Jesse (Jay) Burt Library of Congress Veterans History Project Interview

hi this is reeve with the remembering benzie oral history project today on october 15 2019 at benzie central high school in michigan interviewing jay bird so you were born in north carolina how did you choose south carolina yeah i was born on an army air base in south carolina my dad was in the army air corps and at the end of the war he moved back to illinois which was where i was pretty much raised my connection with benzie county goes back two generations from there my great great grandfather got connected with the congregational summer assembly at crystal lake in 1913 and he ended up building a cottage there and it stayed in the family so i started summering in benzie county in 1945 and fast forward in 1993 i was in kansas city and getting ready to change jobs and decided that i really would just as soon get out of the urban area and so my wife and kids and i moved up here and i had planned on retiring here and we moved up here and i got work a couple of different places but i basically ended up working for gwen frostic as a press operator for about 18 years and then i retired from that could you explain about what um the grand foster company does um they print note paper nature notes um gwen's company was she was an incredible woman to work for a lot of people didn't understand her because of her quote disability unquote she had this persona of this little quiet meek little tree hugging lady and she was anything but and she was brilliant but it didn't the people that knew her well realized that but she was up until she wrote her last book i think when she was 91 and she was as sharp as attack her whole life read everything i've never seen a person that consumed books and magazines and just everything um she never owned a computer but she could talk computer with the best of them i mean she knew the inner workings and everything else but she'd never touched one and she was that way in a lot of things and she was i learned i learned an awful lot from her do you have any like memories of suffering then summering in fancy that like stick out oh crystal lake i spent my teenage pre-teen age and teenage years bumping around crystal lake sailing and walking the beaches and just enjoying um life and at that period that was in the 50s and 60s and at that period wives weren't working the way they do now so my mother would come up to the family cottage as soon as we got out of school and we would be here the whole summer until school started again and it was just wonderful so how well did you get on with your siblings i'm sorry how well did you get on with your siblings acceptable uh i have one i have a sister and we are pretty much opposite sides of a coin um we are totally different and we get along just fine but we're two really different people just across the board so did any of your other family serve in the military my father and of all my relatives i'm i was the last one until 10 or 15 years ago what did your father do he was a ordinance officer in the army air corps this was before the air force existed and he ran bomb dumps or bomb storage facilities in world war ii he was in india running a bomb dump and when korea came along he got sent to okinawa japan where he ran a ordinance facility and he did some work with the armament applications to aircraft particularly they were trying to fit a 20 millimeter cannon into the nose of a b-25 and he was worked on that so how did school go for you as a teenager i was your classic underachiever um that's all i heard was you're smart why can't you why don't your grades reflect it and i just heard that all the way through junior high school high school i just really wasn't motivated to study i read voraciously and i could talk about anything but as far as school work it really i just couldn't get into it and that's one of the reasons that i ended up in the military i was in college and after a year and a half i realized i'm not accomplishing a thing here except spending my parents money and so i opted to go into the military so you enlisted in vietnam i'm sorry you enlisted in vietnam i enlisted during vietnam yes [Music] the army had a program where you could test for flight school before you joined and i took all the testing and was accepted so the day i raised my hand and joined the army i knew that i was already on track to go to flight school which is really what i wanted to do so what did you know you wanted to be a helicopter pilot um pretty much most of the time i like things that are mechanical and technical and i'll use the word artistic something that requires a hands-on finesse and that's one of the reasons i went to work for gwen because she saw that in me and operating a press for her it's mechanical it's technical and it's artistic and it's all hands-on and it's the same way with flying whether it's airplanes or helicopters or whatever you've got all of those factors there and that's the kind of thing i like to do so um how did flight school go flight school was good i had a little bit of a hiccup i joined was in basic training and i had mentioned to my drill instructor that i was going to fly school because i thought you know maybe they'll cut me some slack and most of the way through basic training he came up to me one day and he said is burnt here you said you were going to flight school i guess yes i was i'm all good to go he said no he said you're scheduled to go to advanced infantry training from here that got my attention i did not really want to be on the ground with a gun and so i started the ball rolling and my recruiter in illinois i called him and said hey you know help well my paperwork had gotten lost so that delayed a lot of things i didn't get the date for flight school that i should have gotten because of the delay so i had about a seven month wait between basic training and flight school and so they sent me to and it worked out beautifully they sent me to basic aircraft mechanics school and then they sent me to turbine engine mechanics school and then they sent me to helicopter crew chief school so when i got to flight school i already had this wonderful basic knowledge of the aircraft and all this other stuff and it it it helped me out more than once having all that extra information do you elaborate on that um the one thing that sticks in my mind and this gets a little technical but a turbine engine shaft turbine engine has three what they call igniter plugs they're like little glow plugs in a diesel engine but they they click and the huey has three of them and when you start it up the engine starts to spin up and you can hear these little igniters snapping well if they're not back they're firing you're not going anywhere and in one of the classes one of the instructors said if you're ever in the situation where your aircraft commander goes to start it up and it's not firing and you can't hear the igniters going he said if you shut it down take these little glow plugs out he said and take a number two pencil nothing else a number two pencil and get lots of graphite in all three of them he said you have one shot that it'll work if it doesn't work the first time it's not going to work at all and i happen to be in vietnam as a command pilot and we were way back in the middle of no place um at a special forces camp and we'd taken some people out and we're sitting waiting for them to finish they came out i went to start that thing up and nothing and so my crew chief didn't even know this trick so i told him i said okay come on we're going to go back there and we're going to get this thing flying i said okay help me we'll pull these three igniter plugs and played with a pencil in there and put them back together and safety wired everything fired right up and off we went of course we couldn't start it again but where we were going had a maintenance facility and when i landed i said okay it needs three new igniter plugs because they're shot but little things like that um that particular one saved me a lot of hassle calling somebody to fly out back in the middle of nowhere with three little you know electronic parts so i could fly out again but that was very um very beneficial was there anything you particularly enjoyed about flight school flying um yeah a lot of it was just great fun i mean once you learned how to control the aircraft just basically i mean they sent us out to practice you know refining our technique and we were in mineral wells texas and what the army had done is they had leased areas from ranchers and farmers around the port and you could be flying along and you'd see a white tire or a green tire or a red tire sitting out in a field well you knew you were allowed to land in that area and they were red were confined areas green were just basic enclosed areas and white or just open areas and so we'd be sent out for an hour and you know okay go do 15 landings and then come back well we'd get out there and texas is just full of armadillos you can chase an armadillo with a helicopter because you're much faster than they are and oh we'd get out and just do silly stuff it was it was fun it was fun but i mean it was a lot of work and i mean you were building the skills that you needed to do the job effectively the training was compared to civilian it was just way over the top i get uncomfortable flying with civilian helicopter pilots i mean i'm i'm like a cat on a hot stove because we would practice our emergency procedures to the ground civilian they practice the approach and then they bring the power back in and stop at a powered hover well there's that last three or four feet is what makes it breaks an emergency landing and we were trained well enough that we fairly routinely would do auto rotations or power off landings to the ground and i know it's true for me and i think it's probably true for all the people i flew with i can be at a thousand feet shut the engine off or lose an engine and i can put it down if this parking lot were empty even with the trees and the light poles i could put that bird down in that parking lot so smoothly you'd never know when we were flying or not flying and that was a real skill that we had that the civilians unless they have a lot of time didn't have but it improved your confidence in your everyday flying knowing that you know i can put this thing down on a postage stamp if i have to and you know as i say it comes down just as smoothly i mean it's it all happens really fast i mean you you come in like a brick but at the bottom you slow everything down and zero everything out and just set it down and that's a good feeling how well did you attack adapt to military life just fine um i like the structure of the military you know who you answer to you know who works for you if you're working for me i know that if i tell you i want this done you know by this period of time it will be done and the people above me and everybody was about me um you just did what you were told if you had feelings about it um one way or the other um too bad with the exception and this came into play in um in combat here i am a 21 year old kid with this 750 thousand dollar big big whirly machine and i'm the captain of the ship as far as aircraft operations go i don't answer to anybody except myself if i say it's not safe to fly it's not going anywhere now where we go and what we're doing and that kind of thing yes i take my orders from higher ups but it was a nice feeling to know that you were in complete control and the higher-ups would back up whatever decisions you made right wrong or otherwise and that was nice um you know for a 21 year old kid that you know just likes playing playing with this expensive toy um so what was yours so you mentioned that you were the captain after the helicopter so what else how else was the helicopter outfitted like whoever's down the captain with you okay now say it again who else was like on the captain with you while you were flying well um i would fly as aircraft commander i had a co-pilot who was usually somebody new in country just waiting for a command seat to become available i had a crew chief behind me and he manned one of the machine guns and i had a door gunner on the other side and he manned the other machine gun now what we carried very mixed bag sometimes we were taking troops into an lz or a landing zone if they had an operation and those would normally be what they called a hot lz where there were bad guys on the ground waiting for you and we'd come in with 20 25 30 aircraft each one of them just full of troops we'd come in touch down or at least come to a hover and they would offload and then we'd go off and get some more or whatever we needed to do my job once i got to vietnam turned out to be just a wonderful um assignment i worked for i was in an assault helicopter company and that particular company was in support of the vietnamese army in the northern part of vietnam and i was detached from my unit 150 kilometers to the second urban division in quang nine so i worked directly for a bird colonel who was in charge of the advisory team in support of this vietnamese division he had he had us he had marines he had air force he had navy he had all kinds of people working for him and he just he had a lot on his plate but i worked for him directly he gave me or his people would give me in the morning when i got up they say okay here's what you need to do today and it would be usually taking people or supplies here there and everywhere or picking up stuff or flying to da nang to pick up new personnel coming in that needed to get to where we were um we we just what we called it um over there was um ash and trash basically we were glorified truck drivers i mean that's what we did we hauled stuff but you never knew when you got up in the morning where you would be what you would be doing one of the nicest things was being able to help people on a moment's notice we were flying over highway one one morning and they would have to sweep the highway every morning for buried um explosives because they'd come in at night and bury stuff and then blow things up so they would go through and sweep the entire length of the road and we were just we were on our way somewhere else and we saw this plume of smoke from an explosion and as we flew over it we could see some gi's down there kind of running around and we determined that somebody had gotten hurt and so we looked around dropped in just you know out of the clear blue we had that man in a hospital in under 10 minutes from when it happened and that's a turnaround time it's just incredible i don't know whatever happened with him but i feel like getting him that kind of medical care that quickly and that was that was true in a lot that's why there's a lot of wounded vietnam vets because we could get them to a real hospital just really quickly um i had a this just infuriated me but we had gone on a taken some people back to a camp and as we were leaving the camp we took some ground fire and the man there was a major sitting behind me and he was sitting like this and round came through the floor and took his kneecap off just exploded it was all over my windshield and everything else then we have some other holes in the aircraft but there again i had that man in a full service downtown military hospital less than 15 minutes and i hope you know i i hope he saved his leg but the reason it infuriated me was he'd been in country for a year and he was due to go home the next week and the only reason he was on that aircraft he was killing time and he wanted to go for a you know what we call strap hanger you know okay the birds going out here oh yeah sure i'll go along for the ride well man lost part of his leg because he wanted to go for a ride and see the countryside but there were there was a lot of things like that that were hard that um you know just you know wrong place wrong time but um yeah um we were able to do a lot of good um at least i was because i was so flexible in in my job most of the chopper pilots were in more with us troops and all they did was fly insertions you know every day and they took a lot more a lot more heat than we did but i mean we did our share and as i say it was um it was interesting it was i would not recommend things like that to anybody but on the other hand i wouldn't trade the experiences i had for anything now there i was there for a year and if everything were condensed i would say there was about a total of 10 minutes where i was just absolutely not petrified but i was not a happy camper there for but 10 minutes out of a year go ahead okay 10 minutes out of a year is not a whole lot to be scared to death um but um yeah if you were there for five years if you were there for five years just one year but you're in country in vietnam for a year everybody everybody had about a year's tool unless you volunteered to go back or were in a very specialized high need job where oh well you're going back but yeah it was as i say it was interesting educational i wouldn't trade it for the world but i wouldn't suggest it to anybody um because after i got back i found out that um as a huey pilot it was one of the deadliest jobs you could have over there and i went through my flight school class when i got back you know they took the standard graduation picture and i went through with a magic marker and it was about 40 percent because we graduated in november went to vietnam and came back the next november and in that 12 months about 40 percent of them um were gone but i didn't know that i knew that after not before but as i say i had a very interesting interesting tour there's things that i am still uncomfortable with mainly what i've learned since then we shouldn't have been there looking from here looking back none of us had any business being there um but that's you know that's a decision that was made about my pay grade you know i'm just you know but um a lot of good people died and i don't think they should have but at the time i was doing what i thought was right and i'm i'm proud of the work i did um and um it's funny since we've been talking last week about this whole interview thing i've really been doing a lot of soul searching and a lot of thinking which i hadn't done before quite honestly when we got out of the service in the early 70s military were second-class citizens just walking you know walking around town if you had a military hair hair caught on or were in uniform unless you were close to a base you were a second-class citizen and so we learned we being the vietnam vets learned to grow our hair out keep our mouths shut forget it and move forward and i think that's why a lot of vets did not re-acclimate to society now they've taken steps now that they're working with the returning vets from the other encounters but back then that wasn't even considered and because i was doing all this thinking in the last couple of weeks or so um i've been really going through a lot of different aspects of it and it's been very educational for me but i never it's not that i didn't admit to being a vet i never publicized it ever until maybe four years ago and i decided you know this is part of who i am and there is a brotherhood of sorts of vietnam vets and so i put a little sticker on my car and i've got a vietnam veteran hat and that's i mean that's as far as i've gone but up until then i never mentioned it to anybody unless they ask and you know who's gonna ask you i mean i don't really stand out as you know a baby killer or whatever i mean that's what we were um but that was a strange um the whole thing was strange but i'm lucky that i don't have a lot of memories that are really really ugly i mentioned the 10 minute total there's a couple in there that will wake me up at night on occasion but i dealt with them then and i think i've dealt with them going forward but but because of the talk the other day they've all gotten stirred up and they're more conscious now now they'll fade back away but i found that interesting i've forgotten about that and one of the big things that brought a lot of that you were asking for excuse me memorabilia and this is about the extent of my memorabilia but uh there it is anyway um this is old school but um see i've got a i've got a band-aid on the back there in case i cut myself i could reach back and peel it off and put it on but i did some numbers on it and i spent if you figure an eight-hour day i spent 314 days wearing this in combat and i just got to thinking of all the places this has been not me but i mean obviously i was with it but all the places it had been and the things that had seen and done and that just got all kinds of things going that i never i mean this has been in a box for 40 40 some years and i just took it out and but a lot of memories mostly good but good and bad how was the commodity with people you served with um within a normal unit it was good i wasn't in a normal unit i was as i said i was detached and we had two two aircraft and five pilots and the pilots would rotate through when you're 12 months or up you go home and somebody else would show up so there was a turnover there but where i was i mentioned that we had an air force unit attached like we were and we got to know them very well and they were just just wonderful people what happened was they were forward air controllers in other words they put in they acted as spotters and target marking for the jet fighters bombers and they were flying little cessna aircraft almost a civilian basically aircraft and they were all in this unit that was with us they were all they were all old men i mean we were all of army chopper pilots i was one of the old ones and i was 22 and most of them were 18 19 20. um well 19 20 21 but these guys are all gray-haired and balding they were all majors and light colonels and i started meeting them and getting to know them and why are all you old people out here well what it was they were korean war fighter pilots that had gotten old and were flying a desk someplace and the air force said well you're we're sorry but you're too old to fly jet fighters you know this new stuff we need young kids to fly well how about flying these old little piston engine spotters oh well sure you can do you know you you're good for that so all these guys were well back when i first started applying and they're talking about fabric wood wings and they were just a wealth of um knowledge and i mean they were as crazy as we were but they were in their 40s and 50s but the fun thing for me because of where i was working we had two aircraft and we had five pilots well that's one pilot left over every day so we had unless somebody wanted to take off and take an extra day we had a day off a week well there's nothing to do hanging around the compound so whenever i had a day off i'd bum a ride with the air force and we'd go put in air strikes and it worked out well for them and well for us because we were in the same area every day on the same radio frequencies we knew all the ground units and who was where and this and that and the other and they just loved having us along because we knew all of this and in the event that they took a round and got inc normally they flew solo just one person and they knew that if they got in trouble took a round through the shoulder or something incapacitated them they knew we could fly fixed wing you know pretty directly so um it was good insurance for them and we got to i got to put in air strikes which was great fun not for the people on the ground but from the air it's really impressive um yeah um that whole as i say that whole thing is just totally looking back just totally stupid but at the time you would hear about the b-52 strikes and this is pre-gps internal navigation we're talking about navigating with a slide rule and a map and everything else and they would fly halfway across the world at 32 000 feet which is about the same height your airliner flies at and if you gave them a box on a map two thousand meters by five thousand meters they would guarantee they wouldn't put a bomb outside of that box and one afternoon i learned about b-52 strikes up close and personal um we had heard on the radio they announced that you know okay there's going to be a an arc light you know on this radio from this transmitter and we're figuring okay well that's some place out here and we were out at a camp just sitting waiting for the people we'd taken out to come back well they didn't tell us that they were gonna blow up the neighborhood they were sitting out on the aircraft just kind of you know laying around in the sun watching this that and the other and i looked up and i said hey look at that there goes 352's i mean they were so high up you couldn't see them they're about that big and i looked and i could see a little whisper smoke you know what the hell i was saying then the second one and then the third one i said you know i think we're going to see an airstrike and i'll tell you what we were down on a ridgeline right here and the camp was right here and about a mile away was this big mountain bridge line we're just sitting there and all of a sudden this ridge line starts to evaporate and i have never had the visceral reaction to anything like that it was just unbelievable and it was all they didn't they stayed in their little box i mean we were right there next to it and when we flew out um the whole top of this ridge line which had been 200 foot jungle canopy was nothing but mud there was no greenery there was no scraps of trees nothing it's just well i'm mud i wasn't out walking in the woods but um if you take when you the fourth of july fireworks you know they have those flash bangs that you can feel like this multiply that by about a hundred thousand and make it last about three minutes and that's what you know oh it was unbelievable but you know we're still lost anyway okay what else can i tell you um so did you talk to many civilians while you were in vietnam no very few part of that was it wasn't really in my job description out on the economy out in town or this or that or the other you had to be very careful um because you never knew who the good guys were and who the bad guys were and we're seeing that other places in the world now but um the people that i did meet were just really nice people very interesting a whole different totally different culture different values that was part of the education educational aspect of being over there was this whole different culture and mindset and everything else so um how did you communicate with your family did you do smoke signals um seeing today and 50 years ago basically it was smoke signals um the only way i well i communicated by letter and i bought a small reel to reel tape recorder and i would just talk to the tape recorder and then mail them a small tape physically i talked to them live one time in a year and that was when i was on r r rest in recuperation we got a week off in our tour and we could go we had a choice of half a dozen different places we could go and i elected to go to australia and so i called them from australia but even then it took it took about two hours to set up an international call wow and i mean i can take my phone out right now and any place in the world like that my cousin called me from paris um i have a friend that's in the middle east right now and he skypes with his wife every day how can you do that but we did have the option we could sign up and get a radio high frequency radio ultra high frequency radio telephone link but it took two or three days to set up and you were literally talking on a radio from vietnam to the united states and then it would get on a landline and i never did it but i had a platoon leader woke us up about three o'clock in the morning you know i love you rachel over the whole conversation was like that and he's just really talking loud and we're just you know we don't need to hear this at three o'clock in the morning but uh yeah that was uh that was your only option so um was there um any funny things that really happened constantly um many many funny things most of them [Music] i'll use the word gallows humor um and we're not going we're not going there um i can't think of a whole lot clean funny uh if you will um well we decided that we were gonna airdrop we had some australians in our advisory team and they were out in the out in the weeds with the vietnamese and they just really like their beer and we'd see them every couple of weeks when they'd come back through the compound and we told them well you know when you get out there if you really get get thirsty let us know and we'll uh you know we'll get you some cold beer and they called in one time oh yeah we're just really really thirsty so we took a case a strong cardboard case and filled it with really really cold beer and we we taped it up and we strapped it up and then we put a real long white actually was a bandage that around it and we couldn't land where they were so we flew over them at about 300 feet and just took this thing and threw it out so it would spin in the um streamer would come out so they could find it because when it would hit a a rice paddy it would bury itself about that deep and you'd have to dig and dig it out but we did that a couple of times for them oh what other funny things um i had a call one afternoon and water buffalo are vital to of remote villages in vietnam because they are the motive power for everything there's no gasoline engines there's it's either human powered or water buffalo power that's your only two choices well the village water buffalo had stepped on something and i don't know if it was a booby trap or what but its leg was all blown up and there was an american advisor with this village and he called me up and he said you know we don't have the facilities to take care of this water buffalo and it's really important to the village could you take it back to the town where i lived where there were doctors that you know could take care of it and i said you know i'd really like to but i'm just not comfortable with a 2 000 pound wounded animal in the backseat of my aircraft i mean it would take up the whole back of the aircraft and you know i could see it getting hysterical or something oh my god it'd kill all of us but i told him i said if you can get a sling you know and put him in a sling i'll be happy to you know hook onto the sling and take him back i'd never heard they probably butchered it but that's another thing for my you know culture shock and education we went into a mountain yard village there are the mountain people and they're completely different ethnically from the south vietnamese wonderful people just really uh really really nice and we went in and dropped some people off and then we had to go back later in the day and pick them up well as we went in they were all out the whole village was out on they had a little soccer field open area behind the village and the whole village was out there and we watched them slaughter a water buffalo okay we took off and off we went come back about four hours later there was not even a blood stain on the grass where they had butchered this animal and we're talking two to a 2 500 pound piece of beef they use or utilized everything including the blood you know and in our society oh i'll say half a sandwich you know throw it away but i mean literally um the entire thing got consumed and uh that just amazed me i mean you know not even you know as i say not even a blood stain how did they do that well they split its throat and catch all the blood and then proceed to butcher it and use everything um i've walked into my uh i usually was gone from the room where i lived in in our compound i was usually gone all day and i we had hired um vietnamese girls to clean and do the laundry ten dollars a month seven days a week i mean they work for probably six or eight gis you know doing all their laundry and everything but we had a hot plate and we had told them that they were welcome to cook in there because we weren't we were never home you know in the daytime well for some reason we were back home during the day one time and i had to get something out of my room and the vietnamese sit squatting they sit on their heels or they sit on a little stool that's about this tall and the girl that was doing my laundry was in there and she had a pot of rice going on my hot plate and she was chopping up this piece of meat i looked okay it was the male part of a bowl and we were cutting it up and putting it in the in the soup okay you know that's you know silly naive me we use it all but i said no i'm not going to stay for lunch but thank you but uh talking about food we went to a vietnamese military victory party one night they went out and didn't didn't find anybody for three whole days so they came back and threw a victory party which was you know that was fine everybody came back that was good anyway they were you know showing off for the americans and this and that the other they had little pots of like a fondue pot but it was oil with a lamp under it and then around it were sliced um meat and vegetables and you know they're they don't speak english we don't speak vietnamese but we're just laughing and carrying on and drinking beer and whatever i thought i well you know i'm gonna try this looks like pretty good lean meat i said i'm sure it's water buffalo but uh you know it looks fairly decent so i put my chopsticks and i put it in the oil and that looks good and put some sauce on it and it was really good and so i had about three or four more and all the vietnamese guys were just really yucking it up this young kid is really liking this good lean water buffalo i found out the next day it was german shepherd and it's really good it is really tasty but they it's a food source one of the biggest tricks that the vietnamese had was when they had a you know have a litter of pups they would give the pups to the americans because the americans just feed them and they just get so fat and just roly-poly and then for some reason once they're about six months old they disappear yeah never understood how that happened but uh i mean it just makes sense um you know if it's part of your diet you live in southern south america um what is it um gerbils is it gerbils gerbils or hamsters or something but they're wild and they're quite a delicacy and people eat them all the time it's fluffy to you and it's lunch to me but that's the difference in the cultures and you know what you've got i mean they had absolutely nothing they didn't even have wood because all where i was in the northern section it was on a coastal flood plain that was about 30 miles from the south china sea to the mountains and they'd used all the wood long time ago and you had to cook over dung fires and that was expensive um you had to really watch your consumption of fuel kinds of things and um yeah it uh they they could they could make anything if you gave them the materials they could make anything out of anything i mean just really creative and inventive and you know you're on a subsistence lifestyle and you've got to make do with what you got when you don't have much but anyway okay so why did service end for you i'm sorry what happened when service ended for you um i came back and spent a year and a half at fort knox kentucky flying a test project so we it was a new helicopter they needed to put some time on it the army was buying it but they needed to get a thousand hours on ten aircraft to see how they held up you know what wears out you know so we took those and for 10 months we just flew them night and day and just really beat them up intentionally and about the time that program was finishing the army decided that they had way way way too many helicopter pilots hanging around and so they came down and said okay all you chopper pilots you got two choices you can go home or you can go to officers candidate school but we don't need you so i said and i went from there i went off and finished college i was motivated now and much older and a little older and a little more common sense and world view and that kind of thing and when i got out of school if i had wanted to stay in aviation mainly flying choppers aviation um i could either fly the oil rigs in louisiana or fly for an unnamed u.s government agency in the middle east and i thought you know i'm gonna plan something else and um i'd always been interested in food and cooking and done a lot um my whole life and i got hooked up with while i was in college i was with working with red lobster um you know busboy and then bartender and working my way up that and i went through their management training and got to independence missouri with them and was running a red lobster and didn't really like the corporate aspect of it and i made a mistake and said something one day that i was dissatisfied with and by the end of the month i was looking for work and which was a good thing i ended up working for a sole proprietor that had an old old old-time restaurant in kansas city and the type of food he served and the cooking we did fit me to a tea strictly old style basic classic food i mean we didn't have arugula or any of the other stuff our newest recipe was i think 1928 seriously really our our cooking library the most recent book in there was 1928. that's 90 years ago yeah but we bought absolute top top of the line product that you could possibly buy and that particular restaurant [Music] everything on our menu that we served we made from scratch with one exception and that was breaded oysters because we could not shock a fresh oyster and bread it and have it coming come out looking as nice and plump and juicy as we could buy them froze but other than that literally everything and we had 100 items on the menu and that fit me that was my kind of my kind of cooking and i really enjoyed it so i got into the food business and spent most of my life in food so looking back you said that like in between the time between our last interview and this one that you really started to do some soul searching about like your time in the military what else do you what can you say about that okay i'm not understanding so like how do you feel about your time in the military looking back on it for me it was very character building it's very educational very broadening looking back on it from a historical perspective um i'm not happy that any of us were there but that's you know that's really kind of beside the point now but i was very proud of the work i did and that's that's really about it um there's a couple things that happened that i wish hadn't happened but you know it's war and you're doing your job but um the biggest thing is looking back and really and this is the whole reason that i agreed to do this interview is to give a sense of the historical perspective i mean i went through all of this 50 some odd years ago and i can see the same things going on and if we don't learn from history it absolutely will repeat itself and we've seen it a little bit and we may see a whole lot more of it i don't know i won't be around to find out but if you can learn from history you're better for better off for it um you can avoid some hopefully at least be aware of the mistakes that get made leading up to any not necessarily wars and militaries but all kinds of different things if you look back and say okay this has happened historically what does down the road look like from here climate change society in general you know it's it's cyclical unless you change it and hopefully people can learn from other people's mistakes and other people's situations as it were does that make sense is there anything that you'd like to tell yourself now to the you that enlisted when you're 21. okay i'll say it again is there anything that you as this older man would like to tell your younger self no i think i was told all that when i when i enlisted they said keep your mouth shut and your head down and that [Music] to this day i keep my head down but i don't keep my mouth shut all as much as i should but um no just experience everything you possibly can and um it um people are wonderful they really are i don't care who they are or where they are or anything about them worldwide you know military civilian but if you get to know anybody you can find common bonds and people are basically good people now there's some that but two percent that i object to sharing my air with but uh we'll let them go their way but it's we need a world view um particularly with the technology and where we're going with communications and all this other um everybody's going to have to get out of their little their little mindset and it's one world people and if you don't believe that your children or grandchildren will pay for it um you know what happens here affects everything um and that's true of you know the whole world and we've been doing enough to screw up things that um we're gonna pay for it and we're starting to see it now i mean i can i can take you outside and show you some birds and bees and trees and bugs that are a direct result of what we've done to the planet but i got into the world view because i was in australia and south vietnam and places like that and see how other countries and other societies and cultures and that kind of but yeah it um as i've said a couple of times the military is a very broadening experience i mean even if there's no conflicts going on just the regimentation you know everything is programmed and the military is wonderful for education i mean if you want to get ahead i got three college credits in south vietnam i took business administration while i was there well you're fine and my colonel was connected with the university of maryland and he put a note on the board one day and that he would be conducting a business administration class and i signed up for it and we got our textbooks and we met twice a week and you know uh they're always looking to further edge further educate anybody that wants it and so i mean for people i mean college is getting so expensive and this and that and the other but you can you know okay four years or however many army or navy or whatever but at the same time if you're interested and motivated they'll pay for your education and you get a paycheck too so you know it you know it's not a bad thing and it's a very broadening and maturing environment a lot of a lot of boredom a lot of silliness but it all adds up to who you actually end up being is there anything else that you want to talk about that we haven't yet um i don't think so um i wish i could tell you all my funny stories they're not appropriate um no um that's really about it just you know it's not for everybody but um it's it it can be a good thing and you can you can learn a lot from it both academically and just from being there and it's um we need a lot more the um the one-on-one personal interactions in this day and age with the electronics the way they are that should be on the top of every young person's list is to intentionally go out and work on interpersonal social skills i mean i see it all the time and it's it's really sad but that's life and there's not a lot i can do about it other than say that okay yeah thank you do you have any questions for me no okay okay thank you you're very welcome

Channel: Remembering Benzie

Views: 2,894

Rating: 4.9047618 out of 5

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Id: 9qdoLFSlewI

Length: 79min 49sec (4789 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020