Thomas Stryer
United States Navy
Served April 1st 1967 - April 2nd 1968
Lieutenant Junior Grade (LTJG), U.S. Navy
Assistant Officer in Charge / Operations Officer
Navy Support Activity Dong Tam
Can you introduce yourself. Tell us when were you were born, where you're from, etc.?
My name is Tom Stryer. I was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, which is southeast of Boston, roughly 18 miles in 1944. I lived there the for first 17 years of my life. I went to school in all of the public schools in town. The high school had a total population of about 1200 students, so a little bit bigger than here [Howard Gardner School]. It was only three grades - 10, 11, 12.
Did you enlist or were you drafted? How did you feel?
I was not drafted. I volunteered for the Navy ROTC program which was kind enough to pay for my college education. Basically, I had an income while I was there. The only provisos I had was that I had to take a significant amount of math and science courses, which makes sense because the Navy is a highly technical service. If you don't understand the principles of the systems, you have a hard time performing your duties.
When did you leave for Vietnam, and how did you find out you were leaving?
Well, I found out I that was leaving for Vietnam after talking to my detailer. These are the people in Washington who work for the Chief of Naval Personnel, who make assignments every year. You fill out a thing called a "dream sheet," where you would indicate where you would like to be sent and the job you'd like to have. My first ship was a large, amphibious platform dock. It was about 560 feet long and about 16,500 tons, so it's a fairly large ship. I figured after that first ship, I was ready to go to a destroyer - something fast and deadly. I had hoped to get a set of orders to a ship based in Newport, Rhode Island, which was fairly close to where I grew up. The detailer called me on the phone when I was in port and said, "Hey! Would you consider a west coast assignment?". And I said, oh, West coast, hmm. That sounds like San Diego, or Honolulu, or maybe even Japan. Okay, sure. Naturally, what I got was a set of orders to Vietnam. Well, okay...that was a whole lot further west than I had anticipated. Far enough west, it could almost be considered east. Basically, all I knew about the Vietnam War was what was in the press. I knew that it started out as an insurgency and blew into something a whole lot bigger. The first acts of aggression against the United States was an attack on one of our destroyers on the Gulf of Tonkin. So, in that perspective it was somewhat close to home. Did I expect to go there and be running boats on rivers? Who knew? I was ordered to an extensive training program and that's where I learned all about small boat operations, as far as armed boats. I trained with the crews that I would be serving with, so by the time we actually went in country, I already knew much of the crew. The people who would be assigned to the base, we had a passing knowledge on what we would be doing.
How long were you there?
I was there for a year. I arrived in country, logically enough, on the 1st of April and I left on the 2nd of April of the following year - so I was 67-68.
What were your responsibilities while you were there?
My responsibilities as the assistant officer in charge of Naval Support Activity Detachment at Dong Tam was waterside security, communications - we had the communications links for all of the southern part of the country. So if for whatever reason we lost telephone, telegraph, those sorts of things, we had a radio. Actually, that thing was powerful enough that we could've talked to the United States. It was continuity of communications. As far as riverside security, I had to make sure that we didn't get attacked from the other side of the river. That part of the job was fairly easy because the river was about and half miles wide at that point to the south. To the west, there was a 400 meter wide canal which ran all the way up to the Cambodian border. North, I didn't have any responsibility for. That was strictly the Army's job. To the east, was pretty much an impenetrable swamp. You might've had a couple of people infiltrate through there assuming the insects and the snakes didn't get ‘em, but we never faced any realistic danger from the east.
Did you have any experiences with helping the Vietnamese? If so, what were they?
Probably the most hands on thing we did was when I was in charge of running Medical Civic Action Program trips up and down the river. We would go into a village and we would not set a schedule as we didn't want the bad guys to know where we were gonna be when. They might have a little surprise for us. We would go in with some core men, occasionally a doctor, and we would treat any body who walked in. We didn't ask any questions, whether they were friends or enemies. If you had something that you needed to medically be dealt with, we would treat you. The idea was, if you got to know the Americans, you had to love us 'cause we're such lovable folks.
Do you think that idea was slightly misguided?
Some villages, clearly they loved us. Some villages were less happy to see us. But certainly the overall effect, I think, was positive.
Can you tell us again about your experience with the wildlife in Vietnam?
Well, let's see. I was on a courier mission at the Cameron Peninsula, and I was invited to a boar hunt. Fortunately, I never got to see the boar while he was alive because when I did see him, he was huge! I mean, 600, 800 pounds at least. The tusks that he had tore up a few people. The reason we were on the hunt was because the local farmers there were having their crops completely destroyed by these feral boars. As far as snakes, we had pythons - people used to make belts out of them - and we had cobras. One of which happened to encounter one of my sailors in the middle of the night at the latrine. We had no lights on and he was doing his business and he heard some motion. Shined his flashlight over in the corner, and there he was, facing a king cobra. He left. Didn't bother finishing his business or pulling his pants up, he just left. Then we rounded up the snake and killed it. One of the officers at Saigon's headquarters had a pet python and he'd feed it once a month in the courtyard. He'd make people pay to watch his python kill a chicken and then devour it. Not my particular cup of tea.
Didn't pay to watch that, huh?
I didn't pay to watch that.
You told us you were one of the oldest people at your base. What was that like?
It was…surreal, you know? I just turned 23 and I’m looking at all of my, frankly my kids and little brothers. I had two people in the base older than me. One was an old chief warrant officer, and the other one was our skipper, my boss. They weren’t a whole lot older than me, but they were older.
Piggy-backing off of that, with how young the troops were, do you think they fully understood why they were there?
I believe that my guys did. Everybody, all of the Navy guys, were volunteers. Maybe not quite the way I was a volunteer, but they were volunteers. The draftees, the Army guys, they had two things going against them: Number one, they did not train as a singular operational unit, so they were just piecemealing people in as they needed replacements. So, some of them were able to gain attachments to other folks in the group, but a lot of them, well, there they were and I’ve got to rely on this fellow next to me to help keep me alive, and I don’t know him. And by the way, he’s got a funny accent, or frankly, his skin tone is different than mine. It was not pretty.
So you think there was a greater sense of camaraderie in the Navy as opposed to the Army?
The Navy and the Marine Corps both fielded operational units where you trained together, and you fought together. If you take a look at what we’ve done in subsequent wars, and we’ve had them in Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has basically changed the way they handle their troops and it’s more like the way the Marines and the Navy do.
How do you feel about how the war was reported, and how did you get that information when you were there?
We got the information by way of Stars and Stripes and whatever our families at home sent to us. Frankly, very rarely did what we were experiencing match up with what was being reported.
How did you feel about that and did you sense that your feelings about that were similar with your group?
Well, certainly I talked to my senior non-coms and my fellow officers about, you know, “Can you believe what Stars and Stripes is saying about this or that?” And we were all scratching our heads, saying, “Where the hell did that information come from? That must’ve been a press release from headquarters because it sure didn’t resemble what we were experiencing”.
And what was Stars and Stripes?
That’s the military newspaper.
Do you think the U.S. controlled the direction of the war?
Controlled the direction? I’m not quite sure what that means because there were a lot of small scale platoon-level incidents happening everywhere, all over the country, all at once. Certainly, when it came to Tet, the enemy managed to infiltrate a huge number of North-Vietnamese regulars into the south. Now, they thought that they would cause a general uprising if they performed this Tet attack, and what happened was they didn’t get it. There was no popular uprising. What they did do is they wound up with a huge number of casualties, but what was reported in our newspapers by our commentators on TV was, “Oh, this war’s unwinnable”. And that is basically what caused the tactics that were used during the rest of the war.
So you think that the Tet Offensive dictated what we did the rest of the war?
Yes, exactly. That was kind of what I was going after with who controlled it because over here, people were saying, “The U.S. can’t control the war over there, it’s obvious”. They would use the Tet Offensive as an example.
So was most of your information just from you seeing, or did people tell you what happened? How were you informed over there?
Well, one of my duties included writing intelligence reports. The problem is that most of my intelligence came from villagers, or from some South Vietnamese army sources. And because the sourcing was not from a U.S. source, they basically gave it a much lower rating as far as believability than stuff that they somehow managed to develop in Saigon.
What was your opinion of the war before your service. Did your opinion change throughout it or because of it?
You’ve got to realize that this is the height of the Cold War. We had China as an enemy, we had Russia as an enemy, we had North Vietnam as an enemy. And we had been brought up to believe in this thing called the Domino Theory. So, what had occurred in Eastern Europe after World War II, we had a deal -- or we thought we had a deal with the Russians at the Potsdam Conference. We were going to have a free Eastern Europe. Well, that didn’t work out so well. Basically, they all turned out to be communist governments that were imposed on the people. Now in some cases, they wanted it… at first. We thought, well, if we lose in Korea, and later in Vietnam, that whole southeastern part of Asia is going to wind up being communist. By the way, there’s a whole lot of natural resources in that part of the world that we need to exploit.
So, maybe it seemed like communism was becoming a threat?
Oh, it was a threat. I mean, you guys are way too young to remember a guy by the name of Khrushchev, who was the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union. He was at the U.N. and he took off his shoe and pounded it on a table and said, “We will bury you!” And he thought it was true. So, now we’ve got Putin. Lucky us.
What was it like returning home? Did you have any expectations?
I really didn’t have any expectations. All I really wanted to do was get home and get into my own bed with my wife. I didn’t have an expectation of being spat on. I didn’t expect people to be carrying placards outside of the base where we landed in Travis outside of San Francisco, saying very rude things about us, calling us “baby killers,” amongst other things. I traveled home in uniform and basically you could tell that there was a lot of disdain for the fact that I was in uniform. Now, I was protected because once I got back to the North area and went up to Newport for some more school and went to my next ship, I was basically in a Navy compound. So, other military folks understood and they were pretty sympathetic.
Why do you think people were acting like that? Were they not understanding?
Well, I think that what happened in Mai Lai was published and certainly that was a stain on all American service men. But I can understand how it happened. The problem in any insurgency is that you don’t know who the enemy is. They’re not wearing uniform. This 85 year old grandmother could have a Kalashnikov underneath her robe and could pull it out and start shooting at you. So could 4 year old kids. You never knew who the enemy was and were constantly taking fire from places you could never predict. All you need would be one round hitting somebody in the case of going into a village. What those troops did is they just leveled it and everything living thing in it. I understand. I don’t appreciate it, but I understand.
I’m not quite understanding. For us, when you see someone who’s in service, you say, “Thank you for your service,” but did people not understand that you could be drafted?
Well, they basically looked at us like we were lepers. We had some kind of a brain disease and all we wanted to do was kill, kill, kill. I think that civilians don’t realize that the military is probably the least warlike of the population. We got the most to lose if the shooting starts. We’re the front line, and we’re the front line to protect the whole country, but that was not the image that was put forth by the media.
Do you think Vietnam veterans were a scapegoat for American policy makers?
I believe that, sure. Our policy makers lied to the people, they lied to the military. I listen to Judge Judy and she says, “How do you know when a teenager is lying?” You know her answer to that? Their lips are moving. Well, I feel that way about politicians, more so than I do about teenagers. You listen to some of the discourse today, I don’t care what side you're on, you’re getting hypocrisy and idiocy from all angles. Some things don’t change.
Do you have a standout memory from your service?
Well, when I saw your list of questions, I scratched my head and said, “Oh, where do I start?” I think we’ll start at Tet. The most fire that we had seen on our base up until that time was five, six mortar rounds thrown in, and an occasional 120mm rocket round. They sound totally different. An example of the brilliance of our intelligence people in Saigon, we had 120mm rocket round come in, and it hit my Jeep and obliterated it. I had the tail fins of the rocket round. And I sent a report in to Saigon:
“Hey, we got hit by a 120mm rocket.”
“No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have. They don’t have any down there.”
“Well, I’ve got the tail fins, and I assure you that this is a 120.”
“Oh, no. Not a chance. Couldn’t happen.”
So, that was just the prelude to the night of Tet. Remember, I said they couldn’t come at us from the south, they couldn’t come at us from the west, they couldn’t come at us from the east, the only direction they could come at us from was from the north, and between five and six thousand of them did exactly that. So we had the most sustained fire that I saw. Typically you might be in a firefight, it may seem like it was twenty minutes, a half hour usually it was more like five minutes. This was all night. I mean, we were getting peppered all night and we were firing recoilless rifle and artillery rounds just as fast as they could be loaded. Then, when the Army colonel base commander called me and said, “Stand by to reinforce the berm,” that is to say the outer edge of the base, I knew we were in serious trouble.
Because they were calling the Navy to reinforce?
Yeah. That’s a last resort type situation. I had all of my serviceable boats running in an idle and ready to pull everybody out of the base if necessary.
Jay [another interviewed Vietnam veteran] was talking about the Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Did you have any reaction when those came out?
I didn't know how much of it was a plan and how much of it was real. I wanted to believe that our leaders were trying to do the best they could do, and do the right thing. I didn’t want to believe they were doing the things they were doing strictly to get elected. Dealing with stock in the company, etc. As I’ve gotten older and I’ve gotten more cynical - guilty as charged - I’m not sure we’ve had anybody who has been straight up honest. Maybe Bush 41, but he was there himself back in the 40s. It’s almost a curse having to go through life being a cynic, but on the other hand, I think it’s probably more realistic than not. My advice to you is keep your standards high and as my nephew said many years ago as an address he had to give, “To thy know himself be true.” It’s an experience that the country had to go through. Somebody back in the revolutionary days, said that at least once a generation, there has to be serious bloodshed. Well, that’s fine unless it’s your blood. For the most part, I think Vietnam was -- I mean what the hell were we doing in there? Really? The French after WW2 could rebuild their colonial empire. There were those that would say, “Well, you guys aren’t so great either. Look what you did down in Columbia back before there was Panama. Look what you did in the Philippines. Look what you did in Nicaragua more recently.” George Washington said, “No foreign entanglements.” Now of course, we’re wrapped around every place in the world.
How about the poor guys who are wearing uniform all over Africa? They’re not getting a whole lot of publicity, but they’re in danger every day. I had a cousin who spent the end of WW2 in the Battle of the Bulge and then went on for a 40 year career in the CIA. We’ll never know what he did. At his funeral, all of his CIA buddies said, “He was a terrific guy, had a great sense of humor. We really enjoyed his company. We can’t tell you anything about what he did. All we know is, he was in South America. Somewhere.”
How did your service affect the rest of your life?
Well, mostly up to that point in time I served on board a ship. I still had time left in my obligated service so I knew was going back to sea, realizing that it turned out 10 of my first 13 years of active duty was aboard ship. I started looking at people differently, as far as my shipmates were concerned. The reason for that is, after being in combat I came to the conclusion: I don’t want that guy protecting my six, my back. For whatever reason, either they’re too emotional, not emotional enough, not trustworthy, not technically competent, a lot of different things. I started making judgement calls on who is it that I’m happy serving with and who is it that I’m not so happy serving with. Once I got out of the military business and into business business, then it was more a case of, is this person gonna make me look good or bad? Or is there someone there I can trust more to do whatever needs to be done? But those were that things I never thought about or worried about when I was in school or on my first ship. But after Vietnam, I started worrying about it.
Served April 1st 1967 - April 2nd 1968
Lieutenant Junior Grade (LTJG), U.S. Navy
Assistant Officer in Charge / Operations Officer
Navy Support Activity Dong Tam
Can you introduce yourself. Tell us when were you were born, where you're from, etc.?
My name is Tom Stryer. I was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, which is southeast of Boston, roughly 18 miles in 1944. I lived there the for first 17 years of my life. I went to school in all of the public schools in town. The high school had a total population of about 1200 students, so a little bit bigger than here [Howard Gardner School]. It was only three grades - 10, 11, 12.
Did you enlist or were you drafted? How did you feel?
I was not drafted. I volunteered for the Navy ROTC program which was kind enough to pay for my college education. Basically, I had an income while I was there. The only provisos I had was that I had to take a significant amount of math and science courses, which makes sense because the Navy is a highly technical service. If you don't understand the principles of the systems, you have a hard time performing your duties.
When did you leave for Vietnam, and how did you find out you were leaving?
Well, I found out I that was leaving for Vietnam after talking to my detailer. These are the people in Washington who work for the Chief of Naval Personnel, who make assignments every year. You fill out a thing called a "dream sheet," where you would indicate where you would like to be sent and the job you'd like to have. My first ship was a large, amphibious platform dock. It was about 560 feet long and about 16,500 tons, so it's a fairly large ship. I figured after that first ship, I was ready to go to a destroyer - something fast and deadly. I had hoped to get a set of orders to a ship based in Newport, Rhode Island, which was fairly close to where I grew up. The detailer called me on the phone when I was in port and said, "Hey! Would you consider a west coast assignment?". And I said, oh, West coast, hmm. That sounds like San Diego, or Honolulu, or maybe even Japan. Okay, sure. Naturally, what I got was a set of orders to Vietnam. Well, okay...that was a whole lot further west than I had anticipated. Far enough west, it could almost be considered east. Basically, all I knew about the Vietnam War was what was in the press. I knew that it started out as an insurgency and blew into something a whole lot bigger. The first acts of aggression against the United States was an attack on one of our destroyers on the Gulf of Tonkin. So, in that perspective it was somewhat close to home. Did I expect to go there and be running boats on rivers? Who knew? I was ordered to an extensive training program and that's where I learned all about small boat operations, as far as armed boats. I trained with the crews that I would be serving with, so by the time we actually went in country, I already knew much of the crew. The people who would be assigned to the base, we had a passing knowledge on what we would be doing.
How long were you there?
I was there for a year. I arrived in country, logically enough, on the 1st of April and I left on the 2nd of April of the following year - so I was 67-68.
What were your responsibilities while you were there?
My responsibilities as the assistant officer in charge of Naval Support Activity Detachment at Dong Tam was waterside security, communications - we had the communications links for all of the southern part of the country. So if for whatever reason we lost telephone, telegraph, those sorts of things, we had a radio. Actually, that thing was powerful enough that we could've talked to the United States. It was continuity of communications. As far as riverside security, I had to make sure that we didn't get attacked from the other side of the river. That part of the job was fairly easy because the river was about and half miles wide at that point to the south. To the west, there was a 400 meter wide canal which ran all the way up to the Cambodian border. North, I didn't have any responsibility for. That was strictly the Army's job. To the east, was pretty much an impenetrable swamp. You might've had a couple of people infiltrate through there assuming the insects and the snakes didn't get ‘em, but we never faced any realistic danger from the east.
Did you have any experiences with helping the Vietnamese? If so, what were they?
Probably the most hands on thing we did was when I was in charge of running Medical Civic Action Program trips up and down the river. We would go into a village and we would not set a schedule as we didn't want the bad guys to know where we were gonna be when. They might have a little surprise for us. We would go in with some core men, occasionally a doctor, and we would treat any body who walked in. We didn't ask any questions, whether they were friends or enemies. If you had something that you needed to medically be dealt with, we would treat you. The idea was, if you got to know the Americans, you had to love us 'cause we're such lovable folks.
Do you think that idea was slightly misguided?
Some villages, clearly they loved us. Some villages were less happy to see us. But certainly the overall effect, I think, was positive.
Can you tell us again about your experience with the wildlife in Vietnam?
Well, let's see. I was on a courier mission at the Cameron Peninsula, and I was invited to a boar hunt. Fortunately, I never got to see the boar while he was alive because when I did see him, he was huge! I mean, 600, 800 pounds at least. The tusks that he had tore up a few people. The reason we were on the hunt was because the local farmers there were having their crops completely destroyed by these feral boars. As far as snakes, we had pythons - people used to make belts out of them - and we had cobras. One of which happened to encounter one of my sailors in the middle of the night at the latrine. We had no lights on and he was doing his business and he heard some motion. Shined his flashlight over in the corner, and there he was, facing a king cobra. He left. Didn't bother finishing his business or pulling his pants up, he just left. Then we rounded up the snake and killed it. One of the officers at Saigon's headquarters had a pet python and he'd feed it once a month in the courtyard. He'd make people pay to watch his python kill a chicken and then devour it. Not my particular cup of tea.
Didn't pay to watch that, huh?
I didn't pay to watch that.
You told us you were one of the oldest people at your base. What was that like?
It was…surreal, you know? I just turned 23 and I’m looking at all of my, frankly my kids and little brothers. I had two people in the base older than me. One was an old chief warrant officer, and the other one was our skipper, my boss. They weren’t a whole lot older than me, but they were older.
Piggy-backing off of that, with how young the troops were, do you think they fully understood why they were there?
I believe that my guys did. Everybody, all of the Navy guys, were volunteers. Maybe not quite the way I was a volunteer, but they were volunteers. The draftees, the Army guys, they had two things going against them: Number one, they did not train as a singular operational unit, so they were just piecemealing people in as they needed replacements. So, some of them were able to gain attachments to other folks in the group, but a lot of them, well, there they were and I’ve got to rely on this fellow next to me to help keep me alive, and I don’t know him. And by the way, he’s got a funny accent, or frankly, his skin tone is different than mine. It was not pretty.
So you think there was a greater sense of camaraderie in the Navy as opposed to the Army?
The Navy and the Marine Corps both fielded operational units where you trained together, and you fought together. If you take a look at what we’ve done in subsequent wars, and we’ve had them in Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has basically changed the way they handle their troops and it’s more like the way the Marines and the Navy do.
How do you feel about how the war was reported, and how did you get that information when you were there?
We got the information by way of Stars and Stripes and whatever our families at home sent to us. Frankly, very rarely did what we were experiencing match up with what was being reported.
How did you feel about that and did you sense that your feelings about that were similar with your group?
Well, certainly I talked to my senior non-coms and my fellow officers about, you know, “Can you believe what Stars and Stripes is saying about this or that?” And we were all scratching our heads, saying, “Where the hell did that information come from? That must’ve been a press release from headquarters because it sure didn’t resemble what we were experiencing”.
And what was Stars and Stripes?
That’s the military newspaper.
Do you think the U.S. controlled the direction of the war?
Controlled the direction? I’m not quite sure what that means because there were a lot of small scale platoon-level incidents happening everywhere, all over the country, all at once. Certainly, when it came to Tet, the enemy managed to infiltrate a huge number of North-Vietnamese regulars into the south. Now, they thought that they would cause a general uprising if they performed this Tet attack, and what happened was they didn’t get it. There was no popular uprising. What they did do is they wound up with a huge number of casualties, but what was reported in our newspapers by our commentators on TV was, “Oh, this war’s unwinnable”. And that is basically what caused the tactics that were used during the rest of the war.
So you think that the Tet Offensive dictated what we did the rest of the war?
Yes, exactly. That was kind of what I was going after with who controlled it because over here, people were saying, “The U.S. can’t control the war over there, it’s obvious”. They would use the Tet Offensive as an example.
So was most of your information just from you seeing, or did people tell you what happened? How were you informed over there?
Well, one of my duties included writing intelligence reports. The problem is that most of my intelligence came from villagers, or from some South Vietnamese army sources. And because the sourcing was not from a U.S. source, they basically gave it a much lower rating as far as believability than stuff that they somehow managed to develop in Saigon.
What was your opinion of the war before your service. Did your opinion change throughout it or because of it?
You’ve got to realize that this is the height of the Cold War. We had China as an enemy, we had Russia as an enemy, we had North Vietnam as an enemy. And we had been brought up to believe in this thing called the Domino Theory. So, what had occurred in Eastern Europe after World War II, we had a deal -- or we thought we had a deal with the Russians at the Potsdam Conference. We were going to have a free Eastern Europe. Well, that didn’t work out so well. Basically, they all turned out to be communist governments that were imposed on the people. Now in some cases, they wanted it… at first. We thought, well, if we lose in Korea, and later in Vietnam, that whole southeastern part of Asia is going to wind up being communist. By the way, there’s a whole lot of natural resources in that part of the world that we need to exploit.
So, maybe it seemed like communism was becoming a threat?
Oh, it was a threat. I mean, you guys are way too young to remember a guy by the name of Khrushchev, who was the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union. He was at the U.N. and he took off his shoe and pounded it on a table and said, “We will bury you!” And he thought it was true. So, now we’ve got Putin. Lucky us.
What was it like returning home? Did you have any expectations?
I really didn’t have any expectations. All I really wanted to do was get home and get into my own bed with my wife. I didn’t have an expectation of being spat on. I didn’t expect people to be carrying placards outside of the base where we landed in Travis outside of San Francisco, saying very rude things about us, calling us “baby killers,” amongst other things. I traveled home in uniform and basically you could tell that there was a lot of disdain for the fact that I was in uniform. Now, I was protected because once I got back to the North area and went up to Newport for some more school and went to my next ship, I was basically in a Navy compound. So, other military folks understood and they were pretty sympathetic.
Why do you think people were acting like that? Were they not understanding?
Well, I think that what happened in Mai Lai was published and certainly that was a stain on all American service men. But I can understand how it happened. The problem in any insurgency is that you don’t know who the enemy is. They’re not wearing uniform. This 85 year old grandmother could have a Kalashnikov underneath her robe and could pull it out and start shooting at you. So could 4 year old kids. You never knew who the enemy was and were constantly taking fire from places you could never predict. All you need would be one round hitting somebody in the case of going into a village. What those troops did is they just leveled it and everything living thing in it. I understand. I don’t appreciate it, but I understand.
I’m not quite understanding. For us, when you see someone who’s in service, you say, “Thank you for your service,” but did people not understand that you could be drafted?
Well, they basically looked at us like we were lepers. We had some kind of a brain disease and all we wanted to do was kill, kill, kill. I think that civilians don’t realize that the military is probably the least warlike of the population. We got the most to lose if the shooting starts. We’re the front line, and we’re the front line to protect the whole country, but that was not the image that was put forth by the media.
Do you think Vietnam veterans were a scapegoat for American policy makers?
I believe that, sure. Our policy makers lied to the people, they lied to the military. I listen to Judge Judy and she says, “How do you know when a teenager is lying?” You know her answer to that? Their lips are moving. Well, I feel that way about politicians, more so than I do about teenagers. You listen to some of the discourse today, I don’t care what side you're on, you’re getting hypocrisy and idiocy from all angles. Some things don’t change.
Do you have a standout memory from your service?
Well, when I saw your list of questions, I scratched my head and said, “Oh, where do I start?” I think we’ll start at Tet. The most fire that we had seen on our base up until that time was five, six mortar rounds thrown in, and an occasional 120mm rocket round. They sound totally different. An example of the brilliance of our intelligence people in Saigon, we had 120mm rocket round come in, and it hit my Jeep and obliterated it. I had the tail fins of the rocket round. And I sent a report in to Saigon:
“Hey, we got hit by a 120mm rocket.”
“No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have. They don’t have any down there.”
“Well, I’ve got the tail fins, and I assure you that this is a 120.”
“Oh, no. Not a chance. Couldn’t happen.”
So, that was just the prelude to the night of Tet. Remember, I said they couldn’t come at us from the south, they couldn’t come at us from the west, they couldn’t come at us from the east, the only direction they could come at us from was from the north, and between five and six thousand of them did exactly that. So we had the most sustained fire that I saw. Typically you might be in a firefight, it may seem like it was twenty minutes, a half hour usually it was more like five minutes. This was all night. I mean, we were getting peppered all night and we were firing recoilless rifle and artillery rounds just as fast as they could be loaded. Then, when the Army colonel base commander called me and said, “Stand by to reinforce the berm,” that is to say the outer edge of the base, I knew we were in serious trouble.
Because they were calling the Navy to reinforce?
Yeah. That’s a last resort type situation. I had all of my serviceable boats running in an idle and ready to pull everybody out of the base if necessary.
Jay [another interviewed Vietnam veteran] was talking about the Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Did you have any reaction when those came out?
I didn't know how much of it was a plan and how much of it was real. I wanted to believe that our leaders were trying to do the best they could do, and do the right thing. I didn’t want to believe they were doing the things they were doing strictly to get elected. Dealing with stock in the company, etc. As I’ve gotten older and I’ve gotten more cynical - guilty as charged - I’m not sure we’ve had anybody who has been straight up honest. Maybe Bush 41, but he was there himself back in the 40s. It’s almost a curse having to go through life being a cynic, but on the other hand, I think it’s probably more realistic than not. My advice to you is keep your standards high and as my nephew said many years ago as an address he had to give, “To thy know himself be true.” It’s an experience that the country had to go through. Somebody back in the revolutionary days, said that at least once a generation, there has to be serious bloodshed. Well, that’s fine unless it’s your blood. For the most part, I think Vietnam was -- I mean what the hell were we doing in there? Really? The French after WW2 could rebuild their colonial empire. There were those that would say, “Well, you guys aren’t so great either. Look what you did down in Columbia back before there was Panama. Look what you did in the Philippines. Look what you did in Nicaragua more recently.” George Washington said, “No foreign entanglements.” Now of course, we’re wrapped around every place in the world.
How about the poor guys who are wearing uniform all over Africa? They’re not getting a whole lot of publicity, but they’re in danger every day. I had a cousin who spent the end of WW2 in the Battle of the Bulge and then went on for a 40 year career in the CIA. We’ll never know what he did. At his funeral, all of his CIA buddies said, “He was a terrific guy, had a great sense of humor. We really enjoyed his company. We can’t tell you anything about what he did. All we know is, he was in South America. Somewhere.”
How did your service affect the rest of your life?
Well, mostly up to that point in time I served on board a ship. I still had time left in my obligated service so I knew was going back to sea, realizing that it turned out 10 of my first 13 years of active duty was aboard ship. I started looking at people differently, as far as my shipmates were concerned. The reason for that is, after being in combat I came to the conclusion: I don’t want that guy protecting my six, my back. For whatever reason, either they’re too emotional, not emotional enough, not trustworthy, not technically competent, a lot of different things. I started making judgement calls on who is it that I’m happy serving with and who is it that I’m not so happy serving with. Once I got out of the military business and into business business, then it was more a case of, is this person gonna make me look good or bad? Or is there someone there I can trust more to do whatever needs to be done? But those were that things I never thought about or worried about when I was in school or on my first ship. But after Vietnam, I started worrying about it.