Joe Bangert

​        I enlisted in the Marine Corps in February of 1967 as an escape.  I was raised in a Catholic orphanage in Philadelphia, and the first time the Vietnam War touched my life was when one of my high school buddies was killed.  He served in the Army and died in Vietnam — my senior class went to his funeral.  Most of us in the orphanage went to high school together and many of us enlisted in the military.  There was no other way out, and I think it’s important to remember in the time frame of ’65, ’66, ’67 — at least for working class people — there was no option to go to even a community college, much less a university.  Being 16 and 17 years old, standing in front of a flagdraped coffin of a friend and not having a complex understanding of the world, we were primed for military service.  

        ​I considered it my patriotic duty to help contain these godless Communist hordes.  Being raised in the 50’s, and in a Catholic institution run by priests and nuns, it was very common to end all masses with “Savior of the World, Save Russia.”  I remember the nuns would tell horror stories about how the Red Chinese arrested nuns and fed them head first into huge meat grinders, and you know, the fingernails being pulled out. I didn’t question it, I just thought it was our patriotic duty to go and fight.   

​        I was sent to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey, California to study Vietnamese.  Occasionally other marines and I would go to San Francisco on weekend passes. It was very difficult, being a marine, to find a way to fit into the counterculture of Berkeley and San Francisco.  I remember organizing about five or six guys for a trip to Berkeley for a demonstration — I believe on the 4th of July — sponsored by SDS.  We went there for the sole purpose of waiting for these goddamn students to come out in the street with their Viet Cong flags so we could kick the shit out of them.  It was an incredible scene, especially for a kid from a Philadelphia orphanage.  

​        I remembered being very confused; if they were sending us thirteen thousand miles across the sea to fight Communism, how is it that students had the democratic right to study and embrace Communism in Berkeley, California and peasants in Vietnam didn’t?  I remember the little red books and the works of Lenin and Marx being sold on the streets, and I kind of understood from a democratic point of view that that was okay here, but somehow once you left California and got beyond Hawaii, people who were doing these kinds of things in another country … well then, it was okay to blow their brains out.

​        I returned to Vietnam in 1986.  In this photo I’m holding a bullet I picked out of a wall of the Citadel in the Forbidden City in Hue, a coin and a French magazine.  The photo in the magazine is of me and a former NVA soldier.  I’m holding both an American flag and Vietnamese flag, the same flag I looked for nineteen years earlier in Berkeley.