Oral History

Charles Vernon Thurman: Vietnam War

Born June 25, 1951, Okemah, Oklahoma 
Interviewed December 8, 2002
Interviewer Amanda Dyan Thurman (student interview)

Q:        What is your name and where were you born?  

A:        My name is Charles Thurman. I was born and raised in Okemah, Oklahoma. That’s about 60 miles east of Oklahoma City, right down I-40.  

Q:        Did you live there all your life?  

A:        Yes, I did. Lived there, attended all twelve years of school there, and didn’t leave until I went into the service.  

Q:        What was it like growing up there?  

A:        I don’t think you could beat it, growing up like that. We always lived in town, but yet, it was just a little rural community, and I could take my .22 and walk out into the woods and hunt, or take a fishing pole and go to any number of lakes and ponds that were fairly nearby. It was great. Later on, when I got in high school, that was like a scene from American Graffiti. It was just a lot of fun. It was just a friendly small town atmosphere. It was great. I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up any other way.  

Q:        What year did you graduate?  

A:        I graduated in 1969.  

Q:        How long after that did you join the military and why?  

A:        I went into the Air Force just a couple of months after my graduation, our country was at war in Vietnam, and being raised to love God and country, I felt obligated to serve. I chose the Air Force because I felt that I could serve my country and maybe be trained in an area that I could make a career of after my military service.  

Q:        Did any of your family also serve in the military?  

A:        Yes. We had several members. My brother-in-law served in Korea. Had at least two uncles served in World War II. My uncle, Jack, left the cotton fields in Paden, Oklahoma, to go serve in the South Pacific. By the time he was 18 he had three Bronze Stars, so, yea, there was quite a history of military service.  

Q:        So it wasn’t really a big surprise that you decided to join?  

A:        No, in those days, see I can’t remember when the Vietnam War wasn’t going on. The boys in my age group, it was almost a given that you’d graduate from high school and serve in Vietnam. It just seemed like that war had gone on forever, and there was pretty much no end in sight.  

Q:        Tell me about your entrance into the Air Force, what was it like?  

A:        I was inducted into the Air Force on September 4, 1969, just a few months out of high school. I spent six weeks in basic training or boot camp, and there we just learned military history and policy, chain of command, military drill, marching in formation, and that sort of thing. Lots of physical training, firearms training, and just basic military things that we needed to learn.  

Q:        You told me a funny story about something a recruiter had told you. Could you tell me about that?  

A:        Well, that was in 1969, and Vietnam was going strong. The Air Force could be pretty selective about who they took and who they didn’t. Two of my buddies and I that had gone to school together decided we’d join the Air Force together. As it turned out, we all three tested out pretty well and the recruiter was really anxious to get us. He was courting us pretty seriously. As it turned out, the days that we were to be inducted were on different days and we didn’t understand that. We didn’t understand how you went into a unit when you went into boot camp you stayed in that unit for six weeks of boot camp. We asked the recruiter since we were going in on different days would we still be in boot camp together, and he kind of cleared his throat and looked around the room, stammered a little bit and said, “well, ah, you’ll be in the same general vicinity.” So we thought that was OK, good enough. We came to learn later on that “the same general vicinity” was San Antonio, Texas. We were all three sent to Lackland Air Force Base, quite a huge base. Of course, we didn’t see each other. We weren’t in the same units. I don’t know where the other two ended up. My unit was marching in formation one day on the base and I saw Steve Davis, one of the buddies I had signed up with, standing out in front of a building, and he spotted me in formation. Of course, I couldn’t speak or move. I just kind of looked at him and rolled my eyes, and he shook his head and smiled. We were both thinking “the same general vicinity.” So that was all we saw of each other in boot camp.  

Q:        After boot camp, what were your job assignments before Vietnam?  

A:        I graduated  boot camp in October of ’69 and was sent to an Air Force tech school, or a technical school, and I was trained in jet aircraft maintenance. That school was at Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas. I was there around three months. We learned about the fighter aircraft from one end to the other. I left tech school in February of ’70 and my first permanent assignment was Kingsley Field, Oregon, and that was quite an interesting assignment. I was assigned to a NORAD unit, which is North American Air Defense, and we were part of the Air Defense Command. That command was done away with by the Air Force after the Cold War. Our mission in the Air Defense Command, and NORAD specifically, was to literally guard the northern borders of the country. This was during the Cold War, and we were in a state of détente with the Soviet Union and our unit kept fighter aircraft on a state of alert at all times. We used the F-106 fighter. It was a Delta wing aircraft, and quite a good aircraft for its day. We kept several 106s hot at all times. “Hot” means that they were loaded with live heat-seeking missiles. We were literally a line of defense against Soviet bombers. We were a high-security base. We constantly went through training to launch these aircraft as quickly as possible. We would have simulated alerts and we could scramble those fighters out of there and have them airborne in just a matter of minutes. We were a pretty crack unit. Very effective unit. Thank God we were never needed. I really didn’t understand what I was part of back then. As I said, we were literally there to shoot down Russian bombers in the event we had been attacked.  

Q:        So after your time with NORAD, did you then go to Vietnam?  

A:        Yes, I did. I served my tour of duty at DaNang Air Field, Vietnam. “Tour of duty” is the term for the one-year tour that the American troops did. That was your length of time there, one year. I went to DaNang Air Field. DaNang was the second largest city in Vietnam, and it’s located just a few miles south of the 17th parallel, or the demilitarized zone, which is what divides North and South Vietnam. Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel by the Geneva Convention, so that kind of gives you some insight as to how long that conflict had gone on. Of course, we weren’t involved in it until the early 60s.  

            I got to DaNang and I was very young and very scared. I had made the rank of buck sergeant while I was still state-side. When I got there, I knew that it was an unpopular war in some circles back home, but I had no doubts that what I was doing was right. I loved my country and I knew that our leaders wouldn’t engage us in a senseless, futile war, and I felt like I didn’t have to understand the entire picture. I didn’t understand it. Fact is, I couldn’t even find Vietnam on a map when I went over there. But I felt my country needed me and I was going to serve proudly.  

Q:        You mentioned that while in NORAD you had talked to some men that had already served in Vietnam. What did they tell you about their experiences over there?  

A:        The feedback that I was getting from the returning vets – and some of those guys had been there as early as the mid-60s – pretty much what they told me was that the Air Force duty over there was pretty much like state-side duty. You did your job and then went back to the barracks. Of course, over there the Air Force troops worked 12 hours a day everyday. The perimeters of the air base at that time in the earlier years were guarded by ground troops – infantry troops – that may have been Marine units, 101st Airborne, or whatever. That was what those guys were telling me pretty much then.  

Q:        When you arrived, how had things changed from that?  

A:        It had changed a great deal by 1971. President Nixon had started what he called the Vietnamization Program. This was a process where he began to phase out American troops out of Vietnam and furnish the South Vietnamese troops with the weaponry and supplies to carry the brunt of that war. With the withdrawals the president had made since ’69, the American troop strength was down when I got there. It was down from a height of 500,000 troops to 40,000 troops. The biggest part of that 40,000 troops that were there then were mostly Air Force. You can imagine with that kind of a reduction in troops strength the differences that would bring.  

Q:        What was the biggest change that affected you?  

A:        The biggest change was that the air bases were much less secure than they had been with the ground troops there. The biggest change it made on me personally is that the Air Force troops had to guard our own perimeters. We pulled perimeter duty. The air police were assigned to guard the perimeters, but there weren’t nearly enough of them, so we ended up guarding our perimeters or guarding the wire, we called it – the perimeters were laced with barbed wire. You ended up with mechanics and desk clerks and so on out on guard duty. I’d always done well on the firing range. So when I got over there I was given a little two-hour crash course on an M-60 machine gun and an M-79 grenade launcher, and maybe three or four or five nights a month I’d find myself stuck out on some dark, remote location guarding the perimeter wire. That was the biggest change from my end of my service over there.  

            The air bases were a lot less secure with the infantry units gone and just east of DaNang Air Base we had a mountain called Monkey Mountain. The VC would hide in the thick vegetation and foliage on Monkey Mountain and fire mortars and rockets in on us. They used a 122mm Russian-made rocket that was about 5 or 6 feet tall and filled with shrapnel and explosives. They were for the most part harassment since they were hard to aim, but if they happened to hit a building, a structure, an aircraft, or people they could inflict a great deal of damage.  

Q:        While you were in Vietnam, did you ever happen to come across anybody that you had known from back home?  

A:        Yes, I did. Of course, I’d run onto people that I’d been stationed with states-side from time to time, but I found out that a good friend of mine from high school was over there. He was in the Army and he was at a helicopter base called the Red Beach. That was just a couple of kilometers from DaNang Air Base. His name was Cotton Lang. We graduated from Okemah High School together, ran around together, and had been good friends a long time. I found out he was over there and we got together some. Cotton’s tour was just about over, and mine had just started. So he gave me some good helpful hints for being in-country – dos and don’ts. That just made it nice. It kind of eased some of the anxiety about the first few weeks in-country and it was kind of nice to run onto him. I just found out recently, by the way, that I was the last Okemah High School graduate to serve in Vietnam. I thought that was kind of interesting.  

Q:        I know that right before you left for Vietnam you were married, so while you were serving in Vietnam you had a wife back home. What was that like?  

A:        Well, it just made it all the more miserable. We were just married a matter of days before I shipped out. So it made it twice as bad – that isolation after only being married a short time. It just drug those months out and made them seem so much longer than they were.  

Q:        While in Vietnam, what exactly was your duty assignment?  

A:        I was assigned to the 366th  Tac Fighter Wing at DaNang. We were nicknamed the “DaNang Gunfighters.” The unit got that nickname because down through the years several times the airmen had to defend the base from being overrun and each time they did, they held it. The Viet Cong never were able to take the base. I was assigned to the air repair squadron of the 366th, and air repair was a unit that repaired and rigged the flight controls of the aircraft. We replaced the rudders, ailerons, and so forth, and then made the adjustments on those. In aero repair we worked on several different types of aircraft – jets, prop, we even had some old World War II cargo planes that they used in Vietnam. Those things were still flying. It was like you just couldn’t wear them out. I think that was the old Douglas DC-3. They called it the tail dragger.  

            But our primary aircraft was the F-4 fighter. The F-4 was a tactical aircraft. Sometimes it was used for ground support and bomb runs, but it’s primary use was to escort the B-52 bombers. The B-52s were the real workhorse of that war. Of course, they were the ones that flew the bombing raids up north into Hanoi and North Vietnam and our fighters out of DaNang would escort them. That’s what I did my first few months of my tour. Then later I volunteered to work the crash recovery crew. Crash recovery, as the name implies, would try to retrieve crashed aircraft from the jungles so that they could be repaired and returned to combat. That wasn’t something that had to be done real terribly often, but when we did have to go out after one, I used to joke that this aircraft had been shot, and then crashed, why do we want it back? But, actually, when we did recover a plane or a chopper, it saved the government millions of dollars to repair it and get it back into combat as opposed to having to replace it with a new one. The primary function of crash recovery, or “crash,” as we liked to be called, was to keep the four runways at DaNang clear. We were those guys that you’d see that would go out beside the runway with the firemen and sit there when a place comes in for an emergency landing. As soon as a plane crash landed or became disabled on the runway we had to clear that aircraft from the runway as soon as possible to keep the runway open.  

            In April of 1972, the North Vietnamese launched the second largest offensive of the Vietnam War. It was called the Easter Offensive. I doubt many people know about the Easter Offensive. Everybody knows about the Tet Offensive of 1968, but the Easter Offensive – the launched their invasion out of North Vietnam. They spearheaded it with Chinese tanks and they brought just thousands of troops. They had mobile anti-aircraft weapons that were just terribly deadly to our aircraft. They brought artillery with them. We had never been under an attack by communist artillery before. That was something new. I think I mentioned earlier the rockets and the mortars they used, those were for the most part, inefficient, but with this Chinese artillery, they could aim and use it with pinpoint accuracy. As I mentioned, they launched this big offensive out of the north, and at this time the American ground forces had been pulled out of Vietnam, so the F-4s from the 366th – we pretty much bore the brunt of the Easter Offensive. It was just an absolute nightmare for the crash crew. We had dozens of in-flight emergencies, emergency landings, and crash landings everyday. I recall one day there in April we got down to only one runway open and dozens of planes in a holding pattern waiting to land, so we really had to hustle up that day. For some reason the Navy jets had trouble landing on solid ground, and they would blow tires. When those F-4s blew tires, it would blow pieces of their wheel and brake discs and everything all over the runway, and of course, you couldn’t land planes with that debris on the runway. We had to clear that up, plus get the disabled aircraft off the runway. Sometimes that would require us using a 50-ton crane to come in. We just simply picked the thing up and set it aside, and let the air traffic go ahead and land.  

            In June 1972, the rest of my unit shipped out to Thailand. They had decided to just keep skeleton crews at DaNang, and make up the difference with TDY people, or temporary duty, and I volunteered to stay in Vietnam, rather than go to Thailand. I worked crash recovery the rest of my time there. I really enjoyed it. It got pretty hairy sometimes, but I didn’t want to do anything else. We were kind of located down at the end of one runway, kind of isolated. We always said nobody else wanted to live around us. We had a pretty good unit there. As I said, it was made up toward the end with temporary duty people. We had a unit come in from California that I worked with in crash. Some good guys. I made a lot of good friends there.  

            That was what I did until November 1972. In November, for some reason, Richard Nixon got me out of there a month early. DEROS’d out a month early – DEROS is Date Expected Return Overseas. I was expected to have to be there through Christmas. That was really quite a treat to get out of there that one month early. It seemed like several months.  

Q:        You told me a story about how you found out that you were going home. Could you tell me about that?  

A:        As I mentioned, I got to come home early and it came as a total surprise to me. In fact, I was in my hooch – that’s what we called our living areas. Our was a Quonset hut, the rounded metal buildings like you see on M.A.S.H. and we had little areas where we tacked up plywood or whatever so each one of the guys in the unit could have a little area around his bunk for privacy. I was sitting in my little cubbyhole writing a letter back home and this tech sergeant on my crew walked by and looked in at me. He stopped and backed up and said “what are you doing here?” I didn’t have a clue what he meant, and I said “what do you mean?” I thought he meant I was supposed to be somewhere else. He said “your orders are in.” I said “what do you mean, my orders are in?” He said “your orders are in, you’re going home.” This guy was kind of a somber, straight-laced guy and I thought “he’s not joking.” If it had been some of the other guys, I’d have never believed them, but I thought, Jim, he was pretty serious. And I said “are you sure about this?” And he said “I was at the orderly room, and I saw your orders.” I dropped everything I had and just busted through the doors and ran up the taxi way just full-sprint. It was about a half mile to the orderly room and I ran full-bore. I busted into the orderly room and I was kind of winded and I was trying to catch my breath to ask the clerk if this was true about my orders, and before I could catch my breath to ask him, he held up my orders. He said “what are you doing here? You need to be in class A’s” – a class A uniform, your travel uniform. Without ever saying anything I snatched the orders out of his hand, ran back to the hooch, got into a class A uniform and left most everything I had in Vietnam. I told Jim, the tech sergeant that had told me my orders were in, “Jim, if you find anything you want, it’s yours, buddy, I’m out.” I had my class A uniform and a duffle bag with a few things and out of there I went. They flew me out of DaNang later that day into Saigon, the capitol of Vietnam. And I had a couple of days hold over there. They put us up in these old barracks. It was kind of like barns with screen tacked on them, and somehow they had a little black and white TV hooked up in there. It barely got any reception, but I remember watching Gunsmoke on that TV while I was there waiting to fly out of there. They had a big loud speaker in this compound where we were held over there, and I thought I heard my name mentioned on that speaker, but I thought, well, surely not, I’ve still got like another two days before my flight out. But, just the same, I went into the sprint mode again and sprinted to their orderly room. Almost knocked over a major and he started to chew me out, but I left him in a cloud of dust. Burst in there and sure enough, they had tickets – I can’t recall what they are called now, but I grabbed those and out of there I went. It was a total surprise.  

Q:        After you left Saigon, what was it like being back on American soil?  

A:        When we very first landed back in the states, or back in the world we called it, it was a rude awakening. We landed in Oakland. We were supposed to have flown into San Francisco, and the airport there was fogged in, and they diverted us to Oakland. The people at the airport, at least some of them, knew we were just home from Vietnam and a lot of them jeered us. The term “baby-killers” kept coming up. I remember this woman, probably was about the age of my mother, she spat at two Army troops and myself as we were walking up this corridor there in the airport. After that, I unpinned the ribbons off my uniform and flew the rest of the way home without them. I never put them back on. They stayed buried in a dresser drawer for years and years. I hear pretty much the same stories echoed by veteran and veteran that I’ve talked to. It seems like almost down to the man we met with this type of jeering and insults when we got back in the states or at some time after we had gotten back home. We had all grown up seeing those newsreels of our World War II daddies and uncles coming home to the grand parades and being the toast of the nation, and well they should have been. They deserved that. They should have been greeted like that. These old guys had literally saved the world. We had grown up seeing our vets treated that way – welcomed home with parades and fanfare – and them what we were met with was a pretty bitter pill to swallow. We weren’t asking for anything special. We didn’t expect anything for what we’d done, though we sure weren’t expecting to be treated so poorly by our own countrymen. We were proud to have done our duty and we did it well. We did it real well. That war wasn’t lost by the troops who fought there. It was lost through politics. Vietnam is the only war that we’ve ever lost and the GI’s that fought there have been forced to bear the burden of blame for that loss. For years after that war ended, the Vietnam vets were the dregs of society. People didn’t want to talk about us. We didn’t to talk about the war. We were all pretty much exiled into silence in the years after our return home. We just quietly stuck together. We didn’t talk about the war unless it was to each other. Basically each other was all we had. We had just been boys that were forced to become men by prosecuting a war that we didn’t even understand. Most Americans didn’t even want it. But we served proudly. We did what we were asked to do. We did it well. The troops over there have a fellow motto that went “we are the unwilling working for the unqualified to do the unnecessary for the ungrateful.” That pretty well sums it up in a nutshell for the Vietnam vet.  

Q:        What was it like being in a family after not seeing them for so long?  

A:        Oh, it was very, very strange. It was good, but somehow, speaking just for me personally, somehow that joy was shrouded by – I really don’t know how to explain that. It was strange. It was different. Just a slight sense of alienation. A little bit of I didn’t know who they were anymore, just a bit. And kind of the same way with them. I know I wasn’t the person I was when I left, but I just – like I said I can’t give you particulars. It was just very, very strange. A sense of alienation, and I don’t know how to explain that to you. I guess it’s just something you’d have to go through yourself.  

 Q:        Looking back on your tour of duty, how do you feel about it now?

A:        I’ve always said, since I’ve been back from day one, I wouldn’t take a million dollars for the life experiences that I went through over there, but I would never ever do it again.  

Q:        How do you feel about the war on terrorism that our country is facing right now, and if you were called to serve in that war, would you?  

A:        Well, I’m as anti-war as anybody could be, but the fact is war is a necessary evil. The war on terrorism is not optional. That is something that had to be dealt with swiftly and harshly. I think President Bush did a fine job and is doing a fine job of handling that. If, for whatever reason there was some service that I could still provide, yes, I would. I would serve my country in a heartbeat. But I’ll never be duped into another Vietnam again.  

Q:        Do you have any final thoughts for anyone who might hear this tape?  

A:        Maybe just that I’d like to let them know that for the Vietnam veteran that that war is never over. The nightmares may get further apart or less graphic. The bad memories might grow a bit more dim with time, but their war is never over. Their lives are scarred forever.  If you happen to know one, run across one, meet one, give them a thumbs up. Tell them “thank you,” “God bless you,” because, trust me, it would mean a lot.