Harper, Timothy

              Eric Walz History 300 Collection
Timothy Harper – Life During the
Vietnam Conflict
By Timothy Harper
October 19, 2004
Box 6 Folder 13
Oral Interview conducted by Sean Braniff
Transcript copied by Devon Robb February 2006
Brigham Young University – Idaho
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SB: I was wondering to begin with if you could give a brief overview as far as where you
were born, and significant things that happened that made you want to go into the
military.
TH: Okay, I was born right after World War II in New York actually. My dad had been a
professional athlete and came from out west and met my mother in New York because
that was where he was applying his trade. So that’s where I was born, when he came back
from World War II where he had served in the 82nd Airborne Division as a paratrooper
and he was actually quite a big hero at Normandy. He won a bunch of medals and blah,
blah, blah. I grew up kind of traveling because of my father’s occupation he went with a
defense contractor and was originally in the flight test division. We traveled all over
following the airplanes. We had houses in a couple different places.
Our primary residence was out on Long Island which is an island… kind of we
were way out on Long Island right on the coast: we lived right on the shore there and kept
boats in our backyard. But then we had houses in Maryland and Florida and we came out
[ to the] west a lot. My dad and I loved the west. So anyway I grew up there and it was
kind of… a thing. I mean growing up as a kid I remember Korea. My uncles served in
Korea, two of my uncles actually. One on my dad’s side, one on my mother’s side. They
were both paratroopers and it was just what you did when you got old enough you were
going to go to college and if there was a need go into the military, that was never
questioned.
So by the time I reached the age of, you know, going into the military, quite
frankly Vietnam was just starting. It just kind of wasn’t a question for me. I had an uncle
who had been a Navy Admiral and was a pilot in World War II, flying off navy carriers,
my dad had been in the army and served in World War II, my grandfather, both of them,
had served in World War I. My great- great grandfathers in the Civil War, well at least
one of them did, and… two of them did actually. My other uncles, two uncles, had served
in Korea. There was a war, I dropped what I was doing, and joined the Army. That’s just
what you did. It was something… you’ve got to realize that before 1967 there wasn’t
really a question about that. I’m just old enough, being a true baby boomer, I was born in
1946, and it just wasn’t a question, you did it. Your country was at war, you went and
fought the war. This is going to sound terribly racist, but my dad didn’t mean it in a racist
way, when I was a kid I remember him telling me, “ Boy, you’re a middle class white
boy. You have two jobs in life: fight the wars, and pay the bills.” And that’s what I grew
up understanding was my job. Fight the wars and pay the bills. That was my job, I was a
middle class American. You know, we paid for all the social problems and we fought the
wars, that’s what we did. That’s how it was.
SB: Was it seen, do you think, going into Vietnam, that is was going to be something
similar to the Korean War. Did you think something along those same type of lines?
TH: No, I really didn’t. I saw Vietnam when I first went in as something we had to do.
We all believed the domino theory. We had a friendly government and to me, you have to
remember this was before I converted so I was a Catholic kid, we had a Catholic
government in South Vietnam. And our great hero, John Kennedy, was the one that really
got us involved. It wasn’t Lyndon Johnson. John Kennedy got, actually Eisenhower was
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struggling with it but Kennedy’s the one that got us involved with ( President of Vietnam)
who was the President of Vietnam. And he’s the one that got us involved. So it was this
great crusade for us.
We thought we were helping this friendly government free themselves, you know,
fight off Communism. If they fell, then all of Asia was going to fall, and the world was
going to be a terrible place. Again you have to remember I’m from that generation that
grew up doing atom bomb drills in the hall you know, duck and cover. Every week at
least we did an atom bomb drill where we all got under our desk, ducked, and covered.
Knowing that it really didn’t matter because we were all going to die anyway. So you
know, this whole communist thing, we grew up with this. The whole McCarthyism, even
though we kind of knew that was wrong, this whole “ the communists are trying to take
over the world”… in fact they were, but, you know, they’re system didn’t work so they
didn’t manage to do it. You know, it was a very different mind set.
SB: And so, when you enlisted did you go straight into officer training?
TH: No, I enlisted as a private soldier. I felt, this was in 1964- 65, and I felt that, okay, I
there’s a war going on, I was supposed to go. [ Laughs] I was the road with my band
rocking and rolling, touring… on tour. We had a record out, everything looked kind of
cool. And then our lead guitar player, who we replaced until he could get out of the Army
managed to get his hands blown off in Vietnam, which doesn’t do a lot for your lead
guitar player. So we felt like the band wasn’t going anywhere. I came back, I had blown
past my class date for school. I had been accepted to a good college and chose not to go. I
came back and was thinking about going the next semester and woke up one morning and
said, “ You know what, I probably might as well do the whole Army thing and the war
thing, and do it now.”
So I went down and enlisted in the Army. I went to the recruiter and I said, you
know, “ I’ve got a semester of school, but mostly I’m just a high school graduate, and
what I want to do is be a paratrooper, an officer, and,” this new thing, special forces had
just come out— the Green Berets, “ and I want to do that.” The sergeant looked at me and
said, “ Kid I’ll tell you what. You enlist as a private, we can guarantee you jump school. If
you pass the tests, you can be… they’ll send you to officer candidate school [ chuckles].
And if you pass more tests, and graduate real high in your class they’ll send you to
special forces school. And if you’re one of the three out of a hundred that gets through
that, [ chuckle chuckle], you’ll be in Special Forces.” Fourteen months later I walked back
into his office with jump wings on my chest, a green beret on my head, and a gold bar on
that green beret and said, “ Can I take you to lunch?” He didn’t know who I was, in fact
when I… in the middle of lunch, when I told him who I was be literally dropped his fork.
I went in as a private and went into basic training, in Fort Gordon, Georgia. Then
went to advanced infantry training as a regular infantryman. Still a private. In the
meantime I took the tests and I scored really high, they selected me for officer candidate
school, put that on hold, and sent me to a military police unit. I was there was a military
policeman and made sergeant pretty quickly. I was a PFC, by then, and then a Corporal,
and then I made sergeant. And worked confinement as a guard in the stockade. Then did
some CID work. Criminal investigation as a detective and them my class date came up
and I went off to Fort Benning, Georgia to infantry officer candidate school.
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Was there for, it’s not 90 days, it’s actually closer to seven, eight months, of
incredible pressure. I’ve never been through anything like that in my whole life. We
started with 511, we graduated with 153. All the rest washed out. I was commissioned an
infantry second lieutenant, I had an officer from the military police, but I chose to stay
infantry, put in for jump school, ranger school, and Special Forces, and got all three. As
soon as I graduated from officer candidate school I went straight to jump school, got my
parachutist certification, which was really kind of a big deal. I was second generation.
My father had been one of the original parachutists in the Army, and that was a big
deal… second generation parachutist. And then was assigned to 7 Special Forces group as
part of training group and went through Special Forces officers’ course at the John F.
Kennedy Center for special warfare. And then served with the 7 Special Forces group,
which is in Fort Bragg.
We had the South American commitment [ continent?], a lot of people don’t know
this, but we had a pretty good shooting war going on in South America, it was just all
classified. Went down there, pulled ops, was sent to what they call “ long distance
shooting school.” And learned to shoot upwards of 2000 meters which is over a mile,
with specialized weapons. Went to another classified school where I was certified to use,
well in those days, it was classified then, I don’t know if it still is, it might still be, but
they were called “ Mud Slow” weapons, which were very specialized assassination
weapons that you could use for assigned political assassinations mostly. Pulled
operational duties doing that with the 7th, then I was selected for the defense language
institute in Monterey. I was sent there for almost a year to study Vietnamese, and that’s
what I did for five days a week. So I actually went in as a private and worked my way
through and became an officer through the officer candidate process.
SB: Was it basically always assumed that you would end up in Vietnam?
TH: Yep. I volunteered for it. You don’t get to be a Special Forces officer, Airborne
Ranger Special Forces, without doing a whole lot of volunteering. I had assumed at that
time that I was going to be a professional soldier my entire life. I’ve had people to this
day that know me really well that say being a soldier isn’t what I do, it’s what I am. I
mean, there’s a lot of soldier in me. I was raised to be a soldier.
SB: And so when you finished with the language school is that when you went to
Vietnam?
TH: Yeah, when I graduated from language school in Monterey I was assigned to… in
fact while I was at Monterey was actually assigned to the Special Forces, which at the
time was the Special Forces group that was in Vietnam. To this day the fifth Special
Forces group flash, the little things they wear on their beret that designates what group,
an integral part of it is the South Vietnamese flag, with the three red stripes. I was
assigned to headquarters at ( Na Dung?) which was the Special Forces headquarters for
the all of the country and was going to be sent, I understand to the delta, when a senior
officer, a lieutenant colonel who knew me, came up to me and said to me “ Hey Harper,
you want to have a really nasty assignment?” And I said “ You betcha!” He said, “ Well
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we’re sending you up north.” And I said “ Great,” because up north was where it was
really ugly.
So I went up north, was assigned initially to CNC north, which was classified ops,
running up north, and dealing with politicians, Russian advisors, people like that. And
then I was assigned to detachment A105, which was a true special forces A team, out on
the Laotian border. We ran combat ops out of our site. It was what was called a “ hot
site.” If you stuck your head up above the sand bags you drew fire. 24- 7. I mean we were
just constantly in contact with the enemy. And what we did was ran mostly recon ops.
We’d go out and, I- corps, the northern part of South Vietnam. Vietnam was broken into
four corps. I- corps was the northern part which was up near the DMC, Hue, Da Nang,
places like that. Then you had 2- corps, which was the central highlands. Then you had 3-
corps which was down lower, then you had 4- corps which was the delta, down around
Saigon and below Saigon. Down to Vung Tau, places like that. Which was the real rice
bowl, well it’s actually the rice bowl of Asia. Almost 80% of the rice from Asia is grown
in that part of Vietnam. So it’s called the rice bowl of Asia. But I went up north and
operated there, mostly running… the Marines were really in charge of the northern part.
So mostly I ran recon ops for them. I did that for quite a while and then I was assigned as
a battalion commander with the Mike force battalion, which was kind of an unusual
thing.
Mike force was the only place where Americans actually commanded Vietnamese
troops. We had, on my A- site for example, we had six American Special Forces, we were
supposed [ to] have twelve… it’s actually fourteen, we had six. We had eight Vietnamese
Special Forces, and then we had 635 civilian and regular defense group troops. They
were kind of volunteer troops that served for us in the camp and ran our ops with us. And
then of course we had a recon platoon, which was mine, of 32 mountain yards. Now my
first site was ( Cam Duc?). We got overrun there and we lost the camp. Four of us got out
alive. When I went to ( Numshut?) we re- built the camp there which was in a little area
kind of called fish hook which is where it bulged into Laos, right on the Ho- Chi- Minh
Trail. We ran interdiction ops and recon ops for the Marines trying to stop the traffic
supplies and all that flowing down what was known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the
North Vietnamese regulars and the Viet Cong that were operating in South Vietnam.
Most of the time in the north I fought against North Vietnamese regulars. They
were regular army, well trained, well equipped troops. When we were overtaken at ( Cam
Duc?) they had Russian tanks. We had tanks in the wire. And they had MIGs overhead.
They actually had air superiority and they had firepower on us. We had two divisions
take us down, that little group I was talking about of less than 700 people. We had two
divisions, a division is roughly 10,000 men, it took them 12 days to overrun us. Like I
said, four of us got out alive. But ( Numshut?) was different, that was more pure SF ops.
We ran a lot of covert ops. We ran a lot of recon ops. So then when I left there I went to
this Mike force battalion, and what Mike force does is it’s actual Vietnamese troops who
are regular army troops who are of battalion strength, which is about 600 men, 700 men,
right in there. What Mike force does is when a Special Forces camp is being overrun or
when there is a really ugly situation you go in and bail them out. So it’s real intense,
quick mobilization combat force that goes into a hot area where there is a big battle going
on and sways the course of battle. Fast response, fast attack, light, mobile, you know, real
serious stuff. So I was with them for a long time, then after the last time I got shot up they
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sent me down to a place called ( Belm- bokting?) which was in 2- corps. Now ( Belm-bokting?)
was interesting because it was the Vietnamese Special Forces training center. It
was the jump school. They trained Vietnamese Special Forces there. They had the
Korean Rock training center with their martial arts academy and I was assigned there as
an instructor. Because I speak Vietnamese of course, so I taught classes in language. I
was an advisor to the Rock martial arts, because I have all that martial arts training, and I
was an instructor at the jump school. Now, the real purpose for ( Belm- bokting?) was that
it was B- 52 which to this day is a separate until in the Special Forces that runs the really
covert black ops. So what I was doing was… that was my cover, and I did do it, but most
of the time I would run what they used to call “ the programs.” There were three main
programs. The covert, black ops programs that Special Forces ran: Delta, Sigma, and
Phoenix. Phoenix was the ugly one and that’s the one I worked with most. Basically what
it was was an assignation [ assassination] unit. We would go up north, assassinate Russian
advisors, Vietnamese politicians, so on and so forth. Sometimes renegade Americans… it
was Apocalypse Now stuff, quite frankly.
SB: How frequent were those types of operations?
TH: It depended, I can remember gong on a couple of one- month operations. Sometimes
I’d pull regular recon ops, sometimes I wouldn’t go on one for, you know, a month.
Sometimes I’d pull one a week here and a week there, but often it took a while because
sometimes… well, it depended on the op. If it was a real difficult op, I’d go and take two
weeks to set it up… like if it was a long shot or something. If it was a shooting deal. I can
remember one time it took me two weeks to find the patterns, to set it up, to figure where
I was going to take the shot from. Then I took the shot, I made it… it was a long shot,
over 900 meters. 970 meters I think we figured it. I know that with the scope offset as far
as I could, with this special body 70 I had, the round dropped three feet. So my aim point
was three feet above and that was with the scope set up as far out as it would go. I still
had to aim three feet up and to the right and took the shot to center torso. In fact, I was so
far away I had the second round in the air before the first round hit. I had the second
round away… before the first one ever hit. And I was back on target and reacquired and I
saw the first one take him center torso and I knew it was good. Then I E& E’d for about
four days. I mean I was gone, I was boogieing because they were after me. Finally got to
a place where I could get e- vacked out.
SB: So is that the type of thing you do completely on your own?
TH: Not always. I had two… they call them ( Nung?). They’re the Chinese people who
live in Vietnam, and they’re really big guys. They’re like 6’ 2”, 6’ 3”, they’re your size,
and they’re meaty. Sometimes they would go with me. I always knew that they had two
jobs: to protect me with their life, or if they couldn’t do that to kill me. Because then I
couldn’t be captured and used as a propaganda tool. I sometimes went with them.
Once in a while, once in a great while, I had a spotter. Most of the time I was
solo. Yeah, I was solo, just by myself. Sitting in the jungle, all by myself, rain dripping
off my hat. Watching people walk by me all day long: North Vietnamese, regulars… I
mean I can remember one time I sat in a tree above a North Vietnamese army battalion
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base camp and had about 700 North Vietnamese running around underneath me for about
three days… there in this tree. That’s kind of what you do. Special Forces, there’s a lot of
living in holes in the ground.
SB: What’s the communication like, with your superiors or others in your outfit?
TH: That depends. On a regular op, you’ve got a radio, you know you’re talking. On
those kind of operations, there is none. You have a mission and you’re basically on your
own. In those days Air America had a lot of these Pilatus Porters and these fix winged
aircraft that could land basically in their own lanes. I mean they’d fly you out in these
things, put you down on a postage stamp and you’d dump out with just the gear you
needed. Then they left and you were pretty much on your own. You might have to travel
several days or a week to get to a point where you could… you know… sometimes you
had a small radio with you, but for the most part you had a couple of designed pick up
points and a designated time, and if you didn’t get there… you know. There were a
couple of back ups but if you didn’t get there, you were walking home. I’ve known guys
that a month later when everyone thought they were dead, a month later they showed up.
I literally listened at one point to Hanoi Hannah who was the lady… well I don’t
know if you know about World War II and Tokyo Rose, Berlin Betty, and all those. They
have these propaganda radio who would broadcast on the regular radio, you know, the
radio stations. Whatever the Americans would pick up. And say, you know… we
defeated you here, you’re fighting this awful war. In Vietnam they had what they called
Hanoi Hannah and she would broadcast in English and play rock and roll. She was a disc
jockey and then she would spread this propaganda. I remember sitting in the club one
time in ( Belm- bokting?) and she announced the glorious forces of North Vietnam had
killed that notorious war criminal Captain Timothy F. Harper of the United States Army
Special Forces. Because they thought I was dead. They were wrong, but nobody would
talk with me or drink with me for you know, like a month, because I was dead! The
people call it Doc Daneeka. I don’t know if you ever read the Joseph Heller book Catch
.22, but Doc Daneeka was the flight surgeon but he hated to fly so they would put his
name on a manifest and he’d stay on the ground and he’d get his flight pay that way.
Well, the aircraft crashed and even though he was sitting there with everybody,
everybody was just… Oh, Doc’s dead. You know… no I’m not, I’m right here. But they
wouldn’t talk to him because he was dead. Well the novel’s about the insanity of war,
well of course that was kind of the thing, if you got announced killed and you weren’t
really killed, everybody kind of ghost you, you know [ laughs] because you were
supposed to be dead. So it was kind of a thing. It was a little bit superstition and a little
bit just giving people a hard time. We were all crazy.
SB: So when you finished with the extreme covert operations, where did you go from
there? Is that when you finished?
TH: Yeah. One day I was out in the boonies with my yards, those are the mountain yard
people, they tend to war loin clothes and fight with crossbows and arrows… amazing. I
was running around in a loin cloth and these two Army NCO’s came out and said, “ Sir,
it’s time to come home.” I looked at them, and at that point I had to have my Carb 15 out
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of my hand in about a year, a year and a half, and I looked at them and said, “ What if I
don’t want to go home?” And they said, “ You need to come home, sir, one way or the
other.” And what they meant was either come with us or we kill you. And I thought I
could take them both, but I just said, ah, what the heck. I said ok and they said, “ Well,
give us your weapon.” And I said, “ No, that you don’t get. I’ll come with you, but I keep
the weapon until it’s time to check out of this joint. You’re not taking my weapon.” They
started to, and then they thought better of it, and realized that I was coming with them so
why take the chance because they didn’t know if I could take them or not. So they got a
helicopter and two days later I was in Seattle.
SB: And by this time you’d done three tours, is that right?
TH: Something like that, yeah. It was all back to back to back. I think of it as one big
tour. I was just there.
SB: And it was from beginning of ’ 67 to mid to late ’ 69?
TH: Yeah, I came back, oh my, I came back… right at the end of August because I was
just about to turn 23. I was 22 when I came back. I was 19 when I went over, I was an
officer… I was either 19 or 20. I can’t remember… I was 19. Yeah that’s right, I was just
barely 19. I got commissioned early, early in my life. It’s funny, President Hogge, our
stake president, he was commissioned, he was only about three months older than me
when he was commissioned an Army OCS. He was another, quote, “ baby lieutenant” like
I was. We were joking about that one day, so I was nineteen. And I came home, I was
just about to turn 23.
SB: What was your rank when you came home?
TH: I was captain.
SB: I’m interested in how things were when you got home, I want to get back to that in
just a minute. There were a couple of things you mentioned that I’m interested in. You
mentioned being injured several times and I’m wondering when that happens do you
have the option to then leave or do you just kind of get back to work once you’re better?
TH: I had the option after I got hit in the chest. Biggie. I mean, ‘ cause they thought I was
dead. That was when I got reported dead. The medic turned around and his words were,
“ Oh my God, they’ve killed Lieutenant Harper!” Which, you know, didn’t make me feel
real good. And we had a thing in Special Forces, when a guy was going to die, what you
do is… well the first thing he did was, because it was sucking chest wounds, so he put a
pressure dressing on it so I could breathe. And then did what they used to do, when you
thought a guy was going to die, everybody carried their own can of… well there were
two things you carried with you. You carried a can of serum albumin which is a blood
expander, it takes the place of plasma. What it does is it draws the water out of your
body, this is almost like a concentrated plasma. And it expands your blood to make up for
blood loss. And then you always carried your own body bag. Every guy in Special Forces
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in Vietnam, in the back of your rucksack, you would carry your own body bag. It was just
something, it was a Special Forces thing. It was kind of a macabre thing, you know,
carrying this body bag, which was yours, for your body to be put in if you were killed.
Anyway, what we would do, if a guy was going to be… you know, if we knew he
was going to die, you’d stick him up against a tree, slam a morphine I. V. in his leg, you
know, kind of dope the pains, stick a cigarette in his mouth, light it, and then walk away.
Let him die in peace. And they did that to me. I was, like 20 years old, and all of the
sudden I got really angry. And I ripped the serum albumin out of my arm, threw it away,
stood up, grabbed my weapon, looked at my troops and said, “ Rock and roll boys, here
we go.” And off we went and finished the battle. Well, two days later they figured,
maybe he’s not going to die, I was hurting by that point. I had two bullets in my chest,
and it calmed down enough that they could e- vac me out, and they took me out to the
hospital ship, the hope, which was off the coast, and the patched me up. They sent me in
to ( Belm- bokting?) and my C. O. said, “ What do you want to do, Harper?” I said, “ Hey I
don’t feel that bad.” You know, I was 20 years old, you heal fast. “ I’m breathing okay.”
And he says, “ Do you want to go back to work or do you want to go home?” And I said,
“ Send me back to work.” Well, this is when they shipped me down south because that
was the third time I’d been hit. And officially I should have gone home, but I didn’t.
So that’s when I went down to ( Belm- bokting?) and started doing the covert ops.
Which is a little easier on the body than hopping the woods with 120 pounds on your
back. Which is what we did, you know. We’d go out on these ops and sometimes we’d be
out, a month, two months. Eat and live off the jungle. You know, hopping 120 pounds.
Getting ammo re- supplies if you were lucky. Sometimes you’d get in these fire- fights and
you’d think, well I don’t have that much ammo, you’d just squeeze every round off. Boy,
if you didn’t have someone in your sites, you didn’t squeeze a round off. I think the
average they say was 10,000 rounds of ammunition were expended for each kill we got in
Vietnam. It’s surreal. Combat is really a surreal experience. There’s nothing glorious or
dramatic about it. It’s just a bunch of scared kids sticking weapons up half the time over
any cover they’ve got pulling the trigger then pulling their hands down so their hands
don’t get shot. There’s not a lot of cold bloodedness about it, except for professionals like
me, who would get in a good position, pick out a target, destroy the target, find another
target. That’s what I would do. I would wait there until I found somebody. I’d squeeze
off a round, take’em down, and look around for somebody else, squeeze off a round. And
in Special Forces you found that a lot because everyone was a professional. So I went
back on my own hook.
SB: I’ve heard you say before, the country changed while you were gone…
TH: America.
SB: Yeah.
TH: Oh, did it ever.
SB: Did you notice that in Vietnam? Did you know what to expect going home?
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TH: I kind of heard things about it, like we heard that Jane Fonda went to Hanoi, and
everybody laughed and said ok. And that Joan Baez was giving concerts. Of course we
were all in love with Joanie anyway because she was… well still is beautiful. She had “ the
voice,” so it was ok.
For most of us we didn’t care. “ Wow, I wonder why she was doing that. Oh well.
Hey did you hear the latest album. Wow.” And then this guy Jimmy Hendrix started
playing guitar, we loved that. But most of us, we were into the Doors, man. Because, you
know, “ The killer awoke before dawn, he put his buts on.” We were all nuts. We were
killers, that was what we did for a living. We killed people and we were really crazy. We
were just stone cold, because we had to be. I’ve often believed that the whole time I was
in Vietnam I was utterly insane, and that’s the only way I maintained my sanity. It was by
going and saying, “ You have to let yourself go insane in war, to stay sane.” Because
otherwise, there’s no cushion for the emotions. The best way to describe war is sustained
horror. That’s what it is. And it’s beyond human comprehension. The awful, the horror of
war. And so in order to survive it, one has to just let go of any semblance of civility,
sanity, humanity, and just basically become one of two things: either an animal, or a
machine. The machine is: recognize the target, eliminate the threat. Recognize the threat,
eliminate the threat. You know what I mean? And that’s kind of how I was.
There was a period of time when my best friend, a dear kid from OCS that was a
classmate of mine, died in my arms. And then I went a little on the animal side. I really
got to enjoy it for a little while. I’d go out by myself at night with just a knife and come
back with an ear. Stuff like that. I was crazy because they killed my friend and I just
turned into an animal… but I got over that. I never really, and I didn’t know that many
people that did, but I never really enjoyed it. Some people did, and often we took care of
them ourselves. We’d just send them home in a bag because they were just too dangerous
to have around, ‘ cause they just really loved it. And they were dangerous because of it.
SB: What was the morale like for the most part?
TH: Again, I was in Special Forces. We were somewhat disgusted, only because a couple
of things happened. When Johnson decided not to run, and Nixon got elected, you have to
understand about Army Special Forces: number one, nowadays they make a big deal out
of special ops people, but in my day they hated us, the regular Army types hated us.
Because we were different and we thought were special. I mean we used to have on the
signs to our camps USSF: United States Special Forces, and not United States Army
Special Forces which is what we actually were. We were Special Forces. We had this
beret. The Army hated the fact that we had this beret. And the person that gave us the
beret was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy followed that tradition. Now, they
murdered both the Kennedy boys, so here comes Richard Milhous Nixon. He saw us as
Kennedy’s troops. He hated us with a passion, and so our mission changed. We started
operating more like regular troops, which is not what we were trained for, which is not
what special forces was designed to do.
Everybody thinks Special Forces is like a commando, it’s not. Special Forces is
supposed to be a group, a small group, of highly intelligent, highly trained,
professionals… who go in, and do actually what the Viet Cong did. We would go in and
start revolutions. You create political and economic chaos. You destroy systems. You
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destroy countries from within. It’s all this covert stuff. You sit in holes and watch
sometimes. You’re not a bunch of commandos, that’s the Navy Seals. That’s their job.
They go in and do the commando stuff, and go ra ra ra. One of the mottos of Special
Forces was that sometimes it’s best to run away and live to fight another day. The other
was think dirty. We were the dirty tricks people. We did the nasty stuff. We did what they
used to call the hard thing. The thing nobody else wanted to do, that’s what we did. They
called us snake eaters because literally we can eat snakes. I don’t know how to describe
it, it’s a very difficult thing.
Then they started putting us into this role where we were lean, regular troops, and
regular battles, and it’s like, this isn’t what we do. We run around the countryside where
nobody can hear us, and nobody can see us, and we take people out and we pinpoint
locations, and send the regular troops in, in strength to take care of those locations. A
successful Special Forces op, you really don’t even get into combat because nobody
know that you’re there. You’re in and you’re out and nobody even knows. There’s no
trace that you’ve ever been there. Having said that, we did some of that stuff, and the
covert stuff… I mean when you pop somebody they know that you’ve been there, but for
the most part, the covert stuff… there were a lot of times I pulled operations and nobody
ever knew that I was there. I’d have three of four people, we’d pull an op, we’d do what
we had to do, and we’d be out. All the sudden something would cave in on them and
they’d wonder how’d that happen. That was a really successful op. And somebody would
disappear and what, did a tiger eat them or something?
So that was different, but Nixon hated us, he put Creighton Abrams in, they got
rid of Westmoreland, put Creighton Abrams in, he hated us, so things changed. So morale
got a little flaky there, but for the most part, there was never a question of morale in my
unit because we were Special Forces, we were professional soldiers. This is what we did.
This was our life’s work. It was. That’s what we did. And we did it, you know, well.
SB: You mentioned earlier about this domino effect, and I know you had some
Vietnamese that you were training, did they see the war in the same way? Did they see it
as an extension of the Cold War or did they see it as a civil war?
TH: Well, ok. One has to realize the Vietnamese are perhaps the most bellicose people on
earth. They’ve been at war for roughly two thousand years when we got there. There’s a
good reason they are some of the best jungle fighters in the world, because they’ve been
doing it for thousands of years. Everybody wants them. It’s the rice bowl of Asia. The
Chinese have tried to invade them four times over the last two thousand years, well, over
the last four thousand years… and they’ve kicked the Chinese’ butts every time. The
French tried to take them over, managed to for a couple of hundred years, but then they
eventually kicked the French butts. The Japanese invaded in World War II, they kicked
the Japanese butts. They kicked our butts. I mean, they’re unbelievably good fighters, and
they’ve been doing it forever. They saw it as… just the way it is.
They didn’t necessarily want us there, they do now, because they realized after 25
years of the Russians, “ who are these guys,” you know, “ get out of here. Give us the
Americans back. At least they brought money.” When I went back to Vietnam in the
‘ 90s, they used to all say that. “ Thank goodness you guys are back. [ Laughs] We missed
you, we missed you. I know we kicked you out, but we missed you. ‘ Cause compared to
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the Russians, you guys are great, come on.” I’m serious. They have nothing if not a good
sense of humor. They are very funny people. Let me put it to you this way, the American
joke about the South Vietnamese Army was that after the war, we were all going to
become arms dealers, ‘ cause we could sell all these M- 14s and M- 16s that the
Vietnamese army had used, and you could sell them saying they’ve never been fired and
only dropped once. The joke was, when you got into the… there was a term that begins
with “ S” that we used…
SB: Right.
TH: They dropped their weapons and took off. Now, the mountain yards were not that
way, the Mike force troops were not that way, but most of the South Vietnamese were
that way. They didn’t want this war. They could have cared less whether they were
communist or not communist. There were believers of course who did. Who hated the
communists, but for the most part, the people in the villages, they didn’t care. They were
going to live the way they had lived for thousands of years anyway. It didn’t matter to
them who was in charge. And they’re still that way. They still live the same way.
They’ve got their village chief, now he’s a commissar, ok. It’s a name. They still live the
same way they’ve always lived. Except nobody’s blowing their country up at this point.
SB: Do you think the U. S. understood that background going into it, or was that
something that had to be learned?
TH: It was something that had to be learned. It was a classic case of us believing our own
hype. People really believed the domino theory. People really believed in stopping
communism. And to this day there is still a point to that. Looking back in retrospect, we
had to make stands. But what it boils down to is wars like Afghanistan, Vietnam, some of
the stuff that happened in Borneo, some of the other conflicts around the globe, the quote
unquote “ small wars,” it was really the U. S. and Russia at war. We couldn’t afford to be
at war with two big countries. We couldn’t. We were too big and it would escalate too
quickly. The next thing you know somebody’s pushing buttons and there’s a little cinder
going around the sun. So the two countries found ways to fight these smaller conflicts
that they could control. Where the stakes weren’t, you know, the whole nine yards. We
could bloody our troops, and keep a combat ready force of experienced combat soldiers,
and the Russians did the same thing in Afghanistan. I mean, they had Russian advisors
over there, they had Russians fighting us. You’d cap the MIG pilots, they’d take a couple
rounds and all the sudden they’d start screaming in Russian. They were Russians. And
that’s what it was all about, was the Russians were fighting the Americans and the
Americans were fighting the Russians. That’s what these little conflicts were about, but
they were controllable. So we could have this war that we were having with each other,
without having the big war that meant we had to go ballistic and blow the whole world
up. It was the safe way, if you will, to fight a war against each other. So there was a lot of
that, you know, and there was also a lot of… there were people who were true believers.
Who really believed that if Vietnam fell then Laos, Cambodia, and of course some of
those countries did for a while, the Philippines, you know… bingo, bingo, bingo.
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SB: You had mentioned this and I wanted to come back to it, when you came home how
did you adjust from being in a loin cloth in the jungle to two days later being in Seattle?
TH: When I got off the airplane in Seattle, I realized why they had done such a thorough
weapons check. On those days you got off the airplane on the tarmac. It was really funny,
I came in from the field, and that evening, I was fresh out of a fire- tight, and that evening
I’m taking a shower at Cam Ranh, which is Cam Ranh Bay which is a real back area,
where you go back to the states, and there was a rocket attack. Well the rockets were
hitting almost a kilometer, well maybe not quite that far, maybe a quarter of a kilometer,
half of a kilometer away from me. Everybody’s diving for bunkers and this other boony
rat and I, a boony rat is the people that were actually out in the woods… I don’t know if
you know this but the ratio in Vietnam was about 14 to 1. For every one of us that was a
boony rat, there were 14 people in the rear areas. Every Vietnam Vet you meet nowadays
was in combat, but that’s actually not true. 1 in 14 was and we were called boony rats and
they really got uncomfortable when we were around. I mean we had hair in our teeth, we
were crazed. Anyway, this other boony rat and I, we just stayed in the shower taking our
shower, heck shrapnel wasn’t even quite reaching us. A couple of pieces would sink
through the shower every now and again, but we just stayed in the shower! Got done and
the next morning got up and got on an airplane. Landed in Seattle, got off the airplane, hit
the tarmac and there were all these people behind this gate screaming at us.
This is early September 1969. All these people with long hair screaming at us.
The first thing that those of us that were field people did, we looked for our weapons.
Recognize the threat, eliminate the treat. With weapons we would have killed, well, I
would have. I know I would have. I was looking for my weapon. I was going to kill them.
Who are these clowns? What are they going to do? Do they have weapons? You know,
I’m looking at the little kids thinking, does he have a hand grenade? It’s not unusual for
me to see an eight year old come running at us with a hand grenade in each hand. So what
did you was you blew the eight year old’s head off before he got to you. It’s that simple.
You just did it, you didn’t think about it. You just did it. So we get off and people are
spitting at us and calling us baby killers, yada yada yada. I remember all I did was, I was
still in jungle fatigues, and of course you have to carry your class A’s with you, I got off
the airplane, walked into the terminal, went into the restroom, put my class A uniform on,
threw my jungle fatigues in a bag, went out, there was another aircraft that was taking
me, my parents were at their Florida house, so I was flying to Florida, and flew there.
I had thirty days leave. Basically what I did was I stayed in my room, in my old
room at my parents house, for thirty days, except when I would get on my motorcycle,
cause I did two things: I had an account, because through the armed services you could
buy a car overseas, and have it shipped to the states for free. Opel at the time had just
come out with their GT, and they had one here in the states but they had the European
version which was turbo- charged and really hot, it was this hot little sports car, kind of
looked like a small sting ray, it had this five cylinder super- charged engine, it was hot
stuff. So I had bought one of those, cash, and had it shipped over and it was waiting for
me, and then I bought a Honda 750. So I remember I would stay in my room, listening to,
the Beach Boys had just come out with “ Good Vibrations,” I believe, Beatles had just
come out with “ Rubber Soul”… no I think “ Sergeant Pepper’s,” and a lot of Jimmy
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Hendrix, and did a lot of peyote and acid. And rode my motorcycle stoned on peyote and
acid, mescaline and acid, at like 140 miles an hour screaming at the top of my lungs in
the middle of the night. I did that basically for thirty days. Then it was time for me to
come to Fort Hood, Texas. I’d been assigned as an infantry company commander there. I
had my car driven out there, I got on my motorcycle and rode the motorcycle to Texas
and reported to my duty station and went back to work as an Army infantry company
commander. Fort Hood, Texas.
I was just totally… I mean, I didn’t deal with it. I hid, until I could get back into
the womb, which was the Army. Nobody wanted to hear about Vietnam. Nobody wanted
to talk to me and I didn’t want to talk to anybody else. I didn’t want to talk to anybody
else. The only person I could deal with was my father because he would leave me alone.
He looked me dead in the eye and said, “ I know.” And that was all he said. Then he just
left me alone, because he did, I don’t know how many years of World War II, in combat,
and he knew that I didn’t have anything to say to human beings at all. So I went off to
Fort Hood and was a company commander there for… quite a while. But I was back
amongst my people, the Army.
SB: This makes me remember that you’ve told me before in regards to the 153 graduates
of officer candidate school. Could you tell what happened to them? You were one of
them of course.
TH: Yep. 131 of them were killed in Vietnam. Single most decimated class in the history
of officer candidate school, including World War II, and Korea. We lost 131 out of 153.
To the best of my knowledge and belief, today I am one of two survivors of my class. A
whole bunch of them committed suicide, some of them died from drugs and alcohol, a
bunch from cancer: Agent Orange and stuff.
SB: What do you think has saved you from the suicide, from the drugs, from the alcohol?
TH: From the suicide, I think I can honestly say that never through my incompetence did
I get one of my men killed. If I had, I would have eaten a gun a lot of years ago. In fact,
in 1981… it was really weird. 1981, I took a 12- gauge shotgun, put it in my mouth,
loaded it with a shell that I had loaded, and I loaded good shells, and pulled the trigger
and it didn’t fire. I pulled the trigger, and the shell misfired. Only shell I’ve ever had that
misfired. And that’s when I quite drinking and doing cocaine, and I haven’t since. I went
to a shrink and told her, “ I keep wanting to kill myself.” She said, “ here are some,” and
she called them escape patches. And since then, I mean I’ve had suicidal thoughts but
I’ve known since then I wouldn’t act on it. The alcohol and stuff… it’s really weird.
The drugs, when Stephie was young, her mother and I used to like to do cocaine
together, of course this I long before I joined the church, this is thirty years ago almost,
and one day it caused a family problem and I took it all and flushed it down the toilet and
never looked at it since. It wasn’t worth my family.
The alcohol… I never liked drinking. I just didn’t like it. And I was the type of
person, I’d stay away from it for a long time, then in a social situation I’d drink and I’d
get sick and I hated it. So I quite drinking and I haven’t, you know… years and years and
years and years ago. I didn’t really start coming out of the whole Vietnam thing until
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1990 or so…’ 89. A buddy of mine got me involved in a Vietnam Vets group and we
worked through some issues. I still have problems with it. I still have PTSD, I’ve been
diagnosed with a pretty severe case of it. Your mother’s dealt with it a few times. I’ve got
it pretty much under control. I’ve done a lot of work on that. It’s a… it’s a deal. It’s part
of the price for all the fun I had.
SB: It’s kind of a funny time with all the media and things like that. Have you ever seen
anything that actually depicted what happened over there?
TH: There was a scene in the movie Platoon, in the opening of it, that freaked me out
because you can’t see. Stone was a boony rat. He takes the camera and just pushes it
through the jungle and you can’t see your hand in front of your face because you’ve just
got all this green in front of you. There’s another scene in that movie where you just pick
up a tiny bit of movement. In those things, it may be a little accurate.
You know, people talk about the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan and it’s
very real as far as the sounds go, but the two things that are missing that they can’t ever
reproduce is: the feel of the air pressure as the bullets are going by you. You don’t just
hear a crack, pop, zing. When a bullet is fired in your direction, you hear three sounds.
Crack, pop, zing. The crack is the bullet breaking the sound barrier. The pop is the
weapon going off, you hear that second. And the zing is the bullet going by you. But
there’s also air pressure from that hunk of metal going through the air. It has a sonic wave
because it’s going supersonic and you actually feel the pressure of the bullet going by
you. The other thing that they can’t reproduce is violent death had this very bright,
coppery smell. Death has a smell and when you’ve lived with that smell day in and day
out, you know it. I mean, there are certain things that I will always know.
I will always know that coppery smell that says sudden death has happened here. I
will always know the sound of an AK- 47. I mean that weapon has a very distinctive
sound and I will always remember. I could recognize and AK- 47 if I’m sound asleep and
it’s a mile away. I mean I will wake up to that sound. And the sound of a two- bladed
rotor system, like the Hueys had. The two- bladed rotor systems on helicopters have a
very, very distinct sound. There’s a pop pop pop that other rotor systems don’t have. And
those are kind of the sounds of Vietnam. For the boony rats the AK- 47 and the Bell
Huey. And that smell, so it’s kind of a very different kind of thing. And nobody could
reproduce that.
They also can’t reproduce the way you’re in it. You’re at risk. You could die at
any moment. And no matter how engaged one is, in the action that’s always in the back
of your head. You’re just ready. Today’s a good day to die. You’re just always ready for
death. Everyday, because it’s something you live with. They could never reproduce what
it’s like to be so bone weary, I mean I cannot describe the weariness of combat. That’s
why it’s a young man’s game. How heavy your arms are. I mean you wake up aching and
weary, to throw that 120 rucksack on your back, lock and load and head down the trail
knowing that they are going to try to kill you. You can’t replicate that. So I don’t think
there can ever be an honest depiction of war. Only because it is in and of itself unique.
Combat. Not war.
A buddy of mine who was a classmate of mine in OCS, he got one of these cushy
jobs in the rear area, and he used to say, you know the old expression war is hell, he used
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to say, “ War isn’t hell. War’s great. Combat’s hell. Which is why I won’t go there.” And
it’s true. He was in the black market and he made, oh, hundreds of thousands of dollars
when he was in Vietnam. Selling stuff. He was kind of like a Milo Mindernbinder, again
character from Catch. 22. He had all these little side businesses. He was selling drugs and
he was selling opium, and he was selling currency, and he was stealing supplies from the
Army and selling them. He got rich over there. Living in an air- conditioned hootch and
sitting in an air- conditioned office. They ran a supply depot. Never heard a shot fired in
anger in his whole time in Vietnam. That was his war. You know, war was great for him.
For me it was crawling in the mud picking leaches off my body. Eating weeds in the
jungle. Sticking my finger in what was left of some guy’s throat to pinch off his blood
vessel so he didn’t bleed to death before we could get him into ( Da Nang?). I had a
different war than him.
To this day, I can’t walk outside without looking at the tree line to see where the
firing positions are. Where they are. I’ll carry that to my grave. Today is still a good day
to die. I’ll always be a soldier.