A Minnesota PBS Initiative
My Vietnam Story
At the age of 70, I find myself looking back on my years in the Marine Corps with wonder, nostalgia and some regrets. This June, will mark 49 years since I returned to “the world”.
I enlisted at 17, right out of high school in 1964. I spent four years in the Marine Corps including two tours in Vietnam. Those two tours, 17 months total, shaped the rest of my life.
I was a radar/radio operator, air traffic controller. I worked in small Marine Corps field units that coordinated aircraft close air support, “medivacs” (choppering out the wounded) and bombing sorties. I was stationed in Chu Lai, DaNang and Phu Bai.
We lived in mud, heat, and rain; ate lousy food and worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Probably the worst thing we dealt with was boredom. I’m sure that the “grunts” in the field would have been happy to trade places with us. We had occasional movies, beer, patrols into the “vil” (village).
Our unit, Marine Air Control Squadron Seven, arrived in Chu Lai, Vietnam in the spring of 1965 after two months in Okinawa. We were told when we left Okinawa to turn in our weapons because we would be issued rifles left by the unit we were replacing.
We arrived to discover, not surprisingly, that they had taken their weapons with them back to Okinawa.
On our third night in-country we were sitting in lawn chairs purchased in the “vil”, watching Elvis Presley in the movie Kissing Cousins on a bed sheet hung on the side of the tent that was our mess hall. At the exact moment Elvis was about to kiss his co-star, who was leaning up against a tree on the screen, bullets started to rain down on us.
I saw rounds hitting the dirt around my chair. That moment will forever be imprinted in my memory.
We ran for our bunkers, scared shitless. There were about ten of us hunkered down in a bunker next to our hooch. The only weapons any of us had were one machete, one knife. One Marine, who had agreed to remain in Chu Lai with the new unit, had a hand grenade.
We were expecting the VC to come over the hill any second. Fortunately they didn’t. It turned out that a drunken sentry across the road from us at the Army Field Hospital –B-Med, had fired a couple of clips of ammunition into the air, showering our unit with incoming rounds. Welcome to Vietnam!
Youthful bravado helped us through the incident. At the time of course we didn’t know that “friendly fire” was responsible for almost 40 percent of the causalities in Vietnam.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I wasn’t out on combat patrols or being ambushed in firefights. I saw some of the suffering those men went through.
Some believe that we lost that war. Others believe we fought on the wrong side. Many believe we shouldn’t have been there at all. I’m not sure. What I’m sure of is that a lot of people died because of my involvement.
After Operation Utah, our unit helped unload nearly 150 wounded and dead Marines who had been flown into the Army field hospital across from us. We had helped coordinate the air support for that operation.
I came home mostly whole physically and mentally. I have a lifelong, severe hearing loss, because of gunfire, radio and aircraft noise. The vast majority of military personal who served “in country”, about 2.5 million, never had to face “combat”. Those who died or survived combat were a very small, very courageous minority. They are the ones that the movies are made about; the novels written about.
I didn’t have to face the thing that were specifically trained to do. I was trained to be a Marine, a “warrior”. We didn’t use that term then, but it’s become very popular these days. Marine Corps training pounded into us that every Marine was a rifleman, whose sole purpose was to fight. I’ve lived most of my life with a mixture of relief and survivor’s guilt. Better guilty than wounded or dead.
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During the last weeks of June of 1968, I received my discharge orders in Phu Bai, just outside of the Imperial City of Hue. This was a couple of months after the 68 Tet Offensive.
I was flown to Da Nang, to Okinawa, and finally to the Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, California, where I was discharged from active duty. The transition from Vietnam to home took about a week and a half. Culture shock doesn’t even to begin to describe how it affected me.
I was given an airplane ticket home. I remember walking around in downtown Minneapolis nearly all night. I had planned to spend the night at the Greyhound Bus station – now 1st Avenue- sleeping on a bench until the morning bus to Faribault would leave. They wouldn’t let me stay overnight. I was tossed out onto the street until early morning along with the other “vagrants”. One day I was in Vietnam and 10 days later I was sitting in my parent’s living room trying to figure out what hell had just happened!
I’m seventy years old. I’ve watched our country engage in multiple wars, spending young lives, and wondering if we have really done anything to make this world a better place. I’ve also thought long and hard about my role in that war. I was part of a gigantic military machine that decimated a country and destroyed millions of lives, including 58,000 American lives.
Some believe that we lost that war. Others believe we fought on the wrong side. Many believe we shouldn’t have been there at all. I’m not sure. What I’m sure of is that a lot of people died because of my involvement. I never aimed a rifle at another human being, pulled the trigger and killed them. Instead I was directly involved in the apparatus that rained millions of pounds of deadly bombs and bullets on people, many who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t have the luxury of saying that I killed them before they could kill me.
That said, I’d be a liar, if I said that I wouldn’t do it all over again. Probably not, but hindsight is after all 20/20. At age 17, having grown up on a diet of World War Two movies, with two uncles who were Marine Corps veterans – one was a Marine Raider who fought on Iwo Jima; I couldn’t even begin to understand what I was getting myself into.
Prior to Vietnam, American wars were almost always viewed as honorable and necessary.
People who were honorable served their countries, went to war and “defended our country from evil”. Most didn’t question the government who sent us off to possibly die.
Those protesting the war believed they had the moral high ground. Those who participated thought they had the moral high ground. I’m not sure that either side knew exactly what the moral high ground was. I only know my part in it. Those who had the courage to refuse to participate showed as much bravery as those who participated. It was easy to go to war to then. It was much harder to refuse.
Those years were, in most ways, the peak experiences of my life, an amazing adventure. A lot of good and some really, awfully bad shit!
Dickens said it best: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way .............
Biographical Details
Submitted From: Stillwater, MN
Primary Location During Vietnam: Vietnam 
Story Subject: Military Service
Military Branch: U.S. Marine Corps
Dates of Service: 1964 - 1968
Unit: Marine Air Wing
Specialty: 6742
Story Themes: 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, Death and Loss, Dissent, Don Greeley, Enlisting, Guilt, Marine Air Wing, Marines, Read, Reflection, Stillwater, Survivor's Guilt
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