The General Atmosphere before George left home
It was certainly much better than when I returned. The war had been going on for a while but it had not gotten to the point where people were openly protesting or anything like that. I had always wanted to be a Marine so I was going to go in. Obviously at the age of seventeen I wasn’t drafted and I was only seventeen years old when I entered the Marine Corp. I was going to serve whether there was a war going on or not. I had actually at one point thought to make the Marine Corp a career, but having met my wife after returning from Vietnam, who is my wife now and has been for thirty nine years, I knew that I had to make a choice either to Buy trandate online be a Marine or marry my wife. So for me it was an easy choice; I was going in no matter what was happening at that time. It just happened that my war was an unpopular war. But we served honorably. The movies that I have seen, some of them are realistic but others are surreal; the things they portray aren’t necessarily so.
The general atmosphere for Marines in VIetnam
We were up at the Northern I-corps, right up at the DMZ. The 1st and 3rd Marine divisions, our responsibility was that northern I-corp area which was very much contested all of the time. We were in artillery range from the DMZ; it wasn’t like the Army that was down around Saigon and not until the very end of the war did they see heavy artillery or anything like that. We took rockets and heavy artillery because we were close enough to the DMZ for them to use that kind of stuff. We were engaged with North Vietnamese regulars, they weren’t Viet Cong. I saw a lot of Viet Cong during my tour but it was the NVA regulars that we were often engaged with. They had uniforms just like we did, they had crew served weapons, they had pretty much everything that we did except the air support. Their air planes wouldn’t come down below the DMZ because we would shoot them right out of the sky.
Distinguishing between Viet Cong and Northern Vietnamese regulars
It was nearly impossible. They could be a Viet Cong and part of a village, and they’d be acting as though they were a farmer and once you had cleared the area they could come up behind you. That was always difficult, you were always wary of that. After a while you’d start to get a certain sense of the ones you would have to watch, and you’d be very carefully. You would never complete turn your back.
We would come under fire from time to time and usually, once we engaged them heavily, they would back off. The Viet Cong wouldn’t stand and fight; the NVA Regulars would stand and fight. That way, the only prisoners that we were taking were too wounded to fight. They meant to keep the ground that they held and of course we meant to take it back, and we did.
Dealing with the climate of Vietnam
It took a while to get used to the heat but the humidity was the worst. Sometimes it would rain so hard you had to keep your helmet on, or else it’d drive you crazy. Then the sun would come out and it was almost as though the water was raining back up and reforming the cloud, because of the heat. It would go tight through the cycle again and during the Monsoon it would rain for days on end. You never got dry, it was miserable. You dealt with it. After a while you kind of got used to it but you never got comfortable, at least I didn’t…It was nice to come back to the great weather we have in Southern California, though.
George’s attitude towards the government’s handling of the war
I thought they should have left the fighting of the war to the generals. I think they prolonged the war. You can’t win a defensive war and they didn’t want us to pursue the North Vietnamese across the DMZ. It was okay for the North Vietnamese to come down and attack us and then pull back but they didn’t want us going after them. Like there was a line we couldn’t cross. They would engage us and we would push them back to that line and then we would have to disengage even though we had the advantage. I never understood that. And that was all the politicians.
On air raids
I saw a lot of Napalm. The last major operation I was on was called Bold Mariner and we had a lot of air support. It was close enough that we could feel the heat of it. The napalm would create its own windstorm, it just sucked in the oxygen. The one’s that were really scary were the B52′s because you could feel it before you heard it. You could actually feel the ground rumble. We would be sitting out at night and it would look like the sun was coming up and then you could feel the ground shaking and the rumbling from the bombs.
The return of the soldier and post traumatic stress
I’m pretty fortunate that I have a pretty low-key personality, so it was easier for me and I haven’t had any problems. I recently did this thing called the Vietnam Veteran Registry, and I received a letter saying that I should go be interviewed and checked for stress and see if I have Agent Orange problems or anything like that. The psychiatrist said that I was just fine and asked me if I ever think about Vietnam. I said, “Of course I do, does that ever go away?” and she said, “No, not really”. I had a pretty smooth transition after I got back. You would still flinch at a car backfiring or loud noises and things like that. You’d get used to ducking and protecting yourself the best that you can, but that’s what keeps you alive. It took a few months to get adjusted but after that I was fine.
My father was a WWII vet. He spent thirty five months in the Pacific fighting the Japanese. Having him to talk to was probably the biggest thing that made my transition when I got back. For the first few months I would just keep things to myself and wouldn’t really say anything. Then he started to tell stories about the time he spent in the Pacific during WWII, and I started to tell about the things that I saw and my experience in Vietnam. I felt as though by talking to him I was being decompressed, I felt more relaxed. That helped a lot. The similarities between what he had seen and what I saw took a lot of the stress out of it and that’s probably why I didn’t have a tough time after that.
When I came back my duty station was at the Marine Corps barracks at the United States Naval station that used to be here in Long Beach. There was about a 250 man detachment and about 200 of us were Vietnam veterans. There were some guys who took a while to get settled down but I didn’t see anything that was that bad. Almost all of the guys in the Marine Corps were volunteers. The Army guys were almost all draftees. It makes a big difference, your mind set going in. Being a volunteer and being a draftee are two completely different things.
Comments about Apocalypse Now
The whole premise of the movie, the rogue officer leading a band of Cambodians, I don’t think any American officer would do that. The extremist things, the butchering of people, I never saw any of that. When we fought we were fighting against soldiers. If we fired at anyone that wasn’t in a uniform it was because they were shooting at us. The My Lai massacre was horrible. Any officer that would give orders to fire against unarmed civilians, that’s the worst possible thing I could think of. War is an ugly thing and you would have to be foolish or naive to think that you aren’t going to have civilian casualties in a war. A bullet doesn’t discriminate. People also think how horrible it is that somebody might be killed by friendly fire but when you’re in a combat situation there’s so much noise and confusion that things like that happen. You certainly don’t want it to happen and you don’t want to cause harm to someone that could possibly be your friend, but friendly fire happens. That’s just the confusion and horrors of war.
On respect for the enemy
You must respect anybody you are in conflict with. If you don’t have respect for them you’re foolish. I respected what they are doing, but I also knew that I had a job to do and I did everything possible to make sure that I did it to the best of my ability.
The enemies in Middle East deserve some respect. To me the worst possible thing is an extremist. I know a lot of people that are Muslims that are very good people, and they even say that the extremists are the problem. The greatest thing that our Founding Fathers did was the separation of church and state. Any government that runs their state base on religion is not going to work. Especially if they are extremist, you shouldn’t ever have clergy running a government.