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Speaker 6: You are now listening to true Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 6: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 6: written about them. Gaesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 6: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 6: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 6: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 7: Good Evening. Gary Scogan's tour in Vietnam nineteen seventy one
Speaker 7: to nineteen seventy two was the best year of his life.
Speaker 7: Living with fellow CID investigators in an isolated hooch overlooking
Speaker 7: the South China Sea at the U S Base at
Speaker 7: Shu Lai, Skogan enforced military drug laws during his working
Speaker 7: hours and yet managed to pursue a life of perfect
Speaker 7: hedonism far from the farm life in the southwestern North
Speaker 7: Dakota where he grew up. With unlimited access to cheap beer,
Speaker 7: a wide variety of compliant Vietnamese women, and a gep
Speaker 7: he had somehow commandeered, Scogan perfected his criminal investigative skills
Speaker 7: at a time when U. S. Troop morale had reached
Speaker 7: its nadir. This unconventional, unheroic, and unapologetic book is not
Speaker 7: a typical Vietnam memoir. Together with eighty percent of the
Speaker 7: two million men and women who served in Vietnam, Skogan
Speaker 7: spent his time behind the scenes at a large support base.
Speaker 7: He did not slog on midnight patrols through Vietcong tunnels
Speaker 7: or rice paddies studded with booby traps. He spent his
Speaker 7: year investigating the men who endangered the lives of their
Speaker 7: fellow soldiers by giving themselves over to unrestrained drug use.
Speaker 7: Scogan's gritty narrative proof that some whose names are insized
Speaker 7: on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall died in less than
Speaker 7: heroic circumstances. Backed by impeccable research in the files of
Speaker 7: the Natural Archives and Records Administration, this unromanticized account reveals
Speaker 7: the sordidness of the war in its late phases, and
Speaker 7: questions the validity of seeing all Vietnam veterans as victims.
Speaker 7: The book that we're featuring this evening is Not All Heroes,
Speaker 7: An unapologetic memoir of the Vietnam War nineteen seventy one
Speaker 7: to nineteen seventy two, with my special guest, Vietnam veteran
Speaker 7: police officer and author Gary Scogan. Welcome to the program,
Speaker 7: and thank you for a Greenness interview. Gary Scogan, Thank you, Dan,
Speaker 7: thank you very much. I just wanted to mention for
Speaker 7: those people that might be a bit confused. We did
Speaker 7: this interview last week, but the audio was horrible, So
Speaker 7: as fairness to the audience and yourself and myself, we
Speaker 7: just agreed to well, we have the ability to reschedule
Speaker 7: this interview for the benefit of the show itself. So
Speaker 7: thank you very much for being able to do that. Now, Gary,
Speaker 7: as we spoke last week, let's take our audience from
Speaker 7: how we go from we mentioned in the introduction about
Speaker 7: your life in North Dakota. Talk about your life in
Speaker 7: North Dakota when you grew up, and tell us a
Speaker 7: little bit about that life before you ever thought of
Speaker 7: enlisting in the military.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, I was born in Headinger, North Dakota, with
Speaker 4: the southwestern part of the state, nineteen forty five. I
Speaker 4: grew up on a farm. I attended school for twelve
Speaker 4: years on the same piece of property in Headingon, North Dakota.
Speaker 4: Headinger is a very small town at the time that
Speaker 4: I was growing up. I think it was probably about
Speaker 4: fifty fifteen hundred people. After I graduated from high school,
Speaker 4: I worked around heading Her for a little bit and
Speaker 4: then I moved to Cordelaine, Idaho. I was eighteen at
Speaker 4: the time I got myself a job working in a
Speaker 4: hardware store there, and as I got closer to I
Speaker 4: guess I would say adulthood. I was thinking along the
Speaker 4: lines of wanting to be a police officer, and I
Speaker 4: was kind of pursuing joining the Spokane, Washington Police Department,
Speaker 4: which is only about forty miles away from Courtelaine. But
Speaker 4: of course I had to be twenty one before I
Speaker 4: could do that. Well, in nineteen sixty five, just before
Speaker 4: I before my twentieth birthday, two things happened that kind
Speaker 4: of changed my life and changed my plans and dreams.
Speaker 4: One of them was watching television news broadcasts as they
Speaker 4: evacuated the de dependence of military personnel out of Vietnam.
Speaker 4: The second thing that happened also occurred in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 4: and it was in December of sixty five I received
Speaker 4: a draft notice. Back then, there was mandatory draft for all,
Speaker 4: or mandatory draft registration for anyone that was mail that
Speaker 4: was eighteen years of age. I had done my duty,
Speaker 4: I had registered for the draft, and then I assumed
Speaker 4: Vietnam had something to do with it. They were building
Speaker 4: up troops to go to Vietnam, and I received my
Speaker 4: draft notice. I didn't want to be going to the
Speaker 4: military as an infantryman. That didn't quite seem like something
Speaker 4: I was going to want to do. And because of
Speaker 4: the fact that I had designs on being in law enforcement,
Speaker 4: I talked to a recruiter in Spokane, Washington found out
Speaker 4: about the ability to enlist to be a military policeman.
Speaker 4: So that's what I did. I enlisted, and in January
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty six, I went into the Army with the
Speaker 4: promises of being a military policeman. I went to basic
Speaker 4: training in Fort Ord, California. I quickly realized at that
Speaker 4: point in time that I'd made the right decision because
Speaker 4: basic training is basic infantry training, and I knew then
Speaker 4: that I did not want, definitely did not want to
Speaker 4: be an infantryman. I then went from there to Military
Speaker 4: Police School in Fort Gordon, Georgia. Upon completion of Military
Speaker 4: Police School, I went to an Air Force base in
Speaker 4: Insulac Air Force Base in Madonna, Turkey, and I got
Speaker 4: my first curve by the military. I thought I was
Speaker 4: going to be working law enforcement, and they had me
Speaker 4: there guarding as a security guard basically for munitions in Turkey.
Speaker 4: After being there for three months left. I went to France,
Speaker 4: but I was only in France for a very brief
Speaker 4: period of time and was then sent to Germany because
Speaker 4: at that time Charles de Gaulle was kicking everyone out
Speaker 4: of France. When I got to Germany, I found out
Speaker 4: that again I was going to be working as a
Speaker 4: security guard, and that didn't set with the designs of
Speaker 4: what I had in store for myself. So I found
Speaker 4: out that if I enlisted, I could be transferred to
Speaker 4: re enlisted, I should say, I could be transferred to
Speaker 4: a law enforcement military police unit, which I did. While
Speaker 4: working this military police unit, I'd become familiar with CID
Speaker 4: agents and thought that that's something that I would like
Speaker 4: to pursue. So I put in an application and ultimately
Speaker 4: I was accepted, and in nineteen sixty nine, I went
Speaker 4: back to Fort Gordon, Georgia, attended the CID's school. Was
Speaker 4: then transferred to the city of San Francisco, or I
Speaker 4: began working as a CID agent.
Speaker 7: That sorry, Gary, I'm sorry, sorry, Gary. What is a
Speaker 7: CID agent?
Speaker 4: I'm sorry. CID is a criminal investigator for the Department
Speaker 4: of the Army. It's basically, I guess the best way
Speaker 4: that I could describe it is FDI for the Army.
Speaker 4: The people that work at wear civilian clothes and they
Speaker 4: are criminal investigators for the army and handle murders, burglaries, robberies,
Speaker 4: drug cases, et cetera. While I was in San Francisco,
Speaker 4: I've got my first introduction to Vietnam and what that
Speaker 4: was there were The very first thing that happened while
Speaker 4: I was there was there were some allegations of atrocities
Speaker 4: at Meeli and Vietnam, where Lieutenant Calli and his troops
Speaker 4: had gone into a village and virtually mass occurred a
Speaker 4: couple of one hundred Vietnamese, including women and children. And
Speaker 4: as a result of that, they were the CID agents
Speaker 4: in Vietnam were sending out requests for follow up and
Speaker 4: investigations in regards to the Meli incident. And then of
Speaker 4: course once that one started, there was the you know,
Speaker 4: ball rolling down the hill and picking up speed because
Speaker 4: there was now other atrocities that were coming out from
Speaker 4: other troops in regards to other locations. So because of
Speaker 4: these follow up investigations, that was that was basically my
Speaker 4: first introduction to Vietnam. Because I started doing some of
Speaker 4: these follow up investigations in regards to the atrocities. One
Speaker 4: of the other thing that took place when I was
Speaker 4: in San Francisco was a family whose son was killed
Speaker 4: in Vietnam and they were notified by the military that
Speaker 4: he was killed in Vietnam, and because of the atrocity
Speaker 4: investigations that were taking place, it was all over the news.
Speaker 4: Because of that, they had or informed the opinion that
Speaker 4: their son had been murdered. So they initiated an investigation
Speaker 4: themselves through Congression all and things like that. That resulted
Speaker 4: in an investigation of that, and I was sent out
Speaker 4: to interview them, at which time I asked them for
Speaker 4: the evidence or if they had any evidence that their
Speaker 4: son was murdered, and they showed me some letters that
Speaker 4: had come from their son, and in the letters, he
Speaker 4: indicated that there was a man that he worked with,
Speaker 4: a sergeant that he worked with, that was crazy and
Speaker 4: the guy run around with a gun all the time, etc.
Speaker 4: This didn't make a lot of sense to me because
Speaker 4: this was a combat zone and I'm sure that there's
Speaker 4: a lot of people running around with guns. So I
Speaker 4: queried Vietnam CID and ultimately I had news for the
Speaker 4: family that they didn't want to hear. And that was
Speaker 4: the fact that he had committed suicide, and the Army
Speaker 4: had basically not told them that he'd committed suicide. That
Speaker 4: the fact that he had just died while he was
Speaker 4: in Vietnam, which was one of the things that I
Speaker 4: found out much much later, was this was a common
Speaker 4: practice on the part of the Army to not be
Speaker 4: totally completely forthcoming with family members when there was a death.
Speaker 4: And I'm not sure if the military was protecting themselves
Speaker 4: or protecting the family.
Speaker 7: And that included all kinds of deaths, overdoses of suicides,
Speaker 7: just misadventure.
Speaker 4: That's correct, it gon, sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 7: I wanted to just the may Ally massacre. You we've
Speaker 7: dealt with it in terms of described the incident and
Speaker 7: Sergeant Kelly I believe his name is. But you explained
Speaker 7: in the book how this could possibly and not be defended,
Speaker 7: but how this could possibly happen, that women and children
Speaker 7: would be considered you explained in your book, and I
Speaker 7: won't take the words out of your mouth, so tell
Speaker 7: us how you explain how this may have happened, whether
Speaker 7: it's not to say it's right, a massacre is a massacre,
Speaker 7: of innocent people killed is exactly that. But tell us
Speaker 7: how it could happen by the We'll say the behavior
Speaker 7: of the Vietnamese.
Speaker 4: Well, one of the one of the things that back then,
Speaker 4: females in our armies were not combat soldiers. Females in
Speaker 4: our armies held administrative jobs for nurses, worked in supply.
Speaker 4: That kind of thing is in our army over in Vietnam.
Speaker 4: After I got there, I found this out very very quickly,
Speaker 4: that it was not uncommon to see females in uniform,
Speaker 4: to see females carrying AK forty seven. It was not
Speaker 4: uncommon to see a teenage boy, a young teenage boy
Speaker 4: carrying an AK forty seven. This was not uncommon to see. Now,
Speaker 4: I'm not talking about combat troops that I come in
Speaker 4: contact with, because I didn't come in combat contact with
Speaker 4: in a combat situation with this people. This is just
Speaker 4: people that you would see in the villages. As an
Speaker 4: example of that, I will give an example that's in
Speaker 4: the book. One day, while I was in tu Life,
Speaker 4: I asked to the debate, and as I'm driving down
Speaker 4: Qol One, which was the main road through Vietnam, I
Speaker 4: see a crowd of people and I see a truck
Speaker 4: sitting there, and as I approach, I pulled to the
Speaker 4: side of the road because the road's kind of blocked anyway,
Speaker 4: and I'm curious as to what's going on. It looks
Speaker 4: like there's some types of activity taking place. And when
Speaker 4: I get out of the vehicle, I walk over and
Speaker 4: there's a woman standing there in uniform. She's wearing combat
Speaker 4: fatigue and she is making a speech in Vietnamese to
Speaker 4: these people that are there, and I immediately recognize this female.
Speaker 4: She happens to be a cocktail waitress at one of
Speaker 4: the clubs on the base that July. Now, well, she's
Speaker 4: giving this speech, I notice that basically a little bit
Speaker 4: at her feet and a little bit off to the
Speaker 4: side is two bodies laying there. And these two bodies
Speaker 4: are decapitated. They had their hands cut off, they had
Speaker 4: their feet cut off. And on the other side of
Speaker 4: her are two wooden ammal boxes. And in the ammal boxes,
Speaker 4: laying down on the flat surface would be the palms
Speaker 4: of the hands palms down of these two individuals. At
Speaker 4: the base of the box would be were the feet
Speaker 4: of the two individuals, just popped up against the bottom.
Speaker 4: And then at the top of the box was the
Speaker 4: heads of these two individuals. So it looked like about
Speaker 4: an eighteen inch tall man sitting there. Wow, and this
Speaker 4: is not And she was standing there with a machete
Speaker 4: and she had blood all over. And this is not
Speaker 4: the type of thing that we here in the United
Speaker 4: States would envision one of our females back then, you know,
Speaker 4: as a combat soldier. And now I agree, we don't
Speaker 4: go around decapitating and cutting hands off, et cetera. But
Speaker 4: this just is just to show you that the females
Speaker 4: in Vietnam, it was not uncommon for them to be
Speaker 4: involved in some military thing. And in her case, she
Speaker 4: worked on the Tuly base by day and was in
Speaker 4: some sort of militia by night.
Speaker 8: Wow.
Speaker 7: You talk about another example where a six year old
Speaker 7: boy was The facts were that he had thrown a
Speaker 7: grenade into a tank, killing soldiers.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's true. A small child. You know, he has
Speaker 4: no idea. I'm sure what he's doing, but you know,
Speaker 4: he's you know, like six years old, five years old,
Speaker 4: something like that. And he takes the lobbs a hand
Speaker 4: grenade or lobbs. I shouldn't say it that way. You know,
Speaker 4: he walks up to a jeep and drops the hand
Speaker 4: grenade into the gas tank of the jeeps, detonating it.
Speaker 4: This is the kind of thing that people had to
Speaker 4: watch out for all the time, because this kind of
Speaker 4: stuff took place on a regular basis.
Speaker 7: Right now, you talk about this prevailing attitude, trying to
Speaker 7: get the vivid portrayal that you do in your book
Speaker 7: and this brief interview that we have, But we have
Speaker 7: a bunch of divergent elements going on here and issues.
Speaker 7: Vietnam War was not without its controversy right from the
Speaker 7: very beginning, but especially as the war war on, let's say,
Speaker 7: an attitude towards the war changed and not for the better.
Speaker 7: So tell us what the prevailing attitude was in nineteen
Speaker 7: seventy one, we'll say from US citizens, But what was
Speaker 7: the attitude with soldiers there? And described when you got
Speaker 7: to Shoely in Vietnam? What was the overall condition of
Speaker 7: the soldiers? What did you witness that you even though
Speaker 7: you I don't know what you expected, but you probably
Speaker 7: found this surprising. So tell us what you did observe
Speaker 7: as soon as you got there in the morale and
Speaker 7: what was the attitude? Tell us a little bit.
Speaker 4: About that well, when I first got to Vietnam, I
Speaker 4: had been in the military five years, and anybody that's
Speaker 4: haven't ever been in the military, or people that have
Speaker 4: read about it, etc. There is a certain amount of
Speaker 4: discipline and protocol and procedures and things that the military
Speaker 4: follows on a regular basis. When I and then by
Speaker 4: the same token, when I went to Chuly or when
Speaker 4: I went to Vietnam, my perception was that I was
Speaker 4: going to be going to a combat zone. And when
Speaker 4: I got to Chuly, the first thing that I realized
Speaker 4: at that point in time was that the place that
Speaker 4: I was at was a metropolitan area. It had like
Speaker 4: the twenty six mile perimeter around it. There were businesses there,
Speaker 4: px's and all this stuff, the theater, there were nightclubs
Speaker 4: or clubs, I should say not nightclubs, but the clubs.
Speaker 4: You know. It was just just like being in a city,
Speaker 4: except for the fact that the all the buildings were
Speaker 4: made out of plywood with corrugated steel roofing, et cetera.
Speaker 4: The second thing that I noticed right away when I
Speaker 4: got there was the fact that there didn't appear to
Speaker 4: be a whole lot of disciplines as far as the
Speaker 4: protocol was concerned in regards to, for example, of the uniforms.
Speaker 4: I had never in my five years prior seen someone
Speaker 4: with a peace symbol pinned to their uniform. Back in
Speaker 4: the seventies was the Flower Children era of you know,
Speaker 4: the question authority type thing that was okay.
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Speaker 4: Taking place, and one of the things that they had
Speaker 4: were what they called love bees, and these I'll use
Speaker 4: the term hippie. I don't know if that's the appropriate
Speaker 4: term for the moment, but these civilians back here, they
Speaker 4: wore beads around their necks and with different peace emblems
Speaker 4: on them and things like that. Well, I get to
Speaker 4: July and one of the first things that I noticed
Speaker 4: about the troops is it is the piece metals and
Speaker 4: the the beads that they're wearing around their neck, bead
Speaker 4: bracelets that they're wearing. If you took you know, if
Speaker 4: they took the uniform off of them and planted them
Speaker 4: in the United States, they'd fit right in. That really
Speaker 4: shocked me when I saw that, because I had never
Speaker 4: seen the military uniform disrespected the way that it was
Speaker 4: by the troops that were there. Now, I'm not saying
Speaker 4: all the troops did that, you know, the officers obviously
Speaker 4: didn't I never saw officers with peace metals tinted their
Speaker 4: chest or wearing beads. I just was the enlisted men,
Speaker 4: the lower ranking enlisted men, that were doing this, and
Speaker 4: it was obvious that the military had lost control. The
Speaker 4: second thing that I noticed along those same lines was
Speaker 4: the fact that the black troops had kind of put
Speaker 4: themselves in a attitude of their enslaves in a white
Speaker 4: man's war. Well, as a result of this, they wore
Speaker 4: what they called slave bracelets, and these slave bracelets or
Speaker 4: slave jewelry was braided out of black bootlaces. So they
Speaker 4: had bracelets braided that they wore on their wrists. They
Speaker 4: had choker chains that they wore around their neck. Some
Speaker 4: of them had bands that were braided and above their
Speaker 4: bysets they would have a braided configuration that would be
Speaker 4: six to eight inches long that would go between the
Speaker 4: wrist and the elbow. And they wore all this stuff
Speaker 4: with their uniforms. Now back in the United States, the
Speaker 4: attitude back there was this was not a war that
Speaker 4: there was not a popular war. There was a lot
Speaker 4: of protests taking place here in the United States that
Speaker 4: were anti war. There were people at that time, there
Speaker 4: was a draft that I previously mentioned there were people
Speaker 4: that were going running off to Canada to avoid the
Speaker 4: draft and coming up with very excuses as to why
Speaker 4: they shouldn't be drafted. And at the same time it
Speaker 4: just you know, you were taking these same people that
Speaker 4: had that attitude in the homeland, drafting them and then
Speaker 4: taking them over and dropping them in the middle of
Speaker 4: a war zone. So they were bringing their ideas with
Speaker 4: them that they had before they ever ever left the
Speaker 4: United States.
Speaker 7: Now you talk about drug use there being rampant, and
Speaker 7: especially marijuana, but you know, heroin being a more serious
Speaker 7: drug and a more serious issue I would imagine, and
Speaker 7: access being very very easy there. Tell us about drug
Speaker 7: use and were you surprised at the extent of it
Speaker 7: and in what was your conclusion in terms of they
Speaker 7: did develop this habit once they were in Vietnam or
Speaker 7: did they bring it along with them from the United States.
Speaker 4: Well, there there there were three three drugs basically that
Speaker 4: you saw in Vietnam. One of them was marijuana and
Speaker 4: it was everywhere. The second thing was heroin and it
Speaker 4: run a real quot second in some cases I would
Speaker 4: say that it was probably a good first. The third
Speaker 4: thing that we had over there was opium. You didn't
Speaker 4: see a lot of it, but there was opium over there,
Speaker 4: and opium was coming coming a little button. It was
Speaker 4: about the size of a shirt button, and they'd break
Speaker 4: off a little piece of it and stick it in
Speaker 4: a little pipe and smoke it and get the euphoric
Speaker 4: effects of the opium. As far as the marijuana was concerned,
Speaker 4: marijuana got so bad over there that the military basically
Speaker 4: gave up on it. And the reason that they gave
Speaker 4: up on it was because heroin was just as bad,
Speaker 4: and they directed their attentions at heroin. Now the marijuana
Speaker 4: that they had over there, an individual could purchase marijuana
Speaker 4: and roll his own or put it in the pipe.
Speaker 4: One of the very common ways though, to get marijuana
Speaker 4: was a commercially packaged marijuana cigarette. These cigarettes looked like
Speaker 4: a cool or a Lucky Strike non filter. They packaged
Speaker 4: them up ten in the pack, and it was the
Speaker 4: little plastic bag that was just had been sealed by
Speaker 4: melting the plasts they chrometically sealed, I guess, and they
Speaker 4: sealed them in that and they sold them for two
Speaker 4: dollars a pack. And with those unless somebody was downwind
Speaker 4: and could smell them, then it would look like from
Speaker 4: a distance if someone was just smoking a regular cigarette.
Speaker 4: It didn't have any appearance whatsoever of a hand rolled cigarette.
Speaker 4: The heroine itself was just unbelievable. Over there. It was
Speaker 4: by the time I got to Vietnam, heroin had really
Speaker 4: taken over. Heroin was sold in little plastic, clear plastic vials.
Speaker 4: They had a little snapcap on them that closed them,
Speaker 4: and they held a quarter of a gram. They sold
Speaker 4: for two dollars per file, and they had nice to
Speaker 4: ninety five i'm sorry, ninety four to ninety eight percent
Speaker 4: pure heroin in them. This heroin was being smoked by
Speaker 4: the gis over there, and the reason that there was
Speaker 4: being smoked was because they believed that in order to
Speaker 4: get addicted, you had to be a needle freak, you
Speaker 4: had to be injecting. They did not realize that by
Speaker 4: smoking heroin that it would they would become addicted to it.
Speaker 4: The way that they smoked it was they would take
Speaker 4: cool cigarettes, pull the tobacco out, put in a little
Speaker 4: bit of tobacco back in, Pour a little bit of
Speaker 4: heroin in it, a little more tobacco, little heroin, little tobacco,
Speaker 4: and they would layer it throughout the cigarette, and they
Speaker 4: would just take a tool and just pack the tobacco
Speaker 4: down and then add the heroin and pack a little
Speaker 4: bit more. And then you know, if somebody was sadding
Speaker 4: they're smoking a cool cigarette, it looked like he was
Speaker 4: smoking a cool cigarette, when in fact he was smoking
Speaker 4: heroin and he was getting the euphoric effect of it
Speaker 4: and getting very addicted to it. It was very very
Speaker 4: you know, heroin was just unbelievable over there. It was everywhere.
Speaker 4: When you walked through the company areas on tchou Lie,
Speaker 4: you would fight or could side vials, empty vials discarded everywhere.
Speaker 4: There was one captain. I was at his office one
Speaker 4: day and he had this flat given up fighting the
Speaker 4: system and what he had done, or fighting the heroin
Speaker 4: system that was taking place in this company. And what
Speaker 4: he did was he started collecting heroin vials and he
Speaker 4: took these heroin vials and he placed them side by
Speaker 4: side on every flat surface of his office. And his
Speaker 4: office was covered with thousands of these vials. He even
Speaker 4: put them on bookshelves and weaved the men out of
Speaker 4: the book bindings as they went across the shelf. And
Speaker 4: he just had just given up. He just had decided
Speaker 4: that he was you know, he wasn't going to drive
Speaker 4: him crazy anymore. So he made a hobby out of it.
Speaker 4: When I first went to Vietnam, well let me rephrase that.
Speaker 4: The year before I went to Vietnam, the arrest ratio
Speaker 4: for heroin was six for every one thousand gis. That
Speaker 4: was nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy was. But I was there,
Speaker 4: it was twelve arrests for every thousand gis that was there.
Speaker 4: And this is only the ones that got caught. This
Speaker 4: has got nothing to do with the ones that you know,
Speaker 4: we're usual to out get get away with it.
Speaker 7: Now, give us, as you do in the book. You
Speaker 7: give us some examples of what this really what this
Speaker 7: drug use is, rampant drug use and the you know,
Speaker 7: the surrounding drug crime that goes along with that, the
Speaker 7: trafficking of this and and serious money and serious drugs
Speaker 7: creates an atmosphere that other things can happen as well.
Speaker 7: So give us a couple of stories of of what
Speaker 7: this the ramifications of having this valuable drug that everyone
Speaker 7: was addicted to and the business that went along with it.
Speaker 7: Tell us a couple of tales about.
Speaker 4: That sure, I'll uh one, I'll do this one. First,
Speaker 4: there was a guy that I worked with. Well, i'll
Speaker 4: back up one step. We developed an informant in Vietnam
Speaker 4: that was helping us. There are two line and the
Speaker 4: reason he was helping us so much is because the
Speaker 4: guy was under the influence of heroin all the time.
Speaker 4: He you know, he kept getting arrested and kept getting arrested,
Speaker 4: and he kept helping us and it would help his
Speaker 4: case go away, you know, as happened a lot in
Speaker 4: the working narcotics, where you know, mere possessions you can
Speaker 4: kind of make it go away. If he's going to
Speaker 4: do something for a bigger case than things like this. Well,
Speaker 4: one of the cases that he did was for a
Speaker 4: guy that I worked with, and we went What the
Speaker 4: deal was is he was going to go to this
Speaker 4: place off base and he was going to make a
Speaker 4: heroin purchase, just get a couple of miles of heroin.
Speaker 4: And then after he made the purchase, he would come
Speaker 4: outside the hooch and he'd give a signal and then
Speaker 4: we would go into the hooch and make the arrest.
Speaker 4: And everything went according to plan. And once we got
Speaker 4: inside the hooch, there was a seventeen year old girl
Speaker 4: in there, and she had seventeen pounds the heroin, the
Speaker 4: largest quantity of heroin I saw on one hunk while
Speaker 4: I was over there, and it was in an animal box,
Speaker 4: and she had virtually thousands of bials empty vials that
Speaker 4: she was filling. Well, based upon doing simple maths, she
Speaker 4: had enough heroin to fill sixty I'm sorry to fill
Speaker 4: about thirty one thirty two thousand vials, and at two
Speaker 4: dollars a vial, that would be sixty two thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: especially in Vietnam, in the Vietnam economy back then that
Speaker 4: you just all been talking millions. Most of our heroin
Speaker 4: dealers that we had over there were Vietnamese. Most of
Speaker 4: them were female. There were a few male dealers, but
Speaker 4: most of the time they were females. And one of
Speaker 4: the reasons that the females worked out for them was
Speaker 4: the female had places to hide heroin when they came
Speaker 4: on base that males don't have, and so they would
Speaker 4: smuggle the heroin onto the base and sell it that way.
Speaker 4: But in this particular case, with the seventeen pounds of
Speaker 4: heroin and this teenage girl that was off base, another
Speaker 4: one that took place off base. This was my case,
Speaker 4: same informant. He said that he knew of some females
Speaker 4: that were selling heroin at the rock quarry off the base,
Speaker 4: and that he would make a purchase for us. So
Speaker 4: I decided that I kind of had the delusions of
Speaker 4: grandeur and rather than yet a couple of biles of heroin,
Speaker 4: I thought I'd get quite a few, purchased quite a few,
Speaker 4: hoping that it would lead to bigger and better things.
Speaker 4: And so what we did was he was going to
Speaker 4: drive out there, and we had a three quarter ton
Speaker 4: jeep with a canvastop on it. I painted a peace
Speaker 4: sable on top of the cabinet so that we could
Speaker 4: recognize it from the air. There were some CID agents
Speaker 4: that were following him, and some other said agents by
Speaker 4: self included that bordered a Huey helicopter and we went
Speaker 4: up in the air and we were able to very
Speaker 4: easily track him because of this peace symbol that I
Speaker 4: had painted on the roof. He preceded the rock quarry
Speaker 4: and we could see from the helicopter we were quite
Speaker 4: a ways up, but we could see from the helicopter
Speaker 4: that he met up with some females. He got out,
Speaker 4: got back in his vehicle, then got out and opened
Speaker 4: the hood as if there was something wrong with the vehicle,
Speaker 4: which was our signal to come into the rock quarry.
Speaker 4: So what the pilot did was he auto rotated into
Speaker 4: the rock quarry, which is kind of a controlled crash landing,
Speaker 4: I guess for better term. I'm not a helicopter pilot,
Speaker 4: but that's kind of like what it is. And as
Speaker 4: we're coming Dowt, I'm stating outside the door, stating out
Speaker 4: the skid of the helicopter. And one of the things
Speaker 4: that we never factored in to this thing that we
Speaker 4: were at a rock quarry. And as soon as the
Speaker 4: helicopter got close to the ground, the dust just started boiling.
Speaker 4: You couldn't see anything. And then I saw what I
Speaker 4: thought was the ground and it looked pretty close. Well,
Speaker 4: rather than waiting until the helicopter touched out, I stepped
Speaker 4: off to the skid and it was a long way
Speaker 4: to the ground. Fortunately for me, I did get hurt.
Speaker 4: I hit pretty hard, I rolled pretty good. Then the
Speaker 4: helicopter landed and everybody else got out, and everybody's kind
Speaker 4: of laughing at me because I'd been such a fool.
Speaker 4: Rather than waiting, I'd gotten over anxious and jumped out
Speaker 4: as we had discussed, the helicopter then immediately took off. Well,
Speaker 4: here we go again. We forgot about the dust and
Speaker 4: we couldn't see anything, and the helicopter lifted off. We
Speaker 4: had to wait for the dust to clear. We were
Speaker 4: able to capture the three females that he had dealt with.
Speaker 4: We were able to recover the heroin from him that
Speaker 4: he had purchased, but we never did fight. My money
Speaker 4: never did find it, so obviously it got stass someplace,
Speaker 4: or there was another person there that took off with
Speaker 4: it during the dust storm, or what. We took the
Speaker 4: females back, we had have searched and all that, but
Speaker 4: to no avail. And then you know the way most
Speaker 4: of those cases went. In fact, all of the cases
Speaker 4: involving Vietnamese nationals, we give the heroin and the rest
Speaker 4: these to the local police, which you know, you can't
Speaker 4: substantiate it, but I know darn well what happened. That
Speaker 4: heroin went right back into the market. Nothing was ever
Speaker 4: done with the females, you know, and the heroine was
Speaker 4: you know, I'm sure later on we bought it with
Speaker 4: some other g I bought.
Speaker 7: It right, right, And that's not so tough on crime there, right, No,
Speaker 7: they weren't.
Speaker 4: It was pretty corrupt.
Speaker 7: Now do you talk about the prevailing attitude of these
Speaker 7: guys high on heroin, and you know there was no
Speaker 7: real morale was low for the war. People were drafted basically,
Speaker 7: you know, you know, not too many people volunteered, and
Speaker 7: the guy on the front lines certainly didn't. Now you
Speaker 7: talk about a couple incidents, and it's quite shocking the
Speaker 7: compensation at families, Vietnamese families would get for say, their
Speaker 7: son or their daughter killed in certain accidents or incidents.
Speaker 7: Two stories in particular, the one about the woman, the
Speaker 7: girl that was found raped and killed in the street
Speaker 7: and that resultant story. And then after that you can
Speaker 7: tell us about the boy in the garbage dump and
Speaker 7: the target practice that went horribly wrong. But first tell
Speaker 7: us about the girl that was found the street and
Speaker 7: that investigation and what it all amounted to.
Speaker 4: Okay, there was a young lady she had are you
Speaker 4: referring to the one that was in the foot locker
Speaker 4: or a different one the foot locker? Okay, there was
Speaker 4: a girl that was murdered. Well, that particular one, the
Speaker 4: girl in the foot locker, she was murdered and rape,
Speaker 4: raped and murdered. I should reverse that she had been
Speaker 4: raped and murdered. She'd been placed in the foot walker and
Speaker 4: then driven off base, thrown out of the whatever vehicle
Speaker 4: holder out there, presumably a military vehicle, presumably a GI driver,
Speaker 4: and also presumably a prostitute. That's not known for sure,
Speaker 4: but presumably so. In that particular case, she was never
Speaker 4: identified and we never did find the perpetrator in regards
Speaker 4: to that one. But another one where there was a
Speaker 4: young girl that got run over by a convoy. Now,
Speaker 4: the thing that you were talking about the compensation, they
Speaker 4: called it polidium payments. And what they did is if
Speaker 4: someone if there was death or injury or damage to property,
Speaker 4: this kind of thing, the government paid out money to
Speaker 4: the Vietnamese. But the amount of money that they paid
Speaker 4: out with esthetics. As an example, a young girl she
Speaker 4: was run over by a convoy. Her parents got four
Speaker 4: hundred and sixty seven dollars for her death caused by
Speaker 4: a military convoy. Now that particular amount of money, four
Speaker 4: hundred and sixty seven was a lot of money in
Speaker 4: comparison to what the other payments were normally for death
Speaker 4: or injury. It was anywhere between twenty seven forty seven
Speaker 4: dollars for death or injury. There was a young boy
Speaker 4: that was he was killed by intentional gunfire.
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Speaker 8: It's your captain speaking. We've got clear runway and the
Speaker 8: weather's five. But we're just going to circle up here
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Speaker 10: Terms and conditions apply see website for details.
Speaker 4: But it's probably it's possible. Let's rephrase that. It's possible
Speaker 4: that the gunfire was to scare him, and then as
Speaker 4: a result of scaring him, he was accidentally shot. That
Speaker 4: is a possibility, or in fact, he could have been
Speaker 4: intentionally shot. His parents got a grand total of ten
Speaker 4: dollars for his death inflicted by a gi shooting a
Speaker 4: gun over a six month period. The government. The army
Speaker 4: I should say, paid out a little over seventeen thousand
Speaker 4: dollars to one hundred and twenty two claimants. That's not
Speaker 4: a lot of money to a lot of people. You know,
Speaker 4: quite a people, and that's not a lot of money.
Speaker 4: This type of thing took place all the time. I'll
Speaker 4: give you an example. There was a Arvin that he
Speaker 4: was Vietnamese Army ex Vietnamese Army, I should say, because
Speaker 4: he was missing both of his legs, he was wheelchair bound.
Speaker 4: He used to come up to the front gate at
Speaker 4: Chuly on his wheelchair and then he'd reach under his
Speaker 4: stub a lot of hand grenade, pulled a pin and
Speaker 4: he would sit there and then pretty soon G five
Speaker 4: would come out. G five is the one that made
Speaker 4: the payment. They would come out, count him out some money.
Speaker 4: He'd put the ten back on the grenade, put it
Speaker 4: back under his stub, take the money, put it in
Speaker 4: his pocket, and he'd wheel himself away. This was nothing
Speaker 4: but an extortion thing that he did, and he did
Speaker 4: this about once a month. Another such payment that it
Speaker 4: was made in at this same gate, as a matter
Speaker 4: of fact, was there was an MP out there working
Speaker 4: the gates. And a kid threw a rock at him,
Speaker 4: hit him in the face, broke his jaw. The MP
Speaker 4: grabbed the kid, slapped him, released him. The parents come back.
Speaker 4: They then made a pay it to the parrots for
Speaker 4: the MP slapping their kids. And then this extoor should
Speaker 4: say got to be worse. To the point of what
Speaker 4: they were doing was they would convoys would be coming
Speaker 4: down to you all one and they would take a
Speaker 4: piece of constantina wire and pull it across the road
Speaker 4: and basically set up a gate with a piece of
Speaker 4: constantina wire. The convoy'd stopped, they'd sit there until G
Speaker 4: five come out and counted them out some money. Then
Speaker 4: they'd push their constantina wire off the road wait the
Speaker 4: next convoy. One particular day when this happened, the driver
Speaker 4: didn't want to slow down or didn't want to stop.
Speaker 4: He was slowing down, but he didn't want to stop.
Speaker 4: So one of the Vietnamese threw a rock, hit the
Speaker 4: driver in the head, knocked him unconscious, and the vehicle
Speaker 4: came to a stop, and the constantina wires stretched across
Speaker 4: the road, and they're gonna be they're demanding their money. Well,
Speaker 4: the passenger didn't want to go along with the program.
Speaker 4: So what he did was got himself in the driver's seat,
Speaker 4: put it in gear, drove through the Constantina wire. When
Speaker 4: he did that, the Constantina wire entangled three Vietnamese, three
Speaker 4: Vietnamese kids. He is barely towards the gate with this
Speaker 4: Constantina wire wrapped around the truck, and these kids entangled,
Speaker 4: and the Constantina wire bouncing along behind. And now this
Speaker 4: Arvin that's out there, Ramrod in this thing, the one
Speaker 4: with the missing legs. He's got an M sixteen rifle
Speaker 4: and he starts shooting at the truck on Ferrato. Well,
Speaker 4: when he does this, this M sixteen climbs up a
Speaker 4: little bit and he's kind of leaning back in his chair,
Speaker 4: and the end result is he filed flat on his
Speaker 4: back and he's now shooting in the air. The truck
Speaker 4: gets to the gets to the gate, gets in the gate,
Speaker 4: and now G five comes out and they pay the
Speaker 4: parents of these three kids. They weren't fortunately, they weren't
Speaker 4: killed or anything, but they had some bruises and scratches
Speaker 4: and stuff like this from being dragged along. G five
Speaker 4: came out paid them and then went out and paid
Speaker 4: the the extortionists that are being led by this arban.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 7: Now I wanted to talk a little bit about some
Speaker 7: of the reasons why you wrote this book and why
Speaker 7: you felt it important to talk about a few really
Speaker 7: important issues especially important to you, and that being that
Speaker 7: you make a point that out of the and then
Speaker 7: we did an introduction at a small amount of people.
Speaker 7: Actually we're in Vietnam, but all kinds of people at
Speaker 7: least talk about being in Vietnam and considering themselves Vietnam vets.
Speaker 7: And also you have a big issue with again we
Speaker 7: know that it's limited amount of resources for deserving veterans,
Speaker 7: and you talk about the undeserving veteran and the unethical
Speaker 7: psychiatrists or psychologists that would award somebody that really didn't
Speaker 7: even see any combat. Tell us about these issues and
Speaker 7: why they're important to you, and tell us a little
Speaker 7: bit about some of the things you just discussed in
Speaker 7: the book about this issue.
Speaker 4: Sure, you're more than happy to you know, an American
Speaker 4: in this day and age now we're forty years fast
Speaker 4: Vietnam a little bit over. Everybody when they think about
Speaker 4: a Vietnam veteran, they envisioned a man with a steel
Speaker 4: pot grenade's hanging from a flack vest. He's got a
Speaker 4: booie knife in his waist, he's got an M seventy
Speaker 4: nine grenade launcher in one hand. M sixty machine gun
Speaker 4: in the other. You know, basically the IPC in the
Speaker 4: Rambo movies. That's what they envision all Vietnam veterans as.
Speaker 4: The truth of the matter is, there were there are
Speaker 4: I should say, nine million, nine point two million people
Speaker 4: that are classified as Vietnam veterans. Now. Of these nine
Speaker 4: point two millions, there are actually only two point eight
Speaker 4: million of them that walked on, bobbed in a boat
Speaker 4: off the shores of or flew over Vietnam. The rest
Speaker 4: of the nine point two billiot were in the military
Speaker 4: doing their job other places back in the States, in
Speaker 4: Germany and who are you know, the Philippines, Japan, Korea,
Speaker 4: all the other places that the military does their things.
Speaker 4: Now they're classified as Vietnam veterans, Vietnam era veterans because
Speaker 4: of the fact that they were in the military during
Speaker 4: the Vietnam Era. I don't have any issue with that.
Speaker 4: The issue that I have with it is the fact
Speaker 4: that you know, it's like I said, it's been over
Speaker 4: forty years since Vietnam, I have yet to talk to
Speaker 4: one person that claims or is a Vietnam veteran that
Speaker 4: doesn't regale stories of their combat missions and slashing through
Speaker 4: rice patties and laying their holding their best friend well
Speaker 4: he bleeds out and dies in his arms and stuff
Speaker 4: like this. And the truth of the matter is, of
Speaker 4: the two point eight million people that we're in Vietnam,
Speaker 4: that only happened the less than twenty percent of the people.
Speaker 4: Less than twenty percent of the people actually saw combat
Speaker 4: in Vietnam. The other eighty plus percent were support troops.
Speaker 4: Just like I was the military cat rub without support troops.
Speaker 4: I'm not denigrating anybody that is the support troop. The
Speaker 4: you know, the men in the field. They depend upon
Speaker 4: these support troops for transportation, food, clothing, weapons, ammunition, medical care,
Speaker 4: administrative duties, all the creature companies that people require. This
Speaker 4: comes about, though, as a result of the medias real
Speaker 4: big in making this appear the way that it does.
Speaker 4: When the media goes into a combat zone, they don't
Speaker 4: interview the guy in the motor pool that's fixing the
Speaker 4: jeeps or change in the oil. They don't interview the
Speaker 4: guy that's back at the base camp that's or the
Speaker 4: you know, the the installation that they're at that's cooking breakfast, dinner,
Speaker 4: and supper. Now, don't get me wrong, these people are important,
Speaker 4: but the media doesn't care about them. They're looking for
Speaker 4: the hero slant on their story. So they that's who
Speaker 4: they interview. They go out and they interview the twenty
Speaker 4: year old young kid that hasn't seen a shower in
Speaker 4: thirty days, has been eating nothing but rations. He's filthy, dirty,
Speaker 4: he needs a shade. And that's who they interview. And
Speaker 4: that's what they perceive that all troops are like, and
Speaker 4: that's not the case at all. These guys are the
Speaker 4: support troops. They're important and I can't emphasize that enough.
Speaker 4: I have nothing against them. I have nothing against any
Speaker 4: of these veterans. It's just a lot of you know,
Speaker 4: forty years later, a lot of people take credit for
Speaker 4: being Vietnam veterans, when in fact they're not. There was
Speaker 4: a census, and I can't remember for sure which it was.
Speaker 4: I believe that it was in two thousand. I may
Speaker 4: be in air there. But when it come time to
Speaker 4: check the little box, thirteen point eight million people claim
Speaker 4: to have been in country veterans in Vietnam, and it's
Speaker 4: not even close to that. You know, the uh, you know,
Speaker 4: there are wanna bees. They're making it up there. See,
Speaker 4: the Vietnam War was back then, the Vietnam War was
Speaker 4: an undesirable thing and people didn't want to admit to
Speaker 4: being in the military. Now that, because of Afghanistan and Iran,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of hero worships the country is doing unjustifiably.
Speaker 4: So don't get me wrong there, but these people, because
Speaker 4: they want to be identified as with these heroes, they're
Speaker 4: pretending to be somebody that they're not. One of the things.
Speaker 7: Even more, sorry, go ahead, No, I was going to say,
Speaker 7: is that it's even more you know, which is more
Speaker 7: egregious is that this post traumatic stress disorder is not
Speaker 7: is a very serious thing. But if you didn't actually
Speaker 7: weren't in actual combat and weren't in a firefight, and
Speaker 7: it is unlikely that you would be as deserving as
Speaker 7: someone that was on that front line it did see
Speaker 7: his friends head blown off or something of that sort,
Speaker 7: rather than somebody just lingering claiming to have some sort
Speaker 7: of disorder, it doesn't discredit to all the real genuine veterans.
Speaker 7: It did suffer in war with traumatic events, certainly.
Speaker 4: Uh, you know there there are young men and women
Speaker 4: in any war that lose limbs, lose their eyesight, lose
Speaker 4: their hearing, they have very traumatic brain injuries.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 4: You know all these people, those people are true heroes
Speaker 4: and they deserve to have this country take care of
Speaker 4: them and honor them. When you have PTSD post traumatic
Speaker 4: stress disorders. There are people that deserve to have PTSD.
Speaker 4: Somebody that's been in a combat zone and held his
Speaker 4: friend that died. Uh, somebody that spent the night out
Speaker 4: in the middle of somewhere, not knowing if he was
Speaker 4: going to see the sunrise. Those people deserve to have
Speaker 4: you know, I shouldn't say deserve to have that are
Speaker 4: you know, are entitled to be suffering from PTSD because
Speaker 4: of what they just what they went through. Whereas the
Speaker 4: the that's administration is handing out PTSD to people that
Speaker 4: never left the country this country. They if someone can
Speaker 4: prevent someone that was in the military can present a
Speaker 4: plausible story to the VA about the fact that they
Speaker 4: went into the military and they were stationed in Texas
Speaker 4: throughout their entire career, and the entire time that they
Speaker 4: were there. They traumatized over the fact that they might
Speaker 4: get sent to a combat zone that could qualify them
Speaker 4: for the benefits that someone else is getting for lost
Speaker 4: limbs or traumatic brave disorders, things like this that qualify
Speaker 4: them for it. This PTSD. You know, these people ought
Speaker 4: to be ashamed of themselves. You know, there's a lot
Speaker 4: of money that needs to be spent for the people
Speaker 4: to do in fact have serious injuries, and when somebody
Speaker 4: is pretending to be have PTSD, faking it for lack
Speaker 4: of a better term, they are taking away from these
Speaker 4: veterans that really and truly need all the help that
Speaker 4: they can get. I you know things you have organizations
Speaker 4: like Wounded Warriors that do whatever they can, and this
Speaker 4: is honorable, but it's not there. It's not the job
Speaker 4: of the sub citizens of this country to support a
Speaker 4: charity to do this. Our government, our VA should be
Speaker 4: doing this automatically. And it makes it real difficult for
Speaker 4: them financially when you have all these fakers. There was
Speaker 4: a article that I read here not too long ago.
Speaker 4: This was not Vietnam, but in reference to the Iraq
Speaker 4: and Afghan returnees, where I want to say this in Seattle.
Speaker 4: I can't remember for sure, but I want to say Seattle,
Speaker 4: a VA hospital up there where two psychiatrists said that
Speaker 4: sixty percent of the people that are being warded PTSD
Speaker 4: are fakers. But unfortunately, you can't prove that they're faking.
Speaker 4: It's like somebody claiming to have an injury that in
Speaker 4: their back that doesn't show up on an X ray.
Speaker 4: Doesn't mean they don't have a back injury. It's just
Speaker 4: you can't prove it. And it's the same thing with
Speaker 4: the PTSD they are there's no way if someone has
Speaker 4: a good story, there's no way to prove that they're
Speaker 4: not having these dreams because nobody's in their head when
Speaker 4: they're having these dreams about how traumatic it is to
Speaker 4: worry about going to war. And that really really bothers me.
Speaker 4: Another thing that's kind of an issue with me is
Speaker 4: the Vietnam Memorial Wall, the city eighth names on that wall.
Speaker 4: The truth of the matter is everybody, well everybody believes,
Speaker 4: and I believe this at one point in time too,
Speaker 4: that everybody that was that's on that wall died in combat,
Speaker 4: and that is not true. Virtually one sixth of the
Speaker 4: names that are on that wall are not combat related,
Speaker 4: and I'll give you some examples of that. People that
Speaker 4: die from drug overdoses. Any person that died of a
Speaker 4: drug overdose in Vietnam is on that wall. Any person
Speaker 4: that committed suicide in Vietnam is on that wall. People
Speaker 4: that got involved in a ballroom braw and got killed
Speaker 4: as a result of it, a bra that they may
Speaker 4: have started, they're on the wall. People that get killed
Speaker 4: fighting over a whore on base, off base in Vietnam,
Speaker 4: they're on the wall. One of the examples that I
Speaker 4: can give in regards to this is when I was
Speaker 4: in Germany before I went to Vietnam, there was a
Speaker 4: young troop that got drunk, knee walk and drunk, and
Speaker 4: when he got put to bed by his buddies because
Speaker 4: he couldn't get there himself during the night, he aspirated
Speaker 4: and he drowned in his own puke. Fast forward to
Speaker 4: when I was in Vietnam. A troop there in Jesson
Speaker 4: Heroin overdosed, vomited, aspirated, and drowned in his own puke
Speaker 4: in Vietnam. Now, if the young troop that in Germany
Speaker 4: would have survived, he would have been a Vietnam era
Speaker 4: Vette because he was in during the Vietnam conflict. Count
Speaker 4: of war, the one in Vietnam that aspirated and drowned
Speaker 4: by his own design. He's the one that ingested the heroine.
Speaker 4: He's on the wall and being honored as a hero
Speaker 4: every time that well, either the real one or the
Speaker 4: traveling ones go throughout the United States. That man is
Speaker 4: being honored as a hero because he has a place
Speaker 4: on that wall. And there are a lot of names
Speaker 4: that I personally know from my eleven months in Vietnam,
Speaker 4: in particular my eight months in July, that are on
Speaker 4: that wall that did not die honorably. They died because
Speaker 4: of their own doings. One example that I can give
Speaker 4: in regards to that is two guys, two gi both
Speaker 4: of them sergeants, were at a club one night and
Speaker 4: one of them started taunting the other one, and it
Speaker 4: was a racially motivated taunt. The taunting escalated at the
Speaker 4: end of the night, the taunter wound up getting stabbed
Speaker 4: to death in the parking lot by the tauntee. That man,
Speaker 4: you know, if you did something did start a fight
Speaker 4: here in the United States that now in this day
Speaker 4: and age in particular, that was racially motivated. They certainly
Speaker 4: wouldn't erect the monument your honor. But that man is
Speaker 4: on the same wall that travels all over the United States. Now,
Speaker 4: the perpetrator of that he was tried, convicted, and he
Speaker 4: served thirteen months in prison and then he was discharged.
Speaker 4: But you know, there are like I say, one sixth
Speaker 4: of them. Now I'm not saying that every one of
Speaker 4: the one sixth on that well died of a heroin overdose,
Speaker 4: you know, or that kind of thing, but one six
Speaker 4: of them were non combat related. And uh people, I
Speaker 4: don't think people realize that. H you know, the other
Speaker 4: the remaining uh five sixth on there, they are all
Speaker 4: true heroes. They died doing what this country asked them
Speaker 4: to do, and they they deserve a place of honor
Speaker 4: like that wall.
Speaker 7: Now you have this these criticisms of the your venture
Speaker 7: in Vietnam, But at the same time you said it
Speaker 7: was the best year of your life. Is there any
Speaker 7: conflict with that that you had a great time?
Speaker 4: But well, the reason that I say it was the
Speaker 4: best one of the last years of my life was
Speaker 4: because I was not a combat troop. And I'll also
Speaker 4: have to qualify that a little bit by saying I
Speaker 4: may have a different thought if I was over there
Speaker 4: in nineteen sixty seven or sixty eight, but I wasn't.
Speaker 4: I was there seventy one seventy two, and I went
Speaker 4: over there not as a combat troop. I went over
Speaker 4: there as a support troop, and my job was to
Speaker 4: fight a will was in a war. For lack of
Speaker 4: a better term, I guess my enemy over there was
Speaker 4: not the North Vietnamese or the viet Cong. My enemy
Speaker 4: over there was the troops that I was over there with.
Speaker 4: It was my job to investigate crimes by these troops,
Speaker 4: and there was a lot of it, and I had
Speaker 4: a lot of fun doing it. I won't deny it.
Speaker 4: I spent all of my adult life working in law enforcement,
Speaker 4: twenty seven years with LATD, and one of the greatest
Speaker 4: things to me, let me put it that way. To me,
Speaker 4: one of the greatest things is the ability to hunt man.
Speaker 4: And I don't mean to go out and kill somebody.
Speaker 4: That's not what I'm talking about. But somebody do something
Speaker 4: and then or is about to do something, and be
Speaker 4: able to outthink them enough to either prevent it or
Speaker 4: catch them. That's what I mean by hunting man. And
Speaker 4: I did that in Vietnam, and it was just you know,
Speaker 4: there was more crime over there, need to shake a
Speaker 4: stick at. I liked working drugs. There was drugs over
Speaker 4: there everywhere, and I got the opportunity to work narcotics
Speaker 4: over there. And then another thing that I liked was
Speaker 4: the fact that I was in Vietnam and I wore
Speaker 4: civilian clothes. I did not wear a uniform when I
Speaker 4: was in Vietnam.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 4: C IDE agents in Vietnam did not wear wear uniforms.
Speaker 4: We didn't have any of the military protocol that we
Speaker 4: had to deal with or that everybody else has to
Speaker 4: deal with. Although when I was over there, this military
Speaker 4: uh was pretty much you know, the kind of in
Speaker 4: a demise. It was falling apart. But because of the
Speaker 4: fact I wore civilian clothes, I could come and go
Speaker 4: as I pleased. Pretty much. Uh, nobody you know, questioned
Speaker 4: anything that I did anywhere that I went. It was
Speaker 4: and it was there was the same way here in
Speaker 4: the States. Don't get me wrong, As a CID here
Speaker 4: in the States, I wore civilian clothes on military basis
Speaker 4: also that, but in Vietnam it was much much different.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 4: As a result of that, I was able to with
Speaker 4: some other guys. We were able to acquire a hooch
Speaker 4: that we lived in that was away from away from
Speaker 4: the rest of the truths. We were all by ourselves.
Speaker 4: We had our own little building, our own showers, our
Speaker 4: own you know, bathroom facilities that that's pretty using that
Speaker 4: term pretty let loosely because there's nothing but out houses
Speaker 4: that And then we had, you know, like a living
Speaker 4: room in there. We had our own beds in there.
Speaker 4: And then of course there was the female companionship. There
Speaker 4: was a lot of that in Vietnam, and it fell
Speaker 4: under a few different categories. One of the categories being
Speaker 4: you could establish a relationship with a female companion that
Speaker 4: had didn't have any strings attached. You hung out with
Speaker 4: them or they hung out with you, and nothing was
Speaker 4: expected of anybody. And the next thing that they had
Speaker 4: over there a lot of was what we called fifty
Speaker 4: t whose and what fifty p was was thirty three cents,
Speaker 4: and for thirty three cents, AGI could have his way
Speaker 4: with her for thirty three cents. And then the other
Speaker 4: type of horror, although they didn't consider themselves who they
Speaker 4: considered themselves girlfriends.
Speaker 7: Was.
Speaker 4: Coming in contact with somebody that you know, you buy
Speaker 4: him something from the PX like a refrigerator or you know,
Speaker 4: cigarettes or whatever. Those were gifts. She wasn't hoaring, she
Speaker 4: was gifting. And then there was the other one that
Speaker 4: was a girlfriend that was looking for a ticket back
Speaker 4: to the United States. You know, they're looking to get married. Now.
Speaker 4: The military itself also had a They never called it
Speaker 4: a brothel, they didn't call it a house of prostitution,
Speaker 4: they didn't call it a whorehouse. But what they had
Speaker 4: on the military installations was what they call a massage parlor,
Speaker 4: and for two dollars, any gi that was on that
Speaker 4: base could go there and get get a massage. Well
Speaker 4: once behind closed doors. It was nothing more than a organized,
Speaker 4: military sanctioned house of ill refused. I personally was never
Speaker 4: at one, never had the need to go there. That's
Speaker 4: part of where I think that I had a good time.
Speaker 4: That most of the girls that I dealt with were
Speaker 4: cocktail waitresses at the club. You know, they worked on
Speaker 4: the base. I had a couple of encounters with these
Speaker 4: fifty p hoars, but that never on base. The UH
Speaker 4: and the girls, the cocktail waitresses, they were most of
Speaker 4: them were looking for the ticket, promise them anything, don't
Speaker 4: give them anything, And that was pretty much my attitude
Speaker 4: while I was over there. One of the things that
Speaker 4: back back to the fifty p horse thing, that's one
Speaker 4: of the things that the gis used to do is
Speaker 4: smuggle them on base because they couldn't be there. They
Speaker 4: didn't work there, they weren't they didn't have credentials to
Speaker 4: be on the base or anything. But some g I
Speaker 4: would be in a convoy or something and pick up
Speaker 4: a whore and bring it on base and smugle them
Speaker 4: into their camp. And then these uh you know, at
Speaker 4: thirty three cents a pop get passed around the area
Speaker 4: and they called them security violations and if they got caught,
Speaker 4: they immediately got evicted off at the base that it.
Speaker 4: You know, most of the time there wasn't any catching
Speaker 4: there because there wasn't anybody in the company areas that
Speaker 4: was going to snitch them off. But when I say
Speaker 4: I had it was one of the best years of
Speaker 4: my life is because I was able to do work wise,
Speaker 4: exactly what I wanted to do and it was fun.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't have been a policeman all the years that
Speaker 4: I was if it wasn't fun and I had a
Speaker 4: great time doing it, so that part of it is
Speaker 4: part of it. And then the ability to do what
Speaker 4: I wanted. And then of course, like I say, the
Speaker 4: female command companionship, I never had an issue of wanting
Speaker 4: and not being able to achieve.
Speaker 7: Now you talk about in the book about the prevailing
Speaker 7: attitude that enabled again some of the stories that if
Speaker 7: we put them all together, the one was raped and
Speaker 7: murdered in a foot locker and dumped, likely it looked
Speaker 7: like military, but no arrests were made, Nothing was made
Speaker 7: out of that case, certainly no real outrage. The boy
Speaker 7: was shot at the dump like compensation ten bucks for
Speaker 7: somebody you talked about you categorize these women as the
Speaker 7: thirty three cent whore or fifty p whrr. What was
Speaker 7: the attitude that the US citizens that were now military,
Speaker 7: What was the attitude that was used there to enable
Speaker 7: people to come into this country and be at war
Speaker 7: with these people that you talk about.
Speaker 4: Well, there there was always the perception that and a
Speaker 4: lot of this goes back to go back to what
Speaker 4: they were told by their fathers and their grandfathers in
Speaker 4: regards to Korea that the Asian people life means nothing
Speaker 4: to him. Okay, that's the perception that they bring with them,
Speaker 4: and that comes from Korea because you hear stories, and
Speaker 4: I don't know if they're true or not, but you
Speaker 4: hear stories about how the UH during the Korean War,
Speaker 4: the Chinese would become charging and there'd be one gun
Speaker 4: for six men, and when the person carrying the gun
Speaker 4: got shot, the next one picked it up and continued
Speaker 4: on the fight, and when he got shot, the next one,
Speaker 4: et cetera. That developed the attitude that there was they
Speaker 4: didn't respect life, didn't care about life, and so they
Speaker 4: brought that with him. And then of course the military
Speaker 4: kind of hooked into that. And as a couple of examples,
Speaker 4: you know where somebody was killed of Vietnamese was killed
Speaker 4: in regards to what the military did about it. There
Speaker 4: were a couple of captains that decided that they were
Speaker 4: going to fight the drug war themselves. So they went
Speaker 4: out to the perimeter because they believed that the drugs
Speaker 4: were coming from children through the fence to GIS. So
Speaker 4: they went out there with a M seventy nine grenade launcher,
Speaker 4: except they weren't using grenades, they were using tear gas canisters.
Speaker 4: They went out there and they sought children close to
Speaker 4: the fence, and they started popping tear gas canisters at
Speaker 4: these kids, and the kids would run off because of
Speaker 4: the tear gas. Then they'd come back and they'd pop
Speaker 4: out of some more and the kids would run off. Well,
Speaker 4: one of the times that they popped at these kids,
Speaker 4: these two captains hit a Vietnamese girl in the head
Speaker 4: and they killed her with one of these tear gas canisters.
Speaker 4: There was absolutely no disciplinary action on whatsoever against these
Speaker 4: two captains that did that. None. But then by the
Speaker 4: same token, the military kind of adopted the same attitude
Speaker 4: in regards to their own troops. An example of that
Speaker 4: that I've got in the book because there is a
Speaker 4: guy of the name of James, and these are allow pseudonyms.
Speaker 4: I don't use any of the real names in the book.
Speaker 4: But a guy of the name of James shoots the
Speaker 4: sergeant by the name of Stillwell, and he shoots him
Speaker 4: in the stomach or chest area, killed him. James is
Speaker 4: arrested for murder. Then he pleads guilty to unlawful killing.
Speaker 4: And I'm not really sure what that entails, but he
Speaker 4: was pled guilty to unlawful killing. He was then sentenced
Speaker 4: to six months confinement, forfeiture of one hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: dollars paid for six months and reduced in rank. Everything
Speaker 4: was overturned except for the forfeiture of pay, which means
Speaker 4: that Sergeant Stillwell's life, as far as the military was concerned,
Speaker 4: was worth nine hundred dollars and that was it. Now
Speaker 4: the records indicate the Sergeant Stillwell was killed in action,
Speaker 4: non hostile accident. So not only was it, you know,
Speaker 4: the people bringing this attitude with them over here and
Speaker 4: not caring, the military was doing exactly the same things, like,
Speaker 4: for example, the barroom brawl that I told you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 4: thirteen months for stabbing a guy twice. You know, the
Speaker 4: guy didn't run to the nice twice, but he got
Speaker 4: thirteen months over it, you know. And there's just a
Speaker 4: story after stories similar to that where nothing happened. Another
Speaker 4: guy was shooting grenades with an M seventy nine grenade
Speaker 4: launcher at water buffalo and he shooting at these water
Speaker 4: buffalo the MPs get called. He's out there by the perimeter,
Speaker 4: outside the perimeter and he's shooting at these water buffle
Speaker 4: for the MPs get called. They try to get the
Speaker 4: guy to quit. He won't quit, So to get him
Speaker 4: to surrender and scare him the fire over his head
Speaker 4: with an M sixty machine gun that immediately gets into surrender.
Speaker 4: But a Vietnamese child was killed as a result of it.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry he wasn't killed. He was hitting the hip.
Speaker 4: Excuse me, he was hitting the hips. Nobody was held
Speaker 4: culpable for that. You would think that the guy with
Speaker 4: them seventy nine grenade launcher that started this thing, or
Speaker 4: somebody along the line should have been held culpable for that,
Speaker 4: but nobody was. And that type of thing is, you know,
Speaker 4: it was just just the way it was. The army
Speaker 4: had or the military i should say, was just disintegrating
Speaker 4: and bits and pieces. And it's fortunate that we were actually,
Speaker 4: I guess, in full retreat at that time, because it
Speaker 4: wasn't very long after that there wasn't anybody left in Vietnam.
Speaker 7: Wow, you know, Gary, this book is an incredible story
Speaker 7: about that. You know, like you say, other Vietnam memoirs
Speaker 7: have focused on much different issues and probably subject matter
Speaker 7: to a certain degree, and certainly different era of the
Speaker 7: war itself. You had help with this book, but why
Speaker 7: did you feel it important to write this book at
Speaker 7: this time, and maybe you could tell us a little
Speaker 7: bit about the help that you did receive putting this
Speaker 7: basically together.
Speaker 4: Sure. The way the thing started out is my brother,
Speaker 4: who spent twenty seven years in the Air Force. Him
Speaker 4: and I would get together on a regular basis and
Speaker 4: we'd sit and drink beer, and we'd sit and sell
Speaker 4: war stories and I would relate these stories, some of
Speaker 4: which I've related to you today and many many more.
Speaker 4: And it started out with my brother with the idea
Speaker 4: that we, you know, we should do it, put this
Speaker 4: down on paper and you know, for our kids, just
Speaker 4: basically a diary for our kids. Well, it just so
Speaker 4: happened he was in the air because he was in
Speaker 4: the Air Force at the time, he was wound up
Speaker 4: back east close to the archives, and he decided that
Speaker 4: one day to excuse me to go to the archives
Speaker 4: and kind of look at some of the stories I'd
Speaker 4: been telling him. And so he asked for the MP
Speaker 4: blotters there, and he's so that he could look through
Speaker 4: the MP blotters, a chronologically list of events for each day.
Speaker 4: And he got them and he looked through him and
Speaker 4: when he started looking through the first ones. He found
Speaker 4: a folded piece of paper stuck in the binder and
Speaker 4: turns out it was a crime report that was signed
Speaker 4: by me. He says it had no significance, so it
Speaker 4: never did wind up in this book. But then he
Speaker 4: really did the archival research on this thing, and all
Speaker 4: the crimes, all the deaths, everything that's mentioned this book
Speaker 4: is backed up by archival research, every bit of it.
Speaker 4: The only thing that's not backed up is my anecdotal stuff,
Speaker 4: and there's no way to back it up. It's my
Speaker 4: word or my story against somebody else's story. That's the
Speaker 4: anecdotal part of it. But everything else in the book
Speaker 4: that pertains to deaths and court martials and the arrests
Speaker 4: and autopsies and things like that that are mentioned in
Speaker 4: the book are all documented are caught by these were
Speaker 4: documented through the archives. Then from that point on it
Speaker 4: just kind of started formulating into a book, although we
Speaker 4: didn't intended to. And then, and you know, several people
Speaker 4: read our diary for back of lack of a better term,
Speaker 4: that turned into a manuscript and they thought that we
Speaker 4: should pursue this, And eventually a gentleman by the name
Speaker 4: of Clay Jenkinson with the Dakota Institute in North Dakota.
Speaker 4: The man who wrote the forward in the book persuaded
Speaker 4: us and into publishing the book through him, and it
Speaker 4: was published and released just a few months ago.
Speaker 7: Well, I want to congratulate you. It was an amazing
Speaker 7: turn of events and someone had a good sense to
Speaker 7: publish this book and it's a wonderful project. And it's
Speaker 7: nice that your brother could help you with us and
Speaker 7: inspire you to do this as well. Is a very
Speaker 7: important book too because of the issues that you touch
Speaker 7: on touch on, but it's a wonderful, vivid portrayal of
Speaker 7: you know, an amazing slice of American history. So I
Speaker 7: want to thank you very much for coming on and
Speaker 7: talking about not all heroes.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 7: Is there a way for people to contact you or
Speaker 7: do you do the Facebook thing? Do you have a website?
Speaker 7: Maybe you can tell us a little bit about contact information.
Speaker 4: Two ways easy. One of them is Gary Scogan s
Speaker 4: K O G E M on Facebook and the second
Speaker 4: way is Gary Scogan one word at gmail dot com.
Speaker 8: There you go.
Speaker 7: Well, I want to thank you Gary for a great
Speaker 7: interview and congratulations on the book. Again, Like I say,
Speaker 7: not all heroes and you have yourself a good night.
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you very much, don slave the pleasure.
Speaker 7: Thank you, good night,