Perry Mitchell's interview for the Veterans History Project at Atlanta History Center, part 1 of 2

we are on camera today is Friday March 8th 2019 and my name is Kurt Mueller I'm a volunteer at the Atlanta History Center and with me is Suvero Hoff who's the director of oral history and genealogy at Atlanta History Center we're here today to record the oral history of mr. Perry Mitchell who served in the United States Army during the Vietnam era mr. Mitchell's oral history is being recorded for the Atlanta History Center's veterans history project in partnership with the Library of Congress well honored to have you here with us mr. Perry Mitch mr. Mitchell excuse me Perry I can can I call you Perry all right Perry and we thank you for participating in this project to begin with we'd like you to tell us a little bit to state your name and your date of birth please Perry B Mitchell and we also then to kind of start off with give us some background about your growing up years and so on family as much as you'd like to talk about and I'll turn it to you I'm the native Atlantan and Sue said that's always good to have a local connection and you can't get more of a local connection than me I don't think because I grew up right outside Brookhaven about five miles from here on Club Drive with the Peachtree Road Methodist Church I went to my grammar schools or I'll Hope Grammar School on Piedmont which is where tower place is now that was my grammar school my high school was North Fulton High School which is less than a mile from here and it's now the Atlanta International School my earliest memories is the closest grocery store to our house and Club Drive five miles away with right up the street on the corner there was a big grocery store up there before Sears before any of these office buildings anything it was a huge grocery store up there and I remember going with my mother all the time and the library the Buckhead library out of Williams library my mother took my brother and sister and me every week to the library so Buckhead was our oh I got my hair cut right at the corner right across the street peach tree and Paces Ferry right there on the corner was the Buckhead barbershop so I'm a total native I was married the first time at the Peachtree Road Methodist Church as well I loved growing up here had a great childhood you know y'all are old enough to remember Leave It to Beaver and life with father and father knows best and all that stuff that was us kids played out in the yard all the time Brodin bikes everywhere had a lot of friends very close friends have a friend right now that I'm still really good friends with we've known each other since we were four years old nursery school kindergarten grammar school high school and Duke we went together and now we're back to being really good friends so is a very close community wonderful lifestyle is my father worked for what is now Equifax for 43 years never changed jobs my mother was a housewife but she became quite liberal and that's really why they got divorced but but I took after my mother a lot more quite liberal and it came from her so when I went to Duke it was a wonderful time too and it was the I always say is the time I use my brain more than any other in mind our life graduated from high school here in Atlanta in 1961 graduated from Duke in 65 and Vietnam was just beginning to be a tiny little voice over here and the public conversation around 65 or so and went to didn't know what I wanted to do after college I was an English major didn't know what I want to do and my high school sweetheart and I who also went to North Fulton of course and went the Peachtree Road Methodist Church we got married our senior year in college I was at Duke she was a Carolina Chapel Hill we had all that planned out so my whole life was idealistic in a lot of ways just everything just sort of went along like it was supposed to and so after not knowing really what I wanted to do out of college and she didn't either I decided to go to graduate school and my father and my wife's family said okay we'll continue to give you your allowances that we gave while you were in college while you go to graduate school so I went to the University of Iowa because I was interested in writing and they have a very famous writer school and I had a wonderful time there as well and my wife got a job and she was one of the country's first computer programmers and we we lived in a small apartment which is really on top of a farm house out from Iowa City and Iowa the University of Iowa was a very liberal place too because everybody came from the East Coast and the West Coast and we kind of all met right there in the middle of the country so it was a real interesting mix of people and in graduate school it was even more so Kurt Vonnegut you know the author Kurt why he was one of my teachers and he was even on my thesis committee and read my thesis and so that was a real special time okay so now we're at if I graduated from Duke in 65 and I'm in Iowa from right about sixty fall of 66 really and 67 and Vietnam heated up very quickly and in 67 it was it was exponentially more on the public radar than it was even at 65 so I knew that unless I stayed in school I was gonna be one a because you could get a student deferment and one thing I need to say to about draft boards for people drafting in in general but draft boards in particular for people who might not know this is that draft boards all over the country had there had different requirements to classify you as 1a like if I had lived in Montana somewhere I would still get a student deferment probably but if I was married like I was here I was married in Montana and the pool of people was smaller they're married people would get drafted there but not here or if I had a child here but didn't have a child somewhere else I might get out here but that person over there not gonna get out they don't have a child so I didn't know anything much more about the Army than about I need to back up a second just to set the whole cultural tone that I came from when this even the concept of me maybe having to go in the army came up my father and I quickly realized that he and I were not very cool but we quickly realized we knew nobody zero people who were in the army or had been in the army except my mother's two brothers who were in World War two my father was born in 1903 he was too young for World War one and too old for World War two so he never went and we just didn't know anybody I didn't know anybody from college high school or anything that was in the army I just didn't know anybody didn't the army and the army to us was just this other cultural component over here and then here we were just living our lives and been upper middle class white people having a good time playing tennis whatever going swimming in the summer vacations and and then here's all these army people over here and we just didn't know about there's no interaction so when it came time when my Master's was about up I was about to get it I said to myself I don't think I can go on and get my doctorate and be a college professor I just at the same time the war was heating up you know that hippie 'dom was all over the place every hippie everything was breaking out I remember going to Davidson's to by the Beatles sergeant pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and my first job we just walked right over there and bought that record so I was in heaven because I was liberal by nature and then here comes all this hippie stuff and as we all know hippie ethos was very anti-war what was the one of the most famous sayings of the hippie day make love not war so so when being in Iowa and knowing that I didn't want to go on into a doctorate I knew that I would be exposing myself but I still just couldn't stand the thought of being a young English college professor English literature because it seemed like I was being divorced from all the cool stuff that was happening in society with all the music and all the young people and everything was just exploding for the Boomers just come you know three years older they say the boomers are from 46 to 64 years now you born in 1946 and 64 I was born in 43 so just on the leading edge of that but boy is all exploding around but I've always felt like a boomer so all this hippie stuff was everywhere and I wanted to get out and experience that I did not want to be a college professor and being somewhere in Ohio and some tiny little school making no money and stuck away teaching Shakespeare I wanted to be out and madman you know the TV show Mad Men that was me because when I decided not to get a doctorate I just I thought well but I don't want to do and advertising seemed fun and creative and unbusinesslike I quickly learned that advertising is the least businesslike business there is in the world it's a crazy business still is but back then it was very very appealing to me so I made up a pathetic little portfolio which is you you just write up some made-up ads and radio spots and stuff like that so so I did that and had this little portfolio and I talked to some friends here in Atlanta and and my father didn't know a couple of people of advertising and my sister did so came back to Atlanta my wife and I came back here and unbelievably with no experience I got offered three jobs at ad agencies in Atlanta and I took the one at the biggest agency in Atlanta Tucker wine was his name it was down at Peachtree Center the first building of Peachtree Center and I started work there in 1967 young copywriter they didn't even have an office for me I had a manual typewriter and it was in the agency media library and but man that I have a great time 20 people in the creative department so much fun learned so much about advertising and Road ads for everything from Trust Company bank to Atlantic Coast Railroad to the Chamber of Commerce how does having a great time and then I get the draft notice hey come down here and let's have your let's have your physical and see what's going to happen so I go down there and where you go is you know the old Sears building on Ponce de Leon which is now Pont City Market there's a super hip place right next to that I mean there was just a wall between the two was something called a fees I don't know everything now Hermes acronym of course forget what it stands for but that's where you went for your physical so I went down there nothing wrong come home week later I get my draft notice one I but that's just the notice you're not called up that's just you know you're classified you can be called up other very salient fact here for me was that the 1967 was the 67 68 was the last year's that they drafted the oldest first you could be drafted from the time you were 18 to you're 25 well in Atlanta at least and I think nationwide but been Atlanta for sure they were they were drafting the oldest first so in fact I know it was nationwide because when I got in the army a lot of my friends in the army were almost as older to me or exactly as old as me so and part of that was because they had really ramped up the whole draft system in the room and the pools were getting smaller and smaller because by the time you're back then especially by the time you're 25 you're probably married right and you probably got kids so the people who were 25 who weren't marry and or didn't have kids that pool was primed picking grounds and then they changed the very next year after ours drafted they went back the other way and took the youngest first and then it like a year or two after that came the infamous lottery system so you know a nationwide lottery system but that was all post me when I got my notice and I was 25 years old I got got Christ POTUS won a and thought oh boy this is not good and but my charmed life that I had been living all up until then came to play in that my wife got pregnant at exactly the right time great she's pregnant I get a deferment fabulous boy did I escape that bullet you know we all fell great she and I my friends none of them you know some of them just flunked the physical others just were somewhere else and that weren't in our graph board so I still didn't know anybody who was really being drafted or anything that still had no contact with anybody in the army but now I didn't have to worry about it my wife's pregnant great go back to work having a good time get a call at work after three months of her being pregnant she's had a miscarriage very common as we know for first-time pregnancies she was fine doctor said yeah you know so I didn't tell the draft board as far as they knew my wife was pregnant and one of the only efficient things I ever saw the army do was at the end of nine months they said where's the baby sent me a notice to say okay you gotta show us this is baby certificate I said well I'm sorry my wife out of had a miscarriage and so they said okay you are now 1a and you have 30 days to report and that just seemed inconceivable in 30 days I had to give up everything I'd had in my life and again felt like a charmed life I had such a good time I had never experienced any big traumas in my life or anything and 30 days just seemed like oh my god how can I do this what can I do to delay this anymore one of my big philosophies in life which came to really help me in the army was make the best of every situation you're in especially the bad ones so how do you make the best of a bad situation so my goal here at this point was how can i delay this so I started looking around of course I went to the Coast Guard they had offices here and they just laughed so we've got so many applicants to be in the Coast Guard forget it being in the Air Force the commitment was like at least four years and there were six years Navy was three and a half something like that dad didn't sound good that I would be an enlisted man for that long a time whereas I knew the draft situation you were in for two years of course the shorter the better as far as I was concerned so these other options that led to a longer thing were not good and then I came across the whole concept of officers Candidate School OCS and they know what it stood for it first but it's officers Candidate School and the army at the time had a program that guess especially if you had a college degree you could sign up for this program which would automatically put you in OCS for two years and ten months ten months of it being officers Candidate School in the two years being what you're at least required to fulfill but the real kicker there was delayed you going into the army for 120 days so I said that myself well rather than 30 days and you'd rather have 30 days to go in their army or a hundred and twenty days to go in there and I said I'll take the 120 days because anything could happen in 120 days that's four months I mean we could nuke the enemies you know Russians could nuke us anything could happen in four months so let me do that so I did that and it gave me time to come to grips with what probably really gonna happen I didn't think there'd be a nuclear war but it can't gave me time to come to grips with that and the day's kept counting down and knew it was gonna happen I got accepted obviously yes you have to go to this pre-interview I walked into this interview with these three people there and I'd already started a beard and you know big flowery ties and everything and I went and then the very first question this Colonel I said why don't you have that beard you know back then the Army's zero facial hair that just meant you were total lowlife whatever there was no facial hair at all and short-haired my hair was beginning to get bigger a little bit so he said why do you have that beard and I said well I just like it and I don't know a lot of my friends have them and in advertising well is that a requirement to be a copywriter and advertising that you have a beard and I said well no no no so that didn't seem to go too well but but they accepted me anyway and I think it was just because again now we're talking 68 so we're talking spring of 68 and so now the draft is really going full speed I got that sense and then I got in and you'll see I knew how ramped up it was getting so now I knew that I had these four months I got as much prepared for that as I could but the day finally came and my wife this whole story is filled with all kinds of coincidences and fortuitous and unfortunate us events the unfort öitís event here is of course after I signed the papers for being in the army and you're considered in the army although you haven't got a uniform yet but you're committed it's a legal document you have committed yourself to two years of ten months in the Army about two weeks after I signed those papers my wife found out she was pregnant again and there's no going back there's no going back to the draft board and said hi hey hey now give me another chance here we're pregnant again no too bad so that was pretty bad timing but it wasn't her fault wouldn't my fault wouldn't end I suppose that's just what happened so now I'm going in there army my wife is pregnant the day I go in you have to report it something o'clock in the morning of course down there just right next to the Sears building my wife's crying and can't even drive the car so her sister I drive down there but her sister comes with us say goodbye and it was a very emotional time for for all of us but especially for her I think my wife we had been high school sweethearts went steady in high school got married our college year so we've been together 12 years by this point dating and everything and so it was it was traumatic for both of us and I remember getting out of the car and not walking across the street there at lyon until they turned the corner and left just kind of waved and that was it walked in the door and my first day in the army did not end until 4 o'clock a.m. the next morning so from 7 o'clock this morning to 4:00 o'clock the next morning before I got a bed and could lay down for three hours that was my first day in the army because I go in here in Atlanta and I get sent to Fort Dix on an airplane of course but I was by myself nobody else went up there then because that's where all the guys who were going to go to OCS went for basic training and anyit as they call it advanced infantry training was for Dix never been to Philadelphia never heard of the war never heard of Fort Dix really so I get there getting this you know bus thing get to the base and it's just like you I'm not gonna go through everything that happens there the intake but you don't know what's going on it's in the middle of the night it's raining they send you to this building and you have to go down this line and they give you these clothes you know socks six pair of socks what's your waist here's your underwear here your payouts here your boobs what size of boots blah blah blah and then you have to go get your bedding and they stop all this stuff and I'm duffle bag and you're tired then you people are just yelling okay keep coming keep coming keep coming and finally get the bed and get to sleep and for three hours like I said but but but before that we go to the mess hall and they're saying this is about 2:30 in the morning they say we're just switching over from dinner to breakfast so you get your choice do you want you know cube steak and onions or do you want but with cereal and a muffin or something so you could have either one okay so you lay down exhaustedly and then three hours later a drill sergeant is yelling at you to get up and get out and get in formation and start doing stuff it was totally traumatic to me I had never experienced anything like that I'd had ROTC in high school and just treated it like a joke all students had to take it at the time it wasn't anything you know so but again this was just a volcano in my lifestyle it just had been nothing ever approaching this and I need to say also I felt like a total loser being drafted because I still feel like although I signed up for this two years in ten months I was being drafted I would have never done this on my just gone and enlisted in the army I would not have done it if it had been World War two I sure hope I would have I expected I would have even World War one but I didn't believe in Vietnam I didn't you know we can argue politics forever but I didn't think that was the way to stop communism I didn't know what this country was or what it was about but it was not anything that I believed the United States should be doing so so I wouldn't have been there so sorry and I felt like I was a loser because none of my friends were getting drafted I somehow something went wrong for me and it was it was a depressing thought and I was depressed very depressed at being there but by the same token you're just swept up and swept along with this whole group of people that everybody's doing the same thing you're getting your clothes you're eating whatever and so you just you make the best of a bad situation and my other thought at the time was keep your head down don't cause any trouble and just go along with the flow so that's what I tried to do at Fort Dix though I could tell how ramped up everything was everything was crowded there were guys everywhere everywhere you went for your eye exam shots or whatever you were waiting in line two or three hours but the funniest one of all was getting your head shaved because she you get your hair cut you know and there were lots of guys in there it had a lot longer hair than me I'd already cut my beard at least there are a lot of guys than they were long haired they were really proud of blah blah blah but you walked in this barbershop and there were eight barbers all in a row and the ironic thing was you had to pay $1 for your haircut I don't know what happened if you said you didn't have a dollar but you look over there these barbers drawers and they were stuffed with $1 bills and of course it took him maybe a minute to go and you were done you're out and you bald look terrible I still had some acne I was six to weighed 150 pounds pretty thin I wasn't in bad physical shape but I didn't have any real stamina either played tennis you know just goofed around with place and basketball and stuff like that but I wasn't a great physical shape so get your haircut then your then your put in platoons and you have your own drill sergeant and you start doing marching formations and PT physical exercise and I was not very good at that because again they snob and I just wasn't there but I you know I got along okay and it was I was still quite depressed and I had KP duty which is the worst thing in the world you get up at 3:45 in the morning you're in the mess hall at 4:30 at the latest and you're there until seven o'clock at night and you're either I remember one of the jobs was milk machine I ran the milk machine 450 now you were on duty 15 hours and the whole thing with the milk machine was there were two whites and one chocolate and you just had to keep him full and between meals you had to clean that machine and and this is when the first tricks came in to play for making the best of a bad situation between the meals it doesn't take four hours to clean a move machine but you tried to look like it took four hours to clean a milk machine because if it didn't because if you didn't they would find you something else to do doing out the grease trap which is the worst job or helping with the pots and pans so you tried to stay as busy looking at she you could so it did stuff like that and after about three weeks making Becky friends but just keeping my head down doing what they said I never did anything wrong we had a we had a guy come this is well we'd only been in the army three weeks we had a full colonel or somebody like that come and speak to our company which was about a hundred and thirty guys and he came as outside and we were all in formation and he came and just said you know here's a lot of guys here in this company signed up for OCS it's the greatest thing in the world and if anybody here does not want to give 110 thousand percent - being in the OCS I want to know it right now raise your hand so unbeknownst to him I had found that there was a loophole in this two years and 10 months steel and that loophole was if you dropped out of OCS before you got there that whole ten months went away so you were only you only had to serve two years at that point now there were several other things I found out once I got in the army about all this OCS stuff and the main one being if you went OCS in 1968 there was a 99% chance you would be a second lieutenant in the infantry and there was a 100% chance you'd be sent to Vietnam and what was the highest rate of death among officers in Vietnam it was a second lieutenant in the infantry so I weighed all that stuff in my head and I had done that before we got to this formation because I was so miserable but when we got to that formation and that guy said this rah-rah stuff and he said I want to know right now if you don't want to be in those yes I raised my hand and that was the only person that raised my head and and there was just silence and I don't know where I was I wasn't in the front or anything but but I knew all these guys were looking at me and this colonel was just just dumbstruck and so I kept my hand raised and then I looked around and about one more hand went up another hand and about I would say 15 guys raised their hands that was the bravest thing I ever did in the army and it was these smartest thing I ever did in the army the luckiest thing ever in the army I would have I don't know what kind of officer I would have been but I think I would have been an okay officer but I just my whole mindset my whole culture was not army focused so all I wanted to do was get out as soon as I could so these 15 guys and I bonded I got some real good friends then because once that dam broke I was considered kind of a I don't know somebody who would speak up or something and so we became friends and one of those guys is one of my very best friends to this day which I'll talk about later but we see each other at least once a year talked on the phone once a month he lives in Indianapolis okay so there's 15 guys say we want to drop out of OCS before we get there we have to sign the paperwork we go ahead of course and finish basic training and before we get out of basic training I need to say that I pulled I did everything I could to make basic training as easy as possible like one day there was a 10-mile hike or whatever it was but if you signed to signed up to learn how to drive a Deuce and a half that's a two and a half ton truck you got out of that hike well I could already drive a stick-shift of course I love cars it's a kid and everything so I signed up for that and didn't have to go on the hike great I was just learning how to drive this truck and there was no there was no pressure that I had to join the motor pool or anything like that they just wanted to have as many drivers people qualified as they could so that were great second ploy I pulled didn't work quite as well the second ploy to get out of a ten-mile hike or whatever it was was that you could sign up to be a greater on the for the marksmanship test and that meant that you every every soldier's part of basic training course had to learn how to fire a rifle and we were right at the point where the m14 the old oh wooden rifle thing was being phased out in the m16 that we all saw on all the footage in Vietnam was just coming on but they were every m16 they were making virtually is going to Vietnam they were just cranking them out but they had enough for training purposes so the guys who were taking the test were shooting the m16 and and they would be here and I would be well to their right they would be here I would and the targets were down there so I had so when we got there I said well where's our ear protection and the sergeant just looked at me and laughed we don't have any he just tear the filter tip off a cigarette and put in new years 1968 this would have been sebas September of 68 just put these filter tips in here here so did that but had guys shooting m16s putting a half of my ear eight hours I got tinnitus I still have it I have a ringing in my ear right now had that ringing my ear for 51 years so that didn't work out too well the third thing I kind of pulled and basic training did work out very well for me because one of the physical things you had to do was run a mile in eight minutes in your with your boots and your pants you didn't have a backpack but and it was just a t-shirt it was still early enough to you know wear code or anything but you had you running boots and I knew that I could not do that in eight minutes well if you failed any part of basic training you go back into it again or you they couldn't make you do that or they could make you just go back to a certain point but in any event you did not want to fail basic training so I knew I couldn't do this but it so happened that in my company in platoon I guess it was I found this this little Greek guy who's very short Greek god but someday somehow talking to him I found out he had who was a marathon runner had been you know cross-country in high school and maybe even run some in college and so I said well how about this I gave you $10 and you run nine mile and then you run your mind because I also knew that there again cuz they were so ramped up that that when if you did this running part of the thing there'd be a hundred guys there so there run them in two heats like 50 each and then give you these numbers just like on the Peachtree Road Race or something you'd have just the number that you didn't run by your name or anything he ran by the number and I knew this so I gave him the $10 and sure enough we got started he gave me his number and I gave him my number and he went and well I think is the other way around actually he ran his race first so he just ran his first so these 50 guys come back and they're all given their numbers - they're all mingling together and so he gave me his number I gave him my number because everybody got a separate number I gave him my number and he ran my race after he had run his race and he ran mine faster than he did his own the second mile being faster but man did that work because I didn't have any trouble with any of the tests or anything that gave you that wasn't a problem it was just this physical stamina stuff that did so made it out of basic training AIT advanced infantry training I really don't remember much about it it didn't seem to be much of anything I don't know what we did but the main point was that these 15 guys that had dropped out of OCS we were off the track now you know everybody even the Army's wants to be on a track if you're in the if you're in the infantry you're going right down this way if you're in the armory armored stuff you're going down this way well if you're going to OCS you're going right that way well now here are these guys we're out of sync so after AIT and everything about a third of the guys who now were a larger number and by the way the army closed that loophole about less than a year after we used that that loophole was gone so anyway about a third of the guys were sent to Korea another third were where they went but they did not go to Vietnam oh yes I beg your pardon they went to Fort Polk for jungle training as they called them and every guy that went there was going from Fort Polk right to Vietnam and I saw guys crying at that point because they knew that they were going to be in the jungles of Vietnam within four or five months and a third of us they just seemed not to know what to do with so I got sent to Fort Bliss Texas to learn how to shoot I don't know what luca's are these things you put on your shoulder we were there to learn how to shoot a red-eye missile it was called and this missile was a very clever idea it was literally a bazooka that she held on your shoulder it only had a two-pound explosive device in it that just shot out of this thing well the clever part was it was a heat-seeking missile and it went right to the plane's engine in other words you weren't trying to blow a hole in the plane not when two pounds wouldn't do necessarily too much but this thing was going right to the plane Sencha and when it blew up the engine the plane was coming down so it was cool except the army I wouldn't blame them totally for this because Jets were becoming more and more used all the time and the red-eye missile that turned out couldn't catch a jet so when we were taking this course the only thing of the red-eye missile could shoot down was a was a helicopter or observation plane newspaper these small observation planes you know me my use very few of them were used but that was sort of a totally offbeat program and but I had a great time out there I had a few friends there not not too many but the but there was no more drilling there's no more sergeants yelling at you or anything the El Paso Texas where it was a pretty place I've never been west of the Mississippi so it was pretty out there some friends of mine you know you'd have Sundays were the best day in the army because you didn't have to do anything so we won't we hiked up in these mountains that were over there and and I must have seen the graduate the movie the graduate had just come out and I must have seen the graduate ten times because I could walk to town to ride a bus or walk in the town and late in the afternoon and and watch this movie and so it was cool it was it was a lot of fun the thing that the army was worried about the most however is that you really ever did get to shoot this thing in some sort of combat that you would shoot down an American plane so all our all our classroom work was identifying silhouettes of planes and there had many American planes and there is any kind of inin Russian or Chinese planes that they can have and you had to pass those tests before you got out of there but I did well on that I did well enough it and of course they they put you on a bus and took you out in the white sands the desert out there and it's a practice shooting these things but they weren't letting you shoot a real two-pound thing and shoot down a plane you were aiming and it was kind of an infrared thing that you could see on the or your instructor could see if you were really going to hit this heat-seeking thing with work and I did well on that and all these generals came at the end of our course and and I was one of the people that got to actually shoot a real thing but you were not again I'm not shooting in a plane you were shooting at a parachute thing that they like that simulated the heat of a plane engine and I hit it and great everybody is real happy so that was fun and I think I was there about three months but then that's over and so then what do you do they didn't know so I found myself out in Kentucky Bay's at Fort Campbell Kentucky Port Campbell Kentucky and again I'll show up with about ten other guys none of them who I knew at this point everything is getting shaken around my friends that have made from this bonding time of dropping out of the OCS the ones that got sent to Korea were the ones that were really my best friends so I had been writing to them and they were writing me back and I knew where they were in Korea and so that was nice to have that contact which is gonna play a very important part here in just a minute so we were in touch so now all of a sudden I'm in Fort Campbell Kentucky at midnight standing in the in the office and the intake facility there and this sergeant who was working overnight went down the line and asked people how many years of education if you had we all looked at each other like okay what's the S is that for well he got the million I said 18 and he said no you stupid not how old you are how many years of Education have you had and I said well sergeant I'm 25 years old and have a master's degree in English so I've had 18 years of education and he just looked at me like okay can you type it's the only question he asked but can you type I said yeah I can type about 30 words a minute and he said sit down you're a clerk then I was a clerk no more of infantry guns anything I was a clerk man was not happy to be a clerk I didn't care where I was a clerk I was a clerk so I sat down there and and I quickly learned that being a clerk in the Army has tremendous advantages and it's you remember mash the TV show and the character radar well he was the company clerk and and a lot of the episodes revolved around him because he kind of ran the place you know he knew everything where everything was and what was going on and blah blah blah so clerks in general that's what they do so I was a clerk at this at Fort Campbell Kentucky and I realized you know I can do this at about half speed this job and be the best clerk that they've ever had and I was and they loved me there was great I filled out all kinds of reports I was there every time I could write a letter for somebody you know I could do a lot of stuff that they really appreciated so that was going well at this point my daughter was born hey I'm in the Army in June of 68 my wife Franklin my daughter was born on December the 11th 1968 so I'm at Fort Campbell Kentucky fabulous they're in Atlanta I also found out that I can live off the base that married and have a child I go and rent a house for $80 a month senator block house I'm not in the Army anymore I'm over here in this house and I'm reporting to a job that's the way it seemed after being around their arms I was so relieved to be away for a while man my wife and the baby came up we were having a good time very basic house but but we were making it fun and they had been there about a month and my wife had an appendicitis attack and so she had to go to the hospital instantly and Here I am with a three-month-old child didn't know anything and her mother was down in Atlanta luckily my sergeant who liked me so much his wife took the baby and kept her and so I was able to get to the hospital with my wife blah blah blah everything's fine everything was fine but my wife's mother drove right up there and just got them and took him right back to Atlanta there wasn't any more stand with me and at the same time that really right that the same kind of week or two difference my sergeant came to me and he said well you your name is on this levee and the levee ISM is a huge list of soldiers who are being reassigned and he's got all your it's got your next assignment on this list and my assignment from Fort Dix was Korea and he said yeah I know he said I can get you off this list I said great man that's really nice of you thanks because he was an administrator himself even though a sergeant but he knew all the guys I can get you off this with said great and he said well that's the good news the bad news is I can't do it again and there's gonna be another levy and 80% of the people on these levees were going to be at naam so what do you want to do you want to get off now and take your chance that the next one you'll be going to Vietnam as a clerk but still you're gonna be a big pop so I'll talk today with my wife and we decided that I should go to Korea and I wanted to go because I had these buddies over there so that's what happened I accepted the assignment to Korea and within a month I found myself on a plane to Fort Lewis Washington I believe it was where you get processed for going to Korea and show up in Korea I was not assigned to where my friends were and so miles will get into that now because where they were was a place called pan moon John and and it is the place where the truce talks happened and still happen and I don't know if all our viewers know this I assume they do that the Korean War is still not officially over there was never a peace treaty signed so this 38th parallel imaginary line that goes right across Korea and that's where the two sides agreed to pull back - even though they didn't ever sign a peace agreement they agreed to pull back and the two sides were of course South Korea but really the United Nations command and North Korea and really China Russia North Korea we're all on this side well this this unit was assigned to do two things mainly at bamboo zone for the American soldiers we were under JSA our our camp was called joint security area which you'll see was ironic in a few minutes joint security area it was under the United Nations command we were in the American US Army but we were really u.s. support group joint security area in front of them all was our thing because we were literally the closest people soldiers to North Korea if North Korea had ever started a war again we were all dead because there was one River this 38th parallel mainly followed this one River that went across the country and but we were in front of them all because that's what we all talk about that more in a minute but but the joint security area only had a hundred and seventy-six American soldiers and that assumed that was set assumed the North Koreans could only have a hundred and seventy six too and we had a hundred and seventy-six Katusha as they were called which were Korean soldiers to be there with us because again it was wasn't supposed to be that America was in charge of this joint security area as the United Nations that was in charge of this area so the fig-leaf was here's this small American group but it's under United States command and we all had these that we put on our you know your shirt flap button there you would wear this on there des and we had those scarf things that you put on your in your neck and those were United Nations they were light blue with the United Nations command on them and everything and that's what what we wore and someone was a it was a unique area to be very unusual to be there I can't think of an analogous place anywhere else in the world that the army was and that's where my friends ended up mainly again because of one very strange thing you had to be at least six feet tall to be assigned to the joint security area and why was that because like a lot of Asians the Koreans and it turned out the Koreans in particular were very impressed by height the taller you were the more respected you were and so they the South Koreans told the army this and so the army you could be six five and be drafted and so and I had several friends who were six four and three-quarters inches and you talk about people that were pissed off these guys were pissed off they were 1/4 inch but they were all up there and and this unit was supposedly I am an MP unit although none of us had MP training zero because the main two categories of the GIS that were there were to be to be in the to guard the JSA itself which is actually the village Pam Lujan is not really a village it's just a collection of buildings which I can leave you a picture that you can take him I've got a real good picture of it but anyway of just a collection of buildings and it's where the truce talks themselves were held so you you they were guard posts a set number of guard posts the that the United Nations could have and that the North Koreans could have so if you were a GI up there you had guard duty up there and you had to go and of course you had to guard all night long and so you there were barracks up there that guys would go from our camp up there for like two days spent where they would guard over night and sleep during the day and blah blah and then get but they got rotated out all the time and the second thing was you were an escort driver I know that sounds weird the only thing about escort but back then escort of course in the army was that you were escorting VIPs who wanted to come to JSA because what more macho thing can you do if you're a diplomat or a general or something and you're not in Vietnam what more macho thing can you do is to go up and stare down the North Koreans in the in the truce village that pen name John so of course all those guys came into Seoul and so we had a whole motor pool and fleet of all these big board olive drab board or sedans with flags on the front of them and my friends who were escort drivers they just drove between their like taxes they drove between Seoul and Pam moonshot bringing people up and back and forth so that's the two main things that those guys did well but of course there was a there was a company the guys that were there the hundred and seventy-six guys were in one company and as I remember and platoons and stuff like that but then there was also a battalion superstructure over above the company level and so there that situation was described to me by all my friends that in these letters so I knew and they all said man we're having a pretty good time over here because they said things just sounded unbelievable they said you know we have a swimming pool and we have tennis courts and we have a library and we have a movie theater and why did they have these things well they had them because the VIPs would stay up there sometimes so they they wanted to treat these people as well as possible so yeah there we go so they wanted to treat these people as well as possible so we there were all these amenities up there that were just totally unheard of and by the way this was still considered a hazardous duty assignment so we got hazard duty pay because there were infantry units around us basically just guarding the border too but every now and then there would be North Korean squads that would try to come through and and there would be firefights and there only I never saw anything closer to combat than tracer bullets at night sometimes they go flying over our our camp and they turn different colors and stuff it's kind of cool but and it didn't happen a lot but they was there but it was hazardous duty but 99% of the time where we were there was nothing like that so anyway I get I get off the plane and and sold and I'm assigned to a totally different unit back back away from Pam Lujan but I told that and my friends one of them was the company clerk now my best friend was the company clerk and it just so happened that the battalion clerks time was up and he was leaving so my friend told the his company commander about me and the company commander and my friend made me sound good enough that the company came in and talked to the battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel and so I was I was at this other place and I said and they kept trying to assign me just something I said I don't think I would do that I don't think I'm gonna be here that long and sure enough two days it took two days before my colonel talked to there colonel and they made some kind of deal and I got something JSA and that was the second best thing that ever happened to me in the army it was a wonderful party it was a wonderful place all things considered talking about making the best of a bad situation it was it was my job as the battalion my job as a battalion clerk was especially easy because the at the company level my friend is dealing with all the individual GIS who had you know wanted to leave or didn't fill out this paper or do that or whatever but a battalion level we were just dealing with like the people who in charge of the motor pool the finance clerks that we had and it's much more of an administrative thing so I didn't really have a lot to do so again I told myself you know just thirty forty percent of your effort and you're gonna be a jamup battalion clerk and and I was I I was again totally dependent as there every time when I was supposed to be I didn't really like to drink no problem with any hangovers or anything like that I the colonel and I got along great I really dealt with the colonel the major and the sergeant major those are the three guys I'd element and the colonel quickly learned that I could write so I wrote all his letters I wrote presentations for him slide shows when these VIPs would come up we write a slide show and I've done all that I even helped with the O ers the officer efficiency reports i sat in on some of those things and you know Curt that the oh you are the document that really says whether you going to get a promotion or not and there's a special language you have to use and if you use the wrong word to describe somebody you could really hurt their chances but I got good enough that I they trusted me to really put in my two cents worth and help write some of these officers so I did everything like that and it was easy 8:00 to 4:00 Monday through Friday 8:00 to 1:00 on Saturday there was two minutes from my hutch as they call it where I lived which I want to get into and we're getting towards the end of you know 11:45 this is where I live and your eyes do not deceive you this is a Quonset hut made of canvas once you back it up a little bit this is a canvas Quonset hut with a wood floor these are two little windows in the front door and two windows in the back like that and it was a double layered canvas thing because it gets cold in Korea during the winter and the heat in this couch that I lived in was a oil barrel and it was oil fuel heat so it was very basic in there but there was only two people in there it's not a big place so there was a there was a single bed on either side and and then you had a place for your clothes but it's real small but it also meant that it was private that you weren't in the you weren't in the barracks where which were senator block buildings where the drivers were and the guards were with 3040 people in them you were there with one other person so it was so it was very cool to have that privileged living assignment and it even got better because the guy who I was rooming with his time came up after being there after I was there about three months and he left and when he left I didn't say anything and the guy who replaced him had already gotten in to another barracks kind of place that he liked so being the battalion clerk other officers didn't have anything to do with me so I was there by myself for I was there in Korea thirteen months and I would say for at least eight or nine of those months I lived in this in this place by myself which was unbelievably cool I was the only person in that camp that had his own domicile because even though even the officers were in the officers quarters you know budding right next door to use both this building just was out on its own you know just sitting in the middle of all these other barracks and stuff around it so it was a very special but basic place the basic part was when it was cold in this heat drum thing you got your house boy which I'll talk about in a minute you got your house boy to make sure and leave you two 5-gallon cans of heating oil to get you through the night because when that heat ran out in the actual heater that went up a stovepipe right through the top of the Kwanzaa time when that went out it got really cold in there and then you would have to get one of these cans and walk outside and go I don't know a hundred yards of whatever it was this filling station kind of a thing you did not want to run out of heat during the night but that brings me to house boys everybody had a house boy and so you know I never made my bed I didn't even pick up my clothes I didn't have to straighten anything and we didn't really have inspections but you know just to keep the place neat you had a house boy you paid $10 a week maybe or something for this and you had no KP because no GI did KP because we paid Koreans to do it everybody got assessed about seven dollars a month and then all the Koreans fixed all the food you didn't have to do anything so here we are I'm working not too hard from 8:00 to 4:00 and 8:00 to 1:00 on Saturday and I had from 4 o'clock to the next morning to do whatever I wanted to there were no other assignments and my friends and I just had a lot of time to spend on our own a lot of time to get to know each other a lot of time to be bored and a lot of time to do other stuff which brings me to marijuana yeah and this is the statute of limitations I wanted to talk about a little bit back in the United States hippie time breaking out all over I had probably smoked marijuana two or three times before I got in the army I didn't even I didn't smoke cigarettes so I didn't even really know how to hey you know I might have felt stoned one time before I got there but we got the JSA it turns out that about a third of the g oz didn't smoke or drink about a third of them drank only and about the other third smoked marijuana or smoked dope as we called it back then smoked grass whatever you want to call it that's what that was what we'd rather do and the Army was just coming to grips with this scourge of drug of a drug named marijuana and of course in Vietnam that was further advanced even in Korea there was a lot of guys smoking dope you know that a lot better than me but but as an officer maybe you didn't know too much running into that but where we were all the juniors knew who was who was a smoker and it was a grand Kurt who was doing nothing and the army was just beginning to send CID guys over Criminal Investigation Division guys and we in fact had some undercover guys in our unit at least two and one of them was a really good friend of ours and was around us all the time smoking and we did not learn until he got out of the army and rode us from he got home to Phoenix Arizona wasn't row doesn't said I was the Criminal Investigation guy but I couldn't turn any of you guys him I liked you too much you weren't hurting anybody I didn't say anything so we never got I never saw one person in my 13 months in JSA in Korea get busted for marijuana now where did we get this marijuana well outside the camp and outside of virtually all army bases within any particular geographic area there was a place called the recreation center the army called it the RC and for us it was about 30 minutes away by bus dirt road bus a little bit of a highway and you were at this RC which had a px that was the main that big px we have a small px they had a big px they had they had a big movie theater I don't know they had some other stuff that you could do but what really comprised the recreation center was the Ville look at the village we called it the Ville which grew up around the recreation center because that's where all the Koreans opened their stores to sell us records to sell us furniture that they would hand make Oh tailors I had four or five suits made you could you can read any magazine up at the bill I've looked you up in JSA fashion magazine and just tear a page out of this cool mod suit you know my Bigfoot pals of bell-bottoms and stuff and take it down in the village and they would make you that suit within about a week in the $25 wool suits I had plaid wool suits um I've got a picture show you you could get anything down there including marijuana and one of the other ironies of this whole thing was marijuana was not illegal in Korea because it was considered so downscale and Declassified that the only people who smoke marijuana and Corita were old farmers this guy's just hung out on farms and stuff and just wanted to chill out you know so that so nobody cared nobody kid and some of these but as soon as the Jia's came in there at that time right there 68 69 70 and right in there started asking for this stuff these mom asan's said oh yeah no problem come back here so that she'd take you to the back room she might run a tea shop in the front or a record store or whatever but she'd say yeah come on back here so we'd go in the back and you know a number 10 business envelope the big kind of business envelope stuffed with marijuana $1 when I wrote this up I was writing this I said that's not a typo it was $1 for a big stuffed envelope full of marijuana so we had all there it wasn't real good marijuana by the way it wasn't particularly strong but we had so much of it that we never shared a joint the other weird thing was it's not weird to make sense you could not buy rolling papers however because what do you do with rolling papers and even the army figured out how guys might you know some of these lifers might like to be rolling hand rolled real cigarettes but you couldn't buy a rolling papers anywhere in any army facility and these mama songs didn't have either for some reason so what we did was you'd buy a carton of I bought a carton of cartons of Newports cigarettes as menthol cigarettes and you would just empty the tobacco out of they have they have filter tips on the end so you just do this and get all the tobacco out and you fill it back up with marijuana and close the end often boom you're just going for it so we we smoke my friends and I smoked every night oh I can't think of a night that we wouldn't have smoked and we you as I say well you know anything about marijuana you can't smoke too much anyway you just go to sleep and there with the stuff that wasn't particularly strong that was even that wasn't a problem so we had a great time though and you definitely get high and we looked at it as a social protest too because if you didn't smoke marijuana you were at the NCO club or the general enlisted man's club drinking and you were drinking with the lifers as we call them thus the sergeants and the guys who ran the motor pool and all that and they just drank all the time and they and they cost all the time and they only talked about war stories and it just we just just wasn't interesting to us and we were not those people we were not going to be in the army any longer than two years and now over there we weren't going to be in the army much longer than a year so we just didn't want to hang around with them and so and you couldn't smoke marijuana there obviously or not loose but we looked at it as separating ourselves from the beasts as we called it the army beast and our favorite place to smoke actually was the machine-gun bunkers ironically that were around our camp because there's no shooting going on there were no machine guns in there they were but they are these bunkers that you could see out of and so you could see who was coming and they were on the outskirts of camp and even though the the camp had guards that went around but all those guys knew if they saw anybody in the machine gun bunker there and they're smoking dope so and they didn't care and an officer might come around every now and then but very rarely so we would go in these machine gun bunkers and smoke up and go back to my little hooch but before five of us and we'd sit around listen to music our men loved music but all the all the psychedelic music was just exploding you know in 68 and the stuff of the I mean the doors and Steppenwolf and the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young we'd all love music and so another really cool thing about Korea was that you could get really cheap good stereo equipment it was just coming out of stereo equipment from Japan cheap I mean really cheap so we all had Teac which is a very famous name and in electronics Tea Act reel-to-reel tape decks had kenwood speakers pioneer speakers as huge speakers turntables that were really cool and helps all these super amps that we have the stereo equipment in my couch was worth about 10 times what the hooch was worth itself it was about $3,000 worth the stereo equipment in there and we could blow the roof off we wanted to but but you couldn't because there were places around but anyway we had really good music and another really fun thing about the music was every time you went anybody went home on leave it was very clear that they were to buy the best newest hottest records and bring them back so we could all table and make our own mixtapes so to speak keeping back them and the other thing you did was when you came back with the with the latest Neil Young album you took it to the village and the record shop people there said let me have this brand new record for a week and I'll give you $20 great and so what they did was they took it down the sole they illegally made copies of this all these records and they would give you your master back and their $20 and the next day you would see this Neil Young album in a one-color sleeve it'll be blue and barely legible and it would have this cheap but playable record in there that they sold for about $3 each so there's tons of music and we we had all kinds of fun with it Led Zeppelin we whole lot of love we would record it with so much verb it started playing back on itself and we were just goofed around all the time with music and we would after work you know as the Wednesday afternoon nice weather four o'clock in the afternoon my friends and I'd say well let's go out and go for a swim before dinner so we'd go up to this you know VIP center and as long as there's no VIPs there when they weren't there more than 10 percent of the time at the most it was open he just went swimmin I got pictures of 4050 guys just laying around this pool and jumping in the water have any good throwing frisbees around we had a wonderful time and then the tennis courts they were well they may have only been one court but there were guys went home and brought back rackets or something because there were racquets and tennis balls and I was a pretty good tennis player so we played tennis and then there was the movie theater and they would have all kinds of movie I remember seeing him there was a real avant-garde film version of Romeo and Juliet made with a Zeffirelli yeah Italian director with these young kids so they would even have strange movies like that so you'd go there and watch a movie free and we had a library read a lot because you had so much time you know tons of free time and so I read a lot the library probably wasn't very good but somehow again guys would bring but books back and so I never remember really being out of anything to read I don't remember being the best stuff to read but but we did that so when we were so bored that in fact I and my best friend did this the army didn't do this we were just bored I think we were just sitting around one time and just talking and not said something like well you know this is kind of like being out of high school campus or something maybe we should do a yearbook and in my forensic hello yeah let's do it your book so so we started working on it and and this was this was my colonel Colonel Byrd also ironic in that the symbol for a colonel and the army was an eagle so you always call them bird people but this is Colonel bird and he got behind it wrote this letter and so here are the guys that that I really worked for I told you I work for the for the battalion commander who was Carl Byrd the major major Sonier from Louisiana forget it he's the master sergeant and that's me and and in front of them all was our in front of them all was our logo was our tagline you know and so so this was right outside this battalion headquarters which was another Kwanzaa thought probably so so we had that and we we just took pictures of everybody working that's me at my desk about my desk and so it's just like a college high school yearbook is all these guys and all these guys that we were friends with we made up captions to go with funny captions and these are the platoons and blah blah blah here's all the officers that we had up there and then this was head shots of everybody all the soldiers who were there that's me down here and this is my best friend John Myers was right there Mitchell & Myers that's one reason we got to be friends but could just because of the alphabet everything in there I mean he always wound up about letter so I was always pretty close tomorrow so that's just an example of another thing we did and we sold them we got guys to give us I think $10 each and then it got enough printed that you you got your own copy and and since then some other groups there have done the same thing so so we did that um I am kind of running out of theme here now but I would maybe like to come back is that possible cuz I'm not I'm about two-thirds of the way through absolutely possible okay well because I haven't talked about what happens after the either and that's how I feel like it did change my life in a way that's a good it's a good part so I haven't talked about that yet okay okay well thank you for coming in today and this will be part one of two you do what thank you for coming in today and this will be part 1 of 2 okay oh no no no but you're easy to follow and we I and the thing we we've done enough of these I can sit and like right along with you or you get your thing off now no we're still on going okay anyway but we you're very easy to follow in the story and you can and like so many stories I can put myself with you sitting in the story and I can picture things you you the way you speak you it comes across as painting up pictures I would call it or like a movie in your city and you do a good job of that very very good no no it's it's real and like I say it's extremely easy to follow okay many sometimes interviews the guys will very good we've enjoyed it

Channel: Atlanta History Center

Views: 8,465

Rating: 4.0825686 out of 5

Keywords: Veteran (profession), Library of Congress Veterans History Project, Atlanta History Center (Museum)

Id: EkhYKIdl4z4

Length: 95min 59sec (5759 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020