Interviewer: Tell me, you said, tell me about being a second class citizen...
Interviewer: you learned about right away in the hospital...
Sabatier: Right away.
Sabatier: I went, from probably what most people at that time ah and I think most people in our country probably viewed me as um, and I don't mean me personally but white, middle class, young American, um, that had much potential that would have been coming out of the army, having served in combat in Vietnam.
Sabatier: I had lots of pluses behind me.
Sabatier: I mean, my future was limitless, I could do anything – I was bright, and and I knew that I could do anything.
Sabatier: I went from that as soon as you know that bullet hit me I went from like the general population group who was accepted to something I call today the ungeneral population group, and there's a lot of people in that group.
Sabatier: Anybody who deviates from the status quo, from the general population is thrown in this ungeneral population.
Sabatier: The status quo can't identify with that for some reasons.
Sabatier: Um, so I became, in the ungeneral population I started to understand that I was now a second class citizen.
Sabatier: Not the first class citizen with all the potentials, with all the things ahead of me, but a second class citizen who is viewed as pathetic, as a as a ah burden on society as somebody who would not ever be gainfully employed, and I got labeled right away.
Sabatier: I got called names like uh catastrophically disabled, yet I could sit here and talk, there's nothing wrong with my brain.
Sabatier: I can do any job that the President of the United States can do, he signs all of his bills sitting on his butt, I can do any job the Governor does.
Sabatier: Ah, any Senator, any Representative can do, any mayor, any official – I am an official.
Sabatier: Of the state of Massachusetts.
Sabatier: I can do probably you know, 60% of the jobs that are being done anywhere.
Interviewer: Excuse me, Charlie, tell me about your specific...
Interviewer: Roll back a little bit…
Interviewer: Tell me a little bit specifically about what happened when you got back to the States and the VA Hospital and your feelings there...
Interviewer: Foot is near the mic…
Sabatier: Immediately upon arriving back in the States, I learned you know that I was part of the "special" population group that was being handled that was being restricted, that was being told what to do all over again.
Sabatier: It was almost as if I had no more right to determine for myself what should be done for me.
Sabatier: I was never asked, you know, what was good for me or what I would like.
Sabatier: I was always told that.
Sabatier: And that to me is second class status.
Sabatier: Not having any input in what's going on in my life.
Sabatier: I got to ah [incomprehensible] General Hospital, just to give you a couple of examples of what I'm talking about, I was wheeling from my bed to ah physical therapy down the hall, because I was wheeling my wheelchair too fast, I got stopped in the hall, now this is less probably a month after I've been shot and gone through what I've gone through I come back, I'm wheeling through the halls of this hospital and I get stopped by MP Military Police in the hallway and he writes me up some kind of warning and if I get three of these warnings for going too fast, I'm going to be get what they call Article 15, which is close to a court-martial, and I couldn't believe it.
Sabatier: I said wait – what are you talking about and ah he says ah you're going to fast and...
Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewer: Wait for this.
Interviewer: Go ahead.
Interviewer: Okay.
Sabatier: My introduction ah into what I now call the ungeneral population and my initial feelings of being a second class citizen really began in the army hospital, immediately after I'd arrived in the United States from Vietnam.
Sabatier: I had gone from what I had really considered to be a first class citizen, somebody that was looked up to, to ah to ah second class status.
Sabatier: And the reason I started feeling things like that was ah, came out of incidents like trying to get from my ah my ah ah bed to physical therapy, an MP stops me in the hall and gives me writes me up this warning which is similar to a ticket on the street, that I was going too fast and endangering other patients.
Sabatier: Ah, whether that was true or not, I don't really know, but I didn't like the idea of somebody just stopping me and treating me in that kind of a manner without talking it over with me or informing me of what I'm doing that might endanger somebody, to to have the audacity to stand there and write me up this warning.
Sabatier: I figured, hey, well, you know, I've experienced a lot of bad things, you know, I've gone through this mental and physical traumatic experience and now I'm going to be harassed and treated like I'm dirt or something.
Sabatier: Ah, so I told the gentleman what he could do with his warning, he didn't appreciate my comments and warned me that if I didn't sign this warning that I would be facing the Colonel who was the head of the hospital.
Sabatier: Well, I found that thought very intriguing, and I wouldn't mind facing the Colonel and telling him what I thought about this kind of policy.
Sabatier: So, I refused to sign and he followed me back to my ward and found out where my bed was and wrote down my name and my number from my chart, went to the Colonel.
Sabatier: The next few days I got this um um notice that I was supposed to go to the Colonel's office, and I refused to go, just to see what would happen.
Sabatier: Next thing I knew I had two MPs come and they...
Sabatier: and the medical personnel put me in my wheelchair, they pushed me down the hall to the Colonel's office, Administration office or something, and I was sitting in there and he told me that I either signed this ticket or he'll give me this Article 15.
Sabatier: And what an Article 15 is is, just kind of a ah you can get an oral reprimand or they can reduce your salary or some kind of punishment…
Sabatier: And...
Interviewer: Hold on a second.
Interviewer: Sorry guys.
Interviewer: Could you go back, repeat.
Interviewer: Okay uh he said, if you could pick it up where he said…
Sabatier: I’m gonna wait until she gets off.
Interviewer: …take it…the Article 15.
Sabatier: Okay.
Interviewer: Any time.
Sabatier: He said that if I didn't sign this ticket I was gonna get this Article 15, well I didn't care really what he thought or what I was gonna get, ah, all I was interested in was getting the hell out of the Army.
Sabatier: And ah so I told him he could shove his Article 15 where the sun didn't shine.
Sabatier: I ended up getting the Article 15 and being reduced in rank ah from a sergeant to a spec 4.
Sabatier: Which meant like $25 a month of pay, and like I really didn't care.
Sabatier: But what that showed me was that that I was a person that was not respected.
Sabatier: My my ability to determine for myself was being taken away from me, that I have little control over my life, and that was just one incident.
Sabatier: You know, there were a number of them.
Sabatier: It was a matter of respect, I think, more than anything else, and I began to lose my respect because I saw other people not respecting me, ah, it was it was as if people were treating the warriors or identifying the war with the warriors, and because the war was being lost, the warriors were losers.
Sabatier: And they didn't deserve your respect.
Sabatier: And ah I think that's what I was thinking was going on, and I think it is what was going on.
Sabatier: Because we obviously lacked the respect of the people around us.
Sabatier: I think some people might have been jealous of us as Vietnam vets, being the macho Vietnam vet and wanting to give us tickets because we were Vietnam vets and they weren't or something.
Sabatier: His thing was a matter of he commanded respect without being willing to give it back.
Sabatier: And I was just once again a tool in this little game just as I was in Vietnam.
Sabatier: A rook.
Sabatier: I mean, in the chess game that was being played there.
Sabatier: I finally started realizing what was happening in that, you know, I was being utilized as a tool in this whole military game and it was a game that I didn't want to have anything to do with at the beginning to beginning to begin with but didn't know any better than to get involved.
Sabatier: And ah it was a mistake – getting involved, and I wanted to get the hell out of this game, and ah the next game I got into I hoped that I'd have more control over that the things already happening to me.
Interviewer: Um.
Interviewer: Tell me a little bit about how your feelings changed in Vietnam, about why you were there.
Interviewer: When you were there.
Interviewer: Did they change about why you were there? Did you think about that?
Sabatier: Yeah, they changed a lot.
Sabatier: I went there as a very naive person.
Sabatier: Ignorant about why we were in Vietnam to begin with.
Sabatier: I never even heard the word Vietnam before the ninth grade and which was like four years before, I didn't know a Communist from a Socialist from a Capitalist.
Sabatier: I was just going.
Sabatier: Um, really, for a number of stupid, idiotic reasons, I was going because I was being sent, and if I didn't go I would go to prison, I was going because it was warmer climate, it was humid like Texas, I didn't like Germany, which was cold, I didn't mind going there.
Sabatier: I had to go somewhere in the Army I'd just as soon go where the climate was like I was used to it.
Sabatier: Um, I had these strange ideas in my head that what we were doing there you know was right.
Sabatier: My idea for going there was I think entirely different from the reasons we were really there.
Sabatier: I had these visions of actually helping people.
Sabatier: Like saving people from something that was bad, i.e.
Sabatier: Communism.
Sabatier: Ah, when I got there and talked to the people, those peasants in the fields – in the rice fields and the villages, those kids – they didn't know the difference between Communism and Capitalism either.
Sabatier: But we were over there freeing them from something that I didn't understand and they didn't understand and I'm killing other people to keep them away from these people .
Sabatier: Ah and then I started realizing that what this looks like to me is a is a civil war.
Sabatier: It's a north and a south Vietnam as our own civil war was a north and south.
Sabatier: And if I had been in the Confederate Army, which I probably would have been in Texas, you know, ah a hundred years before, ah I don't think I'd appreciate some foreign country coming in you know helping the other side.
Sabatier: And that's exactly what we were.
Sabatier: We were foreigners halfway around the world to stop something...
Sabatier: then, you know, while I was there, well, if it's Communism that we're afraid of and we're going to stop here, why don't we start stopping it 90 miles away from our shore? It's right there in Cuba.
Sabatier: We could end it there.
Sabatier: Why send us half way around the world? That's not very cost effective.
Sabatier: I just couldn't understand it.
Sabatier: I mean, if it's so important if it’s such a bad cancer, to me, you kno wI identify it with my own body.
Sabatier: If I had a can—two cancers and one was in my ankle and one was near, my heart, I think I'd try to stop the one near my heart before the one I stop the one in my ankle.
Sabatier: And my analogy is that we should stop cancer, which is Communism, which is close to our shore before we decide to go halfway around the world to stop it.
Sabatier: I started thinking that there must be another reason that we're doing this, and I think out of those original thoughts that I started becoming interested in politics and eventually went on to college and go involved in political science.
Sabatier: I started becoming much more aware of the human life in politics while I was in Vietnam.
Sabatier: I gained a great amount of respect for humanity, for human life and life itself after I saw, you know, how easy it was to snuff life out.
Sabatier: It was much harder to keep people alive.
Sabatier: To upgrade the quality of people's lives than to simply downgrade them by calling them gooks and kill them.
Sabatier: And just to think that we are so barbaric in this country that we think we are so good that we can just stigmatize somebody as a gook and snuff the life out of it like it's a worm for the sake of stopping Communism.
Sabatier: It's sick.
Sabatier: Society has to be sick to to to buy that, and I see it happening today.
Sabatier: I see people refusing to sign up for the draft, which is just one step in the direction of becoming a trained killer like I was, people who have convictions who have time to think it over and to decide, no, I don't want to be part of the machine that kills people.
Sabatier: I don't want to learn about the spirit of the bayonet, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
Sabatier: If it's killing people that it's all about, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
Sabatier: And that's the entire that’s the entire object of the military, is to train their people to kill.
Sabatier: Everybody around the military helps the infantrymen.
Sabatier: That's what they're there for – to help the infantrymen.
Sabatier: His sole duty is to kill.
Sabatier: I respect those people who refuse to sign up – to put their names on the line that yes, when the time comes you can call me up.
Sabatier: I don't, you know, those people are the heroes.
Sabatier: That have the convictions that you know, you know that will sacrifice two or three years of their life in prison right out of college you know, it might destroy, might lose their lives just for the sake that they're not, they're going to stand up for humanity instead of insanity.
Sabatier: So.
Interviewer: Tell me about...
Interviewer: think back.
Interviewer: Was there any difference, was there any um antagonism between draftees and enlisted people.
Interviewer: Was there a difference of feeling or was it all the same when you got there?
Sabatier: Ah, when I got to Vietnam there was not much of a difference.
Sabatier: During basic training there was a great difference.
Interviewer: Save that thought.
Interviewer: Save that thought…
Interviewer: Camera too noisy?
Interviewer: [Laughing]
Sabatier: Yeah it’s okay.
Sabatier: I was mentioning the difference of draftees and enlisted people, how easy it was when I was in the States for people to get in fights over whether or not they were drafted or if they were enlisted.
Sabatier: You might be in a bar and if you had nothing else to fight about, you would fractionalize yourself into groups of being...
Sabatier: of the draftees and what they called "lifers." It didn't matter if somebody only signed up for only three years, anybody who'd signed up was a lifer.
Sabatier: And so that was the stigma you placed on them.
Sabatier: You know, you've got to give everybody a name that you're going to hate.
Sabatier: They were lifers, okay.
Sabatier: We were just um grunts, and ah it was like the grunts vs.
Sabatier: the lifers in the bar, and every time you wanted to fight, if you got you know, you just got in the mood to fight, you'd call somebody a lifer, they'd call you a grunt and you'd start fighting over it I mean people would punch each other's faces off for no other reason than one had signed up and one was drafted.
Sabatier: When I got to Vietnam it was like a totally different thing.
Sabatier: That subject hardly ever came up.
Sabatier: And when it did, it was just a matter of conversation.
Sabatier: Nobody was looking to fight or punch each other out over some ridiculous thing, whether they were drafted or or whether they had signed up.
Sabatier: There was see there was just more important things to do and more important things to concentrate on.
Sabatier: Ah, people wanted to to simply do the job, hang out and stay alive, get back home.
Sabatier: Ah, it was much more a camaraderie that had developed when a group of people were in a, you know, halfway around the world, you have ah more important things to do and naturally, I think, there was a glue that held you together.
Sabatier: You were much more friendly towards each other than ah than in the States.
Sabatier: The same thing was true, I think, with respect to uh race, as far as I was...
Sabatier: people in bars...
Sabatier: if they weren't going to fight over being drafted or being volunteers, or they'd fight over race.
Sabatier: Race problems were prominent at the time when I was in the service.
Sabatier: Especially in Germany, it was...
Sabatier: you couldn't go in a bar without fighting because of race.
Sabatier: And so consequently, you decide not to go.
Sabatier: That was not the case in Vietnam.
Sabatier: It seemed to be much more of a brotherhood.
Sabatier: People...
Sabatier: because people understood that, you know, it was important to stay alive and and life was more important and that ah the color of one's skin was irrelevant to staying alive.
Sabatier: And they would forget all of those stupid, irrelevant things that they would ordinarily fight about.
Sabatier: They would get together, you know, and identify with each other's commonalities I guess you might say.
Sabatier: And they'd ah it was a great ah, it's just almost a shame that um you can't have a Vietnam, you know and have everybody go to Vietnam without the killing.
Sabatier: Cause it would bring people together.
Sabatier: It would open people's eyes.
Sabatier: ‘Cause I learned in two years about racism and people being fractionalized and dehumanization and loss of life and things like that.
Sabatier: It just you don't go through an experience like that without it sticking with you.
Sabatier: Without it effecting everything you think or do for the rest of your whole life.
Sabatier: Ah, and when I've been bothered today with the advocacy movement and disabled movement in this country, it all I think reflects from my experiences in Vietnam.
Sabatier: And none of it hardly at all reflects from anything before that.
Sabatier: It was all...it was as if my life really began at the time I got shot.
Sabatier: From the bullet severing my spinal cord, it was almost as if my whole future opened up in front of me.
Sabatier: You know, it was like the Red Sea opening, almost, you know.
Sabatier: I knew where I was going, almost.
Sabatier: It took me a little while to get my own self together, it took me awhile to regain my self-respect, and the respect of others after I'd been shot.
Sabatier: I came back home, and I remember like trying to get those people who loved me to hate me, because I think I hated myself.
Sabatier: I didn't like my new body image.
Sabatier: I was...
Sabatier: I wanted to be the 6'2", 190 lb macho dude that I was before.
Sabatier: And I wasn't...
Sabatier: and I wasn't ever going to be that.
Sabatier: And I went through that traumatic physical thing.
Sabatier: And nobody ever thinks seemed to put much emphasis on the mental trauma that I was going through or that Vietnam vets were going through.
Sabatier: It was as if, they just when you got back, they wanted to forget you.
Sabatier: They wanted to almost, you know, they actually dehumanize you in the process.
Sabatier: That you have almost given your life, and 56,000 people did to save people, at least those young people who died there, died for reasons in their mind that were totally different from the reasons of the politicians that sent us there I think.
Sabatier: You see, they died to really save these people, to help them, to upgrade the quality of their lives.
Sabatier: They died for good reasons.
Sabatier: They weren't bad people.
Sabatier: But the people back here, because you were identified as a loser, you were dehumanized, you were degraded.
Sabatier: You were treated as...
Sabatier: with disrespect.
Sabatier: I mean you were spat on in bars.
Sabatier: People would want to pick fights with you when they found out you were a Vietnam vet.
Sabatier: People want to argue the pros and the cons about it without understanding anything about it.
Sabatier: Or much less understanding what went on in your own mind and you own life, what you had experienced.
Sabatier: They had no idea of that.
Sabatier: They wanted to treat you physically, because that's all they could identify with.
Sabatier: Your physical bodies.
Sabatier: And what they did was, they didn't like your physical body, they didn't like your physical presence, they totally ignored the mental, your emotional state.
Sabatier: They start...
Sabatier: they would start stigmatizing you as a disabled person.
Sabatier: Once you were disabled...
Sabatier: by putting negative connotations to the things they talked about like "you are now confined to a wheelchair."
Sabatier: It took me years to realize that I wasn't confined to this chair.
Sabatier: That I didn't bathe in it, I didn't sleep in it.
Sabatier: That I didn't make love in it.
Sabatier: That I didn't get in my car.
Sabatier: You know, I'm not confined to my chair.
Sabatier: I'm more confined to the shoes on my feet, but those people – the medical people – say that I'm confined to my chair.
Sabatier: I mean they started confining me, restricting me in their minds because to them I was confined.
Sabatier: I was restricted, I was a pathetic.
Sabatier: I was a handicap, I was a catastrophic.
Sabatier: I mean it was sick what they were laying on these people.
Sabatier: Instead of like giving them programs to put them back into the mainstream of life, to give them jobs that they could pay taxes, they want to sustain them on benefits.
Sabatier: You know, money.
Sabatier: Give them money.
Sabatier: We don't know any other way.
Sabatier: It's the American way.
Sabatier: You know, it's either technology or money.
Sabatier: But no feelings.
Sabatier: No feelings.
Sabatier: Nobody nobody wanted to identify or talk, you know try to help you emotionally.
Sabatier: It was like he's a pathetic, put him in a wheelchair, call him confined, dump some money on him and he'll be fine.
Sabatier: And that that was our system.
Sabatier: That's how we treated our disabled vets.
Sabatier: And and you wonder why, you know, so many disabled vets have a hard time.
Sabatier: Because nobody's treating, you know, what's bothering them.
Sabatier: They're over their wounds.
Sabatier: I mean you get over your wounds fast.
Sabatier: I was I was healthy three months after I was shot.
Sabatier: But emotionally, it took me eight years to finally be willing to try to get a job.
Sabatier: It was eight years after I got shot, I was still sitting in a parking lot, afraid to get in my wheelchair, out of my car because the public was coming by.
Sabatier: Walking by.
Sabatier: I mean, I sat there in that car, thinking Jesus Christ, I'm shaking here in this car because I'm afraid to get out of my car and my wheelchair ‘cause I'm so ashamed of the way I look.
Sabatier: And why am I ashamed of the way I look? Because I've been trained by the medical people to be ashamed by the way I look.
Sabatier: Because every time I go down the street people stare at me because I'm a deviant.
Sabatier: Because they've been trained to think of you as deviant.
Sabatier: I mean I I'm obviously so pathetic I'm confined.
Sabatier: And then I started realizing I'm really not confined.
Sabatier: This wheelchair is not a confining object.
Sabatier: It's a liberating object.
Sabatier: It's the thing that gives me the freedom that I have.
Sabatier: If I didn't have the chair I'd really know what confinement was about.
Sabatier: It's not...
Sabatier: I’m not confined to this chair, it's the thing that liberates me.
Sabatier: But people want to to push you in a corner, to put you in that ungeneral population, to keep you there, to keep you down as a second-class citizen.
Sabatier: You know, the the ironic...
Sabatier: not ironic but the odd thing about it is that it's not an intentional systematic thing – well, it is systematic.
Sabatier: But it's not intentional.
Sabatier: And people I've learned from the time I was in the VA hospital ah until today, that once somebody has a policy, they'll do anything to maintain that policy, no matter how stupid the policy.
Sabatier: They will create a policy bearing on peoples' lives, and I'm talking about disabled people, there's thousands of policies dealing with disabled people without ever asking disabled people what the hell their needs are.
Sabatier: They will make policies without ever being aware of what their needs are.
Sabatier: You know, not being aware of what their needs are, they can't ever be sensitive to them or insensitive to them.
Sabatier: They're totally oblivi—oblivious to them.
Sabatier: And I'll tell you, if it's if it's one thing worse than somebody treating you badly, it's somebody ignoring you completely.
Sabatier: Just, you know.
Sabatier: And ignoring your needs completely.
Sabatier: Total disrespect.
Interviewer: Let me switch to a question about the war time.
Interviewer: Tell me again, when you were in Vietnam, what did you think of the an—when you heard of the Anti-War Movement, what did you think of it?
Sabatier: Ah, um, I think when I was in Nam and the Anti-War Movement was going on, I I wasn't really pro anti war because it was hard to be pro anti war when ah I was the killer, you know? It was really a strange thing that you were going through ah mentally.
Sabatier: I mean, I'm learning here.
Sabatier: I'm not here because I want to be here.
Sabatier: None of the people around me were there because they wanted to be there.
Sabatier: But they could hardly oppose what they were doing.
Sabatier: They had to go out on the search and destroy missions, they had to continue to kill people just to make it through their one-year tour to get back.
Sabatier: There were nobody there...
Sabatier: well, three percent maybe enjoyed the killing, I mean that happens everywhere.
Sabatier: In every war.
Sabatier: But 97% of the people I'd say were just guys on the block your neighbors back home.
Sabatier: Just just regular guys who got caught up and found themselves in an uncompromising position and got shipped off really as a slave.
Sabatier: I mean that's what the whole draft was about.
Sabatier: I mean they they weren't in favor or the draft or in favor of ah war ah just because they were there.
Sabatier: They were a pawn, they were a tool.
Sabatier: And they'd they'd been suffering for it ever since.
Sabatier: And I think...
Sabatier: so we were just there trying to ignore the Anti-War Movement as much as we could because we didn't feel comfortable you know, taking part in it but we weren't like pro war either.
Sabatier: We were just there to live out our tour and get the hell out of there.
Sabatier: To get back to ah, you know, the real world, as we called it.
Sabatier: ‘Cause it was as if we were in some strange foreign, you know, alien place that none of us had any business being in.
Sabatier: And we knew a year later we'd be in the real world again.
Interviewer: Okay.
Sabatier: We used to hear about the Anti-War Movement generally in two ways.
Sabatier: Through television and through the Stars and Stripes newspaper.
Interviewer: Would you say that again?
Sabatier: We used to hear about the Anti-War Movement in two ways.
Sabatier: On television when we were back in Cu Chi, which was very seldom, or in the Stars and Stripes newspaper.
Sabatier: And generally it would be like in a third or fourth page.
Sabatier: The front page and the second page would be full of how we were winning the war and the body count, ten to one, you know, our side.
Sabatier: And ah, what a great job, heroics of ah different people around the country.
Sabatier: So if you got to the third or fourth page, you might read a small column about something happening on some campus generally back home.
Sabatier: So it was downplayed there, we didn't get a whole lot of information on it.
Sabatier: On television we would get ah, scenes of the riots.
Sabatier: It was always the status quo knocking the heads of the students, ah the dumb against the smart type thing.
Sabatier: And, ah, what was interesting about that is that the news would come on right after the Vic Morrow “Combat!” series, which would come on, then the news would on showing the anti-war thing and the news would be by a military guy in a military uniform talking about the anti-war.
Sabatier: And so right after the combat thing I guess they figured, you know, the propagandists in the military machine, would figure that after watching combat, that we would be so up, you know, seeing a great big battle and a victory by Americans, that uh, we would oppose the anti war movement.
Sabatier: And when the thing would come along we would all be yelling, you know, booing, everybody started booing the television sets when the police would come out and started hitting heads.
Sabatier: It was just a strange circumstance we found ourselves in.
Sabatier: Booing the status quo for beating the heads of the young people, who were opposing what we were doing in Vietnam, I thought, you know, really crazy...
Interviewer: Great.
Interviewer: Cut right there.
Interviewer: This will be room tone for that interview.
Interviewer: This is audio only.
Sabatier: I was mentioned lot of times in the evenings when we'd sit around our tracks, our little areas there in the perimeter, we'd ah be playing poker and just messing around.
Sabatier: And we'd ah discuss a lot.
Sabatier: About what it might be like to be on the other side.
Sabatier: I think we had a lot of respect for our enemy, and we talked a lot, you know, about them.
Sabatier: Trying to wonder you know what was in their own minds.
Sabatier: Um, especially after a fire fight, we'd talk about the people, you know, that we'd just killed and it was it was quite interesting when you'd you would see somebody, you know, laying right in front of you that you've just blown away.
Sabatier: He's got, you know, big bullet holes in him.
Sabatier: You can't help but wonder what their life was like, you know, back in North Vietnam.
Sabatier: Um, I wonder what their mother's gonna think.
Sabatier: Is she going to get a telegram, you know, like Americans get a telegram in the middle of the night? I doubt it, I don't know.
Sabatier: But we used to talk about I wonder how they inform their parents, you know? Or whether they'll even know, you know.
Sabatier: I I suppose a lot of those people that we killed, you know, we just would bury.
Sabatier: Ah, and and probably most of those people never had identification on them.
Sabatier: We would just dump in a hole and fill it up.
Sabatier: Ah, their parents, their fathers and mothers still living.
Sabatier: Their wives, their kids, they probably wonder, maybe, you know, just like Americans now.
Sabatier: I wonder if they were captured or something and still being held.
Sabatier: You know.
Sabatier: There's probably rumors going on that we’ve we took taken a lot of those people back to America or something and enslaved them.
Sabatier: Um, we used to talk about things like that and ah especially when we'd find somebody that did have identification on them.
Sabatier: Um, we would give the identification over to people who supposedly were to inform, you know, go through the channels and inform those people.
Sabatier: But ah you know, we doubted seriously whether that ever, they ever got informed at all.
Sabatier: Um, we'd talk about the VC when we'd come up on them.
Sabatier: We'd see where they were living, like thirty minutes before.
Sabatier: There still might be coffee, hot, on a fire, or some rice in a small bowl.
Sabatier: There'd still be a candle lit, and everybody's dead, the smoke is clearing.
Sabatier: It was just a strange feeling.
Sabatier: You talk about it in the evenings about these people and just talk about their ways of life and what it was that made them, I think those were the kinds of conversations that got me thinking about our role here.
Sabatier: Because we saw how convinced those people were.
Sabatier: You know, it was during those conversations that we began to realize that if somebody would actually live out here in the stupid jungle, dig tunnels all day long, live in these tunnels for ten years just to fight us, you know, when we're there to do good, it made you start wondering.
Sabatier: You know.
Sabatier: If they're willing to go through all that, you know I must admit, you know, that those things weighed on our minds.
Sabatier: Maybe if it had been a different kind of war, we wouldn't start thinking like that, but the the the troops that were actually out there doing the killing really began to respect the people that they were killing much more so I think than our military leaders in the United States could ever respect these people, because see they had been stigmatized by being called gooks and when you kill from far away, it's a lot easier than if you kill face up.
Sabatier: You know, face to face.
Sabatier: And so we had a lot of respect and and we talked about them a lot.
Sabatier: About the people and the way of life and ah you know, we didn't...
Sabatier: even though we called them gooks, um, I think, you know, we all knew in our own minds and hearts and souls that we had a great amount of respect for these people.
Sabatier: And ah we did honestly begin to question.
Sabatier: It was through killing the people that we began to question, you know, the reasons for ourselves being there.
Sabatier: Because we started to understand here we are killing people who are so convinced of their own rightness that they're willing to go through these extremes and live like this to fight us.
Sabatier: And then we start understanding, of course, we'd be doing the same thing in our own country.
Sabatier: Can you imagine if uh we'd lost WWII and ah we were being ah occupied by Japanese? We'd be fighting guerrilla warfare today.
Sabatier: We'd be living in the hills around here – right in Massachusetts.
Sabatier: We'd be digging tunnels, we'd be doing anything.
Sabatier: We'd be Viet Cong right here in the United States.
Sabatier: We'd never give in.
Sabatier: We couldn't give in.
Sabatier: This would be our country.
Sabatier: They’d have no right here.
Sabatier: We'd do everything we could to get them out of here.
Sabatier: And we started you know, analyzing the situation.
Sabatier: And said of course, they're right.
Sabatier: Of course they're right.
Sabatier: We had no business there.
Sabatier: And they know it, you know.
Sabatier: If our leaders, if our President if our Generals don't know it, at least these people know it.
Sabatier: And they're willing to die for it.
Sabatier: It was pretty simple to us, ah...
Interviewer: Did it make you feel conflicted then?
Sabatier: No question about it.
Sabatier: Um, you know, you're already killing people and see I I gained more respect for those people than I did my own leaders.
Sabatier: And you you can see it on the films of of what you see, the live films, the disrespect the Americans had for their own leaders.
Sabatier: It wasn't really a disrespect for somebody being young, necessarily.
Sabatier: It was a disrespect for the whole damned system that would put them in that that position to have to kill in order to stay alive.
Sabatier: We, after a while we weren't killing those people because they were Communist.
Sabatier: That was absurd.
Sabatier: We were only killing people to keep ourselves alive.
Sabatier: We – you know, we didn't know what the hell Communism was, and we didn't like it.
Sabatier: Once we found out that the only reason we were killing was to stay alive, we didn't we weren't we had no convictions.
Sabatier: We had no commitment, and neither did this country, and it took people ten years to find that out.
Sabatier: We didn't have it there.
Sabatier: When I was there.
Sabatier: I didn't have it the day I landed there.
Sabatier: I was there as a naive, dumb-assed kid, and I ended up having to kill a bunch of people just to keep my own butt alive, and people around me alive.
Sabatier: I never I never killed any body there because he was a damned Communist.
Sabatier: That was ridiculous.
Sabatier: And you know, through those kinds of conversations in the unit, I think we all understood that.
Sabatier: We all understood that what was going on here, we began to realize that Communism might not be good for us, but it might be good for somebody else.
Sabatier: That our system of government might be good for us because of a lot of different factors involved.
Sabatier: But it wouldn't work somewhere else.
Sabatier: And everybody ought to be entitled, you know, to their own kind of thing.
Sabatier: Granted, somebody might be forcing the system on them, but didn't we do that? I mean, didn't we do that? Our Indians, the Indians here didn't like our system, what'd we do? We're the good guys...
Interviewer: Listen to this, and I know what your answer is but I want to hear your words to it.
Interviewer: Would you do it again?
Sabatier: I would fight and die for things I believed in.
Sabatier: But I’d never fight and die for whatever it was we was fighting for in Vietnam, ‘cause I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now.
Sabatier: But I'm smart enough to know when something's worth fighting for.
Sabatier: And I think the young people in this country are smart enough to know when something's worth fighting for.
Sabatier: And worth dying for.
Sabatier: And I don't believe that some old politician in Washington has any right drafting them and enslaving them into the draft making them die for something they think is right, making them die for some slogan.
Sabatier: Like the domino theory.
Sabatier: Making them die for their system, for their status quo.
Sabatier: The young people are dying.
Sabatier: They're always...
Sabatier: the impressionable people die.
Sabatier: The ones with the minds that are open who don't know what life is about end up doing the killing.
Sabatier: End up doing the dying I think, you know, it's years that make you a little bit wiser and it's experience in your life.
Sabatier: I've had much more of that at this time in my life and I think I'm a lot smarter and wiser and that's why they don't try to draft people my age.
Sabatier: They draft the pe—...