Carl E. Stone's interview for the Veterans History Project at Atlanta History Center

on camera today is march 25th 2016 we're at the atlanta history center in atlanta georgia my name is joe bruckner i'm a volunteer at the history center and with me today is sue verhoff who is the senior archivist at the history center we're really honored today to have with us mr carl stone mr stone is a career army officer he served in vietnam and he's kindly agreed to join us today and talk to us about his military career but also about his life and this is part of the veterans history project and mr stone's story is will be on record at the vet at the library of congress as well as the atlanta history center and we're doubly honored today because we've got mr stone's son brian who is also a veteran he's an air force veteran who served in the middle east and has also recorded his story in connection with the veterans history project uh we really appreciate both of you being here with us today mr stone could you give us your full name and tell us your current address okay carl middle name is edward last name of stone and currently reside in athens georgia okay and where and when were you born i was born november night 1938 uh near the little town of warwick w-a-r-w-i-c-k warwick georgia which is in worth county which is in the northern part of the county here in south georgia okay tell us a little bit about your upbringing i grew up on a farm my dad was a sharecropper uh his dad uh was a sharecropper my mom's uh father was a sharecropper and uh most of my aunts and uncles on both sides were were sharecroppers and we had a very small farm and it was before the days of mechanization and we farmed with a couple of mules i think at one time we had three it was a very small farm we were a little bit different sharecroppers than most sharecroppers in that my mother's uncle was the landowner that's who we were sharecropping with he was married to my maternal grandmother's sister so it was a little bit different situation but it was tough times you know in 1938 when i was born it was shortly after the great depression and and we didn't have much we grew up very very poor uh and and most of my family was not educated my grandmother probably the most wonderful person in the world very important person in my life could not read and write you know she couldn't read her own name and when we got old enough to go to school and she would get letters she had four daughters and four sons and some of them lived far enough away that they wrote her a letter weekly or monthly we had the nice joy of reading those letters to her and one of my early childhood experiences and uh we grew up when i was about two years old we moved from warwick georgia to an address it was sylvester georgia that's the the uh county seat of worth county and we lived there until i was about eight years old and then we moved to our the third house that i lived in i lived in three houses from the time i was a baby until i was uh 23 when i got drafted in the army and of course none of these houses had running water none of them had indoor toilets and it you know they were sharecropper houses is what they were you know and uh believe it or not the the middle house that i lived in from that time i was about two until i was eight that house a part of it is still standing there the last house i live in burned a few years ago and of course these houses have been sitting empty for a long time but amazingly the barn that was there when i was a child where the mules were in the hay for the mules and the corn the barn looks like it did the day that i lived there i i when i go back home i drive by there and amazingly that barn is still standing so but uh anyway we had we had a pretty tough life and uh and and i didn't get an education either that's another important thing i'd like to relate here is uh i dropped out of school in the eighth grade and and not because you didn't want an education you know i i later and very shortly after that learned the importance of an education but uh you know nobody in my family was educated and when you're when you're sharecropping the more hands you can put in the field the better chance you have of improving your life slightly and from my memory i know that when i was in first grade when i came home from school as a six-year-old we went to the fields after we came home from school we changed from our pretty good clothes to our ragged clothes and we joined the adults in the field and we did farm work until dark and then you came home and you fed the animals and you did all the chores you had to do and and uh and and what happened was is you know it it wasn't in my family didn't want me to have an education i might had i have two brothers one older than me one younger uh both my older brother got to about the same point in school as i did my younger brother complete i think the 10th grade my and i have two younger sisters and back in that day even the women or ladies they usually completed school both my sisters did graduate but as we go through the the interview here uh i'll come back to the education thing because that's a very important part of my story so when you were at that young age six seven eight nine you were coming home and immediately going out to the fields did you realize how tough that was or is that just all you knew so you just figured that's the way life was well yeah you didn't know any well i wouldn't say you didn't know any better when i started to school i went first six years to a country school i had two teachers during that six years one taught me grades one through three we're all in the same classroom the second teacher grades three three through six actually when i first started school i had three teachers one for first and second one for third and fourth one for fifth and sixth but when i moved from second to third i said oh you don't need but two teachers so i stayed with the same teacher but what was unique i could see my first second and third grade teacher's house from my house you know she lived just a short distance away i couldn't see my fourth fifth and sixth grade teacher's house but it was just over the hill from my house so they lived on either side of me could be good could be bad i couldn't do much out of line because you know but uh i pretty soon realized that there were the haves and the have-nots i mean you know so when you say you didn't know any better well you probably didn't to a great degree but at the same time you did you know and uh i when i turned 16 well when i left school i guess i was about 12 and i worked on the farm until i was 16 and at age 16 i got a job in town with a moving and storage company of course you know today i don't think you could get a regular job at age 16 it'd probably violate the labor laws but i started working for this company and i was too young to drive but i rode with an older person driving a truck we moved people uh not over the whole united states but as far west as el paso texas as far north as maine mainly up down the eastern seaboard and from the time i was 16 until i was 23 i did that most of that time toward the end i didn't go out on trucks anymore but i got to see the countryside there were no interstates in those days but i saw a lot of the country and who were we moving we weren't moving people like me we were moving people who were professional people maybe lawyers doctors whatever and you know you saw the other side of life so you learn a lot about life that you hadn't learned up until that point so well that had to have a sort of an impact on the rest of your life well it did it did it did and you know i learned a lot and as an eighth grade dropout when i was working for this company uh uh i was probably the most educated person there other than the people that owned the company and uh i was maybe a little bit smarter than most of the people that worked there i don't want to be like mr trump today but anyway i was obviously a little smarter because of the the responsibility that they gave me while i was working there and they taught me a lot i learned a lot during that time talk about the circumstances under which you went into the service well when just before i turned 23 i think it would have been about around the 1st of september of 1961. i received that invitation that you've heard so much talk about and because of where i lived in the state i think most people would have come to atlanta to the induction station but down there we went to jacksonville florida and i went to jacksonville florida with a half dozen other people from my county and from the local draft board and we went for a physical and they did some testing and and then they sent us back home this we weren't called up to be inducted we were called up for our physical and and the other things to see if you were qualified to be in the military of course in those days there was no high school diploma required so i wasn't disqualified because of that so anyway that was the first of september and then about the first of december i got the real invitation to to report back to jacksonville to be there i left on the 13th of december 1961 and on the 14th of december 1961 we were sworn into the army and uh a little unique side story we uh they put us up in a hotel somewhere near downtown jacksonville florida and uh a group of us four or five of us says well let's go to the movie you know so we went to the movie and guess what was playing it was the guns of navarone so i'm sure you've all heard of it it's a very famous movie it was up for an oscar that year i looked it up the other day it didn't win the oscar but it was one of the oscar nominees that year but what more appropriate for some young guy going in the army to see the guns of navarone the day before so uh anyway the next did that get you fired up well i don't know about being fired up sir the next day we went back to the reception station and i don't know we didn't have anything to do all day we sat around we laughed we joked you know and i think from my memory there were 63 of us and uh about five o'clock they call us all together and we go into an auditorium or a classroom and they say everybody raise your right hand and uh up until that very moment these guys were laughing and joking and having a good time and when that officer i don't know if he was a lieutenant or a colonel i didn't know one from the other well i did really because i you know i'd move military people so i had some some knowledge of rank but we were sworn in and after we were sworn in all of a sudden there was no more happiness i mean you i guess everybody decided oh we're in the army now and a few minutes later they loaded us on a bus and about midnight we arrived at fort jackson south carolina well talk about your experiences your experiences in basic and what where you went after that and what you did sure well first of all let me ask you another question how did your parents feel about you getting getting drafted well i don't know that my dad it probably didn't bother him too much let me back a little bit my brother was about a year and a half older than me my older brother and he had enlisted in the air force uh right as he turned 18. so he had been in the air force pretty close to five years by that time uh he had spent most of that time at at uh kiesler air force base where brian happened to go for his very first training and uh but he had served a year's tour in saudi arabia another place that brian went and he had come back and matter of fact he was stationed at turner air force base which is in albany back where we live so you know they had one son in the military but the thing i remember most vividly as my mom and dad i had a an older car my first car was a 49 chevrolet this was uh 61 so it gives us some idea of the age they drove me to that to the draft board that day in my own car and i remember my mother crying profusely as they dropped me off at the at the uh draft board to be picked up by the bus to be taken to jacksonville so uh her she probably wasn't too happy about it but i don't think it bothered my dad a lot but anyway we got to fort jackson we spent about a week in the reception station i remember i was drafted on 14 december uh and we get processed in we do all the testing and we start taking our immunizations it seemed like they gave us a hundred we probably only got about 30 but we got eight or ten of them there and we got them throughout basic training but we were when we got finished in the reception station we were taken to our basic training company and uh we got there one night i don't know i guess they took us at night it was dark i remember when we got there and we spent one day in our basic training company and the following day they gave us all a leave we went home we've been in the army for about less than 10 days and we're home on leave now so there were four other gentlemen drafted with me three wyatts and one black gentleman from my county and one of those people had a car and they came all the way from south georgia to columbia south carolina they picked us up they took us home you know we're in uniform we don't know what to do we still got that lacquer on our brass and all that and but we were home for about two weeks and then we came back started basic training around the first of january 62. and of course i was drafted as a result of the berlin crisis and they they were rushing us through basic training to get people out to advance training in their units one of the unique things was is if if you look in that book the basic training book they show this big parade there but we never had that big parade because on wednesday of my last week of training they i caught they put us on a bus and i went went to fort knox kentucky and uh for my first assignment other than basic training and uh so we never had the parade you know the parade would have been that saturday but my whole we had a whole battalion it was basically in the same week of training so we were all moved the same way so uh but i guess one of the first things i learned in basic training is you do everything as a group you've been an individual up to this point but when you're in basic training everything you do is with those 50 guys in your platoon we had four platoons of 50. my company had 201 people in it so we had 50 people per platoon you do everything with those 50 people or you do everything with 100 people you march to go eat the only time you're free when you finish eating you can run back to your barracks but everything you do is a group environment and you've been on this your whole life you do things as an individual or you do things with somebody that you have your friends but not a group of 50 guys that you don't even know when you start out so but you know it was interesting and i uh it went by pretty quickly i was there for about two months and then went to my first assignment at fort knox okay well talk about fort knox and what you did subsequent to that what i did when of course i i i got no individual train no advanced training when i got to fort knox i went to uh i'd move i had worked for a moving and storage company and i'd driven a truck very little a few times but they says oh this guy he's a truck driver okay so i got assigned to the 500 transportation company parentheses car and the car meant car and i spent probably most of the first year at fort knox driving vips visitors to fort knox we drove everybody in my company we drove everybody from the chief of staff from the command in general the chief of staff the g1 you know the we provided sedans and we drove those people around plus anybody coming and going from fort knox we drove we drove mainly vips and a lot of vips came to fort knox in those days and they came into standard field which was the airport in louisville and we had to go to louisville to pick them up and we when they finished we had to take them back to louisville we would occasionally in those days we had an airfield there and it would handle it could handle a twin engine plane as they had in those days there were no no no executive jets in those days but some of the vips would come in to the airfield right there at the fort but most of them flew in and out of the commercial airport and after about a year uh i was selected to be a a clerk uh in our motor pool uh in the maintenance office but i still had to drive and of course in those days we had to pull kp you know we had our own mess hall we had a very small unit we had about 120 people in our unit and you know you had to pull guard duty and you had to pull kp all the things that that young soldiers have to do but coming back to the education and this is a very important part of my career they had a program there there were many people like me who did not have a high school education or high school diploma and they had a program there where we we got to go to school i you know the people i worked for i guess they saw hey maybe this guy's got something promising and they let me go to school i believe i went for eight consecutive weeks eight hours a day five days a week and we had very qualified teachers in all the basic high school subjects and we were taught eight hours a day in the classroom and when we got finished with that we took the the ged for our high school diploma and i was right after i finished i took it and it was through the military education system and they send you your ged and i sent that to the state of georgia one of my documents in my notebook is a letter from the head of the georgia department of education with that certificate and the reason that is so important to me it allowed me in the coming years only two years after that to become an officer without that piece of paper i wasn't qualified no matter how smart i was that piece of paper and that's why that that education was very very important to me and when i look back over it uh i have a lot of respect for the people who allowed me to not go to work every day but for two months i went to school you know and i and it gave me that opportunity to get that document didn't make me any smarter necessarily but you know i got that piece of paper and i'll go ahead and add now and we'll have to talk about it later after i became an officer the army let me go to school again full time i went to school for almost two years two years toward retirement they paid me every day and i got an undergraduate degree and then a couple of years after that i completed a graduate degree on my own and first guy in my family up until that time that had had a degree period i think i think i'm probably the first person maybe on my mother's side i did have a cousin who was a retired as no sex from the air force as a chaplain uh he he might have beat me to the degree but other than that nobody in my family had ever ever gone to college i know your family was proud of you yeah yeah very much so yes sir i can continue on with your journey well after that i spent the two years there in of course uh the first year i was in the cuban missile crisis occurred you know in in the fall of was it 62 i guess it was uh i didn't get involved in that some people in my unit did and then you know the following year 1963 president kennedy was assassinated uh i was waiting to pick up a vip and in those days i had a little one of those little portable battery operated radios and when i didn't have anybody in my car that i was driving i could i could listen to that radio when i i was up near the post headquarters at fort knox the when it was announced he had been shot and and one of the unique things is we from that day until the following tuesday we didn't do anything you know we didn't work uh we had a tv in our day room and we just watched the proceedings for what was it that was friday saturday sunday and monday we all set in our day room we did have a formation i was in something called special troops at fort knox and that saturday morning we had a formation and i'll have to tell you i served a three-year tour in alaska brian served pretty close to a three-year tour i saw temperatures at 40 below zero but the day we had that formation after the day after the president was assassinated is the coldest i've ever been in my life we went our fatigues we had our field jackets on we had our bunny hats but when we got back to the barracks not a single guy could unbutton a button on his clothing until we got warmer we had gloves on i mean but that's the coldest i've ever been so including alaska including alaska but anyway i in in december of 63 i left the army and i went back home went back to work just briefly for this company i'd worked for but i guess by this time in life with all the things that had happened to me i'd kind of seen the light you know i says no this is not my future and i went up to see the air force recruiter because my brother was in the air force and he said well i can take you in but you know and i had made e4 during my my two years and back in those days most draftees left the army as pfc e3 but i'd been fortunate i'd made e4 probably four or five months before i got out he says i can take you in but i have to take you in as a pfc and i was an e3 in the air force airman i said no no i'm not going backwards so i went over and saw the army recruiter and he brought me up to atlanta and i got assigned here to fort mcpherson for the first time and i drove vips here i drove generals and stuff like that and uh stayed here about six months and brian's probably never heard this story before but in those days atlanta was a mecca okay it was a boom in time and not only were there ladies galore here that lived here but they had come from all over the south to work here so it was a matter of just picking one of them and i met his mother my wife but she had to be a local she did live here she lived about three miles from fort mcpherson and uh i met her and then of course you know right if not too long after i met her i ended up going to france my next assignment was in france but i came home the following year on august 29th of 1965 and my wife and i were married and her her family was a member it was a big church in west end section of town here and it was the name of it was west end baptist church we were married in that church and we flew back to new york about three weeks after we were married and flew back to france where i was stationed and you talk about young guys and living wild and dangerously had no place to live i had a new wife and no place to go and i got back over there and i had worked in the enlisted clubs to make extra money because you know we didn't make a lot of money in those days and the guy that ran the club also ran the officer built in which was we had a big hospital this was in the comm z as it was known in those days they'd built a permanent hospital but there there were other things housed in that hospital because they didn't need it for its intended purpose and we he says well i can i can put you up in there so my wife and i lived in the officers i was i was in e5 by now but we lived in the officers boq for about two weeks until uh a house became available on the economy and then we moved into that and then about the time i got back over there the personnel nco which was at another place i was in a place called chenon france our headquarters was in in grandest france and he called me up and says i need you to come down take these tests i'm going to send you to ocs so i went down and took the test and didn't hear from him for a while and about two or three weeks later i guess it was he called me and says oh i got a board set up for you and i went down and of course i i'd always been in transportation i was in transportation there at this was an engineer depot there and uh so i said well i want to be a transportation officer so they had a transportation lieutenant colonel and a major and of course i'm an e5 and i never seen this much rank up close you know in a military environment i was scared to death i didn't think i did very well and then i didn't hear anything and then about the first of january of 1966 i got a call and says here's your orders and i was to report to fort knox again and i went to ocs i went to what was called branching material i did half the program at fort knox and then moved to fort eustis to do the other half and when i met my wife she was getting pretty close to completing her degree at georgia state university here in downtown atlanta and she came back home for my stint at fort knox and went back to school and for a quarter and then when i got ready to go to fort eustis i moved i went to fort knox on washington's birthday 22 february of 66. we completed there about three days four days before memorial day i reported into fort eustis for the last half of my training on memorial day of 66 and then uh and she moved up with me and and was with me and then when i graduated from ocs i was assigned back to fort eustis and i was a tactical officer i had the great responsibility of deciding what other soldiers are capable of becoming second you're a brand new second lieutenant but you're deciding who else can be a second lieutenant so pretty responsible job a fun job in a lot of ways hard work you know but uh i know ocs was i did some of this a lot of the same things in ocs that i had done back in early 1962 and basic training they i you know it's kind of a waste of time in a way because you know you go back to the rifle ranges and you go back for cbr training the stuff you've already done you know but you do a lot of that but you do a lot of other things too you know so but anyway i i was at fort eustis for as a tactical officer for just about a year and uh just before i left there brian's older brother michael her son that lives in california today he was born on april 29th 1967 at the fort eustis military hospital and six weeks later he was six weeks old when i departed for my tour in vietnam in june of 1966. okay and uh what was your feeling about going to vietnam before you went well i don't know i i guess i didn't have feelings either way much i relate a quick story to you when i was stationed in france i worked with a lot of french civilians we had a lot of french civilians working with us and most of them were elderly people and and they did the main work i was a military representative i sat in a in a little office about the size of this with about four french civilians doing her work one of them was a younger gentleman he was probably about brian's age in his 40s and he had served in the french army in in vietnam when they were there and i remember as i was leaving you know i was going to become an officer and obviously knew i was eventually go to vietnam and i remember one of the things he told me he says i got out of the french army after going to vietnam twice and he says we didn't win and you guys aren't going to win and i said oh yeah yeah i will win but as i've gone through the years and and uh of course my thoughts about vietnam today are much different than when i went and but i i go back to what he said to me he says you know we were there and we can't win we couldn't win and you're not going to win either and i think he was probably very correct in his analysis you know so that's interesting but uh other than that i mean you know it you know it's not very nice to leave your family and you have a new baby and uh one of the things i'll go ahead and that i had on my list to talk about that is the toughest part of the military i i went to vietnam for a year i missed the whole first year of his life uh when uh brian was born at fort stewart and july 11th of 1969 he hadn't been born when i went to vietnam but when they were six and four years old i went to korea for the first time for a whole year and then when they were 18 and 16 i went to korea again for a whole year and then i had a number of jobs where i traveled a lot and i went to some short training courses when i say short a month or you know three weeks four weeks and uh but that's one of the toughest parts of the military is being away from your family you never yeah i don't i don't think there's any other occupation where it's such a predominant part of your life you know so but when i got to vietnam i uh i went to uh i was in a place called vung row it was a port we supported a place that went by the name of tuiwa there was a general army general support group there there was a tui air base there and we had we were it was a small port as ports go we could handle two deep draft vessels ocean-going vessels at one time we could handle barges and landing craft all at the same time and i was in a i was in the 119th transportation company terminal service and that means it's a stevedore company your job is to unload ships i got to vietnam a month or so before i was eligible for first lieutenant and i got promoted right after i got there the first lieutenant a company commander was a captain and i was the executive officer and a platoon leader both i'd had two a dual title and uh my uh i was the executive officer of this company for the whole year and a platoon leader and we unloaded ships seven days a week 24 hours a day we work two 12-hour shifts we started at six in the morning and worked to six at night or you started at six at night and worked to six in the morning and there were no days off you work seven days a week when i first got there we were we were unloading a lot of construction materials lumber steel bridge beams and concrete and asphalt and but shortly after i got there we started to receive mainly air force ammo to this day i cannot believe that one air force base and one fighter wing could drop that much munitions but we unloaded ammunition 24 hours a day seven days a week for most of the year i was there at times we had 20 and 30 000 tons on the ground and that's a lot of ammo you stack it as high as you stack it with a forklift and we occasionally got army ammo but predominantly it was air force ammo and that went on for the whole year i was there our company was large it was a we had 322 men in the company and and uh excuse me 323 men and five officers and we worked full strength most of the time and we had most of the soldiers were draftees and most of them young but they were good soldiers they worked hard it was dangerous work but during my time there we never had anybody get we had people injured but nobody was ever seriously injured during my year and we didn't lose anybody as a casualty during the year i was there and but you know we were support troops my last night in my unit we were attacked we had we were attacked with a mortar attack uh mortars and rockets they fired tons of them into the port the ammunition we had mainly the air force used mainly 750 and 500 pound bombs and they also had napalm uh but they're not fused so you know they're not easy to set off okay and uh luckily they didn't set any of it off if they'd set some of it off it blown the whole port away you know but we had a first stage station it was a little building about as big as this room it took a direct hit there was nobody in it we got attacked at night and that little aid station was splinters the next morning we got down there and of course there were six people killed at night there were numerous people wounded i could have hit every guy with a pebble that that was killed i guess sometimes fates with you i you know i there was a navy lieutenant jg i used to he and i used to eat meals together of course i the way we worked one month you worked nights one month you worked days you alternated he worked days all the time he was killed that night he was from mobile alabama he was the only person that i personally knew that was was killed but those people were not in our unit he was a naval harbor defense unit the other people that were killed a truck company had moved in with us recently in fact a battalion headquarters had moved there just right at the end of my tour that was my last night there and i went back to camron bay and a few days later one of the unique things a lot of the people that i had trained as ocs candidates they were now working and they had a a big i guess you called a replacement company at camron bay and everybody going on r and r not everybody but the people in certain areas they pass through there to go on r r to hawaii and the other places so the day i got my got my military records my military records were at cameron bay we were under camron bay uh i got on as i remember a bran if airways was still flying in those days a brand of 707 because of my connections i had a seat that night so that was a pretty happy moment yeah yeah um for somebody who's watching this who's not familiar with the geography of vietnam would you generally generally describe the location say in relation to saigon oh yeah well we were we were on i would say it was the east coast of the of vietnam we're probably about halfway up uh vung road was about halfway between quinon and the train uh they were ports and quinyan in the train uh the train was from my memory was north of me i think i have it right and quinyan was below me i may have it reversed but uh those ports were larger and of course camron bay was a megaport you know and it was a big logistics center and in addition to that there was a large air force base there i actually flew in and out of cameron bay and but a lot of people flew in and out of tanzania which was in saigon and then they built another airfield just north of saigon that i think the name of it was benoit is what i remember and uh i had to travel some when i was in vietnam a unit our size we normally although we had good troops we normally had one or two people in the stockade and the stockyard was at long bend which was a big uh logistics complex i'd say on the east side of the city of seoul and even a person in the stockade got paid i and i was a pay officer i had to go down and pay those guys it was right outside of sagan right outside of saigon yeah and i went there i was in vietnam during the ted offensive the ted offensive happened in january and i remember i went i flew into benoit from probably from cameron you know they had the c-130s and 123s that was how you got around in vietnam and i remember of course you had no you had to catch a ride when you went somewhere you had to hitch a ride with somebody and i remember when i left benoit to go out to long bend the whole area of the city had been totally obliterated during the tet offensive we never got where i was at we never got bothered during it in fact that one attack my last night there was the only time we ever had any enemy activity where i was listening that's something you're there the whole year and you get attacked on your last night there yeah well it really shouldn't have been my last night but what had happened my company commander rotated just ahead of me i was a senior lieutenant that should have taken the company but i only had a few days so they put a lieutenant junior to me he took the company and of course i don't know if it's changed a lot now but in those days you didn't work for somebody junior to you not his officers so you know i wasn't given the company because i just had a week or so and my company commander when he left says when he takes over the company if you want to leave you can leave the mortal story is i left after that night i was there all night it was a long night we didn't sleep any they didn't bother us again they didn't come back during that time frame but the next day i said well he told me i can leave i'm gonna leave i went to cameron bay and i spent about a week in cameron bay but it was a little bit safer [Laughter] nice beach yeah well i didn't go to the beach um i want to go back to when you entered vietnam when you landed when you first got off the plane what was your first round oh i don't know i mean i first of all when i left i went to fort lewis washington in those days you went to fort lewis and i flew up commercially to fort to seattle got off seattle went out to fort lewis and i was there i think like two days but from my memory we went over to mccord air force base and we were in those days the biggest plane flying was the 707s that you know all the airlines were flying us and i was flown on a 707 and and i flew into cameron bay and and i was destined to this 119 trans that's what my order said before i left to go over and but when i got there we got off the plane and i was taken up to i assume a transportation unit or something at uh in the main compound of of camron bay and uh i slept in a tent the first night you know it was just a you know gp general purpose tent and the next day uh they took me back out to the airfield and i got on a 130 and the only thing is is the 130 went to every airfield in vietnam i think before we got to tui finally after airfield airfield airfield you know we had a whole plane load of guys we we ended up at tui and but i don't know that i had you know there was there's no apparent danger that i saw at the time you know and uh and in fact the area i was in there wasn't there never was a lot that one attack we had we had the koreans were up on the hill above us they were our protection supposedly and uh but uh when you say what kind of feelings you have i mean you're just in a new place you know and you know i i don't know i i guess maybe you're overwhelmed or something i don't know i i i don't remember any specific feelings per se you know one other question about your time there did you have the opportunity either on base or in town to deal with vietnamese civilians very little very little we our port was somewhat isolated there was no village close to us the little town outside of tuiwal i think it went by the name of phu hip it was a little village there but uh we would go in you know the area where the air force base the air force had everything even in vietnam i think they had a swimming pool there of all things you know they live first class they had a snack bar where you could get a hamburger believe it or not in vietnam but uh as far as interaction with the local people almost zero we had a we had a few uh vietnamese that that took care of our bathroom and if you were in vietnam you know what the bathroom was like you have the they burned the barrels every day and and they did that dirty work uh and uh we had we had our own little px because we we you know we we were separated from everybody else so somebody in our unit ran a little px the big px was at the tui air base or the army's general support group so if you want to do any kind of big time shopping that's where you went but except for those few people that worked there we had a korean barber we had our own little club we didn't have an officers club but we had a little enlisted club but the only vietnamese i saw were you know those they were probably eight or ten of them that worked at our place every day they came there every day from one of those little villages but that was my only interaction with the with the vietnamese i basically didn't i hardly saw any other net i never went we had we had no village to go to per se so i never went into t there was a town or anything so almost zero interaction before we move on from vietnam is there anything else you want to say about your experience one other thing uh in about no november of i think it was no late october or november we had a typhoon and uh the port was built uh right in the we had a natural harbor area but the port when a ship came in he could see the pier as he came into the port and they had cut a road around the edge of the the bay and our and there was a little cove over here and all the troop barracks the mess hall our little px the orderly room our whole unit was located there the officers we had a little building over near to the port where we were and we knew this typhoon was coming and we took the ships off the pier and they went there was a protected harbor they went up into protected harbor and anchored and it hit us early in the morning and uh my company commander i lived in one building he lived in a building next door but i was in the building with him and we could see the sky through the corners of the wall as this building's moving but those buildings stood up okay but kind of in the middle of the storm my company commander and myself and uh his driver and and the communicate one of the communications persons where he was in his jeep i was in the back and the calm guy was in the back the driver was up here my company commander was here we got about halfway around our unit and these waves these 40 50 foot waves were coming in they were coming in up over the road okay and uh i saw the danger and and there were boulders falling down off the side and there's a big mountain here like i mean steep mountain and uh i told my company to come in and i said we got to get out of here you know when i jumped out of the jeep and he jumped out about that time and the calm guy jumped out and we're we're between the jeep and the side of the mountain and uh the uh about that time a wave came in and it turned that jeep over on its side okay and the waves were probably 20 30 seconds apart the next wave and the driver's missing you know we can't see him the next wave comes in and sits it back up on its wheels again and he told us later that when when that first wave turned it over he was hanging onto the steering wheel like a fish you know and we ran down there and grabbed him and the good thing about having a calm guy was he had strung a com cable higher up on the edge of that mount we climbed up that mountain to get away from those waves and then we had to go probably a quarter mile we were about halfway between the port and our company area and we had to climb along the side that mountain but you know he he had been up there putting that cable up there and he led us around and that was the closest i come to getting killed and part of the story is my original wedding band when i when i got to the unit it wasn't there anymore because you know we were soaking wet yeah we were grabbing onto trees and limbs because we're climbing alongside of a mountain and uh but about a month later my wife met me in in hawaii with our now eight-month-old eight and a half month old son and i either she did or i did bought this wedding band oh good good it means a lot to you done it and to her yeah well you're back in the states now let's talk about well what happened next was i i could have probably left the service that you know when i came home because i had i had i came home in june and my two years was up on 2 august so i told the army i says i'm going to get out of the army but how about giving me a five months extension and uh so they said oh yeah we'll give you a five month extension and i ended up at fort stewart georgia and uh i served the whole five months i was about three or four days from being uh released from the army and by then we knew that brian was coming and i says well i don't have a job got one baby and another one coming we at least we maybe we'll be able to feed them and i made the decision to stay and my battalion commander they had to send a message to the department of the army because you know i was supposed to be released in a week and they said yeah you can stay and of course in those days you made first lieutenant in one year you made captain in one year but because i didn't decide to stay in initially uh i didn't get promoted i was going to go out as a first lieutenant but the day they approved my permanency i was a regular army i was a reserve officer so you know i was on it at their call you know i could have been put out anytime i got promoted that very day right and then uh i had i was already in my second job when i first came back i was uh the executive officer of a medical ambulance company 417th medical company ambulance and uh anyway that was not one of my most exciting jobs but back in those days we had these command maintenance inspections and uh they had one and one or two of the units this battalion i was in had 12 units we had a clock in the officers club with a little hand up there and every unit was an hour around that clock and but anyway one or two of these guys got relieved because they didn't pass their inspection and the battalion s2s3 he was a transportation guy the truck company guy got relieved so he went to take that company and by then this this was a reforger unit they brought these units home from germany and this medical company was getting ready to go back to germany on its deployment for a month or two and by then they got some medical service score officers so i became a battalion s2s3 i'm a lieutenant i have no idea what i'm doing but i was saved many times in my career by good ncos and i had an nco he knew what to do and he just kind of guided me and shepherded me but anyway the day after i got promoted my battalion commander called me in and says i got this company here he says i'm i'm gonna have to replace this guy and he says you're gonna be in so i says oh man i decided to stay in the army and now i'm a company commander not only that it had the reputation of being the worst unit on the whole installation and uh so my wife by then she had finished her degree finished her degree while i was in korea i'm in vietnam she was a teacher in a local school well as it so happened one of the e5s in that company his wife was a teacher and she taught at the same school so my wife goes to school the next day and says oh my husband's going to be your company commander and she comes home that night luckily tells me and i says oh man you've burned my day i says the guy commanding the company ain't been told he's been relieved yet you know now this e5 is going to go tell the whole company there's company commander's leaving you know so i said call her call on the phone and tell her don't say anything well luckily for me i think it was the very next day when i got to work my battalion commander called me in he called the company commander in you know he was a nice guy what he did we swapped jobs he took the s2s3 job and i took his job and i was a company commander for the balance of my tour there which probably one of the more rewarding assignments i had but at the same time a very difficult assignment this unit had been so bad not long before i took it over that the chief of staff the colonel that worked directly for the cg had to approve every person that got assigned to that company you know it was it was a company it was a petroleum company it was a quarter master company i was a transportation officer it was kind of similar they had a lot of vehicles and a lot of equipment but they had they had made it the wrecking yard uh at that time fort stewart had become the fl uh an expanded flight training center the army had done flight training fort walters texas fort rucker alabama but during the vietnam war they needed more aviators so they expanded to fort stewart and hunter army airfield this unit was actually formed to go to vietnam it never went so every uh uh you probably heard the term before and it's probably not a nice one every eight ball got pushed into that unit you know and but right after i took it over things turned around i had a good first sergeant i got a good motor sergeant and not long after i got there we had our cmmi and we passed the inspection back in those days if you didn't pass the cm i see him in my inspection every officer in the chain of command was fired all the way up to the top you know but also in those days there were so many people failing the inspections because of the vietnam war and rotation of people they finally had to say well we don't have enough officers to replace all of them you know but anyway i spent the rest of my tour there and and uh yeah it was uh i guess somewhat rewarding you know well the fact that you could improve that company that much had to be rewarded yeah we had an ig inspection but also i might add that this was also the front end of the racial problem okay the racial problem and another thing that happened during that time frame and you may have heard of this you may not president johnson implemented a program called project 100 000 and during those years they brought into the service their plan was to bring into the service a hundred thousand uh soldiers by lowering the standards okay they lowered the standards for mental testing the whole nine yards and uh they ended up bringing i think in during that from 66 to they brought in 265 000 of these soldiers and when i was a company commander i had i think two or three in my unit and the soldiers never knew that they were a part of the hundred thousand project they didn't tell them and uh i had to do i remember i had to do confidential reports on these soldiers uh to report how well they were performing how well could they do their jobs and i might add that the ones i had were good soldiers and you know they they didn't have to be a rocket scientist to do what we did they could do their assigned tasks so uh and and they didn't i don't think they ever knew they were a part of it i mean you know a part of what i had to do was confidential the report i had to do was confidential they didn't know i did a report on them so but that that was a part of it and we had some pretty serious the racial par problems were starting so was a drug problem you know the drug problem was beginning to come into being so were you given any special training on how to handle those issues once your superiors realize that was a problem the drug issue the race issue not not really the only thing i would tell you is when i had my ig inspection my battalion commander was lieutenant colonel and and one of the problems i had was a haircut you may remember the afro haircut was a big thing and uh i would send you know black soldiers go get a haircut well he'd go get a haircut and he'd let him just take nib off it i'd tell them go get another haircut well you know the barber didn't cut it free he had to pay every time he went that that was the biggest issue i had going on at the time and only thing i can tell you is when when the ig finished with me i think we passed our ig with flying colors but but i told him about i said this is kind of issues i have to deal with all i can tell you is he sent me out i had i had an office about the size of this he sent me out of the office and he sat down with my battalion commander and they had a discussion and i i don't know what they talked about you know the problem didn't necessarily go away i mean it was still there you know i i left that command in the summer of i think july of 1970 and you know it from there it got worse as you may well know you know so okay we'll continue on with where you went well when i left there i went i went to went to my advanced course that was my next thing it went to fort eustis for that and of course they were they hadn't started the reduction in force yet but it was just around the corner and the truck company commander next door i remember he was a tc guy and that was where i was supposed to go when i first went there but you know i i didn't i ended up doing something else for a while and he and i both were ocs graduates and we started taking college courses i started taking courses from savannah state university and took college courses from the university of georgia extension and then went to the advanced course and we were an advanced course a part of our curriculum was to take courses if you had a degree you had to take advanced courses if you didn't have a degree you had to take undergraduate courses and they had a contract with william and mary in williamsburg virginia and i took courses from there and then when i graduated from my advanced course i asked to go to school that's when they let me go get a degree we moved down to fort monroe and we i lived at fort monroe and i went to at that time it was hampton institute it was a predominantly black university but i think at one time we had close to 200 army and air force officers there who were getting undergraduate degrees and so i got my degree there and that's when they i thought i was going to vietnam and they called me one day and says you don't have to go to vietnam if you got if you haven't made plans you can't change i said i can change any plans so i they they offered me uh fort sam houston texas and fort bliss texas and i said well fort sam i like better next day the guy i had a civilian assignment officer at that time not not a military most of my assignment officers always military he called me back the next day and says oh no the one that at fort sam houston was filled yesterday well in officer vernacular somebody looked in my record no i don't want that guy you know so they offered me fort bliss i went to fort bliss when i walked into fort bliss the personnel officer said what are you doing here i said i don't know i suppose you're supposed to have a job farming well they had no transportation jobs you know there were no transportation jobs at fort bliss and and at the same time the third acr was moving from fort lewis to fort bliss and what's the acr uh armored cav regiment it's it's it's a separate unit it's a brigade size army huge unit and actually i made a trip out there and a little side story my first encounter with the back in those days you know you were having the hijackings of planes and they had the fbi agents right they they were doing the things they were in the airports and i walk in i take my family to atlanta i'm flying out to fort bliss to get a house i want to get ahead of these guys get a house because you know we're not going to be there for another almost month and i go into atlanta airport and and they tell me i was randomly picked but you know obviously i had this little briefcase i'm flying to el paso you know war is crossed the border this fbi agent calls me over to the side and first thing he sees is my haircut and he said you military guy and i said yeah he said can i see your id card that was the end of the interview you know so but anyway we moved to fort bliss and uh at first i was in an air defense artillery group with three or four other captains with no job really i mean but right after i got there they had the first rift and they thinned them out and let me back up a minute when i was doing my degree at that time in the army we had a reserve system and a regular army system if you're a regular army you're like a tenured professor they can't they can't get rid of you you know you got tenure so but it's very competitive so i put in to become a regular army officer and i was approved i became a regular army officer but right after i got to fort bliss if i hadn't been a regular army officer i'd have been cannon fodder like these other guys the first rift they had all of a sudden there was nobody left but the s4 and me but i'd been there a short time and then one of the battalion commanders he had a guy i don't i had this knack of replacing guys that get fired he was firing a guy and he wanted to hire me and i became the s4 of a chaparral vulcan battalion as i wrote in my little notes here that was the one time i was kind of a fish out of water you know i didn't i i you know i was totally out of my field so to speak but i learned a little bit about missiles and that sort of thing you know but uh i wasn't there that long because i kept they kept us on the move matter of fact my assignment officer called me one time to tell me he's reassigned me and then called me back next day and says well i can't move you yet you haven't been there long enough so but then you had to have a sense of humor right well yeah but my next assignment was they did call me in december of of uh 73 and says you're going to korea that was my first trip to korea but in route we're going to you're going to be a race relations officer because the racial thing had come undone by this point the department of defense had established the defense race relations institute at patrick air force base that was only a good thing it was in the wintertime it's nice and warm at patrick you know it's next to the space center so i went to that course and was trained there for that course was two months long and then specifically to go to korea to be a race relations officer and of course right at that time was when all the problems the air force had problems the navy probably had the most serious problems they had people getting beat with chains on ships you know and it was a black white thing you know and then the racial unrest in the country was going on so it was going on in the military as well just before i got to korea they had a group of black soldiers that attempted to march on and take over the division headquarters and uh about the time i got there we had a general in the army at the time his name was emerson is he went by the name of hank and he was a patent sort of guy you know and when he got over there he started the most rigorous exercise program that i ever that i encountered during my 26 years during my whole 26 years there was physical training and no physical training and extreme physical training and none but they were running these guys five and ten miles in the morning so and what we had happen in korea was like a lot of place here in the states when he went out the gate all the black soldiers went to the right and all the white soldiers went to the left and just as i got there he had just gotten there and he says there ain't gonna be no more separation they just told all the korean businesses and bars on the north side you're out of business we move it all over here they forced them together but we had some still had some pretty tough times i did that for one year uh and after that year they'd probably assigned me again but i says no one year's enough and it was kind of a twofold job you had the role for the commander just like an ig any soldier that thought he has been discriminated against black or white or any other race could come complain to you and you had to investigate it just like the iig did of course the other part of it they implemented a very rigid i think it was 16 hours of mandatory training we had every person had to undergo 16 hours two days of training on racial sensitivity and and over time you know it got it got somewhat better but it it took a while to for us to get through that and then on top of that going back up a little bit when i was at fort bliss they ended the draft as you well know and we went to the all-volunteer army and my battalion commander went to the commanding general and said sir if you'll give me 150 of the last draftees i'll take them and train them so that battalion that i served in there for about a year we brought in 150 or so of the last draftees and we trained them of course one of the problems the army had during that period this was an army-wide thing the recruiting of the all-volunteer force at first there was a lot of graft and corruption they moved a lot of officers into the recruiting command because uh you know recruiters were under extreme to rest to bring people into the army and you know they were manufacturing diplomas and they were disposing of criminal records and and all this those things like that in order to to meet their quota you know so but uh and some of the soldiers during that early period were somewhat marginal as well but uh over time you know i mean we worked our way through that so that that was another thing did you find say over the next i don't know 10 years or so that once the all-volunteer army had been established and was set that the racial and drug issues got less severe or about the same but did you see any change well i i didn't serve with troops that much in the latter part of my career my assignment in korea in 74 and 75 the troops were smoking so much pot uh i used to play golf we had a little nine hole golf course that had two sets of tees to make it a simulated 18 whole golf course and there was a little river hedgerow thing in the middle of it there was so many peop so many gis smoking pot in that hedgerow that you get high playing golf and uh the uh i was in the division support command i was a race relations officer for the the commander the division support command and uh our i guess it was like our headquarters company the finance guys and all these special guys were in there the story i never went into barracks you know i lived in a boq building but they said they had to run the exhaust fans to pump the the uh marijuana smoke out so yeah it got this was 74.75 and uh from from the re the rest of my career i was in a major headquarters or at a major installation and i never had a lot to do with troops anymore i can't truly tell you when it got better i'm sure there's still some of it there you know i hear a lot of talk about you know they got these rigid rules about synthetic drugs so you know i guess they're still they're still dealing with illness tell us whatever you'd like to tell us about your tours in korea your experience there well as far as overseas areas it my first tour i was in the second infantry division and and i was up near the dmz and you know we were pretty remote course we had a fairly large town right outside we weren't that far from seoul we we got to go to seoul occasionally but the korean people were very friendly and had quite a bit of interaction with the korean people so i would say of overseas i alaska was overseas for me if you didn't live in alaska it was overseas uh i served in france you know 20 years after world war ii ended and uh you know the the normal the average french person was very friendly toward us we had a parade once in the city of tours which was a big city and we weren't in our combat gear helmets and all that and i remember the older french people running out into the into the formation to hug us as we're trying to march down the street that was the french you know of course we got thrown out you know two years after i left there we were tossed out but in korea the people were very friendly and then my second tour in korea i was that was right at the end of my my 26 years the year before my 26th year i was stationed in seoul so a lot more interaction with the with korean people our secretaries were korean we had korean staff members i was a part of the joint headquarters there and uh you know you we we're right in the middle of seoul so you know that that that was a the korean people were very interested very friendly they became a little more antagonistic i went over for brian's promotion in 2001 i think it was and uh that was the only time i went back to korea i never went back to vietnam by the way and i have no desire to go back my good lieutenant friend i became friends with who served with me there he and his son went back about five years ago he sent me the pictures they toured the places the whole country of south vietnam but i don't have any desire to go back there but but in korea would have been my favorite assignment i did go to the middle east tdy a number of times talk about that a little bit yeah in my last assignment i was back at fort mcpherson at third army and uh we were the middle east force we were part of the central command at mcdill in tampa and at that time this was before the first gulf war i i retired in 87 so i was out before the first gulf war the uh we did an exercise one year in egypt we were supposed to do it in country we were supposed to go to sudan one year because that whole area was ours but they were having a horrible famine and sudan so we never went there the exercises i did were in egypt and then the alternating years we did exercises in california mainly southern california but all over california and i was a transportation planter you're playing in the airlift the sea left and here in the states you do some rail lift but that's what i did in my last years i went to i was at third army at fort mcpherson i got there in 83 and in 85 i got sent to korea for a one year assignment with the understanding left my family for while i was there they stayed right in the same house in atlanta went to korea for a year came back to the same job that i'd left and spent my last year in that same job so when you were stationed at fort mcpherson did you live in any of those houses no never never lived i never lived on post at mcpherson the first when i was first assigned there 75 to late 77 a force's command had just been formed they'd split you know the training and doctrine command at fort monroe into two things forces command and tradoc i was fairly i got there when forces command was brand new i was a captain i was promoted to major while i was there but one interesting thing i was still as a captain in major i was the most junior officer there those headquarters are staffed with lieutenant colonels and colonels you know and that's both good and bad i mean you know you're you're a rookie so you get to make rookie mistakes but at the same time you know you're working with guys all everybody's senior to you you know there's nobody junior to you know there's no lieutenants here you're always looking up right you're looking up yes [Laughter] so when did you leave the military left on august 31st of 1987 and i was uh actually left about two i think two or two and a half weeks before that because i had some terminal leave okay and uh 26 excuse me we left and we moved to memphis my wife had already taken a job in memphis and brian and i and we had a little dog named corky and back in those days you could do what they call a ditty move you do it yourself that's what it stood for and of course i wasn't sure where i was going to end up and i stored about half my household goods it's kind of weird how these things come in circles my household goods were stored in athens georgia for some reason don't ask me why but we took the rest of it in a truck brian and i went to move to memphis tennessee and i don't know was it i think a week or one week excuse me one week later i took brian to vmi to drop him off and uh and uh then uh he was there for the next four years and of course our older son was at georgia tech here so i left one here in atlanta and he stayed with his grandparents in the summer course he lived at georgia tech while he's going to school and one of the nice things i got to do after i was retired was uh i commissioned both of my sons as officers in the air force so that had to be two proud moments yeah and and of course mike they're two years apart mike was commissioned two years uh ahead of brian but he uh uh he didn't go on active duty until about three months before brian they went on well before brian got commissioned brian had to wait a year before he went on active duty but uh they both uh didn't when brian graduated uh after his four years i also commissioned him so wow pretty pretty happy proud papa yes and uh tell us about anything you would like to share and have preserved on this uh and the story about what you did after you got out of the military in addition to what you've talked about just anything after i retired we went to memphis and uh my wife did a couple of different jobs there and uh we we lived there for 12 years and then i uh about three i guess three years before we moved back here i went to work for ibm and ibm closed our place in memphis and my wife being from atlanta they offered to move us here we moved back here to kennesaw and we lived here in kennesaw for the next 15 years and i worked for ibm until about three four months before i turned 65 and i retired and i bought a motor home actually before i retired the first one and we started traveling and of course our older son served four years in the air force he served all four years at norton air force base in san bernardino but he never returned he moved to the silicon valley and he's been working for computer companies ever since he still still lives there but we drove that first motor home after we retired about 40 000 miles and then we bought a big motor home which we still have we've driven it 50 000 miles we've been i guess all 50 states in the in the two motorhomes we've been to i think all the national parks except two we're going to do those this year olympic and cascades we've been to all the others we've been to some of them numerous times my favorite is is arches i've been there a mere four times we've been to the south rim of the grand canyon twice to the north rim once we've driven all the interstates east and west we've driven now driven two or three of the of the old highways like highway 50 and and we drove highway 50 all the way from shoals indiana to uh all the way to reno nevada and we've actually driven it over the mountain through into sacramento as well through lake tahoe coming this way so we've had we've had got to do a lot of fun things when brian was at cal berkeley we spent all four winters there we were there when our grandson was born and spent six months out of the year there and and in about a little over a month we're gonna head out that way for maybe one final time i don't know i'm not sure well you you've lived life to the fullest have you yes sir we have and and owe a lot of it to the army you know what what the army did for me and and the army is a part of our bigger government and what the government you know collectively did for me and without getting too political i don't have any reason to take my government back it's been pretty good you know that's well said yeah and and i had a good career you know i think the the the good part of it all is is that we uh both my sons and i we served we've served collectively 50 years 26 20 and 4 for a total of 50. we all came out in the way we went in a lot probably a lot better persons all three of us we didn't get hurt we didn't get injured and for that we're i'm very thankful because as you well know we have a lot of guys that aren't with us today and and a lot of them that are here were get severely injured and you know we haven't we haven't had to suffer through any of that so it was it's been very good to us you know and and i don't know that i would have ever went into the army if i hadn't been drafted and i was 23 going on 24 when i got drafted and uh the uh i made a lot of friends through the years and uh one little quick story of my my bunk mate for my two years when i was a draftee at fort knox a little german guy came over from germany when he was a teenager went to high school here he was a draftee we lived together for two years best of friends i hadn't seen him since december of 1963 and in the spring of 2004 uh i spent the weekend with him some 40 years after we had served and uh you know pretty special but at the same time uh back when i was in in a at fort knox when i was a draftee uh you become good friends with people because we lived in open bays we didn't have rooms and uh i remember that there were six or eight of us at every meal we all gathered around the same table you know we'd have to make room for six guys or eight guys around a four-man table because we were friends and we did things together but except for that one person uh i've never met any of those people since the day i last saw him in 1963. now i do occasionally run into an officer or two that that i knew here you know and and one other thing i had a unique career in that i had uh four assignments with one general that i worked for i worked for them in three of those four assignments one of them i didn't work for him i supported him and kind of the moral of this story was when i when i went to work for him he was a one star and i was a major and i retired as a major and he retired as a lieutenant general but he always treated me with dignity and respect and i think he appreciated the work i did because i could be in a room full of colonels when we'd be in a meeting he would always ask me my opinion i could give him my honest opinion and amazingly none of the colonels ever bothered me whether it was in agreement with what they said or not [Laughter] well that's a good leader to have sheer following right i want to be sure before we finish that you get a chance to show us anything in these particularly your picture oh okay sure in these books and while you're looking i also want to give sue and brian a chance to ask any questions that they want to ask i have to hold it up a little bit all right and point if you can put your finger mr stone on where you are there you are that way yeah awesome okay is there anything else in either one of those binders or books on the table that you want to show you don't have to but if there's something you want let me just give you just a second here these were books that were done this one was done when i was a race relations office this one was on my last tour i don't know what it is about vietnam about korea they they do these books it's kind of an annual thing and i'll tell you what why don't we do i got the other one here when i was uh i'm going to leave this book with her so she can oh okay although we can do that i taught school for a year too i i skipped over that i was a high school rotc instructor for a year but not a very memorable experience i had just left the army and i was in memphis tennessee okay and uh wasn't a very great school it was an okay school there were worse schools than one i was in but i'd left an environment where you didn't tell i never had to tell people what do you ask them to do it and they did it and uh this was an environment when you asked him to do something they always said why why why do you want me to do that you know quite a change and i couldn't deal with it so i i was there for a year and i decided life is too short but i have a tremendous respect for teachers and and professional educators and principals and what they do you know what they have to do for a living you know is there anything else before we finish that you would like to say or put on the record one other thing i would say i think my enlisted experience i was an enlisted person for four years and you know i went from private to e5 i think that was very instrumental during my time as far as uh understanding soldiers you know from the ground up i think that that's probably one of the probably the most important things i learned because young soldiers have to do a lot of grunt work that's not very pleasant but when you've been there and done that you know you i think you have a better understanding of it and uh i don't know i'm one of those guys today i think the young soldiers airmen marines uh sailors and coast guardsmen uh they're so much probably better qualified than we were in our day they're a lot smarter and we travel today we stay at military bases all the time and you know they're they're very smart articulate and they have a lot of young ladies that you know we had very few women in the service in my time but when you go in the gate you know they they see your id card and it says you're an officer and you know they salute you very crisply and and of course my attitude about that is the the return salute is more important than them saluting you you know but i i in recent years since we retired brian mentioned this early in his interview do you miss it well i moved away from it you know i was here in atlanta i moved away so i got away from it i wasn't anywhere close to it anymore but since we've been traveling you know i we've been i've been back with it and and when you're in an rv park on a military base who's there you know they're either active or most of them are retirees so you're you're back to it again you know so that that's been a big plus i would say it brings back a lot of good memories doesn't it right yeah yeah yeah in fact i went to uh they had the first ocs reunion in 2014 up at louisville kentucky for people who attended ocs at fort knox and amazingly very few of these ocs graduates stayed in the military they served two years most of them got out but it was a lot of fun to go back i was the only member of my class that was there but uh you know there they were probably i think there were like 2 000 3 000 officers trained in this program at fort knox and uh we're having another reunion this year in san antonio and i'll be planning to go to that on the way home from our trip so well i can't tell you how much we appreciate you coming in here and telling your story i mean you you're a definite self-made man almost like the american dream i mean you were true a sharecropper yeah and yeah you worked worked your way up yeah didn't just get a high school education you got your college degree right true got a master's i mean that's and i and one of one other side note i've worked on when computers came out we bought a computer right away we had one right from the beginning and and my uh in my uh last tour in korea the army had just bought all kinds they bought computers and plotters and they bought stuff we had absolutely no use for but i was the guy that knew the most about computers so i got even more training that's how i ended up working for ibm you know i did some other things i didn't mention that in between i uh i worked some uh i did a number of different jobs i taught school for a year i worked in in a computer environment for one or two years and i worked worked into retail sales for a year or two mainly associated with computers but the training that i had received while i was in the army was instrumental in allowing me to do that you know well you obviously have a lot of talents and i think leadership is one of the stronger ones obviously from what you've done and um i mean just the fact that you've continued to live an exciting life after you got out of the military and after you retired you're seeing 50 states and you're all over the country and i mean you're living life to the fullest yeah and uh what you yeah i just wish everybody in america could get to see just some of the national parks i mean how many people have never seen any of them you know right you're so right that's they're they're beautiful and you're right every american should see them of course you know ken burns is uh doing the vietnam movie uh hoping i don't croak before i really want to see his take on that i mean he did a great job on the world war ii and a lot of other things but i think it's supposed to come out next year is what i'm reading i think a little bit behind schedule but i read somewhere recently where it's going to be like seven or eight parts of two hours each that'll be interesting to watch from our perspective yeah yeah well thank you again so much and thank you for what you've done for our country i mean you served our country for a long time and and uh i can't thank you enough for what you've done for the country and what you did today coming in here and telling your story sure thank you thank you

Channel: Atlanta History Center

Views: 3,358

Rating: 4.3600001 out of 5

Keywords: Veteran (Profession), Atlanta History Center (Museum), Library of Congress Veterans History Project

Id: tRsAD6FYFX8

Length: 92min 42sec (5562 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021