“I CRY EVERY TIME I THINK ABOUT IT”
Benett: Is there anything that you want to talk about?
Randy: I would like to tell you the most disappointing incident that ever happened to me. Because I still don’t understand it. I don’t know why it happened to me. It has very little to do with the war…it has everything to do with the war. There were displaced… you can’t imagine what it would be like if war broke out here and a foreign country came to chase rebels around the United States. People would be displaced, your house could have been blown up, your school could have been destroyed in a bombing. And then, you’re out on the road. You’ve got the clothes on your back and maybe a bag of groceries and your toddler. And you’re lucky if you can find a refugee camp.
So, anyway…you’re allowed one R&R, rest and recuperation. Our choices were Hawaii, which was where all the married guys went because their wives could meet them there. Or Thailand or Hong Kong or Tokyo. I couldn’t afford Tokyo, Thailand was too close to Vietnam and I wasn’t married so I went to Hong Kong. And I was into photography so, I bought a Nikon camera. The first day off the plane in Hong Kong I bought a Nikon, FTN Photomic with a 50mm F1.4, a 200 mm F4 and a 35mm lens. And I had them in a brown camera box and I would take them out on the high way with me so I could take pictures during the day. Because it was a war zone and you could take war pictures. We would see jets bombing and scraping and shooting rockets, either side of the high way, a mile or so away from us, during the day.
But anyway, so we were out on the highway south of Phu Loc and north of Da Nang and a nice little curve north of Da Nang where the bay kind of comes…eats into the country, a big wide bay. The highway goes very close to it so you can jump out the truck and walk through some little open forest place and you’re right on the beach. It’s a beach like Santa Monica except there’s nobody there. It’s really nice. So we did that a couple of times. And about the second time we did it, I stupidly left my camera and lens and the box in the truck. When we get back, its gone. And me I just think oh… stupid me. But somebody says, “What’s the matter?”
And I say, “Somebody ripped off my camera.” And so these guys I’m with, whom I’m technically in charge of, but they get all fired up and they want to go find out who ripped off my camera. For me. This is all for me, and instigated by me because I’m the stupid idiot that lost the camera, okay.
Well unbelievably we go into this little ville, this little refugee wide spot in the road and they actually track down the camera. They find it hidden in a hole in basically out in the backyard and they find the kid that took it. And he’s like a 17,18,19 year old kid, he’s not that much younger than us. The only difference is he is Vietnamese and he has no home and he and his mom or whoever, you know, is on the road in this refugee camp and is probably hungry and that camera could have probably gotten him and his family out of the country on one of those boats. It might not have been any better than how he was doing but at least he would be on a boat headed somewhere out of Vietnam. But that wasn’t to be because we caught him. I got my camera back but that wasn’t the point. At that point some ARVNs come up, the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, so these guys go, “What’s going on?”
And my guys tell them and they say, “Ok, we’ll take it from here.”
And that’s the last I saw of that kid. They were leading him off you know swatting him on the back of the head and stuff. I prayed ever since then that nothing any worse happened to him but I suspect that he at least got a really good beating out of it and I hope to God that’s all he got out of it. Because I have nothing but sympathy for him. I would have done it myself if the roles were reversed. I wouldn’t have even thought about it because it could have saved my family from the Holocaust that was going on over there. He just wasn’t lucky enough to get away with it. Well, there, here endeth the fable. I cry every time I think about it.