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Jim Frey: Those things won’t go away

That was a lucky day.

When Jim Frey received a draft notice, he didn’t want to go to Vietnam so he enlisted, not knowing that he was going there anyway. "Training was a breeze. We had wrestling in school and I took 3rd in state. We worked out all of the time," he remembers.

When he arrived at Camh Rahn Bay in Vietnam, he remembers it being over 110 degrees. "The stench of that country, that’s always embedded in my mind. That, and the smell of blood. Those things won’t go away."

He was supposed to be field postal worker. But as time went on during his service, he began volunteering for different jobs and ended up as a squad leader of 12 guys with 11 Bravo Infantry. "We were put down by the wire in the compound. We would go out at night and come back in the morning." He remembers a rocket hitting camp and destroying sandbags around him. "That was a lucky day," he says.

He also remembers lost friends. "I lost four guys there. I see two of them splattered on the wall a couple times a day."