McMichael, Eugene
Eugene McMichael, Jr.: Vietnam War
Interviewed by Barbara A. Knight (student interview)
Interview date April 19, 2004
Abstract
Eugene McMichael served in the Vietnam War in 1968-69. He joined the United States Air Force in 1966, and was called to serve in Vietnam in 1968. He describes the conditions in which he had to live and work. His experiences include being bombarded with rockets weekly. He concludes with the fact that he felt this undeclared war was unnecessary.
Q: When and where were you born?
A: I was born in Schenectady, New York, January 20, 147.
Q: How old were you and what were you doing when the United States began getting more heavily involved in Vietnam and in the early 1960s?
A: I don’t know how old I was then! I was about 15 years old. I was in Brooklyn, New York, and I was still going to high school, and I was working a part-time job.
Q: How did your friends and you feel about the war, that is, were you heavily in favor of it or opposed to it?
A: To be honest, we really didn’t have any thoughts on it. We were too busy trying to survive up there in the streets.
Q: What year did you enter the military?
A: 1966.
Q: Did you enlist or were you drafted?
A: I enlisted.
Q: OK. In what branch of the military did you serve?
A: United States Air Force.
Q: Where did you undergo basic training?
A: Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas
Q: Did you and the rest of the men know that you were going to be sent to Vietnam?
A: (laughs) No!
Q: What military rank were you when you arrived in Vietnam?
A: I was a – at the time it was called airman second class, which was two stripes.
Q: OK. What were your overall impressions when you first arrived in Vietnam?
A: I wanted to go home!
Q: How did you feel? What was the general feeling among the other soldiers and such?
A: Honestly, we were all really nervous. We didn’t know what to expect. When we landed we heard gunfire, so that kind of set the stage for the whole year right there.
Q: Wow. Where you stationed in Vietnam and in what capacity did you serve?
A: I was at Bien Hoa Air Base, South Vietnam. I was an aircraft electrician. We worked forward air control aircraft, the aircraft that went out and marked the targets for the jets to come in and fire on them.
Q: In terms of your own experiences, in what kind of conditions did you live and work. Please elaborate about food, clothing, shelter, etc.
A: Well, really, I lived in a tent for the first 8 months on a cot, and, ah, it was a 20 man tent and there was 4 of us living there. We didn’t have any barracks at the time. I went to the civil engineers and I got permission to wire up plugs for each one of the beds so I got the wiring and I got the equipment from them and I wired each one. Then one of the guys was a carpenter. He took and sectioned off some rooms for us in there and we, ah, ate at the chow hall, which was, ah, we had, ah, powdered eggs, which was really watery. We ate, ah, white bread with boll weevils still in it because they couldn’t get rid of them. So we got used to that. At first I used to pick the boll weevils out, but after a while we just started eating the boll weevils, too. We ate a lot of C-rations. Ah, we had to get water from this big “water buffalo,” they called it, and the water was in five gallon jugs. We had to go pour it in there and the water was yellow. So we had to let it sit our tent for awhile and let the stuff that we couldn’t drink settle to the bottom and we kind of survived that. Ah, I don’t know what else. What was the other thing?
Q: Clothing.
A: Clothing? I wore my green, ah, jungle fatigues.
Q: Jungle fatigues?
A: With pockets all over the place, right. Yeah, jungle fatigues.
Q: What kind of contact did you have with people back home? What kind of correspondence did the military permit?
A: Well, we had letters, and I had bought a tape recorder, so I sent tapes back and forth.
Q: Was that the only kind of correspondence the military permitted?
A: Well, we had phone – MARS – but it was so complicated to get through there, we really hardly ever used it.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: It was Military Affiliated Radio Station, that’s what MARS stood for. Military Affiliated Radio Station.
Q: OK. If you feel comfortable talking about combat, please describe the combat experiences you had, if any.
A: Well, I didn’t have hand-to-hand combat, but we got hit at least five times a week for the whole year I was over there with mortars and 122mm rockets. They were trying to blow our base up because we had, ah, one of the major embarkation and debarkation ports in Vietnam for army and everybody that came through there. And we had the 82nd Airborne around us. We had, ah, First Cavalry around us. We had, ah, some Vietnamese military around us. We had aircraft that they tried to destroy, so we were getting rocketed. I got shot at coming from work quite a few times and we had to go through the jungle to fix other planes at other bases, and, ah, they would try to attack out there, also. But I – in the air force, I wasn’t hand-to-hand, but I did get shot at and rocketed for just about the whole year I was over there.
Q: What was your most memorable experience in Vietnam, combat or otherwise?
A: Ah, there was a whole lot of them, really. I remember one time I was in a Jeep going to another base to fix an airplane, and I had my M-16 right in front of me and it was just the driver and myself. And we had to go through this Vietnamese outdoor market and there were so many people around that we had to blow the horn and try to push through them. Well, I was sitting there and we were just blowing the horn and we were talking about different things. All of a sudden I felt a movement to my right and I looked over and there was a gun to my head!
Q: Oh, my God!
A: And I froze. My hands gripped the – in fact my fingerprints are probably still on that M-16 right now that I had there! And before I knew it, water came out of the gun, and I looked and there was little kid running through the crowd! And I was – talk about being shook up! He could have – that could have been real and I could have had my head blown off – that’s just one of the incidents.
And then another time I was coming from work – the first time I got shot at. When I was coming from work one day around Perimeter Road, which ran past the main gate to Bien Hoa City, which was off-limits to us. And we had light cars facing downtown so they couldn’t see on base, but evidently somebody saw our headlights. And, in fact, there was a guy from Oklahoma driving the Jeep. He was a staff sergeant from Oklahoma. The first Oklahoman I ever met in my life. And we started getting shot at. We saw tracer bullets coming past us and we heard them hitting the ground and hitting the Jeep. He turned the lights off and stomped the accelerator and we couldn’t see nothing because it was pitch black out there. I wasn’t praying then, but I started saying, “Lord, help us! God help us!” (laughing) I’m serious, I was holding onto that dashboard and just – we made it – I don’t know how we made it because that road was winding. Quite a few things I could tell you about that over there, but some things I can’t mention.
Q: Um.
A: But it was pretty rough.
Q: How has that experience impacted your life?
A: Well, it made me jittery for along time when I came back, I know that. I couldn’t even – if you came up behind me, I was ready to knock you out because I was so jittery. Loud noises used to really affect me greatly and they still do every once in a while. I still don’t want nobody to sneak up behind me because I almost knocked my wife out one day and then I almost my son out one day because he came up behind me. And then I hit one of my former employers – I hit him in the nose when he came up behind me and scared me. I smacked him in his nose. And, ah, I’ve seen some things that I wasn’t happy about with the way we operated over there as far as being a war, and, ah, not being called a war. I’ll not go any further into that. That’s . . .
Q: OK. Given the fact that historically, race relations in this country have been strained to say the least, and in the 1960s and early 1970s tensions between blacks and whites were running high, how was your experience as an African-American man defined or shaped by your time in Vietnam and what were relations like between black and whites in Vietnam at that time.
A: I’m going to tell you this, I’m one of the people, I get along with everybody. I never – I was – when I was growing up I always looked at the person’s inside. I don’t know – I just had – I never looked at his skin. I always looked at the inside of a person, how they reacted to me, how they conducted themselves, their integrity, you know, their – just general overall, ah, so I really never looked at a person color, although I was raised to do that. I can’t tell you why I never did it. I don’t really know. But I do know that when we had a race riot there, ah, when I was at Bien Hoa, South Vietnam in ’68. I went there in 1968 and left in 1969. And there was a pretty good sized race riot on there at the time. Some people got hurt. These are all military folks, also. But I didn’t really let that shape me. Ah, I got some people angry with me because I didn’t hang out with black folks and I didn’t hang out with white folks. I hung out with whoever I wanted to hang out with because people are people to me. And that didn’t go well with some of my own folks, my own black folks didn’t like that about me, but that’s just the way I am.
Q: So, how long did you serve in Vietnam?
A: One year.
Q: After serving in Vietnam, where did the military send you or were you immediately discharged?
A: No, I went to MacGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey.
Q: What kind of reception did you receive when you got back home?
A: Oh, excellent. It was great! It was great!
Q: Ah-huh. What was the reaction of people when they found out you were a Vietnam Vet?
A: They were in awe, really, the ones that never got in the military. “Man, you are fortunate you made it back safely. We’re glad you made it back safely,” you know, and they were just asking all kinds of questions – what happened while you were over there, and how did it feel to be there, and we’re glad you’re back.
Q: What was your feelings about the anti-war protesters in this country?
A: I don’t know. I never really gave it a lot of thought. I do have a thought on that, though, I believe, personally, that each young man in the United States ought to serve at least two years in the military whether they want to or not. I really believe that because there’s so much undiscipline – there are so many undisciplined young men running around here out there today, I believe it would teach them a little, not only external discipline, but self-discipline and it will give them the direction they need to be going in.
Q: How did your family and friends react to you when you got back from Vietnam? Were they unsympathetic, sympathetic, curious, not curious. . .?
A: They were pretty curious. They were pretty curious. They were glad that I was home because, well, some of the tapes I made, I made them during rocket attacks on our base, and you could hear things blowing up around me when I was talking on the tape to my future wife, my mom, and my brothers. And that made them really nervous. Our base got hit quite often, like I said, at least five times a week for the whole year I was over there. It got to the point where I just got used to the rockets coming in on us.
Q: If indeed, you experienced some kind of physical or psychological wound or wounds during your time in combat, how do these physical or mental wounds affect your relations, interactions with family, friends, spouse, and/or your girlfriend?
A: I don’t think they had an affect on me that I know of, personally.
Q: OK. Do you still keep in touch with any of the men with whom you served?
A: No. I don’t know where they went or nothing.
Q: What kinds of general observations and conclusions do you have about the Vietnam War and your Vietnam War experience? Please elaborate.
A: Um, would you read the question again, please?
Q: What kinds of general observations and conclusions do you have about the war and your war experiences?
A: I really don’t think it was necessary. I don’t think we really accomplished anything over there. That’s just the way I feel about it. I don’t think we really accomplished anything over there. I believe that the government was – but anyway, I don’t think we really accomplished anything over there, and I’m going to leave it at that.
Q: OK, well that concludes our interview and I thank you very much.
