Interview with a Vietnam veteran

((Written for a history assignment))

Danny Richmond was born in 1949 in West Virginia. When he graduated from high school, it was 1967 and the Vietnam War was at its peak.

Richmond’s father had been in the Navy when he was younger. When Richmond made the decision to enter the armed forces to help the country, he knew what branch he wanted to enter. “It was just because of my father that I entered the Navy,” Richmond said.

Richmond was sent to Michigan for 14 weeks to attend boot camp. Richmond grew up in a small community in West Virginia, so his first time away from home quickly made him homesick. “It was completely different,” he said. “I’d never been on a plane. The first five or six weeks were very difficult for me. But, as you make relationships with other servicemen, it becomes easier.”

After boot camp, Richmond went into specialty training. “When I went in, being that I was a high school graduate - a big deal at the time - they gave me three choices. I could have been a radioman, I could have been a medic, and I could have gone to supplies. They didn’t guarantee me any of them, but they guaranteed me one of my three picks.” Richmond’s preferences were medic, then radioman, then supplies. He wound up in supplies.

His supplies training took place in Newport, Rhode Island at a Class A school. When that training was finished, he had a choice to make. “I could have gone to Italy on a supply ship,” he said, “but I decided that I would volunteer to go to Vietnam.” Before he was shipped out, Richmond went home for thirty days. After that, he went to Little Creek, Virginia, for four weeks of survival training which would prepare them for Vietnam. The men were taught hand-to-hand combat, underwent rigorous physical training, and were instructed in the use of guns. Specifically, the M-16. “The M-16 was the gun of choice back then,” Richmond said.

The training exercises the men went through in preparing for Vietnam were nothing if not thorough. “We went on three, four day marches. We could only take so many rations with us,” Richmond said. “When we were on this one particular march ... our guide marched us straight into an ambush. We were captured by guys who were supposed to be the Vietnam army.” Richmond said that the purpose of this training exercise was to simulate what might happen if a soldier was captured by the enemy. First, the men were stripped naked and given a shirt to wear. Then they tricked the men into thinking that they had buried their fellow servicemen alive. There were about 50 men that Richmond found himself in this position with.

Richmond feels that the survival training prepared him for Vietnam more than basic training did. “Basic training was just to teach you the Navy regulations and basically train you and weed out any people that might not be able to deal with the military type of life. ... [Survival training] was more of what we were going to be faced with. But I don’t know whether anything you go through over here really prepares you for what you go through in Vietnam.”

Richmond went home for a week before flying out to Vietnam. Foremost on his mind during that time was what he would experience while overseas. “I was curious about this foreign country. It was the farthest I’d ever been away from home ... here I’m half a world away and in a completely different country, completely different people, and going to a place where people really didn’t like me.”

Richmond said that he was mostly indifferent during the actual plane ride over to Vietnam. “I wasn’t anything. I was going, and that was it. I didn’t dwell on it.” Richmond’s fears may not have been expressed during the plane ride, but they expressed themselves in his subconsciousness prior to the plane ride. “I do recall that I had this reoccurring dream that I was running from something, but I didn’t know what I was running from. I wasn’t afraid when I was woke up, but I guessed that it had something to do with me going to Vietnam.”

The reality of what Richmond was going to do hit him when he landed in DaNang, Vietnam.

“The plane went in really quickly, just went down,” he said. They didn’t circle or anything like that. We got off the plane and we were greeted by an Air Force sergeant. And we went into an area and he was briefing us as to where we were going to go. He kept referring to this thing - ‘The cattle car will be here to pick you up and will take you to where you’re going.’ As he was explaining this, the base went on red alert and he directed us to the bunkers. And I said, ‘Well, I haven’t been here five minutes and I’ve already seen my first bunker, which is a bunch of sandbags that they prepare for these air raids. They used their rockets and mortars, basically. Then, I saw what they were referring to as a ‘cattle car’ - it was a big huge truck with doors on the sides and it was designed to haul cattle but they redesigned it to haul - me.”

Richmond was taken to his base. Even though he was in the Navy, he was stationed on land. He didn’t spend time on a boat until two and a half years into his Navy career. The base that he was stationed at near DaNang was called Camp Tensha. Camp Tensha was made up of many Quonset huts that can house up to 50 people. The base was nothing more than gun towers, and a barbed wire fence, in addition to the Quonset huts. Each Quonset hut had its own bunker.

“When I got there, they put me in kind of ‘home-sy’ barracks until they figured out where they were going to send me,” Richmond said. “There were a number of things I could have ended up doing. I could have ended up going to one of the river patrol boats, that patrols these little water inlets, and these guys see a lot of combat. And then there’s what they call the deep-water pier where all the big ships come in and they all float ammo, tanks, food supply, beer, soda - it’s a big port. They even ship in barrels of asphalt.” Richmond was assigned to the deep water pier as a radioman, directing the boats and crates into the area.

Richmond arrived in Vietnam in October 1967, but wasn’t directly involved in combat until January 1968 during the Tet Offensive. “We were constantly receiving rocket attacks. But actual me shooting was during the Tet Offensive,” Richmond said. “The thing is that I didn’t sit there and see somebody and shoot them and watch them drop down. I shot into where at night, you could see the Vietnamese ... they would come in and we would get into a gun battle and we’d shoot into these directions and we’d send in rockets and mortars.”

Richmond said he never knew for sure if he’d killed anyone. “I’ve seen the end result of what a lot of combat had done, and - Yeah, I’ve walked through a lot of bodies and wondered if I was the one that killed this person. And, I could always say probably not.”

Not seeing the enemy didn’t make the battle any less personal for Richmond. “It’s a very difficult thing too, because as you’re going through, and you see - I mean, these are kids, these are 16, 17 year old kids - and you go through their pockets and you find pictures of mothers and fathers and babies and families. Just like me.”

Richmond was turned off to major-scale fighting after the Tet Offensive. “That [Tet Offensive] was it for me. It lasted for a while. What made the Tet Offensive so bad was that they hit everything. Rockets all over the place. We were in about a 40-acre compound, and during the first night of the Tet Offensive, they dropped about 40 rockets within the compound, I don’t know how many mortars - there was loss of life.”

During his first rocket attack, Richmond was operating the main radio. “I’m thinking, ‘Why in the world is this person out there trying to kill me? They don’t know me. At least come up and say, ‘Alright, I don’t like you, I don’t like the way you look ... I want to kill you.’ But these people - like me - shooting into the woods, into a ravine, I didn’t know that person, but he was shooting at me, and I was shooting back. I wondered, ‘Why does this person want to kill me? Why does this guy want to kill me?’ Then you get angry. And, well, first chance I get, I’ll show you.”

Richmond spent exactly one year in Vietnam. “There were so many different experiences,” he said of his time there. “It wasn’t just the combat, a lot of the stuff was as a result of combat. A number of occasions we had to go into a field hospital in DaNang and ID bodies that had been killed. Even on the Vietnamese side, we’d get a number of casualties that come into the pier. It was something, some of the injuries and suffering that these people were going through.”

One of the more disturbing parts of the conflict in Vietnam was the fact that the enemy was indistinguishable from the allies. “You really never knew who your enemy was,” Richmond said. “There was the DMZ, which separated the North and the South but there was never really any battle lines. You might work side by side with the Vietnamese during the day and be fighting them at night, because they were working for North Vietnam. The Vietnamese would work side by side with us ... and we were there to help them, supposedly. The Vietnamese were supposedly our friends, and they would be working along side, and getting paid by the government. But some of these people, they would work with us, and be friendly with us, but at night - they were traitors, they would go and fight alongside the North Vietnam soldiers. And by day they would be back, working with the Americans.”

Many of these Vietcong fighters used their positions in the military bases to their advantage. “We would get a shipment of ammunition,” Richmond said, “it would come in and it would be staged temporarily at our place before it was shipped up to another port - we would watch the Vietnamese ... they would start pacing, they would pace it off, from where we had the ammunition site. Our intelligence found out that what they were doing was pacing it off so they could give the information at night to the VC so that they could lob in mortars or rockets with the information - so many paces to the right, so many paces to the left, and there may be a klick on a rocket launcher - so we had to make sure that these people were really on our side. And again, it was difficult ... you couldn’t tell the difference, they were the same nationality, sort of like the Civil War with Americans fighing Americans.”

Richmond said that some his most difficult periods in Vietnam were after combat and during the monsoon seasons. “It’s very difficult for anyone when their life is at risk ... It wasn’t during the combat that was so bad, but it was afterwards and you’re like, ‘Man, I was lucky,’ but yet you know it’s not going to be over, you’ve got another 200 days to go, and you just kinda wonder if you’re going to manage.”

Monsoon season brings long periods of heavy rain. “It would be a period of time that I’d probably be wet most of the night tours. We did twelve hours on, twelve hours off. ... When you’re on ... you’ve never seen it rain until you’ve seen it rain in Vietnam during the monsoon season. Even though the temperature might have dipped down to about 70 degrees, it were still cold and wet. Sometimes it would rain, and then the sun would come out and you’d dry out, and two minutes later it’d rain and you’d be wet again.”

Richmond said that the Vietnamese would use the rainy weather to their advantage. “We get a thunderstorm over here, we sit on the back porch and watch it. The Vietnamese would take advantage of that. We weren’t prepared for it. ... They live in monsoons, they work in monsoons, and they fought in monsoons.”

Another difficult part of Richmond’s job was his trips to the hospital to identify dead bodies. He had a jeep that he used to drive around the different compounds. “I had gone up there a couple times to identify people that had been shipped over with me but had gone over to different areas of Vietnam. I also had to take people ... that maybe knew people [who had been killed].”

Richmond’s efforts did not go unrecognized. “While I was there, I received the Navy Achievement Medal with the combat V, because our group maintained radio communications during frequent mortar and rocket attacks, and ground assaults, and we still maintained vital radio communications with people and places. ... It’s worth something to me but it wouldn’t have any value to anyone else.”

Towards the end of their time there, Richmond said, the soldiers noticed some of the troops being pulled out. “I actually started seeing the war starting to wind down - there were still conflicts, we would still have our little skirmishes around the perimeter, we’d still fight - we were still getting rocket attacks - but we were seeing a large amount of troops being pulled out.” Richmond’s group had no shortage of action. They even fought a battle the day they left Vietnam.

Richmond feels that his time in Vietnam really changed his perspective of the world, and was overall beneficial. “There was a saying - and it’s true - ‘I was born in West Virginia but I was raised in Vietnam.’ It is so true. I wouldn’t take a million dollars to go back over there, but I also wouldn’t take a million dollars to take away what I’ve got. I think that it probably made me more compassionate than anything, because of all the suffering. Not only by the Americans, but by the Vietnamese.”

A set of experiences when Richmond returned from Vietnam only affirmed the things he’d learned while in Vietnam. When he returned home, there was no ceremony, he was just given his orders and told to report to a certain ship on a certain day. He made it to Los Angeles and was waiting to take a plane to Connecticut, to go to New London’s sub base. “I was sitting at this bar in Los Angeles,” he said, “and this Navy captain sat next to me and he said, ‘Where you headed, sailor?’ And I told him, ‘I’m going to New London, Connecticut.’ And he says, ‘Where’ve you been?’ and I said ‘I just spent twelve months over in Vietnam.’ So he says, ‘Well, let me buy you a beer.’ He calls the bartender over and he says ‘Bartender, give this sailor a beer.’ The bartender says, ‘Can I see your ID?’ And I showed him my ID card, I’m 20 years old, and he says ‘I can’t serve you.’ The captain says, ‘He just spent twelve months over in Vietnam and he can’t drink a beer? But he can go over there and kill someone?’

“People don’t care about this. I remember leaving and these little old ladies giving us soda and cookies and patting us on the back, but when we came back there was nobody. As I stayed in the states, you were almost afraid to mention the fact that you were a Vietnam vet - it was almost like saying ‘I’m a communist.’ It wasn’t something that you should be proud of.”

Richmond disagrees with those people who criticize the men and women who fought in Vietnam. “After being there [in Vietnam], and seeing what I saw ... I’m sure that we did not do the right thing. I have mixed feelings. The government makes mistakes. The government said that we were going to Vietnam, which was a mistake, but on the other hand, we had this sense of patriotism that ‘The government has spoken and I have to support them.’ And I went. On the other hand, those people that didn’t go, I can understand where they’re coming from ... I don’t resent the fact that people stood up and said ‘No, I’m not going to go’. Where I feel bad is, don’t criticize the people who went. They had a choice and they made it. Right or wrong, that’s what they did.”

Richmond reported to New London and stayed there for a year and a half, and got to work with a piece of history. “Finally I I got into what I was training to do,” he said. “At that time I had no idea that I was dealing with a big thing, but I was assigned to a group of submarines... They’d have a supply officer aboard the submarines and they would come in to me and say ‘We need this’. I was called the ‘Priority Supply Officer.’... And one of my subs was the Nautilus. At that time, I didn’t know much about it, but I read about it, and found out it was our first nuclear submarine.”

Readjusting to life in the United States took some doing. “The hardest thing I had to get used to was the speed of the automobile,” Richmond said. “You’re over in Vietnam for twelve months and the fastest you probably go ... was maybe 30, 35 mph. And my dad picked me up at the airport, and I thought he was flying. I said ‘Slow down, dad,’ and he said, ‘I’m only going 50 mph.’ ... I had trouble sleeping at night. Not because I was having flashbacks or anything, but it was just too comfortable. ... I missed the comforts of home, but you adjust to your environment.”

After his stint as Priority Supply Officer, Richmond was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Fulton as a supply officer. “It was a sub tender, which means that we had a squadron of submarines that we maintained - Everything from torpedos, food, clothing, repair parts, all that.” Richmond met his wife aboard the U.S.S. Fulton, and they were married while he was still in the service. The couple made their home in Connecticut, and today Richmond works as a security guard for Russell Library.

Richmond’s perception of how the United States stands in the world has changed since he came back from Vietnam, and since Sept. 11, 2001. “I don’t think that the United States should be world policeman,” he said. “It’s getting to the point now where if we don’t get involved with other countries’ conflicts there will be terrorism, we’ll have another 9/11. I think we should help these countries fight terrorism. But to run a country? No, I don’t think so.

“I think the United States is on the right track, but we have to be careful to avoid another Vietnam. ... I feel a lot better [with weapons such as the smart bomb] in doing what we’re doing but if we ever have to get involved in another Vietnam, the world would end.”

Richmond would not go back to another Vietnam. “We didn’t prove anything, we didn’t solve anything, we just made a whole lot of people unhappy. A lot of young men and women died. For country, yes, but over there - for nothing.”