Oral history interviews of

the Vietnam Era

Oral History Project

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Version 3 
August 20, 2018 
 Leo Granos
Narrator

Douglas Bekke
Interviewer

May 22, 2018

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Leo Granos – LG
Douglas Bekke – DB

DB: Minnesota Historical Society Vietnam Oral History Project interview with Leo Granos in
Minneapolis on 22 May, 2018. Mr. Granos, can you please say and spell your name?

LG: My name is Leo Granos. Leo L-e-o Granos G-r-a-n-o-s.

DB: And your date and your date and place of birth?

LG: I was born in Minneapolis on February 13, 1950.

DB: And what do you know about your ancestry?

LG: My—on my father’s side, both of his parents came from—came over by boat from
Norway. And on my mother’s side, both came from Europe, but her father came from Germany
and her—I’m sorry, my mother’s father—grandfather came from Germany and her grandmother
came from Sweden.

DB: Um-hm. And did you know your grandparents? Have a relationship with them?

LG: I did. I was—I did not know my grandparents on my mother’s side; they died before I
was born, but I knew her step-father. And on my father’s side, I knew both my grandparents.

DB: Um-hm. And have good memories of them? Good relationships?

LG: Very—they—they had a cabin up north and we would go up several times a year when
we were young to be with them.

DB: And do you have siblings?

LG: I have one brother, two years older, named Nick.

DB: Your parents—did —did any of your grandparents serve in World War I? Do you have a
military heritage in your family?

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LG: My grandfather on my father’s side served for a short period in World War I. However,
my understanding is that he was released from the service because he was missing too many
fingers. But he was in for about three months.

DB: Okay. And your dad? Did he serve in a war?

LG: My dad was—my dad was in the navy. As a matter of fact, he spent some time in
Okinawa and twenty-five years later I spent some time in the very same spot. So yes, he was in
the navy during World War II.

DB: And did—were these military things talked about in your family when you were growing
up?

LG: All the time. I had four uncles on my mother’s side that had served in the army, and two
uncles on my father’s side that served in the army.

DB: And was that kind of a motivating factor for you and your interests in the military?

LG: That’s what you did in my family (Laughs).

DB: Okay, so there was a strong emphasis on military service.

LG: Yes.

DB: Um-hm. And, what did your dad do for a living?

LG: He worked—once he got out of the navy, he worked in retail for Wards for a little while
and finally got a job with Northwest Orient Airlines out at what was then called Wold
Chamberlain Field in Minneapolis.

DB: And your mom?

LG: She worked also in retail—that’s how they met—at Wards and then she became a stay at
home mother when—when I and my brother were born.

DB: And what part of Minneapolis did you grow up in?

LG: We were—we kind of hopped around Minneapolis; we lived on Bloomington Avenue

down on Twenty-fourth, we lived on Chicago up on Thirty-eighth, and a few other places
around—back on Bloomington and Chicago.

DB: Okay, okay. And did—you say your mom was a homemaker—did she keep a garden?
What did you—what did you eat growing up?

LG: Uh—

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DB: Hot dish? That’s the standard for—pretty standard in—

LG: It was pretty much—yeah (Laughs). It was pretty much tuna salad and, you know,
cornbread. We did well you know. The first few years of my life, we did pretty well.

DB: Um-hm. And did she can?

LG: No, she didn’t—she didn’t can, but she was a good cook. She would—she was really,
you know—I’ll never forget the mashed potatoes and the meatloaf and, you know, cranberries,
and things she would put her soul into for us.

DB: And the family meal was the expectation and the norm?

LG: We ate pretty well (Laughs). She never disappointed.

DB: Okay, okay. Do you remember the grade school you went to?

LG: Yeah I went—because we moved a lot, I went to three or four. I went to—started off in
Irving, which is now gone. We then moved a little further south and I went to Horace Mann,
which is also gone. And then I spent some time and went over to Keewaydin and eventually back
to Irving.

DB: And good experiences in grade school?

LG: Uh, pretty much. I mean, when you move schools like that it’s kind of difficult to keep
friendships, but I did well.

DB: You were a good student? Diligent?

LG: Yeah, I worked pretty hard, you know, on my studies and uh, I worked hard trying to
make friendships.

DB: And junior high?

LG: Junior high—by then, my parents had had a lot of trouble and were divorced. So, my
mother was raising my brother and I herself, and she worked real hard to keep us in one school.
So I ended up going to Ramsey Junior High for the full three years.

DB: Okay, so most of the time you were moving around is when your parents were still
together.

LG: We also moved around quite a bit when they divorced.

DB: Okay, okay. And how did junior high go for you?

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LG: Junior high was—it was okay. There was—you know, it’s a little—it’s always hard for
adolescents to—I think to try to fit in. So coming into Ramsey it took—it took a couple years for
me to really strike up some good friendships, but I still have some from that.

DB: Yeah, but you were kind of an outsider; you hadn’t come from the—from the grade
schools that fed into that junior high?

LG: Had to work hard to fit in.

DB: And in junior high we start to develop our interests—they start coming out. What kind of
things interested you?

LG: I liked the woodworking, I really enjoyed the, metalwork that we did in the shops. There
was—mechanical drafting was, I think, my favorite class, and I still—I’m still very particular
about what I draw or write—that it’s done right. But I really enjoyed those types of classes.
Math—I always had an interest in it and—and history. So those were probably my favorite—
favorite classes.

DB: And you had good teachers who facilitated your interests?

LG: Really good. Really good teachers. Really good leaders and instructions.

DB: Did your mother have to go to work after the divorce?

LG: Yeah, she—she spent—she worked a full-time—a few different full-time jobs, but she
also worked part-time—sometimes two or three part-time jobs to make ends meet.

DB: And did that put strain on you and your brother? Stresses?

LG: It um, it became a kind of a tough time in our life because my father had—after the
divorce, when I was about ten—my father moved off to—took a transfer out to New Jersey, and
so from then we’d see him maybe once or twice a year. And she was gone a lot working. So—so
it was—it was a difficult period. It was a lot of— a lot of times when it would have been nice to
have, you know, that father image.

DB: Yeah. It’s a situation where young men stray in these situations. You have a longer leash.

LG: (Laughs) Yeah. And if you don’t stray too far, you’re okay; you can reel it back in. But—
there were times—there we difficult times.

DB: Did you get involved in church activities at all? Was that something in your family?

LG: My mother only asked three things of us when I was growing up. She asked my brother
and I to be confirmed, to graduate from high school, and to be good men. And that was—
confirmation—it was a struggle, but I made it; I was confirmed. I graduated high school, and I’m
still working on the third.

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DB: Yeah, we all struggle with that. And scouting? Anything like that? Any of those kinds of
activities?

LG: No, I was—I was mostly uh, mostly left on my own.

DB: Okay. And did you have hobbies?

LG: Yeah, I—I got together with a few guys and we actually started up a band when I was
about fifteen. And we’d play for high schools or, you know, graduations, we played for Braniff
Airlines once, for one of their get-togethers.

DB: So you were pretty good?

LG: We were pretty good. We were pretty good.

DB: Did the band have a name?

LG: We were called Prodigies. And unfortunately, with the war going on, that’s what ended
splitting us all up. And that was right after high school—I think we had uh, we had actually
played for a business party, and a gentleman came up to us, handed his business card, and said
that he would be interested in maybe sponsoring us to record some of the music that we did.
Unfortunately, my—my best friend and I had already enlisted in the Marine Corps and the
drummer had enlisted in the army. So that all ended quickly (Laughs).

DB: Yeah. Other things get in the way.

LG: Yeah.

DB: Were you involved in school activities? Sports, anything like that?

LG: I played baseball a lot; that was one of my favorite things. I played baseball a lot. But
there again—going back to what we talked about before—when you’re new in a school and
you’re new in an area, you have to re-prove yourself every time. So even though I loved playing
baseball, I would join a team and I would have to kind of earn the right to get out there in the
field, but it always seemed once I did, I was fine. But it just put a little additional burden on me
to have to work harder.

DB: But the band was a good outlet for you?

LG: The band was good. I kind of moved into that area after—after going to Central High
School—we moved—I went to Minneapolis Central High School, and I went out for the baseball
team and I sat on the bench for four games. And at that point I realized that I probably wasn’t
going to play on the team. So I just put more emphasis into the music side.

DB: And in your home did you have a T.V.?

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LG: We had T.V., but I—

DB: Black and white?

LG: It was black and white and I did not watch a lot of T.V. Other than Saturday morning—
you know, the usuals, cartoons, you know, cowboy shows, the westerns, and—and—

DB: Your musical interests didn’t draw you to Lawrence Welk or anything like that?

LG: No, I didn’t spend a lot of time on Lawrence (Both laugh). I did like the Ed Sullivan
show; there was always something—

DB: A variety show.

LG: —something interesting there.

DB: Um-hm, um-hm. Car? What did you—how did you learn to drive?

LG: I didn’t drive until I actually came back from the service. I didn’t really have much need
for it. I didn’t have—I couldn’t afford a car. I did have one friend who had a ’49 Ford—or, I’m
sorry, a ’59 Ford Fairlane and he was our wheels; all we had to do was provide the gas and he’d
provide the wheels.

DB: Okay. And gas costs money.

LG: Yeah.

DB: You got paid for some of your musical gigs, I guess?

LG: Yep.

DB: And did you have other things going on the side where you could make money as a kid?

LG: Uh, not too much—

DB: Cutting grass? Raking leaves?

LG: I did do that when I—I did cut grass and do odd jobs when I was younger. I also—when I
was about sixteen, a friend of mine’s father, had a concession stand at the fair and I spent a
summer up northern Minnesota with a carnival and—and so that provided me some money that
actually lasted for a couple years.

DB: Were you a good saver?

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LG: Yeah. I didn’t spend it on much. Maybe occasional Rolling Stones album or, you know,
the Beatles or whatever it was.

DB: Were you expected to contribute back into the family?

LG: No.

DB: Did you have to buy your own clothes?

LG: I did buy my own clothes. My mother—I bought—at the time I think what was popular
was a shirt called the Pendleton and there were Gant’s shirts, and—and of course, Levi’s. And
with the money that I made, I was usually—I think I had a total of three or four shirts and maybe
three pairs of Levi’s (Laughs) and that’s all I needed.

DB: But there were strict, self-imposed dress codes in those days.

LG: Yes, it was.

DB: You didn’t stray too far.

LG: No, I had to conform.

DB: The Beatles, when that came in, was that an inspiration into your musical interests?

LG: We did do a—I mean I did enjoy listening to the Beatles, but it seemed like everything
came together at once; you had the Rolling Stones, you had, the Beatles, you had—you had the
Kinks, the Zombies—I mean they all seemed to come from England and they all had good
music. So—

DB: Um-hm, the British invasion in general more than any one particular group.

LG: Exactly. And that’s what our band primarily worked with.

DB: And when you—when you would play—generally what could you expect to earn when
you played a concert?

LG: Well at that time, if we played for—like for example, we would play for a junior high
school or something, the band would get about a hundred dollars, and we’d split that pretty much
evenly.

DB: And there was three of you or four of you?

LG: There were four of us.

DB: Four of you. And what did you play?

LG: I played bass guitar.

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DB: Okay. And was that pretty good money for you guys at the time?
LG: It was—it was enough to buy maybe a Gant or two (Both laugh). It was pretty good
money.

DB: Okay, okay. About this time people start noticing girls. And you’re in a position where
you could get a lot of attention up there in the band.

LG: Oh, yeah.

DB: And how did that go for you?

LG: That went pretty well. I—I never had a problem with—with dating, really. But I always
wondering if it wasn’t because, you know, we were up on stage. Because I wasn’t anything more
than normal looking so—so I was pretty careful about that; I looked pretty hard for the right girl.

DB: Um-hm, um-hm. Okay. And in your—within your family, how were holidays celebrated?
Christmas, birthdays—?

LG: Well that’s where things changed a lot because when my parents were together there was
always the—the Christmases and the holidays at his families. And there was usually twenty-five,
thirty people at a time and it was out at—it was out in the rich neighborhoods—you know,
Richfield and Bloomington—

DB: The new suburbs.

LG: The new suburbs. And it was always bright and sparkly and beautiful and—and it was
kind of nice to get out of the inner city. But then after the divorce, it was mainly three of us—it
was just the three of us. We would occasionally have maybe—spend it with my mother’s father
up in Wisconsin, but that—it was pretty—pretty different after that.

DB: And so the number of presents diminished significantly?

LG: Yeah. Yeah.

DB: Did any of your uncle’s kind of step in to help out and fill the void?

LG: I had one uncle, Nathan, who was actually a—he was a driver in the army in Germany,
and I always enjoyed—I always emulated him because he—he just—he was a fun guy and he
had trunks of things that he brought back from Europe during the war. Being a driver, evidently
he had access to sending things back. He had swords, flare guns, flags, uniforms, medals—you
name it, he had trunks of them.

DB: He had ways to carry the stuff.

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LG: Yeah, yeah. And he would—when we needed somebody he would be there. You know,
when we needed a father—and he would come over probably—maybe two times a month and
spend some time with us; take us hunting or fishing.

DB: Similar situation with birthdays?

LG: Yeah it was pretty much—it was with friends, you know—

DB: Get a cake?

LG: We’d get a cake, we’d have some of my friends over and usually, you know, spend a
couple of hours together.

DB: Going hunting and fishing with your uncle—did he provide the equipment? The gun or
the fishing rod?

LG: Yeah, yeah. He had plenty of guns; he was a hunter. My mother’s side of the family were
the hunters. My father’s side were more fishermen. But—but they were all deer hunters and—
and duck hunters on my mom’s side.

DB: Um-hm. And your relationship with your brother? You said he was two years older?

LG: He was two years older. We were typical—typical teenagers, I guess. He would usually
order me around and I’d usually ignore what he said. But—but we got along okay.

DB: Okay, okay. This is the late sixties now? Mid to late sixties? You’re in high school and
there’s a lot of things going on in the world in the early sixties—there was the Kennedy
assassination—I don’t—most people remember exactly where they were when they heard the
word. Do you have a recollection of that?

LG: Oh, I remember. I remember. He was probably one of my first idols because he just—
because there again, he was a World War II hero, he was young, he was, you know, he was just
very active. I think he was a great president. At least he was a great leader. And when that
happened I was going to Ramsey Junior High, and I’ll never forget it because I was going to my
locker and then there was an announcement over the speaker that the president had been shot and
it just shut the whole school down. So we all went home and it was very depressing—very
depressing time.

DB: And were you someone who paid attention to world affairs? Current events? They had
just because that was the Cuban Missile Crisis, Berlin Wall, and the ongoing situation of the
Cold War. And were you—did you pay attention to that? Was that something that was of interest
to you?

LG: Generally speaking, I would listen to what the older folks talked about and all those
subjects that you just mentioned were the ones that we talked about—they would talk about and I
would listen. In those days, it was kind of funny because there was a philosophy, children should

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be seen and not heard. So that was kind of the way it was around them. But they would talk
about the Cuban Missile Crisis and how Kennedy, you know, did a great job. They talked about
the Bay of Pigs and how Kennedy admitted that he did a terrible job. And in all the things that
you mentioned—I think that at the time there was a lot of fear. I remember people were building
bomb shelters—I don’t know what they are now, they’re probably fruit cellars or wine cellars
somewhere—but people were, in general, worried that what happened in Hiroshima was going to
happen in Minnesota, I guess.

DB: Do you remember the grade school drills relating to that?

LG: Oh, yeah, under the desk or—or uh—yeah, every time I would hear a siren go off I would
hope that it was the second Wednesday, or whatever it was at the time and hope it wasn’t the
Russians.

DB: The Russians coming over the North Pole.

LG: (Laughs) Exactly.

DB: But they were really fears at the time?

LG: You bet, yeah.

DB: As Vietnam was cranking up—’65, ’66—were you paying attention to that?

LG: I was off and on paying attention to it. I—I guess I—at that time, what you were seeing
were things like scoreboards where every night on the news they would talk about how many
Americans killed versus how many Vietnamese, NVA’s or Viet Cong were killed. And it just—
was kind of a box score at the time. What really—what I was really more in-tuned with was— I
hung around with a lot of older guys and four of my friends actually went into the Marines. So
that was a huge influence on me too. Even though when they would come home on leave, they
would all—I would tell them I was probably gonna go into the Marines and they’d all say, don’t
do it.

DB: Uh-huh. How much older than you?

LG: Uh, most of them were a year or two older than me. They—a lot of them were friends
with my brother and then they just kind of adopted me into their group.

DB: Was your brother part of that group that went in the service too?

LG: No, he couldn’t go. And that, I think, was—was one of the things that really—that really
impacted him because he always wanted to be in the Navy. But he had a heart murmur and
epilepsy, so he never made it into the Navy.

DB: Um, how about protests? Things that were going on?

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LG: There were so many things going on that I didn’t quite understand what they all were. I
mean, there were burnings going on in California, there was hippy movements going on, there
were—I always—I don’t know why, I think it was probably the way I was raised by my mother
to feel that all people were really created equal and I really didn’t see a lot of racial issues—
DB: Uh-huh. And you were going to Central High—

LG: I was going to Central High School—

DB: And Central High was a pretty integrated school.

LG: Yes, and I had friends that were black, I had friends that were white— to me they were
all the same and it wasn’t until—it’s like there were issues at Central where they would lock
down sometimes and I—

DB: Because?

LG: Because of rioting.

DB: Among the students?

LG: Yes. And I don’t necessarily know if it was because of our students because I never saw
one cause a problem. But they would lock down the school and I just think it was probably
mostly a small group of outsiders.

DB: And what kind of problems were they causing when you say a riot?

LG: Oh, they would break windows, you know—

DB: During a school day?

LG: During school days, yeah. So towards the end of my senior year, they would actually
send police out to stand by the doors.

DB: And were—it was a particular group that doing these things?

LG: Uh, different groups, but—

DB: Was—were they—were they antiwar protests? Was it race issues?

LG: It was mostly race issues.

DB: Okay, okay. But it wasn’t one group on another; it was more just rowdy behavior?

LG: Rowdy behavior. It was—

DB: Okay. Acting out rather than—that targeting any particular—?

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LG: Exactly. I never quite understood what the purpose was other than destruction. That’s
what it was like to me.
DB: We talked a little bit about life in school in those days and the dress codes that existed,
and can you talk about what it was like at Central amongst the kids. A, what the dress codes were
that were imposed by the school, and then how the kids oftentimes enforced it themselves—or
encouraged it themselves. And how it might have changed while you were there.

LG: Well it—that’s hard for me to describe because my second year at Central, there was
what was called a work program. And my—my desire was to get away from the school. I
really—I didn’t enjoy the issues that were happening around the school so I joined the work
program and I would just go and take maybe two classes in the morning and then go to work.

DB: What was the work?

LG: I worked at a silk-screen company down off Lake Street for about probably six months,
and then my senior year—

DB: What was the name of the poster silk-screen company?

LG: You know, I can’t remember.

DB: Wipson? On Hennepin?

LG: Uh, no. No, I’d have to really dig back to remember.

DB: That’s okay.

LG: Typically they made—they made metal rulers and I would run the machine that would
drop it in to the acid to cut the numbers and—and then my last year of high school I got a job
with Kal Abrams Metal Company up in north Minneapolis.

DB: And you got a job through the work program at school.

LG: I actually got a job on my own and then that was accepted through the work program.

DB: Okay, okay. And these are—these are hands on jobs. I mean, you said like the—the skills
you were acquiring through the—the shop classes at the school. Did these jobs play into that?

LG: No, these jobs only gave me money and got me out of school (Laughs). So—so I really
by that time—I mean this was five years after the classes I’d taken at Ramsey and I think—

DB: So these—the shop classes, that interest, that didn’t continue so much into high school, it
was more of a junior high thing.

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LG: Yeah, that faded away after I went to high school. It was a very disruptive time. It was
um, it was a lot of things going on in the world that—very confusing. Some of my friends
were—were church goers, some of my friends were drug—you know, were into drugs. So it was
a very difficult time for me. I spent a lot of time with the band or working to kind of get away
from everything.

DB: Um-hm. And when you weren’t with the band or you weren’t working, were there places
you went to hang out? That kids from the central part of the city went to?

LG: Uh, yeah, I guess for the most part we’d hang around Lake Street—Porky’s and White
Castle (Laughs).

DB: There were some teen clubs up on Nicolet and Lake, too.

LG: Yeah, I think Mr. Lucky’s was one of them that was up there. And we’d spend time up
there.

DB: Did you ever play up there?

LG: No.

DB: That was more, senior bands or—?

LG: Yeah, that was some of the more well-known bands at the time. The Avanties and
Trashmen and—

DB: And aspiration, perhaps, but not in reality.

LG: Yeah.

DB: Yeah, okay. So you’re in high school; you’re not really happy there, you’re looking for
ways to get out but you promised your mother you were gonna graduate.

LG: Right.

DB: And what ambitions do you have after graduation?

LG: I only developed one ambition—really two. One was I was gonna be a marine, and the
second was someday I’d like to be a cop. And, basically the Marines was always the big plan. I
had no intention of going to college, I couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t really want to go on the
outside an—and find a job yet. I felt—you know, and a lot of it went back to the way I was
raised, you know—to pro—serve first. So, so I had to get that done with; I had to serve my time
and I decided that I would go into the Marines.

DB: And how did you make that happen?

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LG: I stopped in the recruiting office—

DB: Which was where?

LG: It was down on—right off of Sixtieth and Nicolet, at the time. And there was actually
three of us and we were—it was the summer of ’68 where we had pretty much bummed around
and played in the band most of the summer—

DB: Were these—these were your bandmates, then, that were—

LG: Yeah. Yes.

DB: You mentioned that earlier, I think, yeah.

LG: Well one had gone in the Army. There were—two of my best friends and I went to—
went in to talk to the Marines. And at the time, we—they told us, you know, that there was a
delayed entry program. So we said, “Yeah, that sounds good.” As it turned out, me and my best
friend went in; the other friend was 4-F. So, he was forced to stay back.

DB: And were you and your friend going in on the buddy program?

LG: We went in together, we went through boot camp together, and he ended up actually
going into Vietnam at the same time I did, but he went into a different regiment about five miles
from me.

DB: Okay. When you enlisted in the Marines, did you sign a contract that specified, I want to
be an infantry man, I want to be an artilleryman, I want to be this or I want to be that—or did you
just sign up to say, “I’m going to be a marine; send me where you want”?

LG: Basically it was, “I’m going to be a marine wherever you need me.” I didn’t even know
you could ask for a specific job. But I don’t know what I would have asked for because marines
are all basic infantry; every—every marine is in 0311, basically. And that’s right up to the
Commandant.

DB: How did the—how did the recruiter sound to you? Was he—was he interested,
enthusiastic, inspiring? What—I suppose he’s in his dress blues or something at the recruiting
office?

LG: Oh, he was very inspiring. He—he knew he had us when we walked in the door. Told us
it was going to be a great experience and we were gonna probably go to San Diego—beautiful
place, you know, by the sea. So and he said, “You’re gonna really enjoy it out there” (Laughs)
and so we were excited about that.

DB: Were you in pretty good shape at the time?

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LG: Pretty good, yep. Yep. I’d always been a good runner, always been athletic, took good
care of myself, spend very little time doing the wrong things.

DB: So you had your four-month delay, and what did you do in that period?

LG: Well it actually—I’d have to go back and look at the time frames because it wasn’t four
months. I actually—I graduated in June of ’68 and I went in August 14 of ’68, so it must have
been a—it must have been about a thirty-day delayed entry—I’d have to really sit down and do
the math sometime—but it was very quick that we went in.

DB: Okay. So, in any case, within that period, what did you do? Did you work? Did you just
hang out? Did you—

LG: We partied.

DB: Oh, okay.

LG: And played in the band. But you know, like I say, we, we had a lot of—that was probably
the wildest time in my life. We—we just spent a lot of time on Lake Street, you know, playing
gigs and—

DB: You had a February birthday, so you’re eighteen; you didn’t have to have your parents
sign.

LG: Right.

DB: And what did your mother think about you going into service?

LG: Oh, she broke down crying (Laughs). She—I never said a word to her, so she didn’t
know until I came home the night I’d signed the papers and showed it to her, and then she broke
down and she said she understood that I was gonna do something, but she really wished I
wouldn’t’ve chosen the Marines. She said there’s just too many of them that don’t come home.
And so I know it was really tough on her.

DB: Did you communicate with your dad about—about it? That you enlisted?

LG: Oh, yeah. He—he couldn’t figure it out. He said, “What—I thought you were going to
the Navy like your dad.” And I said, “No, if I’m going, gonna go in, it’s gonna be the best.” So
he didn’t particularly care for that, but—

DB: Okay, so you had to go into the induction center and get your tests and your physical—
what do you remember about that experience?

LG: I remember it was really funny because the doctor that gave me the physical was the
same one that gave my father a physical. We talked about it afterwards and it was amazing;
this—this guy was like eighty-five years old and he’d been doing it, I think, from the early

42
forties to the mid-sixties or late-sixties. So it was kind of funny. But it was an experience; first
time I’d ever lined up with a bunch of guys I didn’t know and—and preformed tasks, but—but
(Laughs) it went by.

DB: So you passed the physical—no problems there.

LG: Oh yeah. No problems.

DB: And do you remember anything about the testing they gave you?

LG: I remember they were testing, but I don’t specifically remember what it was about. I’m
sure there were—I’ve taken so many tests over my life—different companies and that—I believe
it was probably psychological tests, you know—what would you do in this case? A lot of
different shapes, comparing and—things like that.

DB: So you have—when you initially enlisted, you had to go in and take the test, take your
physical and everything and make sure you’re qualified, and then you go back to the Federal
Building on Washington the day you leave, and—how did you get down there? Did your mother
take you, or your friends drop you off?

LG: We had friends drop us off. What we did was um, there was a hotel about a mile from
there and we had friends drop us off at the hotel and I don’t—I think it was—oh boy, I don’t
know if it was the Adams Hotel, but it was right up on Eleventh and Portland. And that’s where
you stayed the night before and then the next day we had to be down there at eight o’clock for—
you know, induction.

DB: And do you remember taking your oath?

LG: I remember that; I remember taking my oath and I remember thinking that we’ll probably
go home and they’ll probably have us come back in a couple of days. And I was dead wrong
because what happened was then they sent us out the side door and bus pulled up and the next
thing—we were out at the airport.

DB: First time in an airplane?

LG: Yeah, yeah. First flight.

DB: And how did that go?

LG: That was pretty good; we had a little bit of engine trouble and they were talking about—
uh, they were on the loudspeaker talking about maybe having to divert to Las Vegas, and I
remember everybody yelling and screaming that this was gonna be great (Laughs). Well we
never made it there.

DB: What was the percentage of—of uh, potential marines—marine recruits—on the plane?

43
LG: There must have been—there must have been about a dozen of us. Yeah, I believe there
was a dozen of us because the oldest one was given the file for us and was basically in-charge of
making sure that we didn’t wander off or anything. So there was either ten or twelve of us that
came from Minnesota.

DB: And everybody behaved pretty well?

LG: Pretty much. We were all in pretty good spirits, you know. We—

DB: Cocky?

LG: Yeah, oh yeah. Very cocky that we were gonna be the toughest ones, you know. And then
when the announcement was made about Las Vegas, of course, everybody was pulling out their
money and talking about how rich they were gonna be. That all changed when the plane landed
(Laughs).

DB: And where did you go?

LG: We went to San Diego. We wound up in San Diego and—

DB: So you’re at the civilian—commercial airport.

LG: Yes.

DB: And how were you picked up? Do you remember that experience?

LG: Yeah. You don’t forget a lot about boot camp. We got off the plane—the plane got there
late. It was—I believe it was about midnight when the plane landed. And so we—the airport was
pretty vacant at the time—and we all just kind of mobbed our way to the front door. The guy that
was in-charge—the guy that had the folder—made a phone call to the base and then he told us to
hang around by the front door of the airport, which we did for about forty-five minutes. And we
were smoking cigarettes, chewing gum, kicking the ground or whatever, and all of a sudden, a
bus pulled up and a marine walked out—I believe he was a sergeant—three stripes—came out,
and he was mad—at least he looked mad. And he said, “Anybody that’s smoking a cigarette, eat
it. Or put it out and put it in your pocket now.” And we thought he was kidding. He wasn’t
kidding (Laughs). He got us in our ranks and next thing you know, we boarded the bus and he
was mad. He said, “You,”—I don’t remember the exact term he used, but he said—in the bus—
he said, “You are two hours late; you’re gonna suffer for this.” And needless to say, the bus ride
was a little disturbing.

DB: In what ways?

LG: Uh—

DB: Was he the only marine on the bus?

44
LG: He was the only marine.

DB: Plus the driver.

LG: I don’t think the driver was. I think the driver was civilian. But he stood up front the
entire bus—bus ride and told us what to do, told us what we were gonna be going through, you
know. He said, “You will not sleep tonight. You have a lot of work ahead of you.” So for that—
almost that entire ride, it was threatening and harassment, I guess would be the word I’m
gonna—

DB: Some of the cockiness starting to fade now?

LG: Yeah, we were pretty quiet on that bus ride (Douglas laughs). And it was—it was a
definite life changer, for sure.

DB: So you arrive at the base.

LG: Arrived at the base, and we were instructed to go stand on the yellow footprints. And
once you’re there, it just automatically kicks in; everything is just designed one step after the
other. First you—they—you go through the issue—clothing issue, you go onto the next room and
you strip down to your underwear and you pack up everything on a box and you write your
address on it and you leave the box and you walk out with a pair of brand new trousers and a
yellow sweatshirt. The next stop is over at the barber’s shop where you lose everything on your
head (Laughs). It’s pretty humbling—I can still—I can still almost feel the buzz on my head. But
from there it’s just—it’s just instructions, from that moment on. You speak when you’re spoken
to, everything is “Sir, yes sir,” you don’t use the term “I”; it has to be “the private.” Anybody
that you speak to other than another private would be “Sir.” And that’s the way it was for the
next ten weeks.

DB: Did you get a specific drill sergeant?

LG: We had three drill instructors; so I had a platoon commander—Platoon Commander

Taylor, who was a staff sergeant. And he was strict, but he was a fair man—and I think it was
deliberately put up this way—is that he was the one that we were glad when he would show up.

DB: Good cop bad cop?

LG: Good cop bad cop. We had two bad ones; we had sergeant— an E-5 Sergeant Tesh who
was insane—he would bite your ear, he would punch you in the back—you never knew where he
was gonna be and you never knew when he was gonna come up to you, but you didn’t want to
have anything out of place and you didn’t want to have—didn’t want to make any mistakes.

DB: He was the Full Metal Jacket drill sergeant?

LG: He was tough. He was tough. We also had a junior drill instructor, his name was Kelsey,
and he was tough, but he was—we could tell that he was the newer one. And so it was the fear

45
that—that lived with us the most (Laughs). When he was on there was nothing. There was no
fooling around.

DB: Do you remember your actual first day of training?

LG: That’s kind of a blur. I remember we had to form for chow, I remember that the night
went by pretty fast; by the time we were done with all the haircuts and all the instructions and all
the practice about facing and forward marching. The sun came up just—well we got to our
Quonset huts and just about the time the sun came up, we were told to go in and find our racks.
We found our racks and jumped into them and I think it was ten minutes later, we were back on
the road and forming—they were showing us how to form for chow. They—they were
(Laughs)—it was a rough time; it was a rough experience. But mostly that day it was a lot of
practice marching, a lot of people getting slapped in the head for not marching right. I think we
picked up our rifles that afternoon—not positive. But it became kind of a blur after, you know,
after that night.

DB: And you rifle was an M14?

LG: Yes. Yeah, so it was about fourteen pounds of (Laughs) what I would call exercise
equipment mostly. It was something that we would—we would spend a lot of time with.

DB: Did they—did they let you eat in the mess hall, or did they run you through very quickly?

LG: It was pretty much timed. I mean you—you would form for chow, you would enter the
chow hall, you would begin, and you would end when they said. And then you would dump the
tray and be out on the road and you weren’t gonna be late.

DB: But did they give you enough time or was it pretty much get your food, run through the
mess hall, dump it, and get out?

LG: It was—the first few days it was pretty much eat as fast as you can (Laughs) because you
only had like five minutes to—to sit there. It was not the best food, but it was food, and we
usually started off with a latrine call, then the chow hall, then back in the latrine (Laughs). So it
was—it was pretty coordinated.

DB: In this stressful situation, how are the recruits getting along? How are they getting along
with each other?

LG: I would say pretty much like, like scared deer. Nobody knew what to expect; it was—this
was all foreign to us. We didn’t—we had come from—from a world of chaos and disorder and
here we were in a world where basically you didn’t think unless they told you what to think. As a
matter of fact, they had a—they had a saying that they made us say, which was—which was,
“It’s another day—It’s another beautiful day in the Marine Corps where every meal’s—where
every day’s a holiday and every meal’s a feast. Long live the Commandant! God bless the corps!
Amen.” And that’s what we said before we went into chow. But it was pretty structured. Pretty
structured days.

46
DB: Um-hm. And the instruction you were receiving was—the technical instruction of that is
bayonet training and hand combat training, marching, rifle range—everything was well-
presented?

LG: We had several classes every day. As a matter of fact, we would have—there were
classes on the history of the Marine Corps, flag etiquette, rank structure of the different services,
uniform code of military justice, there was nomenclature of—of the M14, nomenclature of the
19—M1911 .45 caliber pistol—lots of different classes—first aid, even— I think it was the
uniform code of military justice that we had to know the different articles—and so it was a lot of
hard work and testing. Tested every day. And if you didn’t score seventy percent on the test—on
the practice test—then you would go into duty hut and for every—for every question you missed,
you’d get smacked in the head and punched in the stomach. And that was—that was very
motivating, I guess you might say. But that’s the way it was.

DB: So they were allowed to get very physical with you.

LG: Very physical. Very physical. I remember one time in boot camp where—and I never did
score below that seventy, but I remember one time I slacked off and I scored seventy-four. And
at the end of the day, when they pulled—when they called the list of names of privates to go into
the duty hut for— for their um—

DB: Counseling?

LG: Yeah (Laughs), I guess that would be a good term. My name was called. So I went in
there with about nine other recruits and while I was standing there, I said—and this was with
Sergeant Tesh—and I said, “Sir, the private scored seventy-four.” And he said, “That’s too damn
low.” And I took a shot to the stomach that I actually—I knocked the pipe out of the heater in the
ceiling. So he caught me off-guard to the point where, where I learned never to slack off again,
let’s put it that way.

DB: Um-hm. There’s—there are no ex-marines; there are only marines. Yes?

LG: Right.

DB: And they’re building this esprit de corps within you. Are you sensing this? Personally
and in a group?

LG: I think—

DB: Or is this something that comes later?

LG: I think it—it’s like they always say—I think that first they tear you down, but they never
tear you down all the way. They tear you down and they—the make you realize that you’re not
gonna win any war yourself; it’s gonna take marines. It’s not going to be one marine that’s gonna
win a war.

47
DB: They’re building a team effort, a team spirit.

LG: Um-hm. So along with that—if somebody made a mistake, the entire squad or platoon
would pay. Lot of times that would be negative, but a lot of times it would be positive because it
would force us to help others. For example, we’d go through inspections every week. If
somebody consistently messed up their boots, we’d be there to help and we’d teach them how to
do it. So—so it was helping each other, you know. Helping each other through. But it was also
individual; if you were called up—like for example, with the pugil stick fights, you were
expected to perform your best—

DB: To be aggressive.

LG: —and to win. And, and there got to be some pretty rough pugil fights.

DB: And as graduation’s approaching, what are you—what are your expectations? What are
you thinking? Just get through it? Are things getting a little easier as—is it ten weeks—marine?

LG: It was ten weeks for me. I think typically it was nine weeks, but unfortunately, my—most
of the guys in my platoon got there five or six days before the platoon was assembled so we
spent an additionally five days more than we should have. But it was about a nine-and-a half-
week boot camp.

DB: And as it’s getting towards the end, are you feeling that you’re—that you joined
something? That you’re—was there a progression in the training that made you something less
than just a recruit? That there was an expectation that now you’re becoming a marine?

LG: Oh yeah, definitely. As we got closer to the end, the last—right before graduation was
two weeks of the rifle training. So we went to a place called Edison Range on—in Camp
Pendleton, just north of San Diego. And it was at the range when you started to feel like a team.
And when you actually were—you know, maybe you were given a cigarette—maybe they would
say, The lamp is lit—because you’d have some corporal in charge of us for a little while instead
of a staff sergeant drill instructor You’d have a PMI—I don’t know what that stood for, but you
would have somebody of a little lower rank that would be in charge of you, and they’d still be
tough on you, but they’d say, Go ahead and have a cigarette, if you did well. So the reins were
loosening a little bit more, you started to feel like you were earning that uniform and by the time
you’re done with rifle range, you knew that it was now down to the last week or so and so you
knew that if you could make it this far, you could make it.

DB: Are you in the same training company with—the guy that you enlisted with? The
bandmate?

LG: Yes, uh-huh. There were times when he uh, when he would come to me when we had—
like Sunday mornings, we’d have a little bit of free time to write letters home or whatever—and
he would come to me and say, “I can’t take this.” And I’d say, “You’ve got to.” Because you
could look across the—look across the Marine Corps boot camp there and you could see the

48
airplanes taking off from San Diego Airport and it was so—so tempting to want to jump that
fence and run. But—

DB: Did anyone do that within your unit?

LG: Not in my unit, nope. We—we pretty much—I think we only lost probably—out of the
thirty some of us, I’d say we probably only lost four or five people—some due to motivation,
some—they had what they called motivation, which was if you were overweight or needed to do
additional work, they would pull you out of the—out of your platoon and put you in motivation
for a few weeks and then you would come back to another platoon that was at that level that you
left at.

DB: You’d be recycled.

LG: Right. So we would pick up a few guys every once in a while, and then we would lose
some either due to—I think we lost one fellow because he fell off a rope and broke a leg. Lost a
few to motivation. But for the most part, we all made it through.

DB: So graduation day comes. Was that something that you were very proud of? You have a
parade? What was the graduation ceremony?

LG: Definitely. It was—it was the highlight of boot camp. I mean we—we were up at five
o’clock that morning and in our uniforms, and we were helping each other straighten—you
know, straighten each other’s uniform, making sure—we had a little—we had a little national
defense ribbon that went on your uniform, so you had to make sure that was perfect. Then we
looked for Irish pennants, which were little pieces of material from your uniform that shouldn’t
have been there, so—

DB: Little strings or threads.

LG: Yep, little strings. And we’d burn them off with lighters or whatever we had to do. Shave
probably three or four times, I mean we—we were spitting’ polish. And then you’d go to the
march and—and probably spend maybe ten minutes on the drill field. And I think at the time,
thinking back, there were probably—I believe there were about seven or eight other platoons that
were going through the same thing. I think there might have been—I think they called it a series,
so there was seven or eight other platoons that we were competing with for—unfortunately, we
would have taken the ribbon for the march, except our platoon commander Taylor, believe it or
not, made the wrong call on the wrong foot.

DB: This was the student?

LG: This was our platoon commander.

DG: Your Training NCO.

49
LG: Yeah. Now the other drill instructors had spent most of the time teaching us the march,
but it was the platoon commander that actually, takes you out there the last day and he called
our—he called a maneuver on the wrong foot and instantly we knew it. Most of the guys—I
would say ninety percent of the guys went with it, and just made the pivot on the opposite foot so
that it would look like it was supposed to, but there were two or three that didn’t and so we—I
think we came in second.

DB: And at this point, once you’ve graduated, how do your drill instructors treat you? Is there
a congratulatory meeting or are they just gone?

LG: They brought us back to our Quonset huts and then they called us—they called us out,
made us stand at attention, and that’s the first time they called us marines. The drill instructor
came out and said—with a stack of papers—and said, “At ease, marines.” And that was the first
time. We looked at each other like, Wow.

DB: Before that you were a recruit or—?

LG: Before that we—

DB: —trainee?

LG: —we were puke, we were (Laughs)—

DB: Anything they wanted to call you.

LG: —slime, we were girls, we were whatever the term was at the time. But private was
basically, you know, what they would call us. Recruits or privates.

DB: Um-hm but now you’re a marine.

LG: Now you’re a marine.

DB: And what’s the next step?

LG: Well then—then, let’s see it was our platoon commander—let’s see, as I recall, the two
drill instructors walked off and that’s the last we saw of them. The platoon commander came out
and gave us our orders and he—he called out first the ones that were gonna be cooks or work at
the laundry or—or, you know, be—go on to some technical schools. And there weren’t too many
of them. The rest of them—the rest of us, he said, “You’re basic 0311’s. You’re grunts; you’re
going to Vietnam. So get ready.” And, and it was —following morning we got on buses and
that’s the last we saw of him. We got on buses and headed up to Camp Pendleton for the next
phase.

DB: Uh-huh. And the next phase is—?

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LG: That was—the next phase we went to was basic infantry training and infantry training
and regiments. So BITS was the first part and the second part was ITR.

DB: And how were you treated here, as opposed to in your initial training?

LG: We were treated pretty well. We were—

DB: Now you’re a marine.

LG: We were marines. We were worked hard. We were still working twelve, fourteen hour
days. We were doing a lot of running, a lot of, you know, backpacks full of rocks or weight—any
kind of weight.

DB: Conditioning training.

LG: Lot of conditioning; we were running the hills, we were route stepping, we—we trained
on the law (light ant-tank weapon), .50 cal machine guns, M60 machine guns, grenades. And
most of the time was—oh, and—and basic setting up field tents—

DB: Bivouac?

LG: Yeah, yeah. So we were spending almost all the time out in the field.

DB: Were some of you being given specialist training—mortars, machine guns? Or was
everyone getting pretty much the same universal training?

LG: We were all basic grunts—

DB: Riflemen.

LG: Yeah. Basic riflemen. And our job was to learn each one of the weapons so that if
something happened, we would take over. Mortars were a different story—think that was a
school that some were chosen for—and we didn’t do—we didn’t do any mortar training at that
time. But it was a lot of night movement, a lot of OPs, LPs—you know, operating posts, listening
posts—a lot of practice raids, patrols, ambushes. And we would—they would split us into
different groups and we’d be, you know, one after the other.

DB: So this is probably now November, December of 1968? You went in in August.

LG: This was October—October—I believe it was the twenty-fourth through the twentieth,
twenty-second of December. So about eight weeks

DB: Yeah. And —when you’ve completed this training, the next step is just Vietnam.

LG: Uh, yes.

51
DB: Or would you go—or did some of you go to units in Okinawa, around the country? Some
people are going to be broken out to be sea Marines—were there—was there a further division
here, or a separation?

LG: Well what happened was, we finished ITR training—BITS and ITR training—on the
twenty-second of December. It was about the twentieth of December when it was announced to
us that they would be letting us go home on leave. So that was the last time that that unit was all
together. Some—some of the marines went to different schools—or to different locations, I
should say—whatever their MOS was going to be. But—

DB: Was your buddy with you now, do you know?

LG: He was still with me. We went home on leave together and we came back to what they
called staging, which was just a little bit more advanced, booby traps, how to—how to secure
going through villages, you know, door-to-door type things, jungle—

DB: Let’s come back to that; let’s go to your home leave.

LG: Okay.

DB: Okay, so it’s Christmastime, and I assume they gave you a plane ticket home, or you had
to buy it?

LG: We bought the plane ticket.

DB: And you’re traveling home in uniform?

LG: Yes.

DB: Nineteen sixty-eight, and how did the world treat you?

LG: Not that well. There wasn’t a lot of respect for us at the time. I did—

DB: Specifically, around Camp Pendleton, or in general?

LG: Well, California was a different bird. California—it was either you were around marines
or sailors—at which point who cared—or you were seeing long-hairs that didn’t particularly care
for us and we didn’t particularly care for them. I think most of us had the attitude that you know,
you’re young enough; you should—you should be here with us. I think at least that’s the way we
felt. And part of it’s probably that it’s the right thing to do.

DB: In your advanced training, did you get days off when you could go into town?

LG: Yes.

DB: And you had to go in uniform?

52
LG: Yes.

DB: Did you have any conflicts with the civilians on those occasions?

LG: Uh no, they treated us pretty well, really, in San Diego—the places that I went to. I didn’t
really—I wanted to get away from the base, so a lot of times I would go into San Diego with my
friends and we would walk the streets, just spend a little time talking—talking about home,
talking about things we were going to do. It was really get away from the base for a little bit. But
we were in uniform, so you’re never far from the marines (Laughs).

DB: Um-hm, um-hm. But no incidents, then, with civilians or anything like that.

LG: No, there were really no incidents, other than—there were a lot of peddlers on the main
streets in San Diego and that got to be a little bit annoying when you walked down and
somebody would—and, you know, somebody would say, Hey Marine, come here. And get in
your face.

DB: Trying to peddle—

LG: Trying to peddle watches or—“You got to get this for your girlfriend; you got a
girlfriend, Marine? Hey, come here, you got to look at this.” And it was—it was very annoying
and so—so uh I wouldn’t really call it a confrontation, but we did get to the point where we’d
say, Back off, stay away.

DB: But on your trip home, how did that go?

LG: That was a little different. That was—that was really—it was hard to describe because
people either loved you or hated you, at least that’s the way it felt at the time.

DB: In route or at home?

LG: At home. At home. And maybe a little bit en route. I mean there were people that smiled
at—that would smile at us, there was—were people that would—like when I landed in
Minneapolis, there was a group of—I don’t know what they were, but it was a Hare Krishna
thing—and they were coming at me with their book of Karma, or whatever it was, and I said,
“Just back off, stay away,” you know. But there was a lot of respect for us too and it was mostly
the older generation. I’d say the guys that were—that we would run into that were of that World
War II era treated us great. But the kids, you know—a lot of the long-hairs and younger
people—they didn’t have the time of day for us. And a lot of people would actually—a lot of the
younger people would actually shake their heads when they saw us. I think at the time, the baby-
killer term was used a lot.

DB: Do you personally remember that?

LG: Um, not until I was out of the service. That’s the first time I would hear it.

53
DB: Okay. So you went back to your mother’s place.

LG: Back to my mother’s place, met with some old friends, but everything was a little bit
different because I was different, and—

DB: But you—you’ve got your friend with you who shared the experiences.

LG: Right, so together we—you know, we came home together, but we didn’t spend a lot of
time together other than, you know, maybe to parties—a couple of parties that we went to. We
just basically wanted to be with our, you know, own people and, my girlfriend, which—oh, and I
have to say that unfortunately, when I got home, I picked up a flu or something, so I spent five
days of my twenty-day leave in bed with a fever and I’ll never get those days back (Laughs). But
it was pretty bad.

DB: But you had a girlfriend.

LG: Had a girlfriend and we married.

DB: At that point?

LG: Yes, we married on—

DB: On Christmas leave.

LG: Yes. Yes, we decided one night—must have been right around—right after Christmas—
that we were going to get married and do it right now. So we, we let the family know, and they
put everything together, and we actually got married on the eleventh of January. So within
twelve days we went from talking about it to doing it.

DB: Wow. Church wedding?

LG: We actually had to go to Watertown, South Dakota to get married and uh, it was a church
wedding.

DB: Was that where she was from?

LG: No, she was from—actually she was from two blocks over from me, over on Elliot
Avenue and Thirty-seventh.

DB: But why Watertown?

LG: She was young. She was seventeen, I was eighteen.

DB: Different state laws.

54
LG: Yeah, different laws.

DB: Okay, okay. But the parents were all okay with it?

LG: Yep, the parents were there. They paid for it and—her father actually had been wounded
in World War II in the Navy; he was hit by shrapnel from a, kamikaze plane on the Yorktown.
So he was—he was very pro-Leo (Laughs), you might say.

DB: How did the Marine Corps feel about this?

LG: They didn’t know (Laughs) until I got back and told them.
DB: And then?

LG: Didn’t really matter. It didn’t matter to them at all.

DB: Because she’s not coming to Camp Pendleton.

LG: Right, right. And I was still a basic private—I think I was a PFC at that time—but no.
When I reported back to Camp Pendleton, I was put into a unit where over the next twenty-four
hours everybody would gradually come into and about half of the guys that I had gone to boot
camp with showed up there. But the other half, I don’t know where they were. I don’t know if
they went to another staging unit—I think at that point they were just basically getting you
prepared to go to the next place.

DB: Um-hm, um-hm. So the training that you got here was very oriented towards Vietnam.

LG: Yes.

DB: And how long did that last?

LG: Lasted for um, about three weeks, from mid-January until the early part of February.

DB: Was your bandmate with you?

LG: Uh, yes. He went through staging with me.

DB: Okay. Was it sobering? Some of the things they were teaching you?

LG: It was uh—I think it was the first time when it really hit home what we were up against. I
mean when—when we’re actually being trained on things to watch out for, like leaves that are
covering a punji pit or trip wires that, you know, they would have dummy grenades. When they
would—they would take us through training where we would—I think they were just beginning
to train you to fire from the hip, so you would fire short bursts instead of aiming like we did—
like we’d been trained with an M14. We were basically holding our weapons at waist level and
trying to zero in like that.

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DB: And have you got M16s now?

LG: Now we had M16s.

DB: Was this the first time you’ve had M16s?

LG: Yes.

DB: So that’s a new experience, too.

LG: That was new. That was new for us, and I really liked it. A lot lighter weapon, easy to
clean, easy to take apart—so I really liked carrying that thing.

DB: Emotionally and intellectually, you’ve got a wife at home. And how did that affect you
when you’re off at Camp Pendleton or—or were you just now back in a different world?

LG: I was back in the Marines, but this time I had a wife. So—

DB: But she’s back in Minneapolis.

LG: She’s back at home, and I realized that she wasn’t going where I was going, so—

DB: Was she with her family? Her parents?

LG: Yeah, she was staying with her family at the time, yeah. Now over—over the course of
the next few months, she would move in with my mother for a while and then eventually she got
an apartment, you know, on her own.

DB: Um-hm. And what was she going to do? Was she still at school?

LG: No, she—she had finished school and—well yeah, she was still in school the first part
and then—and then—I think February until June and then she graduated—and, and then she was
kind of on her own. But she was—you know, my pay checks were going to her, so she was able
to save up a little bit and get an apartment I think sometime around probably August of that year.

DB: Getting—getting an allotment and things like that.

LG: Yep.

DB: So, but how did that—how did you think about all this? Did you take that responsibility
on—you’re an eighteen-year-old—wow, I’ve got a wife? Or now I’m in the marines and I’m just
a marine? What’s going on in your head?

LG: Um (Laughs), I realized I had a wife, and I realized that I wouldn’t be in Vietnam
forever, so I didn’t know what to expect. I—we never really had a honeymoon, so we never
really had a chance to talk about the future other than put it on hold. But we did want to be

56
husband and wife, so I guess, you know, it was—looking back—it was really an emotional thing;
we wanted to be married. I think I wanted to be married. I wanted to have had a wife if
something happened to me and—and I think it was the same with her; I think she wanted me
for—to be able to say that I was her husband. That’s all we could really hold onto. No plans
other than that; it was all someday.

DB: But you have a big plan—or the Marine Corps has a plan for you.

LG: (Laughs) They had a plan for me.

DB: How did you get to Vietnam?

LG: We—let’s see—

DB: No further leave at home—you’ve got your three weeks of training and then you’re
deploying.

LG: Right. Three weeks of training and on, February fourth, I flew to Okinawa.

DB: As an individual—you’re all individual replacements now; they haven’t formed you into
a platoon that’s going together?

LG: Right. There was a group of us. I think—it was a full plane of us that went to Okinawa.

DB: Right, but you’re not—you’re not organized into a unit; you’re a bunch of individual
replacements?

LG: Right, right. We were individuals; we didn’t know where we were going. I’m sure they
knew where we were going, but we didn’t.

DB: Um-hm, was this a commercial flight?

LG: It was a commercial flight, we flew into Okinawa, and I spent—I spent three days in
Okinawa and there was a place called the Animal Pit; it was a bar in Okinawa where it had two
sides to it: it had the one side for the marines that were going back home, and then the other side
for the new guys. You didn’t mix the two (Laughs). You never wanted to mix those two. But so I
was on—I was on the side—we could hear the yelling and screaming on the other side, but—

DB: The other side was probably wilder?

LG: It was a little bit wild over there.

DB: And—and the side going to Vietnam was maybe more restrained—

LG: Little bit goofier, yeah. We were a little bit goofier and we drank over there. And I
remember I—I had a little bit more than I should have that night because I ended up having to be

57
carried back to my bunk. And at three thirty in the morning, somebody didn’t like me because
they woke me up and said, “Get your gear together you’re going down to the air strip.” So I
grabbed everything—I had a huge headache—I grabbed all my gear, I went down to the air strip.
Four of us—they had pulled four of us out of the unit—and we waited for a C-130 cargo plane
that took us to Vietnam. So that was an eight-hour flight in that thing.

DB: Just the four of you.

LG: Just the four of us. I think they just wanted to save some money on, you know, on
passenger flights. So there were four of us and—
DB: They had four seats and you were gonna fill them.

LG: There were four seats, if that’s what you call them—it was netting. But they had four of
us there and two—I believe there was two refrigerators that were being flown with us, so—and
then there was a warrant officer.

DB: So this was February?

LG: This was on February twelfth.

DB: Okay. And the weather in Okinawa was—?

LG: Pretty mild. It was pretty—pretty nice weather. I mean it was very comfortable; it was
probably in the seventies.

DB: And you’re going to Vietnam and you landed in—?

LG: Landed in Danang.

DB: And do you come off the tailgate of the C-130?

LG: Yes, I did (Laughs). And I was—I was wearing my field jacket and by the time I got to
the building—this metal shack that they had there—huge metal barn— I think we were all—our
green clothes were all dark green from sweat.

DB: You’re in utilities.

LG: Yeah. We were in our state-side utilities, leather boots, the whole works—carrying sea
bags and—and it was not a pretty sight, but—

DB: What happens then?

LG: Well then we were met by a corporal who—who basically took over where the drill
instructors left off. And he basically was telling us that we were the unluckiest son-of-a-bitches
blah-blah-blah and that most of us aren’t going to make it back. And so we spent that afternoon

58
listening to him tell us about the different ways that we were probably going to die. That was
exciting.

And then he gave us some bunk—some bunks—in an adjacent building and we waited for the
rest of our unit to come in the following day.

DB: The rest of your unit—is this—?

LG: The rest of the people that we had been in Okinawa with, right.

DB: Okay, okay. And so when they arrived, you go through clothing issue and deal with those
things?

LG: When they—when they arrived, we—they put us with—they put us all together, so we
were doing a lot of handshaking and hugging because we were with a lot of old friends again
now. And that’s where my best friend showed up and said, “Where the hell did you go last
night?” And I said (Laughs), “I went to Okinawa, pal.” And he said, “I don’t think I would have
done that.” And I said (Laughs), “I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.” So then we got our
basic issue and then we were called out on the road and I believe that at that time there was about
thirty—probably thirty, of which I knew maybe ten of them. And that’s when they were—we
were told what units we’d be with. And I was—I was told I would be with the Delta Company,
1st Battalion, 5th Marines and Larry was told he’d be with Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 7th
Marines. So we were about five miles apart from each other.

DB: And—and how did you get to the unit?

LG: Okay that—the next morning, the four—I believe there was four of us that were flown by
CH-47s—helicopters—down to An Hoa. An Hoa was a firebase that the Fifth Regiment worked
out of and it was about twenty-two miles southwest of Da Nang. And we were brought into Da
Nang—or, I’m sorry, brought into An Hoa—pretty much told by the corporal that met us at the
chopper pad to go up and report to Delta Company, which was a little tent.

DB: The buildings you were in, or the location you were at in Da Nang was fairly established.
You’re in buildings?

LG: Right, these were metal buildings.

DB: And you’re on—near the airbase, it’s—

LG: Yeah.

DB: Okay. Now you’re on a firebase.

LG: Now we’re on a firebase so it’s—

DB: How is that different?

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LG: It’s wooden—its wooden frames with canvas, you know, tarps thrown over. Lot of
structures were built from wooden ammo cases and then, you know, behind them would be
sandbags—green sandbags—and, you know, they became pretty comfortable after a while. We
took a lot of rocket attacks in An Hoa, so—so you needed as much as that kind of a—kind of a
fortification that you could get. So sandbags, there were a lot of fuel tanks—empty fuel tanks
that were filled with—

DB: Fifty-five gallon drums—

LG: Yeah, fifty-five gallon drums that were filled with sand or whatever that were stacked too
around troop tents.

DB: Uh-huh. Bunkers?

LG: Plenty of bunkers.

DB: ‘Round the perimeter?

LG: Yeah, we had—I think on An Hoa there were one, two, three—I believe there were three
towers. About three, I would guess, forty-foot towers and the location that we were at—well
there were scattered bunkers around because when the rockets came in you had to have one, you
know—you had to have one close by; you didn’t want to be running through the roads in the
open. So I think around the troop tents there had to be probably five or six of them.

DB: Um-hm. And then the bunker lined with the barbed wire around the perimeter.

LG: Right, yeah. It was several strands of barbed wire. We had Claymores out—Claymore
mines out in case there were breaks in the wire. It was a very—it was a pretty active base. We
were usually—

DB: Active in regards to enemy contact?

LG: Yes, yes. Where it sat we took a lot of small-round fire

Yep. Never really ran into satchel charge things, but we did find a lot of cuts in the wire, you
know. We’d go on—we’d do a patrol around the perimeter every morning and you’d find—
usually you’d find something where somebody had tried to cut the wire and usually decided to
give up because we—we kept the air pretty—pretty lit up when there was any kind of movement
out there.

DB: Did you have—did you have electrical lighting around the perimeter? Lighting of the
barbed wire?

LG: No, no.

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DB: So it was just dark at night.

LG: It was dark at night and the only thing we would do is—the eighty-one millimeter
mortars would fire illumination for us around the perimeter. All you had to do was call in, you
know. If you’d say “ I have movement in the northeast quadrant”—there was—there was an area
up there that had fuel—you know, the fuel tanks—and we were particularly worried about that.
So in that area, if you noticed any kind of movement or felt you needed something, you just
called the mortars and they fired illumination up there.

DB: So you arrived, you met—corporal, I think you said?

LG: Yep, met a corporal and he—

DB: And he briefed you in?

LG: Told us basically we’d—we’d be there for two days and then we’d be meeting up with
the unit. They had just finished an operation out in the—what they called the Arizona Territory
and we’d be meeting up with them in—at the horseshoe, was the term they used for it.

DB: Okay, so you don’t know what the Arizona Territory is or what the horseshoe is.

LG: No idea what any of things were, but we just said, “Okay.” So we spent the next full day
just kind of getting—checking in our sea bags, you know, making sure we had the right gear.

DB: Did you have a weapon yet?

LG: Yes, I’ve got a weapon—that was the first thing we got when we landed.

DB: Did you have ammunition?

LG: Had ammo, had my M16, got poncho liners—you know, the whole supply.

DB: And the time comes to go join your unit.

LG: Okay, we got on a helicopter and we flew for about—I believe it was about ten—ten,
fifteen minutes, and it just—it just seemed unreal at the time because everything below just
appeared to be make believe. It almost looked like a set. I’d never been to anyplace where I just
saw so much sand and elephant grass, brown rivers, these trees—they just didn’t look normal; it
all looked like some kind of a Hollywood set—until we landed and I think it was about ninety-
five degrees that day (Laughs) and I ran off of the helicopter, ran up to the corporal there who
was wearing tiger shorts and boots and said, “You’re going to that fire team, you’re going to that
fire team, and you’re going to that fire team,” and that’s how we were sent to our final unit.

DB: Um-hm. So this is now an established basecamp area, or is this just a field location?

61
LG: This is a field location. As a matter of fact, they told us, don’t get comfortable because
tomorrow we’re moving to the bridge.

DB: Okay, so there’s no wire, nothing—nothing—

LG: No, it was just foxholes. It was holes dug in the sand and it was a bunch of guys with
M16s, helmets, and tiger shorts.

DB: Tiger stripes, you mean?

LG: They—tiger shorts, actually—green shorts.

DB: Hm.

LG: So basically underwear. It was too hot to really be wearing a whole uniform so most of
the guys—I don’t know where they had come from, I don’t know—well, I know where they had
come from; they had come from some action across the river—but they were on their way—they
knew they were on their way back to some security and safety so—so they were pretty relaxed.
We did—we did get hit that night. And—

DB: Well before you got hit you meet your fire team, you squad, your platoon. How are
you—how are you accepted in? How are you welcomed in? You were briefed?

LG: (Laughs) It was not—it was not what I expected. It was—they were nice enough to me.
The squad leader came over, took me to my fire team, introduced me to those guys, and they
basically looked up and said, Hello, and went back to their writing letters or, you know, whatever
they were doing. So there was no really—there was no real celebration; it was basically, do what
you’re told; you’ll be okay.

DB: Were you assigned to someone specifically?

LG: Yeah, I was assigned to a Corporal Soper, his name was. And he was a nice enough guy
but not very talkative and not very happy about the war, I don’t think (Laughs). But—

DB: You were just another new guy coming in.

LG: I was just a new guy.

DB: Was there a feeling that you had to earn your place in the—in the unit?

LG: It was a very, very—it was like I had spent most of my time in growing up. It was—now
I’ve got to start all over again. And so it wasn’t—I wasn’t not used to it. It was just—it wasn’t a
real comradery at first; there was no love lost. It was basically you do what you’re told and
you’ll be fine.

DB: And the first night you’re hit?

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LG: First night we got hit. That was a long night. I remember we were hit on the other side of
the perimeter, so I could hear rounds occasionally zipping overhead, and, you know, I would say
something to one of the other guys, you know, like, “What do we do?” And they would say,
“You just keep your head down and keep watching out in this direction. If you see anything,
open up.” So that—that’s how the first night went and I remember thinking all night long, this is
gonna be a long year (Laughs). This is what we’re gonna go through.

DB: And were you—were you briefed? Were you anticipating—were these North Vietnamese
regulars? Was this Viet Cong harassment?

LG: I think for the most part, it was Viet Cong. But it could have been a mixture of both, too.
There wasn’t a lot—I mean there wasn’t a lot of firing that night. I’d say it went on probably for
maybe twenty minutes and then it stopped. But ironically, one of the guys that I came in with
was killed the very first night. So that—

DB: He just didn’t keep his head down or—?

LG: Right, right. He should of—he should’ve been on my fire team. They kept us down and
watching, but he was pretty much—I guess he was pretty much sitting on the side of the foxhole,
firing. Like they weren’t firing back, or something. So it was—it was pretty hard the first night.

DB: Yeah. And the first morning, realizing that.

LG: Yeah.

DB: Um-hm. So the next day.

LG: The next day was—

DB: Welcome to Vietnam.

LG: (Laughs) The next day the sun came up and I was still carrying all these things I
shouldn’t’ve been carrying—writing pads, extra shirts, extra pairs of socks—I had way too much
stuff in my pack. It got up to be—it got up to about ninety degrees that day, but in the elephant
grass, as we were moving our twelve clicks back to the firebase, the heat was more like an oven.
So the heat was right in the elephant grass. That was my first experience with heat—heat
exhaustion. So I pretty well blacked out during the—that first movement. And the next thing I
recall is my fire team leader and the corpsmen had pulled me off to the side of the trail and
poured most of their canteen water on me and thrown away most of my junk—my writing
materials and books and things that I should never have there. And they told me, you better get
tougher because you have a long way to go. So I never did that again. I learned real quick, you
travel light and—and you don’t carry anything that you don’t need.

DB: Yeah. And so you—other than that you made it back the twelve kilometers to the
firebase?

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LG: Made it back to Liberty Bridge and—

DB: And describe Liberty Bridge.

LG: Liberty Bridge was a small— it was a small compound that was about five miles north of
An Hoa, the firebase. It was a strategic area because the bridge was the link on Highway One
between Da Nang and all parts south. So there was always a company of marines that were
around and on the bridge to protect it. It had been blown apart many times and so it was critical
that it remained intact. And as a matter of fact, they had just rebuilt it again when I got there. So
it was a smaller version of An Hoa; it was a lot of bunkers, a chow hall—which was basically a
tent with a, you know—with the drums around it—and that was about it; most of the structures
there were bunkers.

DB: Um-hm. So what was your job going to be there? Part of the defensive force for the
bridge?

LG: Yeah. What we would do is stand watch over the river. Some of us—sometimes we’d be
on the bridge itself, sandbags around the side, watching for any debris that was coming down the
river.

DB: Did you have starlight scopes for the—?

LG: We had starlight scopes, we had illumination—so, you know, we were pretty—we were
pretty much ahead of the game there. We didn’t—in all the time that I was there, it was never—I
should say in the year that I spent in Vietnam—Liberty Bridge was intact the whole time. So
they never really did destroy it during that time.

DB: Um-hm. Um-hm. And the duty there—the guard duty there—did you—how long did you
stay on the bridge in that guard position? Or did you have to get out and actively patrol around
the area, too?

LG: Oh, it was during the days—it was patrols. So—so I think we were probably there for—I
would guess for maybe four or five days that time. And what you would do is your squad or team
would be chosen to be either a listening post or you’d go out five hundred meters or whatever at
night. If you did, then the next day you didn’t have to worry; you were pretty much gonna sit in
a, you know—sit in a bunker and watch the river. If you—if that was your job at night—if during
the day if you went out on patrols, then you weren’t going out on listening posts at night. So, you
know, it was see-sawing back and forth—either LPs, OPs, patrols, maybe occasionally we’d set
up an ambush someplace.

DB: And looking at pictures that I’ve seen of Liberty Bridge, it looks like it’s very open
country around. It’s not—it’s not jungle; it’s fairly flat.

LG: Very open.

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DB: And so if you went out on an ambush, how would you get out into an ambush situation
where the enemy wouldn’t see you and know you were going out?

LG: For the most part your ambushes would be anywhere that—let’s say the sergeant or the
command post would identity as a potential area that that enemy might come through. And then
you—you would try to set up in some location that would give you that advantage. Not a lot of
places around there, but—

DB: You’d go out at night?

LG: Yeah, we’d go out—

DB: Set up at night?

LG: Right.

DB: And when you do that, and you have to—you obviously can’t see very well—and the
dangers of punji sticks, if they’re around, of landmines, of booby traps—it’s greater in the dark?
Or was that not so much of a consideration where you were?

LG: That really—around Liberty Bridge because of what you—just like you said—it was
pretty level ground and we—we pretty well knew what was going on around the bridge. You
could see any movement in the area. It was really more like the Wild West in that area. You
could see if there was any kind of troop movement or people that shouldn’t have been there. So
we really didn’t have any problem there with traps like that.

DB: There weren’t villages or civilians around?

LG: No, not around Liberty Bridge.

DB: Okay, they’d all been pretty much cleared out?

LG: Right, right. Actually, the whole road between Liberty Bridge and An Hoa—about a six,
seven-mile road—was pretty open. There were hills off to the, what would be the west of us, and
that was—that’s where we knew that the enemy was, but they were just out of reach from most
weapons.

DB: And did you find out what Arizona Territory was?

LG: Yes, we did. We heard rumors of it for quite a while. Um—

DB: But that’s not where you are now.

LG: No, we were across the river from that territory. Arizona Valley was pretty well-known
as no man’s land. There was a lot of movement over there from the NVA. There was—I believe
it was the Ninetieth—the Ninetieth NVA regiment was over there. There was also elements of

65
the 270th NVA division—so it was—it was pretty well-run by the North Vietnamese. We would
go over there, but it was usually some kind of an offensive.

DB: A major operation.

LG: Yeah, that’s when we would go in and clean it out, and then we would come right back
and cover our territories again.

DB: And did you participate in some of those larger operations?

LG: Oh, yes I did. Yes, I did.

DB: And how did that go when you you’re coming up against main force North Vietnamese?
Or did they fade away in front of you?

LG: They were never really—they were never really there in any large force that you could
see. There was—there was a lot of tunnels—there was a network of tunnels over there and spider
holes, and places that they could disappear into. But one—one night in particular, actually the
first night that we went in there, was May 8 of 1969. We were—we were told that we would be
going into Arizona Valley and we would be doing a sweep and then the Seventh Regiment would
be in there as a block. And before we went—before we left, we went down to this area down by
the river and waited for the air force, B-52s, to do their work. They—they did something they
call ark lighting, and it was—what they did was they basically carpet bombed where we were
going. And there was—as I recall, there were two B52s and the arc lighting went on for a good
hour, and it was just like lightning over there. I mean even though it was ten miles from where
we were, we could feel the ground shaking—it was just amazing. I’ve never seen anything like
it. It was like—it was like running a strong thunderstorm in fast motion, it was that much light.
So we figured there couldn’t be anybody left when we went.

DB: And?

LG: And we—so about 3 a.m., we crossed the river, held our rivers up and crossed about
waist-high—

DB: This was a company strength now?

LG: Yeah, this was our—this was full company. And I don’t know how many other
companies were participating at the time, but I do know that we were the tip of the spear at that
time. When the sun came up, we had probably made it about four miles into the Valley. You
could smell—you could smell the smoke, you could taste the steel, the ground was warm still—it
was probably the most amazing I’ve seen. When the sun came up, it was incredible; it looked
like pictures of Hiroshima. There were no buildings, but, I mean, the ground—it looked like the
moon surface.

DB: Craters?

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LG: It was craters, it was—everywhere there was smoke, there were dead bodies, there were
body parts, there were animals—nothing was alive, it was just—it was just incredible—
incredible sight. And you’d walk along and occasionally you’d maybe see a—an NVA soldier’s
body lying there. So it was the first time I realized what the Arizona Valley really was. It was
definitely no man’s land.

DB: Did you encounter intact tunnels in any of the areas that you had to investigate?

LG: Well what happened was on May ninth—May ninth, we set in—we found a small area
that was intact and it had—there were a lot of trees—not a lot, but there was a few trees and
some vegetation. It was an old cemetery, Vietnamese cemetery, so it was mounds; there was
about a dozen mounds there. And we started taking sniper rounds, and that’s when my—when a
good friend and our—our weapons platoon leader was killed. And up until that point, he had
been a hero of mine and I never thought he could, you know—that he would be, ever, killed. But
he ran out to save one of the other marines who had kind of been stranded out there and a sniper
shot him, so—I spent about an hour and a half protecting his body from flies and whatever else
was there before the chopper came to take him. And it was—it was a shock. A real shock.

DB: Were you able to find the sniper?

LG: Um—

DB: Was that part of your mission, or you just called in an airstrike, or—

LG: No, we never did get the sniper. He—it was one of those, what they call spider holes. So
he popped up, did his work, and then disappeared. So we never did get him. But we did find
tunnels there. Mostly though—mostly you would find—I think a lot of them were caught off-
guard because you would find small areas where there’d be three or four bodies that would be,
you know, that would be there.

DB: From the bombing.

LG: From the bombing the night before, yeah.

DB: And except for the sniping, you really didn’t encounter any North Vietnamese then.

LG: Well we—we would encounter them, but it would be over the, you know, small groups
over the next few days. Patrols—this was all part of a large operation. So our job at that time was
to clean the NVA out of there. And, I think between the bombing, and then we spent about
probably two, two and a half weeks there, and that’s what we would do is engage them—
different units on patrols, or ambushes. So yeah, there was a lot of activity that went on where
we would have contact with them. And there were occasions where we would have you know,
we’d be attacked at night. You know, usually around three, four o’clock in the morning type
things.

DB: And what would the attacks consist of?

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LG: Usually small arms.

DB: Sniping, harassment?

LG: Yeah.

DB: They weren’t—they weren’t trying to get into your perimeter.

LG: Right. I think we—I think we had succeed in pretty much dividing the group because it
was—it was always smaller groups that we would run into—never a full regiment, never a full
company. It was only squad—I would say squad or team groups that we would run into.

DB: And how long did this operation go on?

LG: It went on for about two, two and a half weeks.

DB: And you’re taking casualties every day?

LG: Um, every day we were losing somebody, ether to—either to—like there was one time
when one of our Kit Carson Scouts who were Vietnamese that was assigned to our unit to kind of
give us guidance there—he stepped on a landmine and I—I saw—I saw him disintegrate. There
was another a couple of days later where one of our squad leaders also stepped on a mine and
lost both legs. There were a lot of things like that going on. There was a lot of harassment going
on at the time and that was mostly booby traps. We would—we would get harassed at night and
then they’d set booby traps during the day. And I had one experience where at that time, it was
probably the middle of May, where I had sit in on a location, small hill, and I went to throw my
gear down and just as it hit the ground, I saw it—I saw a triple wire. The only thing that saved
me was—I looked over and there was an eighty-one-millimeter mortar that was probably two
feet from me—and the only thing that saved me is that rust had formed on the tip of the mortar
so that it didn’t plunge. And I—I was very thankful for that, and I still am to this day because—

DB: When you had casualties, you had corpsmen with you.

LG: Right.

DB: And what was your procedure? There was always an impulse to want to go help your
friend or help your buddy, but sometimes—as was the case with your—with the guy that you
mentioned earlier—you go out and then you become the next casualty.

LG: Right.

DB: So how were you trained in that regard? Did the training—did you do what you were
trained to do?

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LG: Yeah, I—you—even though you always had the urge to—to be there to help somebody
else, you also—we also all realized that our company was never at full strength. We lost—we
continually lost people to you know, medical problems, wounds, killed—I think our company
always ran at about seventy-five percent. So when you had a—when you were in a position, you
had to look at your job as—you can’t abandon your post, no matter what. Not unless somebody
in charge, or somebody that knows the full picture can say, I need you and you and you—and
then know that that position is still going to be covered. So we were pretty well conditioned to
know that where you were you had to defend that particular spot.

DB: This operation is taking place about four months into your tour and you’re not the new
guy anymore.

LG: Right.

DB: Now you’re the one who’s welcoming replacements in. And how did that go?

LG: Well, I had learned by—by the middle of March that I had a better understanding of why
I was treated like I was treated. You don’t want to necessarily make great friendships. You want
to get to know each other, and you want to be there for each other, but—but you’re reluctant to
become too friendly with anybody because there’s just too great of a chance that you’re going to
be hurt. So I tried—even though I understood what most of the new guys were going through
when they came to us—and I very seldom met a new guy who was real gungy; most of them—
by the time they saw where we were and what we looked like—most of them were pretty much
in a state of shock for the first week or so. And there was a lot of times where they’d come and,
you know—what should I do? And what happened—you know, what’s going to happen? And
where are we going? And—a lot of times they’d—I’d just say what I’d been told myself, which
was, “Hey, don’t worry about it; let it happen, you know? They’ll tell you where you’re going,
they’ll tell us what to do. Don’t worry about it.” I did have one friend in particular, Joe Ford
from Louisiana, who would not leave me alone and, he kept following me around and writing his
mother and sisters and brothers and telling them how I was going to save him and bring him
back. And so he would always, constantly follow me and ask me questions, you know, “What
should I do?” And—

DB: And he’s a new guy that had just come in?

LG: He was a new guy. Yep, came in about May—would have been sometime in May of ’69.
So I’d been there—February, March, April—about four months when he came. He was a really
nice fellow and I really liked him, but I tried to keep him at arm’s length. But it just seemed like
every time I was with him he would do something I would have to correct him. Like we’d go on
a patrol, or we’d go on a movement, and he’d look for a com—when they told the company to
hold up or whatever, he would find a comfortable spot and sit down without looking, and I’d say,
“You can’t do that! That’s—you’re sitting on a stump—that’s the first thing they’re gonna try to
booby trap.” Well of course, when I tell him that, he would write a letter home about how great I
am at instructing him how to survive (Laughs). So it just kind of back fired on me. But I was
constantly telling him, “Don’t do that, don’t do this, don’t drink that, don’t touch that.”

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DB: Your earlier experiences with marine sergeants in training—how were the NCO’s in
Vietnam?

LG: The NCO’s were—they knew their stuff and they were good.

DB: Very professional?

LG: Yeah, they were— they were inspirational. I mean, they were true leaders, they were—as
far as I was concerned, they were men of steel, you know, they—they held their feelings well,
they had senses of humor, they—I remember one time, I got a package from home—it was in the
middle of May—I got a package from my mother and I opened it up and it was a birthday cake.
My birthday’s in February. The birthday cake was the consistency of Styrofoam. She’d also sent
along three pairs of white socks and three white t-shirts. And I pulled them out and my squad
leader came over and said, “Does your mother know where you are?” (Douglas laughs) So uh,
needless to say, I ditched those things. But they were great, great leaders. As a matter of fact, I
think they were the ones who ran the company.

DB: And your officers?

LG: The officers were a mixture.

DB: On your level, did you have much contact with them at all?

LG: I—I did. Usually if we did small operations and they wanted to be involved, so—I mean,
I was known by them. I had a new lieutenant that made a mistake one time and someone saw—
someone saw a Vietnamese running through a field, not probably five hundred meters from us,
and we had a brand-new boot lieutenant, second lieutenant, that came up to me and said, “Grab
four guys, let’s go.” So we headed down the hill—grabbed our weapons, headed down the hill
after this Vietnamese, and followed him probably a good mile and a half. We went through a tree
line, and I noticed and odd thing was that he seemed to slow down once he got to the other side
of the tree—the tree line, and—almost as if he was baiting us to follow him—and it just didn’t
feel right. Well by the time we got through the third rice paddy, about a mile and a half from the
unit, we got—we were in the open—he had made it to the other side—and we started taking fire
from an ambush. So we were taking rounds from B40 rocket and small arms fire while we were
in the middle of this rice paddy.

Fortunately, there was a bomb crater not far from us. So two of the men were wounded and then
it left my lieutenant, myself, and a fellow named Adams who was very tall and lanky. And the
lieutenant said, “Somebody’s got to run back and bring up weapons.” So I looked at Adams, and
he said, “Well, my boots are untied.” (Laughs) And I said, “I guess that leaves me.” So I got up, I
shed everything except my rifle, and I—I have never run like that in my life. But I ran right back
through the line of fire and I was hit with shrap metal from a B40 rocket, but fortunately, it—it
actually blew me forward about six feet and I just crouched, got back up, and ran. When I got
through that line, I looked both ways and I saw NVA on both sides and they were all in the firing
position, but they were—I must have been—I must have gone like Jesse Owens because they
were still firing straight ahead and I was running right through them. So, made it back up to the

70
hill and needleless to say, that lieutenant never forgot to bring a radio again. But fortunately, the
wounds that I got were—I never left the bush. I stayed out there, the corpsmen patched me up;
they pulled some shrap metal out. Fortunately—a lot of people don’t realize that this metal that
hits you is hot and if it doesn’t hit anything vital, it really cauterizes itself in the wounds. And so
for the next—for the next four, five months, I was still finding pieces of metal that had worked
their way out. So—so just one of those things you come to expect, I guess.

DB: Did you take any POWs?

LG: We did. Personally, I did not. I mean we went on patrols and we would occasionally—at
one point we were brought up into the mountains not far from us by helicopter and we were up
there to help out an army ranger unit that was basically supposedly surrounded by an NVA
regiment. And we were brought up—the company was brought up in a—in helicopters and we
had no contact; we saw no contact whatsoever other than at the base of the mountains when we
were coming out, there was one NVA sleeping in a hammock. And the—one of the squad leaders
went over and basically picked up his rifle and tapped him on the head with it and that was our
first POW. But—but the POW situation was occasional. Most of the dealings that we had with
were Viet Cong. And it’s so hard to try to figure out the truth.

DB: How many civilians were in your area? That’s the issue: is it a Viet Cong, is it a civilian?

LG: Exactly.

DB: Is it a question of being a civilian in the daytime and a Viet Cong at night?

LG: Exactly. Now if I saw somebody that was in their early twenties and they were out in the
rice paddies, that didn’t make a lot of sense. So that’s when we would employ the Kit Carson
Scouts or whatever to talk to them, ask them questions. And it was always very—it was always
very tricky because they know what to answer, you know. And a lot of times if they said, Well
the Viet Cong or the NVA come in at night and they take food and they take what they want here
and they leave us alone—it’s hard to know if that’s true but it sounds true. Now there was one—
one instance where I would have to say the first—the first person that I shot—that I ever saw
shot—was a prisoner that tried to run from us. And—and it’s something that I think about all the
time because it’s probably that automatic training, but what happened was I—I was standing by
the mortar pit and all of a sudden—it was crazy—all of a sudden, a Vietnamese came running by
me from the CP and everybody was shouting, Shoot him, he’s a Viet Cong! And—so—so, you
just automatically do what you’re told. And evidently, they’d been interrogating him and he just
got up and ran, and he was almost to the perimeter when—he took about four rounds from
marines. But I could clearly see that I—I was right on because I was the one who fired a .45. So
that was kind of a—a wake up moment for me. But for the most part, any prisoners, or any
people that we’ve sent back were—it had to be a gut call from the command. They would—they
would figure out—there were times when we’d call helicopters in and we’d send, you know,
Vietnamese—never NVA, always Viet Cong.

DB: Did you have many helicopter operations?

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LG: Not really. Not really. I probably—no. I probably spent I would say maybe a dozen times
on helicopters but most of them were transporting either—you know, if I had—like one time I
had to make a phone call back home so I hopped on a resupply chopper and—

DB: Administrative situations.

LG: Yeah, it was things like that. It was taking a bus back to the camp, basically.

DB: Vietnam isn’t like Minnesota; there’s a lot of creepy-crawlies around (Leo laughs).
Snakes, lots of insects, leeches—what did you have to deal with in your areas?

LG: I had two—I had two experiences that I should—I should relay. One was, I was in An
Hoa and I was told to go up and get some grenades—we were going to go on a—on a patrol. So I
went up and got a case of grenades—a wooden case of grenades—and I brought that back to the
tent and I went to open it, so I took my bayonet and I pried up one side of it, reached down to
pull it up with me right hand, and as I was pulling it up, about a foot-long centipede came out
and—and—and hung on my little finger. And they’re extremely poisonous. As a matter of fact—

DB: It bit you.

LG: Yeah, oh yeah. It hung—

DB: It latched on with its mouth—

LG: And it felt like—it felt like fire. And over the course of the next twenty-four hours, my
hand swelled up to about—about the size of a catcher’s mitt. It was just incredible. I had to
hold—I had to hold it up to my chest so that I could handle the pumping because it was so
painful.

DB: What pumping? What do you mean?

LG: The blood pumping in my hand. It was just so swollen.

DB: Couldn’t the medics do anything for you? It just had to heal itself?

LG: I was in An Hoa so there was a battalion aid station there. So I went over to the doctor
and he—he said, “What the hell happened to you?” I said, “One of those little critters—one of
those little centipedes.” And he said, “Oh, yeah.” And he took his scalpel and he cut open about a
four-inch gash on my little finger, and the stuff just came out. And it turned out that the infection
itself was all the way down to the bone, so over the next four or five days he would—he would
stuff gauze in there, wrap it up, and then I would come back the next day, he would pull the
gauze out, you know, put some medicine in there, and then shove the gauze back—or shove a
new gauze back in and eventually the swelling went down. But that was—that was probably one
of the worst—one of the worst things. And once that happens to you you’re very conscious of
what’s going on.

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 I think another time that—it’s—its funny now because—because I don’t have to go through this
again, but we were—it was the middle of March and we were going on a early morning sweep.
So—so our lieutenant got the—got the platoon together and we moved through the nighttime and
then we got on line, I’d say about two hundred yards from a small ville, we were in kind of a
little valley—a little trench that had brush and weeds and things in it. And we—he came through
and whispered for us to be quiet until he gave the word—this was probably five thirty in the
morning—and so we all just kind of sat back in the weeds. It was a hot night and—and I was—I
could feel the sweat, but I noticed at one point that the sweat was going up, not down. So I
looked real closely and it turns out that I had settled into a spider’s web and there were thousands
of these little spiders that were crawling around. And I’ve never been very fond of spiders, so to
have this happen to me and try to be quiet and not move was one of the hardest things I’ve gone
through. But I spent—

DB: But they didn’t bite you.

LG: I didn’t get bit. Thankfully the mama or whoever never bothered me; it was all the
smaller ones that were crawling on me and I spent the next half hour slapping myself. And of
course the other marines next to me were saying, Keep it down. And so I was kind of stuck, but
it’s another one of those things where I think back now and it’s—it’s not one of my favorite
nights.

DB: Yeah. Leeches?

LG: Leeches we would occasionally run into, when we crossed rivers and things like that. But
we never—you know, most of the territory that we were in was what I would call Wild West,
you know; it was mostly sand—

DB: Arid.

LG: Yeah, yeah. I didn’t spend too much time in the jungles.

DB: Snakes?

LG: Snakes we would find occasionally. They had bamboo vipers. I remember one time we
were—we were in an area that had—a lot of times we would go back and forth, take the same
ground, and so we had been in a place called Hill 55 for a couple—for a week or so. And we
moved out from there and we were in Arizona Territory or Liberty Bridge or An Hoa or
whatever else we went to, and we came back about a month later. Our—our fox holes were still
there, but they were, you know, full of water and things like that. And I remember one time, we
took some mortar rounds and I was back in the same spot I’d been to probably six weeks earlier.
And I knew there was a fox hole by these bushes, so I rolled over to fall into that fox hole, and
there was a snake—I believe it was a bamboo viper—it was green and it was swimming around
in this fox hole in the water. And I had to make a decision: do I go in there for sure and get bit, or
do I take a chance that I’m not going to get hit by a mortar up here and I—and I laid right where
I was, covered my head, and—and three or four rounds came and—and then of course it was
over.

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DB: This is after Tet, mid 1969, roughly? Mid tour—how’s moral? What’s the attitude of the
marines?

LG: The attitude, uh—the attitude changed for a lot of marines, I noticed. I think—I think a
lot of impact was felt by—at that time the president Nixon had basically announced that we were
gonna withdraw from Vietnam. And most people—it probably didn’t mean a lot other than, we
give up. The, you know—the antiwar movement won, which is fine if that’s what happened, but
for us, it was very difficult because most of us truly believed that you can’t win a fight backing
up. And that’s what we were—we felt that we were doing. So I would say in my mind, I clearly
went from more offensive to more defensive. My goal was no longer to kill as many as possible;
my goal was to bring home as many of ours as possible. And—

DB: So you moved into a leadership position now?

LG: Uh no, I was still—I had moved from being a rifleman to carrying M79 grenade
launcher—

DB: Were you a lance corporal?

LG: I was still a lance corporal and I had moved into mortars. So I was kind of what you
would call working your way into the gunner position on a mortar. But even that was—that
position was a lance corporal. So I started off as a ammo humper—and by that time I was—I was
in mortars. I think I was an A gunner; I think I was setting up the sights, you know, setting up the
base plate. And once that announcement was made, it was really difficult for us. It was difficult
for a lot of us to try to figure out what does this mean. Does this mean we’re going home? Does
this mean we don’t fight no more? And uh, really it changed—in some ways it changed the face
of the war because we—we didn’t honestly feel that we were winning. Up until then, we didn’t
know we weren’t and we thought we had—we thought we had a president that—I mean who
talked about bombing their harbors—we never understood why we didn’t go north, but we—now
we—now we were facing the fact that we’re leaving. So how do you win? It was a real tough
dilemma for us to try to—try to swallow.

DB: News from home. What are you hearing from your wife and your family? What are you
hearing just in general about the news at home, what’s happening on the home front?

LG: Most of the time that we were there we didn’t have any—we didn’t have a lot of current
news and the only radio that we had was Armed Forces Vietnam. So the news that we got was
basically how we were doing in the war. I remember it was in late June—late July of ’69 when
somebody told me that we had landed on the moon and I thought they were kidding because I
didn’t see how that was possible. And turns out it was possible (Laughs). But there was not a lot
of news from home. The letters that I got were very—were very sanitized because—like for
example, my mother was—was dating a man that we had known—that my family had known—
for a long time. A really good man. And his son was a crew chief on a helicopter in the army,
and he was killed in January, about a month before I got to Vietnam.

74
So that really impacted my mother, and of course him, but they never said a word to me and I
didn’t—I didn’t learn about that until I had gotten home. So I think it impacted how they wrote
and what they wrote about, but I received letters all the time and it was just letters about, you
know—we’re thinking about you, come on home, be safe. I got them from my wife, from my
relatives, you know, from cousins, and—and I did get letters from Joe Ford—I mentioned him
earlier—but his mother and his sisters would write me. As a matter of fact, Snake Charmer, who
was my weapons platoon leader, his name was Jim Ward—the one that was killed in Arizona
Valley carrying back one of the other marines. Anyways—I lost my train of thought on that,
but—but—but he kept us pretty straight. Pretty straight and narrow and—you know, led us well.
As far as news from home, though, there wasn’t that much. There was—I believe the Charles
Manson thing, there was a lot of crazy news and—

DB: Um-hm. And did you get news about the protests?

LG: The news that I got, believe it or not, was from new guys that would come into the unit,
or people that would, you know, go on R&R or—or meet somebody who was just from the states
or somebody who didn’t get sanitized mail. Woodstock, you know—we’d hear about
Woodstock, but we’d hear about it through other guys. But as far as like Watts and things like
that—I didn’t have a clue what was going on back there. The news I was getting basically was
company-size news, you know.

DB: And the new marines coming in—are some of them influenced by the things that were
going on the home front, or are they proud marines right out of training?

LG: There—there was a mixture, but most of the new guys that I saw were just scared to
death. And it was a lot of the older guys—it was a lot of the guys that were rotating—the guys
that were in their last month or six weeks—that would start wearing peace—you know, peace
symbols around their neck.

DB: And that was allowed?

LG: It was allowed. It was—it wasn’t well-liked, but it’s pretty hard to tell a guy who you’re
counting on for your life, who’s carrying a machine gun, to take the peace symbol off or to, you
know, not draw one on his helmet, but that’s what they’d do. But the conversations for those
guys were, I’m going to go home and I’m going to drink and I’m going to party and I’m going
to, you know, rock and roll, and I’m going to find women—and I mean, their mindset was, I’m
getting out of this place and I ain’t ever looking back. And a lot of times they left Vietnam before
they were physically dead, you know.

DB: Um-hm, short-timer attitudes.

LG: Um-hm.

DB: And back to the mail—what are you hearing from your wife? What is she—again, just
the sanitized stuff? Hi, how you doing?

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LG: Yeah, pretty much—Oh, I got a place where it would be nice—I got an apartment in
South Minneapolis, so it will be nice when you come home and we can, you know, buy a house
and picket fence—that type of stuff, you know. It was—it was dreams that you, you know,
would have. I’m thinking about you, you know, remember when we did this, remember when we
did that—you know, things to get your mind off Vietnam.

DB: Yeah. R&R? Did you get an R&R?

LG: I met her in a—in Hawaii and that was a fast ten days. It was super-fast. We stayed at the
Marine Surf Hotel in Hawaii and you know, we walked, we shopped, we—I think at the time the
drink was Southern Comfort and Coke and I think I probably went through three or four bottles
of that while I was there. And then we talked about the future. But it was great.

DB: Did she notice a change in you or how were you acting when you were there? You’re
coming out of a wild and crazy place.

LG: (Laughs) Yeah, I was a lot different. I was—I remember in particular walking down the
street with her and—and there was a backfire or something that happened, and I grabbed her and,
you know, shoved her up to the side, get her out of the way because it just—I never did leave
Vietnam, you know. I was just—I was just thrilled—I was walking sidewalks I hadn’t walked for
four months—

DB: Sheets?

LG: Sheets—there was sheets, there was a bathtub. It took me four baths to get the dirt off. I
thought (Laughs)—I thought it was all suntan. But it wasn’t (Laughs). And she reminded me of
that, too. But yeah, she did notice a change. She—she knew I was no longer that happy-go-lucky
kind of wild guy—

DB: Base player in the band.

LG: Yeah, I was—I was a lot more serious, I was—I was a lot more—I was a lot quieter—

DB: Did the two of you talk about that? Did she bring it up?

LG: Oh yeah. We’d talk—we talked about it and I—I denied it, you know. I told her, “No,
there’s no difference. I’m the same—same as ever.” And she said, “No, you’re not.” And I said
(Laughs), “Yes, I am.” She said, “Oh no you’re not.” And so we spent a lot of time talking about
it. It took me probably a week to feel like I was back to normal. But—but Vietnam had never left
my mind; it was just I think it took me that long to put the defenses down.

DB: Um-hm. Then you have to go back to Vietnam.

LG: Then I had to—I had to put her on a bus and, you know, send her to the airport, and—and
that was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. She said to me, “Come with me.” And I said,
“I can’t do that.” But—it was hard. So, I got on my bus and went back to Vietnam. And—

76
DB: And how far into your tour—how far into—were you on a twelve or a thirteen-month
tour?

LG: It was a—our tour—Marines tour was twelve and twenty. So twelve months and twenty
days.

DB: So how far into your tour were you when you went on R&R?

LG: March, April, May, June—three and a half months. About three and a half months.

DB: Into your tour?

LG: Yeah.

DB: So fairly early on.

LG: Yeah.

DB: You’ve got a lot of time left to your country.

LG: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah that’s why it was—that’s why every minute we spent together was
so important to me because I didn’t really think I was going to see her again when I said
goodbye. I didn’t think I was going to see her—at least in the same—you know, in the same—
physically form. But I—most of us didn’t think we were ever going to see home again. I mean
that’s just the way it—that’s just the way it was.

DB: And so when you went back to Vietnam, you had the big operation in the Arizona Valley
you talked about. Had a lot of other stuff, you went back to Liberty Bridge, probably—did more
duty there?

LG: Yeah.

DB: Pretty much the same patrolling, certain operations that came up.

LG: Yeah most of—most of what we did was retake the same ground or take turns with other
companies in An Hoa, Liberty Bridge, Arizona Valley, the Horseshoe—you know, all within
about a ten-mile radius. That was our area of operation and—and we would—we would spend
most of our time doing those things.

DB: But nothing’s ever really ever settled. Nothing’s ever really won.

LG: No.

DB: It’s take it, give it back, come back and take it again.

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LG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah and I—I never really quite could figure that out. I couldn’t in my mind
figure out if it’s that we don’t have enough troops over here to keep everything at once or if
that’s just the way it goes—kind of like fishing, you know. Kind of like, maybe if we can go
back to the same place and surprise them, we’ll get more. But I never could quite figure it out
and every time I would sit down with squad leaders or those guys, they were like, I don’t know.

DB: Did you ever get any down time in the country?

LG: We did go for three days on an in-country R&R to China Beach, they call it.

DB: In Da Nang.

LG: Yeah, yeah. And that was nice. That was very nice.

DB: You went as a unit?

LG: Yeah.

DB: Did you get into town then too or—?

LG: Nope.

DB: —just pretty just stayed on the beach? They kept you isolated from the Vietnamese
civilians?

LG: Right. Right, they kept us totally isolated and—and really protected. So it was a good
chance for us to swim, you know, drink beers, not worry about things, you know. Some of the
guys went off and smoked pot or whatever they’d do and it was just some time to relax.

DB: Did drugs ever become a problem in your unit?

LG: Not in the field. And it never—I guess it never really became a problem anywhere
because when we were in An Hoa or Liberty Bridge occasionally somebody might, you know—I
mean you could smell pot, but it was never unit-sized, you know? It was small groups of guys,
you know, that would—that would do it. I know we did have one squad leader one time that I
always wondered if he smoked pot and then on—we were on a patrol one day, just a regular
patrol, and we got—we got—took fire from a small village. I was carrying an M79 at the time,
but we took fire from a small village and he took a round through the stomach. It was non-
critical, wasn’t life-threatening; he actually had a smile on his face because it must have just
gone through fat or something because he says, “I’m getting out of here.” And when—you know,
I fired at the—we fired at the village, I fired about five, six M79 grenades into the town—into
the ville, and whatever—whatever was there is gone. But Tucker, his name was—the last thing
he said when he was (Laughs) when he was going on the helicopter he said, “Take care of my
pack.” So—so one of the guys went over there, opened his pack, and sure enough there was like
three bags of pot in there and we just basically hid it, you know. But that was the funny part
about Vietnam was when somebody—when somebody was hit, their gear goes to everybody. So

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it’s kinda like, hey, if you’re not gonna use it we’re gonna use it. So nothing’s permanent over
there.

DB: Most of the time you ate rations—C-Rations in the field?

LG: Yep, C-Rations. And I can think of one time we got—it was Thanks—I believe it was
Thanksgiving—maybe it was Easter, I don’t remember—but we did get a hot meal and there was
even ice cream—it was just in a liquid form by the time we got it. But they actually came out to
the field. I believe it was Easter.

DB: Um-hm. Did you get creative with your C-Ration preparation?

LG: Oh yeah. We—you’d take the pound cake and then you’d mix the cocoa, you know, and
you’d have your frosting and— you know, I ate relatively poorly because I had—usually had to
give my good stuff to the guys who had cigarettes that didn’t smoke.

DB: You were a smoker?

LG: (Laughs) I was a smoker. So most of the time, if I had—if I had steak and potatoes or
whatever it was—meatballs and potatoes—I would have to give that up to get the packs of
cigarettes.

DB: Three or four cigarettes in a ration pack.

LG: Yep, yep. But they were—they were your get away at the time and uh, and the guys
who—the guys who didn’t smoke ate well. We would—the peaches, things like that, very
seldom that I ever tasted them—peaches, sliced pears or whatever—because—or fruit cocktail
mix—that usually went to those guys because the cigarettes were just too important.

DB: You had had hot meals when you went back to Liberty Bridge? They had a mess hall
there.

LG: They had a mess hall at An Hoa, but it would get rocketed regularly, so the only thing
that really came out of the mess hall was bread and mashed potatoes. So that was your hot meal
if you went up to the chow hall.

DB: That’s—that’s pretty skimpy.

LG: It’s skimpy, but it’s not that bad. If—if you make yourself a mashed potato sandwich, it
doesn’t sound good, but it’s—but it did hit the spot.

DB: In—in that situation it worked.

LG: (Laughs) In that situation it worked.

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DB: Okay. As your tour’s starting to wind down how is your attitude? Are you starting to get
cautious like some of the other people you talked about?

LG: Yeah. I would say from the middle of June on—

DB: The last half.

LG: Yeah, the last half of my time there. The whole attitude was changing. Once we realized
that we were going—that we were—that we were going to be getting out of Vietnam, we started
to experience morale issues with people that would come in from other units. Because when they
would retire—let’s say that the Ninth Regiment was being retired, they wouldn’t retire the
regiment; they would retire the people that were in their last ninety days—

DB: They’d retire the colors.

LG: They’d retire the colors. And then they would even move in some people that were in
their last thirty, forty days from another unit. So we would get a lot of people in that still have six
months to go and they’d—and the two things that bothered them—number one, they’re
disappointed they couldn’t go home with the colors; number two, why am I in the Fifth
Regiment? I just spent, you know, six months in the Ninth Regiment and that—

DB: They have a loyalty to their unit.

LG: Exactly. Now all of a sudden, that’s gone. But it was the beginning of September of ’69
when the first sergeant came up to me and said—and I’ll never forget it because he said—he
said, “I want you to—I want you to come back to An Hoa and guard us,”—you know, be a guard
around An Hoa. And I couldn’t quite understand what he was saying but it turned out that—I
think because I was married—because my wife, her brother was over there and lost a leg. I think
she had written to the company—I don’t know. But for whatever reason—oh, and he was—the
first sergeant was from Minnesota. He wanted somebody back there to post guard, you know, to
perform a guard duty around the perimeter, and—and also try to handle the troops that were
coming in. So he asked me if I’d be interested and I said, “I think so.” So September first, I went
back to An Hoa and I spent the—actually, September, October, November, December, and
January—you know, in what they call Rocket City. So—

DB: Um-hm. And was that more dangerous than being in the field?

LG: It was at the time. Because in the field, we lost—we actually didn’t lose—we’ll I
shouldn’t say that. In December I lost my best friend over there. He was—I had talked to him
that day—he was the one that I had got letters from his mother and the one that had, you know,
been under my wing, so to speak.

DB: From Louisiana.

LG: From Louisiana. Joe, his name was. And he came back and we talked and he was going
on R&R. When he came back from R&R, he—you know, I—I talked with him a little bit. We

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had a couple cigarettes together and then he went to get on a truck to ride out to—to meet up
with the company that was at Liberty Bridge at the time. And the bot—the truck ran over a box
mine. Killed five guys from Delta Company. But that was really the last of the kills out there.
From then on, the Vietnamese—the Viet Cong, NVA—knew that things were winding down. So
their attacks were more protective. Like for example, they would—they would rocket An Hoa or
Liberty Bridge constantly, just to keep us on our toes, but very seldom that they would—you
know, very seldom that they would do full-scale attacks like they had done in May—or I’m
sorry, March—which was the biggest attack that I’d been through.

DB: You were on a three-year enlistment.

LG: I was on a two-year.

DB: Two-year enlistment?

LG: Two-year.

DB: Oh. So before the time you come home, you’ve got about five months left, six months
left?

LG: Right.

DB: And what was the process of coming home?

LG: Well, what happened was the tours were now becoming shortened. So in order to meet
the quotas of who they were sending home, a lot of us were being sent home instead of putting in
the full twelve and twenty. They were sending us home—I went home after twelve months—a
little less than twelve months. And actually, two of the guys that I went through boot camp with
that were also attached to the Fifth Regiment went with me home. So they were, you know—
they were sending us home in a shorter period. So I only had—I knew I only had like four, five
months to do state-side, so I couldn’t go back to Vietnam. And I don’t think they would have
sent us there because the war was winding down. So—so the time that I spent on the way back—
I went back to Camp Pendleton—

DB: What was the process of leaving Vietnam? You had to go back to—to Da Nang?

LG: Yes. What we did was I had one of the—one of the orderlies came up to me and said,
“You’ve got orders to—to go.” Said, “You’ll be going back home by the first of February.” And
so I—I said, “That’s great.” And he said, “Come on up to the XO’s office.” So I went up to the—
to the tent there and the XO shook my hand, handed me a bag, and said, “Pack your gear; you’re
going home.” Inside the bag was a Vietnam medal that I have been wearing ever since, you
know, a couple of token things—thank you for your service, that type of thing—and he said, “By
the way, the chopper’s going to be here tomorrow morning. If you’re not on it, you’re here for
another two weeks.” So needless to say, I spent the night (Laughs) getting ready for that chopper.
We—we flew into Da Nang, spent a night there, had some beers. The next day they took us into
this—over to the airport and they put us in about fifteen lines. And this was security at that

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time—this is what the TSA looked like at that time—you walked your line to this little booth—
this little covered booth—it’s like a photograph booth that you would see at a fair—you walk
into that booth and they tell you before you walk in there if you’ve got any contraband, more
than five hundred dollars, anything you shouldn’t have, you better dump it in there because
we’ve got dogs on this end and when you get here, you’re either going on that plane or going to
the brig. So I walked into that booth and I looked down and I saw (Laughs) all kinds of stuff.
Stuff I couldn’t believe: knives, switchblades, rounds, grenades, pot—I mean, everything in the
world. But you come out the other side and sure enough the dogs would sniff you, they’d check
your gear, and send you out the back door and get on your plane and that was—that was the last
of Vietnam.

DB: Fly to Okinawa first?

LG: Yeah. Flew to Okinawa, spent I think a night, and then took the long flight home.

DB: And are you in your jungle fatigues now? Or what are you wearing?

LG: It was—I was still wearing my—my utilities, just like I had been wearing the day before.
I landed in—landed in San Diego, took the buses back up to Pendleton, and that’s where we
were given—

DB: Cleaned up?

LG: Yeah.

DB: And how long were you there?

LG: Three days.

DB: And then you get to leave for home?

LG: On the third day, they—they came in and they called out probably a dozen of us and told
us to go over to out-processing, which I didn’t know what it was. So I was over to this—to one
of the buildings on the base and I talked to a psychologist who basically said, “Are you ready to
go home?” And I said, “Hell yeah.” And went through medical, got shots, got my records
updated, and they told me the next day I’d be going home.

DB: Out of the service?

LG: Out of the service.

DB: You’re getting an early discharge.

LG: Eighteen months. Yep.

DB: So—

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LG: Twelve months in Vietnam, six months stateside.

DB: And about five days home from Vietnam and you’re out.

LG: Yep.

DB: And you’re happy.

LG: (Laughs) I was really happy, yeah.

DB: And so you finish your processing and they give you a ticket home?

LG: Yep, got a ticket home and—

DB: Called home first?

LG: I didn’t even call home. It was a complete surprise. I—I came home—I took a cab to—
let’s see, that was in the middle of February, so the difference in weather from going from
California to Minnesota was pretty—pretty memorable.

DB: But did they give you—you were in a full winter uniform, now the wool greens.

LG: I had a—I had a full winter uniform, but I also was back to—I had lost all the long hair
and everything else. So my head was kind of—my head was kind of bare. And I’ll never—I’ll
never forget it—I took the cab to a block short of my house so I could walk that last block home
and by the time I got to home, to my mother’s house, I was wishing that I had taken the cab the
full way (Laughs). But yeah, it was pretty bad. I should have called home; there was nobody
there when I got there.

DB: You weren’t stuck outside though?

LG: No, it was an apartment building and the lady across the hall was actually the first person,
you know, that I got to meet with because I knocked on the door several times and then I went
over and knocked on her door and she gave me a hug and gave me the key and I went in and Ma
was working and my brother was working and I didn’t know where my wife was—I had to call a
friend up, you know, and then he gave me the address and that’s what—that’s—that was kind of
my welcome home.

DB: And this is—this is very surprising; you thought you had a few months in the Marine
Corps ahead of you. What’s your plan? Or how did you formulate a plan and how long did it take
you to formulate a plan?

LG: (Laughs) I had no plan. I—

DB: Find your wife.

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LG: Yeah, yeah, I had to find my wife. So I did talk to the friend that I originally said that I
couldn’t—that could not get in the service. Contacted him. By then he—his hair was down to his
neck; he looked a lot like Jesus. And he was real happy to see me, but he knew right away that I
was not the same person. And—

DB: Nor was he.

LG: Nor was he. And of course, my wife’s brother, it turns out, had not lost his leg, but it was
an inch shorter because he had taken up AK47 round through his femur and they had to—they
had to fuse the bones together. So—so fortunately—and to this day, he’s still fighting with
infections in that leg—so they were able to save the leg but it was an inch shorter. But anyway,
we were all different. It was a—it was a strange homecoming. He, Greg, his name was, took me
aside and said, “Things are not what you think.” And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” And he
said, “She is not living at an apartment; she’s living with some other people.” And I said,
“Okay.” So he took me over there and she was in an apartment with—living with about three
other people and so that was my—that was my homecoming. It was kind of a surprise.

DB: This was—this wasn’t just a roommate situation? Or what was the—?

LG: I don’t know to this day what it was because we divorced, you know, a few years later. It
was a very—we had both changed too much. We did have two sons together and didn’t—that
couldn’t hold us together. I was a lot different than my party days and she was still in that mode.
So—so we just felt it was best if we—part.

DB: But in the meantime you’ve gotta get a job or you have an option to go to school—you
got the GI Bill. What did you figure out to do?

LG: I floated from job to job, basically. I worked for—I worked for a glass company, Midland
Glass Company for a year, I worked for Munsingwear for a few months, I worked for—I took
some classes at the University of Minnesota, but I ran into a lot of problems with students and
teachers there that found out that I’d been in, you know, in the Marines and Vietnam. And that’s
where—that’s where I got—got into some issues with some of the people there and I just decided
that I was not ready to mingle with too many of those folks yet. So I eventually—I worked for
retail, worked for about seven years for Target. And then one day I got hired by the postal
service and I spent twenty-seven years with them. So it was a good place for me to be because I
landed with a lot of other guys that had been through similar experiences.

DB: Um-hm. And did you tie into veterans’ organizations?

LG: Not really, not until I retired. In 2011, I began reaching out to other places—I no longer
had to worry about work and that environment; I had time now to join the Marine Corps
League—

DB: That’s not an unusual pattern.

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LG: (Laughs) Right.

DB: When people retire, they have time and then they start connecting—similar paths.

LG: Yeah, and you start thinking about—you start thinking about the important things that
have happening in your life and the important people and I volunteer now for—at the VA
hospital. I have a lot of friends that have similar experiences, I spent a lot of time with them and
we don’t necessarily talk so much about the experiences we do about how thankful we are to be
here. There was—there was a thing that a chaplain said to me that kind of—[somebody walks
into room] that kind of—that kind of changed my life back the day before—the day before we
went into Arizona Valley and I’ll never forget it because the chaplain basically had forty or fifty
of us sitting on helmets on top of a hill at the bridge and was giving a sermon and at the end of it,
you know, I thanked him and I said, “You know, I’m trying to figure out this whole thing.” And
he said, “Don’t worry about it,” he said, “that’s for God to figure out.” So I think about it a lot
and I think how thankful I am to be here today.

DB: You just—one story you mentioned earlier, before we were recording, about your—your
friend from Louisiana and your connection with his mother. Do you want to tell that story?

LG: Sure. It—it’s hard because he was a good friend and his mother and his sisters would
write me. Well, he was killed on December 21, 1969 and his—his mother, who was also
divorced and had, I think, six other kids and she lived in a small town in Louisiana—and—and
she got the news of his death on Christmas Eve, which is—it always very difficult. But, I
received one more letter from her and it was—it was once I got home. The letter basically said—
well, actually I received it in Vietnam and I took it home—but it basically said that she knows
that I tried to help Joe and that I was a good friend, and so I always kept that. And then one—one
time in the—one time in the eighties—I believe it was the late-eighties—somebody had asked
me if I watched the movie Platoon and I said no. So I watched it. Well, unfortunately it brought
back a lot of memories and—and so I decided that I should call her.
So, (sighs) so I looked up information in Louisiana and I gave them her name and called. And
she answered the phone and I said, “I don’t know if you’ll remember me, but I served with your
son.” And she said, “Leo?” So—so we reconnected after that and—and we talked for hours. We
wrote each other every Christmas; we would send letters to each other, and we—we got to be
friends again. And that would have been—I guess that would have been in the early-nineties
when I contacted her. But I retired in 2011 and I decided to take a trip down there. So I contacted
her and asked her if I could stop by, and she said, “That would be great.” So I drove down there
and when I pulled up it was a Sunday—I had picked up a plant for her and it was a Sunday
afternoon—and when I—when I pulled up to the house, I noticed a lot of cars around and some
people in the house. So I walked in and it was her whole family. So we spent—we spent three or
four hours together and I updated them on Joe and—before I left, she walked me around the
house—and down there they—they put pictures all over the place—so they had family pictures
on the walls everywhere and the kids growing up and that. But in the middle of the hallway there
was a big, full-sized picture of Joe and then his medals below. And there was one thing missing
and that was—it’s called a French Fourragère. There’s a rope that the only marines that are
allowed to wear it is the Fifth Marine Regiment and small elements of the Sixth Marines. It was
awarded by the French government in 1919 for what they call the Battle of Belleau Woods in

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France where the Fifth Marine Regiment was basically—went in there without any support. So
this rope was awarded to the Fifth Regiment to be worn by anybody in the Fifth Regiment
forever. And I—I said, “He’s missing this Fourragère.” And I explained the story to her and she
said, “Well can you get that to me?” And I said yes. So I went home and mailed her mine. And
she was very thankful. But anyway, it kind of helped close the story for me with Joe. And she did
say when I left—she said, “I feel like Joe visited.”

DB: You’ve done a really great job so thank you very much.

LG: It’s hard (Laughs). But yeah. Thanks for taking the time to listen.

DB: Thank you.

End of Interview

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