US Marine Vietnam Veteran Craig Tschetter, Extended Interview

[Music] those are the same exact boots that i wore without socks one day and got the worst blisters i ever had in my life but i was told you could do that and i was stupid enough to believe it i wish i knew how many miles i walked in those boots i um it's one of the only things i brought back from vietnam and i don't even know why i had them in the bottom of my sea bag but i did i'm craig chetter i served in vietnam from november 23rd 1967 through july 27 1969 following vietnam i was a marine corps drill instructor in san diego california trading recruits until june of 1971. when i was born in 1948 i was raised in a typical post-world war ii blue-collar family we were relatively poor but the one thing that was so prominent in our home was the christian faith that my family had the bible was everything it took they took it literally we did take it literally and church was a very important part of our life it proved to be somewhat difficult for me as time went on because the older i got in middle school high school when you can't go to dances and you can't go to movies and even using a deck of regular playing cards was a sin there was so many things about my life at that time that pushed the religious mandates on me to want to leave and go somewhere on my own i knew i was not college material i knew that but my parents believe that the cornerstone of everything you did in life whether that was your education your marriage your profession a good christian belief and background in the bible was that cornerstone i love my parents but i and i don't really want to say i rebelled against my parents i didn't i just wanted to be on my own and do something different so i saw the military as probably a way in which i could get away i really didn't have any particular branch of service in mind i knew that the recruiters were on the second story of our post office in my hometown so unannounced one day i walked up there and the army's door was closed and locked the air force's door had a sign that said out to lunch so there i stood and i looked down the hallway and there was a man in a white uniform with the door wide open so i walked in and i said to this navy recruiter after i introduced myself what would be the quickest way to get to vietnam he stared at me literally that's all he did he never said a word and i think the look on his face said i'm not navy material is what he was saying so he picked up the phone and he dialed a number and handed to me the receiver and said here you're talking to the united states marine corps and that's how i ended up in the marine corps but had it not been from my childhood and the way i was raised in that um mennonite faith background i probably wouldn't have not i wouldn't have done that um i i'm not using that as an excuse but i'm using it as a means of explaining to you that that's why i chose to leave okay when i speak about my book i often say that it was my childhood the marine corps and vietnam that caused me to know that i'm not the person i started out to be i know that marine corps boot camp was only eight weeks it was condensed all our training was condensed because they needed people to go to vietnam i boarded a pan american airline flight with a group of other marines and after we left okinawa in route 2 da nang south vietnam just before we got off the airplane as it's really quiet in the plane people don't know we're all looking out the windows wondering what we're going to see and feel our students came on the pa and said that we wish you a safe journey and we hope to see you on a return trip and um she announced that the five flight attendants or stewardesses at that time will be here at the door when you walk out and if you'd like a kiss you can i kissed every one of them when i left every one of them and walked off the plane i got there in november on the 23rd one day after i turned 19. i was then according to the pentagon part of 464 000 troops in vietnam i did not know that only 70 000 of that number were chasing the enemy every day with a matter of hours i would be assigned to the third battalion fifth marines and they were members of that seventy thousand club my very first experience was when i joined the third battalion fifth marines there was a gentleman that raised his hand and said 3-5 over here and everybody that was going to 3-5 went to his direction there were six of us totaled seven i mean total and uh there was a six by a big truck waiting outside for us that was gonna take us to the base camp of third battalion fifth marines um he helped the seabags go up on the truck and when we pulled us up he handed us a weapon an m16 a magazine with 20 rounds a flak jacket and a helmet and he said lock and load we've got 15 miles to go guys and it's not secure i looked around at everything standing there the guy behind the 50 cal machine gun on top of the cab of the truck on the back of his flight jacket it said 3-5 and it said get some i remember that clearly i looked at my weapon and it's just dirty really dirty and i kept wondering why they would give me a dirty weapon but i realized after i scraped it it was blood and i did not know what that meant until probably about four months later when i got medevaced and i realized then what that and why that was and that is because the trucks that came to pick up new people to take to various locations their first stop was that first hospital company because when people were medevaced they tore their flat jacket off and threw it in a pile they threw their weapon in a pile their helmet in a pile and that was all medevac with people all the time the only thing that wasn't medevac was the magazines that went in to carry the rounds because guys needed extra magazines in the field so my weapon was from somebody who had been severely wounded obviously because it was full of blood i remember that vividly i'm 19 years old at the time um the experience for me was i had no clue whatsoever what i was getting into none the 15 mile drive well if even if i was going to shoot at something i wouldn't know what to get what to shoot at i i didn't even know what that meant when he said lock and load it's 15 miles to go it's not secure i kept looking for something but even then i wouldn't have known what to do i'm so green and naive i don't know and my squad leader's name was corporal klinger corporal klinger introduced me to the rest of the men in the platoon or the squad excuse me which is 12 guys they seem very cold to me because i'm new i don't know anything but then klinger sat me down on my cot and he started to brief me on things that needed to be that i needed to know and before he left though he left me with these words that i never forgot he said moraine you need to understand something and you need to understand it now you will get hit it's not a matter of if it's not a matter when it's just going to be a matter of how bad but you're going to get hit so you need to know that and he walked i i sat there on my cot emotionally thinking about my future and i was thinking about what i'm gonna have to do to survive the next 13 months because i know i've got to prove myself somehow to these guys i was indoctrinated into combat on the 27th of december 1967 basically a month after i got there now i had been on patrols and been on ambushes but never once did we make any kind of contact that came on operation auburn which was a quite a large operation involved several battalions and my first firefight was so fast and the adrenaline rush that i received out of that i can't even begin to explain to you but it's it's it's survival it's fast it's loud and people are yelling in that particular setting we were in a rice paddy and we were down behind a dike which is about three feet tall maybe and uh the machine gun rounds were literally pinging dirt off the top of the of the uh dike and we would we would lift up and fire our weapons into the tree line and i had no idea what i was firing at none i i just know that that whole experience which didn't last very long maybe 10 minutes at the most was such a confused high adrenaline type experience for me but the end result was i had been indoctrinated into combat and the people that i was serving with that i had to prove myself to knew that i could do what i was brought there to do on january 30th about a month later which was the start of the tet offensive which we didn't know we were our company was sent out to a position that supposedly there was over 200 soldiers enemy soldiers on the end of a peninsula ready to rocket the da nang air base we pinched them and had them trapped on the end of that peninsula that night when we threw artillery on top of them they came over top us literally in waves you could hear the whistles blowing which meant move and they started running and they would run by us we ended up killing 102 and captured 88 the next day there were 17 bodies piled up in front of the foxhole i was in along with two other people the very first person i killed in my life was that night and one day came daylight shame and everything was settled down i walked over to this young man and looked at his body and um he was very young very young we searched their pockets he had a sock filled with rice his pack had been blown apart and um for me the first personal what they identify as a personal kill was a experience that is part of my ghost of war yeah it's it's a face i see okay it's a face i see when our battalion moved from fubai which was up north towards the dmz just south of the dmz we went down to a base camp called anwar and that base camp in the arizona territory had an area called genoa island which was a really not an island it was just surrounded by rivers that when they flooded it became an island so it was referred to as genoy island but it was infested with nba soldiers north vietnamese army soldiers they hated marines because that was our area and there was one particular spot that we all called dodge city because every time you went there it was a shootout there was just no question about it um we got to the point where when the platoon sergeant or squad leader said we're heading to the island we all knew where we were going and whether we were choppered in there or whether we walked in there it made no difference because somebody somebody was going to die and we knew that we knew that i was a rifleman when i went to vietnam meaning i did the same thing any old grunt did and i got tired of walking point tired of it i only walked point three times but i walked point enough to know that this was not the place to be and i walked it one time at night and after that i told my squad leader i want to carry the radio because nobody wanted to carry a radio it weighed 23 pounds it carried a lot of responsibility you were a target and i understood all that but i decided i don't want to be on point anymore so i'll carry the radio my responsibilities at that time as a squad radio operator with the squad leader i moved up to the platoon commander's radio operator and then eventually became a company commander's radio operator when my lieutenant was wounded and my responsibilities as a company commander radio operator i was a senior radio operator at that time basically you're in charge of medevacs you can direct artillery fire you support your company commander in any way shape or form you're basically his secretary you take his messages you do the things that need to be done in communication with the battalion commander there's a second radio operator that goes with the company commander and he communicates with the company lieutenants that are part of each platoon okay so my job as a senior radio operator was to make sure all the radios were constantly working no matter where they were at and at the same time bear the responsibilities of being with that company commander and doing the things that needed to be done on february 29 1968 our company platoon second platoon and i was the lieutenant saul's radio operator went on a routine patrol that day and we were to be returned back to that hill overlooking highway one which we were holding security for but we had by four o'clock that afternoon we had originally gone on that patrol because way city which was attacked into tet offensive there was a lot of nba soldiers that were coming down through happy valley and ashaw valley and they were working their way back into cambodia and they were coming near our area and we were going out there to try to intercept them find them if we could for some unknown reason at the time my lieutenant took off running up a hill and i took off after him it was just a bald hill and another guy came with us doug henson and before we could catch the lieutenant there was this huge explosion and he had stepped on a bouncing betty it blew him apart and laid him up on a rock his legs were literally shredded and he's alive doc dixon gets up there and when he when we're all there somebody else steps on another bouncing betty and that one comes out of the ground and just white smoke and lays there as a dud then we started looking around and we could see these three metal prongs sticking up in various places and we realized we were in a minefield but we needed to get our lieutenant out of there when doc dixon looked at uh lieutenant saul he looked at me and my nickname was bird and he yelled at me said bird we need a chopper if we don't get one saul's going to die and before i could go to the frequencies to find the right medevac helicopter frequency i needed to get on i just looked up in the sky and there was a ch-34 chopper flying by slowly and i changed frequencies real quick to see if i could intersect that thing and i caught him and he basically said this is a ch-43 our ch-34 hidden between fubai and da nang and i said if you're who i think you are pitch that bird one way or the other so i can tell and immediately it went to the right and i said we have an emergency medevac i'm in your vicinity i see you i have you in my sight it's ro2 which is a lieutenant i need you to come in and he said i'm just a male bird we have no guns we have nothing i said turn that chopper around and put it on a heading of such and such and when you get close i'll pop smoke as a radio operator you never identified the color of smoke you just popped the smoke pulled a pin through the grenade popped the smoke then they came back to you and said i copy yellow and if it's yellow that's that's a confirmed landing okay he only wanted to know as if it was secure the lz was secure and so forth i lied i literally landed that chopper in what was an unknown minefield at that time i don't to this day no none of us do how we got him on that chopper without stepping on another mine and how that chopper took off and got out of there when we got back to the base camp later that day doc dixon told the company commander because we were both debriefed that i don't think he's going to make it 30 some years later i met lieutenant saul at a battalion reunion in lagrange georgia saul said to me after i told him the story he said what happened i don't even know what happened that day and i told him what happened i couldn't believe it was all these years and he never knew the end result was that he said to me well then you saved my life i said no not really doc dixon saved your life i just got you on a chopper got you out of there and we hugged and we shed tears my decision to go back to vietnam after the first tour and you have to understand that i had been wounded twice i had been in the hospital with malaria for two weeks that's where i got my bloody weapon that's when i realized that's where it was came from was when i went there my company commander at the time told me when i got my orders i was going to go to see school and i was going to be on a ship and i told my company commander i don't want to do this i do not want to be on a ship he said well i tell you what if you come back to vietnam for another seven months i can only extend you seven months you don't have to be in the bush you could be in the rear as a senior operator and take care of radios do that kind of thing hang around the company office i'll make you a sergeant and once you're a sergeant you can then pick your duty station well i probably should have known better but i learned then that there is no such thing as a promise in the military and when i walked in the company company office when i returned first sergeant or we called him top said where have you been you're going out to the bush the guy that replaced you thomas is dead been killed two days ago guerrilla needs a company and needs a radio operator so get your gear together you're heading out uh that was my i guess come to jesus realization that there's no such thing as a promise on june 15 1968 we were in heavy combat with an nva reinforced force uh we had pulled back our position and we had started to call in artillery that would walk its way closer to our lines the artillery was being fired from three miles away and what we didn't realize at the time was that one of those six guns that was firing was calibrated 50 yards short and when we called in danger close which is the last volley to come five of the guns landed where they should have one of them landed five feet from me fortunately i was prone in a downward position laying on my stomach but that single round killed our company commander two lieutenants our company gunnery sergeant and two other marines and wounded several of us that was on june 15th i guess i could tell you that i learned the core reality of war isn't that you're gonna get killed out there is that you're guaranteed you're gonna lose a friend and i believe that i lost friends that day i lost my company commander he died in my arms four months later i was wounded again and this time it came as a result of a special forces unit of the nva north vietnamese army that simultaneously attacked our small company perimeter they hit every single foxhole at the exact same time at one am in the morning and overran our perimeter they killed five and wounded 35 of 23 of us wounded five or killed five and wounded 23 of us that night i guess i thought about my parents and i thought about some of the things that i knew growing up and that is that you don't want to wait to get to know the lord you need to know him now because in combat you're going to want to be on a first name basis when we were in the bush which at the time was normally 15 days at a crack and then you'd come back and get mail or whatever and have a couple days of respite the longest i was ever out was 45 days mail would be delivered into the bush at that time my mail would come in a rubber band and it would be maybe this thick of letters i'd put them in chronological sequence so i could keep them organized when i read them and one day i got a letter from uh it was return address virgil south dakota and uh i read the letter and it was from a girl that i knew when i was just probably five or six years old our parents each of the parents used to get together at their farm and i had no clue why she's why this woman would write me why this girl would write me she was going to south dakota state university at the time and i found out that my aunt marie mentioned to her one day when her and her mother visited my aunt that she said you remember craig you know he's in vietnam why don't you write him a letter well she was dating a guy pretty steady at the time but decided well what you know i can do that so she did when i came back on my first 30 day on 30 days leave between tours i looked her up and i told the couple that we were with who was married at the time that i'm going to marry that girl someday i am and this coming july 17th of this year uh we'll have been married 49 years and um so i guess i held true to my my claim i would read uh della's letters first yes um well again my parents wrote the most letters my mother did but dilla wrote me fairly consistently over time particularly when i got on the drill field in san diego we corresponded a lot back when i was in country she actually came out to visit me while i was there when i married my wife she was a missouri senate lutheran we were married in the missouri senate church in a little town in south dakota but we're today we you know we raised our children lutheran uh we're we're lutherans today and uh we're very comfortable with our religion and our faith and our beliefs do i still have some [Music] followings back to that part of my life i think it's hard not to to some extent because it's really kind of imprinted in you to some degree i thought about it a lot in vietnam i did i knew that there was a verse in the bible that said something to the effect that you must be born again of both the spirit and the water water being baptism and in the mennonite faith you have to be baptized or you are baptized when you are of an age of realization so you're not really baptized as an infant okay like we do in the lutheran church today we baptize our children when they were very young well that really bothered me in vietnam that i wasn't baptized and if i was going to get killed would i go to heaven so to say and so i was when we baptized our son in 1976 is when i got baptized in the lutheran church when i got out of the marine corps the very first thing i wanted to do was get an education and of course get married and i did we got married first della had already graduated from college south dakota state and um i knew what i wanted to do i wanted to go into funeral service and get a degree in mortuary science which i ended up doing but at south dakota state i took some summer school courses because we were married had a child and i needed to accelerate my time in college so i took some summer classes and i took an inorganic chemistry course along with some other ones that summer and the final exam was a two-day exam which i didn't know i never had one so i went the first day the professor was from univer or from wisconsin that came back in the summer to teach and when i got my grades i had it incomplete so i went to the head of the chemistry department at the time and i wanted to have an understanding what happened and he looked at my folder and there was a note there from the instructor and that instructor had said i don't understand craig because he comes to class all the time he's a good student but he didn't show up for the second day so i have to give him an incomplete and i said well i i didn't understand what what what what are my options and he looked at me and he said you know you damn vietnam vets all you look for is a handout he said you get a choice you take the incomplete you write the exam right now or leave this room i said well it's been weeks i said i'd i would like to brush up he said write it today or leave so i sat down and i wrote the exam i i honestly don't know what i got on the exam but i ended up with a c in the course which was not as good as what i had going for me at the time i know that but i was happy but yeah that you know there was protests going on at the time in college in the early 70s nobody i think in my classes knew i was a vietnam vet i knew that these young snot sitting there excuse me those young people sitting there were so immature spending their parents's money trying to decide what it was they wanted to do in life and talking about things they don't have any idea what they're talking about here i said a former marine corps sergeant who had spent 20 months in vietnam chasing an enemy i had trained over 500 recruits in the marine corps to become united states marines and i thought you know you young snots this is all you have to do and uh that's kind of sad in a way but yet that's how i felt i mean i took the high road though because i didn't want to get involved with anything uh i told my wife i said no i'm not i'm not going to these protest things i'm not getting involved i'm not saying anything i'm just going to be my person and nobody knows anything and that's the way i went i should have known though because of a few things that happened early in my life there in college where i was headed when it come to ptsd and that kind of thing i should have identified it then but i didn't when i was dating my wife i had come back from vietnam before we were married and there was one incident that happened that it was an identifying piece for me that told me in it told me i still had the ability in me to do something or to to to harm somebody um he was saying things that were not true about vietnam and it had me to a point where i was really frustrated and i slowly reached over and took a ketchup bottle that was sitting on the table and i held it by the neck and i had it in my hand and he's sitting right here and i had intended to take that ketchup bottle and literally whip it right across his face he had me that frustrated i don't know why i honestly don't but i put the bottle down i got up i did not excuse myself i just walked outside and i stood by my car and i cried and cried and cried my wife came out i was shaking not my wife my girlfriend at the time my fiance and what's the matter and i told her i said i i i don't know but inside of me what i knew was i could still kill i could do it and it wasn't but i didn't want to because i didn't want to be in prison and i but i told myself then in that time i know it's still there when i look back on after i got out of the military and up until 1980 if i could compress that i would tell you that in 1973 when we started pulling troops out i thought we failed to contain communism i enjoyed watching not enjoyed but i was overwhelmed by the pow stepping off airplanes running into the arms of those that loved him i did it was emotional for me in 1975 i knew i had been duped because saigon fell and i knew it was all for naught everything we did all the people that were killed in 1977 when 2.7 million american soldiers were slapped right across the face as far as i was concerned by president carter when he gave amnesty to over a hundred thousand draft dodgers i knew then it's for certain we were played for fools but it was in 1980 when all across the country the headlines on newspapers were the iranian hostages and how this country put their arms out their loving arms and wrapped them around these iranian hostages they tied yellow ribbons around trees and they opened their hearts to them ironically it was those same exact yellow ribbons that threw me down into a deep dark hole of depression to the point where i i got to where i'd i felt the only way i could end this whole thing stop seeing faces stop seeing things we did events incidents that happened all that stuff that kept coming and flooding my mind was to end my life and i uh honestly don't i can't tell you today why i got in that car unannounced and drove to a va hospital i was very emotional that day when i walked in there i know that and they turned me over to a psychiatrist and he listened to my story and he said craig i can help you but before i do you have to understand something and that is that everything you think about every day is never ever going to leave you it's going to be with you and as soon as you begin to understand that is when you will begin to start to have some form of a life that's normal as normal as can be i can help you with individual counseling group counseling medicine but i can help you i realized then right then and there that i could i could make something yet in my life i didn't have to give it all up and i i wouldn't be sitting here talking to you i would not be sitting here doing this today if it hadn't been for me or for the help i got at the va today i see a va psychiatrist every three months for council and medicine i have for years and will continue to in 2013 i took my son back to vietnam i had a burning desire to go back after years and years and reading things etc because i wanted to smell the air again i wanted to walk the ground that i so hated uh and i wanted to see just how these people are doing with communism what we tried to stop they are a very loving people they treat you extremely well the country is doing extremely well financially economically they speak of the war with america and the two things that they'll tell you they disliked the most about the war with america and you gotta understand they've been at war for many many years and over their course of time and was the bombing that we dropped on them and remember we dropped more bombs on vietnam which is the size of florida roughly than we did in all other wars put together we dropped more bombs they hated it and the other thing they didn't like was the fact they had no birds no birds because agent orange killed him and we did it today i'm sure there's birds there i think they've probably come back but at that time that was not something they had i had an interesting it's in my book too matter of fact the picture of him is in the front cover and near the front of the book i had a our guide uh matter of fact it's right here on page that's in the preface of the book our guide had mentioned to me he wanted me to meet another bus driver that had been in the north vietnamese army and he had fought against us around the fubai area and i said i i'd certainly meet him that's okay so he brought him over to me and this he was smoking a cigarette and he looked kind of gruff and he had a cover or hat on that had a communist star on it for north vietnam and he had army fatigues on it said u.s army but he had torn the name tag off of who owned it and he did that because he said we are now semi-saint meaning vietnam america the same we no longer fight then he said something to our guide in vietnamese which i didn't understand and i asked twin what he said and he said quote i kill marine maureen just shoot at me i looked at twin and i said twin you tell him from me that he's one lucky son of a twin said i can't do that i said yes you will you tell it so he did and uh the look on this gentleman's face was not real pretty he wasn't happy with what i had said when we walked away my son said to me how'd that go dad i said not very good not very good the book came about actually when i had cancer i developed cancer in 2015. and actually it was two or three years before that that i decided i needed to write a book and put things down on paper and i did it because of my children i did it because i thought i could heal my ghosts of war because other veterans said if you write things down and psychiatrists and psychologists told me if you just put things on paper it'll help you i took that literally thinking it might go away but i found out that's not true and i did it for posterity reasons for helping people okay but what really triggered it was i had read a quote one day from a world war ii veteran that really put things into perspective for me because i never felt guilty but yet i wondered why why am i living why am i not part of 58 317 names chiseled in black granite and i bet you every veteran that's ever been in combat has asked themselves that question this quote was combat is fast it's unfairly cruel and it's dirty but it's designed to be that way because it imprints in your brain for those that are fortunate enough to survive what happened so that they can go home and tell other people who just might want to try it when i realized what that was and what he was saying it fit me to a t and it precipitated me putting things on paper it took me one year to lay the footprint for my book it took me two years to do research and it took me two years to write it and most of those two years were in 15 16 and 17 when i had my serious cancer going on and my cancer started in my appendix went to my colon i had a major operation for a bowel repair and then it metastasized to my liver and i had part of my liver taken out but yeah i wrote my book during most of the time when i had cancer that's when i did a lot of the writing take my mind off of that as much as i could but that world war ii quote is really what triggered me i believe people have often asked me why the title and the title comes from people always saying to me for years craig i didn't know you were in vietnam and i usually saw them the dates that i was there but 15 minutes ago is the unspoken answer to the question i've often said and i mentioned this when i speak to my various groups if i was a light bulb and every time i had a thought about vietnam i would flash or come on i think everybody including myself would be dumbfounded by that i know that may be hard to believe but it's true it was like a jail sentence you can't leave you can't go anywhere and who you ever think you who in whatever you think is and whoever you think is your friend is probably your enemy quite frankly the longer i was there and the more i started seeing the abuse of drugs and racial tensions and all that and having experienced our own people's short rounds and friendly fire and things like that i began to fear my own people as much as i did the enemy and that's a bold statement but it's true you see one of the things i took out of vietnam and i've always had it i have it to this day is that one of the most unpredictable things in life is going to be human emotion human emotion people do things under emotional stress under duress love uh hatred they do things that they would normally not do but compound that with giving them a weapon in live ammunition and a legitimate reason to kill somebody and get away with it absolutely it was a fear i carried with me all through my time in vietnam it's probably why a lot of vietnam vets today they don't trust many people i trust my wife explicitly and my children but that human emotion thing is pretty tough for me now that you have met me i will guarantee you if you went through that book again and if you two read it now that you've met me it'll mean more to you the people that have not not because of who i am but because to know the author and to sit and talk with the author it does make a difference karl marlantis is one of my favorite authors and he's written two books and i quote him a lot in my book i think his greatest quote and i i would i would want that in the documentary that we do and i'm going to give you that quote right now okay uh carl marlantes is my favorite author and he's written two books but one of the books that he wrote is his memoir called what it's like to go to war and he opens that book with this cost quote warriors deal with death they take life away from others normally that is the role of god asking young 19 and 20 year old warriors to take on the role of god without adequate psychological and spiritual preparation can lead to damaging consequences what's important about that is that the marine corps trained me in every way shape or form to be a warrior i for 20 months close to 20 months killed enemy soldiers captured them destroyed their weapons destroyed their ammunitions their food we did all of that in the name of communism containing communism and to be trained that way is what the marine corps did and um i lost my train of thought there but the point is that that's that quote meant an awful lot to me it still does because of where it leads me it it i got to the point in my life in vietnam having done all those things where you get to where you become a walking half awake jungle rotten festive zombie is what you are you like all the other guys the guy that stood in the back of that truck over that 50 cal machine gun today he picked me up exactly what he was when you hear people talk about the thousand mile stare in the eyes of veterans it's what it's about they've been there they've done it but you see for those that live and come back to tell their stories gives those who might want to try it a better understanding that's my mission that's where i'm at that's why one of the reasons i wrote the book when i speak at the high school to a literature class i can see the grandeur in their eyes i can see it they want to be army rangers they want to be delta force they want to be marines whatever it is but they don't understand what they're getting into [Music] you

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Id: 1vuN1HJJ7VQ

Length: 55min 41sec (3341 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2022