Looking Back
When you have passion, fighting for a revolutionary cause, that’s what won the war. Do you agree?
100%. As the everyday soldier, they didn’t try to understand why they were fighting. They just knew that it wasn’t right to be one country and to divide it in half. That was their mindset. It was nothing about politics. They didn’t care what the leadership was about. All they knew was, “I got aunts and uncles up in Hanoi and I’m in Saigon, and we’re enemies!” Those people didn’t like that scenario. So they said, “France, we kicked your butt. America we kicked your butt. Who’s next? We don’t care if there are 50 or 100 of us dying to one of you. We aren’t gonna stop.”
I understood the political pressure on the enemy. The Viet Cong. He could literally be your friend in the daytime. Him and his children. I was just one of the few that understood that.
You don’t think your fellow soldiers understood that?
I don’t. They couldn’t wait to kill, kill, kill. They wanted to do it. I was a little unique in that it wasn’t about the number of kills I could get; it was only about one life I wanted saved, and that was mine. I put all of my energy in that. I’m only politically involved now with the Vietnam era because I look back on it now and, in my opinion, it was a waste of American dollars and lives. For 20 plus years, the French and America tried to prevent the merging of North and South Vietnam, and in 1975, that happened. I look back on it and view my fellow soldiers that helping the cemetery grow beautiful by being buried in it because I could have been doing the same thing. And, in my opinion, for nothing.
By the time I was discharged a year later, I was so off into substance abuse, all I could think about was just staying high. That’s all I could think about. Two weeks after I was home, I was so spaced, so loaded off of different types of substances that I literally ran into the rear end of a parked semi. A diesel. I totaled the car and did extensive damage to the diesel. It was all because I was a psychological mess. I was very emotional. I had survived 365 days of combat. The only reason I didn’t get decapitated was because I laid down to go to sleep on the seat while I was driving. So when I went up under the rear end of the diesel, I was…
You went underneath it?
Yes. I broke the steering wheel with my stomach, and it damaged my pancreas tremendously. I was in intensive care for 3 days. It was almost an attitude like, “What’s the use? Who cares? Life’s gonna do to me what it wants anyway, so I’m just gonna waste it and get wasted.” That kind of made me wake up and smell the coffee that I think I’d rather live than die. I had already been through that. By the time I got out of the hospital 10 days later, I survived as you see, and then I started trying to make my life make sense. Within a couple years, I decided to take the spiritual approach. That’s what helped me. I started dealing with a god that I believed in to turn my whole approach on life around because if I didn’t there’s no way I would be giving this interview.