George, I wonder if we could begin, could you tell me when you went ah to Vietnam, what did you do when you got there? Was it what you expected?

I went to Vietnam April of 1971, and the first thing I did when I got there was get off the airplane. I was a medic over there. It was not what I expected by any means. And, um, I expected something similar to a John Wayne movie. A lot of heroics, beautiful women, or a World War II movie, and I got off the plane in Saigon and there were a lot of Vietnamese porters hustling for tips like ahm porters in any airport would do.

And, we were herded on to a bus and we drove to a place called Long Binh Replacement Center. Along the way there, there was ahm large sandbag fortresses on every corner of the streets. A lot of shacks. Women doing all the work. Kids running naked through the streets and concertina wire or rolled barbed wire every place where I looked and my immediate reaction was barbed wire city.

And, then um, my first night in Long Binh we were in an old barracks. It was made out of rotten old wood. The bunks were stacked up very high to a corrugated ceil-steel ceiling, and there spiders crawling around and all kinds of insects, and it was extremely hot. Couldn't go to sleep. Always heard small arms fire at the night, during the night, but nothing at that moment happened, and I heard stories of the Tet Offensive and rocket attacks and I was waiting to see what would happen.

Then, I was reassigned from there to a place in Da Nang a combat engineering unit. I flew up to Da Nang and found out that I wasn't in the unit. I was supposed to go to some other unit up by the DMZ and I had hitched a plane on a air force C-47, landed in Phu Bai which is up in I Corps, the northern most province, and I got off the plane and nobody ever heard of the unit that I was belonging to, and so, the other units had somebody come to pick up their men and I was left stranded at this little shack that posed as an airport, and I had a brand new green uniform on, spotlessly green, and brand new jungle boots, a laundry bag full of clothes, no weapons whatsoever, and I hung around the air base not knowing what to do and, finally, somebody said to go find your unit.

So, I walked outside of the base. I didn't know where I would go or what I would do and I walked down Highway One and some guy in a truck picked me up because he was wondering what this newbie was doing walking down the street without any form of protection or um, weapons. I was obviously out of place. And, we went searching for ahm where my new home was gonna be. And, nobody heard of it. Went to Camp Evans and then to the Phu Bai Base and finally went to Camp Eagle, which is the home of the 101st and then when I just gave up hope, I saw a tiny little sign and it had the name of my unit. I went there and reported in, and that's how I got there.

What was it like, the first mission you went on, what did you actually do the first time you did some work in Vietnam? What was it like? What did you do?

The first one I went on I was on a training mission. And I was in charge of a squad that was supposed to go out and patrol the perimeter, and I had a radio man with me and a couple other people who were clerks, they, nobody knew how to react in any circumstances. None of us were infantry and we went out behind the wire.

We walked about 50 meters from the base and I saw a Vietnamese man digging a hole by a stream and I was going to engage him, but instead I decided to play friendly and I smiled at him and walked on. I called, told the radio man to call in and some people who were better armed and more experienced investigated and it was an underground hospital that the NVA used, and I used ahm rather than firing I used my head cause I didn't want to be outnumbered. And that was the first one. There was no contact.

How did life progress, as you see your work now, is there something that says to you, this is what it was really like to be there, I mean when you went out? Describe an ordinary mission that you would go on, go out on, what would actually happen? What would be a normal day for you as far as a mission was concerned in Vietnam?

On a normal day for me, ahm, was just going out with a group of people and walking around and occasionally a Sapper might shoot one round, and then disappear. The high times were when we were attacked. That was not a normal circumstance, and most of the time is spent in getting stoned or thinking about the United States. What you would do when you got home or fantasizing about getting into the real war and actually fighting.

And, I wasn't attacked personally until I was there four months, and then everything changed. Before then, I was looking at the people and I thought they were very odd and funny. By the ahm, during the first attack I realized that the bullets were real. If they hit me my brains would be splattered all over the pavement, and I would be dead, and I'd fantasize about how the bullet would enter my brain and what would happen to me.

And, at the same time, I was doing what I was trained to do. I loaded my rifle and one of the rounds that I fired jammed because somebody from a munitions plant was cutting back on the gun power, and so the round went halfway through the rifle and I had to break it down and clean it and at the time I was going to kill the person who was, or go back to the United States and waste all the stockholders who owned interest in the munitions company because they were making some extra dollars by shorting the rounds, which meant that I'd get killed, so they could make two cents more.

When you went out there, did you feel, did you go out there with a hearty sense of patriotism or did you want...?

I went there out of pure curiosity.

Would you say that again?

I went there out of curiosity. I went over there to see what war was like. Um, I had no high sense of patriotism whatsoever. I just wanted to be ahm be a warrior, I guess. A twentieth-century warrior and ahm philo—philosophically speaking I was, I could sway with the peace group or the hawks. To me, it made no difference.

What were, what were relations like between the troops themselves. We want a story at this time like fragging, and the effect of dope and the black market. What was the morale of the unit that you were with and what was your own morale like at this time, what...?

On my first three months the morale was very high. Everybody knew each other. They were very tight. Ahm. There were maybe 20 people who used heroin when I was there. By the time four months was over, everybody I knew was gone. I was the only person in country that lasted that long.

And, the new people were doing heroin, I would say about 90 to 96 percent of the soldiers there were doing heroin, including the senior non-commissioned officers and some of the lieutenants and captains. The ah army was cracking down on the heroin because of the ah advertisements they got through the New York Times so they were harassing everybody by making them take urine analysis tests any time, day or night, waking up, waking them in the middle of the night, and they had no regard for human dignity, you know, you were ordered to urinate on the spot. And, in front of a non-com who's sure that you're a heroin addict and they want to put you into jail.

Then there were different ahm groups that developed, or splinter groups. There was a lot of rednecks from Texas or the Deep South who hated people from California or from New York because they were liberals. And...

George, you are painting what sounded like a very black picture of as to the amount to the extent of heroin addiction, and I mean how sure were you that this was the case, and what gave you the feeling that it was actually as wide and as ingrained as it seemed to be?

My job was medical corpsman, and I was assigned to a detoxicification, or I had to build one within my unit and I feel am very accurate in my statements because I personally dealt with these men.

But did this, express it. I mean, did this go on all the time. Wha—are you really suggesting that basically the US Army was, was, was high all the time would it just happen on R and R or wha—what circumstances was, was dope being consumed in quite this sort of quantity.

In my units, the majority of the people were high all the time. Not just on R and R. The dope was brought in. I don't know how it got through the borders. I suspect that the CIA had some involvement and some high Vietnamese officials, but I cannot prove it.

Ahm. It was very inexpensive. You could get a vial of heroin that would go for about 250 dollars on the street these days for a pack of cigarettes over there. So, it was plentiful. And, they had ah occasionally they'd bust a lieutenant, arrest a lieutenant for having enough for his own personal use and say that he was a big pusher and they'd crack down that way.

Sorry.

So...right. So, to me, it has all the ah signs and symptoms of corruption within the higher echelon of the officials that were in the Vietnam War.

How did it actually come about, how were people getting was it just so pervasive? Was it boredom? I mean, how did you yourself stay, stay out of it?

I stayed out of it because I did some minor drugs like marijuana and I was busted for it, and I was arrested prior to going to Vietnam. And, so, I stayed away from it because the second arrest would have put me in jail for a very long time. The other people weren't, and before you're burned, you don't think.

Who was, if you were there, how would you actually get, say, heroin? Was it simply available from anybody in the camp, or was it being sold on the black market?

We had mama-sans working for the camp. They had to be approved by the camp commanders to come to work for the Americans and they'd bring it in and they'd go GI you want some, ah, I'd say they call it chasing the dragon or ah they go you want Vietnamese cigarette or whatever. They'd ahm bring it in. It was very open.

I wonder if you could do it again. Could you say that we had civilians coming in and offering it to us? Could you do the story again. Cause I talked over the first what you were saying.

I'd say ahm, I'm trying to remember the names of the drugs that they, or how they called it. They go, GI you want Vietnamese cigarette. I trade you one pack of Salem. Or, GI can you get me fed, I'll give you this, and make enormous dope deals.

For a box of Tide you could get a carton of pre-packed, pre rolled marijuana cigarettes soaked in opium. For 10 dollars you could get a vial of pure heroin about the size of the say, maybe about that high, the size of a cigarette butt and ahm you could get liquid opium, speed, acid, anything you wanted.

The acid was sent to the United S—from the United States. The other drugs were, came over from the border somewhere. I don't know where but ah it was more prevalent down south than it was up north cause it was harder to get up in the north. In the north you could just get heroin or marijuana.

You were saying that when you first here, the morale was pretty for three or four months. What sort of things were happening when morale got bad?

The first thing that happened was the war was winding down. It was announced that it was, and I forgot which general we had, but he made a deal that or Nixon said there were no longer any ground troops in Vietnam, so in order to keep his word, he ordered the general to order us to lock up all our arms in an arms room which we did, and then as soon as the arms were locked up that night, the VC would throw rockets in and send some sappers in and they'd aim for the arms room and knocked out our mess hall one night, and you had to wait in line while these rockets are coming in and walking towards you to get your weapon and check out some bullets, and the army is run like a bureaucracy now.

Everything has to be signed in triplicate and you do not get your rifle without weapons card, you don't get the rounds without signing for them because they want everything accounted for, and in the meantime, people are getting killed. And, that in itself hurts the morale. Another thing that happened was ahm take a drive into the city, people would shoot at you and you were not allowed to shoot back at them, because they were ARVN's or the South Vietnamese army or they were civilians, and they didn't want something like My Lai to happen or anything, any bad publicity to happen in the newspaper.

Ahm. You were on guard duty, let's say on a burn line, a sapper would come in and you were supposed to call for permission to fire and the permission to fire had to come from the central command which was down at Da Nang a hundred miles away by some big ah by another general rather than your company commander or even the commander at the base. We did not obey the orders. Ahm. Gonna be damned if we were gonna get killed because of some burea—bureaucratic decision. So, if anybody fired on us, we fired back. When people got caught, they were sentenced, ahm held into a military court, and they were court-martialed for murder.

Did you feel that your hands were tied behind your back to a certain extent in combat, fighting that kind of a war? I don't want to put words into your mouth, but what was it actually like to be trying to fight within the situation you describe?

I didn't think I was fighting. I thought that I was being a sacrificial lamb for the United States.

Can you tell me about fragging incidences of fragging? Was it going on? Was it as prevalent as...?

It happened but the person that caught fragged usually deserved it. It was ah, you only frag incompetent officers because there is no way you're going to get them replaced. If somebody gives you orders that would kill you and your squad and you try and reason with them and they go, "I have the rank, you have to respect rank and do what I tell you to," then you threaten them, and if they still don't do it, then you eliminate them, cause that's the only way you'll get another officer. And, it's better that one of them goes instead all of you.

Did this actually happen when you were there?

Three times.

Can you give me some sort of example? Can you give me some examples?

I had one lieutenant who was very ambitious and wanted to make captain and he was a very cowardly person. He armed himself for overkill. He had ahm several hand grenades on his ah ah uniform, always weared a flak vest, his helmet wherever he went.

He had two pistols ahm and his M-l6 knives, and he was always harassing his men and he was always stirring up trouble with the Vietnamese civilians, and if the men did not do what he wanted them to do, I mean, he'd take his power and ask somebody to shine his boots which is not their job. It's his job to shine his own boots. You know, its um, you can only go so far with your power. Um. He kept that up.

Then when we were hit by some sappers - any of the things that we, in contact we may never lasted more than 15 minutes - but he, when we were hit, he was totally incompetent. He'd cower off to the side and shake. The adrenaline went through his body and then he'd run out later waving his pistols and he'd pressure the ah men who were Spec fours or lower to write him up for medals and if they refused to then he put em on chip burning details or give them Article 15's for failure to repair or not having a proper haircut. Ah. As far as I'm concerned, he deserved to get fragged.

What was the first thing that happened? Just tell the story.

First thing that happened was ah somebody took a smoke grenade and put it into his hooch and it was a warning that he should lay ou—you know, just let up.

You were ahm telling me, I wonder if you could tell me again, you had officers who were in some ways fragged, whatever. Can you tell me...

We had one lieutenant who was very incompetent. The only way to get a new lieutenant is to eliminate the old one because every human being, as well as equipment is on the table of organizational equipment. You are nothing more than a piece of equipment, and this person was somebody we tried to reason with and he ahm reacted by being a Captain Bligh type of character, and so the people decided to frag him, but they were going to give him a chance.

So, the first time they booby-trapped his hooch with the smoke grenade, which was yellow smoke, which was a warning, and then he st—didn’t take any heed to the warning and he kept up his ah, I guess his style of commanding and so then he was smoke, had another grenade set off which was red smoke, and he still kept it off, and then there was ah CS gas which is a very powerful mace, and after the CS, the next one is going to be hand grenade or a white phosphorous grenade, and the person, obviously, didn't believe what was going to happen to him, and so the last one was a grenade, and he was eliminated and replaced. And, grenades leave no fingerprints, so nobody's going to go to jail for it.

I take it this one, this was, obviously, an exceptional situation. I mean what was actually the morale, do you think there was overall between officers and men after you've been in a while, between officers and men and between the various groups of men?

Ahm. As a whole I couldn't say. Individually, if the men liked the officers, the morale was good. If they did not like the officers or the officers dislike the men, then it was bad. As it would be in any situation.

As far as the groups go, they polarized. The blacks were moving into their black power thing and they decided to get militant about it. The first thing they did was eliminate any black who was not militant, and then they moved in on the whites, and so there was a short civil war going within my unit. This was when I was in the First Cav Division down in Bien Hoa.

And, the MPs and ourselves we had to put down this minor rebellion and we arrested the ring leaders and anybody who wanted to go back to work went back to work and the higher ups turned their back on whatever law was broken. They wash our hands of it long as they go back to work and they got rid of the people who started it.

But, ah, I did treat a few people who were asleep and they had a knife put into their ribs by someone on their own side. We had ah southerners who didn't like, who were what I call juicers. They were alcoholics who didn't like anybody who smoked marijuana and they'd come in and start fights. Have knife fights or take a handgun and shoot. And, ah, so then there'd be friction for maybe a week or two weeks, and again, the MPs would come in and stop everything, and the ah friction laid off when we were hit by the VC. When we weren’t and pressures just built up like a cauldron of boiling water and tempers flared and everybody seemed to be at everybody else's throat.

You had to speak softly, mind your own business, and sleep with a weapon at all times and only trust your closest buddies, and nobody else. And, ahm, as far as morale goes, it went down when ah Life Magazine did a report about the prisons that the soldiers were put into for minor infractions. They had conexed containers built where the soldiers could neither stand up or lie down and during the daytime they'd throw a black tarp over em, and during the nighttime they'd take it off, and so, you'd freeze in the night and burn up during the day. And, the military denied its existence and I spent the night in one. I know some other people that did. That hurt morale a lot. The only...

Why did you spend the night in one of them?

I was carrying a concealed weapon in Bien Hoa. It wasn't concealed. I had a knife attached to my boot. It was in a scabbard and because we weren't allowed to carry guns, I bought a knife. In case we were hit, you know, I wasn’t gonna go down without something and ahm some MPs saw it and there was a new command again not to have any weapons of any sort in the base and so they busted me and threw me in one of the cells.

And, while I was in the cell we were hit. It was the beginning of the Easter Offensive of '72 and they’re walking in rockets and I was stuck in the cell and everybody else went to the bunkers and I had to stay there like a caged up animal and hope that nothing hit me. And, nothing did.

Talking of things hitting you, as a medic, you must have come across some horrific things that you witnessed or people that you had to deal with in a bad state. Is this something that really sticks in your mind as I mean a sort of horrific example of how bad things can get and what you have to deal with as a human being? Is there something...?

Ahm. Any wounds that happen do not bother me. I've had somebody come in who had his arm fall off when he was holding it. I said I can't do anything 'till you let me see the wound and he took his hand away and it fell down so I put it back on and did what I could. I had ah guys that had bullets through their brains and they were still alive, and ahm, to me it's like working on a car, or being a cook. You know, meat is meat. You detach yourself from what you're working on. Otherwise, you can't function or...

What I find to be a very, very black picture and not the normal sort of picture of the war, or what the war is like. What was the situation you were in? What was it that you were engaged in?

What was the situation? To me, ahm, it was a war. Ahm. That's what it's like. You kill your enemy or they kill you. It's nothing romantic about it or glamorous. You sleep in the mud. You're exposed to rain.

Let's start again. What was the war, what I was trying to get a, the description that you were saying didn't make it sound like war. It almost sounds as if you were at war with yourself or with the people and that your unit was actually sort of fighting amongst itself. Where was the real war? Was it out in the field or was it back at home or was it in both places or what?

To me, the real war was back at home. Not out in the field. Out in the field we had respect for the NVA. We had no respect, or I didn't, for the people running the war, the people protesting the war and the only persons or persons I cared about were my immediate friends.

I hated the rest of the world because the people protesting the war were also throwing bricks and the people running the war were not doing it properly because they were not annihilating their enemy. They were swinging over to the pacifist side. So, to me, everybody was hypocrites except for the individual soldiers out in the field putting their life on the line.

What about Vietnamization coming, was there a lot of — lots of the film that I've seen, for example, is colors coming home and troops going in, weren't you all looking, weren't you looking forward to that? Wha—wha—what was that doing? What was the true feeling?

In October of 1971, Nixon announced that he was pulling out the 10lst Airborne Division, and I was attached to that and I went great, I'm going home. I don't have to put up with this anymore. And, anybody who had a de-roast date or who's time in the army was up was put into clean dress green uniform, given medals and they were paraded out at Travis Air Force Base as the first division that was coming home.

People like myself who weren't in Vietnam long enough and who had anoth, several years to do in the army were transferred to ah another unit called the First Cav Division, the 3rd Brigade of First Cav. They pulled out the other two brigades and they left one functioning brigade and we were swept under the carpet and kept there.

Let's just go on and do one line on voice-over. I'd like for you to say something of your unit. You were saying that Nixon just said that the 101 had been taken out, you've being paraded, then what happened? He's just going to take a sound-over so I'm doing a voice-over without using...

Ahm. Nixon announced that the 101st was being pulled out. He pulled out the colors which is the flag of a 101st and all the men who were getting out of the army or their time in Vietnam was up, you rotate every 365 days, they went home with the colors and they had a parade.

I think there was maybe 100 men at an air field called Travis Air Force Base in California. The rest of the people, there was approximately 100,000 people in the division, I believe. I'm eh, I'm probably overestimating, but there were a hell of a lot of people there. Stayed...

What, what happened after colors, were ceremonially wrapped up? What then happened to you when the...?

Oh, that was great. (chuckles) After the colors were rolled up, the Vietnamese civilians that were working rioted. The population did not want us to go. We thought we were going home. I was put in, into an aircraft, and sent down by Saigon, and I went to the first cav division in Bien Hoa.

Then I was sent out to fire base Mace on the Cambodian border. And, that was another base that the news people said was closed down. Eventually we destroyed it, but not at the time that they said it was being destroyed. By the time I was in the cav for a month, I thought that ah it was just a public relations ploy on Nixon's part and he had no intention of closing the war down cause the bombings were stepped up.

The ahm, actions were coming in a fairly fast pace. Ahm. Like I said in the beginning I didn't see anything for the first four months. The last two months I was there there were um I couldn't recognize anybody in my unit. If you were there a week, you were brand new. And, anybody who was living there for two months was an old man. You know, cause that's how fast life went just zoom, zoom, zoom (clapping of hands).

And, I thought I would never leave Vietnam. And, neither did most people. And, we thought we'd fight forever. I heard about Vietnam when I was ten years old. And, my father was a career military man and he had orders to go there. I never imagined I'd be going to Vietnam. And, I figured since the war ran on that long, I don't see any reason why it would stop.

And, I was pulled out and I left in May of '72 and about a week later, I think they said they pulled out, all the remaining troops in Vietnam were home. And, I was still in the army. Two years later a friend of mine had orders and he was stationed in Vietnam again. So, obviously, the war was not over.

You were saying ah earlier that your father was a career man... did you ever, have you ever since then talked to him about the war and what the war meant to him? Cause it seemed to be a good, was there a gap between what your father experienced or thought about the war and what you thought about it? I mean, have you ever talked to him about it?

Ah. My father doesn't like war. So. I don't talk to him about it. He was in World War II and the Korean War. And, as a career man in the military he thinks one should take it as a job. And, not go into combat or pursue combat. He ahm he says people like me were trained to be a soldier and to do a job and you went to do your job, which is to fight once you're trained as a fighter.

You want to prove that you can fight. And, it's frustrating when you can't because you're not allowed to. He said that is the problem that my particular generation had. The war itself didn't bother me. I liked the, Vietnamese people. Ahm. The thing that bothered me the most was coming home. And...

What do you mean by that?

Landing in the United States, becoming a social outcast, having people fear me. Ah. Not being accepted into the jobs I would have liked to have gone into or the particular academic institutions I wanted to go into, not being taken seriously as anything other than a soldier who's branded as a war criminal like the rest of the people there.

Do you feel bitter about the way society has treated you and about the war?

Yes.

Does time make things any better?

No. It just gave me new directions.

Let's cut it there.