- We didn’t make the
decision to be in Vietnam. We made the
decision to be soldiers. - We was called to
aid a friendly nation, and that’s what we did. - Uncle Sam calls,
you do your duty. At that time we
thought that was right. - They fought a whole
other war when they came home. (somber music) - First heard about Vietnam,
I was on active duty. You got to hearing the stories
about what was going on and the counterinsurgency and all the other
things about that. I don't think the country
had taken hold of it as such. We in the military understood it
because they were taking people out of units,
especially Special Forces units, and they were
being sent to Vietnam. - I was probably very typical
of the people in the late '60s. I knew a lot about Vietnam but was not particularly
interested in going, but then was drafted. I was married
and had one child and actually,
another one on the way. My second daughter was actually
born while I was in Vietnam, about a month
after I got there. I got my Draft Notice
in December of '68. Actually, just before Christmas,
a good Christmas present. I had kind of hoped that
the fact that I was married and had a child might
impact that, but it didn't. I arrived in country
on the third of August and got assigned to the 227th
Assault Helicopter Battalion. - Reported to Vietnam
March '67. Joined my unit, the 173rd
Airborne Brigade Company A, and I was given a platoon as
infantry platoon sergeant. Got wounded
May 21, 1967. Everything in Vietnam
was “search and destroy”. You search the area,
you found anything that aid or comfort the enemy,
you destroyed it. We came upon a base camp
and saw that the campfire was still warm, which meant
that they had been in the area. We began to search it out. I instructed a
young private to inspect a 55 gallon drum
with unpolished rice. Instead of going
the proper way, he tipped the barrel
and immediately found two M-26 grenades
with the pin pulled, as we call a pressure-release
booby trap. He pulled the drum
towards him and the explosion went in
the direction I was walking. In my legs I was wounded
with grenade shrapnel. I stayed in the hospital and
they changed the degree of your injuries and
I stayed in country. In September, I went
back into the field. - I flew into Pleiku. Pleiku's in the
central highlands, which is about
midway of the country, maybe a little bit
on the north side. I was assigned to the
First Cavalry Division, Air Mobile. After I had been there
a couple or three days this guy came by
and he said, Huddleston come on
go with me." He said, "Bring your helmet." My flight helmet. So I got my flight helmet
and went with him. And we were hovering on a
South Vietnamese rifle range, and we got a call
on the radio. They called us and told us that we had a medical
evacuation to do, and see, I had just
gotten in the helicopter. I don't know where
the hospital is, I don't know where
roads are, I don't know what the
radio frequencies are, I don't even know how
to call the tower to get back into this
field where I am. So this guy that I was
flying with was a great pilot. His name was Dave Durling. We called him Lurkey. So Lurkey asked for
permission to take off and we just were over there
in ten minutes at the most and picked up this guy. It turned out that he
was not a combat casualty. It was a snake bite casualty. - So, I left Easter Sunday
of '66 and went to Vietnam. Assigned to 7th Air Force
headquarters in Saigon, and we had a little
operations detachment. We had three airplanes
and a helicopter, and we hauled people
around Vietnam and all over. The Air Force had
a two-star general that was in charge of this
Agent Orange spray that they were
using as a defoliant. We flew him by helicopter
a lot of times, to the areas where
they were spraying. And this stuff was so
bad, it was so strong, it just turned a dense
forest into barren land, so you could see
what was going on. We did that in the mountainous
areas of Vietnam mostly. - You've got the
central highlands. They're small little mountains
like the Ozarks or some of the small foothills
of the Appalachians. They’re very small. And then you've got
the rice paddies. - Walking in rice paddies. One of the most sacred
commodities over there
was foot powder, for when we stopped,
then you put on your dry socks after drying your feet and
putting foot powder on them. When you got ready
to move out, you changed from
your dry socks and put back on
your wet socks and put the dry
socks back in your helmet in the plastic bag
and moved out. - In late March, maybe the
second night we were there, we came under a pretty
good bit of mortar fire. I don't know
how many mortars, but a lot over a period
of several hours. So, I had gone down to
really check on supplies. We get what we call leakers,
we called them leakers. The bladders were rubber and sometimes they'd
get hit with shrapnel or bullets or whatever
and they'd leak and you'd end up with
jet fuel all over the ground. And so, I got caught
out in the open and a mortar hit fairly close. I remember becoming aware
that I was on the ground and that I was
bleeding real bad. Had a lot of blood on me and I
could taste blood in my mouth. That was a little scary. But within a matter
of just a few minutes, somebody slid up beside me
and it was one of the medics. It looked bad and it
scared me pretty bad, I guess. But he kept telling me,
"You're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay." It was funny, the one thing that
has always stuck in my mind, amidst all of that,
he had a white towel. And in the midst of
all that confusion and him trying
to talk to me and check me out,
I kept thinking. I couldn't get it
out of my mind. "Where'd he get
that white towel?" I'd been in Vietnam
a while at that point and I hadn't seen
any white towels. - We had these airplanes. They were designed to
operate in a short area, and we take bladders of fuel,
or bundles of ammunition, whatever the Army
or Marines needed, that was out in the jungles. We take and make what
we call drop missions. Well one time in particular,
we had dropped ammunition, and the Army
was surrounded, a detachment of them
was surrounded, and they had chopped
some of the bushes back. We went in and made our drop,
and were going back to altitude, and one of the Army people
was running across to where the thing stopped,
and he stepped on a landmine, and he just ... Was all over. We had to sit
there and watch that. It's a... Hmm. - The 2nd battalion
of the 173rd airborne brigade ran up on combat soldiers
from the north, and they were surrounded
and pinned down. This was the battle that
started early November of '67. My unit joined it about the
18th or 19th of November. This was the first time
that a unit moved at night
in the jungle. As we got close to
Hill 875, in Dak To, bodies was all around. The first man reached
a body, stepped over, and said to the
next one, "Body." The only thing we could do
at night was hold on to one rucksack that
was in front of him. When he stepped
over and said body, you was ready to
step over and say body. Why was that? One we didn't know if it
was our bodies or enemy. One thing we didn't
take no chance on, that it would be
booby trapped. - We got a call one morning,
and the military had discovered the bodies of six
green beret soldiers that had been dead,
probably, two weeks. We took the highest-ranking
Army General from Saigon up to where this discovery
had been made, and what it was, was the
Viet Cong had captured these six
green beret soldiers, took them out
into the woods, and they made them
strip their clothes off and fold them neatly. Took their green berets,
and put it on top of their little
pile of clothes, and they cut
everyone of em's throat, and laid them down
with their head right next to their clothes,
and they were like toothpicks. Six laying there together. And that's the way
we found them. But after they looked at them,
and everybody cried a little, we had to bag them up. Me and part of the crew, and some of the volunteers
from the Army. It's kinda hard
to bag up people that's been deceased
for two weeks, you know. - It’s difficult to be
in a situation where you see people
being killed. We had two or three situations
where our camp was attacked and where we killed
some of the attackers. And then you had to
go out and watch, some of them
were torn apart. We had one
individual who went in front of a caliber 50
machine gun. You have tracer rounds,
what is phosphorus and I guess it burned at
about 300 degree centigrade. If it hits you, it sets you
on fire, you just explode. So we had a couple individuals
that were hit by these rounds. And you'd have to
steel yourself against it. So what you would do,
you would try to act like it was an everyday
occurrence, so to speak. If you let that get to you,
then you couldn't effectively do what you're
supposed to do. So in your mind,
you let this be how life is. And it carried over
to me to a degree. When I was down in
Georgia, this old man, he stepped off the curb,
and a car hit him, must have knocked him
20 feet, just boom. I recall prior to that
me seeing this I would have been
rushed to him to see if the man's okay,
wondering what happened. I'd have had some feeling. The car hit this man and I
had no feelings whatsoever. I just had nothing. He just got hit. - Once I got home,
after a few days, it was great. Everybody ... Small town. I was from Vancleave,
so very small town. I think within
four or five days, I think I'd seen
everybody that lived there. But after a few days, and
it's really hard to explain now looking back, Vietnam was
all I could think about. All my friends were over there. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know where they were. I didn't know what
was happening to them. I struggled a good bit after a
few days with the fact that no one here seemed to be
as interested in it as I was. It hurt me in many
respects that they didn't. - I returned home,
there was no big fanfare, I came home
as one individual. No big parade or
nothing like that. Medically retired May of 1969. That early September
or late August, hurricane Camille
came through. Hurricane Camille
made Hattiesburg look like a war zone. I slept through it. It didn’t bother me. - People that have never been
in the military can't relate to what they went through. The stress level that these
young people are going through. When they come back, they are
forced to keep it with them because they have nobody
to talk to that understands what they're talking about. I did a lot of counseling
with these guys, and when I say counseling I'm
not talking about me talking, I'm talking about listening
to them tell me what... They took me as
a comrade in arms because I was
in the military and they would
tell me things that they couldn't possibly
tell their wife or their parents
or anybody else. It got to a point that when
we had a welcome home in Fort Collins, Colorado
one year... (voice breaking)
it was hard. These people were ... It was like a family. It didn't make any difference what branch of service you
were in or what you did. All the special forces
came together. You had to be there
to see that. They knew that when
they spoke to somebody, that person understood
what they had been through. And they felt comfortable
in that environment. - Well, I landed
in San Francisco, and then I come
to Mississippi for 30 days before I went to my
next duty station. San Francisco was bad,
as far as the protestors, you know, but one of
my favorite things, in the food line, is milk. I missed it bad
in Vietnam. For a year, no milk, and I
had got me a quart of milk. Was sitting on a park bench in
San Francisco by the airport drinking that quart of milk. (laughing) And the people come by. The only thing said
to me was "You didn't have
to go without milk. Could have stayed home." But, you really
can't stay at home. You gotta do
what you gotta do. - The more that they media
processed all these protestors and what not, it made
them want to clam up. It wasn't for fear, but
they wanted to be accepted. They didn't want to be
known as a Vietnam Vet. They didn't want anybody
to know what they had done, they wanted to
keep it all a secret. A lot of those people
back then did not want to join
the VFW or the Legion because they were faced with
people from WWII or Korea that had not been
through the same situation. - I’ve had some visits to
the VA hospital in Jackson. When you see those people,
and the Vietnam veterans, more so than anybody else,
always try to wear something that displays
where they were. A lot of those guys
are bitter. Because of the public, the
media after the Vietnam War, talking about that it was
a political war, and we didn't need to be there,
and we lost all these people for nothing, and they say,
especially if you see a guy with a limb missing,
an arm, or a leg, or foot, or whatever, you know. “I wouldn't have had
to lose my foot if it hadn't a been a
political war going on.” Of course, consequently,
they're bitter. - The protest that I saw most
was from college students and mostly white
college students that were protesting against
the war and against the draft. I remember being in an airport
and two white college kids calling me baby killers
and these types of things. This is when I
returned from Vietnam. And of course they
encouraged us then, told us to stop wearing our
uniforms when we flew because of the animosity
and the protests and venom that was
heaped your way. And I think one of
the things that happened was when Martin Luther King
got a hold of it and he
protested the war. I think the whole change, and
then it was really full blown because he had a legitimate
protest to start with. I was in the Atlanta Airport and
he was passing through and he saw me,
we were just standing there, and I said, "Oh, man, I guess he's going
to give me the devil." I was in uniform. He said, "Son, are
you going or coming?" I said, "I'm coming back, sir." He said, "Well, thank God
we got you back," and that's all he said
and kept going. - When I first visited the
Vietnam Memorial in Washington, in many respects,
I think it was a turning point. So, we got to Washington. I really had no desire
to go all that time, but now that I'm there,
I want to go, like, now. And so we checked
into the hotel, immediately got a cab,
went over there. Got out at the Lincoln Memorial
and walked down the hill there on the side where
the statues are. I probably stayed
there by the statues, 45 minutes. My wife walked
down there. But I had a hard time
making that commitment to walk down that hill. Eventually I did
go down there. But that walk down
that hill to the base, that's probably the most
difficult thing I've ever done. That would've been
'92 maybe, so I had, like,
22 years’ worth of stuff, but I left a lot
of stuff there. When we left there that day, it
was just as though I left stuff there that I'd been
carrying around a long time. I mean it's just hard to
explain how emotional it was. - In 1994, Doctor Andy Weist at the University of
Southern Mississippi, asked me to come
and speak to his class. And in 2000, they had a
training course in country for those students and
they invited three veterans. I was one of
the veterans to go. This Vietnamese gentleman
came up to me and he said, "You're an
American aggressor." I said, "You're a
VC aggressor." We laughed and we exchanged
names and units we was in and he said, "Come. "We celebrate. We celebrate survival." Couldn't nothing be
more powerful than that. We celebrate survival
when you consider on the American
side some 58,000, not to mention
the millions of Vietnamese. (somber music)
