Chris: Today’s date is August 16th, 2016. I am in the home of Ron Whitlock. Today I’m
speaking with his friend and veteran- friend, Gary Wombles, as part of the Stories of Service
and Ford Oval of Honor programs for WIPB-TV. Mr. Wombles thank you for being here. Could you
tell us when and where you were born? Gary: I was born April 29th, 1949 right here
in Indianapolis, St. Francis Hospital. I’ve lived here
basically all my life. 10:23.26.22 Chris: When you were eighteen years old and
you got your draft notice, you opted to volunteer and join the service. What prompted you to do that? Gary: Well I had made up my mind my senior
year that I wanted to join the Marine Corps and I
wanted to go to Vietnam. That was the John Winn (sic) syndrome I guess
at the time I don’t know, and I didn’t actually get a draft
notice until I was in boot camp. It was kind of unique; they
call you up at boot camp to give you your letters one at a time, and they made me open
it because they could see it was from the government. So I actually got my draft notice then, but
I knew I was going to get one because at that point
they had the lottery and that’s one of the only lotteries
I’ve won in my life; I think I was number twelve or something. My birthdate was, so it was a
foregone conclusion I was going to go. But I had already made up my mind. Chris: You knew about Vietnam, what was going
on in Vietnam. Did you feel that it was your
patriotic duty? Gary: I did feel like it was my patriotic
duty. My father was a Marine Corps veteran of World
War 2, and he had a brother that was in the Army in World War 2, and my mom’s brother
was in the Army in World War 2, so it- our family
had a pretty traditional, patriotic outlook on things,
and I really felt like it was my duty to go, but honestly as an eighteen-year-old I wanted
to- you know, it seemed adventurous, or you know,
like I said you watch all the movies, and I just
wanted to experience it I guess is the best way to explain it. 10:25.27.01 Chris: How would you describe your basic training? Gary: Basic training was probably the hardest
thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. I think in
a lot of regards it was harder than Vietnam because if you made a mistake you were punished
immediately. You were basically broken to the point that
you were willing to do whatever you were told and it was a painful experience. I felt like that those, I think it was nine
weeks, that that was the longest nine weeks of my life. It was- in some regards it was worse than
the Vietnam thing because I would much rather be in a
firefight than have to listen to my DI tear me down,
you know? I mean they did it for a purpose, it made
us stronger, and it made us to follow orders, and we got the sense of the unit is more important
than the individual, so those were the things that I took out of it. It was an unpleasant experience. 10:26.29.10 Chris: Was there a particular lesson or part
of your training that came back to you in combat in
Vietnam? Gary: Yeah, and it wasn’t so much boot camp
but after boot camp we went to ITR, the infantry training regiment, and they taught us there
that if you were in an ambush or if you had taken fire,
rather than dropping to the ground and hiding and figuring out where it came from, that
you should turn and face the fire and move into
it. That made no sense to me whatsoever, but once
you get into that situation that’s the quickest and best way of putting the enemy on guard
a little bit too. If they start shooting and you start running,
or hitting the ground, then it gives them an
attitude of “we’ve already won this,” but if you move into them, or if you immediately
start returning fire instead of trying to hide,
that was the first thing that I thought of in my very first
firefight. These guys were right in ITR, they were right
to tell us to do that. There was a lot of
times that we did drop to the ground, there was a lot of times I wanted to run, but the
training kicks in, you know? Chris: What was your-when you got off- the
plane door opens and you begin to- you experience Vietnam for the first time, what was your
first impression? Gary: My first- when I got off the plane in
Vietnam, my first impression was the smell. I can’t
really relate what that smell was but it was an unnatural type smell. I mean, you could smell diesel fuel and kerosene, you could smell
fish and rice. It was not a very clean place, and there
was just something in the atmosphere, I don’t know if it was fear, I mean you could smell
powder, you know gunpowder, so the smell is what hit me most of anything at all. It almost, I
think I stopped as I was coming down the plane, I got off and you get a whiff of that smell
and I actually stopped and looked around thinking,
“This is not the good ole USA.” Chris: That’s everybody’s first impression,
the smell, they always talk about. How did the
veterans in your unit receive you when you joined up? Gary: When I first joined the unit, they’re
happy to get you, but they kind of want to keep you at
arm’s length. They try to feel you out, you know, “Is
this somebody that we can count on? Or is
this somebody that we’re going to have to babysit?” That type of thing. They were very
informative, they were very inclusive, but it took a couple of weeks or months to where
you really felt comfortable with everybody. 10:29.39.06 Chris: Did you have anyone in your squad who
you immediately bonded with? Gary: Yeah, there was a guy, he actually wasn’t
in my squad; he was the platoon radio operator. He was from Ohio and he and I hit it off pretty
quickly. I’m not sure exactly why that was,
because I actually joined the unit while they were in the field. Ron and I and there was one other
gentleman, and I can’t even remember his name, that they flew us out by helicopter,
and then our unit had sent some people down to pick us
up and take us back up on this hill where they were
and Hadley was one of the guys who came down and for some reason we kind of hit it off. I’ve
lost contact with him, as I have with most everybody, but he and I hit it off pretty
quick. I stayed
close with him until I left. Chris: What was your military occupation or
specialty? Gary: I was an 0311, which is a grunt, or
we called it ‘target’, or ‘professional target’. You go
around and draw fire. Chris: When you joined your squad were you
given any other duties? Gary: Immediately I was not. I was just one of the grunts to go around. After about a month, I
took over the squad radio. The gentleman who had that duty left to go
to R&R, so I was just going to carry it until he came back. Then whenever he came back he said, “Man
if you want it keep it, I don’t want it really back, so
that was the way that worked out. 10:31.37.16 Chris: Was that a burden or was it an honor? Gary: I liked it, because I felt like I knew
what was going on. Because I could listen to the radio
all the time, and if a platoon was getting orders then I was the one who passed them
on to my squad leader, and there were times have us
all get up on the company frequency and you could
listen to what was going on, so I felt like I wasn’t listening to a rumor, I was listening
to what was really going on. At the same time if you were in a firefight
or something like that going on over on the other side where you couldn’t
really see it, you could hear kind of what was going
on, you could prepare for what was coming along. I liked it, it wasn’t that heavy, or cumbersome
or anything like that, so I thought it was a privilege. Chris: Do you think, and don’t let me put
words in your mouth, but do you think that as a young
infantry soldier getting the radio gave you a sense of control over your own fate? Gary: I’ve not really thought about that,
but now that I look at it, yeah I think it probably did. I
felt like I had a little more control. I didn’t, but combat is about 95 percent
mental anyway, and I did feel like I had more control, because
we had to call in artillery strikes or something like that. The squad leader or the platoon leader would
give you the coordinates. There were always two
people who kind of went over the coordinates that made sure you got them right, you didn’t
want to call in an artillery strike on the wrong
spot, but I would relay those into the artillery people. It
felt like you were making some sort of a contribution other than just pulling a trigger. 10:33.31.18 Chris: Yeah. Some agency, you know, there’s not a lot
in the military I guess you can control, but you had that little bit. Gary: Yeah, at least with that I felt like
there was some control, like I said it’s probably more
mental than anything else, but it felt good that I was able to be in communication with
people you couldn’t see. It’s like there’s always help out there
someplace. Chris: What was your first skirmish or combat
like, can you describe what you were thinking? Gary: The first firefight that I was in was
very brief, and it all happened so fast I didn’t have a
chance to be afraid or anything else. We received some sniper fire, and we turned
in the direction the snipers were firing and we returned fire,
basically we were shooting at the air. It took a
minute before you could realize where they were at but saw some muzzle flashes and then
everybody trained their fire on that, but I’m thinking it probably didn’t last ten
minutes. We went
over and found two snipers that we had shot. So that was my first experience. It was kind of a
rush. I’ll never forget going over and looking
at the one particular sniper, he had been shot in the
head. I still have flashbacks sometimes that picture
it was kind of an ugly picture. Up until that
point it was kind of a rush. An adrenaline rush to think alright man I’m
finally here I’m doing this, but when you walked over and saw the
bodies even though they were enemies, then it kind
of hit you that this isn’t a movie, this is real life. 10:35.35.02 Chris: When did you, and you may have already
talked about that, but when did you start to feel
like, “Okay I’m a veteran, I know what I’m doing, I’ve been in situations.” Gary: I don’t know that I ever got to the
point that I felt like I know what I’m doing. After a
little bit of time, you kind of assume that every day is a different adventure; it’s
kind of hard to explain. I guess you get comfortable with that situation,
you know, life and death situations, but after being shot at and returning fire and
seeing the results of your guys being killed and their
guys being killed, I think you just become a little bit more callous. It’s just like going to work in
a factory and punching in and out of the clock. You get up in the morning and you go out and
you do whatever it is that they call you for you to do, and you punch out and go to sleep. I don’t
know if there was ever a comfort level with it, but you just become accustomed to it I
guess. I
don’t know if that’s an answer to the question but that’s a tough question for
me. Chris: Did you, looking back to your service,
do you see an arc of your own experience and how
you changed over time and does it surprise you when you look back? Gary: Yeah, I became harder and less emotional
very quickly I think, and I think it’s still the
biggest thing that I take away from it; I have a hard time showing emotion now a lot. Sometimes
things will hit me and I’ll break down and kind of cry, like I could watch a movie on
TV where somebody has done something for their friend
and that touches me, you know, it’s not so much
the death or whatever, but most of the time I’m pretty callous, and my wife will tease
me about, “It’s okay to smile,” and stuff, so. I guess that’s the biggest thing. 10:38.01.24 Chris: And that has stayed with you since
Vietnam? Gary: Yeah, I was always pretty happy go lucky,
and I guess to some point I still have a little bit
of that, there are things that I enjoy, just I have a hard time showing a lot of emotion,
one way or the other. Chris: Sorry, I’m just checking my notes
here. You had a few skirmishes and a few firefights
leading up to Foxtrot Ridge, can you walk us through that day and tell us how that was
so much different and more extreme than what you’d
been through previously? Gary: Foxtrot Ridge, the actual battle for
Foxtrot Ridge took place ten days, let’s see I was
wounded on the 15th, it was the 28th was when the actual major battle took place, we were
around Foxtrot Ridge, and our job at the time, we
had left LZ Hawk, which was about eight or ten miles
south of Khe Sanh. We had gone up the road and we were supposed
to go down this ravine and sweep the area to find out if there was anything
down there. I had heard the platoon commander
and the company commander on the radio talk about some movement, I thought there was some
stuff going on, some NVA or VC or something down there, so our job was to go down and sweep through that little ravine and valley,
just to see what was there. There again, sometimes
you just felt like you were a target, just going down there to see if you could draw
fire. As we
started out over the road, we went off the road down this little ravine, and my squad
was the point element of the platoon that particular
day, they rotated that around, but we were the point
element, and being the radio man I was about the fourth man back, there was a point man,
another guy, the squad leader and then I was behind the squad leader. But we kind of went
around this boulder, and you can look down in this little valley, and it was a beautiful
picture, but we actually saw three NVA soldiers down there,
and they were just standing down there talking to each other, they had no idea we were there. So we knew immediately that there was somebody
down there and they’re pretty relaxed, so we assumed that there was probably a decent
number of them down there, it wasn’t just two or
three guys by themselves, so anyway we kind of got
down and then they walked out of this little meadow-like thing into the woods that was
around it and so we started down the edge of this big
open meadow and went down over an embankment and it kept getting steeper and steeper, and
we got probably fifteen minutes into this after we had
spotted them, our point element went down into a kind of bomb crater, there was bomb
damage, there was trees and stuff that had been knocked
down. There was holes in the ground, this was
more like a natural ravine. Anyway, Mueller was the point guy and he walked
down and into that as soon as he started back up out of that,
Walsh, who was our squad leader and myself simultaneously spotted a little bit of movement
off to the right, and so Walsh whistled real loud,
I’m not much of a whistler but fortunately he was, and Mueller stopped and turned around,
and he motioned for him to get down and as soon
as he motioned for him to get down they opened up
with all sorts of stuff. Fortunately there was that cover in this little
ravine, and you could see that the muzzle flashes coming from behind these
trees and such, but that was one of the times that
we didn’t move into them, we kind of got down, and it’s probably a good thing that
we did because at the time we didn’t know for sure
how many was there. After the fact, they’ve
estimated a company or maybe a larger unit than a company that we actually made contact
with, and this was the part of that regiment that
was in that area, that actually assaulted Foxtrot Ridge
on the 28th of May. This was the 15th of May when this happened. Anyway, we went down into
there and Mueller, who was our point guy, he was, I used to call him John Wayne, he
was the John Wayne type, he was brave, hero, whatever
you want to call it, but he decided that he try to
crawl out of this little ravine and go around the left side to see if he could get behind
or find out exactly how many people was there, so I carried
a .45 and an M16 since I had the radio, and he
said “let me have your .45 and I’ll take it with my M16,” so I tossed my .45 to him
and then he started up around, and soon as he got out
of sight, you know you could hear them open up on
him, and you could kind of hear him groan, so you knew he got hit, and there was so much
fire we didn’t really do anything. I mean you just get back down, and some of
the guys were shooting over their head, they’d hold the gun up,
the M16 up and shoot without getting up and really
looking, and so then one of the other guys decided he was going to go up the other side,
and the same thing happened to him, he was killed. His buddy, they joined on the buddy system,
I found out later, knew that his friend had been hit,
so he went up to try to pull him back and then he got killed. Within the first ten minutes we had lost three
guys, and then the fire just kept coming, we
called in on the radio and explained our situation, we were kind of cut off from the rest of the
platoon because we were the point element, but we knew where our people were. They had
16mm mortars they were firing and had some M60 machine guns that they were firing to
cover us to keep the people down, because we were
in a pretty vulnerable situation down there. If the
enemy would have decided to come over the hill, or over the ridge into this ravine,
there was only five or six of us down there, and we
could’ve been eliminated pretty quickly, or if they had
just thrown some chicoms or something, the Chinese grenades, they could have done a lot
of damage, but I guess it was the fire from our
unit that kept them down, but it was a pretty nerve
racking experience because that was one of the few times where I felt like I had absolutely
no control over what was going on. You really couldn’t shoot back because if
you stood up to get a shot then you were going to get shot, so we
were just kind of sitting there listening to all this
stuff going on and seeing the dirt and stuff fly up around you, bullets were firing and
hitting, and it was a pretty intense situation. At that point there was about a thirty or
forty second period of time there that all I wanted to do was just
get out of there. I mean if there would’ve been a little
avenue I think I would’ve run. I still fight with the fact that that’s
being a coward. I struggle with
that from time to time because I’m thinking, “here it is, the rubber has finally met
the road,” and I’m a coward because I just wanted out of
there. Now it only lasted about thirty or forty seconds
I guess and then at that point you pretty much decided, “I’m not gonna get out of
here.” So
there’s no point in worrying about it, just sit back and wait for them to come over the
top and take as many people out as you can and that’s
the end of it. It was a pretty intense experience. 10:46.59.28 Chris: Was that the most frightening experience
you’ve ever been through? Gary: Yeah. Without a doubt, that’s the most frightening
thing to ever happen to me. In the
other firefights, and I wasn’t in a lot of firefights in the first three months that
I was there, there was a few, some snipers and stuff like that,
there were a couple other ones, but it all happened so
fast and you felt like you could make a contribution, you could actually get a shot, you could fire
back, but here it was like there was nothing we could do. Now I did feel like I had a little bit of
control, because of the radio. I was in constant contact with the platoon
commander and they called in artillery, and I think it was from
Whiskey Battery, which was stationed up at Khe Sanh. There was also a Marine Corps battery at LZ
Hawk, so I’m not 100 percent sure which battery it
actually was, it might have been both of them, I don’t know, but I know they fired some
rounds in the air, and he got me on the radio and
said, “How close is that to your position?” I talked to
Walsh, and we adjusted it a little bit closer. Other than that I didn’t feel like I could
make much of a contribution. 10:48.22.28 I did feel better; I guess I need to explain
this part. I have some PTSD, and for a while I was
having a lot of dreams, and stuff like that. So sometimes the dreams get mixed up with
reality, you know? IN my mind, the platoon commander or company
commander, I’m not sure which one, actually called in an airstrike, because
I remember somebody telling me on the radio, “be
sure you stay down, the fast movers will be here in thirty seconds.” Which is what they call the
Phantoms, which I assume is what everything was over there, F-4 Phantoms. I’m 98 percent sure
that that’s what happened but- I haven’t dreamed about it much here lately, but there
for a long time I was dreaming about that a lot. I think that there was airstrikes called in,
but if somebody tells me that there wasn’t I couldn’t
argue with them too much. Chris: Between you and your squad leader Walsh
you were able to, I mean you couldn’t return fire, they had fire superiority, but you had
the radio, you had your link to the outside world. Did
he stay calm, was he a calming presence and help the rest of the squad get their stuff
together? Gary: He was very calm; Walsh was very calm. Even the other guys- there was a couple of
guys who were down there who had gotten wounded,
but everybody was pretty calm. I don’t know
what they were feeling, I lost contact with those guys immediately, because I was wounded
and medevac’d out, and I never saw them, never
got a chance to talk to them or anything, so I don’t
know how scared they were. I like to think that my outside demeanor was
reasonably calm, but boy inside it was a different thing. I don’t know if they all felt that but like
I said I still struggle today with the fact that I was a coward, when
the rubber hit the road I did a cowardly thing because I wanted to run, I didn’t because
there was no place to go, but I’m not so sure if there
hadn’t been a little space, I might not have just zipped right on out of there, because
I was totally petrified. I can’t describe the fear, but once you
looked at Walsh and the other guys, they all seemed so calm and right when that was going
on the platoon commander hit me on the radio, or
he hit us on the radio, I was just the mouthpiece, and I talked to him and I handed the radio
to Walsh, so that kind of brought me back to
reality, and at that point I thought, “you’re not going
to make it out of here so just make the best of it, do the best you can. 10:51.21.22 Chris: Almost every combat veteran that I’ve
talked to, I’ve talked to quite a few, I ask them did
you ever feel fear and invariably they all say “we all felt fear,” it was just a
question of your training kicks in and you start doing your
job, you have a job to do, with platoon leaders and
such, “I had to protect my men, and so I overcame my fear,” it sounds like the same
thing happened in your case. You had your moment of fear, and then you
mastered it, and you got on with your job. Gary: The job kicked in, the fear never did
go away, but when they hit me on the radio, and I
had to answer the radio, I mean I knew I had to answer the radio, so I answered the radio
and I talked to the platoon commander for a second
and he wanted to talk to the squad leader so I gave it to Walsh and they talked for, I don’t
know, thirty seconds or so and he handed it back to me. We talked and adjusted fire on the mortars
and everything like that and they came back and said,
“Okay, after these fast movers come in, we’re going to get the other guys down there
to try to help you, to get you out of there.” But there was more going on than just what
was in that little space where I was, because the other guys
were higher up on the hill, but they were taking fire
because Ron got hit partially down the hill, they were trying to come down and relieve
us, and help us get our wounded and killed out back
up the hill. So that was going on up there too. There
was three guys who were killed up top or somewhere between the bottom and the top. So it was a
pretty wide front, though. Chris: How long from, would you estimate,
from the start of the ambush until you were adjusting rounds to relieve some of the pressure
on you? Gary: It was probably ten minutes, I suppose,
until the rounds started hitting. The whole thing,
as I sit here and think about it, I mean it seemed like it was hours, it was probably
thirty minutes, the time we were actually down there in that
position. Within thirty minutes, we had been linked
up with the rest of the platoon, and the company was there as well, so I think they sent some
reinforcements over. They got us and our wounded and killed back
up to relative safety. While I
waiting to be medevac’d after I had gotten back up after I was shot and got back up on
top, they were still taking RPG rounds and stuff like
that, and there was still gunfire going off. It was I’m
guessing about thirty minutes down there in the hole. 10:54.34.10 Chris: So the fast movers, the Phantoms come
through, and there’s some kind of corridor is
made through which you are reconnected with the platoon, what were you feeling at that
time? Gary: At that time I was as happy as I was
scared, I guess. I don’t know that they actually made
a corridor for us to get back up, but what the fast movers did, because they had some
napalm, it kept the enemy down, there was still fire
going on, but it kept the enemy’s heads down to the
point that it probably took five minutes for us to at that point to get down and some of
the other guys came down and helped with the wounded
and the killed to get them back up. So it was
probably five minutes but during that time all I could remember was explosions, because
it seemed like the artillery and the Phantoms
were working an area pretty heavy to keep their heads
down until we got back up to relative safety. 10:55.40.23 Chris: Were you as yet unwounded when they
made contact with you? At what point did you
receive your wounds? Gary: We were about halfway back up the hill
and there was a wounded guy and I apologize to
my unit because some of these guys I don’t remember their names, but anyway, there were
two guys carrying a wounded guy, and Walsh and
I were kind of moving as the four of us together, and I slipped, and when I slipped I kind of
slid down the hill a little bit and there was gunfire
going off around anyway, I felt like something had dropped on my foot, I thought a rock or
something had dropped on my foot, and I was actually shot in the foot. So some other guys had
to help me get back up the hill. It was somewhere in the middle I guess. I seem like I was
reasonably close to the top, because it seemed like just a couple of minutes I was up there
by the LZ where they were calling in the helicopters
to medevac the dead and wounded. Chris: Did you, I mean were you in considerable
pain from the gunshot wound? Were you just
focused on that, was there any, kind of military activity thoughts going through your mind? Gary: I was pretty focused on the pain. It was pretty painful. I didn’t have my .45, but I had my
M16, and I was, you know, I wanted to be sure that somebody didn’t come up behind us,
that I could still protect myself and the other people
as we were crawling up there. I crawled most of
the way, there was a guy who helped me because it was a pretty tough terrain, so there was
one guy helping me, but I can remember having
the M16 up as I was crawling think if I see somebody I’m gonna pop ‘em. 10:57.54.03 Chris: When you got to the top and you were
in a hazy medical clearing or situation, you didn’t
see Ron, and what was going on at that point? Gary: As I was coming back up the hill, and
I don’t remember if Ron’s squad was right behind
us or if there was another squad between us and them, but I can remember that as I was
coming back up, and guys were helping us, I saw the
guys that were in his squad, Smitty and those other
guys, but I didn’t see him, and at the time I thought well I just missed him or whatever,
but then I asked one of the guys, I said, “Where’s
Whitlock?” and they said he got hit. I said, “How bad
was he hit?” and the guy kind of shrugged his shoulders. So when I got back up on top, I was
pretty concerned about that because we’d been friends since we were about five or six
years old, but when I got back up there, the corpsman
who was working on me, he was also working on
another guy that had been wounded, I asked him, “Did Whitlock come through here?”
and said yeah, and he kept working. I said, “Well how bad was he hit?” and
he said, “Well he was killed.” That was harder for me than about anything
I’d been through, up to that point. Ron and I had
been through a lot together. I mean we went camping with each other’s
families, stuff like that. I
remember thinking, “How am I going to explain this to his mom and dad, Bob and Irene? How
am I going to face them?” That was a tough situation for me, and they
put me on the helicopter, and I was hurting, but I was hurting more
inside than I was outside, I think. I couldn’t get that
out of my head, that he was gone. Yeah, you got other friends, people that I
knew there, Mueller and Diaz and Peg and those guys that were
killed. You felt bad about them but it was different
with Ron because he was part of me, you know. It was maybe a three or four minute flight
to Khe Sanh to Charlie Med. It was a long tough flight for me. There was a gunnery sergeant was killed, he was up on top, he was killed, as
we were flying up there the poncho that they had him
covered up with blow open and you could see the hole in his chest. I can remember that, but I
still couldn’t get Ron out of my head. I was in pretty bad shape when I got there;
emotionally I was gone. I was sobbing, and you know crying. You feel bad about that but at the time I
had no control over that, it was just what it was. Then while I was laying there at Charlie Med
waiting for my turn at the operating room, I was pretty
broke up. I heard this voice that said, “What’s
all the racket going on down there?” I don’t remember the exact words, but I
recognized that it was his voice, and I raised up and I saw him down
there. I wanted to get up, but the corpsmen was
right there and they didn’t let you get up. I remember saying, “Are you okay?” and
he said, “Yeah I got some shrapnel,” or something,
but it was like the weight of the world had been lifted
off my shoulders, and I hate to say it, but I didn’t think about any of the other guys,
because we lost seven guys that day, but as low as I
was half an hour earlier I was that much higher. I don’t
wanna say it was the happiest I’d ever been in my life but up to that point it was roughly
the happiest I had ever been in my life. Just to know that he’s still breathing. 11:02.43.14 Chris: Do you suppose now looking back that
looking back, we’ve talked, you said you guard
your emotions very carefully, or you don’t show emotions, that swing from despair to
happiness you experienced in an half hour, do you think
any of that even fifty years ago is a affecting you
now? Gary: I don’t know, I still see a counselor
once a month or so and we’ve talked about that some. He’s convinced that it does, that that’s
part of the reason that I guard myself. I’m not as
convinced as he is, but who’s to say? The thing is Ron and I were both Christian
when we went in, and that played such a huge part of the
healing and all that. I don’t know, I don’t know if
that’s the reason I’m guarded, my emotions. I’m much more private person than I ever
used to be, I guess. Like I said, my counselor at the VA said that’s
probably got a lot to do with it. 11:04.02.03 Chris: You were treated for your wounds on
your foot, and that made you combat ineffective? Gary: Yeah because I was shot right in the
top of the foot, and it took a chip out of the bone, and
it was a lengthy process to rehab, and I suppose that’s why they sent me, first hey sent
me to Charlie Med at Khe Sanh, then they sent me
to Fue Bai (sic). Which is where our battalion was-
our base area was, in Fue Bai (sic), which I’m guessing is about twenty-five miles
south and east of Khe Sanh, somewhere in that neighborhood,
but anyway they sent me there and then I was there for a week or ten days, something like
that, and they sent me to Yakusca, to Japan, to an
Air Force hospital. Can’t remember the name of the hospital,
it was in Yakuzca, and I was there for two or three weeks, and they sent me back
to a naval hospital in Philadelphia. I was there for
a month and a half, two months, something like that. At that point I was on crutches still. It was September, I was wounded in May, it was September
when they transferred me to Camp Lejeune, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines. 11:05.27.13 Chris: When you rejoined the Marines after
your rehabilitation, what were you doing at that
point? Gary: Okay, I did something my dad told me
never to do. As they brought me into the 3-6, there
was about eight or ten of us, that were joined in that battalion at the time, and we were
up at the headquarters and this gunnery sergeant came
out and he said, “Does anybody here know how to
type?” Well, I knew how to type, I wasn’t a very
good typer, but my dad always told me don’t volunteer for anything because they’ll tell
you they want truck drivers and the next thing you
know you’re pushing wheelbarrows, but at the time I thought, “Yeah I can type,”
so I said, “Yes sir, I can type, so I ended up going to work
in the operations office. Started out as a clerk typist,
then ended up being a training NCO for the battalion. So, I had a no-combat duty profile, which
meant you couldn’t go back into combat, as a target, but that was a combat outfit,
but the fact that I worked in the office it was okay. The Third Battalion, Sixth Marines was chosen
to go on the float, the call it where we went over
to the med, they would rotate battalions in and out there
for security, and it was our turn to go. In order to go, I had to rescind my combat
duty profile. I
had to sign off that I was rehabilitated and I would be okay. So I signed off on that, went over
there, went to the Mediterranean, got to see a lot of the world, it was a pretty neat experience. When I got back I got married, and in my mind
I was thinking, “I can’t go back to combat, so it’s
okay to get married,” and the military is no life for a married guy, so after about
six months or so I decided, “You know what, I’m not going
to stay in,” because originally I thought I would
probably make a career out of it, and I could see how hard it was on my wife, I mean she
was only eighteen, I was twenty. It was tough on her, so I thought, I’ll
just get out, and I put in my paperwork, because at the time the Marine
Corps was bringing people back from Vietnam, and
then didn’t have a place to put everybody. So if you had served in combat, you could
get out early. So I signed up for the early out. It was kind of unique, not too long after
I got the paperwork signed and everything processed,
I got orders from DC to go back to Vietnam. So I
guess I’m kind of glad that I decided early to get out. It would have been a tough call at the time
to think, “Well do I take the early out or do I go back and do my duty?” because
I always felt guilty I only spent four months there, three
and a half months there, when everybody else spent
thirteen months, but the Lord took care of all that, because I had already had the paperwork
and the process whenever I got my orders, so they
rescinded the orders and everything was okay. 11:09.06.05 Chris: When you were part of the training
unit, what lessons were you able to impart on the
young recruits? And did you feel you were helping, doing your
part also? Gary: Yeah, I felt like that what we were
doing was going to save some lives, if they got into
combat, because the training officer was Lt. Woodard, who just out of coincidence was out
of Second Battalion Third Marines, he was in
Foxtrot Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines the same time that I was. He got moved up from the platoon commander
of my platoon when I got there, they moved him up to the S2 officer,
the intelligence officer of the battalion. So I
didn’t really know him that well, I knew who he was, but he was actually the training
officer of Third Battalion, Sixth Marines. He was a sharp guy, and he really, in a lot
of the training stuff that he would set up, scenarios where you
would go out and practice combat situations, he was
instrumental in saving a lot of lives. I was the NCO in charge to help move things
around, but he was the one who came up with the curriculum
and the exercises and stuff like that. I did feel like
even if it was a regular battalion that we put them through their paces based on what
we had experienced. There were several people in that office in
the battalion that were veterans, it wasn’t that they were all new guys, it was probably
30 percent veterans and the other 70 percent were
new guys that were just coming out of their infantry training. 11:10.56.20 Chris: So when you were finally separated
from the service, when you left the Marines, were
you still feeling some anxiety, some guilt, or were you relieved overall? Gary: I was feeling quite a bit of anxiety;
I felt like I hadn’t fulfilled my obligation, I had only
spent three and a half months there, in Vietnam, and I was feeling particularly guilty that
I went ahead and took the discharge rather than going
back, because I did have the opportunity to go
back, so there was quite a bit of anxiety, I know my counselor says I have survivor’s
remorse more than anything else because it’s hard
for me to figure out, there were guys who were braver
than me, stronger the me, better than me, that were killed doing their same job that
I was doing, so that kind of bothers me. I was happy to get out, but at the same time,
on the other side of the cord that’s kind of, I felt I was safer
there than I was going out in the world. I had some
experiences when I first came back with the civilians who were a lot of times more vicious
than the VA were, so I felt safer in the service
than I did out there in, what we called it at the time,
being in the world. Chris: You decided, you were newlywed, newly
married, left the service. What was your plan
for yourself? How did that work out? 11:12.45.00 Gary: Well originally I had planned to use
the GI Bill, and I thought I’d like to teach. Which is
kind of unusual, because I was a terrible student. I always tell my grandkids or my kids that
I graduated high school because they didn’t
want me to come back again. I wasn’t a good student
at all, but I felt that from the work I had done there in the training battalion, or in
the training unit, that I felt like I could teach, that
I had that ability. So that’s what I wanted to do. I came
back and went to one of the colleges, local colleges, and interviewed at the admissions department and they basically told me, “We
have enough veterans up here. We don’t need
anymore. It’s going to be hard for you to fit back
into society.” And they specifically told me
“We’re not sure that we could justify that you teach kids, with what you’ve done.” And they
didn’t really know what I’ve done, they were just looking at a piece of paper that
said I was a veteran I guess, I don’t know what paperwork
they had. Anyway, after that I decided that
academia wasn’t the place for me and I went to work, originally I went to work with my
dad, doing remodeling work, he was a remodeling
contractor, and I worked with him about a year and
I got hooked up with a ready mix company, I started driving a truck, and that worked
out real well for me. I was with them for twenty-five years and
I ended up being general manager for the company, so all in all it’s probably good
I didn’t end up going to school, I guess. 11:14.41.16 Chris: The reception had to have stunned. Did it motivate you? Gary: Yes, it did motivate me. I determined right then and there that I wasn’t
as bad as people thought, and I was going to prove to them
that I could amount to something. Number one, we
committed no atrocities. I’m not saying there weren’t atrocities
committed in Vietnam, obviously there were, but the unit I was in was not
like that at all. We were in a position, we had taken
prisoners, gone into villages, we had the opportunity to commit atrocities, but the
thought never occurred to us. So we weren’t as bad as a lot of the public
was portraying us to be. I can
remember watching movies and TV shows when I first got back, and it seemed that all the
bad guys were Vietnam veterans. You know, they had gone off the deep end while
they were in Vietnam. I was bound and determined, from that, that
I was going to be positive, make some kind of positive contribution. Like I said, my faith in God played a lot
in that, I wish I could say I’ve been a real strong Christian my whole
life, sometimes I kind of slid off the side, but that’s
what brought me through, and I think about the guys who on the 28th of May after we were
wounded on the 15th, on the 28th on the actual Battle of Foxtrot Ridge, it was a terrible,
terrible situation. Most of the guys that I knew in my platoon
were killed, at that point. Not all of them,
but most of them, and I felt like I had to live and accomplish something for them. They didn’t
have the opportunity. The one guy, Michael Smith, he was from Mitchell,
Indiana, he and Ron, the three of us got pretty close, and he was
married, just had a little daughter, he got to hold her,
but he never really got to get to know her, and he was killed, and that tore me up, and
I kept thinking, I’m going to make something of
myself for them, so it motivated me quite a bit. I
actually named my oldest, my oldest son, Mike, after him, after Smitty. 11:17.25.20 Chris: Does your son know what kind of man
he was? Gary: Yeah, yeah. For a long time, he didn’t, and even when
we came up with the name Mike, I didn’t even really go into any great detail
with my wife, which as we were considering names, I
said, “Well what about Mike?” As it happened, the best man at our wedding,
another friend of mine, his name was also Mike. I think that my wife thought that, well, it’s
got to do with him, but it didn’t, I wanted Mike because of
Smitty. When my Mike got to be 15, 16 years old, I
told him a little bit about him, about the situation. Chris: Your father was a Marine Corps veteran
of Guadalcanal, which was no picnic. Were you
able to talk to him or any other member of your family about your experiences? Gary: You know, Dad never talked much about
his experiences at war, too, and when I came back we worked together, which was a blessing,
and occasionally we would talk about different things, but we never really talked about circumstances. You talk about different guys you knew, I
couldn’t tell you today any experience my dad had, because he never really shared that
with me, and I never really told him the experiences
that I had. We just talked about the camaraderie. My
dad, I not sure my dad didn’t have a little PTSD too, because he had a friend who was
from Pennsylvania, whose name was Jim Sicily, and
they came to visit us a couple of times, and I can
remember we had this big front porch at the house, and I could remember Dad and Jim sitting
out there, and sometimes they’d just be looking at the floor. They wouldn’t be talking. They’d be
talking and then the next thing you know they’d be looking at the floor. So, I’m not so sure the
PTSD didn’t affect them as well. My dad was the strongest person I’d ever
known, and his big thing was mind over matter. If you get something in your mind and you
want to do it, there’s no reason you can’t do it. Still, I wonder, I wish I had pushed the issue,
because I think he was hurting too. It was a little bit different because they
were welcomed home, as we weren’t. 11:20.18.23 Chris: We had talked about the effect that
Gulf War I, that experience and how America rallied
behind America’s soldiers at that time, and many Vietnam veterans welcomed that or
were able to begin talking at that point. You were treated backwards, your journey with
PTSD has been longer, so can you talk about what eventually
got you to talk and open up about your experiences? Gary: The PTSD, I guess, I’ve had it for
fifty years, I guess. The last ten years is when really
realized that there was something wrong. I would have fits of anger and in my management
position at the ready mix company, we had thirty drivers and some dump truck drivers
and some other people involved, and there are always
conflicts that come up. There were some times when,
boy I’d just; I’d want to come to blows with people. I didn’t, not with my own employees, and
then I also had to deal with some customers, and we used to say the customer is always
right but they’re not always smart. So there was customers that I just want to-
I’d get into arguments with them and I could feel my temper getting up,
and I can look back now and see that was the PTSD
kicking in, because I was so angry at what happened to us when we came back. I had a hard time
getting over that, but when the Gulf War came, I was very proud of the country for embracing
these guys as they came home. I made two trips out to the airport when guys
were coming back, because they would come back as a unit instead
of just as an individual, and twice I went out there to wave the flag and welcome them home,
but at the same time I felt a little jealous, and
that’s a terrible thing to say, because you shouldn’t feel that way, but I did,
I felt a little jealous they could. We did the same thing, we defended the innocent,
and we did our service to our country, and we were just pretty much swept
under the rug. I felt a little jealous, and some of the
guys that I was working with, they knew I was a veteran, and they started asking me
questions more than what they had in the past and I
just clammed up, I said “It’s over and done with, I
don’t want to talk about it.” It kind of drove me the other way, but it
all worked out in the end, I guess. 11:23.23.10 Chris: You had set the timeline that within
the last ten years you had started talking. Do you
think any of that has maybe some form of kinship with the soldiers returning from Afghanistan
and Iraq, and that many of them are experiencing PTSD, and that these young men are going
through problems and maybe they could benefit, or maybe it’s somehow allowed you to talk
more freely? Gary: That has helped me immensely, because
when I was first diagnosed with PTSD, at the VA, which was about ten years ago, eight or
ten years ago, they suggested that I go to up to
Michigan, at the VA in Michigan. They have a real good in-house program, and
I had gone through some programs here in Indianapolis,
but they don’t have a long-term care type thing. It’s
an hour class and you go through eight or nine classes and then you’re done. This was an in-
house program, where they suggested that with some of the anger issues and stuff that I
was having that I should go up there, and I didn’t
even think about that when I got up there, there was
only about eighteen people in this group. We lived in a barracks, just like a military
barracks, and I was up there for fifteen days. There was two Vietnam veterans; everybody
else was Gulf War. That was an eye-opening experience to me,
and that’s when I really started to talk a little bit,
because I could talk to these guys, and they’d befriended me, they took me in like I was
one of them, you know? Even though I was old enough to be their dad,
most of them. So was the other
guy that was a Vietnam veteran. I guess I wasn’t ashamed, that I was having
these feelings, because I always felt like this is a weakness,
it’s a character flaw that I can’t control this, and you
can listen to these other guys, and realize that it was a different arena, it was in the
desert as opposed to the jungle, but they went through
the same things, it was the same fear, it was the
same deal, and that I wasn’t quite of wild an animal as I thought I was I guess, so that
is what really got me started to talk once I hooked
up with some of those guys, and one of the guys in
particular that lives up there, Peter Setters is his name, he and I stay in contact on Facebook,
ever since. It’s been probably five or six years ago
that I went up there, I guess. That was the catalyst,
I guess, being hooked up with those guys and realizing that we’re all brothers, and sisters,
there were some ladies up there too. 11:26.31.14 Chris: You said you were comfortable, you
knew that they understood what you were feeling because they had been through it too. I guess, maybe it’s something that only
a combat veteran, doesn’t matter what the era is, can express
to another combat veteran. Was it easier with a
stranger than maybe your father? Gary: Yeah, because when you started out,
you didn’t feel like you had to guard yourself. When
I’m talking to somebody that I know, I still have to protect from giving away too much,
you know, because I had one experience, maybe
this is not apropos, but I had one experience with a
guy who was a very, very good friend of mine through work, and he and I were very close
friends, for twenty five years we worked there together. He was always pumping me, you know,
“What was it like? What was it like? What was it like?” and sometimes I’d just
make up stuff, just to get him off my back, and one day we
were sitting down for lunch and he said, “I want you
to tell me, what was it really like?” So I told him a little bit about this May
the 15th, 1968, the start of Foxtrot Ridge, and it was never the
same between us after that. I mean, he was friendly,
but there was just a little bit of standoffishness, you know? That concerned me, that was
somebody that I knew, I didn’t really feel like I could open up, because I didn’t want
to drive people away. I didn’t tell my wife, the kids, anything,
you know, because you don’t know how people are going to react, but once I got
up there with strangers, it was different and it was so
revealing to me that I could talk to them and it didn’t drive them away. It brought us closer
together, because they were sharing stuff that had happened to them, and I could relate
to it, you know. Here’s people that are thirty years younger
than me, that we could relate to each other. The way this thing was set up there, there
were different classes that you would go to throughout
the day, and then at about 4:00 or 4:30 you were on your own, you know, they had a theater,
golf courses and stuff like that, so these guys
would ask me, “Hey lets go to the movie,” or “Let’s go
play some golf,” or something, and while you’re out there playing you’re actually
talking about some of that stuff and it becomes natural. It’s not something that you have to hide,
you know, it’s a natural thing that you could- I didn’t
have to worry about am I going to scare this guy, are they
not going to want to have anything to do with me. So that was a catalyst, I think, that’s
when I realized that I owed it to myself to get this
stuff out in the open rather than just keep it all bottled
up all the time. 11:29.45.06 Chris: Finishing up near the end here, if
you had advice for younger soldiers, veterans, who
were suffering from PTSD, what would your advice be for them? Gary: It’s two things, and I talk to some
guys occasionally, that I come in contact with, I still go
out to the VA, when you’re sitting there in the waiting room, I tell them, “Don’t
underestimate the power of God, read your Bible, turn it
over to God,” and the other thing is, don’t hide it,
because you can’t hide from yourself, and that’s what I did for forty years, I hid
from myself. You got to get it out and tell yourself your
story. Write it down, that helped me, to write it
all down, and periodically read it. But don’t stuff it, don’t try to keep
it in there and pretend that you’re somebody that you’re not, because
all that does is it makes the anger get worse, and the
paranoia get worse, the dreams get worse, and the flashbacks get worse, so you got to
get it out. Chris: Any final thoughts as far as anything
you’d like future generations to know about you or
your service in Vietnam? 11:31.11.28 Gary: Maybe not so much personally what I’d
like for them to know about me, but I’d like for
them to know about the Vietnam era soldier, that we were not baby killers, and just out
there to do damage to people. I mean we were eighteen, nineteen, twenty
years old. I celebrated my
nineteenth birthday two weeks before I got shot. We were there to do the right thing; we were
there to help the people of Vietnam overcome the communist regime. You can go back, history
will determine if that was a good war or bad war, I don’t know, but I just want them
to know that we’re just people, we’re just like everybody
else, and we didn’t do, most of us did not go over
and make any atrocities or do something that would that I was ashamed of. I’m not ashamed of
it, you know? There was a lot, forty years of my life, where
I didn’t want to share it because I was afraid everybody else was ashamed of it,
so that’s what I’d like for the future generations to
know, we’re just people. We just did a job and it didn’t turn out
like I wished it would’ve turned out, but it wasn’t our fault, it wasn’t
the soldiers’ fault. Chris: Well Gary, on behalf of WIPB and Ball
State, thank you for your service to our country, and welcome home. Gary: Well thank you very much, and I very
much appreciate the opportunity to share my story. I’ve never done this before, and when Ron
first contacted me I thought, “I don’t know if I can do
that or not, but it was not a painful experience at all, I appreciate very much your openness,
and the opportunity to do this. Chris: Well, thank you, and future generations
will see your story and share your story, and
hopefully learn from it, so thank you very much. Gary: Thank you.
