Interview with Erik Rambusch, Vietnam War Veteran. CCSU Veterans History Project

today is May 11th 2018 I am interviewing Eric R ambush at Norwalk Community College in Norwalk Connecticut the interviewer is Caleb Pittman working with Central Connecticut State University for the record could you please state your full name city and state in which you live Eric Henrique Peter Ram Bush I live in Norwalk the Rowan section okay in what war did you serve served in Vietnam what was your branch of service Army Corps of Engineers what was your highest rank first lieutenant and in which general locations did you serve Fort Belvoir the whole the whole time okay other than basic training and individual training basic training was at Columbia Fort Jackson South Carolina Columbia South Carolina and then I was at Fort McClellan for advanced infantry training and then I was at OCS Engineer OCS at Fort Belvoir and then I was stationed to the instructional methods Division at Fort Belvoir and I spent my entire tour of duty there okay so you said you were drafted right yes do you recall where you were living at the time well I was halfway through my master's degree in MBA at Columbia and I had taken some time off and had worked for company which was then known as Esso which is now known as Exxon and Humble Oil and I had two marketing trainee ships in Sweden and Denmark and I was on my way home to go back to Columbia and complete my MBA and I got a telegram in Paris I was staying at a lousy little third-class hotel known as the Grand Hotel of Luxembourg it was neither grand but it was near the part known as Luxembourg and my brother said you're drafted so that was the first that I knew of it and and immediately I began to say what am I going to do and long story short I have since learned I come from a military family I would never have said that before but I had a distant cousin who was in the Civil War and my father had volunteered for the camouflage Corps which is part of the Corps of Engineers and First World War II and I had two cousins in the Second World War I had a brother who volunteered German Korean War my closest brother and my middle brother was at that time an officer in in the Coast Guard so I have since learned from the Veterans Administration that that qualifies as a military family so yes I thought of getting an affirmative my master's degree I never thought of dodging the draft it's just a question if do I come how do I go later I gotta go and I said go now and so I submitted to the draft and I went down to the draft processing center the inputing center whatever it was called down in the financial district and if you've seen the movie Alice's Restaurant it was the same induction Center that Arlo Guthrie went to and he sat on the group W bench if you know the song and and I shipped out from Pennsylvania Station me and a couple hundred other guys and was on my way to Columbia South Carolina which of course was not the Columbia I had been planning on yeah but and I went through basic training Columbia South Carolina okay um do you recall the date I know it was late summer early fall okay 1966 okay 65 66 I know I think 66 they the war had just turned into being a much greater war we were now sending combat troops to Vietnam we have been helping to be Abney's fight their war but that wasn't getting anywhere very fast and we have been bombing in the north but now we were getting more serious about bombing and we were sending Marines and inventory troops - to Vietnam in fact I can remember a specific instance that's kind of a colorful story when I was in basic training we were doing bayonet training and you're out in the field in South Carolina and late summer early fall and you know everyone was kind of had something else they wanted to do and the company commander came driving down everyone could see him driving around the field and he called the sergeants over and then the sergeants called us over and they say man Red China has just sent troops into North Vietnam we all went back on the field it was very serious so that it was a time of the build-up and so I think it was 66-67 okay and so you were drafted so you didn't choose what branch you were in no I could when I was sitting in the tent and with a couple other guys and for Jackson waiting to start basic training a recruiter came through very good-looking tall guy you know who wants to be an officer who wants to be a marine and and I had always been told by my college professors particularly my economics professor and that was my major in college that the best first job you could have was as a lieutenant in the Army or whatever the equivalent ranks would be in the Navy instant because you know it's a big job and it's a lot of responsibility but it's highly structured so your chances of screwing it up are pretty slim you're gonna learn how to get things done in an organization and so I said yeah oh I'll volunteer process and he said oh well then you have an option if you volunteer to be a Marine he had no option but if you volunteer for army he had an option and yeah I volunteer for the Corps of Engineers because that's what my dad had done in the first world war that's what my brother had done during the Korean War he was in the topographical Corps within the Corps of Engineers so it was kind of like that's that's where I belong okay can you tell me about your first days in service like going to boot camp well my first day in boot camp I woke up on a train and it was you know all these tents outside and we filed out and we you know we all have a little satchel for our clothes and we put our civilian clothes in that and an hour later we were in army fatigues and we had no hair and and then it was a certain amount of waiting I can remember waiting on line to be fed I can remember taking some some intelligence exams you know it was just kind of in the Army refers to it as in processing and when you leave you're out processed so it was in processing and then when they had a group together and I had that you you went a hundred of you would go up to wherever they do basic training so my first day was being processed well my first two or three days were being processed and being interviewed by the by the recruiter so I kind of knew I was gonna what my path was going to be by the time I up the hill to do some real soldiering I was gonna go to OCS and when I got to the training company area sergeant Varney was there he was our sergeant all through basic training a hell of a nice guy from from West Virginia where the Smokey Bear hat and he very quickly picked out the people who had been to college and the people had said managerial experience and we all became squad leaders and the guy who had the most experience that run in a supermarket in Florida and so he knew how to put people on shifts and so forth so he became the temporary company commander he got a band I had a bandage that squad leader so I was in charge of 10 15 men there were four squad leaders and then there was a guy who was in charge of the company and we started doing the things that go on in basic training we learned hack where we were assigned rifles we learned how to clean them and we were assigned a bunk I remember my first night in in the barracks it's interesting that you asked that the first night in the barracks there were two guys who had been on opposite gangs in Manhattan it's kind of like the the Sharks and the were they from West Point story the Sharks and well anyway one was Puerto Rican and one was white and they had been on the opposite happened in in gang wars on opposite sides and now they were sleeping and they were great I think I'm fine you know you're in the army and it's a big mix and I'm very glad I did it I feel I feel sorry for the guys who haven't been any army quite frankly all that maybe Air Force Coast Guard it's the great mixing bowl that's a great experience it's an educational experience okay so how did it feel being there like the first week peanut butta I felt like I was in camp okay you know they were just like the the bunk beds that I had slept in and boys camp didn't feel strange how I felt very comfortable you know I had been to summer camp I had been to all-male schools so you know to me it was I didn't feel out of place okay do you remember your instructors well they had as a drill sergeant in charge of our company was sergeant Varney and there was there was a sergeant there who did not like me and he kind of thought I was in he used the term educated fool because I was probably one of the best educated people I was halfway through her master's degree I've been to Europe and lived abroad and could speak a little Danish and Swedish so you know he was kind of like what the hell are you doing here you know how did you ever get caught up in this mess how are you ever gonna get out of here alive you know if you're an educated fool the challenge for me was not acceptance or personal comfort quite frankly I didn't mind being in that physical environment but I was not as physically fit as my compatriots so you know when we had grenades throw they said throw it like football well I'd never played much football so I wasn't you know that was meaningless to me and and we had this thing called the alligator crawl where you had a crawl on him yet that fortunately what I really got good at was what they call the monkey bars kids do them they on the playground but they didn't have so much of that when I was a kid and if one should learn to swing I could go to the house and one night I was out running track around the parking lot and that same sergeant who called me an educated fool I said what are you doing and I said well I'm trying to you know renting my running skills you said Ramblers you're good on the bars do what you're good at you know play to your strengths and I had never forgotten that play to your strength you know if you got to do five things which can you do best that's the one you do first okay so was there anything particular that you did to get through that challenges no now I mean my and my brother when my eldest brother when he was saying goodbye to me at at Pennsylvania Station he said get with the program just given the program you know and and he didn't have to say that because in a way I had to already made that decision but nevertheless that was the that was the right that mantra to have in my head you know I wasn't fighting it amenda there was a guy in the company who was my he was contacting his mother to write the state senators who get him out because he didn't like it there I just go through it get it done get with the program okay so after boot camp where did you go then I went to infantry training and that was at Fort McClellan the home of the wax in Alabama and by now it was winter because even in Alabama had snowed and our sergeant I don't remember his name but he was from the first cavalry which were the helicopter these were guys in Vietnam who were flown in and out by helicopter and a big beautiful yellow patch with a horse head on it and he says there anyone here who's been to college you know about four of us raised our hand he said good the other squad leaders and off we went and this squad ladies two of us had a private room I forget the other guys name he was from Brooklyn we became very close buddies by that time I was recontact Irie contacted a girlfriend that I had dated in college very nice girl who was going to end up becoming my wife so I had her picture in my and again I was you know learning what they've got to teach you you know there was one sergeant who was very mean who you know was the kind of guy who on Saturday morning wanted you to scrape the bathroom with a toothbrush or something so you can get out people like that everywhere but basically it was a you know you just did what they told you to do and do it as well as you could and you know move on so just kind of more of the same avoid more the same but more intense yeah I can remember leave we have some great this this roommate and I had some absolutely great times in Alliston which is you know southern town so we didn't actually spend much time on the street we just stayed in a hotel room drink and watch TV and and had quiet weekend's and Ed went back and can train some more and then it was on to OCS and it was funny a lot of guys that I had trained with it at Fort Jackson who had decided to be engineers they rejoined us half of us in my engineer company at Belvoir had trained at Fort Leonard Wood which was field training for Corps of Engineers and have of us uh trained and in the infantry my I had an infantry MOS military occupational specialty at that time as a rifleman so half of us we train this rifleman and have us with trained us you know corrupt engineers and we came together at Fort Belvoir now they're not a the afternoon I left for Fort Belvoir this girl that I mentioned to you she helped me pack my duffle bag you know and it was very tearful and emotional goodbyes when I was got off the train or the plane or whatever it was that got me to wanted to Virginia I was picked up by two guys who were ROTC and they drove me to that parade ground that Officer Candidate School and they told me all they're gonna kill you who that the way to go was to have been ROTC you know that's what we are you know you're gonna have to run in the dirt and all that kind of stuff so you know by then I began I was beginning to wonder you know so I found my company area and I found the headquarters Hut and there was a sergeant there sergeant Jackson black guy and he said what are you doing here candidate and I said I just arrived I'm assigned here for the next five six months he said go up there Nestle have dinner and you know I had heard all kinds of things about OCS and health top topic was and and and I was gonna be off balance the whole time I probably wouldn't survive outta da da da and that bit of kindness go up and have dinner just in a ways helped sustain me all the way through and when I did graduate and we were having a graduation dinner I invited sergeant Jackson and his wife to sit with my mom and dad and that was our graduation parties okay so do you have any interesting stories or experiences from those two schools well you know the whole what happened well I had been warned about how tough this was and in an advanced individual training at Fort Jackson Fort McClellan this sergeant said why the heck are you doing that and I said well yeah do I want to be in a foxhole or do I want to be a you know in a job and so he said oh it's terrible they're gonna I didn't think he had been to OCS back in the early days of the war when they were for officers and they were staffing them quickly and they took him because he is an experienced noncommissioned guy and he thought it was a chance to you know leapfrog from the noncommissioned ranks to the Commission rings and he failed he they squeezed him out so he took a taught me something again that I didn't forget he said they are going to try to screw you up I'm gonna be on camera they're gonna do everything they can to confuse you and to break you emotionally it's called the fog of war what you just have to remember that the tactical officer that's called a training advice and counseling or something like that the TAC officer is going to do everything he can to squeeze you out so what you just have to remember what his job is and what he's trying to do it so I had that filed away in my head as well so that was very true the TAC officer was a mean son of a or at least he acted that way and the assistant TAC officer was much the same and they would do everything they could to screw you up they would wake you up in the middle of the night they would dump your trunk on the on the floor for no reason at all they would insult you they would do everything they could do cause people to drop out and say this is now worth it or I can't handle it or whatever and I just kept in the back of the mind this is this is their strategy Erik just keep your head about you day we had we would have a chain of command and we would be running to class you ran everywhere you ran to class and all of a sudden boom the company commander was shot next person takeover boom he's shot to next person and you're saying what was the chain of command today he said yes so who is in charge now am I in charge now and if you screwed up they would insult you and you're not going to succeed that other none of it and if you were building something they would say you don't know what you're doing they they never did you in class when we were learning how to lay out a minefield or build a bridge or build a building or would you know land navigate or whatever the case may be they never bothered you in class but as soon as you are outside that classroom building you were fair game so for example when we were at land we were doing a course where you had to escape from the prison or you have to get through enemy territory to get to the other side if you got caught you went to the prisoner of war camp and guess who the inquisitors were the tactical officers you know and it would start all over again you know there was no escaping these guys so we were we had a peer-review system or I think they do this at all the OCS Officer Candidate School where the hundred people or my my company we have two groups of 50 you peer ranked everybody in terms of how you thought of them as officer material all this guy was really he was and this guy you didn't want to be near him and you know I never got any results until very close to graduation and the tactical officer called me in and you said Ram Bush I'm very sorry to tell you you're at the bottom of the heap yeah there's no one in your class who would want to be in combat with you or just don't have the leadership skills and but you're you work hard yeah nice guy so I'm gonna recycle it this program is 26 weeks long we're gonna put you back into 12 weeks um because every every week they were graduating a new group so you know they had like 26 and coming down the production line so we're gonna put you back twelve weeks or so and I just remembered what that sergeant told about and they're trying to do everything they can to screw you up so I said I'm not interested I said in basic training the company commander after seeing me as the squad leader said you're officer material I'm going to recommend you in advanced infantry training the same thing happened so you know if the K if it's not working now if I'm shouldn't be here then I wish to leave he said okay you stay so he was trying to take me out yeah so what are they what are the things that we had to do along the way was coach lieutenant's are responsible for training their men as are the sergeant's it's such a but the officer you know gets up on a platform as high as this table you know the 50 guys in the companies and he said you know this is what we're gonna do tomorrow we're gonna go up this hill here's the map you know it or this is a new weapon you have to learn it or when they do physical training you know whoever's leaving physical training is on this platform about of Sciences table so everyone can see them so you know they want officers who can project they'll have it so that was part of our training and our CSS we all have got a five-minute presentation of 15 minute 15 and I had been on the debating team in high school and college you know everyone else was playing football and all this kind of stuff and I was into debating and I had done rather well so when it was my turn in OCS to be on the table and and I they were trying to screw me up you know and and make me damn her and all those kind of things and I had done very well so my first assignment was as a trainer so you know here's this tactical officer you know he must've been a good guy you know because he picked me out of the 50 people in the company - and have this beautiful assignment by then Nancy Joe and I were engaged and we were gonna get married so you know for six months we can live in Washington while I do this because the usual assignment in those days was for for everybody - their first assignment was stateside to perfect their skills and then they went to Vietnam for a year and then they came back for six months and they shared taught the next generation of people going over what they had learned in Vietnam and then they you the lefting army or if they were professional soldiers go back to Vietnam so I figured I had six months of married life at Fort Belvoir and my wife was a speech pathology is a speech pathologist and had worked at Bellevue Hospital so when I first brought her on post as an army wife they said to Nancy Joe are you - are you dependent now they meant are you an army dependent are you either you're in the army or you're dependent on somebody who was in the army and she said no sir I'm quite independent thank you very much so we were we were off to a good start and another thing that happened which showed my wife's attitude she was not happy about me being in the Army but nevertheless one day she she was teaching or being a speech service at the three schools that were on post at Fort Belvoir and she developed a flat tire so she pulls into the gas station a post post exchanged gas station of the PX and she's standing on line and this woman comes running in the colonel the colonel the colonel so that the specialist turns to Nancy Joe and he says ma'am what rank is your husband because now he's in a kind of a tough situation and Nancy joe says my husband is a lieutenant but to tie so so we found a beautiful place off-post in in fairfax 77 Donnybrook court and Nancy had a job on post and I had this job on post which I loved I absolutely loved it I was being trained and then I was training others and then I got involved in actually developing training programs at that time the Corps of Engineers was adopting something called behavioral objectives every period of instruction was focusing on some physical skill or knowledge that you would need in the field they this was based on a systems analysis of what was called for in Vietnam you didn't have to start a generator in sub arty conditions but you might have to start a generator and three inches of swamp earth okay so they were taking putting aside everything they had learned in the Second World War which was magnificent and everything they had learned in Korea and how do we do it in the jungle how do we do it in the Delta and so all our training had to be modified because we were not fighting on the plains of Europe we were not fighting in the mountains of Korea which all the older more experienced trainers were graduates of those Wars we had it so so I got involved in redesigning training in terms of specific behavioral objectives and I even designed the course to train the permanent party the people who are there year after year after year how to redesign their courses in terms of these behavioral objectives so I mean I discovered my career in the army because when i when i ind dup being all three all my entire military career was at Fort Belvoir they keep saying stay stay stay we got more for you to do enactment do you want to do more yeah more steak so Nancy Joe and I were living at Fairfax Virginia for the for two years you know in a community kind of environment with tennis courts and pools and everything and my brother the guy who is going to be my brother-in-law was living up there one one community over to the right and was getting getting to know my sister-in-law I had friends of mine in Georgetown I mean it was a great existence and when I left the army I went back to Columbia that one of the best decisions I've made am I like this to go back and complete my MBA and I went into human resources and I worked for dinner bradstreet I worked for the New York Times I was training people recruiting people developing people and helping people with manage their careers and then I ended up being an instructor here at Norwalk Community College so that would not have happened that that career would not have evolved had it not been for getting assigned to the instructional methods division and Fort Belvoir so I consider myself a very lucky person yeah so Oh Fort Belvoir was a typical day like there for you there as an instructor well I was other than the one time I had guard duty I was you know in an apartment with my wife nice three bro apartment where the balcony had a short walk from the pool we would have breakfast we would get in the car and we would drive to Fort Belvoir and I would get off at the instructional methods division and go inside and set it in a desk and she would spend a day going back and forth to the three schools and pick me up at five five and we'd go home so it's not like Africa 95 job absolutely absolutely it was great [Music] you didn't sustain any injuries nope no I was very lucky that way okay you have any interesting stories throughout your time there it's an instructor developing well I mean the interesting thing I kind of alluded to earlier was the the Corps of Engineers well yeah there was something that first of all that the most important thing was discovering the power of the whole technology of instructional objectives behavioral objectives I mean here at the college there's still wrestling with it that every every course should what are what will the students at this College be able to do as a result of English 101 102 and what will they be able to do all the way and then if they take English 102 well what are they going to learn and be able to do as a result of English 102 as opposed to in English what are they going to learn in English 103 you know determine the academics are having a very hard time figuring that out and particularly when you say well he went to Norwalk Community College and he took English 103 but this guy went to southern and he took English 103 it's all ringless 103 the same as what they did at Community College and as you may or may not know they wrestle with that the academics wrestled with that so in a way the army was ahead of the curve because they were getting very specific not only about the course but what was going on in every hour of the course the other interesting thing which I hadn't alluded to was they were running out of people to draft because they didn't want to draft kids that were in college I got drafted because I was had taken time off and I had gone to Europe and all the rest of it so you know my two years of deferment to get master's degree had run out while I was abroad so I was out there I was exposed I was fair game but they didn't want to interrupt people who were in college they didn't want to interrupt people who were in graduate school and they didn't want to interrupt people who were married then you want to break up marriages I didn't want to break up people who are ending so so we're running out of people to draft so McNamara came up with the idea which on the surface is a good idea why don't we lower the standard of the people that we bring into the army why why does someone have to have a high school degree to be in the Army Air Force maybe let's say that if they've had two years of high school they're intelligent enough to be in the army and we will train well there are illiterate didn't even we'll train them to read what better you know quite frankly when when you got to be able to read otherwise you don't get a pass you have control over the students you have a way of motivating suits that the teachers in the public school doesn't have right you know don't have so the army took in a hundred thousand people that it wouldn't normally take in and we got ten thousand of them in the Corps of Engineers so we had to modify our programs or make special programs for these people to train them for jobs we thought we could train them for such as setting up water purification plants maintaining the smaller field generators that we had and in a way I was very excited by that because I thought I was doing some kind of civic good here if you look at the results as I have on the net it was the only ones who actually had a career as a result of that training we're the ones who in the army the kids that got all this special training and support when they left the army or right back on the bottom of the heap of the uneducable you know unemployable kind of people and in fact it's kind of sad but some people refer to this as this these hundred thousand people as McNamara's morons because they they were struggling they were struggling so it tells you something about what was going on in in Vietnam you know the president was there to to build the Great Society this had been a dream of President Johnson since he was a schoolteacher in Texas and finally he had his chance to fulfill the dream of his mentor FDR and McNamara was doing everything statistically and the you know there was no battle lines there were no front lines and enemy lines so he was he was trying to prove that we killed more people than they had killed so everything was body count and and he came up with more draftable people and but it was a very very sad war the good news is the good news is that we left in Vietnam was able to reunite and we helped them in that process and they now see us as friends that's that's the good news and we lost that war the the you but then again as a historian I have to put that in the context the biggest challenge we faced in the twentieth century was the defeat of communism and we defeated countries the USSR collapsed in nineteen anyone so 1945 to 1995 the wall came down at 91 USSR collapsed three years later so we won that war now you can say well this career this Vietnam you're right but in in the big war which was defeat communism Vietnam and Korea were battles and they were like we tied in in Korea it ended in a truce 300 thousand guys 30 thousand guys were killed but and we call it a war but and we call Vietnam a war which was a draw but you put that in the context of what we were trying to do in the 20th century and we did defeat communism Russia is nowhere near the threat today that it was 1915 Thank You Sussie I can remember practicing air raid drills and learning how to get them to this table because the Russians were coming so you know I'm proud of my service I'm proud of what my country is done what more can I tell you well what did you think of the your fellow officers and service miner training oh that's interesting you know I'm not prepared for that question they were they were there were two or three that I thought were smarter than me or as well as sophisticated or you know people that I would want to see after the service you know but they were all good guys I mean they were nice guys do there weren't I didn't think of any of them as being mean or sickies you know I didn't see them in combat or maybe if I had seen some of them I would have had a different view on them I mean but in the barracks context they were nice guys one of the funniest things we did by the way when we were at Fort Fort Belvoir is we were couldn't couldn't go home for Easter so what are we gonna do well we're gonna bury the Easter Bunny so we had a military funeral for the Easter Bunny and we all dressed up we got uniforms you you invented ways of filling in what little free time you had got the gun knows there wasn't much but Easter was we had a little more free time than normal so that's how we filled it in there were guys who had been part of drill teams in high school who obviously reveled in marching the men and were very very good at it and there were a number of guys who were engineers was so they volunteered to get into the Corps of Engineers I remember a guy by the name of Dennis Lee who had built parking garages all over the United States so I think he was he and his wife Charlotte were sent off to Japan to build buildings there was another guy who was into conservation who was assigned he was somewhere in Carolinas to protect a seashore so there was one guy who was a professional magician and an artist guy by name a hunter law and so he had drawn Greek you know athletes throwing the discus and all that in that in the men's room yeah detective officer loved it brought it all the other tactical officers sure you know this Greek art so you know there were there were a couple guys like that who were kind of standouts who company I enjoyed but most my space and we spent our time together and went our separate ways I mean if if I were contacted and company an but it's going to have a reunion I would go I would look forward to it okay great did you keep a journal No so where were you when your service ended I've said Fort Belvoir him yeah I came across a regulation that said if because of when you were drafted and so forth and and the timing of the situation if you were to be let out three months early you could get a semester that you wouldn't otherwise have in other words we don't want to let you out in the middle of a semester and have you sitting doing nothing for two or three months so I found this regulation and I went to dr. gray and I said according to this I can get out in May as opposed to the middle of July you could tell he was he thought I was cheating the system but that was the regs and so Nancy and I went to Ocean City took a little vacation on the on the Delaware Shore or the Maryland shore and then I was mustered out okay so what did you do in the days and weeks afterwards I went right back to school I started at Columbia that June and I started talking to dr. Fred way who was in career counseling and figuring out what I was going to do next I knew I was more interested in human resources I started taking courses Columbia does not have a degree or at least it didn't then in personnel management human resource management and so forth so I kind of put together some courses that related to that and I volunteered and took some course at the School of Architecture I was a volunteer at the Union settlement house and in Harlem which you know took advantage of my desire to be a counselor and trained people I was working for the the settlement house had a contract with the Carpenters Union to train people to furniture makers Union to be at work over in Queens making furniture and we were working with people who were then called unemployable and we actually had to go to their homes in Harlem and wake them up but put them on a bus and feed them breakfast and deliver them to the factory by 8:30 in the morning and an attempt to instill new habits I mean these are the guys who if everyone in the united states every male in the our states everybody and ice age had to go through military training these guys who had no work habits at all there would have been the best thing in the world for them because they would have learned you get up in the morning you work during the day they had you know they went to bed when they were tired to get up when they were rested and the idea of getting up because it was 7:30 and had to be at the factory value activity is just something that was not in your culture you and I were brought up and it caught in a work oriented culture they were not and so they were unemployable yes not because they were stupid not because they were lazy just they weren't used to living on a schedule yeah okay did you join any veteran organizations absolutely not okay absolutely not I had no interest in being with the Foreign Legion or the America those were a bunch of old farts as far as I was concerned I didn't get involved at all with veterans or veterans organizations I had done my bit I moved on until a few years ago here at the college because I like my post corporate career was working here at Norman Community College as an instructor and we started saying we've got to help veterans re-enter civilian society and that is a challenge that is the challenge I had a couple cousins who didn't make it and so I kind of said well I'm a veteran you know can I can I help mentor some people can I help counsel some people and so I got involved in some programs here at NCC where we were helping but no I did not get involved and I don't mean any disrespect to some of the other organizations but I don't have the social needs that other people have to you know go to the Legion and drink beer at night or you know I'm not in Mexico lumbus some elitist but I just don't need those kind of social organizations I've always been very very involved in busy and my work and but where I had the opportunity here at NCC to work with veterans absolutely okay so you talk about it a bit but overall how did your military experience influence your thinking about war or the military in general well in a way I've answered that question I I saw mine because my hobby is history and in my post corporate career I started teaching history I saw what I did in in the greater context of what the United States was trying to do from 1945 to 1995 we the technical term for it is we were not going to fight communism we were going to contain communism and we were successful and in that containment until communism input or the USSR imploded they could not sustain competition with the United States and they imploded and the wall in Berlin came tumbling down and Gorbachev shrunk the size of the of the USSR to what is now called the Russian Federation so I I put my military experience in I just I mean some small little contribution to that overall every I also I also liked being in a male society I also liked the training I hadn't been you know a 4-letter man in college I hadn't been a 4-letter man in high school I like the physical training and I like I like meeting the people that I met in the army that I might otherwise not meet and I honestly think it was good for me and I think it was good for them and I think it would I believe in the universal military service okay I don't think we should have war all the time but I think national service in some form or other is is a good discipline yeah it integrates we are an integrated we the goal of this society is to be integrated the military is a good way to make that integration happen there is no society in our society there is no community in our society that is as well integrated as the military you don't see skin color you see the rank of the person you're dealing with and that's what America's all about right it's what you can do and what you can achieve and what you've done not the color your skin that matters or what country you come from yeah so is there anything else you'd want to add that hasn't been covered yet well in that last respect my son-in-law is is in the military and he had the experience of leading an infantry company where there were three languages spoken so when he gave a command he had to have people translated into other languages and unfortunately he had two excellent grenadiers who didn't speak English and who did not blast but I mean that's that's that's the army that's that's that's what makes this place so exciting and and and the army really strives to integrate so okay well I'd like to thank you for your service and also for taking the time to be interviewed today my pleasure sir

Channel: ccsuvhp

Views: 3,923

Rating: 4.5714288 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: iCqGn-k4c00

Length: 51min 52sec (3112 seconds)

Published: Wed May 30 2018