Skip to playerSkip to main content
LegalDramaDaily
  • 15 hours ago
My Fathers Vietnam 2015
Transcript
00:00:27My name is Soren Peter Sorenson II.
00:00:30And this is my namesake, Soren Peter Sorenson I.
00:00:32He was born over a century before me in Denmark in 1871, and he's pictured here at 17 in his
00:00:38Danish military uniform.
00:00:40Here's his son, my great-grandfather Ralph Sorenson, holding me at two months old as my
00:00:44father and grandfather look on.
00:00:46When I look at this photograph, I wonder if any of these men ever thought that my life
00:00:49would even remotely resemble theirs.
00:01:06There's a stranger lying in my bed It's laid out a sleep assassin in my head
00:01:19I keep on dying until I finally fall dead Every day has a way through
00:01:34There's an ether hanging at my door Across the crucifier, keeping score
00:01:46I keep on smiling until I can't smile no more Every day fades to bloom
00:01:59We go, whoa, survive the gray We go, whoa, survive the gray
00:02:09We go, whoa, survive the gray And we go, whoa, survive the gray
00:02:14For one more day
00:02:21The first time my father took me to Washington, D.C., I was around 10 years old, too young
00:02:25to really get it.
00:02:27D.C. was one of a number of uniquely American destinations we used to visit, places like
00:02:31Annapolis and Gettysburg, where all I ever really learned from the monuments, memorials,
00:02:35reenactments, and powwows was that I loved the junk food that always seemed to accompany each
00:02:39day's outing.
00:02:40When we visited the Vietnam Memorial, I was hardly old enough to comprehend the Smithsonian
00:02:44or the Air and Space Museum, let alone Maya Lin's granite masterpiece honoring the more
00:02:49than 58,000 Americans who were killed during the Vietnam War.
00:02:54The experience always stayed with me because my dad made pencil rubbings of two of the names
00:02:58that day, Loring M. Bailey Jr. and Glenn D. Rickert.
00:03:03I remember standing as far away as I could from my teary-eyed father as he made the rubbings
00:03:07and took pictures of each of the names.
00:03:09Who were these people, I wondered to myself, these dead soldiers.
00:03:12He had never mentioned them before.
00:03:14I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've seen my father's eyes well
00:03:18up with tears and I'm not sure he's ever cried, but it wasn't a good feeling as a
00:03:22child seeing that vulnerable, human side of a guy I imagined was invincible.
00:03:26This little effort to distance myself physically from my father in D.C. continued emotionally
00:03:30throughout my adolescence, manifesting itself as a fear of upsetting or disappointing him as
00:03:35I intentionally grew into what I considered to be a much different person than he once was.
00:03:40This distance between us, real or imagined on my part, caused me to wait until I was over 30
00:03:45to ask him how he ended up in Vietnam.
00:03:51Not by choice, by chance.
00:03:54Or is it by chance, by choice?
00:03:55There was a recruiting slogan that had to do with, by choice but not by chance or something like that.
00:04:04You pick your branch and all that good stuff and you get a career path and go to college
00:04:10and become a PhD machine gun writer.
00:04:12I backed into it.
00:04:14I knew that this was probably the biggest news story of my life.
00:04:16I knew that I wanted to be a journalist or that I thought I wanted to be a journalist.
00:04:20I was a political science major.
00:04:22There have been family males involved in the Spanish, the Civil War, Spanish-American War,
00:04:28World War I, World War II, Korea, and this was just my war.
00:04:32There's a tradition of if you're a male and there's a war on, that's your job.
00:04:36That's what you do.
00:04:37It's just bad luck or good luck if you're into that sort of thing.
00:04:42So I was balancing not wanting to miss this news story.
00:04:49A dyed-in-the-wool Ernest Hemingway fan on the other side of the coin.
00:04:54I knew that this was a bogus war.
00:04:56It was a civil war.
00:04:58The politicians were steering us astray and I sure as hell didn't want to die over there.
00:05:04But you balance one against the other and then depending upon where you want to go with
00:05:09discussions, you can play this out right to the day I got over there.
00:05:15It's avoidance tempered with this is something I should be doing or want to be doing.
00:05:22In 1968, a lot of high school and college seniors were in the same situation as my father.
00:05:27And the perception of Vietnam as a working class war fought only by America's poorest
00:05:31and least educated citizens was changing.
00:05:34In March, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.
00:05:38In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
00:05:40In June, it was Robert F. Kennedy.
00:05:43In November, Richard Nixon was elected president.
00:05:45Nixon had a plan.
00:05:47I remember distinctly sitting in Fort Dix cleaning M-14 and listening to speeches.
00:05:53And Nixon had a plan to get us out of Vietnam.
00:05:56And I was thinking to myself, if he could do that in two months, I would vote for him.
00:06:00Another Connecticut resident who probably voted for Nixon in 68 is Loring Bailey, then an employee of Groton-based Electric
00:06:06Boat, the largest manufacturer of submarines for the United States Navy.
00:06:10Bailey's only son, Loring Jr., or Ring, to his close friends and family, enlisted in the United States Army around
00:06:15the same time as my father, and for similar reasons.
00:06:18When the kids came out or graduated from school, from college, when they ended home here in Connecticut, well, all
00:06:29over the country, there lying in the pile of mail was the card for registration for the draft.
00:06:44Every senior faced that.
00:06:46A lot of people said, my God, if I'm going to be drafted, I'll enlist.
00:06:53I'll go before they call me.
00:06:56It surprised me to hear that so many young people in the late 60s, including my father and Ring Bailey,
00:07:01were still enlisting.
00:07:03Members of my generation, the sons and daughters of these baby boomers, seem to treat the topic of Vietnam either
00:07:08with overt criticism, including comparisons to Iraq and Afghanistan, or eye rolls and apathy.
00:07:14I've honestly never spoken to very many people my age or any other come to think of it, willing to
00:07:18defend the American government's motivations for expanding our military's involvement in Vietnam.
00:07:22But the reasons people enlisted were not as simple as I once imagined.
00:07:26Because the United States military is now all volunteer, I always figured anyone who made a conscious decision to enlist
00:07:32rather than waiting for the draft or avoiding the war altogether, must have been enthusiastically anti-communist.
00:07:38That or too willing to please their fathers, members of Tom Brokaw's greatest generation.
00:07:43I think it's partly doing what is expected.
00:07:46So I think he was reared in the tradition of being responsible, doing the right thing, quote unquote, whatever that,
00:07:53however you define that, and not disappointing your family.
00:07:58And he had not just a father but a grandfather whom he loved and aunts and a family tradition that
00:08:03was one that would be a big deal to just walk out on that.
00:08:07The National Guard wasn't available unless you knew somebody or your name was Bush or you had some way of
00:08:12getting into the National Guard.
00:08:13The National Guard was closed out. The reserves were closed out because they were really popular obviously.
00:08:18You weren't going to see action.
00:08:20I looked into the Army. The Army had a program where, and I was about to be drafted as far
00:08:25as I know.
00:08:25If you sign up for officer candidate school, at any point washout, you get the time that you spent in
00:08:32training subtracted from a two year draft.
00:08:35So my mind's cranking away and I'm thinking to myself, it takes a couple months for basic, a couple months
00:08:44for advanced individual training, however long I can play out OCS.
00:08:53And then if you, again, throw in the towel, if I had played it right I'd have either less than
00:09:00a year, and at that point if you had less than a year they weren't shipping you out.
00:09:03So I would come pretty close to a year. If I had done something other than go, my father probably
00:09:10would have been disappointed.
00:09:11But in terms of my family, I received no input either to go, not go, it's a good idea, bad
00:09:18idea.
00:09:18I think he cared about his father's impression of him, but I'm not sure, but I also think he resented
00:09:24it.
00:09:25It would have been an embarrassment probably, because there was a stigma attached.
00:09:30Again, if you go back to that era, in a neighborhood, if somebody was evading, if somebody went to Canada
00:09:37or something, the neighbors talked.
00:09:55Perhaps America's hindsight perception of 60s counterculture, hippies, and the sexual revolution produces the illusion of a greater protest movement
00:10:02than actually existed.
00:10:05As much as I can imagine enlisting in the military during the Vietnam era, for my father and Ring Bailey,
00:10:10evading, avoiding, dodging the draft, or going to Canada weren't really options.
00:10:14When I contacted Ring Bailey's widow Maris to request an interview, she respectfully declined, stating,
00:10:19The years since Ring's death have done little to soften my heartache and anger over his loss.
00:10:25Maris put me in touch with her brother Rick, who invited me to his home in Burlington, Vermont.
00:10:30Rick's deaf in his left ear, so he received a 4F designation, meaning unfit for service upon completing his physical.
00:10:36He told me the outcome of the physical didn't matter. He wasn't going to Vietnam.
00:10:43Did it look like me? I would have gone to jail. They sent draft resistors to Allenwood Prison Farm in
00:10:50Pennsylvania.
00:10:51It's minimum security. There's no barbed wire. Ring became my sister's boyfriend. Ring was two years older than me.
00:11:05And he became a mentor. He went to Trinity College in Hartford. He was really smart.
00:11:14And I really liked him. And here he was with my sister. And we hung out together.
00:11:22And so that's how I met him. And he eventually married my sister. You know, Ring.
00:11:29And by gosh, the telephone call that I received the night that he went down to Fort Dix was,
00:11:38Hey, Dad, I'm in the infantry. Well, you take Ring's glasses off and he couldn't see a hundred yards and
00:11:49make out anything without glasses in a hundred yards.
00:11:55But here he was in the infantry. Well, okay. So you'll learn how to march.
00:12:01Ring liked automobiles. He was a real automobile enthusiast. His father was an automobile enthusiast.
00:12:09His father had a XK 140 Jaguar coupe. Most of them are roadsters. This one was a coupe. It was
00:12:16swooping.
00:12:17And I learned the appreciation of these automobiles from Ring. He drew cars. He knew race cars.
00:12:24He had little die-cast miniature cars and collected them. And now I do.
00:12:30He had a bug-eyed Sprite. Before he went to Vietnam, he bought a bug-eyed Sprite.
00:12:35And I bought a 1600 Fiat Roadster. And in his time off between, before he went to Vietnam,
00:12:43we worked on these two cars and we drove around and...
00:12:48Fun. With a cloud over your head. Fun.
00:12:52My father met Ring Bailey in 1969 at OCS, Officer Candidate School in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
00:12:58They were both aspiring writers, Ernest Hemingway fans from small southern New England towns.
00:13:03And the seemingly insignificant common ground they shared led to an alliance that almost spared them both from service outside
00:13:08the United States.
00:13:10He was going to be a journalist. He was going to want to go into writing.
00:13:13And he found a colonel who was looking for people to write training manuals.
00:13:18And the colonel said, I need a half dozen, I need four writers.
00:13:23And he got the job. And he came back and said, hey look, go down there.
00:13:27He said, you will spend the next year outside of Washington.
00:13:30He was married. I was about to get married.
00:13:32He said, we'll spend the rest of the, either a year or a year plus, writing training manuals at Fort
00:13:38Belvoir,
00:13:38which is a suburb of Washington, D.C., with our spouses. And what could be better?
00:13:43So in any case, I went down, interviewed, got the job.
00:13:47And in both cases, our orders for Vietnam got cut before the orders for the writing job.
00:13:55My father and Ring both decided against finishing OCS and were sent to different bases.
00:13:59They weren't gung ho by any stretch of the imagination.
00:14:03Neither were countless other Americans who found themselves in Vietnam.
00:14:06Selective service and self-preservation were not as contradictory then as they seem to be today.
00:14:11When my father received word that he would be shipping out in October of 69,
00:14:15my parents had to move their wedding up from September to August.
00:14:18People in my mother's hometown, Wheeling, West Virginia, were convinced she was pregnant.
00:14:21The day that he left for Vietnam, my parents didn't feel comfortable having me drive him to the airport
00:14:26because I was going to be upset, and so they arranged that, you know, bus trip or limo trip for
00:14:33him.
00:14:34So the thing came around the circle. I remember vividly saying goodbye to him
00:14:39and opening that door and having him walk and get in that car.
00:14:46It could have been near America, but it was a commercial flight with stewards or stewardesses.
00:14:52Although we were wearing jungle fatigues, we landed in Hawaii and Guam for refueling.
00:15:01But essentially, other than the fatigues, it was like, I don't recall a movie in flight movie,
00:15:05but we had meals and it was like nothing was happening.
00:15:16And on the way down, everybody was sort of hanging out to their seat and kind of concerned
00:15:21because we were in this commercial setting and sort of a tradition.
00:15:25This is just a regular airplane flight.
00:15:28And the next thing we knew were like a 45-degree angle coming down.
00:15:33And when we landed, I asked one of the stewardesses what the story was.
00:15:39And she said, when we get to Vietnam, we do military landings to lessen the exposure to enemy fire.
00:15:44And on the way down, it was like, we were looking at each other like, we're not going to make
00:15:49it.
00:15:49I mean, we're not even going to land this plane.
00:15:51There's been a mechanical difficulty.
00:15:53We saw the South China Sea. We saw Vietnam.
00:15:55And the next thing we knew, we were just seemingly crash landing.
00:15:59We hit the deck. They opened the door. Once it was opened, it was like a blast furnace.
00:16:04It went from an air-conditioned cabin originating a flight from Fort Lewis, Washington,
00:16:11and the heat and humidity was unbearable. It was just very difficult to communicate.
00:16:17And then within two hours, I was on the perimeter of Cam'ron Bay stringing concertina wire.
00:16:23And I figured I was going to make it 24 hours.
00:16:25I figured the environment or the temperature was going to do me in.
00:16:31I wasn't going to make it because of the weather.
00:16:32I was scared that something might happen.
00:16:34I knew he wasn't going to be in the jungle. That would have freaked me out.
00:16:38I guess I didn't constantly fear the way I would if he had been in combat or a Marine.
00:16:42And then at night, I remember there was some kind of either an arc light, which is a B-52
00:16:46drop,
00:16:47or there was a firefight, something going on in the mountains.
00:16:50And I remember looking, coming out of the hooch and looking toward the mountains,
00:16:55and it was like it was a large thunderstorm.
00:16:59And you'd see a flash, and then there would be a four-minute or whatever delay,
00:17:05and then you'd feel a concussion.
00:17:08And then, again, it brought home that this is, you know, where you are.
00:17:12And then tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, you're going to be closer to what's going on there.
00:17:16Loring was assigned to an infantry brigade or infantry battalion.
00:17:21I was assigned to an engineer company.
00:17:24And essentially, he went off and did his thing. I went off and did my thing.
00:17:27His first letter indicated that he had, on the day of his arrival, that night, they went out on a
00:17:36snake.
00:17:38That was a case of where you blackened your faces, you were heavily armored,
00:17:45and he was with a group of machine gunners, and they set up a blocking force.
00:17:54And he said, the blocking force, we were there, but nothing, nothing occurred.
00:18:00From Cam'ron Bay orders to Chu Lai, which is the corporate, the military headquarters company,
00:18:08the headquarters for the Ameri-Cal Division, and was there.
00:18:12They have what they call the combat center, which is like graduate school.
00:18:15And for a week, you were there to acclimatize yourself, and then also go through quick-kill chorus,
00:18:21where you had a BB gun, you would shoot at pop-up targets, booby traps in mines,
00:18:26and try not to set them off.
00:18:29Everybody set off something, which is kind of debilitating when you're through one.
00:18:34Warning lectures on drugs.
00:18:36All the hooches had essentially plywood walls, screens, and then corrugated ten roofs.
00:18:43And then attached, or very close by, there were culverts, or half shells, covered with sandbags,
00:18:49which were for rocket attacks or incoming, defensive positions essentially.
00:18:54The first night I was there, we had incoming rockets.
00:18:57There was an explosion, and we just, you know, we're green, we're looking at each other.
00:19:02What was that?
00:19:03And finally, somebody came running through the hooch and said,
00:19:09everybody in the shelter, and we all got in the shelter.
00:19:13And there were three or four more rockets that came in that night.
00:19:16So the first night that I was in Chulai, we received the rocket attacks,
00:19:20probably B-10s or Soviet-made rockets.
00:19:24They were just set up with bamboo stakes out in the hinterlands,
00:19:28and they were launched toward the American base.
00:19:31I don't think there were any casualties or anything,
00:19:34but that was my introduction to incoming.
00:19:36From there, I got orders to Duck Fo, which is about 50 miles south on the coast.
00:19:41It's in Quang Nai Province.
00:19:43I was assigned to the engineers.
00:19:44For the engineers, I was shipped out to LZ Liz, or Landing Zone Liz,
00:19:48which is a forward fire support base, and there were three mountains,
00:19:53one large lump where the LZ was located.
00:19:56There were a couple of howitzers there, and I stayed there for four months or so,
00:20:00five months, doing mine sweeps and construction.
00:20:05For soldiers of the Vietnam era and their loved ones,
00:20:08letter-writing was the most useful method of communication.
00:20:11As much as pictures tell us what the war was like for these young men,
00:20:14their letters home are as remarkable, not only for what was written,
00:20:18but also for what was left out.
00:20:20He wrote to us to protect us.
00:20:23You know, he wrote to us and tried to look at the light side.
00:20:27His letters he wrote about, he wrote a letter about a duckling that he took with him for three days,
00:20:33a little duckling that he carried on helicopter rides and finally let go somewhere.
00:20:38There was Pete the puppy dog who followed them around.
00:20:41He wrote about micro frogs.
00:20:43Oh, he was upbeat.
00:20:45It was an upbeat deal.
00:20:47He made it that way.
00:20:49I can tell you one letter that he sent to his wife.
00:20:54Three or four paragraphs of disassembling and assembling a machine gun,
00:21:03a .50 caliber machine gun.
00:21:04I don't think he copied it out of the manual, but it was very, very close.
00:21:10And he wrote this.
00:21:14Also, saw an enormous python the other day.
00:21:18Those exciting animal names grow a bit meaningless or prosaic
00:21:22when we think of them as automobile models or can opener trademarks.
00:21:25But a real python opens your eyes and gives new meaning and respect to the name.
00:21:33He was in a god-awful environment.
00:21:40Just hideous.
00:21:42He was carrying 70 pounds of pack and then going from place to place
00:21:46and then at night setting up ambushes.
00:21:49And if it was the monsoon season, you're wet.
00:21:53I mean, you're cut to the bone.
00:21:55Forty-eight hours, three days, four or five days at a time.
00:21:58Elizabeth, I wrote once a day.
00:21:59If I missed a day, I used to write two.
00:22:01So I probably got back an equal amount.
00:22:05It wasn't like World War II where everybody wrote
00:22:07and everybody sent cookies and everybody did this.
00:22:09It was fairly confined to the closest relatives or closest friends.
00:22:14So you didn't get groundswells of mail.
00:22:17The ones I counted obviously were Elizabeth's and friends.
00:22:21I wrote him a letter every day and did that.
00:22:25But when he was gone, he left in September and at Christmas,
00:22:28which was a big family gathering around the Christmas table
00:22:31with my parents and Aunt Susie and Uncle Atwood
00:22:34and all of the cousins and everybody.
00:22:36And here I was having been married one month and he left in September
00:22:40and it was Christmas.
00:22:41The entire Christmas day and through the entire Christmas dinner,
00:22:44not one person mentioned him.
00:22:46He was not toasted.
00:22:47He was not...
00:22:49He just wasn't in their conscious.
00:22:51Part of our job was to get up very punctual so that
00:22:54everybody knew we were coming.
00:22:55But there's at least eight of us.
00:22:56This parade of people going down the road.
00:22:58We did the sweep and then at the end of the sweep,
00:23:01what happened was a five-ton dump truck would be filled up with sand.
00:23:05It was called pressure testing and it would back down the road.
00:23:08So anything that we missed electronically, theoretically the dump truck would set off.
00:23:14We did this one day.
00:23:16We got onto the truck because the pressure testing had been done
00:23:18and they would drive us back up to the LZ Liz.
00:23:21On this particular day we were working on bunkers
00:23:23and then all of a sudden we heard an explosion down toward the road.
00:23:26It was after the monsoon so they were repairing the road.
00:23:29Anyway, we got down there and the medevac was just leaving the dump truck driver.
00:23:34The mine went off right under the cab and it blew his eye out.
00:23:38He had other injuries but we had to do another mine sweep of the road.
00:23:42So this is the second mine sweep within four hours, five hours.
00:23:46And they did another pressure test.
00:23:47We got back on the dump truck to LZ Liz, started working on the bunkers
00:23:51and we heard another explosion.
00:23:54Another truck bringing a load of dirt blew up.
00:23:58Again, the medevac was there but there were those two in one morning.
00:24:02The next day they had sniffer dogs.
00:24:05They accompanied us for the next week and never found anything else.
00:24:09But we lost two dump trucks, two guys.
00:24:12This is a Corgi die-cast miniature car.
00:24:16You know, I don't know the scale.
00:24:18It's a Di Tommaso Mangusta that I sent to him as a Christmas present.
00:24:22And we liked our cars.
00:24:24And he wrote to me, he said,
00:24:26In the dark watches of the night I roll the Di Tommaso Mangusta Corgi toy car
00:24:31that Rick sent me back and forth very quietly.
00:24:33I sit squishing the suspension up and down for minutes at a time,
00:24:39looking at it at eye level, digging its amber headlights.
00:24:42But that's another form of devotion entirely.
00:24:45Huddled under my poncho, trying to preserve the condition of my stationary,
00:24:50all thought of quality gone, writing away while monitoring my trusty two-way radio,
00:24:55looking out at the little plastic Christmas tree that one of our machine gunners received in the mail
00:25:00and planted before his draped poncho.
00:25:03Put the little metal car, the Di Tommaso Mangusta that I carry in my pocket beneath the plastic tree,
00:25:09and lo and behold, we'll have toys under the tree come tomorrow morning.
00:25:13All the amenities are not lost.
00:25:15One little Tupperware container of mother's best cookies, too.
00:25:19No, all is certainly not lost at Christmas time.
00:25:23Next Christmas Eve, I'll perhaps remember my rainy night,
00:25:26squatting beside my radio on my plastic-covered map to keep my bottom unsuccessfully dry,
00:25:32watching the bushes move,
00:25:34and every so often munching on mixed nuts without peanuts.
00:25:38Maybe this was the Christmas Eve and Christmas to make the rest worthwhile.
00:25:43music playing
00:26:25For about two-thirds of the time, it was as a platoon leader.
00:26:29I went in as a second lieutenant, March, April, somewhere in there.
00:26:32I was promoted to first lieutenant.
00:26:36And so I had a platoon of men.
00:26:41We never had a full complement of people.
00:26:43I believe a full complement would be 40-some people,
00:26:45and we were generally running close to about 30 at the max.
00:26:50And we would go out on patrol during the day, and we'd set up ambushes at night.
00:26:54Most of what we were looking for were resupply issues.
00:26:58The area we were in had been defoliated, bulldozed, burned, and was a free fire zone.
00:27:05So anybody out there, theoretically, was a target.
00:27:09That made it difficult when you actually wanted to eliminate a target.
00:27:12You were told that you could possibly impact some poor, innocent civilian
00:27:16who wasn't supposed to be there in the first place.
00:27:19So I was involved in planning, deploying the troops,
00:27:23making sure everybody knew what their mission was,
00:27:26making sure the resupply came in, whether it was weapons, food, whatever it was.
00:27:31Ring volunteered to go out and carry the radio.
00:27:37I wrote back to him saying,
00:27:39you get rid of the radio as fast as you possibly can.
00:27:43That is a highly visible target.
00:27:47He had already been in this unit, my first unit that I was assigned to.
00:27:52So when I first met Loring, he was Spec 4, I believe was his rank at the time.
00:27:58And he was my radio guy.
00:28:01And so he was responsible for any communication out of our field unit
00:28:06to anything or anybody else we needed.
00:28:09Actually, when I saw the picture,
00:28:12I realized I hadn't remembered a whole lot in the picture you sent me.
00:28:17I remember dark hair.
00:28:20I always had the impression he was a lot taller than I was,
00:28:22but I'm not sure if he was or not.
00:28:26And the glasses.
00:28:30But he seemed like a...
00:28:32It sounds terrible.
00:28:33Not that the other people weren't civilized people,
00:28:35but he seemed more civilized, reasonable, intelligent
00:28:37than many other people I ran into.
00:28:39I'm the guy that when he went fishing as a kid,
00:28:41I threw the fish back in.
00:28:43I never hunted.
00:28:44I'd never been around weapons.
00:28:45I didn't come from a family that was an outdoors.
00:28:49We were tennis players and swimmers.
00:28:51And so this gung-ho,
00:28:54try to keep yourself from being killed,
00:28:57carrying 100 pounds of supplies
00:28:59and being armed and shoot the kilt,
00:29:03very, very strange.
00:29:06The minute I was in country
00:29:07and the night that we were rocketed,
00:29:09I knew that I did not want to be a combat engineer
00:29:12and I knew that I wanted to get as far
00:29:13from the ugliness as I could.
00:29:17And I went to the division headquarters
00:29:19and I got a unit transfer application,
00:29:22dutifully filled it out the second day
00:29:24or third day that I was in country,
00:29:26or in Chulai,
00:29:27and then did not hear anything for four months.
00:29:30During that period,
00:29:31we were in Moduck building a bridge.
00:29:33I took pictures and wrote a story about the project
00:29:37and I submitted it to the 31st Public Information Office
00:29:42and that was that.
00:29:44And about three weeks later or two weeks later,
00:29:46the squad leader over the radio
00:29:48received a call from the captain in charge of the engineers,
00:29:52have Sorensen on the LZ at a certain hour
00:29:54with all his equipment.
00:29:57And the squad leader, of course,
00:29:58looked a little askance at me
00:30:00and said, where are you going
00:30:02and how did you do it?
00:30:03So anyway, I got on the LZ
00:30:05and next thing I know,
00:30:06the captain's personal helicopter was there,
00:30:09picked me up,
00:30:10and then flew me back to Bronco,
00:30:13all five miles.
00:30:15And the captain was in his jeep
00:30:17waiting to pick me up
00:30:18and he looked at me and he said,
00:30:22something to the effect
00:30:23that you look a little scruffy
00:30:25to be someone who's working in the rear now.
00:30:28He explained that I'd been reassigned
00:30:30to the Public Information Office.
00:30:32The story that I had written
00:30:33appeared in either Army Times
00:30:35and or Stars and Stripes.
00:30:37And so someone said,
00:30:40take this guy out of the engineers
00:30:42and put him in the Public Information Office.
00:30:44There happened to be an opening.
00:30:46So that was the transition.
00:30:48It was abrupt.
00:30:49There were four people assigned
00:30:50to the Public Information Office
00:30:52and two of them were officers,
00:30:53two were enlisted.
00:30:55So I was in a position
00:30:56where I could come and go as I pleased.
00:30:58As long as I maintained
00:31:00a certain flow of stories
00:31:02and pictures out of that office,
00:31:04they didn't care if I showed up.
00:31:06They didn't care what I did.
00:31:07Sort of to further add
00:31:09to the confusion
00:31:10and the elation on my part,
00:31:13the division thought
00:31:15the brigade was in charge
00:31:16of the Public Information Office.
00:31:18The brigade thought
00:31:19the division was in charge.
00:31:21So nobody was in charge.
00:31:29One of the things I did
00:31:30was fly with either
00:31:32the combat assault unit
00:31:33or they have a light observation
00:31:35helicopter unit
00:31:36that did scouting work
00:31:37or drew fire
00:31:38or visual reconnaissance flights.
00:31:42And there was a pilot
00:31:44named Rickard
00:31:45and I typically flew with him.
00:31:47Glenn Rickard was a captain,
00:31:50very accessible,
00:31:51very friendly.
00:31:52When I had to take pictures,
00:31:53when we needed aerial photographs
00:31:55or reconnaissance photographs,
00:31:57I would go out
00:31:58or if I needed to take pictures
00:32:00of a body or something like that,
00:32:01he would fly me out there.
00:32:17This is Glenn Aurelius.
00:32:19He flew light observation helicopters
00:32:21with Glenn Rickard
00:32:21in Vietnam in 1970.
00:32:23For him,
00:32:24the Vietnam War represented
00:32:25an opportunity
00:32:26to pursue his love of flying.
00:32:28He works as a pilot
00:32:29to this day.
00:32:30I looked up to him,
00:32:32yeah.
00:32:32Yeah, maybe a role model.
00:32:34Yeah, I believe
00:32:35that would be the case.
00:32:37He had a commanding presence,
00:32:39soft-spoken.
00:32:40I wasn't the only one
00:32:41that would say this to him,
00:32:42but probably the first
00:32:44and I said it many times
00:32:45because we were close.
00:32:46The job we were doing
00:32:47was very dangerous,
00:32:48very risky every day.
00:32:50You never knew
00:32:50what was going to happen.
00:32:51And I said,
00:32:52I told him a couple of times
00:32:54that I could do
00:32:55all of those trips
00:32:56and he wouldn't have to do any
00:32:57because he had a wife
00:32:59and a child now
00:33:00and that there was
00:33:02more to lose there
00:33:03if something happened to him.
00:33:07But I remember
00:33:08the conversations with him
00:33:09and he said,
00:33:10no, he said,
00:33:11thank you.
00:33:11He said,
00:33:12but I really like
00:33:15flying these flights.
00:33:17Like my father
00:33:18and Ring Bailey,
00:33:19Glenn Rickard
00:33:19had only been married
00:33:20a short time
00:33:21before shipping out.
00:33:22His son, Glenn Jr.,
00:33:24was only an infant
00:33:25at the time.
00:33:26He and his mother Margie
00:33:27still live in Pennsylvania,
00:33:28not far from where
00:33:29Glenn Sr. grew up.
00:33:30I think it was
00:33:31a little bit after
00:33:34the parade
00:33:35for Bucks County
00:33:37Vietnam Memorial.
00:33:39I finally started
00:33:40realizing my heritage,
00:33:41so I finally wanted
00:33:43to get it all put together,
00:33:44the letters,
00:33:46the uniforms,
00:33:47things of that.
00:33:49so it was a lot
00:33:50of information,
00:33:51so I figured
00:33:52I'd just kind of
00:33:53start throwing it
00:33:54all together
00:33:54in some type of format
00:33:57just so I could show people
00:33:58because a lot of people
00:33:59were asking after that time,
00:34:01you know.
00:34:01And then in school,
00:34:02I did a project
00:34:04about his life.
00:34:05That helped out a lot, too,
00:34:06with being able
00:34:07to share that.
00:34:08He wanted to go.
00:34:09He wanted to do his part
00:34:10and he really believed
00:34:11in what he was doing.
00:34:13It wasn't that he didn't
00:34:14feel that we should be there.
00:34:16I mean, of course,
00:34:18everybody has mixed feelings
00:34:20about war.
00:34:20Nobody likes war,
00:34:22but if you believe
00:34:23in what the purpose
00:34:24of it is,
00:34:24trying to liberate
00:34:25and oppress people,
00:34:26basically,
00:34:27that's what it comes down to.
00:34:28And he believed in that.
00:34:29He was a very moral person
00:34:31and, you know,
00:34:31he was a Christian,
00:34:32so he valued life,
00:34:34every life,
00:34:34regardless of their politics.
00:34:37In Vietnam,
00:34:38there was a time
00:34:39when I was so wrapped up
00:34:41in the war
00:34:42and what I was doing
00:34:43over there
00:34:44that I didn't really
00:34:45write regularly.
00:34:46It was Glenn
00:34:46that told me one time
00:34:49that my parents
00:34:50were trying to get a hold
00:34:51of me
00:34:51or that the Red Cross
00:34:52had contacted him
00:34:53to tell me
00:34:54that I needed to write home
00:34:55because, you know,
00:34:57I hadn't written
00:34:58or contacted them
00:34:58for, you know,
00:34:59maybe a couple of months.
00:35:01And when you think about it,
00:35:03that's pretty sad
00:35:04with all that was going on
00:35:05on TV every day of the week,
00:35:07every hour.
00:35:08There were pictures
00:35:09of helicopters being shot down
00:35:11and people getting killed
00:35:12by the thousands.
00:35:13And so I thought
00:35:15it was very selfish
00:35:16of me to be that way
00:35:18and not communicate.
00:35:19But I just isolated myself
00:35:21over there
00:35:21and I just really detached myself
00:35:23from the rest of the world.
00:35:25It just didn't exist.
00:35:27No newspapers.
00:35:28I didn't see any TV.
00:35:30It was really what was going on
00:35:31right there then.
00:35:34But then when the Red Cross
00:35:35contacted me
00:35:37through Glenn Rickert,
00:35:39then I realized there
00:35:41that I really needed
00:35:43to communicate
00:35:44and that they cared
00:35:44and they wanted to hear from me.
00:35:46So I kind of,
00:35:47it was a wake-up call.
00:35:48Because of his morality
00:35:49and his beliefs,
00:35:50I believe that's why
00:35:51on weekends
00:35:52he would go to the orphanage.
00:35:54That was an outlet for him
00:35:55that he felt
00:35:57probably counteracted
00:35:57all the death
00:35:58and destruction
00:35:59through the week
00:36:00whenever he could,
00:36:01you know,
00:36:01go to the orphanage
00:36:02and do something
00:36:03in a more positive vein.
00:36:05I think that was
00:36:06an outlet for him.
00:36:07He was really
00:36:08a very humane guy,
00:36:10you know,
00:36:10really cared about,
00:36:11he wasn't prejudiced.
00:36:13He didn't look
00:36:14at the Vietnamese
00:36:15as being,
00:36:15whereas some pilots,
00:36:17they looked at the Vietnamese
00:36:18as being maybe unhuman,
00:36:22not like them.
00:36:24But really,
00:36:24we were all the same.
00:36:27And Glenn looked
00:36:29at the Vietnamese,
00:36:30both the enemy
00:36:32and not the enemy
00:36:33as being people.
00:36:37And there was
00:36:37an orphanage
00:36:38in Quang Nghai.
00:36:38He wanted me
00:36:39to do a favor for him
00:36:40and he had adopted
00:36:41an infant Vietnamese girl.
00:36:43She was probably
00:36:44six months,
00:36:45four months old.
00:36:46And anyway,
00:36:47he just asked,
00:36:47as a favor,
00:36:48would you mind
00:36:48taking pictures of the baby
00:36:50so I could send it home
00:36:50to my wife?
00:36:52It was kind of strange
00:36:53because she was a part
00:36:54of his life,
00:36:55but of course to me
00:36:56it was just a picture,
00:36:57but I knew I'd be able
00:36:58to love her like he did.
00:36:59He flew me up there
00:37:00and we got out
00:37:01and I met the baby
00:37:02and took pictures
00:37:03and printed up
00:37:04some pictures for him.
00:37:06I had it in our kitchen.
00:37:08Well, Glenn was so little.
00:37:09I also had a bank
00:37:11where I was saving money
00:37:12towards our R&R in Hawaii,
00:37:14so it was kind of like
00:37:15Lon and the bank
00:37:16were right there
00:37:17and it was just,
00:37:19that was what we were,
00:37:20you know,
00:37:21that was our goal
00:37:22to get to R&R
00:37:23and then to adopt Lon.
00:37:27Glenn Rickert shot
00:37:28this 8mm footage
00:37:29while piloting
00:37:30his light observation
00:37:31helicopter over Vietnam
00:37:32in 1970.
00:37:34Margie told me
00:37:35that Glenn had always
00:37:35wanted to fly helicopters
00:37:36and that in a way
00:37:37he was very much
00:37:38in his element
00:37:39during the war.
00:37:45For Ring Bailey,
00:37:46unfortunately,
00:37:47things were not going
00:37:48quite as well.
00:37:51So, I think it was
00:37:52at least two occasions,
00:37:54once before
00:37:55and once after
00:37:56I was in the
00:37:57public information office,
00:37:59his unit,
00:38:00I crossed paths
00:38:01with his unit
00:38:02and he was there
00:38:02and he was,
00:38:07I got insights
00:38:09or he had no axe to grind
00:38:12and he was an honest person
00:38:17or candid with me.
00:38:19I had no reason
00:38:20to believe
00:38:20he'd color the facts
00:38:21or would say anything
00:38:24that was inaccurate
00:38:25but the first time
00:38:27he was seemingly
00:38:29pretty down
00:38:30in terms of spirits.
00:38:32The unit was involved
00:38:33with this company
00:38:39either practicing
00:38:40or calling in
00:38:41airstrikes on farmers,
00:38:43clearly not military targets
00:38:45and they were either
00:38:46just for the hell of it
00:38:47or they were practicing.
00:38:50There were situations
00:38:51like that
00:38:51or just the day-to-day
00:38:53grind was getting him down,
00:38:54the lack of sleep,
00:38:55the physical work,
00:38:57the snipers,
00:38:58the ambushes
00:39:00that were set up
00:39:01night after night.
00:39:02He was not in a good place
00:39:03mentally,
00:39:04let's put it that way.
00:39:05He wasn't depressed
00:39:06but he was just exhausted,
00:39:07I think.
00:39:08I had a cat
00:39:11named Miranda
00:39:12and I had her bred
00:39:13and she had kittens
00:39:14and I had written him up
00:39:15about the kittens
00:39:16and here he was
00:39:18in the jungle
00:39:19and he said,
00:39:20you know how I'd react
00:39:22but it's really hard
00:39:23for me to understand
00:39:25the joy of being
00:39:27a cat with kittens
00:39:30when I'm out here
00:39:32in the jungle.
00:39:33The second time I saw him
00:39:35we were about to get
00:39:36an opening
00:39:37in the public information
00:39:37office and I said,
00:39:39and in fact I mentioned
00:39:40it the last time,
00:39:41I said,
00:39:41if I can put your name in
00:39:43or would you mind
00:39:44if I put your name in
00:39:45for position writing
00:39:48and taking photographs
00:39:49and of course
00:39:50he jumped on it
00:39:52and it was about the time
00:39:53that that vacancy
00:39:54became available
00:39:55that I found out
00:39:56that he was killed.
00:39:57It was just another day
00:39:58going out on patrol.
00:40:01We were getting toward evening
00:40:03we were setting up
00:40:05a night defensive perimeter
00:40:06for the platoon
00:40:08and so I had
00:40:09both Robert and Loring
00:40:11with me
00:40:12up on the knoll
00:40:16giving out instructions
00:40:17okay we want our
00:40:19grenade launchers
00:40:20to cover that
00:40:20you know those gullies
00:40:22over there
00:40:22we want the M60s
00:40:23along this
00:40:25straight area
00:40:26this flat area
00:40:27that's open.
00:40:28you know normal things
00:40:29you would do
00:40:30to set up
00:40:30for a perimeter.
00:40:34I can't recall
00:40:34exactly how long
00:40:35we were up there
00:40:35but we were up there
00:40:36shuffling around
00:40:37this area
00:40:37for quite some time
00:40:38and then I said
00:40:40okay let's get that
00:40:41set up
00:40:41and I walked away
00:40:43and that's when
00:40:43the explosion went off
00:40:47and to my knowledge
00:40:48there really wasn't
00:40:49anything left
00:40:49of either Loring
00:40:50or Robert.
00:40:51I was blown
00:40:52through the air
00:40:55what seemed like
00:40:55quite a long distance
00:40:56but I really don't
00:40:58have any way
00:40:58of objectively
00:40:59measuring that
00:40:59I know that
00:41:01one individual
00:41:01about arm's length
00:41:02in front of me
00:41:04had a big piece
00:41:06of shrapnel
00:41:06sticking out
00:41:07through his shoulder
00:41:09he survived
00:41:10but had significant
00:41:11nerve damage
00:41:11on his right arm
00:41:13shoulder
00:41:14and everything
00:41:15would have had to be
00:41:15it would have had
00:41:17to have gone
00:41:17within inches
00:41:18or a foot of me
00:41:19to hit him
00:41:20just with the line
00:41:21of sight
00:41:23so that's
00:41:24and I remember
00:41:25lying there
00:41:27not knowing
00:41:27what the heck
00:41:28had happened
00:41:28ears are ringing
00:41:31and I remember
00:41:32saying
00:41:33my legs
00:41:34my legs
00:41:36and another lieutenant
00:41:37came along
00:41:38and I can still
00:41:39picture him
00:41:40he said
00:41:41it seems funny
00:41:42but in this tragic
00:41:44situation
00:41:44he'd say
00:41:45nothing wrong
00:41:45with your legs
00:41:46Wilson
00:41:46get up
00:41:47and so I got up
00:41:48but I just
00:41:50you know
00:41:50the rest of it
00:41:51is really pretty hazy
00:41:52every night
00:41:53somebody had to go in
00:41:54at 12 o'clock
00:41:56at our office
00:41:57the information office
00:41:58and then go over
00:41:59to the technical
00:42:00operations center
00:42:01where all of the
00:42:03communications
00:42:03from the fields
00:42:04was filtered into
00:42:06one room
00:42:07sort of an action room
00:42:10war room
00:42:10where the colonel
00:42:11could come
00:42:12and see the area
00:42:13of operation
00:42:14and see where
00:42:14various units are
00:42:15what military
00:42:16intelligence
00:42:17was telling us
00:42:17where people were
00:42:20and then there was
00:42:20a list on the
00:42:21corner of
00:42:22enemy and
00:42:24friendly
00:42:25missing in action
00:42:26killed in action
00:42:27wounded in action
00:42:28and that particular
00:42:29day I was on duty
00:42:31so I had to go over
00:42:31and I went over
00:42:32at noontime
00:42:33or not noontime
00:42:33midnight
00:42:35and it said
00:42:36on the board
00:42:37it said
00:42:382 KIA
00:42:411st of the 20th
00:42:43before I went back
00:42:44to wire it in
00:42:45I went down
00:42:45to graves registrations
00:42:47where the bodies
00:42:48went
00:42:48I asked the
00:42:49enlisted in charge
00:42:51if the names
00:42:53of the people
00:42:54who were killed
00:42:54and one was a sergeant
00:42:55and the other was
00:42:58Loring Bailey
00:42:58and I said
00:42:59how did he die
00:43:00and the euphemisms
00:43:02for a booby trap
00:43:04was
00:43:05a minor booby trap
00:43:06was traumatic
00:43:08amputation
00:43:08so he died of
00:43:10traumatic amputations
00:43:14and then he sort of
00:43:16sarcastically said
00:43:17you want to see the body
00:43:18and I declined
00:43:21I didn't think I could
00:43:23take it
00:43:23and anyway
00:43:25dutifully went back
00:43:26to the detachment
00:43:29and called the division
00:43:30and called the numbers
00:43:31in
00:43:31and Loring became
00:43:33a number
00:43:33went from a person
00:43:36to a number
00:43:37the device
00:43:38that killed
00:43:39both Loring
00:43:40and Robert
00:43:43was either
00:43:44an artillery round
00:43:45or a mortar round
00:43:46and we suspect
00:43:47that it was either
00:43:48a 155
00:43:49or 175 millimeter round
00:43:52and that
00:43:53was triggered
00:43:54we think
00:43:55by
00:43:56the battery
00:43:57a couple of
00:43:58metal plates
00:43:59and when
00:44:01the contact was made
00:44:02completed the circuit
00:44:03and up it went
00:44:04the officer
00:44:06that came
00:44:08and announced
00:44:09Loring's death
00:44:13I was at work
00:44:15and I was putting
00:44:16my coat and hat
00:44:18on the rack
00:44:19and I heard someone say
00:44:21he just came up
00:44:22on the elevator
00:44:23and then
00:44:25another man
00:44:27that worked with me
00:44:28came down
00:44:29and said
00:44:29look
00:44:30they want you
00:44:31in the conference room
00:44:32right away
00:44:33so he and I
00:44:35walked up
00:44:36the office
00:44:37and he opened
00:44:39the door
00:44:41and I stepped in
00:44:43thinking that he would
00:44:44come in right behind me
00:44:45but he closed the door
00:44:46and here I was
00:44:49face to face
00:44:50with a service officer
00:44:54a major
00:44:54and a major
00:44:56sergeant major
00:44:57and he was on one side
00:45:00of the board table
00:45:01and I was facing him
00:45:03across the table
00:45:04and the sergeant
00:45:06was on his right
00:45:10and he introduced himself
00:45:12as major so-and-so
00:45:14I can't think of his name
00:45:15right now
00:45:16his daughter
00:45:17worked in soup ships
00:45:19across the street
00:45:21so we had a little chat
00:45:23about the fact
00:45:24that I knew
00:45:26his daughter
00:45:27and then he said
00:45:28I have some
00:45:29well I looked at him
00:45:31and it was perfectly reasonable
00:45:35I saw that he had a bronze oak leaf
00:45:39and the device on his lapel
00:45:43indicated that he was
00:45:46of the engineer corps
00:45:48corps of engineers
00:45:49and that seemed to be perfectly normal
00:45:53to me
00:45:53so
00:45:54well
00:45:54what's this all about
00:45:56it never dawned on me
00:46:00until he said
00:46:01I have
00:46:01some very
00:46:02bad news for you
00:46:07and even then
00:46:08until he went to work
00:46:09and said
00:46:10your son was killed
00:46:11on the
00:46:1315th
00:46:14Monday
00:46:14the 15th
00:46:16and this was Wednesday
00:46:17it was two days later
00:46:25March 17th
00:46:27darling
00:46:27March 17th
00:46:32and that was a
00:46:36that was a tough thing
00:46:38the 15th
00:46:51that movies
00:47:02I can't say
00:47:21My mother called me and told me that he was gone, she said he's gone, and I walked out
00:47:31the back door, and I went home, and I went home, and you know, you see it in movies, you
00:47:37know, the olive green sedan with the dress uniforms that drives up to the house, and
00:47:47there was the olive green sedan in front of my mother's house, and my sister was there.
00:48:03I'm sorry.
00:48:08And the army men were there, and their shoes were so, so fucking shiny.
00:48:16At the time that we were informed of his death, the officer that was responsible went to the
00:48:29apartment, the address that Ring had.
00:48:32That was his abode at the time that he went into the service, was Hartford, and so that
00:48:39officer went to the Hartford apartment, and he received a very unpleasant greeting from
00:48:49a member of Maris's family.
00:48:52When they were leaving, I said to him in my anger, I said, it's too bad he was fighting
00:49:01on the wrong side.
00:49:02The young brother, Maris's young brother, was sort of a wild kid in college, and I don't
00:49:12know what the name of the association was, but he represented the ultra-extreme student
00:49:20opposition to the war.
00:49:23I was involved in anti-war activity.
00:49:27I had a choice.
00:49:28I had a choice when I went to college.
00:49:30Some of my friends went further to the left, went to what they called the Weather Underground.
00:49:35I was involved with a group called Students for a Democratic Society, it was SDS.
00:49:41And I went with what was called the Moratorium.
00:49:45The Moratorium was symbolized by the Dove, and it was the peace movement.
00:49:52And it wasn't just kids like us with long hair dressed, it was grandmothers.
00:49:58And it was, I mean, it was real people who really wanted to end this war and make the
00:50:04world a better place.
00:50:06So I talked with the older brother, and I gave him a little bit of warning and saying,
00:50:14as a result of Rick's involvement, I think you should be aware that I've been informed
00:50:23that there's a possibility that students may go to work and demonstrate.
00:50:32They were concerned about me at the funeral.
00:50:38They were concerned that I'd do things that would, I don't know, you know, all I did was
00:50:47cry, and I couldn't drive my car, and I've never known that amount of grief, ever.
00:50:58Loring M. Bailey Jr. was killed on March 15, 1970, in an explosion that also killed 19-year-old
00:51:04Staff Sergeant Robert A. Wood of Savannah, Georgia.
00:51:08In a letter to my mother dated March 17, my father wrote,
00:51:11I just learned yesterday that a good friend of mine was killed by a booby trap.
00:51:16I'm sure you remember me speaking of a Loring Bailey after OCS and a few months ago when
00:51:20I met him on LZ Liz.
00:51:22It is such a damn waste.
00:51:24I tried ever since I got a job in the rear to get him into the office and out of
00:51:27the field.
00:51:28Now I feel like I didn't try hard enough.
00:51:32A little over two months later on May 20, the helicopter Glenn Rickert was piloting received
00:51:36enemy fire and he was killed.
00:51:38It's hard to recollect because I wasn't there, but from the information that I got, which
00:51:45was sparse, and the way I envision it in my mind is that he was on a combat assault, combat
00:51:55recon.
00:51:55He had aerial cover with maybe some other types of gunships or maybe another loach.
00:52:05More than likely other gunships and he was doing low level reconnaissance, I believe.
00:52:14When I say that, we're talking about five feet above the ground.
00:52:20Hovering around low and slow, blowing the bushes away, looking behind rocks and looking for tunnels
00:52:25and all that.
00:52:27I believe it was on the side of a mountain, maybe 150 feet or 200 feet above the valley.
00:52:34It wasn't unusual to uncover hiding places and have people just, you know, get up and start
00:52:42moving and running and shooting.
00:52:44From what I was told, that's what happened.
00:52:47He uncovered the enemy or somebody was there and they, maybe from behind a rock, shot him
00:52:54down.
00:52:54The bullet that killed him actually came in through his back, through his shoulder and
00:53:01hit his heart.
00:53:03So it was instant.
00:53:06So somehow, even though he had protective armor on, it came in at a side angle, but still
00:53:13directly hit his heart.
00:53:15I was thankful it wasn't a painful death.
00:53:18But for us, it was very decisive and we knew, you know, it was quick and, I mean, that's
00:53:26small comfort, but.
00:53:28I don't remember too much about Vietnam after that day, actually.
00:53:33I'm not sure of the day, whether it was close to the end of my tour, I don't know.
00:53:38But I don't really have much of a recollection of Vietnam or what happened after that.
00:53:45But before Glenn Rickard's body was shipped home, there was a short memorial service held
00:53:49to honor the popular captain.
00:53:52When my father was given the assignment to shoot these pictures, he initially refused.
00:53:55So saddened was he by the loss of his colleague.
00:53:58When threatened with an Article 15 letter of reprimand, he reluctantly documented the ceremony.
00:54:03We had been living up in Sellersville, Glenn Jr. and myself.
00:54:08And that Saturday, there was a parade, a Memorial Day parade.
00:54:14And Chris came right down past our house and we were outside and then came down to a little
00:54:19town square and they had a little ceremony.
00:54:22And I'll always remember at that time, I was, I prayed and was thinking about all the women
00:54:30who were widows or who had lost loved ones that were mothers who had lost loved ones.
00:54:36And, you know, I, I said a prayer for them just in remembrance because this was a Memorial
00:54:40Day parade.
00:54:42And then the next day was Sunday.
00:54:44I had gone with Glenn's parents and then we came home to Glenn's parents' home in Southerton.
00:54:50We came in the back door.
00:54:52And as we came in the back door, the doorbell was ringing at the front.
00:54:57And I walked through the living room and saw the uniform.
00:55:01And you just know.
00:55:03I mean, there's just, so I opened the door.
00:55:06The poor guy there, I said, just tell me he's not dead.
00:55:10And of course, what could he say, you know, just, I regret to inform you.
00:55:15And then Glenn's mom came in the room behind me and she just started crying because she
00:55:20just knew.
00:55:21And, I mean, that's the day I always remember, I'm feeling the emotions right now because
00:55:26it's just something you don't ever want to hear.
00:55:28But the minute you see the uniform, I mean, they're not coming to tell you he's fine,
00:55:33you know, that it's, it's bad news.
00:55:35That's how we found out.
00:55:36We were together.
00:55:37And after Glenn had been killed, the proceedings just stopped.
00:55:42I had received one phone call, like, the week I found out Glenn was killed.
00:55:47And they said, oh, we're sorry.
00:55:49And they hung up.
00:55:50And if I had wanted to go on, I had no connections because Glenn was handling everything over there.
00:55:58And it's been a source of guilt, like whatever happened to Lon.
00:56:02I pray that maybe someone else adopted her or, you know, that she was able to come here
00:56:07to America.
00:56:08But I often wonder what happened to her.
00:56:11Every once in a while I wonder if, in fact, this child got over here.
00:56:17The follow-up, again, the psychology, or my psychology was such, and I think the psychology
00:56:24and the part of a lot of people that served over there was, you serve your time, you get
00:56:27back, and then you get back into the world and you do your thing, which is essentially
00:56:31what I did.
00:57:00And that's actually what I did.
00:57:23Where rings death fell in terms of my activity, you know…I can't—I can't think in all the
00:57:31can't really recall. Now, after he was killed, we defaced a billboard. A billboard said to an
00:57:44unemployed veteran, peace is hell. And so we changed it with spray paint to a dead veteran,
00:57:51war is hell. And for the first time in the history of the Hartford Times newspaper, they printed a
00:57:56picture on the editorial page. And we wrote this letter about it called Years in Uncertainty. We
00:58:02called ourselves the Children of American Blood. But now we were young and we were immature. When
00:58:10President Nixon mined Haiphong Harbor, a group of us, there are maybe 20 of us, got together when we
00:58:21got some 40-gallon steel drums and we made mines out of them. We painted Kaboom on them and tied
00:58:30them with ropes and cinder blocks. And in the middle of the night, drove over the Connecticut
00:58:34River and dropped these drums off into the river and drove to the other side. And when we were
00:58:39all secure, people called all the media and said, we mined the Connecticut River in a protest. And
00:58:46I used to say Nixon. Now I say President Nixon. I mean, I hate the man, but there's a respect
00:58:52that's important. And then we held a press conference in front of City Hall in Hartford
00:58:58and turned ourselves in. This is what we did and this is why we did it. But that put the
00:59:06people
00:59:06on to us, the people, whoever they were, the FBI, Army Intelligence, whoever they were. And
00:59:14they were parked outside our apartment. So we moved. And I was the last one to leave and
00:59:21I came to Vermont. The safety of Vermont.
00:59:26We were no more liberating that country than we were liberating Iraq. We weren't even invading.
00:59:35We were trying to prop up a puppet state to our own ends, either for economic reasons
00:59:42or to, quote unquote, stop communism, stop the domino from falling.
00:59:47He changed. He was always pretty serious. But I think this experience would be life-changing
00:59:54for anyone. And I think it was life-changing for him. So in the immediate return, his startle
01:00:01response was high. We were driving home from a trip right after he got back and a helicopter
01:00:07flew over and he almost, you know, dove out of the car. I mean, he just, he just was much
01:00:12more, and that would be typical. And I also think that it just did. It made him more grave
01:00:18and a little bit darker.
01:00:19I feel guilt about surviving. That doesn't go away. Collateral damage extends not only
01:00:25to the individual who survives or is in fact killed, but there's a ripple effect. It affects
01:00:33the family in physical and psychological ways. Elizabeth essentially has had to contend with a different
01:00:41person than she married after one year. The person you had, or my offspring experienced a different
01:00:49person than I was before I went into the military. And those things don't go away. Those things are,
01:00:57they're perpetuated. And it's like the ringing in my ears from the concussion. It's there all the time,
01:01:07and it's very close to the surface, and I can hear it all the time. And it's just, sometimes it's
01:01:12louder,
01:01:12sometimes it's softer, but it's always there. And that's self-serving because I also know it affects
01:01:21my son, my daughter, my wife. It's not that I feel guilty for surviving. I just, I just, you know,
01:01:30why do these things happen? I don't, you know, it's hard to, I'm trying to find the right words. I'm
01:01:37not
01:01:37guilty for surviving, but I guess you wonder, well, what made me walk away at that moment? You know,
01:01:47where was I going? Was I truly done there? Did somebody call me away to do something else?
01:01:55Why wasn't I there? I went years and years dealing with the symptoms. And then, then we figured out,
01:02:03oh, of course, it's, you know, post-traumatic. So one of the options here is to take some, you know,
01:02:10antidepressants or whatever, which didn't seem to do the job. But it's still there. I mean,
01:02:17it's, it's, if it doesn't, it doesn't, it's not necessarily going to kill you, but it, it's there.
01:02:24You can, you can't rationalize it, but you can identify it, but you can't make it go away.
01:02:28I would like to be able to remember everyone's face that I lost in my unit. I would like to
01:02:33know the
01:02:34names. I would like to be able to, in some way, go back through those, even though they were horrible
01:02:44things because I, you know, I just feel like I'm not doing justice to them to not be able to
01:02:51remember
01:02:51who the heck they were when they died there right in front of me, you know, doing things that we
01:02:56were all supposed to be doing. I have a very low startle threshold. If I was napping or if you
01:03:02came
01:03:02up behind me in the garage, you know, tapped me on the shoulder, my reaction is to spin around or
01:03:07to put up
01:03:08my, my hands or somehow go into a defensive position. I'm telegraphing to, you know, whether
01:03:13it's Elizabeth or you or my daughter, that, that, that the world is hostile, that you have, if you
01:03:19want to survive, this is how you have to be. And it's an unspoken message. It's, it's telegraphed.
01:03:25I, I remember him overreacting to, to certain things, but, but the thing is that that's sort of,
01:03:32that's dad. So he would over, he will overreact to things, but then it'll be fine. And, and his
01:03:38overreaction wasn't a big deal to me ever, ever. It was just the way it was. And, and it's sort
01:03:46of
01:03:46like, it's, I knew it wasn't something that he can, he could control. My daughter, my son, my wife
01:03:51have experienced somebody who since coming back oftentimes does, does not take that step of thinking,
01:04:01but reacts as if in the jungle. He's definitely been, been affected by Vietnam. I mean, he, he's,
01:04:08he probably was a different person before Vietnam, but you know, he's not a bad person now. He's a
01:04:14great person now. Living with guilt is awful. And I think that guilt and regret and remorse and all
01:04:18those things are real waste of emotion because you can do something about them. So if you, you,
01:04:23if you feel guilty about something, what can you choose to do?
01:04:26I was always had this interest in terms of finding where, um, Loring Bailey was buried.
01:04:31I checked a couple of graves registrations and went on the internet when the internet was available
01:04:36and found nothing in the immediate area. And of course, 20 years later, it was our first Memorial
01:04:43Day weekend here in Mystic. Elizabeth said, you're not going to believe, uh, or take a look at the front
01:04:49page of the paper. The front page of the paper had that, the picture I showed you of, um, Loring
01:04:54Bailey,
01:04:54the, the son in Vietnam. And the story that accompanied it had to do with Memorial Day
01:05:00and the mother and father living, living in Stonington, which is four miles away, three miles
01:05:05away. And in fact, Loring's buried less than two miles from where I'm living right now. In any case,
01:05:10I read the article and it was incredulous. You know, after all these years and my failure to find where
01:05:17he was buried, front page of the newspaper sort of rubbed my nose and said, hey, here they are.
01:05:22Here, you know, here's, here's the family. So I picked up the telephone, uh, introduced myself
01:05:27and I apologize in advance if this is a painful subject. Um, but I just want to let you know
01:05:33I
01:05:33knew your son. He was a wonderful person. Your father said, uh, uh, you don't know who I am,
01:05:42but I was with your son in Vietnam and I was with him at OCS. And I said, oh, where
01:05:55are you?
01:05:56Well, he said, I'm in Old Mystic. The thought that I had was, well, he must have picked up
01:06:04ring's name from the stone, the monument down in Old Mystic. And, um, I hesitate to call you because
01:06:12I didn't want to bring back bad memories and I hope you don't mind. And he said, uh, you know,
01:06:19I don't, don't mind at all. And he said, uh, uh, I said that I'll stop by sometime. He said,
01:06:24uh,
01:06:25what are you doing in 10 minutes? We would like very much to, uh, to see you.
01:06:32He said, well, I'd be glad to come over and I'll come over as soon as I change my clothes.
01:06:41I said, well, that's fine. So I hung up, I turned the dot and I said, I have no idea
01:06:48where he is. He's
01:06:49going in and changed his clothes. He couldn't have been at the monument in Old Mystic. It never
01:06:57dawned on me that he was living in, in the area. So he came up the front door and, uh,
01:07:05that's how we
01:07:05met at the front, front door. It was quite, quite interesting. We've been, um, visiting each other
01:07:13ever since. And as I told them, um, I was for 20 years, 30 years more interested in where he
01:07:20was
01:07:20buried than where they were living. And, uh, which is probably a regret or probably, uh, a monumental
01:07:27oversight, but it was just, that's the way it played out. And I think he felt like he helped them,
01:07:32um,
01:07:33really get to understand what their sons, some of the times that he spent in his last year of his
01:07:38life,
01:07:38because when your son's in training or OCS. So just the stories that he could tell and a little
01:07:44bit about what his last months might have been like or what it was like in Vietnam. I know he
01:07:48think he performed a service and really was helpful to them. Dorothy's obviously, uh, you know, feels
01:07:55a loss and, um, that is still very, very sensitive. Not to say he isn't, but he's, he's in the
01:08:00military
01:08:00history and, um, that kind of thing. And it follows the unit history of his son's, uh, involvement.
01:08:08And, uh, when we talk, we talk about, uh, typically I'm talking to the father. I think about him now,
01:08:13and, and it's just sadness that, that, that, that a man would lose his son at the age of 24,
01:08:20that the whole lifetime would be taken away. And, and now, and now here I am, I'm 60 years old,
01:08:27and my son is a Marine. And who'd have thought that my son would be a Marine? And now I
01:08:35fly an
01:08:35American flag in front of my house and, and I wouldn't have thought of it then. Or I would
01:08:40have flown it upside down or, or something like that, you know? I think it's fascinating that there
01:08:45have, at least you've told me, a number of people you've been in touch with about this process of
01:08:49making this, working on this film, where they have said, I never thought I'd talk to anybody about
01:08:54this. I've never talked about this before. So, um, remember that dad and many people,
01:09:00they don't talk about themselves unless they're asked. I'll talk about myself whether you ask or not.
01:09:04Dad's, um, introverted. So if you look at type, he's an introvert. He, um, generally is, it needs to be
01:09:11drawn out. And so when people say, how was the war? They want you to say, fine. And, um, they
01:09:17might say,
01:09:18you know, what was the best thing that happened to you or the worst thing that happened? But
01:09:20if you sit down and say, I want to know what was the hardest thing about it, or what was
01:09:25the best
01:09:25thing about it, or what elated you? Those, I believe, are the things that he's willing to talk
01:09:29about. But you need to feel the interest when you're, when you're somebody that has his particular type.
01:09:34I mean, and I would think that'd be true of almost anybody. It's not a conversation I ever have.
01:09:38No one's interested. You're interested. Would you be interested if your father had not had a similar
01:09:45type of experience? Would you be asking these questions and things? Maybe you would.
01:09:52Uh, but this, you know, if this starts out with, you know, you wanting to know more about your father
01:09:58and what his experience was and what was going on at the time and how did he deal with all
01:10:03this?
01:10:04Um, you know, was that the thing that started you? You know, if you hadn't had that connection,
01:10:10would it just have been something that happened in history and you wouldn't be here today?
01:10:16I'm really glad you're here and I'm really glad I have a chance to talk about Ring. I'm just thrilled
01:10:23that I have a chance to, to let this out. I'm talking to you today because, uh, of the way
01:10:34you
01:10:34presented yourself as someone who's got a serious interest in putting together a little piece of
01:10:39history, some people that are, that are intertwined somehow. And, uh, uh, you know, if there was
01:10:45something I could say that would add to that, I'd be happy to do that. Although I've never had a
01:10:51conversation like this with anybody else before. When David graduated from Parris Island
01:10:56and he was a young recruit, Parris Island, like, eyes like deer and headlights, you know,
01:11:04and we brought him home and we passed through airports and it was obvious that we were parents
01:11:12and he was a Marine. And people came out of the crowd to shake his hand, to pat him on
01:11:20the back,
01:11:21to show the, the respect was overwhelming. And as a parent, it just made us immensely proud.
01:11:29And that's, uh, and I'm sure that that's what Mr. Bailey felt. But the pride and the respect for
01:11:35my son is, um, is wonderful, is wonderful. You know, and I, and I, and I see it and I
01:11:44hear it all
01:11:44the time. People say, how's your boy doing? Where is he now? And I always say, thanks for asking.
01:11:50Thanks for asking because we're very proud of him too. I have to say, it's been interesting. I have run
01:11:56into some people in the last few years and not just when you go in and, uh, see a doctor
01:12:01at the VA,
01:12:02because they're all primed to say, thank you for your service. Thank you. That's kind of part of
01:12:06their, the mantra down there. But I have run into other people and it's caught me quite off guard
01:12:14when somehow they've found out. And I'm not sure if I can't point to a specific conversation,
01:12:19but when they find out that, uh, I was in Vietnam and I was in the infantry and, uh, very
01:12:28sincerely,
01:12:29they, they say, thank you. And, uh, it catches me off guard. Like just saying it now has kind of,
01:12:39uh, because nobody ever said that. And, uh, I didn't realize anybody really thought about it.
01:12:49And it is, it's kind of unnerving because I don't think I did anything to be thanked for.
01:12:54You know, it could have been anybody. It could have been anybody going, anybody being killed,
01:12:59anybody surviving. The difference was, you know, between somebody wounded, somebody being killed,
01:13:06somebody not being hurt, a couple of inches, a few seconds in time.
01:13:11When my son is in harm's way, um, Barbara and I live with a level of fear.
01:13:23Every car that comes down the street, I look to see if it has government plates. That's hard.
01:13:33Because you know what that looks like. I do. Those shoes. Oh, shiny. Shiny, shiny shoes.
01:13:42How do they get them so shiny? Three or four months into the tour, I was noticing the ringing
01:13:49and the inability to understand people when they were talking. And I went to Chulai and they said,
01:13:55uh, they tested my ears and they said, you've got a hearing loss in the mid-range,
01:13:58the nerves are destroyed. It's not temporary. The middle range is where the consonants are formed,
01:14:04which means that you're going to have trouble understanding people when they talk.
01:14:07Here are some earplugs. So if you're going to be in a situation where there's loud noise,
01:14:12where are your earplugs? My father took this picture in Vietnam in 1970.
01:14:18Seconds later, he took this one. When he first showed me these prints, he asked me if I could tell
01:14:23the difference. I pointed out the obvious, or what had become obvious to me during the making of this film,
01:14:27after pouring through hundreds of others like it. The barrel of the 155mm howitzer is recoiled in
01:14:33the second picture and you can see the dust rising from the ground under the weight of the gun's
01:14:37thunderous discharge. He asked me if I noticed anything else and I couldn't think of anything.
01:14:41So we pointed to the people in the second shot and said, they're all holding their ears. I was
01:14:47holding a camera. You know, you think about back on your life and what are the things you wouldn't
01:14:51change. I think this is one of the things that he wouldn't change. It was phenomenal for him
01:14:55in the best way and the worst way.
01:14:58My father has often asked me why I'm making this film.
01:15:01As different as we are, we share this story, this presence like the ringing in his ears.
01:15:06My wife Carrie and I even named our firstborn son Loring, after both Loring Bailey's,
01:15:11junior and senior, who meant so much to my father.
01:15:14And I suppose the journalistic process of making a documentary has brought me closer to him.
01:15:18But in this picture, he still looks about as far away from me as my namesake.
01:15:22Soren Peter Sorensen I, born over a century before me in Denmark in 1871,
01:15:28pictured here at 17 in his Danish military uniform.
01:15:42On the train from Jackson to Chicago, Providence is yet to be revealed.
01:15:50Standing on the platform by my window, soon you will be swallowed by the fields.
01:16:05On the train from Jackson to Chicago, licking all the wounds that never healed.
01:16:14Turn around, turn around, now you're at the end of the line.
01:16:22Don't look down, don't look down, you're standing on the shoulders, you're standing on the shoulders of giants.
01:16:37Every day the shadow of my father is painted on the walls and on the floors.
01:16:45It stretches out across the open water, and crashes on the sandy eastern shores.
01:16:53Searching in the dark, searching in the dark, looking for a clue to what's been lost.
01:17:01Now I see the shadow of my father, on the shoulders of the one that came before.
01:17:09Turn around, turn around, turn around, now you're at the end of the line.
01:17:17Don't look down, don't look down, you're standing on the shoulders, you're standing on the shoulders of giants.
01:17:37Don't look down, you're standing on the shoulders of giants.
01:17:55scary, technique of black Vielen, Chinese rock and white
01:18:00Turn around, turn around
01:18:04Now you're at the end of the line
01:18:08Don't look down, don't look down
01:18:11You're standing on the shoulders, you're standing on the shoulders
01:18:15Turn around, turn around
01:18:19Now you're at the end of the line
01:18:24Don't look down, don't look down
01:18:27You're standing on the shoulders, you're standing on the shoulders of giants
Comments