David Hugh Ingram's interview for the Veterans History Project at Atlanta History Center

today we're going to interview retired colonel David Ingram of the US Marine Corps and get him to tell us about his experiences when he was in the Marines we'll start David by talking a little bit about maybe your your early background where you came from your family situation and up to till you joined the Marines and they will talk about why you joined the Marines and take it from there so talk about your your early background okay I I'm the son of a World War two veteran I was born when he was in the Pacific in World War two in the army there's a lieutenant in the army and my mom was a registered nurse she was from near Chicago Illinois and he was a Florida boy and so she went home to her parents home to have me and Kankakee Illinois which is just south of Chicago so I was born there I lived in my grandparents home for my first year until the war ended my dad came back from the war and then he took us to Florida but I grew up in a small town called stark Florida and it's in a rural part of Florida and I lived a wonderful life as a kid it was post World War two Camp Blanding a large military training base was located nearby about six miles outside town and so stark was recovering from that it was kind of a town where a lot of soldiers went a block from our little home there was a bar and as a little boy my best friend and I used to go into that bar against our parents wishes in Baia for 15 cents a coca-cola and a pack of peanuts and the man named psy who ran the bar my mother was convinced was a drug addict he looked terrible he lurked on the verge of death the whole time but we would go in and I remember the floor of the bar smell like sour beer and we would sneak him and put the peanuts in our colon drink our Coca Cola and compare the bottom of the coca-cola bottle to see who whose coke was made the furthest away and so the only military I was exposed to was the Florida National Guard of which my father was a member and I went to a small school from kindergarten all the way up through the 11th grade and my parents moved to Tallahassee a much larger town but I was in a school with the same group of children my whole career almost my whole secondary school career and I remember seeing a movie called the di with Jack Webb and it was about Marine Corps Recruit Training and that intrigued me and then my father and I would go we take a boat and fish off of the we take the boat out the st. Johns River into the Atlantic and fish sometimes and we did that one afternoon and there was a an aircraft carrier tied up at a fort and it had a sign on the side said open house and so my dad and I went aboard the aircraft carrier and on the deck there was the marine detachment and I was about 13 or 14 years old at the time and there was a marine lieutenant his dress blues with a sword in front of a platoon of Marines and after seeing that movie and seeing the marine it just made an impression on me a very positive impression and I thought that would be really an exciting thing to do some day so that went away so the years went by and my father was the University of Florida graduate he wanted me to go to the University of Florida and I did and so I wasted a lot of time in a fraternity my grades were mediocre but I did not flunk out I got my associates certificate from the University of Florida but my parents lived in Tallahassee and so I thought it prudent to transfer to Florida State and finish there I wouldn't eat my mother's cooking and have a car would be a little little smarter to say and my grades went up too but when I was at Florida these are the years of the draft and ROTC in college was mandatory and I didn't like it I wanted to swear my regular cool college boy clothes and so I had to put on you from every Thursday along with thousands of other young men and go out and drill which I did not like at all so I came back the sophomore year and one of my fraternity brothers had a really close air cut he was Sun tanned and his name was Billy Joe McCabe I said Billy Joe what did you do this summer he said well I don't have to take ROTC anymore I joined the Marine Corps I'm in a Marine Corps officer program I'll be commissioned when I graduate I said how did you do that and he said well there's a Marine Corps Recruiting office in Jacksonville you just go up there and walk in the door and you'll be exempt from ROTC and you'll be commissioned when you graduate so I got on a Greyhound bus on Saturday morning went up to Jacksonville I walked into the Marine Corps Recruiting Office there was no old Master Sergeant sitting there and he said what do you want and I said I'm interested in being a Marine Corps officer and now in those days things were a lot less formal and he said did you play sports in high school and I said yes sir I did he said is there anything wrong with you I said no I have all my teeth and I can see and he gave me an eye test and then he gave me a test called the GCT the general classification test and basically an IQ test and he hand graded it took a couple hours to take it he hand graded it and he said are you sure you want to do this and I said I think I do and he said raise your right hand do you solemnly swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States he swore me in the Marine Corps on the spot so he said we'll be contacting you go back to school so I walked out and these are in the days before pay before our cell phones I got on a pay phone I called home my dad answered the phone he said where are you I said I'm in Jacksonville he said you should be in Gainesville at the University what are you doing in Jacksonville I said I just joined the Marine Corps he think you did what and this was July the 12th 1965 in April of 1965 the first Marines had gone ashore in Vietnam so I I joined the Marine Corps just at the start of the Vietnam War and I I told my father don't worry I'm gonna graduate I'll be commissioned when I graduate that's what that that means he still wasn't too keen on it so after two years at the University of Florida I transferred to Florida State I got away from the fraternity environment I was a biology major my grades went up I was making really good grades and I took a physics class as a first semester senior required physics class and there was a lab on Friday afternoons a three-hour lab I was paired up on the first day of classes one of the three girls who took the class and we became very good friends we never dated the whole semester at the end of the semester I had nothing to do on a Friday night I invited to go to a movie and on the second date I asked her to marry me and we are approaching our 48th year of marriage so we were very poor we lived in married housing at Florida State University she graduated the quarter before I did and worked and supported us and then when I was when I graduated I was commissioned by a former Marine who was happened to be the Secretary of Agriculture of the state of Florida at the ceremony he was the speaker and I had a 1966 Mustang we loaded all our belongings in our car and we headed for Quantico Virginia where the six-month officer school was located so that was my beginnings in the Marine Corps I had done well and the platoon leaders class program the two summers I went and so they offered me a regular Commission and so I accepted the regular Commission I don't know why I accepted the regular Commission it sounded better USMC versus your smcr that's the thinking of a 22 year old so went through the six month basic school course with a hundred and eighty other lieutenants and it was time to choose a specialty I want it to be an infantry officer my wife wanted she said why don't you do something a little less dangerous and so I listened to her I've always listened to her it's very wise thing to do and I chose artillery so it became an artillery officer and then after the officer course at Quantico they sent those of us who are going to be artillery officers about 10 of us to Fort Sill Oklahoma that was the Army artillery school so we went through about a three month course there and then now we're approaching we're in the middle of 1968 now approaching 1969 so we're at the height of the Vietnam War and there was actually a backlog of artillery officers in the Marine Corps going to Vietnam so I was sent to Camp Lejeune just for a few months and they immediately put me on a ship and we would we did landings down in Puerto Rico so that was my kind of first whole thing in the Marine Corps then when I got back I was a regular officer so they sent me on route to Vietnam to a school called artillery survey officers course course where you learn how to actually conduct surveys using maps and instruments and everything so during this time my wife became pregnant with our first child and so I went to Vietnam she was about seven months pregnant and I didn't see our son until I came back from Vietnam so went to Vietnam and that was kind of a surrealistic experience they actually the most frightening thing the whole year including getting shot at and everything else was seeing my mother at the airport who was a stoic she was an emergency room nurse one time she rarely I rarely saw her cry but she she was very emotional so I got on the plane I went boy this am I it is possible I won't come back so uh I don't remember much about the trip but we've ended up in Okinawa we packed up all our non-essential gear and put it in the storehouse and they gave us the equipment we need for going in Vietnam so we we went in and I went into the first Marine Division Headquarters and saw a couple of guys I had known and they sent me down to the southern part of the marine area of operations I was in 3rd battalion 11th Marines and they needed a lieutenant at a 4.2 inch mortar battery and so I went down and the battery commander was a first lieutenant and I was a second lieutenant and I was a battery executive officer and we were beside had a really big fire support base on one side of a runway so the the battery was in real need of some leadership so we we kind of got the battery in pretty good shape we would be shot at occasionally but nothing too terrible mainly snipers would shoot us and they would occasionally shoot mortars Anacin Rockets but nothing too frightening it wasn't too bad so that young battery commander who I am still communicating with by the way today he's a mayor of a small town in Texas I think he'd just finished being the mayor of small-town Texas we communicate we got an older captain in and I didn't really get along with him very well I was used to kind of running the battery for this other lieutenant captain kinda came in did things his own way so I volunteered to go out as a forward observer with a rifle company my last three months I knew I was gonna be I was a regular officer if I was gonna make it a career I had to do something to get some experience so I went out and they flew me into a rifle company I replaced a lieutenant who had been there a long time and I had a forward observer mission like had my pack I had two radio operators and a scout sergeant and that was ed and we were with the rifle company so when the company moved and the company commander was very glad to see me I mean because I meant artillery support for him and he was his name was Joe Williams he had he was on his second tour he had been wounded his first tour and walked with a slight limp but he he was really a great guy a graduate of Vanderbilt and so we had the three rifle platoons the weapons platoon and then I was the forward observer with my team and I had one scout sergeant and my two radio operators so when the company moved one of us would be behind the lead platoon so he would do it on even days and I would do it on odd days we took turns and so if the company encountered something the ford observer who would be up front were calling artillery firing or do whatever he had to do but that was a pretty exciting experience I went a month one time without taking a bath or shower we if you wore regular underwear you you got fungus infections because you were so filthy so we know we were no under reward just wore a t-shirt with our utility trousers and bacteria on your body got a little a few open sores and things but we always took our our anti malaria tablets they was a primer queen tablet it gave you the runs for about a day but that was better than getting malaria so I would line my three Marines up and I would pretend I was a Catholic priest I would administer the sacrament to him give him a pill and I watched him take it and then wash it down with a canteen of water but we didn't we never got malaria it's pretty exciting being with a rifle company because we moved a lot where we were on helicopters a lot and we we went way out west or the Laotian border and I shot a lot of artery I never saw more than about 35 Vietcong in one place through my binoculars and I and that was that was the exception the 35 I counted going through a clearing and shot three artillery batteries at him and also we run a lot of small ambushes we would ambush them we didn't get ambushed very often we were pretty good the greatest threat to us were mines and booby traps and you had to be very careful because they would put the VC would take a hand grenade that they had found unexploded and put it in a sea ration can and tape it to a tree or something and then stretch a fishing line across a trail and they would pull the pin on the hand grenade but it wouldn't go off because the lever wouldn't rotate so the first guy in that who was the point man if he wasn't careful he would trip that wire and pull the grenade out and you'd have three or four Marines either killed or wounded some we had a few of those it was pretty exciting and I kind of got I have to say that I got to the point where I really enjoyed it I had no responsibilities in the world I didn't worry about getting paid food was brought to us in the form of sea rations we tried all different kind of combinations from mixing our sea rations up and as long as you had some McElhenney hot sauce you were okay and a treat each day was brushing your teeth and making a little can full of coffee that you drink that was about it that was a highlight of the day and we did a lot of moving around at night we didn't get a lot of sleep pretty excited about it came really attached to the Marines and to captain Williams I was I really thought I was his right-hand man and there was sort of a strange phenomenon that took place I knew I had a beautiful young wife at home with a son but when it came time to go home I didn't want to go I mean it was very strange it was a little bit like the Stockholm Syndrome where you associate with someone and I felt like I was deserting all the Marines I was with because I was going to leave them and go home but I did go of course eventually but the one of the more humorous events that occurred we would move into position at night and we were in the mountains on ridge lines and it was difficult to tell which originally were on these in the days before GPS and so we thought we were on one heavily wooded Ridgeline but in fact we were on the next one and so my normal operating procedures each night was to shoot in one or two rounds of artillery so I could if we were hit I could shift fires from that target rapidly I wouldn't have to call in grid coordinates I could just say okay from Target one moves such-and-such and so it was getting dark the company commander had to go to the bathroom and or in order to do that I don't want to go to too much detail but we dug a little cat hole and you just squatted over a cat hole and so he was off in the bushes and it was just about dark and the only artery that could reach us was the 155-millimeter howitzer battery which a pretty long range and we were on this mountain this hilltop almost a mountain top and so I called the battery up and I gave him at my command which means they're not going to fire until I tell him to fire and they were firing white phosphorus to white phosphorous rounds a one round from two guns and a 200 meter high two bursts over the point that I had designated which was actually where we were its I thought it was on the next ridge line that was about five hundred meters away so it was really quiet all the Marines are kind of digging in it was really quiet and so I said well let's go fire so I hear way off in the distance and an artillery if you hear the the cannon go off you know it's coming in your direction the round is subsonic unless it's a gun so you hear the the the round being fired I heard a boom boom like that and I said well I know it's going to be near us and you could hear the rounds coming through the air and they got louder and louder and then some marine yelled incoming and there was a lot of cursing guys are jumping in holes and the rounds went off right above our heads and fragmentation from these big WP transferee dangers that were whizzing through all the bushes and everything nobody was hurt but my company commander came out of the bushes pulling up his trousers and said and my nickname was 6:1 that was my callsign he said six one thanks a lot I was constipated so that was the big joke so I was unpopular for a while but after a while I got pretty confident and I think pretty proficient too but that I got sick once the my pack rubbed a sore on my back and I my temperature shot up to about 103 the Navy corpsman where this took my temperature and he said we're just going to medevac you know clean that out and get you back here so I crawled onto a helicopter that landed and they took me back and and swapped out the wound and gave me a penicillin shot and I slept on a bed for the first time in a couple of months and I got up the next morning the doctor said how do you feel I said well I feel pretty good he said get your pack on and go back out there so I went back out it was fine but it was it was quite an adventure and I remember leaving and one of my radio operators a young kid from Ohio a little short guy say goodbye and give me the peace symbol you know this hand I got on a helicopter flew back and it was kind of reverse culture shock coming back to the United States I remember putting on flying to Okinawa and taking a shower and then going into downtown na hawk which was kind of Americanized at the time and going into an American ton style restaurant where there was they had american-style food and I ordered a cheeseburger with everything on it french fries with ketchup and coca-cola with ice and it was still the best meal I've ever had in my life then I went to a Japanese steam bath and I was so dirty then I could just wet my finger and rub it on my arm it would be two shades lighter there just ground in dirt so I went to a Japanese steam bath and got all washed and sweat it out and everything was really clean after that came back in about two days later caught a flight back to the United States and that was a long flight from Okinawa back to the US must be at least 20 hours I don't know but we landed in Hawaii we landed in Guam we landed in Hawaii and then we flew into what's the name of the there's an Air Force Base near Los Angeles I can't remember the name of it we flew in there and got on a taxi with a major March no it wasn't March and that was terrifying I hadn't been in a real vehicle for a year and we were on the the LA freeway with this Mexican driver driving like crazy it was it was a little unnerving got to the airport I was in my Marine Corps uniform with Marine Corps ribbons on and walked down the concourse and there was a rather chubby fellow sitting at a bar he said did you just come from Vietnam and I said yes I did he said drinks around the house and so I had an empty stomach I drank two gin and tonics and I was feeling no pain and I kept looking at my boarding pass to see where the having trouble finding the gate but and I in the whole flight over and I looked around all the people were so well fed and the streets were so big and it was like a real culture shock coming back because all the people in Vietnam were very small there were just a little tiny dirt paths and it was a real strange sensation coming back and so called a flight here to Atlanta you know what they say you know you can't go to hell without flying through Atlanta first so that was the case and then caught a little flight down to Tallahassee and my my dear wife and our son we're at the airport she wanted to be she didn't want all the parents around so and he was very he didn't like to go to men he liked his mother and his grandmothers and he would put up with my father he was about 10 months old and so these were in the days before TSA so they can meet the when meet you when you got off the plane so I saw him and he looked at him and I looked at me I looked at him and he looked at me and I said well give him to me and he looked at me and put his arms up if somehow I knew I was as dead and so we stayed at I had 30 days leave so we stayed at my mother-in-law's house and she lived right across the street from a golf course in Tallahassee and so I put him in a backpack one of those little youth child backpacks I was used to carrying a pack and I walked to 18 holes he went to sleep in the backpack it was kind of the way we got to know each other he's 45 years old and teaches at a university in Ohio now so that's the way we got to know each other and then it was the kind of second part of the marine career I went back and they assigned me back to Fort Sill as an instructor for three years so I went back to Fort Sill and learned a lot awful lot about our torii then after that I they sent me to Camp Lejeune as a battery commander so I had a year as a battery commander and then I was a ops officer for the battalion and then it would this was after the 1973 Middle East war and I got a call from headquarters Marine Corps saying we're gonna send five marine officers to work for the United Nations and you're not going to be armed you're going to be working in the Sinai or the Golan Heights working for the United Nations you don't have a UN uniform and so I when I got briefed in Washington DC and I flew over with another officer over to the Middle East we we went to New York to the UN and the New York and Gunn briefed then we flew over to Israel and we worked we would patrol the UN disengagement zone between the Israelis and the Egyptians and between the Israelis and the Syrians and you could be out for four days at a time you had a white either a jeep wagoneer the old kind of Jeep Wagoneer or you had a Jeep CJ 5:00 in the desert with big tires on it and so we did that for a year it's pretty exciting about three months into it the other marine officer and I decided this would be safe enough for our family so I flew my wife and two children over we got a special deal to the naval attache at u.s. naval attache in Amman Jordan he could get cheap tickets so I flew my wife Sarah over to Copenhagen and then down to Amman Jordan and picked her up at the airport in Amman which is very foreign to her but the way they do business over there it's who you know so I wore my uniform my Marine Corps captain's uniform and I went into the Airport and I said who's in charge of security here and they said it's major whatever he is and I went up and it just so happened that he had gone to the Marine Corps captain school in the United States when he saw me he said whatever you need I'll so he and I went to the plane when it landed and we're waiting when she got off the plane it's pretty name so and we had the two kids and they were just in shell shock because surrounding the aircraft are all these guys with Kaffee is on and it was pretty scary for her but we we lived in Jerusalem for a year and it was a real unique experience then we came back and what do I go oh I went back to Quantico Virginia I was an instructor at the Marine Corps officer school for three years I was a company commander of Marines the same school I had gone through and then after that tour I'm trying to keep all these tours straight but what what year were we talking in where this is about 1976 through 78 79 okay so the Marine Corps opened up the intelligence field as an eel for unrestricted officers before they had used limited duty officers and the Amoy so five of us again were picked to go into the field that was one of those so they sent me to a one-year school in Washington DC defense intelligence school at DIA so went to that school did pretty well and then I went back to second Marine Division I had been in second Marine Division before as a battery commander and then before I went to be an Oso is my third tour in 2nd Marine Division but I work for the g2 who was Colonel Carl Mundi who was later destined to be Commandant of the Marine Corps he died last year as a matter of fact it's fun working for general for Colonel Monday then at the time because he was such a great guy to work for so did that two-year tour and then I was selected to go to marine corps command and Staff College then I went back to Quantico you know the home of all Marines I guess and went to the one-year school and because I've been in Israel we had an Israeli officer who and his family who needed a sponsor so we decided to sponsor them well this was Colonel show Mufasa and mofos later became the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force and the Minister of Defense so there's more to this story hope I'm not boring you okay so we became good friends with him we helped him buy a car and got a place to live on base and and our wives became very good friends as a matter of fact our youngest son and their daughter said they were going to be married someday but it didn't work out so so that was a good one year tour and where we go next oh yeah I was assigned on to a marine amphibious Brigade planning staff at Norfolk we were we worked for the fleet commander at a brigadier general and guess who the brigadier general turned out to be his general Brigadier General Carl Mundy second time I work for him so we were on the on a navy ship and we did landings and in northern Europe mainly winter exercises and northern Norway that's where we went so we we had three winters we went up and trained in northern Norway learn how to survive in the cold did a lot of cross-country skiing and I asked myself at times I am I really going to tell you to do this there's a lot of fun although I left my poor wife at home with three teenagers four teenagers drew she I hope I've made it up to her so yeah we were in Norway Denmark spent some time working with Royal Marines in Britain and in Germany we did some exercises in northern Germany and the Schloss burg Holstein state was in northern Germany along Kiel is there so got to know kind of northern Europe a lot and started started running a lot these guys on the marine Brigade staff said okay we're all going to run the Marine Corps Marathon together and so we trained to do that and I've been running ever since so we would take our running stuff and we would run in these European cities and we it was really fun and this last year my brother-in-law and I hiked across England this last summer and I went back to Hyde Park where I had run around as a major in the Marine Corps 30 years ago and I ran some of the same places it was very nostalgic it hadn't changed very much at all so that was a fun tour and kind of hated to leave yeah we'd go out on a navy ship occasionally and I got to kind of get the Navy perspective on things which was good then after that I got selected to go to the Naval War College initially selected to go to the Indian Defence College in Delhi for a year but I had not been promoted to Colonel yet and they wouldn't brevet you know to brevet means you're not really a colonel yet but that you're just pretending to be a colonel so they wouldn't brevet me they sense and I wanted to go on my wife wanted oh she's very adventurous but they sent an aviator a pilot whose wife didn't want to go and he didn't want to go so I thought the Marine Corps made a big mistake there but they sent us the Naval War College in Newport for a year which was very nice he had to work hard it was a tough got a master's degree but did a lot of writing and what I wrote a paper about an 80 page paper on comparing the intelligence organization of the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force in World War two and how that would apply to a Marine Corps aviation unit and so I had a choice of my next duty station and I had been selected for colonel so no colonel had ever made Brigadier General in the Marine Corps in the intelligence field it was still new and so I said I'm at the end of my Road here I'm just going to pick a duty station it's going to be fun and maybe I can contribute something so I went to the second Marine Aircraft wing the first real Colonel Intel guy they had ever had there and walked into the general's office put that paper on his desk and I said I'd like to do this in the wing the next day he called me down and he had a big red ink across there go ahead and do it and so we tried to do it so I got some really neat training got to go out to marine aviation weapons and tactics squadron and get trained then I went to the naval strike warfare center fell in Nevada and got trained there and then came back and I I could speak pilot I knew what the pilots wanted so had a couple years there made some aviators mad who had been used to doing things the wrong way but I had the generals backing and so I was the g2 of the wing the intelligence officer so in 1990 the summer of 1990 it looked like the Iraqis were massing forces on the Kuwait border and I have to tell you that we were getting no indications of the probability of that from our official intelligence sources I was really kind of me so I'm listening to National Public Radio one morning in August and they said Iraqi forces have crossed the Kuwait border and are heading toward Kuwait City in PR I I ran into the office there wasn't much traffic on this at all I called the general I said they are going into Kuwait and so we spun up for that the whole Marine Corps spun up for that we started sending units over and everything but the wing itself didn't go we were sending a few squadrons over but my boss was General Richard her knee who was a two-star he had his own dc9 so he said we're gonna go in my claim so he became the deputy to the marine forces in in Kuwait not Kuwait and Saudi Arabia actually and so he took me along and he said ok you're gonna be the assistant to the g2 of marine forces you will be back the g2 will be forward and you've got to keep him give him enough information to keep him going so I knew what pilots wanted and we I had a lot of assets I took with me two entire platoons of imagery interpreters and a bunch of other stuff and so I bartered them off to the Air Force we would get our foot I'd go eat lunch with the Air Force intelligence officer in Riyadh it turns out he was also a Florida State graduate and so we would say I'll give you a platoon of imagery interpreters if you give us the feedback from this such and such a system and so we kind of bartered things around and they have all sorts of national and theater type intelligence systems working so we kind of we scratched each other's back and it worked and so came time for the ground conflict the Marines went through faster than the army thought they were going to go through and one of the funny things was the army had all these Army Rangers the guys with the big arms wearing all the special equipment they were going to rappel into the embassy they'd have been they were going to seize the embassy well the funny thing about it was when they repelled down there was a squad of Marines sitting around the swimming pool the embassy eating lunch Marines had already made it in there general Schwarzkopf was not happy yeah cause he wanted the army to do Marines it really moved fast up there so had a major who had worked for me and he was the s2 of one of the marine regiments so every week I would fly up to the Ford headquarters and and take a bunch of stuff including a big sack of Coca Cola's and candy so I became really popular so one story I guess I can tell you this story general hurry I saw general her knee and out in the desert they had everything well camouflaged but they had a hole dug in the ground and it said urinal and so it was just a sandy hole in the ground maybe ten feet deep and so I'ma be improper here I was relieving myself in the urinal standing on the edge of this precipice with this sign stuck in the ground general her knee came up beside me said hey Dave how are you doing I say general how are you he said have you heard we're going home and I said no he said yeah as soon as we fill this hole up with piss ridiculous so the ground war went faster I remember they said all the oil wells ablaze yep so we flew the the general I work for back in the rear was a helicopter pilot so I flew with him up there and we were flying in between these big geysers of I mean there were pools of oil with dead candles in them it was on a real mess so they brought in all these companies from the United States like red Adair these guys who kept exploding oil wells they brought in the one we were associated with it's called boots and coots there were these guys from Texas and the estimate and the morning brief was it's gonna take them a year do this so I talked to this good old boy from Texas with boots and Levi's you know no cowboy hat he said we'll have this done in two months who were they trying to kid and they did they didn't like too much had it all cleaned up so I flew up there one day and we got with the second Marine Division commander and he gave us kind of a tour we drove around his area and we're driving down this road and standing beside the road is this major who used to work for me his name was Mickey chef ski a good Catholic boy from up northeast and I said Mick how are you doing he said hey colonel come on I'll give you a ride in my tank he had a captured t-62 tank that he was driving around and I said well no I don't really have time for that I said how are you doing he said I'm doing fine it's great to see you again so we took off that's the last time I saw him and the other part of this story is he was later killed in a helicopter crash and and I knew it pretty well and we had gone out as couples he and his wife and my wife's back in Virginia Beach and so the years went by and I had a dream it was like 10 years later after he had been killed and I was riding through the desert in that vehicle and Mick was standing beside the road and I said I don't know what I said to him but he said tell everybody I'm fine and then the dream was over and so I called headquarters Marine Corps and they're not supposed to give you phone numbers of widows said look this is really important I'm on the up-and-up here I just have a message for his wife so I called her she was living up in the Northeast and I said I know you remember me I remember you I just want to tell you about this dream I had about I said mix told me that he was fine she teared up of course she said I want you to call his parents here's his parents number call them so I call them so I guess Mick really is fine captain Williams my company commander and Vietnam came back 1984 the last time I saw him was at the Marine Corps ball I introduced him to my wife and he still walked with a little limp but he developed sepsis septicemia which is blood poisoning and he went into the Portsmouth Naval Hospital I was at a staff meeting on the ship the next morning it was this is a that tour I had with the Navy and somebody said I don't know whether you're her but Joe Williams died yesterday and I went what what happened he was in a real weakened condition and they anesthetized him to take out some shell fragments from his arm and they couldn't bring him back he went into shock and died so I went back I was on the ship I wrote an eight-page handwritten letter to his wife trying to remember everything that had happened to Vietnam with him and how much I admired him and everything I got a really nice letter back from her but she remarried she married a British officer and moved to England Royal Navy officer so we came back from Desert Storm it was kind of a strange trip back I won't go into all the details but it was pretty bizarre you just had to catch a plane pack there was so much traffic going back and forth we flew into Maine and then we went down to the second Marine Air Wing and the G 3 of the wing the operations officer and my wife were standing at an the airfield I was one of the first ones back and we saw them and so we were back so my tour ended there my last tour was at US Central Command in Tampa this is a joint command that means you have people you're working with Army Navy Air Force Marine and civilians and so I was the director of the Joint Intelligence Center at US Central Command I work for a wonderful officer who became the head of dia and that's general Pat Hughes and I really enjoyed that tour but you never saw the light of day I mean I was in there at 6 I was leaving it like 7:00 or 8:00 at night 7 days a week it was really very demanding and then that tour was up in 1993 and the Commandant sent out a letter to all Colonels there only about 400 Colonels in the Marine Corps he said if you're not going to be promoted Brigadier General so that I will not have to do like the Army and the Navy and send out pink slips he said if you can consider retiring instead of growing old as a colonel and so the list of brigadier General's came out I was at a big meeting around a big table and they handed a message around to me my name wasn't on the list and so I wrote that I passed it back to general Hughes I went I'm out of here so I retired after 25 years and it was a I just was so fortunate to have a wonderful career an exciting career the marine corps was so good to us and our children are my wife I did not want me to retire really she loved it she was the kind of gal who could climb Mount Sinai at night and see the Sun come up more and she did that and she was pregnant or swim in the Red Sea or take a train up to Haifa from Jerusalem with a bun Arabs and Palestinians she cheated all that so she was adventuresome and she was a great marine life and so we I was I interviewed with a couple of companies in Tampa and since I have a biology degree I had a very promising job offer from what's the big hearing aid company I can't think of the name of it they wanted to hire me in Tampa not pass that up and I got a call from headquarters Marine Corps and I said have you considered Marine Corps Junior ROTC you'll be paid your active duty pay as a colonel you'll be in a high school you'll be teaching young kids I said sounds pretty good well we're gonna start a unit in Coweta County Georgia at East County wait in high school so we we moved up here I took the job the principal had been a marine of Vietnam marine riflemen sergeant Vietnam he said boy we'll hire you today so I was there for 15 years Ronnie Marine Corps Junior ROTC and then I decided they needed a science teacher and all although I had a BA in biology not a BS with the education I had a lot of science classes I had to qualify as a teacher and so I took a one-year supervised practicum took a bunch of exams they were sure that I could teach and I taught biology for four years but I was the senior class sponsor for 15 years and ran graduation was the cross-country coach and they were very good to us they're really great so we retired from there two years ago and that's the end of the story but still at heart I'm marine and it's a great honor to lead and be with Marines a great honor whenever I see one in the airport they you notice they do not wear their utility uniforms Airport if you see a Marine he's in civilian clothes but I can spot him a mile away so I always go up and shake their hand and talk to him even specially the young ones in the airport and he keep in touch with a lot of Marine Corps friends what are you doing now I am I'm in her church and I'm a volunteer I serve in the Presidency of the Atlanta Mormon temple and it's a full-time job the only pay or the blessings you get but we we stay in an apartment and Sandy Springs during the week and then go home on the weekends to make sure our home still standing down and noonan so that's what we do where we do volunteer work and we visit grandkids tomorrow we're flying to Vancouver British Columbia we have a son who will graduate from Georgia Tech he's got his PhD and he lives in Vancouver he's a computer guy so we have a son there we have a son in Ohio who his son who's a CPA in Georgia works downtown here and we have a daughter incoming and there they've all graduated in college and we have 14 grandchildren the oldest is 20 that's Sam and the youngest Henry is in Vancouver he's a Canadian 3 years old so that's our family I'm we last week I went to my high school luncheon in Florida and there is a picture of me as a Cub Scout back in the 50s on the steps of the Methodist Church in that little town and most of most of my Cub Scout buddies have passed away surprised I'm 69 that's pretty young yeah but a lot of these guys are gone I visited the widow of one who was with me when we went aboard the Navy ship Larry Noble he was also a 13 or 14 so I visited his wife and went to the luncheon and saw a bunch of old friends including one boy I used to play with we became friends at age five we played it in the mud together his kids and he was there we were born one day of heart so I saw him last week and drove back so life this is a dangerous thing to say life has been good to us so far and the Marine Corps was a wonderful career still in my heart no doubt about it so that about wraps it up well you have a wonderful story thank you and you tell it well thanks and see I didn't have anything to do what is your yes yeah that's what everybody got who's over there in the United Nations yeah that's one so that's when you were in Palestine el Israel okay so we got to go to some pretty exciting places most people don't get to go to my wife has been to downtown Damascus people can say that intelligence suppressed your past didn't cross oh yeah no I was a long way from Crete although we landed in Crete on the way over there a lot of rocks I mean it's the runway has rocks right beside huge rocks and we have been swimming in the Dead Sea the Med the Red Sea the Pacific the Atlantic so I got got I've never been to Australia but been to Africa got to go to Columbia one time didn't talk about that got to go to Panama all over Europe went out on a Sunday to the Battle of Waterloo the side of a Battle of Waterloo which is not in Waterloo by the way and did a lot of running around Hamburg Germany but hey it was great thank you thank you very much it's been a pleasure thank you for coming for Fidelis appreciate you thank you very much

Channel: Atlanta History Center

Views: 3,777

Rating: 4.8367348 out of 5

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

Id: no-ZLmaHMOU

Length: 58min 48sec (3528 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018