Kenneth R. Tucker

              Eric Walz History 300 Collection
Kenneth R. Tucker – Life during
Vietnam
By Kenneth R. Tucker
February 18, 2003
Box 2 Folder 19
Oral Interview conducted by Amber Torngren
Transcript copied by Luke Kirkham October 2005
Brigham Young University – Idaho
KT: I was born down in Basalt and was raised in Blackfoot and went to school in
Blackfoot. Once I graduated from high school, I went straight into the military. And
actually I was in the military before I graduated because I was in the National Guard.
And I decided I didn’t want to go to Monday night meetings for the rest of my life so I
decided to go ahead and go active duty and get it over with. And, so I joined the air force
and of course went to [ Lachlan?] air force base with basic training. From there I went to
[ Lawry] air force base in Denver, Colorado. And from there I went to Iceland, spent a
year up in Iceland. It was really a… actually it’s kind of a misnomer because it’s really
not, it’s actually ya know you could switch Greenland and Iceland. I think the coldest it
got up there the year I was up there was 28 degrees above zero.
AT: Oh wow!
KT: The wind blows 380 days out of the year, but, it’s really quite nice. Especially for a
single guy there’s lots of ladies up there that loved Americans. And I suppose the reason
why is because the Iceland guys were too cheap to spend any money on them. So, to
them if a guy would take her out to dinner or something like that or go to a movie or
something like that, that was a big thing for them. It just didn’t normally happen. From
Iceland I came back to Riverside, California to [ March] air force base. And from there
that’s where I met my wife, she was originally from— actually, Austin, Texas but I met
her in Glendora, California. And we were married and then I went from Riverside,
California to [ Larson] air force base which is [ Moses Lake], Washington and we spent
[ two] months there in Moses Lake. Anyway from there, from Moses Lake, we went to
Japan and spent three years in Japan, it must have been ’ 63 to ’ 66 and came back to
[ Maelstrom] Great Falls, Montana. Spent about a year or so there, and from Maelstrom I
went to Vietnam that was in ’ 67, July of ’ 67, and stayed there until July, 1st of July ’ 68.
When I got finished with that, I came back and had an opportunity to be sent to
[ Andrews] air force base in Maryland which is home of the 89th Military Airlift Wing.
The 89th Military Airlift Wing is the wing that’s responsible for all the VIP’s, the
President, and… so, it’s really quite a prestigious assignment. The people that go to the
89th are hand- picked air force white, and I was fortunate to be selected to go there, and I
turned them down.
AT: Oh wow!
KT: … so, uh it’s really quite a prestigious assignment, The people that go to the 89th are
hand- picked air force white and I was fortunate to be selected to go there, and I turned
them down.
KT: I told them I hadn’t lost anything in Washington D. C. so I wasn’t going to go. And
they told me, they said well, “ You can’t turn the assignment down, and you should be
honored to be selected to go to there.” And I said, “ Well, I am honored, but still I’m not
going to go.” And I said, “ Send it back. Tell ‘ em I’m not going.” And they said, “ Well,
we’ll do it, but, you know what the outcome’s going to be already. You’re gonna go.”
When the thing came back, it came with [ Ford] air force base, Tacoma, Washington. We
stayed there for about 18 months, and then we went to Turkey for two years. And, it was
kind of an interesting two years to spend over there from ’ 69 to ’ 71, and I didn’t even
know where Turkey was. I had to go down to the library and get a map out and find out
where the country of Turkey was. I rather enjoyed the tour over there, and my wife
didn’t. And we had some young children— and my kids were all blonde. And one of
the, one of the big fears to have over there is the Gypsies over there are infamous for
kidnapping, especially little blonde haired children. Once you… once they get a hold of
them, you never see them again. So anyway, in ’ 71 I came back and went back to Travis
air force base which is [ Fairfield, California] around San Francisco. And we stayed there
for another, well another 18 months and then went back to Japan for three more years and
came back in ’ 76, and went to Maelstrom air force base, stayed there for about a year and
I retired. And that’s basically my military background. Picked up few ribbons and
commendations along the way but I think that you really want to find out information
about Vietnam, right?
AT: Yeah, I mean I…, that’s just…, it’s kind of…, I’m thinking how interesting it is that
( Vietnam) was such a small chapter in all of your experience, yet it’s probably maybe had
a profound impact on your life or…
KT: It did. I brought back some souvenirs which I would just as soon left over there. I
was stationed in the [ Triang] air force base, which is just a little ways north of [ Cameron]
Bay about half way up the country along the coast. The [ Triang] was one of the heaviest
sprayed areas of Agent Orange in the country. And so I… we knew about it. The
airplanes would come in there and they’d be dripping this toxic herbicide, off the wings,
you could smell it terrible. But we never thought about it, [ staining] itself not only killing
the foliage but also getting in the food chain, and the result of that was if you ate the
food-- which we did-- of the local economy, you would wind up with sugar diabetes and
cause of birth defects, so that’s one of the souvenirs I got was sugar diabetes, which I
didn’t know until May of 2001.
AT: Really.
KT: I wound up with it. The only reason I found out about it was— I went to the doctor
because I had two toe nails that turned black. And, I didn’t call in trauma because of toe
nails, and so I went into the family emergency center over here and had them checked out
and it was a normal situation and he did a blood test on me and found out my blood sugar
was 430. Normally, normal it’s a 100, a 120, somewhere around that area. And so they
rushed me right over to the diabetic center and said it’s a wonder you hadn’t had a
diabetic coma with it that high. In August of that same year, I wound up with a diabetic
ulcer on my heel, which took me about 8 months to heal. One of the things that’s really
bad about diabetes is it lowers your ability to be able to heal. And it took me about 8
months and I still have to watch my feet very carefully, to make sure that I don’t break
out again into a diabetic ulcer. I also have neuropathy, ya know, nerve damage in my
feet, so far its still in the area of just my feet, it hasn’t extended up. My wife seems to
think its down in my ankles, but I think it’s primarily just around my feet. Eventually,
that stuff has the tendency to go up the legs. Then in November of 2001, I went down to
the V. A. hospital in Salt Lake City to try to get some help on medicine because some of
that medicine for diabetics is extremely expensive. As well as the stuff to kind of cure
your diabetic ulcers. A little tube of, when I bought this, you know, was it 925 dollars for
a little tube? So you can see why I went down to the V. A. hospital to try and get some
help on these medicines and they did a complete work- up on me to establish a base- line
for my medical care, and they spotted something on EKG that looked a little quirky so
they ran a bunch of tests on me and I wound up with a quadruple bypass on my heart.
And that’s also associated with diabetes. Doctor Gold [ who] was the chief cardiac
surgeon down there at the V. A. hospital said it’s a good thing that, they caught it when
they did, or I probably wouldn’t have been around much longer because I had one artery
that was 90 percent closed, another major artery that was 70 percent closed, and two that
were totally closed. In fact the day that I went in for the surgery I was expecting a triple
bypass and they said,” No, it’s going to be a quadruple.”
AT: Oh!
KT: And the strange thing about it, in all that scenario, I really didn’t have any problems,
it just was a real shock to find out I had these kind of problems. I’d felt like I’d taken
pretty good care of myself until all of this happened. But that’s the thing about diabetes,
is it’s so insidious. In my particular case, since I don’t have any family history of
diabetes on my side of the family-- on either side— it was a total shock for me. So, I
know that’s where it came from. And, of course, my diabetes is all service connected, so
the V. A. takes care of all my medicines and so forth. At the current time I’m 70 percent
disabled. When they get through processing my claim for my heart situation, I’ll
probably be a hundred percent. Now, that doesn’t really make a lot of difference except
for one thing, since I’m retired air force… previously, lets take for example 70 percent,
my disability right now, they would only tax my retirement pay for 30 percent. If I go a
hundred percent, it’s non- taxable. They have just recently passed legislation that
authorized the payment of retirement pay plus disability. When that comes into effect,
then I will probably get a big chunk of money coming back out of it, because they’ve
been taking all that money out, and taxing me on it, which they shouldn’t have done to
me really. And I’ve been retired since ’ 77, so it goes back quite a ways. And we’ll have
to wait and see how that turns out. One of things that is… and I might just ask you a
question.
AT: Okay.
KT: How do you feel about these anti- war protests, that’s been on the TV quite a bit?
RT: That was something I was wondering, how you felt about it because I’ve seen in the
newspaper up at the school today there was different protests. And I noticed that. And, I
don’t know, it just really makes you wonder what would happen if we did go to war, how
many people would be like protesting it and everything ya know. If there is a draft, or
whatever involved, it really… it’s been things that I’ve wondered about.
KT’s wife: You guys are too young to remember the Vietnam Era. I mean, you weren’t
there right?
AT: We were born in ’ 81.
KT’s wife: Yeah. Okay. Ya know, that was hard because I was here and he was there
and I’d get letters from him and he was… and it was hard, it was real hard, and I had
three little kids and, or did I have two, I don’t even remember now. But, what we, I guess
we had three didn’t we? We had Jim too. And, then I had to watch Johnson on TV
putting out all these lies. I knew they were lies. And then I watched the kids during the
protests against the war. You know, so here I am trying to raise three children, getting
letters from my husband who’s over there in danger every day. And I don’t know by the
time I get the letter whether he’s already dead. And then watching, you know, people
protesting. ( At this point Kenneth tells his wife to get a poetry book out of their car
trunk. He instructs me to wait until she comes back because he wrote a poem he wanted
to share with me about his feelings of war in general and about the anti- war protests.)
KT: I wrote a poem that probably expresses how I feel about war in general and then I
also wrote a little thing for you to read about this anti- war and it could probably explain it
better than I could probably. One of [ the] things that… see when I was over there in ’ 67
and ’ 68, ’ 68 was what they call the Tet Offensive. The [ Triang] was also the base for the
[ 5th] special division and my job there was saving aircraft loads for the 5th special forces,
and we had to plan how to get [ pallets] and jeeps and trucks and water trailers and
ammunition and rations and whatever they needed out in the field. Cows, pigs, chickens,
we loaded all that stuff with bulldozers, the reason why we had to load cows, pigs, and
chickens is because that, the 5th special forces group out there in the remote sites had no
refrigeration, so all of their meat had to be shipped to them live. And there were some
humorous stories that came out of that. In fact, this, I started writing poetry. As probably
therapy more than anything else, and it’s taken me I think, ( pause while waitress brings
our food), yeah, ’ 98 is the first, first poem I wrote. But ( pauses to get out his poem), this
one is entitled “ War.” ( He then reads the poem):
WAR
War is such a hateful scene of blood and death and things obscene
Of families that are torn apart, of violence bursting from the start
Of sadness and feelings of despair, sounds of wailing in the air
Of tears that stream from a reddened eye, of faces turned upward to the sky
Petitions unheard from men that ache, that yearns toward a more perfect state
Of home that mankind at last might be able to live peacefully in harmony.
So, I think it kind of explains most people in the military. We don’t go out there as war
mongerers and want to go out and kill people and such, that’s not what were there to
defend, [ in] the United States. And those people here in the United States that were not
involved in Vietnam really should be grateful for us going over there and making the
sacrifices. Fifty- Eight thousand of us came back in a box. And that’s a tremendous
amount of people.
AT: How did that make you feel as a soldier over there, I mean, did you hear of all the
anti- war, everything that was going on, and how everyone was so oppressed to it? How
did that make you feel over there trying to serve?
KT: Actually it made us… most of the guys over there that I knew of really were quite
angry about it. And, to this day have really hard feelings about that. Especially… we
went over there with the idea that we didn’t have a choice. For me I was staff sergeant at
the particular time and so that’s part of my duty. When the Commander- In- Chief, the
President of the United States, says that we’re going to go, we go. And we don’t have
that option of saying, “ Heck no!” And there’s a lot of hard feelings about people who
went to Canada, to escape that, and then even harder feelings when they came back and
they were granted amnesty. That just doesn’t settle really well with most military people.
Even to this day because of those things, I wrote this little story here. When I got out of
the air force, and I went to college down at ISU, down there, and I graduated with a
degree in… a Bachelor of Science in education… secondary education. So… and my
major was business- accounting with a minor in history, and I probably taught more social
studies and history than business courses, and I really preferred it that way because you
get a lot more interaction with the kids and that when you discuss history. In fact, I was
accused of being into Indians and I told them you can’t discuss United States history
unless you include the Indian people. It’s just… you just can’t do it. When I got down to
the point where I’d have to discuss about Vietnam and try to explain it to them, I could
read things and tell them things how the book and some of my experiences that I had over
in Vietnam. And yet, unless you’ve really been over there…
AT: You don’t have a clue!
KT: You don’t have a clue. Nope. But anyway, I wrote this maybe [ it] will help explain
that. It says history repeats itself, and I’ve used that term time and time and time again,
and I tell my students that history does in fact repeat itself from one generation to
another. And I think we’re in that same situation that we have now with this Iraq war as
we were in Vietnam. ( He then reads a short segment he wrote on this subject.)
“ They say that history repeats itself and now we see that once again this statement
is true. The anti- war protesters of the Vietnam War who literally have American blood
on their hands are passing their heritage down to this new generation of anti- war and
misguided Americans and also to the young adults of other nations. We don’t know the
exact number of American lives that were lost as a result of those who aided and abetted
the North Vietnamese with their anti- war protests. However, it is a well documented fact
that their efforts were welcomed by the enemy and encouraged them to keep on fighting
instead of suing for peace. ( All during the Paris talks, they’ve strung this thing out.
They’ve never actually come to terms because they knew that the protests that are going
on here in the United States, and eventually we were going to have to leave. And that’s
exactly what happened.) The anti- war protesters in this day and age are committing the
same offense as their predecessors did during the Vietnam era. They are encouraging
Saddam Hussein not to disarm, to play games of hide and seek with weapons of mass
destruction, to thumb his nose at other nations in the United Nations and the Security
Council and to continue his tyrannical rule over the people of Iraq. The military have no
choice but to follow the orders of their commander in chief. If the decision is made for
us to invade Iraq in order to remove Saddam from power, then the people of the United
States and the world as a whole need to support this decision. If the anti- war protesters
choose to do otherwise, then the blood of military members will once more stain their
hands.”
AT: That was really profound.
KT’s wife: So, you can see he feels very, very strong. And had he not gone to Vietnam,
we may not be in the same… in that kind of a… taking that kind of stand. But we’ve
experienced it, and the terrorists, the people that captured our people and tortured them
over there; they used the protesters against them and would tell them, “ Your own people
don’t support you over here. Why are you here?”
AT: Whoa! I didn’t know that.
KT’s Wife: Oh yeah. Yeah.
KT: When you’re over there by yourself and all the guys come over there and leave their
families, it doesn’t… when your trying to deal with all this stuff that’s going on over
there- having people like Jane Fonda, for example, openly advocated anti- war stance, just
didn’t set well with the military over there. Because they, including myself, felt like she
was aiding and abetting the enemy. Now, if you were in the military, and you did
something like that, you’d be shot. For aiding and abetting in war is death sentence. And
yet nothing was ever said to her. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in having
free speech. But, at some point in time, I think people need to understand that there are
some ramifications on whatever stance you take. And in this particular case of Vietnam,
and it looks like it’s going to happen again in Iraq, maybe the twelve years that Saddam
Hussein has had to disarm and hasn’t done so maybe that’s because protesters. I’m sure
he… he’d be shouting for joy when the Security Council and also the United Nations
basically come to a deadlock. France and Germany and Brussels, Belgium whatever
from NATO not supporting that, not even supporting Turkey, a member of NATO, which
is you know, it’s an agreement that if one nation is attacked then NATO goes in to defend
that nation. And, France and Germany and Belgium, they might not be going in to
defend Turkey if Iraq should attack them. Now they’ve kind of softened down and
they’ll go ahead and support that, but we still have the Security Council with China,
Russia, France, Germany, they’re against going to war and they keep saying they’ll give
the inspectors more time. Well, how much time do they need? You’ve had twelve years
plus to disarm and you haven’t done it yet. There’s ample evidence, that Saddam’s killed
his own people with gas and biological agents. He’s not going to change. After spending
two years over in Turkey, I have some insight as to the way their mentality works, and so
I don’t think that anything is going to change, he’s stalling for time. It gives him more
time to prepare, more time to hide the stuff.
AT: It’s just pushing him on. It gives him just a little more time.
KT: And so that’s how, I guess… does that answer your question?
AT: That… there was a bunch of questions that just basically answered.
KT: You’ve made it so great for me because I haven’t even had to ask the questions. I
think that’s very profound and powerful. I’ve been trying to do some research on things,
especially about the draft and the anti- war this and that, and I’ve read a lot of the other
side. The well maybe these draft evaders are heroes in their own right. And all these
things persuading that way, and it was just really interesting to have… not interesting,
just very powerful to have this other opinion. And it hits home a lot more to me than the
other five books I’ve just spent reading. So, I thank you very much.
KT: I think that the people are misguided. They’ve never been through war and all they
think about is the peace aspect of it. Sure, everybody wants peace, but there are some
people in the world that won’t allow that to happen. Ya look at World War II, the Nazis,
here’s another individual that had to be removed from power. And had not the United
States and Great Britian especially, gone in there and taken care of that situation, who
knows how far Hitler would have gone. And his next move was England, and he’d
already taken over France and Poland and all those European countries there in that area.
And sometimes you just got to bite the bullet and do what you have to do. And, I’m not
entirely convinced that we should’ve been in Vietnam, but there was Southeast Asia
treaties that were in existence and like in Korea, South Vietnam requested our help. And
we didn’t want that country to spreading communism. And that’s where the domino
theory came from, and you’ve heard about that.
AT: Yeah.
KT: And everybody was running scared because the communists were out there to take
the world. Now Khrushchev always maintained that that’s not what they meant that
communism in that state of the world, he meant it from the standpoint that, that their way
of doing things, the society that they have achieved would be much more beneficial that
the rest of the world would accept that socialistic attitude, not that they were going to go
out there and march then, and whether that’s true or not, I don’t know.
AT: Yeah
KT: But then if you look in on the Cuban situation in ’ 62, moving missiles into Cuba…
AT: There’s that side too.
KT: Yeah. So I don’t know even whether he was just trying to pacify people or not, but
that’s what he claimed. But anyways we… I think the United States is out to try to help
everybody, every nation, to become democratic, there’s all the human rights and
everything else. And you get an individual like Saddam Hussein that’s a tyrant that’s
guilty of all these human rights violations and so forth… somebody’s got to do
something.