Bill Lord, Vietnam Veteran (Full Interview)

our guest this week on Veterans Chronicles is Bill Lord he is a US Army veteran of the Vietnam War he's also the author of Vietnam fifty years later and he's known in Washington as the general manager at two television stations here in the nation's capital during his distinguished career and bill thanks very much for being with us happy to be here let's start with the beginning of your story where were you born and raised I was born in Seattle Washington I am still a die-hard Seahawks fan University of Washington fan and I grew up there and want to move back even now really yep Washington to Washington yes yes did you have a history of military service in your family not really I my dad was it was older and was in a World War two I'm sorry World War one Reserve unit the only other person and the person I'm named after was an uncle who was a navigator in World War two who was shot down and killed over Frankfurt on a bombing raid so I guess that's that's my greatest connection to the military is being named after our work to veteran so when did you join the service this was 1966 I was actually part of the draft but it was September of 1966 the no one in you got to my next question drafted or enlisted so drafted by the army and that's why then I went to basic training at Fort Lewis I ended up they had offered me a chance to go to OCS and when I realized that that would be an extra year in the Army I declined but it put me out of the cycle so I ended up in a different unit for advanced infantry training and after that of all things they sent me to Berlin Germany and that was kind of like winning the lottery before the lottery because it was like okay you're you're not gonna go to Vietnam you're the one guy that went through all this and is gonna go to Berlin would you do that I ended up on an honor guard unit and it was the easiest Duty anyone ever had in the army we checked the IDS of the ladies who came in and worked in the American compound there we rode out to the airport with the State Department the diplomatic pouches on the airplanes and the other thing that was really extraordinary is we got to be guards at Spandau prison oh wow now Spandau prison at the time only had one prisoner rudolf hess who was the last living nazi war criminal in captivity and that was quite an unusual situation because he was old and crazy and still very much a nazi so it was it was interesting did you have any personal interaction with him no we saw what we thought was him in a courtyard we couldn't even identify him but there was a great story about him that he was not allowed to have any contact with the outside world so he would try to engage the guards and conversation and if they talked to him he would then turn them in for violating the rules so we were all a little leery of mr. understandable so well the fun ended in Berlin at some point it did and I have to admit and this is funny to look back on I actually started to feel guilty about living in Berlin spending my evenings at a beautiful nightclub doing all this easy duty when the obviously the major event of my generation was going on like half a world away so I ended up volunteering to go to Fiat not really yes how long did you stay in Berlin before this probably six months or so I had about a year left and the army was extremely accommodating no that was pretty much on the next plane out no they gave me actually a very long like 35 or 40 day leave before I went that's how it was I had a nice long vacation went to Mexico and got back into being a civilian and then it ended I had to go so when did you arrive in Vietnam September of 1967 and we immediately attached then to the 9th infantry yes they you go through a process and they somehow give you orders to where you're gonna go and I think within a week I was set off to the 9th Infantry Division did they assign you the radio duties right away or that no no I was a I was a grunt I was a rifleman and over time they gave me a radio and I was the squad radio guy and then I ended up being the company commanders radio guy what was the first mission you went on my first mission well first of all it was terrifying because I didn't know what to expect and the people who had been there for a while told us a lot of stories about some huge battles that they had been in and how many people had been killed and there were several of us that were replacement soldiers I mean in a sense we were replacing the guys who had been killed so it was a very sobering thing and you were worried about everything the funny things that happened is as soon as we got out we were on what they call tango boats these were like little assault craft that the ramp went down and you walked out into the mud and the water of the Delta and within about five minutes I realized that my wallet was soaking wet and that you would never be able to take a wallet with you again and two minutes after that my cigarettes were wet because they're in my shirt pocket so you learned some of the hard things but the whole time being just completely distracted because you were sure somebody was you know behind the next bush was gonna kill you but it was a three day what they call Search and Destroy mission we did not have any contact with the enemy on that first 3-day mission so in that sense I got used to the physical surroundings without actually being shot at what was your initial impression of just the place of Vietnam well getting off the plane my image my initial reaction was it is so hot here I don't know if I can make it down the ramp to the tarmac much less serve survivor year it would just was incredibly uncomfortable it was hot it was steamy there were bugs there were snakes that were you know just a million different things and oh by the way there were people out there trying to kill you so it you know my reaction was this is gonna be a difficult year and at the weather very much I know it varied from hot and sunny to hot in monsoon not much different than too much change in seasons so how would you describe the guys in your unit well there's an interesting group the 9th Infantry Division was one of the mysterious things that the army did they got 150 draftees and they sent him to basic training together at Fort Riley they went to infantry training together they were on a ship and sent to Vietnam as an entire infantry division of I don't know how many people that is a 10,000 or something never been done before but you got to think about this Vietnam was a place where people went in for a year and then came back out and about six months into this somebody realized that we have to send these people home on the same day yes we have to send you know an entire Infantry Division back to Kansas and then they started shipping people around and bringing in replacements and doing everything they could so they didn't have to just destroy an entire army unit so it was a little difficult but to get into that group these were people who had known each other for a year and a half they done everything together there were a very tight group and we were the newcomers the we were referred to by a term called FNG and I'll let you guess what the f is and new guys what's the other part but it took a while to gain their trust and to gain their friendship because you know these are people who had been through some terrifying battles and they you know we we represented their dead friends in a way so just getting into that group was was quite a wasn't it wasn't difficult didn't really shut us out but they were distracted they they were not looking for new friends let's look at that way that's why the group of us that came in as the new people we bonded with one another rather than the people who've been there before now most of the Wars at least of the 20th century leading up to that you kind of have these pitched battles big lines that wasn't the way it wasn't yet not way it wasn't and there's a an interesting point in that in the Delta it was wide open area where you were in rice patties with little strips of tree lines and small strips of jungle the unit had only been there for six months when I got there but they had gotten into a couple of pitched battles they had gotten into these huge ambushes where they got out into the rice paddies all bunched up and they got ambushed and literally dozens of people were killed in these ambushes the other side of that coin though is the Vietcong had established positions and they tried to hold those positions and ultimately you can't do that if you've got American firepower coming in so the Americans lost a whole bunch of people but in the end the Vietcong locked lost a whole bunch of people too I mean literally in the hundreds there's a very famous battle on June 19th of 1967 but I was not a part of that had preceded my arrival but both sides lost so many people that both sides said we got to do this differently the Americans basically open it up to the point where they we put huge lead units out there point people that were way out in front of the main pack so that we couldn't get ambushed the Vietcong figured out that having a large group of soldiers attacking another large group of soldiers didn't work for them either so most of my war and most of the war in the Delta after this period was a matter of short skirmishes they would ambush us and then and then run and they would just dissolve back into the community it was it was a bad running joke but if you survive the first 10 or 15 seconds of an ambush you're gonna live but if you were one of the unlucky ones that that didn't survive it then you weren't but it was never we didn't have like 20 hour battles we had like ten minute battles and then we'd call in artillery and air strikes and by the time all of that happened the Vietcong would generally just be gone it would drift away well we're gonna get into this much more bill let's take a quick break we'll be right back after the break and hear much more about your time and service to our country in Vietnam and beyond we'll be right back on Veterans Chronicles thank you we are back on Veterans Chronicles I'm Greg carumba honored to be joining studio today by a bill Lord a US Army veteran of the Vietnam War he's also the author of Vietnam 50 years later and bill you mentioned that fortunately on that first assignment you did not have any contact with the enemy what was it like the first time that you did well the the entire time we were there we described it as hours and hours and hours of boredom I mean discomfort and boredom interrupted occasionally by just shocking moments of terror and there's just nothing that you can describe about all of a sudden hearing gunfire coming from a place you can't see and hearing bullets and knowing that they were meant for you so no matter how you describe it you you clutch up and you get down and you you know we we would we would do everything we could to find cover and fight back but honestly it's scary I mean I I don't have a good formula for how you do that because so much of it was just luck of the draw you were either in the range of fire or you weren't and the first couple of times it happened I was less than the range of fire that I was later but at the same time it plays the same for everybody and for how it works on your and it's it's frightening stuff did your training or instincts immediately kick in or did some of the guys who had been there longer kind of hide out no I think it does not require any training get dressed we we all figured out that's best we could what to do there were not a lot of occasions where you had to decide what to do or think what to do it was more a matter of react and try to call in support rather than let's go over here and see if we can sneak back around him there wasn't a lot of that kind of stuff because the there were short engagements the terrain didn't really allow for cover it just wasn't that kind of thing that yeah I guess we see in movies a lot where it's like okay you two guys go over there and get around back in the building and then you know flank him it just didn't work that way let's talk about the invention calling in support and I know you've written and I've studied helicopter pilots and the work they've done both the dust off pilots and evacuating is as well as I know you you're an entry unit we're often on helicopters while going to assignments so let's start by explaining your appreciation for the role that they played there well the helicopter pilots took extraordinary casualties the proportion of casualties of helicopter pilots to the rest of people the people in Vietnam was astronomical they would do anything I mean these guys were I hate this call them fearless but they appeared to us to be fearless because they would fly into just about anything to get a wounded person out or to take us into various different battles and I guess I shouldn't joke about this but we would joke what do you do when you're coming into a landing zone and they're shooting at you and the answer is you get out of the helicopter you jump from no matter how high it is because they're shooting at the helicopter you're not shooting at this older but no those pilots were amazing and to this day they're amazing in television work most of the helicopter pilots that fly for television stations throughout my career were former Vietnam pilots and I used to love to go flying with him because there were great guys and they performed a service over there that was second to none in my view because they had the choice of not going in as a matter of fact the jet pilots often would say well we're taking ground fire we don't really want to hang out in here well the helicopter pilots would take the ground fire and fly right into it so a lot of admiration for them and you've written that forget the enemy firing on them it's a pretty complicated machine to get to function only in the first yeah I mean it's you're you're trying to think while you're doing these things I don't know if you've ever tried to concentrate while you're out of breath and running and diving and doing all this other stuff but it's hard they kept their wits about him very well so Hoffmann did you ride with them going to assignments before I left somebody had somebody counts these things that we had done more than 50 helicopter assaults now that sounds like a lot but you got to remember sometimes you could do two or three of them in a day most of them were pretty routine you would fly in to him and nobody was there shooting at you but other times it would be what they call a hot landing zone and there would be people shooting at you and you would jump from way too high to get out of the helicopter and then look for a way to get around it how high do you think it's hard to say but I would say at least the height of jumping off the roof of the house that I grew up because first of all a lot of times you're jumping into mud or water and a rice paddy or something like that which breaks the fall a little bit you don't want to break your legs but at the same time you want to be on to that helicopter in the worst way so you're sitting there kind of making that decision right carrying all this gear so was there as way if you had to jump that they wanted you to land well I don't think that anybody told me how to do it but I think if you watch when when people land in parachutes that they land and then they roll to one side or the other and I think that's kind of what we did without thinking about it and the way it was significant because particularly when I carried the radio it's it's it makes you top-heavy and it's awkward but again whatever that radio is gonna do to you is not as bad as what could happen if you stay in the helicopter so you get out exactly right well let's take one more break we'll be right back here on Veterans Chronicles welcome back to veterans chronicles on the radio American network I'm Greg corumbá honored to be joined in studio today by a bill Lord a US Army veteran of Vietnam and the author of Vietnam 50 years later he was also for many years the general manager of two different television stations here in the nation's capital WJLA and W USA and we'll talk about that a little bit in our remaining time as well we were just talking about helicopters in the last segment and how critical they were in the bravery of the pilots you were involved in at least one crash that I'm aware of what happened that well we were involved in the extent that the helicopter that we were about to load onto came in and it caught the tail rotor a little piece of barbed wire fencing and it flipped over and honestly we were ten feet from it when it happened I mean it literally landed right in front of us and crashed it went over to the other side immediately caught fire and the door gunner on the top got out the copilot was also now on the top got out and as I've told this story the copilot got out with a fire extinguisher which we thought wow he's he's really got it you know he's really thinking ahead because he's gonna put out the fire well the fire was enormous by the time he hit the ground but he had just enough time to squirt the fire extinguisher which is carbon dioxide onto the Plexiglas window in front of the pilot and it froze it in can tracted it to the point where it popped out and the pilot was able to escape so and then the door gunner on the other side never had a chance I mean he was buried and yeah in the flames but the interesting thing about that story I mean it was a it was a tragic thing and it was just the pilot was inconsolable because he you know in his mind this is pilot error but his squadron commander arrived like literally fifteen or twenty minutes later and you would think that they would console the guy but instead he just kind of grabbed him by the collar and said get up off the ground and get into this helicopter and fly it so it's the equivalent of getting back on the bike they threw him right back into another helicopter and told him to go and apparently that's that's how you keep guys I guess competent at doing that it was cruel but at the same time it seemed like a sensible thing to do to save lives yeah I'm sure as well so when did you leave Vietnam in 1968 I left in June of 68 literally it was I got home the day Bobby Kennedy died we had heard that he'd been shot before we got on the plane and he died somewhere on that on our flights back I'd gotten out three months early to go back to school there was some little-known army program that would let you out three months early if you were accepted into a school and if and/or if you had a job in a defense industry and it turned out that I had been a mail boy at at Boeing it's a college job before I left and because I carried the mail I had to have a top-secret clearance and some guy at Boeing wrote a great letter saying that I would be accepted back as an employee with my top secret clearance blah blah blah that sounded very good never used the word mail boy but that and the local community college sent a letter saying I was and they let me out and I felt bad a little bit about leaving but you know by then I was completely burned out by then you also know what's going on you realized that this isn't the domino theory is not working this isn't the north fighting the south we were at least our unit was fighting an indigenous enemy that was in the middle of a revolution and we weren't even sure that they were the bad guys at that point because well they were the bad guys to us because they were the ones shooting at us but honestly it was nothing like what we expected and also by then the country had changed they started out not liking the war and then they started to shift that to not liking the politicians that set us to war and then they started disliking us for fighting the war so just in the 1967 to 68 range we became hated figures we didn't have it wasn't like we were fighting for our country because our country had pretty much abandoned us you know we had our friends there in Vietnam we got our families at home but we didn't have a sports system maybe we described ourselves essentially as orphans we were over there risking our lives only to aggravate the people who we were allegedly fighting for and there were a lot of I'm sure you heard the stories about people going back and being treated poorly at airports and things like that some of those stories may be exaggerated but the fact is that we were not popular when we got back did you experience anything like that I experienced a little of it but nothing nothing overtly hostile no I mean that nobody spit at me nobody nobody yelled at me at the airport or anything but there was a distance you know because I immediately went back on campus and I was not the first person to say hey I'm just back from the Mekong Delta I basically did everything I could blend back into college and if people found out that they'd been there that was fine but I it wasn't something I advertised in volunteer that what was the impact on you and others that you knew of that obviously you go through a tremendously traumatic experience over there mm-hm and you believe you're fighting for everyone back home and then you come back into that reaction once what's the impact well several different impacts but the one that I well on now is when I got back I just said that's over I'm always going to look forward I'm compartmentalizing this I literally didn't talk about but I also didn't stay in touch with any of the people had been there with so you know these are people like you said that we we fought with we you know we had good times we drank we you know we did everything together we were tight but you get home you shove that aside you say I'm only gonna look forward and you essentially because you had a bad experience you're leaving behind a lot of the good people that you do that's too bad because yeah now I'd like to talk to those guys the idea where they are even but that that was one of the costs of doing it now I wouldn't have done it any differently if I could go back and do it over because literally I really feel I would like one of the lucky ones because I was able to shove it back I didn't have any identifiable post-traumatic stress I got back on into campuses I had good schools and good jobs and good family everything everything clicked for me but it didn't click for everybody a lot of people got back and you know they waited for somebody to say thank you and that never happened and they were slow about getting back into a daily routine they didn't get jobs they became resentful a lot of them got drank too much or smoke too much dope or whatever so there was an entire generation of people who literally had a great disadvantage and I feel great that I was spared that but I feel very badly for those people there were many many of them that I knew that just never really recovered from just the the whipsaw of emotion of going through all that trauma only to get back and told you shouldn't have done that you're a bad guy for going out and risking your neck and a lot of people felt very strongly about that and honestly it it was not something that a lot of people could get past we're talking with bill Lord he's a US Army veteran of the Vietnam War the book is Vietnam fifty years later and bill in our remaining time I want to talk to you a little bit about your media career okay but I'd be remiss before I get to that without asking you a little bit about being a radio man oh okay during the war and what that generally entailed well so probably the last five or six months I was there I carried the radio for the company commander which meant that I was the person who kept him in contact with the battalion commander who tend generally flew around in a helicopter my colleague was the person who stayed in touch with the artillery batteries he was the forward observer for the artillery team and we were the ones that had called in the air strikes and all those stuff we had a lot of freedom and honestly I miss to even admit this I hope the statute of limitations has run out but I only had one goal and when I was there once I figured out the set pieces and who was who and what we were doing and how it all worked and that goal was to keep myself and all my friends alive I didn't care at all about you know go attack that you know storm the Bastille sort of stuff so I often used my position as the radio operator to literally overstate the kind of pressure we were under so they would under expect what we might be able to do because when that guy in the helicopter would say literally you know you're taking fire from this tree line over here we want you to send a bunch of guys in there we would just you know I would I would call them the one of the machine gun operators say you know start firing off a bunch of rounds and then when they could hear that on the radio I would say no we can't go in there we're it's impossible because they were there was nothing to win we'd already lost our country we'd already lost our support from home we wanted to stay alive and it's funny the company commander would hear me doing this stuff and he wouldn't object now I never asked him if I could which was kind of interesting if you ask permission you know it's the old forgiveness is easier than permission exactly I didn't ask him when I was if I could I didn't tell him I was gonna do it so he had kind of plausible deniability but when I would do those things he'd kind of smirk and give me a little thumbs-up so he knew what I was doing and in a sense if I could use my position as a radio operator to keep our guys alive that was a win for me that honestly it was the the greatest single thing I can do over there in that position was to use it to keep people alive in terms of Vietnam Vietnam probably the first or certainly in the 20th century that became politically polarized we saw it again with the Iraq war some extent obviously so when you went into media after having that experience coming home from Vietnam and seeing how it was politicized and how veterans were treated how did that impact how you instructed your teams to cover not only issues of military conflict but but news in general well let me just backtrack just a tiny bit okay I got into news because when I got back on campus it was the entire world was polarized you were either if you were on campus you were either shooting flaming arrows into the ROTC building or you were writing right-wing trash for the for the school newspaper I saw being a reporter as being in the middle you got to be involved in everything but you didn't have to stake out some position but I guess what I did was because of that I always tried to get people to listen to other people and to try and walk on their shoes and to hear what they said news is always about people it's always it's a storytelling factor you can if you watch the news and if you see some bureaucrat standing up there and a suit-and-tie giving you facts and figures and stuff it's nowhere near as interesting is if you get to the person who was affected by the decisions made by those people so I would always tell people to get out and find the people who are affected by the story listen to them tell their story you know don't tell the story about what the government wants or whatever you know tell the story about the the people who are affected that and honestly I think that we have an obligation to be fair and to be down the Middle's my greatest regret right now I'm glad I'm retired because I don't think I could be a news person and be objective and be right down in the middle the way we have split the society we live in today everybody's got a channel that will confirm what they already think yeah I was it's a big echo chamber out there for every side and honestly I I think it's a terrible situation it's it's haters and I one of the reasons I got into the media was I didn't want to be one of the haters I didn't want my people in the media to be haters and I certainly don't like it now just a couple of minutes left here bill I want to give you a chance to talk about your book yet no fifty years later what inspired you to write the book and what do you hope folks take from it well I wrote it because my wife and sister found all the rate all the letters I had written home from Vietnam I didn't know they even existed but I'd written probably 40 or 50 letters to my mom and they found him all and they read them all oh you got to put this into a book so I was retiring anyway and I figured well this would be a good little project and it sort of evolved over time I had an experience of seven or eight years ago at work when they somebody was asking well how do you how can you make such rapid decisions under all this pressure and how do you you know how are you sure yourself and how do you assign people to do things and just you just seemed like it's so easy for you and it's like this thing came out of my mouth that I couldn't believe I said I learned everything I needed to know about leadership as an infantry Sarge fifty years ago it was like really did I just say that but it's true the principles of leadership is like you've got to be decisive you've got to you've got to tell people what you do it's it's better to have a wrong decision than no decision so you got to be decisive you've got to be fair you got to be you're gonna tell people what's going on you got to be honest with them and the other huge factor probably the most important thing is you've got to basically look after your people I mean that's what I was talking about with the radio job you got you got to make sure that they know you're looking after them and that always worked for me so in that respect I feel like there was a lesson learned and all that that I wasn't even aware of that came out over time amazing anything about what you saw on your own letters that stuck out to you was surprised you just my incredible confidence at age 19 or 20 to make pronouncements about things that I knew almost nothing about but you know that that was probably it's just I would say well you know let's get Bob McNamara down here I can around in the mud with us let's see how he feels then it certainly wasn't literary but I got my points across and you know my wife thought it was really emotional I didn't find it emotional at all bill it's a fascinating story we thank you for sharing it yeah thank you happy to be here thank you very much bill Lord is a US Army veteran of the Vietnam War he's also the author of Vietnam 50 years later I'm Greg caramba this is Veterans Chronicles

Channel: American Veterans Center

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Keywords: AVC, American Veterans Center, vietnam veterans, vietnam veteran, bill lord, wjla, charlie company, infantry sergeant, 9th infantry division vietnam, 9th infantry division, us army, wjla-tv, wusa9

Id: kFhmZUfp65o

Length: 35min 27sec (2127 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 18 2018