CARL DUANE GRIGGS, Vietnam 1966

[Music] carl dwayne griggs united states army vietnam carl served with the fifth special forces in vietnam as a green beret he enlisted in 1965 and went to vietnam in 1966. carl has one of the most gripping compelling stories i've ever heard a lot of you have watched jerry mcnally's story that i i shared last week and lee alley lieutenant ali terry simmons charles battershall ed masterson charlie harris and others that i've uploaded and i'm going to encourage you to watch and to share this story folks freedom is not free and i remember interviewing carl and his brother gary who was with the airborne in in vietnam in independence missouri 2010 may 28th at speaks chapel and i'm telling you what their stories are just tremendous and you know i just encourage you watching these videos to share them with others and to remember you know what we're doing here you know we're fighting for the same freedoms today our own country folks that are veterans fought for in a foreign land carl and gary griggs they represent the vietnam generation and i want to thank brandon glidden he's a young man who has stepped forward he served in the army himself and he sees the importance of these stories in the history that's being lost folks if we don't remember from our history we're condemned to repeat it how many times have we heard that it's true so i and i say every page of history lost these stories become more precious and valuable so i encourage you to step forward and consider sponsoring one of these stories i don't monetize my videos never will i don't watch videos that are monetized for the most part because i don't think that's where the heart of what we're doing is at so anyways with that brandon thank you again and i'm glad to share with you my complete interview with carl griggs so to sit back and other eyes and ears these veterans are my eyes and ears to a doorway of the past and as carl travels back to vietnam and shares what it was like being 19 years old in the jungle out in the bush in vietnam it's a tremendous story folks i encourage you to share it god bless you thank you for watching freedom is not free it's never free and i thank you for your support of my work [Music] his last name is greg carl how old are you now i'm 63. okay amazing that all the vietnam vets we've interviewed the last couple of days or 63. every single one of them because we were all 19 years old when we were in nam did you get drafted uh no i enlisted in the army in 1965 right out of high school so did you know anything about vietnam then i did never heard of it in my life it was uh that was just a strange place when the first time i ever heard the name vietnam so why did you go in the army uh i went in the army uh basically most of my relatives were uh you know we had a history of of our relatives being in the military and i wanted it but but most of them were in the navy and i wanted to be in the army because i always wanted to be a paratrooper so the navy didn't have paratroopers so i enlisted in the army so that uh i could make sure i got to be a paratrooper so 82nd 101st what did you do well i actually i went to i went to fort benn fort benning uh for jump school and right after jump school i was introduced to a fella who was wearing a green hat and uh he said they said we're looking for guys to volunteer for a special group of guys that at that time were were actually hidden from the public and that was called the green berets and so i come to such such a room tonight at seven o'clock and we'll talk with talk some more so i went there and in fact the guy tried to talk me out of it and said you know i don't think you you're cut out to do this and you know and like that but i kept persisting you know what i really really wanted did i just finished jump school and you know i'd like to really you know i don't know what it is but you don't even know what it is you know why you i mean they really they really made it hard for you to try to get in and then of course then we had to take a test and uh and i got excited i went to uh uh uh they they put you through a two-week period of of assessment to see if they're really going to use you or not and i went through that and then i i got in went to camp mccall and started my training with uh the special forces wow so vietnam you were green beret i was in vietnam but you were part of the green berets yes wow i was one yeah that's wonderful so what year did you go over to don i went to gnome in 1966 uh in 1966 i went over and went by ship and we actually landed on the beach uh near bungtow in higgins boats and uh there's not a lot of guys that went to nam by ship but there was there was uh uh uh every once while i run into somebody but uh uh yeah not a lot of guys went there by ship we came in on higgins boats you know the ramp dropped down we went ashore uh unlike in world war ii we weren't met with a hell of resistance we moved inland and uh went and started setting up our camp later i had the opportunity to go up to the triang where the fifth special forces i was with the fifth group uh and i went up there and uh and then went on many assignments after that and i was involved in uh some mostly down in south in the beginning i was in south vietnam uh and operated in some areas called the iron triangle uh kind of a garden spot of vietnam if you will uh you could literally you were going to be in a in a fire fight just about every day there uh you're going to get mortared at night and you're going to run into you're going to be in running gun fights during the day and we went on an operation they had an operation called cedar falls operation cedar falls the large operation didn't last very long we went up on the cambodian border and back then during vietnam body count was a big deal uh the i think we had a little over 700 body count in about a week and a half and uh so it wasn't we we didn't really feel like that that was really uh that good of a an operation it wasn't that productive in in the aspect that we did you know we were looking for a bigger body count we backed that right up with uh operation called operation junction city operation junction city was we went up to the cambodian border again and the cambodian border was a hot spot because up along places like anlock and lochnin and parrot's beak and the iron triangle hobo woods all vietnam veterans that are combat soldiers will recognize all of those names i just mentioned uh we uh we set up a a a tactical maneuver against the enemy there that were flooding across out of cambodia and our body count at that time was 3 600. we killed 3 600 enemy soldiers in about 2 weeks and we lost about 280 guys and three or four hundred probably wounded somewhere in that neighborhood but we lost about 200 we lost about 280 guys and uh that part's already difficult to talk about were these all green berets no no no no they were uh varied from various units we had several units involved in that operation what was your rank uh at well i was uh corporal at that time and i made sergeant while i was there uh the attrition you know amongst green berets the green green berets primarily is a very small unit uh very small small but our we lost uh uh our casualty ratio was 50 percent and uh so half every green berets that ever went to vietnam died there and because the type of operations that you go on and that you get assigned to uh you know creates that creates uh those kind of statistics and so it's it's very tough when we first got to vietnam in 1966 what we found was a south vietnamese army they had camps all the way uh all the way up north to to the dmz but the problem of it is is that the enemy had pushed them all to the coast so they'd reset up new camps they were all basically set up along the coast they had literally no penetration into the interior of the country every time that they would get out of their base camps to move in inland to to go on any kind of a mission they were immediately met with uh nlf soldiers in lf not the nfl but the nlf national liberation front soldiers these are soldiers that are that have some training but are not they are not uh they're not the hardcore in uniform soldiers or what we call regulars uh but they had some training and were very well equipped now you had you also then you had the viet cong who are just farmers by day soldiers by night then you had the nlf national liberation front little better trained soldiers and then you had the regulars who were wore uniforms and uh so you had three different tiers of people that you were fighting against we found that the south vietnamese soldiers were completely uh just basically pinned in along the coastline and we're making no progress as far as penetrating into the interior of the country uh what what became our job was to get in in in there in 1966 and get into the interior and and especially at night time to take the night the take the night fighting away from them and make it to where they feared to go out at night when the enemy before totally controlled the night that was their time well we flip-flopped that and that became our time that was the time that we did most of our missions was at night time because you have the element of surprise and uh of course you can't be seen so we did most of our operations at night time and one of our operations was an operation called phoenix operation phoenix and that was to kill all the leadership of the nlf and we had uh we had good uh uh my mos was intelligent so i had the opportunity to to have the insight to a lot of this stuff and so we we knew where a lot of them were and where we could find them we had good intelligence we had uh guys that were uh south vietnamese agents in the field operating and and then we would uh we would go find these guys and where they were and we uh uh you know we took them out yeah what kind of weapon did you carry well we carried we carried uh we could carry any kind of weapon that we wanted to uh and i carried various weapons uh i carried basically an m16 most of the time i also carried a sawed-off shotgun for a while and uh and i've carried an ak-47 i've carried you know i had an israeli in fact i had an israeli using for a little while and i have a lot of different weapons we we did you see in one of our special forces team is 12th man team and uh we we generally carried at least one weapon that was uh that had a silencer so we could slip in and out of villages at night the dogs would give you away in fact we called the silencers hush puppies because the dogs would run up to us and give us away and we would have to shoot the dogs and uh uh you know or and that way we could get in and out of the villages and sometimes uh uh even regular officers regular uh uh soldiers that were in the officer corps would go into villages and spend the night there and uh eat with the people and spend the night there and we would go in there and uh and and take care of those people that were there if we if we had intelligence knowing where they were carl you were there for a year yeah so you obviously saw a lot a lot happen i can tell by just talking with you already but um was there i mean you lost friends probably i'm sure people that you knew you lost uh uh that was a uh losing your buddies was uh something that was uh extremely difficult uh i still see their faces today i still have nightmares about about them uh and that's some of the help that the veterans hospitals try to give you know and they try to give us help you know as far as getting beyond that you you never will you know once you're wired for that i mean it's it's there forever and you're you know you become you you lose buddies they go on missions with you and you lose them and there's nothing you can do the problem of it is you don't have time to stay and grieve them and you lose them and but the mission comes first doesn't matter how many guys are left if it's down to the last guy the mission has to be completed and so if you lose people the only thing we always we never want to leave a guy behind uh try to get him out of there the great the great thing is we had dust offs and helicopters in vietnam where they didn't like in world war ii we could get guys out of there well i know myself i was wounded 1966 on the cambodian border i got wounded up there and received a purple heart and you know fly you back to a hospital and take care of you and uh that was a great morale booster for us is to know that uh even if we get killed they'll get a chopper in here and get me out the one the one thing that we had amongst all of us all soldiers not just green berets but all almost all combat soldiers is make sure you get me out of here if i if i go down make sure you get me out of here so get me back to the states we called it the world give me back to the world and uh so that was that was a big thing for us you know tell me about the importance of the helicopter in that capacity and maybe were there times where you helped load the wounded or the dead into the helicopters well probably all combat soldiers just helped do that before help their buddies that were wounded you know you try to uh uh you try to stabilize the guy fast as you can uh in the in with green berets uh to be a medic with the green beret team you have to have two years of training at fort sam houston in in the hospital because you have to be able to perform an appendectomy in the field or tracheotomy or many other uh critical uh medical uh situations that may arise uh stop you know guys shot in the chest you know how to stop a bleeding you know chest wound or what we call sucking chest wound uh did you help do some of that you seem to know a lot of this stuff did you help with something well all combat soldiers has helped helped uh help their buddies that's gone down either you know if they're wounded uh you're down there trying to help them too you know uh sometimes you know a guy gets shot two or three times or he's got shrapnel all over in him uh uh it's not like kind of like in the movies it's really not like the movies you know it's guys get blown to pieces and uh uh you know pieces and parts of people all over the place and i've been in some fights where you know afterwards you'd walk around and i'd literally picked one of my buddies boots up and still had his foot in it and uh you know you put that in in a body bag and you know grave registry goes to grade registration you know you tag it and tag it and bag them you know and the way they go but guys that are wounded yeah you try to get the dust off them but you can't always get them in but it is kind of a funny scenario because the chopper pilots would always call us and go is the lz hot and we would tell them no because we're afraid they wouldn't come if we told them if we told them yeah it's hot we're afraid they wouldn't come in to get our buddies so we'd always tell them so that became a thing with the helicopter pilots then just laugh too because they knew we were lying to them you know uh they go you know it's the lz hot we tell them no we've got a good place for you to sit down well we did have a good place for you to sit down but you are going to get shot at when you get here and uh but they would say you know what they were great guys they would come in i've seen them come in under a hail of gunfire and of course when when a chopper starts coming in the enemy would direct their fire immediately to the chopper because in their thinking they've been trained back in hanoi that you know that's an expensive piece of uh equipment take it out will hurt them economically not only will you kill the crew but you you know you just knock down a million dollar piece of equipment you know uh so is that a big deal to soldiers sure we tried to do the very same thing you know except they took all of their big fighters and they took them north and parked them up in china they had 200 mig fighters sitting up there and they had 600 tanks uh t-54s and t-55s uh setting up there i have had uh you know enemy tanks come after me before way up north but primarily they had more tanks than patton had in world war ii except they had him hid uh they took him across into china and the only way you're going to do that is go to war with china that wasn't going to happen but anyway uh on the choppers you know we have we get we get choppers we call for dust off again we've got you know we tell them how many wounded we had uh we use a code when we tell them that so the enemy doesn't know you know we're not giving you know because they know your units just like we knew their units you know we knew how many men that was in the 10th zafur battalion i mean i knew how many was in that uh you know we were keeping track of their unit strength and they tried to keep track of our unit strength well when you first went to vietnam you're what 19 you said i was 19. well you've never been in combat before no and then all of a sudden you start all this stuff starts to happen what happens to you as a person i mean how does it change you and tell me about the fear if there's well obviously obviously there's the fear factor is is is sheer terror and there's there's no way that you could ever i i could not explain it to anyone uh you know if you sit and watch a movie uh if you ever saw the movie save it private ryan the first 15 minutes of that movie is is probably is accurate is anything i've ever seen so uh but when you're there when you're there and it's happening to you and it always explodes out of nothing you know it's a patrol that's moving along and you've been you've been humping in the bush all day long trying to find the enemy because every mission that you have is uh is a contact mission you know the mission is to find the enemy and kill the enemy that's the mission uh you don't have any other missions it's you know find the enemy make contact destroy the enemy that's the mission search and destroy search and destroy every day make contact with the enemy destroy the enemy that is the mission daily at night time you dig a foxhole you set up in a circle and what we call the perimeter defense to fight out and then you sneak you take a group of guys and you slip out of that away from there and you go set up an ambush somewhere hoping that maybe the enemy will come down a trail someplace and you can ambush him and we were very successful in doing that and uh of course at times they were successful in doing that too sometimes your ambush patrol going out to set up an ambush got ambushed uh but when you're going along on a patrol and you're looking around and and you know you're watching and you're trying to watch the trees you're watching the ground for booby traps you're watching for the enemy you're watching for everything the mosquitoes are horrendous the leeches are eating you up because the place is in the jungle it's steamy it's hot you're sweating leeches are everywhere every creek that you cross every little stream you cross is full of leeches uh they're sucking blood on you they've got these ants over there that seem to they you know everything in the jungle wants to bite your sting you and there's a lot of poisonous snakes did you ever come to a point where you asked yourself the question how did i get into this yeah yeah you think about home and the fact that you think about home all the time you think about how nice it would be to to go back home you have to understand for a lot of guys for a lot of guys six or seven months earlier they were at their senior prom that you're there with you know six months ago they were at the senior prom now it wasn't quite like that for me because i went in and i had a almost a year of training to do so but for guys because i enlisted but for guys that got drafted you know they went to they got drafted they went to basic training for eight weeks and then ait for eight weeks and they were in nam six months earlier they were set trying to get in the back seat with their date and have a little kissy face and here all of a sudden they are in in a place where people are trying to kill them and they're seeing people get killed and they're having to kill people and there's something about it when you have to kill a man when you get close enough to kill a man the difference in in a lot of like world war ii or something in nam when when when you're on a patrol and and you get ambushed and all of a sudden it blows up it's 20 or 30 or 40 feet from you it ain't you know 400 meters or uh a mile away where you're shooting artillery back at each other it is up close and personal and the firefight's on and it's whoever whoever has the best of uh can uh can get the most firepower out the fastest that's who wins and guys are gonna get hit you hear guys screaming guys are getting hit battlefields are real noisy places and they guys are getting shot guys are getting you know grenades are being thrown back and forth at each other i mean at the rate that you know you see them potato mashers coming at you and green tracers come flying at you you know and i mean the incident happens you're on the ground and you're fighting but uh i mean and both of you are trying to outmaneuver each other you know get on this flank get on this guy's flank move on this guy's flank uh circle around and but it's all happening man just like this well wha why did you go to the documentary showing the other day you heard it advertised and you just wanted to go i heard about it i i thought it was a vietnam thing again last year was vietnam well i went there and i thought it wasn't i thought well it was world war ii and i thought well well i'm here i'll just go ahead and watch it you know go ahead and see it and you know you know i started talking to some you know like this elder gentleman that just left you know we're a band of brothers it really doesn't matter what warriors you were in if you're a combat soldier if you're a combat soldier slugging it out it don't matter whether you're slugging it out in the snow or in the pacific or in vietnam or stuff we all share that same existence because for that that space of time right there it doesn't matter it's all about life right then life all of a sudden at 19 you realize that you are not invincible that you can die because you're seeing guys die and all of a sudden you realize that how precious life really is you start thinking about everything i saw guys die that have never i got to watch what i say and be careful but young guys died that's never they never had a chance to get married they never had some of them never even really had a steady girlfriend well your kids are 18 years old they never they didn't know nothing from nothing you know some of them i met them from all over out of chicago off the streets of chicago tough kids i met kids off the farm that didn't that didn't they were so naive they didn't know nothing from nothing and guys from every walk of life that you can imagine kids that had came from very uh families that had lots to to kids right off the street that barely owned a pair of shoes the army gave them more clothes than they ever owned in their life i've seen them all i've been around them all and the worst thing about it in vietnam is after you've been there for several months and you survived young young and new guys come in you don't want to hardly know their names because you don't know if they're going to make it or not and you don't want to get too attached to them and that starts a process after the war that uh takes its toll because you don't let nobody get close to you no more because too much pain is associated with it and uh with losing people and uh guys guys die and and uh they're killed and and after the the battles are over you come back and we shine their boots and and we we have a 21 gun salute for them and you know but they're gone man and guess what there's a western union gonna go to their mom and dad's house that says your little johnny was killed day before yesterday or whatever in vietnam and uh you know that's a tough thing all there's going to be no grandkids from this guy that they thought you know it'll be great to have some grandchildren and that all the guys hopes dreams everything else is gone in an instant and it's over have you ever been to the vietnam wall not in washington i've been to the traveling wall i'm going to make a trip to the i've actually have put it off and uh i went to the to a traveling wall to the traveling wall it was here in uh in clinton missouri a little farm community uh not too uh well about three years ago three or four five man no longer than that seven or eight years ago now and uh never went to it and it's a very tough thing to do you know a bunch of guys on that wall and uh how did this change you as a person you were 19 you were you know a year between school you get out you get into the vietnam you you know you're from from the states and how did it change you i mean well it changed you you will never you're never going to be the same again and at 19 years old when you come out of vietnam you don't feel 19 you feel 40. you like one guy says you know man i went there when i was 18 years old i mean just you know i'm still a teenager it just stole my life well you have to be careful or it can do that but yeah it changes you forever and there's things going to stick with you that that's going to be there forever i i read a book one time it's called once a warrior wired for life and it does it wires you for life how did it change your perspective of death and life and are you a a praying man a religious man well uh yeah i am to answer your question i'm a christian i'm a born-again christian and uh you you realize uh you realize when you look especially when you look back on it man you you think about it how precious that life is is is amazingly precious and uh i've seen guys do acts of bravery and in combat that cost them their life they didn't specifically do it for america they did it for their buddies i don't at that age i'm not sure that you can that you really have a grasp of the whole the whole picture of you know you're not thinking of uh valley forge in the revolutionary war and and and and and the guys at tarawa and guadalcanal and and everything else and pork chop hill and all that you're not thinking about that you're not thinking about betsy ross and all that but you're thinking about those buddies right there that we could absolutely trust with our life we truly could trust them with our life and we counted on them every day and they counted on we counted on each other and life is is so precious in that aspect that as today as i wasn't in vietnam i wasn't really uh i mean i believed in god and and uh uh and everything and and and on some missions before some missions like operation cedar falls in junction city they had priests come out and they prayed for us and gave us the last rights and all that you know and uh copa mayor copeland mayor moxie coppola mayor good luck to you you know may god go with you and uh away you go and uh but i will tell you this that uh i had a buddy who didn't know was not was a non-believer and uh they said we're gonna let half you guys you know you got half you guys keep watching half you guys go back you can pray with the preacher let the priest pray over you that want to go and this buddy of mine he went his name was anatoly actually was a russian descent and uh i said anatoly we i thought you didn't believe and he's like that he looked at me and goes insurance and i was like okay you know so well listen tell me about your last day in vietnam what do you remember about your last day last day in vietnam that was a great day uh actually i didn't know i was going home uh really i i didn't have any idea i wasn't even thinking about getting to go home yet and i knew that i was getting short as time i mean you they only made you do a year because unlike today in the iraqi war where you know uh uh they're calling uh guys are having to go back for more tours because they only have so many guys during vietnam david you're drafting more guys they'd draft more guys you know they had a half a million guys drafted so had guys they could get more but my last day uh i was actually at that point i was up north uh i did a lot of fighting and was on many operations down south then i was moved up north and went into laos and on operation raven and up and again on operation phoenix and uh i was uh basically i was uh getting set up for the night because i was gonna do an ambush patrol and and i was kind of getting you know laying out i was a sergeant at that time i was kind of laying out my map where i was going to take the guys and we were going to set up on a trail and i was trying to get things laid out and this lieutenant who is became a real a pretty good friend of mine just walked over and said there's going to be a helicopter here in about 10 minutes you're going to be on it and i'm like to go where i mean i've been you know a lot of times they'd told me get on a helicopter we wanted to go home you know it was going somewhere else to help out somewhere help some guys out there in trouble and uh and i said what do you mean and he said you're going home and i mean it's just like going home i'm going home i mean it stunned me for a minute you know i mean just like took me by surprise because i'm in the combat mode you know i'm not in the going home mode and uh i was trying to shake it off you know and i'm like what what about my weapons and stuff he said you need to turn your govern and to see sergeant i don't remember his name now turn your weapons into him you know and uh well at that time i carried a an m16 and a 45 and i know probably two or three other guns that i kept on me but i had a bunch of stuff to turn in so i was like okay and uh sure enough uh the helicopter came and they were like greg's get on the helicopter and i'm like okay you know i didn't even i didn't know where it was going it really didn't matter at that point but if it if it was going towards home i was ready to go well actually it they flew me over to uh to chulai and uh and which was on the coast and it's up north and on the coast and they flew me up to july got on a c-130 flew me south to tonsinode air force base got on an airplane a civilian airliner uh then civilian airliners there and got on a civilian airliner and uh no guns or nothing but i'm still in my jungle uniform and still got mud on my boots and uh away we go we take off and we fly in the air and one thing we knew is that the north vietnamese had a lot of rockets and we were afraid they would shoot us down before we could get out of there and the plane takes off but when it got out over water we knew the seventh fleet was setting out there and we knew they couldn't get out there where the seventh fleet was and well man when i mean you could hear a pin drop on that airplane and uh you remember i came over by ship that took me 22 days to get there by ship and now i'm gonna fly home and uh we're gonna fly to yokata japan and then jump from yokata to the states and but when we got out over water man that place just erupted on that airplane and uh in fact we scared the stewardesses and and that was quite a thing too we were actually looking at real american women which was a great thing and uh you know you got to go on r when you were in vietnam and but they would you know you could go to the philippines you could go to japan and you could go you could go to places where they had more oriental women well it was a great thing let me just say this it was a great thing to see some american women and uh so the airplane just you know exploded with applause guys were you know just you know out we're out over the ocean we'd get to japan take on fuel and head for the states and we come to the states uh flew into the states when they flew us into travis air force base vacaville california and we're coming into travis and and it was at night and i could see begin to see the coastline and i was looking out the window and for the first time in a long time i could see red orange blue you have no idea what that's like all i've been seeing is green there are no colors in the jungle men don't have red on them they don't have blue on them because or white on them or anything else that are those colors because it gives your position away it's just you become a target you know i remember one time i got hit in the eye with the it was an accident by an antenna off of a apc and it busted my eye all open and and the uh as a medic who wasn't a green beret medic because i was attached to another unit right then put a great big hunk of taped a big hunk of gold because i had blood all over my face and he tapes this big hunk of white gauze on me and i'm look i'm like is that the only color you got i mean you might as well put a bull's eye on me and uh but he's like well let me see if i can find some you know something that's camouflaged and i'm gonna appreciate that but uh anyway i'm looking at the coastline and it was so wonderful to see all those bright colors again and we land and i'm putting my feet back on american soil i'm back home and uh from there they sent me to uh presidio presidio is a very small little base south of san francisco hardly nobody there and uh when i got there and most guys i never knew i don't never met another guy that went there but there was guys there because i i was one of them but i don't know why they sent me there but i went there they usually sent guys somewhere else but anyway i go to go to presidio they sent me up to presidio and uh i was met there by a sergeant and he brought a few of us guys in there most of us all green berets that he had collected there and he gave us this little ticket and he said this ticket right here he said you see that building right over there where yeah he said that is the mess hall for you guys you take a ticket you can go in there 24 hours a day and you can have steak and eggs you want to go over that three o'clock in the morning have steak and eggs go you want to go over there at one o'clock in the morning nine o'clock at night whatever you want to do they're there to wait on you guys around the clock and we were like wow well unfortunately and i went over there and we all went over there unfortunately our stomachs were shrunk up so much that we couldn't eat a steak we hadn't made a steak in so long that we've been eating sea rations out of a can and most of all of our sea ratchets in 1966 and 1967 were world war ii rations now all the cans on them said 1942 1943 in fact we were like is this stuff safe to eat and they were like well yeah and we're like okay well we did we lived off that that's what we ate but we usually ate it on the run you know you ate uh we took a sock it came in a little box and in that box had a main the main meal like steak and potatoes and these little greasy uh things medallions of some kind of mystery meat and little potatoes that have been in there for 20 years and greeks just packed in there you know so much sodium i mean you had to drink water to you know to get them down and but we'd take all the stuff out of that box we couldn't carry everything we carried had to be on our back so we'd take a sock and stretch a sock out and slide down the main meals into that sock and tie that put it on our rucksack you could carry all the boxes and you know like anything like pound cake pound cake was a premium you could trade pound cake for life almost pound cake was like cherished in vietnam and if you had fruit to go with it like peaches or something peaches and pound cake brother you had a meal so back home let's cut we're i'm running out of some time okay here's what i want to get to at the end with you okay your interview is amazing i mean i've heard a lot of stories but carl this is very good stuff transitioning back into civilian life that was tough well when i came back uh i still had time to do in the army i enlisted in the army so i still had more time today that was good for you then uh yeah good and bad uh i was stationed uh they sent me to fort carson colorado uh as a green beret i went up there the fifth mechanized infantry was getting ready to be mobilized uh great place to be stationed loved it up there and uh but my job there was to train they wanted to train lerp teams long-range counselors patrol teams and uh so they had to have somebody that you know would have that kind of expertise and there was about 10 of us up there green brace up there and we trained lerp teams and uh and we and we set it up very difficult to do in colorado because part of time when i got there i think it was about july and uh but you know it's open territory you know you've been around fort carson you know the you know the terrain you're from grand junction if i remember right so uh uh very difficult to do and i was always constantly complaining you know we need to take these guys we need to take them down to fort gordon georgia or some other place to where that they've uh ap hill or someplace like that where i can get them into the forest you know uh more like it is in vietnam the closer that i could you know get to that kind of uh or or let's take them over to panama you know the jungle school and uh well they didn't like that you know they wanted to do conventional warfare you know how you gonna do conventional warfare with lerp teams but anyway it was a it was a constant running battle between me and higher ranking officers there and i didn't get along with those folks very well but but uh the transition into civilian life was uh difficult for me and remained difficult the rest of my life and uh i uh you know at the time i mean it wasn't a good time to be a soldier really the american cinema you have to you have to understand that uh when i left presidio and i came home nobody you know some guys some guys will tell stories that they got called baby killers and stuff like that no one ever called me that really good that they didn't wasn't the right kind of guy or the right frame of mind to to you know to have anybody mess with me but i found that i hitchhiked home i just got out of presidio walked out of presidio and just stuck out my thumb and you know what i don't think i stood there more than three or four minutes i smoked in those days i could maybe get a half a cigarette smoke and i'd have another ride and people were i found that people were though there was no cars driving around saying support the troops and we as vietnam veterans we didn't have none of that that's what's so good about the young guys today in afghanistan and iraq they do and we'd really try to pull them into us and help them uh but i i didn't find that you know at all i would stick out my thumb one card you know well i can take you down to this road and then i got to get off okay and soon as he let me off i'd get out you know and have a smoke and be standing with my duffel bag in uniform and stick my thumb out i wouldn't even get a half a cigarette smoked in another car in fact one time i remember two cars almost wrecked trying to get to me to pick me up and uh you know where you headed you know and took me and one guy bought me lunch and uh you know well let's stop and have lunch you know and uh i said well i don't have a lot of money you know uh they got my pay all messed up in the army i just came back from overseas and which it was my you know i had my my funds all messed up but i want to keep going and going i want to get your brother in a little bit but let me i want to ask you a question if you don't want to answer it that's fine but i've talked to a lot of navy corps men medics i mean chaplains ministers from world war ii the korean war vietnam and even those servants today um men dying on the battlefield were you with some of the men when they died lots of them do they talk do they do they they all they all say the same thing when they're dying they either ask for god or they cry out for mama everyone almost everyone if they don't just die what some of them do some just die they don't they don't utter anything their wounds are such that it just they they're unable to speak but many of them that in fact almost all of them cry out for god or for mama and sometimes both and i think you know because some of them are 18 19 years old we were probably a and age-wise probably the youngest group of guys that ever went to war in world war ii a lot of that would probably people would go really i think world war ii because i know my daddy went in when he was 16. well it was but they also had a lot of 40 year old guys in there in vietnam if you knew a guy that was 22 or 23 we called him pops we were all 18 or 19 almost all of us and i turned out to be in my unit i was the youngest guy there but everybody was only you know a few months older than me but yeah on a battlefield yeah you hear them call for mama and god almost always and they call for their mama because i think for some guys that's the closest attachment you know they don't know they're dying you know they've got moments seconds to live and you're trying to do all you can for them and we're you know hang in there hold on you know we're words are meaningless you know when your body's torn to shreds you know bullets a from an ak-47 or something i mean it'll just absolutely tear you to pieces and uh you know i mean battlefields and combat you know is brutal it's it's it's something so when guys say well you guys have fought the more stuff you guys are just you know your hawks you know you're you're hawkish about wars and stuff like that let me tell you something it's the last thing on earth that i want to see is a war ever because i've been in one i know what it's like i know what it's like day in and day out when i went to the iron triangle i stayed in there for three months without coming out no change of clothes no hot food no shower no nothing stayed in the bush and just getting staying there and you keep getting missions over and over and over and they're always the same thing you know search and destroy search and destroy make contact with the enemy you know hold contact make contact make contact destroy and after three months of that i don't have the picture my i have a daughter that lives in fort worth she has a picture of it of me when i first came out of there that's the picture that you should have really got but i could test can you scan it email it to us yeah i can get it from her well that's important we'll give you a business card you need to email that to me get if you can ask her to email it to us it'd be great and they brought some pictures today too so i hate to stop you but i want you a little bit of gary but yeah at the end of my film i hope you're comfortable with this at the end of my films the vietnam films always have the veterans salute into the camera can you do that from where you're seated perfect all right [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: Voices of History

Views: 374,533

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Id: aa_bbBVd4u0

Length: 49min 11sec (2951 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2022