The Scarlet Letter
Chuck Lewis
Army
1966–1969
Interviewed by Helen Cunningham

In 1966 I’d had tinnitus, a ringing in my ears. I went down to the base to get tested, and I didn’t pass the hearing test. The guy at the base went to close my chart, saying, “Well, the good news is you’re not going to be drafted,” but when he closed my folder, there was a big R on the front side. A big, stamped, red R for resister. I was 19, and rather ambivalent about the draft, so I hadn’t gotten around to registering. In my draft board, the punishment for not registering was that you were automatically drafted. The guy saw the R and said, “Oh, you have to go to the eighth floor.” On the eighth floor they had a 105 howitzer. They would fire the howitzer, and if you blinked, your hearing was good enough. Nobody, nobody flunked on the eighth floor. I passed the test, and 30 days later I was on the bus. . . .

I actually, at one time, had some prisoners, turned them over to a South Vietnamese unit, got about 100 yards away and heard firing. I went running back, and they’d assassinated one of my prisoners. And there was a lieutenant, an American adviser with them. I asked him why he didn’t stop it. “Well, it’s their country; it’s their unit,” he said. I told him, “This is my prisoner. If you don’t stop, I’ll have you court-martialed. Now, I got this many prisoners. I’m gonna get their I.D. cards, and when we get back to the base there’d better be these same prisoners. All alive.” You don’t shoot prisoners. Once a man’s been captured he’s no longer a soldier. He’s equal to a civilian, and shooting him is no better than murder.

Medicine in the Third World
Priscilla Boekelheide
Medical Doctor
January–March 1968
Interviewed by Michelle Gibson

I heard about the war when it started, of course, and suppose I volunteered mainly to see for myself what was really happening. In the local newspaper, I saw an article where the American Medical Association was asking for volunteers to go to Vietnam. I wrote them a letter saying I would go, but their response was no, they weren’t taking any women at the time. Fairly annoyed, I decided to write back to the editor. “How is it that you have female nurses, female secretaries and female drivers?” I wrote. “What is the matter with having female physicians?” They promptly replied saying I was accepted. . . .

It was fascinating, medically, because there were many diseases there that we had never seen, or hadn’t seen recently: typhoid, cholera, tetanus, bubonic plague, tuberculosis—all of these things were rampant. There were no immunizations at that point in Vietnam. We would see these children come in with various diseases and, by giving them massive doses of medicine, were able to keep them alive.

Living for today
Donald Swanger
Marine Corps
1968–1970
Interviewed by Amy Hylton

There were things I did to try to survive each day. I told myself you can’t worry about yesterday, you’ve got to worry about today. I’ll take yesterday’s mistakes and lessons learned and put them with what I need today. I made a solemn promise to myself that I would put every bit of my life’s energy, every bit of my life’s force, into surviving today. If I get up the next morning, then I’ll worry about tomorrow. I can worry about tomorrow then, but I can’t worry about yesterday—yesterday is gone. And my comrades who died yesterday are gone. I can’t drag them with me. You’ve just got to move on.

Lesson learned
Ernest Paul
Army
February 1967–December 1968
Interviewed by Holly Vranicar

In the years afterward, it really struck me how horribly we treated everyone in Vietnam. Hell, we didn’t even respect the South Vietnamese, who were supposed to be our allies. How can you be expected to win something when not only are you rotating out your troops before they can be effective, but you’re rude to everyone not American?

There really was this institutionalized racism we all were taught, and I didn’t think for once that it might’ve been the wrong thing to do. I was just a kid, after all, so I went with what everyone else was doing. Looking back I realize how ignorant we were. We had no clear goal, no nothing, and all of our troubles came from our decision to let France re-establish their colony in Vietnam. If we’d overcome our arrogance about the whole issue, then maybe—maybe—it would’ve turned out differently or even not have happened. But who can say for sure? My wish is that we’ve learned from our experience and now know enough not to repeat ourselves.

No picnic
John Kitchens
Air Force
1964–68
Navy
1968–1972
Interviewed by Matthew Anderson

I was assigned to Vietnam again and went back in 1967 for a long tour, 13 months—again as a cook. I went to Tan Son Nhut. It was the main airbase outside Saigon. For 13 months I never left the base inside of Vietnam. We were shelled, but after a while I got used to it. If I heard explosions in the background that I knew were at a distance, I didn’t worry about it. My ear picked up when they got closer. When they got closer, I got concerned. We did have a shelling, and we all got kind of showered with fragments, but that was no big thing. I was a cook; I was never out there in the swamps. But it was a very scary experience knowing that somebody out there was trying to hurt me. All I was trying to do was serve breakfast.

Rules of the jungle
John Nesbitt
Army Special Forces
January 1966–October 1968
Interviewed by Triston Mosbacher

When you’re in the jungle, you’re not used to washing yourself. In fact, the more I smelled like mold and dirt, the better off I was ’cause I wasn’t giving myself away to an enemy who was living underground or an enemy who was living in the jungles. So what happens is you cast off the rules of your society for the rules of survival in the jungle. When you come home, you have to now cast off everything that you learned about in the jungle and then pick up the rules of civilization. That becomes difficult. . . .

No respect
Michael Kelley
Army
November 1969–September 1970
Interviewed by Scott Homrighausen

One of the sad memories of [the last day] stands out. One of the last things a soldier does is sign his DD214, his discharge paper. He looks it over, they ask him if it’s all right, and he signs it. They hand him the original, and he turns around and walks out of the Army. Well, these guys were walking down that hall, taking off their uniforms and throwing them on the floor because they didn’t want to be seen in Oakland or Berkeley in a uniform. That’s what it was like in those days: We got no respect. I was heartbroken. I mean, I was very proud of what I’d done, and here’s this sea of uniforms that I had to shove apart to get out. Here were all these guys walkin’ out the gate in their T-shirts. The guards were givin’ them a ration, but they just told them to kiss their ass. I’ll never forget that. I thought, “God, this country is in a sad state.”

Freedom’s duty
Gale A. Dunham
Air Force
September 1968–September 1972
Interviewed by Rebekka Hauert

Everyone needs to go into the military for two years. It gives you ownership of this country. Then when we do have to go to Iraq or Afghanistan or someplace, you understand why. The freedom we have back here isn’t free. It has to be earned, it has to be protected, it has to be kept, or someone’s gonna take it away from you. There’s always little miniature Hitlers out there who want to rule the world and think they can. So we have to work harder.

Read excerpts from the students' journals

Additional information about the veterans’ oral history project, including slide show

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