Leaving All that Behind
Q: How have you learned to deal with the difficulties you experienced in Vietnam?
A: You just have to go on. Go on to the next event you know? It was quite a strange, after being there for a year, meeting all the people, knowing who they were, what they were doing. I went to a wedding, a Chinese wedding. You know the street names, and some of the language, and you start learning things, to have to leave all that behind it pulls on you. There is a tug on you. We can’t abandon these people. They are our friends. So it is a shock and a sad day.
Q: Have you visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial?
A: I was there and I saw it but I didn’t get off the bus. It was a little ways away. There have been three or four of them that have come around. There are two people that I know that are on the wall, Taylor and Glower. They are in the 1963 portion of the wall.
Q: What do you think is the importance of being a patriot?
A: I can’t think if any other country in the world that is more deserving of patriotism than the United States. You compare it to any country that you can think of, who else has put together the technology to go into space. This knowledge, I heard a man on the radio saying that in the last hundred years our knowledge has doubled. The amount of things that we should know about has doubled. And its going to double in the next fifty years and then its going to double again in the next twenty five years. There is this tremendous huge amount of knowledge out there, and there is just no single mind that can handle it all. It’s just overwhelmed with knowledge that we have to deal with.