Called to Serve Vietnam

It is with great sadness that I dedicate this post to the life of a wonderful man, George Williams. His untimely death occurred earlier this week. I got to know George, as many of those who knew him did, because he was an activist for peace who had served in Vietnam and because he was a significant presence in our community. When I decided to write my book about the war and draft, George immediately came to mind as someone to include and he accepted the opportunity to share his experience. This was both difficult and painful for him to do as was evident during both the interview and during the filming of his re-telling aspects of the story for a possible film. Throughout my time with him, George was the consummate gentleman whose kindness, enthusiasm for my project, and dedication to the causes to which he devoted himself were outstanding. In addition he was a gifted artist and loving family man.

So I am including two letters I received yesterday from folks who knew George and whose words honor his contributions. They also tell about the ways in which his life will be celebrated. Following the letters are George’s words about his service and his return to civilian life from his interview for CALLED TO SERVE: STORIES OF THE MEN AND WOMEN CONFRONTED BY THE VIETNAM DRAFT, which will be published this winter.

Hi Fellow Members of Veterans for Peace,

Some of you have already heard the sad news of the passing Wednesday
night of George Williams. George agreed to step up to be our VFP chapter
President a couple of years ago, & we began meeting & being active again.

His death has been a shock to those of us who knew him. Half a
dozen of us had the good luck to spend several days with him at the national
VFP convention, less than a week ago. He was so full of life and energy!
So much his usual self!

At our chapter meeting this Saturday afternoon, we will have the
first part of the meeting for people to share memories & stories of George.

George had set up a Veterans’ Art Show for Sunday, Sept. 12.
Several of us plan to have that show as a Memorial to George. We’ll be
talking about that at our meeting also.

You’re all welcome to join us at the meeting or at the Art Show.
The meeting this Saturday is at the Amherst Unitarian Society, at 121 N. Pleasant St (next
to Bart’s), at 3:30 pm. The art show is from 10-6 in the C3 art gallery in
the basement of Thorne’s.

Below is the e-mail about George’s death from Susan and Rob, at
Veterans Education Project. George spoke in high school classes for them.

Hope to see you this Saturday 9/4, or Sunday 9/12.
Geoff

Dear Friends:

We write to share the very sad news of the passing last night of George
Williams, a Vietnam veteran and a long-time VEP speaker whom many of you
know quite well. George’s death was sudden and unexpected. His partner,
Kaolin, called Rob this morning and told him that George complained of
chest pains and was taken to the hospital, where he was overcome by a
heart attack. Contact information for Kaolin and her family is at the
bottom of this email, if any of you want to send a card of sympathy and
support.

Kaolin is making funeral arrangements, and it will take place at the
state Veterans Cemetery in Agawam. We will forward you details for any
calling hours and the funeral date and time as soon as we are informed.
Kaolin would like to do a memorial service in the future, probably in
October or November. George was a big part of local politics and a lot
of activities and organizations in Northampton, his home since the mid
1990s, as well as being a stalwart member of the VEP. His loss will be
significant to all of us, and it seems fitting to hold a memorial
service for him. We offered to assist in that, and Kaolin gratefully
accepted. We will forward the details on that too, when they are finalized.

George – who was a retired FDNY firefighter – was always there when VEP
needed a veteran for a presentation. His stories of the war and coming
home made an immeasurable impact on countless classrooms and students.
As a “grunt” in the First Infantry Division, serving in the Iron
Triangle region of South Vietnam, George endured some truly horrific
combat experiences. He was wounded-in-action once. However, he would
only occasionally and very reluctantly talk about such events, in
private, to people he knew well. In the classroom he preferred to focus
on the hard lessons he learned in war, not the battles and skirmishes he
participated in. He always spoke of the compassion he discovered and
acts of goodness he delivered for the civilians of Vietnam – especially
the children – who were devastated by the war. One of his unfulfilled
dreams was to go back to Vietnam with a veterans’ humanitarian and
reconciliation mission.

George was active in the community right up to the day of his death, and
was in the midst of planning a veterans’ art exhibit in Northampton this
September. He participated in a VEP project with me in Turners Falls two
weeks ago, and was going to be part of a veterans “talk back” panel at
the upcoming VEP-sponsored play, Ambush on T-Street, the weekend of
Sept. 11. He was to have played a significant role in our school
programs this year. And I’m sure he had a variety of other projects and
plans in motion that I do not know about. He was President of the local
chapter of Veterans for Peace and very active in that organization, too.
We all will miss him dearly. Rest in Peace, George Williams.

Kaolin’s (she goes by that one name) address is 19 Carpenter Ave., 2nd
Floor, Northampton MA 01060. She and George have two children, a
daughter who lives in NYC and a son who has lived with them at times
over the last several years. Kaolin is focusing on family at the
present, we will let you know if she would like any other assistance in
the coming weeks.

George was a blessing in all of our lives, and will be greatly missed.

Rob and Susan

Here is George’s story:

George is a retired New York City. firefighter and father of two children, ages thirty and thirty-four. His son lives with him in Northampton, MA, and his daughter lives in Brooklyn. He is active in two local veterans groups, the Veterans Education Project and Veterans for Peace. He visits area high schools as a representative of these groups to speak to students about his Vietnam experience. Most recently he was asked to mediate a dispute between recruiters and students on the Holyoke Community College campus where he has spoken numerous times in the past. George is also a visual artist.

I grew up in Brooklyn. I got my first real job while I was in high school working for Hayden, Stone and Co., a prominent securities firm, in 1965. My mother was very proud – there was a black man on Wall Street. I enjoyed the job, which involved working closely with the California office. I had an older brother, an older sister, a younger brother and two younger sisters. My mother was a single parent, and my money helped out the family. I was living a fairly good life and figured it would go on that way. Then I got drafted in 1966.

I had been aware of the war, because Martin Luther King was speaking out more and more against it. My father served in World War II, and my older brother was in the Air Force, so I felt a responsibility to do something. It was just my turn to go into the military. Sure I had choices. I could have gone underground. I could have gotten a phony ID and gone to Canada. I could have gone to jail. My response, though, was just to accept the fact I would be sent to fight.

The letter from the Selective Service told me to “Report to Whitehall St.” in downtown Manhattan. There even was a subway token taped to the top of it. I went down there, and they gave me a basic overall physical. During the exam you felt like you were part of a buffalo herd, and you just went along with it. There were a couple of people who probably took LSD or something, because they were bouncing off the walls. Some people were gay, and they pushed that issue right out in front. In all though, there were just a handful of people who seemed to be fighting what was happening. In fact, for me the physical was more like a reunion than anything else. A lot of people from my high school, guys I hadn’t seen in a couple of years, were there, and we were all going in together.
After my physical I started to hear more about the war, and I became more interested in it. However, despite what I was hearing, and even though all my folks, especially my sisters, were hesitant about me going, I just felt like it was something I had to do, like a rite of passage.

It took about six months before they told me to report. When I got the notice I went down to get all my gear, get sized up, jump on a bus and go get a haircut. Then they shuttled us back to our homes to say our good-byes. My father was home, and it was the first time he ever hugged me. I didn’t even know how to react to that, because he was always very standoffish, a disciplinarian. I thought it was just him doing what he needed to do, but I was surprised. I almost couldn’t feel anything; it was such a foreign experience.

In basic training we were holed up in Georgia. The drill instructors were all white southerners. They hated New Yorkers, so they had us and the southerners in separate barracks. They were very harsh and not everyone was used to it. They told us, “We’re going to break you guys from New York.” They did things to us that were inhumane to say the least. There was one guy who couldn’t do enough pushups. They told him he was a monkey and needed to go climb a tree. They actually had this guy hugging a tree, humping a tree. One guy had a book with him, a paperback with a picture of his family tucked into it, and the drill sergeant took the book and ripped it in half. The guy broke down and cried.

There was a time when we were out in a field and we were looking at these rolling hills of Georgia. Everything was so green. I was just saying how beautiful the country was, when this southerner came up from behind where we were standing and said, “Hey, niggers, get off my property!” Back in New York, it wasn’t that unusual to run into racist types, and usually we could just go our own way. Being in the military, though, we had to deal with it in other ways.

One way we dealt with it was to be the best that we could be, so they couldn’t say anything to us. If we were faster than everyone else was, and did more push-ups and chin-ups, we were less likely to get mistreated. Or we could join one of the clubs. We could join the boxing club or something like that, because if you were in a club they treated you differently.

After basic training we went to advanced training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. That’s where the training got more intense. The rifle we learned on first was the M-14, which was before the M-16. It was actually a better weapon, because it had a wooden stock. It was a real down-to-earth weapon. You could drop it and pick it up, and it would still work. When they gave us the M-16 everyone used to call it a Mattel toy because it would jam up at the drop of a hat. You got one little grain of sand in it, and it would jam up. Everyone knew it wasn’t made for Vietnam. A lot of guys, when they got to Vietnam, said, “Either you give me an AK-47 or you take me home!” We also had more specific training at Fort Jackson, learning about weapons like the Claymore mine1 in addition to the M-14.
In South Carolina we were put in barracks where, for the first time, instead of being with the whole group in one huge room, we were stuck in a dorm situation. There was one guy who had never been more than twenty-five miles from his house. He was the real country boy, the big guy, but we got along well because of our similar size. He was down to earth, and he was on the wrestling team, so we wound up wrestling. He kept offering to run down and get us some moonshine.

Some of us used to steal milk from the kitchen and bring it to a rural community near where he lived. Those people were mountain people, and they were really poor. They didn’t know me, but they accepted me because I was in the military; it was automatic acceptance. The kids always got a kick out of me; I’ve always had a thing with kids.
When it was finally time to go to ‘Nam, just stepping off the plane was a situation in itself. When the plane was coming in, there was mortar being fired. We made this really sharp turn, and the whole plane was shaking. All of a sudden it really hit home that I was in Vietnam and I could die. Then, when we opened the doors, we got this hit of air and it was like a hundred degrees. As we were walking along on the runway, the guys who were going home were passing us. They’d say things like, “You’re going to go home with fewer guys than you got now,” and “You’ve only got 364 more days to go!”

We jumped into a bus that was pitifully reinforced. It looked like somebody from a shop class just put some wire mesh on the outside. We went into the station where they told us where we were going. They just basically numbered us off and said, “All the one’s are going there; all the two’s are going there,” and so on. I wound up going with the First Infantry Division, which was a rifle division that went into the jungles. We’d fly out on helicopters on some missions and try to spot any enemy going through the “boonies.”

Fear was always a common denominator, no matter where you were, no matter what you were doing. Even when we were back at base camp, we weren’t safe. We had been mortared there a couple of times, and one time somebody got blown up by a mortar round. That kept the fear with you. There were so many emotions, though; it’s hard to pinpoint any one as the strongest. Sometimes we’d get into a firefight, and it would be so chaotic. We’d get mortared, and at one point a mortar landed behind me in a tree, and that’s how I got some shrapnel in my buttocks. I was treated in the field and was seen by a battalion doctor when I got back to the base camp, but for some reason the Army neglected to include it in my records. To this day I’m still trying to get my Purple Heart. The Army says I have to find the medic who treated me, because even though the battalion doctor treated me, the battalion doctor says he doesn’t know how I got the wound. I say, “I was in Vietnam. I got wounded. Where do you think it came from?”

But I think also at that time a lot of guys were wounding themselves, trying to get out. I mean I’ve seen guys cut themselves on the shoulder, so they wouldn’t have to carry a backpack. One guy I know drank a bottle of booze, and then told another guy to smash his hand. The range in people’s attitudes was unbelievable. There were people who loved being in combat; really to the point that I thought they were psychotic. They loved the act of killing. Then there were guys who wanted to get out so badly they would do anything.

I was somewhere in the middle. I was trying to do my job, despite the fear that was with me all the time. That fear was so powerful; it was almost like it was strangling me. I just wanted to get my time over with. There was a calendar with a Playboy-type model posing, and it was a line drawing with 365 little blocks in the woman’s body. Each day you would shade in the block, and where the vagina was, that was home. Everybody had one of these calendars, marking the days off.

There were a lot of Vietnamese children there. One day I noticed that, no matter where you went, there were kids running all over the place. As I child I wasn’t well off. My family was on welfare, but when I was in Vietnam what I had thought of as the poverty level was blown away. One little boy was holding his sister who was eating out of a sandbag that we threw our food away in. It was a really dirty sandbag, and he was feeding her out of it. His clothes were all tattered. More and more I saw kids like that. There was one ten-year-old boy, I remember; besides Vietnamese, he was able to speak German, French, English and Korean, and another dialect I didn’t even understand. If you wanted any pot, he’d bring it to you. He would ride around on a little motor scooter, and if you wanted a girl, he would bring a girl. He was like a little pimp. I saw how war affected these children.
More and more I realized we weren’t there for a legitimate reason. Even the way we fought the war showed how crazy it was. We would fight, take over certain areas and leave, and then they’d regain them, and we’d go back and have to take the same place over again. It just didn’t make sense, strategically, militarily. It felt like we could have been there forever. It was like constantly taking one step forward and one step back. It didn’t make sense to a lot of soldiers, to a lot of ground soldiers at least.

It didn’t take long for us to realize we needed to be numbed out, to become “self-medicated”, just to get through all the craziness and danger. We drank, and we smoked pot. Pot was probably the most used drug of choice, but there were some people who went to Saigon and got opium and heroin. They used to say, “If you’re going into an opium den, don’t go in alone,” because some soldiers would go in and get killed. If you were going for a night out, you had to be wary, because the Viet Cong were all over the place.

I was really opposed to the way the war itself was being fought. There were the “zippo raids.” I didn’t like them at all. Even if the Viet Cong were around the area, why burn a whole village? If we got shot at, we used mortars until we could get an air strike, but a lot of the time we hit innocent villages. That’s what the Viet Cong did. They hid behind the villages, but we took out the whole village killing many innocent people.

However, the more I was there, the more I understood the Viet Cong. I felt like they were doing a better job than we were, and some other soldiers felt that way, too. In fact, I just got a call from this guy who I was with in ‘Nam. We talked about lots of things that happened, like how some guys always got separated after a firefight, and how our unit had to go look for them. Guys next to me got blown up, but I couldn’t feel angry; I mean I understood all too well why the Viet Cong were fighting against us. In fact, I, and a handful of other soldiers, understood the whole war – they were fighting for their homeland and we were fighting to prevent them from winning it back. The officers, on the other hand, tried to have us dehumanize the Vietnamese, so we would be more likely to follow orders. We could be as brutal as we wanted to and there would be were no consequences.

Fortunately for me, the neighborhood I was in when I was drafted was a blue-collar neighborhood. I had the support of the immediate neighborhood, even if there were some protestors. While I was in Vietnam, having good community and family support helped a lot, and we stayed in touch. Years later, in ’85 or ’86, I was on a T.V. show about the war with two other vets, one a paraplegic, the other a double amputee. While I was on the show, I started reading one of the letters I had written to my mother:

Dear Ma,
How are things back in the World? I hope all is well! Things are pretty much the same. Vietnam has my feelings on a seesaw.
This country is so beautiful; when the sun is shining on the mountains, farmers in their rice paddies, with their water buffalo, palm trees, monkeys, birds and even the strange insects. For a fleeting moment I wasn’t in a war zone at all, just on vacation, but still missing you and the family.
There are a few kids who hang around, some with no parents. I feel so sorry for them. I do things to make them laugh. And they call me “dinky dow.” [crazy] But it makes me feel good. I hope that’s one reason why we’re here, to secure a future for them. It seems to be the only justification I can think of for the things that I have done!
Love to all.
Your son, George

All of a sudden, when I had gotten halfway through reading this letter, a wave of emotion came over me and I started crying. I was really surprised; I had no idea all this was pent up in me. It was reading what I wrote about the children that shook me up. We saw kids blown up, and they had nothing to do with the war. You were just ordered to bomb a village, and no one cared if kids lived there.

Something I didn’t realize until I got back was the proportion of blacks on the front line. It felt like a good twenty-five percent, and everyone knew we weren’t twenty-five percent of the U.S. population!3 It’s hard for me to prove that not receiving my Purple Heart, and not getting promoted to sergeant, resulted from racism, but it sure looks like it. As to actual racial incidents, there was only one I saw personally. This black guy was test firing a rocket launcher. There’s always a backfire behind, so the twelve feet behind you needs to be clear. But this time a white guy walked behind him. So of course he got hit by the backfire, and his response was, “Oh, you stupid nigger, I’m gonna get my gun. I’m gonna blow you up like you tried to blow me up.” He was going for his weapon, so the black guy took out his bayonet and stabbed him. That was the only incident I saw.

Actually, it’s hard to say which things that happened were products of racism. I know that while I was there, serving on the front line, being a black guy on the front line, I didn’t always realize the effects racism had. It definitely felt like the only people promoted were white guys. I was an “acting jack,” which meant that if a sergeant gets killed, promoted, or sent to another unit, they give you a band with sergeant stripes as a temporary promotion until a permanent replacement arrives. Usually when you get that, you get promoted, and I was waiting for my promotion, but it never came in. Instead, a white guy who got his “acting jack” stripes after me was the one who got promoted. After that I said, “Either promote me or take these stripes.” I wasn’t promoted.

The day before I was going to leave Vietnam some of the boys wanted me to have a bon voyage party. There was drinking, smoking and all of a sudden I realized that I had ten minutes to fly out. I missed my plane! Any delay in Vietnam was like walking on eggshells. You were just waiting for something to happen. Thankfully I got out the next day.

But getting out wasn’t like it used to be before the protest movement against the war. When I came back home, it was September of ‘68. By then the protesting was in full bloom. There were hundreds of thousands of people protesting. I joined the Veterans Against the War. I was with them in Oakland, California, but when they wanted to blow up places and burn draft headquarters, I didn’t want any part of that. I didn’t want any more violence.
So I returned to Brooklyn with no place to go, and once again I self-medicated. A couple of vets stayed at the bar all day only to come out at night to smoke pot. I did that for a couple of years. One of my closest friends, John, had to go to Vietnam after I got back. He was convinced he wasn’t going to come back, and I remember being at the bar and saying to him, “Listen if I can make it, you can make it.” He ended up dying in Vietnam. His brother gave me one of his dog tags, and I gave him one of mine. His brother and I have these dog tags that we always carry around with us. He was one of my best friends.

I know that when soldiers came back from World War II, the whole town came out to meet them and welcome them home. They got all these benefits. When we came home from Vietnam, we couldn’t even get regular VA benefits. Nor would the VFW allow us to join. They said Vietnam wasn’t a declared war, so we couldn’t even have a beer in their hall! World War II vets were calling us drug dealers and baby killers. Only in 1985 did the VFW finally hold a Vietnam Veterans’ Parade. It was the first parade, and it had taken ten years to happen! I don’t think the white guys were treated any better. I don’t think any of us got anything.

For me things didn’t really start to change until 1998 when I got involved with the Veterans Education Project. I read about the Education Project in the newspaper, and it was the first veterans’ group I wanted to be a part of. They were doing something positive, helping kids understand the realities of war instead of just glorifying it. I got to go to schools and tell my story to students, which felt important and meaningful. So I joined them, and through them, I joined another positive organization, Veterans for Peace.

It was about that time that I found out my records were messed up. As I said before, I had been injured by enemy mortar fire, and they owed me a Purple Heart. I had to have my aorta replaced and was in the VA hospital for 3 weeks and out of work for a month. Bills piled up. By the time I was back on my feet, I had to go to a credit company for help. I was on the edge and my PTSD was intense. I finally went to the VA to see what was holding things up with my Purple Heart. I took with me the required paperwork: one sheet about where you’ve been, what your assignments were, and what your specialty was. So I gave them this sheet, and told them I was a combat Vietnam vet, and one of them said, “Oh, it states here (he pointed to some papers) you weren’t in combat. We’ll need to see your Army records.”

When the records finally came three years later my separation papers (DD215) showed that I was in combat – I got the CIB (The Combat Infantryman’s Badge4) – that I had an honorable discharge, and that I received an Army Service Bronze Star. When the VA saw that, and more of my records, they admitted I’d been in combat and was due a Good Conduct Medal and a couple of Vietnam Service ones as well. Then, unbelievably, they told me I would have to buy them myself! Not only that, but I wouldn’t be getting a Purple Heart, which would have given me a full disability check every month and prevented me from having to face all of the bills that had occurred while I was in the hospital. According to them they claimed my form gave no proof I was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar in combat, despite the fact an Army doctor had treated me! All these years later I am still trying to find the medic who treated me during that firefight as mortar rounds exploded upon us giving me my wound. The local newspaper wrote a front-page story about what happened to me and how unfair it is, but I’m still fighting the Army to get what I deserve.

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