Combat Story (Ep 6) : Dr. Clyde Horn Purple Heart Recipient | Vietnam Infantryman | Author

and it was hell on earth we got choppers coming in with rockets and all this other kind of stuff that's going on i'm about three feet away from one of my buddies and all of a sudden i hear this crap and he had gotten shot right through the head he falls backwards his eyes are open he's looking straight out and i am just speechless i don't think anyone understands freedom like soldiers welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugit and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interviewed some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story on this episode we hear the combat story of dr clyde horn a former army infantryman purple heart recipient and vietnam veteran he served in the 199th light infantry brigade fighting in the iron triangle from 67 to 68 and supported u.s forces during the tet offensive he was the quintessential vietnam era infantryman who volunteered to serve in some of the most dangerous conditions only to return to berkeley california to a polarizing situation in the u.s after the military he helped children suffering from trauma as a psychotherapist and has written two books on the veteran experience enjoy all right clyde thanks for uh taking the time to share your story sure i wanted i've been thinking a lot about how to start this and most of the people that i interview are from the iraq afghanistan era and so i'm well acquainted with what it was like 911 at that time the feelings that we had going into that that war but i'm less less familiar with the vietnam era before going in into that war so i i was hoping you could take us back to a year or two before you ended up in vietnam before you even probably had an idea that you were going in right to give some context around where you were um how how your family viewed this war right the context around the the country at the time and how you viewed it going in sure well um i was in college right when um i decided i was going to go to vietnam but prior to that i had been working on my own every summer to make money to go to college my family was a military family my father was a career air force soldier and and he was not real interactive with the family he worked a lot he was a ham radio operator he did a lot of things and also he was a very angry man and part of his anger came from the fact that he grew up as a kid without a father and he was the oldest and so he had to drop out of school and take care of the family and work jobs and so forth and so on and he wasn't very prepared to be a parent but regardless of that he became one and so what i learned through that experience was i needed to be self-motivated in order to get through and accomplish things i want because i was pretty much told basically not there's no way i could ever go to college they just couldn't afford it and so forth so regardless of that i found ways to make money and i ordered the money away without them knowing about it and i got a job at a machine shop through an uncle who was the most significant male figure in my life he took an interest in me he knew i was sports oriented an athlete he was a semi-pro football player and he was a dock worker in the oakland docks and he jet his eyes would light up whenever he would see me and he would take me for rides in his beat up truck and he he i he allowed me to do some work in factories where he cleaned and stuff like that and he got me a job at a machine shop in my senior year in high school i made more money than my family made wow doing that job and i was able to cover my first year in college and also i had the gi bill um when i came back from vietnam but not before yeah right so so i went to college and college was the same thing it was you have to study um but i also had to work i worked three jobs going through college i was young i didn't care whether i got sleep or not i was sleepy tired most of the time anyway at the second year i decided i need a break vietnam war just came out i'm going to make my contribution i'm going to do it so what year is that that was 1960 it was right at the end of 1966 and then in 1967 i uh got inducted i went and did it without telling anyone even your uncle even my uncle well and um and then um what happened was um the family was in disarray and they were shocked and you know all that kind of stuff and uh but you know i went and this was early so 66 is early in terms of when the vietnam war takes place the vietnam war was was already taking place a number of years before that but yeah and but it was heating up in that time and of course what i didn't realize is that that actually when i got to vietnam we were close to the tet offensive and those kind of things that i also survived somehow but uh the the interesting thing about it was i went through boot camp very easily i was an athlete i just sailed through it they sent us though from california because fort ward was full to fort polk louisiana and i went to tigerland it was called tigerland the advanced infantry training group and that was an eye-opener even though it wasn't vietnam it was probably the most realistic terrain to what you were going to find yourself i would imagine especially compared to fort ord yeah yeah and um so all the training we did and all that kind of stuff was was quite interesting i learned that that the basics really that every soldier learns one is don't volunteer for anything until you know unless you want to be known and if you're known you're in trouble so yeah and um and when when i got off the bus they had us put all our clothes in a duffel bag we got a duffel bag the the the drill sergeants came and they said dump all your clothes on the ground we dumped all our clothes on the ground is this basic training or is this advanced this is advanced okay and i and i um i had a book on existentialism that i was reading and the drill sergeant comes up and he goes we don't allow pornography in here okay i'm in trouble and that was you know and they didn't have there was no rules in other words they'd get us up any time in the morning and take us on 10-mile walks my hikes whatever uh we wore combat boots who were backpacks we didn't have tennis shoes uh we couldn't say no yeah it was you do it or you die i mean basically you know were the drill instructors veterans at that time uh i could not tell unless i saw them in their dress uniforms and a few were but most weren't just or not it was really interesting too because what i found out later coming back from vietnam was that a lot of the people who did the teaching and stuff weren't veterans they sent veterans oh they sent me when i got back to fort to um colorado to get in apcs and run around the snow i was a jungle expert i mean i could have really made a contribution okay but anyway that's that's the way it was so just i'd like to back up to something you said about um so you're in your first year of college which you saved the money up to do right you're working three jobs just to be there right and clearly it's important to you that you are there so when you say that you wanted to to do your part and serve where did that come from especially if it sounds like your family was not right the same of the same yeah mindset well i grew up with military kids yeah and and we you know we didn't uh become best friends with that kind of thing i mean i had kids i called my best friends but then we'd move away and there's no way to make content okay yeah they have cell phones and stuff like that so and the phones at that time were third-party lines you know they weren't just you could pick up a phone and call anyone you wanted to you had to compete with the neighbors and stuff so um so i really didn't have the connections that stayed um through you know lifelong friendships and uh but i grew up patriotic i grew up realizing that the military made a contribution i lived all over the world and i saw us do good things it wasn't just war it was helping communities it was building things for little towns and villages i mean it was significant stuff we did that empowered other nations that that helped the poor and and it also taught me um insight that i didn't understand you know consciously but but there was no prejudice you you were a human being to me you weren't anything else you could be a good person a bad person i had no didn't matter what your skin or your color was what your religion was or anything else i mean i grew up in that kind of a that's where i think it took me later in life to understand how powerful living that kind of life as a kid was seeing the rest of the world understanding kids from different different cultures um as i became a teenager and moved to the south i couldn't understand the south i had what is going on here why why are the african-americans in a separate dining hall from us yeah i was like what's going on i couldn't you know it was astonishing to me yeah um but it was what it was yeah okay one of the other things that i wanted to ask because i i i remember when i was deciding what branch i wanted to go into my thought of the infantry was heavily weighted in like what vietnam looked like and this was pre-911 we've had desert storm but really i just remember hearing and seeing stories about vietnam right i'm curious and in my mind it's people in the jungle kind of the way that i think your story plays out what did you envision vietnam would look like before you went right if you can even remember what that was like but did you have this idea of here's here's what my life would be like if i'm in vietnam right well for one thing i was not the gung-ho uh person i'm going to go out and take you know well you had the existentialism yeah i did i did yeah but but i also felt like you know i i i mean at that time i believe that that vietnam was not a civil war i thought that that truly if vietnam was taken over by the communists that they would really look at taking over all of southeast asia still part of me believes that this day and and so i thought politically that was a good move on my part as well uh to make contribution to democracy in a place that was being taken over they didn't want to be taken over although you know there was corrupt stuff going on both sides north and the south but regardless of that that kind of helped motivate my thinking in terms of why i wanted to be involved in it and i wanted to be i wanted to be part of the military that fought not part of the military that was an infrastructure as valuable as i think the infrastructure was we needed that as much as we did the combat stuff yeah but what made you want to be in the combat arms side is that the athleticism background i think so um i also kind of wanted to see what was like i had no clue you see war movies and stuff like that i didn't believe them but yeah but you know i thought um i just i can't put words to it yeah yeah it was just there in me and your vision of an infantryman at the time was it pretty accurate to what you ended up experiencing or was it more based on what you had seen or heard from korea world war ii like right what did that in your mind before you went well for one thing it it was nothing like i thought in my mind you know you just cannot imagine the danger until you're in it you just can't it's not even comprehensible for me to try to give some rational explanation to it it is so mind-boggling and so traumatic in terms of your first experiences of what's going on and my mantra became from uh not the first day but after i got into combat because first day we just landed in vietnam they took us through indoctrination and gave us our weapons and all that kind of stuff then assigned us to units and then we went into the field but it was it was the the mantra was i'm gonna wake up and my mantra is i'm not gonna die i'm not gonna die i'm not gonna die i said it three times to myself every day every day when you woke up every day when i woke up because i was seeing so much death i was seeing so many people die and in my unit some of the people that i saw die told me that they were going to die wow and even though i tried to talk them out of that kind of thinking uh you're being negative you're you know you're setting yourself up you know to do something you shouldn't do and all those kind of things yeah they didn't hear it now so this is a great segue into combat i want to touch real quickly on the amount of training you had before you went in so you did basic you did advanced at polk how many weeks are we talking at that point in time because that's 66 getting you set to go in 67 yeah they needed to get people in right so how much training did you feel you got what was it like well i think it was four months of training four months between the two basic and uh advanced infantry um and um i don't think the training meant anything uh well that's not true it taught me uh about weapons and how to use weapons and and all those kind of things but but it did not in any way prepare me for what i was going to learn on my own how to be aware and focused on where tripwire might be yeah how to set up a claymore mine how to listen in certain ways for the way nature changes sounds all those kind of subtleties that you don't think about right in general okay yeah so it's almost it doesn't matter if you had seven months that's right because really it wasn't geared towards what you were about to get into at that time it was information and it was good information but that was yeah yeah yeah so let's then transition into you going into combat and before we do that i know you're in the iron triangle so i wanted to take a moment to make sure that we can scope out where that was right um and then also i think probably depending on when you arrived and i want to talk about that but you're you're in the ted offensive effectively so also a description of when that hit in your tour because of that certainly played a a significant role in your experience there so if we if we start out with the iron triangle my understanding it's north of saigon right that's kind of the the southernmost boundary saigon river is kind of the western boundary right and then the tin river maybe yes on the eastern side and that triangle is effectively held by um the vietnam in both that war with the french they that was a stronghold for them yeah does that sound and please don't feel free to provide more that's correct i mean one of the interesting things is they did not want any of us who were enlisted to know anything where in some units they let you know where you were going and you could look at the maps i only looked at maps when we were out on ambushes and and so uh i had to kind of guess where we were by the way the hueys were flying us and and uh and later i confirmed it that we were in the iron triangle and we were in the part of the ho chi minh trail that came down into the south and so all of the the um infrastructure that they'd built up with the french was still in place so they had they had bunker complexes they had tunnel complexes they had all that kind of stuff there and that that solved the mystery for me is where did they go yeah they were gone you know you're there you're fighting and you know and then you're bringing in extra forces to support you and they're gone and very rarely did we ever find a dead soldier wow yeah so so that's the iron triangle and that's i think where a lot of what we're about to talk about takes place and then if i understand it correctly is it about halfway through your tour the ted offensive begins in january of 68 is that right yeah maybe a little bit longer than half um i was wounded in december of uh 66 and uh 67 or 66 67 60 67 you're right 67 and uh and then all right so let's back to what you had mentioned you kind of arrive in vietnam you go through indoctrination you assign your weapons you're then assigned to the 199th right light infantry yes based out of the saigon area it was the uh uh the main base in saigon um you know what i'm blocking the name well i'll add it later yeah um could you talk to me about the rotation cycle you're on and then the first time you actually go into a mission sure um we um we began um for for about a month and a half um being sent out around saigon on the rice paddy dikes looking for any signs of viet cong activity and and so we walked the dikes and that's where i learned booby trap expertise and um and we had german shepherds that were useless points that would sniff out and if they didn't sniff out they were blown up so by virtue of uh you know walking in swamps as well as the rice paddies sometimes you couldn't walk on the dice you had to walk in the rice paddies you had to look for glint for for the sun bouncing off certain things and and then you also had to look for something that was not natural to the environment and um and so it didn't take me long besides that we had experienced people that we're going to rotate out that we're saying okay watch this look there focus over this direction and that kind of stuff in the mix of that we had people that were just sloppy uh it's a great day i'm you know soldier the rifle over the soldier shoulder and yeah yeah and it didn't take me long to know don't be around people like that so on your do you recall even your first patrol that you went out on and i do how did that feel like this is your first experience in combat right well um they they get you to cluster up in in a we would go out as a whole company but generally we cluster up in squads and so you cluster up in a squad and then you would wait for maybe an hour two hours three hours for a chopper to come pick you up to take you out there so the anticipation was almost choking the first few times it wouldn't be the army if you didn't have to you want to make sure you got the full experience absolutely right there was never an extra it's sort of like the airlines today there's never an explanation whether it's a delay you know so basically you're sitting there the squad is what is it about eight people eight people the squad would generally fill up one chopper yeah and and so and you would sit on the chopper with your feet hanging out you know and clustered in together and stuff so um so the anticipation was you know was really anxiety provoking um we would all be sweating you know we'd be laughing about some joke somebody would make or whatever you know or this is like the army yeah let's move like cows i mean all the kind of stuff you do in the army and um we'd just be silly you know goofy and you remember sitting there for that first oh movement you better believe i do what was going through your head i wonder if i'm going to live today yeah and i hadn't even been in combat right [Laughter] yeah and and so when when we did get on the chopper it was an experience being on a chopper and and you know it comes takes off and it's just going like crazy and you're just going wow you know you're seeing underneath you and everything else and when we come to the lz and we land i had about two weeks to three weeks of shooting mortars from when we set up in the lz area and then the rest of the group would go out into the jungle oh that's right because i was a mortarman so when you your first experience was you get in you stay at the lz right and you were receiving the radio calls for mortar fire right and it's you and how many people with you there i had three three guys i was the head mortar man and then we had one guy that would put in the wow yeah bullets and stuff so that was two two to three weeks that was your first yeah and were you firing mortars during that time i was because we had large open areas that we would bunker in and they'd come out of the jungle and bunker in the bunkers and of course we had to dig out the bunkers so it's not like yeah yeah and and then we set up a perimeter with with the safety zone and that kind of stuff and uh and so we were generally shooting mortars a little left to where our little right to where the the uh patrols were going and um you never knew what you were hitting or not you know yeah you were getting radio calls in for the direction we get real calls in we get adjustments or sometimes we would have um officers would are flying over and chopper and say shoot in this direction or that direction yeah that kind of stuff yeah so yes and so if i understand correctly you guys are out in in enemy territory right you've got four people right and you have to somehow protect yourself and run ops whenever you get a call in for three weeks well we did have a radio man too yeah but you're in a single location yes yes yeah yeah that must have been yeah i didn't even think about it yeah that's how you mentioned it at least the other people are moving i mean i know they're moving looking for contact that's true yeah but you're stationary they've got to know where you are and you're delivering rounds on them yeah so okay but no contact at least that first contact two to three weeks but but then you know the decision was made um [Music] it's not going to work you know just everybody be in the jungle yeah they said forget the mortars yeah it's not good interesting so you kind of went in thinking i'm going to be doing this mortarman roll who knows you know i didn't know i i thought maybe a combination of both who knows what yeah what would happen and i didn't ask for my mls they just assigned it to me yeah yeah so so you get pulled out and i think i remember you describing your rotation cycle is two two weeks in right and then how long would you come out uh it depended it would be like uh three days or so in base camp out in saigon benoit area and we would get hot meals hot showers and we'd be able to sleep in a dormitory type room with a bit with a call it a bed and put a roof in a roof and they actually brought in entertainment from from america and also the outside so you hear live bands you can see like drive-in movies stuff like that do you remember who you saw play live by any chance um uh it was no one famous i heard a lot of uh i i heard a lot of bg music and uh and bob dylan and i'm surprised they let bob dylan yeah that's true but they did uh and um you know rock and roll was just really getting going and so there was a lot of the uh rock and roll stuff going on i do remember when i was in afghanistan we were at a medium-sized spa big enough to have an airfield but not a not a large airfield and we had uh toby keith the big country music center come out and i i just really admired the fact that he would come from the main bases right to at least something like ours didn't have a ton of people but it does like it really it's something when it breaks up the monotony of yeah combat operations to do something like that well one thing that just came in my head was um after i'd been in combat a while i got a call um that the the readyman came up to me says you gotta call they're gonna fly you back to saigon i said really how come they didn't say okay so i get flown back to saigon that says horn report to the airfield they're going to fly you to cameron bay okay another person was with me from my unit we had no idea we got in the chopper and the chopper was being flown blind he had a cover over his face he was doing instrument flight makes you feel really good so they flies cameron bay and then they say okay there's a jeep coming for you it's going to take you out to the airfield whatever you go out there what the hell lyndon johnson came in and i got to see lyndon johnson give us a talk really yeah and then i got to spend the night on the beach at cameron bay oh man how long have you been been in country at the time i would say at least four or five months yeah yeah wow that's pretty neat yeah did you get to shake his hand or anything no no you just didn't know audiences there was like 500 people or whatever yeah from i guess they got i don't know how i got picked i had no idea did they give you a new uniform or something so it looked like uh no no i just want whatever jumbo fatigues yeah so let's go back then the next i guess the next time you go in for your two-week um push into the field right squad sized element and you're actually moving through the jungle right and so what was that like compared to the mortarman experience the my first experience in the jungle was um kind of um it was an out-of-body experience almost it was like this is beautiful but this is dangerous and and of course there were animals you know there are armadillos and there were little things that would make noise and stuff like that and so you're always i mean you're so jumpy when you first get there you just you know you're not steady you're not focused as much as you need to be yes you're just you know like that and that's where that's where the beginning of anxiety starts to come that ended up staying with me the rest of my life yeah and literally the mission is i think search and destroy movement to contact like your job is to go find the enemy right and engage and this was this was an area of vietnam where they told us if you see anybody they're the enemy it's not you question them or anything else you kill them if you see anybody and this is dense forest you're not coming across villages out in like a farmland area we did have times when we came across villages but this was um my first experiences it was and and the jungle was so thick you could not see but two or three feet in front of you is that right yeah two to three feet there were parts of the generals that weren't but but my first experience it was so thick and so everyone carried a machete and you know and so you had to help you know cup the vegetation away to be able to move your legs what type of movement formation would you go in because you got a squad sized element were you in like a v formation were you in a line how did you it was a line most of the time this time was always a line and so there was a radio men at the end and one at the front so they were always keeping contact with each other about how the line was going and that kind of thing how far would you say there was distance between men within the line well it was generally four or five feet because you never wanted to bunch up that was a given uh particularly in the jungle i can't speak to other types of warfare but jungle warfare you never wanted to be together in a cluster um you were just too great and good of a target and ambushes were vicious uh they were waiting they had lines of fire all the time so you would be in crossfire anytime you came in an ambush uh so you could not if if you were clustered up you were annihilated as a cluster so who who was the senior person in that squad sized element like how long it how much experience would they have was it a squad leader would you sometimes have a platoon sergeant we had platoon sergeants and we had squad leaders and then we had the lieutenant our captain but i rarely ever saw a cap somebody this the rank of a captain in in combat it was mostly lieutenants and um and the lieutenants rotated every three months so we always had somebody new you know that did more of the administration and the reporting back and stuff like that but the seasoned veterans were the ones that that in my opinion were the leaders whether they had the rank or didn't have the right they're essentially making the decisions as you're moving yeah unless you were told by someone of a higher power that was flying over in a chopper that you needed to do x y and z yeah yeah and then would you you would rotate who's at point is that right we would and how long would you stay up at the point because i would imagine that if you're talking about the anxiety that has to be the pinnacle it is you would you would stay appoint the whole patrol for two weeks no for for one day for for a day so you always you always that point the whole day you're never relieved all right so let's let's now go to the first time you you were in contact essentially could you talk through how long have you been in country and what was happening what was it like right uh been in country um i don't remember how long i was in country um i have a blank on that maybe that's part of the memory loss that goes um but um uh we had walked into an ambush and it wasn't it wasn't a big uh unit that ambushed it was it was a small unit and so um so what happened was i was back in the middle of the pack at that time and then i heard machine gun fire and we got notice from from the radio wonder attack we're in an ambush um and so those of us that were in squads we started to flank one to the left one to the right from where the ambush was taking place so we could we could either try to outflank the ambush or uh uh get to a safer place basically and um and so when my squad got into a position then we we you make the adjustments um i hadn't learned all this you know it was like by skinning your teeth you need you need to be aware of where people are in your squad is there someone behind you is there there's someone out of line is there someone um too close you know i mean all those kind of things to the enemy all those kind of things you had to be aware of and so i was just beginning to take all this stuff in but the thing i did know is you wanted to get as flat to the ground as you can and and you wanted to have your your weapon at the ready and you wanted to look to see where the fire was coming from but you also wanted to scan above you to see if there were snipers in the tree or sniper fire coming because there was and and so one of the first things i learned is take out the snipers if you can and um and so my communication with the squad that i was in i wasn't the squad leader at that time was if you see a sniper let us know we'll all focus on that focus on the sniper and sure enough one of the my fellow soldiers saw the sniper and we all saw the sniper and then it stopped so we got sniper yeah and then then as we move forward and um and the machine gun fire did not stop it wasn't like they were reloading it's like they must have had multiple machine gunners yeah set up um and that's was my first experience with the the phosphorus on the end of the bullets that would come every fifth round we had in ours too but i'd never seen one come at me you're seeing death on a bullet coming straight at your head on fire and i was just like holy [ __ ] it's real so at this point it's real it's real it has become real yeah and if i could have dug a hole with my hands i would have but i got as close as the ground as i could because those rounds were just zooming by us and and and and so we engaged the enemy and and i would say after 10 15 minutes in this particular my first experience it was over and the enemy was gone had you moved so you hit the ground you're focusing on the sniper that's that is eliminated you're then focusing on on essentially the heavy fire had you moved at all or were you kind of still on the ground just trying to we had we had scurried up we used our elbows and stuff to kind of get closer so we get better sight again one of the lessons is you don't move back you always move forward and so that was what we did and um and we did that you know as a unit i still wasn't understanding how much danger there was behind me from my own yeah unit um and i was fortunate enough that you know there wasn't anything that happened from that but yeah i was reading a book by a former navy seal who describes a fratricide incident in iraq in 2006 but he retells a story from vietnam of seal team one that has fratricide in in an ambush yeah because they have a flanking maneuver taking place they're split and they just lost communication effectively and ended up shooting at each other and how easy that is yeah and that's and as you were describing it that was a team a seal team that had trained together and gone in you were literally hand-picked and dropped into a group of people who hadn't had a year or two of training together so you had to learn this literally whoever new is added to your squad yeah how do they maneuver how can you teach them quickly to stay online and and get with the program effectively yeah i mean um it it helped if if you recognize that um it which i did that education is a good thing it's a real good thing and never underestimate the things that you learn as being superficial you never know when you might need a bit of history or you might need some sense of direction or all those kind of things and and um and so i became a fast learner i wasn't the only one yeah the ones who didn't once again you know they they they may have lived through the war but i tell you a lot of the people that i involved that didn't learn were unwilling to learn didn't come home yeah so yeah thinking back to the end of that first fire fight so it's 15 minutes high intensity you're i assume you're yelling at each other to communicate yeah as soon as that's over what what was going through your mind like this this is your first contact that you'd had how did you process it well i mean i keep bringing up this mantra thing did it start there it well i i started before we went into the battle i will survive i will survive i didn't know if we would have contact or not but but this was i survived i survived yeah so you're telling yourself right you've done it yeah yeah and and also taking in the information what did i miss you know what what wasn't i thinking about and so forth and so on i missed a lot a lot that i learned later to implement into my tool chest so yeah i i remember coming back from one engagement and as a pilot you know i'd land at my nice secure airfield and i could like sit in my room at night and think you are in the field you just have contact you don't have that opportunity i mean you are now back at high alert right you're just in contact so i'm sure the next hour is probably even more intense um how how do you put that behind you and just keep focusing on the mission well uh uh you know once again i'm i'm learning i mean obviously whenever you're in a new situation it's like learning to swim or anything else there are perils to it and so forth i began to understand how my body was reacting it was starting to shut down on me i was shaking and i was starting to shut down on me and i felt cramping and my mind was buzzing and and so when we we pulled back to um more of a safer zone my thoughts were i've got to do things to help my body not overreact what can i do how can i do that once again another learning curve that that i needed to learn breathing better i needed to learn focus i mean just a lot of different things at the time what i didn't understand was that i think post-traumatic stress starts very early under traumatic circumstances and this was a traumatic circumstances and so the subtleties of are the symptoms of post-traumatic stress like of your hypersensitivity your your vision your hearing all the five senses and all that kind of stuff become acute and um so i would say that i began to learn at that point rather than have them [ __ ] me how could they help me and so that's when i began to use my hearing to hear for the enemy that's when i began to use my sight to see the enemy that's when i began to use my breathing to not panic and and to focus and that didn't take away the anxiety the anxiety is always there but that helped me tone the anxiety down to where i could function and function in a productive way i had never seen in my year in combat anyone that was a stone cold killer never to hollywood for that it didn't happen in my experience in war uh you you sometimes came back and you cried and after a good full minutes of crying okay yeah you need to do that it just whatever whatever it was whatever kind of emotions that were overwhelming you you couldn't do it well you could but you shouldn't do it when you were in a combat live situation you had to contain it and then when you were able to throw up it was a good thing and nobody came to another person i never did i never saw any of my fellow soldiers come to me and say oh you're a crybaby or you know you know or that that kind of stuff yeah it was never a put down it was if you then fast forward to some of the harder engagements that you found yourself in once once you had kind of finely tuned some of those senses right maybe you could talk about some of those i know that and i should what i wanted to say is you were describing that you are a psychotherapist by training so like when you are describing ptsd and those feelings it it's uh it comes from a lot of experience um that academically and personally yeah it's worth noting yeah um but if we go to some of the engagements that you found yourself in where you were more finely tuned maybe leading some of those i know that you were injured at one point and then you lost i think it was five five soldiers there were six that that were lost in the in uh various units that i belonged i mean various companies that i belonged in um i was present with the majority of them that were killed so maybe if you could talk about one of those experiences that one of the particularly challenging sure engagements you found yourself here um we had we had gone to the aid of one of the the companies in the 199th i was in echo company um i don't remember if it was bravo or as alpha but but it was one of those companies that had um gotten into a serious ambush we weren't far from them and we were called to aid them and so um we went to them and it was a regiment that was the enemy the enemy was a regiment and we were maybe i don't know two or three companies were you airlifted in or were you close enough to move through we were airlifted from where we were and we dropped in we went up and it was hell on earth um you know we we called up and there were um there were dead soldiers there were dead bodies there were there were inexplicable sights and and the sound of explosions and the smell of gunfire and graphite and and the smoke and it was just almost overwhelming and so fire started coming at us i mean it was like we all hit the ground and we're all spreading out now i'm beginning to look behind me to see if anybody's behind me as i'm falling to the ground i'm looking to see if i'm going to fall on an ied or claymore or any of those kind of things and also is there a red ant file nearby that'll do the trick yeah i don't know any of us that didn't at some point run into the red ants and they feel like bullets man holy crap but anyway so so um and we get we we we're getting air support we got choppers coming in with rockets and all this other kind of stuff that's going on and um and so so i'm looking to my left i'm looking to my right i'm looking behind me i look to see where i fall i i i see bullets coming straight at me and whizzing and so forth and i'm looking up to see if i'm too far in the front because if you're too far up you're going to get hit by shrapnel from one of our rockets they bring on the big guns from the ship and they sound like little earthquakes you know and um and so i'm about three feet away from one of my buddies and we're both like in the same position and all of a sudden i hear this crack and he had gotten shot right through the head he falls backwards his eyes are open he's looking straight at me with open eyes and i am just speechless i crawl over to him and i pull him back just to get him back because bullets were going into him even after he's totally dead and and i you know i don't want to get too graphic here because it it brings up bad memories but his body was being torn apart by the bullets the explosions i can't even tell you what they look like but anyway so i pulled him back and then i engage the enemy and and so forth and i i'm thinking i've got to stay focused and so i stay focused on the line of fire and i stay focused on where i'm seeing some of my fellow soldiers and and we're all dispersed some i can't see because we're in the jungle and some i can see we're using our voices i'm close to the you know so forth and you know i'm over here my buddy just got kia and and you know and if we can get a medic to pull him back you know whatever and and so and with all the bombardment that's coming in and so forth um once again everything stops what now this is after half an hour 30 minutes of yeah and and that's also why part of your preparation is i carried five bandol arrows of magazines i'm a little guy but man i was using those things like you wouldn't believe we had m16s at the time and you know uh fortunately mine didn't jam but they were they were jammable type weapons and and i was in occasions where they did jammed but then you pull out your 45 or you grab somebody else's weapon that's been killed and do what you have to do and that was it so it was 30 minutes 30 minutes fighting a regiment finding a regiment we didn't know as a registered right of course yeah and and and then you know there was a suite that was done and we found this massive tunnel complex where they had a hospital and they had kitchens and they had they had rice from the usa oh my goodness had to be stolen off the dock since i got or the black market or whatever the case might be yeah i mean you and i talked about this before the client but um when i i went to vietnam two years ago with my my dad and my brothers and we went into some of these tunnel complexes and it it's just hard to it's hard to imagine how deep these things went underground right and how resourced they were right yeah i mean i think until you see like a diet like a side view diagram of it you can't appreciate how intricate these were yeah but to house a regiment for instance hospital the ability to cook right um including booby traps along the way that's right yeah yeah so that was probably the worst uh one even even beats the one where i was wounded [Laughter] please tell me about that well uh the the one that i was wounded was um again we were coming to the aid of another company that was under fire and there were actually there was actually a tank country company that was out in the open area shooting their tanks and and so we moved up past the tanks into the jungle and and we got separated from the larger group that needed help and the the larger group other groups that were going to aid this this other group we were we were kind of off to the right and we quite didn't quite know which direction we needed to go we could hear the the fire but it was so muted with the the type of jungle we were in that we just couldn't quite figure go left or right we went right and we came to some jungle that was open i mean you could actually see and there was a river it was right and i'm not sure whether it was one of the rivers you mentioned and and so we were able to stand up and kind of walk you know in a direction and as we were walking vietcong patrol was walking on the other side we both stopped and saw each other and we both hit the ground and i saw a grenade coming lopped coming straight at me and i jumped back and i fell into a depression that but my left leg was up in the air and it got shrapnel from the grenade in the thigh boom yeah and um we actually had a medic and uh and we returned fire but they were gone and so so he uh the the medic came and he pulled the shrapnel out and he says i bet that hurt so i'm going your damn street burned right through my flesh like a snake you know he just butterflied a stitch with the needle and stuff like that and put some gauze over and says you're good to go and we went on you just kept patrolling just kept drawing yeah god so i there there are two stories i recall hearing from you that i would love to to dive into yeah one i think is more of an unfortunate one and you described having i think a platoon leader or a lieutenant with you yeah making what i think many people in the army you could go back to the civil war or today the mistakes of a junior officer right and you've kind of witnessed it firsthand if you don't mind describing no i don't mind sure uh we went through a lot of lieutenants and and most of them were good people they they listened to the wisdom of the experienced soldiers and so forth um but we had one that came in and he was just a cocky son of a [ __ ] and uh and so we were we were out on a patrol i think it was two or three squads of us maybe a couple of squads and um we were spread out and so forth and he was unhappy with the pace he says blankly blank you know you need to move faster who you know come on you need to move fashion god damn it and so no matter what anyone said to him he said you know this is the jungle we need to move slower we need to be careful we need to be looking out for them you guys don't know what the hell you're doing and i'm going to come up here and show you how it's done and so he gets up pushes the point man aside starts walking and silence radio men up front we don't know what happened to the lieutenant couldn't see him anymore couldn't see him anymore we don't know where he went okay let's constantly go search for him spread out in two flanks move around let's see if we can find him sure enough he'd walked stomping fell into a punji pit it had lethal stakes tipped with poison they were all through his body he was dead we got down pulled him up called an evac chopper and he went on to better things yeah it's kind of the the story that you hope every lieutenant hears coming in and they know who to go talk to like they might want to push faster but can they rely on their platoon sergeants to say look we got to slow down been here for months we know this and trust them you know i i would i would say that probably every soldier needs to hear not just lieutenants because there were privates that never got promoted i don't know why they didn't promote it they were seasoned and i you know i i was three stripes i was a sergeant uh e5 and um i listened to some of these privates they had good information you if you were to know it all i mean we're all dependent on each other save each other yeah to watch each other's back you don't go well you're private you don't know anything are you kidding me so so yeah but but i think you're right i mean in terms of you know some of the officers don't be cocky yeah it's not the place nor the time the other story i would love to hear from you because it really struck me as surprising was the use of night vision yeah so i want i would like you to just tell how you how it came to you but what struck me is night vision wasn't a huge thing at the time it must have been highly controlled who had access to it for your unit at a squad level to be given that probably indicates you were doing something important that was that necessitated that type of technology at the time yeah i you know i i didn't even think about it um but we would go out on night ambushes a lot of times we'd fly up to the base of a of a jungle and there being open field it could have been defoliated uh or agent orange or it could have been just an open field and then the jungle starts um and uh and so we would we would build sort of our our bunkers and stuff dig them out and so forth and that's where we'd sleep at night during jungle time rather than sleeping in the gym now there were times we had sleep in the jungle it just we couldn't come out it was just too far or whatever but um and so so when we were doing um ambushes we'd go out as a as a squad and i was a squad leader at that time and so my squad we would go out and uh we would set up a perimeter and and so forth but really it was not so much search and destroy as was trying to find out information were could we hear enemy activity could we you know see things that that you know you need to know about silver and so on where there are water buffalo around that may come stomping into the you know yeah we killed a few water buckets by the way at night so you know and and so so um so we're out one night and we all take a rotation doesn't matter whether you're the sergeant of the squad or not you take a rotation you spend you know however much time you need to spend doing a watch and then you rotate through the night and um one of the the guys that's on watch comes back and he's shaking all of us in the squad there's activity there's activity you got to come up there's activity and we go up and um i was given a a um you know i didn't even know what you call it you know a device yeah and and i was able to see um what was out there in the dark and it was hundreds if not more soldiers viet cong just walking by i don't know we were we could almost touch them and i'm you know i'm telling the squad don't cough don't say anything be quiet if you have to sneeze hold your mouth swallow it whatever you need to do and it just went on and on and on and i'm going holy crap didn't want to make any noise radioing in and after it was gone i mean after they didn't see us i mean they didn't nobody looked our way or anything else they were just a night i think they traveled at night quite a bit to be honest they were safer we called it in and you know we're able to get the big guns and stuff like that to hit in the area but who knows but yeah but i can't tell you how how the experience was in terms of just wondering if anyone's going to look our way yes if anyone can i can feel it right now walk over and pee on us or you know whatever it just oh because any sound because realistically they are pro by that time attuned to the smells yes of what we smell like that's right but any like if the radio goes off a sneeze anything and that reminds me i i told the radio man turn the radio yeah yeah i would even think like the click of those big buttons i know could have been enough when when you know our guy told us that's one of the first things i said turn the radio off you know and then we moved up okay yeah all right i want to transition to the post combat experience but i i had two other questions briefly one is was there anything you took with you into combat that was like a good luck charm i know you got the mantra but did you carry something with you when you were in the field i had a gold cross that i wore a little gold chain and go across um it's my good luck piece did it come from someone important i bought it it just became something i bought it yeah yeah i liked the way it looked okay great yeah very simple just a little around the neck around the neck yeah it banged with i mean it was you know next to my my uh dog tags yeah so yeah wow okay do you still have it um i've looked for it i think i do yeah yeah that's pretty good in the little case yeah and then the last question on the combat experience would you look back and say that the experience you had was representative of what an american soldier experienced in that war yeah it's it seems like it is but i'm curious how you would see it well um it's interesting because now that i'm around other veterans and and i host weekly breakfast with veterans and a lot of them were were in different places than i was they weren't in jungle they were in open areas and so forth so some of their experiences were quite different than mine they got mortared a lot we didn't get mortared a lot until uh ted but but um and um and so um and they weren't in the jungle so people don't understand that um we had to do a closed change about once a week because our our fatigues were ripped to shreds from the vines and all the thorns that we came in contact with in the jungle and sometimes we'd go through slush you know just mud and and gunk and it would rot your clothes and so um so we were always sending back in chopper's uh requests to get you know our size clothes and and stuff like that uh you never i've never seen that in a movie right no no it doesn't look like yeah that's right yeah [Laughter] what you see is john wayne running through the the jungle as a hero and uh and he would have been the first one to die yeah in the jungle warfare i was in so so so it it was very different i think in the jungle and and that's why i speak even when i talk about my combat experience was it was jungle combat i can't compare to the kind of combats that were going on on top of a hill or you know those kind of things um and the jungle changed you know it was thick in places and then it was thin in places it was beautiful in places and it was ugly in places and you know it it had its own persona too and um and you you learning the jungle you had to to learn not only the vegetation all that but the animals in the jungle and what you know you could expect and and you needed to understand the noises of the jungle because if the jungle goes silent there's something yeah there's something that's about to happen yeah i wanted to make sure we we did talk about tech because that's such a pivotal moment in the war yeah especially back home for what people saw right um if you could just describe what was that like as you were in that yeah we were brought out of the jungle to do [Music] night patrols around benoit saigon area and the main base that we were at there and um because there was rumors about there there being a big force coming in i guess was military information or whatever they didn't tell us a lot about it but right before the ambush that happened at tet we were pulled back to the base and we set up around um some of the barracks and stuff like that group squads of us with our weapons and so forth because there was a possibility that if there was a large force coming in from the north that they could break through the perimeter and come into the compound and so we were the second resistant force to meet them if they broke through the first and um and so we were we were outside it was night um [Music] when the attacks started the attacks started um there was noise everywhere there was gunfire there was booms of bombs and and there were choppers in the air there was all this kind of noise and then they blew the ammunition ammunition dump and the sky lit up for a few seconds it was daylight you thought it was the end of the world wow yeah and um and so we weren't getting resistance so we were told to move more up toward the front and so what happened is we began to see sort of like kamikaze pilots just viet cong running at us just madly and and the arvins were amazing at that time they were taking on the brunt of the force and they were holding their own wow they were knocking them back and man they were a fighting force at that time and so we supported them and but i think the the thing you need to understand was that after that experience was over and it was long i don't even remember how long it was all night long um and we began to do clean up some of the dead bodies that we we pulled back were people that worked on the base barbers that had cut my hair at times other soldiers hair and different people that were so forth and whether they were threatened become part of the vietcong or whether they just were and were anonymous i don't know but you just never knew who your enemy was did you have to hold that defensive position for all night and then then was that it and you and you kind of were able to go back to well that was it and the the good thing was we were in the base camp so we actually got a hot meal now the showers weren't in the barrack they were the chain pulling showers but at least they were showers because the majority of the time was in vietnam our showers were the monsoon rains yeah we had a bar soap and that's that was our showers and we we also soaked up our our fatigues that was our laundry yeah okay yeah if we then transition to your to your life after vietnam i mean let's talk about you coming home what was that like because you hear stories of people coming back to really difficult right um conditions yeah just the way the the country felt at that time what was it like for you well um we flew in in a jet uh aircraft there it was full uh it was people from all different unions it wasn't just my unit and we flew into oakland because that was my hometown at the time and um the oakland naval base we flew into i don't even know if it exists now and they took us off the plane and they gave us a new set of clothes and they said we don't want you dressing like a soldier there's agitation going on in the in the community and you could be attacked if you go home in military dress they gave us a steak dinner and then they called cabs for us we all took a cab to our home of residence wherever you know we were my parents were living in berkeley at the time and so i know wow i know you're just in the infantry in vietnam you come back day two you're in berkeley and i'm in berkeley and although we had news reports everything else i had no clue how bad it was uh it was bad berkeley was you know the top of the of the rebellion going on yeah and um and actually after i was home i went and watched some of the demonstrations that were going on from a distance and i was just like flabbergasted just it was just seeing the writing and the destruction and the property destruction and the police and the yeah i was just like holy crap this is like another one how did you process it i mean i was i was befuddled i mean i was like uh and and you know what i can't tell anyone i'm a veteran i never told anyone i was a veteran until like 2006. is that right that's right wow what wow i i kept it close to the chest i you know i never revealed that to anybody there were still even even in you know in the 2000s there were still a lot of people that had very negative views of yeah yeah so 2006 i found out you know that there were support and stuff like that and it was in 2008 that i be got into the va and got sought help and and began to realize the benefits that they had had but they hadn't had when i came back so that's what i wanted to ask now when people come back you've got a week before you're really released to just do whatever you want yeah um but part of that was seeing um a therapist just or some type of medical professional yeah to just say how are you doing right did anything like that happen you came back did you see anybody no no when i came back none of that happened and um and i was sent to boulder colorado uh assigned to a tank unit and did my last six months to be honest it wasn't bad it was in the dead of winter and i'm running around in tanks and uh you know i got discharged there um but it there wasn't the riots and all that i saw it on news things like that and you know then i came back and i went immediately back to college and finished my schooling once again was very reluctant to let anybody know that i'd been in the war and i began to have um i began to have rashes all over my body particularly on my feet and so forth and i looked up that there was a va in la and i was going to college in riverside california southern california and so i drove to the va and um i had made an appointment and they looked at me and said no you're walking you you don't need anything you're you're a walking soldier you know you're okay i said but these rashes you know oh they're just minor rashes go see an allergist or something and and that was it and i gave up uh that was it i said well screw the va you know they're useless and so forth and it wasn't through 2008 when i retired from full-time work after going through school and doing the profession and all that kind of as a therapist right i mean i think it's important as a therapist it's not like you were completely removed from psychology no and dealing with trauma right it was children trauma with children that's right that's your specialty i was a trauma specialist and i was and i was damn good at what i did yeah the trouble is i didn't never understood that i had it and that and that it had limited my my quality of life i i just you know i knew i didn't care about being around people i you know i was isolationist i couldn't attach to a relationship i still feel guilt about having relationships and just walking away from them and the people that i left that were just like what happened [Laughter] i understand now that you know i was disabled but i had no clue and i didn't have i was functional i was able to do work and i was productive at my work and i loved what i did but i wasn't really a good person to be around when i was by myself so i just did things by myself and you know isolated like i said and but when i retired i had a full blown attack of ptsd is that the final what really that really showed you really showed me i have it and i've been devastated by it and i have held off all the memories and all the the the pain and the agony of it and i've never gotten it out of my body it's tearing my body back i began to break down physically too and um and it was in 2008 i began to have a series of heart attacks that were linked to the exposure to agent orange um and and i was shocked because i had no i didn't have diabetes i didn't overeat i didn't you know i was healthy i worked out all that kind of stuff and um and the surgeon was surprised that i why i would have a heart attack and and then i began to research and i found out that you know there was an ancient orange study going on and that their ischemic heart disease which i have was linked to exposure to agent orange and the when you said you had a full-blown ptsd attack experience if you're okay sharing sure what was it uh like a day that you experienced this was it just a few moments um and what was it that happened just in case somebody else happens to have something similar and doesn't recognize it was it it began as not being able to breathe and sweat and at night waking up in cold sweats and uh and horrific um flashbacks and uh i began to have these flashbacks of bullets coming at my head and body parts flying around me and all this horrible terrible stuff that was going on and um [Music] i was actually back in the moment of some of the firefights i was in i was reliving what i went through and that was enough for you to say all right i have to go seek help it was it was enough for me to understand that that i had i had held all this in and uh was quite content to say that i was a functional person i could do my work and do do good work and so forth and so on um but then i began to realize that there were soft symptoms that have been going on through the years that i was in denial about one i can take care of myself kind of rationale two yeah i get you know bad feelings if i hear a helicopter go overhead or i you know i don't like anything to do with guns i don't want to have violence in my life or you know stuff like that um but the acute stuff that comes with the anxiety the acute anxiety that comes with ptsd and and all of the um the flashbacks and and the ability to attach and the intrusions because you could be having a great time at a party and all of a sudden your brain would have this intrusion of chaos and terror and in claustrophobia and i had to get out i had to get out and i would remove myself as quickly as i could and friends began not to understand well you come to a party and you're having a good time then you just take off what's wrong with you yeah yeah and uh and you know we you're no fun we don't want to be around you and i think well i don't necessarily want to be around you either you know and so so i i knew that then i began to know i said i got to get help i you know i i got to practice what i preach i got to get help and i entered the va system and began to learn it was a tough system to navigate at the time yeah it's much better now they're doing a much better job but at the time it was tough so you've written these two books i wanted to ask you a question because they're one of them is called ptsd in in words and pictures pictures pictures and words and the other is veteran guilt right in the same in in pictures pictures and words do you especially from the the therapy side of your background do you see a difference between the two is there because i i had often felt like oh what i have is is guilt that i am a survivor um how does it differ from ptsd yeah well um first of all um right at the top of the list of post-traumatic stress is anger i mean postmates stresses anxiety it's it's out of control anxiety and it's it's debilitating but but part of what goes into that anxiety is anger it's anger being powerless it's it's anger at going through what you went through it's anger it's seeing the injustice of of a lot of what happens around you and and systems of the world and it's it's anger yourself for not being able to control um it's it it's you know it's deep frustration that that even now and all the things you know and all your life experience that you're still struggling to have a relationship and that if you have a relationship and it's the best relationship in the world it's not going well you know you found the person that that's you know the person of your dreams and here you are screwing it up um and you can't stop it you know um so so so my first book ptsd in pictures and words i think has elements of anger in it that i express through some pictures myself um and through some words that i write um and i had thought a time or two to maybe go back and revise it from having gone through a lot of healing um but i think no no i think that can work for some people that are just you know and you know they can take whatever they want to take from veteran guilt was part of my redemption process of recognizing that it's not just survivor skill it's also moral guilt however you want to put that i'm not putting in a religious context as much as i am though we all have some kind of system we live by call it whatever you want to call it but but there's basic rules you you don't murder you don't go out on you know rampages and so forth and so on i knew i knew as a vet in vietnam that i would not be part of any kind of massacre or any kind of of destructive behavior toward the population i mean even my enemies i saw as human beings i just never felt like you want to go to that other place where you know you dehumanize somebody and so so um so my veteran guild book was my way of trying to put words to all of the dimensions that go into guilt and and maybe we need to look deeper yeah at some of the things about that okay yeah um i know you had mentioned you did not go back you have not been back to vietnam no but you have a a really interesting story around going back to the wall and i was hoping you could share that too because i think there are probably many people like yourself who are wrestling with that um i had i had talked about going to see the vietnam memorial in washington dc for for literally decades and just wasn't able to pull myself to go back there um and um my youngest son who who who will be 30 soon he had finished college and he had moved to new york to start his profession and um i had mentioned to him you know it had been 50 years 50 years since i had been in vietnam and he uh so it's just two years ago yeah and so he said dad i've sent you an envelope and in the envelope uh i want you to call me when i get it and when you get it and so i opened the envelope and there were there was a round-trip tick ticket to washington dc and there was reservations to a hotel and he said it's time you went to see the wall and i'm going to go see the wall with you and here's your plane reservations i we have a hotel it's all paid for um time to do it dad and i go go the the i believe in symbols symbols are very powerful things a symbol of the flag the memorial symbols they just speak to me the wall is the symbol for me of the memories of those who lost their lives over 58 000 people and and the names of those that i was in combat with so i said okay i'm going to do it so i flew to washington and um we had i i always forget the days but four days or something like that there and uh so we we uh we would go out in the morning and we would start looking at some of the memorials the white house and went into the museums and stuff like that and um i was really having a good time just wow these are beautiful and you know the museum has such great art and all that kind of stuff and my son found a restaurant named clyde's that is still famous yes famous and we walked into that restaurant and my son said my dad's name is clyde the matridge yells there to the staff hey the boss is here and they gave us a special table and they took care of us and it was just so much fun and i was wearing my vietnam veteran hat with purple heart on it and um and they were all just so appreciative and kind and it was just so cool anyway the last day comes it's kind of overcast a little misty i've never let rain stop me for having a good time if it rains in california i go out and it doesn't matter to me uh and so so we went out and and my son's saying to me today's the day dad okay okay because you've been in dc for several days yeah and now he's like we're going right right all right yeah so we might we start moving toward that and we're walking we're not taking cars or anything we're just walking and and i'm taking photographs of memorial stuff and um you know we come to to you know the view of the lincoln memorial with a huge water we walk around that we begin to see some of the the memorials around uh where the vietnam memorial is and and um see the world war ii memorial just so impressed with the reliefs and the majesty of it and we move over to the korean war and that's just i think that's one of the most impactful memorials around in washington dc just to see the soldiers in the field and the eyes and the backpack you can see the trauma in their their bodies and their eyes while they're doing patrols and stuff just phenomenal memorial walk past the lincoln memorial and then there's a pathway that walks around to the vietnam memorial which is dropped and then there's a long marble wall or whatever it is granite i think and um so we start walking it's there's a little drizzle but it's stopped and we kind of curved down and i see the wall just laid out glittering and i collapse in my son's arms and i just sob and sob and cry i don't know how long he just helped me tell me it's okay i need to get it out this is good for you dad this is a wonderful thing for you to be able to and so we walked down right before you get to the vietnam memorial there are three soldiers that are called the guardians they have maybe they're called the three soldiers i think but anyway they kind of look toward the memorial and they reference represent the three races the majority three races in vietnam um african-american mexican-american and and caucasian and uh they're just gorgeous they're just gorgeous and they're taking my breath away there's powerful images and we go from there to walking down the memorial and there's a woman ranger that had been watching me and my son i don't know how she knew i'm sure she's seen hundreds and thousands of veterans come to the memorial but she just waits for us and she says i'll help you and i tell her i have six names of soldiers that died in battle with me and i brought some paper to etch a name she says no need i have papers here for you and we're going to put them in nice nice envelopes and we're going to get those names edged for you i can't do the etchings my son she gives my son the crayon or whatever they use for the etching and she has a huge book and she's looking up all the names and so she points points them out to us but she's just so kind and the last last name is too high on the wall she says she's going to get a the ranger says she's going to get a ladder and she's going to go up in etch it for us that you know we're not allowed to climb on the ladder so she does that she brings it down she hands me the packet of the six etchings and beautiful presentation of how she had put them in these envelopes and stuff and i opened up my backpack and i put them in my backpack and um right after i zip up my backpack it begins to pour rain and there's a thunderstorm and i don't know whether it was me or my son who said it but it was like i think it was me but i'm not sure the tears of god and the ranger says to us we couldn't have fetched the names if it was raining like this wow on your last day on the last day man it was the most powerful experience of my life to have that happen and i got my son to take a picture of me with my hand on the wall which i have seen i've seen it oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that's special yeah i i guess sorry yeah i'm good um the i guess the question i have after all we've talked about and so you left college went in to serve voluntarily spent that year of hell came back dealt with effectively pretty significant ptsd for 40 years before being treated and then managed it since um so so difficult you didn't want to go let alone to the wall or even the country where it took place but knowing all of that if you could go back to yourself and you were signing up would you have done it any differently dude in a second did you do it again in a second yeah i would know it's amazing yeah yeah yeah i would go now if they called me if they needed me yeah i would i you know i believe in freedom and democracy and i know i know everyone's saying the world screwed up and so forth and america's in a mess but i don't think anyone understands freedom like soldiers we put our lives on the line and i literally mean our lives and um and freedom is not a word and it's not the ability to just do any [ __ ] thing you want to do it is it is respect and it is honor and his dedication to to a place where we can have free expression free beliefs and free sexuality places where people are hung for some of the things that we allow in america and i think understanding that that takes that takes tremendous effort to keep into place and there are countries right now waiting to take us over if if we let him they want us to spit on the flag they want us to not care about our freedom and say that other countries are better than our country they're not i've lived all over the world and i'm sorry i'm a patriot and i don't apologize for it that's all i have to say well i'm super appreciative of your time and being so open about it i know you've written about it before um but just just to talk about it with me is very special so thanks a lot you're welcome glad to do it i hope you enjoyed this combat story if you want to tell your own story go to combat story dot com if you know someone we should interview send me their info at ryan combat story dot com hearing these stories can be tough or bring back your own memories if you're battling ptsd please call the veteran crisis line at 1-800-273-8255-273-8255 stay safe you

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 3,006

Rating: 4.9560437 out of 5

Keywords: veteran, combat, combat story, vietnam, vietnam veteran, infantry, infantryman, clyde horn, PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Army, Nam, 'Nam, Iron Triangle, Tet Offensive, 1965, 1966, 199th Light Infantry, 199th, Purple Heart, Author, Los Gatos, Berkely, PTSD in Pictures and Words, Veteran Guilt in Pictures and Words, Saigon

Id: Ai3IoYnh-P8

Length: 104min 22sec (6262 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020