Vietnam Veteranos: Chicanos Recall the War

V I E T NA M V E T E R A N O S

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VIETNAM VETERANOS Chicanos Recall the War

LEA YBARRA Foreword by Edward James Olmos

University of Texas Press austin

The poem “The Darkness of War,” pages 239 –240, is published by permission of the author, Juan Carlos Heredia. Copyright © 2004 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2004 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.  The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of  ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ybarra, Lea. Vietnam veteranos : Chicanos recall the war / Lea L. Ybarra ; foreword by Edward James Olmos.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. isbn 0-292-70225-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 0-292-70244-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975 —Participation, Mexican Americans. 2. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975 —Personal narratives, American. 3. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975 — Veterans—United States. 4. Veterans—United States. 5. Mexican American soldiers—Vietnam. I. Title. ds559.8.m39 y23 2004 959.704309236872073— dc22 2003018270

This book is dedicated

to my brother Tanis, who, we thank God, came home alive, physically and mentally; to my cousin Raymond, who never quite overcame the trauma of Vietnam and lived his short life lost in a world of his own; to my cousin José, who lost his youth, his dreams, and his life in Vietnam.

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Edward James Olmos ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii PART ONE The Vietnam War and the Mexican American Community 1 1. Introduction 3 PART TWO Veterans Recall the War 13 2. Idealism, Patriotism, and Politics 15 Gilberto 15 Tanis 26 Alejandro 33 Charley 39 Leonel 45 Tony 51 Raúl 59 Antonio 68 Guillen 75 John 84 3. A Matter of Conscience 95 Obed 95 Ricardo 101 Frank 110 4. Psychological and Medical Issues in the Aftermath of Vietnam 121 Ray 121 Lupe 130 David 136 Joe 146 Daniel 150

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5. The Impact of War on Family 160 Francisco 160 Marcello 164 Robert 171 Jay 179 Connie 184 Frank and Socorro 192 PART THREE Overview of Issues Discussed by the Veterans 207 6. The Impact of Differing Levels of Political and Cultural Awareness 209 7. Psychological and Medical Problems 223 8. What Did It All Mean? 232 9. Conclusion 236 10. The Darkness of War by Juan Carlos Heredia 239 Notes 241

FOREWORD Edward James Olmos

I was born in 1947, just after the Second World War, and my life and thoughts of patriotism were established for me long before I got here. From the time I can remember, and I am sure I mean from the time I was born, I can recall hearing about the heroic deeds of Mexican Americans, Chicanos, during our country’s wars. It was part of our culture, part of our heritage, better yet, part of life itself. As a matter of fact, it served as the cornerstone of the pride of our people. Fighting for one’s country was an integral part of living. We were bred on this. I will forever remember hearing about a father or brother, uncle or cousin, niece or nephew who was joining or returning, or who had died in the line of duty for our country. My eternal gratitude to Dr. Lea Ybarra and all the Chicanos who participated in this book, for they have brought us closer to understanding the incredible plight not only of Mexican Americans but of the human race in general during times of war. Within the pages of this book, we truly get a candid look at war, patriotism, fear, and love. Bless all who have helped us with this compelling assemblage of truth. What can one say other than thank you to all who have participated, to those who have lived the stories we are about to embrace. It is part of my upbringing to be proud of God and country, but with this intimate look at the people who have had family or who have themselves been in a war, I, as well as thousands of others, will understand a little more of how we as humans relate to, feel, and handle the overall impact of war. My culture will benefit immensely from these strong and compelling stories, but my hope is that all cultures of this incredible society we call America will read the oral histories of Chicano Vietnam veterans and their families and learn. One cannot quote enough times George Santayana’s immortal statement, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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Edward James Olmos

On behalf of my children, my children’s children, and their children to come, I send my love, compassion, and total gratitude to all those men and women who have sacrificed their lives so that we of many cultures, races, and creeds, living in the United States of America, may enjoy life. God help us to understand these pages.

PREFACE

War is a complex issue that demands to be seen from different viewpoints and perspectives to be more fully understood. The Vietnam War and the impact that it had on the Vietnamese population, on the American people, and on the Vietnam veterans themselves, during and after the Vietnam War, has been chronicled in various books and movies. However, the voice of the Mexican American or Chicano veteran, a population that was overrepresented in the fighting forces and the casualties of Vietnam, has seldom been heard. Vietnam Veteranos seeks to fill a void in the literature, and in the minds of the American public, and to give credit to a group of men and women who have given much to their country but who have received little recognition and appreciation in return. This book chronicles their experiences by detailing interviews with Chicano Vietnam veterans from all branches of the service and from many backgrounds and geographic areas. These veterans reside in various states, including California, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, and New Mexico. Their interviews generally lasted four hours, with some taking up to ten hours. Once some veterans began telling their stories, it was difficult for them to stop. It was the first time many had allowed themselves to remember and discuss their Vietnam experiences in detail. The veterans interviewed averaged nineteen years of age when they went to Vietnam. The great majority, 77 percent, enlisted, while 23 percent were drafted. Fewer than one-fourth of those interviewed had attended college before they entered the military, and no one had been married. These veterans served in all branches of the U.S. military, with the greatest number in the marines and the army. They also represented a wide array of experiences. While the majority were infantry, or “grunts,” there were also paratroopers, helicopter gunners, and medical corpsmen. About two-thirds became sergeants, and several were first lieutenants.

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Their service dates in Vietnam range from December 1965 to November 1972. This wide range of service provides an overview of the war throughout its major stages, as well as extensive information regarding the changes in the face of the war over time. Because the interviews focused on combat veterans, some were hesitant to delve into an area that for most was still emotionally charged. However, the great majority were very cooperative, honest, and forthright. They unanimously commented that they were glad someone finally cared enough to ask them about their opinions and feelings. Because of the difficult nature of the topics discussed, all of the interviewees are identified by first name only. Although the focus of this book is on Chicano veterans—that is, those of Mexican ancestry—the intent is not to diminish the importance of documenting the experiences of all Latino veterans. Hopefully, this book will serve as an impetus for presenting the full Latino experience. Another unfortunate omission in this book is the voices of the Chicana/ Latina women who served during the Vietnam era. Many veterans’ centers were contacted, but no one was able to provide any names of Latina women who could be interviewed. Their stories also need to be told. Even though it was not possible to interview Latina veterans of the Vietnam War, the voices of women were incorporated by including interviews with mothers and wives whose sons and husbands served in Vietnam. They added a unique depth and understanding to the veterans’ stories, and I am grateful for their willingness to share their often painful stories. The stories in this book reflect the views of Chicano Vietnam veterans on a variety of topics—ranging from philosophical discussions on the value of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and thoughts on life and death to specific discussions of cultural and political awareness, issues of race and class, and medical and psychological problems. Interwoven in the discussions is the impact that these issues had on the personal lives of the veterans interviewed, both during and after their military service. Each veteran’s story speaks to us a little differently, but together they provide a portrait of men who fought heroically, through disappointment and pride, despair and hope. Journey with them into the depths of their minds, their hearts, and their souls.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many individuals without whose assistance and cooperation this book would not have been written. First and foremost, I would like to thank the veterans and their families who were interviewed and who so generously shared their time, their memories, and their insights. It is my hope that all those who read this book will learn and benefit from their experiences. I am also grateful to Linda Méndez and Amalia Cota Olvera for the many hours they spent transcribing the interviews. Thank you for doing a great job on this formidable task. Thank you also to Melva García and Noelia Cantú for their assistance on various aspects of the manuscript. I am indebted to Jorge Mariscal, Tanis Ybarra, Obed Fernández, and Gilbert Cárdenas for reviewing the manuscript and offering many helpful comments. Thank you also to Francisco Villarreal, Beldy Champion, and Luz González, who conducted several of the interviews for this book. To my family, particularly my children, Marisa and Nicholas, my deep appreciation and love for their understanding throughout the long process of writing Vietnam Veteranos.

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V I E T NA M V E T E R A N O S

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PART ONE The Vietnam War and the Mexican American Community

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Whether or not one supported the Vietnam War, there can be general agreement that the war was a tragedy. This is particularly true when one considers the number of lives that were lost, the tremendous division that occurred within America during this time, and the fact that the Communist takeover, which the United States expended so many lives to prevent, occurred anyway. There are many excellent books available that detail the Vietnam War. Only a brief overview of American involvement in Vietnam is provided here in order to set a context for the stories portrayed in this book and to help the reader better understand how the war affected so many lives. U.S. involvement in Vietnam began in 1950, when President Truman provided aid to the French military in Indochina and sent thirtyfive American advisors to Vietnam. In 1954, at the Geneva Conference on Indochina, President Eisenhower pledged aid to South Vietnam. When President Kennedy took office in 1961, he increased the number of American military advisors to South Vietnam. U.S. involvement continued to escalate until 1965, when the United States initiated the bombing of North Vietnam and the first American ground combat troops arrived in South Vietnam. Once American troops set foot on Vietnamese soil, many battles were fought, and the number of dead and wounded escalated quickly. After the 1968 Tet offensive, during which both sides suffered heavy casualties, peace talks began. The war and destruction continued as peace negotiations were held on and off. In 1969, President Nixon ordered the staged withdrawal of American troops, but the last American combat troops did not leave South Vietnam until 1972. A truce agreement was signed in Paris in 1973, and the last U.S. military personnel left South Vietnam. Without U.S. assistance, South Vietnam could not remain independent, and by 1975 it came under the rule of the North Vietnamese government.1

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The Vietnam War and the Mexican American Community

What were the costs of the Vietnam War in both human and economic terms? 2 For the United States: • 57,605 Americans killed; • Over 303,700 wounded; • An estimated 27 million relatives affected by soldiers killed or wounded in Vietnam; • $24 billion in American aid to South Vietnam (1955 –1975); • $165 billion in direct American expenditures for the war; in one year alone (the height of the war, 1968 –1969), there were 400,000 American air attacks, dropping 1.2 million tons of bombs, at a cost of $14 billion. For Vietnam: • 220,357 South Vietnamese military killed and half a million wounded; • 444,000 North Vietnamese/Vietcong killed; • 587,000 of the Vietnamese civilian population killed and 3 million wounded; • An estimated 8,000 to 15,000 Amerasian children born from American troops stationed in Vietnam; • 5.2 million acres of land defoliated. With the cost of the Vietnam War, in both human and economic terms, quickly escalating, protest movements began to escalate as well. Within the Mexican American community “La batalla está aquí” was a rallying cry in the 1960s and 1970s for those who opposed the Vietnam War. They held that the real battle was in the United States, not in Vietnam, and that the billions of dollars that were being spent on the war abroad were needed for the war against poverty at home, for improving medical care, housing, and educational opportunities for Americans: “Every time we blow up a village in Vietnam we are spending enough money to build a new hospital or library here. While our bombers tear apart Vietnam, this war also tears apart our own nation—because there is not enough money to wage war and also deal with drugs, slums, medical care, and housing. The poor and unemployed, the Chicanos, Blacks and Puerto Ricans—these have paid the price of this war.” 3 Others within the Mexican American community, however, felt that this was a price worth paying. Thousands of young Chicanos vol-

introduction

unteered for military service during this period. Many felt it was an honor and a duty to serve their country. The ideology within this community, therefore, reflected that of the larger society: there were those who opposed and those who supported U.S. involvement in Vietnam. While Chicanos who opposed the war did so for a variety of reasons, they were united in the belief that the Vietnam War was being fought disproportionately by ethnic minorities and the poor. These issues of race and class have been discussed in research on the topic of Mexican Americans and the war. Robin F. Scott states that the Mexican American veteran “returned to the United States to find the same old prejudices on the home front: certain restaurants still would not serve him, swimming facilities were barred to him, and his children or brothers and sisters were still being segregated in the schools.” Rodolfo Acuña states that throughout World War II, Mexican Americans were treated as second-class citizens. While thousands fought in the war and earned more Medals of Honor than other ethnic group, they still faced racism and discrimination when they returned home.4 In 1971 Ralph Guzmán brought the issue of race and war to the forefront and confirmed what many people in the Chicano movement had suspected. In his short but powerful article “Mexican American Casualties in Vietnam,” Guzmán cites statistics that verify that Mexican American military personnel had higher death rates in Vietnam than all other ethnicities. His analysis of casualty reports from January 1961 to February 1967 and from December 1967 to March 1969 shows that a high percentage of young men with Spanish surnames were killed in Vietnam and that a substantial number of them were involved in highrisk branches of the service, such as the U.S. Marine Corps. Mexican Americans accounted for approximately 20 percent of U.S. casualties in Vietnam, although they made up only 10 percent of this country’s population at the time.5 According to Guzmán, Mexican Americans were under pressure to enlist because they had too often been considered foreigners in the land of their birth and felt they must prove their loyalty to the United States. Organizations like the GI Forum have long proclaimed the sizable contribution of the Mexican American soldier and point to impressive records of heroism in times of war. Guzmán emphasizes that there was a “concomitant number of casualties attending this Mexican American patriotic investment.” 6 There were also the desire for status that military life seemed to offer and a strong economic incentive, since many helped their families by sending money from their service allotments. Relatively

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few of them avoided the draft by obtaining the college deferments available to students in the Vietnam era. Guzmán concludes: “Other factors motivate Mexican Americans to join the Armed Forces. Some may be rooted in the inherited culture of these people, while others may be imbedded in poverty and social disillusion. Whatever the real explanation, we do know that Mexican Americans are over-represented in the casualty reports from Vietnam and underrepresented in the graduating classes of our institutions of higher learning.” 7 The Guzmán article served as a manifesto for the growing antiwar movement in the Chicano community. This movement demonstrated its opposition to the war by holding moratoriums, marches, and demonstrations throughout the Southwest in which thousands of Chicanos participated. The protest movement was most forcefully illustrated by a speech titled “Chale con el draft” (No to the draft), given by Rosalío Muñoz in Los Angeles on September 16, 1969: Today, the sixteenth of September, the day of independence for all Mexican people, I declare my independence of the Selective Service System. I accuse the government of the United States of America of genocide against the Mexican people. Specifically, I accuse the draft, the entire social, political, and economic system of the United States of America, of creating a funnel which shoots Mexican youth into Vietnam to be killed and to kill innocent men, women, and children and of drafting their laws so that many more Chicanos are sent to Vietnam, in proportion to the total population, than they send of their own white youth.8 The ideas of unquestioning loyalty to the United States and of doing one’s duty as a patriotic citizen were also challenged in an increasing number of publications, including La Batalla Está Aquí: Historically, Chicanos have played major heroic roles, particularly during World War II and the Korean War, where there were a great number of Chicano war veterans who were heroes. But for every Chicano hero that made it home alive, there were a great many more Chicanos who died in battle. Today, with the Vietnam War, Chicanos are still fighting and dying to become war heroes. It is time that we begin to realize that our sons and brothers, husbands and boyfriends, cousins and nephews are the ones being used to fight a war from which La Raza gains nothing. We only lose.9 Charles Ornelas and Michael González conducted an opinion survey among the Chicano community in Santa Barbara, California, in

introduction

1971. Their results indicated that Chicanos were more troubled by the war than were Anglo-Americans and that their worries matched those of other nonwhite communities. Chicano antiwar protests seemed to reflect community sentiment more than was generally accepted by critics. Chicanos expressed strong feelings against U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, as well as against the military policies of President Nixon. There was also dissatisfaction with the draft. At the time the poll was taken, almost half of the respondents considered the Vietnam conflict as the single most important problem facing the nation. Sixty percent agreed with the statement that the United States should “withdraw from Vietnam as fast as we can pull out the troops.” Only 11 percent of the males and 4 percent of the females polled stated that we should “send more troops and step up the fighting till we win.” 10 The majority of the Chicanos polled also voiced disapproval of the way President Nixon was handling the Vietnam situation, with only 20 percent of the adult males and 12 percent of the adult females approving of his policies in Vietnam. Ornelas and González found that the level of support for Nixon was lower than that offered by the combined nonwhite populations in an August 1970 Gallup poll and was substantially lower than the support given Nixon by the general public. The study also found that a majority of adults and two-thirds of youth would not encourage their sons to join the service. Although the majority of the respondents disapproved of violence and rioting, 60 percent did approve of some forms of protest against the war, including protest marches.11 Ornelas and González conclude: It ought not to be surprising if Chicanos speak out against the Asian conflict and relate it to problems at home. The impact of the war is not limited to the disproportionate higher casualty rate suffered by the Spanish-surnamed in comparison with the national average. Conditions in the barrios are aggravated by the inflationary war economy that strikes hardest at the many families with incomes below the poverty level. . . . It is because barrio conditions were here before Vietnam and because they will not disappear with the end to the fighting, that the Chicano Moratorium efforts have been increasingly linked to grievances attributed to internal colonialism and cutbacks in domestic programs. The war in Vietnam may fade away, but the struggle in the barrios will go on.12 Since these early studies, there has been an increasing amount of work focused on Chicanos and the military, specifically on the subject of Chicano involvement in the Vietnam War. There have been some

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personal accounts, such as Roy Benavidez’s The Three Wars of Roy Benavidez and Medal of Honor, and Everett Álvarez’s Chained Eagle and Code of Conduct.13 There is also the work by Charley Trujillo, which includes a volume of interviews, Soldados, and a novel, Dogs from Illusion. Daniel Cano’s novel, Shifting Loyalties, and Jorge Mariscal’s Aztlán and Vietnam are recent additions to this literature. They are all important contributions to our understanding of the Vietnam War.14 Additionally, there are data available on Latino veterans of all wars. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, as of 2001, there were 1,027,000 Latino veterans in the United States, almost 60 percent of whom served in times of war, including Korea, Vietnam, and both World Wars.15 An extensive profile of Latino veterans was compiled in a 1980 study titled Chart Book on Black and Hispanic Veterans. This report noted that Latino veterans possessed certain group characteristics: they were generally younger than their non-Latino counterparts (56 percent were under forty-five years of age, compared with 39 percent of nonLatinos); they had less formal education; there was a slightly higher representation of Latino veterans among the unemployed; and income levels were consistently lower than those of their non-Latino peers throughout virtually the entire age spectrum.16 The Southwest and the West had the highest percentage of Latino veterans. New Mexico had the highest proportion of all— one out of every four veterans there was Latino. Five other states had veteran populations of at least 5 percent Latino: Texas (10.8 percent), Arizona (9.4 percent), California (8.8 percent), Colorado (7.7 percent), and Hawaii (5 percent). New York, Nevada, and Utah were the only other states with concentrations of Latino veterans in excess of 3.1 percent, the national average. More Latino veterans (38 percent) served during the Vietnam era than during any other single period.17 Rosina M. Becerra and Milton Greenblatt conducted a study of veterans of all war eras to find out the utilization rate of Veterans Administration (VA) health services and the major factors influencing these utilization patterns. They state that Latino veterans were of particular interest to the VA because they were a population heavily represented during the Vietnam War, and yet they seemed to use VA medical services less often than persons belonging to other minority groups. Of the Latino veterans Becerra and Greenblatt interviewed, the majority were army veterans. However, during the Vietnam War there was a higher percentage of Latinos who served in the Marine Corps. Several factors were thought to account for that choice, including a

introduction

greater prominence of the Marine Corps during the Vietnam conflict and the desire of young men to belong to a “real man’s” outfit.18 Of the Latino veterans they interviewed, 60 percent had been promoted to the rank of sergeant before being discharged. In addition to constructing a profile, Becerra and Greenblatt provide an excellent analysis of issues affecting Latino veterans, such as family background, cultural identification, health-care satisfaction, and attitudes toward discrimination. Regarding the issue of discrimination, they found that Vietnam veterans had a significantly stronger sense of being discriminated against than their older peers. . . . The Vietnam veteran was certainly much more vocal in his indignation about discriminatory practices probably because his consciousness had been raised as the result of the Chicano Movement of which he was and is a part. The older veteran was more likely to accept discriminatory treatment because by doing so he had learned to survive as a minority person in a majority culture. He was more likely to say things were fine at the VA because the organization treated him similarly to how he had been treated by other institutions in the past. The Vietnam veteran tended to feel that he deserved better.19 Becerra and Greenblatt note that, regardless of the type of adaptation to their environment that veterans chose, “ethnic and economic discrimination was a fact of life, whether they lived inside or outside of the barrio.” The veterans they interviewed had joined the military expecting to be treated with respect as soldiers, but they had experienced difficulties. They found that “ethnic tensions and racist feelings were as evident in the military as in the civilian world.” One of the veterans Becerra and Greenblatt interviewed expressed this sentiment: “We were proud Mexicans. We fought in the war to prove that. But we were still Mexicans in the service, looked down upon. They always treated you as if you weren’t smart enough.” 20 One of the conclusions that Becerra and Greenblatt reached was that when Latino veterans were faced with barriers to medical care at the VA, “they perceived these hindrances as a continuation of discrimination that has existed over a life-time of encounters with established institutions. Such barriers are understood as yet another example of society’s devaluation of Latinos as human beings.” They stated that Latinos were insulted because they felt they were not begging for charity, but had earned the right to free medical treatment because of their service to this country.21

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In this chapter, discussion has centered on the impact that the Vietnam War had on the Mexican American community and the differing views regarding military service. In Part Two, the discussion continues with a focus on the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of Chicano Vietnam veterans. Their perceptions of the war and the issues it engendered—particularly as they relate to national loyalty, cultural and political awareness, medical and psychological effects, and philosophical perspectives on life and family—are addressed in the following stories. The testimony of the veterans themselves regarding their experiences during and after the Vietnam War provides the basis for discussion of these issues. Chapter 2 comprises interviews that chronicle the veterans’ journeys through different levels of political awareness. As young men, they went to Vietnam believing in the American ideals of freedom and democracy and were committed to fighting for these ideals. What they often found was a conflict between their strong sense of patriotism and duty and the often equally intense feeling of letdown and betrayal by the American government. These stories help us better understand the Vietnam experience from the perspectives of those who were disillusioned with the reality of the war and those who continued to support the war effort. In Chapter 3, three veterans who grappled with the morality of war discuss the paths they took in becoming conscientious objectors. Each had to weigh his sense of patriotism and duty and examine his conscience. The different paths they chose help us examine our own sense of values and think about the path that each of us might have taken. Chapter 4 discusses the aftermath of Vietnam and the psychological and medical issues it engendered. Veterans offer frank discussions of medical problems resulting from war injuries and exposure to Agent Orange to psychological problems arising from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and drug use. In Chapter 5, the impact on the veterans’ lives and their families is discussed. Within these stories, brothers share their common bond, a veteran and his wife share the issues they continue to deal with, and a mother shares the tragedy of losing her son in war. Part Three focuses on the lessons of Vietnam, both personal and national, as seen through the eyes of the veterans. Various issues brought forth during the interviews, such as political and cultural awareness, psychological and medical problems, and views toward war, are reviewed and analyzed. Unfortunately, only twenty-four of the interviews could be presented at length in Part Two. However, Part Three contains quotes not

introduction

only from those interviews but also from all the interviews conducted for this book. This incorporates the important voices of all the veterans who were interviewed and also adds to the range of perspectives taken into account when presenting an overview of the issues discussed. In reading Vietnam Veteranos and the stories of Chicano Vietnam veterans speaking on all these issues, you will hear voices that have too often been silent. You may understand and relate to some of the stories, while others may disturb and shock you. You will find, nevertheless, that the stories are moving and compelling and shed light on a part of the American experience that has been overlooked for far too long.

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PART TWO Veterans Recall the War

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CHAPTER TWO

Idealism, Patriotism, and Politics

Gilberto u.s. army—corporal e4 Armored Infantry Division Black Horse Regiment, Eleventh Armored Cavalry Division Base of Operations: Near Ben Cat, Xuan Loc vietnam: august 1966 –january 1967 When I got drafted, I didn’t even know what the word political meant. I was a poor Chicano growing up in Salinas. My mother was a single parent and my grandmother was living with us. We were just struggling to survive and I had no idea what Vietnam was. My mother understood it because she listened to a lot of the Mexican programs on television. She threw away two or three letters from the army. I registered for the army in Salinas, but I was working in Oakland. My brother called me one time and he said, “Hey, I just found a letter in the garbage that my mother threw in there and it says that if you don’t show up they’re going to turn you over to the Feds.” I asked, “What kind of letter is it?” My brother said, “You’ve been drafted.” See, all I could say was, “Oh, shit!” That same day I left my job and drove all the way back to Salinas and I couldn’t believe it. I was half in shock. He handed me the letter and sure as hell it was the third notice and they told me my name was going to be sent in to the FBI. I got mad at my mother and I said, “What’s the matter with you,” in Spanish. “¿Qué tienes? Me van a mandar a la prisión” [They’re going to send me to prison]. And then she goes, “Esta guerra no es tuya, esta guerra es de los presidentes y tú no debes de estar allí. Hijito, no vayas” [This war is not yours, this war is the president’s and you shouldn’t be there. Son, don’t go]. Well, I found out later that her comadre’s son had been killed in Vietnam, and it was bad because he had a closed casket. He got hit in the

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head. My mother had found out about Vietnam, and when she started seeing the letters with the little águila [eagle] on the corner of it, she threw them out. I knew from her facial expression and what she was telling me that she was scared. She was aware that she could lose a son. A lot of Chicanos from my community got drafted. I think they wiped out half of the Mexican American community in Salinas in one year. I remember it was Art, Abel, myself, Louie, Danny, all of us got drafted. My friend Johnny and I had spent our army training together. We were afraid that we were going to get sent to Vietnam, so when the orders came down from headquarters that we had been assigned to the Republic of Southeast Asia, Johnny and I jumped up in the air and said, “Great! We’re not going to Vietnam!” And then somebody says, “Hey, stupid, where do you think Vietnam is?” I said, “Oh, shit, you’re kidding me!” I can remember that an icy cold feeling started at the bottom of my feet and gradually increased all the way to the top of my head, and when it hit my neck and my brain, I realized that I was in deep-shit trouble. That same day, I remember three gabachos came up to me and told me, “I ain’t going. I’m married, I got a child. I’m going to Canada,” and they split. The next morning when they pulled us out of rank, man, there was about fifteen guys gone. So here I was saying to myself, “What am I going to do?” I kind of thought about it. Hell, I didn’t want to go to Canada. A Chicano in Canada? Mexico? I have no relatives in Mexico. Even if I left I would miss my family. I’d miss my friends and I know that they’d call me a dirty little coward behind my back if I did do it, so I gradually accepted it. I was stationed in Fort Meade, Maryland, along with eleven thousand other guys, and seven thousand of us got put on planes in a matter of three days. They transported us to the port of Oakland and I realized that I was going on that damn ship and that damn ship was going to take me to Vietnam. There was about three or four thousand guys on that ship and every damn one of them was seasick. They vomited all over the place. It took us about three weeks to get to Vietnam and I think that the three weeks on board ship was a good experience, to gradually accept the reality that we were going there. It was different for somebody else who got on a plane here and was sent over there and one moment they’re walking on the sidewalks and the next minute they’re in the jungles. That’s radical.

idealism, patriotism, and politics

It takes time to adjust to it. So by the time we got to Vietnam, we were mentally and psychologically prepared. When we got there, we were thrown on these little ships that went onto the shores and we were supposed to do this landing. The Eleventh Armored Cavalry Division hitting the shores of Vietnam, like Patton, and there we were, three thousand of us with empty guns acting like we’re taking over something. It was so stupid. But there was the general, right in the middle of all these guys hitting the shores as if we were fighting somebody. There was nobody around. All the Vietnamese farmers were looking at us, laughing. The war was on the other side of the hill. We had no ammunition. It was a show. Yeah, look at the Eleventh Armored Cavalry taking Vietnam. So we all walked up to the side of the road and got thrown on trucks. Okay, guys, showbiz is over. The next thing I know, we started getting our military armored personnel carriers and five of us were assigned to each one. An armored personnel carrier is kind of a small troop carrier made out of aluminum with a three hundred–gallon tank on it that is really rapid. It’s got a .50 caliber machine gun on the top and two .60 calibers on the side. The first thing we did was modify all those damn things because we wanted to go sixty miles an hour. Just in case somebody was shooting at us, we wanted to haul ass. Two weeks after we had gotten up there, we were sent out on an ambush patrol. We were coming back and we were extremely tired because we’d stayed up all night to keep watch. This guy must have forgot to put his machine gun on the safety and he’s tired and, all of a sudden, I guess he put pressure on the trigger and he lit off a machine gun burst and the guy that was right in front of him got hit in the back four times with the machine gun. He got knocked down and the guy started to die right in front of me, killed by his own man. I saw the life drain from him. I saw the cheeks, the eyes, the skin turn white in front of me. The guy bled to death. That’s when I got educated about what was happening in Vietnam. There were a lot of stupid mistakes that the artillery was making, too, because they’d send you out and you asked somebody to drop a round of 105 on grid square 106 and they’d land them right next to you. Finally, you start asking, “Adjust three hundred meters.” You automatically recognize that those guys that are sitting five miles away are expected to pinpoint their artillery fire. It doesn’t always happen and they try to do their best job, but when it’s not right, that’s what kills people.

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On December 14th, ’66, we got involved in this massive attack. We were driving along in the personnel carriers and we got hit by some 448s, Vietcong American killers. They were called the American killers because they would never assault the Vietnamese army, the ARVNs, or anybody there. Their focus was to kill Americans, period. We got hit by about four or five hundred of them and we were driving along in armored personnel carriers and tanks and they were trying to break rank. The first tank, they hit it with the 105 and they blasted it and I saw the tank go over the side. The first two tracks got riddled by recoilless rifles and they went straight up in explosions. It was like a Molotov cocktail. We call them rolling coffins. I hated being in those damn things because one bullet, even from a .50 caliber machine gun, it’s going to blow up and then you got ammunition, hand grenades, and all these other materials in there. They’re going to blow up and when it goes, it goes. You don’t want to be in them. The first three tracks vanished, melted to the ground. We nicknamed the armored personnel carriers “tracks.” I looked up and I saw a tank go up in the air and I saw the guys jumping out. I grabbed one guy and pulled him into our track and that guy went, like a topo, right down straight to the bottom and he was shaking. He was so scared and he was yelling out, “Don’t let them get me!” And I’m saying, “Get your ass up here, start firing!” The rest of those guys were scared because they saw what happened and, meanwhile, all these cabrones, Vietcong, were coming in at us. I’m the second in command. The first in command is up there firing the .50 caliber machine gun and I had to literally get them and put them up on the .60 caliber machine gun and hit their helmets and say, “Fire!” and I’d get the other guy and say “Fire!” They were in shock. I said, “Goddamn you, fire!” and I put their hands on the trigger and I pulled it for them and they finally started firing, and the moment they started firing, the Vietcong started backing out. But by this time, they were starting to shell us. They were bringing in mortar rounds. You know, this couldn’t have been more than five minutes, but it seemed like a lifetime. It was like I had been there all my life and then I’m firing and firing and nothing would stop them; they wouldn’t stop coming. They kept firing and I could see the blasts from the mortar rounds coming in. They would fire a round. Wherever it exploded, they would adjust for it. If it was off five hundred yards they would adjust 100 yards and then another 100 yards until, boom, they hit you right on top. That’s walking them in; they were aiming in on us.

idealism, patriotism, and politics

The last round I remember, I was firing a gun and shells were coming in and when it exploded all of the fragments hit me. A lot of fragments going all over the place, but some of them hit me below the eyes, just peppering, but it was so strong, so fast, and so hot that it was like a fist hitting me right in the eyes and my eyes just blew up, they just swelled automatically and I couldn’t see. I was blinded and I was so goddamn scared because I had no control of my life. The only thing that I could do was to yell at those other guys to keep firing, but I thought I was blind. I thought I had lost my eyes. We killed about three hundred Vietcong. We made piles of bodies. We used bulldozers to dig this great big grave and we just shoveled them in. There were so many bodies that the legs and arms would get stuck in the sprocket of the tanks and in the sprockets of the tracks. The arms would break off and they’d get caught in the wheels, but we didn’t care because we were really glad it was them that died and not us. I was sent to the hospital and my eyes were bandaged for two weeks. They were dilated and checked and they made sure that my eyes were okay, and at the end of two weeks I was sent back to my platoon. I remember when I was walking back inside the camp, a Chicano guy comes walking up and he says, “You okay?” and I said, “Yeah, I’m all right, but goddamn it I wish they would have taken one of my eyes so that way I could have gone home.” He said, “Yeah, that would have really been nice, huh?” See, how the mind works is really incredible, that we’re willing to give up parts of our limbs in order to get out of the situation. There were no good experiences, but maybe the best experience I had was when I got a little bottle of Tabasco Sauce from my uncle. One day we were crossing the river and I fell into the goddamn water, and when we came back out of the water, I was full of leeches. I had leeches on my body, on my arms, I had leeches all over the place. They were just sucking my blood out and I couldn’t stand it. Me daba asco [It made me sick] thinking about those things on me and I didn’t have any insect repellent I could stick on them and I didn’t have any matches, the matches were wet. You can’t pull them off of you because if they stick their little heads in there, it could cause blood poisoning. I remember I grabbed the bottle of Tabasco Sauce and I put some on them and those little bastards just wiggled their little heads out and started coming off. I started putting the Tabasco Sauce on the leeches and they were just falling off like flies and everybody’s looking and saying, “Hey, let me borrow your Tabasco Sauce.” That’s about the only experience in Vietnam that I could

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think of humorously, but it was so funny watching those little buggers fall off, qué feos, los jodidos. In Vietnam, there was only one thing for me, the instinct to survive. I didn’t want to be around people that agonized over their girlfriends or their friends because their mind was not on surviving. It’s too easy to go over the end. Everybody is on pins and needles there and you have to struggle to maintain that sense of stability. Around eight o’clock one night, we were to go out about two miles to a certain location, a rubber plantation, and just sit and listen. I had done this before, so it wasn’t new to me, but let me tell you about this freaky experience I had before I get into it. Do you know that for some strange reason, the excess rubber that comes out from the rubber plantation, when it comes in contact with your body at nighttime, it begins to illuminate? I remember one time when, by the way, we were given government-issued amphetamines, we were given bennies to stay awake because we would always fall asleep. Anyway, that night I recognized that as I laid next to the rubber plantation, I noticed little twigs that were illuminating and I picked it up and I put it in my pocket because I thought that was so interesting. I picked up another one and another one and the next thing I realized, that wherever my hand was at for a certain period of time, the heat, I suppose, from the body caused it to illuminate. I moved to the left and I saw the entire imprint of my body illuminated on the ground and I looked around and I said, “God, they can see me, the VC can see me.” I started crawling away and that night all I could think about was I got to keep moving slowly. I think there was a couple of times out there that I would ask the question, “What are we fighting for? The Vietnamese people don’t want to fight. They’re working in their fields. What the hell are we doing here?” It wasn’t like WW I and WW II or maybe the Korean War, where the military was separated, but it wasn’t like that in Vietnam. I mean, the war was in the towns, it was in the bushes. It was hard to understand, to really feel what the hell it was all about. I questioned it a lot, but I felt powerless to do anything. By that time, we had already been getting these orders that you couldn’t shoot anybody between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. It was a real stupid thing, but orders had come from headquarters that said you cannot fire your weapons on anybody between eight o’clock in the morning and five in the afternoon, and if you do and you hurt somebody, you’re liable to get court-martialed. No rationale other than that was the time that the farmers and peasants came out to work their fields; therefore, we could possibly kill somebody that was not a Vietcong or the enemy. We were

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all angry at that and I remember people sitting around the armored personnel carrier saying, “Hey, somebody gets up there that I think is the enemy, there’s no way that I’m going to hold back from firing at those people; there’s no way.” I remember right before I went out on ambush patrol, prior to getting shot again, I guess it was about two o’clock in the afternoon. I’d been asked if I wanted to go on an R&R, rest and recuperation, to Japan. A sergeant yelled out my name and he said, “Private, I have orders here that you’re supposed to be going out on R&R to Japan.” I remember I just stood there very defiantly and said to him, “I requested Sydney, Australia. I refuse to go to Japan. Send somebody else.” So I gave it up to this other guy. Just after that, I was coming back out of the mess hall and as we were walking out, the sarge walked over to me and said, “We’ve been assigned to ambush patrol, get your gear together. It’s you, Hart, Reyes,” and he mentioned about four other people. I remember getting real upset, “Goddamnit, we’ve been on ambush patrol three days already, this is going to be the fourth time. Don’t you have the balls to tell those people to find somebody else?” He said, “Hey, man, don’t get mad at me, I’m taking orders like everybody else, so if you don’t want to go, don’t go, but you have to deal with it.” I said, “I’ll go, but the next time they come over and ask us to go out on ambush patrol, I wish you’d stand up for our rights.” If you didn’t stick up for your rights and say, “Hey, I’ve been out there three times; it’s time to send out the other squad,” then you’re going to go out there. Anyway, about five or six o’clock we went out. It was really ironic because if I had gone on R&R, I wouldn’t have had to go on ambush patrol. It was actually December 31st, New Year’s night. Well, the cards were dealt to me. As we went out, there was a long twelve-foot gate, with concertina wire draped across the front of it. It was a huge gate. It was designed for tanks and trucks and all of that, but that’s where everybody exited. Every time we’d go out that gate, I’d just take a deep breath, make the sign of the cross, take my Saint Christopher protect me medal, give it a kiss, put it down on my chest, and say, “Okay, here I go.” Then the moment you walk out that gate and you hear that creaky sound swinging back behind you, being locked and chained across, your mind just gets real focused on survival and all your instincts are on that. We used to get really lost in the jungle sometimes. Whoa, did we get lost! But anyway, that night we did and we had walked through the jungle for about an hour and a half, maybe two hours, and by that time

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the sun was setting. When the sun starts setting you know that you have to start looking for a place to stay where you can get as much protection using the land and the trees and the bush to hide and protect yourself. We were walking down this one area and we felt the gravel; it was a roadway, it was just a little gravel area that was kind of a four-corner area. There’s two streets perpendicular running against each other and I remember the sergeant said, “Okay, we’re going to stay here and I want you three over there and you two over here and I want the radio man with me.” We set up our little perimeter, and then I crawled out and laid about forty feet of wire and set up some trip flares, and then the ones behind me set up forty feet of trip flare wire and claymore mines, and some other guy went out there and set the claymore mines. on each side. I put all my hand grenades in front of me. The guy next to me, David, got his M-60, a huge gun, and I was a grenade launcher and that was what we called an ambush patrol. The patrol was designed to ambush the enemy, and when they’d come walking by, you totaled them out. You had so much firepower, in one instant you’d kill off a lot of people. That night, after we set up all of these flares and grenade launchers, we withdrew back into our little area. In the ambush patrol there were eight of us and as we lay there, I heard what I didn’t want to hear. Off in the distance, I could hear feet on gravel. You ever walk on a gravel road? As your feet step on the little rocks underneath, how they make that noise? That’s what we were hearing out there and I kept saying to myself, “You’re hearing things. It isn’t what you think it is.” All of a sudden, the heart began to beat and I could feel the pulsating blood around my neck and I knew my body was ready to go. I could hear it getting closer and closer. Anyway, as they got closer and closer, suddenly the whole world just lit up and the trip flares went off, pam, pam, pam, three of them and there they were. I remember looking up and I said, “Oh my God, there’s got to be forty of them out there!” And the first thing I remember doing is grabbing hand grenades and starting to throw them and the claymore mines were exploding. The whole midnight darkness was blasted out by white gunfire and exploding hand grenades and the whole thing lit up— it was just like daylight. You could see people running back and forth firing and I remember people running behind me, the Vietcong ran between me and David, and another one ran to my right and I could hear people, firing away, yelling and screaming, “Watch it, watch it, shoot ’em, throw more grenades!” I stopped and I turned to my right because I could hear, “Help, help!” and as I was looking out there, in front of me about ten feet away

idealism, patriotism, and politics

was this Vietcong looking down at me, pointing the gun at me and I knew I was gone. All I remember seeing was this flash of light right in front of me and I remember hitting the ground and he was still firing at me. He hit me in the arm, in the hand, hit me in the back, and by this time, I reached across, grabbed the .45 and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t hold the damn gun. When I looked at my hand, my thumb was hanging on the other side of it, on the back of my hand. My gun was twirling on my index finger and it fell out and I could see my thumb hanging on the other side. I got hit in the arm and it hit the artery and it was splashing blood, and I started to kick and all I remember was this massive explosion. A grenade went off and I yelled for help and I could remember somebody grabbed me from the back of the shirt and started pulling me, pulling me, and I had this sudden feeling of traveling through the earth. My body was just traveling right through the ground, going straight down, I might have been going through hell, I don’t know, but all I remember is this sinking, awful feeling as if I was traveling a hundred miles an hour right through that ground and I’m laying back and I knew I was hit. I knew I was in bad shape. I felt pain and I could feel the blood and I could feel people pushing things at me and I remember just laying there and having this conversation with God. I said, “Wait a second, I can’t die. I want to tell you why.” I had this real conversation going on with God, saying, “Well, I shouldn’t die and I got all these reasons why I shouldn’t die.” Anyway, as I was being pulled and yanked along I could hear the sergeant yelling back and forth, “They’re on us, they’re on us, I’m calling the rounds in!” He said, “Drop it on grid square,” which meant drop it right on us. Our artillery started firing right on top of us and I could feel, as these rounds were landing around us, my body would fly up in the air. I’d literally fly up and I’d come back down and I’d go back up and hit the ground again and I remember as I was flying up I was saying, “Oh, shit, man, one of those rounds is going to get me,” because they just kept coming in. We couldn’t get the Vietcong away from us, there was just too many of them. I must have been going into shock because I could just hear the propellers of a helicopter and I could remember them saying, “Hit him with some Demerol,” and they were shooting me with painkillers and I got strapped onto a helicopter. It was January 1, 1967; I’ll never forget that, New Year’s Day. I can still visualize it, but when that chopper took me off all I remember is being in Bien Hoa, in the hospital and waking up momentarily as I was in there. I could feel hands going all over my body and I could hear people saying, “Oh, here’s one, here’s one, I found one, I found another one.”

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It was bullets; they were pulling them out of me, I guess. I passed out and I woke up about two days later and they put me on a plane. I don’t know where in the hell I was going, but I was on the plane and I remember waking up and going, “Ahhh,” and somebody coming along and hitting me with some Demerol and I’d float away and this continued all the way until I got to Letterman General Hospital. I landed in the United States, in Travis Air Force Base. It was Friday the 13th, in January 1967, I’ll always remember that. It’s good luck now, Friday the 13th, because I was back in the States. I needed about three or four other operations. I had a lot of nerve and muscle damage and I needed a lot of physical therapy. I had a bone graft from my left hip to my right hand to replace the bone that I lost in the thumb when I got shot. Anyway, I got osteomyelitis, which I guess is a form of bone cancer. All I know was I got quarantined down at the bottom of the basement of Letterman General Hospital and they wouldn’t allow anybody in there. I probably picked up some infection in the operation and it was so bad that I was in there for three months. They wouldn’t let me move. They wouldn’t let me out of the bed. They had pins and needles in me constantly, running antibiotics through my body twenty-four hours a day for three months trying to clear up the infection. I remember it was so painful, God, I ran out of veins, they had collapsed so many times. They’d stick you and they’d keep sticking you. But I always wanted to live. I had no thoughts of dying. Even with the pain, all I could think about was survival. I think it’s given me a lot of strength. I learned to appreciate life even though there have been very difficult times in my life. The time that I spent in the military helped me to survive. There are other things that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. For example, I could deal with the physical threat of death, but the emotional problems were something else. I remember when I was being driven into Letterman General Hospital, we were all wounded Vietnam veterans and we were being brought into the hospital in a bus. There was this huge gate in front of us that had opened up and outside the gate there were hippies picketing out front and yelling, “Killers, killers, killers!” to us. I think at that moment we were all so angry. I remember I was in so much pain, but when I heard that, I could have become a killer because it made us so angry that we saw people here in the United States condemning us for going to Vietnam and for being involved in the war. It didn’t feel good because we were just totally devalued as a decent, human being. That’s when we

idealism, patriotism, and politics

began to question, because we didn’t hear anybody else defending our reason for being over there. No one jumped up and said, “Forget them. You’re here, welcome back,” or anything else. Everybody else was treating us pretty much the same way. At that time, I thought they were Communist instigators that should have been obliterated, too. I believed in what I was doing at the time. It started to change dramatically probably the middle of ’68. By this time, the war was increasing and more people were going out there. Shit, I was in the hospital and I was watching all these guys come in; they were losing their arms, their legs, their eyes, guys burnt. Thousands of soldiers, all handicapped from the war, and we started to listen to the politics of the war and hearing more and more of why they were protesting and I think that’s when my attitude started to change. Before, I was politically naïve. When I went into Vietnam, when I got drafted, I was very patriotic and I was proud to wear the uniform. I was a flag waver, but I knew who I was. I knew I was Chicano. I knew I was from the barrio. I felt a real sense of calling to duty, to the country, and to demonstrate, maybe more than anybody else, how patriotic I really was. I think a lot of Chicanos shared my same feelings and it was like I had to validate myself, that I was in fact American, that I was a citizen. I was detached from the military in ’68, after a year and a half in the hospital. By that time, I was definitely against the war. I was convinced that it was a bad war. I had experienced the “eight to five don’t shoot law” in Vietnam. I saw the Vietnamese army taking breaks when the war was on. I was bitter toward the Vietnamese. The Vietnamization of the war wasn’t working. I knew the South Vietnamese didn’t want to be involved. I think I was more of a victim of the Vietnam War than the reverse. I thought about that a lot and I don’t feel like I’m guilty. I don’t feel ashamed, but I do think that we should do something because, boy, did we tear up that country. We really hurt it and we hurt a lot of people over there. But I don’t feel guilt, not like other Vietnam veterans that I’ve seen. They have to go back to Vietnam to feel good about themselves, to maybe apologize to people for what they did; I don’t feel that. In a lot of ways, I felt I was a victim and I was manipulated. I’m the one that suffered, and those feelings are things that I’ll always feel. What did we accomplish as a country? Not a thing. Nada. It wasted a lot of lives. It wasted a lot of resources that we could have used to educate people and provide health services to millions of people here. The only thing we got out of Vietnam is the lesson that we cannot be inter-

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fering in other people’s political problems. I mean, that’s the only thing we’ve learned; I’ve learned that people have to be able to solve their own problems. I want to continue to remember what I experienced in Vietnam— the pain and the agony of Vietnam, the disillusionment of Vietnam, and the politics of Vietnam—because I certainly don’t want to repeat it. You know the old proverb that if you don’t learn from history, it’s going to repeat itself. We’ve got to keep reminding ourselves that we can’t be doing this to other people, other countries. I would tell all those little Chicanitos that have a bent toward becoming military people to seriously reconsider those impulses and to struggle in getting a good, solid education, to not be fooled by the marketing techniques that the military’s coming up with nowadays. The whole image of the military now is on freedom, power, and strength, and Chicanos buy into it easily, and they’ve got to be careful. Sometimes there are wars that have to be fought. But I don’t see war as a solution, and my attitude toward war is radically different than what it was when I went in. I can remember so many of us young people that were in there really had the John Wayne syndrome, and we really felt that we were going to make a difference, but I think that syndrome is gone. We understand what war’s all about. Death is forever. Tanis u.s. marine corps—sergeant Helicopter Gunner/Supply HMH 463, First Marine Airwing Base of Operations: Marble Mountain, near Da Nang vietnam: may 1967–may 1968 I was at City College and I really wasn’t going anywhere, so I decided to join the service. My family didn’t like it. They said, “There’s a war going on and it’s going to get bigger. Why do you want to go?” But it was too late because I had already joined. My boot camp training was in San Diego. The Marine Corps basically has two training bases, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. That’s where we get all of our basic military training, and then you go to Camp Pendleton for your infantry training. It was real difficult, especially the psychological part. I mean, our first night in boot camp, we had five guys that went over the hill. They just couldn’t deal with the psychological stuff that they pull on you, the constant harassment, the pressure, the yelling at you. I guess a lot of guys were scared, and they didn’t think they could make it because they

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saw it as already being too hard for them. There were times when I said, “Wow, what did I get myself into?” But, you know, I’m a risk taker and everything’s a challenge to me. After I finished my schooling, I got assigned to a helicopter outfit in Santa Ana, California, and we were told that it was a new helicopter that the Marine Corps had just bought. It was a troop carrier, and from that point on, we knew that we were going to go to Vietnam. It was just a matter of time, when all the training was completed and the helicopters were tested, we were going to go. I wasn’t scared; I don’t know, I guess maybe you get caught up in the excitement with the whole group. We were going over there all together and everybody was excited about going. God, I left for Vietnam on Mother’s Day. For me it was exciting, but later I thought about what the family was going through and I thought it was pretty dumb, what I had done. I think I called my mother the day before I left. She said, “Be careful, y que Dios te bendiga” [and may God bless you]. I was with a helicopter outfit, and my training was in accounting and supply, but in the Marine Corps you’re always a grunt first, and so in Vietnam I also put in my tour as a machine gunner on a helicopter. I put in quite a few flights as a gunner. Also, they needed a volunteer for what’s called forward air observer, air ground controller, or radioman, so my lieutenant volunteered. I volunteered to go with him, so I was his radioman for a while doing air-to-ground control between our helicopters and the grunts. We coordinated the troops and the supplies coming in. We had already been assigned, so we went over as a complete outfit. When we left, we packed up everything except the building we were in. We took all of our helicopters, all of our trucks, everything. When we got to Vietnam, I had already been assigned to drive one of the trucks off the ship and take it to our base camp. So I get there, and it was really kind of freaky because you knew you were in a war area, but you didn’t know what to expect. You automatically think when you’re going to a war area they give you your rifle and they give you ammunition, but it was strange because we got there and they told us to pull our trucks off the ship. They put us in a convoy. We had our rifles, but they gave us no ammunition and, of course, none of us are dummies, right? We all had friends who worked in supply, in the ammunition depot, so we had our ammunition in our pockets, just in case we needed it. But it was dumb. Here we are convoying and we didn’t even know the terrain. They said that the Vietcong were everywhere and we said, “Well, why don’t you give us our ammunition?”

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I was in Vietnam thirteen months. My first response was, “What the hell am I doing here?” At first when you got there, you were scared, and after a while, it’s like everything else: you sort of get used to it and life just goes on. You go out, you come back. You go out, you come back, and before you know it, you’re counting, like almost when you get there, “God, how many more days do I have left before I go home?” Everybody knew that a regular tour was thirteen months, so you start counting days, not months, and you got 395 days, and I got 294, and it just went down the line. I never really thought about whether I was going to come back or not. I think, basically, my feeling is hey, if you’re going to die, you’re going to die, no matter where you’re at. You’re going to die at home just as easily as you’re going to die in Vietnam. That was just my attitude. I remember being scared, but I don’t ever remember really worrying, “God, I wonder if I’m going to get killed?” Our base camp was Marble Mountain, outside of Da Nang. You always wonder, like they tell you, you can’t trust anybody because they’re all Vietcong, but yet they had all these civilians, Vietnamese, working on the base. And then they say, “Hey, we have all this security and all these people have been screened.” I remember our first attack. It was a rocket and mortar attack on our base camp. I mean, somebody had to know what was going on in that base because they hit the ammo dumps, the helicopter pads, the infirmary where the clinics were at. I mean, every target was handpicked. It wasn’t like they bombed us by accident and they hit wherever they hit. They hit the troop areas, so you just wonder, “Hell, what’s going on?” I mean, we’re supposedly in a war, and we’ve got people here on the base who are supposed to be the enemy and then they say no, that they’re friends. It was just screwed. I guess that made an impact on me. There were a lot of things that went on that were hard to understand. We were setting up an artillery base, so our helicopters were bringing in the troops and the artillery. We went in with the first wave of marines that went in, the ones that were going to prepare the area. Sergeants, who’d been there forever in the service, right, who knew just from experience where to put the artillery pieces, were having to deal with the young officers who were going by what the book said and were following orders. So there’s one officer that’s placing all these artillery pieces according to orders, and the sergeant’s saying, “We’re in the wrong place, man. We’ve got to put them up on hills, so in case it rains or monsoons, we’re not underwater.” Well, the officers always won, so

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they set up the artillery pieces. It poured, man. I mean, it rained and rained. Then, during the night, the Vietnamese opened up the dike, little dams that they used. So we spent the entire night basically underwater with our rifles and everything. The next day word went out at five o’clock in the morning, because the sun was just barely starting to break. They said to start getting up because we had to get ready for an attack, which meant we couldn’t use our rifles because the damn things were in the mud all night. We were going to have to go hand-to-hand combat, and I remember saying, “Holy shit!” We got the rifles with mud on them and the other sons of bitches got bullets. I said, “What a combination; we’re going to go hand-to-hand combat here. Well, we’re really not going to have a chance.” Thank God they didn’t attack. You saw a lot of relief on a lot of people’s faces. I’ll never forget the first attack on our base camp. I mean, our whole outfit was really green. We woke up when the rockets were already going off. We didn’t even know if there had been any damage, then we found out about all the things had been blown up. We had seven hundred wounded, about two hundred killed. That’s when you realize that they’re the guys you went over there with; there’s your first casualty, the guy that you knew. That was an experience because it was somebody you knew that had just gotten killed. There’s a lot of stuff like that. They add up one right after the other. I remember coming back from R&R on Christmas morning and I flew into Da Nang. I was on this bus going back to my base camp and I remember seeing this jet taking off. I guess he was going on a bombing run or something, and all of a sudden his jet stalled and he crashed right there on the runway, and I said to myself, “Jesus, what a Christmas present for his family.” There were a lot of lonely times, but I think, to me, the loneliest time I spent in Vietnam was Christmas Day. I went on R&R like four or five days before Christmas, but I was back in Vietnam on Christmas Day and I was sitting there at night, in my bunker, by myself, and, of course, I was thinking about everybody back home. I had just gone through that experience in the morning of witnessing that jet crash, and so I had all that going through my head, right, thinking about his family back home, his wife, his kids, or his parents, who had gotten the notice on Christmas morning. Just sitting there in my bunker at night by myself, and God, what a lonely feeling. It’s real eerie, knowing that everyone, wherever there’s peace, is really enjoying peace and quiet and you’re sitting

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there saying, “God, I hope we don’t get hit tonight,” because it would be a hell of a time to kill somebody, on Christmas Day. I spent a lot of time as a machine gunner on a chopper. When we were transporting prisoners, there were acts committed by the South Vietnamese, but yet the Americans were there, right. So I guess it was committed by the Americans, too: questioning prisoners, interrogating them in the helicopters, and the prisoners not wanting to talk. There’s a term called “lighten the load.” You’re flying at two thousand feet and you just throw one of them out the door, and you see if the other one will talk. There were times when we flew all the way back and we got rid of all of our prisoners. None of them ever talked and so . . . I just didn’t see this as human life. We’re there to do a job and we’re doing our job. I mean, they were killing our guys. So I really didn’t think of it as an atrocity. It was part of the war. As part of our job as gunners, we had to go in and pull out Americans killed in action, and some of the bodies that we picked up, I mean, you knew they’d been mutilated. It just wasn’t from a gunshot wound or stepping on a land mine or shrapnel. The bodies had been mutilated and we’d start picking up heads and arms and legs. The way the arm or the head or the leg had been severed is totally different from when it’s cut off than when it’s been blown off. I saw that, too. You get used to it. You just put it in the back of your head or something. I remember the first time we went out to pick up American casualties, being very careful about how we picked them up, and how we put them in the helicopter. And after awhile you go pick them up and it’s like loading up sacks of potatoes. You just take them and throw them in the back of a helicopter to get them out of there. No more human feelings. You just got to do it to get out of there. We were flying back one time from a mission and we had sniper fire. We always know where we’re going or coming from, we have our coordinates. We know if there’s American troop movement in the area, and we were told there was no friendly troop movement in the area. We were taking enemy fire so we opened up and then we get radio calls to stop shooting, they’re American troops on the ground. All I can say is I hope I didn’t hit anyone. There are a lot of times when you’re in the helicopters and you’re just shooting. Even on the ground, a lot of times you don’t know who the hell you’re shooting at, right? God, I hope I didn’t hit any of our own guys, and you just go on with it. How it affected me now, I just think war is wrong. There’s got to be another solution to it. Probably toward the end of my tour, I started questioning my being in Vietnam. Like in the Marine Corps from the first time you go in,

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the little famous saying, “Ask not the reason why, yours is just to do or die.” We got there in ’67 and Marble Mountain was still considered a base camp. There wasn’t much there. Toward the end of my tour in Vietnam, which was May or June of ’68, by then the military discipline, call it etiquette or whatever, was starting to move into our base camp. When we first got there, we used to run around with our shirtsleeves cut off, we didn’t shave for two or three days, and nobody really gave a damn. I remember when it got to the point where we could no longer cut off our sleeves, and if we did, we had to make sure they had a neat stitch on the sleeves. We had to shave every day, me entiendes [understand], if we were in base camp. I remember coming back one day from a run, and I think we had left at 5:00 in the morning, and we must have got back, God, at 6:00 in the evening. We’d been out twelve, thirteen hours. We were all dirty and grimy and stinky and everything else, and I remember we were walking back from our chopper and we were carrying our guns because we still had to clean them and we got written up for being out of uniform because we were dirty. And that’s when you start saying, “What the hell are we doing here? Man, what’s going on?” I mean, here we are in a war zone. How can you go out and do this stuff and then come back and get your butt written up for being out of uniform? I was in a chopper outfit that had twenty-four helicopters. Hey! Pa qué tengas [To have] twenty-three choppers out of twenty-four down and none of them flying, there’s a lot of dissatisfied people over there. I mean, you got the pilots, but, hey, pilots are officers. Your sergeants are supervisors, but it’s the good old guys in the dirt who are fixing them, and if they aren’t fixing them right, they aren’t going to fly. So I mean, we actually went through a period where we had no choppers to fly. There was something wrong with all of them. It got to the point where nobody wanted to go anymore. I think the mechanics didn’t want to fix them. Our helicopters had jet engines on them. It’d take anything to make that helicopter not fly. Talk about wasted money. You could go down there and throw a little tiny washer right in those jet engines, and that chopper isn’t going to fly. Toward the end of the tour, it was, “Hey, right on. I didn’t want to go anyway. I mean what am I going out for? Am I going to go out and take a chance of getting killed, and for what? I mean the big guys don’t give a shit. Why should I?” And that’s what it basically got to. You talk about the Vietnam War and any person will tell you, if you were there between ’67 and ’68 you were there during the Tet offensive. That was probably the height of fighting in Vietnam, and we actually had times where we were issued our ammunition, and we had to account for the

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expended rounds. ¿Me entiendes? You get to the point where you say, “Hell, I’m not going to do nothing.” We pulled patrols and we’d sit down and say, “If they shoot this way, fine; if they shoot that way, we just sit there and when our time is up we go back.” But it all boiled down to all the chickenshit stuff that was happening. All the bullshit stuff, and why take a chance? But that was toward the end of my tour, when to us it looked like they didn’t care, so why should we? I think it was happening to a lot of us because we weren’t the only ones having problems. I mean, if we went out, we did our work, but we weren’t as gung ho toward the end as we were when we got there. There had to have been at least a dozen of us over there that were cousins, all of us over there at the same time. One of my cousins got killed. He was a medic with the navy, but he was assigned to the Marine Corps and he got killed on one of the hills in Vietnam. I had gotten permission to go visit him, and the day I was going to leave I remember I got a letter from him and he said, “Don’t come, it’s really hot over here,” so I didn’t go. Then I remember a few days later picking up the Stars and Stripes, which is a military newspaper. It got to be a thing where you read the Stars and Stripes and you always looked at the casualty list, and man, the shock when I saw José Ángel López and it was hard to believe it. He was family y se murió [he died]. You think, “What if I had gone? Maybe I could have saved him or maybe I’d be dead, too.” But it was hard because it went beyond the fact that he had been killed or because he was such a nice guy, but he was smart and he was good. He joined the navy because he had wanted to be a medic, so he could get his GI Bill and go on to become a doctor. I looked at it from that context and that really made it sad. I can say that I’m a gung ho marine and I did my trip in Vietnam. I did my trip for the service. My sister was over here protesting and that was her bag, my brother-in-law was a CO and that was his bag. It happened, it happened. In the beginning, when we went over there, we thought we were getting shafted because of the protesters and the traitors, but toward the end we were blaming everyone. We were being shafted by everybody, and we’ll put the government on the top of the list, okay? It was the government’s war. We just went to do our job, and I felt like we were let down, and I guess the main culprit of the whole thing has to be the government because they were calling the shots. One time we were flying in some troops and the helicopters were big helicopters. The ones we took over there could carry fifty-five Amer-

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ican soldiers fully armed. It was in 1967. I remember flying in and we started taking ground fire. A lot of it is sniper fire, and the poor guys are just sitting there on the sides of the chopper, not being able to see or shoot anything, and you’re hearing all these bullets. I remember on the front right side of the door was a gabacho, a young kid, I don’t know how long he had been in Vietnam. I remember taking sniper fire and then all I heard him say was, “I got hit.” He was just sitting there and I looked at him and asked, “What happened?” He said, “I’m going home.” I looked down, he had taken a bullet right through the bottom of his foot. That one I don’t forget, because I remember there was almost like a look of happiness on his face. No pain, nada, and all he said was, “Thank God, I’m going home.” Alejandro u.s. army—sergeant e5 Infantry Airborne Second of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, Delta Company vietnam: may 1968–april 1970 I knew there was a conflict going on, but I didn’t know what it was all about. I was going to City College and, since I wasn’t a full-time student, I was drafted. I was drafted in ’68, so me and two of my friends went down to the army branch and volunteered to be drafted without telling them that we had been drafted. They guaranteed you a choice of fields, which I thought would keep me out of the infantry. I volunteered to go into heavy-equipment operation. What they handed me was a rifle at the end. I got nothing except empty promises. There was six or seven that I know of that went. One was killed that I went to school with. They sent us to Fort Lewis, Washington, for basic training and advanced infantry training. I had a situation in Fort Lewis where the drill sergeant for some reason didn’t like me. We had just graduated from basic training and somebody had stolen a bayonet out of a blue locker that they locked them in and he accused me of taking it. He started making remarks like, “You fucking Mexicans, you’re all alike. I know you took it and you’re going to tell me where it is. You’re not going to leave here until you tell me where it is.” I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t have it. He had me down in the prone position, what they call a push-up position, and he just slugged me one and he’s telling me all this time that my mother was a whore and my sisters were out screwing everybody in town and that we were all alike and just on and on, and he finally got tired and I was out. I really never had any racial experiences or anybody

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discriminating like that until that situation. I got the feeling he wanted me to go AWOL so I could really get the shaft. They could send me to jail and I’m thinking, “God, what am I going to do?” I finally ended up going and talking to the lieutenant. We had a new commanding officer and he was just a young lieutenant. I told him what was going on and he told me not to worry about it, he’d take care of the situation. For the next two days that sergeant wouldn’t look at me because I think he got his ass chewed out. They shipped him out because he did it in front of a lot of people. He always bragged about being from the South and he carried this big knife in his pocket and he’d whip it out and put it to your neck real fast. It wasn’t a switchblade, but he had a pocketknife rigged up where he had something in the blade where it would catch on his pants when he pulled it out of his pocket. I think he did it to anybody that he could. He didn’t like the blacks, either. After I completed AIT, I was sent to NCO school. That was something that they had started because they were losing a lot of the noncommissioned officers and they needed to replace them. So they were literally taking people from the advanced training and sending them to school to become squad leaders. I think I was resigned to the fact that I was in the army and that I was going to make the best of it. I had a couple of bad experiences while I was there, but I accepted the fact that I was going to Vietnam. During advanced infantry training, the only movie they let us watch was The Green Berets, so that was a big clue. Then they give you your orders. A lot of the people I went through training with were going to Vietnam. There weren’t too many going any other place. I went over as a sergeant. There were three of us that were there replacing people that had been killed or shot in the company, because the company had walked into a big ambush and they were short a lot of people. I was kind of looked down at because the other two were Anglos and they gave them the first two squads and I got the weapons squad. As it turned out, I ended up in charge of the whole deal. They moved me up two ranks to a platoon sergeant, instead of squad leader, because we had some people that were really incompetent or they refused to do what they were told. It was Delta Company, Second of the Fourteenth, and it was the Twenty-fifth Infantry Unit. I was in Vietnam for about nine months. I remember coming on a big jet and it felt like you were in a roller coaster because, all of a sudden, it dropped. I later found out that the reason it dropped real fast is because it couldn’t make a low approach or it would be shot at. So, all

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of a sudden, you’re down and they land. They had good pilots, so it wasn’t really anything big. I think the thing that got me was that every day at three o’clock, it would start raining, it was like clockwork. It was hot and humid and it rained. They kept us in a holding area for five or six days, and there they issued you your weapon, your jungle fatigues, and you waited to be sent to a company. I think my feelings really changed on November 4th, when a good friend of mine was killed and I kind of went overboard. I remember running up to him and dragging him a little bit and talking to him, and he’s telling me that he’d been shot. I’m going, “Where, where?” And he’d been hit in the shoulder and the medics were saying, “He’s okay, he’s okay, the bullet just went through.” He always carried a towel around his neck, a green towel. He was shot in the back and it went through his shoulder. He draped the towel around his back and there were bone fragments on it. I kept telling them, “But there’s bone fragments.” He ended up dying from complications that set in. A bone fragment pierced his lungs. One collapsed and he got pneumonia and died. I think I went a little crazy after that because he was the only straight person in the whole company that I knew of. He never did anything out of the ordinary, what people would consider bad. He never smoked any dope, he never really drank anything. All he did was write letters home to his girl and tell me that he had something to go home for, so he wasn’t going to mess up and get killed. He was the first one I saw get killed. It made me want to kill everybody. Kill, kill, just get even. I told him, “I’ll get ’em for you.” I got to the point where I was keeping body count on my rifle with little tabs of the smoke grenades. They’re gray tabs that you would stick on there, and I’d peel those off and paste them on my rifle. I finally had to go talk to a priest because I came to the conclusion I was freaking out; I was going overboard. My friend that was killed was Mexican. There was only three of us in the company, and we were real close. He wasn’t in my squad, but he was in the next squad. At the time, I was weapons squad leader, so I could go from squad to squad because I placed the machine guns when we got into a firefight. He was going to take me home and show me his car. All he talked about was his car and his girlfriend and how they were going to get married. He was a low rider from San Bernardino. He had his car when it was illegal to have hydraulics. He told me where he had his switch hidden for the hydraulics, and how he had the steel plate underneath the car so he could make all the sparks and stuff. It sounded like he really

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had everything together. He never got into trouble, always did what he was told. I think I was there four months and he got killed. That day when they shot Mike was my worst experience. I remember we had shelled this area for hours, it seemed like. It was a big headquarters where they had a lot of bunkers. They shelled and then we were just supposed to go in there and mop up, and we didn’t expect to find anything. They were checking the tunnel out when the firefight started and he was about seventy-five yards away in a bamboo grove—they called them hedgerows—and he was just on the other side of one and they were really thick. They were like barriers or fencelike, and I remember getting up and running that way and saying, “Holy shit, I forgot my bag!” I carried a bag full of my magazines for my rifle, so I had to go back and pick those up because, in the excitement, I had left them on the ground where I had been laying, tucked in the tunnel. As I was running toward the hedgerow, I ran into two Vietcong coming out. At that point, I had never actually looked into anybody’s eyes that I was shooting at. It just happened so fast, and I remember killing these two men coming at me, and then the next thing I was doing was looking through their pockets and I think that didn’t upset me until later, until I thought about it. I don’t know, it didn’t seem like it was any big thing to kill somebody. Later on, things like that just started building up and then I finally couldn’t handle it anymore, just didn’t know what I was doing or why I was doing it. When I was new in-country, we captured two Vietcong, and when I got there, you could not recognize any facial features because they had been beat up so bad. They used what we called the D ring, which was a piece of round metal that the military used. I can’t explain, but it was like a D ring that went around your knuckles. You put it around your knuckles and they beat these two men up so bad that one was having trouble breathing because his mouth, his nose, everything was busted up. That was just something that they were doing, taking their anger out on them because of the ambush that killed a bunch of their buddies. I didn’t know what to say or what to do. I just watched and then they loaded them up on helicopters and took them off. There was another situation where they killed a Vietnamese doctor or nurse. We were taken to this one place where we were supposed to make a sweep, and at dawn we started shelling it and they brought in gunships and they raked the area. Then as soon as it was light enough to see, we started to make a sweep and, in front of me, about seventy-

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five yards, there was one Vietcong on the ground, bleeding, being attended by a female doctor or nurse—I couldn’t tell. But she was dressed in the black pajamas just like they wore. I remember her looking up and she had a piece of surgical tubing or something in her mouth and some hemostats in the other hand tying this guy that was shot, trying to stop the bleeding, and she was shot. She looked up and down and they opened fire on her and shot her up. I remember walking up there and looking over to my right, because she was to my right, and they were taking all her clothes off. It was just like a big game or something, and one guy took his cigarette out. She was naked and he stuck the cigarette in her vagina and just left her lying like that. It was real easy to kill Americans by mistake in the heat of battle. I remember the firefight where Mike got killed, and I was confronted by those two Vietcong that I shot. I shot at the next thing that moved, that was on the other side of the hedgerow, and that was our guys. Luckily, I missed. It’s just that you’re nineteen years old and you don’t know what’s going on. I think the thing that really bothered me the most was when we would find caches of American goods that were being sent over to the Vietcong. People were giving them money and supplies and I remember seeing the United States seal. It was the big shield with the Stars and Stripes on it and two hands clasped in a handshake. We would find supplies like that being sent to the Vietcong and that bothered me. I really didn’t question the fact that we were there. Once I was there, I was making the best of it. My loneliest time was the day of my birthday. If it was your birthday, they would leave you in the rear. You didn’t have to go out on a mission, and I forgot it was my birthday. I didn’t remember until we were on the helicopters going out and I’m telling them, “Oh, shit, I screwed up; it’s my birthday!” And they’d go, “Well, it’s too late now.” We were going on a big sweep and I remember that night, during guard, I just kept thinking, “It’s my birthday.” I should have been in the rear and, all of a sudden, my knees just started shaking, and my body. There was nobody else there and if anything happened, I was the only one that was going to get killed, and I remember sleeping with a grenade in my hand. I woke up and I still had it in my hand. I think that was the loneliest, scared, that I’ve ever been. Nobody was there but me sitting in the middle of a rice paddy. There was a guy I went to school with that I know got killed. He had this short complex because he was a little guy. He volunteered for

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everything, so they sent him out on long-range reconnaissance. They found him, dead; they had killed them all. It never really crossed my mind that I wouldn’t come back. I knew I was going to survive. It was just an attitude I went with and it never really left me. But I think I was confused when I came back. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just wanted to do nothing, to not even think of being over there. I was trying to forget and I remember going to apply for work and the first thing they’d ask you was, “Are you a Vietnam veteran?” I thought, “Hey, I’m a Vietnam vet. I thought it was great. I’ve already done my part and I’m back.” But it wasn’t like that. I remember going out to this big plant that made potato chips and applying for a job and as soon as they found out I was a vet they said, “Well, we’re not taking applications right now. We’ll call you.” It’s always “We’ll call you.” They thought we were all drug crazed, crazy. I don’t know, maybe they were right. I came back and I didn’t know what I was doing. I started drinking real heavy. I started partying, but that wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I didn’t want to be screwed up all my life. I came back and I’d go out to the river and everybody would be partying and doing drugs, and I tried, but I couldn’t deal with it. So I kind of slowly worked my way out of it. I don’t know if it’s related to Vietnam or not, but I feel like my hands go to sleep. For the last fifteen years, my hands have been going numb. I wake up at night and I can’t feel them. I feel like I’m burned out. Since I’ve been back, I can’t fall right to sleep. I’ll lay awake for two hours just tossing and turning and not know why I can’t sleep, yet I’m real tired. I think that’s the biggest problem I have. I try not to think about it, but I don’t think I did enough for my buddies when they were down, like for Mike. Once I was out, I went down south to San Bernardino and talked to his parents and spent two or three days there. They were kind of glad to see me because he had written letters, talked about me, and they wanted to know what had happened, really happened, because the military version is always different than what really happens. They write down what they want people to hear or what the media wants to hear. It’s just like anything else. Just like the newspaper now—they print what’s going to sell. I went and said a prayer over his grave, made me feel a lot better, but I don’t think I could ever go back. Now I work for the Fire Department. I’ve been a firefighter for fifteen years. My job was real hard at first because the Fire Department is like a big frat. Everybody is real close because it’s the same kind of sit-

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uation: you have to depend on everybody. I came in under Affirmative Action and I was looked down upon. I wasn’t readily accepted and I had to prove myself day in and day out. Things have really changed now, but at first there were a lot of bad situations and experiences. I felt bad at first, but now it doesn’t really bother me. I’m glad I’m in. I don’t think I’d ever serve again. I think I’d rather have gone to Canada or Mexico. I didn’t need that experience. I still don’t need it. It’s something that’s happened and I’ve blocked out. I’d rather not even have had it happen. The government is so screwed up that they abuse you and then they throw you away. I’m not going to let them abuse my child. If my sons were drafted, I’d just pack up and leave. I was under the misconception that in a war you were fighting to defend something for yourself, for your kids, and I don’t know what we were doing out there. The people didn’t want us over there. The civilians were trying to kill us. Little kids were trying to kill us. Then they wouldn’t let us fight. This is a free-fire zone, this is a no-shooting zone, you could go here, you couldn’t go there, you could bomb here, you couldn’t bomb there. It was a no-win situation. I came back thinking I better get as much out of life as I could because I remember I was real shy, real timid. I was afraid to do this, afraid to do that. I’m not afraid anymore. I want to do things before I die. I want to see things before I die. But I think that was one of the good experiences. It made me wake up and do things, not just sit back and be a spectator. I think there’s certain things, and certain people, I want to remember. I made a lot of good friends. Those memories seem to override everything else. You had to depend on people and you made friends you knew you could depend on. There’s other things I want to forget, but if we forget, then they can just happen again. We’d just sit back and let them do that to us again. There’s a lot of people that became rich from the Vietnam War, a lot of big corporations. A lot of people made money off the lives of all the kids they killed. Charley u.s. army—sergeant e5 Infantry/Squad Leader First of the Forty-sixth, 196 Light Infantry Brigade Americal Division Base of Operations: Chu Lai vietnam: january 1970 –july 1970 I was eighteen when I enlisted in the army in June 1968. I had just graduated from high school and I was spraying insecticides on the cotton us-

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ing tractors. I enlisted for several reasons. One, adventurism: go to the army and get away from the town that I was at. It didn’t seem like I’d go anywhere else in my situation. Two, tradition in the family: my uncles and my dad had either gone to World War II or Korea, so I felt that it was my turn to go. And three, patriotism was very important, also. There was a war, so I should go. I wanted to go to college, but I couldn’t see myself going to school being a man already. My parents were still working out in the fields, so I had to pull my own weight. One of my friends and I went to enlist, but they wouldn’t take him because he had a jail record or something, but then later they drafted him anyway. It was just like something natural in the community; a lot of people were veterans. For the lower economic classes, it was more difficult to get out of the draft, unless you knew how. One guy went to a curandera before he went to his draft physical and he didn’t pass. We weren’t really very political because, during that time, especially in those small towns, they didn’t teach us anything about Vietnam. It was just the war was there, it was on TV, and they make more escándalo [fuss] about little incidents now than they did about Vietnam in many ways. When I got there, I ended up being a point man and then I was a squad leader. I got there in January, right after New Year’s, and I got wounded on July 16th, so I was there seven months. We had gotten into some hassles before, and the North Vietnamese would fight very fiercely. From my own personal experience, and a lot of the guys that I’ve talked to, when some people make the statement, “The army was held back,” shit, they must have not been where I was at. It wasn’t that we were held back; it was hold them back! Get these suckers off our cases! Some of the guys would tell me, “Hey, you’re going to get killed,” because I would walk point all the time and I’d take a lot of chances on certain things. It can be interpreted differently, but it’s not fatalistic. It’s the idea of, if you’re there, you might as well do it because, if not, they’re going to kick your ass. If you walk point you have more control of what’s going on because you’re the one who goes in front to see. If you have someone who doesn’t want to walk point, or doesn’t know how to do it right, that can lead to a disaster. I think there was a propensity for the Raza to do that, proving yourself. You have pride in what you do and you don’t back down, the machismo. I think there was a propensity for Chicanos and Latinos to walk point or carry the M-60 machine gun and the radio as well sometimes. But that doesn’t mean everyone did. I don’t think anyone was better than anyone else in terms of fighting.

idealism, patriotism, and politics

For me, at least, growing up in Corcoran, it was, like, a little Texas town, cotton and the race relations there and everything. We were cotton pickers. We lived in camps. To me, Vietnam was the most freedom I ever had. I was a squad leader telling white people what to do, and I had never done that. I came close to getting killed. I was taking unnecessary chances, but, then, being adventurous, you just play with fate or death, whatever you want to call it, because there were some other guys that got killed, and they weren’t walking point. They always wanted to be in the back, and they got killed or they got their legs blown off. You don’t think about dying until the actual event occurs, say, you’re getting mortared or you get into a heavy firefight. At that time, you get very afraid, but the rest of the time, it’s always there, but you don’t think about it. Once in awhile, when we’re on our hill, rest area, we talk about, “What do you want to lose, man? If you had a choice, what part of your body would you want to lose?” It’s kind of like bad luck, but still, we talked about it a couple of times. Well, first of all, you don’t want to lose your genitals. The family jewels and all that, no. And then you don’t want to lose your arm, that’s the next thing you don’t want to lose, and then you don’t want to lose a leg, but you’d rather lose both legs than an arm. It was a reality that could happen because it happened to other people there, but we didn’t talk about it too often. Ironically, enough, I said that if I lost any part of my body, I would prefer to lose an eye and that’s what happened. For most Chicanos and blacks and minorities as well, and maybe for poor whites, too, the majority of troops on the ground were from the lower socioeconomic classes. At that time, I wasn’t as heavy as I am now and I have physical characteristics of the Vietnamese. The soldiers themselves would tell me, “Hey, fat rat”—they called me “fat rat”—“don’t turn your back. You look like a gook.” Especially from the back, I only weighed about 125 pounds, the same size as those guys, and so that made me think. Being from farmworkers, it was very common that you see those people working out there once in a while. We worked in freefire zones, so nothing is supposed to be out there, but a few occasions I’d see some civilians. I kind of identified with them, or at least could say, “Hey, these people are farmworkers.” It depends on the individual, too, but to me, I never hated those people. I was never racist. I just wanted to kill the soldiers. That was always my intentions, just to kill the soldiers, and you can break really easily, but I never did. One time, this one guy was going to kill a little old lady for nothing. We were out in the free-fire zone, he pulled a .45

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out and was going to shoot her, and I didn’t say anything because there was three of us and there’s a lot of peer pressure. If they’re going to do something like that, you almost have to go along with it or else you’re going to be ostracized or they might shoot you, too. But he was going to shoot her and, in my own mind, I didn’t see any reason why he should shoot her. She looked like one of those little chenchas in the barrio. So, I said in my own mind, “If he shoots her, I’m going to shoot him,” but he didn’t shoot her. I was there in ’70 and we were using more guerrilla tactics in terms of small units. Sometimes there’d only be five or six of us and we’d spread out the patrols, where before there were bigger units out there. We had gotten into hassles too many times and I just decided I wanted to live and I was taking too many chances. Then there were the political questions. A couple of times we even talked about that. “Why are we fighting here?” So I started thinking all that kind of stuff and I said, “You know what? I’m not going to walk point anymore, I’m just not going to do it,” and about two days before I got wounded I decided that. We went back up a hill where they said that a company had gotten ambushed and so they sent us out there. A lieutenant had gotten shot before and we had a new lieutenant who had dropped out of a seminary or something like that. I had nothing against him, but that’s not the best mentality to have out there, a priest. Maybe as chaplain, but not as a platoon leader, where you have to be aggressive on certain things. Anyway, they called us and they said your platoon is going to be sent out and you’re going to have to go out behind the hill. They gave us very little information. So, as soon as they said we’re going out there, I said, “Well, today’s my day.” I had a premonition. I had come very close so many times. I thought, “They’re going to start firing. I’m going to get it, I just don’t know how bad,” and then I decided to walk point. I thought it was better because I had more experience than anyone else and still trying to be a hero. That’s another thing—you like medals. I was always going to the wedding dances, and you got medals and everything. So we went up there and we ran up into this trail we held. I was apprehensive because I had talked to those guys in the hospital. Some of them had survived that ambush, but they kicked the shit out of them. So I was there watching that trail while the lieutenant called in and I saw these Vietnamese coming up. I guess I got greedy and I said, “Well, should I kill these guys? Should I shoot them first or should I tell these guys to help me out and we’ll all shoot them?” I said, “No, I’m going to

idealism, patriotism, and politics

kill them so I can get a confirm that I killed.” Well, they kept on coming up, so I shot them. I don’t know how many I hit because it was kind of getting dark. They fired some shots back, but we didn’t know how many people were there or anything. Then they passed me up an M70 grenade launcher—they’re like the ones that shoot those canisters—and as I shot, I shot down, and it went so quick that the shot hit me right there. That’s where I had the scar. And then as soon as I felt it I said, “Oh, fuck,” it hurt like hell. I fell down and everything was just black. I didn’t feel my body. Then I thought real quickly of the guys that had gotten shot and how very few survived. Those AK47s are powerful weapons and I said, “I got shot in the head, oh shit, that’s it, I should be dead,” but I wasn’t. That’s what my mind was saying, “You should be dead.” I don’t know if I was ready to unplug myself. Then I started asking God to help me. We had a saying there—I’m sure it came from somewhere in the folklore—“God help me through this one, and the next one I’ll do it on my own.” I was asking God to let me live and then I promised him that I would pick prunes and cotton free for the rest of my life and I saw myself picking cotton, I’m not lying to you, I saw myself picking cotton in Corcoran. Then I started thinking about Mom and enchiladas, not apple pie, enchiladas and all that stuff at home and I came back and the medic was constantly talking to me. I even forgot his name, he was an Irish guy. I trusted him. He was a good guy. So I came back and that’s when the pain came back, just like if someone had gotten, I would imagine, a hot ice pick and just went like this to your eye. That would knock anybody down and I still had the shrap in there. That shrap would go in there as this eye would move, and they had to patch this one so I was blind that night. Then from the pain, being afraid, of course, because I’m blind from one and then I’m hurting. I had to stay out there all night. They couldn’t get me out, since it was already getting dark and we were on high mountains. You don’t get morphine for stomach wounds or for head wounds. When I went to the hospital, they took my eye out. This is a plastic one. I was out there all night and I started to throw up from the pain. You know how it is when you throw up, so when I went like that, the shrapnel would go in harder. Then I started getting the dry heaves after about an hour, and that even got worse. They wouldn’t take out the shrapnel, ¿ves [see]? They’re not doctors. It’s not even that, the damage is done. Just like one of the guys from Corcoran told me, “Yeah, everybody had their Waterloo over there.” He used it to mean that you all had to cry over something out there, sooner or later.

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I was in pain and I was afraid those guys were going to overrun us and I couldn’t defend myself. I was blind. That scared the hell out of me, but I slept about two hours, I would imagine, and I got up like nothing. The eye was totally dead. The next day they brought out a jungle penetrator to get me out. We walked about a mile and got to a place where it was easier, so they started lifting me up. They put a jacket on you with a cable on it, and then when they were lifting me up, the machine they have broke when I was halfway up there: “Oh, goddamn it, I’m never going to get out of here!” They finally pulled me up by hand. Then they took me to Chu Lai, to the hospital. The doctor looked at it a couple of minutes and told me, “You’re going to lose your eye. You’ve lost the vision of your eye.” I don’t know if that’s true. I think those guys after awhile become pretty insensitive to all that. They said, “We can leave it in, but you’re not going to see out of it anymore and there may be a problem where it will affect your good eye.” So I said, “Well, take it out. What do I need it for anymore? I don’t want my other one to get messed up.” They matched the color and everything. So then they put me out. I had never felt so good in my life when they put me out. No more pain and I knew I had made it out alive. Well, I woke up after a few hours. They made me get up and I felt bad. But then, you look at everybody else and everybody is messed up. There’s guys dying in there and blown up and different stuff. That was when they just first brought them in, so I felt very lucky, when you look at those guys. I stayed there for about two days and then they sent me to another hospital in Cam Ranh. It was a bigger base to go to Japan. In Cam Ranh they put me next to some Vietnamese. Like I told you, I never hated those people and I still don’t. They were the enemy, so I’d kill them if I had the chance, and they’d kill you, too. That’s what I was afraid of when I had gotten wounded—that I was going to get caught. Those guys don’t mess with you. They’ll cut your penis off and put it in your mouth. You’re going to die a bad death. In ’67, in the Iron Triangle, three companies got wiped out in ten minutes. The battalion commander took the same trail three times in a row. So he made an error and those guys were dug in. They had an L-shaped ambush, same thing as Custer when he lost all his men. Those things were happening all the time. Platoons were getting wiped out and it wasn’t reported. It’s not put in that perspective. They kicked our asses and I don’t know where these people come out that we were held back—shit.

idealism, patriotism, and politics

The North Vietnamese would come out of their holes and start fighting with the jets one on one. These guys were there to die. They could have taken off, but they didn’t; they just wanted to kill and do as much damage as they could. I started wondering, “Why are these guys doing that?” Of course, one of the reasons we use is, “Well, they’re all doped up, right?” Hey, they didn’t have more than we did. We had a whole bunch of it in our packs. I have to laugh because once I told a friend and he said, “Man, they kept coming and coming and we kept shooting them and they kept coming and we said, ‘Man, don’t these guys ever die?’” When I got home in August 1970, I started seeing those demonstrators. The Chicano moratorium and that type of activity. I said, all right, it solidified certain things for us. No wonder, this is what was messed up. Even though I never participated, I started thinking, “Yes, that’s right what these guys are saying.” I was in the hospital and I really didn’t want to deal with it. I had just gotten out. I mean, I had malaria when I got off the plane, but politically I was thinking about it. I was thinking about maybe going to jail or refusing to fight. I said, “No, I already made it this far; there’s no need to go to jail and get into a big bunch of hassles, and all that shit that’ll be bad on your family.” I just wanted out. Vietnam was like being sentenced in jail: you just want to get out of prison. So I got home and I started to say, “Well, shit, I just came back from a war the Raza’s fighting,” because my identity was really solidified then to who I was politically and socially. To risk my life for some ideals and for the country, that changed, but I was still willing to risk my life for certain ideals that I had, like, for example, the Chicano moratorium. In Vietnam, I didn’t have a political cause. Those guys were actually supporting a dictatorship. They weren’t even fighting for democracy. I felt that I was used. They had lied to me and I was mad at myself for believing it and for letting myself be used like a pendejo. Leonel u.s. army—first lieutenant Company Commander Charlie Company, Second Battalion, 505 Infantry Base of Operations: Phu Bai /Bien Hoa/Cambodia vietnam: 1968 When I went in the service, I was a political neophyte. Just a guy, twenty-one years old, making a little bit of money, new car, all that kind of stuff. I went with it as a duty, honor, country kind of deal and I felt

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like I had my obligation to do. I guess I was feeling like I was pretty bad, so I wanted to go see how bad I really was. I got inducted in Fresno and got sent to Fort Polk, Louisiana. After that I went to jump school to become airborne-qualified parachutist and then to officer’s candidate school at Fort Benning. After graduating from OCS, I got assigned to the Eighty-second Airborne Division, which was in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We were an alert unit, and we were put on alert on a Friday, which means we had to have everything ready to go, and on Monday we all boarded planes. Lyndon Johnson came to the airfield and saw us off. They had already started to go in ’65, but I didn’t go until ’68. We went with the whole brigade at one time, so they probably took at least ten thousand guys all in one bunch. Put them all in planes and we stopped at Fort Lewis, Washington, and Alaska, Japan, Okinawa, and then to Vietnam. Everybody was pretty much expecting to go to Vietnam. By the time you finish with infantry training, airborne training, and you get through with OCS, I mean, that’s what it’s all about—your whole deal is to go. They do a pretty good job of brainwashing you. It’s part of your job, so you’re going to go and do a job. I was a platoon leader and then company commander for Charlie Five. When you finally get there, the humidity is every bit as bad as people say it is and everybody is looking to get out of somebody’s way or get to where you got to go. We were up somewhere in Phu Bai. I had just gone up with the resupply ship to deliver food and clothing and water. We got everything delivered out to choppers and started to head back for the base and we got hit with mortar shells and small-arms fire. The company commander got hit, so they called me back as I was going to the base area. They told me over the phone and I could see that they were getting hit because I was there when everything was happening. A CO was hit, so we went back in to medevac him and a couple of others. I had to stay on the ground as a company commander and, hell, I had no more expected to take over the company than the man in the moon. I was trying to figure out what the hell to do next and I had 120 guys that I had to move off the top of this hill because we were just taking so much flak up there that I had to redeploy them. I mean, you prepare for it. In OCS they give you all the textbooks and they show you what to do and how to do it. I think I pretty much understood all of that, but there’s nothing like getting down to the real deal. You don’t have a lot of time to make the adjustment. You have to make it now; otherwise, you’re going to go one way and the company’s going to go another way. So that’s how I got broken into that particular situation.

idealism, patriotism, and politics

In Vietnam, my worst experience was being lost. Always found it, but being lost in the middle of a lot of activity isn’t the smartest thing in the world. We were out of water, we were out of ammunition, we were out of food. We got out of that okay, but that was not a good experience. We came very close on a number of different occasions to having artillery fire down on us directly, either American fire or South Vietnamese fire on our position, only because a coordinate had not been properly communicated. I think that was a major problem and cost a lot of people their lives. I was lucky on one particular occasion. We were working in the Asha Valley and we had called in an air strike. We set up on the wrong hill and, as it turned out, the air strike never came, but planes that had gone in to an air strike to Hanoi were on their way back and were off-loading some of the ordnance so that they wouldn’t take it back to the carriers. They dropped it on the hill that we were supposed to be on. So, by being lost, we avoided our friendly bombs being dropped on us. They didn’t know where we were. We didn’t know where we were until after that shit was over and done with, and then we could see because we were working under triple canopy—you can’t see anything. It’s just strictly you take a certain pace for a certain length of time and you got a point you can shoot at, as you try to figure out where you’re at. It’s a bitch. I mean, you just have to hang in. You don’t stay lost forever. It’s scary, but it’s part of life. Anyone who tells you they’ve never been lost in Vietnam is a liar, particularly if they were in a command position, because you get lost. I had a crazy experience in Vietnam. We had been on an operation for about a week, and in the jungle your clothes just start to rot off you, your shoes, your socks, your pants, your shirt, I mean, everything just literally falls apart. Anyway, we had the choppers come in and bring us clothes and C rations. We’d called in an air strike and one of the bombs had fallen into a creek and it blew up just a great big hole, probably about a hundred feet in diameter and probably twenty feet deep, so it created a natural pool. So I set up security all around the thing and a squad at a time went swimming and got cleaned up and put on clean clothes. We had a hot meal and, shit, it was the best thing in town. One of my loneliest moments in Vietnam, I recall vividly that we had to go out on patrol on Christmas and New Year’s of 1968. We had just been going like hell and been in a number of different operations and everybody was really beat. So I left everybody else in the reconnaissance team alone. I took the squad leaders and myself and we went and we pulled the ambush for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. There’s nobody else around, just us. But it was a choice we made to give the troops

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some time off because they had been in all this shit for so long. What we had, for the most part, were poor people, and I think there was a strange camaraderie because we’re all in the same kind of position with this damn thing. It was interesting in that it brought out the best of everybody to keep going and striving and doing the best job that they could. It took a little while to understand who I was when I returned. You have to understand that the training that we went through was the best training on the planet Earth. I mean, you couldn’t get any better training than we had, both in terms of motivating people, people going through all that bullshit, dealing with death, and all those things. You simply could not get that by going to Harvard. You couldn’t get it by going anywhere except Vietnam. The test of that is whether or not you were able to accomplish those things in one piece, not you, but the unit, and I think it instilled a sense of diligence and a sense of pride. I got back in ’69. I was with a group of guys and we landed at Travis Air Force Base. I’ve heard this story from other people, so it’s an old story, but it’s applicable. The first thing I did is I got off the plane and I just kissed the ground because I was just so happy to be home. So about six of us got in a cab and we went to San Francisco airport. One of the guys was on crutches because he got hit in the leg. We get to the airport and people look at us, strange looks, I mean, to the point where somebody spit on the guy that was on crutches. That was sort of the start of the notion that something was terribly wrong here. I think the biggest crime is not so much how the U.S. government treated the vets. I think the biggest crime is how the U.S. government misled the American people. The whole thing that triggered our involvement there was an incident that happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1965, which caused the Congress to pass a resolution called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. We created the whole goddamn thing, and it was not until years later that those facts really came out. The vets were merely pawns in the whole deal, but the government lied to the American people. I’m a disabled vet. I had an internal problem that I still have today that was caused in Vietnam. I’m sure I have some psychological problems, like most of the vets that were in the same situation that I was in. Very few of the people that went to Vietnam actually saw combat, probably less than 20 percent, but it’s those 20 percent that I’m saying it takes a hell of an adjustment to go from a combat situation into a peacetime situation. My feelings on Vietnam changed in hindsight, but they did not change while I was there. I don’t think I could have accommodated a

idealism, patriotism, and politics

change personally. I have to look at it on two levels. On the one level is the job that I was sent there to do and doing the job to the best of my ability because that was what I believed my country required of me. On the other side of it, looking at it from a political perspective, it was all bullshit and we should have never been there. But in trying to combine the two, I have no control over being there and I could either choose to deal with that and live or not deal with it and die. So I guess I erred on the side of getting out whole, or at least physically whole, and it’s taken a long time to put that into perspective because it’s not something that’s very easy. I mean, it’s not in any history books that are in the public schools. It’s not something that people talk about. It took a long time for the Congress to admit that there were problems and to have these vet centers. It took a long time for special employment and training programs, so it was not an easy kind of transition to make. What happened in Vietnam, and what’s happened consistently with my life since then, is the fact that if I set out to do something, as long as I feel it’s the right thing and it’s something that can benefit the community, my attitude is to struggle and fight as far and as long as I can because I feel that people can’t kill me. I mean, I’ve been through that and if I can survive that, then the rest of it I can survive as well. My change in thinking happened at the campus. The United Farm Workers were trying to get a lettuce boycott organized on the campus, so I used to run around with a guy who was trying to put it all together. I’d get up at two o’clock in the morning and I’d study till 6:00. Then I’d shower and shave. My classes started at 7:00 and I’d be at school from 7:00 to about 11:00 every morning, then I’d go to work. So I didn’t spend a lot of time on campus, but in between time, I ran into guys who were trying to organize this lettuce boycott. So I said, you know, “What the hell are you guys talking about? What is this?” I got involved by helping to organize the lettuce boycott on campus. Pretty soon out of that little deal came, I guess, my political birth. It must be understood that the people that went to Vietnam in the late 1960s were different from the guys that went in the middle ’60s, and the guys that went in the early ’70s were even different from those two groups. So if you look at this thing over time, the politics of the situation became more known so that the people that were being asked to serve there later in time, ’65, ’70, ’71, and we finally got out of there in ’75, well, it was different. It was a hell of an educational process and a politicizing process we went through so that the troops that were still there in 1975 were of a whole different mind-set, in my opinion, than the

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troops that were there in the early stages. I think that’s when you see the whole phenomenon of drugs, of fragging, of friendly fire and all that stuff, at the tail end of this thing, simply because people were questioning whether or not there was legitimacy to their country asking them to serve in a bullshit situation. I don’t think there’s any question but that people that went later on were a hell of a lot more politically sophisticated then the initial guys that went, but they all paid the price. We don’t have enough resources to be the police of the world. I think if we’re going to go, then, by God, let’s all go together or nobody go. It’s just like we want to go down and fool around with Central and South America, and that’s nonsense. If we’re going to go there, let’s send the senators, the congressmen, the president, everybody. Let’s all get together, make it a national commitment, just like they did in World War II. But this thing of being selected, and the mechanisms for selecting the people that go, to put it all on the backs of the uneducated and of the poor, that should not be allowed to go on. So I would say that if everybody goes, I certainly would go, but if it’s going to be selective and if it’s going to fall to the poor people and to the uneducated to be used again as cannon fodder, I say, “Bullshit, that’s nonsense.” Mexicans are some of the greatest soldiers that lived; they are indeed warriors. They get so caught up in the machismo of that bullshit that they can’t see the political ramifications of it. If you leave it to young people to decide, well, shit, they’re going to go fight, man, because it’s about fighting to see who’s the baddest. They don’t know how they’re being driven there and who really benefits. They’re not going to benefit. They all get used up. For me, I think that war is never the answer. It is an integral part of our lives and I think for the near term it’s going to continue to be that way. The only way that’s going to change is if people take it over and change it. I think there’s hope, but not a lot of hope that it’s going to happen in my lifetime. I do feel that I’ve been able to deal with things better as I’ve learned to be a little bit more introspective about what happened and acknowledge it for what it is. That took a little bit on my part to open up and to accept some of the things that had occurred. I’ve pretty much dealt with it. I mean, I’ve chosen to lead my life a certain way. I think that, in time, all of the vets should be able to put it behind them, but some vets don’t have other things to get on with their lives about and so that’s one thing they can hold onto. It’s like, sometimes I go back to a place where guys hang out that I went to high school with. Well, shit, they’re still talking about football games in high school, which is cool, but that ain’t what I

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want to do. I want to talk about what I’m doing today. I can’t have the same conversation. I think for some vets, the whole Vietnam experience is like that and so they relate to it, but we all need to get on with our lives. I really think that the United States, in the last couple of years, different communities, have begun to acknowledge the fact that there were problems and have made some real significant inroads. That’s part of what they call the whole healing process. It’s been very productive. I think that it is important to understand that there’s another phenomenon at play here with the Vietnam vets and it’s a problem that needs to be dealt with. I think that if you look at the statistics, in terms of Vietnam vets, if you look at the educational rate, the unemployment rate, if you take a look at their earning power, at the number of people who are alcoholic or drug abusers, if you take a look at divorce rates, suicide rates, incarceration rates, these things are all symptoms of a much larger problem. That problem has to do with the way these people, who comprised these statistics, were treated by this country when they returned. Until we can give them the opportunity for their own personhood or sense of being and belonging, I think those statistics are going to continue to grow. So I think somewhere, somehow, something must be done. I think we’ve started that, through the recognition of the fact that we have those problems. We have those parades, you know all those things are happening, but it does not solve the problem. I think it just barely scratches the surface. I think Vietnam has to be looked at historically, and it has to start down at the kindergarten level on up through to the colleges, so that we can see how the hell we got into the mess that we got into. What happened to us during that time and how the government dealt with the whole damn thing. Until those things are done, we’re going to continue to have these kinds of problems. Now, having said that, I do think it’s time to get off the dime and to get on with our lives as Vietnam vets and to be contributors to the community, and a lot of vets are doing that. Tony u.s. army—specialist e4 Microwave Radio Equipment Operator 442nd Signal Battalion, 114th Signal Detachment Base of Operations: Quinon vietnam: april 1968–April 1969 When I entered the army in May 1967, I knew about Vietnam. There’s no way that you wouldn’t know about it. When I graduated from high school in 1965, Vietnam was in the news and it was growing. We knew

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that there was a big chance that many of us were going to go to the army either by draft or by joining. I didn’t have a whole lot going for me. All the guys I hung around with, in my parents’ eyes and everybody else’s eyes, were really on dead-end streets. After I graduated from high school, I applied for admission to City College with the intention of beating the draft. My other choice was to go to Canada, and I wasn’t going to do that. In those days, you would get a different classification if you were in college, so for a year, I had a special classification that prevented me from getting drafted, but in that one year I became disqualified. I wasn’t really ready for college. In high school, they made me a good mechanic, not a good college student, so after that year, I worked. I did everything from fieldwork to driving a forklift, and during the end of my nineteenth year, I got a draft notice. I gave it some serious thought and I decided that if I allowed them to draft me, they were probably going to make me an infantryman, send me to Vietnam, and put me in the front line. I decided to talk to a recruiter, so I went and did some testing and they presented all kinds of opportunities to me, made it sound glorifying and really interesting. They showed me a map of the United States and they said, “Where would you like to go for your training?” And I pointed at a place. I never thought I’d ever be back East, so I pointed at a place about sixty miles south of New York City. He said, “All right, just sign here.” So I signed my life away for three years, thinking that I wouldn’t go to Vietnam. I wear glasses, and the recruiter said they don’t send anybody to Vietnam who wears glasses. “They want somebody who can see good so they can shoot well. Besides the MOS, the kind of training you’re choosing, they don’t have that kind of equipment in Vietnam; it’s too sophisticated.” So I had no hesitation in signing on the dotted line, thinking that I would probably go to Germany or something like that, but it was all a lie. Once you sign up and you’re in, excuse the term, but your ass is theirs. You belong to Uncle Sam. They sent me to Fort Polk, Louisiana, in the summertime, which has humidity and terrain and an environment similar to Vietnam. They sent me to a section in Fort Polk called Tiger Island. When I got there, I got a feeling that everything the recruiter was telling me was a bunch of bullshit because everything I learned in boot camp was above and beyond basic survival training. It was actual jungle training and they were preparing me for something the recruiter promised me I wouldn’t have to deal with. I was the oldest and right behind me, I have three brothers, one after another. My mother was afraid for me, but she told me she was

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proud and that made me feel proud, made me feel more confident. I also knew that if I went to Vietnam, my brothers didn’t have to go, so that was another reason why I didn’t protest or try to challenge what the recruiter had told me and the promises he had made. In fact, I was kind of glad I was going to Vietnam because, at least while I was there, my brothers wouldn’t have to go. I got orders cut to go to New Jersey for advanced training. Except for basic, I had never before left California and here I was flying on airplanes all over the place. It made me feel real special. When I was in New Jersey, it was really a difficult advanced training program because I wasn’t very strong in math and here I was having to learn how to calculate electronics circuitry and different stuff. And to top it off, I went to school from eleven o’clock at night to seven in the morning. They were training people twenty-four hours a day. The first few weeks, it’s pretty hard adjusting to that kind of schedule, but then we got used to it because of threats they made, like, if you fall asleep too often in here and you don’t pass each exam, your chances of getting into the infantry are real high. So we used to help each other out and try to stay awake. If your neighbor was sleeping, somebody would stick you in the ribs with their elbow and they even allowed you to go up in the back of the room and stand up if you were falling asleep. As long as you didn’t go to sleep, and as long as you passed the tests, you weren’t going to go infantry. You’re going to stay and try to learn how to operate this electronic communication equipment. After I went through my training, they started cutting orders, and half of that special training group went to Vietnam, the other half went to Thailand, and I was lucky: I went to Thailand. So I was happy and I wrote back and told my mother I was not going to Vietnam. Little did I know that was to get me in Southeast Asia. I went to Thailand and had a good time there for about three and a half months. Then they said a group of you are going to Vietnam and I was on a plane with that group landing in Ton Son Nhut Air Base. When I first got to Vietnam, as we were landing, the base was being bombed, so that was my welcoming. We were getting mortar rounds at the air base, and as soon as they opened the doors, we ran to bunkers and waited until the fire stopped. When you’re part of the military, they put you where they want. They tell you where you’re going and there’s no ifs, ands, or buts. You have no say-so even if they made kind of a promise to you. I say kind of, because they don’t keep promises; I mean, you’re part of their equipment. That extra training that I went to was on transistorized micro-

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radio equipment and the recruiter told me, and it was a fact, that most of the microwave radio equipment is fixed-site communication, which means it’s great big equipment, great big antennas, and wherever you set that up, it has to be permanent. They didn’t tell me that they already had developed some sophisticated covert kind of equipment that they’re so transistorized and mobile that you can put it in the back of a four-wheeldrive truck. So when I went to Vietnam, we were a special fourteen-man detachment assigned to provide a relay communication site for the Korean unit. I was assigned to a Korean infantry company and I maintained a relay site on the top of a mountain in the middle of the jungle, and we protected the site and patrolled the area with the Koreans. I learned more Korean language and customs than I did Vietnamese. There were many different countries involved in Vietnam—Korea, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. They had an army there and everybody, except the United States, was there to fight a war. We were there to abide by the Geneva Convention rules, and being assigned to a Korean unit made me look at Vietnam as a war and not a conflict with all the rules and regulations that the other military units had to abide by. The Koreans were there to fight a war. They took no prisoners and, of course, the VC and North Vietnamese retaliated a lot more with their forces against the Koreans than they did against the United States. They played the same rules. The Koreans would go into a village and anything that moved, they’d just wipe it out. One time, the enemy retaliated. They were able to surround a squad, I guess it was about fifteen Koreans, and they killed them and mutilated their bodies and stacked them up in the middle of the town. They put a sign on it, and when the Koreans went out looking for their patrol that didn’t return, they found them cut up in pieces. I knew some of the guys. We got to know all of them real well. We’d pull guard duty together and we’d eat together. That was probably an atrocity on their part, but the Koreans did a lot of atrocities, too. I heard one time that the Koreans captured a couple of the enemy and were interrogating them. They took them up on a helicopter and threatened them if they didn’t give them the information they were asking for that they would throw them out. They got the information and threw them out anyway. You know, nothing is excusable, but war is war and they were there to fight a war, and I would guess that American soldiers did the same. My feelings about the war and all that were very conservative. I thought we were there for a purpose. My mother used to send me the

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newspaper, and we used to get some television broadcasts in the jungle, believe it or not, and of course, we had radio stations. We’d always hear what’s happening back home, but we always got these reports about campus unrest, about students protesting, and at the same time, I’m seeing my buddies get killed. There was one time that really tore me up, probably one of the toughest experiences. We were doing a relay site and the other end of the relay sight got run over by the enemy, killed everybody there. We heard it all happening on the telephone and we couldn’t do nothing. It was about that same time that my newspapers started coming in and I started reading about everything that was going on back home, demonstrations and all. My feeling was that maybe they ought to send a bunch of us vets back there to teach those college students a lesson. I mean, I didn’t know. I really believed in what we were doing. They did a real good job of brainwashing us and of having us all believe that we were there for our patriotic duty to defend democracy and help these poor South Vietnamese from being forced to turn Communist. So that was my attitude all through the time I was in Vietnam. It wasn’t until I got out and I came back that I realized how I was used. We took a lot of fire and we used to think about how much easier it might be if you were in infantry, going out there with a gun and having an opportunity to at least defend yourself. If somebody is shooting at you, you can shoot back, but we were sitting ducks up there. We’re on top of a mountain; the whole top of the mountain is bald. They just blow the top off and make it level so that a helicopter can land there and also set up the radio antennas, and we were target practice for any of the enemy who were going through the jungle. They could easily just shoot somebody walking to the bathroom. You’ll never know where it came from, so we’d be shot at quite a bit. You can hear the bullet flying over you and it’s scary. The other thing is, we had bunkers, and a couple of instances, I happened to choose the right bunker to go into and some other guys chose the wrong bunker to go into. I mean bunkers are good for bullets, but not rockets; they just blow them all up. That was the closest I’ve ever been to death. I mean, I experienced death when I was growing up, not tragic death, mostly death by age and car accidents, and I was shot at a few times before I went into the army, too. So I felt I was kind of tough, but I never saw anything like the kind of death that was there. I don’t know, I was beyond fear. I think it really changed me and my attitude about life, I guess. It changed me in my relationship with God. I remember very clearly one night. I was in a bunker that didn’t have a roof—it was just sandbags around you—pulling your guard duty and the stars were extremely bright that night. It was beau-

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tiful. That country is beautiful when there’s no fire. The stars look like you could touch them and I felt close to God for some reason or another. I felt like He was looking on me in particular and I had an urge to pray and I didn’t remember too much from catechism or anything like that. I just knew how to say Our Father and Hail Mary, so I said both prayers several times. Somewhere in there, I made a promise that if He finds it in His heart to get me out of here, that I’ll try to make something of myself, that I won’t be what I used to be, and what I used to be was not a very good guy. I was a gang member. We used to do some bad things. I never respected too many people, and it was good that I was able to leave the barrio and grow up and learn to respect life because I came back a different person. I think it would have been that evening, with God, with Jesus or whoever, you know, it was a very touching moment. I had tears coming out of my eyes and after that prayer session, I felt pretty confident that I was going to go home. It was toward the end of my duty, and when I did get home, I pretty much stuck to my promise. I’m still paying back. I’m still trying to do things on a positive side. Vietnam made me appreciate life. It made me respect others’ opinions. It made me a little more critical about our government—positively critical. It’s not that I’m not patriotic; I consider myself patriotic. As many shortcomings as we have as a government, it’s still the best country to live in. I think the most important thing that it did for me was my whole attitude about respecting others and also, I guess, my new attitude about the Anglo. Prior to that, I didn’t trust them, any of them. I mean, back home, everybody who was white was my enemy. With my experience in Vietnam and meeting and getting very close to a lot of Anglos, close enough to say that I trust them with my life, I learned a lot more than I would have if I never got out of my neighborhood. The longer I was in Vietnam, the more information I got. See, I was there between ’68 and ’69, and that was like the peak of not only the Vietnam War in terms of number of casualties and number of soldiers in Vietnam, but it was also probably the growing peak of the protest movement. More information came, and I believe that toward the end of my stay in Vietnam, I began to question what the hell are we doing here. I mean, this is not right. There’s too much evidence, too many notable people opposing our stay here. I began to question it, whereas when I first got there, I had no questions. It wasn’t until I got home that it really hit me. I started City College and in a sociology class, I mentioned that I was a Vietnam veteran

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and I got put down. It made me feel real bad. My first term paper in college was titled “Manipulation.” I don’t know why I chose the term, but it was how I was manipulated by the U.S. government to thinking what I was doing in Vietnam was right, and I did a lot of research, learned about the casualty rate of Hispanics, and I did personal research of mine. I went to the library of the local newspaper, to the obituary section, and I looked up all the casualties from my county during the year I was in Nam, and there was like fifty-seven casualties, just from this county. I don’t remember my stats too well, but it was well over 50 percent of those fifty-seven casualties were Hispanics. The majority of them were from rural communities and five of them I knew personally. My paper essentially denounced our involvement and it also had a list of all the casualties, with stars by the people I knew. It didn’t take too long, I would say about four months after I was out, to really understand what was happening. It was in that period of time I joined the Vietnam Veterans against the War, and I was in every protest that was ever had on Vietnam while I was in college. My college education required me to write and to think deep inside about situations in my life that were negative. I’m a counselor and you go through training to think about turning negative situations around. I remember there were nice times in Vietnam. There was laughing, there was joking, there were peaceful times. In the springtime, when everything is so green and quiet, there were beautiful times. You can actually, in the midst of war, find beauty and peace, and I think that is probably something everybody in that kind of situation does to survive. I’m still somewhat ashamed of what I did in Vietnam. I’m ashamed for being as naïve as I was, for taking part voluntarily and really believing in what I was doing. I don’t think I’ll ever overcome that. I still have dreams about some incidents, and I just see it as part of my penance, I guess, part of a sacrifice I have to pay the rest of my life for being involved. In general, I can talk about Vietnam, but not specifics. I can’t comfortably talk about killing. Those are sins I keep between me and God. Knowing now what I know about Vietnam, I think I’d go to jail. I wouldn’t serve, because it was unjust. It was a civil war and we had no business there. When I came back I studied the history and how we got involved and I think it goes back years. I mean, everybody that has tried to take that country has gotten their butt kicked, and we’re no different. I’m never in favor of war, but I know man’s nature. We still have that primitive instinct that says you have to overcome an enemy of some kind. If you don’t have an enemy, you develop an enemy, so you can feel

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like you’re in power. I don’t think the character of man is ever going to change, not in our lifetime and not in a few million years. I think maybe that’s part of our nature, to kill one another. My attitude about war probably is the same I had when I went in. It’s just that I’m more mature and more able to look critically into our participation and my individual participation in anything like that again. I won’t do it blindly and I wouldn’t let my children do it blindly just because you’re an American, you have to serve. No, it’s not ever going to happen like that. It reminds me when I was in the barrio and went into gang fights, right, I mean, the same group pressure, I guess. Get in the car together, you go to a party, somebody gets in a fight, we’re all in the fight. You don’t even know what it was about. You don’t even know all your enemy there. Some of them might even be your friends, but regardless, this guy’s with me. He’s from my barrio. We get it on. You had no questions, and that’s kind of how it happened with me in Vietnam. I didn’t have no questions. I was there. Let’s go for it. And then later on, when I started realizing what was happening in the barrio and how I was getting my head bashed in for some fool in my crowd who started it, I started questioning it. I started holding back and finding out for sure what the hell we’re going to be fighting about. That’s kind of ironic, because that’s the way it happened in Vietnam, too. After a while, you start realizing what the hell you’re doing. You’re doing the same thing you used to do in the barrio, you know, the whole gang concept. When I was on the plane coming back, I felt somewhat guilty that I was able to come back, that I wasn’t wounded or incapacitated in some way. Then after I got into my new life, when I was really down, not doing very well in school or having trouble with my relationships, I felt real guilty. I said, “What am I doing here? Why didn’t I die in Vietnam?” It was kind of a suicidal thought that I didn’t need to come back to all this. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a guilt about killing someone, but a guilt about me surviving and the next guy not or me coming back with all my limbs and the next guy not. I really feel lucky when I stand next to a vet who’s in a wheelchair or one that can’t see anymore or one that doesn’t have any arms. I feel fortunate, but yet under all that fortunate feeling, I feel guilty that it was him and not me. It’s a dichotomy—fortunate and glad, but guilty and sad. When I was at the “Moving Wall,” I saw mothers crying in front of the names of their sons. My mother doesn’t have to cry in front of my name, and I feel guilty for her, but happy. It’s really a confused emotion that I’ve never have been able to deal with. I just accept it as a confused emotion.

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There’s no choice for me about whether I’d rather remember or forget Vietnam. I’ll never forget. I think it does me well to remember. I can’t forget because it’s like forgetting your history, and you can’t look at your future without learning from your past. I’d like to forget some of the specific incidents, but those are probably the ones I’ll never forget. They’ll always haunt me. Once in a while, I’ll dream about it. Every now and then, when I see my kids, I can see dead kids. I see my kid laying down; I close my eyes and I can see somebody’s head almost blown out, a little kid, you know, and it hurts. But that’s part of the price of being involved. I don’t think anybody can wipe it from their minds; there’s no forgetting. It’s accepting it happened and forgiving yourself. I have a brother-in-law who still hasn’t forgiven himself, and he’s having a very difficult time. But I think for me, several things helped me overcome this. One is family support; one is my spiritual relationship with God; another is developing ways to deal with depression and stress, and for me it’s handball. If I wasn’t able to exert myself through that sport, I’d be a walking dynamite stick that would be ready to explode. Every individual has to have a different way of dealing with the memory of Vietnam. It’s a matter of being able to forgive yourself for whatever role you had in that whole involvement, and I’ve been able to do that. It’s coping with your memories, I guess, because memories are forever. Raúl u.s. army—sergeant e5 Infantry, Helicopter Gunner First Infantry Division Base of Operations: Lai Khê vietnam: december 1966 –june 1968 I’d just finished the second year of college and I was really trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life at that time. I thought I knew what Vietnam was about. I was fairly politically aware, very much liberal oriented. I wasn’t pulled along. I volunteered for the draft and I went willingly to Vietnam. My mother was very apprehensive, but my father was patriotic about it. He was a World War II veteran, and that had created the basis for his life, because he went into World War II as a migrant farmworker and, because of the military, he eventually went into civil service. It became the basis for him to actually have a decent salary, so he always

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looked at the military experience as a positive thing. He knew there was a war going on, but he felt a sense of pride. I also had an older brother who had gotten drafted. I assumed I would be going to Vietnam. I knew what was going on and I felt like it was the right thing. It was sort of a view about communism being evil. I can tell you, there’s a very big difference when I ended up going to Vietnam before Tet. The Tet offensive started in January ’68 and lasted until about March of ’68. When I talk to people about Vietnam, they’ve got to understand it was two wars: the war before Tet, and the war afterwards. Like fragging, drugs—that happened after Tet. I was there before Tet and I was there for about six months after. Before Tet, we were actually trying to do what we thought was right. We knew it was all screwed up, but we weren’t fragging each other. The racial tensions were just starting. After Tet, it was clear there was no winning. All the GIs knew it, and you could no longer fool yourself about it. The war kept going four, five more years, but there was never any illusion that there was going to be some sort of winning after that, no matter what everybody was saying. That’s when I see a real drop in the morale. I was basically an infantryman, foot soldier. I was in the First Infantry Division and I became a sergeant after about six months there. I was there eighteen months. I’d gone with such expectations of becoming a man, proving myself, so I wanted the army and that experience to be a positive one. After that first year, you think, “What the hell was it all for?” And it was almost like you wanted to have another six months. There’s got to be something here that’s worth it, that’s right. I came here with an idea that I was doing something almost noble, and it was such a disillusioning thing. For me, it was almost like I want to make a mark here and I hadn’t done it, so I went back. Again, some people might think, God, it was dumb, but I went back as a gunner in a helicopter. I remember getting there. Boy, the heat and the humidity just felt so oppressive. That’s what I remember first getting off the plane. I felt like I weighed ten or twenty pounds more than I did. Before we got sent to our units, you had to wait about two or three days on the base, the area where they shipped out the GIs to their units. But it was also the place where the people going home would be there, and I can remember that they didn’t particularly relate to you. They just sort of stayed in their bunks. Some of them were off just partying and others were like zombies. I changed piece by piece, not all at once. About my third month there, I lost my religion. I can remember the very day I decided that I knew I was here and that if I was going to live through this I was going

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to carry myself through. It was the very first time I felt terror. I knew someone was trying to kill me. I couldn’t see them, but somebody somewhere had me in their range. I didn’t think about it right there, but afterwards I realized I was sort of screaming for God, and help me, God. Later, I realized ain’t nobody going to help me except me. There isn’t going to be any God or nothing that’s going to help me. I knew if I was going to survive this, it was me, by myself. I became a sergeant and so I was a squad leader. The most important thing became your squad, their survival. Like the missions that came up, I never did anything unless I thought it was the right thing to do. The orders would come down from the captain or the lieutenant, but most of the actual infantry work is done by squads; eight, nine people go out on a patrol by themselves. So once you’re out there, you’re in charge, and that was me and they’d tell me to go out three clicks, three thousand yards, and I’d look and say, “That’s not very smart,” and I wouldn’t do it. I would just go do whatever and then I’d tell them I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. That’s the way most of the sergeants, I think, who were smart ran things. But at the same time, I did feel that the best way to survive was to do your job. So we went out there, and when I saw the chance to engage in combat, and we had the advantage, I would go out there and try to ambush and try to accomplish the military objective, but I had to see the advantage myself. It wasn’t blind duty. I had lots of wars with lieutenants. All the sergeants will tell you that the lieutenants and captains would come and they’re just there one month, two months, and they’re trying to tell people what to do who have been there, so you always had this friction going on. Once I became the sergeant, I felt it was my responsibility not to be afraid. The other people wanted to be able to be afraid and they wanted to have someone who is going to be leading them out there. I actually didn’t feel fear until shit happened, then it’s human—you just get terror, whereas for a lot of the guys it was like constant insecurity. There was no actual combat 90 percent of the time, but a lot of people couldn’t handle it at all and were insecure all that period of time because, obviously, there’s that one moment, in that one hour, in every month when you could get killed. Well, I got to feeling like I knew when danger was going to be approaching, and I didn’t bother to get nervous or uptight, or terrorized about things until that moment. There were differences in terms of where you were at. Like my brother, who was a marine, he was up near the DMZ, and when he describes his experiences, the war was a much more constant thing, the ac-

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tual times of danger and stuff like that. We were never more than a day away from our base camp or people being able to support us, so there was never a time when we were out there by ourselves for a whole week or even two days, nothing like that. I think that was the way it was for the great majority of GIs around, say, Saigon, except for near the DMZ, and then there were different battle areas. I remember reading about it and it sounded like there it was a whole month of constant worrying about your life. I didn’t lose a single person in my squad, and I had them for six months, but four of them died one week after I left, after another person took over. I knew them and then they were gone. I had to identify the bodies. I hadn’t left yet. I was in that place where I first came in, where the guys were leaving out. When I left my squad, I was there for three days before they could ship me out, and the very night before I left, there was a loudspeaker calling my name and I thought, “What the hell do they want?” I’m getting ready to get on the plane and they wanted me because the people in my squad had run into an ambush and they were killed and they needed somebody to identify the bodies. God, I’ve seen people die, but in a way, I looked at it like these were my people I’d been taking care of, and then they were gone. That added to the cynicism of the whole thing. I remember my first lieutenant there. I’d gotten to know him because he wasn’t a West Point guy; he was an OCS, an officer candidate school. He was a young guy. I had gotten books mailed to me out there and I would be reading things, political things, and I used to talk to him about some of these things. I remember one day, I guess it was about the third month there, I was in an armored personnel carrier. Every time we’d camp at night, we’d make a circle and all the APCs would be around. And then, all of a sudden, he was just walking up the center and, boom, there was this massive explosion. They never told us what, if the Vietcong shot a rocket in or there was a mine there or whether it was just an accident. We had a couple of APCs in the middle and they just blew. They had all the ammunition, all the mines, and, anyway, my lieutenant just disappeared right there. I was looking and, boom, he was gone and about fifteen, twenty other GIs, too. It’s really hard to describe, like in war, you’re with somebody, they’re your friends, they’re like your family, and then they get blown up or killed. Then these people you run into, there’s this real intense revenge. It’s not to condone it, but that shit happened there. You could really sense it, especially after a fight. You could see how that tendency would be there because they were so vulnerable. There were so many

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civilians around, and sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference. I saw GIs shoot at Vietnamese civilians. You could usually tell when they’re an old papasan walking across a field or something, and I’d see people shoot at them. I never did anything like that and I wouldn’t have allowed it to happen in my squad. I remember after the first really big battle, it was like an ambush, and I think they gave it a name, battle of Junction City, or something. I can’t remember now, but they attacked the camp the whole night long. Anyway, the next morning, when it was finally all over, they were bringing some prisoners and the wounded ones were in one place. I remember coming by and they had this Vietnamese, Vietcong, he had been one of the attackers. Anyway, his foot was blown off. I just remember him lying there and they had stripped him completely nude. He was just one person and all the GIs were taunting and humiliating him. He was just looking up there and every once in a while somebody would kick him. I remember looking at him, I just felt repulsed; I felt for him. It was almost like, what if I was there, like this? Obviously, the pain in his leg and he was just there. He knew he was totally vulnerable and everything, naked, and all these GIs with all these weapons going by him. You could sense that if there hadn’t been any official authorities right there in the middle of the day in camp, somebody would have gone off and really done something to him. But I felt almost a respect for him. I can still almost visualize him and his face, and I felt like there was a dignity there, with all his vulnerability, and he’s naked and half his leg is gone, and he didn’t start crying. But I remember thinking, “God, what are you doing? It’s almost like you’re the one that’s really showing your bad part.” I’d tell my squad, “Let’s go, let’s get out of here.” Before Tet, there was still discipline in a relative sense; no one’s throwing grenades at their sergeants or lieutenants. I’m sure there were probably some incidents, but it wasn’t an institution the way it became after Tet. It became dangerous to be a lieutenant. Fraggings were reported, and it wasn’t a secret that if your officers were people who could get you killed, better them than you. Before Tet, they tell you that one thousand Vietcong are killed and twenty GIs are killed, and they’re constantly showing you how they’re winning the war. Then Tet happened, and it just proved that everything they had said to you before had to be a lie. Where did all these people come from? It showed that they were at top strength. So it’s like a well there, with no end. Obviously, no matter what you do, they’re not going to disappear. I saw that the war was obviously not over.

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I remember an incident when I was getting real near the end of my first year and any day I’d be getting my orders to go home. Anyway, I got a new man, he was a white guy, an Okie. When they come in, they’re scared and everything and they want to impress you. I’m his sergeant and, no matter that, I’m a Chicano. It’s still like he wants to gain camaraderie or make a link with me. He was telling me about when he had left, got on the plane, there were demonstrators against the war. In the plane he was joking about them. He was talking, talking, and finally I just told him, “That’s probably where you should have been; it may be better than coming here.” But I was just sort of trying to tell him, “Hey, you’re going to find out soon enough. Don’t worry about that shit.” I remember him just looking at me, but the reason it made an impression was because just about a half hour after I talked to him, here comes the helicopter. The guy says, “Sarge, you can’t,” and I said, “Fuck, I’m done. I’m out.” So he was only my man for about a half hour, and all of a sudden, I got on a helicopter and left. But when I was in Saigon, just getting ready to go, like I told you, they called me, and he was one of the five people that got killed. He was there one week and he got killed. So it made an impression on my mind, you know. This poor guy, he had just come, and I’d just talked to him, and they asked me to identify him. It was just like, what is this? He was complaining about these demonstrators and I remember telling him, “Don’t worry about them dudes.” It wasn’t like I thought the demonstrators don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. I didn’t hold it against them because they didn’t want to come to the war. There was another guy. He was a fairly good friend, an acquaintance, but they become your friends. He was a black guy. Anyway, one of the reasons I got to know him was because he should never have been in the army. The other day in the paper there was a guy who said he was a homosexual when he came in and now they want him kicked out. Well, it was 1967 when he went and when he tried to say, “I’m gay,” they said, “Screw you, you’re going to Vietnam.” They would have taken anybody, right. But now, today, they want to get rid of this other guy because they don’t need the GIs. Anyway, my point was that this black guy, if he had been trying to get into the army today, I’m sure he wouldn’t have been able to on a psychological thing. People, like the military, would say he was a coward, whatever, but I got to know him. He was just not psychologically ready to deal with this shit. He just becomes immobilized and he’s a danger to you, you know. But he was a real sensi-

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tive person, and once you started talking to him, he was really intelligent. Anyway, I became one of the very few people he could talk to, because everybody else resented him. Everybody had to do more because of him, because no one trusted him out there. You didn’t want to go out and be an LP with him because he’s going to fail you, and so I’m not going to put him out there as a point man. Everybody was pissed off at him and would say, “Make him go out there.” But anyway, he had nightmares every night. When you sent him out there on ambush patrols, he’d be having a nightmare; he’d start yelling and screaming in the middle of the dark, and people didn’t want to be out there with him. Anyway, he’d tell me about his nightmares and he’s saying he’s out there, he’s running, running, then all of a sudden, he’s caught. He used to tell me, “In my nightmare, I’m caught and I’m, like, in a spider web and I can’t get away and it’s coming closer and closer and I can’t get out; I’m trapped.” When I was just about getting ready to go out, and they told me to identify the bodies, he was there, too. He had gotten killed. Later, after I’d gotten out of the army, I went to New York and I stopped and saw one of my friends who had stayed back and he had survived the thing. I wanted to know what happened that night when they went out there and five of them were killed. Three of them came back and he was one of them. He was saying they were walking out there and the new sergeant had been transferred that was a friend of mine. I remember because he was from here in California, and we’d gone through AIT together, but, anyway, he had gotten a Dear John letter from his wife about two months before I left. After that, he’d just tailed off. I was the most experienced sergeant in our company, then he was next, so they moved him and made him the leader of my squad. He was the one who took the guys out there and he was one of the people killed, too. After he got the letter, it was almost like he committed suicide. But, anyway, he was telling me, “Yeah, they went out there and they ran into a claymore. He got it right at the beginning,” he said. “He didn’t try to fight to survive.” “And,” he said, “as soon as the shit hit the fan, it was a mine hit, Charlie just ran off into the jungle”—the black guy who I was talking about. He didn’t see him anymore, and then in the fighting and everything, most of the guys got killed. He said the next day, when the guys who made it came back, they found Charlie. He had almost made it back to the base camp, but he ran into our own barbed wire. We set up barbed wire around the camp so if anybody is trying to sneak in, they can’t get in, they set off flares. But Charlie, when he was coming back,

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he just ran right into it and he got all caught in it and he died right there. He was trapped in that barbed wire just like in his nightmare. They found him all shot full of holes because the Vietcong were around. It was part of an attack on the base, and the poor guy just ran into it, and it was like the last thing he ever experienced was his nightmare. I’m sure there were a lot of people who should never have been there. I tried to get him out. I would tell the captain that he should be on a medical or whatever, but they were so shorthanded, they weren’t going to let anybody go: “No, he’s just trying to get away. Make him do what you want.” I think there was about a week or two when three of us were there at the same time. My oldest brother was the first one. He got drafted and at that time they were short, so they took some of the draftees and just put them into the marines. That was about six months before I went in, and he left after I was there about six months. Then my younger brother came in. He got to Vietnam about six months after I did. He was in the marines up north, up near the DMZ, and he saw a lot more fighting than I did. Just before I went home for good, I wrote to the commanders and I fixed it so that he and I could get together for three days in Vung Tau. Vung Tau was like a neutral zone during the war, and I think the Vietcong let it be because it was a place where they could listen to what was going on. Anyway, it was right there near Saigon. You partied—it was like Las Vegas in the middle of the war—and until Tet, GIs would get three days there during their year tour. We had a good time, but I always remember because it dawned on me: he had six more months to go back there, and the last day we were there I was realizing I may be the person that carries his last words back to Mom and Pop. I became very cynical, but it was like trying to figure out what is it that we were doing. I never questioned that communism was obviously wrong, but what was right about us? That’s what was questionable. You’d go into Saigon and you’d see, like, a million prostitutes, beggars, everything. The people are just degrading and you’re degrading. You can see what you’re doing, and so, like, what’s good? This is what we’re trying to do? It took a while for my ideas to change. I mean, I felt a need to hang onto what I thought we were doing, to find a value to it. When I came back, I was twenty-two. For the first three months, I was just partying. I knew things were going on, but I could care less, and then I went back to school in October ’68. There was a growing anti-

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war movement. I was part of MEChA and then I started writing for a newspaper. There is an interpretation of Vietnam, and it’s very important that we define or have a Chicano interpretation of what the experience was for us. I’d say 99 percent of the Chicano GIs who came back, regardless of whether they supported the war or were against the war, knew it was a screwed-up experience, that something was really fucked up. We were just going to try to do the best we could, and then you get this resentment that you’d been tricked and that you’d been really screwed. There’s all kinds of explanations for why the experience was screwed: the politicians didn’t give us enough weapons, and so on. We’ve got to insist on our interpretation, and that’s a subjective, political thing. You’re getting the Rambo interpretation nowadays. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find 50 percent of the Chicanos who went to Vietnam saying, “Yeah, we should have obliterated them,” or “If we had had the weapons . . .” That would have made the terrible experience the good experience we thought we were going to do. I see things through my own perspective. I was a Chicano there, and I don’t feel bad about our performance in Vietnam, as a group or individually. I thought we were very good soldiers and I could always count on the Chicano. They might complain to me, but I always knew that I could trust them. Looking at it through my own chauvinist eyes, I would say that all the Chicanos that I had come through seemed to me to be different forms of myself. When I went there I was very good; they could count on me. There was work that every squad had to do, lots of drudgery, and I would always be willing to do my share and more. I made an extra effort, and it seemed to me all the Chicanos who came, it was a general tendency. There was something that was driving us. We wanted to make this be a good thing and we wanted to do good, and even if it wasn’t, we were going to try to make it be if we could. And, I think, we probably tried too hard and too long. I mean, there’s reasons why more of us got killed proportionately, and it wasn’t because we were stupid or bad soldiers, or dumb, or even, like, John Wayne types. I think we were trying harder to actually be like what we were supposed to be there, even if it wasn’t turning out to be that way. Vietnam, for whatever it was, it defined my life for everything afterwards and, for better or worse, it’s still going to. It destroyed a lot of lives. A lot of people aren’t alive. There’d probably be a lot of doctors, a lot of good things that might have been invented. Probably ten thousand Chicanos who are dead, who today might be alive, they’d have kids

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and families. They’re not here anymore. They’re just not around. That’s all it accomplished for Chicanos. Antonio u.s. marines—sergeant Infantry First Battalion, Ninth Marines Base of Operations: Phu Bai vietnam: december 1965–december 1966 I’m from South Texas, and we were a fairly poor family. College was not an option nor going off into the corporate world, because we didn’t have those opportunities there. I had just graduated from high school and I was working at a paint factory for a few months, and then I realized I didn’t want to do that the rest of my life. The only other option was to go off to the service. At the time, I didn’t even know about Vietnam. We kind of knew there was a war somewhere, but, really, I didn’t know what it was. There was no antiwar movement; there was no sentiment against going in the service. I mean, it was probably the most common thing that eighteenyear-old Chicanos did. My orders came at the end of 1965, and by November I was on board a ship on the way to Vietnam. I didn’t think about it in terms of going to a war, because it was such an unknown thing. There was so few veterans coming back telling us about the war that we were literally ignorant of where we were going. For the marines, we were the first group called ground combat troops, since, until then, they had been called advisors. We didn’t know what we were heading into, but once they issued us our rifles and combat gear and we were flying into Vietnam, then I really got the feeling that I was going somewhere very different. Just the second day after I was there, I was already on guard duty. In those three weeks, we got attacked a few times, but then after that we moved to the northern part of South Vietnam, to a little village called Phu Bai. I always had the feeling that I was somewhere where I felt very inadequate. Even though we were from Texas and my dad used to hunt, he didn’t allow the kids to play with weapons, so I never handled a weapon. When I was there, I kind of felt like I’m not going to know what to do even though I’ve been through all this training, but once I went on patrols, I had a sense my training taught me how to do it. I just had a serious lack of confidence that I would be a good soldier. I turned out to be actually a very good soldier and I was promoted regularly.

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I knew from the first day I got to boot camp that I made a very bad mistake joining the service. I knew that it was not what I wanted to do and it was a serious contradiction between not liking what I was doing and not understanding why I was so good at this. I made sergeant in Vietnam in a year. Obviously, it meant that a lot of people were getting killed, so I was getting promoted right and left. I was a squad leader, so I overcame that lack of confidence. You know, the fear part came when I got back, never there. I never really had a fear; I never shook real hard or I never cried. I never did a lot of the behaviors that the other guys did when they were really scared. I stayed very calm and always pumped up. The fear didn’t really come until I was on the way home, like the plane’s going to crash or something is going to happen that was not going to let me come home, and that fear still really exists in a lot of ways today. For example, up until just a couple of years ago, I always felt that I was going to die because I was going to be shot, and it would just be a continuation of that journey. In Vietnam, I had absolutely no relationships with Vietnamese people. Even though two times I actually lived in villages, I never really developed any kind of relationship, whether friendly or antagonistic. I stayed to myself. There are several other things that really made me start thinking about the whole Vietnam experience. I had a white girlfriend in high school, and she had given me her picture before I left. I remember I showed it to one of the Vietnamese kids and he pointed at it and he said, “She’s number ten,” and then he pointed to his face and then my face and said, “Same, same.” So he was telling me, like, “Why are you fighting us? You and I look the same.” And he called her number ten, which is the worst you can be. “She’s number ten,” he said, because she was white. He was so small that he looked to me like he was a little kid, but he was probably a young teenager. I remember it really struck me that he was right. Where I’d come from, Chicanos and whites were antagonistic. Texas, in the mid-sixties, was still segregated, not by law, but in practice, so we knew that we were different than everybody else; we didn’t belong. I started thinking about that and about what he had said. In fact, I remember writing to my parents about it. To me, that’s one of the few intimate moments I ever allowed myself with the Vietnamese. I just detached myself from everything because I couldn’t do both—fighting and be friendly with them—so I just kind of left it alone. I think for me the worst thing that happened in Vietnam was I gave up being a Catholic. In fact, I gave up being a religious person because of Vietnam. I got real angry with the priest because our priest used to

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bless our rifles and the bullets and everything and he used to tell us to go out and kill some Vietcong. I remember talking to him and saying that this is not the kind of priest I’d ever known and we were always told not to kill, and he could never explain to me why he could say this. So I quit. I really didn’t believe in God. I never prayed. I never made the sign of the cross. A lot of my friends would be praying or calling their mama or “Oh, God, don’t let me die,” and for me it was just like, well, all I can do is stay in this hole and keep down and when they stop, they stop. I guess my thinking was very narrow. There’s only certain things I can do about this, and so if I do them all, my chances of surviving are good, and that’s what I did. There were some that just froze up or started babbling or crying uncontrollably. I never really made any friends, because I saw what was going on. I mean, people dying or getting hurt, and so I didn’t want to go through the anguish of trying to say good-bye. I just felt like it was better this way for me. If I can keep myself under control, then I can keep them under control. I always saw myself as being in charge. A lot of things we did were under the guise of, like, joking. Just to give you two examples: When we were riding on convoys, trucks, the Vietnamese would be riding on bikes on the side of the road and one of the common things, at least with the marines, was we would have a big two-by-four, a big piece of wood, and as we drive by them, swing it out and hit them, and most of the time you hit them in the face. You obviously messed them up. Or we set their villages on fire. It was part of the psychology of the warfare, and as far as killing people, yeah, that happened a lot. Or taking prisoners and pushing them out of the helicopters and all that kind of stuff. There were some soldiers that said, “We shouldn’t do that; that’s not part of our job,” and they didn’t do anything. I don’t know if it came from a political consciousness as much as a moral conscience, because we were all really young kids, eighteen, nineteen years old, and we still remembered right and wrong from our parents. So we kind of knew this wasn’t right, but we still did it and we would talk about it afterwards and it’d be like an argument in the tent. We’d laugh about it and go have a beer or something and never solve it and do it again the next day. Every two or three months, they would change policies on us. Like when we first got there, we couldn’t fire unless we were fired on first. We couldn’t have rounds in the chamber of the rifle unless we were threatened or had fire coming in, and then they went from that mode to search and destroy. So we were out there burning everything, setting things on fire, and just blowing things up. Then we went to pacification, so we

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were supposed to make the villagers love us, right? So we lived in the villages and we gave them our food and we showed them how to use soap and how to give shots, and so we were always changing. For us it was like, well, it’s just life in the corps, in the marines, which was always a series of screwups, a series of changing and conflicting orders. Toward the end of my tour there, I started getting mail from my friends about the antiwar movement, the Chicano movement, and all that. The new marines that were coming in every day were bringing in the music with them, and we’d be hearing the antiwar slogans and about the demonstrations at home, and by late ’66 and stuff, the soldiers were wearing peace buttons and beads, and the stereos were blaring out Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix. So they were bringing in the antiwar language and the sentiment of what was going on and, really, in a sense, they were bringing a very different attitude than we had and that I didn’t really understand. It was making me mad that they were coming in questioning the whole process. Because I was so rigid and so disciplined, I was thinking, “This won’t do because you won’t be able to control these kids.” So it was that structure in me that was rejecting them. It’s funny because, in a lot of ways, we understood what they were telling us because we saw, as I mentioned, the changing policies. We were always having to change to the needs of General Somebody, so we kind of knew that there was chaos and there were problems. After a year, we knew that we didn’t really know what our mission was. I remember a lot of us talking about, “Why are we here? Why are we doing this? We fight for a village for three days and then when we get there, we give the sucker up or we take this mountain and we lose all these men, and then after a day or two of staying on the mountain, we leave.” So we had those questions, and when we talked to the younger soldiers coming in, not younger in age, but younger in time of in-country, we’d argue with them, but our arguments were more like we didn’t like their attitude. The new wave, the second and third and continuing waves, really were bringing the Chicano movement. With the blacks in particular, Black Power was very evident and very clear. Also, the Puerto Ricans were very nationalistic. We didn’t understand it, but we were also very segregated within our own groups, so the Chicanos kind of hung out together, and the blacks. We kind of had our own tents and the blacks, and the whites were divided between the southerners and the others, so they even had their own splits. I went to Taipei on R&R. I was there for five days and I went to this bar and I started talking to this German guy. He spoke English and

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he asked me if I wanted to leave and go to Germany and that he could arrange for me to get on his boat and I said, “Well, why?” He said, “A lot of people are leaving the country and a lot of young men are refusing to fight and they’re going to Canada and Mexico and Europe.” “No, I can’t do that. Where am I going to go and where am I going to live?” It never occurred to me to challenge him on what a bad thing that would be to do. It was, like, well, where am I going to live? I don’t speak German and I don’t have any money and what about my family? I mean, here’s all these practical questions to a very philosophical thing that he was offering me. The Stars and Stripes, the military magazine, was telling us that when we were going home, these hippies were going to attack us at the airport. So when I got home, when we landed at El Toro Marine Base somewhere in Orange County, I remember literally feeling the same way that I felt when I landed in Vietnam, which was that somebody was going to kill me or somebody was going to attack me, because that’s what we had heard. I was always real quiet, but I became really aggressive and violent. I knew I had killed people and that I couldn’t be the same person that I was again. I was still in the service and I served a year and a half after I got back, so all that time, I was sheltered by the military. I became an office clerk my last year in the service, and part of my job as a clerk was to process the discharge papers for the marines. I remember I used to tell them, “God, why do you want to get out so fast?” But these guys just wanted to get out. Some of them were very politicized, especially like the blacks and the Chicanos. In fact, when I was in Camp Pendleton, nineteen marines were dishonorably discharged because they had signed a petition condemning the U.S. war in Vietnam, and these were mostly blacks and Chicanos. I remember them asking me to sign it, and I was going, “God, I can’t sign that.” They were way ahead of me in thinking and in their commitment and their politics. They were Vietnam vets and they were getting ready to get out. They knew the repercussions of what they were doing, so they held it to a number that they could trust. It was a very powerfully written document, talking about the discrimination in the U.S. and then the war in Vietnam and all that. They got dishonorable discharges and they lost their pay, their benefits, everything. They were just very angry because of what had happened to them as individuals and because they knew, now that they were home, nothing had changed, the poverty and the discrimination, all of that. They

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were angry that they had been used, and by the time they were home, they had total disdain for authority. They didn’t salute anymore. They didn’t get up in the morning if they didn’t want to, and they cussed at their officers. I mean, it was chaos. This is ’68. By then it was a total breakdown, so that the Vietnam vets that were coming back were kept on the totally opposite part of the base from the new recruits. In fact, all the trainers of the new recruits, if they weren’t lifers, they were non-Vietnam career officers. They didn’t want Vietnam vets training the new vets, because they knew they had a bad attitude, so you’d see two very different groups of people. My joining the civil rights movement and Chicano movement and being really involved in a lot of issues and trying to do good—like, I worked for the United Farm Workers for a long time—part of that was trying to feel you were compensating for what you had done. I was also really active in Vietnam Veterans against the War. I just saw it as two different periods: I did this, and now I’m going to try and stop it so others don’t have to go through it. I tried to stay away from my family only because it was driving them crazy. Like at the dinner table or just hanging around the house, I was always cussing and screaming and flying off the handle. Then at night I would wake up screaming in dreams. I realized that I was really hurting my family. In fact, as I tell my friends in a joking way—but it wasn’t funny then—I went to live in the barn. I didn’t stay in the house with my family because, that way, if I was screaming in my sleep, they wouldn’t hear me. My mom and dad were actually pretty good about it. They just kind of left me alone and talked to me whenever they felt that I needed to talk to somebody and they realized what it was directly attributable to, even though my mom would cry all the time. It was hard on my brothers and my sisters, because they were trying to intervene right away to make me feel better. They were always trying solutions, like my oldest brother would say, “Well, I got you a job at the post office. You can start Monday.” And I told him, “I don’t want a goddamn job.” Or my sister said, “I got you a blind date.” I mean, they were trying different interventions and my mom and dad just kind of said, “Okay, he’s going through something and he’ll come out okay.” In fact, some years ago, we went to a quinceañera for one of my nieces. It’s almost like fifteen years later. We were at the ranch and they were going to slaughter a cow. So my mom came over and she says, “Here’s some money, go shopping.” And I go, “Mom, I don’t need anything.”

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And she goes, “Yes, go shopping.” I was going, “What the heck,” and I said, “Okay.” So she gave me some money and I got in the car and drove downtown. Then the next day, my dad goes, “You know why your mom gave you money? Because she thought you’d start screaming in your sleep again if you saw them kill the cow.” I mean, it’s like all these years later, they’re still trying to protect me, so that’s one of the real indications to me it was really hard on them. As soon as I got back, I knew that I would never do it again. I know that I would never volunteer to carry a weapon or anything like that. That’s very clear to me. Like I refuse, even at a circus, to shoot a weapon and I don’t let my daughter do it. I mean, we can play other circus games, but I refuse to let her have weapons. I used to be a real free person and I used to think real big, and now, it’s really narrowed my range of emotion as to what I think about and what I allow myself to do. I think that I changed in my view of what my life is or what it could have been. I don’t think there’s a day goes by that I don’t think about Vietnam. I think for the first time the U.S. felt its mortality and, on a personal level, I think it damaged thousands of guys, not even talking about the dead ones or the wounded ones; I’m talking about those of us that went through it. For the country, I don’t think it did a single positive thing. A dream happened to me some months after I came back here, and I think it’s a reflection of the way the media covered the war. One night I remember having a dream that I was being interviewed by Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor while I was in a foxhole. They were sitting in there asking me how I was feeling and what did I think of the war and did I miss my mom, all these really trite questions in the middle of this war, bullets flying and things, people dying, and here are these cameras sitting there just interviewing me. It’s like the fantasy of it, that they were seeing it at home and we were fighting it. One of the therapists said it was like my way of asking for recognition, too. I always saw it as that acknowledgment that I was there and no one ever paid attention to me and no one knew I was there. You know, it’s funny because when I go to Washington, the Wall doesn’t raise one emotion in me. Then I go look for the names of the guys that I knew that died and nothing happens. I have no emotion and I stare at it. I’ll stay there for an hour, two hours. I’ve seen it in the snow, in the rain, in the sun, I’ve seen it in all kinds of weather, and it never

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creates a single emotion. I don’t know, I guess because the war was people to me, and we were noisy and it was dirty and it smelled and it was loud and it was colors, and this is just nothing. The first day I went, it was snowing and cold. I was in a hotel right close to the capitol and I remember thinking, “It’s snowing,” but it was like you got to go. I had avoided it the first two times, but then when I went I looked at it and it just didn’t do anything, so I said, “Okay, the next time I come back.” I attributed it to the cold and my being anxious to get out of the cold. The second time it was summer and I looked at it and went to touch it. I go there and I see the vets and they’re crying and touching the walls and they break down and they wear their uniforms. I would never wear a uniform again, and the vets that go there, over twenty years later, they wear whatever part of the uniform fits them. It tends to be their cap or their jacket, never the shirts or pants, and they sit there and they’re saluting and I go, “God, I wish I could have some level of emotion like that.” Guillen u.s. army—staff sergeant e5 Track Driver, Mechanic I.514th QM(PL)2, MAC-V Team 21 Base of Operations: Pleiku vietnam (two tours): november 1968–november 1969; november 1969 –december 1970 I joined the U.S. Army in July 1966, and I volunteered for three years. I was eighteen years old, graduating from high school, and getting ready to go to work in the packinghouses and fields. I wanted to travel, to do what the poster said, “See the world.” I come from a family that has a history of being in the service, uncles, cousins, even sisters. Everyone has been in the service. We were aware of Vietnam, but it still just seemed so distant. At eighteen, everything not within the city limits is distant. I had requested duty in Vietnam and found out I was going in late October of ’68. I had just about finished two and a half years in the army and my three-year contract was up. In early ’68, I started running into the first Vietnam veterans that came from Vietnam to Germany that didn’t get out, but stayed up in Germany, where I was at the time. Talking to these veterans and hearing their stories, it was just a matter of going over and finding out if they were true. It was really bad in the sense of the killing and the bombing, which I couldn’t imagine at the time. When someone tells you about bombing

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and you see movies and everything, that’s one thing. When you talk to somebody that’s been bombed by our own air force, not to hurt them, but to get close enough to the enemy that the ground vibrates, and you get showered by the shot and the earth and everything covering your positions with debris, that’s something that I don’t think you can get through movies or books or anything. I wanted to go to Vietnam. The fear of dying or getting wounded in Vietnam crossed my mind, but I think as many eighteen and nineteen year olds at the time would think, “I’m not going to die and if I do, who cares?” I went over to Vietnam with the attitude that I probably wasn’t going to come back, but it really didn’t matter. When I first got there, I was assigned to a quartermaster pipeline unit. They pumped fuel from the coast off of ships all the way to an air force base that was about twenty miles and to another base which was about 110 miles off the coast, which made it about thirty miles east of the Cambodian border. So it literally was a pipeline that went across the country, the jungle, to the air bases. And the first job that I got, I was assigned to a crew that walked the pipeline seventeen miles from the road to the air force base. Every morning, as soon it got daylight, a truck would drop us off where the pipeline took off from the road. We would walk the pipeline, checking it for leaks and booby traps and to see that it was still in one piece, and if it wasn’t, we repaired it. I was with the security team that guarded the pipeline and guarded the maintenance people that would fix it. And it was a very secure area going through that jungle. There were quite a few villages, maybe about ten in the seventeenmile walk. Jet fuel came through the pipeline. That was money, so at the beginning, the local people would tap it to steal it more than they wanted to blow it up. At night, we would close the fuel down, but there would still be a lot of fuel in the line and fumes. And they would try, of course, to steal this, sometimes by shooting through it and making a hole in it and then collecting it in pans and buckets. So when we would secure it by walking it, we saw some makeshift valves. Sometimes they consisted of a wooden plug and a bullet hole. Sometimes we would even provide a valve for them so they would make our job easier in the long run. They were almost a part of the security team. And it’s a very heavy, hot job out there, because when the pipeline did catch on fire, it would warp and the pipeline would be out of line. So you had to put a brand-new straight section in, and sometimes you had to replace three or four sections, and each section of pipe weighs about 150 pounds. It took two or three

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people to carry it, though I saw Vietnamese by themselves balance it on their shoulders and take it off. And that was another part that the Vietnamese would do, too—sometimes they would literally steal the pipeline. When I first got to Vietnam, they would have the roll call three times a day to tell you where you were going, so there were three formations a day that were mandatory to make. One morning I got called to formation and I got picked for detail. You’ve probably heard of the shit-burning details. They picked the whole front rank to go burn shit. So when I heard of this shit-burning detail, I thought it was just a shit detail. Not physically taking shit and burning it, but just another detail. We all loaded up on the back of a truck, and I asked one of the guys that had been there a little bit longer, “Where we going?” He says, “We’re going to go burn the shit on the hill.” I said, “You’re kidding?” He said, “No.” “Are you going to burn shit?” And he said, “No way.” I said, “What are you going to do?” He said, “We’re jumping out of the truck. We’re going to come to one hill before we get to where they burn the shit. And when it stops at the stop sign and starts going slow, we’re jumping out.” I didn’t believe it, but sure enough, when the truck came up to that stop sign and slowed down to start climbing the hill, three or four guys jumped out the back of the truck. And there I was trying to make a decision. Should I stay with the truck or go with them. I waited too long and I did jump, but they had already left. And the truck had already gone in one direction and now here I was, somewhere on the air base, lost. The guys that had already jumped out before me took off at a dead run. I took off and saw they were too far off to catch, even after calling at them. They just kept going, and so I just started walking in that same direction. Well, I walked maybe about half a mile and then the road split up in three different directions. So I just kept walking and asking people for directions. I walked all the way back, and it took me until noon to get back. When I first got to Vietnam, I was a 514 quartermaster, which was a daytime job, and at night we went into the compounds and had the responsibility of the road that was in front of us in both directions. We had what they call a react team. If something happened during the night, you either went out by truck or by helicopter to where there was trouble. Of

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course, being young and stupid, I always had my gear right there. And when the alarm went off, the first twelve or whatever they needed would go because it was a matter of speed. There was a bridge that was about a mile from our compound, and they guarded it twenty-four hours because if it was blown up, it would close the road, which stopped everything going further up the roads. At night they would pull in extra people. That bridge got hit about a month and a half after I was there. The react team was called and, of course, I jumped on the truck and off we went, only to find that all the troops there had been killed. The ones there maintained a bunker complex. There was a charge set at the base of their bunker and tower. They either got killed by the explosion or got crushed with all the sandbags. So we came in and the helicopters came in and they lit up the sky with flares and spotlights. The unit that went in first went down the stream chasing VC, and the helicopters were helping them even before we got there. The ones that were in the bunker were killed, and we took the bodies out and put them on the truck. I remember one guy was so heavy, it took three of us to lift him to the truck. I had his feet, so I just remember his feet going in there, and that was my first real bad experience. I don’t even remember his face or anything. Sounds funny, but I remember the bottom of his boots. I was really gung ho and I was trained real well, so I knew that was supposed to see me through in some way, because that is what is drilled into you. I figured that if I was going to be a good solider, I wasn’t going to die because I wasn’t going to make errors. That sort of changed after a while, but it took a long time for that naïve attitude to go away. The very first unit I was with was stationed in a valley which also contained a South Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp for the VC and NVA, North Vietnamese army, whoever they would capture. You couldn’t tell the difference; they all wore black pajamas. But I remember coming down the road in a cargo truck and there were about four or five Koreans in the back of it, and they had four or five Vietnamese all tied up in one big bundle, sitting on the floor of the truck. We were behind them going kind of slow down a bad road. These Koreans were constantly kicking and beating the prisoners with their rifles and kicking them with their feet. As we got closer, you could see they were all bleeding and they were one huddled mess. But the Koreans could care less. If they saw that one got tired of kicking, the other one started kicking them. There was a big village that went along a main road, and there was hardly any agriculture in this little valley, because there was just a quarry

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at one end of the valley. But one of the hajenze [soldiers] got into a fight with a South Vietnamese soldier or civilian, I’m not sure which, but the South Vietnamese shot him and killed him. Well, the Koreans came right back the next night at the same time that Korean got killed and lined up thirty-five South Vietnamese, old and young men, because I saw them aged from real old to teenager, shot them, and lined them up on the road. The next morning when we went out on the road, there was thirtyfive bodies there. But that was a lesson that they didn’t mess with the Korean soldiers. And they left the word that those bodies would stay on the road right there ’til the following evening at the same time, before any of the families could claim the bodies. I had been in-country maybe less than six months at the time because I was ready to leave that unit. And, really, because they were South Vietnamese, it didn’t mean nothing. I mean, the eight GIs in the bunker in the tower complex, the first I had seen killed and helped move the bodies, that meant something. The thirty-five Vietnamese really didn’t mean nothing, mainly because that was part of war. That was their war. And it seems like our war was to survive. Our war was not the rest of all the garbage and the politics and everything we heard and read about. Our war was to do the year and come home. But, as I mentioned before, they had the react teams and I used to volunteer for those. But after going out on maybe ten, then I became like the other guys, too. I didn’t hear the clanging no longer and I didn’t have my gear ready and maybe I was in the bunker if I did hear it. And then they came and got you. They would find the first people, but I stopped running to the truck or to the helicopter pad. At the beginning, there was a big glory going down the road with all the guns blazing and everything, zooming up there with .50 calibers and everybody firing M-60 machine guns and all the tracers just going out. It’s something else. I mean, your heart just races. We’d go in firing like crazy, and that was exciting. The excitement left, because that’s like anything. If you ride a roller coaster enough times, then you’re not going to ride it anymore. I wound up in the Special Forces in Vietnam mainly because most of the ones there had already done two and three tours and they said they were getting burned out and, of course, they took a heavy casualty. So they were recruiting and, at the time, I was with MACV, which works real close with the South Vietnamese army and I picked up a little bit of Vietnamese. I had my own interpreter at that time, so I just mainly went from across the street to another unit, which was Military Assistance

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Command Vietnam and the Special Forces. They were nonregular army units. They weren’t structured like the rest of the divisions. I also worked with Koreans at An Khê. The ocean side was all Korean territory, and I was at a place called Pump Station 36. There was anywhere from fifteen to thirty GIs out in the middle of nowhere, and during the day it wasn’t too bad, but at night we couldn’t secure the place. So we had to call in Koreans, and every night Koreans would come in. They stayed just outside our perimeter and they had to do our security, because we didn’t have enough people to do it. That’s where we lived and that’s where our job, everything, was, right in there, within the wire, and those pump stations were always there. I went there to learn that job, but that was also a place of punishment. If you were bad in a unit, say, if you smoked marijuana or you maybe did something stupid, you’d go do three or four weeks at Pump Station 36 and you’d always come back about thirty pounds lighter. But just imagine, about fifty miles in each direction all the way around, no Americans, just you and that hilltop full of Koreans that you had to rely on to come down and secure you every night. Later on, when the air strikes were used, they said, “Well, we’re taking too many casualties and we’re winding down the war. Let’s just throw more bombs and less soldiers,” and the air strike was the big tool then. The enemy couldn’t shoot these planes out of the sky, so what did he do? He went after the fuel dumps and blew them all at one time, and then, all of a sudden, fuel dumps became a dangerous place to be at because they were the target. I used to go on some very dangerous operations we called SLAM— search, locate, and annihilate mission. Our job was to find them and call in the air strikes. We were especially after the 390th Battalion, a North Vietnamese battalion, because they were the security for one of the North Vietnamese divisions, but they were good soldiers. They had a whole division of North Vietnamese coming through this area where we’re at, and this battalion would defend this division by fooling our intelligence. This battalion could make themselves look like a division and be spotted from the air, only to split off in about seven different major companies and take off in different directions. They would put companies in a row in front of this division and if they ever got spotted, the division moved slow and hid well. The battalion moved fast and didn’t bother hiding. In fact, their job was to get spotted to protect the division. They even knew the commander’s name that was running this elite battalion, and everybody wanted to get this battalion. While I was there, we never did, but they would take a beating because, if they were spot-

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ted, we would call air and sometimes they just couldn’t run fast enough or hide good enough. It was a cat-and-mouse game, and we had the air force and the artillery that did the job, but they fooled us a lot. When I was in my first year in Vietnam, I didn’t miss home. The army was my home. My second tour, I came home for two weeks and I met my wife, who is now my wife, and I had somebody in my second tour. I reenlisted for my next three years in Vietnam. When you reenlist you get money, choice of duty station, more education if you wanted, and I took the money and Vietnam for three years. I didn’t stay the full three years, though. They wouldn’t let me stay anymore. By then, I had a cousin, Johnny, who died. I really won’t even talk about some of the bad stuff. I was there for a long time and I kind of didn’t even want to come back, because I knew everything. I knew the area like my hometown. It seemed almost like I was born there because I made a point of learning everything. I bribed a lot of people. I always wanted to know what was going on, so I learned to stay alive. One time we were going to the ocean and we got up late, and you have to get up early in the morning to catch these convoys out. They start early in the morning, get on the highway, and they usually have what they called convoy points, and we started out to that convoy point. We got on the last trucks that were left, and I wore a combination of civilian clothes and South Vietnamese uniforms and I jumped up on the running board of this truck, and before I could ask the driver, the GI, for a ride, he picked up a C ration can and threw it at me and hit me straight in the face and called me, I don’t know, everything from gook to all the derogatory terms they used for Vietnamese and told me to get off his truck. Well, his throwing the C ration can in my face knocked me off the truck, but I heard all the remarks. I was 119 pounds in those days and a little darker than I am right now, and he thought I was Vietnamese. That was one bad thing, and the next thing that happened after that is one of the good things, and that’s when I jumped on the next truck and, of course, then I knew to open my mouth right away and say, “I’m a GI, I need a ride for me and my friends.” And that’s the day I met Tony, and we’re friends to this day. In fact, that same day we became friends, the convoy got hit. At the time, me and John and the other two Montagnards, one of our favorite weapons was an M-79 because it lets you fire at a distance and do a lot of damage with a small explosive. We happened to be carrying three of them that day with about two hundred rounds. We got into an

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ambush and two of the Montagnards grabbed one side, I grabbed the other side, hanging out of the doors, because down the middle of the road it’s getting hit with fire from both sides. The Montagnards are proficient with this weapon. Well, after the third round they can put that fourth one anywhere they want. After that, the rest would fall in, and they walked them right up the road until they found that zone and just started laying until all the rounds were gone, and me and Tony did the same thing on the opposite side of the road. I stayed in the military when I came back and got buffered in two ways. First of all, I didn’t have to go out and look for a job and intermingle with everybody that had no experience about Vietnam. In the military, we not only had ourselves as Vietnam veterans, as that peer group, we had another group around us who were servicemen, but had not gone overseas. The war was already winding down—this was ’71— all the shipments had already stopped going over, and it was a process of coming back. There was still an antiwar feeling out there, and if you told somebody or looked like a Vietnam vet, you caught some flak. Well, I looked like a Vietnam vet to the max, but I stayed within the military. I did worry about getting a job, but, see, the military took care of that, too. They had a thing called Operation Transition. They give you a code number and a letter and give you all the answers to the test and you could either go the post office, the IRS—there was a range of places. A bunch of guys had jobs before they were out of uniform. So did I. One day in the army, the next day in post office blue. I went to college, but I never did get my GI benefits from going to that stretch of college because I wouldn’t tell anybody I was a Vietnam vet. I read about it in the paper, saw it on TV all the time, so I didn’t want a part of it. I’d do it all over again. That’s just part of being an American and part of wearing a uniform. I can’t speak for those that were drafted, but you talk to anybody that volunteers and I think you’re talking to a different type of person. Nobody wanted to be drafted whether there was a war or not going on; nobody wanted to be pulled out of whatever they were doing and thrown into the military and told what to do, day in and day out. I feel sorry for some of them because, at that time, being the same age and everything, and especially if you talked to some that were better off than I was, that had good jobs and had good homes, a nice little car, a girlfriend, and were looking forward to college. Then the government comes along and tells you, “You’re coming with me,” and they plop you down here for ten weeks, pick you up, and give you a toss

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way over there, and that world is really a different world. You go to a foreign country, you don’t speak the language, you don’t know the customs, you don’t know your left from your right over there. Your shoes are still shiny from the prom and within three months you’re over there, and you’re expected to stay there a year, and you’re literally dumb. You just learned by doing, and time educates you and within six months you become a pretty good soldier. And if you survive six months, then it’s to take those six months of learning and turn it into six months of going home. Basically, that’s what it was all about. Then, all of a sudden, you come back after being gone a year, and your parents sold your car or maybe your little brother or sister’s got it and you go to the family grocer that says, “Now this guy is taking your place and I can’t let him go because he’s here and things have changed since you’ve been gone.” Some of the guys even told me their girlfriends thought they didn’t exist anymore, so they start all over, and their buddies, some are already married and have kids and are in college, and you’re supposed to catch up now. I could see where some of it was the stress. I think the better you had it before you left, the harder it was to come back and get back into it. Of course, war is bad, but I think if you’re going to end war, to me, I guess from a military point of view, the only way to end it was to win it. But they went the other way, to not support it and say, “Don’t win it; just come home.” I think that was the main strategy of the protesters— pick up and come home—which became even Nixon’s policy. What was his phrase? “Retreat with honor”? I don’t know, but he came up with some phrase. They always do. Nixon was a superhawk, and I think he’s one of the best presidents we ever had when it came to the hardest part of the war, because any time things got rough, politically or militarily, he says go bomb the hell out of them, and he cut loose on those B-52s. There was about four or five incidents when, literally, probably every B-52 in the southern Pacific was over Vietnam dropping bombs. I mean, they’d bomb for a week, but that week would last for six months, because it’d throw the Vietnamese, their whole supply system, and kill a lot of their people. It’d take them six months to get back to where they were. Fifty-five thousand dead. Was it worth it? I say it was, but I think you have to ask the families of those fifty-five thousand, really. To me, I think it was worth it in the long run, for a lot of reasons. I think the main one is that we learned a big lesson: if you’re going to fight a war, win it. You didn’t know where the enemy was or who the enemy was. You knew the enemy was there, because he was hurting you bad, so the pol-

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icy was to kill them all, but, then, that’s not really right, because you’re killing the people you’re trying to save. It was just hard, all that suffering, for Americans, and it’s continuing right now. About the only thing the war accomplished, basically, is that South Vietnam as a government, as a people, remained non-Communist longer than they would have been, that’s about it. We fought that war for around ten years, ten years that this country bled to keep that one free. John u.s. army vietnam: two tours I was sixteen years old when I joined the army. I lied and I forged my mother’s signature. I had dropped out of school and I was a hell-raiser, a gang member. The only reason I joined was to get out of the situation I was in, which was nothing but gang fights. We were doing everything you’re not supposed to do. I didn’t like what I was doing and I wanted to leave. I had always wanted to be in the army, so I joined. In 1958, 1959, I was in Germany, and there came a request for Spanish-speaking interpreters that wanted to volunteer to go to NATO Headquarters in Paris. I said, “I can speak Spanish. I’ll go for it.” So I volunteered and I get my orders and I go to Paris. I’m assigned as an interpreter for Spanish air force people that are undergoing some training there. During the course of that time, I get approached by a guy who knew everything about me and I knew nothing about him. He asked me if I would like to join the intelligence organization. I said, “Sure.” I’m, like, nineteen years old at the time. I didn’t know what the hell this guy’s talking about, except he’s offering me good money and a chance for adventure. I said, “Of course I’ll go for it.” So I did. I look back at it now and I thought to myself, “Oh, boy, what did you do?” Well, that started a long process. So he recruited me into a class. I took it and then nothing happened. I get reassigned back to the squadron I was in back in Germany. I’m there for a few months and then I get rotated back to the States. From there they sent me to Ontario, Canada, and then my time comes up for discharge and I get discharged. I’d gotten married in the interim and I had a son, so I started working as a truck driver. They were building all these missile things and I’m driving a truck, making money and having a good time. At this time, I’m like twenty years old, and one day, this is like about 1962, a guy comes up to me. He says, “Hey, I’m glad to see you

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again.” I’m looking at this guy kind of strange because I don’t know who in the hell he is, but he’s talking to me like he really knows me. He starts recounting past history, like when I was in the air force. He said, “I understood you wanted to join the army?” “How would you like to go to OCS?” I said, “What are you talking about?” “I can make it happen for you.” I said, “Really? What do I get out of this?” And he lays out the benefits. At the time, I don’t have a steady job. I have to be there at six in the morning. Maybe I get hired that day, maybe I don’t. The guy says, “You join the army, we’ll take care of you.” I said, “Sure, I’ll go for it.” Steady paycheck, you’re going to put me in school, and I get an important position. By ’64, I’m out of school and I’m now promoted to a first lieutenant. I’m assigned to the Presidio in San Francisco and then comes the FBI with an operation called Cointelpro. This was the national security effort, spying on all the civil rights movements of the sixties, starting with ’64. We get briefed on subversives and assigned to that operation. So here’s what we’re doing. There were a couple of guys, one was a deputy sheriff with Santa Clara County and he left the sheriff’s office and just became a freelancer. He started burglarizing all the Peace and Freedom Centers and the farmworkers, Chávez’s offices. Up and down the state, this guy burglarized a lot of offices. He got lots of information. I was the guy that did the physical transfer of stuff so that he could microfilm all the records that he was taking out of these offices and take them to Fort Ord, where we did the microfilming. We provided him with a warehouse. He could drive his car in and close the doors and photograph all the stuff he had. Then, after that, I had these big rolls of film he had to give to somebody. After it was photographed, we got rid of it. We just burned the stuff. I wasn’t thinking this was against the law. We’re told we have an agent out in the field procuring information and he’s going to give us these rolls of microfilm. My job was to, number one, facilitate microfilming of all the records. Secondly, I was to convey the records on microfilm to somebody in Sacramento. As I was looking at it, we’re dealing with Communists and subversives and our job is to get these dirty guys. That’s what I thought. You have to remember, I’m twenty-something years old at the time. I really don’t know a hell of a lot about what’s going on. My head is filled with “I’m a commissioned officer now.” I’m a high school dropout, now all of a sudden, I’m commissioned. I’ve got all this power. I’m making good

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money, and we’re fighting communism. It’s a pendejada is what it is, now I look back at it. I transported the microfilm to Sacramento and I gave it to this guy. Years and years later, this guy gets arrested. ¡Ay, chingado! What a mess! There was a guy, an FBI agent, and he finds out about it at the same time I do—about the arrest and that there’s going to be a trial. They’re not going to charge him with burglaries because the statute had run out on that. They’re going to charge him with possession of stolen property for all these damn records. He tells me because I talked to him, he says, “Hey, you know what, I’m taking an annual leave,” and I said, “Good idea. I’ll see you.” I leave and I go to Mexico. I’m down there for four months. I’m living a good life. That’s why I went on vacation. I said, “The hell with this. I don’t need this, right?” The agent comes back thirty days later. This is, like, 1975. The minute he steps off the airplane, the DA’s office is there, waiting with a subpoena. They subpoena him, take him to the municipal court, and he’s forced to testify. He perjures himself. He’s bounced from the FBI and he loses everything. Here I am, I’m still sitting in Mexico, right? I said, “Hey, no way in hell I’m coming back until I know this thing is dead meat, because I’m not going to testify.” But where he perjured himself was he didn’t know that I had written out an affidavit to the DA’s office and I spelled it out. I laid it all out what my role was, because, at this point, I don’t have any protection. The army’s not going to protect me. The army’s denying everything, right? The FBI, they’re not going to do a goddamn thing for me. Nobody’s going to take care of me. So I said, “What the hell’s the harm?” I talked to my control officer. He said, “In this particular instance, you got to go with what you got. Do what you think is best, but you have no backup. Nobody’s going to protect you.” So I said, “The hell with it.” I made this sworn affidavit, I signed it, I gave it to the DA’s office, and then I took off. I said, “Screw you guys, I’ll see you later. Hasta luego, amigo.” So I go to Mexico. I got plenty of money. The agency’s already provided me with escape money. And that poor guy, he comes back, gets arrested, and he perjures himself. I’m not part of the army anymore. From the beginning, I was with the DIA. The Defense Intelligence Agency is the military intelligence arm of the combined armed forces of the United States. The DIA is a bigger agency than the CIA. It has a bigger budget. It has more personnel. The DIA is the agency that provides the military manpower, the Green Berets, to the CIA for all of the covert operations that are going on. If you want to talk about assassination teams, they come from the DIA. The military

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personnel are officers. It’s a very interesting point that you cannot become an agent of the DIA if you’re not a sworn officer. The DIA is the first backup to the Secret Service, where the Secret Service needs X numbers of bodies to protect the president because he’s on a tour. Very few people know about it. I’ve been out of the army for years, but even today, if my control officer knew that I was talking to you and telling you the things that I’m talking about, he’d probably have a heart attack. He’d say, “Wait a second, we have to get a national security clearance on this. What the hell are you talking about? This is what you’re supposed to say.” It would be something along those lines. But I’ll tell you something: the DIA is never going to take care of me. They will ask me to do things, take care of this mission, take care of that assignment, but they really don’t give a shit about me. As far as they’re concerned, I’m just another guy with certain specialties and I can do things, but that’s all they want from me. So what am I supposed to think? These guys are going to take care of me? No. If shit comes to shove, I get shoved and they walk and I’m the one holding the bag. Anyway, in 1966, I didn’t go to Vietnam, I went to Laos. I didn’t know I was going to Laos when I went there. If you had asked me at that time, I would have said, “Where in the hell is Laos?” I had no idea about what was going on. We get a few hours of briefings, nothing real concrete. We know we’re going to go do a covert operation, but we really don’t know what the hell is going on and we don’t know why we’re doing it. We go into Laos on a chopper, and there’s a lot of indoctrination going on all this time. There were eight in my particular group. We’re all MIs, military intelligence. We’re not part of the army, we’re not part of the CIA, we’re DIA operatives, and at this point, I’ve already gone through training. First of all, I went through airborne. Then I went through ranger, then I went through the Green Berets, and then we’re going through some other training on top of that and, in between—like most of these training periods were six to eight weeks—we go to a town in Laos. At this time, this is all still under so-called democratic control. We’re not supposed to be there and we get sworn to all these secret agreements that we’re not going to talk about this. Well, hell, big deal. Time, Life magazines have already carried all of this. Out of the group of eight that I was with, three of us were Chicanos. One made big-time headlines in Panama; he’s a general now. I’m a full bird colonel. I got a little eagle float on my shoulders. I say “float,” because they’re nebulous; they

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may float away— especially now that I’m talking to you. Who knows what the hell is going to happen to me, but I’m not really concerned about it. We went there on an operation called Operation North Star that was to get the Hmong to fight for us and to intercept the Ho Chi Minh Trail along the border, where Laos borders with Vietnam and Cambodia. We were down in that little sector. I was not only in Laos, but I was also in Cambodia. Once we accomplished Operation North Star and got the Hmong involved, our next assignment was part of the Phoenix Program. The Phoenix Program was not totally what a lot of people think about it today. It wasn’t to assassinate the leadership of the VC—that wasn’t the total aspect of the Phoenix. The part that I was involved in was to track down and either get back or assassinate the renegades; that’s what you call American deserters that have gone to the other side and were now living and operating as soldiers with the VC. Our instructions were real simple: locate, identify, and terminate with prejudice. In the intelligence part of it, to terminate someone with prejudice means to kill them, that’s what that means. But I’m not going to get into the details of some of the men that I knew and what happened to them. We would receive reports from the established military command: “X number of people have deserted. We think they have gone to so and so.” We never had unit desertions. We had one on one, guys that just couldn’t deal with it anymore and they left. We got the official record from the army. Let’s say, for instance, someone would send us a packet of information on a deserter and in there would be his entire military record, photographs, etc. We would take that information and, obviously, they would send it to us because the guy was within our command, the area that we were responsible for. Then we would take that information and we would pass it around to our scouts. This guy we think is hiding out somewhere in this area, we want to know where he’s at. Our scouts, which were Hmong or Cambodians, would go out into the field and, as part of their regular work, they’d come across information. Hey, there’s an American living in village so and so and this is what he looks like. They gave him up as fast as we asked for one. We knew there were some guys out there and we let them stay there. It was in our interest to leave them there. They served a purpose: to attract the VC so that we could bring the VC in and we could do something to them. You have to remember, in my business, people are used like pawns; you use them to

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draw in your enemy. We would find, quite often, where three, four, sometimes six or seven of the guys would congregate in a particular village just because they came together there and the village was amenable to them being there and they took them in. They worked with the villagers and they provided part of the defense to the village. At the point that I got into it, it was too late to ask questions. It was either we’re going to take them down or we’re taking them in. I don’t know if too many of the men that were in my unit were taking everybody in. So we would take them down, and that was pure and simple. These people and I made a distinction that these guys were not our guys. They had deserted us. When I came across them, when I was face to face, it wasn’t a question, that, hey you’re an American; no, the dirty sons of bitches were not Americans anymore. They were deserters. They had let us down and they had turned and gone against us. We didn’t know what information they had told the enemy to help the enemy kill us. So what did we do? Well, what did I do? My first thought was, “You’re a dirty son of a bitch. What you did cannot be pardoned. There’s only two ways for this thing to go: you either commit suicide, or I’ll blow your brains out.” And if they didn’t do it, I did. And that was the way it was. We gave the option, and some did, rather than come back and face total disgrace to be tried as deserters. You have to remember the army didn’t want to court-martial anybody for desertion. Who in the hell wants to do their dirty laundry? The orders were real simple: dismiss with extreme prejudice. They never had a chance. We never gave them a chance. After that, they were dumped, you know, like a shallow grave. Their families were told they were missing in action or killed in action. You have to remember something about soldiers. The main and primary mission of a soldier is the killing of the enemy; that’s the primary mission. When you have one of your own that deserts you and goes to the other side, maybe just to escape, then you got no choice. That individual becomes more of a problem, more dangerous, because he knows your tactics, he knows your philosophy, he knows what you’re supposed to be doing. He knows the inside stuff, as you would say, so what do you do with a traitor? You exterminate the traitors. Somebody has to do that. I, for one, did what I had to do. I obeyed my orders and I consider them even to this day very legitimate. I took out the people that didn’t conform. They were our enemies. The Christian mentality says, “Thou shalt not kill.” You have a soldier out of line who’s got a rifle and he’s pointing at the enemy and his entire upbringing, everything about his life, the Ten Commandments,

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says, “Thou shalt not kill.” Guys didn’t want to kill somebody; they don’t want that on their conscience. It takes a certain amount of fortitude to kill another person. It’s not like in the movies, it’s not like these Rambos. You don’t have guys going out there with their damn M-16 and put it on full automatic and just blow somebody away. Most American men don’t want to kill somebody. But at that time, I had no qualms. Ask me the same question today and I would have to give you a different answer. I think the line troops pretty well understood: if you split, if you desert, they’re going to get the headhunters out after you. They didn’t know our names. They didn’t know who we were. They just knew that there was a hell of a goddamn presence out there, which in itself was promoted by the army as a deterrent to the troops. In most cases, when we caught somebody, and we caught quite a few, we’d send the dog tags back and we would say something like “Found body, dog tags attached.” We wouldn’t say anything about that we killed him. We would just say that we had encountered a corpse and take one off the MIA list. We were kind of like cops. We’re going to punish the wrongdoers and the punishment was real simple. We were not only to apprehend them, but we were going to be the judge, the jury, and the executioner. The only thing that we strived to do was, when we went after one of ours, was to get the damn dog tags, or some other kind of identifying information, a wallet. Most Americans are real peculiar: they always have to carry a damn wallet. We would frisk a body, get what we needed, and then we got the hell out of there and let the animals, los animalitos, take care of the body. We never did them the honor of a burial. That was my choice. It would have given them recognition. I wasn’t prepared to recognize them, because they turned against us. Interestingly enough, that’s when we formed the Eighth Brigade. The Eighth Brigade is not an existent organization. You can’t look up in a book of, say, military organizations, where’s the Eighth Brigade? It doesn’t exist. The Eighth Brigade is really this. There were eight Chicano guys and we came together and said, “You know what? Let’s call ourselves the Eighth Brigade,” and we formed, like, a little club, and from there the Eighth Brigade grew and it encompassed a lot of Chicanos that were either Green Berets, CIA, or they were DIA guys. But it’s kind of like a little closed fraternity. You could not become a member of the Eighth Brigade if another member who’s already established in the brigade doesn’t know you. We were all assigned different jobs. This is a social organization that I’m talking about. This is how Chicanos that work in that business know each other.

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You know what it was with the Chicano guys, as it was with me: I had always wanted to be a soldier. I mean that. When you ask little kids, “Juanito, what are you going to do when you grow up?” “Oh, I’m going to be a policeman. I’m going to be a fireman. I’m going to be a teacher.” Well, if you had asked me, I would have said to you, “I want to be a soldier.” So as things evolved, I said I don’t want to be just a soldier; I want to be the best kind of soldier. I want to be with the elite. I wanted to be the best of the best and I did it. Now I look around and here we got that general in Panama, he’s the crème de la crème. How did he do that? Because he volunteered, just like I did. He went through the right schools and he stepped right up the ranks by performance. You don’t get promoted in the army because you’re academically correct. You get promoted in the army because you do the right things. You’re at the right place at the right time, and only a man would understand that you put your balls on the line and that’s how you get promoted. You get promoted because you’re in the field and you do the job, and every time you do a job and you’re successful, you get a little star next to your name, just like in grade school. And, little by little, you accumulate enough stars and pretty soon you get promoted. Here you are, you go from lieutenant to captain to major to colonel, just like that. We did ambushes in the middle of the night, where the guys walked in and we didn’t know who they were and we wasted them. Then we went back and looked at the bodies and they were all wearing American uniforms—we didn’t know. They weren’t supposed to be there. They were just lost. These were not Americans shooting at other Americans. You have to understand where I was at. I was with the Hmong and these were Hmong soldiers that were doing the shooting. We were advising them, telling them what to do. We’d set up ambushes and American troops would come in, but we had no coordination with the Vietnamese action forces and where we were at. Try to read those stupid maps that they used to give us. Goddamn things, half the time they weren’t correct. We’d be talking to people on the radio and we wouldn’t know where the hell they were, and they thought we were in this valley and we were ten miles away in another damn valley. The mountains were really treacherous; you just really didn’t know. My feeling, personally, tough shit. Because you know it could just as easily have been me on the other side— casualties of war. I mean, what else can you call them? It’s just the way the damn thing happened. Had I taken it personally, I’d probably go crazy. As it is, even thinking

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about it this morning really disturbed me a lot. Even just coming to this interview, the thoughts that were going through my mind. Do I really want to talk about this? Do I want to think back on the things that I saw, that I did, because, obviously, there’s such a thing as having blood on your hands. I have, for years, felt that there’s no amount of time that I can wash my hands enough because I know I did some things that were pretty brutal and I know that sooner or later there’s going to be a time where I’ve got to face the Man and I’m going to have to explain my conduct and I’m going to have to deal with it, and I know that. There was a time, not too many years ago, that some people that were very close to me wanted to have me committed for being criminally insane. There was no basis for it, but because I talked about things that they couldn’t understand, they were going to do that to me. But they weren’t successful. Why? Because I’m not crazy. I’m not insane. Yes, I did some insane things, by whatever standard, but there’s a lot of people that have no conception of what the hell we were doing and why we did the things that we did. These things happened long before you could begin to consider civil rights. What the hell, if you had talked to me about civil rights in 1964, I would of told you, “You’re full of shit; you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. What are you, some kind of Communist, un-American?” In those days, we were trying to join the establishment. That was the whole goddamn dream; everybody was doing that. Later on, we understood that there were other choices, that you didn’t have to join, you didn’t have to become a gringo to be a part of this country. But in those days, who the hell knew different? Who knew different? There were times, and this is no joke, when I think guys like me, my age, we had to go a little bit further. We had to do a little bit more to prove that we were Americans, so that we could be accepted. What the hell choice did I have? I want to eat like everybody else. I wanted a job. I wanted some kind of validation that I exist. I am somebody. I think, in my opinion, hey, a lot of us Chicanos, we’ve been stupid. We were striving to do what we did and we did those things. There was a lot of Chicana women that were sitting back, saying, “No seas pendejo, no te vayas” [Don’t be stupid, don’t go]. There’s another way. How many of those women are saying the rosaries today? They’re crying for the guys that did what I did, except they bought it; I didn’t. So I’m here. They’re dead and they’re buried someplace, but who are the ones that are left crying, even to this day? I did two full tours, one year apiece, and then I did another three months after that. The last three months that I did were in ’75, and that

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was when it was winding down, and then it was only to assist and identify the Hmong that were going to come to the U.S. The first time I went there, I was green. I’d never been bloodied. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. All I knew was that we were fighting communism. The second time around, though, I’d already had a benefit of being there once and coming back to the States. I saw the demonstrations. I saw what the hell was going on in this country. In effect, I was a civilian and I was seeing how America viewed the war. Then I got my orders to go back again. I go back; now I’m scared. Second time around, I’m not so damn brave. I’m not naïve either. But once I was back into it, you don’t show your fear, you don’t dare. You know how you see those guys on the corner, you know how they stand? Well, you do the same vato thing when you put on that uniform. You’ve got the same stance. You’ve got the same mentality. You say, “¿Órale pues? Go ahead, ese, take your best shot, man, because I’ve got the next one.” That’s what Chicanos do today. Well, hey, we were doing the same damn thing then. We all had our fears. I could look at my own men, I could see that they were afraid. They didn’t want to go into combat. What for? It was so easy to take a fork on the trail and go to the left instead of to the right, because if we went to the right, we had to do the ambush and if we went to the left, we’d never see them. It was that easy. But yet, invariably, we always went to the right. We always did what we had to do, even though we were scared. It’s good to be scared. You know why? Because if you’re scared, you’re cautious and you’re aware of what the hell’s going on and you’re listening and you survive to a day that comes, like today, where I can talk about it. The first time, there was a lot of idealism. We’re here to fight communism. Second time around, hey, I’m no longer a virgin. I’ve been there already. I’m no longer thinking about I’m here to fight communism; that’s idealism, that’s a bunch of bullshit. We weren’t there for that. I was there to do a job and I was becoming very calloused in my attitude about why I was there. After you see so many dead bodies blown apart, you realize the kind of damage a bullet will do to a person. Give you an example: a bullet hits you in the forehead, it blows the top of your head off. I mean, it’s all gone. Well, how many times do you have to see that before you get used to it? The worst part is not the sight; the part that stays with you is the smell. There are times even now, for instance, I’m not going to go by a slaughterhouse where they kill cows because that smell reminds me of what it smelled like, and I can’t take it. You can blot out the visual im-

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ages, but you can never blot out the smells. Death has a very peculiar smell to it. We were involved in a lot of action. The way I remember it, it was just one long damn conflict, and it was more like trying to get the hell out of there before they shot me. We did what we had to do and got the hell out of there. I don’t know that you would call them atrocities. Did we shoot some people that we probably shouldn’t have? Yes, we did. When we took an American, it’s because we knew that this person was a traitor. Did we shoot Vietnamese unnecessarily? Yes, I think we did. Am I personally guilty of doing such a thing? Yes. I’m not proud of that. I know in my own mind that I did some things that I shouldn’t have done. There comes a time I’ll have to atone, and I’ll take whatever is coming to me for the things that I did. Years later, after it was over, something like around ’76, ’77, I started having different feelings about the whole damn war. At that point, I started questioning the validity of what the hell we had been doing. Why did we do all this? All these guys that I used to know, that were my friends when I was a kid, that I grew up with, where were they? What happened to them? All of a sudden, I saw that my carnales, my buddies, they’re all gone. Well, when you start seeing that everybody around you is gone, if you’re a thinking person, you have to begin to understand and ask yourself, “Hey, what the hell happened? What happened to the best part of my life? What happened to all those years?” Because, you know, there was a lot of years eaten up there. It wasn’t something that was just over and done with in one year. We’re talking about a whole goddamn decade—gone. What have I got to show for it? Not much. I ain’t got shit to show for it, really. I look around and I ask what happened to Temo, to Turo, and some of those others, and if I went to their houses, their mothers would look at me and say, “You used to run around with my son, with Turi.” “What happened to Turi?” “Oh, Turi died in Vietnam.” “Artemo died in San Quentin.” We really didn’t have a hell of a lot of choices.

CHAPTER THREE

A Matter of Conscience

Obed u.s. army—medical corpsman Seventh /Eighth Artillery, Headquarters Battery Base of Operations: Bien Hoa vietnam: may 1970 –july 1971 I was pretty politically aware and I felt that the Vietnam war was wrong. I was involved in several sit-ins and moratoriums. When I got drafted, my reaction was one of surprise and resentment. I didn’t want to be drafted. First of all, I’m a conscientious objector. At age eighteen, I had signed up as a conscientious objector with the draft, when you have to go in and sign up. I wasn’t opposed to serving my country, but I certainly was opposed to carrying a weapon. I didn’t feel that I had the right to take anybody’s life, and probably that had something to do with me staying in school, because I knew that was one way to avoid it. Once drafted, though, I felt that it was an opportunity for me to serve my country. I felt very patriotic and felt like that was my duty. Well, I went to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, for basic training and advanced training. Basic training in Fort Sam Houston is for people who are conscientious objectors. We all have the same basic training except for the two weeks of firearms training. I was in a whole battalion of brand-new trainees that were all conscientious objectors. We all refused to carry arms. Just in my own battalion there must have been about four hundred people. Following basic training, we went into AIT, which, if you’re a conscientious objector, one of the options you have is to become a medic. I went on and got my medic’s training, which was a ten-week course in San Antonio, and following that, I was given thirty days’ leave and then sent to Vietnam on Mother’s Day, 1970. I was scared, probably because I didn’t know what to expect. There were rumors flying all over the place, a medic’s life expectancy is fifteen

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minutes once you hit country, things like that, and that just raises the stress level immensely. My mother cried and my father has always been a rock. I think, though, that he showed his in another way, and I didn’t realize it until I came back. He aged an awful lot the year I was gone. My mother and my family were very good to me. They always wrote letters, always sent me goodie packages. I think I had good family relationships compared to some of the guys that I saw over there, and the other thing, too, is I was twenty-one. Most of the guys I was working with were all younger. In Vietnam, I got about three days of in-country RVN training, they called it, jungle training, and then two weeks of additional medic training at the Ninety-third Evac Hospital in Long Binh. While at Long Binh, we would receive casualties on a daily basis. Following that two weeks of training, I was sent to Cambodia. That was in the first mission that the United States admitted they were in Cambodia. They had already been in there. I was in there the last forty days of that operation, and I took a mail truck from Bien Hoa up into Tai Ninh by the Black Virgin Mountains—they called them Nui Ba Dinh—and then we went into Cambodia. Cambodia was a really beautiful country when we went in. There was a lot of fighting and when we came back it was just burned and wasted. The assignments for anybody in Vietnam, including medics, were done by where the need was. You fly into Vietnam into a processing unit and you hang around there for about two or three days and then you get your assignment. The people from that battalion come in and pick up their medic or their artilleryman or whoever is coming in, and they’re just replacing all the people who are leaving, so I was one of the replacements. Once you’re in as a medic, you’re assigned to Headquarters Company, and I kept thinking, “Great, I won’t ever have to leave this area.” But that’s not the case. As a medic, you’re assigned to Headquarters Company, but you are then loaned out to whatever battery needs you. So my whole time there, I was with Bravo Battery and Charlie Battery and I spent about nine months total out in the bush. It was all the way from Tai Ninh into Cambodia and back and all the way down as far as Vung Tau and the deltas and near the beach. There were about two guys from Puerto Rico and there was me. There might have been ten out of the four hundred or so COs that I saw. There were very few Chicanos. I do recall that in the artillery unit there was a lot of Mexicans and a lot of blacks, probably one third each. I was in Vietnam thirteen and a half months. I think one of the things that really sticks out in my mind is riding through the small towns

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and the Vietnamese people being very poor. I remember riding through one time and at the end of one of these little towns, there was a dead VC right in the middle of the road, and all of the vehicles would have to go around it, and I remember the body was already getting all swollen. It was, like, black and blue. I almost got sick and it scared me because I thought that could be me, that could be anybody. By the time I left Vietnam, a dead body didn’t bother me at all. It was no big deal; it was just another one. It didn’t have the same effect. I came home thinking that life meant absolutely nothing, that it wasn’t worth anything. It was so easy to see somebody dead. When you get that feeling, boy, you really start to think about your own life, and I think for me, anything that I could do to survive the year, anything that I could do to make sure that I would make it back home is fair play. Certainly, you didn’t volunteer for any kind of assignments that the captain or somebody might want. You had to be ordered to go do those things. There were drugs in Vietnam. When I was there you could see the vials laying on the floor. Maybe you walked in twelve feet, you’d see one or two vials just sitting there of white powder. I don’t know if it was heroin or what, but it was white powder. Then it was very common. You’d see the guys smoking it all the time. When I was out in the field, I didn’t sleep very many nights. I would stay up all night and go from bunker to bunker to make sure the guys were awake, because I knew that some of them smoked. One of the things the guys did to stay awake on guard duty is that they would be smoking cigarettes and they would put it between their fingers so that there was only maybe fifteen or twenty seconds before the flame would start burning—wouldn’t burn your fingers, but it would get so hot that they’d wake up again. That’s a survival type of thing, because they knew that they could get in trouble if you got overrun. You may never find out if you fell asleep. I couldn’t sleep, so I would just go from bunker to bunker every half hour or so and keep the guys company. The commanding officer would say, “That’s okay, Doc, you go out there and you do what you need to do,” and he’d let me sleep in. I never had to make formations because of that. If you’ve ever been a medic in the military, all of a sudden, you recognize that you’re one of a kind in whatever unit you’re in, and the guys themselves are real protective of the medics. There’s only one commanding officer, there’s only one lieutenant, and there’s only one medic. When we had two medics, that was a lot, but they protected us. In fact, every time we went anywhere, they usually put us right next to the officers,

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and whenever somebody would get hurt and they needed a medic, the guys never let me go alone. They knew I didn’t carry a weapon and they’d say, “Doc’s not going without me,” and three or four guys would always go. They’d get off the helicopter first and on the way back they’d get on last. They were my protection. I felt a lot of pride because those guys, that was like a volunteer thing that they were doing and, like I said, most of the time, you don’t volunteer for anything. But I soon learned that those guys really depended on the medics. They couldn’t understand when things started getting hot, they’d be down shooting, not lifting their heads, and the medic would be scrambling around getting to the people who got hurt. I don’t think I lost fear more than I shoved it away and put it somewhere where it wouldn’t bother me. I almost think that I became less afraid. It didn’t bother me so much. It was like, if you’re going to get hit, you’re going to get hit, and there’s nothing you can do about it, outside of me doing crazy things that would get me hurt. I was very conscious of that. I mean, I wasn’t that gone. I think the biggest impact on me was going into Cambodia. I say that because that was the first thing that I did in the field when I got there. Then I realized how pretty Vietnam must have been because, as we were going in, it was very lush and very green and the rice paddies were just immaculately cared for. The houses were up on stilts and painted white and it just looked like a picture. On our return, most of those houses and all of those fields were gone, burned, bombed. The people were very respectful. I remember as we would be riding by in our truck vehicles, they would actually bow in our presence. They used to come up to me and put their arms next to mine and say, “Look, same, same.” They kind of got a good feeling that somebody from the United States looked like them. I had dark skin, except that I was quite a bit taller than them. They were all about five feet and maybe a hundred pounds and I was 185 pounds and five foot ten. Personally, I had a good relationship with the people that lived there. I felt badly about the killing. I remember one incident, we had a Chu Hoi camp right next to us. Every morning, the Chu Hoi guys would go out and do their patrols. Chu Hoi means that these people were VC and they had rallied over to our side. So we have this Chu Hoi compound right next to us, and every day they go right through our compound and go out on their patrols. They come right back in the evenings. On their way back one evening, they got talking with a couple of the black guys and they got mad at each other and one of the black guys just started

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beating the hell out of one of those guys. All I can remember after that was that I was running over there and I was shoving the black guy off from on top of him and getting on top of the Vietnamese guy, and he was so afraid of me that I felt terrible. I felt like, “Oh my God, what have we done?” And then I looked at the berm and all of his friends had their weapons trained on us. The berm was the perimeter between our compound and theirs. I just slowly picked him up and I said, “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” and I grabbed him and I took him all the way back into his compound and I was thinking, “Oh shit, I’m going to get killed here.” I didn’t know what was going to happen. When I was coming back, after I had helped him, I noticed one of the guys in our compound had gotten up on a five-ton, he had quad fifties on it, and he had just swung it around and pointed it right back at them. So I knew if they started anything right there, my own people may have killed me. I thought, “Boy, what did I do all this for?” I mean, they start shooting and everybody else would have started shooting. But that certainly had an effect on me. When I was in Cambodia, there was a little kid playing out maybe a hundred meters from our compound, near a tree. We heard an explosion and somebody said, “There’s a kid hurt out there,” and I just took off running with my bag. I didn’t know if it was mined or anything, and then later I was told, “Hey, you’re crazy.” All I knew is that somebody was hurt. The other medic that was out there with us, Jim, came up and we patched him up, and Jim said, “Okay, you run back and get a dust off.” A dust off is a helicopter, and when you needed a dust off, it means you had an emergency and you needed somebody evacuated as soon as possible. The little kid lived, and that was my first experience, and I remember distinctly that day I was saying, “Man, if this kind of stuff is going to happen all the time, I don’t know if I can make it.” The very next day, on the road that we had just rode in, there was a Vietnamese kid riding his moped and he ran over a mine and he lost his legs. I remember one time we were at Black Horse. It was a fire-support base, and in the middle of the night someone discovered that a Vietnamese ARVN soldier had come into our compound and he was stealing our stuff. The sergeant caught him and held him and he woke everybody up and he let all the guys take turns beating him up. They tore all his clothes off, they tarred him, and they got their pillows and put feathers on him, and then they went over to his commanding officer and told him that he had been caught stealing. One of the things that happens is that the Vietnamese, when we were there, it was like if they stole and got away with it, it was okay. But if they got caught and they lost face, it was even go-

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ing to be worse for him. We didn’t see what happened, but whatever happened was probably far worse than what our guys had done. I didn’t like the guys doing that. I remember Jim was with me then, too. He was a medic that was about six foot four. He didn’t like it either, and he told one of the sergeants that, and they ended up getting in a fight the following day. I kept my mouth shut, but I admire Jim for having stood up and said that he felt that was wrong. I always felt like why couldn’t that have been me? But I think I had already learned how to survive. One incident that I recall and that led us to not having grenades was about an officer that was killed in Vietnam. I think there was a big trial here in California. A guy was accused of fragging. We carried the dead body from that incident. It happened in another compound, but we ended up carrying that officer, and the talk then was that the officer had found this guy smoking dope and told him, “I’m going to write you up and make sure you get court-martialed.” So the guy decided he wasn’t going to get court-martialed and the officer ended up dead. I remember I extended fifty-five days because I knew I couldn’t come home and have to spend five months spit shining my boots and making sure my uniforms would be pressed. I don’t think I would have been able to adjust to that. I extended, so when I got back in-country, they would let me out of the service, because you could get five months early out. I think Vietnam veterans learned how to handle stress without showing any emotion. So in essence, I think that may be one of the strengths, if you want to call it that. The other thing is, and I wasn’t aware of it, but I was pretty angry when I returned. I felt like being politically aware before I went, and having a lot of things confirmed for me, recognizing that people were telling me, “Go home, GI, we don’t want you here,” that resulted in a lot of resentment. I couldn’t get out of my uniform fast enough when I got home, and I went back to school immediately and I hid in school. I recognized that we didn’t belong in Vietnam, that we had no reason to be there, and now I really appreciate the fact that I was a conscientious objector because I don’t think I carry one-fourth the baggage that a lot of guys carry. I used that anger to get me through school. I kind of felt like they’d screwed me and, if at all possible, I was going to get back from the government for what they had done to me, and the next thing I do is, I even went to work for them. So in a sense, I’m still taking that anger out and it’s resulted in what I think is a good career, and I feel like I’m still doing something as a result of all that.

a matter of conscience

When I got back, I remember not telling anybody I was a veteran. In fact, I didn’t even apply for my GI benefits until my wife said, “Don’t be crazy, it belongs to you, go ahead and apply for it.” So I applied for my benefits one semester after I was already in school. I didn’t tell anybody that I was in Vietnam. If they asked me, then I’d say, “Yeah.” They’d almost pry it out of me. I think I had some real adjustment issues that I had to deal with. The issue of being a conscientious objector always bothered me, because I remember the day that I knew that life didn’t mean much over there. I’d decided while I was there that if somebody was going to kill me and I had an opportunity to grab a weapon and kill him first, that I would. I had a real hard time dealing with that, but then I recognized that’s one of the things that war does. It changes your ethics, your moral fiber. I think what I really react to in today’s world is that, when I was a youngster, it was peace, “give peace a chance,” and today all I see is a lot of Rambo films and a lot of little kids dressed in cammies, and they think of war as something that’s neat and something that you can make games out of. That’s the kind of mentality that our country will be drafting, and I would really hurt for those kids because they don’t know what they’re getting into. I’m still CO. I don’t have any weapons. I never have and I don’t think I ever will. My feelings toward war have changed. The issue, I think, about war for me is not how to fight a war or how to stay away from war. I don’t think there should be anything like that. I think some of the guys would talk about the next time we fight a war, we better declare it one. To me, that’s not the issue. I think for me now, the issue is no more war. Ricardo u.s. navy—petty officer e4 Ship Fitter USS Hancock, Gulf of Tonkin vietnam: january 1972 –november 1972 About a week after I graduated from high school, I went to live on my own. I rented an apartment, got me a job, and bought a car a week before graduation with the money I saved during the summers working in the fields. I worked in the grapes, rabanitos [radishes], zanahorias [carrots], plus I worked in restaurants. I felt that you should be a man, be your own person. In September ’69, the U.S. Selective Service announced that for 1970, there was going to be a lottery, so many numbers drawn based on

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birthdays. My birthday came out on the fifth day of January, so I was going to be drafted into the army. When I saw that, the next day I went down to the navy recruiter and I asked him if I could join. It was right after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, and you could already see a lot of things going on in this country. Probably the most famous television coverage was when that colonel shot that guy in the street of Da Nang and the blood was spurting out of his head, and that was really vivid. To realize that was so real, that it would affect me later on. So I said, “Well, I want to go into the service” because I had relatives already in the service. I had my uncles in the Korean War and World War II. I was just part of a generation going through a feeling that you have a sense of duty to your country. Anyway, I wanted to get an education, so I figured I could get the GI Bill and at least go to college, because we couldn’t pay for it as a family. So I joined the navy on December 22nd, three days before Christmas. I didn’t care if I was going to have to spend Christmas and New Year’s in boot camp. My family wanted me to go to the service. It was part of the trend that you should be in the service, that you come out a man. But I look at all that and I see what happened to my uncles. Now I know. When they came back from the Korean War, my uncle wasn’t the right person anymore. He was different. Everybody saw it, but nobody wanted to admit it. He didn’t want to admit it to himself either. My other uncle was out of World War II and having his problems, drinking a lot, talking about the good old days—never progressing from where he was at because, when he got out, he got a medical because he got hit. A bomb hit a truck and he was in the hospital for four or five months. He had a skull reconstruction, so he was never really the same, but there was always pride that they went to the service. I guess that’s what you look at, the pride behind it. That was a carryover from the fifties that I saw. We had our people around the community where I lived at, kind of a small barrio, that went into the service, and everybody really liked them, so you feel this pride, this sense of obligation. You’re almost brainwashed to believe it’s blind obedience which makes you a man. That’s what I see is still going on, the prevalence of blind obedience, that you have to do this because you signed a contract. Whether you’re morally justified in what you’re doing, that’s not the point. The point is that you signed a contract, that you said that you would do exactly what they told you to do. During some summers, I worked at the high school and they had this guy come back during the ’68 Tet offensive. He got shot pretty bad,

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and I happened to be working with him on the school farm and he was showing pictures of all these guys that didn’t come back. I mean, it was vivid pictures of mutilated bodies, burned bodies, dead animals, stuff that the Americans did also. Once you lose it, it’s a survival technique. It’s not whether you were right or you were wrong, it’s who’s left. Your survival is more important to you than the other guy’s. So, politically, I was one of these gung ho people: “Yes, let’s go do it. Kill them all. Don’t leave anybody alive. Do whatever we have to do.” This is the John Wayne attitude. Go in there, you’ll come out a hero. But nobody really sees the death, the smell of decaying bodies, because that’s what it is. War is death. But everybody glorifies it. I was in a destroyer and I got sent to San Diego for six months and then transferred to Alameda. That’s where most of the carriers were from and where I got exposed to the antiwar movement. That’s where it really hit me. In August 1970, there was a killing in Los Angeles of a reporter, Salazar, and it came out in Time magazine. There was a guy from Boston and we were reading it. To me it wasn’t really a personal issue, but it was just a newsworthy item. This guy asked me, “What do you think about this?” I said, “Well, cops are pretty bad in L.A., especially against Mexicanos, everybody knows that.” He said, “You should think about it, man. That’s going to affect you.” I just kind of shined it off because I didn’t really think about the movimiento then. I went to San Diego and there was this guy there, I think an indio from Arizona, and he was going for a conscientious objector status. I started to ask him questions and he started telling me about the war. I told him he was crazy: “You have a duty to your country.” He said, “You don’t know what’s going on over there.” So I really started thinking about it. He was just saying it was wrong. This guy had just come out from boot camp into the Naval Training Center. So we started talking, and I said, “Well, let me help you.” I started helping him write it. I guess he wanted to get out bad enough and, to me, he was sincere. Soon, another guy got in, and the three of us were writing it. Pretty soon, I started seeing that these two guys were going against a lot of friction and they started really getting bad on them. I left and I went to Alameda and during that time I started really thinking about this war. Do you remember when they were saying that the Chinese were going to come over here and take over the world, take

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over the U.S.? It is a big fear people use as a psychological control. That’s what you want to do is to kill communism. Kill them because they hated God or something. But later on, you realize that they’re people like you and I. I was involved in one antiwar demonstration when I came back, but before I went to Vietnam I was like this spectator. So I wanted to know more. I wanted to find out why so many people were against the war. I started going to these centers where people help servicemen, not to be conscientious objectors, but to be antiwar activists. I saw more Vietnam veterans questioning the war. I decided that I was going to write a conscientious objector statement. I really didn’t want to get out; I just didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I just felt that it wasn’t right. I picked up this book called The Pentagon Papers and I started reading it. Then I saw Daniel Ellsberg in the news and I started correlating things together. He comes out and talks about that we’re actually losing the war. Why continue the war if we’re going to be losing? So I went by the library and, sure enough, I started reading, and it turns out that the French brought us in there. So I started looking at the papers dating back to 1950, right after World War II, that it was already initiated. It was a pact between the U.S., the French, the British, New Zealand, the Australians, and South Koreans, and those were the people that were in the Vietnam War. What it came down to was that the British had rubber there; Michelin was one of the big companies. Shell, Standard Oil, rich companies from the U.S. were there. That’s what really turned me against the war, when I started realizing that it wasn’t an ideal that you theorized, it was a money war— a money war where young people were dying. Eighteen months after I entered the service, I started the CO process. I was told to go see a psychiatrist. They thought I was nuts; I shouldn’t be talking that way. Then I got this pain in my back, so they sent me to the naval hospital in Oakland, which is where most of the returning amputees were being stationed at from Vietnam. They were in the floor above me. I remember one of these guys in a wheelchair. He said, “Hey, Chicano.” I said, “Yeah, what’s going on, man.” We started talking and pretty soon we became friends. He said, “I got some more buddies up here.” Since I was just there for observation, they would give me Valium to calm me down. I wasn’t really a hyper person, but they would give me Valium every four hours, so I wouldn’t take them. I would keep some of them. Later, I had, like, a little stash of them. I was there thirty days, but after about two weeks, I started collecting more and I would give

a matter of conscience

them to these guys. Pues, they looked like they were in bad shape, worse than I was. They started telling me stories that you can’t make up, how one time they were in this line, about seventy Americans, and there was maybe about a hundred South Vietnamese soldiers there. Anyway, there was a charge of Vietcong at them. Well, the South Vietnamese dropped their guns and ran and who sat there and took the brunt of the punishment was the Americans. They didn’t really care whether we were there or not. To them we were just expendable. On the black market they could make money off American goods, so that really started making me think that if these people really wanted us there, they would help us. Then you start realizing that the book was right: there’s a lot of corruption in the government. These guys were questioning what they were doing there, now that their lives had been shattered. They’ve been dramatically changed forever. There’s no legs, confined to a wheelchair, no arms or one arm, one leg, and they sat there and cried. I started seeing more things that were trying to tell me what was happening there. I told them that I wanted to try to be against the war and they said, “Yeah, that’s what you should do.” I think a lot of it was perceived that if you were a conscientious objector, it was a religious attitude. It was your religion not to do this, and I didn’t want to fall into that stereotype. It was a moral issue, a conscience issue, that we have to come to grips with ourselves. I started believing that no man has the right to tell you where you should die. I don’t care what country you come from. That’s what they’re saying, “Go to Vietnam, and if you come back, great, and if you don’t, well, too bad.” After the hospital stay, I went back and I was in group sessions, a psychiatric doctor’s care. Some were there for being nonconformists, just troublemakers, and they didn’t know why these guys were like that, and so I was asked to go see this doctor aboard ship. I told him who I was and that I needed to talk to him about being a conscientious objector. He started throwing all these right-wing attitudes at me—“Coward!”—and I stood there and listened to this guy for about five minutes telling me all this derogatory, negative stuff. Then I asked him if he was done and he goes, “Yeah.” “Well, then, I still need to talk to you. I want to resolve this problem.” And he goes, “Okay, I just wanted to see your reaction.” We sat there and that’s when he told me to get in this group for psychiatric help. So I went and every time Vietnam came up, I made it an issue of bringing up corporations controlling the war.

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Basically, I was going through a chain of command. There’s a process that has to be taken: you see a psychiatrist, then you see a doctor, then you talk to the chaplain, then you talk to somebody in personnel. It’s a tedious process, but something that has to be done; you can’t go right to the top and say, “I want out,” and that’s it. I wasn’t overjumping my boundaries because I had seen the ramifications where you go directly to the captain and you pass up the division officer and people in your department and they get all offended. So you become more of a pain in the butt in that department and then you’re given the really bad jobs. But we started this process, and I then talked to the chaplain. He was a Catholic chaplain there and he wanted me to do service work for him and I didn’t want to, so he got annoyed. I felt that it was a moral issue, not a religious issue. He didn’t want to support me. I was in Japan during this whole thing. Just before we went to Vietnam, this guy from Tejas, we got together and I said, “Man, they don’t have any Mexicano music here.” They had a radio show and they had a TV station. So we go, “Yeah, man, we want to hear some Santana or something. There should be a Mexicano disc jockey putting on music like that.” So aboard ship, we went to the communications center and asked the guy in charge of the radio station, “Hey, you guys going to put on a Mexican program during the time we’re in Vietnam?” “No, we don’t have anybody. Do you want to do it?” I said, “Sure, why not, I’ll do it.” So I was a disc jockey on Sundays for an hour and a half every week. There was an officer in charge of the marines named Valdez who brought me a lot of rancheras and cumbias, and the Puerto Ricans would give me music. Then El Chicano came out with “Revolución,” which was really one of the biggest hits that I used to play all the time. When I was on the air, I said a lot of bad things about the war in Spanish: “Que se chingue la guerra” [Fuck the war] and things like that, half Spanish, half English. That officer, Valdez, heard it once and he came up to me and told me that I shouldn’t be saying that over the air. He was a Mexicano from Austin, Texas. I was walking down a passageway and he said, “I heard that comment you made the other Sunday on the radio. I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t say that.” I mean he talked to me like a human being. I said, “Okay, I won’t say it anymore.” To me, that was kind of a respect and I respected him for that. From Japan, we went to Vietnam on a carrier with the bombs and the jets. I had no choice. I figured, well, I’ll just go along and do my paperwork, whatever it takes to do this whole process.

a matter of conscience

During the time we were in Vietnam, we had what’s called ammo working parties. Here comes a ship which is nothing but bombs for the jets. This is all done at midnight, when there’s no light. Each department assigns a person to the working party. You transport the bombs, you put them in the storage places, and then they go back to Vietnam and bomb them again. This is done out in the middle of the ocean near Vietnam. They called this rendezvous, which were cargo ships carrying bombs. I got assigned to this ammo working party. My name was up so I went to the chaplain and I said, “Listen, you know how I feel about this. I want my name off that list and I know you can do it.” That was about eight o’clock in the evening. That working party was going to be at two o’clock in the morning. So he got on the phone, called the department to get me off the working list, and put somebody else on. As soon as he hung up, he said, “I shouldn’t have done that.” It’s like making a different set of rules for me than the rest of the people. I said, “Well, it’s done,” and I just walked out of his office. When I came back to the department, I was being subjected to even worse working conditions. I was unplugging bathrooms and urinals and what have you, dirty jobs that nobody really wanted, scrubbing and sanding the floors. The supervisors and couriers, that’s who was giving me the most problems. I even got the police—they’re called master of arms—that searched my locker, saying I had drugs. There was intimidation, knowing that I was doing this. We went to Hong Kong for one of our R&Rs, after being two months out on what they called the line, North Vietnam, seeing the jets take off, land, fill them up with bombs, take off again. We were the carriers. The jets and the bombers were on our boats. There were about six carriers out there. It was the Kitty Hawk, the Enterprise, the Ranger, the Constellation, the Hornet, and I was on the Hancock. During this time, I’m doing my book work for my next classification. The test came up and the officer was a lieutenant, a gabacho from Tejas, and he told me I wasn’t going to take the test. He didn’t feel that I was patriotic enough. I said, “Well, I passed, I have all my paperwork in. I have an assignment saying I’m going to take the test.” He became furious. He was going to go to the captain; he was going to make sure that I was going to be taken off that list, because of my antiwar attitude. So five days later, the list came out, my name was on it, and I took the test. Well, three days later, the results came back and I was one of the first ones to make the grade. He got worse. Now I was going to be a petty officer in his department. They were going to make

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me really do the worst jobs. Now they’re getting all these guys against me. I’m bringing the morale of the department down. In this department, there was about twenty guys, and most of them are like me, what they call an E3, E2 and below. What they were going to make us do is that if we didn’t sand on our hands and knees and paint a certain section of the ship, we weren’t going to go to liberty because it was my fault. So that was one of the tactics. The guys started getting upset with me. What happened is it got worse. All these guys, about six of us, were supposed to sand the floor, so I throw mine on the floor, the sandpaper, and I started using my foot. They wanted me on my hands and knees and I wouldn’t do it. They said, “Forget it, get out of here.” They couldn’t really do nothing to me. They told everybody to get out of there. They were getting so upset that, if they would have hit me or we would have gotten into a confrontation, that would have been even worse for them. They were provoking it, but they didn’t know how I would react to a situation of violence. Sometimes we were in Vietnam two months at a time bombing, what they called a campaign. We’d go up to the Gulf of Tonkin, which was North Vietnam, where most of the violence was being done from. You could see five miles down the ocean and you could see another carrier doing the same thing. One time we were out there four months on the ship. Out there just bombing, that was our job. In 1972, that’s the year they started using the bombs with the cameras in the front, where the pilot could control it, like a little Nintendo joystick and direct a hit. The last time I was in Vietnam was in November of ’72. We were gone eleven months. We left in January, right after New Year’s. We were on our way home from Vietnam and my CO got approved. The thing is, I still felt that I did make a commitment to do my four years, but I didn’t want to be involved in the Vietnam War. We were in Vietnam, one of those days out in the middle of the ocean, and I got called to the captain. They said that they had approved my conscientious-objector status, but that we’re still in Vietnam. What were they going to do about it? One thing, I wouldn’t be on ammo working parties, and the office that was trying to stop me from getting an E4 got told by the captain that I was going to make my rate. I felt vindicated. I mean, I went through the biggest bureaucracy and actually accomplished what I started out to do with as many problems as I had in between. To me, that signifies a moral victory in the end. I came out a different person. I wasn’t this naïve boy anymore that came

a matter of conscience

in with the attitude, that’s the way life is. You come out with a different perspective. People said that we never had nuclear bombs aboard our ship, but actually we did. When we went to Japan, we had to take them off before we got there, in the middle of the ocean, unloaded from our ship to another ship. It was a very secretive operation. Imagine two football fields put together, end to end and maybe about thirty feet high, that’s how big the inside of the ship was. The only thing that I used to look back at were those guys at the hospital. That still lives with me in terms of seeing what they’ve gone through and never wanting to see my son in that condition. But if he wanted to go to the service, I would want him to go as an officer, because you don’t see that many Mexicano officers in the service, except for that marine. I would say, “I don’t want you to go as an enlisted personnel; go as an officer, get an education, do something for yourself.” I really couldn’t talk about this to anybody, about the attitude that I had in the service, the conscientious objector. That is my personal life that I had to go through. It was something I had to live with, and it’s nothing that I’m going to brag about and tell the whole world that I was a conscientious objector, because I don’t feel that way. Everybody has their own right to live their lives. To kill somebody takes something away from you. A lot of people don’t want to talk about that, because they disassociate themselves from the process of feeling remorse. Their job was to kill that person, and whether that person had a family background, had a life, was a worker, or whatever he was, there had to be a commitment from him also to do what he had to do. The things that are going on in Central America, we’re calling them murderers and insurgents and revolutions and counterrevolutions. For somebody to pick up a gun, a rifle and to commit themselves to a revolution or to a counter-revolution has to take an understanding that a lot of them are human beings that come from families; they have a wife and kids. I wouldn’t want to go away from home to go to war unless there was a national need for it. To pick up a rifle and go to war and do revolutionary things—I couldn’t associate with that. I don’t believe in brainwashing, because some people are prone to that. Young people are very impressionable, like my son. We were talking about how I felt about the war, and he’s telling me that there were people in his high school that want to go to war and really want to fight and kill, and he says they don’t understand; they’re brainwashed for some reason.

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Right after we came back from Vietnam, as we’re coming into the pier in Alameda, a friend of mine made a big giant poster on the ship, “U.S. out of Vietnam,” and we draped it over when we were near the pier. You ever see television news coverage, when a ship is coming in, you have all these families and relatives out there waiting? Well, we dropped it in front of them, right over the ship so everybody could see it. The banner said, “The USS Hancock, Sailors against the War.” Vietnam accomplished the truth that we were an arrogant nation. We’re a group of people that are easily led into believing that we’re doing it for the good of the cause. In terms of reality, it’s the corporations that entice us to do it, because we’re protecting American interests— that’s the bottom issue. It’s not that we’re protecting lives; we’re protecting American interests, which is material things, and that’s what we propagate in this country and that’s what we’re doing in Central America right now. We got big business down there, American subsidiaries that we need to protect, and whether we kill those people there or not, that’s irrelevant. We have to protect our American interests. But they use us, our ideas, our motivation to be free from communism, use it against us: If you don’t do this, you’re a Communist. I’d rather not forget Vietnam in terms of making sure that things like this don’t happen again. What we did to those poor people there, we poisoned their land, we increased the mortality rate. Whether we liked it or not, we were the ones that created this problem. Now we don’t want to acknowledge it. We want to say, “We didn’t do that; the war did that.” Nobody wants to take responsibility. I feel that we all have to be responsible for our actions; that’s a part of growing up. That’s what America has to do: be responsible for their actions. Frank conscientious objector In 1969, right after the first draft that they were using the lottery numbers, I applied for conscientious objector status. I think I was nineteen. I was a college student and working, too. At that time, I had just started at San Francisco State. I knew about Vietnam. Actually, I had known about Vietnam in my senior year of high school, because the majority of my friends that I used to hang around with dropped out of high school. The military had an offer that two or three friends could join the service and if they joined, then they would go through boot camp together. They had asked me to be part of this buddy system and I said no, that I wanted to see if

a matter of conscience

I could finish school. There was, like, six of us in this group of friends that were always together, and three of them had already had some kind of experience in having to decide about the military. We had talked about it, although we really weren’t politically aware. We really didn’t know why the United States was in Vietnam. We just knew that we had to go and the decision would have to be made. Since I started community college, I got a student deferment through the one year, and then the second year I was in college, all the student deferments were canceled. That’s when the lottery came, and so I had to really decide what I wanted to do in regards to being drafted or not. It turned out that in the lottery there was two ways that you could get a number. The first was under the birthday that came out. September 14th, my birthday, was the lottery number that was picked first, and so I was number 1 on the lottery. And under the last name, they had two lotteries that you could be selected. It was under G and I was number 2, so I knew that I would be one of the first to get drafted. It was like we all went into mourning, because we were a group of students, and one friend had a television set and so we all crowded into the room. It was like the lotto now, and we’re all sitting there to see if our number came out, and the first thing they picked out was my birthday. They just said, “Wow, that means you’re going to have to go.” We had talked about it, whether we wanted to go or not and what it meant to be patriotic. Were we going to be patriotic by going to fight, or were we going to be patriotic by staying here and not, because we had all been involved in social issues regarding us as Chicanos. Having taken courses in Mexican American /Chicano history, we knew that we were very much a part of the United States, yet we never had access to the institutions. We were a handful of us at the university and knowing the high drop-out rates, the housing issues, these were important to all of us, and we really were trying to do something about that. We thought, “Where are we going to be able to do the most good?” And so that made me think about what am I going to do about getting drafted. Am I going to just let it go, or am I going to resist? I thought, at that time, that the only two options were to just go if they call you or to leave the country. So I thought maybe I should go to Mexico, but I really didn’t have close relatives that I knew well enough that I could just up and go to Mexico. All of my family came from Texas and no one really in Mexico, so it was hard for me to say, “Yeah, I’m going to up and go to Guadalajara to my uncle’s house.” I just didn’t think that it was the right thing to do, either.

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We talked about what our options were and we took the whole scenario of what we would do if we were to go into the military. One guy said, “Well, if they call me, I’m just going to go.” And I said, “Well, I don’t think I really want to go.” See, by that time, I think that we were politically aware enough to begin to question why are we in Vietnam? Why is the United States fighting this country? I had also seen an article Prof. Ralph Guzmán had written. He had started to put a list of casualties together from the different Chicano communities and found that all these Chicanos were getting killed. So my friends said, “What are you going to do? Are you going to go to Mexico?” And so then we took that and sort of did a scenario together discussing it and they were supportive. But after taking it through that scenario, I decided that wouldn’t be the way that I wanted to go. Well, right after that, you know, I sort of became famous, since everybody found out I was number 1 in the lottery. There was a black student who had decided not to go, and he heard about my getting number 1, so he told me, “You know you have several options: you can go to Canada or, in your case, Mexico, but really, Canada is where everybody is going, or you can just start harassing the draft board and start sending them articles and tell them you’re part of the revolution.” He said that that’s what he had done, that he had started writing letters to them that the U.S. is an imperialist country and that all they do is oppress Third World people, that they’re part of the big international military machine, and that they’re taking over the world and that he disagreed with them. He kept sending them articles of the Black Panther Party and their stance against the military. I really didn’t think that was really where I fit. Then he said, “There’s the CO and as a CO you have to feel that you’re philosophically against war.” And I said I really was against war, so I figured maybe that’s the way I should go. That’s when I decided to look into that. I started asking people if they knew if anyone had been a CO, a conscientious objector, and I had a hard time at first finding people. Then I ran into a number of people that were COs. They were all Anglos. I met a person who was a draft counselor and I began to ask more questions there, and the counselor thought that I was a CO, and so we started looking together into this. She told me that, although some of my reasons were political, I hadn’t taken it that far back or looked at it deep enough to really understand it. She asked me how I had grown up, from a religious perspective, and I said, “As a Catholic.” I was never an altar boy or anything like that, but all my personal beliefs and a lot of my val-

a matter of conscience

ues have come from having had religious training in the Catholic religion and I thought, “Well, maybe it is true, maybe my sense of what’s right and wrong comes from not just a political motivation but a religious motivation,” and so I decided to pursue that a little further. At that time, my girlfriend, who is now my wife, had a roommate who was a teacher and we talked about wanting to become a CO, and she happened to know someone who had just gotten a CO status and was a friend of hers. She said that he had gotten some advice from a priest, and so she agreed to call the priest and have him over for dinner so that we could talk about what it meant to be a CO. So we had dinner and we just talked about it in general without getting into detail, but we made an appointment so that I could go and talk to him more in depth. He felt that there was enough basis in my beliefs to become a CO and that I should pursue it. By the way, there hadn’t been any Chicanos go through the Santa Cruz County Draft Board that had ever gotten a CO status; I think I was the only one. So the more I talked to people that knew about the CO status, the more I began to understand it. I did meet with the priest and I found out some really interesting things about being a CO, from only a religious perspective versus from a political perspective. I learned about being able to separate those two and that a lot of my political motivations, or the reason that I had certain perspectives, were because of some of my religious beliefs. I didn’t know if I qualified, because being against the Vietnam War only was not good enough of a reason for you to become a conscientious objector. You had to be against all wars. I found out from the priest that he really understood those differences, and so he began to ask me questions that were probably the best training for me and helped me to understand the religious part of it more. I got several draft notices to report for the physical, so I went through the physical, and the next step after the physical was to get drafted. Around the same time I was asked to report for the physical, I applied for the CO with the help of my draft counselor, who helped me write it up, although I put together all the thoughts myself. It ended up being a seven-page document that I put together on my religious beliefs. I really determined that I was against war in general and not just Vietnam, after thinking about it and questioning myself and deciding that I really didn’t want to fight, and having to come to grips with whether I was being a good American or a good citizen. I felt that just as much work needed to be done here to change attitudes about racism and about

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equality, that that was the way I was going to do it, and that I would do it as a CO instead of going to go fight people that I didn’t know, for a reason that I didn’t know. I found out later that I could have had people come with me to the draft board. As a matter of fact, I drove myself on my motorcycle to the draft board and I probably should have had friends with me or somebody that was supportive, but I just felt that it was something personal that I had to do myself. We were sort of made to feel that you were trying to dodge the draft or that you were doing something wrong, and I really tried to keep it to myself as much as possible. But I kept questioning myself. It made me feel like I was being unpatriotic, but I didn’t see any business that the United States had over there. I was from a small town, and all these Mexicanos were getting sent to Vietnam and people didn’t know why we were over there. Then later, we began to see that the U.S. had companies there and they had financial interests and that’s what they were protecting, yet that’s never talked about, even in the movies that you see on Vietnam. Now, one person, I guess this was already after I had gotten my CO, I told him what I believed about why we shouldn’t be in Vietnam. He was on leave and he made a deal to go back one more year to serve and do another tour of duty. He was so homesick and he wanted to come home and spend Christmas with his family, he agreed he would serve one more year in Vietnam if they would let him come home. During that time, when he was home for Christmas, we all got together and we were out cruising and drinking—that’s what you do in small towns—and we were talking about this and he kept saying, “You’re a draft dodger.” I told him about us being like them, as farmworkers, and I said, “When they’re working out in the fields, do they look just like your father, who’s a farmworker, and your little brother being out in the field for us to have to go out to villages and shoot them, not knowing if they are in fact our enemy and not knowing why we’re there? I mean, they’re just like us.” That brought tears to his eyes because he was thinking about one of the missions that he went on that someone shot a small kid. I said, “What about that kid that was shot? What if he was your little brother Mario who happened to be out in the fields with your father working? So other people come into your area where you’ve always worked, where you’ve always lived, and then begin shooting people up and not knowing why.” I’m sure he thought about it. Then we just talked about something else, because he had already made his decision and it was too late for him to be able to do anything about it.

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With the draft board, it happened that there was one person who was Chicano who happened to be on that draft board. He had been an officer in the service. So when I came in he said, “Hola,” to me in Spanish and said that he had read my statement and that they just needed to ask me a few questions. It was very cordial, but as he introduced all of the members of the board, all of them were Anglo and military people who had had some kind of high rank, Captain So and So, Lieutenant So and So. They asked me first of all if I knew what a CO was, and I told them yes I did. They said the document I had sent them on the question was very well written and very well thought out and they asked me if I had written it myself or if somebody had written it for me, and I told them that I had written it myself. I had people edit it, but that all the thoughts that had gone into it were mine. I really worked on it and spent hours and hours doing it and redoing it until I felt comfortable with it and so it really was my own effort. It was sort of hard for them to believe it, because there weren’t too many of us who had gone to college and actually do that well in writing. They didn’t expect it from a Mexicano for sure. I mean, they were even surprised that I could handle myself with their questions. One question that I remember, for example, was about if I didn’t want to be a CO that would serve noncombat capacity like a medic or something. I told them if a person is against war, then part of your job as a member is to help individuals who are shot while in combat. If I saw a person from the other side who had been shot, I would have to help whatever individual needed it in order to keep a human person alive and that I couldn’t see myself helping heal people so that they could kill more people. It was just something that was against my religious principles, and I said that I wouldn’t want to fight in that capacity. They were making the argument that helping people is helping people and that if I believe so much in humanity, then I would be saving a life if I was in a medical capacity. I said, “Well, it would still contribute to other people getting killed.” So they tried to find ways of finding a crack in my argument for nonviolence. So they asked me, “Okay, let’s go to another situation. What if you and your mother were walking down a street and some guy pulled a knife out at you? What would you do?” Although I probably would do whatever needed to be done, that didn’t mean to me that I still wasn’t a conscientious objector. One of the things I learned from the priest, for example, anytime they asked me a question that was situational, was to say, “It’s a hypothetical situation and nobody knows how

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they’re going to react, but in this situation what I probably would do is get between them. I would rather have them harm me than harm my mother.” Then they used another situation. They said, “What if there was another situation like during the time of Hitler and they came and attacked us here in the United States? Would you fight then?” I used the same argument and I said, “No, I wouldn’t.” They said, “How can you say that you wouldn’t fight against Hitler?” “Well, I don’t know if I would or wouldn’t, but the way that I feel now, I wouldn’t. I’m against all wars, not just whether it’s Hitler or anybody else, and I would try to protect my loved ones, but not using anything that uses violence. There’s other ways to protest, and I would do it in a way that’s nonviolent, but not directly fighting or being part of that whole effort to kill people.” So that was a real hard one, of course. Who’s going to be for Hitler and against your own mother? What they were trying to do was get me to be physical so that they could use that argument: “Well, see, you would fight if you had to, and in a war, it’s a situation where you either have to fight or die.” I didn’t have to put myself in that situation, and it’s not likely that we’re going to have another Hitler in the next generation, and if someone is going to harm you when you’re with your mother, there are ways to talk people out of it, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be with violence. I got forced into fights when I was a kid, but as an adult, I have never had to do anything physically violent against another individual and I have been involved in situations and have been able to get out of it without having to use violence at all. It sounds like they were real mild, but when they were asking the questions and I answered back, they got really loud. They tried to offend me so that I would answer in a way where I would get angry and lose my temper, so they were threatening and just really rude. I managed to maintain myself and keep perspective of how I was answering my questions. They would scream at me, and one guy kept saying, “You mean you wouldn’t protect your mother? You wouldn’t pick up a rock or something and try to hit this guy who’s trying to harm your mother? What if he’s trying to rape your sister?” I mean, just trying to get the worst situation, and he was trying to get me as angry as I could and I just said, “No, I wouldn’t. I’d get between them, and if they’re going to harm anyone, they’re going to harm me.” “Well, that’s not the way it happens in real life.”

a matter of conscience

I told him calmly, “You don’t know if that’s going to happen.” So at the end they said, “Okay, that’s all the questions for now,” because they were frustrated with me. So I knew at that time that I had been successful. I finally received a letter in the mail that told me that I had been granted CO status. My mom was glad I had decided to become a CO because she really didn’t want me to go into the military at all. My older brother was in the service. He went right before the big push to send people to Vietnam and he was lucky enough to go right before, guess it must have been ’64 or ’65. Vietnam was taking place, but it wasn’t like during the time when a whole lot of U.S. troops were going in, so he did his tour in Germany and, already having had one son in the service, she knew she didn’t want me to go to war. She was always very religious and through her being a very peaceful kind of woman, that’s the influence I got from her. From a little boy, I remember her saying fighting is not the answer, killing is not good, and that stuck with me. I have never been sorry. So many years after Vietnam, I think back and I’ve never even thought twice about having made the decision I made. I think I made the right decision and I think I was right for not going and for standing up for my religious and social and political beliefs. I think that as an individual, I was able to find out something about myself that others didn’t get a chance to. Like some of the people that were there fighting and who actually had to do the killing come back and say, “You know, this was all senseless.” I was able to foresee that before it actually happened, and so I didn’t have to go through the experience to feel that I didn’t belong there. I still feel that we shouldn’t have been there. I don’t think that I was a coward, because I was actually protesting against the war. I participated in moratoriums and in trying to put pressure on the president and the administration during that time to get out of Vietnam and not be an aggressive country who’s fighting and killing people for a company’s personal gains and not really having any regard for people and the sovereignty of their countries. How can I feel myself to be a coward when I refuse to participate in something that’s wrong? I’ll never change my mind to that, just like I don’t feel it was right when the United States was aiding the Contras in Latin America. They shouldn’t be doing that, because they’re violating the sovereignty of those countries who have the right to organize and determine their own destiny. That’s something that I learned at the time, when I felt that we were having to fight against the system here because those were the

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same kind of rights that we weren’t getting as a community, that you could have change without having to be violent. I don’t feel resentful to those people who ended up going to fight in Vietnam. In a sense, I really respect that they went because they really believed that they were helping. That’s the fine line, see. I believed that I was helping the United States and all the people as Mexicanos by staying here and protesting and not being complacent. For almost the same reason, they went because they felt they were fighting for the United States against this enemy. So they were doing it personally for the right reason, but politically, they were doing it for the wrong reason, because I don’t think they really knew politically what it meant. I don’t feel like I made a mistake and if they called me draft dodger now, well, they can call me that. I was refusing to do something because it was wrong. It wasn’t because I was dodging anything. That’s why I didn’t go to Canada or Mexico, because I decided I should do it here and I should do it in the right way. I think my ideas have become more clear as to what war means. In some cases, violent revolutions are inevitable, because they happen and because many times when there’s conflict, people don’t know anything else to do. I don’t have to agree with that, but I understand that. I feel that there are ways to accomplish change, although it’s slow change, without having to result to all-out war. What fighting and killing do is promote more fighting and killing. It doesn’t promote any peace. Anyone who believes in democracy should let countries who are going through changes or conflict deal with those changes within, but it seems like the big military powers like the United States, what do they do, they put in millions of dollars to somehow take control of the political situation. They even fund people, usually the military people, who are really the ones doing the repression. So they can give them the equipment and the military know-how in order to keep the people suppressed rather than to let the people themselves decide which way they should go in governing their own country. I don’t know of one situation where war has really done any good, and so I really don’t believe that dealing with conflict in that way will solve anything. I guess the closest that I’ve seen, where there has been a violent revolution that has led to betterment of a country, has been Cuba, and they have their problems, too. They don’t think that people that have communist ideals can be peaceful and loving people and want what’s best for their family and their country and have that same fervor that some Americans have about being patriotic to their country. Others have the same patriotism that we

a matter of conscience

have in the United States, but the United States and the American people can’t put themselves in the place of another person in another country and see what they see. Whatever interest the United States is involved in, if it’s going to be good for the U.S. to repress other people, that’s what we’ll do. We supported the Contras and we supported Pinochet from Chile. The United States is very consistent about helping the people who are repressing the most. My wife and I are raising our sons as conscientious objectors, whether they know that they are or not. We don’t allow them to play with guns. We tell them that killing is wrong and we don’t want them to kill even little animals. Some people think, well, it’s okay for us to go shoot a bird with a BB gun—we just don’t allow them to do that. We have never seen a Rambo movie, and if they have, it’s because somebody else let them see it. We don’t let them see anything that’s violent or degrading to women or different ethnic groups, degrading to anyone. We’re not perfect, because it’s hard to control what the media does, but I’m hoping that if they grow up to have to make a decision, that they at least have gotten the base already for them to do it. I can’t make the decisions for them, but I think what we can do is teach them those values that we believe in. For example, we decided to go to a rally for César Chávez, who was on a hunger strike, because we wanted them to be able to see that there is someone who has really high principles and has put himself through a fast so that they would understand that there are other ways to resolve conflict. When we first migrated from Texas to California, we lived in a house that was a duplex. I had a really close friend and we lived next to each other from junior high until high school. He ended up dropping out of high school. By that time, we moved to other places, but we were still good friends, and he ended up getting killed in Vietnam. He went in at the beginning of my senior year and before I graduated, he had already gotten killed. I was working really late one night and I came home about three o’clock in the morning and was kind of winding down, so I turned on the TV and I saw that they were doing something on the Vietnam Memorial. I had been really interested in the whole issue of Vietnam and being against it, because so many people were killed and how the veterans from the Vietnam era had been treated really different than all other wars. I was interested to see why, after almost twenty years later, there was finally a monument. It happened that it was in my old hometown, Watsonville. When I saw that, I thought, “Wow, almost twenty years af-

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ter, and they’re finally doing some kind of commemoration for these people that have been dead for years and years.” The first name that they showed on the monument was my friend and my neighbor and his name was Alaniz, and the next one was another person that I knew, Benítez. I mean, it brought tears to my eyes because here’s people that I knew and they had gotten killed and there was no reason. I think about it: what was the reason they had to go and I didn’t? Well, they ended up dropping out of school because the educational system wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do and the majority of the Chicanos at that time were dropping out. The only other option they had was to go into the military, and they died because they didn’t have any other options. There was no choice for them to be able to do anything except go into the military, and I felt it was senseless. It was senseless then and it’s senseless now. Although I felt proud to see that a monument was up and he was being commemorated, they were commemorating something that really shouldn’t have been.

CHAPTER FOUR

Psychological and Medical Issues in the Aftermath of Vietnam

Ray u.s. army—e5 Helicopter Door Gunner 116th Assault Helicopter Company, Twenty-fifth Infantry Division Base of Operations: Cu Chi vietnam: july 1968–january 1970 I did a tour and a half in Vietnam, from 1968 to about 1970. Before I left Vietnam, I reenlisted and I put in my contract that I was to take photography school. I never got it. When I got back from Vietnam, the fort that I was at was very heavy into the protest movement. I was in a grunt outfit and most of the guys that were there were all Vietnam veterans. There was heavy antiwar sentiment and the military was trying to have control of this, but at that time, the My Lai massacre case was still going through trial. Lieutenant Calley and the three grunts that were being tried for the My Lai massacre were in my outfit, so it was very media oriented. A lot of things were happening there in the fort and there was a lot of dissension among the grunts. At that time, I started to look at the war from another perspective, that it was no longer a thing to look forward to. The antiwar movement against Vietnam was very strong all over the country. The thing that was happening to my outfit was that a lot of these soldiers were going AWOL; the military couldn’t control them. They were totally anti-Vietnam. I was still a believer of the war and that what we were doing was correct, but I started to listen to ideas other than the ones I had before I came from Vietnam to the States. I started to speak out and because I was supposed to be an example, since I had so many medals and so many years in the military, they decided the best thing for me to do was to go back to Vietnam. I just said, “No, I want to get out.” The first time I went in the service, in 1956, I was seventeen years old. I was just a young kid, a school dropout. I only had my mother. My

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father left for Mexico, took two brothers, and left me here with my mother and six sisters. The second time I went in the service, I was twentythree years old. All this time I was looking for war, because in 1956, the Hungarian crisis started. In 1961, there was the Cuban crisis where they had the blockade after President Kennedy found all those missiles. The third time I went in was in ’67. I was literally homeless. I could have gone back home probably and stayed with my sisters, but I decided I wanted to see if I could make it. I lived in the streets. I would eat out of the garbage dispensers that are in the alleys. I was in a very dire situation. Anyhow, it lasted for about four months. One day I was walking down the street where 11th and Broadway is in Los Angeles and I saw the old army recruiting station and I got an idea. I said, “Maybe I can get back in the military.” I went in to the recruiter and, I mean, I was literally not dressed for the occasion. I had a big beard, long hair. I was a total bum. When I walked in there, he just didn’t believe that I was asking him all these questions about the military. I guess he felt sorry for me and said, “Let me check your file and I’ll call you in two or three weeks.” Well, a month went by and nothing happened, so I go by the recruiting station again and sure enough, the guy says, “Hey, I got your papers and if you want to get in the military, we can get you in.” I went back into the military and I went to Fort Ord, California. The ironic thing about this is that every time I got out of the military and went back into the military, I had to go back through basic training. So in reality, the military trained me so good that they even gave me an opportunity to take basic training three times and to take AIT three times. So I was a fucking killer with all that knowledge. I was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for my airborne basic. After jumping two times and seeing three guys get Mae West, I said, “Fuck this place.” “Mae West” means they got killed. When they landed, their legs went up through their bodies and ended up in their shoulders. I didn’t want that. They sent me to Korea to a line outfit in the DMZ, an artillery unit. After spending seven or eight months in Korea, I asked for reassignment to Vietnam. That was in July 1968, when I landed in Ton Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam. When I arrived in Vietnam, I went to Bien Hoa, where they put me as a truck driver, but in this case, it was a pontoon that we have to take to different parts of Vietnam to set them up for the crossing of troops and tanks over blown-up bridges. They’re makeshift bridges that are

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

done very fast so they won’t stop the flow of war material going back to the troops. I wanted to see action, so I volunteered for door gunner and I was sent to the Twelfth Aviation Group in Long Binh. At the Twentieth Engineers—that’s the outfit I was in—they found out that I was volunteering for door gunner and they thought I was crazy. It had the highest death rate, but you can die anywhere, so what’s the difference? I ended up with the 116th Assault Helicopter Company. When I first got there, we had a barrage of incoming. That was my baptism under fire. We threw all our duffel bags and left everything there and started running for cover. I wasn’t scared at all. It was my adrenaline; I was fascinated with the idea of finally being in the war. After spending about nine months with my outfit as a door gunner, I was seeing that the group that I was with were getting killed and wounded. It was getting closer to me and the missions were getting scary. We were in situations that were clandestine and I volunteered for missions that were classified secret. We were sent many times to the Vietcong- and NVA-controlled areas, where the massing up of the troops was. This was near Tai Ninh city and there was a lot of heavy fighting there. We would take soldiers that were specialized to kill and immobilize the Vietcong and the NVA. They were SEALs, a very special group of navy personnel. I did it for kicks. It was nothing for me to pull the trigger. Nothing. The 116th was a real renegade outfit, a real individualistic, proud outfit. The camaraderie within the unit was always very high because the door gunners all knew that death was instant at any time; any of us could get zapped and we were. We were getting killed, little by little. Some disappeared from their positions in the door. We would insert grunts into areas, hot landing zones, and sometimes we looked back and the door gunners were not there. We went back but they were gone. Some were shot out, right flat-ass killed. I mean, the helmet that I had, had creases of the bullet holes that came through. The pipe that held my gun had holes where they hit. I had two of what they called “chicken plates.” One was a piece of steel that would cover my chest and the other I put down on my ass if they shot when you went into a hot landing zone. The Vietcong had a unique system of disappearing. I mean, these guys were so goddamn good. They used to get bamboo and shoot these rockets through the bamboo instead of having the mortar around the pipe, but then they’d disappear. As we got our intelligence, little by little, we started to weed out the tunnels. I mean, there were tunnels all over the place and we would get hit, I’d say, maybe three times a week, sometimes at night. We’d send out the helicopters and we’d send out the Jolly

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Green Giant, bombard the shit out of them, and still the next night they were back out there again. It was crazy. I mean, everybody was killing everybody. We were killing them and they were killing us and the mind can only go so far and you become very dangerous, even to yourself. After almost nine months of being there, I started to get scared. I guess it finally hit me that something was wrong, because all the killing was constant. I mean, twenty-four hours a day you were in a state of combat. Right from the beginning, the excitement of Vietnam, the excitement of killing was, in a sense, part of me. I finally felt that I was doing something good, that maybe because I failed educationally, since I was literally a bum and they helped me, I must help the government. I was trained very well to kill with no feeling at all. I want to elaborate a little more, because certain things happened. In one of my trips, I landed in Saigon from Cu Chi. In Saigon, there’s a street where all kinds of bars are. There was nothing like the Saigon of the ’60s. That’s where the excitement was. Anyhow, at one of the bars, I met this woman and I made a proposal to her and she went along with it. So we go out by the Saigon River and we ended up in a house where she lived. As we went in the house, right away, I looked to see if I’m in danger or not. In the room, I saw a bamboo curtain that led to probably the kitchen and I saw a bed where I went directly with her. I saw a table over here and a couple of chairs. Near the bed there was another little table, but a lower table. I wanted to have sex with this woman. I paid her the money and I started to take care of business. She ends up in bed, takes her clothes off, and then I take my clothes off. I go to put my clothes up by the little table and I put my .38 there. I don’t trust nobody. I was making love to her and right away I felt funny. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I don’t take drugs, so I’m very keen to things that happen to me. That’s why I’m still alive. I noticed certain things about her. She kept my head like this, like the horses have the blinders. I knew right there and then that something was coming down and I knew if I didn’t make a move something was going to happen to me. Well, right away it clicked on me: it’s a trap. I looked back to where the curtain was and I knew then that there was a figure there because I saw the curtain move and I said, “They’re going to kill me.” I threw off her hands like that, I grabbed her neck and I went for my .38 and as soon as I went like that, a guy with a machete came after me. I shot him point-blank and he came down near me. By then, another one came at me and I was holding her, she was moving, and I aimed at this guy. The bullet went through his brain and ended lodging by the

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bamboo curtain. Then I was so pissed off that I opened her mouth and I fired twice with my .38. I killed her. I went very calmly, put my pants on, my shoes, put my shirt on, and opened the front door to make sure that nobody was coming at me. I went to the back and checked—it was nighttime then—but I disappeared out into the night, and up to this day, nobody knows about this. What’s the difference? They were assassins. I mean, when you’re a soldier, regardless of what army you belong to, regardless if you’re in the U.S. Army or in the Russian army, when the time comes for you to make that final decision of putting that one pound of pressure, you’ll either do it or, if you don’t do it, you’ll end up dead, period. Anyway, that was one of my worst experiences. That and the overrun of Cu Chi. We got overrun two or three times and we killed Vietcong that were trying to come in through the wire. We also had to stay overnight outside what they called firebases that had been overrun and we had to fight hand-to-hand combat. There were twenty-five or thirty people that got killed. It was in the Tet offensive of 1969, when they were after our helicopters. My outfit was the worst of its kind for being shot at, because we were what you called an assault company. We were always under fire. The one thing I did see many times, we would get calls to go to Saigon and we would pick up people in the intelligence, maybe a major or a captain. They would have two or three Vietcong with them, their eyes banded and their hands in back of their backs, and we would fly them up to about two thousand, three thousand feet in the air and as they’d take the blindfolds off of these guys, the Vietnamese officer would be asking these Vietcong questions, and if they didn’t answer the correct way or what they wanted to know, they would just drop these guys, I mean, literally, get them and just dump them out of the helicopter. I refused to be a door gunner anymore because of my hearing and I was sent to Da Nang, three hundred and some miles away to the Eightieth Group. The farther north you were, the closer to death you were. Being in Cu Chi, which is a big military base and they hit it, can you imagine a little base with a few soldiers? We got hit constantly. I was hurting a lot, so I eventually went through a medical evaluation and they said no more flying. I got 20 percent disability. I had a good friend of mine that died and it was the most coincidental way of finding out how he died. At the beginning of my second tour, I ended up in Bien Hoa. There I met three guys that I had basic training with. When I was in basic training, I kept telling the guys that

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going to Vietnam was not that easy, that they’re going to have to learn not to be joking so much because at basic these guys really didn’t care. They were eighteen years old, some seventeen years old, and you can’t tell a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid nothing. Anyway, these three guys were going back to the States after being there a year, and one of them said, “Don’t I know you? Weren’t you in Fort Ord?” I looked at the guy and I said, “Yes, I remember you.” Then he said, “Do you remember what you said to us? We should have listened, but we learned the hard way. Too many of our friends got killed. We made it, but most of the guys that were in that outfit in basic training got killed.” He was telling me that a guy named Robert, a Chicano from California, nice kid, and I found out that he stepped on a mine and got killed. In 1970, when I got back from Vietnam, I met my wife and we got married. As soon as we got married, I thought that I finally came home and I was finally safe and I didn’t have to worry about nothing. I was in an insane asylum where all the locos were let loose and I finally cured myself. I’m talking about Vietnam, because it was an insane asylum. And I’ll tell you because I worked in an asylum in a state hospital— when you are disabled in the mind, you are sick. Well, here, the sickness is not in the mind, but in the whole idea of communism versus capitalism. The strong technological world of the United States against a country that is totally back in the Stone Age. Think about that in perspective. We go to a country like Vietnam and say, “Okay, they fucked us up in the Gulf of Tonkin. We will make a resolution. The resolution is that we’ll go back and kick their ass.” Anyway, I see myself married to my second wife and I have my apartment. I’m safe, I’m home. I go right back to work. I’m saying that it’ll all work out, but in reality by the time my first daughter was born, I’d say about two or three months after, I started having problems with my body. Something was awfully wrong. A monster was inside of me and I didn’t know what it was. It went on for a while and I kept telling my wife, “I don’t understand why I’m having these feelings. Something funny is going on with my body.” Now I know what it was. Agent Orange is derived from an herbicide called dioxin, which was used in Vietnam extensively in the areas that had foliage. But to have this chemical, you now add another chemical that is more powerful. Now you’re getting a reaction. Now this chemical becomes a big fucking monster and it is one of the most poisonous things that the human brain can derive. They shot thousands and thousands of pounds of this stuff out in the countryside where they

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would open the roads, so that the Vietcong would not ambush the Americans or the flow of the war material. Well, I had very strange symptoms in my body. I could not eat. My body was having literally big rashes all over my body and I didn’t know why. I mean, it was just very unnatural and I always kept telling my wife, “What’s wrong? Why am I having these things?” I went to a dermatologist and they just said that my body was poisoned. Nobody knew what was going on and, as time went by, I started getting worse and worse, big old rashes on my head, on my private parts, on my toes, on my fingers, everywhere, they were just coming out, and I was fidgety, I was going bananas. I would go see the doctor, the doctor didn’t know what was going on. I went to the VA, the VA didn’t do a thing. I was thirtyone by then. After a couple of years, another thing started to pop into the picture. I would say it was a double whammy. I couldn’t sleep. Where I laid, my sheets were yellow from the poison that came out, and it came out every night and I would have these weird sweats every night. The flashbacks of the war started to creep in on me. The post-delayed-stress disorder started to take place and the Agent Orange, too. I was literally getting killed by these two problems that I was having, and my wife and I started to question the fact that maybe my children were going to be messed up. One of my daughters has a thyroid problem and my boy and my other two girls also experienced the breakout of these rashes. It’s a strange thing that we have experienced, and the VA never did anything for me. They were assholes about it. Anyway, that went on for years and years, and I went through all kinds of doctors and the doctors didn’t know. They didn’t understand this. Little by little as the years went by, more and more veterans were bringing out the same story. I mean, literally thousands of them were making the same statements I was making, so something was going on. The government just did not want to respond to it. Well, you know the case about Agent Orange? We won the case, but the only way you can collect money is if you’re totally disabled. Agent Orange is a dioxin, it’s fatal. I mean, I know I’m dying. You have to remember that while you were in Vietnam, regardless of where you were, you had to drink the water. You had to wash up. One guy said he remembers it’d be like this yellowish substance and they used to think it was a bug killer, and he said, “And you’re the bug. I thought I was a man.” Then he goes, “We used to rub it all over our skin because there were all these gnats and we were told it’s going to kill the bugs.”

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I have proof of what happened to me because I shot a film when I was in Vietnam. Anyway, not only did I get the rash, I also got things in my head and I was going crazy. I’ll tell you one incident. I went to do this one pool with this guy who was also a cement finisher, but he was real lazy. Anyway, we did what they call a spa and the pool. I did the whole fucking pool by myself and the asshole was still in the spa trying to figure it out. Well, I finished the pool. I mean, it took six hours and then I got back and he was still there smoking a cigarette. I said, “Hey, come on, asshole, you got to finish this or else we’re going to be here until midnight.” And he said, “Fuck you,” and he should have never said that. I went to my car and I got my knife, opened it up, and I went over to where he was and then I said, “What did you say?” And he said, “Fuck you.” I showed him the knife and his eyes just bugged out. And he looked at me and he couldn’t run, he was trying to get up. I go right inside the spa, which he just finished making that one part of it, I went in there and I grabbed him and I said, “Look, I’m going to cut your fuckin’ balls off, asshole!” He started crying, “No, don’t kill me,” and all this shit. I said, “Don’t ever say anything to me like that!” “I won’t, I won’t, please.” And he was crying and it dawned on me, “What the fuck am I doing? I’m not back in Vietnam. What’s wrong with you, pendejo?” So I just dumped him. I walked out of this brand new spa. I went into my car and I sat there for a few minutes and I just quit. I mean, that’s how short-tempered I was and that’s all it took to set me off. I couldn’t hold a job. Boom, I was set off for no reason, even in my car or even with my wife or my children. Oh, it was horrible. I mean, it was really a bad time. My wife is a Mexicana that would stick by the husband no matter what, and it’s been a roller-coaster ride for her. She has taken all the abuse that I dish out at her and it went on until a few years ago. My marriage was always hanging by a thread. I’m a very dominating person and she literally would control me by using extraordinary patience. Now she doesn’t. Now she lashes out at me and she won’t take no shit from me. But I guess she realized that a lot of it was not in my control. We always say, well, it was the drugs or it was the liquor or whatever. Now she keeps reminding me that I fucked up and she wants everything that I took from her, and so that’s why I buy her the rings that

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

I buy her. I buy her all kinds of gold, maybe to make up for the injustice that I put her through. I have learned to try to have control, but I’m still working at it. My wife is the most wonderful person that could ever live to have to deal with me, because I was very fucked up and I’m mellowing out now, little by little. I almost hurt my wife several times because, like I said, during this time of what’s happening with Agent Orange, I was also getting post-delayed-stress flashbacks, where I would wake up and was in Vietnam trying to kill somebody, and my wife wakes me up because I was delirious. I finally had to go see the VA. Then I found out that there were agencies that were helping veterans and, little by little, fifteen years later, I started to know more about Agent Orange and also post-delayed-stress disorder. I went to a vet center and I met a doctor who is my psychiatrist. He’s the only one that I can say I trust because he’s another combat veteran and he understands veterans. He took my case because he said I was a walking time bomb. I was very sick and he said that if I did not get help, that I’d probably commit suicide. But I really would not commit suicide; I’d probably kill somebody or get killed. I went to this doctor and out of that several things have happened. One is that I understand more about Agent Orange. I know more about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and I’m being helped. I’m getting medical help and I’m getting psychological help. They are very good to me now. The VA has made a 360-degree turn on this. Now, the other is that a combination of Agent Orange and PTSD has given me a 20 percent disability. The fact is that’s not enough. Now I’m seeking more help, because something new came into the picture. I’m having a nervous disorder in my left side of my face. My eye is twitching constantly. The last time I went to the VA, they said that it’s permanent damage that I have in the brain because of stress that I had all these years. It’s also affecting my speech pattern, the left side of my mouth, all of my left side here in my ear, and inside of my head. For a long time, I bottled it up and just my wife and I talked. Now I can talk to anybody about my experience. I went to an unjust war, but I’m very proud to be a veteran and I’m proud to be an American. This is our home. This is our country. But as a veterano, I would say don’t jump because there is a war in Afghanistan, there’s a war in Nicaragua, the marines are the machos—

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think about it. I’d rather be educated and then make my decision. That’s the key, because education gives you the time to say, well, I want to go this way or I want to go that way. Without it, you are always going to end up in the bottom of the barrel, like a lot of Chicanos who went to Vietnam. They got the infantry and they’re dead. They’re all out there on the Wall. Lupe u.s. marine corps—lance corporal e3 Machine Gunner Second Battalion, Third Marine Division, and Third Battalion, First Marine Division Base of Operations: Da Nang vietnam: january 1969 –february 1970 At the time I entered the service, I was in my senior year. During my junior year, the recruiters came by and they were saying, “When you graduate you’re going to get a diploma in one hand and in the other hand you’ll get a draft notice. This is your opportunity to join something you want to do, so you can pick your own career.” It sounded real nice and I thought about it, and, finally, during my senior year, I said, “I’ll just go with it.” There were educational benefits and all kinds of opportunities. I wasn’t oblivious to everything. I knew there was a war going on, and I saw it all the time in the news. I think my turning point was The Green Berets. I went to a drive-in and The Green Berets came on, I think with John Wayne. Something really inspired me and I said, “Hey, I’ve got to find out what this is all about!” and that did it. My first day that I arrived in boot camp, I was told that I was going to be a tunnel rat and a machine gunner. A machine gunner is a support weapon. You fire through support when you get hit, you provide cover fire. You may have a shorter life expectancy in combat because you’re the first they try to knock off. That was my main job. My other job was tunnel rat. That was to search tunnels and to take prisoners, gather all the information available because a lot of them went underground. The tunnels were sort of tight, but I was short, five foot three, and 118 pounds. I was the right size for it, so I fit right into the tunnels and I was able to search and destroy. After you do it for a while, it just doesn’t mean anything anymore. But the first tunnel, I remember I could hear my heartbeat—it was bouncing off the walls. I was terrified that they would discover me and know that I was there. I kept going, “Man, I’m not going to make it,”

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

because I was trying to stop my heartbeat. I was holding my breath. Nothing, man, nothing seemed to stop it. It’s just like it was amplified so loud that I said, “Oh, my God, a big old band coming down!” That was really my main concern, not the booby traps, just my heartbeat. I arrived in Da Nang, Vietnam. Our rear was in Quang Tri, which was about nineteen miles from the DMZ or so, right up there. When we first arrived, I remember we were in the landing strip and they were trying to get us all out of the plane to line us up and send us to a particular area when these big sirens went off and we were getting rocketed. It was mass confusion. We didn’t know where the bunkers were at and we were just running all over the place. We finally got into these bunkers, but that was my first experience and I was more confused than scared. My life changed very shortly after spending time in Vietnam. It was unfortunate, I guess, but we made contact about two weeks after I was there. After a while, I didn’t care about my life, didn’t care about living. When I first got there I was concerned about, am I going to make it? My buddy next to me here, is he going to make it? I spent all my time in the bush—it means out in the jungles. They put me in this helicopter and they took me out. I was going to the bush to take over a machine gun. The first time I was on guard, it was like, if you go to sleep, we’ll blow your brains out if they don’t. So it was that kind of training right off the bat. I didn’t sleep much the first days at all. The thing I saw in the movie The Green Berets, and when I got over there, was a completely different feeling. Seeing bodies at Quang Tri at the MASH unit they had there, bleeding and gunshot wounds, I mean, just blood all over the place and guys dying, it was like, hey, this is real and these guys don’t get up anymore. It was a big awakening. I was brought up to respect people, and when you have to fire into a village and there are women firing back at you, when you see four- or five-year-old kids coming up and blowing themselves up and taking another marine’s life away, that really made an impact. One of my worst experiences in Vietnam was being in a firefight where you’re outnumbered thirty, forty to one. We ran into an ambush, a regiment; I lost an awful lot of men. I was wounded and I’m fortunate to be alive. I was a squad leader, in charge of the guns, and we had four rookies that only had about a week in-country. We had lost some men, so we were short and they gave us this bunch of green people. That was their first night ambush and they were making an awful lot of noise and I had to change positions in the formation to keep these guys from making noise. When I did that within a short span, hell broke loose and, as

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a result, the guy in front of me got a big hole right through the middle of his gut. The guy behind me, one of the new recruits that I was trying to quiet down, was blown completely in half. I was just thrown all over the place. The next thing I know, there was all kinds of machine gun fire going on and I don’t remember really being hit. I think I was so busy firing that, after a while, I just ran out of ammo, and I kept on looking for weapons trying to fire. It wasn’t until they were on top of us that I realized I had one shell left. I had taken a .45 caliber shell and saved it and put it in my pocket. There’s a saying that when you start firing your .45, you might as well kiss your ass good-bye because you’re gone, and that’s what happened. I ran out of ammo and I loaded my shell for my own self; that was my shell. I wasn’t going to be taken prisoner, but I didn’t realize how bad I was wounded. I thought it was sweat, but it was blood. I had blood all over me and within a split second there was another explosion. I don’t remember nothing until the next day, when somebody was trying to put me in a body bag. I guess the hit must have thrown one of the bodies near me and I had their body debris all over me and obviously I was in such bad shape that they tried to bag me. They thought I was dead. I remember waking up, sensing something and, somewhere deep in the back of my mind, I thought it was the enemy and I didn’t want to open my eyes. I didn’t want to see, but there’s a smell to the bags. I bagged them before, so I knew what the smell was, so when I smelled the bag I said, “Oh, shoot, that’s a body bag.” I opened my eyes and there was this big black guy and he tried to put me in the bag. I remember just seeing his face and he didn’t know what the heck to do. He hollered for the corpsman and then one of the corpsmen came up and decided to go through all the bodies. One of the things that happened, too, right before that, was that the radioman was the one that got hit pretty bad—he was gone. When I got to the radio and tried to turn him over, I put my hand right through him, because he had a hole through him. I finally flipped him over and I got to the radio. I called the fire missions on the position that we were at. I don’t know if the rounds that started coming in were ours, theirs, or who in the heck they were. We knew we were in trouble and we knew we were all going to be goners, so we might as well take some of them. There was another squad coming up behind us, trying to give us some support because we couldn’t handle all of them. So they were firing what they call the M-79; it’s like a little hand grenade, and they were firing

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

that into our position. That was to keep them from being on top of us. So it could have been a combination. I don’t know why I was left. It’s just a miracle of God. I’ve never found out about any other survivors from that group. I saw what the Vietcong did and so from then on I didn’t think whether there was some legal rights to it or whether they were right or wrong. It didn’t matter. I saw a real young, I would say five-year-old, kid blow up my best friend. He was wrapped with a sack of charge explosives around his body. When he got up to him, he pulled the pin, blew himself up, and blew my buddy up. So I mean, this is a child. Their culture was to be raised as guerillas from a very young age. There was nobody that was safe. There was no such people as you’re friendly, you’re not friendly. I mean, to me they were all the same. Most of my encounters was with the NVA, the North Vietnamese regulars. The only time we came close to the VC or what looked like VC, who in the heck knows what they were, was in villages during the day operations. By the time I returned from Vietnam, I had made a 180-degree turn. I was not the same person at all. When I came back, I was just one angry person. If somebody looked at me, literally, I would just blow up. It was just like an explosive inside me. When I came back, my family didn’t understand me. To everyone it was such a big thing to welcome me home. We were a poor family, but my family was really happy. They threw this big party out in the country for me and everybody they could invite that possibly knew me was there, and I must have stayed about fifteen, twenty minutes and I got the hell out of there. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t be around people. I couldn’t stand loud noises. I couldn’t sleep in the house. I lived out in the country and I slept in the grape orchards, in the almond orchards, on the back lawn, and I always had a weapon. My family kept insisting that I sleep indoors and I didn’t want to. Finally, I couldn’t sleep in my room, so I slept in the living room. My mom would cry. I mean, she was hurt, so to make her happy I would lay down in the living room and I’d sleep there in the wintertime. One day, my dad came and woke me up and I about nearly killed him. That’s because he touched me. Yeah, the pattern for being crazy was there. My family honestly thought I was crazy. Even though they didn’t realize it, it was the effects from the war. Eventually, I ended up going to the rescue mission. I went into the Chinatown area and I ended up being a bum for about eighteen months total. I was out in the railroad tracks. I was eating off garbage cans, I didn’t care. If I found a bottle in the road, I would drink it.

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I was in that area when this old man came by one day and offered me a free meal. I had never known this guy, but he took me in, fed me, cleaned me up. I hadn’t made any contact with my family for seven, eight months, maybe more. They didn’t know where I was at. I just took off. I told him who I was and he happened to have met my dad one time, out there at the fairgrounds, during one of those big Mexican ceremonies. He was from the same background in Mexico, so they sort of knew each other. So then he made contact with my dad and my dad made contact with one of my uncles. My uncle came down to see me and we sort of went back into a mutual understanding, but it was a slow process of getting out. Within that time that I came out of there, I went looking for a buddy of mine. We went in together, but he went AWOL and I went overseas. But as a result of looking for my buddy, I ran across my wife. I knew my wife when she was younger. We started talking and after a real short relationship we got married. But the reason I married her was I needed somebody to lean on, to keep me going, so I used my wife as a crutch and I’ve shared that with her. I think a lot of my anger had to do with being hurt that I was pulled from Vietnam, that I wanted to go back. As a matter of fact, when I came back I was saying, “How can I go back?” And they looked at me and said, “You can’t go back.” I think it was just that I’d become like a father, I guess, since the other guys that were below me were young. Once you’re in-country, as you’re there longer, you’re able to spot things, you’re able to protect people. It’s, like, this is my family and if anybody screws up down the road, if I have to, I will blow them away. They know that, so they listen to you. I work with a lot of veterans now and I help them get their benefits. I help them fight the government. There’s a lot of problems, but I think there’s a difference between having problems and having them in the right perspective. I have problems, yeah, but I have them sort of in the right perspective. I know that if I go into a theater, I’ll have these feelings come over me, but I know where they’re coming from. If I see a Vietnamese, my first instinct is to kill him, but I realize if I do that, it’s going to be something else. This is the difference between now and then. I still have a lot of problems with sleeping. I sleep two or three hours at a time and then I’m awake for a long time. I can go to bed at ten o’clock and be up by twelve, watch TV until four o’clock in the morning. Go to sleep, get up at seven and I’m ready to go. To me that is very normal, but that is not so-called normal with other people.

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

There are some experiences that I won’t touch on, but the only reason that I can talk about some of my experiences in Vietnam now is because I’ve had treatment. I’ve been through the vet centers and I’ve had eight and a half months of continuous drilling just to get to where I’m at. I was unable to function. I attempted three suicides and I think, after a while, you don’t know what to do. The hell with it, you just let it go. It’s like nothing really matters anymore. Telling myself I needed help was probably one of the hardest things for me to do. I was brought up, if you go see a psychiatrist, you’re crazy. So my family had been saying, “You’re crazy.” All this time I was saying, “No, I’m not, no I’m not.” But then for me to go see a psychiatrist, hey, I’ve got to be crazy. When I saw a psychiatrist and he told me, “You’re not crazy. What you’re suffering is real. This really happened to you at such a young age. You had responsibilities that were beyond what a normal human can take, and because of those reasons you’re having the problems you’re having,” that was good to know. Group therapy was really helpful, dealing with all the vets who had similar problems in a controlled environment. I’ve had encounters with groups of veterans who get together in a bar and talk. Well, that’s not going to help. That didn’t help me any because then you’re just dealing with the problem on the surface. But through the vet center at Menlo Park, that’s a special program for Vietnam combat veterans. There’s a lot of influences that the war has done to me. The war made me very mature. I think I grew up so fast. I hate to see children get hurt or suffer in any way. I think I screwed up when I first came back. I really didn’t see my first daughter until she was four years old. I mean, I missed her when she was a baby. My second daughter I did the same thing. I pushed my family away. I’m a loner and I was happy that way, but a change came over me when we had our new baby. All of a sudden, I wanted closeness. I needed that feeling that I’ve been missing for all these years. Before, I didn’t want to get close because of the fear that if I get close to somebody, he gets blown away, and as soon as that happens it hurts so much. Well, I don’t care anymore; it’s like I need that closeness. Vietnam took that away, but those feelings are coming back. I still have a problem with Agent Orange. In Vietnam, I didn’t know it was Agent Orange. I thought that it was bug juice, that it was for the mosquitoes. So when they said, “Let’s spray with bug juice,” you jumped up and you tried to bathe with the sucker. I mean, those mos-

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quitoes will eat you alive. But my second daughter was born with defects and I strongly suspect Agent Orange. They can’t find what’s wrong with her. I break out in severe rashes and my hands peel. They checked me for Agent Orange and they say that my organs are of an old man. They told me, “You’re normal as a Vietnam veteran, but you’re not normal as a person who wasn’t in Vietnam,” meaning that your organs are old like everybody else that was in Vietnam, but not the same as those who weren’t. So I guess I am a normal Vietnam veteran if that’s how the government states it on the record. They’re denying anything about birth defects. The only thing that they do recognize, and this is to get the Vietnam veteran off their backs, is chloracne, any skin condition. Normally, if a guy has a skin condition, those serve as a connection to Agent Orange. I enlisted for two years, and I figured that, hey, after two years I’m through and I’ve done my duty for the government. I’ve earned my citizenship. If somebody ever calls me a wetback, I’ll be able to fire back at them. But when I came back, I couldn’t get a job. They asked, “Do you have a high school diploma?” “No.” “Do you have a GED?” “No.” “What do you want to do?” “Hey, I know how to set ambushes, I know how to kill people.” “Well, there’s no job like this, I’m sorry.” I sure in heck wouldn’t be in favor of anyone in my family going through what I did. I would do anything that I could to avoid that. Just look at it. In Vietnam, where were all the people with money? Vietnam, if you were poor, you were there. Before I fight again, I would like to know more of what I’m fighting for this time. They got me when I was young and stupid, but they ain’t going to get me when I’m older and wiser. David u.s. army—e4 Infantry, River Rat Forty-seventh Battalion, Ninth Infantry Division Base of Operations: Mekong Delta vietnam: july 1968–august 1969 After you finish boot camp, they read out your MOS, in essence, that means your assignment, and mine was infantry. I remember waiting for my name to be called and I saw all the people, how they were somewhat happy when the infantry was announced to them. I remember one guy, a Chicano, his MOS was a cook and he about cried. I couldn’t under-

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

stand that and I wanted to trade with him and they wouldn’t let me. He was kind of gung ho and he wanted to get out there and fight with everybody else. At the time, I noticed there was a lot of minorities that were drafted. As a matter of fact, when I was drafted, I believe it was April of ’68, it was the largest draft ever for Vietnam. I forget how many thousands, but I was amazed at all the minorities, blacks, Chicanos, Indians. I know my family was all worried. I remember as I was leaving the house, the last phone call I got was from a tía [aunt] that said she’d build an altar and put velas [candles] out for me and she’d pray every day that I was gone and she’d have my picture right next to Kennedy’s. I felt that was an honor at the time. They gave me my rosary and prayed and they all escorted me to the airport. There was a lot of fear and uncertainty. By then people started listening more to the news and what was going on in Vietnam. My first fifty-two days, I was with the Ninth Infantry Division of the Mekong Delta. We were on the perimeter of the big base camp. We’d get some incoming every now and then, but I was praying that I would stay there for my duration because it wasn’t bad. But it got bad after a while. A couple of times, we got some wrong coordinates and found out that we hit some of our own people. Although it wasn’t our fault, that really made us feel bad. I remember one time, out in the field, B-52 bombers were going over and they were hitting us. I remember big pieces of shrapnel—you could hear them knocking down trees like toothpicks—and we were right in the middle of it, and I don’t know how many of ours got hit. Right away, they were radioed in and then they stopped, but it was kind of late; we had lost two guys. There was a lot of times when people go nuts and start shooting and someone will get hit. I remember when we got off the plane, the first thing that I noticed was the smell. I felt the heat and the smell of strong, heavy humidity. I would see all these other vets there, some getting ready to come back, and they looked so old and here we were, looking so young. From then on, the smell never left, the feeling never left. I didn’t believe I was ever going to come back again. I guess it’s like going somewhere and being lost in the forest or something, and you kind of get that feeling that you may never come back again. And to think that we had to stay there a whole year. It felt like the odds were against us sometimes, against me, anyway, knowing I was going into infantry and, for a couple of days, I was just having bad vibes. I went to see a priest and it helped in terms of I

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prayed and I gave it to the Lord. I made some promises that I would be good forever, just let me survive this. I remember some incidents that took place. I don’t know how I survived it and I just had this feeling that he had something for me to do, that my time wasn’t ready, and I guess Vietnam strengthened my religious beliefs. One thing that I’ve gained from Vietnam is I trust myself. I don’t have to prove myself to no man. I’ve already proven myself to me. I know who I am, I know how I would react in a life-and-death situation. I’ve been under those conditions and I can take whatever life has to give. That was something, I guess. In the whole ordeal, you have a chance to look at things and see who you really are. Where I was at we didn’t fight the regular North Vietnamese army; we fought Vietcong. As a matter of fact, we never saw NVA. We lost most of our guys through booby traps and snipers. The North Vietnamese army had uniforms, guns, strategies, and that was like fighting during World War II, in a sense. The Vietcong were usually people that lived there in South Vietnam and they were recruited by North Vietnamese to fight with them. In the daytime they’re civilians; in the nighttime they’re the enemy, and they look just like the people we’re there to protect. It’s kind of ironic because during the eight, nine months that I was in the field, we probably got into maybe four actual firefights, where we can actually get down like you see in the movies. You get some revenge and get some of it out of your system. For six of those eight months, we go out for three days and three nights, come back in for one night. We never came back missing less than three guys, up to eighteen sometimes. We started out with 250 and when we got out, there was about thirtyfive of us. We wouldn’t get reinforcements or anything like that because we didn’t do the complete year, and that’s because we were deactivated. That was the first troop withdrawal in Vietnam. There’s times when I wish I would have died because it got so bad. The biggest part about losing guys is you don’t want to get too friendly. You know some of them are going to die, and it hurts too much to get tight with somebody and know that this is going to happen to them. I got out of the service in ’70. I got married in December of ’71. I talked to my wife about Vietnam one time and she made a statement that—she didn’t intentionally try to hurt me or anything—but she said the real heroes were those that fought not to go and those of us that went were like cowards. I knew what she was saying because I was an activist after I got out, and had I not been tapado [ignorant], I would have

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fought going in, also. But that really hurt me and, as a result, we never talked about it for about ten years. As a matter of fact, my wife and I were having some problems and we started going to see a counselor. I was seeing a counselor for about three or four months and he wanted to talk about Nam one time and I told him I’d rather not. He told me it was up to me, but he thought maybe it might help me. I had never talked about it before that and it really had an adverse impact and it affected me for several days. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I cried; I just couldn’t get it out of my system. It was like it was happening all over again and I was scared. I contemplated suicide. Then they interviewed me for a documentary and we got to talking about it. I’ve given presentations in quite a few different places, and there’s times when I get emotional, but that brings it out little by little and I’ve got a lot of it out of my system. I feel very fortunate because I know there’s others that have similar experiences that still have it bottled up. I lost some close friends. I just don’t like thinking about it. I’m afraid that if I talk about it, I’m going to start remembering some stuff and I’m going to have these dreams, and it affects me for more than just one or two days and I don’t really like that feeling. But I learned from that one counseling session I had that after I talked about it, it got easier and easier, and now there’s some things that I can tell that are pretty descriptive of the type of war that it was. Let me tell you about a couple of times. First of all, the officers, puros gabachos, only had to spend two months out in the field. Sometimes only one month, just enough time to get that combat infantry badge. And so there was a constant turnover of officers, and the grunts like us, we had to spend the whole time out in the field unless you got hit. One time we had been out in the field already for maybe three months. We came down this little mountain, so everything was flat. We have a lot of jungle; we have dikes; we mark the path, but they’re full of booby traps. A couple of dikes away, I saw some Vietnamese and I said in Vietnamese, “Stop!” And this guy stopped, looked at me, and started to run. So I got my M-16 ready and I was getting ready to let him have it and the officer said, “No, if you get him, that means we’re going to have to go after him.” “But that’s what we’re supposed to do.” This guy was green and he’s giving us orders and running the platoon. Twenty minutes later, we get ambushed and I lost five friends. My friends are dead and I have to live with it every day. I think about it a

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lot. I’d known what I should have done, pushed this dude away and just taken care of business; that was my job. I didn’t do it, he told me not to, and twenty minutes later we get ambushed and, oh my God, it’s all my fault. It didn’t have to happen. If I would have got him, we would have been prepared, but it didn’t work like that. There were two blacks in our squad and one was so wiped out. One of his eyeballs was hanging. He didn’t have a nose or an ear. You learn from your mistakes, and I said I’m not going to do that again. A few months later we get another lieutenant and a similar thing happens. I shoot a Vietcong and he’s laying down, he’s dying, and the lieutenant walks over and says, “Okay, shoot him, waste him.” I said, “Wait a minute, I can’t do that. It’s not self-defense anymore. The guy’s down, he’s not dead.” “I’m giving you a direct order. I want you to waste him right now.” I said, “No, I’m not going to do it.” He said, “This is the third time I’m going to tell you. I want you to waste him.” I called the guys over and I said, “Look, this is what’s happening.” And he said, “Oh, no, I want you to put him out of his misery. Can’t you see the guy’s hurting?” I said, “No, that’s not my job to do that. The guy’s down. He’s a man.” And I knew that as much as I wanted to, that wasn’t me and I couldn’t do it. They choppered him off and he talked, and as a result of his talking, we found out what to anticipate. So that was like from one extreme to the next. Lieutenants were useless. After they had been there a month or so, then they know what’s going on a little bit and they’re more equipped to give orders, but we had to train so many of them it was senseless. I also went through five different captains during that nine-month period; some never went out in the field. I remember one first sergeant that went out just one time and he blew it. He panicked and he started shouting at night and we got hit and he never went back. He got choppered out that night. We captured a lot of Vietcong and we’d take them to the choppers and the choppers would interrogate them. I hear the stories where they kick out a few and the other ones begin to talk. I’m sure that happened, but I never really witnessed it. What I did witness, and this is something that I have this constant conflict with myself, because I’ve seen our own guys cut off ears, put cigarettes out in their face, cut off fingers, pull skin off of them. They were alive, after we would capture them. I saw some guys with necklaces with parts of fingers or thumbs or ears.

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

At the time, I was angry for two reasons. We had lost a lot of guys, and there was no way of getting any revenge. It’s not like the typical firefight—you just lose guys through booby traps or snipers, and then, boom, you don’t hear anything for a long time. You go a little ways longer and then another day or so, and you get a couple more. Or you’re walking through the village and they’re not supposed to be firing, but they fire at you. They hit a couple of guys and you can’t fire back because the rules say you’re not supposed to—there’s innocent people, there’s children and women. You lose guys and there’s nothing you can do about it. You get all this frustration building up. Some guys can’t handle that and so they go and they get their revenge one way or another. I was angry because I wanted to do it. I lost some good friends, but I couldn’t do it. I was angry at myself because I couldn’t do it and I was angry because I couldn’t stop the other guys from doing it. But these guys were my friends and out in the field these are the kind of guys we want to have around us, too, because they’re poco locos [a little crazy], but when they were doing that, I know I should have stopped them. That eats away at me a lot because I was confused. What do I do? Help them or stop them? And I didn’t do anything. The primary reason is because I understood what was going on a little bit more. It didn’t take long to understand that we had no business there. You start talking to guys that have been there and the feeling was mutual with everybody. We had no business there. There was a few gung ho assholes and they didn’t mind it. There’s a lot of people who had good jobs there that didn’t mind it. But the infantry, right away, I mean, you’d start talking to them and you would find out it’s not a win situation. I mean, if we wanted to fight, we should go out there and just kick the shit out of them and keep going to North Vietnam, take care of business, but that’s not what we were doing. We were playing games and it was senseless. It eats at you because how can the government do this to us? Right away you see the disparity between minorities and gabachos—who has the cushion jobs and who has the field, and in the field that’s as low as you can go. You’re just stuck and entertainers go to Vietnam and we never get to see them. It’s just the quirks and jerks, as we called them, used to get the entertainment, and we used to have to protect them. I never had any bitterness about that because no me tocó [I didn’t get the chance]. The bitterness I have is the politicians. Their kids don’t have to go out there. There was a few good times in Vietnam. The good times outnumbered the bad. It’s just that the bad was pure hell. The good times, we’d

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have our little parties, get drunk and tell dirty jokes and play cards. There was some crazy experiences out in the field. This one guy, a good friend of mine, he had this thing about passing gas, and one time he did it out in the field and gave our position away, boom, boom, boom. It wasn’t funny at the time, but afterwards we laughed about it. Who’d think that that would give our position away? I met a lot of good people, and you get real close to them and you get kind of intimate about our families, and you find that, no matter where they’re from, we’re all the same. It was good, probably the only time in my life where I experienced nondiscrimination. It’s kind of like, no matter who you were, or what color, out in the field you were all brothers and that was great. It wasn’t like that when we got out. I remember after I got back on ship, the MPs, they were looking for me. I got in trouble because I hadn’t written to my parents in a couple of months and they were concerned. The MPs told me, “You got people at home that want to know if you’re alive.” I didn’t know what to say in any letters, still here in the shit, going through hell, what do I say? It was two months that I didn’t write to anybody. I just signed off. While I was there, I had a bad case of ulcers and I had gall bladder problems. As a matter of fact, I had some gall bladder attacks while I was in Vietnam, in the field, and they choppered me in. When I went to the hospital, they told me it was all in my head. They took X rays and they sent me right back out in the field. I got to thinking, “Shit, what the heck is this? I know I’m not a doctor, but I’m not stupid.” I know it was hurting, it would buckle me under. They’re very painful and you got these quacks telling you that it’s all in your head. Even though there was a doctor on the ship that we were on, he was a fat-ass drunk. You know, he was so overweight that he had to have help to get on the tango boats. Drunk all the time. After I got out of Nam, they sent us home for thirty days, and every week that I was home, I had at least one attack a week. I went to Castle Air Force Base and I went to the veterans’ hospital, and they couldn’t do anything because I was on inactive duty. So well, shit, I don’t know what the hell’s the matter now. I mean, all I know is that I was in constant pain for hours, sometimes it went for a couple of days and the following week I had another one. Well, my mother insisted that I go to her doctor. The first visit they told me I had gallstones. They said I had a couple of options. I could either go in the hospital here right away or I could go in Hawaii and they could take care of me there. That’s where I was going to be stationed. I decided to go to Hawaii. Little did I know.

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

I had my X rays with me and they didn’t do a damn thing. It wasn’t until I had my last attack and that was in, I guess, around Christmastime, and they got so bad that the stones just broke loose and they got caught in the ducts and I had yellow jaundice. I was in constant pain for over two weeks and they accused me of being on drugs and the needle. I never used the needle in my life. They wouldn’t believe me. Those military quacks didn’t do anything for two weeks and I almost died. Well, they finally operated on me and they were astounded that I felt relieved. I was exposed to Agent Orange, too. I remember them spraying it in the fields and I was going right into that shit. When I got out, I used to get rashes really bad and I’d go in the VA hospital and they used to tell me that it was some type of athlete’s foot. I said, “Hey, man, on my back, on my chest, on my private parts, look at this shit.” I mean, big old scabs, three, four times a year sometimes. I got tired of them telling me it’s all in my head. My wife and I were married ten years before we had our first baby. Prior to that we lost three, in the seventh month on two of them and one, almost there. I’d go to the VA hospital and they’d say there’s nothing wrong with you and it wasn’t until the Wall, the film, and everything else that I’ve been putting two and two together and realizing, hey, that maybe it is Agent Orange. I heard about the lawsuit and I got involved right away. They had hearings in San Francisco, so I went with another friend of mine. For two days, I heard one guy right after the other saying the same thing I was saying about the rash, the numbness in my fingers, losing the babies, and then the babies that did survive all the problems that they were having. I had no idea, and then they made the relationship to Agent Orange. Well, that’s what it was. I still have some things in me that I still have to get out. One of these days I’m going to do it, I don’t know when. Also, I realize the effect that it had on my wife. I didn’t realize it at the time, but when we lost those babies, what’s going on through her head. I considered that the war has also affected her and, in spite of my nightmares, in spite of my waking up in sweats and the way I get when I go through one of these episodes, she stuck with me. I think I lucked out with our relationship. I got a beautiful wife and I learned to appreciate her a lot more. When I first got out of Nam, it took me awhile to get back to the family. I have a sister that was in the army and she’s the one that straightened me out. I remember I couldn’t talk to anybody until finally she sat me down and started talking about the family and the way we were raised. I started communicating again with my brothers and it took a

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little while, but it happened, it came back again. But that was a real problem because I wasn’t all here. There’s a lot of parts missing from you, it seemed like, and it lasted awhile. I’d think about those guys that would still be here if I would have done what I was supposed to do. One of the things that used to happen, we used to go out in the field and, a lot of times, we’d be out there a half a day or so and these little babysans would come and join us and the shit would come down and they’d still be around. I don’t know where in the hell they came from or why. They were always picking up stuff after us and doing little errands. We’d leave and they had to stay there, and that bothered me a lot. I think a lot about the babies and that’s something that people have asked me. There’s been a lot of Vietnamese people come to the United States and people are saying, “Oh, they’re getting all this money and don’t you just hate it?” Hell, no! When I was in Nam, I always prayed that, God, some of these people would be able to come to our country and live some decent lives and have an opportunity like we have. The guilt feelings come from some of the mistakes that were made in Nam. Some of the things that you can’t change anymore and the guilt feelings about killing, about the way we felt and some of the guys that didn’t come back and we’re here. I drank a lot. I used to get loaded every day because I was afraid to go to sleep. I remember the nightmares and I didn’t want to dream. These nightmares were like being in hell and going through it all over again, about battles and some things that weren’t even what was going on in Nam. I remember this one nightmare, they wanted me to go back because I had experience and I said, “No, I already went.” They were pulling me back, pulling me back, and some nights, I was able to escape because I was loaded and I refused the dream. I remember one Veterans Day, I had this urge to go out and have a drink, a shot of something. I was doing some work around the yard and I had this strong urge to do that, and my son came out and he must have heard something on TV and he said, “Hey, Pop, let’s talk about Vietnam.” “What?” At the time, he must have been five and it was great for two hours and he was asking me some questions. I have a lot of stories to tell him. I talk to him a lot. He’s my pride and joy. I mean the marchas that we have here for August 29th—he’s gone on three of them with me. But that Veterans Day, he started asking me about the babies and I told him about the time that water buffaloes chased us up the tree

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

and babysans came and took them away. He asked me a lot of questions and after he finished, I didn’t need a drink. What did the war accomplish? For me, it made me a wiser person. I think it was unnecessary for it to happen and I felt as an American totally ashamed of the country for what it did to ourselves and to some innocent people over there. But I appreciate people a lot more than I did before. I appreciate life. I think there was a reason for my not getting killed. I totally believe in God and I don’t know what He has in store for me, but I know that I pray every day for the wisdom and the knowledge to do the right things and to have Him lead me in the right direction. I don’t know what the future has in store. I’m doing something that I really love right now, but there’s a lot more and, hopefully, I’ll have an opportunity to do it. It did change my life and opened my eyes to a lot of things. I’m going to vow I’ll remember as much as I can in an effort to teach my son and in an effort to teach others. It’ll be painful, but it’s getting better and I think it’s good therapy for me, too. I was very fortunate to meet up with some good people that gave me some direction and helped me. There’s other vets that weren’t as fortunate and that stayed in the drugs, that didn’t get into politics and other things, and that wasted their lives. There’s one incident that I think about. We had captured five Vietcong and we were walking back. We had a new officer and he got us lost. It was so infested with booby traps, there were some that weren’t even concealed, just right there out in the open. In the trees, you could see the Vietcong flag. I remember in situations like that we have a Vietcong walk point and then we have someone walk behind them. Well, it was a Vietcong, the point man, myself, and there was a couple of others and then another Vietcong and then the rest of the company single file, and we were losing people like crazy. I remember that point Vietcong literally jumped on top of a booby trap. It went off and it ignited a couple of others. I saw the guy in front of me go up and back. I landed on my knees and I hit the ground and all hell broke loose. I had a vision. It’s hard to believe, I don’t talk about it—the guy behind me was the black guy that I was telling you about. He was so wasted that I didn’t even recognize him. His eyes were hanging out, and the other guy in front of me, he was just gone, torn apart, but not a scratch on me. We lost eighteen guys that day. I prayed to God to let me get killed. I was just so tired. You have to carry the dead and my arms were about to fall off. We were getting hit, we couldn’t fire back, we were

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out there maybe three or four days. It was a long one and it was just pure hell. I don’t know why I made it back, but it was that one experience that put in my mind that the Lord is saving me for something. There must have been a purpose for it and I know it’s not over. Joe u.s. marine corps—corporal e4 Infantry Delta 1/3, First Battalion, Third Marine Division Base of Operations: Quang Tri Province vietnam: august 1968–november 1968 Friends that had gone to Vietnam and had come back said it was hell. I thought about it and figured, “Well, it’s part of my job to go out and do my duty,” so I went. My parents really didn’t want me to go, but what can you do? I had made my decision and I wanted to go. Actually, this one guy that I grew up with, he and I were going to go into the army under the buddy plan. Once we got down to the induction center and I saw the Marine Corps uniform and everything, I said, “You know what, let’s go in the marines.” He said, “Hell with you. You go if you want to.” So he stayed in the army and I went to the Marine Corps, not only because of the uniform, but I knew that they were a lot tougher, they had better training, better skills. So I wanted to go. I figured I was doing something for myself and my country. I guess the Chicanos got that machismo. When you first arrived there, it looked like a real hellhole. You see people coming in, see body bags going out. In the middle of the landing fields, you could see body bags getting ready to be loaded on to the planes so they could be sent back home. We arrived, approximately sixty of us, and from there we got detailed to different units. You get kind of leery about it, but you can’t jump on the plane and come back. You just live from day to day and try to make it to the next day and watch your back and watch your partner’s back. Being transported from the rear to my unit, I’d see some of the GIs throw cans of food under the trucks. They’d reach over and toss them under. The kids would dive for them, to get the food, and the kids would get run over. Papasan, mamasan, would sit there on the side of the road and they’d go, “GIs, chop, chop, chop.” In other words, they wanted them to give them food and the guys would get cans and just throw them

psychological and medical issues in the aftermath of vietnam

at their face. I mean, from the top of the truck, like throwing a baseball, hit them on the face or wherever and they’d collect their food and be on their way. There was hate because of what the kids were doing to some of the GIs over there. They’d booby-trap themselves with grenades and walk toward a group of GIs and they would blow themselves up with the troops. You more or less kept to yourself because, before going over there, you’d always hear about somebody getting it in the back because of what you did or what you didn’t do or what you spoke up for. There’d be a few guys that would say, “Hey, don’t be doing that,” but those were the guys that had been there longer than the rookies, and they would have more guts to say something, but most of the guys would just kind of turn around the other way. If you didn’t get along with some of the guys or you ratted on somebody, you’d always have to watch your back because somebody would come up with a .45, or drop a grenade and you got hit. I wasn’t for it, but I wasn’t going to be one of those guys that are going to be saying something about it, especially being the new guy. I mean, it was survival. Number one is coming home, no matter what. The worst thing is being in a firefight, wondering if you’re going to get hit or not. I did about ten patrols—most were at night—and on one of them, I got hit with shrapnel on my left leg. We started getting incoming, and there was about twenty of us. We had dug in for the night and all of a sudden we started getting small fire and then we started getting rockets coming in. When I got hit, the corpsman came over and gave me a couple of shots of morphine and I was just laying there, looking up at the sky. It was the middle of the night and it was lonely, wondering if you get overrun, are you going to be able to make it? I didn’t worry about my wound because I knew it wasn’t that grave. Even if I did get my leg amputated, I knew it was just my leg, not like half my brains were popping out or my jaw blown away. The next day I got medevac and went to Quang Tri, then I spent a few months in Japan at the naval hospital there. I lost the usage of my leg. I use my crutches, but as far as long walks or for work, I use my wheelchair. A few years ago, I was spending too much time going to the VA hospital because of my leg. I got arthritis in my hips and a couple of my vertebras deteriorated because of the shrapnel wound, lack of usage, the stiffness and all. It was a hell of an experience. One minute you’re sitting there talking to someone, you turn around, the next minute they’re gone, blown away. They’re not talking to you anymore. They’re just dead. I got sicker

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than shit. I’ll admit it. I’m not going to say that was the first time I’ve seen death, but to where you’re there with somebody and you make friends. That’s why they’re always telling you not to make friends, not to get too close, because when the time comes and something happens, you might go crazy, go after Charlie, and you’re going to get yourself blown away. I was different when I came back. Frankly, I just didn’t give a shit. I drank a lot up until some years ago. I quit drinking, but then, of course, now my liver’s going out and I’ve got kidney problems and everything else involved with liquor. I was very bitter at people that didn’t appreciate or at least say, “Well, hey, we know you were there. Thanks.” It’s not that we want to get a pat on the head, but at least acknowledgment that we were out there putting our lives on the line. Being a veterans’ representative, I’ve had a lot of guys come up and tell me that the veterans’ hospital services are just poor. I saw an incident where a veteran and his wife were being treated very bad and, of course, I intervened. I talked to the doctor and I told him I was going to report him to the director because of his attitude, the way he was treating the people. They had already been there four hours waiting. They had an appointment and he told them that he really didn’t care what their problem was, that they were going to have to wait. The lady was halfway in tears and the vet was all upset. He said, “The hell with this place. I’m going to go home. I’m going to take care of myself.” To make a long story short, the doctor ended up taking care of them. So I’ve seen people bitch about the VA system, that they don’t get treated right, they always have to wait, that the doctors have a bad attitude toward them, the nurses don’t give a shit, the orderlies don’t pay attention to them. But then, of course, the VA hospital is just like any other hospital. Some hospitals treat you real good, some hospitals don’t. I still have recurrences of things that happened over there, things that we did, incidents like, even now, three-fourths of the time if you hear a chopper, you get the chills. You start looking around to see where it’s coming from. There’s a lot of Asian people here and that kind of more or less gives you a bad feeling. Some of those people may be the ones that possibly killed my buddy or possibly blew me away. You just can’t get that out of your mind. It’s gotten better over time. I mean, at first, I’d wake up in a cold sweat, shaking and everything. I’d get them just about every night, two or three times a night. I’d always sleep with a weapon under my pillow, even now that I am in the chair, I still carry a weapon with me for protection.

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Some years ago, I had marital problems at home and I attempted suicide twice in front of the family and my first ex-wife. I pulled a gun and I put it to my head and I told them I was just going to end it all. I mean, it was just the marital problems, my disability, the family situation and everything. I just said the hell with it. Just finish it. I don’t think my family really wanted me to do it, but, on the other hand, maybe they did. I mean, I really don’t know, because we never did discuss it. I just got in my truck and I drove myself to the VA hospital and I committed myself. I still had my pistol out in the truck and they asked me to leave it there, and my ex-wife came over and picked it up and got rid of it. I realized what the hell was I doing. I knew, especially with my daughter, that was something that I shouldn’t have done in front of her. She was four years old. It’s a trauma for a child to see something like that, their dad sitting there with a damn pistol to his head, don’t know what the hell they’re going to do, if they’re going to shoot them or yourself, or you’re going to shoot up the whole neighborhood. I’ve never asked her, but I’m sure she felt real bad and I felt real bad after the situation. PTSD hadn’t come out at that time. It was there, but they really didn’t want to admit that there was a problem with the combat vet that was over there in the bush, in the rice paddies, crawling in the middle of all that garbage. That was an unpopular war and when you came back, people would meet you at the airports, bus depots and start spitting at you and call you baby killers, and the acknowledgment wasn’t there. I’ve gotten people come up to me and they ask, “Hey, did you get this chair in a bike accident? Were you driving a Harley?” “No,” I say, “I was in Vietnam.” They say, “Welcome home, brother.” You know that person has been there before, and it makes you feel a little better. Through my line of work, when I do workshops for the veterans that I do intake on, I give them my home phone number and I’ve been in a situation where I’ve gotten many calls in the middle of the night. Guys are going through different traumas, different situations about Nam, marital problems, or they’re upset because they can’t find a job. I’ve stayed up until three or four o’clock in the morning sometimes and then looked outside and it’s daylight and I’m on the phone still talking to this person, as to what’s going on with their life. Gotten dressed and met them at an all-night coffee shop or even in my own car. They sit there and just cry. I know the feeling, so sometimes I cry along with them and let them see that, hey, I was there, too. I know what the hell they’re going through and I talk to them about my situations that I’ve had at

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home, the suicide attempts, and all this stuff and I just tell them, “It’s not worth it. Just try and get your shit together and do the best you can. Life’s too short and beautiful; just make the best of it and sometimes it’s rough.” There’s a percentage that still have problems, but there’s a lot of people that I talk to that are getting out of it. It was about ten years after Vietnam, maybe a little more, I had to go to psychological therapy. I told my counselor, “Listen, whatever comes out now, there’s always going to be something in the back of your mind that you don’t even talk about. I mean an incident, something that happened over there. It’s going to be with you until you die.” I know there’s a hell of a lot of guys that feel the same way, even though they have what they call bullshit sessions or rap sessions, or start talking about what happened to them. Everybody has one incident deep down in their mind that even to another vet that was there, that they’re not going to discuss. I mean, it’s going to go with you. When you die, that’s going to be the end of the story. My son-in-law joined the Marine Corps and I went and saw him the weekend before graduation. They call it Family Day. When I was at the graduation ceremonies, I had three young men who came over to me. I can think of this one particular guy who came over and he reached down and shook my hand. He got on his knees and he started crying because he lost his dad over there. Then he said, “Thanks,” that’s all, and I cried. I think they cried because I reminded them of their dad, being a vet and being over in Vietnam. I think, too, they wished they would have at least had their dad in a chair, I mean to where they could still touch him and hug him, but they didn’t have their dad. They didn’t have their dad anymore. Daniel u.s. army—sergeant e5 Paratrooper 101st Airborne Division, I Corps Base of Operations: Northern South Vietnam vietnam: october 1966 – october 1967 The day I left to go to the induction center, I went to pick up two other friends. The three of us were going to go together. I went to the first man’s house and his mother had us kneel down in the middle of the living room floor and she blessed us and said a prayer to bring us home. Then we went to the second guy’s house, Joe, and the same thing happened, and then we went to my house, and my mother also said a prayer

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and blessed us and asked that God bring us back. I think she was familiar enough with the war that she asked that we not lose any limbs either, not only to bring us back alive, but to bring us back with everything. In a sense, I think, that is kind of the community giving us permission to be warriors. We were aware of the racism—we were farmworkers, we were campesinos. You go to any small town where they’re picking grapes during the harvest and you’re aware of it, because you go to town on Saturday after you get paid and you buy your stuff and they treat you like shit. But I think the message that our families gave us was a message that had only to do with our community, and it was quite apart from the rest of America. It was, this is what men in our community act like and it just so happens that they have a proving ground over there that is incidental to growing up in this country. This is what America is about, at least from our subcultural oppressed perspective, because it was an oppressed existence and it continues to be, but we were told this is the country that we are part of and, to a great extent, I think the implicit message is prove that you are worthy to be a citizen. When I was a little kid, guys were getting out of the army from Korea and I can remember this one guy. We used to call him Blackie, and he was this older guy, I mean, just decorated. The thing is that I played the same damn thing out. He had his duffel bag over his back and he walked right down the middle of the barrio, just as proud as he could be. I must have been around seven years old, and that was where I got my first message: this is what men do. And then by the time Vietnam came, we were knocking down the induction center doors. I mean, stop and think about it. There’s a whole lexicon I think that we use growing up that expressed it. When a guy was a seasoned street man, you know, been through all the gang fights and into the cantinas, he was a veterano, he’d never been in the military but he was a veterano. Look at all the corridos. What do they celebrate? They celebrate the revolution, I mean, even the women, with the Adelitas. When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was a damn paratrooper. I was going to be a man’s man and there was no restriction from it. It’s could I run five miles in the morning and could I jump out of a damn airplane, and it was the first time that there was equal opportunity to compete and you’re damn right I competed. For once in my life, I felt like I was a man. It didn’t matter what color I was. So war is a kind of way for us to measure our own worth, but it’s such a distorted notion, in retrospect, because if you look at the fu-

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tility of it, you don’t come back a hero. You don’t come back anything. You come back somebody who is broken of spirit, who is robbed of humanity. I remember when I left, my mother saying, “I sent two men to war already and they came back. You come back, too. Don’t you let me down.” And I came back and my younger brother went and he was wounded badly. I went to Letterman Hospital to pick him up in San Francisco and bring him back home. At some point, my brother and I, all we knew was that life was going crazy on us. I mean, some mornings you wake up and it’s just like fear, but you don’t know from what. I remember my mother and my brother and I happened to be down at the house and we were going to have dinner. And I don’t think either of us was really hungry, and I remember her saying, “Vente a comer,” because she had set the table. And my brother said, “Ah, mom, I’m not hungry.” We were both practicing alcoholics, I mean, right down to the bone. That was our self-medication and she got just outraged. She gave us this long lecture: “You went over there, do you think you’re the only ones? Look at Doña Lupe, she lost her son over there, and now she’s got another one there, and you’re back and look at what you’re doing to yourselves. If her son had the chance to take your place, don’t you think he would? And look at what you’re doing. Is that any way to be a man? You got your GI Bill, which is more than most have and you’ve got your whole life.” I was twenty-two and my brother was twenty and she said, “You can go and be somebody. You don’t have to be doing the same old thing. You don’t have to be a janitor.” I think there are studies that would suggest that veteran status, especially for men of color, doesn’t substantially increase one’s ability to earn in the workplace. I think it’s a popular myth that says if you go into the military, you’ll learn a skill and you’ll come out and you’ll be more marketable. The fact of the matter is that Vietnam was the first war that systematically took its graduating high school seniors out of the society, and 350,000 of those men were below what the standard armed forces qualification test said they should be. They had set an arbitrary number that men were supposed to pass to get in. Well, during Vietnam, they lowered it; that means that they were functioning at about a fifth-grade level intellectually. That was called the McNamara 100,000 project, and they were supposed to get a hundred thousand inner-city kids, but they wound up getting 350,000. That started in 1966. They were escalating because in 1965, the First Cav fought the first major battle in the Ia Drang Valley. By the time

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’66 rolled around, the combat brigade was in full force. So the McNamara 100,000 project, as soon as it passed the books, didn’t have to wait for the machinery to warm up. They had already lowered the armed forces qualification test and the physical requirements in ’65. This was just rubber stamping. The major effort was to get inner-city kids. It’s sort of when they talk about how the poor and the minorities would become the cannon fodder because, in essence, that’s what they were recruiting them for, right? To take them and put them in the front lines in Vietnam. Right after jump school, when we had our last formation, they said, “The names that we’re going to read will be going to the Republic of South Vietnam,” and they started reading the names of every paratrooper. I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t gone. Nobody is a paratrooper until you’ve been in combat. It’s all just make-believe until you actually get in there. But if you had given me a map of the world and said find Vietnam, even when I was on my way, I couldn’t have found it for you. I mean, when I say that I was parochial in my worldview, I’m real serious. Vietnam was the kind of war where whoever got in the way got killed. And that was just one of the givens of guerrilla war, especially a war that lasts thirteen years where the enemy sometimes dresses up like the common villager. You know, for the men, I think, who fought the North Vietnamese army, NVA, I think they have fewer issues with the killing than men who were fighting Vietcong and, in the process, had the misfortune of killing someone who was maybe not a soldier, who didn’t have a weapon, maybe a boy running across a rice paddy dike. They thought he was Vietcong, because they had taken fire from a position, and they saw him and then they shot him only to find out it’s a kid that had absolutely nothing to do with anything; maybe he was just trying to get home. I think those kinds of things are the events that one has a hard time reconciling with who you think you are. Killing is something that we’re taught is a taboo, but to kill somebody that is not your enemy not only has a psychological impact, but there’s no rationale for it. It doesn’t fit the role of soldier/warrior. I mean, guys come in and they say, “That was the war,” and intellectually they can say that, but emotionally it’s another thing. They’ll tell you, “Hey, I don’t have any problem with Vietnam. My old lady wanted me to come in here,” because he drinks too much or he uses too much drugs or he beats the wife up. He can’t hold a job, he can’t have friends, he’s isolated, he isolates the family, he goes into fits of rage, he has night-

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mares, he has intrusive thoughts during the day. There are stimulus that set him off: rain and diesel, helicopter noises. He can rationalize it to you because that means you’re not going to ask any more in-depth questions that are going to make him raise up that emotion. We call that “stuffing”: you stuff the traumatic experience. You can stuff it emotionally and you can stuff it consciously, but it’s going to come out in your life. So the guy comes in and he says, “I don’t know why I’m here. Go ahead and tell me what to do, man. I’m supposed to be a saint or what? How do I make my old lady okay? I mean, I kiss her ass, what more can I say?” I tell him, “Why don’t we just start with Vietnam. How was Vietnam? Tell me something about it.” “Vietnam was Vietnam. It was a goddamn war. What the hell do you expect? You were there. It was a war, good things, bad things, that’s it, man.” That’s so much bullshit, and I’ll tell you why. Because even if you were eighteen when you left, the church, the school, the family, the community, all the morality of the society is given to you by those institutions. At eighteen, morality is black and white. So when a guy comes to me and he issues that kind of moral statement, black and white, it’s stuffing. I think what jump school successfully does in this whole aura and mystique of the paratrooper is that it gets him to a place where he’s more prepared to die. I mean, all you have to do is look at the number of paratroopers killed in Vietnam. You know we’re one percent of the military, but we’re a great proportion of the ones that died. I think the way you deal with it—and I saw it in Nam—I think you’re resigned to, first of all, that’s it’s going to happen to everybody else, but it’s not going to happen to you, because you’re the baddest motherfucker out there and that’s it. That’s what everybody has to think. And then there’s a time when, probably shortly after you get there, you realize that’s all bullshit, that you’re vulnerable. I think all the men that I’ve seen over the years, at some point shortly after they got to Vietnam and were under first contact, first firefight, first enemy activity where people were killed, I think you come to terms with your own mortality, and the one thing that you do is you kind of set goals. You don’t mind dying as long as it’s not at the end of your tour. You don’t mind dying as long as it’s fast. You don’t mind dying as long as they can get your body out of there. That is meeting your own mortality head on. Once you resign to death, under those conditions, it empowers us and it makes us not so afraid of death. It allows us to do everyday life

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without being preoccupied with dying, and I think most of the men at some point made that kind of decision. And coming home, getting out of that mind-set, getting out of that resignation to death and getting on with life, I think, is inhibited by having made that decision at such a young age. And so what happens is that you have no sense of the future anymore. There’s no way for you to structure it, because death is just something that you’re resigned to now. And then, just meet with some setbacks, to come back from a setback each time gets harder and harder, until finally you have that old resignation to death, and it doesn’t have to be physical death anymore. It can just be spiritual death, psychological death, just giving up. Waking up scared and not being able to lay in bed or having a bad dream the night before and not being able to go back to sleep, and then the rest of the day is going to be messed up. Dealing with PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, if a man is in the state of denial about the impact that the war is having on him, if it’s impacting his emotional life, his psychological life, the first thing that we have to do is we have to unlodge him from that denial state. What we do with the trauma is we take away the power of the memories by having them verbalize it and feel it. One of the things that’s a prime indicator of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is anger and rage, and anger and rage when they go unmanaged turn into violence. In the years past, since we’ve come home, approximately sixty thousand men have killed themselves by suicide. That’s as many as died in the war. We could start another Wall. That’s the urgency that informs my job, because I care. I had a cousin that did it. So for me, this is a personal thing. When that anger and rage goes unchecked and gets turned into violence, it’s turned against us, our own selves, because of our lack of self-worth and our sense of illegitimacy. When men don’t deal with that anger and that rage, it’s going to come out somewhere in their life. So the anger and the rage keep the hurt from hurting, it keeps the pain away, and the hardest thing, when we’re treating PTSD among veterans, is to make them feel that hurt. There’s a survivor’s guilt that accompanies Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Vietnam, all about if they had done more, if they had been better soldiers, if they had been more awake, this guy wouldn’t have died. All that self-blame just drives low self-esteem further and further down. Drives down any sense of worth and maintains that whole cycle of illegitimacy and the survivor’s guilt, then just mitigates against any kind of positive activity in your present life.

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The one thing that comes back to me over and over, and I think was traumatic, is being unable to do an activity that validates who you think you are. I think about it to this day, and every time I see the Vietnamese kids, it really does something to me, like when I was doing my teaching apprenticeship and the first day of class I went in to teach and there was about fifteen Vietnamese students. It was an undergraduate class. In Vietnam, we were guarding a village during the rice harvest and the kids would come beg food. They would have their hands out like that and they wanted C rations, and there was a little girl and she wouldn’t come and beg for food. She absolutely refused to do that, and her mother was trying to push her to go. She was about four years old and was absolutely the most beautiful child you ever saw. I was coming off the perimeter and I remember I crossed the fence and all the little kids were down there and the guys were giving them candy bars. I mean, that’s the truth of the matter: GIs were the Faustian men. With one hand we give something that’s good to people and with the other hand we hurt you. And the guys couldn’t give enough away. They were giving whatever they could. I think, regardless of ethnicity, when you’re out there, you’re all the same. But I saw this little girl up there and I started walking toward her. She went right for her mom’s leg, and I remember saying in my limited Vietnamese something to the effect that I’m a friend, and I took off my rucksack and I had stuff that my mom had sent. I used to like those Cherry-O-Lets, those little round things with nuts on them and they had the cherry filling. I had received a care package a couple of weeks before, but I never used to eat the stuff. It was more a security thing than anything else and I had saved it. So I opened it and there was canned meat in there and there was candy. I knew she was afraid of me and I did it like that so she could really see that there was stuff in there. I told the lady to take whatever she wanted out of there, and after that the little girl would wait for me and she would come and I would always have stuff for her. I asked her mother if I could send her back to my mother, because I knew that place was going to go after we left, just as a retribution. I think her father was killed. I don’t remember the village, the name, I mean. One was like the other one, but every time there’s a certain kind of look that I see in some of these kids, the one thing that comes to my mind was my inability to meet a goal that I thought would make me more humane, more human. I didn’t see the U.S. role as an incorrect role or an immoral role. I think I saw the futility of it, though, but it was not that articulate. It was

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more like, “I want to get the fuck out of here,” because people were getting killed. I think we were probably less politically focused, but we all used to have “FTA” on our helmet, you know, “Fuck the Army.” So ours was a protest of minuscule proportions as opposed to active and open drug abuse and, you know, fragging and insubordination, which came after Tet. I think soldiers were saying, “Wait a minute, this war started in 1964, ’65, we got our ass kicked in ’68, and how many guys have already died in six years, and they want me to do what? They’ve been to that same hill fifteen times!” One of the first things that I do is to separate the war from the warrior. The war was a political event by and large; the warrior was in the trenches. The warrior was the product of one politician’s inability to deal with another politician. When the peace talks in Paris failed to stop the war, the ground activity picked up, and that meant guys died, so that all these high-level political dealings, for the men in the field, translated into fear and death and dying and maiming. I know the groups that I work with of Chicano combat veterans, we separate the war from the warrior and then we direct them to responsibility. I know it sounds like a contradiction, helping the men to get to a place where they can separate out what’s their responsibility in the war and what’s not their responsibility, because most of the guys will own all of the war, everything. They’ll feel guilty and bad and the need to be punished about everything that happened in the war. The anger that we see and the rage that we see, that’s what encapsulates the hurt. But once they tell you their story, each man has his own private little secret, and it can be anything that symbolizes their perception of the war. One of the friends I first went to the induction center with is a radical amputee, both legs. I didn’t even know that until I started looking for him, and I shouldn’t have even looked for him. That’s the truth. It was none of my business. I thought he was going to be smiling and laughing and doing all this shit that he always used to do; he was always clowning around. I found out from his mother. I went to the place where he was at, but I just didn’t talk to him. I thought it would be awkward for the both of us. I mean, I think one of the things that happens is that you choose to construct a kind of livable reality. I have two cousins who are amputees, one an arm and one the foot and this part of one arm. I hit rock bottom. Shit, it was almost eleven years after Vietnam that I stopped. I was a daily alcoholic. I held down jobs. I went to school. I used to drink during the day, but I wouldn’t get, like, smashed until after work, and then I was a classic alcoholic. I used to go by myself and drink. I could just go home, be by myself and just turn on the stereo, put

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on Barry White, and just kick back and drink until I fell asleep. If I would miss a day of drinking, then for that day I would be so depressed. I never missed work and I had classes, but I drank every day. I was a real responsible alcoholic. The truth of the matter is, I always saw myself as a person who had stuff to contribute to the community and I always thought I was worthwhile, and somehow or other that sense of worthwhileness got distorted in Vietnam and I stopped caring about me. But I always had this kind of core set of values that informed my self-esteem, and what I’d been doing all the time that I was drinking is just kind of having to stop facing the reality of what had happened. I do a job where I got to listen to gory stuff all the time, you know, and it wears on me. That’s the truth, and their trauma becomes my trauma or it gets mixed up with mine. Am I afraid of my PTSD? Yeah. It scares me, but it’s manageable where I’m at right now, and maybe someday it won’t be manageable. I think one of the things I realized a long time ago, and it was an intellectual realization more than it was an emotional awareness, is that I was probably a real angry and violent person and I didn’t think anybody deserved to have to be around that. I just didn’t see that anybody should inherit the stuff that I was doing. I think one of the functions of Vietnam has been for me to be real private. I mean, I live alone. You know one of the things that happened, and it just gives you perspective on life, when I first went in the army, I went to Fort Ord, right? I got spinal meningitis, fourteen of us, and twelve died and the other guy got paralysis, and look at me. You remember what I said, some guys are assessed as having PTSD and you know their expectations of life are real different. I mean, my expectations of life are that things go wrong in life— that’s what growing up poor in a campesino family taught me. But things that go wrong can be fixed. There is nothing so valuable as yourself. Because poor people can’t think that “Oh, this house is real valuable,” because we lived in a shack. So I think what happened is I grew up in a poor family with middle-class values, what we call “value stretch.” I mean, when I say poor, I don’t mean just a little bit poor; we were the worst kind of poor because we were poor and proud. We didn’t accept anything from anybody. If we didn’t have anything, we just didn’t have anything that day. But you know what? We had a set of encyclopedias. Six of us and all are successful. In the Chicano moratorium, I would go to the rallies and I would talk to other Vietnam vets about what our role was. I think what hap-

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pens is that war just generally politicizes individuals, either that, or it thoroughly defeats them. I think politics is kind of a crutch insofar as it allows you to deal with some issue that is maybe traumatizing to you, maybe unacceptable to you. But it lets you do it at a macro level, where you can intellectualize it. So that for me, politics, I think, was a way of not dealing with Vietnam. It was a way of atoning for that at some level and I got involved in it. I think most men will tell you they wished that they could forget Vietnam. The reality of the situation is they can’t forget it and, I think, when men come into vet centers and they begin the processing of the trauma, when they begin to get a handle on what the issues are, when they begin to get on that path of emotional, psychological wellness, I think they’re glad that they had the option of processing rather than forgetting. I think there are times in my own personal life when I just wish Vietnam hadn’t ever happened. I mean, it’s a funny feeling that it brings to you because, you know, I miss it sometimes. Why shouldn’t I? I miss it because it was a place where there was camaraderie. I miss it because of the rush. I miss it because I wish I could go back and do it over. I miss it because it represents my youth, my innocence. I miss it because it was the only time in my life that I knew there were absolutely no rules, nothing to constrain me, nothing to confine me, nothing to govern my most primal self. I miss it because, for all the terrible things it was, it was honest—not the war, but that place. I miss it because it was the most powerful I’d ever been, and I hate it because of all the things it’s done. I hate it because there’s some times I sit alone and that’s all I can think about. So I come to a place like this and I get a little relief from it. I think changing the perspective from anger to hurt, I think the war hurt everybody. It hurt me, it hurt the guys that come in here, it continues to hurt their families, it hurt the Vietnamese, it hurt America. You know, in jump school we used to say you never get over your fear of jumping until you stand in the door and look down there and see how far it is. Look it in the face and see what it is. This is my greatest fear, and I come every day to do battle with it, and some days I’m the victor and some days, with my tail between my legs, I’m the vanquished. But I’ve always, in my own heart, been proud of the warrior aspect of myself, maybe not so proud of Vietnam, but that’s one of the contradictions between who I am and what the war was that I have to deal with on a personal level.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Impact of War on Family

Francisco army—medical records specialist e5 Seventy-first Evacuation Hospital Base of Operations: Pleiku vietnam: january 1968–december 1968 When I graduated from high school in Nevada, I went back to Colorado, where my father and my brothers and sisters were living. I was working at a sawmill, and I enlisted almost a year to the day that I graduated. I wasn’t involved politically, but I knew that Vietnam was going on. Part of the reason I enlisted was as a way of not getting sent to Vietnam, but I ended up there anyway. I was stationed in Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and we were just waiting for our orders. I got my orders before my brother. He was in Fort Mead, Maryland, at the time. That was the only consolation that I can recall about having gotten the orders, that he wouldn’t have to go. In Nam, I was in charge of inventory control for all the medical supplies and equipment for the Seventy-first Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, Vietnam, the central highlands. It was a full evacuation hospital and it was next to an air force base. I ordered all the medical supplies for the hospital. God, the hospital was always so full. I don’t remember how many beds it was, but it was a big hospital. I remember one time that they needed a special instrument in the operating room and I had to deliver it. They were operating on a GI, I think he was an officer, and I remember that they had a clamp on his head and they had his skull and his skin just split open and they were pulling shrapnel out of his head. I would go to the operating room every once in a while because I had to take stuff, but I tried to stay away from it. I would see GIs in all kinds of conditions. They also had a ward where they had GIs that were mostly drugrelated kinds of cases, and there was a lot of that. They would be sent in

the impact of war on family

to the evacuation hospital. They did have bed check and all that, but for the most part, they were kind of free to wander around the hospital, and they had access to drugs in the hospital. I didn’t see it as being out of control. I mean, it was like drinking: you knew who was doing it. I never got into hard drugs, because I was scared. I used to see some of these GIs and I used to say, “I ain’t going to get like that.” But then again, I didn’t have some of the stresses that they probably had. Like in our compound, the only reason that I think the guys from the motor pool did it, they were under a lot of stress because they had to drive the convoys. I remember the first time that I was introduced to marijuana over there. This guy that lived in the same hooch I did asked me if I wanted to smoke and I said, “Sure.” He used to laugh at me because he never gets over the fact that I thought he was asking if I wanted a regular cigarette and what he was offering me was a marijuana joint. So they always said, “Where do you come from?” But it was common. I mean, you could go anywhere and buy marijuana, a “nickel bag” they used to call them, and people just rolling them. It was like no one cared whether you had it or not. I had two frightening experiences in Vietnam. One was when I had come stateside to be an escort for my nephew who got killed in Vietnam. I went back and I was waiting to be transported back to the Seventy-first Evacuation Hospital. We were sitting in a waiting area and there was a command station, and all of a sudden, it just blew up. There was smoke and a red alert and everything went dark. This was in Bien Hoa, the main station where you arrive into Vietnam, and it was in the Saigon area. I remember sitting there and it was just packed. I mean, almost all the chairs were filled, just GIs waiting to be transported. Nobody really had weapons, and then all of a sudden, the command station blows up and you look out there. It’s dark, but you can see the tracers. I remember just before the lights went out, everybody just got up and started running back, because we knew where the bunkers were. There was a section of the waiting station that was sort of like a little barbershop and things like that, and it was sectioned off and there were chairs along it. GIs were running and they would hit the wall and fall down and nobody would stop and pick them up because it was like, “Hey, I got to get out of here.” We all ended up in this bunker. It was dark in there, and I remember that I had this rosary with me and it was the first time that I ever really prayed as much as I did. But it was scary because you don’t know what’s going on and you don’t have a weapon; you have nothing to protect yourself and you are being attacked.

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On that same trip, on the way back, something else happened. I don’t know why it was that you flew at night. I could never understand that. Maybe it was for safety reasons or whatever, but it seemed every time I landed in Vietnam, I would land at night. We landed at the airbase there in Pleiku, and they told us that there had been some heavy mortar and fighting and so all the lights were off. They put me in this Jeep and they could have been taking me anywhere. I knew where I was supposed to be going, but I didn’t have a weapon, and here again there was a firefight going on. You could see all this and you could hear the mortars going off. You could see the Hueys and the sky filled with the tracers, and I didn’t really feel safe until I got to the hospital. At first, we felt a sense of security because they’re not going to attack a hospital. But when I was on escort duty for my nephew, they actually attacked the hospital and there was a GI killed there. Ever since then, you knew you weren’t safe. I mean, there was danger everywhere. I used to feel lonely at first. I never really associated with anybody. I was always working real late. I mean, the other GIs used to sort of rib me because they’d say that I let the sergeant bully me around because sometimes I wouldn’t leave the supply room until ten, eleven o’clock at night. Everybody else is out partying and I’m still working, and they’d say, “He’s making a slave out of you.” But it paid off because he left and he had taught me good and I always prided myself in that there is no GI that died in Vietnam because I didn’t do my job. They had what they needed and I never let, as far as I controlled, I never let any drugs out. I mean, I had people ask me, “Shit, get us this, get us that,” and I’d say “No, that’s for the GIs.” I still think about the guys in Vietnam. There was this other Mexicano from Ohio and he and I sort of hung around together. I met good people, but it was a bad experience in that you saw a lot of death and you felt it. I think about it, I mean, is there always going to be war and things like that, but I don’t let it keep me down. I say, “Well, I don’t ever really want to do it again, but I don’t know that I would be a draft dodger.” For the most part, I came back missing my friends. I didn’t really want to leave them, but once I got home, well, I had my family and that was great. In terms of where I’m from, I can’t say that this is true, but it seemed like many of the people that went to Vietnam were Mexicanos. I don’t know any of the gringos that I grew up with in southwest Colorado that went to the military, other than one guy I met in Vietnam. He’s the only one that I ever knew that went from my hometown to Vietnam,

the impact of war on family

and we had my primo [cousin] and my nephew that were both killed over there, and I think about it. I think one of the loneliest and hardest times I had was when I heard that my nephew had gotten killed. That was pretty devastating, and you couldn’t let anybody see you cry. He died when he was about twenty-two. He was in the army and he was married and had a son. His son didn’t even get to know his father. When he was killed over there, they had a closed casket. I remember the frustration that I went through in the decision whether to have select members of the family, only the men were going to view his remains, to make sure that it was him, because there was always that doubt that he wasn’t there. Who did we bury? Did we really bury him? I think for my sister that really affected her. That was the first time that I was involved in the family to make a decision as to whether we would view it or not. I kind of wanted to and I didn’t, but I had to remove myself and say, “Well, you tell me what to do.” But they said, “No, you find out if we can do it or not,” and we went through this big ordeal because my nephew’s wife didn’t want to. Her parents didn’t agree with it and, really, you had to respect her rights as the wife, but then, at the same time, she was caught in between, because his mother and father wanted to know if it was him. I think she probably did, but it was more like she was relying more on her father and mother, and to them, it was better if she didn’t see. Finally, they said they wanted to do it. I remember calling to Oakland because that’s the number that I had. I got the go-ahead: “If that’s what the family wants, you can go ahead and view it.” But before I had a chance to tell them, they decided no. So I said, “I’m not going to tell them that we can.” But that was something that I carried a long time in terms of we could have seen him and we didn’t. It was hard and the only real psychological problem that I had with Vietnam. I think those things went through my mind in keeping that information because, if I’d have given that bit of information, we would have probably seen him. And the thing is that I did try to open it myself, because I got in the hearse the day of the funeral. I was to ride in the hearse with him and I got in the back. I lifted up the cajón [lid] and I put the rosario in there and it was a black plate of glass. You couldn’t see in there. It was a trip. I said, “What if I would have pressed the right button and it would have lifted up?” When my nephew died, my cousin was only about twenty years old, too. He hadn’t even been married a year and he got drafted the same

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way as my nephew. But with my cousin, you couldn’t touch him or anything, but you could see him through this clear glass and it was like he didn’t have hands. His mother was asking, “Pues ¿qué pasa con las manos de mijo? No tiene manos” [What happened to my son’s hands? He doesn’t have hands]. I think I learned a lot from Vietnam. At that time, part of what you did is you went to the army. Now I think about it in terms of some of the political issues. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but at the same time, I’m not going to say it was a mistake. I used to feel like I couldn’t talk to people about Vietnam because I felt guilty and I didn’t want people to really know I was a Vietnam veteran. I even used to hate to put it on my résumé because I thought it worked against me more than it helped me. I’m in the field of education now and, in some ways, I’m still trying to survive. Marcello u.s. army—first lieutenant Forward Observer, Aerial Observation 1/14 Artillery, 198 LIB Base of Operations: Chu Lai vietnam: february 1970 –december 1970 I entered the army in 1969, as an artillery officer. I was about twentytwo and I had just graduated from the University of Arizona. I’m from Nogales, a town about sixty miles south of Tucson, where the university is. I was in ROTC and the whole idea was to go into the army after I got out of college. I joined because I was always going to go into the army. All of my uncles were in the service. I think it’s something that Raza does. I felt an obligation to meet that commitment as a citizen of the country, but rather than going in as a private, I thought that it would be better to go in as an officer. I went to Fort Sill for three months and attended classes that trained me to be an artillery officer and a second lieutenant. I joined what they called an STR Unit, School Troop Requirement Unit. The school was basically training enlisted men to be artillerymen and officers. Initially, it seemed like Vietnam had a good reason for being fought, and as time passed, it seemed like those reasons became less appropriate and more questionable—whether it really was a good idea to be over there. In the back of my mind, I didn’t have very positive feelings toward the war, but there was a sense of being a professional as an officer. You tried to do the best that you could do because you realized that some of

the impact of war on family

the training you were getting might save your life or might save somebody else’s life. I took the training very seriously because it was important when I got to Vietnam that I knew what I was trained to do. I came in from being a safety officer to battalion headquarters, and there was a kind of a board with all of the officers listed, and it gave what your current duties were and whether you were bound for someplace else. I walked in the door, looked up at the board, and next to my name in that column that said what my duty station was going to be, it just had RVN, Republic of Vietnam. Looking up at that board and seeing my name, even though I knew I was going, it was kind of scary. Thinking you might not live, that you’d go over there and die, that kind of brought it closer to happening, seeing it up there. You always have the faint hope that the army is going to forget that you exist and that somehow you’re going to be miraculously saved. As an artillery officer, your main function is to be a forward observer, so when I got to Vietnam, they assigned me to be a forward observer with the Delta Company. There were probably about 120 men in the company. My job, if we got into trouble, I called up the artillery and basically coordinated with their company commander about the needs for artillery for that unit. When I got there, the division commander was a man whose father had been a judge in Nogales, and I never knew that judge, but my uncle did. He always told a story about how when he first got his driver’s license, he crashed into the judge’s car and got his license suspended. When I first got there, he called me into his office. He introduced himself to me and said, “You’re from Nogales. Who’s your family?” I told him who my uncles were and he said he was a friend of theirs, went to school with them, and said that when he got home he was going to go to the Elks Club and have a beer and tell them that he had met me over there. I said, “Well, this son of a bitch is going to keep me out of the field. He’s going to give me some great jobs so he can tell my uncles back in Nogales that he saved my life.” That afternoon, I was in a helicopter headed for the field and they dropped me off and left me out there, and there I was with this real desmadre [out of control] company, Delta Company. Just after I got to Vietnam, I was promoted to a first lieutenant. But when I first arrived in Vietnam, I remember flying in, it must have been like a 707, and we were packed like sardines in the plane. Leaving from Oakland and flying up to Alaska and then down to Japan, it was a long, long flight. It was very uncomfortable for maybe thirty hours

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that it took us to make the flight. I can remember anticipating getting to Vietnam and I knew that I was going to be landing near Saigon. I figured it was nighttime and that if I looked out the window as we got close, I’d probably see a lot of fighting going on. Your imagination was probably more vivid than what was actually happening on the ground. But I remember it was kind of comical because the pilot came on and said that we were five minutes outside of Bien Hoa, the air force base out of Saigon, which was in the south of the country. He said, “We’re thirty-five thousand feet and we’re five minutes out of Saigon. We’ll be landing shortly.” This guy just barreled over and almost took this big plane into a nosedive and headed from thirty-five thousand feet to land like that. Obviously, he was afraid of getting shot or something, or it was regulation that they fly that high. But it was the most incredible descent that I’ve ever had in an airplane going from thirty-five thousand feet and landing five minutes later. When he said that, he wasn’t lying. You couldn’t see anything, so I was kind of disappointed. I hated being there the whole time I was there. You could have been killed anywhere. So you just have to always be alert and ready, anticipate if something happens. As afraid as you are a lot of the times, I didn’t think a lot about death. When you’re that age, you hope you’re not going to get killed, and there was a little bit of a sense of invincibility, and so it kind of tempers the fear. I definitely wanted to live. I think that’s one of the things that you learn being in a place like that—that humans can endure incredible hardship and survive and be better off for it. Survival was the number-one instinct. I have a lot of memories of people and places. Over time, memories change. When I first got back, the memories were kind of bitter and harsh, but, later, the memories tended to be more humorous. You remember funny things that happened. I remember this one soldier that had transferred to our unit from the First Division. He was taking a bath from a well that people were taking turns filling helmets with water and pouring it over each other. He was one of the last people to bathe and a sniper fired on our location, and there’s this guy, naked, by this well and he pulls on his pants and zips up the zipper and he catches the foreskin of his penis in the zipper, and here he is screaming and hollering, and we had to call a dust off to come and pick him up because he had to be surgically extracted from his pants. Those things were kind of funny. I mean, it was a lot better than losing legs and arms and stuff. There were lots of bad experiences. There was one night where we got involved in a lot of contact and had a couple of guys killed and I

the impact of war on family

think about six or seven wounded. We hit a big booby trap and it was right as it was getting dark and we fell into an ambush. We spent all night long being sniped at. It couldn’t have been very many of them, but they kept our company tied down and made the night kind of a harsh memory. But other memories of going to the hospital after somebody is wounded and seeing them without arms or legs, your friends, I think those are just as agonizing as having to try to get through a night of sniping and no sleep. There’s a lot of stuff like that that’s part of the baggage you carry. There’s a lot of racism on the part of the GIs. I think it was more of a “don’t give a shit” attitude. We’d operate sometimes with this armored unit called Hog Troop. It was part of our light infantry brigade in Vietnam, in Chu Lai. What they would do when they would kill VC, in a contact, they would pile the bodies in kind of grotesque kinds of ways. If there were women, they would put the dead bodies on top of the women as if they were fornicating, because a lot of the VC were women. So if you got in contact, you’d kill women in the firefights. Also, they’d run over the bodies with the tracks and they’d be even bloodier than they were, and you’d see that kind of stuff. I was told that the unit that we were working with shot a pregnant woman in the stomach when we walked into the hooch, but it wasn’t something that I could do anything about. But I think the nature of our attitude toward these Asian folk wasn’t a very positive one. I think their lives weren’t very valuable to us, so it was easy to kill them. There was this movie that came out after the war; it was called Friendly Fire, and it was a movie that starred Carol Burnett. Her son had been in Vietnam and he was killed by artillery fire. My sister got me the book and I read it. It was friends of mine in Vietnam and I didn’t realize what had happened at the time, but a friend of mine accidentally fired the artillery that killed the son of this woman, and those things happened. What does happen is a lot of careless stuff because whenever you’re around weapons, you have to be very careful. But our company was very poorly disciplined. I remember getting into a firefight one night and having a listening post out in the trees and we were kind of set up in an open area, in a rice paddy. The VC opened fire on our position in the rice paddy and the company commander was not in the listening post, which you’re supposed to do as soon as they report any contact or the enemy out there. So because we were so poorly disciplined, we ended up shooting our own people and we killed one of our own soldiers that was in the listening post, shot him in the stomach.

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Another time we had a pit dug where we paid the little Vietnamese kids to bring in unspent bullets, hand grenades, or whatever kinds of ammunition that they had around and we’d give them food or cigarettes or whatever, and we’d put them in this pit when we were around populated areas, and then we’d blow it up before we left. We figured it was a way of getting this stuff out of the hands of VC. I remember a group of people staring into this pit at the end of a day and this dock handler picking up an M-79 round that had been a dud, picking it up and having it go off and wounding eight people that were around the circle. Real stupid things. Another time a guy came in from an ambush patrol and he was the point man. They came into the company area and a friend that hadn’t gone out in the patrol walks up and talks to him, and the guy that was the only one that was allowed to chamber a round in his rifle puts his rifle down and it accidentally goes off and kills his friend as he’s talking to him. That happened right behind me. There was a fifty-five-gallon drum burning trash up at this firebase one time, and these four or five guys watching this burn got a can of shaving cream and threw it into the fire to see what would happen. Of course, it exploded and the can was like razor blades and they flew out and hit all these guys. So this kind of shit was always happening. It was serious kinds of wounds, because when you’re in an area, a country as dirty as Vietnam, there’s so much infection that all of those wounds were trips home because you couldn’t fight the infection. I have flashbacks about the things that happened, triggered by stuff that’s happening today. Somebody will say something in conversation or something will come on the news and it will bring back a memory. I think about those stupid things that would happen. You just try to be smart enough not to let them happen to you and the people that you were in charge of, so I kept a close eye on my charges and made sure they didn’t get hurt. I certainly wasn’t going to have them killed there. In my company, most of the Latinos ended up in the mortar platoon. The mortar platoon was the hardest-working group in the company because they were responsible for lugging around this very heavy mortar, which included the tube, the legs, the base plate, and also you had to carry the rounds for the thing, which weighed about twenty-five pounds apiece. And so there were about ten or twelve Latinos that were part of the mortar platoon. They were the ones that carried the heaviest equipment in order to provide support for their comrades. So they were excellent soldiers and there was a lot of positive feelings about them. The camaraderie was very strong among Latinos.

the impact of war on family

I think one of the good things about Vietnam for me is being able to be responsible for not having people killed. There were times, as an early observer, where I would get calls to look at artillery missions that were being fired by other artillery officers. When I went over and looked where they wanted to have the artillery land, in a couple of cases, they were calling artillery on themselves just by not being aware of where they were in relation to where they were calling the artillery, and I just shut off the mission. That would have resulted in the artillery landing on them. I remember one mission that they said there were five hundred VC in the open, which never happened at that point in the war. The VC were a lot smarter than that. But they were ready to really fire a ton of artillery at these five hundred VC, and what had happened is a corps of engineers had cleared this big area because there were a lot of mines. It was the area where I had walked when I was in the infantry. There were so many mines in the area that the commanding general just said, “I’m going to level the whole place,” and he did. He leveled maybe a five-mile-wide by twenty-mile with bulldozers and, in leveling it, it would create a lot of brush and a lot of firewood, and there were hundreds of Vietnamese out in these piles of wood, cutting the wood and collecting it to take back to the highway, and they were ready to blow them away. I’m sure there were VC in that group, but that kind of thing happened quite a bit, where you would just shut something off and save people’s lives. In my graduating class in high school, one was killed and in my graduating class from the U of A, two of them were killed. One was killed in Vietnam and the other was killed in Korea. I mean, I was out in the field in Vietnam when my classmate from the U of A was killed and actually we were in the same division and I was listening to them trying to rescue him over the radio as all this stuff was going on. I found out later who it was. I think I was a much different person when I returned from Vietnam, but I never tried to figure out what happened to me. I think the war had a more psychological effect on me than I realized and changed me in ways that later on affected my life. But it’s hard to put a finger on it. There was almost no respect for the Vietnam vet when we returned. I can remember coming back and going to a friend’s house, an older friend that I knew in Nogales. It was a Christmas when he was in town or something. He’s a lawyer in California. I walked into his parents’ house in Nogales and I just wanted to chat, and he looked at me and he said, “Baby killer.” I just kind of walked away. It was nonsense, because

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there were some of us that killed babies, but the vast majority of us didn’t. But that was the kind of reaction we got. You certainly didn’t want to be wearing your uniform. I got an early drop to come back to school. I got a master’s degree and I got hired as a teacher in an inner-city Chicano school. So within about nine months, I had a job and I was starting a career, but you don’t realize the effect of the war. Now looking back, I realized that I must have been kind of fucked-up. I think some of the problems that I had in my marriage was in not communicating who I was when I came back from the war, because I got married about thirty days before I went to Vietnam. Even though I dated this girl for a year and a half before, I wasn’t the same person when I got back, and even though we were married twelve years, that marriage ended in divorce. My wife ended up saying, “You’re not the same person you were.” It would have helped me to figure it out, but you’re kind of oblivious to it. You don’t realize the effect that this thing is going to have on you, and I don’t think I dealt with it very well. I was the type of person that talked a lot about my experiences, and I think psychologically that’s been helpful. I don’t hold it in. I still tell war stories, but not as frequently. I think probably less-harsh war stories, but I think it’s still certainly a big part of who I am. I think it helped me to realize that there is a lot of adversity that you have to overcome in life as a Chicano, and if I can survive being in Vietnam, I can survive any of the stuff that I’ve had to deal with here. So I think it’s helped me quite a bit. I’m a university professor now. I’m developing a very satisfying career and I remarried. I have a son by the first marriage and a daughter by the second marriage. My life, I feel right now, is very happy. Vietnam was a paradox because it’s just part of the sense of duty that I had. While I was over there, it was kind of funny, because you don’t believe in the war, but you certainly believe in your fellow soldiers. You don’t want to do anything or act in a way that will hurt somebody or cause somebody to lose their life or be crippled. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been able to deal with the war without a lot of guilt. I not only had a professional attitude about what I was there for and a high set of standards of professional conduct, but I think there were things that I got from my upbringing—a strong set of moral beliefs and spiritual values—that I think kept me from doing things that other people did, like murdering people, for example. So I don’t feel any guilt.

the impact of war on family

I think there’s times we have to fight wars. It’s been there through history. I think war helps to deal with adversity, but you always try to say there has to be a positive outcome of this sucker, and I think that may be it. You really have a sense of the kind of person that you are by how you behave, and I think that’s the benefit, and you can judge yourself by that behavior. I don’t think the war in Vietnam accomplished much of anything. I don’t think there were any positive outcomes. It was a waste of time. We interfered in a kind of civil war in that country, and it could have ended the same, only a lot sooner, with a lot less people killed. We had fifty-six thousand Americans killed. The North Vietnamese had a million people killed. It was a tremendous loss of life. We really didn’t need to do that. I hope they don’t screw up again. With my son, I certainly don’t make war glamorous. We’ve watched war programs together, and I remember there was a PBS series of about ten programs, and he must have been seven years old, and we were watching them. At the end of ten weeks we were just kind of chatting about the last program and he said, “Dad, did you win?” And I said, “No.” Robert u.s. marine corps—sergeant Casualty Reporter Third Marine Division, I Corps Base of Operations: Northern South Vietnam vietnam: march 1968–april 1969 One family had three brothers serve in Vietnam. This interview and the one that follows are with two of the brothers. Whenever my brothers and I sit down, whenever we’re having beers, relaxing, we’ll just start talking about Vietnam and we talk for hours. It’s the greatest therapy in the world for us. We talk about all the things that happened, bad things, good things. We’ve got three different stories. My story is completely different from my brother, who was in a tank. He’ll tell you about the Mexicans that were cool, that jumped out on the tanks, the John Wayne types. They’d get shot right off, like nothing, but they’d be jumping out there and they’d be screaming when they’re shooting. I entered the Marine Corps in 1967, when I was nineteen. I knew about Vietnam just by turning on the television. When I saw the news,

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everything was Vietnam—today thirteen guys were killed, forty-five were wounded—that kind of stuff. I had a brother, Johnny, who was in Vietnam already. I joined the Marine Corps because my older brother was in the Marine Corps and my other brother was in the army. My mom was upset. One brother was getting out soon, but then another one had just gone in and he had already told her that he was going to Vietnam, and then I joined the service. One of my brothers was stationed in Okinawa, and when I went to Vietnam, he signed a waiver for me to get out of Vietnam. So they sent him to Vietnam and when he got there, he wrote me a letter and told me, “I’m in Vietnam now; you can leave,” because you can’t have two brothers serving in a war zone. He did it to get me out of Vietnam because he was my big brother. I wrote him back, and I can’t tell you what I wrote down, but I told him, “Next time, ask before you sign waivers.” So we both stayed in Vietnam and I saw him three times there. We knew from boot camp we were all going to go. Everybody in boot camp is trained to kill, kill, kill. When I got to Vietnam there was a thing called “casual.” If you were a casual that means that you would go to an area and you would wait around and see where you were going to be assigned. So they told me I was going to be a casual and I didn’t know what the heck I was going to be doing, so when I landed in Vietnam, what I found out is that it was a casualty section for the Third Marine Division. I was a casualty reporter in Vietnam. That was my job for thirteen months. At the time when I got there, there had been people that had been killed and they were sending them home. They were finding out, instead of being gunshot wounds to the chest, it was to the head, and families when they were opening up the casket to identify their sons would freak. So part of my job was to make sure if a guy was shot in the chest, he was shot in the chest. So I had to confirm it. I saw probably more than three thousand bodies. I saw a warehouse with five, six tiers of Americans in the mortuary in Da Nang. The first day I was in Vietnam, I saw four bodies. That was the first time I had ever seen death right there, and I swallowed real hard because I had just kissed my mom four days ago, and here I was looking at this stuff. To see the war, when I was on the plane, it was something that you just dreamed of. You saw John Wayne doing it, but when you’re actually there, everybody else with you is just like you—there’s no John Waynes. These guys were the ones that were teaching me, because when I saw those dead, a guy came up to me, and he knocked me right out of it.

the impact of war on family

“Those stupid asses, look at them.” And I looked at this guy and he told me, “These guys had to peek, now we’re going to send them home in a bag.” I’m trying to figure out where this guy’s coming from. Apparently, an ammo dump had been hit, and everybody that’s smart, even commonsense will tell you that if an ammo dump goes up, that means there’s shrap metal flying everywhere, and these four guys were protected, they were in a sand bunker, but they all stood up to look to see what was going on, so they all got wasted. At that point, it’s like you tighten up your gut and you go, “Okay, this is what it’s going to be like.” I look at my friend who was hurt and I understand what he went through. I saw it so many times in my job. One guy in particular, he was an air force guy, a Mexicano. In fact, at that time, we were taking prisoners and about three months after I was there, marines were not taking any more prisoners. Maybe they weren’t giving up, but we just weren’t taking them. But this Mexicano, he was in the air force and everybody hated the air force because they were all a bunch of wimps, but this guy was just grabbing these NVAs and just throwing them into that ambulance. I lost all my compassion for the Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, Vietcong. My compassion for those people se fue [went away]. Especially when I saw those Americans dead, because they never should have died. At first, I just assumed they died for a good cause because we were all Americans. When I was in Da Nang, on a boat heading for the USS Sanctuary hospital ship, a navy guy was on the boat, and I saw this big old Standard Oil sign, big sucker, and it’s an offshore oil rig, but it was in Da Nang harbor. I look at this guy and I go, “What the hell is that?” And he goes, “You stupid ass, that’s why we’re here.” I go, “What?” All the way to the ship, I kept watching that thing and going, “Why are we here?” He was right. But the marines were the people that were going to win the war; I was that brainwashed. So after I got on the ship, boom, se acabó [that was it], I went right back into my world and my world was my job. There were seven people that I worked with, and these guys were all my age and we were under the command of two other NCOs and an officer. Actually seeing the bodies and looking at the guys that were the triple amputees, the guys that had third-degree burns that looked like frogs, you just live with it. It hurts, but you talked to them because they’re still human beings. I grabbed this one guy once, I swear to God his face looked like a frog. He just had slits for lips and slits for eyes and his nose was gone because he had third-degree burns. There was about

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four of them that came in on an amtrac that hit a mine. The guys inside don’t have a chance. It’s just an inferno. I was at a hospital in Da Nang called the Twenty-second Casualty Station and my job was to help assign these guys to go to hospitals in the United States. I would always grab the Mexicanos and I would ask them where they’re from. If they were from Texas, from California, wherever, I would always get them as close as possible to their homes, because your mom and dad are going to want to see you. This guy, this frog, though, we had to send him to the burn center in Maryland, and this guy goes, “Corporal, Corporal, come here.” I said, “Yeah,” and he says, “I have to go to the bathroom.” “And you expect me to help you, right?” He says, “Yeah, please.” “Okay,” I said, “but don’t tell anybody.” So I pulled down the covers and he was okay in the torso. But his face, his arms, his hands, he had no fingers, they were just burned off, but I helped him urinate. I told him, “Listen,” as I’m holding his penis, “if I see a smile come out of your face,” and you could see a shitty little grin there, but you know what, it was okay because this guy had guts. It got to the point that when I went into that mortuary in Da Nang, there would be four hundred men dead. I was there in March of ’68, the height of the Tet offensive. The Battle of Hue, which is what that movie Full Metal Jacket is based on, well, that battle was as fierce as they say it was. My brother was in that battle. The second day I was in Vietnam, we drove through that town and it was destroyed. You see so many Americans dead and you know who’s doing it. You know we’re not killing each other. That was the turning point, I guess, when I saw those guys dead there. Three days prior to coming home, we were looking for four marines that were killed. The Vietcong had decapitated these men. One was a negro and the other three were gringos. We couldn’t find their heads, so we had search missions going out there looking for them. The day before I left, they found the heads. I didn’t even have to go, but I went because I had to see what happened. They got the heads, and it’s kind of sad because you’re looking at these guys that are finally going to be able to go home, because they’ve been sitting there for two weeks in Graves Registration. They found their heads and they tried to put them on the right one. These guys in Graves Registration are cabrones. They’re all guys that were shot up, ex-grunts, but these guys were grabbing cabezas [heads] and putting them on different bodies. This is callousness at its extreme. It was crazy.

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I saw a doctor llorando [crying] because he was pumping this guy’s heart, he pumped him and pumped him and was screaming at him to come back, and he died. Everybody is watching this thing happening in triage. He’s screaming and he’s crying and I’m going, “Shit, look at this guy, and he’s a doctor.” To me the body’s a count. He died. Come get him out of here, okay. We had one guy in Registration whose father committed suicide and when he came back to Vietnam, because they give you thirty days off, they reassigned him because he couldn’t see another dead body. He said, “I’m not going to work this thing anymore.” When I came back from Vietnam, the first movie I saw was M*A*S*H. The original M*A*S*H was a great duplication of the chaos, the stuff that happens because it’s just moving and everybody knows what they’ve got to do, from the guys that run out to get the litters to the people that are just waiting. You’re sitting in that triage, which is like the emergency room, and there’s only a field phone. Remember M*A*S*H, when they bring them all in and then they set them down and there’s Hawkeye and the other guy’s screaming do this or that? That’s a triage. See, they didn’t have operating rooms where they would just keep them. This was the initial, boom, put them in here, clean them up, start cutting them open, and then throw them into an operating room if it was a life-and-death situation. When the helicopter is coming in, he’s calling and it’s coming in over one of these phones. You’d be sitting there, shooting the breeze, and all of a sudden the phone rings, you’re watching one guy run over there and everybody is just waiting and you can hear a pin drop. Then, you’d hear fourteen KIAs [killed in action] and 36 WIAs [wounded in action], and everybody starts running all over the place and they’re calling the doctors. The doctors are coming in on the Jeeps and getting ready and then you can hear the helicopters in the distance. To this day, I hear them five miles away. They come in there and all you’ve got is people running out, grabbing bodies, putting them in. I would always go through this one hospital, the 22nd Casualty Staging Flight. The CSF was the last thing they saw before they got sent off to one of the hospitals in the States. I would always find the Mexicanos. I did it because it was instinct and because I’ve got family. Anyway, this one kid he says, “You know, I think I lost it. I lost it. I lost it.” I’m saying, “Okay, okay, what did you lose?” I already knew he lost his leg. Me dice [He tells me], “But I don’t care, porque voy a ir a mirar [because I’m going to go see] a mi jefita,” his mother. “Well, ¿por dónde vives [where do you live]?”

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“Tejas, hombre.” I said, “You know what I’m going to do for you? I’m going to send you right to your mother’s house, okay?” “Ándale [Go on], ese, could you really do that for me?” I said, “No problem. Let me look at your leg.” I took the cover down and I looked at his leg and I asked, “How do you feel?” He said, “I don’t give a shit. I’m going home, that’s all I know.” There was one Mexicano that I remember distinctly because he came up to me. He was going home on a psych thing. I don’t know what they called them, psychiatric care or something, but he came up to me and he was a real nice guy, real tall. He says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They want me to kill, I kill.” I asked him, “What’s the problem?” “Now they’re going to send me home because I like to kill.” “Hey, man, you know how these guys are,” le dije [I told him], “they’re all a bunch of idiots,” and I called them all kinds of names. I talked to this other guy and he said, “Yeah, that son of a bitch has killed twenty people.” He snapped. But you know what? It wasn’t his fault. A lot of people, when they kill somebody, it affects them differently. Something inside him snapped. When I was in Vietnam, the first month was terrible for me. Not only was I seeing death firsthand, but I was seeing something that I wasn’t accustomed to. If I didn’t have the other guys with me, I think I would have snapped, too. My brother and I sat on a hill once and I talked to a negrito, a Mexicano, and an Anglo that were going into the field, and it was like a hill right here, not as high, and there was dense bush over here and it was about three hundred yards off, and they’re talking, shooting the breeze. My brother and me had driven in and he was showing me around. One of the guys says, “Well, we got to get going, “We’ll see you later.” “Hey, órale, I’ll see you.” They went three hundred yards and my brother says, “They’re doing a search and destroy.” Okay, I just shot the breeze with these guys and all of a sudden, it’s like all hell broke loose. There was about fifty Vietnamese and, all of a sudden, they started shooting. There was a lot of screaming and then it stopped. You could see them coming back up and there was three guys dead. One of them was that negrito that we were talking to. One time, my brother and I were in an outhouse when we got hit with rockets, and we laughed all the way to the hole to jump in while they were shooting at us. We got hit at my place one time. I jumped in

the impact of war on family

the hole screaming for him because, when you hear incoming sirens going off, three in the morning and I’m screaming, “Güero, Güero, incoming, Güero!” And I’m looking all over the place for him in the tent and I jump in the hole and there he is, saying, “What took you so long? I heard it when it came out of the tube, man.” I told him, “You’re crazy! I heard it coming out of the tube, shit!” We were hit by rockets quite a bit, and mortars. My first encounter in Vietnam, we opened up that base in Quang Tri. It grew up to be a gigantic son of a gun after the army came in. They came in with ten thousand guys, but we were there with about five hundred. They say, “Here comes the army. They’re going to be here in September.” They came, I mean, thousands of helicopters. They set up and, all of a sudden, we’re not needed anymore. But those nights prior to that were very scary. When you hear these mortars hitting and the rockets hitting, distinctive sounds, nothing like TV, believe me, and you can’t bury yourself in the hole because there is no hole, that’s when you start praying to God, “Please, God, don’t let me die this time.” And I would flash on my mom all the time, my family at home. When I came back, I worked and then I got married to somebody I didn’t love. I had a kid and I do love her. Then I just went on from there and got a divorce. My girlfriend got married when I was in Vietnam. So when I came back, I just wanted somebody. That happened to my brother, too, but his girlfriend waited until he got back home to tell him and she was already six months’ pregnant. We’re still dealing with twenty-year-old kids who don’t know, and in ’68, ’69, there wasn’t too many of us thinking. I found out from my mom that my girlfriend had gotten married. My girlfriend didn’t let me know. So I cried by myself over in Vietnam, in the hole. I went into a bunker and I just sat there and I just said, looking up at the sky, “You’ve got to get a hold of yourself. You’ve got bigger problems than this.” I think that’s where you draw the fine line between men and boys. Boys couldn’t have existed over there; men did. She was a Portuguese girl. Her father did not like Mexicans and he made it very clear that she could not date me or see me, and when she got married to an Anglo, everything was hunky-dory in his life. When I think about it, it made an impact on me when I got back because I married the person I didn’t love. I’m not a vengeful person, but I did go to his funeral, his wake, actually, and I just looked at him and said, “So I wasn’t good enough for your daughter.” He’s dead, mind you, and I’m all by myself; nobody was in the room. I’m sitting there looking at this

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guy and I’m thinking and I’m talking to him, muerto [dead]. I’m going, “Here I go to Vietnam and I go through all these head trips and you didn’t like me because I was a Mexican. You stupid ass. I will never forgive you.” The guy that she married, he OD’d on heroin. He was a drug dealer, a drug addict. “So it was okay to marry a drug addict, but it wasn’t okay to marry me, was it?” It’s crazy how things work out. When I came back from Vietnam she was the first thing on my mind y cuando la miré [when I saw her] it was like, “You got fat, you got a kid and it’s not mine. See you later.” “But I love you.” “Sorry.” I was very callous to women and to everything else. What I’ve learned is that everybody dies and the living go on. My grandmother died when I got back from Vietnam. I went to see her and there was no emotion. I didn’t even cry for her. Then my grandfather died and I didn’t cry for him, either. I’d lost a lot of emotions, a lot of compassion, because I saw so much, but I’ve gained some of it back. If I knew then what I know now, I would never go to Vietnam because, first of all, it was a war that couldn’t be won. The battles could be won, but the war couldn’t be won and we were losing American kids for nothing. They told us it was a police action; that was bullshit. That was a war. Police action is what we’ve got out here in the streets now. War is war. When you’re losing Americans every single day, that’s a war, and I wouldn’t go back. I wouldn’t leave for Canada, but I sure wouldn’t go there. One incident I remember. Here’s the mountains all around you, there’s forty thousand gooks shooting at you. Why are you going to send a bunch of guys over here to search and destroy? We lost thirty marines one time because the guy wanted a mission, for them to go and see if there was any enemy out there. I mean, you’re surrounded, you jackass, surrounded. The planes would land, but they wouldn’t stop. The plane would land, go all the way to the end, and by the time it slowed down—they’re C130s—they open the doors and you’re jumping out and throwing out stuff. When they’re done with their tour, the guys are running in and the guys that are hurt, they’re running up and putting them in there. By the time it turns around in the runway, there’s gooks shooting at it. So it just has to take off immediately. Now why in the world did we have that base? I don’t know. But I was a casualty reporter and I knew that we were taking a lot of WIAs and KIAs, a lot of them, every single day. But anyway, what happens?

the impact of war on family

It’s over, se acabó. They moved them out. Blew it up. The gooks come in, they start their own air base. So what do the Americans do? Okay, let’s send some more marines in there. We landed in there, gave us choppers, kick some ass again, yeah, and we got killed again. We left again. Why? It wasn’t even a tactical position. That’s how stupid that was. It was bullshit. Why would I go back now? I’ve learned so much from that experience. Damn, that was a crazy war. I became a member of the Selective Service Board where I live. The president appointed me to that position and the reason I’m doing that is to make sure Mexicanos will also know that they’ve got an out, too. I wanted to make sure that there was representation for the Hispanic community on this important board. Somebody should have said something when I was going in. Somebody should have said something to my mom and dad: “Hey, you know what? You’ve got three sons. There’s a war going on. These are your options.” I want to remember Vietnam. You know why? Because there’s a wall in Washington, DC, that reminds me that I have to remember. I can never forget. All those guys that I saw in the mortuary in Da Nang, all the guys that I saw in the USS Sanctuary, all the guys that I saw in Dong Ha and the 22nd CSF, all those guys that I saw come in and out of my life, I owe them something, and that’s for me to survive as long as I can, because a lot of them didn’t. Like the guy with the frog face, the Mexicano without the leg, even the goofy guy that killed all those gooks, I’ve got to go on for them. If I can do it with a tie, it’s even better because people notice the ties. People don’t notice the poor suckers like us before we become professionals, and this will remind me that I have to continue for these guys. I owe them. Jay u.s. marine corps—sergeant First Tank Battalion, First Marine Division Base of Operations: I Corps, Laos vietnam: december 1967–january 1969 On December 24, 1967, I enlisted because I was a young kid and I thought that was the right thing to do. I went in with four people and we all went into the Marine Corps. In Vietnam, I was used as a tank gunner and I did some infantry, TAD they call it, temporary additional duty, when they run out of bodies and they needed to use you. I guess I just became calmer about death. You were supposed to die. I thought I was going to die. That’s the way I looked at it. I just got lucky.

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I remember one time where basically we got fooled by the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong. They set us up in a situation where we went into an area which was similar to a forest where you couldn’t traverse your tanks. Your guns were lodged in there. They set up the trap for us and they were so close, they were attacking us, and we were shooting them right off the tops of our tanks. They were loaded. We were loaded, too. Anybody that’s got any guts will normally take a shot of whiskey or have something to drink unless you’re really into the religious type where people don’t, but nobody wants to admit that you’re really scared. Nobody wants to die. When people are shooting at you, you get a fear factor, but if you’re a little bit high, as they say, you get caught up into it. There was a large amount of drugs going through there. I stayed away from the other drugs because I felt that I wouldn’t be very strong, and I was a corporal acting actually like a captain or a lieutenant because the captains and the lieutenants were mostly shoving the corporals and sergeants around and making like officers in a war. Fragging was done all the time. They were just doing their job, but they were green. They didn’t know what they were doing and they’d get in our way. You’d have someone that would be giving an order because that’s the way he was taught coming out of his officer’s training. They ask you to do something, to go shoot somebody. They don’t want to do it; they want you to do it. And then before you know it, they were just being shot accidentally. The war in Vietnam was ours if we wanted it, if they left us alone— they wouldn’t. They had politics involved. They would not allow us to go in there and take care of the people that ran over our groups. That’s when the problem started. I questioned why someone puts us into a war and tells us that we can’t shoot when they’re shooting at us and to ask for permission to shoot back. Everyone knew that, all the infantry and all the people that were in battle. That’s when you started looking at the people that were the brass. You could see problems. You can’t come in with soldiers and tell them to put their hands in their pockets while the others are shooting at you. That was the whole problem in Vietnam that I saw. I was in the First Tank Battalion. Our company was a rolling company. We were called the Huns from the North. We had drawings on our tanks for having the most kills, and it was like a macho trip to see who had the most kills in our company. A lot of people don’t realize that in Vietnam there was about a good 60 percent that would very rarely shoot their rifles. There wasn’t action all the time. It’s something where you

the impact of war on family

have people that are sappers. They break into your areas at night just to cause turmoil, but we were the ones that were the farthest out, before anybody got hit in the big compounds. We had kilo teams out there a lot different than what other people saw. Kilo teams means teams that went out and killed anybody that got near you. I was on a combat unit based on the 173rd Airborne. We had two units from the Marine Corps attached to them. We were on the outskirts when they came in, and they attacked the army unit and they went right through the middle of the camp. We turned our guns and opened up and we probably killed thirty to fifty people that night, and we were just watching the airport. They just got overrun. After this whole thing stopped, you could see the helicopters, the Cobras, coming in around us, and you could feel the links that hold the machine gun rounds on the helicopters falling on top of you when we’re trying to aim at night. You can’t hear the helicopters because of the firing, but you can feel those things hitting you. If you’ve ever seen tanks and recoilless rifles opening up, it’s really a bloodbath. You cut people literally in half. You become very callous. There’s no feelings. You can’t. I had friends of mine that were shot up and I didn’t care. Better them than me. Before you know it, you become callous about everything. You don’t want to have friends. It’s easier. I went to a doctor in San Francisco where they told me I had problems. They shoved me right out the back door and they lost my record. I knew they didn’t want to be bothered by me, so I just never bothered them. What I’m saying is that’s just the way the game is played. Remember the Agent Orange stuff? I used to sit there on the tank drinking beer when they were coming over us, spraying us. Luckily for me, nothing so far that I can tell has hit me, but who’s to know? My eardrums were perforated from the explosion of the tanks. They were bleeding down my face while we were shooting. Of course, I was aware of it, but you don’t have much time to worry about it. It’s like when you get into a fistfight. Someone breaks your nose, you keep fighting, then you take a step back and say, “God, that hurts.” What happens is they come in with a corpsman, they check you out, and if it stops, you don’t have to go into sick bay. There’s no bullets in you, and the Marine Corps was into a macho trip on who is the strongest and the best fit to handle any injury. They put a coat of armor around them so they don’t feel it, but, deep down inside, they never wanted to kill. You just do what you have to do. That’s the sad part, it really is. I wasn’t the one that saw Bob Hope. We were the ones that were loaded down. I came into Phu Bai loaded down with grenades and a

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submachine gun. The officers got scared of me. I came in to see my brother and they were saying, “Take it easy, Corporal, don’t go crazy.” They didn’t know how to figure me out. They could see in my eyes when I came in there that I’d already been shooting. You’re taught one thing: that’s carry a rifle and kill people, and that’s what it was coming down to. In my case, I was riding a big halfa-million-dollar box and I just shot people, blew up whatever I saw. Sometimes there’s guilt of maybe I’m not thinking right and maybe I should have seen a psychiatrist for a while. I don’t think I’m crazy or anything, but I still carry the feeling that I can do something without any emotion if it had to be done. I feel I could kill and with less feeling, and the problem is that I don’t like myself that way, but I can’t do anything about it. It doesn’t feel good. When we came back, nobody cared. At the time, everybody was into the idea that war really stunk. I felt they had turned their backs on us, and they felt that we were just warmongers. They were right about one thing: we became warmongers, but it was because of our pride for our country. I felt the antiwar demonstrators were cowards and they would find any way out. You have people that don’t want to fight for their rights. You have them everywhere. Vietnam had them with their people. I had to go to San Francisco, the Presidio, to pass a test because I was an automatic 4F. I went back up there because I wasn’t going to let anyone not let me fight for my country. I had a bone disease in my right leg. I have a scar from my upper knee down to my ankle. I didn’t have to go to war. What I’ve come across is that the people that were in Vietnam were the ones whose families were the most uneducated. Their sons were fighting for something they really didn’t know what they were fighting for. They want to believe they were fighting for their country and something they feel is just, but they weren’t educated enough to know that it wasn’t the right thing to do. I’ve educated myself now. I already know the mistake I made. I would do everything on my part to stop my children. I don’t trust our government. I do not want to go into a fight when someone ties my hands behind my back. I think anybody that goes into any war, there’s a lot of misgivings, as we say. People die, a lot of innocent people get hurt, but you have to have a reason to fight, and there was no reason, none whatsoever other than a few politicians deciding that we should go in there. I think our military force is the mightiest military force there is. The army, the Marine Corps, the navy, and the air force. We could have

the impact of war on family

taken over that whole country without a problem if the politicians would have gotten out of there and the news media would have stayed out of there and if the people would have just let it go. The people themselves tied our hands up. But there won’t be no more wars like that. We live and learn. I remember being brought up Catholic: “Thou shalt not kill.” Then you come into the military and they sit you down and tell you that it’s okay. God says that it’s all right to fight for your country. It’s the hardest thing to accept. You don’t just have someone, after all the training you have, tell you that you can go out and kill people; now it’s all right. You’ll find that with most of the religions, and that is what I used to watch with the Catholic priest. When you do battle, they come in and you’d see people kneeling to get the sign of the cross and their last communion before you go into battle. The heaviest thing is to sit there and watch helicopters come in and pull these priests, pick them up and get them out of there before all the firing starts, and you wonder, “So you are the priest that is taking care of me? You’re going to pray to God. Well, you’re afraid to face it yourself.” I have lost all my respect for them, and I’m angry at myself because all priests aren’t that way, but with what I’ve seen, I have a very bad feeling for them. To me, they’re just ordinary people and they fooled everybody. You start praying for one reason: you get scared. I always felt that it was a coward’s way out. I felt you ought to stand up and go and take it the way you’re supposed to, and I’m not going to kiss anyone’s ass and I didn’t pray. Crazy, huh? I was wrong. I really think that religion is important, but I was just trained that way. I was asked to be an officer in the military. It was 1967, just before I left for Vietnam. There was about twelve or fourteen of us who were asked to be lieutenants. I was the only Hispanic there. The rest were all white, and there was no blacks. I turned it down because I felt I was another number that was going to be shot up like the rest of the lieutenants. Second lieutenants were going down like flies. I do think war is necessary. I don’t like to sound so much like a hawk. They say if you’re a hawk you’re dumb, but no matter where you’re at, some people are weak and some people are real strong. Like, you can have a couple of big bruisers walk in and they go into a place and just go, “We want it, we’re taking it.” Sometimes you have no choice: you have to stand up to them or else they’ll walk right over you, walk over your family. They’ll do what they want. I always felt that I had to be the one that would jump in front, and I said, “If I go down, I guess that’s the way it goes.”

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Connie connie’s son hank died in vietnam on july 15, 1969, at age twenty-two I knew about Vietnam, and as Hank was coming closer to draft age and his turn was coming, I listened more to the news because I didn’t want him to go. And he kept saying he wanted to. As a mother, I tried to keep him in school so he wouldn’t go, but he was too busy having fun. At the last minute, he tried to enlist in the air force, but by that time it was too late and he was drafted into the army in late 1967. I petitioned the draft board for my second son not to have to go. Hank went to boot camp at Fort Polk. On his last leave home, he told me he was going to Vietnam. He was there less than five months. I lived for his letters. I wrote to him almost daily and sent him packages at least once a week. He would ask for rice, candy bars, just snacks. He had a very soft heart and he said that the village people had children and he liked to share the goodies with them. I would send him everything he asked for. When he wouldn’t write, I would be worried and I couldn’t sleep at night. When I started getting really worried was about in early July. In a dream I had, he was just walking on water. I could see the waves of the water, but he seemed to be walking just very still. He wasn’t falling or anything, and I told my husband, “Something’s wrong. I’m really worried about Henry. He hasn’t written and I had this dream.” He said, “Oh, no, it’s just because you’re nervous. You’ll get a letter.” But I didn’t get a letter. The next night, I remember that he was in this canyon. He was all alone down there, and I was looking down and he was looking up to me to help him out and I couldn’t. There was no way; it was too steep. So I knew then. I really started panicking and I never was too religious, but I remember just praying and praying and asking the Virgen de Guadalupe to please help bring him back alive. My husband was in Mexico and I was working in Porterville, but after that dream, I asked for an emergency leave so I could go to Mexico. I took a plane out of L.A. and I arrived in Guadalajara, I think on the thirteenth. It was so hot and humid that my sister-in-law and I could hear cats crying and owls hooting and I was just a nervous wreck. So I woke up and I told my husband, “I want you to take me right now to Mexico City.” It’s about an eight-hour drive from Guadalajara. I said, “Something’s wrong.” So we drove and it just seemed years before we got there. We got there on the night of the fourteenth in the evening and we got a little room about two blocks from the old basilica.

the impact of war on family

The next morning I put on a lavender dress because we were going to walk over to the basilica where I was going to light a candle. We were about one block from the basilica when, I don’t know why, I told my husband, “Wait, we’re going back.” We went back to the room and I put on a black dress and a black scarf. At that moment, I don’t know why I did it, I just knew I had to take off that lavender dress and we walked over. I thought if I went on my knees he’d have a better chance. So on my knees I went up to the altar and I lit the candle. I’ve always felt guilty because I asked the Virgin to please bring him back safely and in one piece, that I didn’t want him to come back without a leg, or without his eyes because he was such a fun-loving person and if he came back like that, well, it would be just terrible for him, and maybe I shouldn’t have asked that. Then afterwards, when I got home—we got home about four days later, that’s as long as it took to drive to get back—I had a dream on the road. I woke up about eight hours before we got home. I had this dream that one of my daughters—I could see her face so clearly—was almost in tears, like something awful had happened and that Robert had had an accident on the side of the road. That was the dream and I told my husband, “Let’s not even stop anyplace. Let’s get home; something’s wrong at the house.” I thought it was Robert, the other son. I said Robert must have had an accident. I said I dreamed him and he was crying and he’s very hurt. I dreamed Gloria and she was panic-stricken. So I don’t even think we ate two meals, and when I got home, everybody was quiet. I got home asking, “Has Hank written?” And they would look at each other, but they wouldn’t say anything. I thought the kids were acting strange, no interest in the trip, no interest in what I had bought. And they told me that Henry hadn’t written. By then, I knew something was wrong and, sure enough, I guess they were just waiting because, evidently, two officers had been there and when they didn’t find me, they asked them not to tell me anything, that they had to tell me. They wanted to be called the minute I got there and they got there about an hour and a half after we arrived. They just told me that they had some bad news for me regarding my son. Oh, it was terrible. I was at the funeral, but I remember they gave me some shot. I was there, but I wasn’t. I wish I could remember more about it, but I don’t. It was pretty bad. So when they told me, I guess I went crazy. It’s a part of my life, about two years, I think, I was lost. I worked, came home, no interest in anything. I couldn’t face it. I took some time off, maybe a couple of

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weeks, but work seemed to help me because I worked with developmentally disabled children. But the minute I got home, it was there again. I neglected my home, my children, my husband. They all felt that I didn’t care about them, and I did. I didn’t want anything, and holidays—forget it. We were so close, Hank and I. The other ones were close, too, but not like him. He knew how to get around us, both of us. My husband was very good to him. But I snapped out of it when I saw my younger son. He wasn’t really in trouble, but just going the wrong way with the wrong friends, and I missed a lot about what my sixteen-year-old daughter was doing. She was in high school and I didn’t even care where she wanted to go, what she wanted to do. It was just that he was my life. My mother told me, “Leave him alone, let him rest, because he can’t rest.” But I wouldn’t listen. I was just at the cemetery, buying him things and putting them on his grave, and they’d steal them and I’d get angry. On holidays, Thanksgiving, I’d go over there before we sat down to eat. I think they resented it. At the house I just wanted to be with him. I felt that he was with me in the house by myself. I didn’t want anybody in there; everybody was in school. I thought I could hear doors close and that he was there because I would talk to him. Now it seems odd, but I remember buying a set of books, ordering them from this place, about how you could talk to them and bring them back, and oh, I followed it and the Ouija board, because on the last leave he asked the Ouija board if he was coming back. He and four of his friends were having a little party there at my house. The other boys, the Ouija board said yes, they were coming back. And poor Hank, he tried and he tried, and the Ouija board kept saying no, that he wasn’t coming back. So I knew and I think he knew, too. So when the Ouija board said that he wasn’t coming back, he told me, “Oh, Mom, I’m coming back. I’m not going to push up daisies.” Of course, now daisies is what I try to take him to the cemetery. I don’t go often anymore. I go about Memorial Day and Veterans Day. I started going to church and it helped me a lot. It helped me understand and resign myself to the fact that he was gone and that I should appreciate what little time I did have with him. We had some beautiful rosebushes, and on his last leave, we lent him the car. He went out and he came in late. It was raining and he didn’t want to get wet, so he drove in and he ran over my rosebushes. Of course, after he went to Vietnam, my husband brought the rosebushes back to life and nobody could touch those rosebushes. After his death, oh, I’d get so angry if anybody even looked at them wrong.

the impact of war on family

On one trip to Mexico, we didn’t take him and we paid him to paint the house. When we got home, it was painted, but then on one of the lockers that we had outside, an old locker my husband bought, like school lockers, he’d put his white handprints on that locker. I saved the lockers; I didn’t want anybody touching those handprints. My husband finally said, “We’re moving, we’re buying another house.” I didn’t want to leave, but we left the house and we bought another one and we rented that one to my daughter, who had two small daughters. He wanted to get me out of that one so I wouldn’t see his room or any of the things that would remind me of him. Hank was very fun-loving. He wasn’t the all-American hero and he gave me a lot of headaches, but nothing bad, not like the kids of today. He’d run up my phone bill and when it came, he’d toss it up above the cabinet in the bathroom. And he loved his hair. He wore it kind of long because he loved the Beatles and he would spend hours admiring himself in the bathroom. So my two granddaughters would tell their mother that they would see this man in the bathroom looking in the mirror. They couldn’t see his face, but that he was combing his hair and he had black hair. They didn’t know him. Lisa was a baby about nine months old when he left and Regina was born while he was over there, and you know, that scared me, and my daughter said that she would hear noises in the back room. I said that’s my fault for not letting him rest. I knew it was time to just let go and I did. I just asked for help, the church, my brother and everything, and if it was him, they didn’t see him anymore. But my granddaughter, right now she’s twenty-four years old, and she still remembers the man that she would see in the bathroom. At that age, I guess they thought he was probably some man, really. I had made up my mind I was going to let go of him so I went to, like, a missionary. I told him what happened to my granddaughters and that I felt that it was my fault. He went to the house and they prayed at the house. I started reading the Bible and going to church and I felt a lot of comfort in that. I resigned myself to the fact that I enjoyed him when I had him. What happened, happened. I couldn’t prevent it. Sad, because he tried to live in his twenty-two years—I think he lived forty. He was that kind of a person. He was a good person. It hurt me because he acted so tough and he wasn’t. Evidently, the first person he killed over there made him feel very bad, because he wrote to me and he said, “Mom, he was so young, he was just a boy.” He said he couldn’t sleep that night thinking of that young boy. He’d write about the village people and the kids and there’s a picture of him carrying the kids on his back.

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There’s a grandmother on his father’s side and she wanted him to go to Canada and I did tell him not to go. During that time, if they left, they had no future. He said that his grandmother wanted him to go to Canada. I think he felt that perhaps I would say, “Well, go ahead and go,” and if I said it, he probably would have gone. But I didn’t say it. He had rheumatic fever when he was a young boy and he’d write to me and call me on the phone during training, that his knees really hurt him, and I said, “Hank, do you want me to go and get the records from the doctor where you had rheumatic fever and perhaps you shouldn’t be in there?” The training they had at Fort Polk was just like being in Vietnam, go in the river and swim for hours, to try and survive in it. When he’d get out, he said his leg really hurt him, but he said no. He was ashamed of what his buddies would think, that he was being a sissy and that he had to have his mother bail him out. He went to officer’s training school and he made sergeant pretty quick. So I didn’t do it. I wish I had. I think if I had insisted, he would have gone along with me, but I didn’t. That’s what bothered me. Now, after I started going to church and resigning myself to the fact that it happened and there’s nothing I could do, I started feeling a little better. I think I’m a different person than I used to be because it was always him. I mean, on Thanksgiving he had to have the drumstick; the huge turkey drumstick was always his. I couldn’t decorate the tree on Christmas until he got there and it had to be a live tree. He wanted nothing artificial. But afterwards I hated Christmas, I hated Thanksgiving, and they couldn’t understand why. I was extremely bitter, but I changed, too. Where before I was a person that really didn’t care, I got involved in the community. I started getting involved through my own bitterness. It was little things. I began to open my eyes and see. Like there was one instance when Hank had asked me for a Mexican flag and an American flag to put in his bunker, and he wanted a medallion of the Virgen de Guadalupe. I had everything except the American flag. Well, I felt that I had to bury him with those two flags and his medallion, his Virgen de Guadalupe, in his coffin because that was what he asked for in his last letter. I went to the VFW because I couldn’t find a flag. Everybody asked the American Legion for flags, so I called up the treasurer and asked him for a flag. I was so hurt because he said they had flags, but if they were going to give flags away to everybody that asked for them, they’d go broke. So I remember going to the bookstore and finally I found a small flag, so I bought it and I buried him with it. But that started it.

the impact of war on family

I think Hank was the twenty-third or twenty-fourth boy that got killed in Vietnam. So they had a memorial plaque at the library with all the boys’ names on it, and everybody made a big show of unveiling the plaque at the library. I went to see it afterwards. I was so angry when I saw it. Everybody’s name was in this embossed gold writing, and they had his name—Sergeant William Reyes instead of Sergeant Hank Reyes—so I called up the secretary of the American Legion. They ran the whole show, and I said, “I went to see the plaque at the library and I noticed that my boy’s name is Sergeant William Reyes,” and he got very upset on the phone and he said, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” “That’s not his name. His name is Henry Reyes.” And he said, “And what do you have against the name William?” I said, “That’s not his name. I would really like to have his name as it is,” and he was very huffy about it. He didn’t even promise to correct it. So I went back the next day and the following day and it was still “William Reyes.” By that time, I was really angry. First the flag that they wouldn’t give me, then the name on the plaque. So I always say, “Well, he was a Mexican and they don’t care.” So I wrote a letter to the editor and there was so much commotion over that letter. They called me, some other guy from the American Legion, the commander, and he said that they would correct the name and I went the next day and there was a whole bunch of people there. By then they had corrected his name, but everybody’s name was in that pretty gold ink and his was in black! I guess they did it in such a hurry. So I wrote them another letter and I said it would stand to reason that, being a Mexican, his name instead of being in gold lettering like the others was in just rough black ink, just to satisfy me. That’s when I started really working with people in Porterville and helping in what I can. I never went back to check. They have another one now at Memorial Auditorium and that’s correct. And then when Desert Storm happened, I wrote them a letter because here they were honoring all these poor boys that were going over there, and I knew what would happen. A year later they weren’t going to remember those poor guys. They would be jobless. They’d be in debt. Some would have turned to drugs, divorced, and nobody cares. You see, in Porterville, I guess I stood out as being one of the few that was against it. They had the vigils with all the Desert Storm mothers and fathers and husbands and wives there. A few of us over here were against it, you know, quietly. Some of them couldn’t understand why, but I knew they were going for a war that I didn’t see any sense in.

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I’m not as openly bitter as I was in the beginning. Now I don’t really say anything about it until I’m asked or there’s a need to voice my feelings, like with Desert Storm. I felt it was going to be a repeat and I felt sorry for the boys and especially for the parents. I almost hated the parents that I’d see on TV saying how proud they were to have their sons over there. I even saw some, the few that were killed, some of the fathers saying that they know that their sons would have been glad to have given their lives for their country. I don’t believe that because I know that every boy, if they had a choice, they wouldn’t. I don’t think there’s one soldier that actually wants to give his life for a country whose people won’t even remember them a year later. I think that they feel they’re honoring their son by saying that he would have been proud to have given his life, that it shows that he was very patriotic. Maybe something good did come out from Hank’s death. Like I tell you, before, I didn’t really care to see what was happening in the community with the people, as long as it didn’t come near me; as long as I was treated all right, it worked. But now, since that happened, everything changed. I began to notice things, like how the Anglos had the good jobs and the Mexicans were mowing the lawn or hoeing and the Anglos were sitting on top of the tractor, driving, just waiting for the other ones to do the work. I began to notice all that and I couldn’t keep quiet. I don’t think young men have much of a choice of whether they want to go or not. In other words, before it was the draft—they had to go. They didn’t enlist because they were wanting to stay home, and they waited until the last, like Hank, then it got too late. Now they don’t have the draft, but they enlist. Why? Because they can’t get a job on the outside and there they promise them an education. They make it sound like, oh, they’re going to see the world, like it’s an education and vacation at the same time. Here these boys have been not been able to have a good job, they drop out of school for whatever reason, so it sounds good. After they’re in there, and something like Desert Storm or Vietnam comes along, by then they don’t have a choice. When the newspaper interviewed me about Desert Storm, I said I couldn’t be a flag waver, that I wasn’t proud that my son had died for his country—I wanted my son alive—and they printed it. See, the Mexican people have a need to be recognized. I don’t know what satisfaction they get out of it, but just to be called Mr. or Mrs. López by somebody, they feel that’s something. So, of course, for their son to go and they’re being recognized and, at least for that moment, they’re somebody. They’re not thinking about the time when

the impact of war on family

maybe their son will come back in a coffin, and that’s what I would tell them. How much comfort is that recognition going to do them, if their son should ever come home in a coffin and they would never see him again? I don’t think they’d get too much comfort. I guess I have this thing about noticing things. I watched CNN all during Desert Storm. What made me so angry is that the soldiers they would interview over there, they were only blacks and Anglos. I watched daily from the minute it started in the morning until late at night and I never saw one of the Mexicans. But see, they don’t care about the Mexicans because we can be talked into anything. All they have to do is smile or have whatever candidate it’s going to be, governor, council member, have this open house and potluck, say a few words, and bring a mariachi band, and they’ll go for it. I don’t want you to think that I’m not a good citizen, because I am. If I had a son today that was of draft age and in the service, and we had a war, what I call a war, that our country was really in danger of being invaded, then I would accept the fact that my son would fight for his country. But here they were over there in another part of the world protecting somebody else. I try to believe that what happened was for a reason, maybe his life out here would have turned out to be something else, maybe more tragic—you don’t know all the problems these young men that came from the war have had. Twenty something years later, some of them have never recovered. I wish my boy had done that conscientious objector. I have always felt that he hid behind the macho image, saying that he wanted to go. I don’t think he wanted to. It’s bad to say, but we’re led. It should teach us something, but I just don’t think we’re willing to learn. I think it should teach us to stay in our own backyard and if we’re going to have to help somebody, help the people here. There’s so many people here in need of help. After Hank was over there, I used to watch it on TV and, of course, I was always panicking when they said how many dead there were and how many wounded because he was around the Da Nang area. He was a paratrooper and he’d write and say how bad it was, how hot and humid. And they had these bunkers, which apparently were holes in the ground, that’s where they’d protect themselves from the enemy and sleep there and everything. There was an area where it was, like, safe ground, and he enjoyed that and they waited for the helicopters to drop the packages and the

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mail. They’d wait for those helicopters for news from home and when they did come, they let the packages drop and half of them were smashed. They felt that in the U.S. people had forgotten them because they’d read the newspapers and there was really nothing about the boys over there, just so many killed, nothing specific that showed that people really cared about how those boys were doing. I felt bad that he died thinking that nobody cared. That was during the time when President Nixon kept saying that he was going to bring the boys home. So every day I’d listen for that news. I wanted them to bring the boys home, but that never came about, at least not while he was alive. Nixon never did it, but every day there was that hope that maybe today would be the day when he’d order the boys home. Hank had all his life planned out. He was going to be a writer. He wanted a movie camera to film the countryside, because he said the countryside was so beautiful. For a long time, I wondered if he was really dead, but I guess it was him. He had a Timex watch and apparently he had it on when he stepped on the mine. When they sent back his belongings, it was still ticking, and I always wondered how he stepped on the mine and died and nothing happened to that watch. I didn’t see him. My Robert, he saw his hair. My son and my brother. They didn’t tell me, but I dreamed him. One day I told them I had this horrible dream. I dreamed Henry stepped out of a casket and when he stepped out, he was all bandaged, just like a mummy. I kept untying and untying and unraveling and unraveling and inside the mummy was Henry, and then Robert told me, “Mom, that’s the way he was. Uncle Jack and I, they told us that we had to identify the body, and I recognized the thatch of hair because he was so proud of his hair. It was Henry, his thatch of hair, but he was all bandaged up.” I didn’t know, but, see, when I asked for prayer to rid myself of all those dreams, it worked, because he was my life. Frank and his wife, Socorro u.s. army—e4 Twenty-fifth Infantry Division Base of Operations: Pleiku vietnam: august 1966 –march 1967 Frank: Vietnam was like something far away that really didn’t concern me. When I was drafted, in a way I was afraid, because I didn’t know what was going on, but I was kind of glad, too. I lived in a farming com-

the impact of war on family

munity and I was working combine harvesters, working long hours. I was glad to get away because, at that time, there really wasn’t much future there. I took basic training in Fort Ord, California, then I went to Fort Polk, Louisiana. At first I hated it, but looking back, it was really good training because it’s hot and humid and they got swamps and all that, so it was the ideal place to take your jungle training. One thing, though, was that we couldn’t drink any beer there. They said, “Okay, for Easter we’re going to make an exception. We’re going to have a party out in the field.” They brought in beer and then they said they just got all the orders of where everybody is going to AIT, advanced infantry training, and they started reading out the orders. An old friend of mine was going to go to Panama and these other guys were going to Washington and New Jersey. We had already heard enough about Fort Polk, Louisiana. If you went to Fort Polk, every single person that went there for AIT went to Vietnam. So they were reading the different places and then they read Fort Polk, Louisiana, and I remember the first name they read off was mine. I said, “Oh, man, I didn’t want this,” and I just sat down. Then they started passing out the beer. I didn’t even feel like drinking. Man, I knew right then, five weeks after I went in, that I was going to Vietnam and I knew that I was going to go infantry, to top it off. Probably only fifteen, twenty of us out of the whole group of about 120 were going to Fort Polk. It was a lot of Mexicanos, negros, and poor whites. We had to report to Oakland Army Terminal. It was like thousands of guys there at the army terminal. Guys coming back in and going out, and they took us in planeloads. I laugh about it now. We went on commercial flights, our summer uniforms on and a stewardess, the whole works. I guess they didn’t want to make it seem that bad. In training, when they showed us a picture of a VC, it was always someone with black pajamas and a pointed straw hat, and they said this is the way they dress. I’ll never forget, when we landed and got off the plane, I saw these hundreds of people dressed in black pajamas and pointed hats and I said, “Oh my God, these can’t all be VC, just walking around here,” and it really shocked me. It was two o’clock in the morning and you could see flashing going off up in the hills and the mountains. There were MPs all over the place guarding. When we landed there, on the same plane there was a group coming back home, and you got to see the guys going back, and they were all happy. This one guy, a drunk negro, he could barely walk. He was

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singing that song, “Uptight, everything is all right, out of sight.” That kind of reminded me when I saw the movie Platoon, when they get there and Charlie Sheen and the other guys are leaving, they look at you like, man, I feel sorry for you. I was in the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, Third Brigade. The Third Brigade was stationed in the central highlands by Pleiku, and that’s where I wound up at. I was in a recon platoon, which is not supposed to make contact with the enemy, but in reality, it’s not the way it worked. You were actually going out there to try to make contact, and we’d go out there four or five weeks at a time, sometimes more. You come back into camp and basically rest for about a week, and then you’d go out again. All the other infantry units within that brigade—there were twenty thousand men— did go out. I remember they’d go different places within the Ia Drang Valley and then we went to Cambodia a couple of times. I wasn’t really aware at the time about the controversy going on. Afterwards, when they made Nixon cough up a date and he said ’68 — which was ridiculous, because we’d been in Cambodia in 1966 and we weren’t the first. I had run into some guys that had been there six months before, so it was just a bunch of lying going on and I didn’t realize it at the time. I do now, though. I used to say I was only there seven months, but now I omit that “only,” because seven months is a long time. This one guy said if you’re in the bush, it’s a long time. The reason that I was there seven months is because a brother of mine got orders to go to Vietnam, too, and back then, two brothers didn’t need to be in Vietnam at the same time and he was aware of it. Being the older brother, I guess he felt this instinct to help me out, so he went to Vietnam and when he got there, he laid it on them that there was two of us there. I remember that he got in trouble because I went to visit him and his first sergeant was chewing him out because he wanted to know why he hadn’t mentioned this back in Virginia. He and I got together and we talked about it. We knew that one of us had to come home for my mom’s sake and, of course, him being the older one, he said I should go home. I was in the infantry and we’d been out there and you get in this macho trip and I said, “No, you go home. I can take care of myself.” I’d already gotten wounded once, like the month before he got there. I’d been in the hospital twenty days, so I kind of had that fear already out of me and I felt that I could do anything. We finally came to the conclusion that it made more sense for me to get out than him because he was in rations breakdown, which is distributing food.

the impact of war on family

We went and drank some beer and talked and he was introducing me to all his friends. I could tell he was real proud. He said, “Hey, my brother’s in the Twenty-fifth Division.” They were a support unit and they didn’t get to go out there, so they didn’t get the glory. That’s kind of bad, that guys get glory only if you go out and kill people. Looking back now, I think if my brother hadn’t done that, I don’t know if I’d be alive today, because right after I left, about 30 percent of the guys I was with got killed in Cambodia. It was two months afterwards. We were new in Cambodia and the guys didn’t know the territory. As a matter of fact, the day that I left Vietnam, the very next day, they were going back into Cambodia, and that’s when all those things happened with my friends. Through the mail I’d get letters, so and so got killed and this and that happened. I felt like I had abandoned them, really, because I remember a friend of mine, Albert from Tejas. The day that the orders finally came for me to leave, we were by Cambodia and they called me up and they said, “Hey, you got your orders. You’re leaving.” And right there at that moment, I changed my mind. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay and I remember telling Albert, “You know what? I’m not going to go, man.” He said, “You better go. If you leave, we’re going to have one less person to worry about. You go ahead and go.” That’s how come I left, but I really didn’t want to go because we were real close. But he made it back, too. I got there August 9th, and exactly one month later, on September 9th, I remember waking up and I said, “Well, I’ve got eleven months to go.” They said we were going to go to this North Vietnamese campsite they knew was there, and we were going to do some reconnaissance and gather information. Our artillery unit was also aware of that camp. But when we got there, the North Vietnamese themselves were out on patrol somewhere else. We were waiting for them and the Americans started dropping artillery rounds on our site, and I remember hearing those rounds go over my head. They said when you can’t hear it anymore, that’s when it’s going to hit and that’s exactly what happened. A round hit me in the arm and blew up my rifle, and they started hitting more rounds all around and we jumped in a foxhole. I got hit with friendly fire. It’s kind of a contradiction, the term “friendly fire.” How can it be friendly fire? The first dead person that I saw there was a North Vietnamese soldier. We were on patrol and I remember stepping on this North Vietnamese soldier that was dead. He’d been dead three or four days and it was like 128 degrees and he was all bloated up and all purple, and his

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eyes were kind of halfway popped out and he had ants eating at his eyes. I had never seen something like that. You’ve got different hospitals set up like a minihospital out in the field, and I remember seeing the helicopters bring bodies and bodies, American bodies, just laying out there. They had, like, a little morgue there where they were taking their guts out because it’s so hot over there that right away it starts smelling. I remember I’m waiting there for the doctor to see me and I saw all these helicopters coming and dropping bodies off. You had thirty, forty feet of bodies, just lined up, and you had two medics picking them up, going in there, and you could hear where they’re cutting them and they’d bring them back like a little assembly line, and the guys, it didn’t faze them. They’d get two more guys, take them in, cut them up, and they’d get them out and stack them again. Then I saw my arm and it didn’t seem like nothing compared to these guys. Here’s all these guys that had been killed, probably about thirty of them, just laid out. That’s why I’m saying I feel real fortunate. I changed my whole attitude toward the war. You see, in Fort Polk, I guess all the other places, too, they brainwash you and tell you how good of a job you’re doing, that you’re fighting communism. You know, you’re only nineteen years old and you start believing all this bull. So when we graduated from AIT, I’d say 90 percent of us were actually looking forward to going to Vietnam. We thought, “Man, we’re going to save the world and fight the Communists.” But after seeing all those guys dead, I said, “Something’s wrong here. This is not supposed to happen. We’re supposed to be the heroes.” So, my attitude went from fighting communism and helping these people out to I’m going to do everything I can to get out of here alive, just me and my buddies. A lot of the other guys’ attitudes changed, too. We’d see North Vietnamese soldiers and if we didn’t have to come into contact with them, we didn’t. We’d go in another direction. It’s like that North Vietnamese soldier I saw. I said, “You know what? That could be me, being dead right there, bugs eating my eyes out. That’s not the way I want to die, out there in the mud, stuff going in through your ears and everything, and you’re not even aware.” I guess I was there maybe a month and a half when I started seeing the politics of the war. Supposedly we’re in Vietnam to help the South Vietnamese government fight communism, but I used to see the South Vietnamese army and I noticed these guys weren’t carrying their weight. We were doing all their fighting for them, and they’d go out in the field with us and as soon as the shooting started, they’d take off. You

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knew that you couldn’t count on them. When we used to go out with them, which was very rare, when they would force them to go out and the shooting would start, we’d tell them, “You run, we’ll shoot you in the back.” They understood that real good and so they wouldn’t run, but otherwise they’d take off. I’ve heard so many stories from all my friends about similar things. One friend had an incident where they had a report that they were going to get run over by a battalion of North Vietnamese soldiers. He and three of his marine friends were assigned at this South Vietnamese army post to train them. He said they stayed up all night and the marines got in each foxhole and in the other ten foxholes—it was a circle—were the South Vietnamese. When the sun came up, they saw all the South Vietnamese soldiers had split. They left the whole three-quarters of the perimeter unguarded, and here are these guys all night counting on the South Vietnamese soldiers to help them. He said he turned around and there wasn’t anybody there. Thank God, the report they had gotten wasn’t accurate and they didn’t get run over. They would have been slaughtered. I think instead of becoming more sensitive, I think I went the opposite direction. I lost all feelings. After a while, when I’d see whether it was Americans or Vietnamese, I wouldn’t feel nothing as far as seeing them all blown up. I saw four Vietnamese one time getting killed. This first sergeant of ours shot them. We didn’t know at the time, but they had these RPGs, rocket-propelled grenades, and they were shooting down helicopters. So we ran into them and they hid behind some anthills. The anthills in Vietnam were about three feet tall, so they were hiding behind them and the sergeant and the whole squad surrounded them. Once these North Vietnamese soldiers realized that there was no chance for them, they tried to give up. They popped up with their hands up. Well, he had a five-shelled shotgun and he shot them. He shot them one by one, in a matter of a split second. I remember this one Vietnamese that I kind of felt a trace of sympathy for him because he’d gotten shot in the face, in his upper torso, and he was bleeding real bad and he was crawling and his instinct was for him to take out his emergency first aid packet. He took it out, and blood is just pouring out of him and he’s trying to bandage himself, he can hardly get that bandage around him, and I’m seeing him. I’d been about six months already in Vietnam and I remember feeling sympathy, but it didn’t really faze me. I remember another time, Christmas Eve, and we were going to go see Bob Hope, so we were going to go to LZ, a landing zone, a clearing

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to catch a helicopter, and we ran into one North Vietnamese soldier and the guy was sick. He apparently had malaria and he was there all by himself and he had two hand grenades and he was laying in a hammock. When we kicked down the door, we didn’t see anything and then when me and my buddies turned around, we were looking at other things there on the floor. He happened to wake up out of the hammock. This other guy that was with us, he’d just been in-country a week or so, and he tapped me on the shoulder and he says, “There’s a gook in there,” and I turned around and here’s this North Vietnamese soldier. We’re, like, three feet away from each other and we just look at each other in the eyes. Then he looks down and he grabs two hand grenades and when he grabs the two grenades, all my friends started shooting at him. I’ll never forget that guy. They shot him about two hundred times, man, I swear. There’s about ten guys shooting full automatic at this one North Vietnamese soldier and he was just bouncing all over. By this time I’ve been there six, seven months and I remember seeing that and it didn’t bother me one bit. The lieutenant was new in-country and I could see that it bothered him, but he wanted to be one of the boys, so after all the firing stopped, he got there and he put his .45 on the gook’s head and he shot him one more time, which was ridiculous. The guy had two hundred rounds in him. He’d been shot so many times that on one side of his head where your ear normally goes, about six square inches was completely gone and half of his brains are hanging out, and there’s like ten rounds in that brain and I remember you could hear it just sizzling. The lieutenant was kind of like he didn’t know what to do, then somebody said, “Well, it’s noon right now. We’re already stopped. Why don’t we just eat lunch?” So everybody said, “Yeah, let’s eat lunch,” and we sat down. There’s the guy with his brains hanging out and we’re going to eat lunch and the lieutenant’s looking at everybody and then he says, “Well, aren’t we going to bury him or something?” When he said that, you thought he had said the funniest joke in the world. All of us just started laughing. We thought it was so ridiculous that this guy actually wants to bury him. We laughed, and I remember that was the turning point in my tour. I thought to myself, “What in the hell am I laughing at? Here’s this guy with his brains hanging out, he’s got all these bullets in him, he’s dead, he’s a human being and I find it real funny.” Then the guys started grabbing him—they’re so little, man. They grabbed him and one of the buddies threw him at me and I stepped back and here’s that soldier’s brains all over my shoes and my pants and everything. What do we do,

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we started laughing again. We thought it was funny and that was scary. That’s when I knew that something had clicked there that wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t right. Shortly after that incident, I started seeing them in a different sense, the North Vietnamese. After a couple of other incidents, where we ran into them and they got shot up and killed and we used to go through their belongings, I started finding pictures of their families and letters and stuff. Then I started kind of relating to them, and I said, “This guy’s got a family, he’s got kids. He doesn’t want to be here just as much as I don’t want to be here.” I started seeing them as human beings then. It kind of changed for me after that. When I went to college, after I got out of the army, I started getting more political. That’s when I realized that not only myself, but the Mexicanos in general had really gotten screwed over by the war. We had been placed in high-risk positions, infantry and all that, and the way things were here, things never changed. You’re over there and you think you’re fighting for your country, but when you come back in they still treat you like a foreigner. But I wasn’t aware of that until way after I got out. When I first returned from Vietnam, I didn’t think about anything. I just went day by day and I was trying to make up for lost time, trying to have a good time and drinking and running around. At first, I didn’t think about what had happened. Later on, I did start thinking more about it and what it meant to me. I think one of the things that Vietnam did do is it made me appreciate life a lot more. I see what things are important, like material things to me aren’t really that important. Important is my family and the kids and people that I know that they’re well and trying to enjoy life. I put all my feelings aside over there and it’s hard for me to feel. I numbed my feelings because I found it a lot easier. I went from just being really scared in Vietnam to not caring about anything. That attitude helped me survive there, but the only problem is that it carried over to here. I see people get hurt and if it’s not my kids or my wife or somebody I know, it doesn’t really bother me. I should be more sensitive to things like that. Socorro [Frank’s wife]: Sometimes I tell him, “I don’t know what happened to you, but when you went to Nam, you put those feelings on the side and now there’s times when I need you to feel with me and you get real strong. When are you going to bring your feelings back? You need to get into some kind of counseling.” But I think that he’s so hardened by that, it’s going to be hard to break. He’s not rude and he doesn’t

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treat us mean or anything, but it scares me because he doesn’t bring out his feelings. I tell him, “Get together with some friends, veteranos, and bring out those feelings.” I’m concerned about him and about his health because he does get stressed out. I met him in college two years after he came back. When Frank and I started dating, he started telling me about everything that would go on. Until this day, he can tell me stories more than three or four times. I always tell him the one I like is about Jimmy. I feel like I know Jimmy and when we’ve gone to the Wall they put right here, I always look for his name and I always ask him, “Is there any way you can look up his family?” Frank: We went over there together and got to be real good friends. He was from Arkansas and his wife was expecting when he went over there. His wife had the baby in, like, November of ’66, and I remember him being real happy. It was a son and she named him Jimmy, también after him. He didn’t have cigars so he was giving out cigarettes. Jimmy didn’t do drugs and didn’t mess around. He was a clean-cut guy and he wound up getting killed. That happened after I left, too. The rotors from the helicopter decapitated him. A freak accident that the helicopter landed and the ground wasn’t solid and one of those bars at the bottom that hold the helicopter when it lands, it sank, and the rotor tilted and decapitated him. Not only him, but the lieutenant, the one I told you about that was all amazed that we were laughing at the dead Vietnamese. He went to help Jimmy and he got decapitated, so both of them. Jimmy had a son and my wife always tells me, “You know what? You ought to make some effort to try to find his son.” I always think maybe I should, but I keep putting it off. Socorro: You hear a lot of kids saying, “I wish I knew how my dad was like,” and I tell him, “You talked to his dad. You could give him a call, maybe he’s got kids.” And tell that story, that one about the guy from Hanford, the one that gave you the note to give to his grandparents. Frank: Yes, Danny, from Lemoore. He also got killed about two weeks after I left. I saw him the day I was leaving. We took basic training together and then I didn’t see him again until we got to Vietnam and we came back into the same unit again. He had grown up with his grandparents and so the day I was leaving I said, “Hey, Danny, I’m going back home. Is there anybody that you want me to go see?” He said, “Yes, can you go see my grandparents, tell them I’m okay?” And I said, “Yes, I’ll do that.” Well, by the time I got home, another friend of mine that had taken basic with me was home on leave

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and he knew Danny, too. Then us two happened to be at the same place later on. I said, “Hey, let’s go to Lemoore. I got to go see Danny’s grandparents because he told me to go and tell them that he’s all right.” And the guy said, “Didn’t you read in the paper he got killed?” I said, “No.” He said, “Yes, he got killed.” So, I was home on leave and instead of going to see his grandparents to tell them he was okay, I went to Danny’s funeral. That was really bad. I never did get to talk to them. Now I regret not talking to them, but, at the time, I really didn’t know what to tell them. I thought, in a way, it was going to make them feel worse. Socorro: We didn’t talk at first about it, but the more he would tell us, I started learning a lot of things from him. I changed my views later on. Frank: I think when my son was born everything really changed. Once I had him, then it was like, no, I don’t want him to go through this. I really looked back at how things had gone and all my friends that had gotten killed and how it wasn’t worth it. It really isn’t worth it for somebody to be killed for political reasons. Socorro: When I used to hear his mom talk, every time she would see his picture, she’d say, “Cuando mijo estaba allá en la guerra” [When my son was over there in the war]. She would always bring up this story about how she would make peanut butter cookies, and then she would cry, and his brothers and sisters they didn’t understand how their mom felt. I could see it because le decían, “Mom, if you’re going to make peanut butter cookies and cry and remember, don’t be baking them.” And I would tell her, “No, acuérdese y llore y hable” [No, remember and cry and talk about it]. Frank: My dad, like a month or two after I was home, he finally said, “We heard you got wounded over there. Is that true?” I never told them I got wounded, because I knew that if my mom found out she’d think the worst. They had heard rumors that I got wounded because I made the mistake of telling some of my friends through the mail and in a small town it gets around. Finally, some woman somewhere down in the Laundromat told my mom, “We heard your son had gotten shot or killed.” She was all worried. I told my dad what happened and his advice was, “No le vayas a decir nada a tu mamá” [Don’t tell your mother]. Socorro: They all wanted to protect her, but I think by trying to protect her, they did her more harm because she had those feelings to deal with. I guess that’s why I always make an effort to take care of him for her sake. I tell him, “I can imagine what she must have gone through

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when you were over there and I hope that someday someone will do that for my son.” That’s the advice I give wives that have husbands like this: “You better listen to them,” because for me it’s something they went through that was real bad, and they’re trying to break out of there. I’ve heard wives que me dicen they tell their husbands, “You’re crazy. You’re going to start with your stupid stories all over again.” I couldn’t see myself telling him that because it’s an experience they went through. They tell me, “Oh, there he goes, another sad story,” or “I’m so sick and tired of his stories.” I think it’s very sad. If you’re not going to be there to support him, don’t say that. I mean, you can shut them out and let them talk all they want, but don’t turn around and tell them that. Frank: Sometimes something will remind me of something that happened and I tell her, “This reminds me of this incident that happened in Vietnam.” And then about halfway into the conversation, I realize that I’ve already told her that story ten times, but she’ll be there listening. My son and my daughter, too, they know all about Vietnam. From an early age, I’ve made them aware. I showed them pictures on the map and what went on over there and both my son and my daughter, they’re 100 percent against war. They think it’s interesting and they want to know more things. What I did for a long time was just tell them the funny things. I’ve told them about this one incident. We used to go out in the field for four weeks or whatever and then come back into the base camp. Our base camp was just a bunch of tents. We’d come back in and we’d sleep on a cot and it was like a luxury, like the Hilton. So when we were back at base camp this one time, I remember we had all been drinking and stuff. We came back to the hooch and it was time to go to sleep and this guy, se llama Eddie, he opened up his sleeping bag. It had been there two months by itself and he crawled in that sleeping bag and he got one of his arms out and he zipped it all the way up. Then to be really warm he put that other arm back in. So he was up to his neck in a sleeping bag and zipped up. All of a sudden we turned off the light and we started hearing “Ahh, ahh!” What the heck? We actually had electricity back at base camp, so somebody turned on the light and here’s Eddie, it looked like a worm all over the floor, just bouncing around, and we couldn’t figure it out. We thought, “Maybe this guy’s on some kind of a drug or something,” that he was going crazy, so we thought we’d just let him ride it out, right? He was bouncing all around the barracks and the floor screaming. Finally, he managed somehow to get one of his arms out and

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unzipped the sleeping bag and when he unzipped it, about a two-foot rat came out of there. This rat had been biting his toes and he could feel the teeth and all the hair and, I mean, he was so scared he couldn’t talk. He had an M-16 and he started pounding on that rat until there was nothing but pulp. It was just hair and blood and guts all over the place and that rifle butt was all full of crap. I remember there was about ten, fifteen of us in there and we’re all just looking at him. He had the rifle by the barrel and the butt was at the other end, all bloody and hairy and everything. It dawned on him that all of us had been watching everything that had happened and he wasn’t about to have anybody laugh at him for what he had just gone through. Then he started looking at us, one by one, to see who was going to laugh so he could bust their head también with that rifle, just like that rat. And I remember he was breathing real hard and he started going all around the barracks and nobody laughed, of course. Pretty soon somebody couldn’t hold it any longer and reached up and pulled the cord. The lights went out and you could hear everybody trying to muffle their laughs. We were all trying to hold it back because it was actually funny, but it wasn’t funny to him. It helped a lot that I’ve always been able to talk about Vietnam. I know a lot of people can’t talk about it. So my support group has been my wife and my kids and some of my other friends. It doesn’t bother me to talk about it because I don’t have a guilty conscience. I really didn’t do anything that was bad, like, I know some people that shot kids or older people. A friend of mine told me about incidents like that. He saw some American soldiers beating up on some Vietnamese kids and he knew it was wrong. He told me he regrets that he didn’t speak up because if you did, they’d think you’re maybe a VC lover, or you weren’t a man. A man is supposed to do all this kind of stuff and not have any feelings. Socorro: What’s sad about it, that during that time, like he says, you get to the point where you don’t care anymore. They see those people like animals. We were behaving like animals and, after a while, people do turn like animals. Frank: It wasn’t their fault. The average age was nineteen and, at that age, when you’re by yourself with a bunch of other guys, it’s a macho trip. If you haven’t killed anybody, you weren’t like a man over there and so the sooner you got that over with, the guys would kind of accept you. I still remember one time in the mess hall, two guys got in an argument and one of them pulled a hand grenade and pulled the pin out.

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That was my first day there and I thought, “Man, these guys are crazy,” and that’s the way they were. Some sergeant came by and talked him into putting the pin back. But that’s the way they dealt with it out in the field. This one person had been in Vietnam seven months already, so he didn’t care. He had that attitude, like, what were they going to do to us? You do something like that in Vietnam, the guys would say, “What are they going to do to me? Send me to Vietnam? I’m already here. Take me back to base camp and lock me up where it’s nice and safe and I can sleep on a bed? Is that what they’re going to punish me with?” There was nothing they could do to us. I wish I could have had some of the good experiences that I had over there and met the people that I made friends with, but not with the war. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t go. With what I know now, that we really didn’t gain anything from it, not only as an American but being a Mexicano and seeing how the disproportionate amount of Mexicanos and Latinos that were killed over there, and we really haven’t gotten anything out of it. As far as economic, jobs or whatever, we didn’t gain anything. We put everything we had out there for them, for the government, but in return they gave us nothing. The only way I would serve is if we were in danger of somebody coming over and bombing here, where my wife and my family, my parents were in danger, yes, I would. But so I could pay ten cents less a gallon at the fuel pump, like the Persian Gulf, no, I wouldn’t. When I look back at all these lives that were lost, and friends of mine that didn’t make it back and, as young as they were, these lives are just gone forever. They can never be replaced. That’s why I say that I don’t think it was worth it. I wouldn’t want my son to go through that. He’s got all this living to do and he’s got his whole life ahead of him. I wouldn’t want him to come to a stop just so some politician or somebody in the military-industrial complex could get rich from him when they themselves are at no risk at all. Socorro: During the Persian Gulf, you see all these pictures of women who say, “If my son died I would be proud of him.” I get chills when I hear that. It makes me mad. No, you wouldn’t be proud. You would be proud at that moment because right now everybody’s feeding you all of that bull, but you wait, a year later, two years later, see how proud you’re going to be. I feel bad for those that the parents would even encourage them to go. I’ve always felt they’re going to have to kill me first before they take mijo. Frank: I tell you that a lot of them, especially the Latinos and the minorities, we’re still trying to be accepted as Americans, to prove our

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loyalty, and there’s nothing returned. I’ve worked with two Mexicanos that went through the Persian Gulf and they both were good workers. And when it came down to a layoff, hey, they were the first ones to go. It didn’t count one bit. They were like us when we came back from Vietnam. We thought that the country owed us something and we were going to cash in, we paid our dues. They were still under the same creencias [beliefs], and when one of them got his notice that he was being terminated, he couldn’t believe it. Somebody else said they saw him in the parking lot and he was actually crying. He could not believe that after what he went through, they kept some guy that hadn’t even been in the military. In other words, whether he’d been in the military or not, whether he’d gone to war or not, to the company it meant nothing. Bush had no domestic agenda of what to do with these men after they came back, and that’s what really gets me mad. You feel lost, because I know I felt lost. Socorro: As a mother, I feel that they jump into war too easy. I’d like to get involved with politics and if whoever’s running, if they’re for war, from a mother’s point of view, I wouldn’t vote for that guy. I don’t see why they should take our kids. Why don’t they pick on someone older? Because they would know better. They pick these young kids that are barely starting to live. As a mother, I think it’s wrong, and mothers should go out and get educated politically before they say, “I’m proud that my son went to war.” Get involved and see if you really are proud of your son going out to some country and killing other people. I wouldn’t be proud. There’s nothing to be proud of. Frank: You know it’s really hard to say what the war accomplished. As far as anybody gaining anything, I don’t think anything was really accomplished. As far as politically, you got all this training and briefings about how you’re going to help the South Vietnamese people to stay free and fight communism, but when you got over there, the people didn’t want us over there in the first place, and we had to do all the fighting and they hated us. We hated each other and they wound up falling under the North Vietnamese. We lost fifty-eight thousand men and a lot of them, 20 percent, were Mexicanos. We lost all these people that could be raising families now and be educated and everything. The United States is not better off because of the war, and the South Vietnamese sure aren’t better off. The North Vietnamese, I don’t know. They had a bigger loss than we did. I saw it on Sixty Minutes where we had, like, a little over four thousand POWs, MIAs, and the North Vietnamese have over a hundred thousand that they don’t know what happened to them.

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I know what happened to them because I saw that a lot of times. When we’d run into North Vietnamese, we’d kill them and leave them there to rot. There’s a hundred thousand over there that rotted away and there’s all these families, they’ll never know exactly what happened to their son or their husband, or whatever, and I told my wife, “I know exactly what happened to those people. They got killed and they got left out there to rot, just like a dog.” Socorro: The Vietnam War caused a lot of pain and it isn’t over yet. I see it in him and I see it in his friends. Frank: At first, I just thought about what I had gone through and my experience and how it affected me, but now that I look back, there was a lot of other people affected by it. I wasn’t married at the time, but my mom and dad, it took its toll on them. They both aged a lot during that time. Then it didn’t help matters any that my brother also went. That made it worse. So it affected him and my family. Without even realizing it, I allowed the government to do that with me—put all these things in my mind, brainwash me, glorify killing, and send me to Vietnam to see all the things that I saw. I saw enough to change my whole life, and that’s something that can never be taken away from me. I would rather remember everything that happened, even though I wouldn’t want to go do it again. Somebody said, “The memories I have of Vietnam, I wouldn’t trade them for a million dollars, but I wouldn’t give you three cents to go through them all over again.” That’s the way I feel about it. It’s over and done with. I survived. I made it. I think I’m a better person for it now, a stronger person, and I appreciate things that I should appreciate and see what really is important in life and what isn’t.

PART THREE Overview of Issues Discussed by the Veterans

Each veteran who was interviewed had a unique story. However, similar issues or themes underlay their accounts and, in varying ways, affected their experiences during and after the Vietnam War. Chapter 6 will focus on issues arising from their differing levels of political and cultural awareness and how this affected their perceptions of race and class, cultural identity, U.S. foreign policy, and the Vietnam War. Chapter 7 covers the veterans’ psychological and medical problems, including the impact of Agent Orange and alcohol and drug abuse. In the conclusion, Chapter 8, veterans discuss their views on what the Vietnam War accomplished and, in the end, what it all meant to them and to the country. Only some of the interviews that were conducted for this book could be highlighted as separate stories. The overview, however, includes quotes from all the veterans interviewed. Every source was important in the writing of this book.

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CHAPTER SIX

The Impact of Differing Levels of Political and Cultural Awareness

POLITICAL AWARENESS The veterans represent a wide range of views, from being apolitical to being very politically aware and involved before, during, and after their tour of duty in Vietnam. The majority of the Chicano veterans interviewed stated that they had not been aware of what the Vietnam conflict was about when they entered the military and that they were generally apolitical. Most of these veterans said that they had recently graduated from high school and were working in blue-collar jobs when they were drafted or enlisted. A few were high school dropouts with no steady employment, while several others were already attending college. Not quite understanding what was involved, beyond a sense of both duty and adventure, approximately 65 percent of the veterans interviewed enlisted and 35 percent were drafted. It was quite common for groups of friends to enlist together. Regardless of their circumstances, the great majority (90 percent) had little knowledge of issues outside their daily activities. By the time these young men returned from Vietnam, this percentage had almost reversed, with 95 percent stating that the reality of the war made them become much more politically aware. Their level of awareness apparently increased as the war continued. Those who went in toward the later years of the war were obviously much more aware of the political issues than those who went during the early stages of the conflict. The level of political awareness among these veterans when they first entered the military can be exemplified by the following comment: “If you had given me a map of the world and said find Vietnam, even when I was on my way, I couldn’t have found it for you. I mean, when I say that I was parochial in my worldview, I’m real serious.” 1 Very few of the veterans said that they could initially identify the political issues surrounding the Vietnam War. The majority of respon-

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dents enlisted basically out of patriotism and a sense of duty; they felt they needed to do their part. Others enlisted because they knew they were going to get drafted and they wanted to join a particular branch of the military before being drafted. Several veterans also noted that they joined the military as a way of escaping their particular circumstances, whether a strict home environment or the lack of a meaningful job. Some veterans, however, did have a very clear sense of what going to Vietnam meant and were committed to serving in the military. One veteran, who was in the ROTC at his university before going to Vietnam, stated, “I think it’s something that Raza does. I felt an obligation to meet that commitment as a citizen of the country, but rather than going in as a private, I thought that it would be better to go in as an officer.” 2 Many of the veterans interviewed felt Mexican Americans in general had a high sense of duty and pride in serving their country. They believed they needed to prove their patriotism and do their duty by going to Vietnam. As one veteran maintained, “I wasn’t pulled along. I volunteered for the draft and I went willingly to Vietnam.” 3 Some felt this duty was dictated by the fact that “my father and my father’s father before me have done it.” 4 Others held that even though they were Americans, their loyalty and citizenship always seemed to be called into question, and serving in Vietnam was a way of “earning” their citizenship. Some of those committed to going to Vietnam believed that communism in that country was a threat to the United States and that it was their duty to fight against it. One veteran emphasized this by stating, “You give them an inch and they take a foot. I’d rather fight communism over there and try to stop it than to fight it here at home.” 5 Other veterans also had a clear sense of what going to Vietnam meant; however, unlike those who were committed to being in the military, these veterans understood the political issues surrounding the Vietnam War and were involved in antiwar demonstrations before going to Vietnam: “I was real politically aware, involved in demonstrations and the like with the stuff that went on in ’68, with Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. I was in the resistance.” 6 Another veteran who was involved in antiwar demonstrations before he went to Vietnam believed that Chicanos who disagreed with the war had few alternatives: “I recognized that we didn’t belong there and I felt it was hard because, as a Chicano, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. The alternative to Canada wasn’t an alternative for me as far as I saw it. And Mexico, my whole family, we’ve been six generations in the U.S., so we don’t have any relatives in Mexico that I know of.” 7

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The veterans’ level of political awareness went through various stages. As discussed previously, only a few had a high level of awareness when they entered the military. The majority became more politically aware while they were in Vietnam or shortly after returning. Those veterans who became politicized while they were in Vietnam did so primarily after seeing the reality of the war and some of the military decisions that were being made. They began questioning whether or not there was a good reason to be in Vietnam and “we weren’t as gung ho toward the end as we were when we got there.” 8 “I remember a lot of us talking about, ‘Why are we here? Why are we doing this? We fight for a village for three days and then when we get there, we give the sucker up or we take this mountain and we lose all these men, and then after a day or two of staying on the mountain, we leave.’” 9 Even though these veterans noted that they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied, the majority still held onto the view that the United States had a valid role to play in Vietnam. In the later years of the war, however, many of the younger soldiers brought with them a different attitude about Vietnam, the result of a changing political ideology. These new men were arriving with a stronger sense of ethnic and racial identity and a new political awareness. The American soldiers in Vietnam also began hearing about the antiwar demonstrations in the United States. As the war continued, soldiers coming in were bringing a new wave of stronger antiwar attitudes with them to the battlefront. While the veterans observed that most kept doing their job, they nevertheless began increasingly to question the reasons the United States was in Vietnam. Although for many the process of questioning started in Vietnam, some did not come to terms with their doubt until they returned to the United States. They all expressed a need to hang on to what they thought they were doing, to find a value in it, for as long as they could. These veterans seemed to have the most difficult time reconciling their past actions with their changing beliefs about the war. The great majority went to Vietnam believing they were doing the right thing and were disillusioned when they saw the reality of the war. As they returned home, the antiwar movement was in full swing, and they were often forced to think about, and to question, their role in Vietnam: “All the time I was in Vietnam, I really thought we were doing something for our country. I believed we were stopping the spread of communism to different parts of the world and I believed in what we were doing. I wasn’t aware until after I got out how we were all used and

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what a lost cause it was. It was really devastating to come back and find out the truth about Vietnam.” 10 Some veterans began to reflect on their experiences in Vietnam; for others it was easier to try and forget the experience. They said they wanted to “bury it” and leave it behind them. One veteran best summarized these feelings when he noted that whether a vet still supported the war or came back antiwar, they all felt that it had been “a screwedup experience.” 11 Antiwar Demonstrations The Vietnam veterans also discussed their feelings toward antiwar demonstrations. This issue created intense feelings among the veterans, both while they were in Vietnam and after their return. Although toward the end, some of them changed their views toward the demonstrators, this was an emotionally charged topic. Whatever their initial reaction and current position, this was another issue about which the veterans voiced strong opinions. One of the most often stated feelings was the anger many of them felt toward the demonstrators: “We were the ones that were dying and bleeding over there. What the hell did they care about the people that died?” 12 Veterans also declared that they were angry because, when they returned to the States, many of them were called “baby killers.” No one seemed to be coming to their defense and no one said, “Welcome back.” As one veteran stated, they felt “completely disrespected and devalued as a decent human being.” 13 While some veterans did not support the war themselves, they still felt hurt and betrayed by the demonstrators: “When I first came home, I was angry at the demonstrators. I was against the war at the time myself, but I just didn’t think they realized the personal sacrifices that a lot of us were making at the same time that they weren’t.” 14 Others may not have liked the idea of the demonstrations, but they felt that individuals had the right to demonstrate: “I didn’t know people were demonstrating over here until I got out of Vietnam, but it’s a free country, and that’s why we’re fighting, for them to do that.” 15 Only a few of the veterans felt that antiwar demonstrations had helped end the war and they supported them. Some of the veterans actively participated in antiwar demonstrations after they returned from Vietnam: “Right after we came back from Vietnam, as we’re coming into the pier in Alameda, a friend of mine made a big giant poster on the ship, ‘U.S. out of Vietnam,’ and we draped it over when we were near the pier.

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You ever see television news coverage, when a ship is coming in, you have all these families and relatives out there waiting? Well, we dropped it in front of them, right over the ship so everybody could see it.” 16 While the veterans interviewed all agreed that the demonstrations, and the public opinion they engendered, did have an impact on the way the war was conducted by the U.S. government, there was uncertainty and disagreement about whether or not the antiwar demonstrations helped shorten or prolong the war. Some argued that the demonstrations helped end the war sooner and prevented even more Americans from dying. The majority, however, felt that, had it not been for the demonstrations in the United States, which caused the U.S. government to put limitations on how the war was fought, the United States could have won. They felt that political, rather than military, decisions caused a greater number of casualties and the ultimate defeat of the United States. Conscientious Objectors and Canada The veterans also had differing views on individuals who avoided Vietnam. This included those filing for conscientious-objector status and those who left the country, to go primarily to Canada. There were very negative feelings about those who went to Canada to escape the draft. While a few of the veterans understood this decision, the great majority were angered by it. The most common sentiment was that these men were cowards who didn’t deserve to come back and should have never been pardoned: “The draft dodgers escaped to Canada and then they come back again and have the same kind of freedom that we have. I’m still bitter about that. A lot of kids got killed up there for their freedom, but they say, ‘Let’s forgive and forget.’ That’s kind of hard for me to swallow.” 17 Only a few veterans did not fault those who chose to go to Canada and tried to understand their motives, even if they did not agree with them: “They had their own life to live, but they have to live with what they did. I don’t blame them, really, because that was a useless war. We should have stayed there and finished it off or we should have never gone in the first place.” 18 The great majority could not understand how anyone could go to Canada and just leave his country and his family. A few veterans said that, from their current perspective, perhaps it took a lot of courage to realize that the war was wrong and to do something about it, even if it meant leaving family and going to Canada.

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The veterans’ feelings were much less hostile and much more supportive of those who were conscientious objectors or who received other deferments. The many conscientious objectors who went to Vietnam as medics were highly thought of and respected. The veterans acknowledged that even though the COs didn’t carry rifles, they faced the same risks as the soldiers who did and some of them were killed in the war. Some veterans did not agree with the idea of deferments, primarily because they felt that not all individuals had equal access to, or information about, their availability. This was particularly true of college deferments, which they felt went primarily to white middle-class and upper-class youth and not to the poor or minorities. Thus, frequently voiced was the feeling that those who were wealthy or had political connections were able to keep their sons from going to Vietnam, whereas the poor had few options available to them. RACE AND CLASS Did veterans’ being Mexican American, and thus part of an ethnic minority in the United States, affect their view of the Vietnam War? Did their sense of who they were ethnically go beyond a sense of patriotism to a broader understanding of race and class issues? This discussion must encompass several dimensions, including how Chicano veterans related race and class issues to their Vietnam experiences, their relationship to the Vietnamese in this context, their views of racism in the military and in the United States, and the extent to which these different dimensions developed a sense of culturally based camaraderie. Most veterans stated that although they were aware that racism existed in the United States, they did not relate this issue to the war in Vietnam. This was particularly true when they first entered the military. Most veterans declared that they did not think about it, or if they did, they did not make the connection between the two: “When I joined, I just thought about it like it was a job. I separated the racism of Texas from all of this. I was so naïve that I didn’t even see a connection.” 19 Others were aware of the racism in the United States, but still felt that, as Americans, they had to fight in Vietnam, regardless of how they were treated at home: “We were aware of the racism—we were farmworkers, we were campesinos. You go to any small town where they’re picking grapes during the harvest and you’re aware of it, because you go to town on Saturday after you get paid and you buy your stuff and they

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treat you like shit. But I think the message that our families gave us was a message that had only to do with our community, and it was quite apart from the rest of America. It was, this is what men in our community act like.” 20 There were some veterans who affirmed that at the time they went to Vietnam, they had thought about racism in this country and how it related to their fighting for democracy or for somebody else’s rights in another country and the contradiction that this entailed. Several of them emphasized that as they became more politically aware, although they had gone to Vietnam to fight for freedom, they realized very little had changed in the United States for Mexican Americans. There were still police brutality, low-paying jobs, and lack of equality. Only a few veterans felt that their being politically aware affected the way they looked at the war. For example, one veteran noted that he didn’t call the Vietnamese “gooks” and other names as much as other servicemen did and said a lot of times he just called the Vietnamese “chinos.” He felt almost instinctively that, because Chicanos experienced racism themselves, calling the Vietnamese “gooks” and “slopes” was like Mexicans’ being called “greasers” and “wetbacks.” This veteran stated that being Chicano made a difference in his view of the Vietnamese and helped him deal with them in a less-racist way. The great majority of Chicano veterans interviewed, however, indicated that they did not identify with the Vietnamese as being people of color like themselves. They saw them only as the enemy; very few of the veterans said that this was an issue that bothered them. While a few said they couldn’t help but be aware that some of them looked like the Vietnamese in skin color and stature, they never saw any similarities beyond that. Even those who had empathy for the Vietnamese people and declared that they didn’t hate them still felt like the U.S. soldiers were the “good guys.” Even with heightened political awareness, the Chicano veterans found themselves in a dilemma. As one veteran, who is now a veterans’ counselor, went on to say: “I don’t care what ethnic group you’re from, I think one is inclined to dehumanize them because you know what you have to do. And if you make them people, it’s going to be harder to do it. So they were ‘gooks.’ Dehumanizing them was almost a psychological must.” 21 Thus, while there were a few veterans who connected racism in the United States with their role in the Vietnam War, the majority did not feel that it made a difference to them and retained their sense of duty.

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The majority of those who did make the connection generally did so only after their return to the United States. Racism in the Military Perceptions of the degree of racism that existed in the military varied, with the majority asserting that there was obvious inequality among the different groups: “In the Green Berets, most of the guys that were serving with me, I would say probably six out of ten were Latinos. The gringos were always in charge; damn few Latinos were ever in command of anything. Were there racial distinctions? Absolutely. I think they were reflective of the overall society at the time of the ’60s.” 22 Many of the veterans remembered specific incidents that highlighted race relations among the troops, with the negative occurrences increasing during the later years of the Vietnam War. One veteran discussed an incident that occurred when his ship was stationed right outside of Vietnam. He said it escalated into a riot: The whites, even the white supervisors, were degrading the blacks and the Chicanos on board that ship. There was always a certain amount of it, but it became such a problem that there was an actual fight. They had to bring in the marines, and some of them got involved in the fight, too. Just like gangs. During the fight we, the Mexicanos, weren’t involved. But you had hard-core white people in there that wanted to fight. They came from the South, and some blacks came from Alabama and Louisiana and they hated whites. They had been segregated back home and here they had to live together in this confined area.” 23 He believed that by the end of his tour, things had gotten a little better and that, although they had problems, people realized that they couldn’t be as violent or as free to call people names as before. Another veteran also discussed racial tensions in his unit: In my hooch, I was the only Latino. The rest were Italianos or Germans and they emphasized that. They were gringos to me, but they were proud of being Italian or German. There was this one white guy that nobody liked in that group and he instigated a near-racial riot between the whites and the blacks. I remember the negros lining up on a hill like a football bowl, and they were calling us out, and it was all because of this guy. If you envision the war between

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the whites and the Indians, like when they show the indios all lined up against the bluffs and the white settlers down here—I mean, it was like that. It was scary, but the blacks picked up that we weren’t being racist and that ended it.” 24 The veterans all maintained that the major confrontations seemed to be between the black and the white servicemen: There was a lot of racism in Vietnam between the whites and the blacks and there was a lot of fights. I witnessed one at the mess hall where we had locking and loading. Locking and loading means you’ve got the rifle and it’s ready. About eight or ten on each side and they just started locking and loading, puros blacks and whites, and they were screaming and pointing their rifles at each other. You know what defused the whole situation was un Mexicano. I don’t know where the hell he came up y comenzó [started], “What the hell’s going on here? What the hell’s wrong with you? Can’t you see we’re in Vietnam, you assholes?” And they’re all looking back and the Mexicanos, they were all on one table, and they’re starting to get up and they’ve all got rifles, too. All of a sudden, he defused the whole situation. God knows who he was, but I know he saved some lives there.25 Regardless of the type of conflict, the veterans felt that, in the majority of incidents, the Mexican Americans generally maintained a neutral position: “The Mexicanos generally stayed out of the fights. Our attitude was, ‘Que se den en la madre los dos,’ we ain’t going to get involved. That’s their pleito [fight].” 26 As another veteran noted, “We didn’t have a war with the gringos or the negros; we had a war with the Vietnamese.” 27 While most veterans witnessed racial conflicts among the U.S. troops in Vietnam, several noted that they never saw any racial incidents in their units and it seemed that, for the most part, everybody got along: “I never did segregate myself. Basically, whoever wanted to hang around with me, that’s who I hung around with. Everybody seemed to get along.” 28 Others asserted that if there were divisions or problems, they weren’t always racial. Other factors came into play: “Ethnics got together and then you filtered out who you liked and who you didn’t like. Then you had the people who got high on drugs versus the people who got high on alcohol. And you had the athletes, who had another outlet. You had some allegiance based on ethnicity, but then you also had them

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based, like maybe, Chicanos and blacks and whites who wanted to play sports. The biggest difference wasn’t ethnic.” 29 According to the veterans, racial problems occurred more frequently in secure areas. They said that when they were in combat, the only thing they could concentrate on was survival, and everyone had to depend on each other: “In combat, we all mingled and became part of a unit. We had to work together to survive.” 30 Another veteran emphasized this point by claiming, “It didn’t matter what he was, he was your protection. If you didn’t protect him, he wasn’t going to protect you and you were going to get killed.” 31 Many veterans emphasized that, despite the conflicts, the need to work together also created strong friendships across ethnic and racial groups. They remembered the positive relationships and the differences in attitude that they developed in Vietnam: “I think the most important thing that it did for me was my whole attitude about respecting others and also, I guess, my new attitude about the Anglo. Prior to that, I didn’t trust them, any of them. I mean, back home, everybody who was white was my enemy. With my experience in Vietnam, and knowing and getting very close to a lot of Anglos, close enough to say that I trust them with my life, I learned a lot more than I would have if I never got out of my neighborhood.” 32 “I remember going with a black partner of mine who was in our platoon. We went by a group of blacks and they said, ‘Hey, brother, what are you doing with those honkies and them spics?’ He told them, ‘Screw you guys. These are my brothers. We give our lives for each other.’” 33 Most agreed that what they liked to remember about Vietnam were “the friends and the good things, what we meant to each other.” 34 There was also a heightened awareness of and interaction with Latinos from other backgrounds and other parts of the country: “One of my best friends was a Puerto Rican from New York and he and I were real close. He hung around with the rest of us. He could claim Black Power and he could claim Brown Power; it didn’t matter to him.” 35 As with other issues that became prominent in Vietnam, there were differences in the perception and number of racial incidents between those who went to Vietnam early and those who went in the later years. In the beginning, there seemed to be a greater sense of unity and purpose. In the later years, particularly after the Tet offensive, there was a heightened awareness of race issues and thus increasing numbers of racial incidents: “When you first got there, it was a relatively high degree of people trying to live the ideal, like we were one family, one army, and we’re fighting the Vietcong. But after about the sixth month, sur-

impact of differing levels of awareness

vival became the only thing, and it became very individual, particularly after Tet. They just wanted to get the hell out of there, and this conscious attitude to create a single camaraderie unit broke down under the reality of the war.” 36

Chicano Cultural Identity The veterans were asked whether they had a sense of cultural identity as Chicanos and Mexicanos when they were in Vietnam and whether, if it existed, it created any special camaraderie. One veteran noted that, although in aviation, where he was, the percentage of Mexicans was small, wherever they were, they managed to connect with each other: “There were Mexicanos from all over the place. Being from Tejas originally, you could always figure out who was from where just by the way they talked. You start talking about huerco [kid, guy], hey, this guy’s got to be from Tejas, and we had a way of finding each other.” 37 Many of the veterans said that they looked for each other as Mexicanos and that “the camaraderie was very strong among Latinos.” 38 They found it easy to relate to each other when they talked about the things they did back home. They felt there was an automatic bonding, or carnalismo, among them, and they always knew they could depend on each other: “Los Chicanos nos buscábamos [We Chicanos looked for each other]. There was not an awareness of the Chicano movement per se, but there was a real cultural awareness that came over us while we were there and it made us proud.” 39 The veterans also said it was very common to speak Spanish to each other. Several of the veterans related that Mexicanos who were radiomen would communicate in Spanish slang because they knew that if the enemy tried to monitor them, they couldn’t understand. For example, they would use “chancla” to mean a click on the coordinates. They felt good that they could speak Spanish and felt that others in the platoon respected them because of this ability. While the veterans noted that friendships in their platoons crossed ethnic lines, with few exceptions, they also revealed that they instinctively looked for each other when they joined the service. Their cultural awareness was brought to the forefront and strengthened, both before and during their time in Vietnam: We used to listen to rolas mexicanas when we would get together. That wasn’t music that any one of us grew up listening to. I mean, we heard our mothers playing it, but it wasn’t music that we would

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hear when we went to the dances, basically rock and roll, especially the guys from California. It was the guys from Texas, by and large, that had that sense of traditional culture. I remember in North Carolina, one of the guys from Brownsville was married and we used to go and have barbecues because his wife could make tortillas. For me, at least, this symbolized home and the music symbolized home. All of a sudden, it was this cultural awareness, and I think it was because we were so far from the culture. In North Carolina, they used to call us “long-haired niggers.” That’s the first time I ever heard anything like that, and so that racism made me take refuge in something that was familiar.40 A strong Chicano identity emerged as the war continued. Later arrivals were bringing in the cultural awareness, music, and slogans of the growing Chicano movement in the States.

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY The veterans also discussed U.S. foreign policy in terms of both the war in Vietnam and involvement in Latin America. Latin America was discussed in terms of whether their cultural identity as Latinos would conflict with their role as soldiers if they had to fight other Latinos instead of Vietnamese. When asked how they would feel if the United States went to war with a Latin American country, only one agreed with past and current U.S. policy in Latin America; the others unanimously stated that the United States should not be involved there militarily. First, they believed it would be a repeat of the Vietnam mistake, and, second, it would definitely be more difficult for them to fight other Latinos than to fight Vietnamese: “I really do see that if the United States fights a war in Central America, it’s for the same reasons, the same motivation, the same things that went on in Vietnam. I don’t have any problems not fighting because it would be like fighting your cousin to be engaging in war in Latin America. For Chicanos to fight Latinos, that would be a real tragedy if we allowed ourselves to be used like that. I think there’s a point where we have to say, ‘This can’t happen.’” 41 Some veterans were cynical about U.S. intentions in Latin America. They felt that, unfortunately, U.S. foreign policy was often on the wrong side and supported governments and dictatorships that were abusing and exploiting their own people. They particularly disagreed with past U.S. actions in countries such as Nicaragua and Chile, where

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the United States had supported Somoza and Pinochet. They also opposed current U.S. policy toward Cuba and felt that the United States should have long ago ended the embargo. These veterans also voiced the opinion that too often all the United States was interested in was protecting the big corporations so they could continue making money: “It’s all political. All these warmongers want to do is go over there and kill people. If that’s the case, let them go over there and fight the war themselves. It would be stupidity on everybody’s part to go.” 42 Whom the United States was fighting against and the particular situation made a difference in how the veterans looked at their own involvement in a possible Latin American conflict. One veteran maintained that he would fight if it would “put a stop to a lot of these dictators over there that are causing problems.” 43 “I don’t want to kill anybody, right? But if it came down to it, I would not want to fight a Sandinista, but I would want to fight a Contra. So, there’s Latinos and there’s Latinos.” 44 Another veteran also believed that U.S. policy in Latin America was often a political action that had little to do with national security: “We don’t have any business trying to intervene in other people’s politics. I think people have the right to self-determination. We are not the world’s police force. I don’t see us doing anything unless we have a real direct threat—they’re coming through El Paso, for example.” 45 Several of the veterans concluded that a conflict in Central America would divide the country the way the Vietnam conflict did. There would be strong feelings on both sides, and it would be a very politicized situation, with no clear direction and no clear victory. Most emphasized that this time they would certainly question the reasons for U.S. involvement and would not accept it blindly, as they did during the Vietnam era. In particular, as one veteran stated, “it would be very devastating to send a lot of Chicanos down to South America to kill people who speak our language.” 46 About one-third of the veterans stated that who the people were or the color of their skin was irrelevant if they went to war, “because that’s your job, that’s your duty.” 47 They felt that there really wasn’t much of a choice or decision to be made, because the military trained soldiers well to fight anybody: The military trains you to hate your enemy so much that after a while they’re not real. Even though you know that they’re going to

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die and bleed just like you, they become others. You detach yourself from them as human beings and you just see them as a potential person that’s going to kill you. I think if it came to that, most Chicanos, Latinos, and soldiers would do it, if they were asked to. I mean, you could have a surge of conscience once you’re there, but I think they would go just because of the training and the psychological undoing and rebuilding that the military does to you.48 The great majority of the veterans, however, still believed that the United States should not become involved in a war in Latin America and that it would be more difficult to fight against other Latinos. Their views differed on whether or not they would actually be willing to fight if called upon to do so. Most said they hoped they would never have to make that decision. In the end, the common sentiment voiced was that if the United States was involved in Latin America, it should not be from a military standpoint, but, instead, from the standpoint of helping the people become more self-sufficient: “We don’t need to feed the military there; we need to feed the people.” 49 Whether the discussion focused on cultural identity and camaraderie or on race and class issues, it is clear that for the great majority of the interviewees their level of political and cultural awareness was heightened, and oftentimes radically changed, by their experiences in Vietnam.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Psychological and Medical Problems

At least one-fourth of the veterans interviewed stated that they had psychological or medical issues as a result of their involvement in the Vietnam War. This section discusses those problems, their impact on the veterans’ lives and families, and how they have tried to deal with the problems that arose. PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS While all veterans had problems adjusting when they returned home, most were able to overcome them. The majority returned from Vietnam even more determined to take advantage of the educational benefits available to them under the GI Bill and to get on with their lives: “I’ve got my sad points about Vietnam, but compared to a lot of guys that have real heavy-duty problems, I think I was able to deal with it psychologically within myself. I just kept going, and that’s my attitude: lo que pasó, pasó [what happened, happened]. When I came back from Vietnam, in a way it made me go back to school, to make something better of myself. I just put it behind me and I went on.” 1 The majority of interviewees agreed with this sentiment and felt they needed to put the war behind them. However, they recognized that some veterans found it difficult to forget their experiences and continued to relive them: “The thing that really affects me is when somebody starts drinking and they start talking about Nam. I have some friends who are still there, where you’re getting real pedo [drunk], all they do is regress to the glory days. They’re not glory days, they’re horror days. But that was the top of the hill for them, that was their contribution to mankind. You got to get on with life.” 2 Unfortunately, many veterans faced psychological problems for many years and did not take advantage of the educational and other benefits to which they were entitled. For most, it was difficult to seek the

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psychiatric care they needed. These veterans felt there wasn’t anyplace where they could go for help and that no one seemed to really care about their problems. They believed society had little understanding of what they had gone through and that societal attitudes actually exacerbated the psychological problems many of them were facing: I think a lot of guys had to deal with the fact they actually killed children or killed women or old men. I don’t think anybody really went over there planning to kill children. It just happened. I mean, you weren’t going to know there was an old woman or child inside a hut. If they’re shooting at you, you’re going to shoot back and you don’t really stop and think who’s there because you’re too concerned about your own life. So these guys come over here and now they’re called “baby killers” and they can’t deal with it. They’ve got that thing in their head that keeps bothering them. They should blame those that called them baby killers.3 Several veterans also voiced the feeling that they had to face their problems on their own because, culturally, they did not think it was acceptable to admit they had psychological problems: “In the Chicano community there is a positive value placed on being a warrior and a negative value placed on getting mental health care. To be a warrior and then to go where crazy people go, so to speak, is to somehow negate your warrior role.” 4 Probably most often mentioned by the veterans was that they became desensitized in Vietnam and, when they returned, they cared little about others: “Your feelings are gone. You can see people hurt and say, ‘No big deal.’” 5 Because of this loss of feeling or emotion, they also found it difficult to form close relationships: When I got out of the service, I stayed in California and went to college. Because the antiwar movement was so strong, a psychiatrist there started a vet group. That’s really when I started getting some therapy. By then I was so bad off, I was taking drugs and being really hostile. I mean, like every month I would have a different girlfriend because I couldn’t stand to be with anyone who was giving me pressure. I knew that I was on a bad road, and even though I was as nutty as I was, I still knew that I didn’t want that.6 Another complaint voiced by these veterans was constant and overwhelming feelings of panic and anxiety: “I couldn’t sit still. I have this idea that, basically, your chemistry changes when you’re there, especially in a free-fire zone. When you’re hunting them and they’re hunting

psychological and medical problems

you, your chemistry is always rigged up. Many times, especially Chicanos, when you have problems like this, you look at it as a weakness, so you keep it within yourself.” 7 Many veterans noted that not knowing what was causing this anxiety or how to deal with it wreaked psychological havoc in their lives and those of their families. Some veterans also found it difficult, even after many years, to forget what had happened in Vietnam and to justify what had been done. They had feelings of sadness and memories that could not be overcome: “Some crazy guys said, ‘It’s a war,’ but, I mean, why hurt women and children? Sometimes I still have a nightmare every now and then about being there, like a wild dream, and I’m out there in the jungle without any shoes or without a rifle.” 8 Other veterans revealed that they continued to feel very angry. One veteran, who said he had “some experiences that I’ll never forget,” 9 added that he would still get very angry when he thought of a time when they could have saved the lives of American soldiers, but didn’t because of bad orders from an officer. This feeling of unresolved anger was a common sentiment and occurred for other reasons as well: “I wasn’t aware of it, but I was pretty angry when I returned. I felt like being politically aware before I went, and having a lot of things confirmed for me, recognizing that people were telling me, ‘Go home, GI, we don’t want you here,’ that resulted in a lot of resentment. . . . I recognized that we didn’t belong in Vietnam.” 10 Anger also resulted from the attitudes of an unwelcoming society when the veterans returned home: “When I came back I went to the strip over here and I got a ticket from a police officer. I said, ‘Hey, I just got back from Vietnam today.’ He goes, ‘That’s your problem.’ That was my welcome home.” 11 Some of these veterans noted that the anger and hostility that continued after they returned home could easily turn to rage and, in some cases, this bottled-up anger often led to fights. They said that unfortunately it took little to provoke them into attacking someone. Particularly difficult for many of the veterans to come to terms with were the strong feelings of guilt they experienced—guilt for things that happened, guilt for things that didn’t happen, guilt because their friends had died, and guilt because they themselves had not died. Many have yet to fully understand and resolve these contradictory emotions: I felt somewhat guilty that I was able to come back, that I wasn’t wounded or incapacitated in some way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a guilt about killing someone, but a guilt about me surviving

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and the next guy not or me coming back with all my limbs and the next guy not. I really feel lucky when I stand next to a vet who’s in a wheelchair or one that can’t see anymore or one that doesn’t have any arms. I feel fortunate, but yet . . . I feel guilty that it was him and not me. It’s a dichotomy—fortunate and glad, but guilty and sad. . . . It’s really a confused emotion that I never have been able to deal with.12 Other veterans who expressed feelings of guilt stated that, upon their return from Vietnam, they became involved by joining the civil rights movement and the Chicano movement and working for organizations like the United Farmworkers. They felt that was part of compensating for what they had done. Another issue created psychological problems for many veterans. Particularly when they first returned to the United States, they realized they had lost their humanity in Vietnam: “We used to go to the Cambodian border and it was common, when you killed an enemy, to cut off an ear and wear it. And you didn’t think about it at the time because, when you had a friend that you went through the war with and then the enemy kills him and does atrocities to him, to cut an ear off wasn’t nothing. When you told the people over here, they’d say, ‘You can’t do that, that’s inhumane.’ Well, it was inhumane what they did to our guys.” 13 The lines between right and wrong, self-defense and revenge, justice and injustice all blurred when soldiers were in a war zone. After a while, they said, it was just easier to become oblivious to everything that was going on around them: “I remember the first time we went out to pick up American casualties, being very careful about how we picked them up, and how we put them in the helicopter. And after a while you go pick them up and it’s like loading up sacks of potatoes. You just take them and throw them in the back of a helicopter to get them out of there. No more human feelings. You just got to do it to get out of there.” 14 One of the veterans described how the transformation regarding life and death occurred. He had just arrived in Vietnam and saw the body of a dead Vietcong in the middle of the road. All the trucks were having to go around it: “I remember the body was already getting all swollen. It was, like, black and blue. I almost got sick and it scared me because I thought that could be me, that could be anybody. By the time I left Vietnam, a dead body didn’t bother me at all. It was no big deal; it was just another one. It didn’t have the same effect. I came home thinking that life meant absolutely nothing, that it wasn’t worth anything. It was so easy to see somebody dead.” 15

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The psychological numbing described by this veteran was a common theme in the interviews. The majority of the interviewees emphasized that this lack of feeling or caring for human life didn’t change just because they returned to the United States: These guys were in Vietnam, in jungles fighting for their lives. The next thing they know, somebody says, “Come out of those jungles, you’re going on a plane back to the United States,” and twentyfour hours later they land on the damn sidewalk of America, walking down Mission Boulevard and being expected to operate like everybody else that’s walking down that sidewalk. That can’t be done. I mean, there’s tremendous psychological problems to overcome. The instincts that you had when you were there, to survive, to kill, they don’t leave you. They’re with you, sometimes for the rest of your life.16 Three veterans attempted suicide; two of them tried to kill themselves several times. All three were extremely depressed and anxious and felt their lives spinning out of control. One of these veterans put a gun to his head in front of his wife and children. His daughter’s pleas and the terrified look on her face were what stopped him. Another veteran who attempted suicide several times fell into a deep depression exacerbated by constant and unexplainable medical problems. These problems were finally attributed to the effects of Agent Orange. After many years on an emotional roller coaster, all of these veterans received psychiatric treatment and have made progress, although they admit their struggle is ongoing and their battle is not yet over. Most veterans related in their interviews that they did not know for a long time what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was and had trouble understanding what was causing their psychological and physical problems. Many believed they would have benefited from some help in dealing with the emotions they kept bottled up for years. One veteran, who is now a counselor, asserted that many Chicanos and other Latinos did not receive the counseling they needed, because of the stereotyping inherent in our society. Most of the vet centers, where they dealt with issues such as PTSD, were located in predominantly white communities. He felt that perhaps the government had bought into the idea that blacks and Chicanos didn’t need the help and that they didn’t suffer as a result of the war: “I think the people who assess Anglos have greater expectations of those veterans, and when they don’t meet them, it must be PTSD. And if the Chicanos don’t meet them, well, they weren’t going to meet them anyway, ¿qué no? So that when

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some Chicanos fail to make it after Vietnam, there are plenty of normative explanations for why they don’t make it. They’re lazy, etc.” 17 This vet-turned-counselor emphasized that the need for adequate and culturally relevant services continued. There are still some veterans who need to resolve the trauma of war before they can enjoy normal social patterns of love and friendship: One of the big problems was learning how to feel again, because you bottle up that emotion and you get the feeling, like, if you ever start crying, you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to stop. So as a Vietnam veteran, I recognize that’s one of their problems. I really focus on that, because they’re bound and determined to repress that. They’re really afraid that if they let go, they won’t be able to regain control again, and that’s not true. We have a lot of strength. We’ve been able to control it for thirty years, so there’s a way to relearn how to feel again, and when we do that, then life changes; it becomes enjoyable again.18 Among the veterans, there was always a cautious optimism that the majority of veterans had overcome their problems and moved on with their lives: “I go here to the vet counseling center and from everything I see, the vets are still hurting, not all of them, but a lot of them are hurting in many ways—you know, all the data, the divorce, the suicides, cancer, not holding jobs, and all those things. I try and convince myself there are more like me who, in a sense, have achieved some success, but I’m just hoping that’s the case.” 19 As discussed more fully in the veterans’ individual stories and alluded to in the foregoing quotations, the veterans interviewed have faced various psychological problems. These range from deep anxiety and a constant sense of fear to alcohol and drug abuse, and from uncontrollable anger and fits of rage toward others to being sullen, withdrawn, and suicidal. Many are still angry that they were never welcomed back by the country. They received “no parades like World War II veterans, no thank-yous for doing our job, only scorn and accusations of being baby killers.” 20 The psychological trauma was particularly deep because many of the servicemen who were sent to Vietnam were so young, only eighteen or nineteen years old at the time. The youth of these soldiers was poignantly illustrated when several veterans revealed that they remembered, as comrades lay dying, many times they could be heard calling their mothers: “Mamá, help me!”

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Over time, they have all tried to deal with their psychological issues by seeking professional help as well as speaking to other veterans. The majority of veterans interviewed have in fact “moved on” and lead productive and successful lives. They have furthered their education, obtained good jobs, and reared families. For all of them, however, the memories of Vietnam linger. MEDICAL PROBLEMS Some interviewees had serious medical problems and disabilities as a result of the war. Some were wounded and lost an eye, or lost the use of their legs and are now confined to a wheelchair. Several endured months of hospitalization for serious injuries. For some, their wounds have long since healed. Others continue to have medical problems that are difficult to explain, such as constant rashes, numbness in the limbs, cancers, and illnesses with unexplained symptoms. Agent Orange Those veterans who feel they are experiencing the effects of Agent Orange are still plagued by medical problems, both physical and mental. Some confessed that they still awakened at night, drenched in a sweat that was still so full of the “poison” that it turned their sheets yellow. One veteran explained the result of his exposure to Agent Orange: I was sprayed on and I saw the effects of it while we were on patrols. I drank water from those rivers and creeks and I’m sure that the spray got on them. In fact, I had cancer of my kidneys and I had one of them taken out. At first, I thought my body failed me. Then I really thought there was a link between me and the effects of Agent Orange because there was so much information about the high incidences of cancer and birth defects and all kinds of things, even though the VA denied it.21 Agent Orange has continued to affect not only these veterans, but their children as well: “My second daughter was born with defects and I strongly suspect Agent Orange. They can’t find what’s wrong with her. I break out in severe rashes and my hands peel. They checked me for Agent Orange and they say that my organs are of an old man.” 22 Many veterans complained of having “nervios” (bad nerves) when they returned from Vietnam. They said it was hard for people to wake

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them without their reacting violently and defensively, thinking they were under attack. They stated that, too often, the doctor’s advice was to “drink a couple of beers.” This only contributed to the problem of alcoholism that some of the veterans were already facing. This problem of bad nerves seemed to be accompanied, for most veterans, by “the shakes,” a trembling and numbness of the hands and other limbs. One veteran, a Marine Corps sergeant, exemplified the situation of many veterans who had to face various medical and psychological issues all at the same time: When I got back from Vietnam, I was always shaking. I still am. I committed myself into the hospital because anything would trigger me. I noticed that more, so I tried not to drink. I’m scared to get close to driving on a bridge too. I know why, because we hit a mine and I was on top of a tank and we landed in a river. Three of my guys drowned inside the tank. I tried to get them out, but we couldn’t get them out when they panicked. Most of them died on each other trying to get out of the tank.23 Drug Abuse One of the issues that has received a great deal of attention from the media and the public is the seemingly out-of-control drug use in Vietnam during the war. According to veterans’ accounts, the extent of drug use among the American troops seems to have varied. The majority of veterans interviewed believed drug use was much more prevalent in the later years of the war, particularly after Tet, than at the beginning. Both the quantity and the type of drug used changed, from mainly marijuana use at the beginning to a wider use of heroin and opium. Apparently, drugs were readily available and plentiful: “Guys that would go in with the resupply chopper would bring it out in sandbags. If you were in the field, you know what you would say, ‘Go on and put me in jail, man.’ And then who’s going to fight the war? And if everybody’s doing it, who you going to put in jail?” 24 One of the veterans explained that, since drugs were so plentiful, both in Vietnam and in the United States when veterans returned home and they were experiencing trauma, there was a “user-friendly system for drugs” that they could plug into.25 For many, their tour of duty in Vietnam was also the first time they had used methamphetamines, or “speed”: “I remember people saying,

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‘Take these little green pills, they’ll keep you awake,’ because there was a big problem for us sleeping. We weren’t used to staying awake twentyfour hours or forty-eight hours, so there was a lot of government-issued amphetamines to keep you awake.” 26 Many of the veterans we interviewed felt that the picture of the crazed, drug-addicted veteran had been blown out of proportion. They maintained that, particularly with the troops out in the field, drug use was not as extensive as we have been led to believe. While there were some problems, most soldiers were responsible enough to know that they had to be alert or they could cause the loss of life: There was drug use, but it wasn’t rampant like it’s portrayed in the media. We knew when we could afford to let our guard down and get loaded, because you couldn’t do it all the time. If you’re out in the middle of the woods in an ambush, the last thing you want is somebody stoned next to you. So I saw a lot of guys smoke pot, shoot heroin, but if there was a bad enough drug problem, we’d go tell them, “Hey, get this guy out of the field because he’s not doing me any good out here. He’s going to get some people killed.” 27 There was undoubtedly drug use in Vietnam, and some veterans continue to live with drug and alcohol problems; however, many others do not. The veterans interviewed declared that they wanted to be seen as individuals who were leading constructive and productive lives because many, in fact, are doing so. Because they were trying to resolve the problems they were facing, most of the veterans expressed anger at the cold and impersonal treatment that they received when they sought medical care and psychological counseling at VA hospitals. They felt they were “treated like welfare patients and seen as an embarrassment.” 28 According to the veterans, it was the vet centers that were eventually established that provided them with the counseling and support they needed. The centers helped them deal with the trauma of the Vietnam War and with family, drug, and alcohol problems, and they also helped them understand the effects of Agent Orange.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

What Did It All Mean?

Most of the veterans interviewed asserted that they began to reevaluate the Vietnam War and their role in it while they were still in Vietnam. Some realized from the beginning that “it was a senseless undertaking”: 1 I didn’t see the U.S. role as an incorrect role or an immoral role. I think I saw the futility of it, though, but it was not that articulate. It was more like, “I want to get the fuck out of here,” because people were getting killed. I think we were probably less politically focused, but we all used to have “FTA” on our helmet, you know, “Fuck the Army.” So ours was a protest of minuscule proportions as opposed to active and open drug abuse and, you know, fragging and insubordination, which came after Tet. I think soldiers were saying, “Wait a minute, this war started in 1964, ’65, we got our ass kicked in ’68, and how many guys have already died in six years, and they want me to do what? They’ve been to that same hill fifteen times! 2 The majority of veterans interviewed felt that the Vietnam War had accomplished very little: “It could have ended the same, only a lot sooner, with a lot less people killed. We had fifty-six thousand Americans killed. The North Vietnamese had a million people killed. It was a tremendous loss of life.” 3 One veteran, a Marine Corps sergeant who spent three tours of duty in Vietnam, also exemplified this feeling. He stated that because the United States pulled out before winning, “in a way, all those kids that died over there just fought for nothing.” 4 Many veterans also expressed sadness at the tremendous loss of life and felt that the final outcome of the Vietnam War did not justify the number of Americans who were killed: “The worst thing I can remember, shortly after I got there, there must have been fifty, sixty ambulances at a landing strip. I asked what was going on, and they said there was a company getting overrun by the enemy and they were bringing in a lot

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of wounded and a lot of dead bodies. The first thing that came to my mind was that I felt sorry for the guys’ folks back in the United States when they got the news.” 5 Some of the interviewees questioned their role in Vietnam because they felt the burden of the war had not been shared equally by the South Vietnamese army and the people they were there to defend: “We came back from this village and they were still firing at us with rockets and everything and we were real tired. Those battles are exhausting and they really zap you. Anyway, when we came back, the Vietnamese popular forces were playing volleyball, and I said, ‘Oh, shit, and we’re supposed to be helping these guys fight their war and here they’re playing volleyball. Why aren’t they fighting?’” 6 Whether or not they would serve again and whether they questioned the value of the Vietnam War really seemed to depend on when they went to Vietnam. Those who went in the later years of the war were much more cynical and pessimistic. When asked if they had to do it over again, would they still serve in Vietnam, the Chicano veterans’ answers ranged from mixed feelings to a definite yes or no. There were a few who said they would go to Vietnam again because their views about U.S. involvement had not changed: “I think politically looking at it, it was the correct move because, since we’re not there, we’ve lost three countries and destabilized Southeast Asia.” 7 Even if they questioned what happened in Vietnam, a few of the Chicano veterans said they felt they were “just doing their job” and they would be willing to serve again. One noted that he would fight for the United States without question because “this is my country. I was born here and I want to live here.” 8 Another stated that serving in the armed forces was just part of his family’s tradition: “In my family, all my relatives were military. My uncle Agapito died in Germany. My uncle Leon served in WW II in the infantry, and my uncle Mono was a bombardier in the war. My dad and my uncle Herman served, and so on. If there’s a need to go, I would do it over again regardless. We’re patriotic. We have faults, but I believe in my country.” 9 This veteran felt that although Vietnam was a mistake, his going to Vietnam wasn’t, because of the type of job he had done. He was there to help the other GIs, and he did his job. Several veterans had mixed feelings about this question: “I’d probably not be as quick about it as I was then. I think if it was wrong, it was wrong, but at that time you were fighting for your country, and what the

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political leaders thought was the right thing to do. Now we’re smarter about it. We’re not going to let ourselves get into that kind of situation. I think, for the most part, Vietnam was a mistake.” 10 Other veterans distinguished between serving in another conflict and serving in another war. They perceived a difference in the amount of support soldiers received when they were in a conflict such as Vietnam as opposed to a declared war: “We could have won Vietnam. You cannot fight a political war, and that’s exactly what we were in. You can’t fight the government, you can’t fight the people fighting the government. Coming home to the United States and having tomatoes thrown at you and being called baby killers was not a good thing.” 11 Others expressed this sentiment more strongly and stated that if they had to do it over again, they would not go to Vietnam: “Why go and waste time? Peace without victory. We didn’t do a bit of good, and nothing came out of it.” 12 Several of the veterans reflected upon their children and how future wars might affect their lives. Some said they would allow their children to make their own decisions about whether or not to get involved in wars or serve in the military. The majority, however, were adamantly against their children’s having to go to war and would not want them to become involved in a similar conflict: “What I’ve come across is that the people who were in Vietnam were the ones whose families were the most uneducated. They really didn’t know what they were fighting for. They wanted to believe they were fighting for their country and something that was just, but they weren’t educated enough to know that it wasn’t the right thing to do. I’ve educated myself now. I already know the mistake I made. I would do everything on my part to stop my children.” 13 While some veterans felt their sons and daughters had to make their own decisions regarding their participation in military service, they all hoped the decision would never have to be made. As one father stated, “I hope he never has to go to war. It’s a hell of an experience.” 14 Veterans’ views differed on whether or not war in general was necessary. Some felt it really didn’t matter what anyone thought; there would always be wars: “I feel war is necessary. If there is no other means, then, obviously, war started because nobody is talking. When you break communication with somebody, you fight. I don’t think there’s any way we’re ever going to prevent war, but you have to think what the government has done now. They’ve taken the word ‘war’ out and they’ve put in ‘conflict’ and they’re putting everything else in but ‘war.’

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But really the bottom line is the same darn thing.” 15 Other veterans, however, felt strongly that there had to be alternatives to war: “My feelings toward war have changed. The issue about war for me is not how to fight a war or how to stay away from war. Some of the guys would talk about the next time we fight a war, we better declare it one. To me, that’s not the issue. I think for me now the issue is no more war.” 16

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CHAPTER NINE

Conclusion

There are a number of reasons why Chicanos served in the military during the Vietnam War. As past studies and the veterans themselves point out, they had little opportunity to take advantage of the college deferments that were available to the predominantly white middle and upper classes. Few minority youth had the knowledge or resources to successfully gain conscientious objector status. Many Chicanos were drafted, but more enlisted because of community expectations and served because of their belief in duty and patriotism. The feeling that Mexicanos and other Latinos were not looked at as Americans and always had to prove their loyalty was repeated often in the interviews: “You’re over there and you think you’re fighting for your country, but when you come back they still treat you like a foreigner.” 1 The interviewees also felt that Mexicanos were very patriotic. This patriotism was steadfast, even though they were aware that discrimination based on race and socioeconomic class was prevalent in the United States. Their patriotism not only was based on national loyalty but also was linked to a cultural mandate that if they were going to join in a fight, they should fight well and with honor: I made an extra effort and it seemed to me all the Chicanos had this general tendency. They came from different places, but there was something that was driving us and we wanted to do good and to make this be a good thing if we could. And I think we probably tried too hard and too long. I mean, there’s reasons why more of us got killed proportionally than others, and it wasn’t because we were stupid or bad soldiers or even John Wayne types. I think we were trying harder to actually be something like what we were supposed to be there, even if it wasn’t turning out to be that way.2 Despite questioning their role in Vietnam, and despite what they

conclusion

perceived as poor treatment from both the government and the public when they returned home, the Chicano veterans frequently emphasized the point that they had been good soldiers. Many still felt pride that they and other Mexicanos fought bravely in Vietnam. They reported volunteering for dangerous assignments, and there was a strong sense of pride in having done so. Many stated that if “you were going to get hit, you knew that the Mexicano was going to be there, even if it meant his life. He wouldn’t run.” 3 Other veterans expanded on the idea that being a good soldier was embedded in Mexican culture. One veteran stated that when he was a boy, a Mexican American who was a Korea veteran walked proudly down the street with all his medals; that is where the interviewee got his first message that this was what men did: When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was a paratrooper. I was going to be a man’s man and there was no restriction from it. It’s could I run five miles in the morning and could I jump out of a damn airplane, and it was the first time that there was equal opportunity to compete and you’re damn right I competed. For once in my life, I felt like I was a man. It didn’t matter what color I was. So war is a kind of way for us to measure our own worth, but it’s such a distorted notion, in retrospect, because if you look at the futility of it, you don’t come back a hero. You don’t come back anything. You come back somebody who is broken of spirit, who is robbed of humanity.4 The patriotism of the majority of Chicano veterans remains unshaken, even though they are not blind to the problems of race and class in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, and even though the great majority of them came to disagree with U.S. policy in Vietnam. They went believing they were defending the ideals of freedom and democracy that America stood for, but the majority returned disillusioned with the politics and reality of the war. Their disillusionment underscores the sense of tragedy that so many convey in their stories: comrades were lost and acts of violence were committed which can never be undone. It darkens their memories of having been good soldiers and brave men. In the end, they are left questioning the value of what they did in Vietnam and what it all meant:

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Did the war accomplish anything? No. . . . It destroyed a lot of lives. There’d probably be a lot of doctors, a lot of good things that might have been invented. Probably ten thousand Chicanos who are dead, who today might be alive, they’d have kids and families. They’re not here anymore. They’re just not here.5

CHAPTER TEN

The Darkness of War Juan Carlos Heredia

What filled my mind with the terror of war? It was not merely the sight of the burned-out hulls of abandoned tracks or choppers nor the constant pounding of artillery and the quaking of the earth beneath my feet It was not eating in the rain sleeping in the mud or finding scorpions hiding and waiting in my sleeping bag It was not the firefights with the utter confusion the noise the yelling the screaming and the smoke cluttering the air all invading my senses at the same time It was not the bone fragments charred flesh bodies turned inside out half a face frozen in midframe expressing some thought of the world none of this not even a painless death finalizing the rage of a warrior or a slow twisting death alone in the mud Nor was it the flames of this uncontrollable devastation fanning itself into our existence blinding us with its flashes of white-hot light sucking our lives into the pillars of smoke that faded into the clouds

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No, hell was not being devoured by these flames it was not in dying it was in living Hell was our existing in the embers the embers that shot skyward in the warmth of the evening fading into the night and being lost forever As if that ember that spark of light had never existed never would it make a difference in a world already set ablaze Lost like thousands of other sparks of light moving up into the heavens away from distinction fading in sight and importance fading into silence Screams of fragile young men never heard we exist in the silence hollowed within numbed by it This is what we had become we were emptied of all hope of all faith in humanity emptied of any spirit of innocence that young men carry with them into the world The fire of our youth had burned brightly and then burned no more What happened? what happened? what happened to the boy in me? what happened to us all? We all became the embers But some of us still returned from Hell WHY?

Notes

1. Introduction 1. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1983); Jeremy Barnes, The Pictorial History of the Vietnam War (New York: Gallery Books, 1988). 2. Jerold M. Starr, ed., The Lessons of the Vietnam War (Pittsburgh: Center for Social Studies Education, 1988). 3. Lea Ybarra and Nina Michel Genera, La Batalla Está Aquí: Chicanos and the War (El Cerrito, Calif.: Chicano Draft Help, 1972). 4. Robin Fitzgerald Scott, “Wartime Labor Problems and Mexican Americans in the War,” in Manuel P. Servín, comp., An Awakened Minority: The Mexican Americans (New York: Macmillan 1970), p. 141; Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), pp. 253–254. 5. Ralph Guzmán, “Mexican American Casualties in Vietnam,” La Raza 1 (1971): 12 –13. 6. Ibid., p. 12. 7. Ibid., p. 13. 8. Ybarra and Genera, La Batalla Está Aquí, p. 4. 9. Ibid., p. 4. 10. Charles Ornelas and Michael González, “The Chicanos and the War: An Opinion Survey in Santa Barbara,” Atzlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research 2, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 24 –26. 11. Ibid., pp. 27–32. 12. Ibid., p. 34. 13. Roy Benavidez, The Three Wars of Roy Benavidez (San Antonio: Corona Publishing, 1986), and Medal of Honor: A Vietnam Warrior’s Story (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1995); Everett Álvarez Jr., Chained Eagle (New York: D. I. Fine, 1989), and Code of Conduct (New York: D. I. Fine, 1991). 14. Charley Trujillo, ed., Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam (San Jose, Calif.: Chusma House Publications, 1990), and Dogs from Illusion (San Jose, Calif.: Chusma House Publications, 1994); Daniel Cano, Shifting Loyalties (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1995); Jorge Mariscal, Aztlán and Vietnam (in press). 15. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPS (Washington, D.C., August 2001). 16. Stephen J. Dienstfrey and Robert H. Feitz, Chart Book on Black and Hispanic Veterans: Data from the 1980 Census of Population and Housing

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Notes to Pages 8–219 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Information Management and Statistics, Statistical Policy and Research Service, Research Division, 1985). 17. Ibid. 18. Rosina M. Becerra and Milton Greenblatt, Hispanics Seek Health Care: A Study of 1,088 Veterans of Three War Eras (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), p. 67. 19. Ibid, p. 89. 20. Ibid, p. 115. 21. Ibid, p. 140. Chapter 6 1. Daniel. 2. Marcelo. 3. Raúl. 4. Cipriano. 5. José. 6. Manuel O. 7. David. 8. Tanis. 9. Antonio. 10. Tony. 11. Raúl. 12. Cipriano. 13. David. 14. Julio. 15. Manuel C. 16. Ricardo. 17. Agapito. 18. Manuel C. 19. Antonio. 20. Daniel. 21. Daniel. 22. John. 23. Ricardo. 24. Francisco. 25. Robert. 26. Tanis. 27. Robert. 28. Max. 29. Manuel. 30. Agapito. 31. Cipriano. 32. Tony. 33. David. 34. Francisco. 35. Lupe. 36. Raúl.

Notes to Pages 219–232 37. Tanis. 38. Marcello 39. Julio. 40. Daniel. 41. Raúl. 42. Max. 43. Jay. 44. Charley. 45. Manuel O. 46. Obed. 47. Tanis. 48. Antonio. 49. Francisco. Chapter 7 1. Tanis. 2. Manuel O. 3. Tanis. 4. Daniel. 5. Cipriano. 6. Antonio. 7. Charley. 8. Arturo. 9. Max. 10. Obed. 11. Robert. 12. Tony. 13. Cipriano. 14. Tanis. 15. Obed. 16. Gilberto. 17. Daniel. 18. Daniel. 19. Antonio. 20. Manuel C. 21. Antonio. 22. Lupe. 23. José. 24. Antonio. 25. Daniel. 26. Daniel. 27. Gilberto. 28. Julio. Chapter 8 1. Julio. 2. Daniel.

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Notes to Pages 232 –238 3. Marcello 4. José. 5. Arturo. 6. Charley. 7. Richard. 8. Manuel C. 9. Agapito. 10. Francisco. 11. John. 12. Arturo. 13. Jay. 14. Tanis. 15. Lupe. 16. Obed. Chapter 9 1. Frank D. 2. Raúl. 3. Lupe. 4. Daniel. 5. Raúl.

Index

Acuña, Rodolfo, 5 Agent Orange, 126, 127, 129, 135, 136, 143, 181, 227, 229 –231 AIT (advanced infantry training), 65, 95, 193, 196 Alameda, 103, 212 American Legion, 188 antiwar movement, 4 –7, 56, 64, 71, 72, 93, 121, 210, 211–213 armored personnel carrier, 17, 18, 21 army, 39, 52 AWOL, 34, 134

Da Nang, 28, 29, 102, 125, 131, 173–174, 191 deferments, 214 Delta Company, 165 Desert Storm, 189 –191 DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), 86 –90 discrimination /racism, 5, 9, 151, 214 –220, 236 DMZ (demilitarized zone), 61, 62, 66, 122, 131 drug use, 97, 217, 230, 231

Battle of Hue, 174 Becerra, Rosina M., and Milton Greenblatt, 8, 9 Bien Hoa, 23, 161, 166 boot camp, 52

Ellsberg, Daniel, 104 El Toro Marine Base, 72 enlisting: reasons for, 5 –9, 52, 53

Cambodia, 96, 98, 99, 194, 195, 226 Camp Pendleton, 26, 72 Cam Ranh, 44 Canada, 16, 188, 210, 213 Castle Air Force Base, 142 Central America, 50, 109, 110, 221 “Chale con el Draft,” 6 Chicano moratorium, 6, 7, 45, 158 Chicano movement, 6, 9, 71, 73, 219, 226 Chu Lai, 44, 167 CO (conscientious objector), 32, 101, 104 –106, 108 –117, 213, 214 communism, 60, 85, 104, 110, 196, 211 Contras, 117–119, 221

Fort Benning, Georgia, 122 Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 46 Fort Lewis, Washington, 33, 46 Fort Meade, Maryland, 16 Fort Ord, California, 122, 193 Fort Polk, Louisiana, 46, 52, 188, 193 Fort Sam Houston, Texas, 95, 160 fragging, 50, 100 free-fire zone, 39, 41 friendly fire, 17, 30, 50, 167 GI Bill, 102, 223 González, Michael, 6, 7 Green Berets, 216 Gulf of Tonkin, 48, 108, 126 Guzmán, Ralph, 5, 6, 112 Hanoi, 47 Hmong, 88

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Index Ia Drang Valley, 152, 194 Iron Triangle, 44 Junction City, 63 Korean infantry, 54, 78 – 80 La Batalla Está Aqui, 6 Laos, 87 Latin America, 220 –222 Latinos, 8, 9, 40, 168, 219, 227, 236 Lettermen General Hospital, 24 Marine Corps, 27, 30, 32, 71, 146, 150, 172, 173 MASH, 131, 175 McNamara 100,000 project, 152, 153 MEChA, 67 medic, 97, 100 MIA (missing in action), 90 Montagnards, 81, 82 Muñoz, Rosalio, 6 My Lai, 121 navy, 32 Nixon, Richard, 3, 7, 83, 192 North Vietnamese army, 40, 45, 78, 80, 133, 138, 153, 173, 180, 195, 199, 205 Oakland Army Terminal, 193 OCS (officer candidate school), 46, 62, 85 173rd Airborne, 181 Ornelas, Charles, 6 patriotism, 25, 52, 56, 210, 236, 237 Pentagon Papers, The, 104 Persian Gulf, 204, 205 Phoenix, 88 Phu Bai, 46, 68, 181 Pleiku, 160, 162, 194 Presidio, 182 PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), 129, 149, 155, 158, 227

Quang Tri, 131, 177 race and class issues, 5 R&R (rest and recuperation), 21, 29, 71 religion, 56, 61, 69, 70, 112, 113, 146, 183 ROTC, 164, 210 Saigon, 62, 66, 124, 125, 166 Salazar, Ruben, 103 Scott, Robin F., 5 Selective Service Board, 179 SLAM (search, locate, and annihilate mission), 80 South Vietnamese army, 25, 30, 79, 105, 196 –198, 233 Special Forces, 79 Stars and Stripes (magazine), 72 student deferments, 111 Tet offensive, 3, 31, 60, 63, 102, 125, 174, 218 Ton Son Nhut Air Base, 53, 122 Travis Air Force Base, 24, 48 United Farm Workers, 49, 73, 85, 226 U.S. foreign policy, 220 U.S. involvement in Vietnam: history, 3; human and economic costs, 4 U.S. Selective Service, 101 USS Sanctuary, 173, 179 VA (Veterans Administration) hospital, 8, 9, 143, 147, 148, 231 veterans interviewed: demographics, xi, xii Vietcong, 19, 22, 23, 27, 28, 36, 37, 105, 123, 125, 133, 138, 140, 145, 167, 169, 174 Vietnamese, 69, 77, 144, 205, 232 Vietnam veterans: problems, 51; statistics, 51 Vietnam Veterans against the War, 57 Vietnam War: views toward, 4 –7, 25 –27, 31