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Bob Gaskill: You Never Get Your Soul Back

Bob Gaskill saw the Marines on television and said, "I loved the dress whites of the Marines. So I went to the recruitment office and signed up." After that, he was off to bootcamp. "The training itself wasn’t all that difficult. I was a boxer and had practiced Judo and cross country sports. I was in really great shape, but the mental process was scary. It was pretty brutal."

After bootcamp, he received his MOS- a machine gunner with the 2nd Battalion 7th Marines. He remembers his first moments in Vietnam vividly. "I can remember the smells. They were just terrible... rotten fecal matter. It was a steaming 112 degrees."

"At the airport, I saw them loading caskets into the plane. It seemed like as many people that got off of that plane, they were hauling as many caskets back to the US, so it was really an eye-opener."

I went out with the dead.

Bob's job was to bail people out in hard situations out in the bush. After a few weeks in the bush, he'd return to a ship and take a shower, get refitted, and load up with new ammo.

"Most guys were full of jungle rot, sores and worms." An average day involved waking up at 4:30 a.m., unwrapping from the poncho liner they slept in, and never taking off their boots.

When it came to combat, "We didn’t do anything until we heard ‘gun’s up.'” He sustained a broken leg in combat, and was medivaced out. “I went out with the dead,” he recalls of the chilling ride with dead buddies from the platoon.

After his tour ended, he arrived home on US soil at 3am. "I think it was intentional. You didn’t see me in jail, so nobody spit on me.” Even fifty years later, one phrase resonates with Bob about his experience: "You never get your soul back."