I was in a supply unit in Vietnam located in Long Binh. We went out on the field depot and I worked a location deck. What they told us was, if we come in and do the right thing in the beginning, that we’re doing the menial jobs now and as other groups come in they will get the jobs and we will get a better situation. So I accepted that for words. So in the beginning we had a lot of dirty jobs: burning feces, cleaning out urine pits and all kind of different things. But what I began to notice is that a lot of white recruits were coming in and they weren’t getting the same assignments I was getting. It seemed like we were always pulling up the short end of the stick.
One time the first sergeant was talking about these gooks or something, and I replied …
“yeah, the gook is the same thing as a nigger.” It was like a light went off, it was a real rev-elation. I was naive about a lot of things. I had to develop a racist attitude. I never was raised with that. The first sergeant told me I was a smart nigger, that’s just what he said.
One incident that really opened my eyes was with a white GI named Muncey, from Ken-tucky. He was really a typical super artificial macho guy. A group of Vietnamese kids came up to our truck as we were coming back from guard duty. We had food and stuff and we’d feed the people out in the field. We had leftover food, bushels of apples and oranges and stuff. These kids came up to the truck begging and you could see it in their faces, these kids had that I’m hungry, feed me, kind of look. So Muncey says look at these gook kids and he took a bite out of an apple and threw it in the dirt and about four or five kids dove on it. It was just like when you drop a piece of bread in the fish tank. It just really set me off. I damn near threw him out of the truck and it was still moving. I was brought up on charges for that.
these brothers. That blew my mind. After I’d been in the stockade about two months, I
the feces with. Some guys got together and said they were going to have a riot in the stock-ade. They asked me to bring in an extra can of kerosene every other day so they couldn’t see build-up. So I did. It started in minimum-security but they went to maximum-security and broke the locks and let everybody out. They picked noon because that’s when the guards change and most of them were eating in the mess hall. They broke the gate, broke the lock, let everybody out of maximum security, and started burning the hooches and what not. There was a lot of chaos. A lot of people got hurt and I imagine some people got killed. I remember seeing white guys, in particular, and guards getting beat up with bunk adapters. If you were white you were in trouble, whether you were a good guy or a bad guy.
I’ve never been as violent as I was in Vietnam. There was a lot of rage; it just began to build and build. I did so many things that were unnecessary and hurt some people and it really wasn’t their fault. But I had to take it out somewhere, I had to vent this anger in some way. Today I work on not becoming violent, I’m scared of violence.
Archived Material
Podcasts
No posts