:19:23.000 - 01:19:45.000

When they hit Kong and North Vietnamese Army, when they really began to take things over, this area out here became very unstable, but they really came in to this two-core area. And when Pleiku fell, I remember being on the news, I said, "Well, if the heart of the country falls, that's going to be the end of it."

01:19:45.000 - 01:20:03.000

This was the cover of Newsweek in April of '75, and it was called "The Last Battle." That's basically what it was, because after the Pleiku area fell, that was it. It didn't last much more than a couple of weeks before it was over. Having been there and known how the area was in the center of the country,

01:20:03.000 - 01:20:18.000

it couldn't be defended. It was a very hard area to defend. There were a lot of troops there, but for whatever reason, many reasons, Vietnamese Army just was not able to hold it. And when that fell, I said, "Well, that's what it's over, and it was."

01:20:18.000 - 01:20:31.000

What are the chances of the people that were there surviving under the Communism? Oh, I think a lot of them did. I don't really think there was really-- Initially, when the enemy came into the city,

01:20:31.000 - 01:20:45.000

I don't think there was a lot of really killing. Things like that came later. I have really no way of knowing what I read, et cetera. Even today, I think Americans are fairly popular over there now,

01:20:45.000 - 01:20:58.000

because the Russians had been there for the '70s and '80s, and they didn't spend much money and weren't real popular. So even today, I've talked to a couple of people who have been back over there, and they said, "The Americans are treated fairly well."

01:20:58.000 - 01:21:15.000

Especially the younger people now, they have no remembrance of the war, and their parents, by and large, there are good memories about it. Americans tried to help. And I guess right now, Americans are fairly well liked.

01:21:15.000 - 01:21:34.000

Sometimes I think our government needs to reassess their diplomatic programs and policies toward Vietnam, because we are not really disliked that much over there. Their government doesn't like us, but generally the people, you're very well accepted. Something that happened 20 years ago, it's over.

01:21:34.000 - 01:21:45.000

So maybe in the next few years, our government will reassess. There was a large base in the south of Cam Ranh Bay. Did you ever get into there? I did, just in and out.

01:21:45.000 - 01:22:00.000

It was a very large port facility. The Russians took that over. They made a naval base there. Just to get into Phan Thieu, in Saigon, a lot, there's a huge air force base there.

01:22:00.000 - 01:22:22.000

Quite a buildup, and I guess when we lost a lot of equipment, a lot of material, and the war ended, but that's how wars often end that way. It's in the past now. Like I say, I think we are probably in a good position to exert a lot of influence on Vietnam now,

01:22:22.000 - 01:22:36.000

just because of the fact that we are in a position to help them with their economy, trade, things like this. I'd like to see things change a little. I would actually like to go back over there sometime. I don't know how I could do it, if you could do it the roundabout way,

01:22:36.000 - 01:22:52.000

but I knew a few people over there, and I don't know what happened to most of them. I had no way of finding out, really. But now, as Americans who are welcome there, I would kind of like to go back and see it again. Would it be safe enough for you?

01:22:52.000 - 01:23:08.000

Oh, yeah, probably. I think so. Like I say, Americans are generally too welcome to be there now. I would go back over there, but it's not a real big priority. I do travel a lot, and if I could put together the time, et cetera, I may consider going over there.

01:23:08.000 - 01:23:24.000

I mean, if you came to Bangkok and said you have a business, you could take a side trip. Possibly so. You have to be careful. You don't want to get in trouble with the State Department, as far as transport. It can be done. It's not that you can't get over there. It's just a little more difficult.

01:23:24.000 - 01:23:42.000

But I don't think they issue visas for Vietnam. I don't think we do here. You'd have to get it out of the country. You couldn't get one here. You'd have to go to somewhere like Thailand, Bangkok to get one there. And you'd have to have a professional or business reason, which is not that hard.

01:23:42.000 - 01:24:00.000

I don't want to say fake it, but it can be done. Like people traveling to Cuba, it's not really legal, but people do it. It's illegal what you're doing. You have to be doing business, education, et cetera. Any other questions?

01:24:00.000 - 01:24:09.000

Have you seen that movie, Air America? No, I haven't. I've only seen some clips. Might be interesting. I'm sure you've seen it.

01:24:09.000 - 01:24:20.000

I've seen it. I'm sure you can identify with it. More so than the other Vietnam movies. I'm sorry, what did you say again?

01:24:20.000 - 01:24:32.000

I'd say probably more so than some of the, like Platoon and that, you know, the ground war, Brunton's that kind of thing, or Hamburger Hill. Yeah, you'd probably identify more with the early ones. Like I said, unfortunately I rented the video, but I just didn't get to see it all.

01:24:32.000 - 01:24:47.000

What I saw was interesting. It was a script written for a movie, but a lot of it was true, because you do do a lot of see the fans flying and flying in these little small fields. I've done things like that. I know I've flown a 123 into a little small field and things like that.

01:24:47.000 - 01:24:58.000

You land on these steel runways. It's just, they call it PSP. It's just pure steel planking, and they make a runway in the jungle, and you come in and land and offload your stuff and take off right away.

01:24:58.000 - 01:25:12.000

I've done that a few times. I'm very familiar with the 123 now, also because I spent three years in Panama, and that's like, probably the Panama is in the airport down there. The 123 is three years down there.

01:25:12.000 - 01:25:22.000

Are those turboprops? No, they're not. They're recipes, and they had, the K models had a jet. Twin or four engine? It was four engine, two props, and two jets.

01:25:22.000 - 01:25:33.000

The jets hung out on the wings, if you've ever seen the movie Air America, you've got a good shot. Do they hang from the wings like pods? Right, they're on pods. There's a fuel tank on each wing, and then there's a jet on each wing.

01:25:33.000 - 01:25:41.000

So they're primarily transporter craft. Transport. The movie Bat 21 was about this recon plane. I know.

01:25:41.000 - 01:25:49.000

Was it something like that? Your plane was larger, though. Oh, much larger, yeah. Bat 21 was a O2, was it one with the engine and the tail?

01:25:49.000 - 01:26:02.000

It was a Cessna. Now, 123 grosses out at about 60,000 pounds. Pretty large aircraft. Yeah, it's not as big as the 130s.

01:26:02.000 - 01:26:18.000

If you've seen the 130s, the four engine Hercules, yeah, that's a lot larger. That's a turboprop. But the 123, unfortunately, I had some pictures, but I just couldn't seem to find a lot of my old aircraft pictures. This is a Caribou.

01:26:18.000 - 01:26:25.000

You can see it's hard to see. A C7, it's called. This is a little smaller. I'm going to pass that around.

01:26:25.000 - 01:26:43.000

The Caribou is a little smaller than the 123. But the 123 grosses out at about 60,000. You can carry about 40 troops, 40, 50 troops, 20, 30,000 pounds of cargo. I don't know exactly how numbers are skating now after all these years.

01:26:43.000 - 01:27:00.000

One of the 123s was shot down in Central America about three years ago. I know it was at a CIA-run airline down in El Salvador. I saw it on the news, and they had shot one of the airplanes down. They captured a crew.

01:27:00.000 - 01:27:14.000

As a matter of fact, one of the crew that lived was somewhere out here in western Illinois. I remember he was reunited with his family. But they had some pictures of the airplane that was shot down in the jungle. I saw the tail number, and I thought, "Well, that looks familiar."

01:27:14.000 - 01:27:41.000

So I took it down, and it turned out that I had flown that airplane in Panama. It was an airplane that was transferred from the Air Force to this operation. But a lot of little operations that we don't know about. Here's an interesting picture.

01:27:41.000 - 01:27:59.000

It's a rather old page, but a picture of me. I just took years ago. That is a shell crater. One of the nights the base was attacked, it blasted a hole in the ground about 3 1/2 feet deep

01:27:59.000 - 01:28:22.000

and about 12 feet wide and landed about 20 yards from where we lived. It sounded like the whole world was blowing up. That's a picture of me standing in there in uniform, probably about 15 pounds lighter. It was an experience, and I can say I survived it.

01:28:22.000 - 01:28:34.000

Memories I'll always have. Did you ever have any problems in the air with other traffic like Air Force jets or Navy jets or B-52s? Was there ever any problems? Never really did.

01:28:34.000 - 01:28:53.000

We had a cabin air traffic control system, just like you would have here in the States. There were radar sites in mainly the big cities all up and down the coast, Da Nang, Da Nang, Lakeview. You would just call them up like your normal traffic control. You would ask them about any traffic.

01:28:53.000 - 01:29:08.000

They would tell you about it. We had a close call once. B-52s were bombing an area somewhere, and we were flying. They were at 20,000, 30,000 feet, and they were dropping bombs.

01:29:08.000 - 01:29:18.000

It was called an arc light. A huge bombing run. You could just see the jungle blowing up as it went. We were flying along, and we heard this on guard about, "Be careful.

01:29:18.000 - 01:29:27.000

There's an arc light." All of a sudden, we looked, and down on the ground, we were at 8,000 feet, down on the ground in front of us, the jungle was blowing up. It was like boom, boom.

01:29:27.000 - 01:29:31.000

So you were between the aircraft? He was ahead of us. We were flying into the thing. Oh, you were going to fly into it.

01:29:31.000 - 01:29:45.000

Yeah, the bombs had been dropping right across our track. So we made a quick turn out of there, and who knows, I don't know how close we got, but it was closer than I ever wanted to be again. So we were very impressed with it.

01:29:45.000 - 01:29:55.000

They dropped a lot of bombs, and I guess they did some good. That was the only problem you really had. Once in a while, you'd get into a busy area. You just had to be real careful.

01:29:55.000 - 01:30:06.000

It's like flying an airplane around the states in a busy airport. There's a lot of traffic. A lot of it's not on radar, so you just had to look. But they had a pretty good radar system,

01:30:06.000 - 01:30:29.000

so we were able to avoid other airplanes. Okay, if you think of any other questions or comments, you might want to ask them pertaining to anything we've talked about or in light of some of the other veterans we've had with relations to his experience. I guess you had some folk over in the Army.

01:30:29.000 - 01:30:34.000

Right. We've had Navy SEALs maybe. Yeah. Sure.

01:30:34.000 - 01:30:38.000

We had a door gunner come in. Door gunner. A couple of medics. Uh-huh.

01:30:38.000 - 01:30:50.000

We've had them from different aspects, which a woman that was stationed in personnel in Long Bend. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. There were so many jobs there.

01:30:50.000 - 01:31:06.000

You find that veterans will have many different stories to tell or things to relate. If I had time, I could just relate any number of things. The little things that happened, you always remember. You help people do this.

01:31:06.000 - 01:31:20.000

You help people do that. I remember one time it just always stuck in my mind that one day right outside the base, we'd come back from a mission, we were in a crew van going back to our quarters, and the Vietnamese military police were standing there with guns,

01:31:20.000 - 01:31:34.000

and they had a bunch of people sitting around like this in uniforms with towels over their heads. And they were capturing a Viet Cong enemy. And a couple of them were shot, arms shot off. But now I think, well, the tide's almost turned.

01:31:34.000 - 01:31:52.000

The people who were in charge then, maybe the fighters that were prisoners at that time, they eventually were able to take over. Were any of your people ever taken prisoner? None of our--none of my unit ever was,

01:31:52.000 - 01:32:09.000

other than the 16 men lost in the airplane. That was it. We did have a couple of people injured in the city through traffic accidents and all that. But other than that, no, we were never overrun or anything like that.

01:32:09.000 - 01:32:29.000

What is your estimation of MIAs? Do you think there are any MIAs still in Vietnam, mission in action, or field of mission? I kind of think there are. The whole story hasn't been told, especially when you get away from urban areas,

01:32:29.000 - 01:32:40.000

you get out in the countryside where little small units like that, I almost think that there may be something to this. I don't think there are many. Some people think there are an awfully lot.

01:32:40.000 - 01:32:55.000

We've been talking 20-some years. I think what it is is sometimes if we had very few--we had a few defections, Americans would go over to the enemy side and sort of--there wasn't much of it, a lot, but there was some. But like in the Korean War, we had those 21.

01:32:55.000 - 01:33:11.000

Yeah. So I think that may have been part of it. And now some of these guys are trying to go home, or maybe guys who just--maybe deserted. I didn't know personally, but I knew of guys who knew people who they deserted, married a Vietnamese woman,

01:33:11.000 - 01:33:29.000

they're involved like this, and they've disappeared into the culture. And I think there's some of that, too. As far as being a lot of POWs, I really don't think there's that many. But I think Vietnam is trying to curry favor with the United States and get on our good side for many reasons.

01:33:29.000 - 01:33:41.000

And I just don't think it is the big problem that some people want to think. I don't know. Personally? Any of your parents Vietnam veterans?

01:33:41.000 - 01:33:46.000

Sure. Some of them uncles and cousins. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah.

01:33:46.000 - 01:34:04.000

Because generally the age would be--well, now, probably late 30s, 40s, and 50s, time by '45. So I was up there in '69. So it was usually the middle, early 40s, the whole gamut, 40s to the 50s. Right, yeah.

01:34:04.000 - 01:34:15.000

The 50s would be guys who were there before me. Marines and so forth. But I was--well, I've run into people now that I work with. I'm a pilot for Delta Airlines now.

01:34:15.000 - 01:34:32.000

I work out of O'Hare. And people who were captains, senior people--when I was a new pilot 17 years ago up here, they had--some of them had been to Vietnam in the mid-60s, early 60s. So now they're in their 50s.

01:34:32.000 - 01:34:47.000

They were over there. It was quieter and smaller than the war eventually became. I think it's had a large effect on the U.S. over the years. I mean, it's changed our country in many ways.

01:34:47.000 - 01:35:04.000

I think now that we have the large Southeast Asian population that's come over here now, I think a lot of that is because of Vietnam and the refugees, especially the people who took in after the fall of the South Vietnam. A number of boat people, for instance--I've had a number of students--

01:35:04.000 - 01:35:17.000

or a few students that were--we've served the boat people that came over. And their stories are very heroic. They don't come direct. They had to go to Malayo or Thailand or someplace like that.

01:35:17.000 - 01:35:30.000

When I first moved to Oak Park about, say, about five years ago, six, a little more than that, I remember an apartment building I lived in here. There were some boat people who lived in there. It was a refugee.

01:35:30.000 - 01:35:46.000

The man was a doctor or something, but he brought his family. Nice gentlemen, relatively--spoke good English, quiet. But they also had their parents with them. The parents, they spoke good English to everyone else.

01:35:46.000 - 01:36:02.000

If any of you have ever been down in the city to what they call New Chinatown, along the Broadway in Argyle, it's an interesting area up there. There's a lot of Vietnamese who live up there. And as you drive down Broadway and down Argyle, they call it--

01:36:02.000 - 01:36:18.000

well, it's called Chinatown North, or small Chinatown. But a lot of the stores and restaurants in that area are Vietnamese, a lot of Vietnamese signs and things. I go up there, and it kind of reminds me of being back in the place where the people talk.

01:36:18.000 - 01:36:27.000

It's interesting. And there's a Vietnam Museum down there also. It's something that--it's right there on Broadway near Argyle. It's run by veterans.

01:36:27.000 - 01:36:38.000

And it's open during the week and on weekends during the day. If you ever downtown, you may get a chance to see it. You might look in there and see a lot of stuff in there. Army equipment, things like that.

01:36:38.000 - 01:36:45.000

It's interesting. It's a small museum. They take a donation. They have a lot of things, artifacts.

01:36:45.000 - 01:37:03.000

Have you ever gone to any of the Vietnamese restaurants in the area? Yeah. When I feel like some good music, I usually go down that area there on Broadway at Argyle. I do like Oriental music.

01:37:03.000 - 01:37:16.000

Being over there--I was over in Vietnam for a year, and then I got back several times on temporary duty to Hong Kong and places like that. So I developed a taste for Vietnam. I do like--

01:37:16.000 - 01:37:21.000

How many years were you in the Air Force then? Not just the-- I was in six. Oh, six years.

01:37:21.000 - 01:37:31.000

I spent a year in flight school and a little over a year in Vietnam, and then throwing a leave and stuff. The other three years I was in Panama. In Panama.

01:37:31.000 - 01:37:42.000

In the South. Which was interesting. Okay, anybody else have any other questions or comments you'd like to ask Mr. Rickman? Anything else?

01:37:42.000 - 01:37:48.000

We certainly thank you for coming in. [applause]