Chris: Today is June 25th, 2015. I am at Ball
State University in the studios of WIPB with Gerry Waite, as part of the Ford Oval of Honor
project. Gerry, can you state your name and spell your name for us? (09:01.49.19) Gerry:
Well my nick name is Gerry. My official name, my Ball State name is Gerald. G-E-R-A-L-D
W-A-I-T-E. But I go by Gerry. As you know, I sign everything that way. Chris: Okay, we’ll
go by Gerry. That’ll be easier. Can you tell us where you were born and when? (09:02.13.08)
Gerry: I was born in Carbondale, Illinois in 1947. Raised in Albion, Illinois which
is near Princeton, Indiana; in a very small farming town. Raised in town but did farm
work most of my life or most of my young life. Worked on farms and went to school in Trinidad,
Colorado for my first year and came back to the University of Illinois. Chris: How would
you describe your family’s history with regards to the military? Did you have a history
of service in your family? (09:02.51.14) Gerry: My last eight grandfathers were in the military.
My first grandfather, that I know of, is a man by the name of Benjamin Waite who was
a Puritan in Deerfield, Connectic-, Deerfield, Massachusetts. Deerfield, Massachusetts, and
he was Sergeant Benjamin Waite in the local militia. He was known as a proficient Indian
killer and the Indians killed him in 1703 in a raid on Deerfield. The skinned him 2
alive because of his reputation. But, I’ve had grandfathers in that war. I’ve had grandfathers
in the War of 1812. Well, grandfathers in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the
Civil War. I had my great grandfather’s Civil War Sergeants kit from the Civil War.
I donated that to the Illinois State Museum since he was in the 1st Illinois Cavalry.
My grandfather, my mom’s dad, died when she wasn’t even born yet from the result
of mustard gas in the Argo. So, and my dad was in the Army Air Core during World War
II. Although he was a trainer in Biloxi, he never went overseas. Chris: So your family
history is rich, or well populated with men who served, men who served their country.
Was it any surprise to your parents that you entered the service and how did you enter
the service? (09:04.38.25) Gerry: Well, actually, I was at the University of Illinois and my
grades were abysmal. My draft board in Albion, Illinois told my dad that I was number three
on their hit list for draft. So I quit school and “enlisted” to do what I thought, I,
you know, I might be able to direct what I wanted to do. And I signed up as an Artillery
Surveyor, did basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. Did advanced individual training
at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, was a qualified Artillery Surveyor. Officer candidate school for artillery
was right across the street from my barracks at Ft. Sill and I liked that. I looked at
that, liked that and thought, “I really want to go over there”. So I applied. And
I had ninety semester hours in college so I was given serious consideration. I got my
orders for OCS and it said Ft. Benning, Georgia. And I asked my company commander, I said,
“So is there artillery OCS at Ft. Benning?” He just laughed Chris: So Benning is infantry?
(09:05.56.06) Gerry: Benning, Ft. Benning is infantry, all infantry. It’s the infantry
school and still is. But, I flew to Ft. Benning on the night of August the 4th, 1968. We got
off the plane we were greeted at about five o’clock in the morning at a barracks, told
to leave our duffle bags where we were in formation, and we ran five miles. Two people
who didn’t finish the run we never saw again. Their bags were taken somewhere, they were
taken somewhere, but we never ever saw them again. But, for twenty-nine weeks we ran and
ran and ran and ran. And I went from there to jump school, parachute school, which was
just across the street. Got assigned to the 82nd airborne in Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.
And at Ft. Bragg I was late getting there. I didn’t go with my cohort, because I had
broken an ankle in jump school and was on as a, I was a casual at Ft. Benning which
meant I was 3 staff duty officer and every other dirty detail they could find for a 2nd
Lieutenant. And so I was late and got assigned to the division G5 which is civil affairs.
And I did basic civil affairs stuff, I did a study of education in Puerto Rico when the
82nd was in Puerto Rico for a couple of weeks. I did local stuff around North Carolina, I
was at Fayetteville, North Carolina, I did local stuff with civilian populations. And
they sent me to civil affairs school at Ft. Gordon, Georgia. So I went there, and from
there I went to Vietnam. I went to Vietnam; I arrived in Vietnam on January the 1st, of
1970. Chris: Was it a disappointment at all to be trained first in artillery then in infantry
and now you’re going over as a civil affairs officer? (09:08.04.02) Gerry: I really, I
actually liked civil affairs. I had ninety hours in college, mostly anthropology. I kind
of imagined myself the social scientist although I really wasn’t at the time. It was how
to combine the Army and the military with what I really liked. So, civil affairs was
really good, I just didn’t know how it was gonna work in Vietnam. Chris: What was, going
back to officer’s candidate school training, you talked about running and running and running,
so physically challenging. What were the mental or personal challenges? (09:08.49.02) Gerry:
In officer candidate school, as I said, we ran a lot. But we were always deprived of
sleep, we averaged three or four hours of sleep a night. We had to learn how to sleep
on the trucks when we were going to ranges, we slept sitting in classes. One guy even
claimed he learned how to sleep with his eyes closed. The food was really stringent, you
had to do twenty-five pushups and ten pull ups on the pull up bar to get into the mess
hall then you had five minutes to eat siting at attentions, so with one hand in your lap
and you could eat with the other hand. And you could look straight ahead, not every look
around or talk to anybody, and if you did they’d run you out. They’d just dump your
food and run you out. We had one guy that lost a lot of weight. In the first six or
eight weeks he left. He was actually a staff sergeant in the Army who had applied for OCS
but he just didn’t adapt. And adapting was the real problem, figuring out how to cheat
without being dishonest, how to sleep without, you know there was a real stringent honor
code. If you lied you were out, if you stole anything or broke the rules you were out.
But we’d have our wives come bring us pizza and slip it through the windows at night so
we could get stuff to eat. And we would take care of people who, for instance if they,
one of the ways of harassing people is to put one person down 4 for pushups while everybody
else is running. And that person then has to do twenty-five pushups and catch up. So
what we would do, after a while we learned that if they put somebody down for pushups,
we’d all stop, we’d block traffic. And this is a formation, you know, we’re a platoon
of forty people, there may be a hundred and sixty more behind us. So we’d do that, we’d
break up the whole formation. We’d stop post traffic which is cars coming and going
on the roads. And we basically had a little power to harass back. And when somebody screams
at us, “Candidate such and such, Candidate Waite, I didn’t tell you to get down.”
“Oh, I thought you did, sir.” But, we learned how to work together, how to cooperate,
how to basically give back what we got. And how to survive, how to adapt and survive.
A 139 graduated out of that initial class of 240. And out of that there’s an awful
lot of them dead. Dead in Vietnam. Didn’t survive, my officer candidate roommate Bobby
Williams, he died on September the 29th, 1970 in, I can’t remember which valley, it was
a highland battle. He was in the 4th infantry division and he took a round through the head.
He’s buried in the black section of the cemetery at Loughton, Oklahoma. And I’ve
been there to visit the grave; I always send flowers on behalf of all of us in the company.
I really dislike the fact that there’s a black section and white section in that cemetery
and there’s no veteran’s maker on his grave either. I guess his family didn’t
want it. I’ve never been able to locate the family. But, we were tough; we could run
ten miles in combat boots with a pack. We, each of us could do 500 pushups, everybody
could do 500 pushups. We had pushup competitions in the hallway at night. And we actually had
people who could do 100 one handed, although I couldn’t. But we were really in pretty
good physical shape. We were sharp mentally and we knew how to work as a team. Chris:
Did that essence of teamwork and survivability help you the most when you get to Vietnam
and you find out you’re not going to be with an army unit but you’ve been assigned
in the Marines? What was that like, what was your reaction to that assignment? (09:13.38.22)
Gerry: My reaction to the Marine Corps, being assigned to the Marines, I didn’t even know
where I was going to be assigned when I got to Vietnam. So I flew into Cam Ranh Bay, arrived
in the middle of the night, went to a barrack. Looked like a plywood barrack in the United
States. And the next morning they said, “Well you’re going to Da Nang, to the 29th civil
affairs company.” And when I got there they said, “Oh yeah, you’re going to the Marines.
We’ll send you right up there.” So they put me in a Jeep and sent me to 1st Marine
division. I survived well in the Marines. The Marines are all about a team. The Army
in Vietnam, I think the Army was scattered. You had maintenance units, you had helicopter
units, you 5 had people who were in this sort of unit, that sort of unit. But the Marine
Corps for the most part was strictly a fighting unit. And the spirit of the Corps, the teamwork,
and the feel of the place was something that I understood, and liked and got along with.
They’d call me a “dirty army doggie” every now and again but they accepted me.
Chris: I was wondering, you are not just Army but you are freshly minted out of OCS. 2nd
Lieutenant? (09:15.06.05) Gerry: I was a 2nd Lieutenant when I got to Vietnam, but I was
pretty promptly promoted to 1st Lieutenant. But I was still very green. And the Marine
Corps particularly understands that Lieutenants of any rank are green. But, they treated me
alright. In the Marine Corps particularly, more than the Army, there’s a real division
between the officer and enlisted. So you had your officers club and officers would never
go to the enlisted club. You had your officers mess and enlisted mess. The only officer that
ate in the enlisted mess was the Commanding General and he’d eat in enlisted mess every
week somewhere. And God help the mess officer if the food wasn’t up to par. In the Marine
division rear they had outhouses that were officers only and all that sort of stuff.
So there was a real division, but within the officer corps at 1st Marine division, I was
really accepted, well accepted. And they really made me feel at home. Chris: Describe your
assignment with the 1st Marine division and the team you worked with. (09:16.36.04) Gerry:
We had a small detachment of the 29th civil affairs company. A Captain, two Lieutenants,
and three enlisted men that did refugee work. We organized med caps for refugee villages.
At that time in 1970, we were in what they call the pacification era of the war in Vietnam.
And we were trying to basically rectify some of the wrongs that had been done and some
of the damage. So in Quang Nam Province, it’s about the size of the state of Maryland and
that was Marine land. But Quang Nam Province had 500,000 people as a population and half
of those were refugees when I got there. We did return to village projects, we did med
caps, we organized med caps, medical professionals who would go to refugee villages and treat
people for all sorts of things. I actually had one doctor one time that I took out to
a refugee village with several nurses, two doctors and we got there about eight-thirty
or nine and by nine-thirty this guy was sitting in my Jeep. And I ask him what he was doing
and he said, “Uh, I’ve seen every disease they told me ever existed in medical school.
I want to go back.” And I said, “Well I 6 can’t take you back, you’ll just have
to sit.” So I left him to sit out in the sun till I got the others ready to go or until
we treated everybody. It’s not a big refugee camp, it’s probably three or four hundred
people. So we had lines until about three or four o’clock and then we had to leave.
Chris: Did this doctor refuse to work? Did he ever come back? (09:18.35.15) Gerry: No,
he refused to work. He sat in the jeep all day. And never volunteered for one of those
things again. I think he was really upset by what he saw, refugee villages are terrible,
terrible places. You know we have 30 million people as refugees in the world today and
that really worries me because the refugee camps I’ve seen are just nasty, nasty, dirty,
disease ridden places. And if you think about 30 million, that’s a lot. Chris: What positive
effects did you see, in those refugee camps, during your time there? (09:19.18.14) Gerry:
I’m not sure there was any positive effect; we tried to make it bearable. But you’ve
got to consider, the military mission is to search out and destroy the enemy. Period.
That’s basically it. And that goes double for the Marine Corps. They have boots on the
ground to locate, identify, and destroy the enemy. So, basically, our job was to keep
civilians out of their way. If civilians were in refugee camps, if they had food, if they
had water, if they had some medical treatment, then they weren’t out in harm’s way with
the Marines. People don’t understand with the military, the military really aren’t
social workers. The military have a mission and that mission concerns what they identify
as an enemy, it’s their assignment. So stuff like civil affairs is superfluous, it’s
over and above the military mission. But it’s to keep the military mission from being hindered
by civilians. The Quakers in Quang Nam Province alone, the Quakers documented over a hundred
massacres of one sort or another where civilians got in the middle of a fire fight or civilians
were killed. We had Korean Marines operating, as well as American Marines and the Korean
Marines killed several groups of civilian people, which the Marines later got blamed
for. And I talked one time to a Korean company commander and he says, “You pay us to kill
VC. They’re all VC, we kill them all.” That was his answer. Chris: So an interchange
like that with a Korean Marine Commander and also the American combat commanders, did your
mission, as far as civil affairs and trying 7 to keep civilians out of harm’s way ever
conflict with their mission? And if so, how did you resolve that? (09:21.30.07) Gerry:
There’s a lot of conflict of mission. At the time maybe I viewed myself as too much
of a social worker and I got reminded of it often. But, when I lived in villages and worked
in villages with what were called CAP Marines, Combined Action Platoon. There’d be seven
Marines that would live in a refugee village or a returned village project. I lived in
a returned village project for four months with seven marines. And they would really
get on my case. “This is interfering with ambush tonight” or “this is interfering
with patrolling”. Or “You can’t build that out there, that’s out of our security
perimeter”, that sort of thing. I was a lieutenant and the commander of the CAP was
a Sergeant, so technically I outranked him, but for security issues, he was absolutely
in charge. So he thought I was young, dumb Lieutenant and it was always, “Sir, you
can’t do that,” that’s how he would say it. Chris: So the chain of command was
respected but at the same time, was he inflexible in his military orders? (09:22.55.23) Gerry:
You know, the chain of command is really difficult. If you’re a Lieutenant, you really need
to listen to people who are often times subordinate to you. But they out rank you in terms of
age, stage, knowledge, war time experience, etc. You become much more flexible. We had
a lot of Lieutenants that were killed when they got there because they simply decided
they were in charge, they knew how it was going to be, they would take orders and put
people directly in harm’s way without any consideration for the situation or whatever.
They get orders to take a hill, they’d say, “Okay guys, take that hill.” And maybe
taking that hill needed thought out a little more. And often times a platoon sergeant would
tell a platoon leader Lieutenant, “You know, we can’t do it like that sir. We gotta do
this a little differently. We’ve got our orders but we gotta handle it better.” And
often times orders were coming from people who were not in the field, people who didn’t
see the terrain, people who didn’t see us on the ground. They didn’t know what that
hill looked like. They didn’t know that there was a minefield between us and the hill.
They didn’t know what kind of casualties we were taking from snipers; they didn’t
know a lot of that sort of stuff. Chris: Was there dissatisfaction then with the troops
who were on the ground and preforming the missions and the higher command? 8 (09:24.42.29)
Gerry: Not in the Marine Corps. I saw some Army units that I was close to where there
was. The Army units seemed to have a lot of trouble. The Marine Corps is much different
from the Army. There were some race problems. We had race problems within the Marines; we
had race problems in the Army. We had a lot of dissatisfaction; actually I had a guy that
I recommended for Court Marshall in our 29th civil affairs unit. He was assigned to me
in the Marines but he really worked hard at keeping everything screwed up. And in the
field he couldn’t be counted on. I never wanted to get shot at with him around cause
I didn’t know if it was him or somebody else. I didn’t trust him, couldn’t trust
him. Chris: Can you describe in any detail any of the race problems you had? And you,
as an officer, how did you deal with that or defuse the situation? (09:25.48.21) Gerry:
Okay, I didn’t have any direct contact with race problems in the field. Mainly because
I was with a seven man team, most of the time in the field they were all white. A friend
of mine from 5th Marines was a black Lieutenant and he often times had problems; he would
tell me blacks in his unit didn’t want to go to the field or they would ask him why
he was Uncle Tom. He said that they weren’t necessarily good Marines. They were drafted
Marines, Marines could be drafted at that point in time. When you went to the draft
they would tell you, “Okay, you four are going to the Army, you two are going to the
Marines.” Just go down the line like that. Some of the black Marines were drafted. And
the Marine Corps had to keep them. They couldn’t get rid of them. Nowadays, if they have someone
unsuitable they can get rid of them. Discharge them. But he said his biggest problem was
probably race within his unit. And that there was a lot of division between black and white.
In the Army you saw the same thing. Chris: How much of a factor do you think the struggle
for civil rights here in the United States was having an impact in the military? (09:27.25.16)
Gerry: There was a lot of impact from what was going on here in the states. People idolized
Martin Luther King, people idolized Malcom X. This was after the assassination of both
men. People were really on it like, “why are we fighting this white man’s war here?”
And I heard that in person several times. But, Martin Luther King’s speech on the
Vietnam War and some of the things Malcom X had to say really affected the way black
soldiers felt in Vietnam about what they were 9 doing there. They’d be like, “Why am
I risking my life for some war that’s created by some white guy in Washington?” That’s
how they put it. Chris: Did you understand that at the time? And or do you understand
it now looking back? (9:28.27.25) Gerry: At the time I was sort of offended by it. I mean,
I was really ridged, structured, Lieutenant, thought I was really doing the right thing.
And I didn’t understand where they were coming from, I was really offended. The other
thing was, people of that stripe, the times I was in the field I wouldn’t want to be
with people like that because once again, you couldn’t trust them. You have to trust
the guys your with. You have to be able to trust that their covering your back and you’re
covering theirs. So, at this point in time, I understand clearly where they were coming
from. And considering the war itself, King and Malcom X were both right, although they
were coming at it from a very different aspect. The war wasn’t right, we were wrong in that
war. And some people had the foresight and vision to say, “Hey, we shouldn’t be participating
in this.” Chris: When you went out into the field, describe some of the activities
that you did that were military and some of the activities that were civil affairs. (09:29.59.13)
Gerry: When I was in the field, civil affairs was military. Everything I did was military.
Whether it was building a school, which I’m really remembered for there now, I’m really
surprised. But I went back to that village and they said, “Oh you were the Lieutenant
that build the school.” Everything had a military purpose. Whether it was settling
people in one place or trying to get agriculture going again in a controlled environment where
you could secure it. Everything was about security. Everything was about strategy. Everything
was about keeping military control, or what we thought keeping military control. When
I go back now I look at it and we maybe controlled five percent of the land and about that same
percentage of the people. We weren’t really in charge; we just thought we were at the
time. Chris: And when you live for four months in that village, you lived with them. You
weren’t coming in and going out. And what was it like to live with them? And what were
your relations like in that village with the locals? (09:31.10.14) Gerry: When I lived
at Gunoy, that’s the village that I lived in. It was Phu Loc. Gunoy Island, and Inland
Island. Myself and the Marines, we got our food supplies from 10 the outside and then
there was a small army unit that was there with another Vietnamese unit and they got
supplies. But we ate with the locals, we slept in local bunkers. There was a bunker attached
to every house. When we weren’t on ambush or patrol we slept in the village. We worked
with people to try and get irrigation going again. We worked with people to try and clear
fields. My first job when I lived there was destroying bombs. The place had been carpet
bombed for six months prior to our moving into that village and in the first month that
I was there, I destroyed 2,500 bombs. I would pay kids to find bombs for me and often times
the bombs were booby trapped but the kids would show me where the trip wires were. So,
we’d tiptoe up to a bomb and put plastic explosive on it and blow it up and put a twenty
minute fuse on it and tiptoe away and go fine a big hole to crawl in. But I had kids there
called bomb finders. I’m still acquainted with some of them today; I still know some
of them. They’re grandparents now. But I was paying them twenty-five or fifty cents
for every bomb they found for me. And I figure at this point in time they really didn’t
care if I got killed, but it would do in their source of income. So that’s why there were
a couple of times there were bombs or booby traps they were really careful to tell me,
“Don’t step there, there, or there.” They showed me how to get to it. I had one
bomb finder that was killed. There’s a thing called a cluster bomb that we used a lot of
in Vietnam. And cluster bombs have 730 baseball sized bombs that come out of a larger bomb
unit and then they twirl and scatter over a large area the size of a football field.
And about thirty percent didn’t go off so the kids would get them and play with them.
Sometimes they didn’t go off because they didn’t spin enough in the air and arm. So
throw somebody a curve ball and it might explode when they catch it, which is what happened
to one of my kids. But they were warned not to pick them up, not to touch them. And I
really am scared of cluster bombs. I never touched one other than to very gently lay
a little block of plastic explosive on it and set a timer and literally tiptoe away
from it. They’re so dangerous. They’re still blowing them up there today. They’re
still finding them. In Laos, they estimate there’s as many as twenty million of them
left. In Vietnam, there may be in Quang Nam Province alone there may be 5 million of them
still on the ground. I was there last summer and the Army was still there blowing them
up on Gunoy. Chris: I mean there’s the human cost, the civilians who are kind of caught
in the middle between the warring factions. But did you ever get the sense that some of
those civilians may have actually been VC? (09:34.42.28) Gerry: Trying to evaluate what
civilians were doing and who civilians were in the war itself was really, really difficult.
Sometimes I agreed with the Koreans; they’re all VC. But, I liked people; I got along with
people in the villages. My peer, the guy I 11 was assigned to was the village chief.
He was assassinated but they didn’t assassinate me, they could have. Chris: Why didn’t they
assassinate you? I guess as my follow up question. (09:35.24.00) Gerry: I don’t know why they
didn’t shoot me. They could have. Maybe I wasn’t worth it. Maybe they didn’t want
that much trouble. Maybe I brought stuff to the village that everybody wanted. I got a
lot of supplies and I brought stuff. I build a school. I got books. I got rice. I got irrigation
tools. I got farm tools. And I think the village chief got assassinated for political reasons,
not for pragmatic reasons. He didn’t care what people got as long as he was in charge
and he was getting his own. So it may have had to do with his own corruption. But, I
figured out later, the kids showed me, when I went in 2004, the kids showed me where the
tunnels were beneath where I lived. And I thought, I don’t know how I survived this.
But my village chief got wacked, there was a military guy I worked with, Captain Yim,
he got shot, wounded and it broke his leg up pretty badly so he never came back to the
field. A guy by the name of Joe Smith that I worked with, he was State Department Civilian
and he got me the funds for school and the funds for agricultural stuff. He got killed.
In 2011 I took his wife back to where he got killed. And his wife actually met the person
who was probably the commander in charge of that. So figuring out who was who was the
most difficult part of the war. Basically in that war, 300,000 Vietnamese people that
were military, 300,000 died. 3 million people died total. Ten percent were military, the
rest were civilians. And as a result of the war, another couple million people have died
since. So the cost of the war is 5.2 million, according to the Vietnamese. According to
the American government, the war only killed 3 million people. Only, as they say. They
say that. Chris: At any point while you were over there, did you experience a loss of faith
in your mission? (09:38.05.03) Gerry: As I talk about and think about faith in my mission,
I don’t believe that I ever faltered. I always thought I was in the right. But I told
you, I was a ridged, young Lieutenant. Twenty-two year old Lieutenant. And I thought I was doing
the right thing. So obstacles were obstacles, they’re just something to be overcome. I
also, I did have a lot of freedom. I could come and go as I wanted. Often times I’d
come back to Da Nang, which was fifteen kilometers away. About ten miles or nine miles. And get
my laundry done on the weekend or go to the Officer’s club and get a steak. I was really
protein starved in the field. I could go to Da Nang 12 City which most Marines couldn’t,
most Army couldn’t. I could go places that other people couldn’t. I had one time at
Gunoy, I had an old nun that came out to see me. Old, old nun, she was in her seventies.
Course I’m getting close to that now and I don’t consider it so old. But then, she
looked ancient. But she asked me for concrete. And I told her, “Well, you know, I just
can’t provide you any concrete.” We were not supposed to provide the Vietnamese any
concrete because they’d use it to reinforce tunnels and bunkers. But anyway, I went to
the orphanage that she ran. Four nuns had about 2,000 kids; some older, who helped,
and some younger. And lots, and lots, and lots of kids in diapers. My first wife and
I corresponded about it and we decided we would adopt the first baby in the first crib
in the first building. Which we did. So I adopted my daughter Leann and brought her
home babe in arms when my tour ended. They actually kept me there and extra month getting
an exit visa and a Vietnamese adoption done, I had to do that. If I hadn’t had the freedom
that I had, if I hadn’t had the sort of ability to move about; I did provide her with
some concrete. I can say that now, I wouldn’t tell anybody then that I gave that nun any
concrete, but I also saw the building that got constructed out of it. Every bag of it
got used there. Everybody’s war was different there, everybody’s war. My war was different
than most in that I had a lot of freedom, I did think that I was doing the right thing.
I could really, in many ways, I could prescribe my own job. I volunteered to go live with
the Marines out at Gunoy, nobody was gonna make me. And as a matter of fact, I had a
Vietnamese interpreter. I had a short language school but it didn’t take. I know more Vietnamese
now than I did then. My interpreter went with me then deserted. He left. We got shot at
one night, just very little, and he disappeared. I don’t know whatever happened to him. Chris:
Did that happen often? You were working with local military or para military, South Vietnamese.
How reliable were they and did you feel it was just you and seven Marines? (09:41.44.08)
Gerry: In our case it was me and seven Marines. We had what were called PSDF’s- Peoples
Self Defense Forces. They were fifteen and sixteen year old kids that we armed with Korean
vintage weapons; Thompson submachine guns, carbines and whatever we could get. We’d
go out and ambush a patrol at night but if we got shot at at night they’d disappear.
We lost a lot of weapons because they’d throw their weapons in the river then jump
in after them. I would have people called PSYOPs, psychological operations. They would
come out and show movies in the village at night. I took a picture one night. Saw Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a first run movie in that village one night. And I took
a picture of the crowd that was standing around then got it developed later in Hong Kong and
13 looked at it and thought. Well I won’t tell you what I thought but there were two
of the girls that were supposed to be out on village perimeter standing there with their
weapons watching the movie. Some Vietnamese forces were very reliable, some were very
unreliable. I think it just varied. There was no telling what the composition was. I
will say this about that, Quang Nam Province, where we were, has the highest number of heroic
mothers in the communist state at this point in time. Mothers who lost three or more sons
to the revolution. This includes Hanoi, all of North Vietnam, all of South Vietnam, all
of Vietnam. The biggest number of heroic mothers live in Quang Nam Province, which was friendly
territory. Chris: Like you said, that village was carpet bombed and leveled. Where the people
who lived there previously brought back to that village? And are those the mothers and
are those the circumstances in which they lost their children? (09:44.04.07) Gerry:
No. Heroic mothers are mothers whose sons enlisted in the VC, or the northern forces.
They’re sons who fought for the north, and were killed. There were a lot of kids killed
in different situations in South Vietnam. There were kids who were killed in bombing.
There were whole villages that were wiped out. They’re still gone. People are just
called missing. We have 2,300 soldiers missing in the war. The Vietnamese have over a million
people missing from the war. Totally missing. In the case of Gunoy, Gunoy was cleared. In
1968, Gunoy had a lot of Vietcong who were mounting attacks against the airfield at Da
Nang. Against the province capital at Hoi An, which is about ten kilometers away. The
U.S military, the Marines, the Korean Marines, the Army all decided to absolutely clear it
and bomb it. So the bombed it for six months. And it’s in the final approach for the Da
Nang air base. So bombers who didn’t let their bombs go over Hanoi or didn’t let
their bombs go over Laos or wherever would drop their bombs on Gunoy as they were making
a final approach to the Da Nang runway. It was as clean as this floor. It was jungle
and rice fields. When I moved there, there was nothing but sand and metal debris and
unexploded ordinance. That’s all there was. Chris: And you had to build a village out
of that? (09:46.11.17) Gerry: The Marines, myself, other people like the state department
guy, Joe that got killed, we were charged with building a village, a return to village
project. It was a model project that was the way everything was supposed to go. Then President
Thieu visited they village. They cleaned everything up like you wouldn’t believe for that. Commanding
General would drop out once a week. You’d see his helicopter coming and we’d run and
go get our helmets and flak jackets on so 14 that we looked somewhat military presentable.
We knew his helicopter. We knew his helicopter at a distance. But, he’d come out and visit
us and he’d just walk through and say, “How’s it going,” and, “did you get this,”
and, “are you getting food?” The Marines guaranteed you, at that point in time, the
Marines guaranteed you one hot meal a day in the field. So they might drop it out of
a helicopter at 10,000 feet but, they gave you a meal a day. We had some very scrambled
eggs a few times. And we also had hot food. The Korean Marines were in the other end of
the island for some of that time so we would trade them scrambled eggs for kimchi. And
then mix our remaining scrambled eggs with some kimchi. I learned to like kimchi that
way. Chris: I was gonna say, was that any good? (09:47.38.14) Gerry: Kimchi and scrambled
eggs go together very well. There’s a saying that I can’t remember but you just sort
of learn things under those conditions. You learn what works and what doesn’t. We got
a lot of sea rations which we traded to the villagers for some local food. We ate a lot
of rice. We had local Cokes. We had Beer Bomboya which is Beer 33. It was always hot. We’d
get the ice. Which you weren’t supposed to eat the ice there either because it was
contaminated. You know, don’t touch the water, don’t drink the ice. Or don’t eat
the ice. But, we’d get ice for our beer and twizzle the ice around in our beer and
throw the ice out. Just to cool the beer off. We had a woman, Ms. Tien who often cooked
for us. She almost killed me with some uncooked snails one time. I had amebic dysentery and
I was on hospital ship sanctuary for a couple of days with that. Ms. Tien would cook for
us. She always had Cokes and beer and what not. We figured out later her husband was
a Viet Cong that we never saw. They were actually looking for him and he never appeared again.
I saw Miss Tien again in 2004 and she told me that her husband never showed up again
after the war. They don’t know what happened to him or where his bones are. Chris: One
of the million missing. (09:49:20.27) Gerry: Yeah, her husband would be one of the million
missing. Chris: Aside from the amoebic dysentery which was probably unpleasant, militarily
what was your scariest moment? (09:49:36.01) 15 Gerry: You know it’s hard to figure what
your scariest moment is. I’ve only been shot at a few times, not very many really.
Actually my scariest moment I was with a Vietnamese unit and this was this Army team had what
they called RFs, Regional Forces, which are a paramilitary unit also but a little more
professional. I went out on ambush with them one night and they were out there smoking
dope. So you could see them with a spliff a mile away and I’m thinking these guys
are going to get us shot. And then somebody did shoot a round, I don’t know if it was
us or somebody else, but these guys called in artillery and the artillery came in right
on top of us. So we had several people wounded. And I’m like how are they going to get this
stopped. I had access to a radio but I couldn’t speak enough Vietnamese to call the Vietnamese
artillery back in Hoi An that was dropping 105’s on us. I couldn’t do anything and
I’m just trying to dig a deeper hole. And that was pretty scary. Those guys going out,
I didn’t offer to go with them again, I really didn’t. I thought they were hazards.
Chris: That was enough. And that was like a local patrol near your village? (09:51:13.11)
Gerry: Yeah, that was on Ganoi, that was a local patrol just west. The west, one kilometer
west of the village, the island I lived on was 11, I always get miles and kilometers
mixed up. But I think it was 11 miles, no 11 kilometers long, we’ll go with that.
And one kilometer west of the village you were in no-man’s land, it was a free-fire
zone. So anybody could shoot anybody out there, no questions asked. We had air strikes that
came in there, we had artillery we called in there, we had a lot that went on. There
was a Sapper Battalion, a North Vietnamese Sapper Battalion that we knew we at the far
end of the island, it was the 82nd Sapper Battalion, from Hanoi. They were very green
and they always had a lot of mess ups in what they did which was fortunate for us. But we
went out on ambush in that no-man zone, the Marines went out there almost every night,
the Army unit that was there, some of their people went out there every night. And it
was real difficult to keep coordinated because we also had some Korean Marines that were
coming and going. So there was Army, Marine Corp, Korean Marines, Vietnamese, there were
a lot of people out there. Chris: Did you have instances of friendly fire between units?
(09:52:45.14) Gerry: Well, that was friendly fire, friendly artillery fire we dropped on
ourselves that one night. There was not too much considering the people that were wondering
around out there. I think the Koreans shot at us one night but I’m not sure. 16 Chris:
When you would go to Da Nang you had mentioned you’d go to Da Nang to the airbase. Were
you ever caught there when it was subjected to attack? (09:53:18.12) Gerry: I was at the
airbase, the airbase never got attacked directly when I was there. It was attacked in 1968
during Tet of 1968. But what would happen at the airbase was that they would get rocketed
at night, and often times those rockets originated at Ganoi or near Ganoi. So I’d drive to
Da Nang just to get rockets from home as I used to say. One time we were there at night,
I tried not to stay at the airbase at night. There was a First Marine Division Rear and
I had a bunk there and that was near the airbase but the airbase was obviously low and long
because it had a two-mile long runway. They would take rockets at night. One night I was
there when they did and I told the guys, and it was at the far end, it wasn’t anywhere
near us, but I told the guys “They’re missing me, they’re sending me rockets from
home.” Chris: You felt more secure in your village than you did at Da Nang? (09:54:25.03)
Gerry: Yes. Well, First Marine Division Rear was really pretty secure. And I spent several
weekends there, quite a few weekends and Christmas and that sort of stuff. It was up against
the side of a mountain. They had good security on top of the mountain, good security around
the bottom, they were much better secured than most of the other installations like
the airbase or the Army bases along China Beach. So that was really secure, you could
sleep good. Very rarely did anything happen. Chris: I’m wondering if, you look back on
it now, if ignorance was bliss. You talk about going back in 2004 and 5, finding out about
the tunnels. Would your attitudes or actions have changed if you had known about the tunnels?
What would have changed? (09:55:22.26) Gerry: As I look back on it now, you know hindsight’s
everything, hindsight’s 20-20. Ignorance really is bliss. If I’d have known what
was going on in that village underneath my feet or around me or out in no-man’s land
it would have been a whole different war. I didn’t have to stay out there, I might
not have. The fact that it was as insecure as it was I really didn’t realize that.
You think you got a defensive perimeter and you’ve got some machine guns set up in the
perimeter, but people are coming in and out your back door so to speak. The village was
17 right next to a river, so we had a defensive perimeter around 3 sides but not the river
side. People were coming and going at night in canoes, boats, on the river we didn’t
even know about. People were tunneled underneath us. The land is very sandy and I dug some
wells, never found a bottom to the sand, found a lot of water. But apparently there were
concrete reinforced tunnels under the village when we were there. The party chairman there
at the village now was the VC commander at the village at the time I was there. And I
asked him, I didn’t know that. But I asked him “How long have you lived at Ganoi.”
And he said “All my life, I’ve never left.” And I said “But there were no middle-aged
men in the village when I was there.” And he said “I was there.” He said “I know
you, you just don’t know me.” Chris: How do you deal with that? Obviously everything
is safe there now but what went on in your mind as you heard that? (09:57:26.27) Gerry:
You probably don’t want to hear it. It just like oh shit. What was I thinking, what was
going on, what was going on in my head. Why wasn’t I looking at things more closely?
Basically why didn’t I understand, why didn’t I understand what was really going on in the
war. And why didn’t I understand an insurgency. America wasn’t the first but we used an
insurgency effectively against the British in the 1700’s. Very effectively. And other
people have adopted our ideas and perfected them since. Insurgency is just almost impossible
to defeat. Virtually impossible. And whether it’s search and destroy or it’s pacification
or it’s winning hearts and minds or whatever it is, if you can’t identify the enemy you
can’t win. Vietnamese fought the Chinese for a thousand years like that. They defeated
the Chinese, it just took them a thousand years. If we had known that history and understood
that history and understood what an insurgency really looked like on a large scale I’m
not sure we would have been there. I think we would have understood it was not winnable.
I have friends that say we should have nuked them all, kill them all, let God sort them
out. There’s just no good answer to what you do in a war like that. There’s no good
answer. I mean we’re seeing no good answer at this point in time, same sort of stuff.
We’re seeing more and more bombings in Baghdad, we’re seeing more and more problems in Afghanistan,
Syria’s a total mess. But insurgencies are just impossible to defeat. Chris: Think, well
it’s not really so much a question, I guess. American military hubris, Cold War politics
and not even understanding the history of Vietnam and the French colonial efforts in
that area, all kind of combined to blind us, or..? (10:00:03.14) 18 Gerry: We were blind
to what we were doing, and we did it a step at a time. We had President Truman, President
Eisenhower, President Kennedy and President Johnson and then Nixon and Ford all involved
in this. And none of them, none of their policies, none of it really made good sense in hindsight.
But at the time everybody thought they were doing the right thing. The only one I could
really fault would be Truman because we had people who fought with Ho Chi Minh to get
rid of the Japanese. And then Ho Chi Minh wrote Truman several letters and asked to
be an American territory or anything, just don’t let the French come back in. French
in the form of President De Gaulle said Vietnamese people are our property, we want our property
back. So we sent a whole different set of advisors to help the French take back control.
In 1954 when the French were finally soundly defeated they left and we took over. We divided
the country. America in the Geneva Accords divided the country. We appointed a Boston
ex-pat buy the name of Diem as president of South Vietnam and then promised elections
in ’55 or ’56, but we cancelled them and kept Diem who was, you know, been living in
America, kept him on as president. Chris: Abrogating the terms of the Geneva Accords
if anyone cares to read them or look at them, we were not supposed to install anyone, we
were not supposed to officially recognize any government in South Vietnam, but based
on the advice of CIA operative Edward Lansdale Eisenhower said okay, let’s do that. So
it’s one mistake after another and it’s Cold War policies that misinterpret the local
landscape as far as the Vietnamese people. Like you had said, fought the Chinese for
a thousand years. How are we going to overcome that? (10:02:18.19) Gerry: Vietnam is a series
of mistakes. I don’t think anybody was more anti-war than Eisenhower. If you read the
statements he made about war and about the military industrial complex you know that
by the time he was president he was really anti-war. But it was almost like the office
was bigger than the person. He just kept committing more and more and more people to a situation
that, you know, we were signers of the Geneva Accords, we basically broke our agreements
from the Geneva Accords and we tried to keep power. By then it was about Communism. When
it first started with Truman it was simply about colonialism. We had to establish western
dominance once again in this area of the world. And Communism was not a problem in 1946 and
’47, not too much. Stalin was a little bit of a problem but it wasn’t really, you know.
Mao hadn’t really risen to power and it wasn’t really a big problem. It was about
colonialism. Each series of mistakes compounded the next, so we made a lot of mistakes and
presidents of, you know, Democratic, Republican, Democrat, Democrat, Republican, Republican,
they all made mistakes through time. And often times 19 on good advice. But the basic concept
was flawed to begin with. Every mistake is another, every mistake compounds it. Chris:
And those mistakes put young men like you in Southeast Asia. And you stayed true to
the mission, you had faith in the mission. As you were getting short and you’re getting
near the end of your tour you had a future plan, you and your wife had agreed to adopt.
What were you thinking as you were nearing the end of your tour, and did your attitudes
and behaviors change? (10:04:42.20) Gerry: I don’t think so. I don’t think that my
attitudes and behaviors really changed toward the end of my tour. But part of that was because
I was in some ways such a free agent. Literally. I had my own transportation and I could come
and go where I wanted, so I could in some ways just do what I wanted. I could spend
time at Ganoi, I could go to this refugee village or that refugee village. I was still
pretty much a gung-ho Lieutenant. As a matter of fact one of the guys that was one of our
enlisted people from that unit that was in the Marines with me has been back to Vietnam
with me twice and he tells me, he says “You were so gung-ho, I can’t believe you were
so gung-ho.” He was drafted out of graduate school at Berkeley and was a translator of
sorts. He got a hold of me in 2010 and we went back to Vietnam and then he went back
in 2013 with a student group. I was listening to him talk to the students, he said “Oh,
Lieutenant Waite was so gung-ho he was unbearable.” Chris: Was that a surprise to you? (10:06:03.10)
Gerry: That was kind of a surprise. I felt like I did my job. I had a more basic sense
of patriotism than I do now. I think the sense of patriotism that I had then was you just
do as you’re told. Now my sense of patriotism is more investigate what’s behind it and
let’s see what we can do about it to make things right. I have a shirt that I wear,
didn’t wear it in here today, but “Peace is Patriotic”. And working for peace is
very patriotic I think. But at the time it didn’t matter whether it was war, peace
or whatever, you did what your country wanted and that was being patriotic. Chris: You exited
Vietnam. How long did you stay in the service after that? (10:06:54.12) 20 Gerry: I went
in the service in 1967. I left the active service in the spring of 1972. I stayed in
the reserves as a Basic Training Company Commander until 1981, so I went back and forth from
Indiana, I went back and forth to Fort Benning as a Basic Training Company Commander. Chris:
You carried back with you not just your memories of Vietnam but a living legacy, your daughter
came back with you. Did that influence your decision to go back to Vietnam and when did
you go back the first time? (10:07:37.12) Gerry: When I left the military in the ‘80’s
I had no thoughts about going back to Vietnam. If you ask my daughter what she is she’ll
tell you she’s and Asian-Hoosier. She was raised here in Muncie, she went to Burris,
she went to St. Mary’s and then to Burris. And she had no desire to go back. In the late
‘90’s, I’d been divorced, I was re-married, and my wife, my daughter and I started talking
“Why don’t we go to Vietnam.” And Leann says “Yes, I’d really like to see Vietnam.”
So in 2000 the 3 of us went back together. We went to a lot of the places where we’d
been during the war, or we went to the orphanage where Leann came from. The orphanage now is
a home for old folks, the government manages adoptable kids because there’s money in
that. So the nuns who were there at the time running the orphanage, one of them who was
a very young nun at the time, is still there. And my daughter and her took off and went
around Da Nang to different places. My daughter speaks no Vietnamese but they both spoke enough
French to get by. But anyway, when we were there in 2000 we went to Ganoi and I met people
who said they knew me, I didn’t remember them. But I started formulating plans for
actually doing some research on how this village had developed and changed and how it had grown
back into the landscape the way it had once been. So I applied for and got the Cohen Research
Fellowship for the Cohen Peace Studies Fellowship for 2004 and I went back and lived at Ganoi
for the summer and did some research. And then started going back with students, other
groups, different people, so I’ve been back 11 times since then, 11 times since 2000,
counting 2000. Chris: Was it hard that first time to re-visit scenes of very intense memories?
Was that hard for you? (10:10:02.12) Gerry: When I went back the first time I woke up
looking for my weapon. It was the smell, the heat. The hotel air conditioners didn’t
make a bit of difference, it still smelled like some place that I’d been before. The
noise, I was really suspicious of how people would treat me. Actually, Vietnamese love
Americans. They 21 dislike what America did but love Americans. This is kind of emotional
still, but during that first visit I was at Nha Trang, which is between Ho Chi Minh City,
between Saigon and Da Nang. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful beach, probably the world’s most
beautiful beach. My daughter, my wife, they wanted to stop there so we did. We also had
people to visit there. A restaurant owner friend of mine in Indianapolis, his parents
live there and we visited his parents. I walked down to the beach and I was talking to a bookseller
who’s sort of famous. He trades books with people. You take a book down and he’ll trade
you any book that he’s got. He’s just on the beach and he’s got books all over
the place in little shelters on the beach. I was talking to him about where I was during
the war. So, as I was walking back to the hotel from the beach by myself about dusk
two guys on a moped come up really quickly. And I’m like “What’s going to happen
here, what’s going on.” And one guy, the guy on the back, jumps off and runs up to
me and says “You Ganoi, me VC Ganoi, shoot your ass.” And gave me a big hug. But, you
know, I’ve had a lot of stuff like that happen since I’ve been going back. In some
ways we’re all soldiers, no matter which side we fought on. At this point in time the
war’s gone, the war’s fini, over, heckroi as the Vietnamese say. So we were all soldiers.
We may have been shooting at each other then but we were doing the same job and we understand
them, they understand us. There’s a woman that’s a really famous war hero in the south,
near Saigon, and she owns a restaurant. I take students to her restaurant every now
and again. And the last time I was there she pinned one of her medals on me. She said she
was a good soldier, I was too Chris: And people who were on such opposite sides can come together
after 40 years. (10:13:13.21) Gerry: Yeah. I had another thing like that happen to me,
another, I had another instance that happened many, many years after the fact in Germany.
My wife is German. Her uncle was in Rommel’s Army, on the Eastern Front, and was taken
prisoner and kept prisoner in Siberia for a year or two. But as he was dying he asked
my wife and I to come and sort of explained through her, he said “I was a soldier, your
husband’s a soldier, I can talk to him about some of this stuff that I never talked to
anybody about. Because he’s a soldier he’ll understand.” And he gave us 2 hours on tape
right before he died about his experiences in Africa and Russia that none of his family
ever heard. Chris: And he shared them with you. And there’s a common experiences, common
bond among all soldiers you think? (10:14.23:05) 22 Gerry: I think it’s just, I really think
that’s a common bond among all soldiers. I have people that I know that don’t agree
with my take on the war, nor do I agree with theirs. Like I said, some people said we should
have nuked them all, killed them all. And they certainly don’t agree with mine, I
work in Peace Studies at this point in time. But we’re still close because we were brothers
in arms. Chris: You’ve taken students over, you’ve taken students in your classes over
to visit Vietnam. And you’ve taken veterans over as well. What are the differences in
reactions when they get there, and how do they cross generations to communicate those
emotions? (10:15:23.15) Gerry: Working with veterans and students in Vietnam, putting
those 2 groups together is really a lot of fun because the veterans often times will
open up about their experiences. The students are really interested, and although they’re
naïve and obviously the place is not the same at this point in time, it brings about
some different sorts of reactions. I’ve got a new book that will be out on Amazon
here yet this summer about that, and it’s about students. And the title is “The Millennial
Generation in Vietnam: Lock and Load, Rock and Roll”. When we stepped out, when I took
a group of 10 students and 5 veterans to Vietnam in ’13, and when we stepped out of the airport
one of the veterans said to the other “Welcome home brother. Lock and load, rock and roll.”
And the students picked that up and started using it, much differently, but that was their
mantra for the whole trip. The veterans, some were reserved, some were really out there,
but the students spent time on the bus with them, on boats, in hotels and restaurants.
We all ate together, we talked together, we went to different places, we went to different
cultural sites as well as different war sites. We went to places where these guys were in
different battles. We had 3 Marines, no 2 Marines, 3 Army. These students are the age
that we were when we were there, so in some ways we can relate to them. In some ways.
There’s some boundaries there, but still we can relate to them because they’re as
young and dumb as we were when we were there. Chris: But it’s, it’s entirely different.
Is Vietnam now more westernized in urban centers where our students can understand that environment,
and how do they react to the Vietnamese? (10:17:49.00) Gerry: Vietnam is westernized to some degree.
And it’s Westernizing very quickly. In 2010 there
were less than ten-thousand cars on the streets of Saigon. Millions and millions and millions
of mopeds. When you drive up to a traffic light you’ll 23 see mopeds 30 and 40 across,
and pedal to pedal, foot to foot, pedal to pedal, and lined up as far as the eye can
see. There’s no way to explain how many mopeds you can get in one intersection. They’ve
got traffic lights since 2004 which they never had in Saigon before. It was a mix and mesh
sort of, just actually organized chaos. And since 2004 they’ve got traffic lights. They’ve
got a helmet law that came about in 2008, and now since 2010 they’ve got new car dealerships
and there’s probably a hundred thousand cars in that 8 or 9 million mopeds that are
on the street at any time. There are buses, there are trucks, there are water buffalo
carts, there are hand carts, there are bicycles. It’s anything but western. It is so foreign
to our students, they just go into shock. You have to just get them out there, you have
to push them out into traffic and say “Hey, we’re going to walk.” For instance, when
you walk across the street in Ho Chi Minh City, that’s an experience. I took my department
chair with me from Ball State one time, and she’d freeze like a deer in the headlights.
She’d get halfway across the street and freeze up. What you have to do is, you have
to keep your eye on where you’re going and walk at the same pace and do not make, do
not look at anybody, do not make eye contact. And the mopeds and traffic will just flow
around you smooth as can be. But I had one student that was hit by a moped and some old
lady, some 75 or 80-year-old lady on a moped hit this student and knocked the moped down,
knocked the student down, just bruised the student luckily. But the old lady got up cussing
her out in Vietnamese and put her moped up and left. It was not humorous to me at the
time because I was responsible for the student but it was just, thinking about it later it
was just funny. But students soon learned to deal with the traffic. Students soon learned
that this is different than anything they’ve ever, ever seen before. Now, you can say it’s
Westernizing because you’ve got more cars, but you’ve still got the main mode of transportation
is mopeds. In Ho Chi Minh City they sell 1500 new mopeds a day. In order to buy a new moped
you have to get a driver’s license. Most people in Vietnam have not got driver’s
licenses. So in order to buy a new moped the government requires a new driver’s license.
There are new laws like helmet laws. I have to have a helmet, my head’s 7 ¾ so I take
my equestrian helmet with me and that passes for a moped helmet. So I can drive a moped
or be on a moped. They have elongated seats that they put on mopeds so you can take the
whole family out for a drive. You used to see 3, 4, 5 people on a moped, really packed
on there. Now there are laws about that so you can only have two people on a moped, or
two people and a baby. The government does not require helmets on babies, which was really
amazing to me. And then I got told the reason. They said well, that helmet on top of its
head can restrict its growth. They’re really concerned about people being tall enough to
be western. But the culture itself, the city itself, the cities, the towns they’re not
westernizing in ways 24 that you and I would think. Vietnamese take other cultures and
make it their own, they make it uniquely their own. So when we go to Hoi An, which is a place
I’ve lived before and I dearly love, you can find American and English and Spanish
and Portuguese and French and Chinese and Thai cuisines all rolled into one. It’s
the cuisine capitol of Southeast Asia. But the Vietnamese have ways of putting stuff
together and making it individual and their own like no other people I’ve seen. It’s
really amazing. Chris: Did you find you missed that when you went back, was the cuisine,
was the food even better, did the smells change, did things change over time the more visits
you took and it became less threatening? (10:23:22.05) Gerry: The smell of, the heat and the fish
oil smell never change. Never ever ever. When you step out of the portal, you know I call
it a portal, it’s a door. But when you step out of the air conditioning of the Ho Chi
Minh Airport and step into that city street with all that noise and all that smell and
all that heat, you’re like I know where I am, I know where this is. Cuisine changes
but a lot of it has been there for hundreds of years so there’s a lot that’s constant.
Other stuff changes. This shirt’s made in Hoi An. I’ve had lots of clothing made there.
I told somebody before the taping that this shirt is at least 12 years old. But you can
get really nice clothing made fairly inexpensively. Half of what it would cost you otherwise.
So thread shops and cuisine and whatever, there’s just a lot once again that’s uniquely
Vietnamese. Chris: When you take veterans back you’re experiences have been by and
large positive. Do you feel a sense of closure, and what do you hope to achieve when you take
veterans back over to re-visit the sites and sounds and in some cases the adversaries?
(10:25:01.24) Gerry: My purpose in what I do is basically try and educate people about
the real Vietnam. When we were there in the 1960’s and ‘70’s we didn’t know the
real Vietnam and we didn’t, very, very, very few people knew the Vietnamese on any
sort of intimate basis. Had we knew Vietnam, had we studies Vietnam, had we done the sorts
of stuff that I’m doing right now I don’t think there ever would have been an American
war in Vietnam. But like I say, hindsight’s 20/20. What we’ve got to do is we’ve got
to get our kids to understand that this is a global world and that they’ve got to know
people from other places. They’ve got to know people on a people-to-people basis, they’ve
got to understand how the world has worked in the past and what mistakes have been made
before so that we don’t repeat 25 them. They’ve got to understand what sorts of
conflict situations cause wars. And taking veterans with them is a really good way to
educate them about that. Now my goal, my goal in all of this is to get people to come back
and talk about Vietnam. And talk about this as another culture, another place, as a different
people. To talk about people. So my students go and they come back and they write papers,
some of which get published. We’ve written two books, second one’s in the process of
getting published right now. We’ve done a sort of film series that went to seventh-grade
students here in the state. We have done a lot of work to try and educate people. The
students have talked to church groups, civic groups, class groups, academic conferences.
They’ve taken their experiences and taken them other places. And that’s the idea of
doing it, just one person at a time. Mother Teresa said she never intended to start an
order, she simply intended to pick up one person off the streets. In the book “Such
a Vision of the Street” she talks about just, you can work with one person, you can
change one person. But if that one person changes one person more and more and more
then you’ve made some positive change in the world. And that’s what I hope to do.
Chris: So you were a Cold Warrior and now you’re a warrior for peace, or a proponent
for peace. A warrior for peace, that’s an oxymoron. (10:28:00.15) Gerry: Warrior for
peace is an oxymoron. But in some ways you’re working for peace the same way we worked to
win a war. I like it and I don’t like it, the warrior for peace term. It is sort of
an oxymoron, and I tell my students I try to be a peace worker. That’s really all
I can do is I can work at it. Chris: What have I forgotten to ask you Gerry? I’ve
hardly looked at my notes because we had a good conversation. When future generations
look back at this tape and other records of all the interviews we hope to do with Vietnam
veterans 30, 40, 50 years down the road what do you want future generations to know about
you, your generation and the war in Vietnam? (10:29:06.10) Gerry: As I look at my life
and think about future generations, future generations in this country, future generations
in Vietnam and other places I would like it if I could make some small change in how I
get people to look at war and look at conflict. I may be not a good example. I think people
could start at age 1 being peace makers. You don’t have to take such radical changes.
Radical changes in your life at age 40 or whatever aren’t always that pleasant. But
I would hope that by looking at where we were in Vietnam and looking at the sorts of things
that war 26 does to people that we could put an end to conflict. Put an end to violent
conflict particularly. Non-violence, live in a more non-violent world. More of a progressive,
workable world that adapts to people instead of trying to force your ideas on people, win
them over through love and kindness. Chris: That sounds like a great plan actually. It
does. (10:30:43.18) Gerry: This isn’t for the tape necessarily but I’ve spent 18 years
here at Ball State teaching in the prison program too. And I still get letters reminding
me that my teaching, my being there had influence on people, positive influence, which I didn’t
expect at the time. It was just a job. I’m retired from that and the peace studies thing
is what I do in my retirement. All I’m trying to do is make, trying to understand myself
and how I work and how I best work and all this. And to also make some change in the
people around me. But I can’t change them unless I can change me, unless I can be a
more peaceable person I can’t change people around me at all. Chris: Starts with you,
radiates from there. And like you say it’s a series of connections that you, through
Facebook or social media… (10:31:55.15) Gerry: Life is a series of social connections.
That’s all. Whether it’s family, whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s Twitter, whatever
it is we are social beings and we connect and re-connect and re-connect. I’m always
amazed at how much, how many connections Facebook has. I get emails from people that I’m not
connected with on Facebook but they heard from somebody who heard from somebody who
heard from my nephew. I lost a phone in the Charlotte airport. Some woman from Virginia
emailed me and said she had my phone and that somebody had picked it up in the Charlotte
airport and dropped it off at her office and she had my phone. And she found me, somehow
or another she connected with my nephew on Facebook and then got my email address and
connected with me and sent me my phone back. I sent her a bouquet of flowers. Chris: That’s
nice. But it’s a small world and it’s the little gestures and acts of kindness one
little one at a time. You start with that and you build… (10:33:17.25) Gerry: Yeah,
there’s this thing called random acts of kindness. I think that’s important. We need
to think about that. 27 Chris: Any final thoughts? And Richard’s gonna talk in our ears and
ask us other questions probably, but I want to give you the floor Gerry to summarize.
(10:33:36.12) Gerry: No, I think we summarized here the last few statements. See what Richard’s
got to say. Additional question: First impression of landing in Vietnam (10:34:11.02) Gerry:
When I landed in Vietnam I flew Flying Tiger, which was a military contractor airline. I
reported to Ft. Lewis, Washington. I flew through Alaska and Tokyo, I remember seeing
Mt. Fuji on the way. It was the old Tokyo airport then, Narita wasn’t built. And then
flew into Cam Ranh Bay at night. And I remember, I do remember the heat getting off the airplane.
I don’t necessarily remember the smell. But then they put us on a bus and took us
to a plywood barracks that was dark and the lighting wasn’t very good and it was moldy,
it smelled moldy. There were bunks with sheets on it. We just put our stuff down. It was
probably 10 or 11 o’clock at night there, we’d flown for 20 hours to get there. And
so we slept until the next day. The next day we got up and I remember seeing Cam Ranh Bay
out the, the barracks was up on a hillside and I didn’t know what to think. One of
the guys said “Well what if we get rocketed here” or whatever, because Cam Ranh Bay
had been rocketed the day before. But I remember seeing Cam Ranh Bay and it was really pretty.
I remember the foliage, the foliage was really dense and thick. And I do remember the smell
that day, I didn’t remember it from the night before. But that fish oil smell along
the coast, it’s always there. I was there for one day and then they picked me up in
a C-130, 4-engine propeller aircraft, a military plane, just one with the net seats along the
sides, flew me Da Nang. And then at Da Nang somebody picked me up with a jeep, took me
to what they called I-Corp Headquarters which was an old French fort in downtown Da Nang,
and they assigned me to First Marine Division. So I went from there to the Marines. My first
impressions of Vietnam. I do remember that I landed with 10, there were 10 people on
that busload that came with that plane that were helicopter pilots. I do remember thinking
at the time, these were Warrant Officer helicopter pilots from Ft. Walters, Texas and they’d
just been through helicopter school and hadn’t even had any stateside assignment. And I remember
thinking “How many of these guys are gonna be out of here alive inside of a month or
two?” 28 Chris: That’s not the, couldn’t be a pleasant job. But I’ve heard nothing
but respect for…We had Gary Bussell in yesterday talking, or the other day talking about those
helicopter pilots. They have my respect. They went through a lot of hell. (10:37:33.13)
Gerry: I had a brother-in-law that was a helicopter pilot and he got shot down 4 times, walked
away each time. And he actually, one of the villages I built at Ganoi, the second village,
he actually burned it. He took fire from there and his squadron literally burned that village.
It was wood, it was made of wood. All the houses were wood and they just torched it.
The Army helicopter pilots were fearless. They were like the rest of us, they were young
and dumb. If we got somebody wounded, and we had people wounded at Ganoi, we called
the Marine Corps Medi-Vac. Some guy would hang around at ten-thousand feet and say “Are
you taking fire? Is this a hot landing zone? Is this a hot LZ?” And a half-hour later
he might come down for a second while you throw a person on that’s probably half bled
to death by then. Whereas with the Army heli, we could call and we could call sometimes
Army Medi-Vac, and Army Dust Off you would hear the helicopter before you saw it. There
was a bridge called the Kalo Bridge that was about a half-mile away. You’d hear the helicopter
and you’d see the helicopter come under the bridge and down along the river bank.
The river bank was probably 20 feet down to the river. They’d fly right down the river
bank, they’d pop up over the river bank and before you could even pop smoke for them
they’d have landed, took a person and they were gone. With some of the pilots, when you
have a 35 or 40-year-old pilot that’s got 3 or 4 kids at home he’s a lot more cautious
than a 22-year-old cowboy. The helicopter pilots, the Army helicopter pilots were cowboys.
Actually had 2 brother-in-laws that were cowboy pilots, one did 2 tours, one did 1. My sister
is since divorced from the one I was talking about, he’s still flying, he’s flying
tourists in Hawaii at this point in time. Chris: There’s someone in Ridgeville we’re
supposed to talk to who flew for the Army for 40 years. Another question: More about
patrols at night Chris: When you were in the village you said you’d go out with some
of the local forces but also with your Marines as well. Describe like a Marine patrol, going
out the with Marines. (10:40:32.16) Gerry: We’d have a siesta somewhere like a bunker,
which was sometimes cool and didn’t have flies. We’d have a siesta in the afternoon
on Ganoi and then we 29 would sit down probably at 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon with
a map and plan out where we were going to go that night. We may have an ambush, we may
have a trail where we think people are coming in or where we think people are crossing the
river, we may have some area that we’ve seen signs that people have been traveling
that are not associated with the village. So we would go out and patrol those areas
at night or set up an ambush at night, or we’d set up a series of ambushes around
the village at night. Most of the time unsuccessfully. But we would generally plan pre-planned fires,
means we would get in contact with a mortar unit or an artillery unit and plan out fires
with coordinates where we’re going to be, where we would like to have pre-planned fires.
So when we are out there and we get in some sort of trouble then we can call in a pre-planned
fire. Most of the time the Marine Sergeant was in charge of all this. He’d take my
advice but he said Lieutenants can’t really read maps. And actually I taught map reading
at Ft. Benning for a little bit, so I was kind of insulted by that. But he was pretty
good. The time with the ARVN unit or the RF unit was an absolute disaster. They should
have let somebody like some Lieutenant look at their map at that point. I didn’t do
it a tremendous amount, I sure didn’t stay in the village by myself at night. If there
was no place else to go, if they were going out I went out with them. I was safer there
than I was in the village. We had one Marine that was killed because he was, he decided
he wanted to sleep in one night so he stayed in a bunker and some kid threw a hand grenade
in the bunker with him. Sometimes I slept with the little Army unit, one time I slept
with the Korean unit, I was kind of a gypsy. I didn’t have a real home. The caps were
the closest thing I had to a home, and I was assigned to the Marine Corp so I stayed there
most of the time, or stayed with them. Chris: But as a freelance artist, like you said,
you had a lot of freedom, a lot more than any other Lieutenant. (10:43:23.22) Gerry:
I could go ride a civilian bus back to Da Nang, or if there were somebody out there
that day I might get a ride back to Da Nang, or might get a ride to Hoi An. So I would
sleep wherever I landed. I had serious considerations, I had serious security considerations, if
I was staying in the village at night. I wanted to stay close to the Marines. Another question:
Did he have to be cautious of the villagers? Chris: So there were times when you really
didn’t know who the enemy was. (10:44:24.03) 30 Gerry: There were a lot of times when I
didn’t know who the enemy was. It was a weird situation, where you don’t trust anybody,
even the kids. I trusted my bomb finders not to get me blown up, but I didn’t totally
trust them. And actually one of them is the son of the Party Chairman, so he was the son
of the VC Commander. He just happened to be 8 years old at the time. I know him now too.
I wasn’t leery of the villagers, I just didn’t take any chances. There’s a picture
of me sitting in Miss Tien’s house and I’m sitting there having a Coke in the afternoon
or something of the sort, and my rifle is leaning up against the wall behind her. And
a lot of Marines tell me, they said “I can’t believe you let that woman get between you
and the weapon, you and your weapon.” You know a Marine sleeps with his weapon and a
Marine and his weapon are inseparable. Army doggies are a little more careless. And actually
I carried a 45 that was my only assigned weapon. But I got an M-16 when I went to live at Ganoi.
But there’s a good picture of that M-16 with her in the picture and me, I’m sitting
on the other side, taking the picture. And the Marines, every time a Marine sees that,
every Marine that’s ever seen that picture says “Can’t believe you let her get between
you and your weapon.” Chris: You talked about having a 45 on your hip. Now that was
officers generally used the sidearm. And did you have your rank displayed, or how did you
secure yourself in that regard? Were you expected to be saluted, did you have your rank on your
shoulders? (10:46:31.05) Gerry: No. Actually, most of the time at Ganoi I wore a t-shirt,
so we didn’t have any rank showing. I had rank on my hat but I took it off, you didn’t
want to have rank showing. We never got any sniper fire at Ganoi but we could, so you
didn’t want to have your rank showing. People knew who I was and I knew who they were. We
wore t-shirts and I had a bush hat, a floppy bush hat, kept the rain out and whatever else.
I’ve got rank on it now, I’ve still got that hat. But I didn’t have rank on it when
I lived there. I had a shirt with my rank on it and if the General’s helicopter showed
up we’d put our shirts on, put our flak jacket on so he could tell who we were. And
actually, after we got to know him, his name was General Doller I think, and after we got
to know him a little bit we didn’t even do that. He’d just show up and we’d talk
to him and he’d leave. Chris: He understood, you think, the circumstances you were in with
regards to a lot of military protocol and… (10:47:49.24) 31 Gerry: Yeah, he really did.
As a matter of fact I do remember one time when he showed up that we saluted him and
he told us “You don’t have to salute me out here.” Chris: Probably better for him
if you don’t. Got his own helicopter and someone just saluted him, a sniper might make
the right conclusion. (10:48:10.22) Gerry: Somebody could, and he was within sniper range.
Across the river there was a tree line, lots of good places probably 3, 400 yards away
for snipers. Chris: You talked about making sure you were careful in your situation, with
your own personal security. Did you have stress and anxiety and feel danger the entire time
you were in Vietnam? (10:48:38.05) Gerry: Well, I don’t think I did. Okay. I don’t
think I was stressed when I was there. I don’t think I felt like I was really in any sort
of danger. But that’s part of being young and dumb. But I do know that after I came
back and for several years after I was really clinically depressed. And I have a friend
Richard who’s a, he’s a personal friend but he’s also a psychiatrist and he said
“Well, you know, you’ve come from a very stressful situation and you don’t realize
it but that’s why you are where you are now.” I think I felt the effects of the
stress for several years after. Chris: How did you deal with it? (10:49:37.02) Gerry:
Badly. I dealt with it rather badly. I don’t think, my family suffered, my friends suffered.
I didn’t get stuff done that I should. I didn’t have any alcohol problems but I was
pretty bi-polar for some time. Richard and then others that I’ve talked to since then
said that’s a form of PTSD. That’s just reacting to the stressful situation you’ve
come from to where you are now. Chris: Several of the veterans I’ve spoken with in the
past few weeks have mentioned that when they got back and tried to get back into civilian
life that they felt isolated because no one wanted to talk to them about their service
and no one cared. The other extreme was people were angry at them. Did you experience that
for yourself and do you think it contributed to some of your problems? (10:50:55.20) 32
Gerry: When I came back from Vietnam I didn’t run into any of the airport stuff that people
report on at this point in time. There were a group of Hare Krishnas that were being all
nice in the San Francisco airport. My daughter and I had both gone through immigration in
a hanger in Anchorage. It was 18 below at the time and we both were sick by the time
we got to San Francisco and then really sick by the time we got to St. Louis. But when
I got back the local paper did a story on Leann, did a story on my bringing this baby
back on the plane. My dad was an officer in the local American Legion, the local VFW offered
me a membership gratis. There was just all sorts of stuff that, you know, this is small
town America, people didn’t understand where you’d been but they tried to make you welcome
back. But I still felt isolated too, like they didn’t understand, they didn’t know.
I felt like there‘s a war going on, people are dying and these people don’t care. They
just want to wave the flag and have a parade. Chris: Did that manifest itself in any confrontational
way with anyone? (10:52:38.02) Gerry: No, more self-isolation. Chris: At what point,
you know talking with your friend Richard and others who are out trying to help you,
at what point did you decide I think I need to talk to somebody or I need to see somebody?
(10:52:55.25) Gerry: Actually I really didn’t decide that until the ‘80’s. I went through
most of the ‘70’s. And in the ‘80’s I finally went to see, somebody, you know,
Richard really encouraged me to see somebody. But he and I had, he was in New York, I was
here in Indiana so we didn’t see much of each other. And obviously he’s my friend
so I’m not going to talk to him much on that line anyhow. But he really encouraged
me. And during the ‘80’s, in the ‘80’s I started going to counselors and started
really looking at where I was with all this and sort of this paper world that I’d created.
Chris: Do you think it, did you have a better experience talking to other veterans like
at the VFW, and maybe even with your father? Your father was a veteran. And were you able
to get some understanding with other veterans, did that help? (10:54:04.01) Gerry: Talking
to other veterans has helped. And actually I’ll tell you what, traveling to Vietnam
with other veterans has really helped because you get to see the war very differently. People
in a line unit, people in an infantry unit saw the war a lot 33 differently than what
I did. You know I knew people like that there and in some ways I was the same as they were.
But in other ways I wasn’t. You know this free agent thing was in some ways bad. Well,
it wasn’t bad, it gave me a very unique war experience. But people that were in line
units really had it tough in a lot of ways. And but taking some of those people back and
starting to understand their stories and understanding how different each of our stories are has
really made a difference in my life. Chris: You’ve talked with Vietnamese who were veterans.
Seeing the war from their side, what does that tell you, what does that inform you of?
(10:55:13.24) Gerry: They fought for their country, they didn’t fight, they weren’t
communists, they weren’t idealists, they weren’t fighting for some abstract entity.
We were foreign invaders, they fought foreigners who wanted to run their country. That’s
the way they see it, plain and simple. Most of the veterans, most of the Vietnamese veterans
are not members of the Communist Party, weren’t, never will be. You know Ho Chi Minh, you know,
that’s their George Washington, he is the father of modern Vietnam. Most of them would
not fight somewhere else for him. They were fighting to defend their homeland and they
were fighting an invader in their homeland. And I understand that, I‘d still do the
same thing here. But I don’t think at this point in my life even if I had the physical
ability that I would be the invader in somebody else’s land. I learned, I actually learned
a really good lesson when I was a kid that I should have took with me. Didn’t understand
it fully then, I do now. I delivered papers, and there was this guy I knew by the name
of Perry who I didn’t get along with, and one day when I delivered a paper to his front
door he was standing around the side and he said “Come around here.” And we got into
a fight in his backyard. And his mother came out and beat the living daylights out of me
with a broom. And I’m like, never ever ever get into a fight in somebody else’s backyard.
And we’re still learning that lesson. We’re in Iraq, we’re in Afghanistan, we’re in
other places. We’ve got over 700 military bases around the world where we’re trying
to control other people. And Vietnam was the same way. Why go to somebody else’s backyard,
you can’t win. World War II was a different sort of war, and we had people, you know,
people who were taking the war out of their country and trying to conquer. Wars since
that time, Korea’s a non-winner, Vietnam’s a non-winner, Panama only because we put 6-thousand
people after about 15-hundred. And Grenada the same way. Desert Storm was incomplete,
we’re still fighting it now. You don’t do well in other people’s homes. Chris:
So watch for mom and her broom. 34 (10:58:05.20) Gerry: Yeah. She beat the living daylights
out of me, man I lost big time on that. Chris: To get it from the kid and then to get it
from the mom, that’s rough. That’s when you stop delivering papers to their house
I think, Gerry. (10:58:21.11) Gerry: No. I delivered papers, I just collected from his
dad. Another question: Reaction from soldiers or people at home about adopting Vietnamese
child. (10:58:38.23) Gerry: Yeah. Adopting a Vietnamese child was really problematic
with some people because some people really hated the Vietnamese, really hated them. I
had a friend Roy that when we came back to the United States, he just told me “I’m
not having anything to do with anybody that has anything to do with those gooks.” That
was the last time he ever spoke to me. I lost a few friends like that. Lot of people who
were there liked Vietnamese, but some, especially people in hard core combat units, really hated
the Vietnamese. You had to hate them to try and kill them on a mass scale. Roy was in
the Americal Division which was south of us. The Americal Division was the same division
that created the My Lai Massacre. That was not their modus operandi most of the time
but it was some of the time. But he hated them, he really hated them, and he hated my
daughter and really cut me off because of that adoption. Chris: Sad. Gerry: Happens.
Chris: I think we label people or we demonize the enemy, de-humanize the enemy just to make
it easier. (11:00:18.09) Gerry: There’s a guy by the name of Philip Knightley that
wrote a book called “The First Casualty” and his thesis is that the first casualty
in any war is the truth. No matter whether it’s Crimea or it’s World War I or World
War II you have to, you have to tell a lie to get people to start killing each other.
And one of the lies that’s told is demonizing people, telling people how different these
people are. 35 Chris: That’s foreign to me, it’s antithetical to the way I am now.
You talked about changing your way of life at 40 and I experienced the same thing. So
it’s, I went from rah-rah guns to that’s stupid. And I guess people can change if there’s
something good to take from it. If we think about our actions and our history and see
people as people and not as representatives of their political whatever then we can relate
to people better. Chris: Well Gerry, on behalf of Ball State and WIPB I want to thank you
for coming in and talking with me. Appreciate it. Gerry: You’re welcome.
