Dr. Eugene John Valentine Vietnam Veteran Interview

John appreciate your showing up today and letting us talk to you more than welcome tell me your real name you're holding Eugene John Valentine and your date of birth 512 1940 where do you live now I live here in Portsmouth Ohio but I was born and raised in Detroit Michigan Troy yeah when did you move to Portsmouth in 1990 okay now in Detroit that did you graduate from high school there I graduated from high school there and it was my home of residence until I was 35 years old what was the name of your high school Cooley high school Cooley yes vol II why not the Cooley high school that's the subject of a movie by Spike Lee in Chicago I believe it was Spike Lee but the other cool Asian yeah okay now your your parents so what was your father's name it was identical to mine Eugene John Ellison yes mm-hmm and your mother's name Ruth Townsend Valentine what was her Townsend was said her maiden name yes okay now how far back can you go what was your father's grandfather's day our grandfather was also Eugene John Valentine three in a row here yeah and he was born in the United States in Detroit but his family had emigrated from Alsace Lorraine and he was the youngest of 14 children and he had nieces and nephews that were conserve way older than he was and arriving in the new country some of the family adapted and some didn't and in my grandfather's case he was going to the family was Roman Catholic and he was going to a local parish school now the family emigrated from Alsace Lorraine to the United States to avoid being conscripted into the germ I mean the franco-prussian war because they were Pro French sympathies so that would be about 1872 a little later I believe yeah but anyway he was going to local Catholic parish school which was in a heavily German neighborhood and he was getting beaten up this way to and from school and so he asked my great-grandfather would you intercede with the priest and see if he could go to different parish school and the priest said no you know you live in my parish you need to attend my school and so at age fourteen my grandfather left the Catholic Church joined the high Episcopal Church which in many ways is you know a mirror image of the Catholic Church and that caused a rift with the older folks in his family who is older brothers and sisters because back then religious differences still played a really powerful role and so glad you know post Vatican - why you know that issues kind of put behind us right now did he get to go to another school at that point he would have had to because he was no longer acting Roman Catholic okay what about your grandmother then what was her name my grandmother was a man of talent okay and what was her history let me ask you this how far back does anybody searched the tree and a little bit yeah I can go back one more generation but if we want to stay in the Valentine side of the family those folks that were in Alsace Lorraine were ethnically Italian and they had gotten jobs employment as seamstress seamstresses for the Napoleon Napoleon army when the polian occupied Italy for a while and when he retreated they had never been remunerated as well and had a study at work so they retreated with the army and ended up male suffering so ethnically Italian in terms of citizenship they were Alsatians and came to this country speaking French not Italian somebody could write a book here cuz they reality that's true of most people in this country yeah what about your mother now what was her name my mother was Ruth Townsend tell boat I'm her mother and father this is what we have an Ohio connection and Ohio yeah Townsend was born and raised on a farm in northern Ohio they're lucky Ohio and to a large German family they all spoke German they lived on a farm and she learned English when she went off to school and in 1957 I was an American field service exchange student in Germany for a summer and I remember my grandmother trying to teach me a bunch of German if she could before I headed over there but on a plane trip a couple of years ago I sat next to someone who was from lucky Ohio and he knew the the family that they were they were Joseph's before my grandmother Barry became in Thompson and that the family is still quite prominent in that area and still owns a large farm and I have memories as a very young boy of being on that farm did you ever when you went over to Europe and this is Detroit did you meet up with any of your ancestors in your relatives no I never had a real interest in that now of course towards the end of my life I would love to know as much as I could I think as a young person I was just living in the moment they had more important things to do ego did you have any brothers and sisters I have an older brother what was his name he's Fred Townsend Valentine they still live in yes he's in the process of retiring he's a professor of medicine at NYU Medical School okay now are you married single divorced widowed I'm married for 35 years I've been married once waited very late now it's 45 when I married but she watched and nickerson Belen well and Ecker so she she didn't like that well there's a realtor not her family were all sisters and so she was worried about the family name dying you know if she did not maintain it do you have a children we have two children what are their names Daniel and Michael they're 14 months apart they're adopted because I my wife was 40 and I was 45 I got married we decided I put our through selves through all the efforts to create our own children when there were children that needed needed families what do they do now well the oldest boy is a power line mechanic he works out of electrician's Union in Columbus his name is one he's Daniel Balint and Daniel John Dickerson villainess okay and then my younger son works with a counseling center he's Michael Warren Nickerson Valentine does he work here at the hospital Melissa I know Jeff Valentine is that the relation know there's lots of Valentines up in the hills of Appalachia but we have no direct relationship well something told me you were his brother but that's not the case yeah there's another actually Eugene John Valentine in the area somewhere who get his mail no but what happened one time we went to the ethnic food festivals the st. Mary's I believe has every year and had a wonderful time came back home I got a phone call that we just won the raffle there was one one raffle for the entire event over several days and I said well we never even bought a raffle ticket well your Eugene John Valentine I match and I said yes and so they started poking around they found another Eugene Valentine it actually won the raffle oh never the basket no we didn't get the vests and we never got to meet this person so after you graduate from high school look what did you do then I went to college there was a at Harvard University Harvard okay and when I graduated from Harvard I taught in a German gymnasium for West German gymnasium the government is still divided then what was your major philosophy and government I didn't do a major and while I was in Germany I received a draft notice oh and so they allowed me to just teach out the year what year would this be this would be 60 to 63 so you got drafted in 62 63 well 63 yeah yeah okay and then I came back to the United States and I had 45 days to square with my affairs and I enlisted in the Marines Officer Candidate program at that time you didn't want to go in the army I thought as long as I just gonna have to serve I challenged myself as much as I couldn't get as much out of it and that's being unfair to the army but you know I bought into the Marine stuff so I want to back up about one piece you know the family tree and all of that because if maybe he explains a little bit why I joined the Marines when at a very advanced age I was 47 and my wife was now 42 and we decided to go ahead and adopt mmm we were a little concerned where they would take us over here that age but we found an agency that you know determined we were in good health and had a line employment history and so on so forth and one of the questions they asked us would we adopt a minority child and we said sure we didn't request to adopt one our bottom line is we wanted to adopt an American child because at that time a lot of people were going to Korea remember and then to China and even to Russia to adopt children and they were American children who won't be it up weren't being adopted so our boys are biracial and we adopted them not because they were black but because they were American okay good well so you know you're in the Marines in 1963 actually they were running one this was pre Vietnam line I enlisted so you can accuse me saying I wasn't a genuine and I know ever we were going out there or he might not even listen okay so the Marines really went running one officers Candidate School a year and I just missed it by a couple of weeks so I had basically a year on my hands before I went in and I did I got a job the auto factory being a Detroiter that's part of the rite of passage saw so many Appalachian people working the auto factories I started reading about them at night as a local public library and ended up going down to Appalachia to Clay County Kentucky up in the mountains Knox County the next county over has lots of Valentine's in it and did poverty work with the Appalachian volunteers for the better part of that year and then in 1964 in October when officers Candidate School should commenced was that in Guantanamo or where did you go for the Quantico Quantico yeah yeah Guantanamo party insulin mm-hmm so how long was that it was going to Quantico though was your officer basic there's three months officers Candidate School and then you receive a commission if you're selected at the end of those three months did you get your commission yes second lieutenant second lieutenant there's about a 40% washout rate so 60% made it through and then there's six months of officers basic school which is also a clinical before you go into the Fleet Marine Force so when we started officers basic school in January of 1965 and the instructors were trying to motivate us they'd say you know if you get to stuff down right and do well on your first assignment you might be able to go to Vietnam as an advisor what are you looking they looked at that yeah well you know in your young marine and you know action in combat and all that and so you know that resonate with a lot of folk you know I get a good grade here in basic school and do well on my first assignment cuz I've understood everything I learned in basic school I could get to be an advisor in Vietnam well by March of 1965 we were introducing combat units to Vietnam and so the motivation became you better get this stuff right because when you graduate from here you're going to have a kind of transitional period in our involvement award Vietnam we had about 10 to 15,000 advisors there I believe and then the decision was made to go into full bore and those first units were in March of 65 so in Quantico you went directly to bid what happened well after I graduated from officers basic school I put in for Oceanside count yeah and when I got the Oceanside California 2:30 in the morning I drove across country the Corporal behind the desk the intake desk said don't unpack your bags lieutenant in two days you're shipping out to Vietnam but what you think about that well I missed a miss I know volleyball on the beach never had that you have a MOS did you what was yours I was an infantry if the trees okay did you have a platoon then when you wanted what I had a mortar platoon now 81 millimeter mortars and it's a large boat unas if it's fully staffed it's 94 men and so I've raided a senior first lieutenant and a junior second lieutenant that was the ideal staffing and that junior second lieutenant we learn from the senior first lieutenant well very quickly we made we were making raids off the coast of Vietnam and our very first major raid the first lieutenant was wounded and medevac back to the United States so very young in my military career I became a lieutenant for that mortar platoon um so then what did you train with did you train with the m14 or m16 we had the m14 the m16s were introduced while we were there and that you know is ugly when you're new you're actually in combat and you're learning how to use a new weapon and how to more important how to maintain it but you know what levels you have to keep it saying free in order for it to function I'm reading that some of them had to field-strip they're there their weapons during battle and did that happen well that that didn't hit our platoon I'm not sure exactly why this is you know there are other units that were using the m16 perhaps me because we were mortars I don't know you know by about ten months into my tour I did get an infantry but a rifle platoon another so mortars and rifle two Tunes are both considered infantry and I'm MOS was infantry that I went from the mortar platoon to the rifle platoon and this was not a decision made at the battalion level was made by someone in headquarters in Danang who was just looking at service record books and saying this person has an infantry MOS but he never had a rifle platoon they've only had mortars and I think it's time that they you know we want a well-rounded officer so we give you an infantry platoon and that was kind of like a business model of some sort you know in terms of your officer corps but you know officers were falling left and right and your best chance to win the war was to have an officer who knows what they're doing and I got pretty good at mortars and then all of a sudden I was a rookie again with a rifle platoon you know I understand that back in the United States that would have made sense where you know you're not an actual war or people are dying and you're trying to win not just on paper but on the ground but in the middle of combat I don't think that was a wise way to detail out here your officers where were you stationed there fou by four much of the time well we did ships landing force for for three months but he's made these rates off the coast half of us would go across the beach and Amtrak's and the other half would get hella left it in hopefully catching the bad guys in between and then we were stationed in Phu Bai which is outside of way and for another four months or so and then we went up to Coby TomTom right south of the DMZ and that's why I was assigned over to a rifle platoon hello were you in I was there for 10 months total ten months total and I saw on your license tag you were combat wounded yes okay I've ever Inc tour was 13 months and I was cut short with a with the world with a wound that was deemed severe serious enough to get medical treatment in United States so what about military life in Vietnam I mean was a of course a new experience and I read there was sometimes racial friction the title of a boot before I get to that because I believe those are important issues the physicians that examined me said that it would probably I had part of my pelvis shot off and it would probably take about four months to heal and that's exactly I was in Great Lakes Naval Hospital for four months so actually I would not have been able to go back to combat even if I've been on the hospital ship because my tour would have been up about two months into my stay in the hospital one of my troops was rotating home he had had thirteen months in and [Music] stopped by to visit me in the hospital and I asked her about the night when we were in a field hospital the day after we'd gone into an ambush and there was a young man I had never even got a chance to know his name he just mustered in several days before we went out and I had just taken the platoon over who was had a very bad chest wound and his lungs were filling up with fluid and they had to wake him up every 45 minutes he's heavily sedated to cloth and it was very painful for him to cough even though he was sedated and but he had to or he would have drowned we would encourage him and sometimes the encouragement was come on marine you know you can do it this and you know nothing's too painful for a marine you know and that wasn't working you'd get her all garetty's his way whatever we could do to get him to keep his lungs clear of fluid and I asked this marine who visited me did he make it he said series back in the field so you're 13 month tour was taken seriously if you could get back in the field before you're 13 months or up they kept you there so that's a little bit about the marine ethos okay wonder what happened to him that as far as I know he completed his tour and returned back but it wasn't a pinprick you know he was on death's door but the nature of his wound you know no bone was hit or at least you know thing that had in it back in over a period of four months how do you feel about the Marines the ethnos there is a very fly if anybody wants to understand the Marines goodbye to darkness by William Manchester goodbye well good-bye to darkness William Manchester was a sergeant during World War Two in the Marines he made several landings in the Pacific and ended up being a professor of history at Wesleyan University one of our elite small liberal arts schools and after he retired he was professor emeritus he worked out a deal with the State Department where he could go by and walk all of the major landings the ones he'd made himself like he did Eva Jima for example and those that he didn't do just so to get the complete marine experience and part of it was a memoir part of us a chronicle part of Ellis therapy just to put that behind him and so I asked goodbye to darkness and he starts off by talking about his father being a marine in World War one and there was a lot of family misgivings about the kind of medical treatment his father got to his father was wounded during World War he had a partially his father and a partially compromised arm he couldn't use it very well kind of hung there but he noticed that his father always marched in the military parades and you know Marine Corps birthday and so on and so forth even though he could also talk about ways in which the Marine Corps had failed him or at least he felt the Marine Corps failed well Manchester and walking these landings and reading about them and reading the history realized some of the horrible blunders are made in terms of the cost you know countless lives and so on and has a pretty clear eye view of the Marines they put their shoes on boots on one at a time foot at a time and are capable of making mistakes and being fail but it's like everybody else and towards the end of the book one of the last landing cities chronicling was area that is now not part of it was never part of the United States it's one of the island nations I camera which one it was and because the local potentate he had State Department clearance to meet with and the local indigenous leader wanted to honor him and so he put together a kind of an old marching band with tubas and all that sort of thing and they played a bunch of songs and they ended with the Marine Corps hymn now if you're a marina or marine then you hear the Marine Corps hymn you stand up and Manchester Road I stood up Emily excuse me I'm not going to apologize for it in other words even though he'd seen you know the dark underbelly of any organization he was still going to stand up the Marines do you stand up oh you know you know I don't join I don't belong the Marine Corps League you know I don't I am now a member dayne Dickies post primarily just to use the facilities it's never been something I've tried to stay connected to biz Valdez you the connection there is very real have you ever been back to Vietnam no I came very close I had an opportunity to teach at the American School in Danang and if we weren't in the final stages of raising our sons I probably would have but this was just not the time for one of their two parents to be absent for a year or two I would like to go to back at some time and a lot of Americans are going back I will say this our the minister First Presbyterian Church were my wife at tens he had been a missionary in in Vietnam and for a number of years and he had speak to the church a Vietnamese woman who escaped after the war she was a boat person and came to the United States and tried to make a life here and was kind of searching spiritually and she joined the Presbyterian Church became a presbyterian minister and she spoke to our congregation and of course afterwards I wanted to talk to her and I mentioned that a lot of reason to go back to Vietnam a lot of army you know if people who served there go back and they find little animosity you know the wars behind us you know we were friends nylons on and she says that's only true if you're not I think Lee Vietnamese if you're ethnically men to me you have a manager who follows you around wherever you go and you know they're the Vietnamese are still very concerned because a lot of Vietnamese were on our side you know I think is you know most people now say well the other side had the support of the population so they won well the other side used you know assassinations and lots of other things in there and and plus the North Vietnamese Army you know and there was a sizable part of the Vietnamese population it was not Pro yet calm but if you live in a village where the Vietcong have an infrastructure in place you you know you ended up going along with the program and so you know the Vietnamese are aware of this today the Vietnamese communist government that they're not universally popular or well-liked and they keep it very close watch on names but ethnic enemies who would go back to Vietnam and the ethnic Vietnamese in the back of their mind are always concerned will they Trump up charges and hold me and so on and so forth so there's really two different experiences if you're a Vietnamese American and if you're not Miss America and as far as going back to Vietnam have you stated contact with any of your mates or comrades yes one and he and I were very close and I'm godfather to his son we one of the people in our basic class about 40 years I love organized a reunion and which I couldn't go to the first two reunions and then the third ring which are last with our 50th anniversary from graduating for basic school I went and that was a wonderful experience to catch up with people and believe it or not to make new contacts you know that you sort of knew their name had seen them but then all of a sudden you find you have very similar war experiences and there's a bonding that takes place how long were you in the Marines see three years or three months of Auster's can a school and there's a three-year enlistment they let us out about a month and a half or so early which worked out really well for me cuz I could start graduate school mid year one of the reasons they lives two dollars they knew you know we had already said we were not going to re-up and so we're just living out our last four or five months the Marines returned to all went to the East Coast mostly to Camp Lejeune and so you had a lot of salty troops there you know they've been to Vietnam they weren't going to go back to Vietnam they were just biding their time till they got out including officers and so they were kind of happy to let us solve it a little bit early because we're getting salt here by the day and I was actually an exception to that because when I came back I was training officer for the Marine Corps counter-guerrilla Warfare Center so I worked the day I mustered out I was in the field because we were still sending large numbers and Marines overseas when did you get back from Vietnam when did did you land in what Long Beach or where was it well I I was medevacked Filipinos from Vietnam to the Philippines to Great Lakes Naval Center I think that was in 1966 a goal or actually early June 1966 and then I first parted in 1967 I went to Lejeune and became them training officers the Marine Corps trauma girl wore a siren had you ever experienced any civilian animosity cause she went personally no I have a good friend who served two tours in Vietnam and my friend isn't his if anything under his understated rather than overstated and he was spit upon when he got out of the airport in San Francisco where he had no comeback as a returnee he wasn't wounded everything like that he was in uniform and I was on college campuses then and there was a lot of anti-war rhetoric personally I never no one ever said anything to me or did anything I had service members who were like I returned he's on campus who did have bad experiences and because I was a little older and I've been an officer the VA there would shoot these people to me and we talked I did I think probably lose a couple of jobs early in my career because of that one I was interviewed and I probably shouldn't name the schools because they're well known in these parts but anyway for a position and I thought the interview went quite well and I didn't get the job and then at a American Philosophical Association I majored in philosophy meeting I saw the chair of that department that I thought that I interviewed for and thought my interview had gone well and it was a social event we all had various degrees of alcohol he probably more than I but he came up to me and he said you know I'll deny this if you ever say it in public but that's why I don't want to mention the name of the University but you've lost that job because you're in Vietnam the first thing that you know we heard when you walked out the doors you know this guy was over there killing kids and and one other occasion there's similar feedback or someone that I had faith would be a truth teller and had no reason to say what he said it was good friends with a chair in another department I applied for and I never even got an interview and I thought nah my feet it would it was very strong at least get an interview and and my friend said he had asked about what happened to my application he said we didn't even consider you know not giving his background now those were still the war was still going on and I think after that it may even have become a plus you know while someone who was in Vietnam you know but first entered the job market or probably worked against me if you got time for a little side trip here this is very interesting I mentioned that worked in Appalachia doing poverty work was the only cash money in that's an Appalachian right in in you call it a town bright shade Kentucky was a post-office box and was tobacco base if you had had some tobacco base you could make some money that way but they've been consolidated only one or two people and the county here in that area had tobacco base they bought it off from other people and they were well-to-do okay was working in the dollar coal mines that were the coal seams were narrow enough that you couldn't pay union wages you couldn't get unions to organize people because there just knew it was not economically capable of paying union wages you know they're cold too difficult to extract conditions where you set your own Timbers and so if you it's all piece work you got a dollar 25 for loading half a car and yes I'm on the other side more than the other half and you had to wait to he finished his half or helped him finish his half and then they would pull the car out and bring another one in and at the end of it you put your tag on the car and at the end of the day mm-hmm you go out and you see how many tags are on the board and they got that many times times the dollar twenty-five and so there was this tension do I set my Timbers real close together so that no overburden comes down on me and spend time setting my Timbers I could be loading coal and making money or do I keep my Timbers further and further apart which means I spend more time loading coal but I've increasing the risk of the overburden will come down at me so I was I was interviewing for a job I can say this universe exists far enough away LSU okay LSU and the chairman of the department was a very prim man very well dressed and nails were done well under wonderful southern accent and he said to me you have a hole in your Vita you know you taught it to give nauseam for a year and then there's a year where I don't know what you did and then you join the military so what did you do during that year you know okay were you dealing drugs and I told them the story that I was with the Appalachian volunteers and the families I lived with I moved from home to home the only cash money they had is just the man of the house or one of the sons worked in the mines and so towards the end of the time I was there I took a job in the dark little minds and I explained to them how that worked and he said you did that you did what and he said such a loud voice that people at other interview tables were turning around like I just told him I wasn't drug dealer but that shows sort of the mind-body split you know the philosophers are very mind or hinted in that body or hinted that someone could do manual labor for it was a split yeah you know could I really be a lover of wisdom which is what the word philosophy means follow Sophia Sophie's the goddess of wisdom vitus's brotherly love if I were to do something crazy like that so he is did you have any medals did you did you get any awards I got the Purple Heart I got the Purple Heart and earlier on when I had the mortar platoon I was recommended for a Navy Cross and the company commander who recommended me was told by the battalion commander that this was too soon you know I've only been there for you know what's the battalion for less than three months and basically I was we had one 11 day operation where I kept he's 94 people in the field and kept him moving and kept him under cover and so on and so forth and we were carrying 150 pounds on our back and the mud was pulling the soles off our boots it was a real challenge you know thought but I've done extraordinarily well was there combat during that oh yes yeah yeah we lost men and that many too you know foot issues you know you're walking in your socks and rice paddies and things like that and we you know we kept our guns up we kept our communication wire up we kept our radios up the factory battalion commander used to use our attack neck a lot because his would go out and he had a captain managing his I have said a corporal so it looked pretty good and I was recommended and but there's still a little bit too soon you know but see he's got a whole tour head up on the element and then that captain was killed I eventually was transferred to a rifle platoon and we had an ambush I lost some men and so I received the Purple Heart did you ever get the American Navy Cross did you ever no no no they say the person who recommended me it was killed and then I lost men in the ambush and that I said that he's everyone with a bitter taste one that I still have in my mouth today Purple Heart and the Vietnam oh yeah okay yeah well that salad ya know the only one that really means anything is the purple there's a Purple Heart are you remember of that organization no there is one around the fact that former faculty members Shawnee State I think kind of heads it up you were the only one that that had the Purple Heart no I say there there is a Purple Heart organization at Shawnee well not at Shawnee but a former faculty member Shawnee headed up the local Purple Heart organization so they never had any interest okay is there that when you returned home and you got out of the Marines that day that you were discharged where where did you go there's a story with the day I was discharged even though I had never thought of joining the military I did so only because I was drafted I never thought of trying to dodge the draft either you know when I left that day from Camp Lejeune drove out to the gate it was a real bittersweet feeling you know I was leaving a lot of people behind who were going to head over for their second tour and so on and so forth the story that most comes to mind when you say leaving base for the last time was I was dating a woman in Washington DC and we're still very good friends to this day and I would stay in Washington as long as I could before I'm Sunday evening before I would drive back to Camp Lejeune which is about a six-hour drive oftentimes very tired from partying and all that and back then I 95 and not being completed all the way done and there was a divided highway 301 and I was driving down 301 and I saw a glow and the median and I got closer and marine in a car had had an accident and I don't know what where the other car was with I only remember the one with the Marines in it and one of the Marines the firewall the car was a peg crushed down on his leg so he couldn't extricate himself and local people were gathering around smoking cigarettes and you know I was trying to shoo them away because it was gasoline all over the place and this young marine was behind the wheel and he was cognizant enough to know that he was in a very dangerous situation and he's also in great pain because because of her legs we were you know compressed by the firewall hit on car and you know he was sort of yelling uncontrollably and I said marine this is captain Valentine Yelling's not helping - yelling us hurting We Need to Talk I need to hold your hand yes sir okay well okay the day I left the guy asked to take my sticker off the back of the car as a young corporal was that young man okay yeah he remembered I didn't want to remember oh are you captain telephone so that's part of the marine just you know that that's a big part what your mate he's in pain he's hurting he's in danger he might blow up and him in a gasoline it's yes sir was it I I sir yes yes sir Navy BIA good well then you're going home did you go back to Detroit well I went up to see my woman friend of course but yes then back to Detroit did your folks know you were coming I believe so yeah wondering if you're surprised and well no I didn't I didn't make any effort at a surprise they knew I was getting out weird phone communications as I say because they let us out a couple of months or I could start graduate school in January when you when you were in Vietnam did you have R&R I mean you you weren't in the field and all the time on active duty were you well I never had our there was our for for the people over there and my major concern was that my troops got R&R and there was a separate on our track for officers but I wasn't I wasn't elbowing my way into that track or anything like that I thought well that happens it happens but does I felt no real need there's another fun story that comes out of that all right there was a kid in my mortar platoon young man and my more but said great James from Detroit and he had enlisted for four years and he was in his third year and if he'd ever made PFC I wasn't aware of it he was just a flat private but he and I became real good buddies we played the Detroit thing up big and I always had reputation of having a well organized platoon you know we'll supplied with whatever they needed you know the right map sound like that when it came to my own personal gear and that I was a total disaster and would very often go into the field without any rounds from my 45 and so on so James that was he made that his mission to see that I had ammunition for my and you know this in use someone you wanted the foxhole with you no question about that but you know as far as what happened to him did he make it home and there as far as I know and but he he got R&R you know and yeah that evening he came to the fire Direction Center or the gunnery sergeant I and a radio man slept his were right next to the guns and he says sir can I possibly borrow $40 from you have R&R tomorrow and I don't have any money at all yeah James are all you've done for me after you know no problem at all you know so I gave him 40 bucks mm-hmm well and he's flying on the next morning like 6 or 7 o'clock there's a airfield at Phu Bai and about three or four in the morning the radio man wakes me up private James would like to speak to you sir he hands me $500 and he says can you hold this until my flight tastes a big one but one a playing poker with 40 bucks okay and you don't make this stuff up it just happens you could write a book like I said yeah did you bring back any souvenirs anything from that Vietnam no I'm still have your uniform ah I believe I do yeah I I just wanted to put it everything behind me as it worked pretty much until now I'm retired my kids are gone and I think more and more about it now and that's not unusual I started to reach out to people like that I met at the fat lab our reunion the 50th reunion so on and and some people I knew from other basic school classes that I either do in college or what have you and you know I've started to write something about my experiences semi war chronicle semi you know autobiography and I found that a number of people my age that it served you know are doing the same thing my guy said it's just for my desk drawer you know but just wanted to get that down on paper your thoughts my old English teacher in high school said if you can't write it down you don't know what it is you're thinking Oh which may be a bit of an overstatement there's some truth to that you know so the writing actually helps you dick come to that you know grips with what who you really were and what really happened yeah so the good memories and the bad memories where you got to have them all there you know there was an authentic to him just one of the other would you want to say how you got one did I sent a squad into a village we really hit gold with found several ton of rice in various places cached and so on and so forth and two or three abandoned villages and then when going into a fourth one or actually there they're not villages they're a subset of the village and I'm having a senior moment here anyway I sent a squad in to see if it was safe to take the whole platoon in and it was a new person just back just from the United States so I had a new platoon and a new NCO and it so happened when you move your unit you can't always have the same unit in the rear is much harder for them to follow you have to rotate them through otherwise you're really gonna wear out that we're we're squad and he dis rotated to the front just before we got to that village and he went in as he came out everything's okay and then we started to go in on file we didn't get online and the point person got shot and I made a rookie mistake of going I would to check on him and then I got shot and unfortunately the platoon CP following me island several them got one as well and it turned out that there was a very good this is a very good sniper units the Vietcong had lost a lot Aalto loving people to sniper fire that day now they weren't all on my watch but you know there's a larger battle ensued after that that was awarded the pelvis and in the hip you know yeah and so I I called in artillery and they stopped firing and you know the normal thing is usually they they they're considered themselves to be not out man dot weapons you know by the American forces and so I just assumed that the are we assumed that they you know we had retreated and so they brought medevacs and all my wounded and were gone then I didn't get fallen to the hospital I got flowing to command battalion command post to debrief the battalion commander our debris sakali battalion commander and then later in the day the fighting resumed they had distri positions themselves this unit that we ran into and so I think all told the our battalion lost 21 men that day five or six would have been all I was on the ground the you know i briefed the battalion commander and after that I was taken to the field hospital and by that time I had lost enough blood I was going in and out of consciousness but I never thought about myself dying at all you know I never thought about myself you know I've lost a lot of blood I should be going to the hospital not it's a battalion commander I wanted to go a little bit Gillian join her tell her what's going on you know I mean I was eager is is so mission focused and these stories seem to be very common I was put on a stretcher off a helicopter from the challenged CP to the field hospital as on a stretcher and the corpsman I remember hearing the corpsman say there's no pulse on this one sir and I was going in and out of consciousness but I wasn't conscious enough to hear those words and I said something like you think again corporal or and it was solely he seen a ghost but anyway at that point I was taken care of but the only reason I'm mentioning this is not that I almost died you know that's not a big deal when people around you are dying okay but I never thought about it the mission was everything and you know I'm not saying that doesn't happen in the army or other military units but just you know we get back and you're going up and see your girlfriend and Washington DC and eventually get back to Detroit you get to graduate school where do you go to graduate school Michigan State what was your major thing hello I see yeah okay so you got a masters at that time and I got a master's in a PhD at Michigan State yeah did you teach where you professor at the one of them well as a graduate student towards the end I had my own courses you know teaching as a regular faculty member and then I was what was known as a generation of gypsy scholars of what gypsy scholars in the 60s you know prior to the Vietnam War and the global economy catching up with us we just had this view of you know the future is right for everybody you know the economy is growing and we have the strongest economy in the world you know the Japanese are not yet back totally back on their feet you know by the 70s the auto industry was suffering from Japanese competition but you know and so the universities over expanded and of course part of us because the baby boomers are coming through or so the economy was doing really well there's lots of money for hiring people and lots of undergraduates coming through you know we're gonna be paying tuition Ahsan and then with a couple of years basically you know everybody was downsizing and you know we're trying to cut back and so on and so forth the legislators for giving the money to the universities and there weren't as many kids now because the baby was being in a dialect and so there's kind of a dearth of positions like her philosophy you might be one of 300 candidates you know most of whom are just on paper but you know 300 people submitting applications and so you you were lucky to get an app the new a job for a year for a sabbatical replacement or whatever and so I taught in a number of universities before I came to Shawnee State how'd you end up here then you had answer to the head for yes Johnny stated posted ad and how long were you here I don't talk for over 20 years and you're retired and stayed here yes and parkas are our kids have roots here now and we have grandkids oh okay John is there anything else you'd like to say I mean did you like the military well like any institution has its pluses and minuses and I realize that's a very you know evasive answer I gave one of my book my older son wanted to join the Marines and he passed his drug test he passed his ass fab he was had been Defensive Player of the Year for section 10 of the state of New York he was a good athlete but he'd gotten into many bar fights and he was walking out the door with this recruiter here in forced us to go to West Virginia and be inducted and I was there to send him off and a call came from First Sergeant in in Charleston and he said don't bring the Valentine kid we've done a background check on them and then and he has all these arrests you know I got on the phone and said you know most of those were arrests but you know no charges I mean very often the person who went to the bar flight is the one who kids for besting you know but anyway we went back and forth on the phone and I said I think I know where I'm talking about I was in the Marines for you know sorry says well that was the old course or this is a new Corps we don't do things that way anymore and at that point I would have gladly strangled a man I could have put my hands on him but the reason I'm saying that is I thought the Marines would have been perfect for him given where he was at and I gave him bucks you know about people's experiences in the reins and one of them was written by a young Hispanic man from Arizona New Mexico like a member what who did written when a Navy Cross in in Vietnam no no he wanted in an Iraq I'm sorry and he'd gotten out and he was writing about starting college so you know copies the experience in the Iraq war like mine in Vietnam go ahead and serve see come back go back go to school and you remember that we saw word on the Iraq war very quickly you know we were gonna hope for going in this was the second Iraq war that George which is here aqua and there's a lot of bitterness we would be trade and so on a sense of betrayal and this young marine who had won the Navy Cross said he would be at the lunch table and people would say you kill people over there didn't issue you know why would you want to do that why would anybody want to be in the military it's kind of like push push push and he wrote in his book you know I'd listen to that for five or ten minutes or something like that and then I'd say if you ever had 45 people around you who would die for you good answer mm-hmm but he didn't but your son didn't go no he never did he's got a fine construction career now are using those physical skills and so on but there is this this sense when you served and I still haven't parsed this on my own mind as someone would say were you glad you were in the military well you know I'm not glad that I killed people I'm not glad that people got killed okay obviously I'm not glad about any of that and so for me to say I was glad as in the military that sounds almost creepy in one sense but then you had that sense of bonding and at the counter guerrilla warfare center which is my last gig before I left everybody there was a it was a Vietnam returnee because we wanted the freshest experiences from Vietnam and I spent a lot of time with the troops there who were facing the decision whether to re-enlist or not and you know my answer eyes look if you believe oh or doing over there because at this time the Vietnam War is just 67 people were raising a lot of questions and and you believe in our mission it's a very noble thing to do and they would say well I don't know anything about the war I just know that I've never felt so tight with people in my life and I said well you know there's opportunities to feel tight with people a lot of these kids were from disadvantaged homes and you know the military was their way out of poverty so there's a you know there's a chance to feel that way in the civilian world too but part of me knew I was lying part of you knew you were lying yeah I mean and again I that's an oversimplification you know you got sports teams and things like that you really do become brothers and sisters you know it's not just a military military is the most extreme form of it Jonah is there anything else you'd like to say no one day when I have the answer to the question am I glad I served in the military I'll come back thank you so much thank you

Channel: Portsmouth Public Library - Ohio

Views: 13,218

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Keywords: portsmouth, public, library, ohio

Id: aOu3ZpXuIwY

Length: 61min 13sec (3673 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 21 2020