Reflecting on Vietnam Part II: Col. John Anthony Cash

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Colonel John Anthony Cash, who served in the Army as a Rifle Company Commander in Vietnam. In this final part of his interview, Cash tells more incredible stories, reflects on the war as a whole, and talks about coming home.

Col. John Cash:

See the thing that we had going for us is that we could get ahold of the enemy and hang on to them and maintain contact. We had all these endless firepower resources and if they were dumb enough to stand and fight with us, that was it. And if they could get away from us and decentralize and break down so they didn't present a lucrative target, then we would have to go search for them again. And that's what I think, in retrospect, was the advantage of just keeping pouring it on and pouring it on. We have been told for example, that the Ia Drang was really by design as far as the enemy was concerned because they wanted to give the death medal to the air mobile concept. That's what all the historians are saying after the fact. And it's conceivable that White Wing was more of the same, you see. That we're going to do a job on what's left of the 1st Cav. Maybe they believe their own propaganda. Maybe there are actually soldiers in their army that actually believe that they dealt such a death blow to us.

Well, let's talk about advantages. I think they were very well led, and I've always felt after all the years I've spent in the Army that there are three components to effective use of military force. Leadership, training, and the things you use in many material. I think you can have inferior equipment and even not the greatest training. Good leadership will always make a difference. We had good leadership too, but the NVA, their leadership was even more important because they were highly motivated. As recent events have shown, the communist system threw into town and said, we outspent them and outlasted them or whatever. One thing I'll give them and that's that zeal. That zeal that the leadership had in belief in something bigger than themselves. And I'll give the NVA that what else could have allowed them to put up with all the hardship and going down the Ho Chi Minh trail. One guy carrying one mortar round, another guy carrying half of this, and that's on bicycles and things and they outlasted.

I think that's why they won the war at the strategic level, although they didn't win it at the tactical level. I'll give you an example of the kind of determination they have. I remember we captured a wounded North Vietnamese soldier, and it was when Specialist Weiss was killed and it was raining, and the guy had been seriously wounded. He was laying near, oh, I'd say maybe about from here to where your kitchen door is. And we figured because he was so badly wounded that we didn't have to worry about the guy. Many of guys were tired, we hadn't had any sleep. And I had one guy sitting under a poncho and every now and then he'd look around and he was monitoring the radio. And I remember one of my radio operators, I said, "Look at that guy." And we looked over there and you ever see a praying mantis how slow they move? We watched this on VA and he was moving ever so slowly trying to get to the guy's rifle. And we said, "What's he going to do if he gets the rifle? Where's he going to go? He's surrounded by Americans." And I went and told the radio operator because we told guys to stay alert and I said, "You want to lose your rifle and your life? That guy over there is going to get it." He got mad and went over and kicked the guy. And I think the guy died of internal bleeding because the next morning he was dead. But I had to ask myself, I said, "There's a certain level where you say, 'I've done my best as a soldier. What do I hope to gain by continuing this?'"

Then I'd heard other stories from other people and they were very, very shrewd. I remember when they finally hit Ahn Ke with mortars one night. We were on the berm line, they used to call it, our particular battalion had responsibility guarding it. And they picked a night when there was no moon. And we could see the flashes of the mortars, maybe nine or 10 rounds in the air before the first one hit the ground. They created a diversion by attacking on one side of this perimeter and then they sent an overwhelming force up on Hahnenkamm Mountain, which is a little hill about 500-800 meters high. And they killed guys in the beds laying there asleep, playing with transistor radios and everything. It was a major embarrassment. And were away before we could do anything. I can remember watching a gunship hovering about 200 yards away, firing a full saddle, 48 rockets, 24 on each side, into their storage tank where they kept all the fuel and everything, a big ball of flame. And they were just good.

I remember we had a demonstration once of how they would get through a... On the berm line for example, we had triple concertina, double ache from barbwire fence, minefields and everything. And they had a captive BC demonstrate to us how they could get through all that, with a lot of guts and patience. And then they capitalize on the way Americans do things. We are lazy and very extravagant. We used to set up ambushes where we would leave with case of C-rations or half a case of ammunition in the middle of an LZ. And then the rest of the company would leave and I would stay behind with one platoon. We'd surround the LZ and they know that when they see helicopters taking out, the dumb Americans probably left some stuff there. And we could never entice them to come in and take what we had and where we would get them because they were so good at figuring out how Americans were. So I think they had extremely good leadership. And at the strategic level, I just don't think we were any match to it.

Just the night before Saigon was overrun, we had people in Hanoi that were part of that commission that was supposed to see about the way the war was going to be concluding and whatnot. And the American officer turned to his NVA counterpart and said, "It looks like you guys are going to win the war but let me tell you one thing. You never defeated an American battalion on the field of battle," which they didn't. And the North Vietnamese's supposedly replied, "That's right. We didn't. But that was not what the war was about and that's where you Americans made a mistake. You didn't understand what the war was about." They were just good. They used minimum means for maximum gain. And we had all that firepower. And I don't know what it's like to fight without air cover. They did and they prevailed.

I've seen B-52 strikes. I've sat a deep or maybe five kilometers away and we watched an area, but three football fields alone. Erupt in smoke and flame and dust and dirt and you see gauges of everything going in the air. And then we flew right into exploit it. And our first reaction is, how in the hell could anybody live through that, yet we took sniper fire? And we saw a body sticking up out of the dirt, cows, half a village blown away and whatnot. And you wonder, how could anybody live through that and still prevail? And they did.

You do need rules of engagement, I suppose, because you want to avoid friendly fire against your own forces, for one thing. When you got people going in all kinds of different directions, it was not a linear war like World War II in Korea. And yet, it put us at a deciding disadvantage because you had to identify the target. And it didn't take them long to figure out what our rules in the game were. Hell, all they had to do was read the [inaudible] instructions and read between the lines because things like that in an offhand manner were discussed in the news media and you had to make positive identification and then you had to go through a chain of command where the word had to be given that yes, you can fire or no you can't fire and so forth. These guys were so good.

I remember on my second tour that they actually could imitate American voices. And we used to use smoke grenades, for example. And the smoke grenades come in different colors and if you wanted to fire or do something or identify yourself on the ground, some of the helicopter gunships could know where and where not could shoot. The VC had the same color smoke grenade so we had to develop a procedure so that when the guy saw the smoke, he had to tell you what color it was. You couldn't say, "I'm going to pump a yellow smoke," because the VC would do the same thing as soon as they see yellow smoke. But they were very good. They learned the lesson well.

They also did some dumb things. I can recall catching VC asleep in the middle of the jungle and sometimes they threw trash on the ground and gave themselves away and then because of the food they ate and whatnot, you could smell. The smell carries a long way in thfe jungle and you could actually smell them. I don't want to say that from a cultural ethnic sense but you just could because of the source they used on their food and they had hygienic problems as much as we did. And of course, we were the same way. You try to tell them a bunch of GI's don't like cigarettes, so don't talk. We used to tie string to each other, use that for silence. It lasts for about an hour and guys start talking about the girlfriends back home and everything. Yet we still managed to win wars. At the unit level, at the company and platoon level, I would say that they were just as good if not better because we were good too and Americas are naturally aggressive and whatnot, but we had so much more going for us that sometimes we did not put it to good advantage like the Artur or the helicopters and whatnot. And they prevailed after all that.

We used to booby trap them because the Vietnamese, I think, had the same attitude towards their dead that we did, to retrieve them. Now as far as ripping patches off and putting them on bodies, I had one sergeant, he used to carry extra patches. They were not cloth patches, they were the kind to have the stick-on thing and he would put them on the VCs, right around the chest area.

I had one guy execute a prisoner one time. It happened before I could do anything. It was on White Wing. We were coming across the rice paddy, I had two platoons abreast and a VC, who was probably scared, jumped up out of a foxhole about 50 yards, 100, started a run. And the interpreter said, "Dừng lại!" which means stop. And the guy was just scared. He had an AK on his back and he was probably trying to reach for it at the same time. Two platoons opened up on the guy. By the time we got up to him, he was laying there. He had nothing but bullet holes. He just standing, laying there, blinking. And the medic got down and interpreter got down with him. "What unit are you in?" they said, and the guy couldn't even talk. So the medics had said, "Sir, this guy's dying." Half his genitalia had been shot off and whatnot. Before I could even say anything, I remember there was a Sergeant Bass, was a particularly bloodthirsty guy, walked over. His platoon was the nearest to the action and got all the guys in this platoon who were new and started saying, "You guys think you're in combat? I'm going to show you what war's like." He took an M16, put it on full automatic, put it right here and put a whole magazine in the guy's head. Before I could even say boo, he walked up to me and said, "So you want me to finish them off?" And before I could even answer, I was drinking out of a canteen, he went ahead and did it. And then the guy head just exploded like a watermelon. And they wanted to take his poncho off his back and put it inaudible. I thought about that for years. I kept telling him, I said, "Well, the guy was going to die anyway." Guys were pissed off. We'd had a few casualties the day before and so forth and so on.

But as far as that being a pattern and atrocities and torching prisoners and things like that, I don't think that was a policy. I think individuals would sometimes get carried away because I think most guys are probably like Nick.

I can remember looking through my binoculars one time during White Wing and seeing women and children, and Battalion Commander in his little helicopter, "What are you going to do?" He said, "That's where your fire's coming from." And I wasn't about to shoot any women. The girls out there looks just like my little daughter. And I didn't do anything. We had two guys wounded from that fire, but I wasn't about to start shooting at any civilians.

After every operation or even during everything, we would see bodies of people killed, wounded. I remember one time we came across a woman who had a baby in her arms, and at the last minute she must've put her hand over the baby's face. It was the only part on either of their bodies that wasn't burned. And you'd see people laying out in the middle of the jungle with black pajamas on. You didn't know whether it was VC or not. It's a very bloody business.

I remember one time we found, I think it was a Second Lieutenant NBA's body, and remember we looked through all this personal belongs. The guy was a poet. He was a school teacher from somewhere near Hanoi. I remember the interpreter was reading his poems to us. He no more wanted to be out there in the middle of jungle than, the man with a beautiful wife and two little daughters in their school uniforms and whatnot.

I don't know. It's all history now. We have these reunions with the 1st Cav every year, and I don't go to them anymore because of that one experience. But the war stories get bigger and better. Bigger and bigger and bigger.

A lot of times because of the way the war was fought, we would be put into a helicopter. So sometimes we wouldn't even know where we were going until we were airborne. And then I would get a coded message in my helicopter and I'd have to figure out how to tell all the other baton leaders so we at least have a concept of what to do When we got on the ground. The frustration, in general terms, was not making contact and it was a double-edged sword because some guys didn't want to make contact because when you make contact, naturally somebody might get killed or wounded. And there was a general feeling that unless you made contact and let's say you went weeks at a time without making any, always trying to make sure guys didn't get lax and let the guard down and then trying to figure out what you could do to give them a means of saying that something…

We used to have mortar practice all the time because we were always in a problem with the mortars because we had such good artillery support. Each runner's life companies had a mortar platoon, and when I first took over, I started having the entire platoon. Each one guy carried 180 1 millimeter round, that's what, 30, 40 rounds. And we tended to draw the artillery instead because they were so much more proficient at it until the point where I eventually retrained the rifle platoon to retain the mortar platoon. There's a rifle platoon that got permission to do that, give us more rifle foxhole strength. But you always had to fight to keep guys at a high level of readiness because if you just go for days and days and days and you don't see anything, there's no indication of the enemy and so forth and so on, you can't relax. And that's what you had to avoid.

The biggest fear all of us had was getting ambushed. I never got ambushed. I'm very proud of that. And that's because I didn't like to walk on trails. I remember the Bataan commander jumped on me one time. He said, "What do you got against trails?" I said, "Sir, each one of these guys got some lead time with 18, 19 years." I said, "I want to take them all back home." He said, "Yeah, all you ever do is fire at [inaudible]." I said, "Sir, I'll clean out the AP, ammo point, if you let me." I said, "Because I think one artillery round as an equalizer is a lot more effective with this bursting radius than prior to so-and-so there from whatever. There are some people that feel that you use Americans as cannon fodder. There is a time in place in combat when it's unavoidable that you're going to have to lock horns with the enemy. But I figured if it's just us out there on the ground and we're trying to make contact, let them know what he's up against” and had a lot of guys trying to get in my company as a result.

The fact of the matter is that if you do patrol, even though you don't make contact, you've accomplished a military means, a military objective because you've kept the enemy from doing something else because mostly they've tried to avoid contact with us. Now it's interesting you say send them out by squad. I always felt more comfortable just to send the platoons out because platoon leader has got a radio, he's a trained officer and the use of artillery can call in air strikes and whatnot. And you weren't always sure that you could trust a sergeant to do that. I don't want to knock sergeants because they run the army but I would leave it up to platoon leaders and we never went out as a company. We went out as a company in the helicopters where we always broke down into platoons and I would always stay with the weakest or the most problematic platoon leader and then I'd visit all the others from time to time and they would set up many patrol bases with me as a central patrol base. We tried to stay no longer than maybe 48 hours in one particular location.

And you were gaining other things by doing that. Guys were becoming hardened and they're developing their map reading skills and little techniques you use for being in the jungle and so forth and so on. And then again, it's the intelligence. We had such imprecise intelligence to go on as to the whereabouts of the enemy. They didn't have the kind of radios we had so you couldn't monitor the radio signals and you had to use Deerslayer type techniques, looking for signs of people, moving them along the trail and that sort of thing. We would question the villagers. We had interpreters with us who would ask.

And here's an example of how quickly you can lose your perspective as to compassion. We had a platoon sergeant, one of our platoons, and we nicknamed him Ben Quick. You ever see the movie, I think it was The Long, Hot Summer with I think Paul Newman was a barn burner and they called him Ben Quick. And if he didn't like people for whatever reason, he'd burn down a guy's barn. This guy, we'd go into a village and if we found any indication at all, any of the huts or anything that the VC had been there, he'd get out a cigarette lighter and up go a guy's house. And I remember one time at battalion command that jokingly said to me, said, "I can tell you what company’s down there because of the trail of burning huts all the way through the jungle." And we thought it was okay until one day I stopped and asked myself, I said, "Wait a minute now, we're burning down people's homes." I really gotten the point where I didn't give a damn.

I remember one time we showed up at a village and we went into... in a monsoon period, we kicked an entire family out of the hut and I made that my [inaudible] until the interpreter told me they were having a religious ceremony. The altar was set up and everything. And it’s something.. how quick you can lose that.

It was a beautiful country. I've always felt that. One day, I'd love me a waterfalls way up in the middle of nowhere. And it was just a beautiful country. Sometimes you'd forget there was a war. And we'd find fruit out in the jungle, add that to the C-ration, which was of course an improvement. And the people were peaceful and of course they'd probably wave at anybody to try to be on everybody's side. And I took a camera with me. I kept a camera in one of my ammunition parts. One guy asked me one day, he said, "How the hell could you be company commander and find time to take pictures?" I said, I was doing it for posterity.

But yes, it was very exhilarating. I remember we had a parade after Marm was nominated for the Medal of Honor and they had a brigade parade and they put us in our combat uniform, fixed bayonets, and we marched by and saluted General Kinnard. We were all 20 feet tall, we weren't 10 feet tall. We just knew we were hot stuff. Really not much else I can say about that, but yes, it was very exhilarating.

In 1966, it was a different United States. There was a lot of euphoria about the rightness of our cause. I would've gone home buck naked with nothing wrong with my CIB, I was so proud of myself. And I remember, I'm from Lanston, New Jersey, when I finally got home, they had a big party for me. I was a local hero. Big sign over the door, welcome home, John and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Years later when I went back on my second tour in 1971, when I got home, there was no such reaction. I remember the negative aspects of the war had begun to filter through to us by virtue of the Stars and Stripes and whatnot.

I remember while I was in Vietnam that a group of doctors from the 93rd evacuation hospital working out of Saigon wrote an open letter to the army dealership or someone, I don't know who, but it was published in the Stars and Stripes about, what are we here for? We spend most of our time treating guys that OD on drugs and whatnot and guys that frag people and accidents and so forth and so on. I just heard about it in the scuttle button mode around Bar Talk or whatnot. But I was told that the Army tried to cover it up. I don't know they did. I remember that the first carrier division by then only had one brigade left and they were stationed at Bien Hoa, and there was a talk. It got into Stars and Stripes. There was talk about a platoon leader who went out on an ambush patrol and had some trouble controlling the lieutenant because there was this, ‘I don't want to be the last guy in Vietnam to get killed’, just like the Thais. I was advisor to the Royal Thai Army and they had one brigade left and as it became obvious when the date was announced to the commanders, when they would be going back to Bangkok, they all of a sudden stopped being very aggressive in the field. And I remember the American General for that second regional assistance command came down to me and said, "I want these Thais to make more contact." I said, "Sir, why don't you come down and tell them? I'm working for Thai general and I don't think I'm in a position as a major tell them what to do but you've got two stars and you could certainly do more than I could." But you could see the differences in morale, the Second Tour and how it would reflect it from the mail I would get from home or whatnot. And what was going on in the United States, the pathology of all the stuff with Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and so forth and so on. And the Watts Riot and George Wallace running for president and then the racial thing had entered into the Vietnam scenario in a big time. I remember when my First Tour was there, we know the Army has a large preponderance overly so, maybe what 10% more than it's reflected in the population at the time. And I can't recall of any race problems. I don't think I had blinders on. I certainly would've picked up on it. And as I've told people, we used to come back from the field my First Tour and literally the companies would be fighting each other, getting into fistfights over who killed the most VC. That's how high the morale was. But by the time I had my Second Tour, there were black soldiers separating themselves, having a meeting giving the black para salute. There were race relations officers assigned to most of the major units. I can remember going into a drug treatment center and seeing a helicopter pilot, an officer, laying up there, a young kid, who had been strung out on drugs and they certainly couldn't let a guy fly helicopters doing that. I said, "Well, things must be pretty bad when you see an officer involved in that crap," because officers are supposed to have a different code altogether. That's why they called officers. And then it was just a question of when are we going home and getting it over with.

I've got a son from Generation X. He was born while I was in Vietnam. And although I love him to death and so forth and so on, I know that he's different from me, just like I'm different from my father.

I have a lot of disappointment in these people, but then I may just be a dinosaur to them, I don't know. Especially the Black kids because they look at a guy like me and say I'm a sell-out and this, that, and the other, and I try to tell them all the time, when I was teaching high school, they'd say, "What's a fool like you doing in Vietnam?" I said, "Man, you don't understand." I said, "Why you want to give it to the white boys that don't want you to even be in this country, that hates you because of your color. This is your country as much as it is anybody else's." But it's like I'm talking to that box over there.

It might be that I come from a generation where you always obeyed people of authority. I would never think of saying the things to my parents my son says to me, and I think he loves me and this, that, and the other. I always try to please people in authority, people of my generation did. I used to get trembling feelings and my throat would lump up saluting the flag. I tried to put the flag up in my neighborhood a couple of years ago. I've been living in [inaudible], yeah, "A couple of neighbors complained about it." And I said, "It's just a sin to love your country? This is a good country and I've been in the army 32 years, I've traveled most of the world and I'm always glad to get back to this country, with its racism and all its faults." I said, "You guys don't know. You don't know."I don't know what it is, but if you lose that feeling that you owe something to your country, I think we're in big trouble.

I asked my son one day, we were sitting there drinking. I said, "Do you think there's anything worth dying for?" And he had this long pause. He said, "Well, dad, I'm not going to make the Army a career." He said, "You did." I said, "Yeah." I said, "There are things worth dying for. This is my country." I said, "When I grew up, being Black was a kick in the ass, worst thing you'd ever had. And yet I served with pride in the United States," and I don't think I'm that naive. But like I said, I'm not reaching them. I don't understand their music. Sometimes I don't think they do either, or some of the other values that they have.

I remember I was telling war stories one time, my son, to a friend of mine, a guy wanted me to tell him, we were both drinking. Son got up and walked out of the room. When General Moore gave me an autographed copy of We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young, I said, "I'd like one for my son." And so he wrote in there that your father and I saw a lot of danger together. My son was embarrassed by it. This crap.

I told him what I was doing the day he was born. I was up in Operation White Wing. We were getting ready to go out on operation and when the Red Cross guy came and told me, Colonel Moore said, "Give him about 10 minutes to let it sink in," so they cut off the helicopters. I told him how I sat there and how proud I was to have a son.

My house's one of my hobbies. I built mono airplanes and tanks and everything. Every room in my house has got all this stuff all over the place. It drive my son up the wall. He moved in with me because he's trying to go to college on the cheap. He took all my models and everything and put them out of the room and so forth and so on.

But then nowadays it maybe we getting back to the way used to be, it was not considered very nice to be for your country. You just wanted to do a good job. Like I said, I came back and, "You mean you volunteered for Vietnam?" I said, "Man, I'm a soldier. What the hell am I supposed to do?" The whole purpose of being in the Army is I don't want to invent war just so I go find out what it is to orchestrate all the machine guns and the troops maneuver and everything, but that's what I'm in the military for. I don't see anything wrong with that.

Well, I'd saw the movie Platoon.

Interviewer:

Yeah, that's what I had.

Col. John Cash:

And I know what... What's the guy's name that did the film?

Interviewer:

Oliver Stone.

Col. John Cash:

Yeah, Oliver Stone had a certain amount of agenda with JFK and all the other movies he's made. And I saw that movie and I said I was in the same kind of environment and those things didn't happen where guys were afraid of their own troops and the sergeant kills another sergeant, raping and pillage and all that crap. That just wasn't my experience. There were moments when I had to be careful because we always had guys, in any group you're going to have a couple of guys you've got to look out for.

And the other thing I don't like is this portrayal of a Vietnamese veteran as a guy that's susceptible to what's the syndrome or whatever the hell they call it. I had my own problems. I came back, I ended up getting a divorced. I don't want to blame it on Vietnam. But most guys did what most guys did, is that they came back, put their lives together, and went on and raised their families and did their thing. And then there's always a tendency in a lot of movies and even in books to portray officer as bumbling idiots, fascinated by technology, wasting American lives, and so forth and so on. That also is not true. But then whoever said that fiction had to be the truthful portrayal? And like I told a guy one time that saw Platoon, I said, "Hey, man, those are flickering images on the screen. That's all it is. That's someone else's interpretation of what it's like to be in combat." Just like in the movie Full Metal Jacket. I thought it was very well done. Stanley Kubrick's a great director. But come on. It's like taking Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and make it into Apocalypse Now. Come on. A renegade Special Forces Colonel way out in the middle of... I mean, we just got some tall stories about the Special Forces, but don't you think that's taking it a little bit too far?

But given the ambivalence most Americans have about the military, it makes for good ticket receipts. And I'm sure they'll eventually come up with something like that about Desert Storm. I remember I saw the movie The Great Santini. Now that was well done because I'd run into colonels like Robert Duvall. That was very well done.

But like I said, I think it's the kinds of people that write novels and write stories and things. I remember when I was in graduate school, I didn't tell anybody I was an Army officer. I went to the University of Wisconsin. I didn't even get my graduate degree because they had to close down the school. I left a week before the guy was killed in math center explosion. And I was taking Portuguese, I was going to go to Brazil, and I was taking a course in Portuguese literature and by about the third week I took a summer course. We each had to stand up and say where we were from. Now here I am going out with these students, I don't wear a beard, I don't have an Afro 10 feet wide. I'm just average run-of-the-mill guy and I got more money than other students. And then when I finally had to stand up and tell them where I was from, I tried to beg my way out of it. I said, "I work for the government." And one thing led to another and when they found out I worked for the Army, these kids, we had these move chairs with the arms on them, I had one entire side of the room to myself. And I asked them, I said, "Now I thought I was a good guy?" I said, "You guys, I buy your beer all the time. Now you want to institutionalize me?" I said, "And I suppose people should do that to you because you don't wear bras and you have long hair and don't take baths and walk around barefoot and everything."

And we do have people in the military that look at society like that. I remember Robert Goroski came to Fort Leavenworth and at the Command General Staff College, he gave a guest lecture and the subject was why does the Army try to make the reporters their public affairs officers? And he got very heated and he says, "Our job is to report the war, warts and all." He said, "We're not trying to do a job on the military. But a lot of times you guys tend to be self-serving, we try to get behind that."

In the question-answer period, it got so acrimonious. One guy stood up and said, "Let me tell you, I'm going to be a Battalion man. If I catch one of you damn guys in my area of operations, watch out." It got real quiet and the Colonel who was monitoring the program had to call the off. And a lot of guys in the class agreed with what he said to Mr. Goroski.

But viewed from a certain perspective, Platoon was a good movie, so it was Full Metal Jacket, but it wasn't my experience.

I remember when I got back to the States, I saw the thing really turned my stomach. A 1st Cav guy, the 1st Cav patch on, there were two guys holding down the VC and they were taking the canteen of water and pouring it down his nose. I am sure there are probably colonels and people in authority that condone that sort of thing.

And I will say this much that, that sort of thing does work. That's one of the things that people don't like to talk about. I had an experience in El Salvador as an attache and I found out one thing, terrorism works like a champ, if you want it to. The guerrillas down there didn't take prisoners when they first got to El Salvador, nor did the government. And they said, "Well, what do you take prisons for? They're nothing but delinquent terrorists." And look what a VC would do. They go into a village and they would kill anyone in authority. If the person could have just been a militiamen something, they'd kill them. Whereas pointed out in the movie with Marlon Brando and he said how they would send out teams to provide medical aid and so the VC would come behind him and cut off anybody's arm that'd been inoculated. That doesn't surprise me. No surprise.

We had a program in Vietnam that started after I left called the Phoenix Program. Now if they were assassinating government officials and all the American advisors they could find, wouldn't it make sense that we'd do the same thing to them? And it was very effective. But the people back here in the States got worried of, "Oh, we can't do that," so forth and so on. But those things happen in wars. I suppose everybody that's ever been in one has got things he'd rather not talk about.

You can see some guys have had the usual things that happen to people when they get middle-aged. I've had a bypass. Guys, you don't recognize them, they gain too much weight. They're a shadow of their former selves. General Moore has had a hip replacement, he wears a hearing aid. I can't believe that stuff when I look at him. This guy used to outrun anybody. I think a few guys have gotten religion. Some guys don't ever bother to show up. It did a lot of damage to a lot of marriages, you can tell.

And we all sit around, at least when I used to go to them, and try to relive the past, and you can't recapture it. I'm 58 years old. When I was in Vietnam, I was 29. I could run up hills like a gazelle with a goat. I weigh 208, 9 pounds. In Vietnam, I was 178 pounds. And all the rest of us were the same way. You look at the pictures then and look at the guys now, we're portly, middle-aged men that don't really fit in anymore. I remember we started seeing Gary Owen at one reunion and somebody from a party next door came in and said, "Why don't you people pipe down?" Almost caused a riot.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Col. John Anthony Cash.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.