Bethany+and+Leila

Narrative for Mr. William Smith Interviewed by: Bethany Beard and Leila Omar 3/31/11

Mr. William Leonard Smith was born on Thursday, October 7, 1937 in Providence, Rhode Island. His parents sent him to school early, so he was the smallest, weakest, most unathletic kid in his class. He was the kid that the bullies had picked on during school. All the way through grade school, he would be picked on and teased and taunted until he finally joined the Marines. It had not always been a dream of his to be in the Marines. In fact, he had joined the Marines in order to learn how to fight so he wouldn’t be picked on anymore; it must have worked, because he hadn’t been picked on since 1958, when he was 21 years old. No other members of his family had served in Vietnam, but his Uncle Albert Williams served in the South Pacific in World War II, and his cousin Ray Leighton served in the Korean War. His parents were both worried and proud of their son. Being their eldest son, his parents worried about how he would fare while serving. They were also proud of him, though. Mr. Smith put his life on the line for his country voluntarily, which isn’t what most of the “ideal” Christians were doing at the time. Both of his siblings, however, were basically the opposite of their parents. While his parents were both worried and proud, his siblings thought that their older brother was the “bad guy.” Both of his siblings had gone to school in the 1960’s, where they had been taught that war was extremely bad, and that people who fought in the war were not good and not spiritual. Therefore, they weren’t proud of their older brother, or happy when he’d gone off to fight. Adjusting to military life hadn’t been a struggle for Mr. Smith. He’d made the decision to go, and once that decision was made, he had decided to obey any and all people superior to him. Once he had proved that, everyone got along fine with him. When the superiors said, “Do it,” He said, “I’ll try hard, sir.” Therefore, Mr. Smith had obeyed his superiors, and his camp and training all went well. When he started his training, however, it was not an easy life. It was tough and demanding. There had been 78 men that started in Marine Corps boot camp, but only 43 graduated, including him. In Army Officer School there had been 170 men starting, and about 99 made it through, again including him. During training he was taught how to shoot, how to take care of and maintain equipment, how to lay mines and booby traps, and how to find his way around using a map and a compass. His journey to Vietnam was very long; it was about 9,000 miles across the ocean from California to his destination in Vietnam. The airplane stopped in Hawaii to refuel. Then their trip continued, and they flew across the Philippines. Although he was in some very terrifying situations, his decisions in battle were never life-changing. He had made all of the important decisions before leaving for battle. He’d put his faith in Christ as his savior, and became an adopted child of God. He believed that everything happened for God’s reason, and that anything that God didn’t want to happen to him could not happen. He also believed that God would protect him, unless it was God’s will for him to be hurt. While in Vietnam, Mr. Smith met and became very good friends with people in the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He would also look up missionaries in the area he was in at the time. When he transferred out of the regular army and into Special Forces, he worked with mostly Vietnamese citizens. He befriended many of them and met their families. Whenever soldiers were killed, or there was any destruction that he witnessed, there would be two things that popped into his mind. One, he would try to get the injured soldier to safety before more damage could be done. The other thing would be to try and get the enemy that had shot his fellow soldier before he could injure anybody else. Living conditions during the Vietnam were not pleasant. During the rainy season, which was April to October, it rained every day. Even when it wasn’t raining, it was extremely humid. When he would walk through a stream, he would get to the other side and squeeze as much water from his pants as he would sweat from his shirt. During the dry season, which was October to April, it was still humid, and hot, and he would “sweat like a pig”. After walking through water, he would stop to wring out water and pull three-four inch leeches off of his clothes and skin. Mr. Smith was a Scout Platoon Leader. He was in charge of a platoon that had 18 men. His job was basically to find “something” and tell the rest of the battalion to come help him fight. He sums his job up into “seeing something,” preferably before it sees him. The Northern Communists sent several thousand Southern-born but Communist Vietnamese back to the South after the 1954 division of South Vietnam to try and overthrow the South Vietnamese government so the Communists wouldn’t have to fight for the area. The RVN Counteroffensive was when the RVN (Republic of South Vietnam) tried to hunt down and destroy the communist terrorists. Whenever the Communists failed to successfully complete a mission, the North Vietnamese would send down more help to “raise the stakes again”, and the South Vietnamese would try to hammer them down. Again, his job was to try and help find where the bad guys were located, and whisper, “Hey I got something,” and then Americans and/or South Vietnamese would come help him battle it out. The Allied Intelligence, American and South Vietnamese found 6,000 - 8,000 North Vietnamese soldiers at a place called Dak To. The “bad guys” could escape into Cambodia, which was only about 6 to 8 miles away, but the American and South Vietnamese soldiers were forbidden to chase them there. They did, though, catch them and stomped them at one point, but the American news media made it look like the American soldiers were losing. The news had only showed the dead and wounded Americans, to make it appear that the Americans had been defeated. Unfortunately, there was no internet or texting or any way to easily communicate with families while overseas during the Vietnam War, so he kept in touch by writing letters when he could. Also, to Mr. Smith, there was no such thing as good luck; he believed God would keep him safe from anything that wasn’t supposed to happen to him. There was no charm that he carried around with him for luck. Mr. Smith had not dreamed to be a soldier all his life. Even though he’d had an honorable discharge, he chose to reenlist because it was his opinion that, when the country goes to war, that the single, able-bodied Christian men should volunteer in bunches. Since God had loved them enough to let His own Son die for them, He knows what’s good for them and He is strong enough to make sure that they only get what’s meant for them. Christians get killed and wounded, and even LTC Smith got beat up some, but Mr. Smith knew that nothing could happen that God didn’t want, which will eventually be for Mr. Smith’s ultimate good. In addition, President Johnson’s involvement in Phase III of the RVN Counteroffensive was that he didn’t really have the will to win the war. That’s what kept the Americans from helping the South Vietnamese from winning the war; they didn’t have a reason to win. When Johnson announced on not winning the war, the North Vietnamese were not affected, which led to the deaths of a lot of Americans for no reason. Being a Special Forces Captain had been a dream of Mr. Smith’s ever since he’d read Outpost of Freedom by Roger Donlon. Reading this book had made Mr. Smith join the army the second time he enlisted instead of the Marine Corps, because the Special Forces was part of the army. A regular A-team is supposed to have one captain, one lieutenant, and ten of the finest sergeants in the army. The one that Mr. Smith took over already had two lieutenants, and he was the captain, which made three officers, and only eight enlisted men. Some of the eight weren’t even sergeants yet because enough people had been lost that they were being replaced with people who hadn’t had that much training. His job had been to coordinate with the Vietnamese Special Forces captain, run patrols and ambushes and stuff like that in the 93 square mile hunting area that they had to make it a miserable experience for the bad guys whenever they trespassed into it. Mr. Smith’s most memorable experience while in Vietnam was being able to lead five Southern Vietnamese soldiers to faith in Christ. He found that a lot more fun then putting about 50 Northern Vietnamese on the ground. When the South Vietnamese had to surrender, his camp was still holding out, so he had planted a church there. Also, in the 26 months Mr. Smith was in Vietnam, the Protestant-Christian percentage of the free Vietnamese population had gone from two and a half percent to about four percent. The few churches that were there were ran by old men, crippled men, and women because everyone else was in the army. When a village was taken over by Northern Communists, the first people they would try to kill was any government official, and any Christian clergymen they could find. The free Southern Vietnamese had a lot of guts to continue to spread their faith, despite deadly persecution. Also, Mr. Smith believed that the Vietnam War was caused by Communist determination to rule the world. When the Viets, Laotians, and Khmer Rouge had driven off the French in 1956, the Communists went to North Vietnam and grabbed that, while Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam became independent countries. According to Mr. Smith, several thousand southern communists in the anti-French Freedom Fighters went North with the other Communists, where they were trained, equipped, and then were sent back South to start over again. Mr. Smith had been fighting two armies: the Viet Cong, which were the Communist citizens of South Vietnam, and the NVA, the North Vietnam Army. The French had re-created the South Vietnamese Army in 1954, but was only good for fighting in conventional war. The tanks and trucks did not work well if they were fighting in swamps and jungles, but America sent advisors to help enable them to fight. The South Vietnamese army did well enough then to prevent the Viet Cong from taking over South Vietnam. Whenever the Viet Cong failed, the Communist North would send down more supplies and tools and soldiers to replace the ones that Mr. Smith and the rest had obliterated. The North would replace the lost equipment two or three or four for every one piece that was gone, which was why the war kept swelling up and getting bigger. On July 8 1969, William Smith was called out of the woods, and told he was being sent home. He spent the next day on an airplane on another over-the-ocean flight. He landed in Seattle after dark, and he spent the night on a bus to St. Louis, Washington. The next day he was given a steak breakfast, and immediately handed a plane ticket and thrown back into society only 40 hours after being called out of the woods. When William Smith was seven years old, his uncle returning from World War II was looked at like a hero, and everyone gave him polite answers. However, when Mr. Smith came back from battle, he was treated like he was the bad guy. There were long-haired American hippies chanting “Ho ho ho Chi Minh; the NVA is gonna win!”, “Hey hey Green Beret how many kids you kill today?” and other nasty words were thrown at them as they walked through the terminal. After voluntarily putting his own skin on the line to fight for his country, and seeing how his uncle had been treated when his uncle had returned, this reception was quite a shock for him. Some people watching the arrival of the veterans actually brought guns and pistols. One of Mr. Smith’s sergeants, who was out nearly 370 days in Vietnam without a scratch, ended up with a bullet in the right shoulder and left thigh while he was returning home. For self-defense, Mr. Smith had naturally brought a loaded and cocked gun that he kept hidden in case anybody tried to harm him. Overall, the return was not quite how he’d expected it to be. For a few years after the war, LTC Smith kept in touch with a few friends from the war by writing back and forth. After awhile, though, they lost touch. It was the curse of the war. Mr. Smith became closer than brothers with some of his fellow soldiers, but then they are separated and never heard from again. Today, there are several organizations dealing with veterans and the wars they were in and/or their disabilities. LTC Smith is a member of Disabled American Veterans, and the Special Forces Association. All of the other organizations basically deal with bars, and Mr. Smith does not drink. Of greater importance, Mr. Smith has many injuries from the war. The Veteran’s Administration Hospital rates him at 80% disabled with an outcome of 100% unemployability. Mr. Smith also spent 105 straight days in a hospital. He cannot straighten his left elbow, and his short-term memory is destroyed. He has a hard time remembering people’s names even after knowing them for a long period of time. He also has a skull fracture and a brain injury, plus a lot of broken bones. During the war, Mr. Smith received many honors. He received the South Vietnam service ribbon with six battle stars, which is roughly for half of the war. He also received the Vietnam Campaign Ribbon with 1967-1967 on it, which were the years that he was in Vietnam. In addition to those, he received the South Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry more than once. Readjusting to civilian life was hard for Mr. Smith. When he left for the war his brother and sister thought he was wonderful. When he came back he was evil and bad and wicked for joining the army. He was a criminal. He is virtually unemployable, unfortunately. He never made $10 an hour in his life outside of the army. He finally retired in 2002. When the war had officially ended, Mr. Smith was in South Carolina, driving home from work. He had the 5 o’clock news on his car radio, and it announced that President Duong Van Minh had surrendered the remains of South Vietnamese to the North. All of the sweat and pain and misery. All of the dread that came with killing other people, everything that Mr. Smith had voluntarily put on the line to save innocent people went down the tube. According to him, it was thrown away by “400 political enemies of freedom,” or the Congress of the United States. It was the majority of them that voted to stop funding South Vietnam. In the 1972 Paris Peace Accord, we had promised to replace South Vietnamese fuel, ammunition, wrecked vehicles, planes, and whatever else, on a one-to-one basis, and the Russians and Chinese would do the same thing for the Communists. However, the Communists had their stuff replaced 3 or 4 for every one that was wrecked. We kept it one replacement for every two wrecked for a while, but then cut all help to Vietnam off. From the summer of ‘72 through ‘74, Mr. Smith says, South Vietnam held on alone. However, when the U.S. Congress cut off all fuel and ammunition, they went under. Tanks and airplanes won’t move without fuel, and guns are pretty much useless without ammo, so after 5 months of ‘75, South Vietnam went under. Overall, serving in the Vietnam War negatively affected Mr. Smith’s civilian life because he was not praised for his service, and he could not get a full time job afterwards. He is very proud that he went, though. He’d save anybody’s life, whether he knew them or not. And if he’d have the chance to go again he would in a heartbeat. Thank you, Mr. Smith, for your time and service during the Vietnam War.

Transcript

Beard: This is Lieutenant Colonel William L. Smith. He was born on Thursday 7 October 1937. He served three years as an enlisted Marine on active duty and three more years in Marine reserve. His military obligation ended on December 2 1963. Even though he could not be drafted, he chose to volunteer to serve again in the Vietnam War of 1962 to 1975. In the army, he rose to Sergeant and then was commissioned as an officer on May 10 1966. He was stationed in Southeast Asia from May 10 1967 to July 9 1969. A total of 26 months of war. He finally retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. Our names are Bethany Beard and Leila Omar. Lieutenant Colonel Smith is a friend of mine, and we attend the same church. We are interviewing him on Monday February 21, 2011 for the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.

Beard: So, Mr. Smith, where were you born?

Smith: Where was I born? A long time ago. Providence Rhode Island, USA. My mother went to training to be a nurse at that hospital, and she went there to have me. And it worked, I’m here.

Omar: What was life like before you entered the service?

Smith: Not as good as it might be. My folks sent me to school early, and that meant that I was, all the way through grade school, from first to twelfth, I was the youngest, smallest, weakest, unathleticest, and so forthest. In my peer group, I was the one the bullies picked on. Until I tried to kill one, unfortunately, my zeal exceeded my knowledge, and I did not succeed. But he got the hint.

Beard: Was it always a dream of yours to be a Marine?

Smith: No, actually, I joined the Marines to learn how to fight, so people would stop picking on me, seemed like the whole world was bigger than me. Well I guess it worked, I haven’t been physically picked on since 1958.

Omar: Did any other members of your family serve in the Vietnam War?

Smith: Not in Vietnam, no. My Uncle Albert Williams served in the South Pacific in World War II. My cousin Ray Leighton served in North Korea, but I’m the only one who fought in Vietnam.

Beard: How did your family react to your putting your life at risk after your military obligation was already over?

Smith: You cotton-picking idiot, what are you doing? No. Dad was ferociously proud of me. Both Dad and Mom worried a lot, after all I was their senior son, I’m the one they trained on, and used me for practice for raising the other two. My sister and brother, unfortunately, were products of the school system of the 1960’s. They were taught by their teachers that the war is bad and the people who fight are not spiritual and not good, so they weren’t mentally enthused.

Omar: Was it hard to adjust to military life?

Smith: No, not really. Once I made the decision to go, I made the decision to obey my superiors. Once that was settled, we got along fine. They said, “do it.” I said, “I’ll try hard, sir.” It all went well.

Beard: Can you describe your training?

Smith: To ladies? No. Yes, it was tough and demanding; 78 of us started together in Marine Corps Boot Camp, and only 43 of us graduated. I was one of them. In army officer school, 170 of us started, and an even 99 made it, again, 98 and me. It was basically tough. It was not a vacation.

Omar: What kind of skills were you taught?

Smith: Teamwork and obedience to orders, naturally. How to shoot, how to take care of and maintain equipment, how to lay mines and booby traps, which was fun as long as you’re using blanks? Map and compass work, how to find your way around with just a map and a compass, which is not bad in daylight, but it’s a real bummer in the dark, especially when you step on funny looking things.

Beard: What was the journey to Vietnam like?

Smith: Like any other journey actually. It was just a long airline flight, takes a long way to get from California to, about 9,000 miles across the ocean. We stopped to refuel at Hawaii, and flew over the Philippines, but that’s the closest I came to seeing them on the way over.

Omar: Did you ever have to make any life-changing decisions in battle?

Smith: No, I’d made the decisions that mattered before I went. I enlisted in the Marines when I was twenty, and enlisted in the army when I was twenty-seven, and when I was fifteen or sixteen, I put my faith in Christ as my savior, which made me an adopted child of God Almighty, and since God loved me enough to let his only son die for me, that’s more love than I have for anybody else. I might die for another person, but I’m hanged if I let my son die for one, especially an enemy. And, since he’s also all powerful, He can block anything that would otherwise happen to me that’s not for my ultimate good.

Beard: Did you meet any interesting people in Vietnam? Did you make any friends?

Smith: Yes to both; I met mostly Americans. Whenever I was anywhere that there were missionaries, I looked them up. I became pretty good friends with David Fraser and Charlie Long of Christian and Missionary Alliance. And after I transferred to Special Forces, I worked with mostly the Vietnamese. I became friends with several of them and even met some of their families.

Omar: How did you keep in touch with your family and friends while at war?

Smith: What they now call “Snail Mail”, writing letters. Personal computers hadn’t been invented yet, much less the internet and stuff like that. E-mail and Skype and stuff like that nobody had ever heard of, so either you wrote letters or you forgot about it.

Beard: Before you went into battle, was there anything you did for good luck?

Smith: No, I don’t believe in good luck. Like I said, once I turned my life over to God, He is smart enough to know what’s best for me, and powerful enough to make sure that nothing else happens to me except what God either sends or allows, which is for my eventual good. That didn’t mean it was all fun. I got a “Dear Bill” note from the girl I was engaged to two weeks before I came home, which was not fun. At all. But I lived long enough to see that the Lord knew what He was doing. I mean, she’s a fine woman. Last I heard of her, she was a missionary in Taiwan. But, she’s not the one the Lord had for me.

Omar: What were your thoughts when saw soldiers killed, or hurt, or buildings destroyed, or things like that?

Smith: Ouch. Basically, if I saw one of my own fellows get hit, two thoughts popped into my mind simultaneously. One of the rare occasions when I can think of two things at once. I don’t multitask very well. My first instinct was to grab them and get them undercover. My other instinct, just about simultaneously, was to see if I could shoot the guy that hit him before the bad guy hit any of the rest of us.

Beard: What were the living conditions like during the Vietnam War?

Smith: Oh, goody. In the rainy season, ran from April to around October. It rained some part of every day. When it wasn’t raining, it was horrendously humid. At one point, I walked through a stream about waist deep, and when I got to the other side, I wrung as much water out of my shirt from sweat as I did from my trousers walking through the stream. It was gross. The mosquitos in the dry season, it was still humid, even though it didn’t rain from October around to April usually. But it was hot, it was humid, you’d sweat like a pig. Walking an hour, you could literally take off my shirt, wring it, and water would drip out of it, and mosquitos and leeches weren’t much fun either. Walking through a stream, then pulling three-four inch long leeches off your skin was very unfun.

Omar: What was it like to be a Scout Platoon Leader? What was your job?

Smith: An Infantry Battalion has 14 platoons of men that shoot. A platoon is one officer and 20 to 35 men. I never had more than 18, but anyway, life is tough. And, each aligned company (three companies in a battalion) had three rifle platoons and one mortar platoons that took care of the 12. The battalion had a platoon of heavy mortars, which were kind of poor man’s artillery, threw a round up in the air and they’d fall on the bad guys. And, one Scout Platoon, and that was mine. My job was to go out and find something, preferably before it found me, and whisper into a radio, “Hey I found something”, and then the battalion would come along and help me fight with them. Basically it was my job to see something.

Beard: What was the RVN Counteroffensive and what was it like for you?

Smith: Well the RVN was the Republic of South Vietnam, the “good guys”, and the Communists from the North had sent down several thousand Southern-born but Communist Vietnamese after the 1954 division of South Vietnam to try to overthrow the South Vietnamese government so the Communists would get the place without having to fight for it. Every time the Communists tried something and got stomped on, the North Vietnamese would send down more stuff to raise the stakes again. The South Vietnamese would try to hammer them down. My job was, again, it’s a matter of trying to help find where the bad guys were, and whisper into a radio, “Hey, I got something” and then either Americans or South Vietnamese would help me come fight with them.

Omar: What caused the battle of Dak To?

Smith: My role, not much. The Battle of Dak To, the Allied Intelligence American and South Vietnamese found best part of a division of a 6-8,000 North Vietnamese regular soldiers at this place called Dak To, which is about 6 or 8 miles from the border of Cambodia. The bad guys could hide in Cambodia, but we weren’t allowed to chase them there. However, we did catch them in one place and stomped them really badly, before the survivors escaped as far as Cambodia. Unfortunately, the American News Media made it look like we were losing. The only thing that people saw on TV on the 6 o’clock news in America was either dead or wounded or hurting American soldiers. And, that was all they saw of the war. It looked for all the world like we were losing the war.

Beard: Had you dreamed all your life of being a soldier? Is that why you voluntarily returned to service to fight in Vietnam even though you had an honorable discharge and could not be drafted?

Smith: I know it’s not a popular opinion upon military-age Christians and their parents, but it is my opinion that when the country goes to war, single, able-bodied Christian men should volunteer in bunches. We’re the only ones that are safe to fight. I mean, as I said a while ago, God loved me enough to let his own son die for me, He knows everything, He’s smart enough to know what’s good for me, and strong enough to make sure that that’s what I get. I don’t believe I don’t have that option. Sure, Christians get killed and wounded and beat up. I didn’t get killed, but I got beat up some, but nothing can happen to me except what God either sends or allows, since he loves me that much it’s got to be for my ultimate good.

Omar: How do you feel about President Johnson’s involvement in Phase III of the RVN Counteroffensive?

Smith: If you’re going to win a war, you have to hurt the bad guys bad enough that they’ll quit fighting. If we’d had to fight World War II by the same rules that we had to fight the Vietnam War in, Hitler would still own Germany. After we freed France from the Germans, we wouldn’t be allowed to go to Germany and defeat them. When Johnson insisted on not winning, it just hurt the bad guys a little bit, but not enough to make them quit. A lot of Americans get killed for no good reason, which I find very irritating.

Beard: What was it like to be a Special Forces Captain? What did you have to do?

Smith: Well, ever since I read Roger Donlon’s book “Outpost of Freedom”, which is about Special Forces Camp, he commanded back when I was still in college, I’d wanted to get into Special Forces, which is why I joined the army the second time rather than go back to the Marine Corps, Special Forces is part of the army, and an A-Team is supposed to have, on paper, one captain, one lieutenant, and 10 of the finest sergeants in the army. The one that I took over, A-325, had two lieutenants already there, the captain was me, and that made three officers, and only eight enlisted men, some of whom weren’t even sergeants yet because we’d lost enough people that they were having to replace the people killed or wounded with people who hadn’t been trained that well. Basically my job was to coordinate with the Vietnamese special forces captain, that was leader of the camp, and run patrols and ambushes and stuff like that in the 93 mile hunting area that we had to make it miserable for the bad guys to trespass.

Omar: What were operations Cochise Green in the Soui Ca Valley, on July 28, 1968? And what happened to the Scout Platoon that was ambushed on August 2?

Smith: I can’t help you much there; I transferred out of the regular army into Special Forces in May of ‘68. Summer of ‘68, I was commanding an A-team in Duquai District of Haou Nia Province between Saigon and Cambodia, and I wasn’t anywhere near these two battles, so I don’t know what happened to them.

Beard: What are some of your memorable experiences in the Vietnam War?

Smith: Most memorable: I was privileged to lead 5 South Vietnamese soldiers to faith in Christ as their savior, which I found a lot more fun than the 50 something I had to put on the ground with the bad guys; and my camp was still holding out when South Vietnam finally surrendered in 1975, so unless all of them were killed, I got to plant a church there, which was great. Also, the Protestant-Christian/Christians in South Vietnam went from two and a half percent to four percent of the South Vietnamese population in the twenty-six months I was there; and they did it with the church being mainly staffed by old men, crippled men, and women because everybody of military age was in the army; and every time a village was taken over, even briefly, by the Communists, the first two people they tried to kill was any government officials they could catch, and any Christian clergies; and knowing that he was next, after the bad guys came back, as soon as they left, the Senior Elder or Deacon of the church would take over as a pastor, knowing they were going to kill him when they came back. These people had guts like there’s no tomorrow, and the blood of the martyrs is indeed the seat of the church.

Omar: In your opinion, what were the causes of the Vietnam War?

Smith: The short answer is Communist determination to rule the world, starting next door to whatever they currently own. After the Viets, Laotians, and Khmer Rouge, the people who lived in Cambodia, had driven off the French in 1956, the Communists in the Freedom Fighters group went to North Vietnam and grabbed that, and the other three places, Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam became independent countries. Several thousand of the Communists in the Freedom Fighters, who had been born in South Vietnam and were South Vietnamese citizens went North with the rest of the Communists, where they got trained on, equipped and whatever, and after a couple of years they were sent back South to start over again. That’s where the Viet Cong came from. There were basically two armies we were fighting. One was the Viet Cong, which were the Communists who were citizens of South Vietnam. They were mainly gorillas. And the NVA, or the North Vietnam Army, which was the regular army of North Vietnam. When the French went home, about 1954, they had recreated the South Vietnamese Army after French model, which was good for fighting a conventional war. Unfortunately, they were not very good for fighting gorillas, because the tanks and trucks and stuff like that don’t work with zip in swamps and jungles, but America sent advisors over there, and John Kennedy, and tried to help to enable them to fight, and they did well enough that the Viet Cong were unable to take over South Vietnam. So, that being the case, the Communist North would ship more people and weapons and stuff down there to replace the ones that we and the South Vietnamese army had killed off and they’d replace them by two or three for one, and that was why the war kept swelling up and getting bigger

Beard: How do you think modern technology affects wars today? If you had this technology 50 years ago how do you think it would have changed the war?

Smith: Well, the short answer to that is I don’t think it would. In the 1960’s we had better equipment than the Communists had, and at least in Vietnam we had more of it. What we lacked was the will to win the war. We won most of the battles we fought, and even in the battles we lost we killed three or four of them for everybody we lost. But LBJ had decided that we’re not going to try and defeat North Vietnam. Well, that being the case, then hey, there’s only one of us that’s at risk. If I’m trying to take your camera, and you’re not trying to take mine, the only one risking anything is you, and why should I quit? I’m not losing anything, and the Reds thought the same way.

Omar: How did you return home? What was the journey like?

Smith: Well basically it was another long, over-the-ocean flight. I was called out of the woods on July the 8, I spent July the 9 in the airplane flying across the Pacific, and landed after dark in Seattle. There was a bus to Fort Louis in Washington, where I spent the night. Next morning, they got me a well-done, good tasting steak breakfast, handed me a plane ticket, and said, “Thanks for your service Bill. You’ve done a good job. Now go home and stop killing people, and have a nice day. “Forty hours, from the time I left the woods, I was in dress uniform, heading off with a plane ticket in one hand and a map in the other, and on my way to the airport. No “cool down” time at all.

Beard: What were the reactions of the people when you returned home?

Smith: Not good. Let me drop back a little bit: I was seven years old when my Uncle Albert came back from the South Pacific in World War II, and after World War II any returning serviceman walked on water and talked to to God and got polite answers. Everybody loved them. When I came back after voluntarily putting my skin on the line, I was the bad guy. There were long-haired American hippies chanting “Ho ho ho Chi Minh; the NVA is gonna win!” and “Hey hey Green beret how many kids you kill today?” I’m way behind turkey come over here. No. But nobody attacked me. One of my sergeants, who came home before me put 367 days in Vietnam without a scratch. Between the airplane and the passenger terminal in California, he got a bullet in the right shoulder and left thigh from an American hippie. Naturally, when I came home I had a loaded and cocked 9 mm pistol under my coat. They didn’t have metal detectors in airports in those days, but nobody tried to kill me and nobody got hurt. But it was grossly unfun.

Omar: Have you kept in touch with any of your fellow veterans?

Smith: Not this long, no. For a couple of years or so, a few of us wrote back and forth, but we all went our separate ways after separating. That’s the curse of the military: you become closer than brothers for a while when you’re sharing foxholes or something, but then somebody gets transfer orders and you never see them again.

Beard: Are you involved with any special organizations dealing with the war?

Smith: Yes, I’m a member of the Disabled American Veterans, would you believe? To get into that you’d have to have a disabled injury that you got from military service; yes I have. I’m also a member of the Special Forces Association; that’s any veteran that wore the green beanie in combat. It never occurred to me to join the other mainly fraternal organizations; basically, they run bars and I don’t drink.

Omar: Do you have any war-related injuries?

Smith: Yep. Short answer is yes. On one occasion I spent 105 straight days in Sam’s Hospitals; my left elbow still won’t straighten. My short-term memory is virtually destroyed so I have to keep asking people what’s their name after I’ve been seeing them in church for a couple years. As a matter of fact, I still have trouble keeping you apart from your next sister. Anyway, I have a skull fracture and brain injury, and a bunch of broken bones and a total of eleven scars, and what they call mental-emotional injuries, the stuff that don’t bleed. The Viet Veterans Association reached an 80 percent disabled and 100 percent unemployed.

Beard: Did you receive any medals or honors during the war?

Smith: I have the South Vietnam service ribbon with six battle stars. an American who had stayed there from ‘62 to ‘75 would have twelve. In the time I was there, I got six of the twelve, so I figured that I got my share of the war, roughly half of the war. The Vietnam Campaign Ribbon with 1967 to 1969 on it, that’s the years I was there. But I have no American Hero medals. I do have the South Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, twice, and the Cross of Gallantry with palm, once. No American Hero medals. I’m sneaky rather than brave.

Omar: Was it easy to readjust to civilian life?

Smith: No, not really. Forty hours after getting out of the jungle, I’m in the jungle here. No, not really. The liberal politicians, draft-dodging hippies and whatever, and the people who messed with my brother and sister, they had sneaked off to college while I was there to hide from the draft, had taught my brother and sister that serving in wartime was wicked, murder, and bad and whatever, and so when I left to go to Vietnam, my brother and sister had thought that their big brother was wonderful. By the time I got back, I was a criminal. That wasn’t much fun either. The people who taught them that are my enemies, and will be until I die. Unfortunately, I am virtually unemployable. With nine years of college and two master’s degrees, I have never made $10.00 an hour in my life, outside the army. I finally retired in 2002.

Beard: Where were you when the war was officially over?

Smith: I was in Columbia, South Carolina, driving home from work. The 5 o’clock news on my car radio announced that President Duong Van Minh had surrendered the remains of South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese, and all the sweat and misery and pain, the unfunness of fighting and killing people, all the stuff that I’d put on the line voluntarily to save people who were free from becoming slave went down the tube. It was thrown away by 400 political enemies of freedom. Basically, it was the United States’ Congress mostly, which is made up of 535 people, and the Senate, which is 100. A vast majority of them were the ones that voted to defund South Vietnam. We had promised, in the 1972 Paris Peace Accord to replace South Vietnamese fuel and ammunition on a one-to-one basis and wrecked vehicles, planes, and whatever on a one-to-one, and the Russians and the Chinese would do the same thing for the Communists. Unfortunately, they replaced theirs 3 or 4 to 1. We never did replace ours. We may have replaced it one replacement for two wrecked or something for a while, but then they completely cut to help Vietnamese off. From the summer of ‘72, all of ‘73 and all of ‘74, South Vietnam held on alone, and then our Congress completely cut them off fuel and ammunition, and tanks and airplanes won’t move without fuel, and guns are useless without ammunition, so they went under after five months of ‘75.

Omar: How did the Vietnam War affect your life?

Smith: Well I guess I have to say it destroyed my civilian life. However, I am ferociously proud that I went. I do think that freedom is worth fighting for, whether I know the people that are in trouble or not, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat if I had the chance.

Beard: Do you have any memorabilia’s or souvenirs you’d like to share with us?

Smith: Yes. I have some right here. In here I wore ammunition. This is NOT the rifle I used in Vietnam. It’s illegal to have a fully automated automatic weapon. This is a civilian copy of it. It looks exactly the same as the M16 rifle I used, and I have ammunition for the thing in here. This is a flashlight, would you believe. In the bottom of the flashlight, there are three filters you can put over the light part; you can put either a red one, a white one, or a blue one. Red and blue is for signaling, and the white one is so you can use the thing to read a map without it blowing light all over the place. This thing here is a compass, Dai-uy (Di-wee) Smith, Dai-uy is captain in Vietnamese. Smith is me, would you believe. This thing is a GI compass. The way you use these things: you set it so the thing goes wherever you want, you figure the direction you’re looking to go, and you turn this thing down this way like that, and leave this up, and look down through the thing onto the compass face, and when you’re satisfied that the arrow’s in the right direction or whatever, then you look through this little rear sight into this front sight thing, and you find a tree or a rock or something directly in front of the direction you want to go, and you head for it. If you have to walk around something, or whatever, it doesn’t matter, as long as you get to that thing there. Then, once you get to that marker, then you do the same thing again. Sometimes it works. Yes; you’d probably noticed the baloney slicer on my back. This thing used to be a leaf spring on a two and a half ton truck before a Vietnamese got hold of it and filed it into a nice sharp point, and carved a hand grip for it, so now it’s a snake shortener, makes a long snake short. It can cut down trees and things like that, and it can very quietly get rid of people if you were in a really quiet situation; like you don’t want to make a lot of noise and get embarrassed; you sneeze at the wrong time and they all turn around and shoot you. That can ruin your day. She is a Communists soldier; she doesn’t know I’m coming. I’m sneaking up behind her, real quiet; I’m going to deal with her, appropriately. You come down on the best whack you can do. Anyway, you don’t take the head off; you start right here and come down like this. Another thing we had to do was: everybody in the woods carried a total of ten empty sandbags. Carrying a loaded sandbag gets really old, but you don’t feel a thing carrying empty ones. Half of us carry snake shorteners, and the other half carry folded shovels. This is a folding shovel. You can open it up like that, screw it down together so it doesn’t fold up shut again, and this is also good for shortening a snake. It’ll make a long snake short really quick. Again, if you’re into something quiet, and you need to deal with somebody without causing noise, or trouble, or shooting or things like that, if you sharpen this at the edges of the thing, it makes your point in an argument. No, this thing here is not for stabbing people with; when you’re digging, this thing is for digging out roots and rocks and stuff like that when you got to make a foxhole or things like that. Of each four men, two men are carrying these things, and the other two are carrying baloney slicers, and everybody is carrying ten empty sandbags, so when we get to where we’re going, about maybe 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and we’re going to spend the night there, we immediately pull out our tools. Those of us with baloney slicers go out and cut down logs, and the ones with shovels work on a hole maybe as wide as here to the rest of the thing, and maybe about this long, for the four of us. They make it about yay deep, and they fill all of our sandbags with the dirt they dig out of the hole. We put a log on each end of it, and more logs over the top, and then sandbags on top of the logs. That will stop a direct hit from a 2 millimeter mortar, in case that matters to you. It’s very nice; you could fight, because every four men in the group has a bunker like that for you, and if the bad guys attack us, and they get close to us, you simply shoot anybody you see above ground, because we’re all in the holes. That way it’s really easy to tell who are the enemies. If anything goes wrong, you do not jump out of your hole; everybody else will shoot you, they’ll think you’re one of the bad guys. This thing here is a carbine. We used them in World War II, and North Korea. The Americans didn’t use these in Vietnam, but the South Vietnamese loved these things because they don’t kick very much. This thing: I have two 15 shot magazines taped together. You fire off 15 shots, pop the release in this manner, turn it over, and pop the thing off, and you got 15 more shots. It also covered with a 30 shot magazine, but my 30 shot magazine is loaded, and I don’t want to...