J. Leonard Ignatowski
United States Army
Served November 1970 - September 1971
169th Engineer Battalion Staff: Assistant S-3 (Operations) Officer
43rd Engineer Company (Dump Trucks): Dump Truck Platoon Leader
544th Engineer Company (Construction Support)
What’s your name and where/when were you born?
My name is J. Leonard Ignatowski. I was born in January 1946 and raised in Wilmington, Delaware in a very Polish ethnic neighborhood.
Were you enlisted or were you drafted?
Well, see, that’s the wrong question because everyone at that time, if you’re 18 and if you’re medically-fit, you’re draft eligible. Men only enlisted because they had a choice. When you enlisted you had a choice over your military skill or how long you were going to serve. If you got drafted, you had no choice. You normally went in for two years and at that time, nine times out of ten you got infantry. I saw the handwriting on the wall. Plus, I was also compressing five years of engineering into four years and you would lose your student deferment after four years. I would have been drafted right after my fourth year of college so, I enlisted in ROTC, or I guess you can say volunteered for ROTC. That gave me the fifth year to finish and I graduated in June 1969. I went on active duty in December 1969.
How old were you when you started serving?
I was a relatively old man - I was 23 years old.
Where were you stationed?
I went on active duty on December 7th, 1969 which was an ominous sign. Everyone knows what happened on December 7th, 1941. I went and reported to Ft. Benning Georgia where I was commissioned as an infantry officer. I had nine weeks of schooling in the art of being an infantry, platoon or company leader. We had classes on everything from how to fill out a morning report to how to plan a major airborne assault. We went out in the field, we fired the weapons, we played with all the toys, we rode tanks and helicopters and everything like that for nine weeks. I graduated and then went to Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri where I was assigned as a training officer in boot camp. We brought young men from St. Louis, Arkansas and Alabama and in nine weeks, we made them into soldiers. Basically in that job, I was a babysitter. My job was mainly to make sure the drill sergeants taught the required courses and did not harass or intimidate any of the soldiers. I did that until around September and then I got my orders for Vietnam. At that time, all infantry officers we required to go to jungle school down in the Panama Canal. There, we basically lived in the jungle for two weeks and learned how to survive and live in the jungle. Then I went to San Francisco and got on airplane. It took 24 hours to fly to Vietnam. When I got to Vietnam, I arrived an Bien Hua which was a major airbase and then went to Long Bình post where we were assigned to our units. I was assigned to the 169th Engineer Battalion. Long Bình post was right outside of Saigon, but we were rebuilding a road QL20 up towards Xuan Loc which is about twenty miles east of Saigon.
What jobs and tasks did you perform while you were there?
I started out as the assistant S3. My boss was a Major who was responsible for keeping everything moving smoothly. We were sort of like a civilian construction company who did construction support. We were rebuilding this road and it was his job to plan and execute the mission, repair parts, and address any technical issues. I worked with him basically as a Lieutenant. I was a gopher. One time I went out and I had to hand count each piece of equipment that the battalion had because there was a report that the company commanders were giving out equipment in return for favors like war souvenirs such as AK-47 rifles and other things. Then, one evening I was working on a report for him and he came in and said “Lieutenant Ignatowski, you're not happy working for me”, because I basically had a desk job. In true John Wayne fashion I stood up and said “No sir, I didn’t come to Vietnam to sit behind a desk” and he said “okay, I’ll see what I can do for you”. I then had second thoughts because I was wondering what I had just opened the door to - am I going to go to an infantry unit or what? He came back two days later and said “you’re going to the 43rd Dump Truck Company”, which was an engineer specialty unit. This was a dump truck company that had 72 dump trucks and they were stationed right next door. All I had to do was just pack my bags up and walk across the street to my new unit. Every morning we drove from Long Bình post to the road where we picked up asphalt and crushed rock. We took it up to the construction sites and we did that all during daylight hours. During the evening we came back to Long Bình post. A couple months later I got called into the Battalion Commander and without going into details, I got my second transfer to the road where I was with the 544th Engineer Company where they made the crushed rock and the asphalt for the road building. Then, my Battalion Commander said “I normally don’t transfer a man for a third time but if you don’t like it in six weeks let me know. I’ll give you any assignment you want in the battalion”. Well, he didn’t tell me he was leaving in four weeks so I wound up staying with the 544th until I left.
How did you feel about the work you were doing?
Well, in operations I felt very good because I was compiling reports and whatnot. I felt like I was being effective. When I went with the dump truck company in was sort of a mundane job because I was sort of like a babysitter. My responsibility was to drive up and down the road and at that time, we didn’t convoy. As soon as a truck was loaded up with asphalt or crushed rock, it went by itself up the road. Like everything else, trucks break down. If they had a flat tire or engine trouble, I would stop and call in the tow truck and stayed with the dump trunk until it got repaired and towed back to Long Bình. I did that. I went up and down the road two, three or four times a day until it got dark. Then when I went with 544th, that was once again like babysitting because I was in the equipment platoon and my men serviced all the different functions in the rock quarry, on the crushers, in the asphalt plant. In the morning, once they went, I didn’t see them again until the evening time. My job was mainly to walk around a make sure nobody was goofing off and that the rock was flowing.
What did you do there when you got any free time? Did you get any free time?
Well, it was strange. I mean, you think about a war zone but when I was at Long Bình it was like a U.S. city with about 5,000. They did everything from make ice cream to repair equipment. The officer’s club had Armed Forces TV where they televised the same Cowboys game that was in black and white. We had a bar, checkers, things like that. Otherwise, you would just stay in your room and write or read. We had basketball courts, volleyballs courts. We even had a Chinese restaurant that was about three blocks away. It was almost like being stateside even though you couldn’t leave the base and couldn’t have any female companionship. It was the same thing with the 43rd, we had our own club and beer was ten cents a bottle. Cokes were 5 cents a bottle. That’s how a lot of people passed their time. When I got out to the field, again, we had first run movies every night. We would often migrate towards the bunker of one Lieutenant where we would dump off our ration of beer and chit chat, or else we’d go to one of the clubs and have a beer but that wasn’t too appealing. Also, we had R&R for one week and you could go anywhere from Sydney, Australia to Japan as a government expense. You had to pay for your meals and whatnot but they provided the transportation to and from. One week, I went to Sydney and I made the mistake of going in May, not knowing their seasons are reversed. I went there expecting to see this beach full of women in bikinis but no, because it was winter there. I went to Hong Kong for a week and Bangkok for a week also. So, if you ever go to Sydney, be sure to leave in December.
If you’re willing to share, what was your experience with the Vietcong?
I was very fortunate. It was a strange, strange war. When our unit first got on the road they got hit one night and they almost got overrun. But after that, the VC saw that we were no threat to them so they were not going to waste any manpower or resources on us. So, they let us build our road but they were fighting all around us. My first week there, we had a hill behind the quarry site and all night long, jets came in and napalmed the hill. The next morning, the top of that hill looked like Mount St. Helens, it was just bare. People were getting ambushed along the roads, but the engineers sort of escaped all of that. We didn’t get hit or attacked except just after I left, when the American military had mainly withdrawn, the VC were getting active along the road when they went from single trucks to convoys. So, I didn’t have any direct exposure. I never had to fire my weapon in anger.
How do you think the South Vietnamese felt about American troops?
That’s hard to say. They look at us, from my perspective, like we had big pockets and the ones we hired got paid a good salary. We introduced products into their black market that they didn’t have before. The road was in a Catholic area that had refugees from the North, because they were told that the Communists were going to kill them. So in this area, they coexisted. We were told that there was a VC finance center up on the next hill over and we kind of sensed that because one night we saw villagers walking through our base camp around 11:00 at night, heading into the jungle. We figured they weren’t going there for a date. The Catholic priest was the village chief and he liked us because we did favors for him, we got things for him that he couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. There was also a rumor that he was paying the VC off so they wouldn’t attack us because one weekend the Company Commander was told to be on the lookout because the village chief forgot to make his payment to the VC. Now, that’s all hearsay but again, a sniper on a ridge line could control the entire base camp or pick off anyone, so to this day I wonder why they didn’t attack us. There was a fire support base down the road before I got there and they said that they got attacked every night and it used to be like the 4th of July. So I think it was peaceful coexistence. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
Do you think they thought that you guys were doing them a favor?
No. You know, I’ve read a lot. I think they basically wanted peace and quiet. They didn’t care who was in Saigon or Hanoi as long they could harvest their bananas, grow rice, feed their families and live in peace. When we were there, we sort of improved their living conditions somewhat but building the road, some companies drilled a well for the villagers. We had a civic action where once we accumulated enough food that was supposed to be thrown away, we sent it to the local Catholic orphanage and donated it there. Before we left, the nuns asked us for a color TV. So, in a way, they looked at us like we were there to help out. Is that right or wrong? I don’t know.
How was pride and morale during the war for American troops?
Well, when I got there the war was over. We were like the Little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike. American units were being withdrawn when I first got there. The engineers had a backup in case we got attacked. There were these professional fighters that would come in and help us. The First Cav had a fire support base down the road. Then there was the 199th Infantry Brigade, they came in and then pulled out. Then we had the 11th Cav on the other side of the hill, who also pulled out. With that in mind, most of my men couldn’t care less - okay I’m here, for a year. Let me do my thing and then I can hopefully go home without any injuries. We some morale issues that were racial - we had some (what we called in those days) black power advocates versus the rednecks. There was constant friction between those two. Then we had the pot heads. Drugs became very evident and were cheap. Villagers would sell them to the GIs. That added to the friction between certain segments. Then we had the group that said “hey, I just want to be myself, leave me alone”. I spent more time pacifying disagreements than I did worrying about whether the VC was going to attack us. Luckily nobody got shot but there were some serious confrontations. I wasn’t trained for that. I wasn’t trained to separate two American guys trying to cut each other’s throats. It was an educational experience.
How informed did you feel? Did you get news coverage during the war?
Well, we got a newspaper called Stars and Stripes. That was about eight pages - it covered sports, international events and whatnot. But then I was lucky, my hometown of Wilmington had The Wilmington Journal, and then sent a free subscription to everyone who was stationed in Vietnam. About once or twice a week I would get 3-4 editions of the actual hometown newspaper so I got a lot more detailed information about what was happening back in Delaware. When you’re there, you more or less didn’t pay attention to that because you’d say well, what good is it? I’m here, I’m doing my job, so when do I go home? That was the attitude.
So you didn’t have much experience with how the media was reporting the war?
There were no TV crews coming around us. Before coming to Vietnam I saw the clips of Tet and it’s just hard to say. You see it on TV and it’s like another world but when you’re actually get there your mind sort of gets set on something else. Who cares what President Johnson or President Nixon were doing, as long as there wasn’t a ceasefire. You live from day to day, from hour to hour. When you get up in the morning you say “Gee, I survived the night”. Then you go through the next day and onto bed and say “I survived another day. I’ve only got 100 more days to go”. So, you didn’t really pay too much attention to the news.
You mentioned Tet, but another big thing the media was upset about was Agent Orange. Did you know anything about Agent Orange while you were there or before you were there? Or did you find out about it after?
No. Agent Orange didn’t really come into effect until about a few years after the war when all of these strange diseases were coming up in Vietnam veterans. I’m proud to say that the Vietnam Veterans of America were one of the forerunners in getting benefits for it. That’s one of the secret casualties of the war. A lot of my friends, as a matter of fact, my Company Commander actually just passed away from Agent Orange cancer on December 19th. I met a platoon sergeant and I said “hey, you used to have a mustache there” and he said “yeah, skin cancer from Agent Orange”. One of my men lost a lung due to Agent Orange so yeah, like I said, it’s really one of the secret casualties of the war.
I’m sorry. Did your perspective of the war change?
Wow, that’s a loaded question. I usually do these presentations and say Vietnam was like a diamond, it had many facets. Some were flawed, some were perfect. And the more I read, we went in with good intentions, then politics got involved. I think General Abrams who took over for Westmoreland had the right attitude. Whether it would have worked or not, I don’t know. You see, a lot of people don’t like this, but Ho Chi Minh was like George Washington. They say he was a communist, but he only became a communist because when he was in France, he was a socialist. After WWI, France was getting its colonies back and the socialists said “we’re going to become a great French empire”. The communists were the only ones who wanted to get rid of the colonies so, he became a communist because he wanted to free his country from French oppression. In WWII, Ho Chi Minh fought against the Japanese and after the war they defeated France and divided up the country. Then the Americans came in. Westmoreland was like Lee, go to the battle and charge the main elements. Take your casualties and wear them down. What we didn’t realize was that the North Vietnamese was willing to sacrifice generations of people to achieve their goal. We [the Americans] always look at the short term - “okay, we’re going to go in there and kick their ass for six months, then come home and declare our victory”. That didn’t work out. Abrams had the right attitude - how can you say we’re winning the war if Saigon is getting hit with rockets every night? So he decided So he decided that you’d go up the road to the first village, secure that, bring in the government services, drill a well, start the schools, set up health services, train them. Then you would go into the next village and keep building these security zones to deprive the VC of their main resource…the people. But then again we were dealing with a corrupt government. Diem was corrupt, the journalists were corrupt. So to me, winning was possible but it was up to the Vietnamese to win it. We couldn’t win it for them. Unfortunately, there were good military officers but most of them were mediocre. For example, the last battle was fought at Huan Loc which was right where I was stationed. They actually defeated the NVA but ran out of ammunition. Now that was one of these “stellar” field generals, but when you got to Saigon you had that all of these political hacks. It’s all very complex. Basically, we were supporting a corrupt government from the local village chief all the way up. They were taking bribes, circumventing U.S. aid. If you don’t have good leaders, your troops won’t fight. In Tet, we gave a Silver Star to an RVN tank commander because he went in and saved a Marine unit, but there were other guys who, as soon as the VC showed up, went away. So, it was sort of a hodgepodge. It’s sort of like Iraq and Afghanistan. Trying to impose our Western standards on societies who have no idea what it’s like. I think the answer still eludes us.
Did you come up with that perspective after the war? That us messing around in other countries hasn’t gone too well for us?
Well, the first thing I have to say is that I’m Polish. I was raised in a Polish neighborhood and we hated the Communists, okay? I can remember my mother would go to my grandmother’s house and they would build care packages. They would go to a Polish shoemaker and on the heels, grinded out, they would put American dollars. They’d send roughed up clothing because if you sent new clothing, it might be stolen, and you’d have to pay a higher import tax. I saw that. So, when Vietnam came along it was like “yeah, we’re going to fight the Communists!”, so I got to do my patriotic thing. When I came home, I think I despised the draft dodgers more than the Communists because I saw who fought the war. It was Billy Bob from Alabama and many from the city of Detroit and whatnot. I saw who got into the National Guard and who didn’t. I was very down on the draft dodgers. I got a job and went to work, got married, started practicing my professional engineer career. I remember when Vietnam fell I was working and it made me pause and think what was going to happen to some of the people I worked with? As time marched on, we [the U.S.] got involved with these little episodes in Panama and Grenada. I marched in the demonstration against the Iraq invasion downtown. It wasn’t until I started having children that I was saying to myself, do I want my kids to go and fight in another Vietnam? No. So, I wasn’t conscious of it until I got married and started having kids.
That’s interesting. What was it like returning home?
You get your orders, you go down to the processing center, you take your drug test to make sure you’re clean, you hope on an airplane and 24 hours later, you arrive in Oakland in the middle of the night. Within 24 hours, you’re a civilian. There’s no parades or anything, you’re just happy to be home. My brother lived in Reno so we went. No big deal there. My brother was happy to see me. We spent two or three days there and took the train to Chicago then flew to Philadelphia. I came home and my mother was happy to see me, my relatives were happy to see me. But, the neighbors…when I walked down the street it’s like I hadn’t been gone even though the local papers had an article called “The Vietnam Mailbag”. It was like time had stopped. It was like okay, you’ve been gone for two years. It was like they forgot all about it. No one ever said “glad to see you home” because most of the people I grew up with didn’t go in the army, they got married, got into the National Guard, or got medical deferment. There were three of us who went into the Army and to Vietnam out of about twelve of us. That was another thing, some of my friends sort of avoided me. So, there was nothing earth-shattering, there were no people spitting on me like they said in San Francisco, but it was like business as usual.
So you weren’t the victim of any angry, anti-war protesters?
No. I did come back during the recession and had a hard time finding a job. I finally got a job in Baltimore and I resumed my engineering career.
How did the war affect the rest of your life?
Wow, uh, it’s strange. I forgot where I was, but I coached youth soccer, basketball and t-ball. About ten years ago, my son said to me, “Dad, the players on our team was asked ‘hey, is your dad one of those crazy Vietnam veterans?’” and that really hit me. It wasn’t until I got married that I got somewhat involved with politics, I worked for certain state and presidential candidates. It bothered me that people were saying “hey, let’s go invade” when they had no military experience like the elected president of the United States right now. Even he was a draft dodger. I just irritates me when these people say “let’s go and send the troops in” but their families aren’t involved. We did away with the draft and I’m very vocal about that. When I came back from Vietnam, I let everyone know I was a Vietnam veteran and I didn’t give a damn. It just came up in discussions and in that way, I was able to find other Vietnam veterans who were sort of hiding it. But I didn’t care. When I came back, I started going and visiting bars. You know, a single guy. As soon as you say “oh, I just got back from Vietnam”, all of the sudden the girl would say “oh, my grandmother just died, I can’t date you”. So, I sort of became a social stigma. In some cases, if I liked the girl I didn’t mention that right away but I got married. Diane knew I was a Vietnam veteran and she taught at an Army post in Germany for three years so she was sort of in tune with soldiers who were going to Vietnam and coming back or not coming back. Our marriage didn’t really have that problem. I remember going to see Platoon and coming out and breaking down for about thirty minutes – I cried. Luckily, the organization I belong to was there to help us. Since I joined them, I have been an advocate of veteran’s benefits. Right now, these veterans are coming home and become homeless. Most of them, well, I don’t want to say most of them, but a lot of them are women. When I was in the military, a woman was either a nurse with a needle ready to stick you in the wrong place, or they were clerks. Now, they’re combat medics, they’re pilots. When we went down to our reunion in Ft. Bragg, I saw this parachutist come down. It looked strange, so I followed it and as the parachutist was coming towards me it was a lady – a girl. She was a bulldozer operator, I talked to her afterwards. She said he dad owned a construction company and he wouldn’t let her operate the bulldozers so the first opportunity she had, she joined the Army where they said she could be a bulldozer. In that respect, things are changes. That’s what I’m trying to look out for the new generation because they’re the real heroes. They could be down the street at McDonald’s or something and now maybe they’re in Iraq or someplace.
You mentioned the stigma surrounding Vietnam veterans. Do you feel that stigma only stuck with veterans the first couple of years, ten years, twenty, today? You mentioned a few of your co-workers were hiding it like it was a dirty secret.
Well, Hollywood picked up on it and so did television. I think it was Kojak which is probably before your time. There’s always the deranged Vietnam veteran in the detective stories and in the movies. I think that sort of placed the social stigma and a lot of them went into the closet for whatever reason. It probably started to end with the first Gulf War because we won that one. The started to change the whole perspective on the military. Now, at the Wounded Warrior dinners they will stand up and say “thanks to the Vietnam veterans because they changed the public attitude towards veterans”. If you had a choice of hiring a Vietnam veteran and a draft dodger, they probably would have chosen the draft dodger because we had that baggage. Whether it was true or not, that’s the way people perceived us.
Do you think that’s because Vietnam veterans were the first to talk about PTSD?
I don’t know. I guess it was because they learned to separate the politics from the soldier, from the warrior. If the war is set by the president and turns out to be a bad decision, blame the president but not the troops. I don’t know what brought it about. Maybe it was the first Gulf War with Bush. Bush was a WWII hero, all of his commanders were Vietnam veterans, so it sort of changed the perspective of the military.
Do you think the Vietnam War was winnable?
That’s a very difficult question. From what I’ve learned, the people wanted their country back. Vietnam has a history of being invaded. The delta area of Vietnam was actually part of Cambodia. I went back in 2011 and that’s when I learned that people mostly consider people down in the delta not truly Vietnamese. The true Vietnam starts in the central highlands in the North. Anything below that, you’re not the true Vietnamese. 95% of the country was Buddhist, 5% were Catholics but that 5% took 95% of the leadership positions. You can’t win a war that way. Ho Chi Minh wanted to unite the country. That’s a very difficult political agenda to defeat. The only way you can defeat that is by showing you have a better deal. At the time I think a lot of the Vietnamese were living for today. Why worry about the future? It was the war for the Vietnamese to win or lose. We gave them all the help we figured was needed for them to stand on their own two feet but the South wasn’t going to change. The North was willing to make the sacrifices. They lost like five million people – soldiers and civilians. We lost around 55,000 – of course they were fighting the war much longer. If it could have been won, it would have been a very long-term endeavor. Americans don’t like long things, they think on the very short-term.
Served November 1970 - September 1971
169th Engineer Battalion Staff: Assistant S-3 (Operations) Officer
43rd Engineer Company (Dump Trucks): Dump Truck Platoon Leader
544th Engineer Company (Construction Support)
What’s your name and where/when were you born?
My name is J. Leonard Ignatowski. I was born in January 1946 and raised in Wilmington, Delaware in a very Polish ethnic neighborhood.
Were you enlisted or were you drafted?
Well, see, that’s the wrong question because everyone at that time, if you’re 18 and if you’re medically-fit, you’re draft eligible. Men only enlisted because they had a choice. When you enlisted you had a choice over your military skill or how long you were going to serve. If you got drafted, you had no choice. You normally went in for two years and at that time, nine times out of ten you got infantry. I saw the handwriting on the wall. Plus, I was also compressing five years of engineering into four years and you would lose your student deferment after four years. I would have been drafted right after my fourth year of college so, I enlisted in ROTC, or I guess you can say volunteered for ROTC. That gave me the fifth year to finish and I graduated in June 1969. I went on active duty in December 1969.
How old were you when you started serving?
I was a relatively old man - I was 23 years old.
Where were you stationed?
I went on active duty on December 7th, 1969 which was an ominous sign. Everyone knows what happened on December 7th, 1941. I went and reported to Ft. Benning Georgia where I was commissioned as an infantry officer. I had nine weeks of schooling in the art of being an infantry, platoon or company leader. We had classes on everything from how to fill out a morning report to how to plan a major airborne assault. We went out in the field, we fired the weapons, we played with all the toys, we rode tanks and helicopters and everything like that for nine weeks. I graduated and then went to Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri where I was assigned as a training officer in boot camp. We brought young men from St. Louis, Arkansas and Alabama and in nine weeks, we made them into soldiers. Basically in that job, I was a babysitter. My job was mainly to make sure the drill sergeants taught the required courses and did not harass or intimidate any of the soldiers. I did that until around September and then I got my orders for Vietnam. At that time, all infantry officers we required to go to jungle school down in the Panama Canal. There, we basically lived in the jungle for two weeks and learned how to survive and live in the jungle. Then I went to San Francisco and got on airplane. It took 24 hours to fly to Vietnam. When I got to Vietnam, I arrived an Bien Hua which was a major airbase and then went to Long Bình post where we were assigned to our units. I was assigned to the 169th Engineer Battalion. Long Bình post was right outside of Saigon, but we were rebuilding a road QL20 up towards Xuan Loc which is about twenty miles east of Saigon.
What jobs and tasks did you perform while you were there?
I started out as the assistant S3. My boss was a Major who was responsible for keeping everything moving smoothly. We were sort of like a civilian construction company who did construction support. We were rebuilding this road and it was his job to plan and execute the mission, repair parts, and address any technical issues. I worked with him basically as a Lieutenant. I was a gopher. One time I went out and I had to hand count each piece of equipment that the battalion had because there was a report that the company commanders were giving out equipment in return for favors like war souvenirs such as AK-47 rifles and other things. Then, one evening I was working on a report for him and he came in and said “Lieutenant Ignatowski, you're not happy working for me”, because I basically had a desk job. In true John Wayne fashion I stood up and said “No sir, I didn’t come to Vietnam to sit behind a desk” and he said “okay, I’ll see what I can do for you”. I then had second thoughts because I was wondering what I had just opened the door to - am I going to go to an infantry unit or what? He came back two days later and said “you’re going to the 43rd Dump Truck Company”, which was an engineer specialty unit. This was a dump truck company that had 72 dump trucks and they were stationed right next door. All I had to do was just pack my bags up and walk across the street to my new unit. Every morning we drove from Long Bình post to the road where we picked up asphalt and crushed rock. We took it up to the construction sites and we did that all during daylight hours. During the evening we came back to Long Bình post. A couple months later I got called into the Battalion Commander and without going into details, I got my second transfer to the road where I was with the 544th Engineer Company where they made the crushed rock and the asphalt for the road building. Then, my Battalion Commander said “I normally don’t transfer a man for a third time but if you don’t like it in six weeks let me know. I’ll give you any assignment you want in the battalion”. Well, he didn’t tell me he was leaving in four weeks so I wound up staying with the 544th until I left.
How did you feel about the work you were doing?
Well, in operations I felt very good because I was compiling reports and whatnot. I felt like I was being effective. When I went with the dump truck company in was sort of a mundane job because I was sort of like a babysitter. My responsibility was to drive up and down the road and at that time, we didn’t convoy. As soon as a truck was loaded up with asphalt or crushed rock, it went by itself up the road. Like everything else, trucks break down. If they had a flat tire or engine trouble, I would stop and call in the tow truck and stayed with the dump trunk until it got repaired and towed back to Long Bình. I did that. I went up and down the road two, three or four times a day until it got dark. Then when I went with 544th, that was once again like babysitting because I was in the equipment platoon and my men serviced all the different functions in the rock quarry, on the crushers, in the asphalt plant. In the morning, once they went, I didn’t see them again until the evening time. My job was mainly to walk around a make sure nobody was goofing off and that the rock was flowing.
What did you do there when you got any free time? Did you get any free time?
Well, it was strange. I mean, you think about a war zone but when I was at Long Bình it was like a U.S. city with about 5,000. They did everything from make ice cream to repair equipment. The officer’s club had Armed Forces TV where they televised the same Cowboys game that was in black and white. We had a bar, checkers, things like that. Otherwise, you would just stay in your room and write or read. We had basketball courts, volleyballs courts. We even had a Chinese restaurant that was about three blocks away. It was almost like being stateside even though you couldn’t leave the base and couldn’t have any female companionship. It was the same thing with the 43rd, we had our own club and beer was ten cents a bottle. Cokes were 5 cents a bottle. That’s how a lot of people passed their time. When I got out to the field, again, we had first run movies every night. We would often migrate towards the bunker of one Lieutenant where we would dump off our ration of beer and chit chat, or else we’d go to one of the clubs and have a beer but that wasn’t too appealing. Also, we had R&R for one week and you could go anywhere from Sydney, Australia to Japan as a government expense. You had to pay for your meals and whatnot but they provided the transportation to and from. One week, I went to Sydney and I made the mistake of going in May, not knowing their seasons are reversed. I went there expecting to see this beach full of women in bikinis but no, because it was winter there. I went to Hong Kong for a week and Bangkok for a week also. So, if you ever go to Sydney, be sure to leave in December.
If you’re willing to share, what was your experience with the Vietcong?
I was very fortunate. It was a strange, strange war. When our unit first got on the road they got hit one night and they almost got overrun. But after that, the VC saw that we were no threat to them so they were not going to waste any manpower or resources on us. So, they let us build our road but they were fighting all around us. My first week there, we had a hill behind the quarry site and all night long, jets came in and napalmed the hill. The next morning, the top of that hill looked like Mount St. Helens, it was just bare. People were getting ambushed along the roads, but the engineers sort of escaped all of that. We didn’t get hit or attacked except just after I left, when the American military had mainly withdrawn, the VC were getting active along the road when they went from single trucks to convoys. So, I didn’t have any direct exposure. I never had to fire my weapon in anger.
How do you think the South Vietnamese felt about American troops?
That’s hard to say. They look at us, from my perspective, like we had big pockets and the ones we hired got paid a good salary. We introduced products into their black market that they didn’t have before. The road was in a Catholic area that had refugees from the North, because they were told that the Communists were going to kill them. So in this area, they coexisted. We were told that there was a VC finance center up on the next hill over and we kind of sensed that because one night we saw villagers walking through our base camp around 11:00 at night, heading into the jungle. We figured they weren’t going there for a date. The Catholic priest was the village chief and he liked us because we did favors for him, we got things for him that he couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. There was also a rumor that he was paying the VC off so they wouldn’t attack us because one weekend the Company Commander was told to be on the lookout because the village chief forgot to make his payment to the VC. Now, that’s all hearsay but again, a sniper on a ridge line could control the entire base camp or pick off anyone, so to this day I wonder why they didn’t attack us. There was a fire support base down the road before I got there and they said that they got attacked every night and it used to be like the 4th of July. So I think it was peaceful coexistence. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
Do you think they thought that you guys were doing them a favor?
No. You know, I’ve read a lot. I think they basically wanted peace and quiet. They didn’t care who was in Saigon or Hanoi as long they could harvest their bananas, grow rice, feed their families and live in peace. When we were there, we sort of improved their living conditions somewhat but building the road, some companies drilled a well for the villagers. We had a civic action where once we accumulated enough food that was supposed to be thrown away, we sent it to the local Catholic orphanage and donated it there. Before we left, the nuns asked us for a color TV. So, in a way, they looked at us like we were there to help out. Is that right or wrong? I don’t know.
How was pride and morale during the war for American troops?
Well, when I got there the war was over. We were like the Little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike. American units were being withdrawn when I first got there. The engineers had a backup in case we got attacked. There were these professional fighters that would come in and help us. The First Cav had a fire support base down the road. Then there was the 199th Infantry Brigade, they came in and then pulled out. Then we had the 11th Cav on the other side of the hill, who also pulled out. With that in mind, most of my men couldn’t care less - okay I’m here, for a year. Let me do my thing and then I can hopefully go home without any injuries. We some morale issues that were racial - we had some (what we called in those days) black power advocates versus the rednecks. There was constant friction between those two. Then we had the pot heads. Drugs became very evident and were cheap. Villagers would sell them to the GIs. That added to the friction between certain segments. Then we had the group that said “hey, I just want to be myself, leave me alone”. I spent more time pacifying disagreements than I did worrying about whether the VC was going to attack us. Luckily nobody got shot but there were some serious confrontations. I wasn’t trained for that. I wasn’t trained to separate two American guys trying to cut each other’s throats. It was an educational experience.
How informed did you feel? Did you get news coverage during the war?
Well, we got a newspaper called Stars and Stripes. That was about eight pages - it covered sports, international events and whatnot. But then I was lucky, my hometown of Wilmington had The Wilmington Journal, and then sent a free subscription to everyone who was stationed in Vietnam. About once or twice a week I would get 3-4 editions of the actual hometown newspaper so I got a lot more detailed information about what was happening back in Delaware. When you’re there, you more or less didn’t pay attention to that because you’d say well, what good is it? I’m here, I’m doing my job, so when do I go home? That was the attitude.
So you didn’t have much experience with how the media was reporting the war?
There were no TV crews coming around us. Before coming to Vietnam I saw the clips of Tet and it’s just hard to say. You see it on TV and it’s like another world but when you’re actually get there your mind sort of gets set on something else. Who cares what President Johnson or President Nixon were doing, as long as there wasn’t a ceasefire. You live from day to day, from hour to hour. When you get up in the morning you say “Gee, I survived the night”. Then you go through the next day and onto bed and say “I survived another day. I’ve only got 100 more days to go”. So, you didn’t really pay too much attention to the news.
You mentioned Tet, but another big thing the media was upset about was Agent Orange. Did you know anything about Agent Orange while you were there or before you were there? Or did you find out about it after?
No. Agent Orange didn’t really come into effect until about a few years after the war when all of these strange diseases were coming up in Vietnam veterans. I’m proud to say that the Vietnam Veterans of America were one of the forerunners in getting benefits for it. That’s one of the secret casualties of the war. A lot of my friends, as a matter of fact, my Company Commander actually just passed away from Agent Orange cancer on December 19th. I met a platoon sergeant and I said “hey, you used to have a mustache there” and he said “yeah, skin cancer from Agent Orange”. One of my men lost a lung due to Agent Orange so yeah, like I said, it’s really one of the secret casualties of the war.
I’m sorry. Did your perspective of the war change?
Wow, that’s a loaded question. I usually do these presentations and say Vietnam was like a diamond, it had many facets. Some were flawed, some were perfect. And the more I read, we went in with good intentions, then politics got involved. I think General Abrams who took over for Westmoreland had the right attitude. Whether it would have worked or not, I don’t know. You see, a lot of people don’t like this, but Ho Chi Minh was like George Washington. They say he was a communist, but he only became a communist because when he was in France, he was a socialist. After WWI, France was getting its colonies back and the socialists said “we’re going to become a great French empire”. The communists were the only ones who wanted to get rid of the colonies so, he became a communist because he wanted to free his country from French oppression. In WWII, Ho Chi Minh fought against the Japanese and after the war they defeated France and divided up the country. Then the Americans came in. Westmoreland was like Lee, go to the battle and charge the main elements. Take your casualties and wear them down. What we didn’t realize was that the North Vietnamese was willing to sacrifice generations of people to achieve their goal. We [the Americans] always look at the short term - “okay, we’re going to go in there and kick their ass for six months, then come home and declare our victory”. That didn’t work out. Abrams had the right attitude - how can you say we’re winning the war if Saigon is getting hit with rockets every night? So he decided So he decided that you’d go up the road to the first village, secure that, bring in the government services, drill a well, start the schools, set up health services, train them. Then you would go into the next village and keep building these security zones to deprive the VC of their main resource…the people. But then again we were dealing with a corrupt government. Diem was corrupt, the journalists were corrupt. So to me, winning was possible but it was up to the Vietnamese to win it. We couldn’t win it for them. Unfortunately, there were good military officers but most of them were mediocre. For example, the last battle was fought at Huan Loc which was right where I was stationed. They actually defeated the NVA but ran out of ammunition. Now that was one of these “stellar” field generals, but when you got to Saigon you had that all of these political hacks. It’s all very complex. Basically, we were supporting a corrupt government from the local village chief all the way up. They were taking bribes, circumventing U.S. aid. If you don’t have good leaders, your troops won’t fight. In Tet, we gave a Silver Star to an RVN tank commander because he went in and saved a Marine unit, but there were other guys who, as soon as the VC showed up, went away. So, it was sort of a hodgepodge. It’s sort of like Iraq and Afghanistan. Trying to impose our Western standards on societies who have no idea what it’s like. I think the answer still eludes us.
Did you come up with that perspective after the war? That us messing around in other countries hasn’t gone too well for us?
Well, the first thing I have to say is that I’m Polish. I was raised in a Polish neighborhood and we hated the Communists, okay? I can remember my mother would go to my grandmother’s house and they would build care packages. They would go to a Polish shoemaker and on the heels, grinded out, they would put American dollars. They’d send roughed up clothing because if you sent new clothing, it might be stolen, and you’d have to pay a higher import tax. I saw that. So, when Vietnam came along it was like “yeah, we’re going to fight the Communists!”, so I got to do my patriotic thing. When I came home, I think I despised the draft dodgers more than the Communists because I saw who fought the war. It was Billy Bob from Alabama and many from the city of Detroit and whatnot. I saw who got into the National Guard and who didn’t. I was very down on the draft dodgers. I got a job and went to work, got married, started practicing my professional engineer career. I remember when Vietnam fell I was working and it made me pause and think what was going to happen to some of the people I worked with? As time marched on, we [the U.S.] got involved with these little episodes in Panama and Grenada. I marched in the demonstration against the Iraq invasion downtown. It wasn’t until I started having children that I was saying to myself, do I want my kids to go and fight in another Vietnam? No. So, I wasn’t conscious of it until I got married and started having kids.
That’s interesting. What was it like returning home?
You get your orders, you go down to the processing center, you take your drug test to make sure you’re clean, you hope on an airplane and 24 hours later, you arrive in Oakland in the middle of the night. Within 24 hours, you’re a civilian. There’s no parades or anything, you’re just happy to be home. My brother lived in Reno so we went. No big deal there. My brother was happy to see me. We spent two or three days there and took the train to Chicago then flew to Philadelphia. I came home and my mother was happy to see me, my relatives were happy to see me. But, the neighbors…when I walked down the street it’s like I hadn’t been gone even though the local papers had an article called “The Vietnam Mailbag”. It was like time had stopped. It was like okay, you’ve been gone for two years. It was like they forgot all about it. No one ever said “glad to see you home” because most of the people I grew up with didn’t go in the army, they got married, got into the National Guard, or got medical deferment. There were three of us who went into the Army and to Vietnam out of about twelve of us. That was another thing, some of my friends sort of avoided me. So, there was nothing earth-shattering, there were no people spitting on me like they said in San Francisco, but it was like business as usual.
So you weren’t the victim of any angry, anti-war protesters?
No. I did come back during the recession and had a hard time finding a job. I finally got a job in Baltimore and I resumed my engineering career.
How did the war affect the rest of your life?
Wow, uh, it’s strange. I forgot where I was, but I coached youth soccer, basketball and t-ball. About ten years ago, my son said to me, “Dad, the players on our team was asked ‘hey, is your dad one of those crazy Vietnam veterans?’” and that really hit me. It wasn’t until I got married that I got somewhat involved with politics, I worked for certain state and presidential candidates. It bothered me that people were saying “hey, let’s go invade” when they had no military experience like the elected president of the United States right now. Even he was a draft dodger. I just irritates me when these people say “let’s go and send the troops in” but their families aren’t involved. We did away with the draft and I’m very vocal about that. When I came back from Vietnam, I let everyone know I was a Vietnam veteran and I didn’t give a damn. It just came up in discussions and in that way, I was able to find other Vietnam veterans who were sort of hiding it. But I didn’t care. When I came back, I started going and visiting bars. You know, a single guy. As soon as you say “oh, I just got back from Vietnam”, all of the sudden the girl would say “oh, my grandmother just died, I can’t date you”. So, I sort of became a social stigma. In some cases, if I liked the girl I didn’t mention that right away but I got married. Diane knew I was a Vietnam veteran and she taught at an Army post in Germany for three years so she was sort of in tune with soldiers who were going to Vietnam and coming back or not coming back. Our marriage didn’t really have that problem. I remember going to see Platoon and coming out and breaking down for about thirty minutes – I cried. Luckily, the organization I belong to was there to help us. Since I joined them, I have been an advocate of veteran’s benefits. Right now, these veterans are coming home and become homeless. Most of them, well, I don’t want to say most of them, but a lot of them are women. When I was in the military, a woman was either a nurse with a needle ready to stick you in the wrong place, or they were clerks. Now, they’re combat medics, they’re pilots. When we went down to our reunion in Ft. Bragg, I saw this parachutist come down. It looked strange, so I followed it and as the parachutist was coming towards me it was a lady – a girl. She was a bulldozer operator, I talked to her afterwards. She said he dad owned a construction company and he wouldn’t let her operate the bulldozers so the first opportunity she had, she joined the Army where they said she could be a bulldozer. In that respect, things are changes. That’s what I’m trying to look out for the new generation because they’re the real heroes. They could be down the street at McDonald’s or something and now maybe they’re in Iraq or someplace.
You mentioned the stigma surrounding Vietnam veterans. Do you feel that stigma only stuck with veterans the first couple of years, ten years, twenty, today? You mentioned a few of your co-workers were hiding it like it was a dirty secret.
Well, Hollywood picked up on it and so did television. I think it was Kojak which is probably before your time. There’s always the deranged Vietnam veteran in the detective stories and in the movies. I think that sort of placed the social stigma and a lot of them went into the closet for whatever reason. It probably started to end with the first Gulf War because we won that one. The started to change the whole perspective on the military. Now, at the Wounded Warrior dinners they will stand up and say “thanks to the Vietnam veterans because they changed the public attitude towards veterans”. If you had a choice of hiring a Vietnam veteran and a draft dodger, they probably would have chosen the draft dodger because we had that baggage. Whether it was true or not, that’s the way people perceived us.
Do you think that’s because Vietnam veterans were the first to talk about PTSD?
I don’t know. I guess it was because they learned to separate the politics from the soldier, from the warrior. If the war is set by the president and turns out to be a bad decision, blame the president but not the troops. I don’t know what brought it about. Maybe it was the first Gulf War with Bush. Bush was a WWII hero, all of his commanders were Vietnam veterans, so it sort of changed the perspective of the military.
Do you think the Vietnam War was winnable?
That’s a very difficult question. From what I’ve learned, the people wanted their country back. Vietnam has a history of being invaded. The delta area of Vietnam was actually part of Cambodia. I went back in 2011 and that’s when I learned that people mostly consider people down in the delta not truly Vietnamese. The true Vietnam starts in the central highlands in the North. Anything below that, you’re not the true Vietnamese. 95% of the country was Buddhist, 5% were Catholics but that 5% took 95% of the leadership positions. You can’t win a war that way. Ho Chi Minh wanted to unite the country. That’s a very difficult political agenda to defeat. The only way you can defeat that is by showing you have a better deal. At the time I think a lot of the Vietnamese were living for today. Why worry about the future? It was the war for the Vietnamese to win or lose. We gave them all the help we figured was needed for them to stand on their own two feet but the South wasn’t going to change. The North was willing to make the sacrifices. They lost like five million people – soldiers and civilians. We lost around 55,000 – of course they were fighting the war much longer. If it could have been won, it would have been a very long-term endeavor. Americans don’t like long things, they think on the very short-term.