Interview with David Kloskowski, Vietnam War Veteran. CCSU Veterans History Project

for me what was your high string when I was in Vietnam it was specialist v after afterwards I got out and joined the reserves and I ended up retiring as a cw3 Warrant Officer okay and in which general locations did you serve in Vietnam um just throughout your whole service I was in basic of Fort Dix New Jersey I was in AI T at the intelligence school at Fort Holabird Maryland I was in Saigon Vietnam in Danang Vietnam and then I was at Fort Carson Colorado and then in the reserves I was in Cromwell Connecticut East Windsor Connecticut and Danbury Connecticut okay so were you drafted or did you enlist enlisted where were you living at the time New Britain Connecticut okay do you recall the date that I enlisted right oh yeah what happened once I was going to college at the time and I almost was ready to graduate but didn't have enough credits and I ended up having to take three French courses in one biology course or something in the French courses you couldn't take all at the same time so this was the June of 1968 and I kind of was depressed and if I didn't do something I would be drafted and if you're drafted you have no choice as to what you want to do so I ended up going down to the post office in New Britain and I went to look at the recruiters I know I didn't want to join the Marines the Air Force recruiter wasn't in the Navy recruiter I talked to and I couldn't see myself on a ship for four years so I went to the army recruiter talk to him and he said to me well what do you like and I said to him well I like maps he said I got just the job for you and took about I had to go take a test took about two or three weeks ended up you know enlisting taking the oath in New Haven and then going by bus to Fort Dix New Jersey okay so and you did boot camp at Fort Dix right right how did it feel to be there how was your first day there my first day there was the first night they took some blood and I almost passed out okay and after that I never looked at anybody ever giving me a needle or taking my blood I found out that after I joined the Army if after about two or three days I actually hated it and the reason was the lack of personal freedom they basically tell you what to do all the time there's all these rules and regulations and even though I don't violate rules and regulations in general I hate somebody telling me to do stupid things you know yeah I went through basic and it was in the summer of 1968 it was hot they you know you had to be in certain physical shape by the time you got out you had to be able to shoot a rifle and all those things and do certain things that's all okay um do you remember any of your instructors yeah I remember my drill sergeant sergeant clarinet he was gonna he had gone to Vietnam and he was going to go to OCS so he could become an officer he was fairly decent okay many others oh there was a sergeant Douglas he was a pain in the ass one time we were getting shots and the medics were giving us all these shots and what it what happened when we were in basic is before you want to eat you have to go on a horizontal ladder hand over hand to strengthen your arms and everything well what happened was my hands were soft so I ended up getting blisters on my hand and of course since you do this like almost every day and never got the heal medic saw the blister he says what's that let me look at it yeah and the surgeon goes he looks at her nice of us after the medic got through with me he says boy I don't know what your problem is but if I was you the company's waiting on you and if you don't move your ass is grass and I'm the lawnmower and you know I didn't make a big thing out of it and took me about a month after getting out of basic for two thing to heal you know I he wasn't bad either but you know they they when you're in basic they don't tell you about your rights they don't tell you about what's called a UCMJ they kind of just make you do certain things that they probably couldn't get away with if you knew what your rights were so was there anything you did to get through that anything you told yourself er uh no not really I mean I got what I got held over because I couldn't pass the PT test it took me about a week or so after that and then I got it I got through basic and they sent me on to AIT okay and that was in Maryland yes it was place called Fort Holabird Maryland it was in bought actually in Baltimore around the edge of Baltimore Maryland I ended up taking a bus from Fort Dix to downtown Baltimore Maryland and then a city bus from the center of town from the Civic Center to fort halberd and the bus went through a like a rundown section when all sorts of strip joints and everything called the block and then Fort Holabird was low kated in an industrial area like where there was Chevy plants and things and it basically was a bunch of warehouses and some army army buildings that you went into basically event that's that was the intelligence school for the army eventually they moved it to Fort Huachuca in Arizona because what was happening was Russians from the embassy and DC would go there and take pictures of people entering and leaving because the Russians could travel 50 miles from their embassy and this was within that range and yeah so I ended up taking a course that was called imagery interpretation which actually was a real photographic interpretation and you learn how to read out aerial photographs and you use maps because you had to find out where the pictures were being taken and you have to be able to identify Soviet equipment you learned how to do that and the course was probably I'm gonna say about 12 weeks long maybe 16 ok so your assignment there was just to go to school and learn write me and also they also had other courses they had intelligence analysts interrogators they had something called an area specialist was actually a spy they had counterintelligence which is like kind of like detectives things like that but you just did the imager you know right okay so that was 16 weeks he said right it was from October 68 to January of 1969 all right so after that where did you go went to Washington DC for a week to Fort McNair which is real nice place it was on the Potomac River and everything and they were showing us how to I don't know that we were doing some sort of stuff to help them come up with a new way of identifying equipment or something they were using models instead of real pictures or something so is that more of what you were doing at AIT more classes or was that well yeah with class about a week of classes okay after that they sent me home on leave and then I what and I think that was about two weeks worth and then me and the friend of mine I flew to Pittsburgh and then New Orleans we went there for Mardi Gras and then from New Orleans we went to San Francisco and Oakland and Oakland they sent me they sent us to Vietnam from there okay so we're in Vietnam did you initially why I landed in Benoit which is a airbase and of course I love Connecticut in February it was like 20 degrees outside at midnight and get there and eight o'clock in the morning it's 90 degrees you know right they started sweating for a month you know and from there we took a bus to long Binh which was a replacement center and I had orders to go to the Americal division and when I got that a replacement Saturday were changed and they sent me to Saigon and in Saigon it was the headquarters of the first in my battalion and they had detachments in the country they had like five detachments and they decided to send me to Danang so I was in denying for 14 months basically I basically when you went to Vietnam you went for a year okay but I decided to extend for another six months and when I did that I went back to the name for two months and then they sent me to Saigon because there was like they were drawing down and instead of having five detachments they ended up like making only one one thing one one company that handled the whole country basically okay so when you got to when you first got to Vietnam you said it was hot oh yes what other impressions did you have of the lot of mosquitoes mm-hmm first night I got bit by like I got thirty mosquito bites on one arm friend of mine who was in the same room got over a hundred because he slept all night I couldn't sleep because these things were flying in my ear and everything you know mm-hmm thought we had a massive dose of malaria or something so you went when you got today the name what was your assignment there I was a different tree interpreter that's basically I was the job was to read out aerial photographs that planes took mostly Air Force planes in the northern part of the country later on when I ended up in Saigon I became I was an aerial photo interpreter or the head of certain bunch of aerial photo interpreters and we did the whole country plus parts of Cambodia okay I was at that time we and we had invaded Cambodia mm-hmm so what was your average day like doing that like energy analysis day or night we had there were two shifts day shift the night shift I I work nights about 60% of the time in days about 40% of the time night shift probably started at 7:00 6:30 7:00 in the evening and went to about 5:30 6:00 in the morning and we'd go out we lived in it in the city of the Nang we lived like in a kind of a 2 to 3 storey building in the middle of the city they called it the modern hotel it really wasn't a hotel but it was as far as living conditions were concerned it was probably better than like 99% of the people had when they were in Vietnam ok like we had it I had my room have my own room were a room with one other guy we had a bathroom we had toilets we had you know we didn't have air conditioning but we had fans we had maids that did our clothes cleaned our clothes and everything and polished our boots and all that stuff so we go out to the and we worked in I Corps compound which was maybe a mile or two away we'd take a truck there and there was that's where the general for I Corps was located be Vietnamese general and it was guarded this compound was basically guarded by the Vietnamese there was a wall around that it wasn't that large there was a little barbed wire not a lot and there were we had trucks there and on the back of the trucks were built like structures like like tin structures and they were air-conditioned because there were computers in there too where because of the film basically there were computers to read out the film to a degree what would happen is when we change shifts there'd be like a briefing and then if there was film there then we would read up the film which was the Air Force used to or let's say the military used to fly missions all over the country or let's say in I Corps at the time and they probably flew totaled in the country about let's say in a busy time could be about 400 - 450 missions that means jets taking pictures okay and let's say most of the time they were taking pictures in Jungle because that's all you saw we only we only saw film when I was there of we never saw North Vietnam we never saw Laos you only saw let's say Vietnam and later on Cambodia anything else that went over the border they would cut out and these these jets were most of them were Air Force some of them were marine and a few were Army and the Air Force was basically based in Saigon what they used to do is they'd fly the missions they come in somebody would look at the film down there down in Saigon and then they'd fly it - they had a plane that flew around at night or well actually three times a day and they would take it up to let's say Danang and we'd have to pick it up and then we'd get it and there was always negatives big rolls of negatives and 90% at a time you wouldn't find anything because there was jungle you know there was everything was hidden okay every so often you would find let's say units enemy units or foxholes or trucks or whatever you know and if you found it well you have to write a report it anyway you know even if you didn't find anything but if you found something you would you know say where what it was where it was and then you would send that report to high your headquarters and basically we were like secondary or tertiary readout on this stuff we read it out like either within a day or two days at the most okay so that if it was on the when it was taken chances are these people had moved since you know they didn't generally have buildings in any location because we bomb them you know what I mean most bombed areas of Vietnam were like the DMZ the border between North and South Vietnam and thing called para the parrot's beak which was in Cambodia and in Vietnam along the border that was closest to Saigon also around the cities we used to bomb to a degree because the enemy would come in and put rockets or mortars in certain areas within a certain distance you know let's say seven miles or something so we used to bomb in those general areas and there were a couple other areas - okay so basically you're writing reports to people who had ordered bombings on those areas not bombing they'd order they'd order missions in areas to try to find the enemy sometimes we do reports on areas that were bombed like let's say by b-52s to try to find if they destroyed anything you know most most of the reports were to find the enemy not them not to actually bomb them okay well if we found them they they would be bombed but generally it was to try to find the bad guys all right and he said you could do day shifts or night shifts yeah I thought a night shift which like I started a certain time at about I'd say 10 11 o'clock I would end up going to the airfield to get film at about 12 o'clock we usually had breakfast and we go to the airfield to get breakfast the Nang airbase which is about a mile away and then the rest of the night you know we breed at redoubt film or look at the film or whatever the heck it was and then at some time about 5:30 6 o'clock there would be somebody would have to stay where we were because you couldn't leave the place alone you know and unlocked and all that stuff the day shift you get in during the daytime and usually I'll say something when it comes to the army and let's say intelligence or any other activity for that matter if you work days or nights generally you get more done during the night than you do during the day because during the day you have officers running around you you have people wanting to see what you're doing and things like that so it basically slowed up whatever you were doing okay whereas at night there wasn't anybody coming to inspect or anything you know what I'm saying mm-hmm so where's your where your tasks and schedule well your schedule is different but where your tasks any different dear nature sorry James no it's basically the same okay yeah except you know you ate lunch and you ain't supper when you work night shift you might eat supper and then you had to breakfast or something you know it was if you work nights you had a lot of eggs you know yeah and did you have like complete choice over which one you choose to eat uh which shift you would choose no I put you on where they wanted to they did Jeff I think they did shift at times in other words let's say after a month they might change you to the day shift for for a month or something like that it varied you know dependent if what they needed people to do at a specific time or it might be every three weeks or two weeks I tell the truth they don't actually remember I remember working nights for six weeks straight that was tough but and then you get a day off every let's say let's say two weeks or so you know or maybe even a week sometimes and so that would screw up your your sleep schedule and you know what I mean mm-hmm so you're your weekly schedule you'd only get a day off every two weeks yeah at least once every two weeks maybe two days sometimes or when you were changing or when you were changing schedules you might get a day off there in other words if you were going nights two days you would get a day off and then you change to today's let's say or same thing if you were going from base the nights you would get a day off there you know so it's just tend to reset your schedule right okay did you see any combat or was this year only we when I was in Danang um we got rocketed about a half a dozen times when I was there rocketed or mortared yeah about two weeks after I was there some colonel was coming to inspect us or so alright and this was two o'clock in the morning and they said ski why don't you go into the orderly room we need to mop the floors or something so I go to the orderly room open up the door come out with a mop and all of a sudden a rocket came in it was a helipad right across the road from us and a rocket hit it and I just happen to be looking in that direction it was pride owned I was let's say from here to maybe a hundred yards maybe 200 yards but I happen to look and see it hit and it was like it hit the helipad and and exploded and you could see the shrapnel coming up because the shrapnel was white-hot so you can see that at night you know most of the time I didn't you know we'd have a rocket attack and we had a bunker next to where we were working which was like about four the walls were four feet thick or the top was at least and it was above ground because the water table was high so you'd be in there and you'd hear you'd hear these things hitting and take you and pick you up off the seat once in a while or you can hear shrapnel hitting the top because the top of the bunker had a like a tin roof so you can hear like like metal falling no you know I'm saying when I get when I ended up in Saigon I'd say after about a couple weeks or a month after I was there there was an American billet or something a couple blocks away and it was a taller building than the other buildings around and I you could look out and see it and one day they blew it up if somebody put a bomb in and you can see that like the roof go up and then down it didn't destroy the thing totally but killed a few people mm-hmm nobody ever shot at me directly okay was there like a procedure when you were getting when that was happening where you supposed to like go somewhere or does it just kind of like wafers yeah well you know the funny thing was when we were working we had a bunker where we were living there was no bunker okay yeah if they were shooting rockets into the city you got under the bed and if it came through the ceiling you were dead you know in case when I was working one time everything was Ho Chi Minh's birthday or something they had they hit a ammunition dump on the other side of a river that had all sorts of Mines or something they went off and the there was like we had some glass in front of the building the glass all got blown into the like the building okay and I remember walking in up the stairs the following morning over all these shards of glass and things but you know that was basically it see you never really got directly attacked that where you know okay were there any casualties from that at the bunker where you were working in DES name well people hit their head trying to get in we when I was there we lost one guy okay and I saw him at 7:30 in the morning and by 8:30 he was dead he was taken he we had vehicles that had to get gas every day and he was taking the Jeep to get gas and he was coming back and a what had happened was that a Marine had gone to a psychiatrist and told him he was cracking up and that he wanted out of the field and the psychiatrist said he was okay go back to where you come from well what he did was he flagged this guy down and shot him in the chest like seven times and killed him that was the end of it you know his name is on the wall yeah do you know how to ended up having to that marine was he arrested I never heard I'm sure well that's a good question you know I really would like to know but now I I don't know being a Marine they probably put him in prison but who knows so after your assignment Denis and you went to psycho yeah well I went home for a month after a year then I went back to Danang and then after that I went to like you said I was two months in Danang again and then they started like moving troops out of the country and consolidating you know and basically ended up in Saigon for four months and when we were in Saigon we did the whole country plus parts of Cambodia okay and this was 1970 or 71 1970 yeah okay I'd say you know probably March 70 or March or April of 72 September of 70 okay and did you have the same assignment in Saigon yeah basically I was in charge of one of the shifts I think we were I'd like to say we work nights most at a time but I kind of remember that idea okay and what did you do as what were your extra responsibilities being in charge well basically I had to make sure that people reported you know I'd have to look at people's work and we had one photo interpreter that didn't like to report enemy activity and he never found anything you know so one day I happened them I don't watch him when he was looking at the film and I said no what about those foxholes I don't see him I said right there look at him oh yeah yeah yeah they've been reported already oh really so we had databases we had like overlays that you put on the map to see if actually it had been you know it's is it old is it new have we found that well we didn't find that it what they weren't on there I says you better report that well okay but you had to watch this guy you know so it's kind of making sure everyone's doing their dry directly right right okay we'll bury impressions of Saigon okay I was in Danang and I was in Saigon I like to nang a lot better it was the name was a smaller city he was a lot cleaner Saigon was I don't know one or two million people there's a lot of pollution because what they were driving which was you know military vehicles and they caught things called sick loaves which were like I don't know if they had a gasoline they had a gasoline engine and they would spew the smoke up and everything and that would go on all day long basically until the night you know so it's a lot dirtier a lot larger I like to say hotter could have been somewhat the difference in heat and humidity wasn't that much different was there were ways to spend money that could get you into trouble in Saigon worth and then the name was a strange place in that it was off limits we lived in a city but we couldn't just like walk around you know and go to a bar or go and buy something on the street Saigon you could do that you could you know you could take a taxi cab you know downtown or anywhere you wanted to go and you know go to a restaurant go to a hotel do whatever you want where it's in the name you couldn't do that the reason for that was when the Marines originally got to Danang they start they used to have brawls fights Marines like the fight themselves or other people if they get the opportunity so they tear up the city so they kind of made it off-limits whereas Saigon you had a lot more you that didn't happen okay so did you enjoy kind of the more personal freedom of Saigon ah yeah yeah to a degree like I say I like the other place a little better but yeah it was nice as far as that was concerned I'm trying to think I remember one time I got stopped by the MPS and almost put in jail there because I don't know I had to take a bus on base and I had walked up to the bus to get out to the base and they said you know who are you what are you doing well I'm going on base I got a uniform and all that yeah well you know you don't have a pass so you don't have this so they take me to jail you know and I'm sitting there I they didn't put me in the cell though I'm sitting there near guys in cells and although the sergeant says to me what are you doing here I said well your boys picked me up you know so well you can go now I said well what happens when I have to get off the bases says they gonna do that again no no don't worry about it you know and a friend of mine same thing happened to him you know during one of these things except he used to used to have a sinus problem so you had Dristan nasal spray in this pocket or so and they said what's that says Dristan nasal spray no you're using drugs so he ended up in the same place you know strange but that's that's the military for you okay so after Saigon went home for a month and then I went to Fort Carson Colorado okay and that's near um Colorado Springs what was your assignment there well it's supposed to be imagery interpreter but I ended up being the mail clerk okay because they have too many see in the United States you don't do anything you know when it comes to intelligence work so you know they just said ski yeah we're gonna make you male clerk and it was actually a good job because actually had something to do I had a jeep to go get the mail and I had some freedom of getting around worth the other guys who are just like there and they didn't do anything you know plus they used to get details where details are like going and I don't know painting rocks or whatever they want you to do at any time you know so it was pretty boring to work there did you like it wasn't bad I was there from late October or November of 1970 to June of 71 and you know so I went through the winter and so I was there for eight months okay and into the summer and then you know I got out of the army what's it it was my situation was fairly good compared to most people's situation but you know it was somewhat boring if I had to be there a year two years it might be a different story you know mm-hmm what were your impressions of Colorado base one of my impressions of Colorado well for one thing they didn't like soldiers Colorado Springs did not like soldiers okay for one thing they had the Air Force Academy north of it okay like I don't know 25 miles north Fort Carson was about seven or eight miles south of it and they were like the golden boys and but it was funny because we had people I remember there was one guy in Russian interrogator who used to write term papers for the cadets you know these guys were supposed to be honorable and you know all that type of thing I remember getting a hard time I took it I was taking a I wanted to take a course like they had a community college or something and I wanted to take a course in speech or something and it was like at that time being in the army was not a good thing okay I mean you were looked down upon and all this and I remember like the instructor well tell us about your experience and I didn't want to do that I mean so basically I dropped out of the course you know so that plus I remember getting harassed one time at one of the hotels or something some house detective came we were went on the roof of the hotel to look at the mountains and the view he said what are you doing up here got to get out of here that type of deal you know okay good okay when I was in Vietnam I'd say two or three months after I got there when you say have different types of missions priority one two three most of our missions went three okay one day we got a priority one mission and most of the priority one missions we didn't get many of them we're out in the middle of the jungle somewhere okay but this was like along the coast on the main road and all this other business and I remember that it was me and my friend is it doesn't make sense you should lead her out in the middle of the jungle so we you know we got we've got the map and we've tried to figure out what it was and then we looked at the film too in the film what's going to the Americal division and looked in there was just a bunch of like rice paddies and destroyed villages and what it was was a over here at the malai massacre No oh you never did know but a year before in 1968 an American company went into this area of Vietnam and killed like six hundred and eighty people and they were civilians they were basically told that everybody they find there was gonna be enemy okay Plus that area was heavily booby-trapped and a lot of their guys had been killed in that general area before so they were told it was going to be a enemy area so they killed everybody men women and children and it basically kind of faded away and it took a year for it to get into the newspapers and everything and then what happened was the army went and got a general to do a major investigation his name was peers and this was a film that they were going to use to like see where everything happened they might have made a mosaic for it or anything like that but this was the reason that mission was flown was so that they would have pictures of that whole general area so they could say well this happened here that happened there - that type of deal so that was as a result of the malai massacre and the Pearce Commission actually yeah okay so we we ended up we ended Colorado and then what I get out of the army right mhm yeah so how long were you in Colorado eight months okay so total of two years now within a total of three years okay I didn't I was in the art you know most a lot of people when they join or when they get out or when they get drafted get out like early you know they don't do the full-time yeah me I did every damn day of my three years you know didn't let me out one day early and actually that helped me afterwards I didn't realize it at the time because you know I ended up working for the federal government and that counts toward your retirement yes other garbage you know yeah so once do you remember the day you got out sure do it was June 23rd it was a hot day in Colorado probably 90 to 100 degrees and I got out about noon took my hat threw it in the air took my uniform and tore it off got in the car drove to San Francisco okay did you have family and friends there I had in San Francisco yeah uh there was a friend from Vietnam that I went off to see okay you know it took me like three day two days to get there mm-hmm it was funny because that was summer of 71 or something and you'd be dry especially in Nevada you know like Connecticut there's one town on another Nevada tour there's nothing like that it's like you've got a town and then you got the desert and all this and what was happening was you know what hippies are yeah well they were going to California so what would happen is I guess the sheriff's wouldn't let them into the town because they were grungy and all this stuff you know so here I am driving and there's a bunch of hippies you know hitchhiking and all this stuff and I'll never I'll never forget nobody's stopping to pick them up right so there was one guy who was a had kind of long hair but not real long and he had a sign and it said unarmed student you know what I mean yeah I didn't pick him up anyway but I thought it was funny so you went to San Francisco just to meet with a friend or did you move yeah I stayed there no I stayed there for a month and then I had parked my car on a pier and it happened that there was a little when I wanted to get it it was a longshoreman strike so they wouldn't let me get my car I had to go to the Union headquarters and plead my case mm-hmm and then the guy from the union said okay you can have you could we'll give you a piece of paper saying you know you can go get your car so I go to I crossed the picket line and they're swearing at me and yelling at me and all this other business I go inside the guy there goes they gave you a pass nobody ever gives us a pass for this so I said yeah well let me go get my car well it wouldn't start because it was sitting there for a month a as battering Randa so finally we got it going and then I drove home you know it took me five days to get home it's a Connecticut yeah okay how was your homecoming when you came back woke up my parents at midnight yeah yeah what are you doing here I finally got home did you keep in contact with your family yeah I did I used to send that we used to I used to send them letters my problem was I told you about that rocket attack right mm-hmm I wrote my mother a letter that talked about it and she freaked out you know so after that I never wrote anything ever happened near me you know mm-hmm yeah so did you go back to work her you say you worked well I didn't have it I didn't have actually what happened was I I had dropped out of school it was funny about that - uh I dropped out of school when I was in Vietnam I wrote a letter to Central saying you know next thing I know I get a letter saying I've been accepted you know this is when I'm in the middle of Vietnam I showed it to my operative officer he says I don't think you can go back right now yeah you know so then so then when I got out I probably towards the end of my timeframe or whatever the heck it was in the army I wrote him another letter and they said yeah you can come back and all this business and I changed my major to teaching major and I had to do a year he had to do a year of courses took a lot of Education courses which were absolutely worthless but that's beside the point it's student taught and all that those of that on the GI Bill yeah okay so after you went back to school you go to work you said you worked in the federal government right so I couldn't get a job once I graduated and it took me about a year to year and a half to find the job I ended up getting a job with the Veterans Administration first I worked at schools I worked at central helping people get their VA benefits then I ended up inspecting schools going through school records to see of see if let's say veterans were actually passing their courses and then later on I started dealing with incompetent veterans which veterans would get benefits some of them can't handle their money because of drug alcohol psychological problems traumatic brain injury old age dementia you name it you know I used to appoint people to handle their money and have to do reviews on them and also at the same time I was also in the reserves I was in the reserves for like 21 years okay so you'd have to go in for training with out every now and then I'd go one weekend a month plus two weekends a year okay and that I did photo interpretation for about half the time and then I became an intelligence analyst okay so that was just took more on the side huh what are you doing that kind of bumming right okay I never was activator I almost was activated for Bosnia you know but thank God I got out of it see said 21 years so that was in the 90s when you stopped yeah I was from 1974 to about 1997 okay actually maybe 96 I don't know you know whatever ended up too the years plus three years active so that's 24 years and did you your other job the veteran with the Veterans Administration was that your entire career doing that yeah I did I was with the VA for 36 years okay so during your service did you feel a lot of pressure and stress during that I know you said you didn't really initially you didn't really well you know like from what I saw or just in general okay - or - well we're doing dealing with two things one I hate to say it but I was pissed off that I was in the service you know because it's kind of like you're losing three years in your life to degree plus you run your under you have this you know people telling you what to do when giving you a hard time over like haircuts and appearance and whatever they decide you know what I mean so you've got that all right so I remember coming home and being like angry for about a year or so the other part of the problem was when I came back you couldn't say what you were doing like I'm trying to think if you weren't a service wasn't in your interest to broadcast it so it was like that three-year time frame was kind of like you couldn't talk about it to anybody yeah you know I mean I went back to school I mean central actually was a fairly non they wouldn't really give you a hard time there but well you still still kind of kept your mouth shut you know yeah there were schools where that wasn't the case okay I never had anybody really give me a hard time but I never really broadcast that I was a veteran you know it was a time frame I don't you haven't you weren't around for this you know Reagan Yeah right let's say when he I remember marching in Veterans Day Parade in Hartford during the Reagan years beginning when he became president and afterwards and in the first parade I marched in we were booed okay yeah a year later people were cheering there was some sort of a turning point in there you know so let's say the 70s you had to keep quiet about being in the service not wear your uniform things like that by the 80s that had changed okay so do you think it became a lot easier to deal with your time in the service ones feeling more accepting of it right I mean the thing was to though I mean I remember going to Disney World and it took 41 years before somebody ever said thank you for your service yeah you know what I'm saying [Music] but so when you were there was just kind of the stress of not wanting to be there yeah kind of that yeah I mean I I did not have any PTSD because of you know seeing dead bodies or anything like that okay was there anything you did for a good luck anything special no okay so what did people do for entertainment over there drink go find girls they did have USO shows they had Bob Hope come through every year did you go to any USO shows I never went to Bob Hope show no I was working that day as I remember we did have a club and we did have entertainers come to the club like Filipinos Australians that was one thing when I was going from Saigon to Danang at the first time we had like a group of Australians they were entertaining at the club and I saw him that night no usually we get Filipinos they'd have a tendency to mispronounce the words to the songs and there do you remember any particularly humorous or unusual events stories when we were over there and I was over there I used to get my home newspaper mm-hmm well there was another guy that used to get his home newspaper and get the Saturday edition well he opens up the newspaper and he goes my girlfriend's getting married but not to me yeah and after that he was a hurtin puppy it was funny to everybody else but not to him okay any other stories like that no I could tell you some bad stories like starving people and all that type of thing but I don't know if you'd want to hear that well if you want to share it uh when i Danang is a port right it has a river that goes into it bay and there was a German hospital ship there called the helgeland we drive right by it and what was happening during the war was we had a lot of refugees the United States used to bomb and shoot our Tillery into the countryside and that forced a lot of people into the city I mean raised the population of the city of dramatically same thing in Saigon for that matter and one day I went to the Danang hotel for lunch come out I'm sitting in the back of the truck with another guy and this woman comes up and she had like a tattered outfit on and tattered hat and she had this baby that was like looked like he was half dead okay scabs things and she was begging for money they don't generally do that and so I gave her a $20 bill you know what would be a $20 bill in American money but it was we used to have what they called MPC which was a b-52 bomber or something and I turned to my friend and I sorry gonna give her anything so no I said why not because she was probably gonna die anyway which is probably true yeah and I thought about that after like what could I have done well like we could have taken her to the German hospital ship which would have treated her and the kid plus because of the war and because what we were doing in the war if these country these people lived in the countryside they'd be they they'd make the wrong food grow their own food and you know would be okay but we were driving these people into the you know getting them out of the countryside into the cities giving the Vietnamese government tons of money to take care of them and they weren't doing it you know that's basically one thing I saw that really ticked me off you know yeah do you think that influenced your view of the military leadership or the government the American government the military leadership with our military leadership their military or the war in general or what well just kind of your ideas on the military and war in general Mike I'll tell you some ideas on word this a couple of things number one I think there should be a universal draft I think that what's happened now with the volunteer forces that they can send them anywhere as many times as possible and they will wear them out because you can't continue to go to bad places and see bad things and be normal okay Vietnam you went for a year and you would then you would be you know it'd be over nowadays nowadays you could send people like if they join for three years they could spend maybe two years there or six months there alternating and you'd have people going six seven times depending on how you know what their job was and things like that so you kind of wear them out and wear them down you end up with a lot of PTSD I think 35 percent of the people that you know in Afghanistan and Iraq end up filing for PTSD because of what they've seen you know what I'm saying yeah I also think that it would help having people in Congress that were in the military so that they wouldn't jump into these things as quickly as they do I think that they you know worth more thought should be a given before you get into a war and then when you get into a war you should fight to win it because you have a responsibility to the people that die or get wounded or will never be the same again I mean you end up playing if you have a war you end up paying VA benefits and people file for compensation or pension they could they could be paying for benefits for them their wives and their children for up to like 92 years I mean last World War one veteran died somewhere in the 2000s 2005 2006 or so when I was in the sir when I started at the VA we had Spanish American War veterans now the World War two veterans are dying out well widows and those veterans some of those people are still getting money mm-hmm okay and you know like I say average age of a Vietnam veteran is probably about my age which is around 70 you know yeah so you know as you go on there are results to this thing you know what I mean yeah I remember when I was working for the VA at Central we had one girl come woman come in she was taking getting a master's degree in education her father had died in World War two and she got married and her husband died in Vietnam this is like in 1973 or four or something so I mean you know I mean she was affected at least twice yeah so during your service what did you think of your officers than your fellow servicemen there were some good officers some bad officers same thing with my fellow servicemen the the regular servicemen the you know people on of my rank and all that stuff they were fairly decent fairly intelligent because it was military intelligence not everybody was super smart or anything but there are a lot of them that were a lot of them didn't hadn't go out to college yet some of them would never go to college but they were basically highly intelligent people some of the officers were morons some of them were pretty smart the NCOs same thing some the problem with now some of the NCOs were good and some of them were strange that's all I can say okay did you keep my journal when you're over there no okay we were awarded any medals or citations I got a army commendation medal on it's only I received okay friend of mine gave me a friend of mine gave me his Silver Star for $50 I got that upstairs did you sustain any injuries as far as let's say shot or whatever you know shrapnel no but I ended up getting prostate cancer because of Agent Orange in fact I talked to the the guy that was my roommate in Vietnam the Christmas time we were talking and I said Lola have you had any problem since you got out yeah I got diabetes you said how about you oh yeah I got a prostate cancer okay well the planes they use to drop the Agent Orange we're also the planes they use to spray the cities for insects you know mosquitoes so did they cost did it cost my prostate cancer I don't know that it cross his diabetes maybe yes maybe no I don't know it's possible you know you join any veterans organizations oh okay yes I joined the VFW and I also joined the DAV hmm I never joined a Veterans organization until I retired okay I belong to one in Berlin you know most it most of the guys are Vietnam veterans there is couple World War two vets and a couple post Vietnam you know I don't know Persian Gulf things like that but most of the people are around my age okay did you join right after you left the service or did you no I joined like maybe 7 or 10 years ago something like once that once I retired you know to give me something to do keep me off the street that type of deal okay do you attend reunions never went to one but there my unit has had them okay seem to have them every two years its overall how did your service experiences affect your life it made me basically I wouldn't have got a job with the VA I wouldn't have understand what it was like to be in the service see I used to read a lot I mean I read a lot of history I'll ever read a lot of books I still do for that matter about war in history and things like that and I understand it a lot better being been in it Plus like I say I get it I get a pension because of the military plus I get a compensation because of my disability plus I have got a government job because I was a veteran so you know basically shaped my life in that way okay is there anything else you want to add that we have to discuss no that's about it okay well I'd like to thank you for your service and also for taking the time to be interviewed sure [Music] you

Channel: ccsuvhp

Views: 6,445

Rating: 4.5609756 out of 5

Keywords: Army, US, VHP, Veteran, History, Project, Veterans, Vietnam, War

Id: pXXWOspjpTg

Length: 62min 28sec (3748 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018