(film reel rolling) - [Cooke] There's
not a day goes by that I don't think about Vietnam and usually more than once. - [Thiemann] My
memories of it were it was hot, stinking, humid, and unpleasant, unbearable. - [Pryor] We hit
a tilt rod mine. It blew the driver's
escape hatch, the driver's seat, and me out. - [Stotler] We were on search and destroy missions
most of the time. A Shau was a free fire zone. There wasn't supposed to be
anyone there except enemy, so anybody was there
we tried to kill. - [Cooke] When it comes to war, there's no room for mistakes. You make a mistake, you're dead. - [DeLoatche] War
is a complete change from a normal civilian life to a sort of savagery in which you are
li terally fighting for survival from day to day. Every day you are living in fear that the next bullet
might be for you. (film reel rolling) - My unit was 57th 1st Cav, and I was 11 Bravo, which was infantry, so I was out in the
bush all the time shooting and getting shot at. - As an ROTC graduate, we had the opportunity to choose our first overseas assignment, and I chose to go
to Central America. To spend a little
time in Panama, it would help acclimate me and get me ready for Vietnam. - I did not want to
miss the experience of being in a war. So I actually dropped
out of college and to my parents'
great shock and dismay, I joined the army, and then I volunteered
to go to Vietnam. - In the '60s,
there was the draft, and if I had had my druthers, I'd of just as soon
gotten my degree and gone right to work, but when the draft came up, you had to serve the country, so it was my obligation so
you did what you had to do. - My boss at Caterpillar
had been a lieutenant in the Korean War, and he encouraged me to look into being an officer, going through officer
candidate school. - I entered the Navy
December 7, 1967, Pearl Harbor Day because my Dad was a Pearl Harbor survivor, and I did it in his honor. - I was in North Vietnam, Laos, and a little bit of
Cambodia a couple times but mostly in North Vietnam. - There was 200 and
some of us in formation. The commander was on the podium, said, "Gentlemen, we
need some volunteers, "and the volunteers I need "are for the United
States Marine Corps." I didn't volunteer. I was pushed forward. (laughing) - They'd simulate
shooting at us, and I was supposed to,
when I was walking point, I was supposed to
find those people that were shooting
at us and shoot back, and you know, I had
weapons training from when I was a kid. So I never shot at
anything I couldn't see. I couldn't see them
so I never shot, and so I thought this probably
isn't real good. (laughing) - We went out on patrols, and we did road
security sometimes, but we were in the jungle a lot. - The equipment that I got
involved with was a minesweeper. It's much like where
you see somebody on a beach looking
for diamonds and gold but more elaborate,
a little bit bigger, and we'd search for land mines and clear the roads each day before convoys could go through. - I went to NCOC school
at Fort Benning, Georgia, and after that I went to
Fort Lewis, Washington for eight weeks of
on the job training. Then I went to Vietnam. Then I went to Japan
to the hospital, and then I went back
to Fort Leonard Wood, and I ended up in
charge of the building that I went in through. In Vietnam, I arrived at Tan Son Nhut
Air Base in Saigon, and I was then at Saigon at the first signal brigade. - I found out my younger
brother was in Germany and his unit was scheduled
to come over there, so I stayed in country to
keep him out of country 'cause I already knew
what was happening. - I tried to enlist
when I was 16, and I went to St. Louis. I passed the physical. I passed the written test, and I was supposed to
leave on a Wednesday to go to California
to boot camp, and the recruiter called
me Monday morning, and said, "We got a copy of
your birth certificate today." He says, "We'll
see you next year." So the next year at my
birthday he called up, wanted to know if I
was ready to join so. - Camp Evans was big. They also had, all the 1st Calv helicopters
were there basically, and a lot of units were there, and that was probably the
main 1st Calv base up north. We were mainly fighting against
the North Vietnamese Army, and you know, the VC were the
Village Communist Fighters. They'd be in the
village saying hi to you during the day and at night come out and
try to cut your throat. The NVA, you knew, they
were a well trained army. - [Narrator] Steve
Stotler of Peoria arrived in Vietnam on Ho Chi Minh's
78th birthday, May 19th, 1968. He was assigned to an
infantry unit at Camp Evans, just south of the
demilitarized zone in Vietnam. Not coincidentally,
it was the same day the camp's ammunition
dump was hit by North Vietnamese
Army rockets. To the south, near
the Laotian border, was the A Shau valley. - Tet offensive
was basically over, but the NVA was still
strong in A Shau valley, and so the first six months
we spent chasing them out of Vietnam or trying to. - [Narrator] The North
Vietnamese Army had been using the A Shau valley as a
point of infiltration into South Vietnam. Portions of the valley
were thick with jungle, proving advantageous to the
North Vietnamese soldiers who were familiar
with the territory. - Wading through the streams, and then going through
the dense brush of the jungle was very hectic. In fact, I had to use my
machete many times to sort of, we hack a path to get
through the jungle because the terrain
and the brush and the bushes
were just so thick, and it was so very hot that it made life
very miserable. I'll put it that way. - In the jungles, it
was very close contact. I mean, you really
didn't have time to think about it until it was over, but we were trying
to kill each other. - The 101st, my particular unit, the 3rd of the 187th infantry went in with about 400
combat ready troops, and at the end of the battle, there were perhaps about
90 who were combat able to sustain combat. There were a lot of my buddies that were killed and
wounded in that fight. It bothers me now to
even think about it and remember the
terrible losses. - [Narrator] At the edge
of the A Shau valley, about a mile from
the Laotian border, the Ap Bia mountain
rises 937 meters skyward. Noting the elevation, the United States Army referred to it as Hill 937. Alternately, the soldiers
who fought to capture it in May of 1968 called
it Hamburger Hill because they felt
the ensuing battle chewed up soldiers
like a meat grinder. As then Lieutenant DeLoatche
and fellow soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division scaled the slopes
of Hamburger Hill, the North Vietnamese army rained shots on them
from atop the mountain. On the fifth day of a battle that would last
nearly two weeks, DeLoatche was hit twice, first by a rocket
propelled grenade and then by a bullet. - Coming under heavy
small arms fire, and then there was a loud sound of an RPG shell, and I felt the pain in my knees from the RPG shell
exploding fragments in it, and the next thing I felt
was a hot, searing feeling behind my neck, and that's the last
thing I remembered. The shell glanced
just to the right. The doctor described it in
my seventh cervical vertebra, and it just did miss the spine, and the fragment was
so close to the spine that when the doctors
operated on it, they thought it was best
to just leave it in there, so it's been in there
for over 40 years now. - [Narrator] DeLoatche
earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star
in that one battle. He feels his efforts
were diminished in value, however, as the United States quietly abandoned the hill just 16 days after winning it. The loss was just so great. The suffering was so great, and then to abandon it after such a
tremendous sacrifice, it was very disheartening, and I felt that that perhaps was one of the main turning
points in the Vietnam War. It really set the
American public at odds at the
military operations that were being
conducted in Vietnam at that time because of the way that the Hamburger Hill
campaign was carried out. - We would not take
and hold territory. That was the biggest
disappointment of the whole war. I mean, you'd take
the same place two or three times, and then stay there a day, blow up their bunkers, devastate the whole
area and then leave, and then they'd
move right back in. - We worked in the
southern delta area of the country
called Four Corps. So if you picture a clock, we might work a couple
hours of that clock for a month or two, and we would sort of eradicate the Viet Cong and
the North Vietnam from a big section, but then we'd move along to
another part of the clock, and during the year I was there, we probably went
around the clock twice, but as soon as we
moved out of an area, of course the enemy
would move back in. By the end of the war, I figured this wasn't
the kind of war that I thought it
would be at all. This was just kind
of a holding pattern, and we could hold
on to it forever, but we could never
actually stabilize it. - It begs the question
after all the sacrifice, after all of the loss of
life and people wounded, what's the use, and what was it all about if you're just going to fight for 14 days and get up a hill and conquer the hill and then just give it back? I'm sure that's one of
the big question marks and one of the most
disheartening aspects of the Vietnam War. - [Narrator] A few days before the Battle of Hamburger Hill, the Battle of An Bao raged for three days
beginning May 5th, 1968. The NVA surprised an American
mechanized infantry unit. - We came against two
battalions of NVA, and they, it was tough. They were very strong. They had us outnumbered
probably about five to one. We were able to hold our own, and we lost 22 guys
that day and 91 wounded, and I think that shows you. It gave you an appreciation of what life can really
be like in a war zone. Then we had to go
into the kill zone to pick up the dead
and bring them back. That was probably the
toughest part of my tour. - [Interviewer]
Did you participate in the reclaiming of the bodies? - Yes. - [Interviewer] What
goes through your mind when you're doing that? - I think your mind is kind
of like a camera in a way. You go up and you
look at somebody, and you see them there, and your mind just freezes. You can't tolerate
really what you see, but you know you
got to get in there, and you gotta get
them outta there as quickly as you can. - [Narrator] South Vietnam
was militarily divided into four areas or corps. The southernmost corps covered
the Mekong River Delta, where Jim Hinrichsen piloted
Bell AH-1 Cobra helicopters. - The Cobra is a
helicopter gunship. It was used in several
different roles, as a aerial rocket artillery, and it was used, which I did, escorting troop
lift helicopters. It was also used in a cav role, which was a hunter killer team. And the Viet Cong and
the North Vietnamese knew that the Cobra was
really hard to hit, and they weren't
that good a shot. It was a very narrow aircraft, and if they missed,
they were dead. So fortunately for me, Cobras very rarely got shot at, which was a good
assignment to have. - [Narrator] Huey helicopters, or the Bell UH-1, presented more of a
target to the enemy because they carried
ground troops into battle. Bruce Thiemann was a gunner and crew chief on a Huey
named Dutchmaster 680. - The door gunner mans the gun. He sits in the hell hole on
the right side of the ship. The crew chief mans the gun. He sits in the hell hole on
the left side of the ship. - [Narrator] Each
gunner on a Huey carried two to three
boxes of ammunition, with 3,000 rounds in each box. - The barrels got so hot
that they started to glow, and then they would deform, so we had an asbestos
glove we would put on. We'd reach out. We would flip a switch, pull the hot barrel off, put it underneath the seat, take the cool barrel out, put it on the gun,
flip the switch, and then start on that barrel. - [Narrator] The
enemy's return fire required self
designed modifications to the Huey as a
personal safeguard. - The bullets would tear
through the helicopter, so we had some protection. We had armor chicken
plates we wore. We tried to sit on
little pieces of armor we would take off of
downed helicopters. The pilots actually had armored
seats with slides on them, and they could stop
mainly a 30 caliber round. - They had sliding
doors on the sides, but we took the doors off because we never shut the doors. We even took the doors off
the front of the helicopter because it was just so hot, and we wanted the air
flow through there. It could hold maybe eight or
nine Americans fully equipped, maybe 10 or 12 or 13
ARVNs fully equipped 'cause they were lighter. We would have the
troops on our Hueys, and we would go in hot, and we would go in
low with guns blazing, and the Cobras would come in
alongside of us firing rockets, and we would dump the troops off in these areas called
landing zones, or LZs, and if we were getting fire back they would call that hot LZ. They weren't always hot, but
a lot of times they were, and then we would get
out of there quickly. - Two Cobras were
always assigned to a flight of six to eight
Hueys or troop carriers, and so we would fly
above and behind them, and they had of course a gunner and a crew chief
on board the Huey as well as the two pilots
always looking for ground fire as we were going
from a pickup point for the troops to
the drop off point, and whenever they
saw ground fire, they would also throw
out a red smoke grenade and that was just
a signal for us to roll in and put automatic
weapons fire or rockets on it. - [Narration] Off
shore, Lynn Shindel was aboard the aircraft
carrier USS Intrepid where he worked
on the flight deck with planes called Skyhawks. - It was an A4 fighter squadron. That's a single
engine jet fighter, and at that time it was
the backbone of the Navy, very good small aircraft for
hauling a lot of ordnance. It held a lot of ordnance. Everybody on the flight deck
has a different color shirt, and the plane captains
had a brown shirt, and my job was to make sure
that the plane was clean, and it had oxygen in
it for the pilots, and it had been fueled, and then when our pilots, these were single man aircraft, when the pilot came, we'd put the ladder
on the side for him to crawl up and
get in the cockpit. - Four to five canopy, and what I mean by
canopy is the trees, you would have a
growth in the trees, and then you'd have
another growth above that and another one and another one and sometimes five canopies, so the sunlight didn't get
through there very often, so it's pretty dark down there. You map out the terrain
and find out everything that's in there. The kind of vegetation
that's in there, how many canopies, and the trees there are, how high it is, if there's anybody in there, and how many of them
there are in there, and what they're
eating for breakfast, dinner, and supper. After the mission's over, we'd done what we're
supposed to do. Now they want some contact. Then once you make the contact, then it's every
man for themselves, and they got to come and get us, but that's when it
gets a little hairy. Sometimes there's a distance
of 20 feet, 30 feet. Sometimes it's a distance,
spitting distance. You're like almost
eyeball to eyeball. None of my guys
died in my squad, and I'm very proud of that
fact being a point man for my squad the whole time, that I got them back safe. That's important. - You could be
laying in your rack, and all of a sudden you would
hear incoming mortar rounds, or you just didn't know. The unexpected could
happen at any time. - Probably about two
o'clock in the morning, we got hit by probably an
estimated 60 Viet Cong, NVA, probably Viet Cong, and I was on the bridge
with eight other guys. We had mortars firing
illumination rounds so we could see
what was going on, which you really couldn't 'cause there was
smoke everywhere, and basically we shot, fought them pretty
much the whole night. None of us got hurt, but we killed
probably 16 of them. - [Narrator] While nobody was
injured that particular night, during the 13 months
Toliver was in Vietnam, more than 100 members of
his battalion were killed. In addition to the memories of his fellow fallen Marines, Toliver carries
another mental burden. - So I grabbed my
gear and my rifle and were running down the road to this unit that's in trouble, and then I can see
off to my left, there's this Vietnamese family with a kid who's
just blown to hell. His guts are hanging out. Bones are sticking
out everywhere. He's not dead. He's holding himself up on
one arm looking at himself, and I don't remember
a thing after that. I don't remember what happened
when we got to the unit that was in the big firefight, and I totally forgot
that whole incident until 20 years later, and then, ah, I've got to take a breath. - You have feelings
for the people that is caught up in it, like the little children
and the older people. They get caught up
in the middle of it. You have feelings for them. You can't be real
callous about it, but you have to do your duty. - First day out in
the field, fire fight, in the side of a bomb
crater for some protection but still took a
round in my side and was carrying a radio and
my radio took two rounds. And I have a disability because some of
the shrapnel stuck on the outside of my lung, and they don't want
to do anything with it unless it causes a problem
so it's still there. - [Narrator] The troops
were always aware that times of enjoyment
could be nothing more than fleeting moments
in a war zone. - I'm estimating
between 10 to 15,000 if not more that were
there for that USO show, and there was just
complete silence. It was just acts like
somebody flipped a switch, and Bob Hope did his show. The Gold Diggers
sang Silent Night. We all sang Silent
Night with them. Bob Hope waved goodbye to us. It wasn't 15 minutes
after he left that all hell broke loose again. - We lost as many
people in accidents as we did in enemy fire because it was
just so dangerous. The helicopters being around
each other all the time, having to be maintained
all the time, being over stressed
all the time, the heat. It was just a hard
environment to operate in. - One really bright
young buck sergeant was coming back in
a loach one day. He was in the back end of it, and he had an M-60 machine gun, and when he landed, he jumped out, and he
had his machine gun, M-60 machine gun hanging on a hook on the back
wall of the loach, and he hooked it
with his web gear that he was wearing and
pulled it off the rack, and it hit the ground and
went off and killed him, a round right through his back. - We went to a
village in the morning and talking to the people and handing out candy
bars to the kids and build up relationships, and coming back,
because of the situation we had to go through
actually the same path because the lake
was on one side, and we had to go
around this one area and coming back we hit a mine and two of the guys were killed. - [Narrator] That
incident changed his unit's travel patterns. - So we always usually traveled in one line to make sure that we didn't hit any mines, and that we had the people going in front of us a lot of
times with mine detectors. - [Narrator] Don Smallberger
was one of those soldiers, a minesweeper. When the detector
signaled something unusual was in the ground, they began probing the dirt. - You had just like a Bowie
knife type of a thing, maybe not quite that big, and at a 45 degree angle, you would just probe
into the ground looking for something
that might be mine-like, and iff anything that looked
like it could be a mine, that's when we'd
get our trusty C4 out of the back of our
little wooden trailer, and we'd place a block of
C4 with a blasting cap on it and typically a fuse, and then we'd just take
it and blow it in place. - [Narrator] Ridding
the roadways of mines didn't always go
according to plan. Smallberger remembers the time he found a mine
that was considered to be a safe 250 yards
from a Vietnamese village. The huts at the
edge of the village were made of nothing more
than sugar cane and grass. - At this particular time, we'd found the land mine, and I put the C4 on it, and I detonated the C4. It exploded, and then
we're about to go to work starting filling up the
holes and moving on, and we noticed
some commotion down where the grass hut was. And at that time, the papasan
was carrying his daughter out of the hut and a piece
of shrap metal had hit her and cut her throat,
and she was dead, and I still carry that with me, and it was very tough
with my daughter Brittany when she got to be in that
same age and size category. The nightmares
would just come on. - [Narrator]
Smallberger had to deal with a wide variety of mines, some of which were
covered with dirt and disguised with
false tire tracks. - I always watched the road because sometimes mines
were command detonated mines which meant someone might
have been laying over in the rice paddy ready
to push the button when you get close, or maybe they were just
a compression type thing. If you step on it or trip
wire or trip grenades, those types of things. A mine did explode, and I'm confident that that
was a command detonated mine with somebody sitting out in
a rice paddy or somewhere, and at that time, we had
four people that were killed. One person got to
be a friend of mine. He was from
Beardstown, Illinois, a guy named Billy Cook. - [Narration] The explosion
was July 18, 1968, destroying a truck
like this one. Some 32 years later, Don Smallberger
paid his respects by finding the names
of all four victims on the memorial wall
in Washington, D.C. - I became infantry, so I went down to
Fort Polk Louisiana for infantry training
at Tigerland, and then I did pretty well
I guess on tests and stuff, selected to go to instant
NCO school at Fort Benning, come out a buck sergeant. They were losing a lot of
sergeants at that time, so before I went to Vietnam, and then while I
was at Fort Benning, my cousin was killed, and he was my dad's
brother's son. He was a twin, Mike and Dick, and he was out working with
villagers, special forces. That was their main deal, trying to convince the people that they really
don't want to be with the North Vietnamese, and they got overrun, and he was killed in February of '68. - While I was in boot camp, I learned my friend
that I grew up with was MIA in Vietnam. You grow up with somebody in a little town of
Carlock, Illinois. There's 300 people in that town. Classes were real small, our grade school
and high school. His name was David Lee Scott, and from what I heard that him and another Army guy were on point. They were walking a trail
in the A Shau valley ahead of other men, and they got ambushed. - [Narrator] David Lee Scott is one of seven
central Illinois men who served in Vietnam who were killed in action, and their bodies
were not recovered or who remain missing in action. - You try not to get too close to everybody because
the next minute they might be gone. - I got wounded on January 1st. Benjamin Benton got
promoted to take my slot. He got killed on the 18th, and the survivor's guilt, whatever you want to call
it, will never go away. He ended up where
I should have been, and several of my guys
got killed that day, and I've always felt I
should have been there. - One day a mortar came
in and hit the outhouse, and there happened to be
a staff sergeant in it, and he was gone
with the outhouse, and I happened to be
there to see that. So those things are pictures
that are in your brain that sort of wake
you up at night. - We were in a firefight, and one of my
friends got trapped inside his personnel carrier, and it was caught on fire, and the ammo that they
carry for the 50 gun on top was going off so they
asked for volunteers to stay out at night and
guard it so that the enemy, so the Viet Cong,
wouldn't get the body. So about five of us
volunteered to stay out there. - [Narrator] For his bravery
that night outside of Cu Chi, Campana was awarded
the bronze star. - There was another
warrant officer who was actually
from the Peoria area who was lost the last
month I was there. We're gonna put his name
on the memorial wall that we're building at the
courthouse for Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan. His name was Don Lukens, and he went to grade school
and high school in Peoria. - [Narrator] Warrant
Officer Don Lukens was killed by a single
51 caliber shell in May of 1970 while
co-piloting his helicopter in the delta region
of South Vietnam. He was two weeks short
of his 20th birthday. - Being located along
the coast like that, we were most of the
time in sandy soil. They had a lot of rice paddies
with dikes in between them, but it was really pretty
much a hot, humid climate most of the time. - We were in hootches
most of the time, and it just typical plywood, tin roof hootches, or buildings that usually housed
four to six men in them. They had a metal
locker in there, and that's all you had
to put your clothes and your rifle and stuff in. You had a bed if you were lucky. If not, you had a cot to lay on. They were up off the ground because of the rats being so
bad over there in Vietnam. - We had two 55 gallon drums up on a stand with a shower head attached to each one of them. Well, in the morning,
the solar heating hadn't worked overnight, but by evening it
was pretty warm water so you could get a warm shower. Go to bed. Get up in the morning, and go back and do it again. - In that month of October, we got six feet of rain
total in one month's time, in 30 days' time. It just rained and
rained and rained. I know we couldn't get dry. We couldn't build any roads. We had a lot of the highway
one that we had put in got flooded out going
into the city of Hue. - [Narrator] The
conditions in base camps could be considered
relatively comfortable compared to patrol
duty in the jungle. Chuck Campana
remembers some patrols where they didn't return to
base for well over a month. - We'd set up at night, set up a perimeter, and they would helicopter
food in at night, but the rest of the
time it was C rations, and we used to use C4, set it on fire to
heat up the C rations. A lot of times we
were washing clothes in bomb craters with water. - [Narrator] Letter
writing was one way for Jim Hinrichsen to
make the surroundings feel more home like to him and to ease his family's
anxiety at home. - Here I am again with
more hot bits of news from the vacationland
of southeast Asia, beautiful Vietnam, and so, it was my job to keep my mother relaxed about this. That's the way I felt. That's the way I wrote. - I think the one thing is to realize how nice we have it back here in the States compared to how some of
the people in Vietnam have to live in the
small villages still, and we in the army
had it a lot better than some of the Vietnamese had. It really gives
you an appreciation of what life is like
in the United States. - In certain areas,
they dumped a bunch of Agent Orange to defoliate. When you're in
triple canopy jungle, that gave the enemy
a huge advantage, so they defoliated
a lot of that, but then when you're
in a firefight, we had the Cobras coming in, and the jets and
everything else, and, I mean, it stripped
the trees of the foliage, which was good 'cause
then you could see who you were shooting at. - [Narrator] Marv Cooke
earned two Purple Hearts during his tour, but it isn't his battle wounds that have left
him 100% disabled. His health concerns began
when a rocket hit him near his base. Two friends dragged
him to safety. It was five days before
he was to go home. - When I got hit by a rocket, and Clark and
Williamson drug me back to the bunker that night, my legs were
completely wide open, and the bones sticking out, and they drug me
through the damn dirt. They filled up with
dirt, you know, and when I got to Danang, they had to actually
operate on my legs just to get all the dirt out of there so they could even
operate on legs, you know, put them
back together. So there's no doubt in my mind I got full of Agent Orange
just from that one incident, let alone being
in contact with it all the time just living there. I've had five bypasses,
both carotid arteries done. My hearing's shot. I've had a stroke. I've had both
knees replaced now, and it goes on and on and on, and now with this
Agent Orange thing causing a lot of
this internal stuff. It's just a day to day thing. - I have 70% disability. I have problems with my
heart, kidneys, diabetes. I had melanoma cancer in 1984. I have neuropathy in
all my extremities. It's called the Order
of the Silver Rose, and it's an honorary
thing to belong to this. You have to be an
Agent Orange victim, and I'm only one of two
here in McLean County that got the Silver Rose, and I think more of this than all the ribbons
I got in Vietnam. - [Narration] Lynn
Shindel was exposed to Agent Orange
when he transported leaking barrels of the liquid. The name is derived
from the orange stripe that marked the barrels. Like Shindel, Esaw
Peterson is 70% disabled after exposure to the defoliant. - I can tell you what, I did see it in the jungle. I mean, a couple
of places I went in the jungle they had
sprayed Agent Orange, man, and everything had died. - They had sprayed the jungle, and then we went in two
days later, busting jungle, and our tanks looked like
they had a wax job on them. The stuff was still
dripping off the trees. - And then there
were a lot of areas that were deforested 'cause
all along the canals, all along the rivers, all along the edges
of the tree lines, they wanted to push
the tree lines back so there was all
this deforestation, and that was strange to see, areas that had no growth at all. - [Narrator] Agent
Orange was a combination of two herbicides. It contained a
chemical contaminant called dioxin, which
is linked to cancer, birth defects, diabetes,
and other diseases. The production of Agent Orange was discontinued
in the early 1970s. - I go out to the VA
clinic each month, and I do go through
a counseling period to keep me on track
because the PTSD symptoms are still there. I believe you are
impacted so very deeply, and you're so
emotionally scarred from those
experiences over there that they never go away, and they affect you
in a lot of ways that sometimes we
really don't realize, so the PTSD is always there, not as severe now, but the impact of
it is still there. - Nobody talked about it, and at that time, I didn't
want to talk about it, and I kept everything
in for years, and it was something
that boiled in me, that hurt me, but I
couldn't talk about it. At this point, I'm very grateful that through some
friends of mine that was going to the VA that I started going to the VA and started taking counseling, and learning that if
I talked about it, it actually got a
little bit easier, not having to hold it in and maybe not as stressful. - The doctor told me
the older I'd gotten the worse my flashbacks
and nightmares would get, and I go out to the
clinic for help with that. - As you get older,
you start remembering, and it affects you, the
way you think about things. You know I tear up
a lot, stupid stuff, but it's just part of life. - Yeah, I had some nightmares. I got married, like I said,
two weeks after I got back, and I had scared my new bride when I'd wake up and
thrashing or wake up and sit up and yell, but nothing violent, and as time went on,
those dissipated. - My wife always got up earlier than I 'cause she
worked at the hospital, and she would have
an alarm go off, and every time that
alarm would go off, I'd want to hit the deck, and finally, I opened up
more in terms of what it was, and it's like, well, dear,
when that alarm goes off it sounds like the air raid
sirens that we had in Vietnam. So she changed
that to the radio, and that made me feel
better. (laughing) - I'm sure that the PTSD and some of the attitudes
and temperaments that I experienced made
the marriage difficult. A lot of my friends went
through the same experience, and the divorce rate was high for Vietnam veterans
who had married before going in because you were a different
person when you returned. - You get in a firefight, and there's stuff
going off next to you. We got the occasional
mortar attack, so, yeah, a lot of
noise, so I'd say, yeah, that's probably the
beginnings of my hearing loss, not unusual for Vietnam vets. - I know that my hearing as I wear hearing aids now is not what it used to be. - Great Lakes
Naval Hospital was, I'd have to say, the low
point of my whole enlistment. They put us white guys
on the bottom floor, and they put the black
guys on the top floor. They segregated at Great
Lakes Naval Hospital, and that caused a big problem. We weren't segregated
in Vietnam. We all bleed the same red blood. - They say I have
depression, but not PTSD. I had a job for 22 years with
the sheriff's department. I managed to overcome
my alcoholism. They say, "Well,
if you had PTSD, "you're too stable, "but you are depressed. "You do have
clinical depression." Like, oh great. - We have many veterans now who are still fighting
to get benefits for the injuries
that they suffered, and I hope that Mr. Trump and the new administration
will be able to rectify that over a period of time because many of our
veterans really are hurting, and they need help, and they need it now. - We have our good
times and bad times. When we have our
bad times, you know, sometimes you want to be alone. - A lot of people say we
didn't win the Vietnam War, but we stopped them. That was the line in the sand. They didn't expand any further. Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. They also had intended
to take over Thailand, and as far as maybe Malaysia. They had expansion
on their mind. - There's no doubt
in my mind yet today that we needed to be there, and those people needed help, and those were the
people I wanted to help, not just fight for my country. Those people needed some help, and we only helped
them for a while, and as far as I'm concerned, it wasn't the fighting man
that gave that thing up, it was the politicians. - Cameras are everywhere. That's what really
hurt us over there. It was, and a lot of politics. - A war is an ugly
thing by definition. They always have been, and they always will be, and there's not a place for
that in Mom's living room, and unfortunately, our leaders
didn't have the backbone to say, "Yes, this is important. "It's critical," and so when the will
of the people said we've been there long enough, they rolled over
and played dead. - That is a war that we
could have won easily, but I think the
politicians didn't want to. - President Johnson just
wasn't able to handle the war. - Nobody ever talked to us
about goals at all. (laughing) It was we're gonna go out. We're gonna find the enemy. We're gonna engage him. We're gonna shoot him, and that was pretty much it. - I lost a lot of
good friends there, a lot of good people, and they were basically
lost for nothing because we didn't
decide to go into this with a commitment to win, and we could have won. - I knew pretty early on that I was not gonna be
helping the South Vietnamese in any way, shape, or form. So after that, what
the goal becomes is can I get out of here alive? And so that's pretty much it, and then when you get back maybe you think about, well,
what was this really for? And the answer is nothing. It wasn't for anything. - It's mentally difficult
to think back to that because we were there
for a year at a time, and we were not allowed
to accomplish anything. We never really lost a battle, but we just gave up and said, okay, we're done
with this and left. So there's 58,000 guys out
there dead for nothing. That's the hardest part. When you go to war
you want to win. - When I came back,
I was surprised at the attitude of the people, and we had been
hearing some of it, but new guys that came over, but we didn't realize
it was that bad, the protesting and
the attitude they had toward the Vietnam veterans
returning from over there. - When we stepped off the plane, stepped off the plane, there were bottles
thrown, beer cans thrown. There was vulgar language and literally got cursed
out for being in Vietnam, and we were the villains, and we were the bad guys. - They would spit on
us and call us names, and especially when
we landed in LAX 'cause we had to go to Fort Ord to get new uniforms and
everything like that, and it was pretty bad. - I didn't really appreciate it. I felt like they were against us when we were fighting for them, to allow them to
do what they do. - My parents were at
the airport to greet me but then after that there
was so much turmoil, so much protest against the war, that the only thing
I wanted to do was just hide my uniform and
put on my civilian clothes and try to get back to normal, didn't tell anybody
other than the few people that knew you were there. You just wanted to blend
into society again. - And I started college at
the University of New Mexico in January 1970. Well, if you know your history, May of 1970 was Kent State and the University of New Mexico is one of the campuses
that just went nuts. Everybody's marching around. "We're on strike," and I'm standing there. I was just sort of stunned. I didn't know what this meant, and then I thought,
you know what? I paid big time to go to school. I'm going to school. So we went through the lines, not a big deal. Nobody got mad at
us or anything. I go in and sit down, and we're waiting
for class to start, and the professor doesn't come. Nobody else comes. I look around the room. Every person was
a Vietnam veteran, every single one of them, and I knew, I'm different. So that was a little tough. - I had switched to civilian
clothes at some point. I didn't talk about it. It wasn't until
about 10 years later when the VVI got started, the Vietnam Veterans
of Illinois, that I started to hang
around with guys from Peoria. It was the best thing I ever did as far as getting everything
straight in my head about the war was to meet all
the other Vietnam veterans and then kind of take
pride in what we did, and that we as Vietnam
veterans have every right to take pride in our service, just like the Korean
War veterans did, just like the World War
One and Two veterans did. - Unlike a lot of places, the
Midwest was very supportive. I got medivaced all the
back to Fort Lenard Wood, so I didn't go through Seattle or Chicago or San Francisco. I went all the way
back to Leonard Wood. Then as a sergeant, I could
come home every weekend, so I re-assimilated
into the community on weekends until
I got released, and the Midwest
supports the military, so I didn't have the problems
that some people did, and I'm thankful for that. - [Narrator] Bill Bontemps
chronicled his unit's actions in Vietnam through photographs, like the profile of a soldier with an M-79 grenade launcher or the flamethrower
clearing underbrush, and while he recorded
the death of the enemy, he never photographed the
bodies of fallen Americans. Yet it was his pictures of
Vietnamese school children that had the most
lasting personal impact. - We saw, toured
some of the schools and saw how their educational
facilities were so poor. So when I came back
home I was able to work with several of the
local people here, at the telephone company and people at Concordia
Lutheran School to help gather supplies and ship over to my unit, and they in turn
then took them out to the villages
and to these people to try to help them out. - [Narrator] Captain
DeLoatche had intended to make the army a career, and he still proudly
wears his medals today. However, his injuries eventually
precluded that choice. He also found a more
important calling, to save souls instead
of take lives. - I guess I had what you call somewhat of an epiphany where I did feel the calling by a higher power that I neede d to change my life to
go into the ministry. Today, I regret that I had to
be involved in enemy action seeing other people die
at my hands perhaps, and there's a sense of guilt and a sense sorrow that I feel, and I'm sure that other
soldiers felt as well. (film reel rolling)
