I was nineteen and turned twenty when I was there. I joined the Army in May of 1962 and was in Vietnam in December, just as I finished radio school. That was my first assignment. I could've had orders, as everyone else in the class did, to Germany. Two of us had orders to Vietnam. Before  I even joined the Army I ran into a guy who'd graduated from high school a year or two ahead of me. He had just gotten out of the Army from Alaska.  He said, "Wow, the place to go is Vietnam. You get combat pay in addition to overseas pay. You can really clean up." In the Army there was an undercurrent that there was someplace in the world where you could get combat pay. But there was no real discussion in the newspapers, as I can recall.

Some people in the unit had no conception where they were in the world, they didn't care. It wasn't Tennessee. It wasn't the state they came from. So therefore they had no interest in learning anything. Other people were very interested and learned Vietnamese and became very close with a number of Vietnamese people. At some point you began to realize that the people around the military base were clearly cooperating with the guerrillas because they were able to infiltrate the inside of our bases and we hadn't the faintest idea where the guerrillas were.

When the Buddhist demonstrations began against the Diem government [1963], it became very clear to most Americans there who probably hadn't been paying attention that we were supporting a police state which, against its own people who were peaceably having demonstrations, would turn loose tanks and machine guns and barbed wire all over the country. From May of '63 all through the summer we'd get caught up in them, just trying to walk around in civilian clothes to go to bars....

The entire contingent of Americans in Vietnam was so thinly spread out that there probably weren't more than five hundred in any one place.  Tan Son Nhut had the highest concentration. And it was becoming apparent that the ARVN  [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] might turn on us. That became a real worry in the summer of 1963. It became rather apparent from discussion going on that there was going to be a coup. I recall going to Saigon several times and hearing this undercurrent in bars where Vietnamese officers would be.

I left Vietnam in mid-October 1963 and the coup happened two weeks later. One of the people who was still there said that the night before the coup took place they were told to get packed up, be ready to leave the country, be ready to blow up their equipment. At that point one of the options was to completely leave Vietnam....

Almost no one in the Washington area knew we had anything like what was going on in Vietnam. Those of us who had been there wore our military patches on our right shoulders, which denoted that we had been in t e war. Colonels would stop me and say, "What war have you been in, son?  Where is that?  We have people fighting over there?"