WEBVTT

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- Well, my father was military,

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and when I graduated from high school,

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I decided that I didn't wanna go to college

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because I wasn't ready for college,

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so I decided to go into the Air Force.

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Like all young airmen, I didn't know what was going on.

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When I graduated from basic training,

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I came out with two stripes.

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I wanted to go to the Air Rescue Service,

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and of course at the time I joined,

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the Air Rescue Service didn't need anybody,

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so they put me in the next best thing,

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what they thought was the next best thing,

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which, at the time, was Personal Equipment,

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so I started out doing that, and then Air Force decided

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that we needed to have a separate career field,

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so they basically said okay,

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we're gonna pull you out of supply,

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and we're gonna make your career field

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the Personal Equipment career field,

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and that's where you are gonna be,

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and you will be permanently assigned to a fighter squad,

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and you will no longer be in supply.

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My first deployment was actually to Vahdati, Iran

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on Exercise Delaware, and that was an eye-opener for me

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because we were sitting in an area

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where 20 miles from us was the Russian border

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and the Russian Army and Air Force were right there,

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prepared to jump on us if they wanted to.

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Shortly after that, actually in November of 1964,

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President Lyndon Johnson came on the radio,

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on television one night, and he said,

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ladies and gentlemen, he said,

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we're actually introducing the first combat troops

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to Vietnam.

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Well, five hours later, were down in the hangar

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processing for deployment.

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We worked basically 24 hours a day, seven days a week

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for the first six months that we were deployed to Vietnam.

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I lost pilots.

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I know that some of them went down and were recovered,

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and I know two of 'em were shot down

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and were never recovered.

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They're still listed as KIAs.

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As people found out later on during the war,

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you never could tell who your friends were

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or who the enemy was.

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It's a choice between us and them,

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and we decided that it was us instead of them.

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And then we came home, and it was whole different world

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back here 'cause we knew where we were,

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what we were gonna do.

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Right after I retired, I spent 10 years

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working for the American Red Cross at Moody.

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I was the Red Cross Station Manager for 10 years.

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I've been involved with a lot of programs downtown,

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in the veteran's programs downtown,

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and when I first started workin' for the Red Cross,

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my boss worked over at Fort Stewart under the Army,

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and she said to me one day, she said,

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you got all this experience being a veteran

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and being in Vietnam, and we have a lot of Vietnam veterans

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that are having problems with PTSD,

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and you seem to not have a problem.

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And I said no, that's not true.

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I do have a problem with PTSD,

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but I have a very good support group.

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I have a wife that knows me and has been there for me,

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so I've been able to control my PTSD,

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but I'm also willing to sit down,

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and I have sat down and talked to other veterans,

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so we've come to a spot where we can talk to each other

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and work things out, and try to help each other get through

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what the hard times are or what the hard parts are.

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50 years later after Vietnam, I'm still serving,

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even as a veteran, we still serve one way or the other.

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We might not be active, but a lot of veterans

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are still serving today.