...Early and I'm from Mary Washington College and it is October --

20th.

-- 20th, 2001, and I'm in Middletown, Maryland, and I'm interviewing Rusty Anderson about his military experience. And what war did you fight in?

Vietnam.

Vietnam. And what was your rank?

Buck sergeant.

And where did you serve?

BenHoa. BenHoa Air Force Base.

Okay. And were you drafted or did you enlist?

I enlisted.

Where were you living at the time?

Washington D.C..

And why did you decide to join?

At the time the family didn't have much money and I wanted to go to college and the service had some of the best programs to pay your way, pay your tuition to go to school, so I just went in for that reason.

And why did you pick the service branch that you joined?

It was kind of a toss up between Air Force and Navy because I thought the two of them had better programs than either the Army or the Marine Corp for education. And I honestly forget, other than the fact I didn't want to go away to sea for months at a time. I guess that was probably the reason I chose the Air Force.

And do you recall your first day of service?

Oh, intimately, yes.

What did you like?

Some very interesting feelings. For one, we were sworn in in Baltimore and flown immediately to San Antonio, Texas, where I went to basic training -- I'm sorry, I'm losing my voice here.

That's okay.

I couldn't -- first, I think it was one of the -- well, it was only the second time I had ever been on an airplane, I was 17, and I couldn't believe they were going to fly me all the way to Texas for free and I didn't have to pay for it. Other than that, I was just curious, I would say. Certainly a little anxious, but more curious just wondering what was going to happen next.

Okay. And tell me about your boot camp training experience.

I was a squad leader, which in and of itself was interesting, because I was one of the youngest guys in the outfit. But they lined us up according to height, so that when we marched, the tallest men were in front and the shortest men in the back. And then they told the tallest men upfront that you were now squad leaders, so it had nothing to do with leadership skills at all. The tall guys were the squad leaders. But it wasn't really that tough to go through it all. Certainly a little bit of head games. Nothing physical -- of course I was an athlete coming out of school, so physically there was no real challenge. I got into one fight while I was in boot camp with a guy who was just spoiled rotten. Obviously, he had never been away from home and his parents had given him everything he wanted to and he just didn't want to go along with the rest of us. That just led to some -- typical boot camp. You know, bring a bunch of people together that don't know each other and away from home for probably the first time and these things happen.

Do you remember your instructors?

Very well. Yeah. Had three drill instructors. One was a great big guy, who marched us more than anything else.

That's most of what he did. He was tough. He used to cuss at us all the time. I remember that. Not that that bothered me, I heard that around the house enough. But then there was an older guy and, of course, when you're 17, older could have been 35, you know, but he -- he was a nice guy. Rarely raised his voice, you know, just marched us and, you know, ran us around through whatever we had to go through. But just was not hard to deal with at all. The third guy could be abusive. He'd come in drunk and he had a bunk in the barracks with us and he'd start raising hell with us and throwing stuff around the barracks. He could be tough to deal with, but, yeah, I remember all three of them very well.

And what would you say kept you through it, got you through it, boot camp?

Curiosity, I guess, just wondering what was going to happen the next day. I never even remotely felt like I would want to quit or stop. I mean, there was nothing that seemed to be that bad. And I didn't have any strong goals at the end of it like I really wanted to go to some formal training or some base or something, you know, and I couldn't wait to get there. I didn't have anything like that going on. I just was curious what was going to happen next.

Okay. So where exactly did you go when the Vietnam war started?

Well, it's kind of hard to answer that question. When it started, I was actually -- well, when it started, I was in junior high school probably --

Okay.

if you want to go back that far, but when things really started to kick up, I mean, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, I think I was -- by that time I had left boot camp and was in Colorado for technical training. I was a weapons specialist and they were training me on a bunch of weapons. And I remember getting a call from -- calling home and finding out from my mother that a buddy of mine in the Marines had been sent to Vietnam. And he and I were supposed to go into the Marines together. In fact, I had gone down and signed all the papers and everything, but I was only 16, so they wouldn't take me. Which was fine. I didn't want to go in at 16, because I still wanted to get through high school, but my mother said she wouldn't sign the papers for me at 17 to go into the Marines. But I'm sorry to ramble, because I do ramble. At any rate, while I was in Denver, a buddy that -- I heard about my buddy going to Vietnam and I thought, oh, my God, they must really be cranking that up. I wouldn't get there for about another year, maybe a little over a year, but -- yeah, he was --

What year was that?

When I heard about my buddy going over that was '65. And I went over in the fall of '66.

Do you remember arriving and what it was like?

Yes, very much. Yeah, it's -- it's one of those things that -- there are a few things that happen to you in your life when you remember everything about it, and I didn't expect that to happen. What happened is we landed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, which is really Saigon, and we landed at Saigon and we were in a commercial airliner, that's how we took the troops over, and I just expected to get off the plane and they'd form us up, tell us where to go, what have you, but the minute I got to the door of the plane, there were a lot of differences. It was really hot. And really humid and that just hits you right in the face like somebody punched you. And the smells. I mean not -- not bad, necessarily, but just so many of them. Everything from jet fuel to, you know, decaying plants, because it's very tropical. Just everything hit at once. I remember very well that first night, yeah.

What was your job or assignment?

I used to load bombs, rockets, ammunition onto planes before they took off and then wired up the fuses. Everything -- we were responsible for all of the explosives. And then much of the time I spent on the end of the runway, because you weren't allowed to taxi a plane through the general parking area with live ammunition and live weapons on it, so they would all be -- what we used to call safety wired off, which is basically what it is. You use wire to keep the fuses from engaging. And then when you get out to the end of the runway, we used to remove all the safety wires and all the safety pins and then they could take off on their mission. So I spent a lot of time out on the end of the runway doing that as well.

Did you see actual combat?

Yeah.

And were there many casualties in your unit?

Yes, over the period of a year. The combat that I saw only happened, of course, when they attacked the base, and that didn't happen very often, but we lost a lot of pilots. In fact, we lost the equivalent of the whole squadron while I was there.

They were shot down, crashed or something.

Tell me about a couple of your most memorable experiences.

Well, one was, I guess, the first time I went into the town of BenHoa, we used to get passes for the day, you could go out, and I'd never been in the Orient, so it was just shocking -- again, the smells and a lot of it is garbage and decay and sewage, and what have you, but then there's the cooking smells that are totally different. You're mobbed by kids trying to get stuff from you and it's not nice. I mean, it looks like kids just want chewing gum and stuff, that's how they portray it at the movies. Generally what it is, one kid's patting you down real good while another one is picking your pocket or grabbing your watch or whatever, so you've got to be careful of that, but I had been warned of that, so I watching out for that. But everything -- even including the architecture, if you want to call it that. Houses and homes are all stacked up right next to each other, on top of each other and the roads twist and curve.

It was, you know, probably just a little, you know, farm town or something until that base went in. And I went to the market that first day, and the market is unbelievable. You've got all these colors all over the place. And again, they don't have anything in the way of refrigeration, or didn't, so you got all these -- all this fish and meat and all this stuff just out, flies flying on it and stuff. It's like, "Oh, my God, who could eat it," and a lot of fruit and half the fruit's probably decaying. So like I said, all these different smells, really strange. And everybody wants you to buy something and they don't speak English and you don't speak Vietnamese.

Okay.

Oh, there's one other thing, too, memorable moments.

Three things. The second one is just -- I got pretty sick while I was over there, and I used to be flown up to the hospital at Cam Rahn Bay, that happened about three times. And one time I was coming back, I'd finally gotten well and I was riding a bus from Saigon to BenHoa, which is about 16, 20 miles, I think, something like that. And I noticed the bus driver was going like a bat out of hell, I just couldn't believe it. It was dangerous he was driving so fast. He finally got us there okay and everybody on the base was carrying a weapon. We'd never carried weapons before. The Air Force, we'd shoot ourselves in the foot probably. But as it turns out, there was a whole division of North Vietnamese in the area. And we were told by intelligence sources that we should definitely prepare for an attack, so that's -- just -- that was the first time I saw that. And I would see that later, but the first time you see it, it's kind of a shock, because, damn, we are at war. And another situation that I remember very well, just to give you some background of the sort of stuff that went on. When we loaded weapons onto a plane, we loaded it as a team. It's a four man crew. And one of my -- well, the load crew chief, the guy I worked with, Johnny was the oldest on the team and he was like a master sergeant, a tech sergeant. And Johnny -- gosh, he was the oldest, but I bet he was about 32. He'd been around a while. He developed what --

I don't know if it was skin cancer or not, now looking back on it, but his skin just started -- basically almost falling away from his hands. I mean -- and his arms. It was horrible, the blisters and what have you, the sores. And the doctors told him to stay out of the sun, seem to be what was causing the problem.

And apparently they were right. So we started working nights, from midnight to eight in the morning. I worked nights at least half the time I was over there. One night we came in and we were the only crew on, because at night you're usually just sort of picking up the pieces and it's -- it's less hectic than in the daytime. And we came in and we had some work to do. And some of the guns on one of the planes were jammed up really bad, to the point we couldn't fix them down on the flight line, so they took them back to the gun shop and Johnny went with them, so it left just two of us down on the flight line. And just through a strange set of circumstances, some of them have never been explained to me, they ended up being stuck up there all night waiting for those guns to be repaired. In the mean time, we heard that the division of North Vietnamese in the area were moving and they were moving closer and we scrambled out the planes that were on alert. And then they came back and they had to be loaded and then we had our own planes that had to be loaded that had come in from the last mission of the day, which we would normally do with the four of us. And we had to clean out all the old ammunition cases and everything and put the new guns in. The bottom line is, first of all, you're not even supposed to touch a plane without a full crew, but we only had the two of us. So Gary and I started in on the first one and just went from there, one after another, and I loaded the ammo and he cleared the guns -- the guns would be all jammed up from the last mission.

And he cleared the guns, and what have you, and we did all the ammo and cleared all the guns for 16 planes, which is -- it's just impossible to do. You can't -- and I must admit, everything went perfectly. When I threw a can, an ammo can into the side of the plane, it should slid in and locked down perfectly the first try. Normally you'd be banging it and twisting it and carrying on trying to get it to go in. That took place all through that whole string of -- and we were worried, because we generally thought if we didn't get this thing up, then these guys are going to be all over us. And they were flying the planes out as fast as we were loading them. But not only did we load the 16 with ammo, but then we started with the bombs and we got all the bombs strung under the wings. And you absolutely don't do that with two people, not to mention going up and wiring up the switches in the cockpits correctly so that the bombs get dropped correctly.

So -- I'm rambling here again, sorry, --

That's all right.

-- but just to make the point, it's -- it's just utterly impossible to do that with two guys in the time frame that we did it. And we did it all by six in the morning. You cannot do it -- it would usually take two or three crews easily about twice as much time as we had and we just made it happen.

And along about 5:30 a master sergeant came up to us, who runs the flight line, and he rides around on his bicycle and makes sure things are going smoothly, and what have you, and he came up to us and said, "What the hell are you doing? The two of you loading this plane?" I said, "Sarge, we don't have any choice.

There's only two of us and we've got to get this stuff out of here." He said, "Well, I didn't see this." You know, and he rode off, he said, "But I will see if I can get you some help."

So he rode up to the barracks to get some guys, and about the time the guys from the barracks came down, Johnny got back from the gun shop and by then everybody jumped in and picked up with it, but we'd done it -- we were off basically, I guess -- well, shortly after that we left about 7, 7:30, and I just remember walking off the flight line with Gary, the guy who'd done it with me, and probably the proudest moment of my life. Just -- you could see the look on everybody's face, because the word travels through an outfit when something like that happens, and I mean everybody was looking at us like they just couldn't believe it.

They were just shaking their heads. And nothing was ever said, you know, we were never called out and handed a plaque or a medal or anything. You know, that's exactly as it should be, because it wasn't anything superheroic or anything, but it was still something that we were able to do, which I don't think anybody else could have done at that night, in that place, at that time.

And to this day, I'm still very proud of that. It was neat. It was really neat.

Okay. How did you stay in touch with your family while you were there?

Letters. Never did call them. There was one hookup that I heard about, I never used it, which was really a shortwave radio, and you'd have to say, "Hey, how you doing, over," and do that sort of stuff. And ham radio operators, I think, are the ones that put it together back in the States, but I never knew anybody who did use it. And we all used to talk amongst ourselves. We sort of said, geeze, after seven months of not talking to anybody, I don't know what the hell I'd say. I've always been better at writing, as far as just -- in getting my emotions out to people. I'm much better at writing than speaking.

What was the food like?

Great.

Really?

Well, it was good normally. I would say good. But there was one period which -- this is funny. I don't know if you even want this sort of stuff, but we were pretty remote, even on the base, we were all the way at the far end of the base and right on the perimeter and they were still building a lot of the base out that way. A lot of really heavy construction. And there was an outfit called Red Horse that was known all over Vietnam. Red Horse were construction workers and these guys ran the big heavy equipment and -- you know, the steam rollers and all that sort of stuff. And they were always in remote locations, because they were building things, so they would have a kitchen, a Red Horse kitchen. And it was one cook, one stove, a tent, and that's where we ate. They allowed us to eat at the Red Horse kitchen. These guys -- they'd have more than one chef, I guess, because he'd have to be -- somebody would have to help him out from time to time. But, first of all, they got excellent food. I mean, we had steaks. I walked in one night we had lobster. I don't know where the hell they got that. But he didn't have -- like he didn't have an oven, I don't think. There were a lot of normal things in a kitchen he wouldn't have. He was cooking over a fire for a lot of stuff. I just remember fried toast in the morning. It was great. The food was just fabulous, and they gave you lots and lots of it, because they were used to feeding construction workers. And we were basically very physical in what we did, too. In fact, I know the guys in electronics, radar and communications, what have you, used to call us the bikers of the Air Force, because we were always dirty and it was a very physical job to load the bombs, what have you, so I think that's one reason why they sort of put up with us, the Red Horse guys did, but, oh, the food was great.

Did you have plenty of supplies while you were there?

Yes and no. It's funny. Later on I'm sure it got better, but when I first got there you would have lots of something and nothing of something else. It's like -- there would be tons of Ivory Snow soap, you know, but no other kind of soap, you know. Or there would -- I remember the guys at Cam Rahn Bay had a freighter come in that was full of some kind of beer from the Philippines or something, it was just terrible, and it got to the point where guys were burying cases of beer in the sand just to unload that damn freighter so they could get another kind of beer in. But we had most anything you would want. I don't remember really hurting for anything.

Was there something special you did for good luck at any time?

I don't remember doing anything.

Okay. And how did people entertain themselves?

Oh, gosh. We drank a lot. It's when alcohol was very cheap, because there was no taxes on it or anything. We had a lot of squadron parties it seemed like. And usually we'd find an occasion for it. Like a squadron commander one time just called us all together to thank us for a mission that was run a couple days previously that was particularly difficult and we managed to get it done and do it well. But in the squadron parties it would -- well, we'd usually have like a big barbeque going, which would be a 50 gallon drum full of charcoal and we'd cook up steaks, or something, or hamburgers and hot dogs. And one guy in the outfit had a pair of boxing gloves and we used to box each other and that was fun. It went on until one night two of the pilots put on the gloves, and I don't know what had happened between these two guys, but they proceeded to beat the crap out of each other. And the squadron commander said from that point on no more boxing gloves. He couldn't afford to lose a pilot.

We did that, but there was -- and there was an enlisted men's club on base and that's just a bar. I mean that's all that is.

And we went to town a lot. We would go in and just sit in another bar. We didn't -- there wasn't much to do that -- we couldn't do the things I would liked to have done. I always said when I was -- like in boot camp or something, if I ever got sent overseas I was going to make it a point to get to know the people and the town and the area and what have you. And, of course, if you're in Germany or something you can do that, but we weren't even allowed to obviously. Leave the base and you're liable to get shot, so --

Were there actual entertainers that came?

Oh, yeah. In fact, I saw Bob Hope.

Oh, really?

Yeah. I had to go to another base to do it. That was a last minute -- actually he was supposed to come to our base, I remember that, and they found a couple of mortar -- rocket launchers that were set up, aimed right at the stage, so we decided not to have Bob Hope in BenHoa. But he came with a whole bunch of people to the Army base nearby and got to go there.

Then -- but you would see -- almost -- well, every night there would be a band at the enlisted men's club. Most of the time it was made up of guys that actually were stationed there. And they'd put a band together and they played country music, which I hated at the time, but I got over it. But we also had a lot of small bands come through, like from the Philippines. Really good outfits. Or small comedians. Or they'd have a stripper come through once in a while, which was always dangerous. You'd always have these giant goons on the stage. Okay. But they had a lot of entertainment come through that nobody knew, but were really quite good. They really were. And, in fact, the only named entertainment I saw was Bob Hope. I never saw any of these ballplayers come through that you hear about or Miss America or any of that. Never saw anybody.

Okay. What did you do when you were on leave?

You have to flip this in about two minutes. It won't tell you it has to do it.

So I asked you what did you do when you were on leave?

I never took leave.

Oh.

Other than like a one day pass or something like that.

That was always just going to BenHoa. One time, I remember, we got permission to go to Saigon, which was far enough away that you had to get permission to do it, but that was it. Anyway, as I was saying, I never really took leave and when I did get a day off or something, I would go into BenHoa. And once we went to Saigon, we had to get permission to do it, but we did. But that was it.

And did you travel anywhere else while you were in the service?

You mean other places other than Vietnam?

Well, maybe while you were in Vietnam did you travel?

In Vietnam? Yeah, I did a couple of things. One's kind of exciting, I'll tell you about that in a minute. I went to Cam Rahn Bay several times because that's where the big hospital was and I really was sick over there. One night actually I was on the way to Cam Rahn Bay, I got on a big cargo plane -- you had to hitch rides wherever you went. Got on a big cargo plane at BenHoa and they loaded up, oh, gosh, about 150 Army troops with me. And we flew to -- I don't even know where we were, but we were out in the jungle and we landed -- well, we didn't land, we crashed onto an airfield that was lit up by smudge pots and we just -- fires for the landing strip. Nobody was killed fortunately, but we crashed on landing. And we all got out and I'm wondering what am I going to do? We're out in the jungle and they've got all these Army troops that had just got in country, they had just gotten there, and there was some big master sergeant yelling at them like they were still in boot camp and forming up all on the side and they took off. And I was left there with a Green Beret captain and, I think, one or two other guys and we're thinking what's happening here. Well, we got lucky. The plane we were on was carrying the mail and mail had the highest priority of anything in Vietnam, so they flew another plane in just to get the mail and we jumped on the other plane and got the hell out of there. I wish I could tell you where we were, I have no idea, somewhere in the jungle.

Do you recall any particularly humorous events?

Oh, gosh. You have to pardon me for this, but this is a little bit risque, but not too bad. The whore houses in Vietnam were like one lined up -- be like a whole block of whore houses, but they really didn't have any substantial walls between them all. There were paper walls. And used to play football.

We'd play football in the whore houses and you'd hear somebody yelling, starting to yell off signals, hut one, hut two, hut three and at one end of the whore house. And what he would do, he'd start running through and running through the walls and, of course, the girls, the pimps were not real happy about this, because we were tearing the place up. When you'd try to tackle the guys, you'd guess when they was going to come through the wall and tackle him. So I always thought that was good for a laugh. Other than -- I remember laughing a lot, but one thing I do remember, too. We had a python for a mascot in the outfit and he was pretty big, he was about a ten foot python, but a nice snake. He was well treated so he wouldn't bite you, but pythons don't bite anyway, they're constrictors. And everybody always wanted to get their picture taken with him. Unfortunately I have some pictures, but I never had one taken with the snake. But we had this one little kid, little black kid from Philadelphia, who'd never even been off the streets of Philly, so -- who didn't know anything about animals or what have you. He was terrified of this thing. Absolutely terrified. Yet he absolutely had to have his picture taken with that snake wrapped around him. And just watching him as they put the snake on him and the snake started to coil up on him a little bit, too. I mean, he was terrified, but he was trying to smile at the same time and get his picture taken. And I just remember all of us were in hysterics watching this guy go through all kinds of emotions.

What did you think of the officers or fellow soldiers?

The officers, I thought a lot of. I dealt only with fighter pilots, so it really is a different breed. They're -- I don't want to say they're a little crazy. I mean, it's a cliche, everybody says that, but they're extremely self confident. And their emotions, I guess, are right on the edge all the time.

They love to party and they get crazy as hell at their parties, but then when they're in the cockpit, I mean they're deadly serious about what they're doing. And very good at it; the ones I saw. I have enormous respect for them. And they treated us very well, too. Nobody looked down on you or anything. I mean, they depended on us to do a good job for them. And they treated us well because of it. The men I served with, it was the strangest feeling that I've ever had and I know I could never get it back, but it was such a strong sense of camaraderie that I really felt like I had about 20 people as close to me as my own brothers. I could have picked up, gone to town with anybody and had a great time or gone to work with anybody and been able to depend on them. You get so close to them. Just extremely close.

It's very strange.

Did you keep a personal diary or journal?

No, I never did. Not a bit.

Do you wish you had?

I -- I don't think so. Because it's -- there are long stretches of boredom. There was a lot of -- I think that was the one thing that we all decided was the toughest part about being at war. Certainly the one thing we all shared, maybe not the toughest. Getting shot at all the time would be the toughest, but the one thing we all shared was the loneliness. I mean, we were very close to each other, but we all missed home desperately. And missed the families and missed being a part of what was going on at home. You know, it doesn't take long for you to realize that you've taken a whole year out of your life that is going to be dramatically different than the year that all your friends are having. And there are some positives of that, of course, but there's a lot of negatives, too. You're going to miss all the stuff happening, so that was a little tough, but --

Do you recall the day your service ended?

Oh, sure.

In Vietnam?

Oh, in Vietnam? Yeah. Yeah.

Where were you?

Well, I was at BenHoa and they actually flew me out of BenHoa. But when we first went over, the planes never came in to my base. They always came in at Saigon and then we had to take a bus up to the base or you took another plane to wherever you were going in the country. Or Denang, I think they flew into Denang as well. But by the time I left, they'd put in -- they did not put in the other runway yet, but they still were bringing in the commercial flights to BenHoa, so I got to fly right out of my base. I just remember being tickled to death, of course, I was leaving, but also being a little sorry to say goodbye to some guys. And the thing that really surprised me, I'll never forget this, you've probably heard this song, "If you're going to San Francisco, you better wear some flowers in your hair," yeah?

Yeah.

When I got on the plane, I guess the stereo wasn't working when we first got on, but as soon as he broke ground, I put the headset on and that's the song that was playing and we were headed for San Francisco.

What did you do on the days and weeks after that?

After I came back?

After you came back from Vietnam.

Got married for one thing. I had gotten engaged before I went over, we had plans to get married when I got back. Well, there were a lot of changes. My parents had moved for one thing.

So when I came back it was to a different house. I was totally focused on Pat, who I was going to marry within a couple of weeks. And didn't even care that much if I -- I mean I wanted to see other people, but she was the one I really wanted to see. So that -- it didn't create problems, but I could see that -- like my mother, for example, would -- wanted more of my attention than she was getting. But I went around and seen a lot of friends. I noticed, too, that a lot of my friends weren't around, because they were off at school or in the service and over in Vietnam.

Did you work or go back to school?

Well, I was still in the service when I came back. And after I got married and was home for leave a couple of weeks, I had to report into duty in Ohio, and I served out there for about nine months and then got discharged.

Did you make any close, long lasting friendships while you were in the service?

I made one -- I'm just trying to think here a minute.

I made one with a guy I met in Ohio after Vietnam. I've not kept up with anybody I served with in Vietnam. And I tried once to contact some of them, even with the Internet now you can find some folks, and I was so sure I found this kid Dufus. His name is (?Dufocia?) or something, we called him Dufus, but Dufus lived in New Hampshire. And I was absolutely certain I had found him, but when I called the guy claimed that he had never been to Vietnam, didn't know what I was talking about, okay. Yeah. The only other guy -- still stay in touch with Junior Cooper, who's down in Tennessee and I met in Ohio.

Did you join a veterans association?

No, not really. I joined the VFW here in Frederick, but that was just to get access to the swimming pool. And I joined AMVETS up here in Middletown, because it was the only bar in town for a while, and that's it.

So what did you go on to do after the war and after your service?

I got a job as a computer technician. That's a story in itself, too. I might as well tell you this.

Okay.

We were coming up on the end of our enlistment. It was me and three, four other guys. And we were all getting out together because they were shutting down our outfit. I got out early. And normally I would have had to serve up until February and I got out in September of '68. But along around July or August, we start talking amongst ourselves about what we were going to do and none of us felt particularly well trained for anything. I wanted to go back to school, but now I had a wife to support, you know, and time to build a family and so on. So one of the guys in communications who was an electronics wiz, told me about NCR and the fact that they were interviewing people -- he thought they might be interviewing people, said why don't we go up and check. And we just called personnel and they said, yes, come on up. We were both going to interview, but the guy from personnel who was going to do it got a call and he had to go somewhere, so he didn't have much time. So he ended up interviewing both of us together at the same time, and it turns out that I have a very logical mind. I'm really good at logic and just figuring things out as the way they should be, and he was an electronics wiz. And I didn't know anything about electronics. I mean, just barely, you know, you plug something in here, you get a light turned on over there. But to this day I'm convinced that what happened was the guy, every time he asked an electronics questions, my buddy would answer it. And every time he asked us questions about logic, I would answer it. Or mechanics. There was some mechanics involved, too. And I was good at that. But by the end of the interview, I'm sure -- or within a couple days, he just -- it all got muddled and he figured we were both a couple of geniuses, so we got hired.

Thank God to be computer technicians on the old huge mainframes.

In fact, they had tubes in them, believe or not, back then. And I went on to become an electronics technician, computer technician, and they trained me for everything. That's one thing about NCR and -- they're not that way anymore, nobody can be, they can't afford it, but I worked for them for five years. And the five -- in the five years that I was there, I spent two years in a classroom. Eight to five, five days a week, every Friday you get a test, fail a test, you're fired. So real motivation there. But I ended up, I think, with basically as much knowledge as I would have received had I gone on and got a degree in engineering.

Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or military in general?

Oh, yeah. I came back from Vietnam an absolute passivist. I just didn't ever, ever want my children to have to fight in a war. Or see a war. It's horrible. It's just -- it's just horrible. You can't imagine what it does to -- well, certainly to just the human body with some of those weapons, but then to those who survive, what it does to your head, huh-uh.

And as much as I was against war, I still thought that we had done the right thing and our government should be supporting the government itself, Vietnam, and fighting communist oppression, or insurgency. And we -- you know, I was pretty young and pretty naive and I bought a lot of crap, which I later found out was lies, but for what I had to deal with at the time, I thought we were doing the correct thing. But I still was a little antsy about it. I know what I was trying to get to here. When I found that -- the country was just being ripped to shreds by this war. I could see it on T.V. and I could see it -- working in Washington, of course, you get to see all the demonstrations. That's when I decided the war had to end. No matter what the situation was. And if we had to sacrifice the South Vietnamese government to do it, then so be it. It was better we sacrifice them than sacrifice ourselves, but I had -- I know the point I was trying to make, too. John Kennedy had had an enormous impact on me, particularly his speeches when he said things like, you know, we will go anywhere, we will pay any price in support of freedom. And I really believe that. I thought that was -- he was a tremendous leader. And that's why I thought doing what we were doing for South Vietnam was the correct thing, but we could not afford to lose our whole country. Still to this day, I like to think I'm very much a passivist. But I don't have any problem, whatsoever, in declaring war on Bin Laden for his acts on the 11th of September. And we will lose men because of that, and that's a horrible thing, but we could lose our country if we don't act on these things. So there's a period, I guess, where you -- there's a line that I'm willing to cross. Some people won't cross that line. They are passivists to the end and that's -- you know, if that's your conviction, I don't have a problem with that, but it's not me.

Overall, how did your service and experiences affect your life?

Probably made me more organized, because I was pretty disorganized. They say that they build men out of boys and stuff, of course a lot of that you do on your own because you are getting older while you're in, but I think I did start to understand responsibility a little more. And I lost some of my naivete, became a little more discerning of things.

You had mentioned on the phone you had health problems related to it?

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. What it was is we flew all the country fare missions out of BenHoa. Country fare was the name for the missions that were Agent Orange related and the defoliants and all that stuff. And those planes used to fill up their tanks at BenHoa. We had all that stuff. And what it was was not only did I come in contact with it just because they were spraying, and if they sprayed everybody in the country came in contact with it, but I had the added joy of actually working around Agent Orange. When they came down the runway -- down the taxi way and made a turn onto the runway to take off, they would go right by us when we were on the end of the runway working arming the planes and setting up fuses and what have you. And their tanks, I remember seeing them all the time, would be leaking and splashing and what have you. And I know I was walking through Agent Orange, kneeling in it, sitting in it, it was everywhere. And I paid a pretty high price, because I lost one lung almost entirely, kidneys are shot, bladder's shot. What else is shot?

Did it take you a while to realize you were affected by it like with health problems? Like right away?

Didn't relate that to it at all. You know, I knew I was sick, but nobody knew why. And then it would go away. Like I'd go to the hospital for a month and run horrendous fevers and lose huge amounts of weight. I'm a big guy, but I'd lose 60 or 70 pounds. And I'd come out thin as a rail. And then finally somehow it would stop. They would be treating me with antibiotics and stuff, but they were never quite sure whether that's what did it or it stopped itself. It was always labeled a fever of unknown origin, that's what they do. And then in '76, so that would be almost ten years later, yeah, I ended up at NIH.

I have a doctor who's been following me forever. And -- well, forever. Since I got out of the service. And he got me into NIH and they put a name on it. It's polyarteritis nodosa. And I've also got traces of Wegener's granulomatosis. It's a blood vessel disease. And I think it's related to Agent Orange. There's no real proof of that. The government's reluctant to identify very many diseases that they say are related to Agent Orange. There's only about six or eight, I think, that they say are related.

And, you know, I just don't buy it. Both of my kids have had cancer. They both beat it, thank God. But there's just too many inconsistencies. Too many things to point to. That's life.

Okay. Is there anything you would like to add that we haven't covered in this interview?

Oh, gosh. I guess -- overall -- this may be a horrible thing to say, but overall I'm just not terribly proud of my generation. I think that we've had the opportunity to do some great things and we certainly like to tell everybody how great we are. You know, we had the greatest music in the 60's, and all this, but I think we've squandered a lot. But I do think that the men who served with me -- as a group, I think, we've not performed as well as we should, but there are individuals within my generation that I think are extraordinary, and I served with some of them in the service. And I've known some of them since I got out who had been in the service with me. Like, I've got another buddy who was over there with the Marines at the time and I didn't know him then, but I met him in business, who is just another extraordinary guy, but I just think some of the men who were over there with me were just phenomenal and I would just --

I don't know, like to tell the world that sometimes.

Well, I think that's all.

Okay. Well --

Thank you very much.

I hope I gave you what you need.