Post-War
How did you feel about your position and doing those actions?
Hated it, absolutely hated it. Made me sick to my stomach just seeing what it was that we were doing. This guy in my squad, we called him Doc. He was a conscientious objector but nevertheless he carried a .45. So he walks up to the guy’s body and this is kind of graphic but this tale needs to be told. He opens up his mouth and he sees that he has gold teeth. So he starts stomping on the guy’s body, his face, trying to dislodge the teeth. And after a while he would just reach in there and wiggle the teeth but couldn’t get it out. So he took his surgical scissors, and I’ll never forget this sound. It’s like the sound of scissors cutting through a carrot. And he literally cut the gold teeth out of the guy’s mouth and put them in his pocket. And I was in absolute disbelief. I mean this is defacing, defiling the body and I thought “Wow, the enemy does this, we don’t do this!” But here I am witnessing this first hand. And I’m looking around and of course one thing that you learn is you keep your mouth shut.
What was your post war experience?
At the end of 1970 I immediately, I didn’t waste any time, I was home for three days and I went straight back to my college and I said “Look I want to get back in,” and they embraced me with open arms. As a matter of fact it was probably the best experience that I had and I was really received very well by the department. I changed my major and went from accounting to sociology. So my time in Vietnam really changed me as far as that was concerned. I was struggling about what to study, but sociology just seemed so rich to me. I thought about that during the time. And I always knew that I was going to back and finish my degree. I just didn’t want to do it in accounting. But when I came back the United States was contentious but it seemed like the whole world had changed in the two years I was gone.
I had a completely different perspective on man’s inhumanity to man and the terrorism of war. It’s unlike anything that anybody could, you could read great books about it and I know there are a couple really good books that’s about killing and combat and it really nails the existential experience being in war. And keep in mind that there’s a philosophical piece. There’s an existential piece, other’s a spiritual piece. Because when you start engaging in life or death, you start questioning your beliefs and you start questioning the way that people live life and how easy it is to take a life, which is just horrendous when you just think about how easy it is to take a life. But why is it that we need to take lives in order to propagate political ends. And I think that’s what I came out of it with. Was more of a distaste for politics and for the misuse of young individuals to fight wars for reasons that really weren’t clear about and still aren’t clear today.