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Courtney McCall Interviews San Marino Resident Rick Caldwell
My name is Courtney McCall and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview San Marino resident Mr. Rick Caldwell. Mr. Caldwell is married to Jeannie Caldwell, a two-term SMUSD Board Member.
Hello, everyone. My name is Courtney McCall and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing San Marino resident, Mr. Rick Caldwell, in room 404 at San Marino High School.
Mr. Caldwell, in my US History class this summer, we have learned about the Vietnam War and I have invited you here today to ask you some questions about that war.
The first question I am going to ask is . . . in what year did you graduate from high school? 1966.
And after high school, did you serve in the war? Yes.
Was it the Army, Airforce, Navy, or Marines? The United States Army.
Did you enlist or were you drafted? In what year were you drafted? I was drafted. August 1, 1968.
What did your family and friends have to say about you going into the service? Not much. My two older brothers were already in the service.
So no one in your family in any way any object or were not supportive of your decision to join the service? Well, that's true. They didn’t object, but they weren't very supportive either. My family thought I should have registered for the next college term and not get drafted.
Did you ever, for a second think about trying to dodge the draft? Not really. I had friends who did, but I didn’t.
Your two older brothers served in the war. What did they do? I had a brother in the Air Force and a brother in the Army.
Can you now tell us a bit about your basic training? Like where you trained and what you liked the most and the least about basic training? My basic training was at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. And there isn’t anything to like about basic training. It’s eight weeks of where the Army takes you from being an individual and molds you into a soldier that is part of a unit. So you don’t think about yourself; you think about the unit all the time. It wasn’t any fun there. It was eight hard weeks of my life.
How about the living conditions there? Were there tight accommodations? Yah. I was in barracks with fifty other guys. And we got up at four o’clock every morning, we trained all day, came home, cleaned the barracks, spit-shined our shoes, we went to bed (the lights out were at nine o’clock), and then we were back at it at four o’clock in the morning.
Now, I want to ask you some questions about your time in Vietnam. What were your specific duties during the war? I was an RTO radio telephone operator. I started out in the artillery but ended up into the infantry by coincidence; which is where I was drafted into. Here is the story of how I ended up into the infantry if you want to use it. I was in the Ammo Section of a 155 Howitzer Unit in the rear area at the beginning of my tour of duty. I was the lowest ranking person in the Ammo Section so my job was to sit on the pad all day in 100+ degree weather hooking up ammo pellets in large nets to helicopters while the other guys were back in the barracks sleeping.
The choppers would call me on a PRC 25 and asked if the sortie was ready for pick-up on pad 10 and I would answer…”yes”. No training on the radio, just pick-up the handset and answer yes when someone calls pad 10. One day the Colonel’s chopper asked permission to land on my pad and I said “yes”. All I ever said on that radio was yes. The Colonel came to me (I was a PFC at that time) and asked me if I could operate that radio and I said “yes sir”…not knowing that he meant really an RTO with Signal Corp Training. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them offloading a wounded soldier from his chopper. He said: “go get your stuff and report back to my chopper in an hour, you are now going to the field soldier”.
I start to tell him I was not trained on the radio and he said “move it troop” so I did. When I got to the field the FO (Forward Observer – a Lieutenant) went crazy when I told him I was not a trained RTO (another story for another time).
Was the radio heavy and hard to carry around? It was very heavy. I had to carry the PRC 25 and it weighed probably ten pounds. And then the two batteries I had to carry around each weighed probably one pound a piece. I had to carry that along with all the food, water, and ammo. And I was a small guy; about a hundred and twenty pounds. 128 pounds.
I can’t imagine how difficult that was. What did you enjoy the most about this work, and what did you enjoy the least? Well, I enjoyed the least was the monsoon season. It rained. Rained and rained all the time. Heavy rain, raining so hard that you couldn’t even see the hand in front of your face. That is how hard it rained. What I enjoyed the most? Probably mail call. The mail was about the only good thing about Vietnam.
Did you make any friends who were Vietnamese? No. I was in a combat unit. Although we did have some guys that are called Kit Carsons. Do you know who Kit Carson is? Or what a Kit Carson is? Well, he’s a famous cowboy that was a scout. We had some guys that were Vietnamese who were in the ARVN’s Army Republic of Vietnam that were called Kit Carsons because they spoke English and Vietnamese. They would go out on combat assaults with us to interpret when we landed. But I didn’t get to really know any of them well. They would use my radio and I would call stuff like choppers for them.
Do you know anyone who was killed or injured in the war? Yes. During my tour of duty, there were sixty-two guys that died in my unit.
Was there ever a point in time where you feared that you were not going to make it? A couple of times. Landing Zone Grant on March 8th and 11th, we were hit really hard. Landing Zone Carolyn on May 6th, we actually made the national news on that one. And Landing Zone Buttons on November the 4th was tough.
Did you ever receive any awards or medals for your years of service? Yah. I received a Bronze star, an Army Commendation Medal with a “V” Device of Valor, another Army Commendation Medal for Meritorious Service, and an Air Medal.
That’s amazing. Now I want to ask you some questions about your life after the war. In my history class, we learned that many American service men and women have struggled emotionally after coming back from the war. Was it difficult for you to adjust to life in the US when you came back? Not really. There was a law back then that said that when you return back they have to give you your job back, all your promotions, and all your salary increases. So I immediately went back to work. I worked for a bank. I just wanted to work and I didn’t think about the war much anymore.
Do you know anyone who struggled emotionally after coming back from the war? I’ve run into a few guys over the years that have, but I haven’t been real close with them.
Since you risked your life for our country, how do you feel about those who either dodged the draft or protested against the war on our college and university campuses? I don’t have any animosity against people that dodged the draft or protested. We, the soldiers, were not treated very good when we got home. It was just a bad time; it was just a bad time for the country then.
Mr. Caldwell, according to a Gallup poll taken in 2000, seventy percent of Americans believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you believe that sending Americans to Vietnam was a mistake? That’s a tough question to answer. Back in those days, the Soviet Union was going around the world. They were setting up communist countries and I’m sure the United States wanted to put a stake in the ground and to keep Vietnam from turning into a communist country. It was an unpopular war. None of us wanted to be there. No one wants to be in the Army unless you volunteered. Now looking back on it, I don’t think it was a mistake for the guys that died over there. You know they died fighting for their country.
Recently, I read an article an article that Mitch Lehman wrote for the San Marino Tribune. The article was entitled Caldwell Claims that He Was Just an Ordinary Guy. So you really do not see yourself as a hero? I don’t think anybody in combat sees him or herself as a hero. I think that we think that the guys that passed away are the heroes.
Mr. Caldwell. Is there anything else about the war that you would like to tell us about that you haven’t yet had a chance to express? I'll tell you the story about the Moon Landing. My unit was sitting on this large pad waiting to go out on a combat assault, during the Moon Landing. And since I was an RTO I was broadcasting the Moon Landing over an intercom device that I had attached to my radio. We were listening to the module (you know) drop towards the Moon. Helicopters came. We called the helicopters choppers. They came in to pick us up to leave and the guys, the Astronauts, were like four minutes from landing. It was a very critical time in the Moon Landing. And so one of the door gunners asked me if we were going to board. And I asked the captain and he said no, we’re gonna stay here until we land on the Moon. So we did. The captain was afraid that we would lose some guys on that assault so he wanted all to hear that the astronauts made it safely on the moon.
So you had a friend with you in basic training, where you placed into the same Army unit? No. What happened was we were in the same basic training and advanced training together, we flew to Vietnam together. We were all in a huge line and they split the line in between him and me. He went to the 25th twenty-fifth Infantry Division, which at that time was a combat division. But he was not in that, he was in a support unit. So just like I told everyone else, about eight out of ten at people in Vietnam were in support, while two out of ten were actually in combat units out in the fields doing the work. He had a great time in Vietnam. If you were interviewing him he would have said that he had a great time. I did not, but he did.
Well, do you have anything else that you would like to say? No.
Okay. So that’s it. Mr. Caldwell, that’s all the questions I have, I really want to thank you for your time this evening. I found it all very interesting and think the rest of the class will too. Thank you, Courtney. Much enjoyed.
Rick Caldwell in Vietnam
With his bunker in the background
Artillery bunker - Landing Zone Tracey
Mr. Caldwell showing me a few things before the start of the interview
Wearing Mr. Caldwell's helmet (aka his "silver steel pot")
Mr. Caldwell's short timer's card - which he always carried with him in his helmet
His wallet
Mail call - the only good thing about Vietnam
His carrying case
Landing Zone Carolyn CBS New Report (part 1)
Landing Zone Carolyn CBS News Report (part 2)
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Erik Olson Interviews SMHS Teacher Scott Barton
My name is Erik Olson and on Friday, June 10, 2016, at approximately 12:30 AM, I used the StoryCorps app to interview San Marino High School teacher Scott Barton.
Hello, everyone. My name is Erik Olson and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing SMHS physics teacher Mr. Scott Barton in Room 404 at San Marino High School.
Mr. Barton, in my US History class this summer, we’ve learned about the Vietnam War and I’ve invited you in here today to ask you some questions about that war. The first question I want to ask you is this . . . in what year did you graduate from high school? I graduated from high school in 1978
So given that the war ended in 1973, that means that you never were given a chance to serve in the war, is that right? That's right. I did not participate in the war, but while growing up, I was able to watch the news with my parents and see the news clips every night of the correspondents that were there. I was able to watch the draft when it was on T.V. You see the little balls as they come down with all the dates. I was able to see anti-war protests on T.V. Actually in 1969 I actually went to San Francisco and saw some protesters there as well (in the Height Ashbury District).
So you felt pretty informed about the war? Yes. I did. I used to read a lot about back then. And since then too.
Did you know anyone who had served in the war? I had a distant cousin that was there, but that was the only one in my intermediate family.
Did he ever tell you about his experiences? No. I’ve never really talked to him about it.
Mr. Barton. According to a Gallup poll taken in 2000, 70% of Americans believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you believe that sending Americans to Vietnam was a mistake? I believe with the value of hindsight yes that it was a mistake.
Do you know anyone who was killed or injured in the war? I don’t know anyone personally who was killed. I do have an interesting story. I grew up in a small town in the middle of Iowa. The very last U.S. soldier killed in Vietnam as we were evacuating the U.S. embassy was from my hometown. He was 19 or 20 years old, He was four or five years ahead of me in high school. So I knew about that, I didn’t know him personally but that was probably the closest thing I’ve had to a personal encounter with someone who was injured or killed.
Is there anything else about the war you would like to tell us or talk about? I think I’ve done a lot of reading about the war. I’m not sure many people understand what happened, how it started. I think it’s one of those conflicts that the U.S. has been involved in that's least understood. Everybody understands World War II, World War I, the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, but I think the Vietnam War, maybe because it was the most recent and unpopular war, I think a lot of people are actually pretty ignorant about what happened and what went on there.
Now, did you see that sort of ignorance in your hometown or anything? No I again I was too young, you know the war ended in 1975, so I was 15 and you know, I was aware of what was going on but I had other things. I was insulated, I wasn’t personally affected by it so I didn’t really see that, and again it was Iowa, it wasn’t the hotbed of protest or anything like that.
So you never felt like the war was a threat to Americans or anything? No, not at all.
How did your parents react to the war? That’s hard to say. And it’s a great question, but again it was something that we watched or they watched, and I happened to be in and out, on the news every night, but they didn’t talk about it very much and again because we really had no close immediate family affected that’s probably why they were more quiet about it. I know that my stepfather had, he was a teacher in a middle school, and I know that he had students that actually served, but never really talked about it or thought about it, and again you would see guys in the military come home for leave, so I’d see people that were definitely in the military, I mean in the late 60’s, with shaved heads but it wasn’t, again where I was, it wasn’t a big thing in general.
Is there anything else about the war that you would like to tell us about, and haven’t yet had a chance to express it? Nope. Just this. If you have any further questions just come on up to my room and ask.
Okay, Mr. Barton then that’s all the questions I have for you. I really want to thank you for your time this afternoon. I found it all very interesting and look forward to having you as my teacher next year. Thank you, Erik. Much enjoyed.
Side note:
According to wikipedia.com "Charles McMahon and Darwin Lee Judge were the last two United States servicemen killed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The two men, both US Marines, were killed in a rocket attack one day before the Fall of Saigon. Charles McMahon, 11 days short of his 22nd birthday, was a corporal from Woburn, Massachusetts and Darwin Judge was a 19-yearold lance corporal and Eagle Scott from Marshalltown, Iowa." Marshalltown, Iowa is Mr. Barton's hometown. To learn more about Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge, click here
Courtney McCall Interviews San Marino Resident Dan Clarke
My name is Courtney McCall and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview San Marino resident Mr. Dan Clarke. Mr. Clarke is the father of 2016 SMHS graduate Nicole Clarke.
Hello, everyone. My name is Courtney McCall and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing San Marino resident Mr. Dan Clarke in the computer lab of the College and Career Center at San Marino High School. Aside from living in San Marino, Mr. Clarke is also the father of 2016 SMHS graduate Nicole Clarke.
Mr. Clarke, in my US History class this summer, we have learned about the Vietnam War and I have invited you here today to ask you some questions about that war. But before getting started I want to congratulate your daughter Nicole for her recent graduation from the high school.
So now to my questions. The first question I want to ask you is this: In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War and at the height of the anti-Vietnam War protests, you were in the naval reserves and attending college, correct? That is correct.
Can you tell us a bit about all that? Well, in 1967 when I was a senior at Crescenta Valley High School, the draft was on. And I figured that if I’m going to have to serve, I want to do it on my own terms. So the day after grad night I put my hand up at the Los Alamitos Naval air station in Orange County and joined the naval reserves. At the same time I got into the naval flight program, I took an aptitude test. I did good enough, so I was in the naval reserves at the same time that I was in the flight program. Which meant after I graduated from college, I would go to Officer Candidate school. Then from there I would go to the flight training. So that’s pretty much how I got involved with the navy. And that's why in 1968 I was in the naval reserve going to college.
What did you do for your officer training? Well after I graduated from college, I went down to Pensacola Florida. I went through a sixteen-week officer candidate training course. It was sorta like a boot-camp combined with academics, military, and other stuff. So I graduated as an Ensign in the United States Navy. And from there I started basic flight training in Pensacola. That went on for the next year and a half. See, you go through a basic flight training, intermediate, and then advanced flight training. From there they give you these navy wings of gold. Then you go to your first active duty squadron.
An active duty squadron, what is that? Well, the navy is pretty similar to the other military branches. They have all of their aviation divided into squadrons. These are organizations that have a specialty associated with what they do. For example, they have helicopter squadrons, they have fighter squadrons, they have the fighter aircraft squadrons, and they have the bomber squadrons. Mine was a transport type squadron that carried mail, passengers and cargo aboard aircraft carriers. So I was basically a transport pilot. Carrying mail, passengers, and cargo along the east coast, Caribbean, and Europe. So that was my specialty.
So, the war for the United States ended in 1973 and if I have this right, you never went to Vietnam during the war years, is that correct? Yes, because by the time I have finished flight school it had been the end of 1973 and so I got orders from my first squadron, which was VRC-40. That was the transport type squadron that goes aboard the carriers. That was homed in Norfolk, Virginia. So that's where I went for my first active duty squadron.
Did any of your friends or family serve in the war? Well, I had a lot of friends of course. Friends that I made in the Officer Candidate School and other people that I knew from college. There were friends with me. None of my family, though.
Do you know anyone who was killed or injured in the war? Well yes, I do. A couple of folks who graduated from Officer Candidate School; they went to the last part of the war and a couple of guys, they unfortunately got killed. I knew some others that got killed later in post-war type activities. Not too many though. The Naval Aviation Program was pretty well trained and we pretty much knew what we were doing. It was rare if we got caught up in an accident. The only folks that got into trouble were those who got shot at.
Did any of your friends or family dodge the draft? You know Courtney, that is something that is. . . zero. I know of nobody that I knew. And I knew a lot of folks coming through high school. But my high school, which is Crescenta Valley High School is a pretty conservative high school and we didn’t have much liberalism going on there. I went to Oregon State University for college and at the time that college was pretty conservative too; so there wasn’t really that much of an anti-war sentiment in my experience.
Mr. Clarke, did you ever participate in an anti-war demonstration? No. It wouldn’t have been in keeping with me going through the military. Although I did have friends down in Berkeley that were Oregonians. So I had the chance to go down there and observe some of the anti-war demonstrations. But I was more of an observer. I never participated.
Did you see any violent actions at some of these protests? Well, I did see at Berkeley Square some very active demonstrations and there were some active confrontations between the police and security and the folks demonstrating. It was quite vivid and I guess you call it somewhat entertaining, but it was somewhat violent. Yes.
A final Vietnam War question for you, Mr. Clarke. Do you think that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake? You know that's a very good question Courtney and it's been almost fifty years on. Let me answer that free-form and I would like to answer it completely. First of all, I think the original involvement in that war (it was basically a civil war in the late 50s and the early 60s) was an honorable intention.
Because we didn’t want that country to go communist. And there was by indication since there was big support from Russia that there was a global war against communism, there's just no doubt about that. So, the original involvement was honorable. But then there are a couple of things that happened. First of all, there was no real, clear mandate in what we were doing. There was never any clarity. And why we were there and what we were doing.
Then the war became horribly politicized back home. And then the thing that really put the nail in the coffin for our involvement in Vietnam is that nobody could really make the case that us fighting in Vietnam had any aspect of protecting our national security. As was maybe our war with Japan in World War II and our war fighting the Nazis in the eastern front in World War II. Nobody could never make the case that our national security was really in jeopardy fighting a civil war abroad. So in hindsight, yes it was a mistake, but the original intentions I thought were honorable.
So with that, we've come to the end of the interview, Mr. Clarke. Before closing, is there anything else about the Vietnam war that you would like to tell us about that you haven’t yet had a chance to express? The Vietnam war was a reflection of the Cold War and that extended well into the 70s and the early 80s when I got out of active duty. So even though Vietnam was a lost war, the hangover from that war stayed with me even though I was on active duty and we were still really involved, in a very active cold war with Russia. So it wasn’t just 1973, it wasn’t that everything had just ended. It kept going as a hangover. For all the other aspects the navy was doing, until probably 1980 and 1981. And that's when I got out of the active duty and entered the reserve; which I stayed for another thirteen years.
So you stated that you were still affected after the war had ended. Was there anyone you know that was emotionally affected by the war? Well, I think everybody who served in Vietnam had a certain aspect of being affected. They were certainly happy not to be fighting in the war, but most of the guys I know now, there were a lot of the ground troops that I didn’t really know. I knew mostly that air people, the air department people and they were rather affected by being shot at a lot. But they were very happy not being shot at after that. The only thing that was dangerous was going aboard the aircraft carriers. That always made them nervous. But the effect from that was was very obvious. You could see it, how people acted, the ones that actually had to fight there.
Okay, so that’s it. Mr. Clarke, that’s all the questions I have for you. I really want to thank you for your time today. I found it all very interesting and think the rest of the class will too. I enjoyed myself immensely. Thank you.
Side note:
One other question that was asked that was not in the interview but accidentally (and luckily) was recorded is this question . . . were you ever scared when trying to land on an aircraft carriers? Well, let me tell you. Flying an airplane actually becomes rather routine after awhile. Take off, flying and landing - many times it’s just like riding on a bus. You take off, fly, and you land. Yet there are times when the routine is anything but boring and that's especially true when trying to land on an aircraft carrier. In those instances, you have to be always alert; 100%. We were always on edge and the danger was always clear and present. That was a very dangerous environment. We were flying very close to other aircraft and of course landing aboard the aircraft carrier was always dangerous. Always, always dangerous. We were dealing with a moving platform. Sometimes the ships, when you’re on rough seas, the rear deck would be doing this. . . and this. . . [making hand movements of what the rear deck would do]. Each aircraft carrier would be different.
My name is Kyle Yen and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview San Marino computer applications teacher Mr. Bill Mann.
Hello, everyone. My name is Kyle Yen and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing SMHS computer applications teacher Mr. Bill Mann in room 404 at San Marino High School.
Mr. Mann, in my US History class this summer, we’ve learned about the Vietnam War and I’ve invited you in here today to ask you some questions about that war.
The first question I want to ask you is: what year did you graduate from high school? 1961.
Ok, and did you serve in the war right after high school? I went to college, but I was in the reserves in ‘57, ‘58 maybe. And then during college, I went into the service, in active duty.
And where did you go for basic training? We went down to San Diego, and I was in the Navy. We had two weeks of basic training, not the 10 weeks that is normally the cycle . . . because that’s for people that invest. But yeah, in San Diego.
Can you describe some parts of training? Because I was older, I was in charge of our group, our… I don’t know what they called it at the time, platoon or I don’t know. We did the hiking and we did the shooting and we did the swimming. We did all the things that are in the training to be in the service.
When did you know when you were being deployed to Vietnam? In 1965, they told me, I had served 4 and a half years in the reserves, and they that it was my turn to go, in active duty.
Ok, so now some more questions about your time in Vietnam. So, what years did you serve in the war? I was on active duty from 1965 to 1967.
So you were in the Navy, what were your specific duties? I was a radar-man, and also I was an ECM operator, which was Electronic Counter-Measures, and I went to school through the reserves, for radar, and then I went to Point Loma for ECM operator.
So radar-man, is that on the ground or further back? I was on a destroyer, and I was stationed down below. We plotted courses, we looked at maps for any dangerous things, so we could plot a course so that the ship could pull into harbors and things like that.
Did you ever physically set foot in Vietnam? No, we went up some of the rivers, and we had .50 caliber machine guns, I think, on the sides of the ship, and one in the rear. We would go up the rivers, and I could throw a stone to the land, but I never set foot on the land.
Where did your training as a radarman? They call it “Blacksmith.” It’s the navy and marine building up on Sierra Madre Boulevard in Pasadena and I went to a two-week school down at Point Loma for radarman.
That doesn’t sound like a very physical job. It’s not.
Did you feel like you wasted your time training? Actually not, because we did so much. When we took on ammo, or we took on stores, or we took on fuel, we all had to participate and pull the lines over and do that. I was up in the nets during bring up ammo, and I’d have to take the shots and pass them to another person. So it was helpful.
What was day-to-day life like on the Destroyer? In war time, or when we were close to Vietnam, we would be 5 hours on, 7 hours off, 7 hours on, and 5 hours off. In other words, that was the 24-hour cycle that we used. When you’re on, you’re up in radar, and when you’re off, you’re down in the bunk area, and sometimes we’d have to clean up the bunk area, and sometimes we didn’t have to. That was our free time, basically.
Where did you keep your belongings? Our bunks were 3 high, and then, underneath the bunks, the bottom part of the bunk was where we had lockers, and there were 3 lockers under each bay of bunks. If the bunks were 6 or 7 feet, then you divide that up by 3 and that was a locker.
Were living quarters really cramped? Um, yeah they were, but not really really bad. The showers were in another place, and the bathrooms were in another place, so they weren’t right where we were sleeping.
Just going onto some other questions here, do you have any family members or friends that served in the war? My uncle was a marine, but he didn’t serve in that war. He served in WWII. And then my brother-in-law, he was in another ship. He went in before I did, and so I didn’t see him over in Vietnam.
Do you have any stories from your time on the Destroyer? We have a lot of stories. When we refueled, that was always a time that everyone got together, and helped each other, that sort of thing. One time, we lost a cable overboard, when we were refueling, and it got tangled up in the propellers, so that was something that happened. And so we got that straightened out. We did a lot of things on the ship. One of the things was we picked up probably about 8 pilots that made it to the Tonkin Gulf and their planes were shot up, so they couldn’t get to the ship, so we’d try to pick them up before the Viet Cong got to them.
Did you ever make any friends who were Vietnamese? We had people on the ship that were from Vietnam, and we made friends with those people. They were officers in the Vietnam army. And yeah, we made friends with them.
Ok. Just some more questions about after the war:
We know now that a lot American service men and women struggled emotionally after coming back from their service. Was it difficult for you to adjust to life in the US? It wasn’t difficult for me because I didn’t see any real shooting of people. None of the people on our ship got hurt. It’s not like in the Armory or the Marine Corps, where they lost a lot of friends, but when we came home, it was what I call a thankless war. Nobody thanked you, nobody cared that you were in the service or not, it was just a thankless war.
Do you feel like you were treated badly by other people? Not so much badly, I don’t think, it’s just that people didn’t care. I don’t know, nowadays, when people are in the service, they do a lot for them. Some restaurants will give them free meals and that sort of thing, and we had none of that. Nobody really cared.
Given that you took the time, and everyone was risking their lives in Vietnam for our country, how do you feel about those who either dodged the draft or loudly protested the war on our college and university campuses? It was their decision, and I think they have to live with their decision, and I feel sorry for them.
According to a poll recently taken in 2000, 70% of Americans believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you agree with that? I don’t think that we shouldn’t have gone there, because there were a lot of Communists there, and people were coming down from China in Vietnam, and they were Communists. The people under the Communist rule didn’t have any freedom, it was just a really bad situation. I think it was important, I think even though we didn’t win the war, I think think that we made an impact, and you can see the impact that it made with Russia and tearing down the wall in Germany, and hardly anyone is a real Communist anymore, like they were in that day and age.
Just a last thing, do you have anything you want to share about the war that you think, like any thoughts? I have some thoughts. One was I believe that Jane Fonda was a sympathizer with the communists because she collected the nametags of the soldiers in the prisons there. She was an actress. The family was involved with acting. She received nametags from some of the prisoners for her to come back to the United States to tell their families that they were okay, they were still in Vietnam in prisons, but they were okay. And she gave the nametags to the Viet Cong and they tortured them because they did that. And I really believe that she was a traitor, and that’s one of the things that I really have a rough time with.
That’s interesting. So, Mr. Mann, that’s all the questions I have. I want to thank you for taking the time this afternoon just to come to this interview. I found it very interesting and educational. Thank you for serving in our military, like you said before that it was a thankless war, but I think that all the soldiers and you on the Destroyer, that really helped the movement, and that kept Communism out of the world. Thank you again. I’ll go ahead and stop the recording now.
SMHS Junior Ben Ly Interviews San Marino Resident John Ly
My name is Ben Ly and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing my father Mr. Ly in my home in Los Angeles, California. My father grew up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Hello, everyone. My name is Ben Ly and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing my dad, in our home, San Marino High School.
Dad, in my US History class this summer, we have learned about the Vietnam War and I have invited you here today to ask you some questions about that war and the first question I want to ask you is this:
How old were you at the time of the Tet Offensive? I was only 6 years old.
Do you have any memories of that event? Yes. It was the Second Day of Chinese New Year and all of a sudden everybody was shooting off firecrackers, and then the firecracker sounds got bigger and bigger. At first, we didn’t realize that those sounds were coming from the guns of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong Communists who had mixed in with the crowd and were shooting at the South Vietnamese soldiers. That’s how the Tet Offensive began.
Ok. Do you have any other memories? Yea, we were trapped. The war zone was in Cholon. Cholon is a mainly Chinese neighborhood and the Communists were coming by boat because during Chinese New Year there are a lot of boats coming from villages far away. They were bringing the flour and the seasonal goods and the communists were with them. So that how they got into Cholon, and then they quickly took the route to Saigon, and then they started bombing and shooting the American Embassy, and all of a sudden, the embassy was under attack. The president’s house was under attack.
Then within the next 3 months we were in the war zone. We were living basically in the middle of the war zone because every day and night we would see soldiers going to the next street, which is where we lived. Next street to fight. Then the gun sounds and the bombing was nonstop. There was no such thing as a ceasefire. When night came the fighting was more aggressive and more brutal. We saw helicopters flying with a 50-millimeter gun. The only thing we could remember was they were shooting rockets back.
We didn’t know how to describe it. We always kept saying, ¨Look, the American helicopter is peeing!” Actually, they were shooting rockets at the ground where the VC, Viet Cong, stayed. For 3 months, it was nonstop. From February to May it was nonstop. We had no communication, no power, no light, and we didn’t have water. Our drinking water relied on the rain because Vietnam was under monsoons; it was a good thing that it was the rainy season so we could collect so water from the rain. We could filter it out and drink. No food. Nothing. Whatever we had was just rice because that’s what we had leftover. Rice. And you were not allowed to go out. You stayed in your house all the time, nothing else. And at night time all we saw was no light. You were so scared to turn on the lights or put a candle on because then they though you're one of the VC. So all the lights were shut off. And the whole neighborhood was like that. They were living in fear. That event was so traumatizing.
By the time they went back to normal curfew it was May. We went back to school. The school become more like a refugee camp because the next 8 months, a lot of people lost their houses. They had no place to go; they were waiting for relocation and we were going to school side by side with the refugees living at school. I lost a lot of childhood friends because they never came back. They never came back to school, and we don't know why. We don't know where they lived but they never came back. They never did. Never. A lot of them didn't come back to school.
And later on, my father, when the curfew was over during May and June, was able to visit those areas in what you call the War Zone. It's the same thing you see in any war. All the buildings were collapsed. Nobody lived there anymore. The place needed to be cleaned up real bad. You saw dead people all over the place. And that’s how it was. That is how the Tet Offensive was. During the Tet Offensive, a lot of Viet Cong died; also a lot of GI soldiers died. So did the Vietnamese soldiers, too. But I think a lot of people who died were just the civilians. They got caught in the middle.
What is a GI soldier exactly? A GI soldier is an American soldier. American marines that went to Vietnam to fight the war. About half a million of them were there during the Vietnam War. In 1968, what they called the Tet Offensive played a major role. It was the first time the Northern part the Viet Cong almost went to the capital of South Vietnam to do their advance, but to them, it was a disaster, but to the Americans, I think the Americans and Southern Vietnamese soldiers suffered a lot of casualties. During this war a lot of people lost their lives. Not until 1973, this was called the most serious fight in the central highland area, the Central Vietnam highland area. Southern Vietnamese soldiers lost almost 2 battalions. Think about it. (lost almost over 1000 soldiers) They also lost 2 generals. Almost 1 million soldiers died during 1973, but during the Tet Offensive, the number was not lower.
And how old were you when you came to the United States? I came to the United States in 1978. July 2, 1978. I was 14 years old.
How did you get here? By plane or boat? My father took a lot of effort to try and get us here. We were here by plane, but we went to Singapore first, then we came to the United States.
Can you now tell us your story from the time you came to the United States until the very present? I’m especially wanting to know how hard was it for you to adjust to life in the United States? Well you know, we were going to a completely different environment. We came to the United States. Most of them were Southern Vietnamese who escaped from the Communist country coming to the United States or either Paris or Australia - for freedom. Life was not easy. I recall my sophomore, senior, and junior year. I lived on the dictionary. Back then there was no ESL available. We had to have a dictionary to go to school. Back then, there was no Internet, so we only relied on a dictionary that could help us with everything, and during the summertime, we would do summer jobs. I remember the first summer in 1978. I worked with a building contractor we would do some painting. We went to people’s houses to paint. I went to do construction work when I was only 14. I was happy to get paid one dollar an hour. Back then, it was more like adult labor. In 1978, a gallon of gas was only 30 cents, and bubblegum was only 5 cents.
Have you ever been back to Vietnam? I have been back to Vietnam because of business purposes. I am an international buyer in a food distributor company so it is my job to go back to Asia and different countries of Asia to the conventions and food shows. I did manage to go back to Saigon, which is now called Ho Chi Minh City. The city has been changing a lot. Everything is more modern now. Because of the war, we can find most of the Vietnamese in Santa Ana, so that’s why you have a little Saigon in Santa Ana, Orange County, Garden Grove. There are over 4 hundred thousand Vietnamese living there right now in San Gabriel Valley. You have another 2 hundred thousand living in San Gabriel Valley. In the Northern San Jose area, you have more than 350 thousand Vietnamese. The next city with the biggest population of Vietnamese of 300 thousand living in Houston and Dallas, Texas. And then 50 thousand living in West Virginia. Those places have a strong Vietnamese community.
What the best and the worst thing that you can say about Vietnam today? The best of Vietnam right now is … because after the war, the government did a lot of reconstruction, especially during 1980 and 1990. They opened up for international trade, so that attracted a lot of investors from Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, and Japan during the 1990s. The US finally had a first established contact with Vietnam since after that there wasn’t a lot of international trade until the late 2000s. I believe it was in 2009 that Vietnam made it to an Asian apex which made international allies against economic developed Asian countries led by Japan, Korea, Malaysia, China, and India. They called it apex.
So in the last 5 years, business has been booming in Vietnam. But then again, the people are the same. People suffer a lot because the poor continue to be poor. The government officials are the only rich because they are like China and India, where they take a lot of people’s rights. Big business is like that. That is the bad side of Vietnam.
Dad, in my US History class this summer we have learned that according to a Gallup poll taken in 2000, 70% of Americans believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you believe that sending Americans to Vietnam was a mistake? In a way it was, but if you’re talking post WW2, the Asia region has all become Communist. First, the fall of China, and then Indonesia. Let's not forget these 2 countries have the highest populations in Asia. Eventually, the Korean War took place in the early 60s ended within 5 years. China is another country that is divided into north against the south and constantly have disputes. Northern and Southern Vietnam is divided by the equator. The 17th parallel is what they call it, which divided it in half. When they divided, the residents had only one month of choice - either go to the northern part or they come to southern part.
So were you given that time period? Like you and your family to choose sides or no? No. Most of them lived where they lived. You didn’t have a choice. Unless you were rich, you ran over the border and abandoned everything. That’s what I heard. I was not born during that time.
So this beyond your choice? Yeah. I was born in South Vietnam in 1962. During that time, Vietnam was going through so many wars and revolutions. From 1960 to 1969, 7 presidents ruled South Vietnam . We were going through bad turmoil. The country was not stable. Basically, South Vietnam was not stable which was mainly controlled by the US government because every single day, there were half a million of GI soldiers. Every single day a 3 million dollar expense was spent in Vietnam for the GI soldiers. You’re talking about the 1960s to 70s. So that was a very big budget deficit at that time.
That is why most Americans did not approve of this war. During the whole entire Vietnam War, over 50 thousand American soldiers lost their lives there. And most of them were 18 to 22. They were new young soldiers who got there for their first deployment. Back then there was not that much training. They only had 3 months of basic training. Then they were sent to the battlefield. The replacement rate within the army system was constantly replacement with new soldiers coming in, so the chain of command was quite confused and that is how I was learning and knowing about it during the war.
You never took part in the training, but you just heard from people or friends who were going in or you just knew? I grew up in that area so it's not like I never heard of it. I constantly knew about it and especially back than 1965 or 1967, when we already had the black and white TV in Vietnam. We could listen to it on the radio station. We grew up in war times so we were alert about it.
Dad, that’s all the questions that I have for with the exception of this one - Is there anything else about the war that you would like to tell us about, and haven’t yet had a chance to express? I think at the end of 1969, the American missed the chance to stop the Vietnam War. If they had bombed Vietnam for 2 more weeks, North Vietnam would have surrendered, but President Johnson stopped. And because of that the Northern Vietnamese were able to get supplies from China and Russia. There were fierce battles during 1973 and spring of 1975, and with the help of the Chinese soldiers, they entered Saigon in April 30. Because of the protests in mainland America, nobody wanted the war anymore.
So 1975 is when America pulled out just to finish this war. That is why Southern Vietnamese like us felt betrayed by the Americans because we could fight in the war, but we didn’t have support anymore. At the end of the war, we didn’t have the force, and the chain of command was lost, so that’s how we lost the war. In 1975, we lost the war starting from the beginning to April 30 in only 51 days. The North Vietnamese had advanced. Their position on the border, which is the 17th parallel started to go down south. It's not that they could not stop - it’s just that American support units just pulled out. They just didn’t want to fight anymore. And South Vietnamese had no support, no chain of command; and that’s how they lost the war.
So you are saying that if we kept on bombing them for 2 more weeks we would have won is that what you are saying? We would have won in 1969 if America had kept bombing Hanoi. Everyone knows it. Anyone who studies the Vietnam War knows about it, and because of President Ford wanting to stop the war, they just pulled out.
So were you just energized by that when you think back to it? If they continued, could they have won? They might have. The country might have still been divided into North and South today. Let’s not forget that in 1975, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all lost because America pulled out of this region. They all pulled out. Three countries all lost to the Communists.
Ok then dad, that’s all the questions I have for you. I really want to thank you for your time this night. I found it all very interesting and am sure the rest of the class will too.
Thank you for having me.
Hello, everyone. My name is Courtney McCall and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing my grandmother, Reiko McCall, in Torrance, California.
My name is Christopher Yang and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview San Marino resident, Don Phan. Mr. Phan was 13 years old and living in Vietnam at the time of the Tet Offensive.
Hello, everyone, my name is Christopher Yang and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today I am interviewing San Marino resident Don Phan in Room 14 at San Marino High School. Mr. Phan grew up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Mr. Phan, before I ask the following questions, I would like to thank you for joining me today. Thank you.
Mr. Phan, in my US history class this summer, we have learned about the Vietnam War and I have invited you here today to ask you some questions about that war. The first question I want to ask you is: How old were you at the time of the TET Offensive? I was twelve and a half years old during the TET Offensive, and I remember that well. I turned 13 in late September of that year 1968.
In your own words, can you tell us what the TET offensive was? Tet is a New Year Lunar holiday, which in most years is the same day as the Chinese New Year. In 1968, Communist forces in Vietnam violated the traditions and conducted a military offensive all over South Vietnamese territory. The attackers were crushed militarily. However, they achieved political victory, especially with the brief occupation of the US embassy in Saigon. CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, declared a stalemate in the war. Of course, these are conclusions reached by the military and other scholars, because I was too young to understand the larger implications of the war.
Do you have any memories of that event that you would like to share with us? At the time, we briefly left our home, and we returned to find our walls pockmarked with bullets. We had stayed with my maternal grandparents, about a mile away. Walls outside their house were covered with sandbags. Still, I reproached my grandma for not listening to my advice. I had seen another brief battle in the city during the rebellion against President Ngo Dinh Diem less than four and a half years before that; therefore, I had urged my grandma to build an underground bunker in her house. But she had not had it done.
Approximately how long did you live in the sandbag house? Probably a couple of weeks, I would say. It was very short, at least in Saigon, but the battle went on for months in other parts in Vietnam, especially in the battle of Hue, which was the old Imperial capital. It took more than a month for the battle to end. And there was another battle that took several months in Kesan, another military outpost, in the valley in South Vietnam.
I see. Other than that can you please tell us about your life in Vietnam during the war years? For most of the war years, Saigon saw little fighting. Despite terror bombings, Saigon was really much more secure than Baghdad, Iraq, Kabul, or Afghanistan. We lived a typical upper-middle class life, a San Marino life if you will. Private schools, tutors, and country club sports. However, there was no air conditioning, and we used coal for cooking. Of course, we rarely ventured outside the city. Even on vacations in Vung Tau, a beach town about 50 miles away, we never traveled at night. The most remarkable fact about these years was the quickening inflation. By the time I was a freshman in high school, an Army colonel was no longer able to afford tuition for even one child on his official pay.
Wow. The Easter Offensive of 1972 also left a strong impression. My 17 year old classmates and I were called up for military service, but our orders were cancelled later. The book “Summer of Fire,” authored by a former South Vietnamese Army captain, made a national icon of a young colonel killed while leading his battalion on the northern front. Finally, my second cousin, an Airborne first lieutenant, was fragged in his sleep by a trooper under his command. Fragged was a term that came out of Vietnam, which means the trooper threw a fragmentation grenade into his lieutenant's room and killed him.
Did you know your second cousin well? Actually, I knew his second brother much better, but I had known about him.
How old were you when you left Vietnam? On October 20, 1973, I was almost a month past my 18th birthday.
How did you get here to the the United States? Can you tell us that story? I had graduated high school and came for college. Having missed the fall semester, I spent 2 months in Paris with relatives and arrived in LA on December 30.
Can you now tell us your story from the time you came to the United States until the very present? I’m especially wanting to know how hard it was for you to adjust to life in the United States? First, I was a foreign student. I received refugee status following the fall of Saigon in 1975. Then I was a permanent resident. I became a US citizen in 1982. My parents and siblings arrived right after the fall of Saigon. I received a Math-Computer Science degree from UCLA and an MBA. Like many in my generation, I worked in a variety of industries: oil, banking, tech, hospitality, real estate development and investment, and now health care. Initially, adjustment was amazingly quick. I was immersed in college life, beginning with the mild activism at UCLA. I briefly considered becoming a civil rights lawyer. After business school, however, my career was my main preoccupation. However, I never forgot that I had lost the country where I was born. Even today, I read obsessively about American law and local, state and federal politics, the military, as well as foreign affairs. I also read about immigration, race, ethnicity, and civil rights. In retrospect, the journey continues, developing a new identity and community is more difficult than I thought. My career did not go well because I was too modest with my goals, and not modest enough about my capabilities. That is, that my dreams were too small and I did not work hard enough to achieve them.
Have you ever been back to Vietnam since you came to the United States? I went in 1992, when US citizens were first allowed to explore business opportunities. I was there again when the trade embargo was lifted in 1994, and tried to do business thought 1996. I returned briefly for a family visit in late 2002. It took a while, but I returned from Vietnam very disappointed. Vietnam once again did not resemble the picture painted in the media, the emerging economic “dragon” with unbounded energy and promise. In fact, it was a closed society, hugely distrustful of foreigners, and especially of its expatriates. The greatest disappointment was that Hanoi no longer resembled the urbane, sophisticated city of my mother's youth. Of course, much has probably changed in the last twenty years, but I suspect that much has not.
I see. What was the best and the worst thing that you can say about Vietnam today? The best thing about Vietnam today is that it is at peace. However, democratic institutions, human rights, and civil liberties remain concerns. The worst thing is that an arrogance remains not just from winning the war, but from a thousand years of winning wars. Unfortunately, winning the economic race requires totally different skills. In some ways, Vietnam bears uncanny resemblance to China, except that it is 20-25 years behind. The Vietnam War ended in 1975 and the Communists took over China in 1949. Vietnam opened up to the world in 1992, but China had done so in 1972. In other ways, Vietnam is much further behind, as China’s business culture has been shaped by the experience of its very successful diaspora communities.
Mr. Phan, in my US History class this summer, we have learned about a Gallup-Poll taken in 2000, which said that 70% of Americans believed that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you agree with the Gallup-Poll? John Kerry thought so, Bill Clinton, I think Bernie Sanders, and others. Many did not. However, if you ask the professional military men who fought the war, most will beg to differ, you can cite Jim Webb, John McCain, and Barry McCaffrey, the most distinguished soldier no one has ever heard of, once the Army’s most decorated general officer and its youngest four-star. Those professional officers thought the politicians had lost the war, by setting out vague objectives and promising quick victory when a long war was inevitable. (You can consult the book “Dereliction of Duty,” by H.R. McMaster, now a lieutenant general.) You can note that American troops are still stationed in Europe, Japan, South Korea decades after the relevant war. We have been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq for 15 years and the end is not in sight. Those prominent veterans also said the politicians set unreasonable limitations on strategy and tactics (see “Prodigal Soldiers,” by James Kitfield). I used to think that as a Vietnamese, I was conflicted about the war, and as an American, I considered it a mistake. But now, I am not so sure. Vietnam remains the only war in which American troops were actively engaged for a significant period of time, and then withdrew. We should have learned some lesson. It turned out much worse than the limited insurgency in Greece and the brief one in Korea, we saw the limits of American tactics there.
Mr. Phan, that’s all the questions that I have for you today, unless of course there’s something you would still like to say about the war, but haven’t yet had the chance? Well, Vietnam should have taught us that a limited war can overwhelm the limited means intended for it, but apparently it hasn't. You can reach Andrew Bacevich, another prominent veteran and professor of history, for more detail in that range. I am going to have to go with Bacevich and conclude that we, as a nation, have not learn a lesson from Vietnam. The question we as citizens need to ask each time our government again wants to go to war is, "Why are we fighting there? What is the compelling interest to America? Are we willing to see it through to a successful conclusion? What do we want this success to look like? How is it going to end?" That is what Colin Powell said. But, given the financial and human cost to the armed forces, in the last decade and a half, Andrew Bacevich also asks, "Can we afford it? Can we in good conscience accept the sacrifices? Are we avoiding the hard questions, since only a small slice of the US population, the volunteers of the armed forces, personally bears the cost of war?" Paul Kennedy spoke about imperial overstretch, by which means he meant American military and political goals exceeding its resources. Then, Francis Fukuyama wrote of “the end of history” when the United States stood unchallenged at the end of the Cold War. By the way, you might want to note that Fukuyama was the head of policy planning at the state department. Therefore, he was the successor of Mr. X, or George Kennedy, the man who basically invented the American foreign policy after Truman in 1945. Each of us has to ask which thinker was more correct, Kennedy or Fukuyama. Personally, I think that presidential administrations associated with both major parties, Democrats and Republicans, have set impossible foreign, even domestic, policy goals in the last sixty years, and in the long run we can expect to be disappointed at every turn. Perhaps, we should have more modest goals and work harder at achieving them. Our goals are too big and we are not achieving them, and I don't think we will.
I see. Do you have any other opinions on the presidential campaign currently? I believe that both major presidential candidates do not represent a vision that we can accept, because America will not be successful by either expanding goals, continuing the Obama policy, to fight in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya, and soon in Yemen and other places. I believe that Hillary Clinton is asking the government to do too much, both domestically and in foreign policy, but Donald Trump wants us to withdraw totally from the world, and I don't think that's possible, either. I believe that we should limit our goals, but work harder at them. Like I said, show up in Europe, but don’t even think about fighting in Ukraine or Yemen or any other place you can think of.
Okay then, Mr. Phan, that’s all the questions I have for you. I really want to thank you for your time this afternoon. I found it all very interesting and i hope the rest of the class will too. Thank you. Thank you.
Mr. Barton, in my US History class this summer, we’ve learned about the Vietnam War and I’ve invited you in here today to ask you some questions about that war. The first question I want to ask you is this . . . in what year did you graduate from high school? I graduated from high school in 1978
So given that the war ended in 1973, that means that you never were given a chance to serve in the war, is that right? That's right. I did not participate in the war, but while growing up, I was able to watch the news with my parents and see the news clips every night of the correspondents that were there. I was able to watch the draft when it was on T.V. You see the little balls as they come down with all the dates. I was able to see anti-war protests on T.V. Actually in 1969 I actually went to San Francisco and saw some protesters there as well (in the Height Ashbury District).
So you felt pretty informed about the war? Yes. I did. I used to read a lot about back then. And since then too.
Did you know anyone who had served in the war? I had a distant cousin that was there, but that was the only one in my intermediate family.
Did he ever tell you about his experiences? No. I’ve never really talked to him about it.
Mr. Barton. According to a Gallup poll taken in 2000, 70% of Americans believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you believe that sending Americans to Vietnam was a mistake? I believe with the value of hindsight yes that it was a mistake.
Do you know anyone who was killed or injured in the war? I don’t know anyone personally who was killed. I do have an interesting story. I grew up in a small town in the middle of Iowa. The very last U.S. soldier killed in Vietnam as we were evacuating the U.S. embassy was from my hometown. He was 19 or 20 years old, He was four or five years ahead of me in high school. So I knew about that, I didn’t know him personally but that was probably the closest thing I’ve had to a personal encounter with someone who was injured or killed.
Is there anything else about the war you would like to tell us or talk about? I think I’ve done a lot of reading about the war. I’m not sure many people understand what happened, how it started. I think it’s one of those conflicts that the U.S. has been involved in that's least understood. Everybody understands World War II, World War I, the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, but I think the Vietnam War, maybe because it was the most recent and unpopular war, I think a lot of people are actually pretty ignorant about what happened and what went on there.
Now, did you see that sort of ignorance in your hometown or anything? No I again I was too young, you know the war ended in 1975, so I was 15 and you know, I was aware of what was going on but I had other things. I was insulated, I wasn’t personally affected by it so I didn’t really see that, and again it was Iowa, it wasn’t the hotbed of protest or anything like that.
So you never felt like the war was a threat to Americans or anything? No, not at all.
How did your parents react to the war? That’s hard to say. And it’s a great question, but again it was something that we watched or they watched, and I happened to be in and out, on the news every night, but they didn’t talk about it very much and again because we really had no close immediate family affected that’s probably why they were more quiet about it. I know that my stepfather had, he was a teacher in a middle school, and I know that he had students that actually served, but never really talked about it or thought about it, and again you would see guys in the military come home for leave, so I’d see people that were definitely in the military, I mean in the late 60’s, with shaved heads but it wasn’t, again where I was, it wasn’t a big thing in general.
Is there anything else about the war that you would like to tell us about, and haven’t yet had a chance to express it? Nope. Just this. If you have any further questions just come on up to my room and ask.
Okay, Mr. Barton then that’s all the questions I have for you. I really want to thank you for your time this afternoon. I found it all very interesting and look forward to having you as my teacher next year. Thank you, Erik. Much enjoyed.
Side note:
According to wikipedia.com "Charles McMahon and Darwin Lee Judge were the last two United States servicemen killed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The two men, both US Marines, were killed in a rocket attack one day before the Fall of Saigon. Charles McMahon, 11 days short of his 22nd birthday, was a corporal from Woburn, Massachusetts and Darwin Judge was a 19-yearold lance corporal and Eagle Scott from Marshalltown, Iowa." Marshalltown, Iowa is Mr. Barton's hometown. To learn more about Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge, click here
Darwin Judge
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My name is Courtney McCall and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview San Marino resident Mr. Dan Clarke. Mr. Clarke is the father of 2016 SMHS graduate Nicole Clarke.
Hello, everyone. My name is Courtney McCall and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing San Marino resident Mr. Dan Clarke in the computer lab of the College and Career Center at San Marino High School. Aside from living in San Marino, Mr. Clarke is also the father of 2016 SMHS graduate Nicole Clarke.
Mr. Clarke, in my US History class this summer, we have learned about the Vietnam War and I have invited you here today to ask you some questions about that war. But before getting started I want to congratulate your daughter Nicole for her recent graduation from the high school.
So now to my questions. The first question I want to ask you is this: In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War and at the height of the anti-Vietnam War protests, you were in the naval reserves and attending college, correct? That is correct.
Can you tell us a bit about all that? Well, in 1967 when I was a senior at Crescenta Valley High School, the draft was on. And I figured that if I’m going to have to serve, I want to do it on my own terms. So the day after grad night I put my hand up at the Los Alamitos Naval air station in Orange County and joined the naval reserves. At the same time I got into the naval flight program, I took an aptitude test. I did good enough, so I was in the naval reserves at the same time that I was in the flight program. Which meant after I graduated from college, I would go to Officer Candidate school. Then from there I would go to the flight training. So that’s pretty much how I got involved with the navy. And that's why in 1968 I was in the naval reserve going to college.
What did you do for your officer training? Well after I graduated from college, I went down to Pensacola Florida. I went through a sixteen-week officer candidate training course. It was sorta like a boot-camp combined with academics, military, and other stuff. So I graduated as an Ensign in the United States Navy. And from there I started basic flight training in Pensacola. That went on for the next year and a half. See, you go through a basic flight training, intermediate, and then advanced flight training. From there they give you these navy wings of gold. Then you go to your first active duty squadron.
An active duty squadron, what is that? Well, the navy is pretty similar to the other military branches. They have all of their aviation divided into squadrons. These are organizations that have a specialty associated with what they do. For example, they have helicopter squadrons, they have fighter squadrons, they have the fighter aircraft squadrons, and they have the bomber squadrons. Mine was a transport type squadron that carried mail, passengers and cargo aboard aircraft carriers. So I was basically a transport pilot. Carrying mail, passengers, and cargo along the east coast, Caribbean, and Europe. So that was my specialty.
So, the war for the United States ended in 1973 and if I have this right, you never went to Vietnam during the war years, is that correct? Yes, because by the time I have finished flight school it had been the end of 1973 and so I got orders from my first squadron, which was VRC-40. That was the transport type squadron that goes aboard the carriers. That was homed in Norfolk, Virginia. So that's where I went for my first active duty squadron.
Did any of your friends or family serve in the war? Well, I had a lot of friends of course. Friends that I made in the Officer Candidate School and other people that I knew from college. There were friends with me. None of my family, though.
Do you know anyone who was killed or injured in the war? Well yes, I do. A couple of folks who graduated from Officer Candidate School; they went to the last part of the war and a couple of guys, they unfortunately got killed. I knew some others that got killed later in post-war type activities. Not too many though. The Naval Aviation Program was pretty well trained and we pretty much knew what we were doing. It was rare if we got caught up in an accident. The only folks that got into trouble were those who got shot at.
Did any of your friends or family dodge the draft? You know Courtney, that is something that is. . . zero. I know of nobody that I knew. And I knew a lot of folks coming through high school. But my high school, which is Crescenta Valley High School is a pretty conservative high school and we didn’t have much liberalism going on there. I went to Oregon State University for college and at the time that college was pretty conservative too; so there wasn’t really that much of an anti-war sentiment in my experience.
Mr. Clarke, did you ever participate in an anti-war demonstration? No. It wouldn’t have been in keeping with me going through the military. Although I did have friends down in Berkeley that were Oregonians. So I had the chance to go down there and observe some of the anti-war demonstrations. But I was more of an observer. I never participated.
Did you see any violent actions at some of these protests? Well, I did see at Berkeley Square some very active demonstrations and there were some active confrontations between the police and security and the folks demonstrating. It was quite vivid and I guess you call it somewhat entertaining, but it was somewhat violent. Yes.
A final Vietnam War question for you, Mr. Clarke. Do you think that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake? You know that's a very good question Courtney and it's been almost fifty years on. Let me answer that free-form and I would like to answer it completely. First of all, I think the original involvement in that war (it was basically a civil war in the late 50s and the early 60s) was an honorable intention.
Because we didn’t want that country to go communist. And there was by indication since there was big support from Russia that there was a global war against communism, there's just no doubt about that. So, the original involvement was honorable. But then there are a couple of things that happened. First of all, there was no real, clear mandate in what we were doing. There was never any clarity. And why we were there and what we were doing.
Then the war became horribly politicized back home. And then the thing that really put the nail in the coffin for our involvement in Vietnam is that nobody could really make the case that us fighting in Vietnam had any aspect of protecting our national security. As was maybe our war with Japan in World War II and our war fighting the Nazis in the eastern front in World War II. Nobody could never make the case that our national security was really in jeopardy fighting a civil war abroad. So in hindsight, yes it was a mistake, but the original intentions I thought were honorable.
So with that, we've come to the end of the interview, Mr. Clarke. Before closing, is there anything else about the Vietnam war that you would like to tell us about that you haven’t yet had a chance to express? The Vietnam war was a reflection of the Cold War and that extended well into the 70s and the early 80s when I got out of active duty. So even though Vietnam was a lost war, the hangover from that war stayed with me even though I was on active duty and we were still really involved, in a very active cold war with Russia. So it wasn’t just 1973, it wasn’t that everything had just ended. It kept going as a hangover. For all the other aspects the navy was doing, until probably 1980 and 1981. And that's when I got out of the active duty and entered the reserve; which I stayed for another thirteen years.
So you stated that you were still affected after the war had ended. Was there anyone you know that was emotionally affected by the war? Well, I think everybody who served in Vietnam had a certain aspect of being affected. They were certainly happy not to be fighting in the war, but most of the guys I know now, there were a lot of the ground troops that I didn’t really know. I knew mostly that air people, the air department people and they were rather affected by being shot at a lot. But they were very happy not being shot at after that. The only thing that was dangerous was going aboard the aircraft carriers. That always made them nervous. But the effect from that was was very obvious. You could see it, how people acted, the ones that actually had to fight there.
Okay, so that’s it. Mr. Clarke, that’s all the questions I have for you. I really want to thank you for your time today. I found it all very interesting and think the rest of the class will too. I enjoyed myself immensely. Thank you.
Side note:
One other question that was asked that was not in the interview but accidentally (and luckily) was recorded is this question . . . were you ever scared when trying to land on an aircraft carriers? Well, let me tell you. Flying an airplane actually becomes rather routine after awhile. Take off, flying and landing - many times it’s just like riding on a bus. You take off, fly, and you land. Yet there are times when the routine is anything but boring and that's especially true when trying to land on an aircraft carrier. In those instances, you have to be always alert; 100%. We were always on edge and the danger was always clear and present. That was a very dangerous environment. We were flying very close to other aircraft and of course landing aboard the aircraft carrier was always dangerous. Always, always dangerous. We were dealing with a moving platform. Sometimes the ships, when you’re on rough seas, the rear deck would be doing this. . . and this. . . [making hand movements of what the rear deck would do]. Each aircraft carrier would be different.
Turboprop aircraft carrier landing
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Kyle Yen Interviews SM Teacher Bill MannMy name is Kyle Yen and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview San Marino computer applications teacher Mr. Bill Mann.
Hello, everyone. My name is Kyle Yen and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing SMHS computer applications teacher Mr. Bill Mann in room 404 at San Marino High School.
Mr. Mann, in my US History class this summer, we’ve learned about the Vietnam War and I’ve invited you in here today to ask you some questions about that war.
The first question I want to ask you is: what year did you graduate from high school? 1961.
Ok, and did you serve in the war right after high school? I went to college, but I was in the reserves in ‘57, ‘58 maybe. And then during college, I went into the service, in active duty.
And where did you go for basic training? We went down to San Diego, and I was in the Navy. We had two weeks of basic training, not the 10 weeks that is normally the cycle . . . because that’s for people that invest. But yeah, in San Diego.
Can you describe some parts of training? Because I was older, I was in charge of our group, our… I don’t know what they called it at the time, platoon or I don’t know. We did the hiking and we did the shooting and we did the swimming. We did all the things that are in the training to be in the service.
When did you know when you were being deployed to Vietnam? In 1965, they told me, I had served 4 and a half years in the reserves, and they that it was my turn to go, in active duty.
Ok, so now some more questions about your time in Vietnam. So, what years did you serve in the war? I was on active duty from 1965 to 1967.
So you were in the Navy, what were your specific duties? I was a radar-man, and also I was an ECM operator, which was Electronic Counter-Measures, and I went to school through the reserves, for radar, and then I went to Point Loma for ECM operator.
So radar-man, is that on the ground or further back? I was on a destroyer, and I was stationed down below. We plotted courses, we looked at maps for any dangerous things, so we could plot a course so that the ship could pull into harbors and things like that.
Did you ever physically set foot in Vietnam? No, we went up some of the rivers, and we had .50 caliber machine guns, I think, on the sides of the ship, and one in the rear. We would go up the rivers, and I could throw a stone to the land, but I never set foot on the land.
Where did your training as a radarman? They call it “Blacksmith.” It’s the navy and marine building up on Sierra Madre Boulevard in Pasadena and I went to a two-week school down at Point Loma for radarman.
That doesn’t sound like a very physical job. It’s not.
Did you feel like you wasted your time training? Actually not, because we did so much. When we took on ammo, or we took on stores, or we took on fuel, we all had to participate and pull the lines over and do that. I was up in the nets during bring up ammo, and I’d have to take the shots and pass them to another person. So it was helpful.
What was day-to-day life like on the Destroyer? In war time, or when we were close to Vietnam, we would be 5 hours on, 7 hours off, 7 hours on, and 5 hours off. In other words, that was the 24-hour cycle that we used. When you’re on, you’re up in radar, and when you’re off, you’re down in the bunk area, and sometimes we’d have to clean up the bunk area, and sometimes we didn’t have to. That was our free time, basically.
Where did you keep your belongings? Our bunks were 3 high, and then, underneath the bunks, the bottom part of the bunk was where we had lockers, and there were 3 lockers under each bay of bunks. If the bunks were 6 or 7 feet, then you divide that up by 3 and that was a locker.
Were living quarters really cramped? Um, yeah they were, but not really really bad. The showers were in another place, and the bathrooms were in another place, so they weren’t right where we were sleeping.
Just going onto some other questions here, do you have any family members or friends that served in the war? My uncle was a marine, but he didn’t serve in that war. He served in WWII. And then my brother-in-law, he was in another ship. He went in before I did, and so I didn’t see him over in Vietnam.
Do you have any stories from your time on the Destroyer? We have a lot of stories. When we refueled, that was always a time that everyone got together, and helped each other, that sort of thing. One time, we lost a cable overboard, when we were refueling, and it got tangled up in the propellers, so that was something that happened. And so we got that straightened out. We did a lot of things on the ship. One of the things was we picked up probably about 8 pilots that made it to the Tonkin Gulf and their planes were shot up, so they couldn’t get to the ship, so we’d try to pick them up before the Viet Cong got to them.
Did you ever make any friends who were Vietnamese? We had people on the ship that were from Vietnam, and we made friends with those people. They were officers in the Vietnam army. And yeah, we made friends with them.
Ok. Just some more questions about after the war:
We know now that a lot American service men and women struggled emotionally after coming back from their service. Was it difficult for you to adjust to life in the US? It wasn’t difficult for me because I didn’t see any real shooting of people. None of the people on our ship got hurt. It’s not like in the Armory or the Marine Corps, where they lost a lot of friends, but when we came home, it was what I call a thankless war. Nobody thanked you, nobody cared that you were in the service or not, it was just a thankless war.
Do you feel like you were treated badly by other people? Not so much badly, I don’t think, it’s just that people didn’t care. I don’t know, nowadays, when people are in the service, they do a lot for them. Some restaurants will give them free meals and that sort of thing, and we had none of that. Nobody really cared.
Given that you took the time, and everyone was risking their lives in Vietnam for our country, how do you feel about those who either dodged the draft or loudly protested the war on our college and university campuses? It was their decision, and I think they have to live with their decision, and I feel sorry for them.
According to a poll recently taken in 2000, 70% of Americans believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you agree with that? I don’t think that we shouldn’t have gone there, because there were a lot of Communists there, and people were coming down from China in Vietnam, and they were Communists. The people under the Communist rule didn’t have any freedom, it was just a really bad situation. I think it was important, I think even though we didn’t win the war, I think think that we made an impact, and you can see the impact that it made with Russia and tearing down the wall in Germany, and hardly anyone is a real Communist anymore, like they were in that day and age.
Just a last thing, do you have anything you want to share about the war that you think, like any thoughts? I have some thoughts. One was I believe that Jane Fonda was a sympathizer with the communists because she collected the nametags of the soldiers in the prisons there. She was an actress. The family was involved with acting. She received nametags from some of the prisoners for her to come back to the United States to tell their families that they were okay, they were still in Vietnam in prisons, but they were okay. And she gave the nametags to the Viet Cong and they tortured them because they did that. And I really believe that she was a traitor, and that’s one of the things that I really have a rough time with.
That’s interesting. So, Mr. Mann, that’s all the questions I have. I want to thank you for taking the time this afternoon just to come to this interview. I found it very interesting and educational. Thank you for serving in our military, like you said before that it was a thankless war, but I think that all the soldiers and you on the Destroyer, that really helped the movement, and that kept Communism out of the world. Thank you again. I’ll go ahead and stop the recording now.
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My name is Ben Ly and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing my father Mr. Ly in my home in Los Angeles, California. My father grew up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Hello, everyone. My name is Ben Ly and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing my dad, in our home, San Marino High School.
Dad, in my US History class this summer, we have learned about the Vietnam War and I have invited you here today to ask you some questions about that war and the first question I want to ask you is this:
How old were you at the time of the Tet Offensive? I was only 6 years old.
Do you have any memories of that event? Yes. It was the Second Day of Chinese New Year and all of a sudden everybody was shooting off firecrackers, and then the firecracker sounds got bigger and bigger. At first, we didn’t realize that those sounds were coming from the guns of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong Communists who had mixed in with the crowd and were shooting at the South Vietnamese soldiers. That’s how the Tet Offensive began.
Ok. Do you have any other memories? Yea, we were trapped. The war zone was in Cholon. Cholon is a mainly Chinese neighborhood and the Communists were coming by boat because during Chinese New Year there are a lot of boats coming from villages far away. They were bringing the flour and the seasonal goods and the communists were with them. So that how they got into Cholon, and then they quickly took the route to Saigon, and then they started bombing and shooting the American Embassy, and all of a sudden, the embassy was under attack. The president’s house was under attack.
Then within the next 3 months we were in the war zone. We were living basically in the middle of the war zone because every day and night we would see soldiers going to the next street, which is where we lived. Next street to fight. Then the gun sounds and the bombing was nonstop. There was no such thing as a ceasefire. When night came the fighting was more aggressive and more brutal. We saw helicopters flying with a 50-millimeter gun. The only thing we could remember was they were shooting rockets back.
We didn’t know how to describe it. We always kept saying, ¨Look, the American helicopter is peeing!” Actually, they were shooting rockets at the ground where the VC, Viet Cong, stayed. For 3 months, it was nonstop. From February to May it was nonstop. We had no communication, no power, no light, and we didn’t have water. Our drinking water relied on the rain because Vietnam was under monsoons; it was a good thing that it was the rainy season so we could collect so water from the rain. We could filter it out and drink. No food. Nothing. Whatever we had was just rice because that’s what we had leftover. Rice. And you were not allowed to go out. You stayed in your house all the time, nothing else. And at night time all we saw was no light. You were so scared to turn on the lights or put a candle on because then they though you're one of the VC. So all the lights were shut off. And the whole neighborhood was like that. They were living in fear. That event was so traumatizing.
By the time they went back to normal curfew it was May. We went back to school. The school become more like a refugee camp because the next 8 months, a lot of people lost their houses. They had no place to go; they were waiting for relocation and we were going to school side by side with the refugees living at school. I lost a lot of childhood friends because they never came back. They never came back to school, and we don't know why. We don't know where they lived but they never came back. They never did. Never. A lot of them didn't come back to school.
And later on, my father, when the curfew was over during May and June, was able to visit those areas in what you call the War Zone. It's the same thing you see in any war. All the buildings were collapsed. Nobody lived there anymore. The place needed to be cleaned up real bad. You saw dead people all over the place. And that’s how it was. That is how the Tet Offensive was. During the Tet Offensive, a lot of Viet Cong died; also a lot of GI soldiers died. So did the Vietnamese soldiers, too. But I think a lot of people who died were just the civilians. They got caught in the middle.
What is a GI soldier exactly? A GI soldier is an American soldier. American marines that went to Vietnam to fight the war. About half a million of them were there during the Vietnam War. In 1968, what they called the Tet Offensive played a major role. It was the first time the Northern part the Viet Cong almost went to the capital of South Vietnam to do their advance, but to them, it was a disaster, but to the Americans, I think the Americans and Southern Vietnamese soldiers suffered a lot of casualties. During this war a lot of people lost their lives. Not until 1973, this was called the most serious fight in the central highland area, the Central Vietnam highland area. Southern Vietnamese soldiers lost almost 2 battalions. Think about it. (lost almost over 1000 soldiers) They also lost 2 generals. Almost 1 million soldiers died during 1973, but during the Tet Offensive, the number was not lower.
And how old were you when you came to the United States? I came to the United States in 1978. July 2, 1978. I was 14 years old.
How did you get here? By plane or boat? My father took a lot of effort to try and get us here. We were here by plane, but we went to Singapore first, then we came to the United States.
Can you now tell us your story from the time you came to the United States until the very present? I’m especially wanting to know how hard was it for you to adjust to life in the United States? Well you know, we were going to a completely different environment. We came to the United States. Most of them were Southern Vietnamese who escaped from the Communist country coming to the United States or either Paris or Australia - for freedom. Life was not easy. I recall my sophomore, senior, and junior year. I lived on the dictionary. Back then there was no ESL available. We had to have a dictionary to go to school. Back then, there was no Internet, so we only relied on a dictionary that could help us with everything, and during the summertime, we would do summer jobs. I remember the first summer in 1978. I worked with a building contractor we would do some painting. We went to people’s houses to paint. I went to do construction work when I was only 14. I was happy to get paid one dollar an hour. Back then, it was more like adult labor. In 1978, a gallon of gas was only 30 cents, and bubblegum was only 5 cents.
Have you ever been back to Vietnam? I have been back to Vietnam because of business purposes. I am an international buyer in a food distributor company so it is my job to go back to Asia and different countries of Asia to the conventions and food shows. I did manage to go back to Saigon, which is now called Ho Chi Minh City. The city has been changing a lot. Everything is more modern now. Because of the war, we can find most of the Vietnamese in Santa Ana, so that’s why you have a little Saigon in Santa Ana, Orange County, Garden Grove. There are over 4 hundred thousand Vietnamese living there right now in San Gabriel Valley. You have another 2 hundred thousand living in San Gabriel Valley. In the Northern San Jose area, you have more than 350 thousand Vietnamese. The next city with the biggest population of Vietnamese of 300 thousand living in Houston and Dallas, Texas. And then 50 thousand living in West Virginia. Those places have a strong Vietnamese community.
What the best and the worst thing that you can say about Vietnam today? The best of Vietnam right now is … because after the war, the government did a lot of reconstruction, especially during 1980 and 1990. They opened up for international trade, so that attracted a lot of investors from Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, and Japan during the 1990s. The US finally had a first established contact with Vietnam since after that there wasn’t a lot of international trade until the late 2000s. I believe it was in 2009 that Vietnam made it to an Asian apex which made international allies against economic developed Asian countries led by Japan, Korea, Malaysia, China, and India. They called it apex.
So in the last 5 years, business has been booming in Vietnam. But then again, the people are the same. People suffer a lot because the poor continue to be poor. The government officials are the only rich because they are like China and India, where they take a lot of people’s rights. Big business is like that. That is the bad side of Vietnam.
Dad, in my US History class this summer we have learned that according to a Gallup poll taken in 2000, 70% of Americans believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you believe that sending Americans to Vietnam was a mistake? In a way it was, but if you’re talking post WW2, the Asia region has all become Communist. First, the fall of China, and then Indonesia. Let's not forget these 2 countries have the highest populations in Asia. Eventually, the Korean War took place in the early 60s ended within 5 years. China is another country that is divided into north against the south and constantly have disputes. Northern and Southern Vietnam is divided by the equator. The 17th parallel is what they call it, which divided it in half. When they divided, the residents had only one month of choice - either go to the northern part or they come to southern part.
So were you given that time period? Like you and your family to choose sides or no? No. Most of them lived where they lived. You didn’t have a choice. Unless you were rich, you ran over the border and abandoned everything. That’s what I heard. I was not born during that time.
So this beyond your choice? Yeah. I was born in South Vietnam in 1962. During that time, Vietnam was going through so many wars and revolutions. From 1960 to 1969, 7 presidents ruled South Vietnam . We were going through bad turmoil. The country was not stable. Basically, South Vietnam was not stable which was mainly controlled by the US government because every single day, there were half a million of GI soldiers. Every single day a 3 million dollar expense was spent in Vietnam for the GI soldiers. You’re talking about the 1960s to 70s. So that was a very big budget deficit at that time.
That is why most Americans did not approve of this war. During the whole entire Vietnam War, over 50 thousand American soldiers lost their lives there. And most of them were 18 to 22. They were new young soldiers who got there for their first deployment. Back then there was not that much training. They only had 3 months of basic training. Then they were sent to the battlefield. The replacement rate within the army system was constantly replacement with new soldiers coming in, so the chain of command was quite confused and that is how I was learning and knowing about it during the war.
You never took part in the training, but you just heard from people or friends who were going in or you just knew? I grew up in that area so it's not like I never heard of it. I constantly knew about it and especially back than 1965 or 1967, when we already had the black and white TV in Vietnam. We could listen to it on the radio station. We grew up in war times so we were alert about it.
Dad, that’s all the questions that I have for with the exception of this one - Is there anything else about the war that you would like to tell us about, and haven’t yet had a chance to express? I think at the end of 1969, the American missed the chance to stop the Vietnam War. If they had bombed Vietnam for 2 more weeks, North Vietnam would have surrendered, but President Johnson stopped. And because of that the Northern Vietnamese were able to get supplies from China and Russia. There were fierce battles during 1973 and spring of 1975, and with the help of the Chinese soldiers, they entered Saigon in April 30. Because of the protests in mainland America, nobody wanted the war anymore.
So 1975 is when America pulled out just to finish this war. That is why Southern Vietnamese like us felt betrayed by the Americans because we could fight in the war, but we didn’t have support anymore. At the end of the war, we didn’t have the force, and the chain of command was lost, so that’s how we lost the war. In 1975, we lost the war starting from the beginning to April 30 in only 51 days. The North Vietnamese had advanced. Their position on the border, which is the 17th parallel started to go down south. It's not that they could not stop - it’s just that American support units just pulled out. They just didn’t want to fight anymore. And South Vietnamese had no support, no chain of command; and that’s how they lost the war.
So you are saying that if we kept on bombing them for 2 more weeks we would have won is that what you are saying? We would have won in 1969 if America had kept bombing Hanoi. Everyone knows it. Anyone who studies the Vietnam War knows about it, and because of President Ford wanting to stop the war, they just pulled out.
So were you just energized by that when you think back to it? If they continued, could they have won? They might have. The country might have still been divided into North and South today. Let’s not forget that in 1975, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all lost because America pulled out of this region. They all pulled out. Three countries all lost to the Communists.
Ok then dad, that’s all the questions I have for you. I really want to thank you for your time this night. I found it all very interesting and am sure the rest of the class will too.
Thank you for having me.
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My name is Courtney McCall, and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview my grandmother, Reiko McCall.
Courtney McCall Interviews Her Grandmother Reiko McCall
Hello, everyone. My name is Courtney McCall and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing my grandmother, Reiko McCall, in Torrance, California.
Grandma, in my US History class this summer, we have learned about the Vietnam War and I have invited you here today to ask you some questions about the war, but before I get there, I want to ask you some questions about your life before the war. . . with the first question being where were you born? I was born here in Southern California, in 1940.
So Grandma, that makes you about a year old at the time of the Pearl Harbor attacked, right? Yes. You’re right.
And where were your father and mother born? Well, my parents were born here in the United States. My father was born in the Sacramento area of California in 1909. My mother was born in 1915 in Denver, Colorado. So they were US citizens, but their parents immigrated from Japan.
So given that your parents were Japanese and that your family lived here on the west coast, right around your first birthday, you were sent to an internment camp, right? Yes. The process started when I was maybe a year and a half. We were sent away, taken away from our homes. First, we were taken to the Santa Anita race tracks; where we spent six months in the horse stalls. Then we were placed in trains and sent to Arkansas. Of all places, it was so far away.
When did you go to Arkansas? Well, I think I was a year and a half. Which would be around 1942, perhaps.
What year did you get out of the internment camps? I think I was about three and a half to four. Unfortunately, I don’t recall really much about it because I was too young. Although I did get information from my parents, but they didn’t talk much about the internment camps. So actually I knew very little about it. I just knew that my family spent a lot of time there. When we first left the internment camp, in Rohwer Arkansas, we went to Chicago for a period of time. Then we went to Seabrook Farms in Southern New Jersey; where my father was able to work in a food processing plant, rather than being inducted into the service. Seabrook Farms supplied food goods to the armed forces. I did though have many uncles who served in the United States Army in Europe, not in Asia.
Do you remember the living conditions in the internment camps? Or do you remember your parents talking about it? Well, I remember my mother talking saying that she had to stand in line for everything. Even for meals where they had what they called mess halls. See, you would have to stand in line for your meals, you would stand in line to go to the bathroom, and you would stand in line to take a shower. Families did not have private bathrooms.
Can you please tell us about your life from the point in time that you got out of the camp, up until the end of the Vietnam War? Oh, that’s a long time. Oh golly, let’s see. Well, we [her family and herself] spent five years in New Jersey, where I started my schooling. We then returned to Southern California in the same home that my grandfather was in before the war. (My grandfather used to farm in Redondo Beach, Palos Verdes. He was a truck farmer; which means that he leased the land, raised his produce, and drove them down to the market in downtown Los Angeles every day). So we were able to go back to that home; which was nice. However, there was nothing left inside. All the furnishings, everything was removed.
Then, I came back to California when I was nine. I went through the Torrance school system until I graduated high school. Then I went to El Camino City College for two years and got my AA. Next, I went to Long Beach State and got my teaching credential. So I was busy going to school and college getting my degree. Then I started teaching in Torrance in elementary schools and I got married and started a family. I stayed home with my three boys until they were all in school. Then I returned teaching again. So that part of my life was really quite busy. I just remember being fearful that my husband, John, would have to go to Vietnam war. But it turns out that when he signed up for the draft, they said to him, “you don’t have to go to serve in the war right now because you are a full-time college student and you have a family, so you don’t need to go right now.” So that’s what happened.
How old were your children at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975? Well, let’s see. Little John the oldest was born in 1965. So he was around ten years old. And Michael, your dad, was about a year younger, so nine-ish. Dan, the youngest, was three and a half years later so that is six-ish.
Now onto my questions about the Vietnam War itself. . . for starters I want to know, what was it like to live during the Vietnam War? Well, I was so busy staying at home and taking care of the children. All I really knew about the war around me were the protests being done in many different colleges as well as people moving to Canada to avoid the draft. Unfortunately, all wars are ugly. Too many terrible things happened. Too many people were hurt. So I wasn’t directly involved, because no one in our family was in the war itself.
We do know of a neighbor who did serve during the war, though. He was stationed in Japan and he said that his purpose there was to supply South Vietnam. So he would go in supply them. Although he was discharged before the heavy war started; he had already served his five years. He said that he didn’t directly see any combat, but he was in the area and saw it from the outside. He did see the fall of Saigon at the end of the war.
I can say that I meet someone after the war who was directly affected by it. I had a student, a fifth grader who was Vietnamese, but I’ll tell you about it later.
Were you for or against the war? Well, you always support the United States. We are a wonderful country. I hate to see people oppressed and being controlled. So of course, I wanted to help. I always support whatever the United States is doing at the time. Even though I didn’t like the war, the fighting itself.
Did you ever personally witness or participate in any anti-war protests? No.
Did you know anyone who got drafted? Only our neighbor who served in Japan for the US.
Did you in any way participate in the war? No, I didn’t. I was busy with my three boys.
What about the people around you. The people you worked with, your fellow teachers for example. Did they talk about the war? Oh yes, of course. This is where we started to hear about the boat people. You know this is after the fall of Saigon; where the people were trying to escape South Vietnam. I heard about the boat people and I just hoped that they can find refuge and safety.
But it turns out that one of my fifth-grade students was one of those refuges. He said, “Mrs. McCall, my dad was a pharmacist in South Vietnam and he wanted us to be in a safer place. So we escaped at night; he took my sister, my brother, and myself. We went in the middle of the night to get onto a large boat with many others trying to escape. Then we came to the United States after a lengthy time. But the United States Government would not allow us to step onto United States soil until we went through a quarantine period; which I understood, but we were there out in the ocean again for about a month. The Red Cross would come to us and bring us supplies. You know Mrs. McCall, I never want to be on a boat again”. So it left quite an impression on him. But he was a wonderful student. He learned English very quickly. His name is interesting. It is spelled “Duc” and in Vietnam, he was called Duck. He knew enough that he would be teased and called Donald Duck, so he changed his name to Duke. He and his sister and brother all did well in school. They worked very hard and they were very kind people. The sad thing is that they couldn’t bring their mother with them. Their mother stayed with the grandparents because those were her parents and she wanted to take care of them and see that they were safe.
Unfortunately, I was transferred to another school two years later, so I don’t know what happened to the little boy. I don’t know how much longer he had to wait for his mother to join his family in the US. Its sad that the mother had to be let behind. They were in communication though and I hoped to think that she would have soon reunited with her family.
Do you perhaps remember his age when he came? Yes. He was still very young. He was around ten or eleven. I think he was eleven when he was in my classroom.
Did any of your students whose parents served in the war tell you stories of the war? No. Not that I can recall.
Grandma, do you have any other interesting stories about people that you know that were somehow involved in the war? No, the stories that I told were the most interesting ones. I feel bad because I don’t have a lot to share about this topic due to the fact that I wasn’t really directly affected by the Vietnam War.
Grandma, unfortunately the Vietnam War was not the first time you had experienced war in your lifetime. And with that in mind, I’m wondering. Did the Vietnam war bring back any memories of your experiences in World War II? Perhaps that I was affected differently. In World War II, it was a panic you know the United States had never been attacked on any of its territories like that. I think that. . .maybe it brings back the feelings that were involved in a conflict. It’s a little mixture of emotions, you know.
Last question for you, Grandma. Is there anything else about the war that you would like to tell us about, and haven’t yet had a chance to express it? Only that it was such a sad thing to see. A lot of it we didn’t know about until we saw it on the news or we saw it in movies made of that time. Then we would see how ugly it was and how awful it was. We would see how many people were hurt and it’s sad. There’s a sadness to seeing that. War time is a very ugly time and it just hurt so many people.
Do you remember any clips from TV about the war that really stood out for you? Only that some of the things that were shown on the news. It’s truly sad. I just remember hoping that people would learn from these thing and so they won’t repeat it. It’s scary how much anger some people have and that they feel like they have to act out on it. It’s a sadness, we need to work more with kindness together.
Okay, so that’s it, Grandma. That’s all the questions I have, I really want to thank you for your time this evening. I found it all very interesting and think the rest of the class will too. I don’t know if this is that interesting or helpful to you, but thank for having me!
Sidenote:
The Rohwer War Relocation Center was a World War II Japanese American internment camp located in rural southeastern Arkansas, in Desha County. It was in operation from September 18, 1942, until November 30, 1945, and held as many as 8,475 Japanese Americans forcibly evacuated from California. The Rohwer War Relocation Center Cemetery is located here and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1992.
Erik Olson Interviews his Grandmother, Peggy Olson
My name is Erik Olson and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview my grandmother, Peggy Olson.
Hello, everyone. My name is Erik Olson and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today, I am interviewing my grandmother (or MorFar in Swedish) at my house in San Marino, California.
MorFar, in my US history class we have learned about the Vietnam War and I’ve invited you here today to ask you some questions about the war.
My first question is, how old were you when you first learned about the war? Let me think. I think I was about 16.
So, you were still a child when the war started, did your parents give you much information about the war? No, no I really, I don’t think I was aware much that it was going on.
So Grandma, that makes you about a year old at the time of the Pearl Harbor attacked, right? Yes. You’re right.
And where were your father and mother born? Well, my parents were born here in the United States. My father was born in the Sacramento area of California in 1909. My mother was born in 1915 in Denver, Colorado. So they were US citizens, but their parents immigrated from Japan.
So given that your parents were Japanese and that your family lived here on the west coast, right around your first birthday, you were sent to an internment camp, right? Yes. The process started when I was maybe a year and a half. We were sent away, taken away from our homes. First, we were taken to the Santa Anita race tracks; where we spent six months in the horse stalls. Then we were placed in trains and sent to Arkansas. Of all places, it was so far away.
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| Rohwer Relocation Center, Arkansas |
What year did you get out of the internment camps? I think I was about three and a half to four. Unfortunately, I don’t recall really much about it because I was too young. Although I did get information from my parents, but they didn’t talk much about the internment camps. So actually I knew very little about it. I just knew that my family spent a lot of time there. When we first left the internment camp, in Rohwer Arkansas, we went to Chicago for a period of time. Then we went to Seabrook Farms in Southern New Jersey; where my father was able to work in a food processing plant, rather than being inducted into the service. Seabrook Farms supplied food goods to the armed forces. I did though have many uncles who served in the United States Army in Europe, not in Asia.
Do you remember the living conditions in the internment camps? Or do you remember your parents talking about it? Well, I remember my mother talking saying that she had to stand in line for everything. Even for meals where they had what they called mess halls. See, you would have to stand in line for your meals, you would stand in line to go to the bathroom, and you would stand in line to take a shower. Families did not have private bathrooms.
Can you please tell us about your life from the point in time that you got out of the camp, up until the end of the Vietnam War? Oh, that’s a long time. Oh golly, let’s see. Well, we [her family and herself] spent five years in New Jersey, where I started my schooling. We then returned to Southern California in the same home that my grandfather was in before the war. (My grandfather used to farm in Redondo Beach, Palos Verdes. He was a truck farmer; which means that he leased the land, raised his produce, and drove them down to the market in downtown Los Angeles every day). So we were able to go back to that home; which was nice. However, there was nothing left inside. All the furnishings, everything was removed.
Then, I came back to California when I was nine. I went through the Torrance school system until I graduated high school. Then I went to El Camino City College for two years and got my AA. Next, I went to Long Beach State and got my teaching credential. So I was busy going to school and college getting my degree. Then I started teaching in Torrance in elementary schools and I got married and started a family. I stayed home with my three boys until they were all in school. Then I returned teaching again. So that part of my life was really quite busy. I just remember being fearful that my husband, John, would have to go to Vietnam war. But it turns out that when he signed up for the draft, they said to him, “you don’t have to go to serve in the war right now because you are a full-time college student and you have a family, so you don’t need to go right now.” So that’s what happened.
How old were your children at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975? Well, let’s see. Little John the oldest was born in 1965. So he was around ten years old. And Michael, your dad, was about a year younger, so nine-ish. Dan, the youngest, was three and a half years later so that is six-ish.
Now onto my questions about the Vietnam War itself. . . for starters I want to know, what was it like to live during the Vietnam War? Well, I was so busy staying at home and taking care of the children. All I really knew about the war around me were the protests being done in many different colleges as well as people moving to Canada to avoid the draft. Unfortunately, all wars are ugly. Too many terrible things happened. Too many people were hurt. So I wasn’t directly involved, because no one in our family was in the war itself.
We do know of a neighbor who did serve during the war, though. He was stationed in Japan and he said that his purpose there was to supply South Vietnam. So he would go in supply them. Although he was discharged before the heavy war started; he had already served his five years. He said that he didn’t directly see any combat, but he was in the area and saw it from the outside. He did see the fall of Saigon at the end of the war.
I can say that I meet someone after the war who was directly affected by it. I had a student, a fifth grader who was Vietnamese, but I’ll tell you about it later.
Were you for or against the war? Well, you always support the United States. We are a wonderful country. I hate to see people oppressed and being controlled. So of course, I wanted to help. I always support whatever the United States is doing at the time. Even though I didn’t like the war, the fighting itself.
Did you ever personally witness or participate in any anti-war protests? No.
Did you know anyone who got drafted? Only our neighbor who served in Japan for the US.
Did you in any way participate in the war? No, I didn’t. I was busy with my three boys.
What about the people around you. The people you worked with, your fellow teachers for example. Did they talk about the war? Oh yes, of course. This is where we started to hear about the boat people. You know this is after the fall of Saigon; where the people were trying to escape South Vietnam. I heard about the boat people and I just hoped that they can find refuge and safety.
But it turns out that one of my fifth-grade students was one of those refuges. He said, “Mrs. McCall, my dad was a pharmacist in South Vietnam and he wanted us to be in a safer place. So we escaped at night; he took my sister, my brother, and myself. We went in the middle of the night to get onto a large boat with many others trying to escape. Then we came to the United States after a lengthy time. But the United States Government would not allow us to step onto United States soil until we went through a quarantine period; which I understood, but we were there out in the ocean again for about a month. The Red Cross would come to us and bring us supplies. You know Mrs. McCall, I never want to be on a boat again”. So it left quite an impression on him. But he was a wonderful student. He learned English very quickly. His name is interesting. It is spelled “Duc” and in Vietnam, he was called Duck. He knew enough that he would be teased and called Donald Duck, so he changed his name to Duke. He and his sister and brother all did well in school. They worked very hard and they were very kind people. The sad thing is that they couldn’t bring their mother with them. Their mother stayed with the grandparents because those were her parents and she wanted to take care of them and see that they were safe.
Unfortunately, I was transferred to another school two years later, so I don’t know what happened to the little boy. I don’t know how much longer he had to wait for his mother to join his family in the US. Its sad that the mother had to be let behind. They were in communication though and I hoped to think that she would have soon reunited with her family.
Do you perhaps remember his age when he came? Yes. He was still very young. He was around ten or eleven. I think he was eleven when he was in my classroom.
Did any of your students whose parents served in the war tell you stories of the war? No. Not that I can recall.
Grandma, do you have any other interesting stories about people that you know that were somehow involved in the war? No, the stories that I told were the most interesting ones. I feel bad because I don’t have a lot to share about this topic due to the fact that I wasn’t really directly affected by the Vietnam War.
Grandma, unfortunately the Vietnam War was not the first time you had experienced war in your lifetime. And with that in mind, I’m wondering. Did the Vietnam war bring back any memories of your experiences in World War II? Perhaps that I was affected differently. In World War II, it was a panic you know the United States had never been attacked on any of its territories like that. I think that. . .maybe it brings back the feelings that were involved in a conflict. It’s a little mixture of emotions, you know.
Last question for you, Grandma. Is there anything else about the war that you would like to tell us about, and haven’t yet had a chance to express it? Only that it was such a sad thing to see. A lot of it we didn’t know about until we saw it on the news or we saw it in movies made of that time. Then we would see how ugly it was and how awful it was. We would see how many people were hurt and it’s sad. There’s a sadness to seeing that. War time is a very ugly time and it just hurt so many people.
Do you remember any clips from TV about the war that really stood out for you? Only that some of the things that were shown on the news. It’s truly sad. I just remember hoping that people would learn from these thing and so they won’t repeat it. It’s scary how much anger some people have and that they feel like they have to act out on it. It’s a sadness, we need to work more with kindness together.
Okay, so that’s it, Grandma. That’s all the questions I have, I really want to thank you for your time this evening. I found it all very interesting and think the rest of the class will too. I don’t know if this is that interesting or helpful to you, but thank for having me!
Sidenote:
The Rohwer War Relocation Center was a World War II Japanese American internment camp located in rural southeastern Arkansas, in Desha County. It was in operation from September 18, 1942, until November 30, 1945, and held as many as 8,475 Japanese Americans forcibly evacuated from California. The Rohwer War Relocation Center Cemetery is located here and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1992.
Interview (6:22) with George Takei, internee at Rohwer Relocation Center, Arkansas
* * * * * * * * * *
My name is Erik Olson and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview my grandmother, Peggy Olson.
MorFar, in my US history class we have learned about the Vietnam War and I’ve invited you here today to ask you some questions about the war.
My first question is, how old were you when you first learned about the war? Let me think. I think I was about 16.
So, you were still a child when the war started, did your parents give you much information about the war? No, no I really, I don’t think I was aware much that it was going on.
Could you talk about your life as a child during the war? Well, things were just normal, I don’t have any information about it really because our family just didn’t talk about war very much.
Did you know anyone who served in the war? Yes, so, he was really hypervigilant during the war, it was a very confusing war, he didn’t know the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, and because everybody looked the same.
Do you know anyone who tried to dodge the draft? Definitely, I did. In fact, he even changed his name so that the government wouldn’t find him, and he was nervous about it for sure.
I know that my grandfather was not in the war, why was that? Well, first he had a deferment because he worked for the defense department and he had contracts with them, and then when he and children, that was another deferment, so that is why he didn’t have to go to war. Our family was really happy about that.
You told me that people wanted nothing to do with the war, what is the main reason for this? Well, I think that it was confusing to people. It wasn’t clear, and we really weren’t sure if we were on the right side, and also we lived in an area that was kind of like an island. We lived in Palos Verdes which wasn’t actually an island itself, but we were separate, we felt separate a little bit. Then we moved to Palm Springs and we just never got involved.
I know that your sons, my father and my uncle, were born during the Vietnam war, so my question is, what was it like raising children during the Vietnam war? Well, we just went about our daily lives normally, and actually we preferred not to expose our young children to something so negative.
I know that you are a very positive woman, did you try to rub that off on them? Oh absolutely, I really felt strongly about that, so we just kept away from negative things if we could.
I think it is so interesting that the war started when you were a child and your generation were children, but it didn’t end until after you had had kids and they had grown up to be teenagers.
In my research I found that there were several protests at Pomona College, your alma mater, starting in the sixties, did you ever witness or participate in any peace rallies during this time? No, because actually Erik I graduated in 1961, so I don’t even know if they had very many at that time, but our class was considered to be apathetic anyways, so if there had been any we didn’t get involved.
You never saw any outside? No, I wasn’t actually aware of it. I was taking classes and I was studying. I wasn’t thinking too much about the outside world.
Even though you were a college kid and the typical college kid you think gets involved in the war, you never felt that? No, our class didn’t and I didn’t just because we were working so hard with our books. We were in the library. When you’re a Pomona college you spend a lot of time in the library.
You also lived during the Korean War. What major differences did you see between the Korean and the Vietnam War? It was a huge difference, and even though I was younger during the Korean War than the Vietnam War, we knew what was going on. We watched television. We looked at the 39th parallel and we saw that we were winning. We would root for the south Koreans and they would move up the map and we would be really happy. Then the North Koreans would move us down and back and we’d be very sad. It was a completely different war.
Even though the Vietnam War is credited for being the first televised war, you still didn’t see many people watching it? Well maybe they were, but we didn’t. Our family didn’t, it was mostly jungle. You couldn’t tell, it wasn’t clear. It was just confusing.
In a Gallup poll taken in 2000, 70% of Americans believed that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake? I can’t say. I really don’t know at this point. I would feel very badly if I thought that our government was doing the wrong thing, so that’s very hard for me to say that we did make a mistake, but I definitely question it.
At the time you said you weren’t very involved in the war so do you think that plays into it at all? Of course, I think it does. I think that definitely plays into it because I just didn’t know much about it. I didn’t get involved.
Well, thank you very much for letting me interview you today. You brought some great insight about the average American during the war. Thank you very much.
You’re welcome.
My name is Kyle Yen, and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview my Dad’s friend and mentor, Jack Shuman.
(to hear the first part one of the 58:28 interview, click here)
(to hear the first part two of the 58:28 interview, click here)
Hi. My name is Kyle Yen and I am 16 years old. Today, I am interviewing Mr. Jack Shuman, my dad’s friend and mentor. We are recording this interview at his residence in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
Uncle Jack, thanks for giving me the time to interview you. In my US History class this summer, we’ve learned about the Vietnam War, so I have an assignment to interview someone. I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn about someone who my dad respects.
So, first question: In what year did you graduate from high school? 1966.
Did you do anything after high school? I worked at an abalone company and went out on a boat and took supplies to divers, and brought back the abalone, and then we unloaded at the dock in San Pedro, and we took them to our processing plant.
So this was right after high school, that you were doing this? Yeah, I actually started on holidays and vacations working there after high school. I worked there, and one of the woman working there said, “I told my husband about you, and told him you were a good worker, and he said they’ll hire you at Quaker Oats,” so I went to Quaker Oats and worked there, and I worked there until I went into Marine Corps.
Getting into the actual army, were you drafted, or did you volunteer to actually serve? I joined up.
Where did you go for your basic training? I went into what’s called MCRD -- Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego.
Do you have any stories from your patrols or your operations? Anything that happened that sticks in your memory.
Several things. Um, one night, I was walking point for our company, as the lead person, and it’s so dark there at night because there’s no lights whatsoever, no moon or anything. You can’t see hardly anything expect the tops of hills or the tops of trees. You could make out different things like that, but you couldn’t really see your hand in front of your face, so the guys behind you would kind of hold onto an article of yours, so they wouldn’t get lost. We had to stay that close together, because you couldn’t see anybody.
They had passed word up to me, to go a certain direction, and they said, “Go in that direction, go into that treeline. We’re going to meet up with another company.” I was in K-Company. They called it Kilo-Company, and we were supposed to meet up with the Mike-Company, which was the M-Company. So they passed the word up, and we had these ponchos on, because there was some light rain. I had to get inside of my poncho with a compass, and we didn’t have a flashlight, so I used my cigarette lighter to get the compass and coordinate which way I was supposed to be going. And then I had to put that away and wait a little bit to kinda get my night vision back, cause you lose it once you have that light on there.
Did you know anyone who served in the war? Yes, so, he was really hypervigilant during the war, it was a very confusing war, he didn’t know the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, and because everybody looked the same.
Do you know anyone who tried to dodge the draft? Definitely, I did. In fact, he even changed his name so that the government wouldn’t find him, and he was nervous about it for sure.
I know that my grandfather was not in the war, why was that? Well, first he had a deferment because he worked for the defense department and he had contracts with them, and then when he and children, that was another deferment, so that is why he didn’t have to go to war. Our family was really happy about that.
You told me that people wanted nothing to do with the war, what is the main reason for this? Well, I think that it was confusing to people. It wasn’t clear, and we really weren’t sure if we were on the right side, and also we lived in an area that was kind of like an island. We lived in Palos Verdes which wasn’t actually an island itself, but we were separate, we felt separate a little bit. Then we moved to Palm Springs and we just never got involved.
I know that your sons, my father and my uncle, were born during the Vietnam war, so my question is, what was it like raising children during the Vietnam war? Well, we just went about our daily lives normally, and actually we preferred not to expose our young children to something so negative.
I know that you are a very positive woman, did you try to rub that off on them? Oh absolutely, I really felt strongly about that, so we just kept away from negative things if we could.
I think it is so interesting that the war started when you were a child and your generation were children, but it didn’t end until after you had had kids and they had grown up to be teenagers.
In my research I found that there were several protests at Pomona College, your alma mater, starting in the sixties, did you ever witness or participate in any peace rallies during this time? No, because actually Erik I graduated in 1961, so I don’t even know if they had very many at that time, but our class was considered to be apathetic anyways, so if there had been any we didn’t get involved.
You never saw any outside? No, I wasn’t actually aware of it. I was taking classes and I was studying. I wasn’t thinking too much about the outside world.
Even though you were a college kid and the typical college kid you think gets involved in the war, you never felt that? No, our class didn’t and I didn’t just because we were working so hard with our books. We were in the library. When you’re a Pomona college you spend a lot of time in the library.
You also lived during the Korean War. What major differences did you see between the Korean and the Vietnam War? It was a huge difference, and even though I was younger during the Korean War than the Vietnam War, we knew what was going on. We watched television. We looked at the 39th parallel and we saw that we were winning. We would root for the south Koreans and they would move up the map and we would be really happy. Then the North Koreans would move us down and back and we’d be very sad. It was a completely different war.
Even though the Vietnam War is credited for being the first televised war, you still didn’t see many people watching it? Well maybe they were, but we didn’t. Our family didn’t, it was mostly jungle. You couldn’t tell, it wasn’t clear. It was just confusing.
In a Gallup poll taken in 2000, 70% of Americans believed that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake? I can’t say. I really don’t know at this point. I would feel very badly if I thought that our government was doing the wrong thing, so that’s very hard for me to say that we did make a mistake, but I definitely question it.
At the time you said you weren’t very involved in the war so do you think that plays into it at all? Of course, I think it does. I think that definitely plays into it because I just didn’t know much about it. I didn’t get involved.
Well, thank you very much for letting me interview you today. You brought some great insight about the average American during the war. Thank you very much.
You’re welcome.
* * * * * * * * * *
Kyle Yen Interviews His Uncle Jack ShumanMy name is Kyle Yen, and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview my Dad’s friend and mentor, Jack Shuman.
(to hear the first part one of the 58:28 interview, click here)
(to hear the first part two of the 58:28 interview, click here)
Hi. My name is Kyle Yen and I am 16 years old. Today, I am interviewing Mr. Jack Shuman, my dad’s friend and mentor. We are recording this interview at his residence in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
Uncle Jack, thanks for giving me the time to interview you. In my US History class this summer, we’ve learned about the Vietnam War, so I have an assignment to interview someone. I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn about someone who my dad respects.
So, first question: In what year did you graduate from high school? 1966.
Did you do anything after high school? I worked at an abalone company and went out on a boat and took supplies to divers, and brought back the abalone, and then we unloaded at the dock in San Pedro, and we took them to our processing plant.
So this was right after high school, that you were doing this? Yeah, I actually started on holidays and vacations working there after high school. I worked there, and one of the woman working there said, “I told my husband about you, and told him you were a good worker, and he said they’ll hire you at Quaker Oats,” so I went to Quaker Oats and worked there, and I worked there until I went into Marine Corps.
Getting into the actual army, were you drafted, or did you volunteer to actually serve? I joined up.
Where did you go for your basic training? I went into what’s called MCRD -- Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego.
Do you have any stories from your patrols or your operations? Anything that happened that sticks in your memory.
Several things. Um, one night, I was walking point for our company, as the lead person, and it’s so dark there at night because there’s no lights whatsoever, no moon or anything. You can’t see hardly anything expect the tops of hills or the tops of trees. You could make out different things like that, but you couldn’t really see your hand in front of your face, so the guys behind you would kind of hold onto an article of yours, so they wouldn’t get lost. We had to stay that close together, because you couldn’t see anybody.
They had passed word up to me, to go a certain direction, and they said, “Go in that direction, go into that treeline. We’re going to meet up with another company.” I was in K-Company. They called it Kilo-Company, and we were supposed to meet up with the Mike-Company, which was the M-Company. So they passed the word up, and we had these ponchos on, because there was some light rain. I had to get inside of my poncho with a compass, and we didn’t have a flashlight, so I used my cigarette lighter to get the compass and coordinate which way I was supposed to be going. And then I had to put that away and wait a little bit to kinda get my night vision back, cause you lose it once you have that light on there.
So I coordinated myself in that direction as soon as I could see good enough again, and we took off in that direction. Well, we were kind of in lower land and we got to this treeline where they were supposed to be, and the ground was maybe 5 feet higher than the ground we were on, and it had been wet and slippery, like clay, like mush, so you could hardly walk in it. I was using roots and stuff to kind of pull myself up. So I pulled myself up, and you got all your pack and you got a lot of weight, so it’s kind of hard to get up there. And the guy behind me was my squad leader, so I was helping him get up. And the two of us got up.
You had so many straps on you, from your ammo your were carrying, your bandolier, your Law’s Rocket, your flak jacket, your rounds of machine gun ammo. You had so many on you that your arm would go dead, because it couldn’t get any circulation. So I used to carry this claymore mine pouch. I had my flak jacket and I had this claymore mine pouch in front of it, and I kept all my magazines in it, and my M16, I would put a magazine of it between my flak jacket and that magazine pouch that I had. And I would just rest my arm on it, so it wouldn’t go to sleep. And I always had my finger on the trigger, and my thumb on the selector. The selector is for the safety, to switch from auto and regular single-shot fire. And I kept my rifle right there, and I’d rest my arm on it.
You had so many straps on you, from your ammo your were carrying, your bandolier, your Law’s Rocket, your flak jacket, your rounds of machine gun ammo. You had so many on you that your arm would go dead, because it couldn’t get any circulation. So I used to carry this claymore mine pouch. I had my flak jacket and I had this claymore mine pouch in front of it, and I kept all my magazines in it, and my M16, I would put a magazine of it between my flak jacket and that magazine pouch that I had. And I would just rest my arm on it, so it wouldn’t go to sleep. And I always had my finger on the trigger, and my thumb on the selector. The selector is for the safety, to switch from auto and regular single-shot fire. And I kept my rifle right there, and I’d rest my arm on it.
Well as soon as we both got up there, somebody told us to stop in Vietnamese, they said “dung lai,” and that means stop in Vietnamese. So we stopped, we both stopped there. He’s about arm’s length from me, and these two figures start coming towards us, and the one that was directly in front of me, his legs were shining. For some reason, his legs were shining. And I thought, “Boy, something is wrong here,” because in the Marine Corps, you don’t roll up your trousers or nothing like that. That’s just against the rules and all. His legs were shining, and that kind of made me think something’s wrong.
So, it was so dark, I couldn’t see. So they came right up to us, and the guy that had his legs shining was right in front of me, and the other guy got right in front of my squad leader. Nobody said a word, because we couldn’t see who the other person was. We didn’t know if they were friendly, or enemy, or who they were. So they got right in front of me and I took my rifle and shoved it in the guy’s chest, and it seemed like it took forever, but it was only a couple of seconds. And my squad leader put his arm on the shoulder of the guy in front of him, and kind of about the same time, that guy shoved my squad leader’s arm up, and the guy in front of me shoved my rifle up. And I just brought it back down, and just started firing. In each magazine I had 18 rounds, so they fell to the ground, and they were shooting back up. You could see their muzzle flash, but it was going up into the air.
I emptied my magazine, and they were still making noise, breathing hard. So I took my magazine out, and put another one in, and I fired some more. Then, someone behind them started shooting off flares, and they had a machine gunner in there, and they opened up on our company that was still outside. So I started throwing grenades, and we didn’t realize at the time, but what had happened was that we had walked right inside the North Vietnamese perimeter. They had their perimeter set up, and we’d walked right inside it.
The flare kind of died down, and you could hear them start gathering up mess gear. It sounded like they were gathering up tin cups and pots and stuff like that, you could hear them gathering up, and they were gone. It was really dark, so we just sat right there for that night. And then the next morning, the two guys were dead there, and the others took off. That really sticks in my mind, I remember that one very well.
According to a Gallup poll taken in 2000, seventy percent of Americans believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you believe that sending Americans to Vietnam was a mistake? Yes, I do believe it was a mistake, because we had 58,000 people killed, and I can’t tell you how many got wounded or lost limbs. We didn’t gain anything from it. We basically just walked away from it, when it was over, and there was nothing gained out of it. They put a line called the DMZ, and we could not pass that line. Yet the North Vietnamese could come into South Vietnam, which they did. They used what’s called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and they got supplies and people through there every day. We’d bomb them a lot, but they had so many people that they’d just rebuild it and keep on coming. Well, if they would’ve let us just go into North Vietnam, we could’ve finished the war off, but they would not let us fight like we should have been fighting. They should’ve just let us go, but they put that line there, and once you put that line there, and we’re not supposed to cross it, well, you’re never going to win, because all they have to do it run behind that line and we can’t get them. They didn’t let us fight it properly. They didn’t let us fight it to beat the North Vietnamese. If they would’ve let us fight it to defeat them, it would’ve been worth it, but seeing how we never gained anything from it and South Vietnam still wound up getting taken over by the Communists after we left, nothing was gained, so I think it was a mistake. A big mistake.
Is there anything else you’d like to share? Well, just that I think it was not necessary. We didn’t gain anything from it, and we’re doing the same thing over in Iraq and Afghanistan. We didn’t even know who the enemy was half of the time in Vietnam, because of a lot of them were civilians during the day, and Viet Cong at night, shooting at you. And they got the same thing going in Afghanistan and Iraq. You’re not really fighting people that are in a different uniform, that you can say, “Okay, we’re fighting these guys.”
You don’t know who you’re really fighting. And it’s hard to do that, because they put all these restrictions on you, that you can’t fire unless somebody fires at you, but if you see someone with a rifle pointed at you, you’re going to shoot at them. They may not have an army or some kind of military uniform on, so you don’t know who your enemy is. I think if you can’t go in there and fight an army, instead of trying to fight your way through civilians, not knowing who’s on what side, you’re really just wasting your time, cause you’re never gonna get all the people that are against you.
Well, that’s all the questions that I have, I want to thank you again for your time this afternoon. I want to thank you for service, I think it’s an amazing thing that you went out and volunteered for our country. I think it was very educational, and I’m eager to share your experiences with my class. Thank you.
So, it was so dark, I couldn’t see. So they came right up to us, and the guy that had his legs shining was right in front of me, and the other guy got right in front of my squad leader. Nobody said a word, because we couldn’t see who the other person was. We didn’t know if they were friendly, or enemy, or who they were. So they got right in front of me and I took my rifle and shoved it in the guy’s chest, and it seemed like it took forever, but it was only a couple of seconds. And my squad leader put his arm on the shoulder of the guy in front of him, and kind of about the same time, that guy shoved my squad leader’s arm up, and the guy in front of me shoved my rifle up. And I just brought it back down, and just started firing. In each magazine I had 18 rounds, so they fell to the ground, and they were shooting back up. You could see their muzzle flash, but it was going up into the air.
I emptied my magazine, and they were still making noise, breathing hard. So I took my magazine out, and put another one in, and I fired some more. Then, someone behind them started shooting off flares, and they had a machine gunner in there, and they opened up on our company that was still outside. So I started throwing grenades, and we didn’t realize at the time, but what had happened was that we had walked right inside the North Vietnamese perimeter. They had their perimeter set up, and we’d walked right inside it.
The flare kind of died down, and you could hear them start gathering up mess gear. It sounded like they were gathering up tin cups and pots and stuff like that, you could hear them gathering up, and they were gone. It was really dark, so we just sat right there for that night. And then the next morning, the two guys were dead there, and the others took off. That really sticks in my mind, I remember that one very well.
According to a Gallup poll taken in 2000, seventy percent of Americans believe that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you believe that sending Americans to Vietnam was a mistake? Yes, I do believe it was a mistake, because we had 58,000 people killed, and I can’t tell you how many got wounded or lost limbs. We didn’t gain anything from it. We basically just walked away from it, when it was over, and there was nothing gained out of it. They put a line called the DMZ, and we could not pass that line. Yet the North Vietnamese could come into South Vietnam, which they did. They used what’s called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and they got supplies and people through there every day. We’d bomb them a lot, but they had so many people that they’d just rebuild it and keep on coming. Well, if they would’ve let us just go into North Vietnam, we could’ve finished the war off, but they would not let us fight like we should have been fighting. They should’ve just let us go, but they put that line there, and once you put that line there, and we’re not supposed to cross it, well, you’re never going to win, because all they have to do it run behind that line and we can’t get them. They didn’t let us fight it properly. They didn’t let us fight it to beat the North Vietnamese. If they would’ve let us fight it to defeat them, it would’ve been worth it, but seeing how we never gained anything from it and South Vietnam still wound up getting taken over by the Communists after we left, nothing was gained, so I think it was a mistake. A big mistake.
Is there anything else you’d like to share? Well, just that I think it was not necessary. We didn’t gain anything from it, and we’re doing the same thing over in Iraq and Afghanistan. We didn’t even know who the enemy was half of the time in Vietnam, because of a lot of them were civilians during the day, and Viet Cong at night, shooting at you. And they got the same thing going in Afghanistan and Iraq. You’re not really fighting people that are in a different uniform, that you can say, “Okay, we’re fighting these guys.”
You don’t know who you’re really fighting. And it’s hard to do that, because they put all these restrictions on you, that you can’t fire unless somebody fires at you, but if you see someone with a rifle pointed at you, you’re going to shoot at them. They may not have an army or some kind of military uniform on, so you don’t know who your enemy is. I think if you can’t go in there and fight an army, instead of trying to fight your way through civilians, not knowing who’s on what side, you’re really just wasting your time, cause you’re never gonna get all the people that are against you.
Well, that’s all the questions that I have, I want to thank you again for your time this afternoon. I want to thank you for service, I think it’s an amazing thing that you went out and volunteered for our country. I think it was very educational, and I’m eager to share your experiences with my class. Thank you.
* * * * * * * * * *
Christopher Yang Interviews San Marino Resident Don PhanMy name is Christopher Yang and recently I used the StoryCorps app to interview San Marino resident, Don Phan. Mr. Phan was 13 years old and living in Vietnam at the time of the Tet Offensive.
Hello, everyone, my name is Christopher Yang and I am a San Marino High School junior. Today I am interviewing San Marino resident Don Phan in Room 14 at San Marino High School. Mr. Phan grew up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Mr. Phan, before I ask the following questions, I would like to thank you for joining me today. Thank you.
Mr. Phan, in my US history class this summer, we have learned about the Vietnam War and I have invited you here today to ask you some questions about that war. The first question I want to ask you is: How old were you at the time of the TET Offensive? I was twelve and a half years old during the TET Offensive, and I remember that well. I turned 13 in late September of that year 1968.
In your own words, can you tell us what the TET offensive was? Tet is a New Year Lunar holiday, which in most years is the same day as the Chinese New Year. In 1968, Communist forces in Vietnam violated the traditions and conducted a military offensive all over South Vietnamese territory. The attackers were crushed militarily. However, they achieved political victory, especially with the brief occupation of the US embassy in Saigon. CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, declared a stalemate in the war. Of course, these are conclusions reached by the military and other scholars, because I was too young to understand the larger implications of the war.
Do you have any memories of that event that you would like to share with us? At the time, we briefly left our home, and we returned to find our walls pockmarked with bullets. We had stayed with my maternal grandparents, about a mile away. Walls outside their house were covered with sandbags. Still, I reproached my grandma for not listening to my advice. I had seen another brief battle in the city during the rebellion against President Ngo Dinh Diem less than four and a half years before that; therefore, I had urged my grandma to build an underground bunker in her house. But she had not had it done.
Approximately how long did you live in the sandbag house? Probably a couple of weeks, I would say. It was very short, at least in Saigon, but the battle went on for months in other parts in Vietnam, especially in the battle of Hue, which was the old Imperial capital. It took more than a month for the battle to end. And there was another battle that took several months in Kesan, another military outpost, in the valley in South Vietnam.
I see. Other than that can you please tell us about your life in Vietnam during the war years? For most of the war years, Saigon saw little fighting. Despite terror bombings, Saigon was really much more secure than Baghdad, Iraq, Kabul, or Afghanistan. We lived a typical upper-middle class life, a San Marino life if you will. Private schools, tutors, and country club sports. However, there was no air conditioning, and we used coal for cooking. Of course, we rarely ventured outside the city. Even on vacations in Vung Tau, a beach town about 50 miles away, we never traveled at night. The most remarkable fact about these years was the quickening inflation. By the time I was a freshman in high school, an Army colonel was no longer able to afford tuition for even one child on his official pay.
Wow. The Easter Offensive of 1972 also left a strong impression. My 17 year old classmates and I were called up for military service, but our orders were cancelled later. The book “Summer of Fire,” authored by a former South Vietnamese Army captain, made a national icon of a young colonel killed while leading his battalion on the northern front. Finally, my second cousin, an Airborne first lieutenant, was fragged in his sleep by a trooper under his command. Fragged was a term that came out of Vietnam, which means the trooper threw a fragmentation grenade into his lieutenant's room and killed him.
Did you know your second cousin well? Actually, I knew his second brother much better, but I had known about him.
How old were you when you left Vietnam? On October 20, 1973, I was almost a month past my 18th birthday.
How did you get here to the the United States? Can you tell us that story? I had graduated high school and came for college. Having missed the fall semester, I spent 2 months in Paris with relatives and arrived in LA on December 30.
Can you now tell us your story from the time you came to the United States until the very present? I’m especially wanting to know how hard it was for you to adjust to life in the United States? First, I was a foreign student. I received refugee status following the fall of Saigon in 1975. Then I was a permanent resident. I became a US citizen in 1982. My parents and siblings arrived right after the fall of Saigon. I received a Math-Computer Science degree from UCLA and an MBA. Like many in my generation, I worked in a variety of industries: oil, banking, tech, hospitality, real estate development and investment, and now health care. Initially, adjustment was amazingly quick. I was immersed in college life, beginning with the mild activism at UCLA. I briefly considered becoming a civil rights lawyer. After business school, however, my career was my main preoccupation. However, I never forgot that I had lost the country where I was born. Even today, I read obsessively about American law and local, state and federal politics, the military, as well as foreign affairs. I also read about immigration, race, ethnicity, and civil rights. In retrospect, the journey continues, developing a new identity and community is more difficult than I thought. My career did not go well because I was too modest with my goals, and not modest enough about my capabilities. That is, that my dreams were too small and I did not work hard enough to achieve them.
Have you ever been back to Vietnam since you came to the United States? I went in 1992, when US citizens were first allowed to explore business opportunities. I was there again when the trade embargo was lifted in 1994, and tried to do business thought 1996. I returned briefly for a family visit in late 2002. It took a while, but I returned from Vietnam very disappointed. Vietnam once again did not resemble the picture painted in the media, the emerging economic “dragon” with unbounded energy and promise. In fact, it was a closed society, hugely distrustful of foreigners, and especially of its expatriates. The greatest disappointment was that Hanoi no longer resembled the urbane, sophisticated city of my mother's youth. Of course, much has probably changed in the last twenty years, but I suspect that much has not.
I see. What was the best and the worst thing that you can say about Vietnam today? The best thing about Vietnam today is that it is at peace. However, democratic institutions, human rights, and civil liberties remain concerns. The worst thing is that an arrogance remains not just from winning the war, but from a thousand years of winning wars. Unfortunately, winning the economic race requires totally different skills. In some ways, Vietnam bears uncanny resemblance to China, except that it is 20-25 years behind. The Vietnam War ended in 1975 and the Communists took over China in 1949. Vietnam opened up to the world in 1992, but China had done so in 1972. In other ways, Vietnam is much further behind, as China’s business culture has been shaped by the experience of its very successful diaspora communities.
Mr. Phan, in my US History class this summer, we have learned about a Gallup-Poll taken in 2000, which said that 70% of Americans believed that sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Do you agree with the Gallup-Poll? John Kerry thought so, Bill Clinton, I think Bernie Sanders, and others. Many did not. However, if you ask the professional military men who fought the war, most will beg to differ, you can cite Jim Webb, John McCain, and Barry McCaffrey, the most distinguished soldier no one has ever heard of, once the Army’s most decorated general officer and its youngest four-star. Those professional officers thought the politicians had lost the war, by setting out vague objectives and promising quick victory when a long war was inevitable. (You can consult the book “Dereliction of Duty,” by H.R. McMaster, now a lieutenant general.) You can note that American troops are still stationed in Europe, Japan, South Korea decades after the relevant war. We have been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq for 15 years and the end is not in sight. Those prominent veterans also said the politicians set unreasonable limitations on strategy and tactics (see “Prodigal Soldiers,” by James Kitfield). I used to think that as a Vietnamese, I was conflicted about the war, and as an American, I considered it a mistake. But now, I am not so sure. Vietnam remains the only war in which American troops were actively engaged for a significant period of time, and then withdrew. We should have learned some lesson. It turned out much worse than the limited insurgency in Greece and the brief one in Korea, we saw the limits of American tactics there.
Mr. Phan, that’s all the questions that I have for you today, unless of course there’s something you would still like to say about the war, but haven’t yet had the chance? Well, Vietnam should have taught us that a limited war can overwhelm the limited means intended for it, but apparently it hasn't. You can reach Andrew Bacevich, another prominent veteran and professor of history, for more detail in that range. I am going to have to go with Bacevich and conclude that we, as a nation, have not learn a lesson from Vietnam. The question we as citizens need to ask each time our government again wants to go to war is, "Why are we fighting there? What is the compelling interest to America? Are we willing to see it through to a successful conclusion? What do we want this success to look like? How is it going to end?" That is what Colin Powell said. But, given the financial and human cost to the armed forces, in the last decade and a half, Andrew Bacevich also asks, "Can we afford it? Can we in good conscience accept the sacrifices? Are we avoiding the hard questions, since only a small slice of the US population, the volunteers of the armed forces, personally bears the cost of war?" Paul Kennedy spoke about imperial overstretch, by which means he meant American military and political goals exceeding its resources. Then, Francis Fukuyama wrote of “the end of history” when the United States stood unchallenged at the end of the Cold War. By the way, you might want to note that Fukuyama was the head of policy planning at the state department. Therefore, he was the successor of Mr. X, or George Kennedy, the man who basically invented the American foreign policy after Truman in 1945. Each of us has to ask which thinker was more correct, Kennedy or Fukuyama. Personally, I think that presidential administrations associated with both major parties, Democrats and Republicans, have set impossible foreign, even domestic, policy goals in the last sixty years, and in the long run we can expect to be disappointed at every turn. Perhaps, we should have more modest goals and work harder at achieving them. Our goals are too big and we are not achieving them, and I don't think we will.
I see. Do you have any other opinions on the presidential campaign currently? I believe that both major presidential candidates do not represent a vision that we can accept, because America will not be successful by either expanding goals, continuing the Obama policy, to fight in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya, and soon in Yemen and other places. I believe that Hillary Clinton is asking the government to do too much, both domestically and in foreign policy, but Donald Trump wants us to withdraw totally from the world, and I don't think that's possible, either. I believe that we should limit our goals, but work harder at them. Like I said, show up in Europe, but don’t even think about fighting in Ukraine or Yemen or any other place you can think of.
Okay then, Mr. Phan, that’s all the questions I have for you. I really want to thank you for your time this afternoon. I found it all very interesting and i hope the rest of the class will too. Thank you. Thank you.
Lesson (4:06), describing the TET Offensive
