I've got the right hat on Frank.... I'm Gene McKenna. I've been in Bowdoinham for 32 years. 33 years. I was smelting with my wife Jane. The other night, we got three three smelt. I got drafted in 1968 because I flunked out of college, and my parents gave me a send off. My father said," If they offer to send you to school, go", and my mother said, "you'll be in the brig in six months". I said, Ma, I said, they don't have a brig in the army. Whatever they have for a prison, you'll be in it. So they gave me some motivation. I knew that I was going to get drafted. I was working in a produce department at the local supermarket, and I was just waiting for the call. And my brother, I was in the shower, ready to go to a three to 11 shift at the at the produce department. And my brother came in and said, "Hey, fatso, here's your draft notice". So he was bigger than I was. I weighed at the time, 226, pounds, and when I went to the induction station. You're standing there in your skivvies, and this guy is looking at me, and I went on the scale, and he starts laughing, which I didn't take very, very well. I said, Why are you laughing? He said, Oh, if you were four pounds heavier, you'd be 4F. He said, But don't worry, they'll knock the weight off you. So eight weeks later, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, I lost 66 pounds in eight weeks. 66 pounds in eight weeks. I thought I was going to die. My platoon sargeant. I was the only one from other than south of the Mason Dixon Line in the company. He kind of pulled me under his wing rather roughly. He said, You're going to be on the fat man squad every day, and I'm going to go through the chow line with you. And if you put your hand on anything that's fattening, he ain't going to get it. I'm going to hit you with a stick. So So anyway, he told me. He said, If you pass the PT test, which I flunked terribly the first day. He said, I'm going to bring you to my house for a spaghetti and meatball dinner with a glass of red wine. So guess what? I got the spaghetti dinner. I also got new uniforms. We they lined us all up and said, Okay, everybody, take your belt off. If your pants fell down, you got a new uniform. So I went to Fort Hope, Louisiana, which is the armpit of the world. It seems like the United States Army has a great way of buying real estate. It was full of coral snakes, rattlesnakes, chiggers. You think checks are bad. Where do you see chiggers? Anyway, I saw, I saw my first mini gun in the middle of the night. We were out on our patrol in that ribbon of orange. flame, and that, that sound that you just talked about, I said, What have I got myself into? So my father, I told you, he said, if they offer school go, well, they offered me school. They offered me flight school to fly a helicopter because they were getting shot down, and Brent was policing them up after they got shot down, or I could go to OCS to become a second lieutenant, because they were getting killed on a regular basis. So I couldn't see myself flying a helicopter, which you can hear from about two miles away. So I went to OCS, and I went in at 19 a year and a half later, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant, but I was not old enough to get a drink in the state of Georgia, where I was at Fort Benning, which I found kind of ironic, I was able to lead 30 men into combat, but I couldn't get a goddamn Drink. Sorry about that, but I went to I kept going to school. I went to Airborne School. Jumped out of 37 perfectly good airplanes over the next couple of years. I went to Special Forces school, Green Berets at Fort Bragg. Went to the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Devens in Massachusetts, where I had on my team men who had spent two and three tours in the fifth Special Forces Group, up your guys way, and they told me some really scary stories. They told me that that the fifth Special Forces Group, something called CCN study, studies and observation group, they were studying the Ho Chi Minh Trail, counting Chinese and Russian trucks going down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They had to take pictures of them, because nobody would believe that the Russians were there helping out the the NBA. So they said that they had 100% casualty rate in the fifth Special Forces Group, CCN, 100% you either got shot, you got shot several times, or you got killed. So I said, Oh, this is what I have to look forward to, because I had orders to go to the fifth group. My roommate and I at Fort Devens, we've both had orders to go to the Presidio in California, which is a pretty nice address. Clint Eastwood is the mayor of Carmel, where the Presidio is located, so we figured we were going to be in pretty nice duty learning the Vietnamese. But I ended up in Fort Bliss, Texas, which is a desert. It's right on the border with Juarez, Mexico, which is the murder capital of the world. So we went to the bull fights. Three or four of my pals, Airborne Ranger Special Forces, the cream of the crop of the United States Army in 1970 and one of the guys left when they started sticking the bowl with a pick, a door, pick, a pick, a picardello or something. He left. We thought he went to the to the men's room. Well, he didn't, he didn't come back. So finally the matador came out with the tight pants and killed the ball, and we went out to the gate, and there he was, and he's like the boy next door, blonde hair, blue eyes, handsome guy. So where'd you go? He said, I couldn't watch. Couldn't watch. So what do you mean? You couldn't watch? He said, I got all that blood and everything. Is it? Furthermore, I'm not going to Vietnam, because we all had orders to fly to get to Travis Air Force Base in California, Oakland. And guess what? He didn't show up. So we went to Anchorage, Alaska, two plane loads of GIS, 120 guys in each in our short sleeve khaki uniforms in November in Anchorage Alaska, the first plane load took off down the runway, got halfway down and crashed and burned. Big, big flames. Everybody dead on the plane. So I said to my pal, I said, we're going to be here for a couple of weeks anyway, while they clean up this mess, they took some bulldozers and scraped the wreckage away, and they said, "Okay, boys, let's go". So kind of traumatic, wasn't it? So we got down the runway and we're white knuckles, and I'm thinking, I haven't even got there yet, and all this stuff is happening. So, so anyway, it deteriorated from there. I was an infant infantry platoon leader down in the Mekong Delta. We were there. This is 1970 71 we're turning the war over to the Vietnamese. The problem was they didn't want it. They wanted us to fight it. They just wanted the graft and corruption that went along with the Army system. They would the the Vietnamese officers would take all the rations in the in the weapons for them from their men, and sell them on the black market. And they lining their pockets, and because I could speak Vietnamese a little enough to understand what they were talking about. Brent was went on search and destroy -maybe it was Frank- search and destroy you go out looking for the enemy, you find him, and you beat their pants off. Well, they had a "search and avoid" system. They say, okay, the VC here, a VC there. We'll go down here. So I questioned them. I told him. I said, You lie in Vietnamese, only South. And the guy pulled me aside. He said, Look. He said, You're here for a year. I'm here for the rest of my life. He said, chill out. I said, Okay, so from then on, and I was, I was a lean, mean fighting machine. I wanted to stem the tide of communism. I was brainwashed, but I said, I'm not putting my men at risk. We had a lot of problems with