Recently is that one of our volunteers is good, like has in the past been a college counselor, and I knew that somebody that we were working with had a kid that maybe was going to apply to college, but had mera, so I like call them, and I said, Hey, do you want to get, you know, what? Can we get these two together to sort of make sure they have a plan for success? So, you know, it's stuff like that. It's connecting neighbors. When you have you've got heating fuel and you're getting rid of it. Do you know
...we're recording it so you'll hear it later, Sally.
Good evening, everyone. I am Kate Cutko, and I'm the library director at the Bowdoinham Public Library. I'm pleased to welcome you to I think our third, maybe fourth, annual. (I should keep track of such things), Ice and Smelt Storytelling event.
I'm thankful for the kernel of the idea that was shared with me four years ago when Gene McKenna was volunteering to tell a story that evening, and he asked if a story about Vietnam would be appropriate choice for the event. And we talked about it, and we decided, no, not yet, "but let's come back to that, Gene". So here we are, we came back to it. Frank had begun his effort to keep to create a record of Vietnam veterans, as we have with veterans of other wars, of Bowdoinham folks. And I said, I think this is the perfect time to have our Vietnam storytelling evening.
Before we get into that, I think it would be appropriate to have a moment of silence for our dear friend Calvin Temple, who was one of the best storytellers in town. Yes, could we just have a moment of silence for losing Calvin. ... (silence)...
Thank you.
God Bless Calvin.
Tonight we have the honor of hearing from four Vietnam War veterans, four Bowdoinham men who lived through one of the most complex and controversial conflicts in modern history. The Vietnam War left an indelible mark, not only on those who fought in it, but also on the nation as a whole. For many who served, the experience was a mixture of duty and doubt, pride and pain, camaraderie and conflict
Our storytellers will share their personal accounts that reflect the complicated emotions and memories that they carry with them. To this day, I want to thank each of them for revisiting some old memories like Frank, they are pulling the trunk out from under the bed, some literally, some figuratively, and dusting off old memories that are both difficult and powerful. I know we I speak for you all when I say we appreciate what comes with the process of telling us these stories. Your stories may challenge our perspectives, move us in unexpected ways and remind us of the human cost of war. This is a space for listening, learning and honoring the voices of those who were there. Please join me in welcoming our four storytellers. Frank Connors, Gene McKenna, Ryan Jennings and Brent Zachau.
Welcome, you know, for a week... two weeks, maybe, I've been trying to think of a connection between smelt fishing in Bowdoinham and Vietnam. And it was a reach, but I got one. When I came home, my brother Grant and I went smelt fishing that following winter, and several winters after that, it was just a good place to sit and chat and reflect. Some of you may not know it, but I have a younger brother who was a Cobra pilot in Vietnam, and five or six months, that he was, that he was a Cobra pilot. And I said, why Colorado? And he said, Frank, we were waiting for you to get out so I could go over. So they had a rule. And he was, I think, Alden always grudged me a little bit that, you know, he couldn't get over there just because of one guy living in a hole. So. I wrote some things down...
Welcome folks. I'm Frank Connors. I was born in July 1946 at Yarmouth Maine. It's been my good luck to live in Maine all my life, so far, and to have lived in Bowdoinham for maybe 60 of the best years of my life. In the army, I passed basic training, Advanced Institute training and jump school with honors!.
With honors, volunteered for the airborne and served six to eight months with the 101st airborne in Kentucky, where I worked as a public information officer and made eight jumps from perfectly good airplanes.
I arrived in Vietnam on June 29 1967 was processed in at Camp LBJ, that was, it was Long Binh Junction, which is just outside of Saigon, Long Binh Jail, too. Long Binh jail. Also, that's right, and I was assigned to Alpha Company, second Bat of the 173rd Airborn brigade. And I joined the herd at Dok To in the central highlands. There was a report that the North Vietnamese intended to use their regular army forces for the first time and to try to cut Vietnam in half at the elbow. Can I use that? (...map...) If you look it up, so the DMZ was up here, the red line that separates North and South Vietnam and their their plan was to come through at Dok To and break to the sea and and just move it on down so...The map is going to be up here later, right?
We were dropped in to prevent that. Our basic strategy was deploy and company size search and destroy missions and be used as bait against the North Vietnamese. My first job in country was A M 60 machine gunner. I was big, I was strong, I was stupid... He knows...
26 pounds worth, yeah, and then we got to carry ammo!
Let me explain: an M 60 machine gun fired from a prone position will eject hot brass into your shirt and into your pants. I had little burn marks all over my chest for months after that experience, Next came a radio operator's job working for a company commander.
He was from Georgia. We used to make fun of each other the way we talked like we were from different countries. I became a team leader, squad leader and platoon leader, promoted most often to fill vacancies, not because I was natural born soldier. I was never combat wounded, but had two bouts with malaria, a disease that no doubt saved my life.
Alpha Company suffered heavy casualties. Every member of my squad was lost on the slopes of Hill 875, while I languished in a hospital. My Alpha Company holds the distinction of being the first unit described by name in the American press as annihilated. My editor, friend at the Brunswick record, saw the report, assumed I was gone, and wrote what I'll always consider first rate eulogy.
I was in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, the resignation of President Lyndon Johnson, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the advent of mini skirts in America, and we were winning when I left. I left Vietnam in May 1968, a platoon sergeant with a combat infantryman's badge...
...Almost done ...good thing, huh?
...and various other service ribbons. A week later I'm back in Bowdoinham wondering what's next and waiting to meet Jane!
One last comment, please. My mother saved most of the letters that are sent to her during that year. Some were not discovered until after her death. On the 50th anniversary of my service, I organized all those letters by date and filled a big white binder, and then I did a 40 page synopsis as a Christmas gift for my three grand boys. I always believe that the lasting, the lasting value of my service in Vietnam was that neither of my kids had to serve in the war zone. Now it's for me to worry about my grand boys. Thank you.
The folder that Frank just referenced. We have a copy in the library which is available for circulation, and It's wonderful reading.
Who's going next? Brent.
All right, our stories are really pretty connected.
But Frank came home in May, and I went over in August. Frank started by saying trying to think of some connection to smelt fishing and my story is completely connected to smelt fishing. And like Frank, I was I probably went to college a little bit too early in my life, and
in December of 1967 just before Christmas, I dropped out of Forestry and Wildlife Management School at Orono, and came home knowing full well that I would be 1A immediately,
and Iwent to work at Riverbend camps for the whole winter season, which was a lot longer season than it is now. And I don't know how many of you know Bernard Walentine, but he was a guy that I was scared of growing up, and I ended up going to work for him, and he was the nicest boss I ever had in my life. All during that winter, there was a lot of political discussions going on about everything, and that was partly why I dropped out of school, I think because there was so much going on, was it was hard to be a good student in the middle of all that. And I can remember Bernard telling me, it was this old Bowdoinham farmer, and he was telling me if if you wanted to go to Canada, he said I would not hold it against you. That really surprised me, because he was a pretty conservative person, and his son and I were the same age, and the Son also went over and but before smelt fishing was even over, the draft grabbed me. I think I was only took 'em six weeks to get a hold of me. That's how many people they were pulling in at that time. And it says here culture shock, and that really was what I hit, you know, and we were, we were young. I mean, I wasn't 19. That's the average age of soldier in Vietnam, but I was, I was 20 by the time I went in and I
I think it was March something. Went down to went to Fort Dix for a basic training, and I met a guy from Vermont who was a lot like me, came in on the same day, and we went through the same basic training, lived in the same barracks, and we both got sent to we finished basic, and we both got sent to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the Airborne. I don't know, did you go to Fort Bragg?
"AA all the way!", yeah.
Well, unlike other people, though, I grew up with Bruce Berry right here in Bowdoinham, and he told me (he had just gotten out of the army.) And he told me, if you volunteer for anything, I'm never going to speak to you again. And I took that to heart and managed to get through Fort Bragg, without going airborne or signing up for pretty much anything stronger than K.P. and my buddy Larry. He was from Rutland Vermont. We both came from the same kind of families. Our parents grandparents were farmers. We were brought up on farms, and be the soldiers that we may have played when we were kids.We finished our training at Fort Bragg without either one of us what I'd gotten myself into, and I was, I was felt like loneliest person on earth sitting there on my duffel bag, wondering what's next. And lo and behold, Larry and I got sent to the same we got sent up to the Central Highlands, right up pretty close to where Frank was and
fourth entry Infantry Division, and we became the two medics for the recon platoon for the Fourth Infantry.
And we were part of the first of the "10th Cav". We were in D troop of the "first of the 10th Cav", which the symbol was buffalo. You know the Bob Marley song, Buffalo Soldiers? Well, we were a remnant of that. We happened to be white. That's all Buffalo Soldiers originally was an all black outfit in the Civil War. So we were kind of proud of that, being that unit. And I. He and I both got sent to the the first of the 10th cavalry was four troops as A, B and C troop, and those were tanks and armored personnel carriers and infantry to go along with them, but it was kind of a romantic idea to be in the helicopters. And so we told the doc, we if there was an opening there, they happened to have an opening for two medics. Well don't know what caused that? And so we both went there at the same time and joined D Troop, and our platoon was called Aero Rifle, and we were the reconnaissance platoon. So we got there and and just trying to think how fast things changed. We basically just started flying missions whenever we'd go wherever they sent us. We're up in a near a city called Pleiku way up in the central highlands, not too far from Dak To where Frank went, and being in the helicopter squadron was D troop was a pretty amazing experience. The commander of D troop was a guy named Major Glenn, and he was incredible. I think he's, he's the reason most of us came home alive, because he really watched out for his for the whole troop. He flew his own Cobra. So the way that troop operated was, it was kind of beautiful in a way, even though it was a war thing there was, there would be two little light helicopters, light observation helicopters. We call them loaches. And how a typical mission would start is we would go out and we used there were airstrips all over the place, in different parts of the area around us, where they had set up special forces camps in the previous years. So what we would typically do for our mission would be to go, if there was some reconnaissance from the long range recon people, which were small groups that would go out looking to see what's going on, they'd gather all the intelligence. And if there was an idea that something was going on somewhere nearby, they would send us to the Special Forces airstrip nearest we flew in four helicopters called slicks, and there would be five of us in each one, and there's three on the floor and two on the seat, and then behind us were two door gunners, and then the front was the pilot, and what they call the Peter pilot. So we'd go to those airstrips, and we would sit there waiting to see what's happening. Meanwhile, there's a couple of cowboys in those little loaches, and they're going around looking to see what's going on, and sometimes they were more aggressive than some were more aggressive than others, about what they were finding like they'd see movement down in the jungle somewhere, and they'd maybe they'd see a bunker or something. They'd hover over it and drop a grenade out the window, and that would usually get quite a response. So we had one guy. The name was Captain King. He was from Texas. He got shot down seven times, and he lived through all seven of them. The last time he got shot down, he broke his back, and we were so relieved that he got sent home. There was only one guy in a whole outfit that would still fly with him when that happened. But each time he was he was just so lucky. The last time that he got shot down, it was up near some big mountains, and he went in, and he was doing that trick of being a little too close. They came out, and that's when he got hit. But he managed to pull up the stick and. Just kind of get up over the nearest ridge and down over and come to find out, he was hovering above one portion of a brigade size NBA regimen. I'm not quite sure how many guys that is. That's 1000s. It adds up to about 1000 Yeah, you're right. They were come they were on all the hillsides there. And so we're sitting there on the airstrip, and all of a sudden the radio guy says, "Okay, boys, Captain King's down again". And time for us to go in. So that's where the Cobras. I forgot to mention, there's also behind the loaches. There was always two cobras in the air. Well, if they weren't in the air, they were on the airstrip right nearby. They could, they could get up in a minute or two. And there were also fighter jets from Thailand. There's a gentleman up back here that could tell you all about all of that stuff. They would be in the air in no time, and come in if you needed to call in really heavy support.
And our commander was in his Cobra up above the other two Cobras. So the minute Captain King lifted the stick and went up over that ridge and crashed. The other two cobras came in heavy and they had how many rockets, 52 rockets on each one? I think I don't know. They came in. They had mini guns. They could shoot a bullet into every square foot of a football field every minute. You don't even hear the separate fire. That's all you would hear at nighttime. You just would see a clear line of tracers, and every fourth bullet was a tracer, and you'd see it going all over the place. So they came in, and right behind them, I think some some fighter jets from Thailand came in and they dropped a whole bunch of napalms. So there's like a forest fire going around there. And right underneath that they would put us in, and we had to secure Captain King, and he was alive, and so was his helper, and so we managed to get him out almost at the same time we went in, and, of course, we got left there to secure the area. But by then, there was so much firepower that was what kept us alive, was we had so much firepower behind us that we could survive stuff like that, and we moved pretty fast, so we had to stay there long enough to get we had to stay there and do reconnaissance ourselves and take care of a lot of details, like finding the long range recon team that first discovered that complex, and we found them and brought them out, and so we kind of did that sort of thing for nine months. When somebody gets shot down, we'd have to go find them. If they'd lose contact with a long range team, we'd have to go find them and and also, if they were getting ready to do an operation, they would always put us in first to secure it, and then we'd get everybody else in there, and then we'd go to another location and do the same thing again. Well, after about nine months it was up, there was a change in command, and most of the guys that I had been with since I came in country were rotating out and getting ready to go home and and then I got malaria, and I was the platoon medic I took every pill that you're supposed to take, because I was in charge of trying to make sure that everybody in my outfit took them. There were anti vaxxers Even then. And I used to ride them pretty hard, and I had to make sure everybody's shots were up to date. And then sometimes I had to sneak up on them. I had one guy that was so he came to us from long range recon. I mean, that's, that's the heaviest duty job in the whole outfits. But he was scared to death of needles. I caught him coming out of the out of the shower and Base camp and got 'im.
But yeah, I ended up with we had a new commander, Major Glenn was gone, and everybody was scared to death that he was gone. He got replaced by a colonel who had come from the War College, and he missed a few pages on how outfits like ours worked. And so we weren't being treated the same anymore. And my buddy Larry, when I was while I was in hospital with the malaria, that'll hit you pretty hard. I think Frank and I both had the kind that if you don't die, you don't ever get it again. Think I was, it was like Christmas Day. They of 19...of 1968 they flew me to Cam Rahn Bay, which was kind of like going to a resort right on the shore, and I was so I had lost 20 pounds in 11 days from they had wicked fevers. You'd be normal one minute, and then in 15 minutes, your fever would be heading for 104 and beyond. And they would pack you in ice and turn big fans on and to keep you until they got the medications working. Quinine, I think, was what they used. Oh, while I was in the hospital, my friend Larry was, he was talking to the doc and just telling them, you know, things, things aren't the same as they used to be. Is there something else we could do now? We've been at this long enough to get a little bit of a break. And so there were outfits called C.A. Teams - civil affairs. And basically, there were two medics, a political officer was usually like a staff sergeant. There was a supply person and a captain to be in charge, and one more guy who's head of nondescript duties. So we went to Montagnard village, which is the tribal people. Probably the closest thing that I could describe would be the equivalent to the American Indian. Montagnards were not treated really well by the Vietnamese or anybody for that matter. But they, they were really good, honest people, and they, they fought well. They were, they were good to have around you. Usually, when you went to do reconnaissance, that the two Americans and a Montagnard, they would wouldn't pick anybody else if they could help them. So Larry and I ended up moving into a Montagnard village. It was a consolidation of four small villages, which were all pulled together for their own try to get them in so for their own safety, and also to try to win them over. And they, I think they did like us. The South Vietnamese people didn't treat him very well either. So we moved into the village, and he and I both having carpenterial experience, we built a makeshift building with metal sides and metal roofing, and the front half was like a little mini hospital, and the back half was for a school, and they were trying to get a teacher there for the kids. There were a lot of kids in the village, villages, and the kids were fascinated by Americans more so than the adults. And. And so basically, Larry and I had this little hospital, and we would teach them basic hygiene of various kinds and try to deal with anything that came along. And they all had, almost all the kids had worms. I'm not exactly sure what kind they were, but they were not nice. And we had bottles and bottles of what's called piperine titrate, and we had all kinds of medical supplies. You know, you could always get anything you wanted for supplies, pretty much from in the base camp, which was three or four miles away, and we'd line them all up and they'd come up and eat each one. Of course, you got to be sanitary about it, so we didn't want to spoon feed them. And we had these 10 CC syringes, and we'd fill them up like squirt guns. And the kids loved it. They'd line up and they'd come up and give them each a shot, you know, and that was their worm medication. And we'd give them soap, and we just showed them everything we could think of to make life better. And the other the other things were, we were we had another, another worker that was working on getting them to use improved rice seed Rice, Rice plantings, so they'd have a better harvest. And can't remember if there was a well drilled or dug, but a well that provided enough clean water because there wasn't much clean water anywhere. They didn't have bathrooms. Yeah, this would be a whole family's house. So there were a lot of these. They were all in rows. And there's probably eight or 10 people lived in that, in that, and then in the middle, they've got a whoop, yeah. Put it into the audience. Those are their steps. There was a hole in the roof up here. I didn't happen to put one in there. I found this at the recycling bar and all this stuff, and just made this with some hot milk glue when Ivy was in third grade Bay. They'd have a fire going in right in the middle of the floor in a wooden house. They'd put some dirt under it, and you know, you hope it doesn't catch. I don't remember a house ever burning down while we were there. That's pretty good. And so they all lived in those houses, and we lived right in the middle of a big group of those houses in our own little compound, and we were basically underground sandbags and stuff and stuff over the top for our own safety. I remember I had a little girl one one time she had third degree burns all over her arms. There were scars from when I like, when she came in, when the other kids got her to come in, she had fresh burns on her, but her arms were was had scarred, and they had healed so that she couldn't open her arms anymore. I was trying to figure out, how did this happen? Did somebody do this to her and finally put it together? She was epileptic, and they all had sleep right around the fire, and one of the other kids managed to do enough English to because we kind of in communicating was not easy, and we I couldn't do it now, but we had developed a pretty good way of talking with each other and finding out a lot of stuff.
And it ended up, he said she has fits, and in the night, she rolls over into the into the fire, into the coals. I managed to take her into base camp and get her on Dilantin, which is a pretty good controller for epilepsy. And I. Think for the time that we were there, she was doing better. We would see her, and she appreciated the help. And there were lots of times stuff like that that sometimes it was stuff we couldn't handle, but we always had access to the docks in base camp. We could, we could get a camp driver to take us in there and bring a bring a patient. Was a little hard, because the whole family wants to go, everybody, but we did our best with it.
And then we both signed up for some extra time, because we in spite of the good time we were having, we really wanted to not be in the Army anymore. And we extended 53 days each of us, and we came home on the same day, same airplane, just the way we went over. And when I landed at Logan Airport and got out, I was walking through the terminal, and I met another Bowdoinham person, Frank Skelton, he was on his way over and shook his hand, and I said, Good luck. Don't volunteer for anything.
Thank you.
None of us were all that scarred, but we've got a few furrows in our brows.
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
booby traps. They call them EODS now improvise improvised explosive devices. We had booby traps back in the day, and we had casualties. So I had the Vietnamese walk point so they find the the booby traps. I didn't lose any men. I had casualties. I went to the to the hospital to visit one of my guys who got shot up and who's there, but a gal was a nurse at Fort Devens. She and her pal and my roommate and I were in the same bachelor officers quarters, so we had a sort of reunion. And anyway, the same day that my roommate was initially said he was killed in a place called Chi Lang on the Cambodian border. My daughter was born in Fort in the Hospital at Fort Bliss. So you talk about an emotional rollercoa roller coaster. You think you those 20 body bags laying there, and my friend was supposed to be in one of them, and I they've been laying there for a couple of days, and you can't believe the smell. You just can't believe it until you've experienced it. So I wasn't going to go open in those 20 body bags looking for my pal come to find out. Two years later, I found out he wasn't in the bag. He had been wounded and taken prisoner over the border into Cambodia, and if anybody is in Leominster Massachusetts there, is a VFW hall that's in his honor. Gerald Francis Kinsman the 3rd, First Lieutenant United States Army. I guess that there was a common thread here. We all didn't do too well in college. So if you got kids, tell them to go to school. And I just, I want to, I want to thank Kate. This has been a wonderful experience. All had common, common memories of what we did. It was a very unpopular war, but I'm the army was good for me personally, losing that 66 pounds, and becoming a man, jumping out of those 37 perfectly good airplanes. I got extra money for it, 110 bucks a month extra. So I'm glad I did it, but I'm paying the price for it a little bit. I crashed in a couple of helicopters and still trying to get some money out of the VA. So with that, I will thank you and thank you .....applause.
I'll get my notes out. You know, this honors me, because this the first time anybody's ever asked me to get in front of anyone to talk about Vietnam. Mm. And I'll be fast, but first of all, I like to thank the women that were there.
They really did a lot. I don't care if you call them donut dollies or whatever. They had all kinds of names, and they were in the war zone, and they didn't have the protection that we did, but they were really there. And I was I was born in Lewiston. I grew up in Leeds and went to Levitt High, and I hated school. I just plan on going to college at all. And I don't know anything about the smelts down here,
but so I decided I was going to go in the military. I had my oldest brother went in the Air Force. My other older brother went to Marines. I says, I'll go in the army. That's a great branch to go into law, really. But so I went into went into the Army, trained at Fort Dix, and from there I went to Fort Kate of Fort Knox and Kentucky tank training. Then I thought I had it made, but you never had it made in the army, I guess. But anyway, it was, it was different. And like these, all these gentlemen was saying it's different when you put your feet somewhere else and not a familiar face. It's kind of scary in some ways. In some way, I like to find different things about things, learn about about things. But I uh, the when I got into tanks, they sent me to Germany. That's pretty good. I guess that was with the second armored cav in Germany. It was with tanks and stuff. So while I was there, as the heck with this. So I volunteered Vietnam different college. And so I was sent to Vietnam, and I got over there, and I was stationed with the 11th Armored Cav, and that was a great outfit, I think. Anyway, I'm here. And so I went there, and I felt like these guys, man, everything stinks around here. Nothing looks familiar. Everything's covered with Sandy orange dust, whatever it was, all over the place. People didn't speak English, and they really didn't like him, and honestly, the culture really shocked me. You could go up a street and see a lady pull a dress up and take a leak, and that kind of scattered me at first, you know, really. And I said, Man, what is this place? And we finally got together, and I met up with a couple other people, and they flew us out to the outfit that I was in, and that was the 11th Cav. And I got there in 67 and they set up camp there in 66 and they're overrun on how many times. And they finally built a good base camp there, and so this good friend of mine, he was Michigan. His name was Mike Ogle. He was a great guy, and we kind of did a lot of stuff together and talked and stuff. And his family was somewhat like mine. He had four or five brothers, and that's what I had. And some would get talking, and we ended up in getting in different battles with an enemy, or whatever you want to call it. And Mike would really get shook up. He'd come over and try to talk to me. They said, Man, I can't handle this. And they keep talking like that. But he did. He made it he made it home. But it was it really cut into his mind a lot, like he did a lot of people. And so we finished there, and I kept in contact with him, and one day they came to Bowdoinham to visit my wife and I and my family. And I thought that was, you know, pretty decent. But a few months after that, he committed suicide. Hmm, and so that was so I kept in touch with his brother. But that kind of ended after a while. But during the times in Vietnam, I used to think this must be the way I have to live. There's no other way to live just this way. And these gentlemen probably say same thing, you know, I'll get up in the morning all dusty and everything and trying to find a drink of water or whatever. And I said, People back home feel like this. And I just it was stuck in my mind, that's the way I had to live. So I accepted that for a while, and then as the time went on, it was a daily routine. Every day I'm not trying to be able to drive my walls or something, but somebody be shooting at you every shoot if you have to shoot them. And that's not the way we grew up. And so, you know, we just kind of put it in our backpacks and walked on, and then I can't even read my notes, but the I seen the choppers going over the buckets of blood, we called it -just steady red tracers going through and then I remember hitting land mines. I remember one time going across this field, and this guy says, don't stop for anything. And I was in a tank. I was driving that tank that day. I think he's going across. You could look across the field. You could see other tanks of personnel carriers. And he says, We can't stop and I'll hear a compound. See something blow up. And then it went I says, Man, I can't I'm not gonna go any further than this. My radio was on. He could hear me talking. That's all right. But anyway, we made it out of there. We made it alive. And I had many, many times I was close calls. But to think about the other things was, was the food we ate, C- rations. And we swapped some C rations because I hated a lot of the stuff, and I hated ham and lima beans. Oh, no. Oh, and that was one, I really hate to
We used to call 'em something else.
It was terrible. But I remember one day I turned 21 I was sitting on this log or something with this other guy, and I said, Here I am 21 eating ham and lima bean. And I hated it, and I couldn't get a beer, because if I was home, I could, but and that was all right. And then we maybe people heard stories of monkeys in base camps. We had a little monkey. We kept him on a chain and stuff, and when we came back from the field or something, we'd take him out and get him drunk, such an ever sad, poor little guy, and we try to wake him up the next morning, he wouldn't even want to wake up. He'd be very, very grumpy, pretty ugly about everything. But he worked out his name was Joe, and he bit someone, and they said we had to shoot him and get rid of him because he probably had rabies. But we didn't do that. I think we let him go, whatever. But I, I really, really like the kids over there. It was a sad place. If you look in the country just like, what's going on the world now, and seeing these little kids running, they don't want what the heck is going on? Everything is blowing up. Everything is gone, and that half of them are also so I always try to get along with kids, but you had to watch out for them. Yes, they would throw a hand ready at you just as fast as an adult would... They'd have a little bomb, "come here, come here". And you didn't want to go there, but if you did it, could it be the end of it, or could it be the beginning? I don't know.
Give you a coke with ground glass in it. Yeah, yeah.
And I got hurt a couple times, but that's all right too. I made it home and met my wife in Bowdoinham. Yay. FiftyFour years ago, and I'm still here, but anyway, that's about it. ...
Frank was really hoping that if you had some questions, that these gentlemen might answer them or respond. I don't know what time it is.
I'm curious why you call it "a really good plane". Both of you said that.
"perfectly good plane". Yeah, when I when my when my son was about six or eight, he and I were walking across the field on a C130 took off at the Navy base, and I pointed at it, and I said, "Look Miles,. I used to jump out of planes just like that." And he stopped and he looked at the plane, and he goes, "Why, Dad?", I don't know what your story is. That's why
110 bucks a month.
Yeah, it's gonna land in about 15 minutes.
When I was at Fort Bragg, they used us as guinea pigs, because we were there to go to Special Forces school, and they had us jumping out of c1 41 which is a jet aircraft. It's equivalent of a 727, that we would take to Florida. The c1 30, they could slow down because they were propeller driven. Well, the c1 40 ones, they opened the door, and usually you would, you'd have a static line that you connect it to the airplane, and you jump out, and you grab the skin of the aircraft and jump out to get away from the aircraft. Well, the c1 41 was going about 500 miles an hour instead of 100 and it sucked you out. You never got a chance to grab and then it bang it down the fuselage. One guy got a broken collarbone, or I got bruised up and everything. But again, you know, 110, bucks a month, then the next day, it says we got a better airplane, A, c5, A, which you can drive two or three tanks into. And that went even faster. It was even bigger, and same results. So they learned from all the injuries that we, that we sustained, that they had to put a spoiler on the leading edge of the door to keep to break the wind, to allow you to get away from the aircraft. So the army had a lot of good training that a lot of us went through. And they had, they had a policy that any any man, whether he weighed 150 or 250 could get by with two canteens of water a day in, you know, Fort Campbell, Kentucky, or Fort Polk, Louisiana. All the bases training bases were down south. We lost men at Fort Campbell to heat stroke because they didn't have any trucks to take us out to the rifle range. So we had a march to the rifle range in 100 degree heat and helmets, and, you know, all your gear so, so I think they they're more enlightened these days, but we'll see.
Thank you all for your service, I'm curious ...sounds like you served at different times in the war... What it was like coming home ... and how you were received.
I'll be candid, I changed into my civvies as quickly as I could, because the the the what's the right word, the reception that GI's got coming back, particularly in California, people would spit on me. So I changed changed out of my uniform and into into my civvies as quickly as I could in San Francisco, and that was sad, because that was probably the biggest, the biggest downside of serving in an unpopular war, there was no ticker tape parade when we came home. There was people spitting on you, people asking you how many babies you killed. And I had a I had a guy in my platoon who had been in the country 39 months straight. He had gone on R and R to Bangkok. And Bangkok has a certain reputation for loose morals, if you will. And I said, Oh. I said, you, Doc, you like the you like the ladies over there. He's Oh no. He said, I went there to hear a toilet flush because he hadn't heard a toilet flush in 39 months because we didn't have any toilets. So we were in a rice paddy one time on a search and destroy mission, and Doc is beside me, and these two figures with the conical hat made out of straw black pajamas, which is what the Viet Cong wore. They're running across the field, so he gets down with his M 16, he's going to shoot 'em. And I had field glasses, binoculars. I look- two little girls with with school books, so I put my foot on his on the rifle, and the barrel went and bullets went into the into the mud. He was going to kill him. So I felt pretty good about saving those two little girls and whoa be tied somebody was going to spit on me when I got back, because the a lot of other things that I wasn't proud of, but that was something that I was and, you know, I will, maybe I'll get into the pearly gates because of that.
Frank has a has a story about coming home. Sure,
Sure, I came home in 68 and it was, it was the spring that Martin Luther King had just been killed and and leading up to Bobby Kennedy being killed and, and so it's kind of tough trying to be in American. And there had been some incidents at the gate at Travis. And so what they started to do in 68 they would they segregated in Vietnam. They'd segregate the combat people from some of the support people. And we were flown into Fort Lewis, Washington, and we flew in the middle of the night. We were we were separated, meaning put out, taken out of the service, and given civilian clothes. And we also had a green dress greens uniform, and we were told not to put it on till we got through Chicago, and I put mine on in the toilet in Portland airport because my mother was picking me up. ,
There was a gentleman who didn't want to speak tonight, but his wife told me a story about coming home that I thought was very poignant. I'll try to get through it. She described that she and her husband decided to visit the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC in the 80s. And they were from Bowdoinham, and they were little disoriented in the city, and couldn't quite find where the memorial was. And they walked up to the area, and they saw a serviceman at the post there guiding people toward the memorial, and he approached this veteran and said, "Welcome home, soldier." And she said it was the first time anyone had ever said that to him.
I remember coming home and seeing like big sheets, I think, but people had written on that painting on that- "baby killers", and that's when I thought, something's something wrong here. But it was, I thought it was kind of rough in certain places.
When I was at Fort Benning, going to officers, Candidate School, Lieutenant William Calley, the purveyor of the Me Lie massacre, was under house arrest at Fort Benning and that kind of brought it home to to what, what kind of bad things that occurred over there. But, you know, people talk about the "fog of war". It's it's true. It things are not cut and dry, things, things we didn't know who the enemy were most of the time. Somebody who would give you a haircut today, it would be well, the helicopter that I crashed in the Viet Cong put a hand grenade in the in the cowling of the engine on the base the night before with a rubber band around it, and they sprinkled a little gasoline on the rubber band so eventually it would deteriorate. The handle would snap over and it blew up, blew the engine off the side of the helicopter 2000 feet over the Mekong River, which is like the Mississippi times three. And so it was bad things happen, but they happen. Bad things happen in Iraq and Afghanistan and World War Two and Korea, because war is wars. It is itself. I Nick
I was wondering if any of you ever had a desire to go back. I've heard many, many of the Vietnam veterans have gone back to sort of present day Vietnam. Have any of you ever had a desire to go back or or not?
My only, only desire to go back is I like to go to the Hill eight seven five, and I like to go to Dak To, and I like to go to Pleiku. And I don't think any of those places are on the on the tourist list.
I have a friend. ...
Can I go ahead and
You know, Kate's put together a list of Vietnam books, and the one you ought to read is called "The Things They Carried". Yes, it's about a, it's about a guy who takes his daughter back, and that's all I'll tell you. But it's, it's, it's a good it's mandatory reading for anyone who's interested in this stuff. What's the title? Again, The Things They Carried, wonderful book, Tim O'Brien,
and there's a new book about the women in Vietnam, the nurses who, whoever did the research. That book is spot on the first thing you the first thing I experienced when we got into tantanu, the place smell like an outhouse. The whole country smell like an outhouse. And that, that hits you, and then the people squatting in the in this, this sidewalk, doing their business. But that, that,
what's the name of the book, "The Women". The women, yeah, great book. I had, I had a friend who married a Vietnamese gal, and actually it her mother was Vietnamese, and she's half Vietnamese. Her father was a GI they got married over there and came home anyway. She went back a few years ago, started in Hanoi and went all the way down to what used to be Saigon, now as Ho Chi Minh City. And she put some pictures on Facebook. There's skyscrapers where we you have trouble driving a Jeep on the road from bomb craters, and so it's certainly changed a lot. But I thought about going back, but we're going to go to Iceland instead.
I'm here kind of like in a memorial for a lifelong friend. And I don't know if you guys remember, I'm sure you when we were kids in San Diego, but when you got in trouble with the law, you go before the judge, and the judge would say, Hey, son, I know you're obviously we both know you're obviously guilty here, but if you want to join the military, we'll let the whole thing go. John took that - he bit the hook on that one, and he went over to Vietnam, and he was unfortunately a door gunner, and he got shot down twice, but the second time, he lost his left leg and half the other foot, and he was that friend of mine, lifelong friend. I knew him before I knew my wife for 51 years, and he was that friend that was such a good friend your wife hated him. So, yeah, we were very, very tight. He was a great guy. And unfortunately, the Agent Orange took him down a couple of years ago, but he told me one day, he said, You know, I hate to even think about it, but I have been in the VA. System for 56 years. It was in the VA system before the passed, and I just like to say rest in peace. Staff Sergeant and John Dana.
Amen.
Thank you,
Kate, yeah. Two more stories.
You got it. You got to put the hook two.
I had a I had a guy delivered to me in in handcuffs and leg iron the MPs grab them in Florida, where everybody goes, when they dessert, either go to Florida or Canada, and anyway, they delivered him to me and handcuffs. Here you go. LT, so they took it off. He had deserted. It was gone for several months, and they brought him from Florida to California to to Vietnam. And I said, Okay, wise guy, you're going to carry the machine gun. M, 60- 26, pounds, and then another 26 pounds of ammo. That's a lot, and it's cumbersome. It did have a handle on the top, but my he turned out to be my best soldier. He was ruthless with that machine gun. He would lay, lay down a base of fire, and God, God forbid you were downrange of that guy. And I have bail him out of jail a couple of times. He got a little rowdy downtown, but, but he was, he was a good soldier. And then my, my roommate, Jerry, he was he had the choice between two years in the Army and two years in jail because he rode his Harley Davidson motorcycle into a nightclub in the combat zone in Boston, and he turned out pretty well. He went to OCS after that and airborne and and special forces. So there was a lot of those two years in the army or two years in jail. I had many of them in our in our platoon, but they, they all, they all did their job, and some of them came home.
So any more
questions? I heard a lot about Agent Orange, and I wonder
what was I have a friend Francis Smith, his job was to load, to wait around and 55 gallon drums in larger containers of the stuff loaded onto a c1 23 is which is similar to c1 30 prop plane, and then spread it out the back of a they have a cargo ramp. They dumped it out the back of the cargo ramp on the vegetation along the canals and the rivers. Well he he went on, he came back. He started a plumbing and heating business down in Cape Cod. Had all kinds of medical issues. He went on his own, own nickel, down to Washington, DC, to do tests to see whether or not the agent Orange had affected him. And guess what? The army said, Nah, you don't have any problems. Well, his kids have had problems, and his grandkids have had problems. And I don't have any love for the VA, I'm sorry, but that was, it's like Roundup on steroids. It killed everything to take away the the Viet Cong the NVA, would build bunkers right along this, the edge of the canals and the rivers so that they could ambush any river boats with John Kerry coming by. And so they'd spray the Agent Orange, kill all the vegetation, and we would go in with c4 which is plastic explosives, and blow up the bunkers so that we deny them the access to those. So it's bad stuff and but it was necessary. Again, the fog of war, you do what's necessary.
So after, after they've, they've, it's kind of like crop dusting or something? And then would people going in afterwards, like the soldiers get affected?
That'd be me.
It's not very different from the spray the highway crews used to use while we were waiting for the school bus. Yeah.
Yeah, please.
I want to close with this is the book that I it's at the library.
The M 60 was that guy stupid?
No, he was stupid to get caught
big and strong, yeah. Anyway, I won't try that again. I was just standing my record. But this is the book, and there is a copy in the library, and it was, it was a thing that I put together from my letters home. And I just want to, I think this might be fun to close with this. I just Do y'all remember there was talk back in the in the 60s about Sugarloaf and Saddleback, getting together and getting the Winter Olympics in Maine? Any of you old enough to remember that? Anyway, my mother sent me a clipping about that and I thought that was a great idea, so I told herself. And then I said, "that was a very interesting newspaper story. Thanks. Keep them coming. I'm not sure I can imagine the guys at Sugarloaf and Saddleback actually working together. But well. And then I went on to something else. And I said, How are things going? Really? (This is a request from my mother to me.) Tell me, do you want to know? Really? I get mad from time to time, and you'll hear about it, but I'm sure it will add to your worries if I were to burden you with what's really going on over here . We're fighting a war, things have to be bad. It's nothing, it's nothing that will damage me for life. This stuff will make me just that much more able to cope with, ...with life with Jane? (laughter)
" ...cope with any problems that I have later in life".
