Perceptions of the Anti-War Movement
Interviewer: Were you bothered by the anti-war movement and public perceptions of the war? They didn’t know the truth. And I don’t really know what you can say about that. You can tell people, but I guess I’ve always kind had a short fuse. I never really took the time sit down and try to explain things or have a conversation with these people. I just was very angry with them and would have been more confrontational. But fortunately I wasn’t really around people like that very much. The day I got back at the airport, the day I was leaving. I left military service from Vietnam – so they flew me back to the airport in San Francisco and then I had to make my own way home from there. As I came out in uniform there were protestors there. And I was angry about that because I thought of the people who died both on their side and ours, the Vietnamese and ours, and it just uhh – these people had such a good life. They can go to movies, they can sleep safe all night, they don’t have to sleep in the rain, they don’t have to climb hills. And they are disparaging the people who made that possible and that kind of hurt. The Vietnam War is very misunderstood, very often you hear people saying that the Vietcong defeated the Americans. Well the decisions that were made were political, militarily we were not defeated. There was no American Dien Bien Phu, the enemy lost far more people than we did; and if you look at the occupation of Saigon at the end of the war there weren’t a lot of little men in black pajamas walking in, there were North Vietnamese regulars riding in on their Tanks. That’s who defeated the South Vietnamese when we left. They didn’t defeat us.