NOT ALL HEROES-Gary Skogen

Dakota where he grew up. With unlimited access to cheap beer, a wide variety of compliant Vietnamese women, and a gep he had somehow commandeered, Scogan perfected his criminal investigative skills at a time when U. S. Troop morale had reached its nadir. This unconventional, unheroic, and unapologetic book is not a typical Vietnam memoir. Together with eighty percent of the two million men and women who served in Vietnam, Skogan spent his time behind the scenes at a large support base.

He did not slog on midnight patrols through Vietcong tunnels or rice paddies studded with booby traps. He spent his year investigating the men who endangered the lives of their fellow soldiers by giving themselves over to unrestrained drug use. Scogan's gritty narrative proof that some whose names are insized on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall died in less than

heroic circumstances. Backed by impeccable research in the files of the Natural Archives and Records Administration, this unromanticized account reveals the sordidness of the war in its late phases, and questions the validity of seeing all Vietnam veterans as victims. The book that we're featuring this evening is Not All Heroes, An unapologetic memoir of the Vietnam War nineteen seventy one to nineteen seventy two, with my special guest, Vietnam veteran

police officer and author Gary Scogan. Welcome to the program, and thank you for a Greenness interview. Gary Scogan, Thank you, Dan, thank you very much. I just wanted to mention for those people that might be a bit confused. We did this interview last week, but the audio was horrible, So as fairness to the audience and yourself and myself, we just agreed to well, we have the ability to reschedule this interview for the benefit of the show itself. So

thank you very much for being able to do that. Now, Gary, as we spoke last week, let's take our audience from how we go from we mentioned in the introduction about your life in North Dakota. Talk about your life in North Dakota when you grew up, and tell us a little bit about that life before you ever thought of enlisting in the military.

then I moved to Cordelaine, Idaho. I was eighteen at the time I got myself a job working in a hardware store there, and as I got closer to I guess I would say adulthood. I was thinking along the lines of wanting to be a police officer, and I was kind of pursuing joining the Spokane, Washington Police Department, which is only about forty miles away from Courtelaine. But of course I had to be twenty one before I

could do that. Well, in nineteen sixty five, just before I before my twentieth birthday, two things happened that kind of changed my life and changed my plans and dreams. One of them was watching television news broadcasts as they evacuated the de dependence of military personnel out of Vietnam. The second thing that happened also occurred in nineteen sixty five, and it was in December of sixty five I received

a draft notice. Back then, there was mandatory draft for all, or mandatory draft registration for anyone that was mail that was eighteen years of age. I had done my duty, I had registered for the draft, and then I assumed Vietnam had something to do with it. They were building up troops to go to Vietnam, and I received my draft notice. I didn't want to be going to the military as an infantryman. That didn't quite seem like something

I was going to want to do. And because of the fact that I had designs on being in law enforcement, I talked to a recruiter in Spokane, Washington found out about the ability to enlist to be a military policeman. So that's what I did. I enlisted, and in January nineteen sixty six, I went into the Army with the promises of being a military policeman. I went to basic

training in Fort Ord, California. I quickly realized at that point in time that I'd made the right decision because basic training is basic infantry training, and I knew then that I did not want, definitely did not want to be an infantryman. I then went from there to Military Police School in Fort Gordon, Georgia. Upon completion of Military Police School, I went to an Air Force base in Insulac Air Force Base in Madonna, Turkey, and I got

my first curve by the military. I thought I was going to be working law enforcement, and they had me there guarding as a security guard basically for munitions in Turkey. After being there for three months left. I went to France, but I was only in France for a very brief period of time and was then sent to Germany because at that time Charles de Gaulle was kicking everyone out

of France. When I got to Germany, I found out that again I was going to be working as a security guard, and that didn't set with the designs of what I had in store for myself. So I found out that if I enlisted, I could be transferred to re enlisted, I should say, I could be transferred to a law enforcement military police unit, which I did. While working this military police unit, I'd become familiar with CID agents and thought that that's something that I would like

to pursue. So I put in an application and ultimately I was accepted, and in nineteen sixty nine, I went back to Fort Gordon, Georgia, attended the CID's school. Was then transferred to the city of San Francisco, or I began working as a CID agent.

drug cases, et cetera. While I was in San Francisco, I've got my first introduction to Vietnam and what that was there were The very first thing that happened while I was there was there were some allegations of atrocities at Meeli and Vietnam, where Lieutenant Calli and his troops had gone into a village and virtually mass occurred a

couple of one hundred Vietnamese, including women and children. And as a result of that, they were the CID agents in Vietnam were sending out requests for follow up and investigations in regards to the Meli incident. And then of course once that one started, there was the you know, ball rolling down the hill and picking up speed because there was now other atrocities that were coming out from

other troops in regards to other locations. So because of these follow up investigations, that was that was basically my first introduction to Vietnam. Because I started doing some of

these follow up investigations in regards to the atrocities. One of the other thing that took place when I was in San Francisco was a family whose son was killed in Vietnam and they were notified by the military that he was killed in Vietnam, and because of the atrocity investigations that were taking place, it was all over the news. Because of that, they had or informed the opinion that their son had been murdered. So they initiated an investigation

themselves through Congression all and things like that. That resulted in an investigation of that, and I was sent out to interview them, at which time I asked them for the evidence or if they had any evidence that their son was murdered, and they showed me some letters that had come from their son, and in the letters, he indicated that there was a man that he worked with, a sergeant that he worked with, that was crazy and the guy run around with a gun all the time, etc.

This didn't make a lot of sense to me because this was a combat zone and I'm sure that there's a lot of people running around with guns. So I queried Vietnam CID and ultimately I had news for the family that they didn't want to hear. And that was the fact that he had committed suicide, and the Army

had basically not told them that he'd committed suicide. That the fact that he had just died while he was in Vietnam, which was one of the things that I found out much much later, was this was a common practice on the part of the Army to not be totally completely forthcoming with family members when there was a death. And I'm not sure if the military was protecting themselves or protecting the family.

of innocent people killed is exactly that. But tell us how it could happen by the We'll say the behavior of the Vietnamese.

carrying an AK forty seven. This was not uncommon to see. Now, I'm not talking about combat troops that I come in contact with, because I didn't come in combat contact with in a combat situation with this people. This is just people that you would see in the villages. As an example of that, I will give an example that's in

the book. One day, while I was in tu Life, I asked to the debate, and as I'm driving down Qol One, which was the main road through Vietnam, I see a crowd of people and I see a truck sitting there, and as I approach, I pulled to the side of the road because the road's kind of blocked anyway, and I'm curious as to what's going on. It looks like there's some types of activity taking place. And when I get out of the vehicle, I walk over and

there's a woman standing there in uniform. She's wearing combat fatigue and she is making a speech in Vietnamese to these people that are there, and I immediately recognize this female. She happens to be a cocktail waitress at one of the clubs on the base that July. Now, well, she's giving this speech, I notice that basically a little bit at her feet and a little bit off to the side is two bodies laying there. And these two bodies are decapitated. They had their hands cut off, they had

their feet cut off. And on the other side of her are two wooden ammal boxes. And in the ammal boxes, laying down on the flat surface would be the palms of the hands palms down of these two individuals. At the base of the box would be were the feet of the two individuals, just popped up against the bottom. And then at the top of the box was the heads of these two individuals. So it looked like about

an eighteen inch tall man sitting there. Wow, and this is not And she was standing there with a machete and she had blood all over. And this is not the type of thing that we here in the United States would envision one of our females back then, you know, as a combat soldier. And now I agree, we don't go around decapitating and cutting hands off, et cetera. But this just is just to show you that the females in Vietnam, it was not uncommon for them to be

involved in some military thing. And in her case, she worked on the Tuly base by day and was in some sort of militia by night.

So tell us what the prevailing attitude was in nineteen seventy one, we'll say from US citizens, But what was the attitude with soldiers there? And described when you got to Shoely in Vietnam? What was the overall condition of the soldiers? What did you witness that you even though you I don't know what you expected, but you probably found this surprising. So tell us what you did observe as soon as you got there in the morale and what was the attitude? Tell us a little bit.

going to be going to a combat zone. And when I got to Chuly, the first thing that I realized at that point in time was that the place that I was at was a metropolitan area. It had like the twenty six mile perimeter around it. There were businesses there, px's and all this stuff, the theater, there were nightclubs or clubs, I should say not nightclubs, but the clubs.

You know. It was just just like being in a city, except for the fact that the all the buildings were made out of plywood with corrugated steel roofing, et cetera. The second thing that I noticed right away when I got there was the fact that there didn't appear to be a whole lot of disciplines as far as the protocol was concerned in regards to, for example, of the uniforms. I had never in my five years prior seen someone

with a peace symbol pinned to their uniform. Back in the seventies was the Flower Children era of you know, the question authority type thing that was okay.

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bracelets that they're wearing. If you took you know, if they took the uniform off of them and planted them in the United States, they'd fit right in. That really shocked me when I saw that, because I had never seen the military uniform disrespected the way that it was by the troops that were there. Now, I'm not saying all the troops did that, you know, the officers obviously didn't I never saw officers with peace metals tinted their

chest or wearing beads. I just was the enlisted men, the lower ranking enlisted men, that were doing this, and it was obvious that the military had lost control. The second thing that I noticed along those same lines was the fact that the black troops had kind of put themselves in a attitude of their enslaves in a white man's war. Well, as a result of this, they wore what they called slave bracelets, and these slave bracelets or slave jewelry was braided out of black bootlaces. So they

had bracelets braided that they wore on their wrists. They had choker chains that they wore around their neck. Some of them had bands that were braided and above their bysets they would have a braided configuration that would be six to eight inches long that would go between the wrist and the elbow. And they wore all this stuff with their uniforms. Now back in the United States, the attitude back there was this was not a war that

there was not a popular war. There was a lot of protests taking place here in the United States that were anti war. There were people at that time, there was a draft that I previously mentioned there were people that were going running off to Canada to avoid the draft and coming up with very excuses as to why

they shouldn't be drafted. And at the same time it just you know, you were taking these same people that had that attitude in the homeland, drafting them and then taking them over and dropping them in the middle of a war zone. So they were bringing their ideas with them that they had before they ever ever left the United States.

and opium was coming coming a little button. It was about the size of a shirt button, and they'd break off a little piece of it and stick it in a little pipe and smoke it and get the euphoric effects of the opium. As far as the marijuana was concerned, marijuana got so bad over there that the military basically gave up on it. And the reason that they gave up on it was because heroin was just as bad,

and they directed their attentions at heroin. Now the marijuana that they had over there, an individual could purchase marijuana and roll his own or put it in the pipe. One of the very common ways though, to get marijuana was a commercially packaged marijuana cigarette. These cigarettes looked like

a cool or a Lucky Strike non filter. They packaged them up ten in the pack, and it was the little plastic bag that was just had been sealed by melting the plasts they chrometically sealed, I guess, and they sealed them in that and they sold them for two dollars a pack. And with those unless somebody was downwind and could smell them, then it would look like from a distance if someone was just smoking a regular cigarette. It didn't have any appearance whatsoever of a hand rolled cigarette.

The heroine itself was just unbelievable. Over there. It was by the time I got to Vietnam, heroin had really taken over. Heroin was sold in little plastic, clear plastic vials. They had a little snapcap on them that closed them, and they held a quarter of a gram. They sold for two dollars per file, and they had nice to ninety five i'm sorry, ninety four to ninety eight percent

pure heroin in them. This heroin was being smoked by the gis over there, and the reason that there was being smoked was because they believed that in order to get addicted, you had to be a needle freak, you had to be injecting. They did not realize that by smoking heroin that it would they would become addicted to it.

The way that they smoked it was they would take cool cigarettes, pull the tobacco out, put in a little bit of tobacco back in, Pour a little bit of heroin in it, a little more tobacco, little heroin, little tobacco, and they would layer it throughout the cigarette, and they would just take a tool and just pack the tobacco down and then add the heroin and pack a little

bit more. And then you know, if somebody was sadding they're smoking a cool cigarette, it looked like he was smoking a cool cigarette, when in fact he was smoking heroin and he was getting the euphoric effect of it and getting very addicted to it. It was very very you know, heroin was just unbelievable over there. It was everywhere. When you walked through the company areas on tchou Lie, you would fight or could side vials, empty vials discarded everywhere.

There was one captain. I was at his office one day and he had this flat given up fighting the system and what he had done, or fighting the heroin system that was taking place in this company. And what he did was he started collecting heroin vials and he took these heroin vials and he placed them side by side on every flat surface of his office. And his office was covered with thousands of these vials. He even put them on bookshelves and weaved the men out of

the book bindings as they went across the shelf. And he just had just given up. He just had decided that he was you know, he wasn't going to drive him crazy anymore. So he made a hobby out of it. When I first went to Vietnam, well let me rephrase that. The year before I went to Vietnam, the arrest ratio for heroin was six for every one thousand gis. That was nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy was. But I was there, it was twelve arrests for every thousand gis that was there.

And this is only the ones that got caught. This has got nothing to do with the ones that you know, we're usual to out get get away with it.

Tell us a couple of tales about.

He you know, he kept getting arrested and kept getting arrested, and he kept helping us and it would help his case go away, you know, as happened a lot in the working narcotics, where you know, mere possessions you can kind of make it go away. If he's going to

do something for a bigger case than things like this. Well, one of the cases that he did was for a guy that I worked with, and we went What the deal was is he was going to go to this place off base and he was going to make a heroin purchase, just get a couple of miles of heroin. And then after he made the purchase, he would come outside the hooch and he'd give a signal and then we would go into the hooch and make the arrest.

And everything went according to plan. And once we got inside the hooch, there was a seventeen year old girl in there, and she had seventeen pounds the heroin, the largest quantity of heroin I saw on one hunk while I was over there, and it was in an animal box, and she had virtually thousands of bials empty vials that

she was filling. Well, based upon doing simple maths, she had enough heroin to fill sixty I'm sorry to fill about thirty one thirty two thousand vials, and at two dollars a vial, that would be sixty two thousand dollars, especially in Vietnam, in the Vietnam economy back then that you just all been talking millions. Most of our heroin dealers that we had over there were Vietnamese. Most of them were female. There were a few male dealers, but

most of the time they were females. And one of the reasons that the females worked out for them was the female had places to hide heroin when they came on base that males don't have, and so they would smuggle the heroin onto the base and sell it that way. But in this particular case, with the seventeen pounds of heroin and this teenage girl that was off base, another one that took place off base. This was my case,

same informant. He said that he knew of some females that were selling heroin at the rock quarry off the base, and that he would make a purchase for us. So I decided that I kind of had the delusions of grandeur and rather than yet a couple of biles of heroin, I thought I'd get quite a few, purchased quite a few, hoping that it would lead to bigger and better things. And so what we did was he was going to drive out there, and we had a three quarter ton

jeep with a canvastop on it. I painted a peace sable on top of the cabinet so that we could recognize it from the air. There were some CID agents that were following him, and some other said agents by self included that bordered a Huey helicopter and we went up in the air and we were able to very easily track him because of this peace symbol that I

had painted on the roof. He preceded the rock quarry and we could see from the helicopter we were quite a ways up, but we could see from the helicopter that he met up with some females. He got out, got back in his vehicle, then got out and opened the hood as if there was something wrong with the vehicle, which was our signal to come into the rock quarry. So what the pilot did was he auto rotated into the rock quarry, which is kind of a controlled crash landing,

I guess for better term. I'm not a helicopter pilot, but that's kind of like what it is. And as we're coming Dowt, I'm stating outside the door, stating out the skid of the helicopter. And one of the things that we never factored in to this thing that we were at a rock quarry. And as soon as the helicopter got close to the ground, the dust just started boiling. You couldn't see anything. And then I saw what I

thought was the ground and it looked pretty close. Well, rather than waiting until the helicopter touched out, I stepped off to the skid and it was a long way to the ground. Fortunately for me, I did get hurt. I hit pretty hard, I rolled pretty good. Then the helicopter landed and everybody else got out, and everybody's kind of laughing at me because I'd been such a fool. Rather than waiting, I'd gotten over anxious and jumped out

as we had discussed, the helicopter then immediately took off. Well, here we go again. We forgot about the dust and we couldn't see anything, and the helicopter lifted off. We had to wait for the dust to clear. We were able to capture the three females that he had dealt with. We were able to recover the heroin from him that he had purchased, but we never did fight. My money never did find it, so obviously it got stass someplace, or there was another person there that took off with

it during the dust storm, or what. We took the females back, we had have searched and all that, but to no avail. And then you know the way most of those cases went. In fact, all of the cases involving Vietnamese nationals, we give the heroin and the rest these to the local police, which you know, you can't substantiate it, but I know darn well what happened. That

heroin went right back into the market. Nothing was ever done with the females, you know, and the heroine was you know, I'm sure later on we bought it with some other g I bought.

Two stories in particular, the one about the woman, the girl that was found raped and killed in the street and that resultant story. And then after that you can tell us about the boy in the garbage dump and the target practice that went horribly wrong. But first tell us about the girl that was found the street and that investigation and what it all amounted to.

and also presumably a prostitute. That's not known for sure, but presumably so. In that particular case, she was never identified and we never did find the perpetrator in regards to that one. But another one where there was a young girl that got run over by a convoy. Now, the thing that you were talking about the compensation, they called it polidium payments. And what they did is if someone if there was death or injury or damage to property, this kind of thing, the government paid out money to

the Vietnamese. But the amount of money that they paid out with esthetics. As an example, a young girl she was run over by a convoy. Her parents got four hundred and sixty seven dollars for her death caused by a military convoy. Now that particular amount of money, four hundred and sixty seven was a lot of money in comparison to what the other payments were normally for death or injury. It was anywhere between twenty seven forty seven

dollars for death or injury. There was a young boy that was he was killed by intentional gunfire.

a lot of money to a lot of people. You know, quite a people, and that's not a lot of money. This type of thing took place all the time. I'll give you an example. There was a Arvin that he was Vietnamese Army ex Vietnamese Army, I should say, because he was missing both of his legs, he was wheelchair bound. He used to come up to the front gate at Chuly on his wheelchair and then he'd reach under his stub a lot of hand grenade, pulled a pin and he would sit there and then pretty soon G five

would come out. G five is the one that made the payment. They would come out, count him out some money. He'd put the ten back on the grenade, put it back under his stub, take the money, put it in his pocket, and he'd wheel himself away. This was nothing but an extortion thing that he did, and he did this about once a month. Another such payment that it was made in at this same gate, as a matter of fact, was there was an MP out there working the gates. And a kid threw a rock at him,

hit him in the face, broke his jaw. The MP grabbed the kid, slapped him, released him. The parents come back. They then made a pay it to the parrots for the MP slapping their kids. And then this extoor should say got to be worse. To the point of what they were doing was they would convoys would be coming down to you all one and they would take a piece of constantina wire and pull it across the road and basically set up a gate with a piece of

constantina wire. The convoy'd stopped, they'd sit there until G five come out and counted them out some money. Then they'd push their constantina wire off the road wait the next convoy. One particular day when this happened, the driver didn't want to slow down or didn't want to stop. He was slowing down, but he didn't want to stop.

So one of the Vietnamese threw a rock, hit the driver in the head, knocked him unconscious, and the vehicle came to a stop, and the constantina wires stretched across the road, and they're gonna be they're demanding their money. Well, the passenger didn't want to go along with the program. So what he did was got himself in the driver's seat, put it in gear, drove through the Constantina wire. When he did that, the Constantina wire entangled three Vietnamese, three

Vietnamese kids. He is barely towards the gate with this Constantina wire wrapped around the truck, and these kids entangled, and the Constantina wire bouncing along behind. And now this Arvin that's out there, Ramrod in this thing, the one with the missing legs. He's got an M sixteen rifle and he starts shooting at the truck on Ferrato. Well, when he does this, this M sixteen climbs up a little bit and he's kind of leaning back in his chair, and the end result is he filed flat on his

back and he's now shooting in the air. The truck gets to the gets to the gate, gets in the gate, and now G five comes out and they pay the parents of these three kids. They weren't fortunately, they weren't killed or anything, but they had some bruises and scratches and stuff like this from being dragged along. G five came out paid them and then went out and paid the the extortionists that are being led by this arban.

And also you have a big issue with again we know that it's limited amount of resources for deserving veterans, and you talk about the undeserving veteran and the unethical psychiatrists or psychologists that would award somebody that really didn't even see any combat. Tell us about these issues and why they're important to you, and tell us a little bit about some of the things you just discussed in the book about this issue.

The truth of the matter is, there were there are I should say, nine million, nine point two million people that are classified as Vietnam veterans. Now. Of these nine point two millions, there are actually only two point eight million of them that walked on, bobbed in a boat

off the shores of or flew over Vietnam. The rest of the nine point two billiot were in the military doing their job other places back in the States, in Germany and who are you know, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, all the other places that the military does their things. Now they're classified as Vietnam veterans, Vietnam era veterans because of the fact that they were in the military during the Vietnam Era. I don't have any issue with that.

The issue that I have with it is the fact that you know, it's like I said, it's been over forty years since Vietnam, I have yet to talk to one person that claims or is a Vietnam veteran that doesn't regale stories of their combat missions and slashing through rice patties and laying their holding their best friend well he bleeds out and dies in his arms and stuff

like this. And the truth of the matter is, of the two point eight million people that we're in Vietnam, that only happened the less than twenty percent of the people. Less than twenty percent of the people actually saw combat in Vietnam. The other eighty plus percent were support troops. Just like I was the military cat rub without support troops. I'm not denigrating anybody that is the support troop. The

you know, the men in the field. They depend upon these support troops for transportation, food, clothing, weapons, ammunition, medical care, administrative duties, all the creature companies that people require. This comes about, though, as a result of the medias real big in making this appear the way that it does. When the media goes into a combat zone, they don't interview the guy in the motor pool that's fixing the

jeeps or change in the oil. They don't interview the guy that's back at the base camp that's or the you know, the the installation that they're at that's cooking breakfast, dinner, and supper. Now, don't get me wrong, these people are important, but the media doesn't care about them. They're looking for the hero slant on their story. So they that's who they interview. They go out and they interview the twenty year old young kid that hasn't seen a shower in

thirty days, has been eating nothing but rations. He's filthy, dirty, he needs a shade. And that's who they interview. And that's what they perceive that all troops are like, and that's not the case at all. These guys are the support troops. They're important and I can't emphasize that enough. I have nothing against them. I have nothing against any of these veterans. It's just a lot of you know, forty years later, a lot of people take credit for

being Vietnam veterans, when in fact they're not. There was a census, and I can't remember for sure which it was. I believe that it was in two thousand. I may be in air there. But when it come time to check the little box, thirteen point eight million people claim to have been in country veterans in Vietnam, and it's not even close to that. You know, the uh, you know,

there are wanna bees. They're making it up there. See, the Vietnam War was back then, the Vietnam War was an undesirable thing and people didn't want to admit to being in the military. Now that, because of Afghanistan and Iran, there's a lot of hero worships the country is doing unjustifiably. So don't get me wrong there, but these people, because they want to be identified as with these heroes, they're pretending to be somebody that they're not. One of the things.

is a very serious thing. But if you didn't actually weren't in actual combat and weren't in a firefight, and it is unlikely that you would be as deserving as someone that was on that front line it did see his friends head blown off or something of that sort, rather than somebody just lingering claiming to have some sort of disorder, it doesn't discredit to all the real genuine veterans. It did suffer in war with traumatic events, certainly.

going to see the sunrise. Those people deserve to have you know, I shouldn't say deserve to have that are you know, are entitled to be suffering from PTSD because of what they just what they went through. Whereas the the that's administration is handing out PTSD to people that

never left the country this country. They if someone can prevent someone that was in the military can present a plausible story to the VA about the fact that they went into the military and they were stationed in Texas throughout their entire career, and the entire time that they

were there. They traumatized over the fact that they might get sent to a combat zone that could qualify them for the benefits that someone else is getting for lost limbs or traumatic brave disorders, things like this that qualify them for it. This PTSD. You know, these people ought

to be ashamed of themselves. You know, there's a lot of money that needs to be spent for the people to do in fact have serious injuries, and when somebody is pretending to be have PTSD, faking it for lack of a better term, they are taking away from these veterans that really and truly need all the help that they can get. I you know things you have organizations like Wounded Warriors that do whatever they can, and this

is honorable, but it's not there. It's not the job of the sub citizens of this country to support a charity to do this. Our government, our VA should be doing this automatically. And it makes it real difficult for them financially when you have all these fakers. There was a article that I read here not too long ago. This was not Vietnam, but in reference to the Iraq and Afghan returnees, where I want to say this in Seattle.

I can't remember for sure, but I want to say Seattle, a VA hospital up there where two psychiatrists said that sixty percent of the people that are being warded PTSD are fakers. But unfortunately, you can't prove that they're faking. It's like somebody claiming to have an injury that in their back that doesn't show up on an X ray. Doesn't mean they don't have a back injury. It's just

you can't prove it. And it's the same thing with the PTSD they are there's no way if someone has a good story, there's no way to prove that they're not having these dreams because nobody's in their head when they're having these dreams about how traumatic it is to worry about going to war. And that really really bothers me. Another thing that's kind of an issue with me is the Vietnam Memorial Wall, the city eighth names on that wall.

The truth of the matter is everybody, well everybody believes, and I believe this at one point in time too, that everybody that was that's on that wall died in combat, and that is not true. Virtually one sixth of the names that are on that wall are not combat related, and I'll give you some examples of that. People that die from drug overdoses. Any person that died of a drug overdose in Vietnam is on that wall. Any person

that committed suicide in Vietnam is on that wall. People that got involved in a ballroom braw and got killed as a result of it, a bra that they may have started, they're on the wall. People that get killed fighting over a whore on base, off base in Vietnam,

they're on the wall. One of the examples that I can give in regards to this is when I was in Germany before I went to Vietnam, there was a young troop that got drunk, knee walk and drunk, and when he got put to bed by his buddies because he couldn't get there himself during the night, he aspirated and he drowned in his own puke. Fast forward to when I was in Vietnam. A troop there in Jesson Heroin overdosed, vomited, aspirated, and drowned in his own puke

in Vietnam. Now, if the young troop that in Germany would have survived, he would have been a Vietnam era Vette because he was in during the Vietnam conflict. Count of war, the one in Vietnam that aspirated and drowned by his own design. He's the one that ingested the heroine. He's on the wall and being honored as a hero every time that well, either the real one or the traveling ones go throughout the United States. That man is being honored as a hero because he has a place

on that wall. And there are a lot of names that I personally know from my eleven months in Vietnam, in particular my eight months in July, that are on that wall that did not die honorably. They died because of their own doings. One example that I can give in regards to that is two guys, two gi both of them sergeants, were at a club one night and one of them started taunting the other one, and it

was a racially motivated taunt. The taunting escalated at the end of the night, the taunter wound up getting stabbed to death in the parking lot by the tauntee. That man, you know, if you did something did start a fight here in the United States that now in this day and age in particular, that was racially motivated. They certainly wouldn't erect the monument your honor. But that man is

on the same wall that travels all over the United States. Now, the perpetrator of that he was tried, convicted, and he served thirteen months in prison and then he was discharged. But you know, there are like I say, one sixth of them. Now I'm not saying that every one of the one sixth on that well died of a heroin overdose, you know, or that kind of thing, but one six of them were non combat related. And uh people, I

don't think people realize that. H you know, the other the remaining uh five sixth on there, they are all true heroes. They died doing what this country asked them to do, and they they deserve a place of honor like that wall.

fight a will was in a war. For lack of a better term, I guess my enemy over there was not the North Vietnamese or the viet Cong. My enemy over there was the troops that I was over there with. It was my job to investigate crimes by these troops, and there was a lot of it, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I won't deny it. I spent all of my adult life working in law enforcement, twenty seven years with LATD, and one of the greatest

things to me, let me put it that way. To me, one of the greatest things is the ability to hunt man. And I don't mean to go out and kill somebody. That's not what I'm talking about. But somebody do something and then or is about to do something, and be able to outthink them enough to either prevent it or catch them. That's what I mean by hunting man. And I did that in Vietnam, and it was just you know, there was more crime over there, need to shake a

stick at. I liked working drugs. There was drugs over there everywhere, and I got the opportunity to work narcotics over there. And then another thing that I liked was the fact that I was in Vietnam and I wore civilian clothes. I did not wear a uniform when I was in Vietnam.

anything that I did anywhere that I went. It was and it was there was the same way here in the States. Don't get me wrong, As a CID here in the States, I wore civilian clothes on military basis also that, but in Vietnam it was much much different.

And then of course there was the female companionship. There was a lot of that in Vietnam, and it fell under a few different categories. One of the categories being you could establish a relationship with a female companion that had didn't have any strings attached. You hung out with them or they hung out with you, and nothing was

expected of anybody. And the next thing that they had over there a lot of was what we called fifty t whose and what fifty p was was thirty three cents, and for thirty three cents, AGI could have his way with her for thirty three cents. And then the other type of horror, although they didn't consider themselves who they considered themselves girlfriends.

they didn't call it a whorehouse. But what they had on the military installations was what they call a massage parlor, and for two dollars, any gi that was on that base could go there and get get a massage. Well once behind closed doors. It was nothing more than a organized, military sanctioned house of ill refused. I personally was never at one, never had the need to go there. That's part of where I think that I had a good time. That most of the girls that I dealt with were

cocktail waitresses at the club. You know, they worked on the base. I had a couple of encounters with these fifty p hoars, but that never on base. The UH and the girls, the cocktail waitresses, they were most of them were looking for the ticket, promise them anything, don't give them anything, And that was pretty much my attitude while I was over there. One of the things that back back to the fifty p horse thing, that's one of the things that the gis used to do is

smuggle them on base because they couldn't be there. They didn't work there, they weren't they didn't have credentials to be on the base or anything. But some g I would be in a convoy or something and pick up a whore and bring it on base and smugle them into their camp. And then these uh you know, at thirty three cents a pop get passed around the area and they called them security violations and if they got caught, they immediately got evicted off at the base that it.

You know, most of the time there wasn't any catching there because there wasn't anybody in the company areas that was going to snitch them off. But when I say I had it was one of the best years of my life is because I was able to do work wise, exactly what I wanted to do and it was fun. I wouldn't have been a policeman all the years that I was if it wasn't fun and I had a great time doing it, so that part of it is part of it. And then the ability to do what

I wanted. And then of course, like I say, the female command companionship, I never had an issue of wanting and not being able to achieve.

thirty three cent whore or fifty p whrr. What was the attitude that the US citizens that were now military, What was the attitude that was used there to enable people to come into this country and be at war with these people that you talk about.

to him. Okay, that's the perception that they bring with them, and that comes from Korea because you hear stories, and I don't know if they're true or not, but you hear stories about how the UH during the Korean War, the Chinese would become charging and there'd be one gun for six men, and when the person carrying the gun got shot, the next one picked it up and continued on the fight, and when he got shot, the next one,

et cetera. That developed the attitude that there was they didn't respect life, didn't care about life, and so they brought that with him. And then of course the military kind of hooked into that. And as a couple of examples, you know where somebody was killed of Vietnamese was killed in regards to what the military did about it. There were a couple of captains that decided that they were

going to fight the drug war themselves. So they went out to the perimeter because they believed that the drugs were coming from children through the fence to GIS. So they went out there with a M seventy nine grenade launcher, except they weren't using grenades, they were using tear gas canisters. They went out there and they sought children close to the fence, and they started popping tear gas canisters at these kids, and the kids would run off because of

the tear gas. Then they'd come back and they'd pop out of some more and the kids would run off. Well, one of the times that they popped at these kids, these two captains hit a Vietnamese girl in the head and they killed her with one of these tear gas canisters. There was absolutely no disciplinary action on whatsoever against these two captains that did that. None. But then by the same token, the military kind of adopted the same attitude

in regards to their own troops. An example of that that I've got in the book because there is a guy of the name of James, and these are allow pseudonyms. I don't use any of the real names in the book. But a guy of the name of James shoots the sergeant by the name of Stillwell, and he shoots him in the stomach or chest area, killed him. James is arrested for murder. Then he pleads guilty to unlawful killing. And I'm not really sure what that entails, but he

was pled guilty to unlawful killing. He was then sentenced to six months confinement, forfeiture of one hundred and fifty dollars paid for six months and reduced in rank. Everything was overturned except for the forfeiture of pay, which means that Sergeant Stillwell's life, as far as the military was concerned, was worth nine hundred dollars and that was it. Now the records indicate the Sergeant Stillwell was killed in action,

non hostile accident. So not only was it, you know, the people bringing this attitude with them over here and not caring, the military was doing exactly the same things, like, for example, the barroom brawl that I told you mentioned earlier, thirteen months for stabbing a guy twice. You know, the guy didn't run to the nice twice, but he got thirteen months over it, you know. And there's just a

story after stories similar to that where nothing happened. Another guy was shooting grenades with an M seventy nine grenade launcher at water buffalo and he shooting at these water buffalo the MPs get called. He's out there by the perimeter, outside the perimeter and he's shooting at these water buffle for the MPs get called. They try to get the

guy to quit. He won't quit, So to get him to surrender and scare him the fire over his head with an M sixty machine gun that immediately gets into surrender. But a Vietnamese child was killed as a result of it. I'm sorry he wasn't killed. He was hitting the hip. Excuse me, he was hitting the hips. Nobody was held culpable for that. You would think that the guy with them seventy nine grenade launcher that started this thing, or somebody along the line should have been held culpable for that,

but nobody was. And that type of thing is, you know, it was just just the way it was. The army had or the military i should say, was just disintegrating and bits and pieces. And it's fortunate that we were actually, I guess, in full retreat at that time, because it wasn't very long after that there wasn't anybody left in Vietnam.

basically a diary for our kids. Well, it just so happened he was in the air because he was in the Air Force at the time, he was wound up back east close to the archives, and he decided that one day to excuse me to go to the archives and kind of look at some of the stories I'd been telling him. And so he asked for the MP blotters there, and he's so that he could look through the MP blotters, a chronologically list of events for each day. And he got them and he looked through him and

when he started looking through the first ones. He found a folded piece of paper stuck in the binder and turns out it was a crime report that was signed by me. He says it had no significance, so it never did wind up in this book. But then he really did the archival research on this thing, and all the crimes, all the deaths, everything that's mentioned this book is backed up by archival research, every bit of it. The only thing that's not backed up is my anecdotal stuff,

and there's no way to back it up. It's my word or my story against somebody else's story. That's the anecdotal part of it. But everything else in the book that pertains to deaths and court martials and the arrests and autopsies and things like that that are mentioned in the book are all documented are caught by these were documented through the archives. Then from that point on it just kind of started formulating into a book, although we

didn't intended to. And then, and you know, several people read our diary for back of lack of a better term, that turned into a manuscript and they thought that we should pursue this, And eventually a gentleman by the name of Clay Jenkinson with the Dakota Institute in North Dakota. The man who wrote the forward in the book persuaded us and into publishing the book through him, and it was published and released just a few months ago.