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It was a war where people died for nothing: Sam Thompson
"I went to Vietnam in October of 1969 and I was in the Army. I started out in a place called Tan An. I stayed there for three or four days, then I was transferred to a mobile infantry unit in a village called Bin Phouc. I originally went over with an artillery piece, but when I got to Tan An I was assigned to carry a radio and they put me with a mobile infantry unit and I acted as a forward observer.
When we would go through the jungle, if we encountered heavy action, it was my job to call back to the artillery base and get the artillery to support the infantry. I was a part of the ninth infantry division and I was part of the 47th infantry brigade.
Once I got to Bin Phouc, it was pretty interesting because there were three things that the enemy looked for when they spotted Americans. One of them was an officer, one of them was a medic, and the other was a radioman. I was one of the targets.
I was pretty lucky, though, the only wound I had to worry about was I got shot through my shoulder. It went clean through. That was in April of 1970.
I was part of the Cambonian Invasion Force in June of 1970 and we were digging sandbags for the foxholes and me and three other guys were just digging sand and all of a sudden I shoveled into a nest of black scorpions. One crawled up my pant leg and stung me on the calf, and within a half-hour I was real sick. They carried me to our medic's tent and I had a temperature of 104 degrees for at least four days. They airlifted me out of Cambodia and put me in a field hospital until they got the fever under control.
Vietnam is an experience that I wouldn't want to do again, but I wouldn't trade a million dollars for the experience that I had. When you're a 19 or 20 year-old boy and you've never been away from home in your life and you're suddenly trust in a situation where you're defending your life and you have to see things and do things that are monstrous and go against your character, it's extremely hard.
I learned how to be self-sufficient. I learned that when anybody is faced with a life-threatening danger, I don't care how much you claim to be like John Wayne, you're going to be scared. Sometimes you do the most remarkable things when you're scared. Sometimes the things that you think would be impossible to do, you find out that you can do them.
I made the mistake of trying to make a lot of good friends. I'm sure that it's probably the same with every other war, but when you get close to people that you're in a war with and you lose them, it's extremely devastating. I still have nightmares about some of the friends that I lost. It's like losing a part of your family. Vietnam taught me just how precious life can be. Before I went to Vietnam, I never thought much about how fragile life really was. I never thought about fate, but Vietnam made me a firm believer of fate. I don't care where you are or what you're doing, you're not going to die before it's your time to die. I saw guys that took all kinds of crazy chances and didn't get a scar out of Vietnam. I saw some guys that were over-protective and they carried them out in bags.
I was very proud to go to Vietnam. I didn't want to go, but I was asked to go and I was proud to serve my country. My father was a World War II veteran and all through my childhood, my father instilled patriotism and pride in me. He told me, son I don't care if you have to shovel dung the whole time you're in the service, you serve. I was drafted in May of 1969 and my brother, Fred, he was in the lottery that they enacted and he had a high number, so he never had to go into the military. He had the luxury of staying home and listening to all the protesters and all the rhetoric about Vietnam.
The day I got back from Vietnam, we landed at Travis Air Force Base in Oakland, and I was so thrilled to be able to get back home. When I came down the stairwell off the airplane, I got down on my hands and knees and I kissed the ground.
When our plane landed, they landed it over near the edge of the tarmac and they had these buses lined up to take us to the transfer center and lined us all up in rows and assigned us a bus. While we were waiting, there was a peace demonstration going on outside the fence line. They had all these real hateful signs. I had a balloon full of urine and a bag full of dog feces thrown on me while I was waiting. That was my welcome home.
I got spit on in San Fransisco Airport. I went to a party at my brother's house the week that I got back and he had invited some of his anti-war friends over. They were sitting in the kitchen on the floor and I went in to get some ice so I could get a drink and this girl looked up at me and asked how does it feel to be a baby-killer. How are you going to ask a stupid question like that? There's no answer that you can give somebody who thinks so little of you.
The first ten years after I got back from Vietnam, I had a lot of problems. I was continually having nightmares. The first six months that Linda and I were married, I'd sleep with a knife under my pillow. I was so used to it.
Vietnam was a thankless war. It was a war where people died for nothing. That's the one thing that scares me about our young people serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm scared that if these people in this country who are so hell bent on leaving Iraq or Afghanistan and abandoning the whole campaign, I'm afraid that the young people who are serving there and have died there are going to face the same thing that we did and they really did serve and die for nothing. I think what we're doing there is a noble cause. Anytime that you can try and give freedom to oppressed people in the world, that's a noble thing to do. Our country has done that all through its history. It's a shame that you have people in this country that can't see through what they're told by the liberal press and anti-war from the get-go. Sometimes it takes a warrior, a veteran, to understand what's going on."
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