HOMETOWN HEROES HOMETOWN HEROES Heroic Stories from Brave Men and Women by Greg Mclntyre

HOMETOWN HEROES HOMETOWN HEROES Heroic Stories From Brave Men and Women by Greg Mclntyre www.mcelderlaw.com

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Published by Shelby House Publishing Web: www.mcelderlaw.com FRONT COVER IMAGE BIO

he image on the front cover of this book is my Tgrandfather, J.C. Horne, in all his military splendor. Even today, reading the interview I did with him gives me chills. I loved that man with all my heart, he was my buddy. It’s hard for me to accept that the gentle man I knew and loved as my grandfather experienced the atrocities mentioned in his story. I can only imagine what four days R&R in Paris was like when you’d been fighting on the front lines during World War Two in Europe. You can read the interview with him in this book.

Without veterans like my grandfather, we may not have a great country to call home. We owe Veterans our freedom. The world would be a much different place than it is today without their sacrifice. It is our duty to take care of them. PREFACE

’m Elder Law Attorney Greg McIntyre of McIntyre Elder Law. My passion is helping seniors protect their assets and legacies. II am also a veteran of the US Navy. I served on the USS Constellation and the USS Nimitz. I use my skills as an attorney to help guide veterans in times of need. This book combines those passions by bringing to you the stories of men and women who fought and served in the United States Armed Services, and also provides valuable information about a benefit that could serve them in return.

This book is called Hometown Heroes because our veterans are exactly that. I spent a lot of time poring over interviews I conducted with veterans over the last couple of years, and that’s where the book started. But why write Hometown Heroes?

Let me explain the reasons this became so important to me.

1. I believe veterans need to be celebrated. There are heroes living next door to you right now. Whether serving in the military during war or peace time, their efforts made us safe and kept us free. We should celebrate our veterans, those men and women who have fought for and served our country.

2. I believe the stories in this book will help veterans feel the camaraderie they experienced while in service. I saw myself in some of these stories and I know there are others who share similar experiences. That’s important, it’s building community.

3. I wanted to inform people about the Veterans Aid and Attendance pension benefit. There is a chapter in the book dedicated to it. It is a little known benefit with huge significance and reward for a veteran’s service.

Veteran’s Aid and Attendance benefits are available to a veteran, the spouse of a veteran, or spouse of a deceased veteran. It can add a significant amount of income just when it is most needed, when someone is suffering from health issues and needs extra income, perhaps to pay for in-home, assisted living, or nursing home care.

Many veterans and their spouses are unaware of the Veterans Aid and Attendance pension benefit because it is not widely advertised.

I’m making it my job to advertise it, talk about it, and make sure all veterans know about it.

I hope you enjoy the stories in this book, and feel the camaraderie you felt while in the military. I also hope you benefit from the information provided. FOREWORD

ake a walk through the streets of any town, large or small, and you will find them there. Will you be able to Trecognize them, probably not? You won’t be able to just look at them and know who they are, but if you will spend some time in their town and get to know the people, they will rise to the forefront.

Who am I talking about? I’m referring to those men and women who, at some time, were willing to put their lives at risk to protect your freedom and mine so that we can live in a country free from the dictates of a monarch or leader who is only concerned with making him or herself rich and controlling the people. I’m referring to our “hometown heroes”, those men and women who were drafted or volunteered to enter our military service to protect the rights and freedoms we have in our great nation, The United States of America.

This book is about some of those heroes. It tells the stories of a few of those men and women from small town America and some of their experiences as they served their country. Many of these heroes did not experience the anguish and terror of combat. Some served in support roles so that those in combat could have the information, equipment and supplies to carry out their missions. But they are all still heroes. All were not deployed to some far-off country, but nonetheless, they served and are still our heroes. You will read about soldiers, marines, sailors, airmen, and coast guardsmen and women who served all over the world. Through their stories you will experience happiness, sadness, loneliness and many other personal feelings, but each one will give you a glimpse into the personality of that hero who was required to leave his or her home to take that place in history as a protector of your and my freedom.

So sit back and begin a journey that will enlighten you and make you proud of those in your town and give you a new sense of what freedom really means. You’ll probably gain a greater sense of appreciation for our flag and our national anthem through these stories of our “Hometown Heroes”.

You will also catch a glimpse of the largest veteran’s service organization in the world, The American Legion, and how it is serving veterans through the many and varied programs which have been established by this organization. Once again, because of the efforts of the Legion, you will see why we refer to our military service veterans as “Hometown Heroes”. Why? Because this organization is operated through the volunteer efforts of these same heroes who have come home to serve other veterans, youth and the community. These are truly “Hometown Heroes” who deserve our utmost respect and appreciation.

Evan Thompson American Legion Post 82 Commander TOC

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Jim ‘The Tarheel Terror’ Hardin ______11 J. C. Horne ______31 Roland Stewart ______37 J.D. and Virginia Thomas ______53 Earl Mace ______67 Dr Frank Sincox ______77 The Schenk Brothers ______95 Michael Carpenter, Marine, Barry Carpenter, Air Force _ _115 David Rose ______125 Bob Cabiness ______137 Gene Ramsey ______147 Ray Kale ______157 Bill Hardin, Marine & Larry Gamble, Navy ______173 Roger Wuest ______185 Tom Haines ______191 Evan Thompson ______205 Ludy Marvin Wilkie ______219 Jim Quinlan ______233 Martha Bridges ______243 Martin CJ Mongiello ______253 Arthur ‘Art’ Gordon ______263 Rit Varriale ______275 Greg McIntyre ______295 Veterans Benefits ______303 About The Author ______315

Greg Mclntyre

Story 1

JIM ‘The Tarheel Terror’ HARDIN World War II & Korean War Fighter Pilot

I have known Jim Hardin my entire life. Jim is a World War II fighter pilot and was a fighter pilot in the Korean war.

Were you originally from Shelby? I was born and raised in Grover, North Carolina. As a kid, I I plowed and tended to hogs and cows and everything like that. My dad was a rural mail carrier. He had all kinds of fowl, ducks, geese; I took care of all those. Jim in Uniform taken after That’s what you did out there in graduation from flying school the country. I didn’t enjoy it then, as 2nd Lt. plowing.

What do you think it did for you? Responsibility? Maybe, I guess. My dad started carrying mail with a horse and buggy, and the first thing I recall was sitting in the open car he carried mail in when he could. I remember seeing an auto-gyro coming overhead when I was just a little thing sitting in that seat.

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What’s an auto-gyro, is it a helicopter? Kind of like one but it’s pulled by a prop in front and has a rotor on top to give it lift. You don’t see them around anymore, but that was when I realized I wanted to fly. When the war came along, I was at Mars Hill College. I remember where I was on D-day. I was sitting in the Brown dormitory, and at lunch time they came on the radio with the news that Hawaii had been attacked.

The F-86 Jim flew on 100 combat missions in Korea over Seoul out of Kimpo International Airport (now Gimpo International Airport) in Seoul. His squadron flew daytime “air superiority”, protecting fighters on the ground along the Yellow River from Russian and Chinese MIG 15’s flying at higher altitudes.

It feels like it happened 75 years ago yesterday? Yeah. The school at Mars Hill started a program for civilian pilot training, I was in my second year. They were conducting that program over at Asheville Hendersonville airport. It’s no longer an airport now.

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What were you flying? We were flying Cubs. You don’t go real far or real fast. I enjoyed that program. One of the requirements when you completed that program, you had to sign up for the Army, Navy or Marine Corps. When I finished, I had a friend who wanted me to go into the Navy with him, and I said, “Listen, I have enough trouble finding an airfield if it’s where I left it when I took off.” So, he said, “Okay, let’s go to the Marine Corps.” “No, I’m going into the Army Air Corps.”

I signed up and went and took my physical in Asheville. When I finished and left Mars Hill, I went home and waited for them to call me to go into the Aviation Cadet Program in San Antonio. I got a telegraph in May from the Army Air Corps, telling me to travel to San Antonio, and go to Kelly Field into the cadet program. I took a flight physical there, which was more strenuous than the first one. So, I finished my military training at Kelly Field.

You had to be an officer, right? No, I was a private when I was at Kelly Field but when we were appointed as aviation cadets, it was the same rank and pay as a Staff Sergeant. When I finished, they sent a group of us over to Randolph Field, which is on the north side of San Antonio, to go through a special program that Hap Arnold, who was the head of the Army Air Corps had started. Normally you went through preflight, which was the ground part of it, then you went to primary flight training, then to basic flying training, and then to advanced flying training. That was the program you had to complete for flying training. The program Hap Arnold started was, you skipped primary and went directly to basic pilot training.

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I don’t know if that was good or bad. Well, we only had one cadet killed during training, and that was a night flight when he collided with another cadet. I graduated from pilot training from there. We did get a few hours in primary planes which were PT19’s. I didn’t get more than 3 or 4 rides in that. The rest of it was in PT 13’s. I flew PT13’s a little, and PT 14’s, and as I got close to the end of my training, they brought in some AT6’s. I got about 10 to 15 hours in AT6’s. I graduated Dec 13, 1942, and was commissioned on that day as 2nd Lieutenant. I was 19 years old.

Jim in flight suit with survival kit including parachute and Mae West

They shipped all of us new Lieutenant pilots out to various assignments, and I was assigned to Lake Charles, Louisiana, as a flying instructor. The Army Air Corps needed a lot of pilots at that time, that’s why they had these rushed programs. There were 10 of us that went to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and I was

14 Greg Mclntyre there until December or January, 1943. They opened a new base in Victoria, Texas, which they had just built. The whole training unit was transferred there. This was an advanced flying school, we flew AT6’s. There was also another advanced flying school the other side of Victoria called Foster Field. They also flew AT6’s. We were assigned, as I remember, 5 trainees. Each instructor would carry them all the way through their training.

When I first got there, you were taken through all phases of that training. This included formation flying and gunnery training. The T6 had one gun in the nose which fired through the propeller.

When you say, it fired through the propeller, what do you mean? The gun was behind the propeller up near the cockpit, so it fired through the prop. That’s the way they did it in World War II. They had to be timed just right so it didn’t hit the prop.

They had to have some kind of mechanism that knew when the prop was in front of the gun and couldn’t fire. Yeah. Later, they got around that by putting the guns in the wings.

So, that’s what you taught them, how not to shoot their own propellers off. We hoped the armament people had that all fixed. We didn’t worry about that. We would go down to Matagorda Island, which was just off the Texas coast in the Gulf of Mexico for our training. We would take our students down there for gunnery training.

I stayed there as an instructor, and then they started a special training unit there at Aloe Army Airfield, I was assigned there. They started a section that just instructed instrument flying

15 HOMETOWN HEROES training. I went to an instrument instructors school in Bryan, Texas, and I was assigned to that unit. I was there until May 1944.

They took some instructors from there and sent them out to go to combat. I went to Tallahassee, Florida, and was farmed out to some base in the lower part of Georgia. While I was there, we got some P40’s in, and I managed to get a few flights in P40’s because I wanted to fly fighters. Then they shipped me down to some place in Georgia and they had some P47’s.

Is that the Mustang? No, the Mustang was the P51. When I first learned I was going to fly a P47, I walked up to that thing, it was the biggest thing I had ever seen for a fighter. It was a lot bigger than the P51. It had a radial engine which meant the engine had the cylinders around it.

Why would you want a big fighter? What’s better or worse? Well, if you fly bombers, you fly straight and level and all that. I liked to do air acrobatics and fly upside down, and you could do it in a fighter. With an AT6 you could do anything, it spins and rolls.

Could you do that in a P47? Oh yeah, and it had a 2000 horse power engine. So, after I finished that school, I was shipped out to New Jersey to go overseas, and we left on a ship from some harbor up there across from New York City. I rode a ship over with a whole lot of pilots and others. It took us about 10 days to get over there because they went various routes on account of submarines. We were in a convoy.

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Jim beside his plane, a P47 nicknamed the “Tarheel Terror”, in Europe in WWII, 53rd Fighter Squadron, 36th Fighter Group in France then Germany dive bombing and strafing and provided escort missions protecting B26 and A20 bombers.

We landed in Blackpool, England, and I went from there to an overseas combat training unit before we went into combat. That was at Atcham, England. I was there flying P47’s, and I was there on D-Day, training. In the briefing room that morning, the briefer said, whatever you do, do not go near the English coast today. I had an instructor who had been in combat, and he had a flight of 4, himself and 3 students. We took off, and the minute we got the wheels up in the wheel wells, he headed straight for the English Channel. We were up probably 3 to 5000 feet and I never saw as many aircraft in my life. The sky was covered with airplanes. We were above most of them. When we got near the coast, we didn’t go over the English Channel but we could see the ships. It looked like you could step from one ship to another there were so many of them.

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As we completed our training, they asked us if we had a special unit we wanted to go to. I always wanted to fly a P51, so I told them I wanted to go to a P51 unit. At that time, they had the 8th and 9th Air Force flying out of England. The 9th Air Force had two P51 units, and they shipped me to the 363rd fighter group, the 380th fighter squadron.

Where was that in England? I don’t remember, it was somewhere between London and France. They had the buzz bomb then, which they called the V1.

V1 rocket? It wasn’t a rocket, it had a pulse jet engine in it. They had 3 routes those buzz bombs were taking toward London. We were under the middle route, so we would hold our breath when the buzz bombs came over until they got past us, and we would cheer on the anti-aircraft gunners because we didn’t want one of those landing on us. A month after I joined that unit, we moved to Cherbourg, France. I flew my first combat from Cherbourg in a P51. We moved one time after that.

We were supporting the 9th Air Force, who were supporting the ground forces. We didn’t do many escort missions. The only escort missions I flew were escorting the twin engine bombers, like the B25 and B26. They later had other twin engine bombers called A-Twin 6’s, which after the B26 was retired, the A-Twin became B26’s. Those were the only bombers I escorted. I flew 29 combat missions with the 363rd fighter group, the 380th fighter squadron.

At that time, they changed the fighter group to a reconnaissance group. They mounted cameras to take pictures

18 Greg Mclntyre of the Germans. So, I was shipped out again. I went to the 36th fighter group which was flying P47’s.

Jim as a Captain in 1945 beside a P-47.

I have a picture from the end of the war of a P47 that the Germans recovered and were flying. They would go up next to our bombers and direct their fighters next to the bombers. The bombers didn’t realize, they knew it was a P47 but they didn’t know it was German. Anyway, for what we were doing, the P47 was better suited because they could take more punishment than the P51. The P51 had a liquid cooled engine, the P47 had an air cooled engine. Anyway, I joined the 36th fighter group and was assigned to the 58th fighter squadron, and most of our missions were supporting the Army. Part of that time we were supporting General Patton’s unit. We were dive bombing and strafing and some of our bombs were fire bombs. I flew 61 missions with the 36th fighter group, and I was at Castle Germany Air Base when

19 HOMETOWN HEROES the war ended. I stayed there until I could get transportation home which was about a month later.

When the British came in and took over these airfields, they threw a phosphorous grenade into the cockpit of each German plane so they couldn’t be flown.

I was flown back to Paris where I caught a C47 to fly me home. We landed in Iceland, and we landed in Greenland. We ended up somewhere in New England. I was separated there, put on inactive duty. I went in to the reserves.

You came back for the Korean War didn’t you? Yeah, I was inactive for 2 years but I came back in before the Korean War, on active duty. I went to the 363rd fighter group in Roswell, New Mexico. That was the home of the B29 wing, and we were assigned to the bomber unit.

You know of the UFO that landed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, I was there at the base where this thing supposedly landed. Something landed, and to this day I don’t know what it was. Whatever it was, they sent a bunch of people out and picked whatever it was up, brought it back and put it in an aircraft hangar where I was stationed. It was top secret. Nobody could go in there.

I was there about 2 years when the whole fighter group was transferred to Otis Field in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

From there I went to school in Panama City, Florida to aircraft control and warning school, and became an aircraft controller. That was a 10 week school. After I completed that, I was assigned to Orlando, Florida, Orlando Air Base at that time.

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We didn’t even have a radar there, so not long after that I was transferred to Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. I was assigned to the National Airport as a GCI controller. We would pick up aircraft coming in from overseas. If we couldn’t identify them, we would scramble interceptors to identify them. They would get the tail number and type of aircraft. We would intercept them if they were not on the right time, or the right course that they were supposed to be, otherwise we didn’t intercept.

I was up on a hill overlooking the ocean there, near Highlands, New Jersey, and was there until the Korean War started. They came out with an order that anyone who had been flying fighters before becoming a GCI controller could request to be returned to fighters, which I did.

You weren’t married yet? I was married a year after I graduated from flying school in 1943 in Victoria, Texas. I have two sons called Jim and Bill. Jim was born in 1944, while I was on a train going to the port from Florida, and he was born in the Gastonia Hospital. Bill was born in New Jersey, and there’s a funny story about that. When we were stationed in Germany, I had my family with me, he was playing with some of the other little boys in the area. They were telling about where they were born, and Bill told them he was born in New Jersey, and they beat him up. Betty went out to get him and he was crawling up the stairs, and he said, “Mama, don’t tell anyone I’m a Yankee.” We always had a big joke about that.

Anyway, when the Korean War started, I asked to be returned to flying status and they assigned me back to the 36th fighter group, which was at Otis Field, Massachusetts. They had 3 squadrons and one of them was stationed in Westover Air Force

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Base, Massachusetts. I was transferred there. I left from Westover Field to go to Korea. I was up there maybe a year flying F86’s.

What’s an F86? It’s made by North American, it’s a swept wing jet fighter with the intake and radar in the nose.

That’s a cool looking aircraft, I remember you having a model of that aircraft. It was quite a step above from an F80. Back when we were in the Army Air Corps they were P80’s. So, I was at Westover maybe a year flying the F86. They had one F86 unit over in Korea, the 4th fighter unit, but they were sending another fighter unit, the 51st fighter group. I went with a group of F86 pilots and flew our F86’s out to California and loaded them on an aircraft carrier. They flew us out at the same time by commercial.

When I was notified, they called us into a meeting, a pilot’s briefing room, and they said, all pilots who have not been to Korea, go home and pack your bag, you are leaving today. So, I went home and packed my bags. We took our parachutes and escape kits and all that kind of thing with us.

I was stationed in San Diego, new wife, great apartment, and I got to my shop and they told me I was leaving Wednesday, and it was Monday. Over the next several months I was pretty much gone, and then to a six month cruise. They don’t give you a lot of warning. Normally they give you more than a day at least. So, I went home and told Betty to get ready, pack your bags, get the kids ready. They stayed with her parents in Kings Mountain while I was gone. We drove all night long to get back to Kings Mountain.

22 Greg Mclntyre

The next morning, she got up and drove me to Charlotte where I caught a commercial airliner to Oakland, California, across from San Francisco.

They had a Navy base and there was an escort carrier sitting there. It was loaded with F86’s. We got on the carrier and departed a day later. They took us to Japan, which was about a week to get there. We met a group of pilots at Johnson Field, and they were forming the 51st fighter group, and Colonel Harrison Thyng, from Maine, was in the officer’s club. A group of us officers were there and some of us knew him because he had been the commander of the 36th fighter group at Otis Air Force Base. So, we went up to talk to him, and asked if he would request us. So, we went to the 4th fighter group. Colonel Thyng was our commander while I was there at Kimpo Air base. I was at Kimpo the whole time I was in Korea. I was there for a year, and I flew a hundred combat missions in F86’s.

That’s a lot of combat missions. Well, I didn’t get into a fight except one. Our opposites were MiG-15’s built in Russia, and they had a couple of airfields right there on the border with China on the Yellow river. The North Koreans had a base on the south side of the river, but they kept their planes on the north side. We weren’t attacking anything on the north side because we weren’t supposed to go into China.

Most of our missions were flying top cover for F84’s, F80’s, and naval aircraft that were bombing and strafing. My crew chief was awarded the Bronze Star because he kept my airplane in such good shape it flew 100 missions without an abort because of mechanical failure. I did start flying F84’s at Roswell.

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F-84 Fighter Bomber Jim flew prior to being stationed in Korea, where he trained in bombing and strafing. He was commander of his training squadron.

They have fuel tanks on the tips of the wings, is that smart? Well, I had one come loose on the end of the wing when I was over Washington D.C. I was flying with one of the guys in our outfit. We had been down to Florida for the weekend for flying time, and we were going back. His folks lived in Washington D.C. He was doing acrobatics, and I was in the trail. I was following him, and one of the braces that held that tank level on the wing fell off, and the tank fell over. I almost lost control of the airplane when it happened.

But the MiG, I don’t care what anybody tells you, I was flying F86, 80’s and F86E models. They later got F86F’s which were a greatly improved F86 but the ones I was flying could not climb as fast as the MiG-15. It was about the same speed. We could go faster going down in a dive but we couldn’t climb as fast or as high as they went. Usually when we went up there, there would be flights of MiGs up above us, but they wouldn’t come down to fight. If they didn’t come down to fight we couldn’t tangle with

24 Greg Mclntyre them. Those that did come down, quite a few of our pilots shot down a lot of MiGs, but we couldn’t reach them if they stayed above us.

I got into one fight. My boss, he was the wing operations officer, we were flying with the 335th fighter squadron, and he was flying my wing. I was leading the flight. We were paralleling the Yellow River on the south side, and he called out, “Bogies at ten o’clock low,” so I looked down and I didn’t see any enemy airplanes. I kept looking and I still didn’t see anything. In a little bit he called them out again but I still didn’t see them, so I said, “You got it,’ which meant the flight was turned over to him. We went down in a dive and we dove all the way down. Well, he crossed the Yellow River. That’s why I didn’t see them, I wasn’t looking there.

We went down and MiGs were taking off in pairs, and we got down into the middle of that. We couldn’t catch the MiGs, they were out of range, and our leader was shooting at one but he was out of range. I was flying his wing, clearing my tail. I had two MiGs on me and he had two on him. They kept getting closer and closer. We were at full throttle because we were trying to catch the MiGs in front of us. I called them out to him and he said, “Roger,” and just kept shooting. Finally, when they got close enough to open fire on me and him, I called him and said, “I’m breaking to the right,” which meant I was going to make a sharp turn. I broke and headed out to the ocean. I didn’t see my leader anymore.

I went full bore. When those MiGs got close enough that I thought they were going to fire, I’d make a break and do a three hundred and sixty degree turn. I had a g-suit on, and I knew those

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MiG pilots didn’t have g-suits, so I would turn tight enough to that point where I would just start to grey out and then hold that turn, and I would make a three hundred and sixty degree turn and roll out to the ocean again. When I looked back, there was only one MiG behind me. So, I would keep going at full throttle towards the water. When he got close enough that I knew he was fixing to fire and hit me because he kept that close, he wasn’t shooting out of range, I broke with him again, and did the same trick on him. I couldn’t out-climb him because he would catch me anyway, so I made a three sixty and looked behind me, and he was gone. My fuel was low because I was down at low altitude all this time. A jet burns more fuel at low altitude. As you go higher, it burns less fuel. So, I was low on fuel and started to climb it back up to altitude. I was worried about my fuel all the way home, but I made it.

How did your leader do? He got home.

Sounds like he was just interested in getting a kill? Yeah, he was interested in getting a kill. I was interested in not getting killed.

I’m sure that was scary. It was, that’s why I was headed for the water. I was sure he was going to get me. That was the only way I could figure I could get rid of those guys. In the turn, I knew when I started to black out, he would black out. He could have spun in or whatever. I

26 Greg Mclntyre don’t know what happened to him. At the time I didn’t care what happened to him.

It wasn’t cool they gave you an under powered aircraft but they did give you a g-suit. We‘d been flying in g-suits for years but they didn’t have them.

Could you explain for anyone who doesn’t know, what is a g-suit? It has a band around your stomach and your legs, so when you start to pull G’s, it inflates and keeps the blood from going down, and keeps the blood around your head, so you don’t black out.

These are the medals you were awarded for your service. Lieutenant Colonel James M Hardin United States Air Force Awards and Decorations. }} Distinguished Flying Cross }} Air Medal with Thirteen Oak Leaf Clusters }} Air Force Commendation }} Presidential Unit Citation with One Oak Leaf Cluster }} Air Force Outstanding Unit Award }} American Campaign Medal }} European, African, Middle Eastern Campaign medal }} World War Two Victory Medal }} Army of Occupation Medal

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What’s your favorite medal? The Distinguished Flying Cross. General Stirling awarded me the DFC at the Castle.

Why did you get the distinguished flying cross? I got that in World War II for dive bombing a bridge and railroad yards in Germany. I got hit by eighty-eight millimeter flak. It hit my aircraft between the fuselage and the guns on the right wing and knocked part of the wing off. I was in a dive at the time so I was pulling g-forces, and the aircraft started shuddering and stalling going down. I had to release some of the back pressure and pull out more gently so it would stop stalling. I finally got it to climb and went back up and went home.

When I got home, I flew over the tower to get them to see if there was any damage. They couldn’t see any, so, I came around to land. I landed a little fast because I had lost part of my wing. What I didn’t realize was, when the flak hit me, it flattened the right main landing gear tire, and with the brakes and rudder I couldn’t hold it on the runway. It went off the right side of the runway and nosed up. I was looking straight down at the ground. I said to myself, “Oh no, this thing is going to flip over onto its back,” but it twisted a little bit on the nose, then fell back down on the tail and broke it in two behind the cockpit.

You were okay? I was fine. The crew chief brought the aircraft forms up for me to fill it out, you know, if there was anything wrong with the plane and my flying time and so forth. He brought the form to me and I put it on the wing. I was fine until he handed me a pencil and I started to fill it out. I got to shaking so bad I couldn’t fill it out. I handed it to him and said, “I’ll get this later.”

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What other medals do you have? }} National Defense Service Medal }} Korean Service Medal }} Air Force Longevity Award Ribbon }} Armed Forces Reserve Medal }} Small Arms Expert Marksmanship Ribbon }} ROK (Republic of Korea) Presidential Unit Citation }} United Nations Service Medal }} The Republic of Korea War Service Medal When I retired in 1964, I was stationed at Syracuse, New York, I was Air Force Advisor to the Air National Guard. I made Lieutenant Colonel.

Jim, I appreciate everything you and your family have done for this community and for our nation. Thank you.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

Greg Mclntyre

Story 2

J. C. HORNE World War II Veteran

I would like to share with you the interview I did with my grandfather, Papa J, who was a veteran of World War II. His name was J. C. Horne. The initials stood for Jonathan Chivous, but the doctor only wrote J. C. on his birth certificate. I called him Papa J, and everybody knew him as Jay or J. C. He passed away when I was 13 years old. I was extremely close to him.

The interview was on a cassette tape which I converted to digital for posterity.

So, without further ado, here is the transcription of that interview with J. C. Horne, World War Two veteran.

It was December the 7th, 1941, on a Sunday morning. I was sitting, listening to the radio. They broke in saying, Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. I, like most people, didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was. So they finally told me where it was. Like I said, I was only 15 years old. It didn’t really affect me that much, but before I knew it, I was 18 years old. I was 18 on February the 24th, 1944. Two months later, I was in the service.

I Went to Fort Bragg, was inducted and sent to Camp Blanding, Florida. It took 16 weeks of basic training. I went to

31 HOMETOWN HEROES

Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, and on Thanksgiving Day of 1944, I boarded the ship for Europe. We didn’t know where we were going. They didn’t tell us until we got halfway across. We landed in Portsmouth, England, a southern resort equivalent to our Miami, Florida. We stayed there ‘til Christmas. Then we left for Le Havre, France. We went from there to the Battle of the Bulge.

PFC J.C. Horne Infantry 385th CO. M. Machine Gunner 605

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So, we relieved another division, then went to Luxembourg. From then on, we went into the Siegfried Line. At about March, they started letting guys, one at a time in the company, get a pass right off the front lines. You had a choice of Brussels, Paris, or London. I took four days in Paris and had to go right back on the front lines again. At that time, the war was winding down. Still war was going on but by that time it wasn’t that severe. We started taking a lot of prisoners everywhere we went. We knew it wouldn’t be long until the war would be over then, and the war was over a little later, in April. In the meantime, they put us on displaced persons camps, guarding them and looking after them.

We did that for about a month. Then to my disbelief, they said we were going home. We were waiting to go to the Pacific. In the meantime, they dropped an atomic bomb, right before we left to go to the Pacific. Our orders changed, and we got to go home after they dropped the bomb.

I was very, very happy. I got home and was about the happiest person in the world, I guess. I knew a little later I’d be getting a discharge.

Could you tell us about some of your experiences during the war? I was a machine gunner, .30 caliber. The same type they used in World War I. It didn’t fire as fast as the German machine gun, but it was very accurate. You could pinpoint a target by going up a click, down a click, left a click, right a click. You could just about drop something in their pocket.

Every third shell would be a tracer. That’s where you could see it glow, light up, so you could see what you were hitting. It

33 HOMETOWN HEROES just looked like a stream of fire with every third tracer glowing like that. And that’s what we did mostly.

The infantry went right ahead of us, and we sat down where we could give them covering fire and shoot over their heads. It was like we were on a hill and they were going down in the valley. They’d take towns and we’d give them covering fire.

One person would carry the tripod and one the ammo. You strapped it onto your back with a board with straps on it. Two cases of ammo were on that. The other person carried the machine gun. When we had to mount the gun, we sat our parts down and we mounted them so it would be ready to fire in a matter of seconds. So that’s what I did.

In the meantime, machine guns would always catch a lot of mortar fire and artillery fire. My helmet looked like it’d been hit with a hammer all over it. We dug down and shrapnel hit your helmet, you know, where if you hadn’t ducked down, it might have wiped you out. See, the blast went up then you hit the ground. If it doesn’t hit right on you, you’re all right. You had the 88’s coming in and you could hear that screaming sound. You got to where you could tell exactly where they were going. If it got to a certain level and started fading away, you were okay. If it got louder and louder and started screaming, you knew it was coming close, you hit the ground. Until it hit the ground, you stayed there. Sometimes it knocked tops of trees out and everything all around you.

Could you tell us about your foxholes and where you stayed during that time?

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Well, we had to dig the gun in every time, and especially at night we’d have one person on the gun. The squad had one on the gun all the time and the rest of us slept. After you spent two hours on the gun, you’d go wake the next man. He’d spend two hours, and he’d wake the next person up. By the time that comes around, it’s your turn again. Every night, when you would be on the gun watching for something, seemed like about every tree in the distance would move. You’d think it might be somebody. You’d be watching that tree, and it seemed like it moved.

Near the end of the war, when we knew it was about over, it wasn’t over but we had met hundreds of German troops, with their commanding officer in front, walking right toward us to give up. We’d just motion them back to the rear. We didn’t have time to fool with them.

Most of the time, the commander would be a general or something. They didn’t want to be captured by the Russians.

What would the Russians have done to them? They treated them very, very mean for the simple reason, the Germans treated them that way. So they were very afraid of the Russians. They knew they’d take their anger out on them. *** END OF INTERVIEW ***

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

Greg Mclntyre

Story 3

ROLAND STEWART Roland Stewart is a Veteran of the US Air Force.

Recent photo of Roland Stewart

RS: I have had a very interesting military life. I was in the Pacific for about three years. I flew all over the Pacific. I spent a month and a half on Midway Island, a week on Guam, Kwajalein, Wake Island, and many others.

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What year did you go into the military? RS: 1952.

That was after World War II and during the Korean conflict. RS: There was an awful lot of World War II that I encountered while in the Pacific.

So, even though the history books say the war ended on a specific date, it didn’t really end on that date? Was that because of reconstruction? RS: There were a lot of people in the Pacific that were involved in the war. You asked them questions and the whole thing would come back to them.

Elaine (Roland’s daughter): He was under age when he went into the military.

Do you think there are some young people out there who might benefit from hearing your story? RS: It all depends on the individual. Some people get more when listening to something they’re not familiar with. My life has been exciting. I enlisted in the Air Force. I wanted to go in the Marines, but my mother wouldn’t sign. I was seventeen.

Why did you want to go in on the heels of World War II? RS: Well, my mother worked in a cotton mill in Gaston County. I have two sisters, and my father had left my mother. He was gone for thirty two years. I said I would never come back to this part of the country simply because of the cotton mills. I’d take my mother lunch but I could not stand to be in the cotton mill with all the cotton flying around. Going in the military was

38 Greg Mclntyre my escape. I went on flying status two years after being in the service. I was on flying assignments the rest of the time I was in. On Hawaii I was on Air-vac and flew into Clark Air Force Base on Manilla and also Japan.

Recent photo of Roland in his Air Force jacket.

Where were you in Japan? RS: I was a Medical Technologist on the Southern Island of Kyushu. I was in charge of the clinical laboratory, which meant I took care of whatever the doctors needed. They would write me a note and I would see it got done.

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So your job in the military was a Medical Technologist? RS: Actually, I went in the Flight Surgeon’s office and took care of flying people for two years. Then from there I went to Newfoundland. That was a nice place. You would see all the icebergs floating down and sometimes you would see polar bears on the icebergs.

Seriously? RS: Oh yeah. I was home wherever I was at because I was allowed to take my family wherever I went. When I first flew in to Newfoundland, the airport was about ten miles from the hospital where I worked. You went down white corridors. The snow was about two feet from the top of the telephone wires. When you got to a crossroad, you would look down another white corridor and another white corridor.

So they would cut out corridors through the snow for people to walk? RS: Yeah, but with the highways, they would scrape it down and either truck it out, or blow it off to the sides of the streets. If they blew it off, it would just get higher and higher. We lived in St John’s, Newfoundland, and I was at Pepperrell Air Force Base. The paper boy would have to walk across my car to bring the paper to the house, the snow was just that deep. There were times I couldn’t even drive my car. We were maybe a quarter or half a mile from the air base at St John’s and I just didn’t want to get out on the road, so I’d walk. There was a lake out in front of the air base and I would walk straight across the lake. There were times when I wanted to fish, so I’d put up a tent on the lake itself. I’d take a saw and cut down through the ice and make a

40 Greg Mclntyre hole and go fishing. I would have a fire in the tent, eat and really enjoy myself. I enjoyed my whole career.

Actually, I was at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii and went to Waikiki so much it’s sickening. I flew air-vac from Hickam. When I was on Midway Island, planes would come in from Japan on their way to Hickam, and myself and a nurse would take care of the patients while the crew went to get something to eat. Most of the patients were litter patients. We had what was called a striker frame where the patient was basically paralyzed. When we flew air-vac, about half of our patients were litter patients, and every once in a while we had someone who was on a striker frame.

Roland, 2nd from left working in the laboratory in Japan where he drew blood from patients.

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So you were flying around taking care of the medical needs of military personnel? RS: We would fly patients from the far east back to Travis Air Force Base in California. My whole career was dealing with patients.

So you had medical training? RS: Yeah, I went to Gunter Air Force Base. They had the medical training there. I also went to Washington DC. They had a couple of places for medical training. I wasn’t going to stay in the service, I intended to go in and come back out, but because of what I saw, they trained you and sent you to places most people never get to visit, and I really enjoyed that.

That’s not bad for a boy from Gaston County. Now you sent us pictures of aircraft carriers. Did you fly to and land on aircraft carriers? RS: Well, every once in a while it was possible. It wasn’t my primary duty but I have worked on aircraft carriers, battleships and submarines.

How did you end up on battleships and submarines when you’re a pilot? RS: Well, I wasn’t a pilot, I was a medic.

So you were air-cleared, and did flight checkups for pilots, and were fortunate enough that your family could come and live with you. Was your daughter traveling with you during that time? Elaine: I got to travel the entire time, right through high school, in the service.

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RS: She went to Japan with us for three years.

The Stewarts became friends with Taiho Koki, 3rd from right and his family while stationed at Itazuke AFB (now Fukuoka International Airport) in Fukuoka, Japan on the Island of Kyushu from 1966 to 1969. Roland taught Taiho’s children to speak English. He and his family often attended the Sumo wrestling matches. Taiho became what is called a Yokozune, the highest rank in Sumo, in 1961 at the age of 21. He still holds the record for the 2nd most career championships in the world.

Do you or did you speak Japanese? Elaine: I could say, how much is this, how are you, where’s the bathroom, good morning. We taught English to the Japanese, that was part of what we did. You were talking about the aircraft carriers, when we left Japan it was monsoon season. The aircraft that was supposed to fly us from Atsugi Air Force Base to the mainland did not arrive, so, they took us on an aircraft carrier

43 HOMETOWN HEROES where we sat on the sides of the plane. The first thing I remember him telling us is there’s no bathrooms. They had a patient who was a liver patient with IV poles, and we sat in canvas seats. The back of the plane would let down and you would walk up. They drove cars on and off them. But it wasn’t the norm to carry your family.

It sounds like it was good and an interesting way to live to have your family with you. RS: Yeah, that kind of kept me in service because there were places I could go to that otherwise I couldn’t go. That’s why we were able to spend so much time in Japan. I used to teach English in the Mitsubishi company and got to learn Japanese by doing it. They were very good. They would occasionally come out to the airbase.

Did you get extra pay for that? RS: Oh yeah.

Elaine: He played Santa Claus for a Japanese worker. There’s a picture of Taiho who was the sumo champion. At that time he was in the Guinness Book of World Records. We watched him wrestle.

RS: I got to go to a lot of the matches they had.

Sumo wrestling is big in Japan. RS: It’s the primary entertainment.

Elaine: We also went out to Hiroshima, where the bomb was dropped. They still had charred people in glass, preserved.

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I read that more people died in the United States from testing of nuclear bombs, approximately six-hundred and fifty thousand (650,000) than from both bombs dropped on Japan. I have been to Japan, I was based at Yokosuka Naval base and I’ve been to Tokyo. RS: Did you climb Tokyo Tower?

I did not climb Tokyo Tower, but I would like to climb Mount Fuji. RS: Mount Fuji is an exciting place to climb. I’ve climbed Mount Fuji, and there’s another volcanic peak on the southern islands, I forgotten what it’s called.

Roland E. Stewart & his late wife, Katherine E. Stewart . They were high school sweethearts.

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Mount Fuji is like a holy trek for the Japanese. RS: Yes. There’s a lot you have to be careful of because the Japanese have not done everything that should be done for safety.

I was on the southern island at Atsugi Air Force Base, and I would fly up to Tokyo and visit temples and all kinds of stuff. I got to interact with quite a few sumo wrestlers and other people. They were as much interested in me as I was in them. Some of them would come out to my home on the air base at Atsugi.

Elaine: We also hosted young G.I’s who were away from their families at Christmas.

What was your wife’s name? RS: Katherine Elizabeth. Her maiden name was Harrison. We were high school sweethearts.

Elaine: They were married at fifteen or sixteen years old, and then he joined the service.

RS: She went with me wherever I went. Sometimes I would go over to get us a place to live and have her fly over, but if I could, I brought them.

In the photographs we have of you in the service there are some of the medals you were awarded for merit and efficiency. RS: I have had quite a few awards. My youngest daughter has all my medals. I was in charge of most places I went to, and I taught about the laboratory, things most people wouldn’t know.

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Two of the many medals Roland Stewart received. Metal on the left was for Military Merit. Metal on the right was for Efficiency, Honor, & Fidelity.

Elaine: When he came out of the service, he was over at Richland Memorial Chemistry Lab in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s one of the biggest, so his knowledge that he gained coming up through the ranks made him the man of action.

RS: I was in Newfoundland for about two years, Hickam Air Force Base for three years, Japan for three years, Korea.

Elaine: We were in Japan from 1966 to 69 and then came back to Dayton, Ohio and that’s where he retired.

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The pictures you have are great and they bring back so many memories. RS: Absolutely. When my family came back from Hawaii, we came back on a ship. My place was on the bottom of the ship and my wife’s place was on the first floor below the main floor. I would come up to eat breakfast, lunch and supper with her and then go back down. I slept on the top bunk, and I think it was four bunks high. I could reach up to the pipes on the ceiling of the ship to exercise.

Roland E. Stewart & his late wife, Katherine E. Stewart

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I always preferred the top bunk because it was open and there was no one above me. How long were you in the military? RS: I was in for over twenty years.

So that has given you military retirement, healthcare and I’m guessing you probably had a second career when you left the military? RS: I worked in chemistry labs.

Elaine: They were in Springfield, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina.

So after the military you worked in the area you were trained for? RS: Oh yeah.

You probably got paid a lot more though? RS: Absolutely. I think I was above average in what I did because I enjoyed it and I wanted to do it the right way. I had doctors who worked with me and would benefit from my experience. They would come to me about laboratory stuff, but they should have known more than me.

Elaine: He also travelled with five kids.

Did you tend to stick with military families or make friends in the communities? Elaine: Even to this day we are in touch with military families. In Japan we had Japanese friends who would come over. We were part of the Japanese American society where we would go to their schools and they would come to ours.

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RS: On the southern island, I had some very close friends who were Japanese. There were places on the island where I would take the kids. I’d get a boat, a raft from the military and take them out. They would dive out of the boat and swim back to the beach.

Elaine: He made a point to educate us when we traveled to different places that were significant to the country and culture, which I thought was good. When traveling, before we flew out, we drove from North Carolina to California in a station wagon, and he would stop at places, such as Carlsbad Caverns.

Five kids is a lot, but it sounds like you enjoy being a dad? RS: Yes, I enjoy being with my family. I tried doing what I could for them.

Elaine: He was also a missionary to Romania and Africa.

RS: Actually, Elaine was a missionary in Africa and I went to Liberia many years ago. I learned an awful lot about other countries and cultures.

Yes, I love traveling. But, just traveling for a vacation, you don’t get to experience what the people and the culture are really like. I like to go to a place and live there to experience it. RS: When I was living on the southern island of Japan, I had to get a train out from Fukuoka to where I lived at Atsugi. There was a demonstration outside the train station on the streets. They were demonstrating about Americans, ‘Americans go home’ and things like that. At that time, they didn’t realize what America had done for Japan. When I was coming back out of the station, six

50 Greg Mclntyre or so Japanese had surrounded me and walked me away from where the people were demonstrating.

They essentially gave you an escort. This was only a few years after the war so there were some Japanese who did not want Americans there. Those were tough issues. We occupied Japan after all. There was bound to be some resentment. RS: The people I taught English at Mitsubishi, there were about twenty or thirty of them, they would buy me things, and take me out to eat. I enjoyed being there but when it was time to come home, I was ready to go. I was very fortunate to have been in all those places.

Well, I really appreciate your service. I always think the world would be a better place if younger people took the opportunity to join the military. It expanded my world by getting me out of my home town and gave me a new perspective of the world. It allows you to travel, get an education and many of the jobs in the military world are applicable in the civilian world.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

Greg Mclntyre

Story 4

JD AND VIRGINIA THOMAS Married in the Military

This story is about JD and Virginia Thomas and is a love story. Did you know each other when you went into the military? JD: No, I’m from Georgia, she’s from Connecticut.

How did a country boy from Georgia, or you might have been a city boy? VT: No, tell him.

JD: No, I’m from the back woods.

So, why did you both go in the military? VT: I had five uncles in World War II and I was down in Hartford. The recruiters were around, so I went in and got some information about the Air Force. I was just thrilled. I had two years of college at that time. I signed up and went down to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. It was a completely different part of the country, so it was interesting.

I’ll bet San Antonio was a little different from Connecticut. VT: Yes, they had people dressed up in Mexican costumes going down the river playing songs. It was a wonderful place

53 HOMETOWN HEROES because you hardly ever had to leave, as there were movie theaters and a hospital there.

I did a thirteen week basic because it was patterned after the Army. By the end of basic I was getting pretty sick of trying to be perfect all the time, you know, everything had to be neat. Then I was sent to a base called Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado. I worked all the time in an education office doing GE and CLEP Testing, helping people become officers and all that. He (JD) came to the education office to have some things done. I didn’t know him then until I met him on the police gate when I was going out. On the way back, they would ask to see our ID cards so they knew your name, and they were ready to have a little conversation with you. Way to get acquainted.

What year did you go in the military? VT: 1954.

Was it common for women to go in the military then? VT: Yes. We were in a college right there. Women Commanders, First Sergeants, we were really protected from what happens these days. Everyone seemed to be treated pretty well there, the girls and the men. It was a different era. It’s kind of sad what goes on now. They interviewed me and said, “What do you think about going into combat?” I said, “I’m not so much worried about the enemy, I’m worried about my own troops.”

So, you met JD when he came in for education? VT: I did, but he was just one of the people coming in. I really got to know him when he was an air policeman at the gate. The base had a cafeteria which was where most of the enlisted men went to get coffee.

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I want to know the details of how you both met. So, JD, it looks like I will have to come to you to get the whole story behind this. Why did you go in the military? JD: I grew up in Georgia where the Appalachian Trail starts in Haven. There was nothing down there but a cotton field, there was no work. I was born and raised there until I was about ten or eleven, when we moved away to South Carolina. I went in the Army National Guard there in 1953 with my cousin.

VT: His cousin was fifteen years older.

JD: I was in the 51st Infantry Division, 51st Signal Corp. I took boot camp at Fort McClellan, Alabama, and then we moved again to Belmont, North Carolina. A friend of mine came home from the Air Force and I asked him, “Can you get me in the Air Force,“ and he said, “Yeah.” So, we went to Charlotte and he swore that I was seventeen, and swore that he was my guardian. I boarded that plane and went to San Antonio, Texas.

VT: He never went back.

JD: I went to San Antonio and from there to Lowry Air Force Base as an Air Policeman. I did the flag detail, raising the flag, lowering the flag, running security and I worked my way up. They put me in charge of the arsenal, the base defense weapons, so when someone brought weapons on base they would check them in to me and check them out. The ammunition would have to be through me also. I worked mostly for a Colonel on the base. He would handle all the military funerals for the state of Colorado. In 1959 the Commander called me in and said, “You’re going to meet some VIPs out at a funeral, so just do your job and get out

55 HOMETOWN HEROES of there.” I came to find out the VIPs were some of the astronauts Kennedy introduced.

I just watched ‘The Right Stuff’ again last week. JD: There was Gus Grissom, Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, Gordon Cooper, I buried his father, he was a Colonel in the Air Force in Rifle, Colorado. They sent me up there with eighteen men by train because there was so much snow. If you have eighteen men and there’s three bars in the whole town, I knew where to find them. We did a good job up there. It looked like Boot Hill. I buried thirty-six troops in the state of Colorado. I enjoyed my time in the service. It was a good education for me and a good learning experience. I only came home once or twice in the whole eight years. I got the Air Force Commendation Medal for being on the funeral detail and setting it up, handling it and making sure it went off all right.

That’s a lot of salad over there? JD: These aren’t all of them but I just don’t want to show them all off. Do you know who only wore one ribbon, and I stood honor guard for him? Eisenhower. The Good Conduct Medal is all he wore.

And he probably had a lot more than that? JD: Oh yeah.

VT: Mamie, President Eisenhower’s wife, her family came from Denver.

JD: He used to come out fishing in Colorado. I got out of the Air Force in 1960 and we moved to Connecticut. I went to Barber

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School on the GI Bill. I had to work for somebody for eight years before I could get my own shop. I owned my own shop in 1967.

At that time, you had to work for another barber for eight years before you could own your own shop? JD: Well you could own it but you couldn’t run it.

VT: It was the old European apprenticeship system. Apprentice, journeyman and then a master barber.

Law used to be an apprenticeship profession as well. JD: That’s the way the barber pole got started. What the barber pole represented was the blue is for the veins, red for the blood and white is for the bandage they used when they did bloodletting. They’d pull teeth and everything. When I would go to the doctor I would tell them, we gave up your trade.

Anyway, I got back to Connecticut and opened my own business in 1967 and ran it for a couple of years, then sold it and came down to North Carolina, but didn’t like it so we turned around and moved back two years later.

VT: We came down in 1972 and thought the segregation issue was over but it wasn’t.

JD: I had got on the board of education in Lincolnton. The schools were just like open barracks, no doors on the showers, it just wasn’t suitable for school, so we moved back. I bought my old house back and my old shop back. It cost me a lot of money to make that mistake but I got it out of my system. And here I am again doing the same thing.

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What I miss more than anything down here is my clientele. You can’t be cutting hair for fifty years and not know somebody. You realize when you cut a head of hair, you’ve got to have another one right behind them because one hair cut doesn’t pay a living. You realize how many people you’ve got to know to have a barber business. I started cutting hair in Granby, Connecticut. In the sixties for men it was a dollar and a half, kids were a dollar and quarter. In 2013 in my shop, haircuts were sixteen dollars. I cut most of the military guy’s hair and state cops.

VT: He would come home with some funny stories.

JD: You’ve got to have a good story. Cutting hair and talking, it’s the same thing. You know, a guy comes in to get a haircut, he wants in and out, he’s on his lunch hour. He’s working at Hamilton Standard, or Pratt and Whitney, and he’s got to eat and get back to work in an hour. The best thing you can do in business is, you don’t talk religion, you don’t talk politics, and you don’t talk money. Those three things are no one’s business, how much money you make, which party to belong to, or which church you go to.

But you do talk. I think that is a lost art, small talk, being able to talk to somebody else. VT: We’re against the technical world because we were never in it.

JD: It’s here to stay and let’s just hope it works. Eventually they will have robots doing mine and your job. What are we going to do?

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I see a lack of connection to people, even other business people now. You go into a department store and you’ve got to help yourself. When I was growing up here, I would go into a department store with my mother and there would be multiple people there who knew her and would help her. That’s not the way businesses are set up anymore. JD: Technology runs us in some ways. There’s no longer a family life because of technology. The dishwasher, the TV, the telephone, all these technologies have taken family talk out of the house. The mother and daughter used to wash the dishes and talk.

I still like to do that, wash the dishes and have my kids dry them, and talk with them. JD: Technology is here to stay. Cities used to be the place to shop. It was safe to walk around in the cities. In the sixties when we got out of the service, we shopped in Hartford. What did away with the city was the mall.

Same thing in uptown Shelby, when the mall came about, everybody moved up there. JD: And you know what, they’re now doing away with the mall. Everybody shops on their computers and has it delivered by drone.

VT: When I finished, I got a degree and worked in the schools, but because of the times changing it was very difficult. Like here, the mothers are working and the kids are left alone. There are so many incidences of child abuse or neglect, it’s terrible.

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JD Thomas grilling at the WE STAND event on Veteran’s Day 2017 hosted by McIntyre Elder Law & American Legion Post 82.

60 Greg Mclntyre

There are a ton of problems. I was talking with someone at church about that very issue. The lack of employment in Cleveland County, how to put people back to work and get off drugs. VT: It would be wonderful if they opened up the CCC again.

What’s the CCC? VT: Civilian Conservation Corp.

JD: They built a lot of the state parks and the roads and dams.

VT: It was in the thirties when it started. They had places to stay and were paid and would send money home because it was hard times.

JD: They had these camps and would give whoever was in the CCC five or ten dollars and send the rest home to their spouse. We’re just at the beginning of the technology thing. We’re not always going to use money. A lot of people never see money, it’s always on a card. I never had a credit card, an ATM card, or a debit card. If somebody stole my identity he wouldn’t know how to use it. He’d bring it back. It’s good to be that way. A lot of people buy on impulse with a card and get themselves in trouble.

It’s too easy to overspend, you don’t see the money. I went to the store the other day and got some food, and it came to nineteen dollars and sixty-seven cents, so I handed over a twenty dollar bill and sixty seven cents. The cashier didn’t know what to give me back. If the machine didn’t tell them what to give

61 HOMETOWN HEROES you back they don’t know. They can’t count money. You’ve got to know how to count backwards. The world is moving too fast in some ways.

I wonder how we’ve gotten to a point where many people don’t care about themselves anymore? It might be related to education and jobs. JD: It might be that people are just too busy with all this electronic stuff. You go into any dentist’s office and everyone is sitting around playing on their phones.

VT: His sister is in the hospital here, she’s very ill. Everyone was going up to see her and sitting in the waiting area on their phones.

JD: No one was talking to each other or seeing what was going on. Their minds were ten thousand miles away.

It is distracting. People are not living in the moment when they’re doing that. JD: More people get killed on the roads because they’re texting on their phones than drunk driving.

Let me just bring you back to the beginning, do you remember meeting Virginia? JD: Yeah, I remember meeting her in the service. She was coming to the gate, Gate Fourteen, and I was checking entries. It was a Nash Rambler fifty-four.

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What’s a Nash? JD: It’s a car, it was a green station wagon.

VT: I was working part-time.

JD: She worked at Chicken Delight. So, she came in and I checked her out, and said, “What are you doing out this late at night?” I took my time checking her out because there was no one around.

I worked three jobs in the service. I worked at a service station and the commissary taking groceries out for people just for tips, then I would go to work at seven in the morning until three o’clock for the military, running the arsenal and checking people in and out. At three I would go down town off base and work at the service station until ten at night. I would close the service station, walk across to the bar and grill and wash dishes until two in the morning. I did that for three years. I was about the only guy on base with money before payday because I never spent any. People knew where to come to get money. They’d come to me because they knew I had money. They’d say, “I need ten dollars. I’m going down town to see the girls.” I always carried checks for the bank on base. I’d say, “Okay, here’s what you’re going to pay me back for the ten, sign it. Two days after payday you come and look for me, I’m not coming to look for you. I’ll cash this check, and the old man will have you in the office if you don’t come and get it.”

VT: If you wrote a bad check back in the service they really dragged you right in.

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So you would take a check back and get a little interest? JD: The banks would do it, why shouldn’t I?

You were the base bank? JD: Yeah, the banks were closed when people wanted to go out. I’ll tell you a good little story about Wells Fargo as we’re talking about banks. They were hauling a big load of money out in the bad country out west in a stage coach, and the wheels were real deep in sand. They were going along pretty good with the shotgun rider and driver, and soon the shotgun rider said to the driver, “You know there’s an Indian behind us,” and the driver said, “How close is he?” The shotgun rider said, “I don’t know,” and the driver said, “Well how tall is he?” “Oh, he’s about knee high.” “Oh he’s about thirty miles back, he’ll never catch us.“ So, they’re going along good until the shotgun rider says, “That Indian is gaining on us,” the driver said, “How tall is he now?” he said, “He’s about waist high,” the driver says, “He’s got one horse, we’ve got six, we’ll outrun him.” So, now they’re making a load of dust. Pretty soon the shotgun rider says again, “You know that Indian is about ready to climb aboard,” the driver says, “Hell shoot him,” and the shotgun rider says, “I can’t shoot him, I’ve known him since he was knee high.”

VT: He should tell you about one of his air policeman friends who noticed one of the girls in the military and you had the car. We were going to meet at the cafeteria, I was with my girlfriend.

JD: He was an air policeman and he set this thing up through his girlfriend. I didn’t know who I was going to meet. I knew she was a female. So, we went up there.

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VT: Yeah, I knew the other air policeman, I had talked to him, so when everyone got in the car, the other air policeman got in the car with my girlfriend and I was stuck with him.

JD: We’ve got four kids now, Eeny, Meany, Miny, and Randy, ain’t gonna be no Moe.

People don’t tell jokes like they used to either. They’re scared to offend somebody. JD: Do you know the best person to tell jokes? A salesperson.

It’s a great icebreaker. JD: A sales guy once told me, he says, “The worst thing you can do when you go in to sell somebody, is to sell to somebody who smokes a pipe.” I said “What do you mean?” He said, “All you do is watch him clean that pipe. He’s not listening to a thing you’re saying. You might as well leave, you’re not going to sell him nothing.”

VT: I grew up on a dairy farm in Connecticut, I was lucky to have that kind of a life. There was a lot of dairy farms there. It was a time where, heavens to Betsy, any woman who smoked and drank was looked upon as someone of ill repute. That’s how it was with my family, so I never got into smoking or drinking. His sister was working in the mills down here and they never used masks or anything. This was what was so unfair; breaks were given only if you were a smoker, so if you wanted a break you smoked to get out.

JD: In the whole of America, if you do things in moderation it won’t hurt your body. You can over drink, you can over smoke, you can over work. You’ve got to know when to say when.

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You two seem to be two of a kind who met in the military and are still together today. JD: I think everyone should go into the military after high school, men and women. Makes no difference if they have brains or no brains, they’ve got jobs for you. They’ll teach you to take orders from someone other than your parents, teach you right and wrong, it’s a good upbringing in the service.

I agree. I grew up by being in the military. It gave me a better foundation to build a life on. JD: I had a sign in my shop which said, “Attention teenagers, now is the time to take action. Leave home and pay your own way while you know it all.”

Getting out of your parent’s house, seeing the world, getting some discipline and making some money, it’s not bad for you. JD: Everybody talks about the good ole days, well, the good ole days are right now.

Live now and take advantage of your opportunities. I want to thank you both very much for your service and for being so entertaining.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Story 5

EARL MACE Veteran of the United States Air Force and National Guard

You were in the National Guard since you were a kid, right? Yes, I joined around 1955. I was eighteen maybe.

What motivated you to join the National Guard? I lived about half a block away from where they met. When I was a kid that was our baseball field, our activity place. It was probably the largest building in Shelby for any kind of gathering. When they marched, the kids in the neighborhood would go set up chairs, and when we were old enough we learned to march with them. We would go down there and march along. They let us stay as long as we wanted.

How long were you in the National Guard? Two years and then I went into the Air Force.

Why did you go in the Air Force? I had two brothers and a brother-in-law in the Air Force so I thought it was my obligation to follow them. There was a lot going on around here at the time; cotton mills and things like that for work, but I was adventurous, so why not see the world.

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I would like to say the reason I joined the Navy is, I’m patriotic, I wanted to serve my country, but it wasn’t just that. My dad was in the Navy and it worked well for him. I wanted to get out of town and see the world and have a different experience and adventure. That was what the Navy allowed me to do. My first thoughts were to join the Navy. The Air Force, the Army and the Navy recruiters were all in the same building, and I went two or three times to see the Naval recruiter but he was never there. Me and my friends always talked to the Air Force recruiter every time we went in there and he finally talked us into joining.

I’ve heard nothing but great things about the Air Force, especially the bases, that they’re top-notch compared to Army, Marines or Navy. I was always at a good place. I started off with basic training at San Antonio, Texas. That’s where everybody goes when joining the Air Force. From there, I went to Cape Cod, Massachusetts which was a very nice place. That was where the girls were. I think there was a movie about it.

There was a movie about all the girls in Cape Cod? Or a song.

And that was where you wanted to be? Well, that was where they sent me. I didn’t know at the time but it turned out good.

So how was Cape Cod? It was great. I loved fishing and different places, so it suited me fine. When I got my orders, it said I would be going to

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Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts and I thought, my lord, what kind of place is that. But I rode the train and Buzzards Bay happened to be the nearest train stop to the base.

How was Air Force boot camp? Nothing to it. I’d been through the National Guard already so I knew how to march. The basics of the military can be hard for a lot of people but there wasn’t anything to it. The whole lot of us got yelled at, of course.

Did you feel you got some benefit out of boot camp? Sure, discipline and respect, mostly.

It gave me some leadership opportunities that I hadn’t had before and some confidence. What did you do in the Air Force when you were stationed at Cape Cod? I was always in transportation: vehicles, heavy equipment stuff like that. I was an operator, driving a bus, or crane and wrecker operator, towing aircraft around.

There’s a million different things you can do in the military. Were you stationed elsewhere? Yes, I was stationed in Cape Cod about a year, and then I was sent to Misawa Air Force Base in northern Japan. It was on the northern tip of the main island.

I’ve not been to Misawa but I did go to Yokosuka which is a Naval base. I would go and head into Tokyo whenever I could. Tokyo was about five hundred miles on the opposite end of the island. The main island is close to six hundred miles long.

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That’s amazing to think how much bigger the United States is to Japan. North Carolina is about five hundred miles long. There’s lots of islands.

Japan was a major force against the allies in world war two, and to be that mighty of an empire considering its size is incredible. What was your impression of the Japanese when you were there? Or how did you like living there? The first year was intriguing but after that I was ready to go home. It was kind of a drag the last year. I got to see a lot of places though. I bought a motorcycle when I was there and a few of us would travel around on motorcycles and see places. We met up with a few women and had some drinks. We could drink beer and smoke cigarettes in Japan. Once we knew a few words of Japanese, we did okay.

I was impressed with Japan. I was there in the late 90’s but I wasn’t there long enough to know the language. If I had been stationed there I imagine I would have. So you were a boy from Shelby, North Carolina, and all of a sudden you found yourself living in Japan for a couple of years, that’s different. Do you think it changed you in any way travelling like that? Probably some.

I think it gave me a different perspective on the world, how big of a place it is. I thought it was good for a boy from Shelby, North Carolina to go around the world. Tokyo was something else. Did you ever make it there? I did. There were five or six of us and we all had motorcycles. We had all heard of a motorcycle race at Mount Fuji which was

70 Greg Mclntyre right out of Tokyo. One of the guys who was a pilot had a pick-up truck, so he put the motorcycles on the truck and he and some of the guys drove that truck to Tokyo and the rest of us flew. I don’t remember making it to Mount Fuji but that was our intention when we went there. One of the guys got in a wreck in downtown Tokyo but his motorcycle wasn’t busted up too bad. The police confiscated it. We found it, got it back and got it running again. Two more got wrecked and so four of us pretty much rode on the back of that pick-up truck with four motorcycles for four hundred or so miles to get back to the base. It was a bit crowded.

What did you think of Tokyo? Massive. It was big, busy and interesting.

I remember riding from the Naval base to Tokyo by train. I knew I was riding from one town to another but looking out the train window, you would never know you left a town. When I first got there, we went to Tokyo and rode the train from Tokyo to the base in Misawa. I never did understand why they didn’t fly us but seeing the countryside was interesting.

I remember a couple of us missed curfew at night coming back on the ship. We had been out in Tokyo in this area called Ripongi, which was an area where you could eat and maybe have a few beers. We were just hanging out and missed the train back because they closed down at a certain time. We had to wait until morning to get back. In the morning, we got on the train and were tired and fell asleep. I woke up as we were at the end of the train ride getting ready to go back to Tokyo. I looked around and there were the ocean and cliffs. We were way off from where we should have been, somewhere on the other side of the island. I said, ‘fellas, I think we screwed up.’

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So we had to ride it back, but I remember how everything was very clean, the people were polite and nice, well dressed and well mannered. I don’t remember Japan being clean in the late 50’s. It was dirty and nasty. Where I was, it was mostly farm country, rice paddies. It was all dirt roads. They were maintained by the people who lived on the road, that was the way they paid their taxes. The government allowed that because they were poor. As a matter of fact, we had Japanese Nationals who worked on base and they were probably paid $20 a month which was a lot of money to them. But I remember the streets were dirty. Only the main streets were maintained. Off the main street it was muddy. It was a small town and nothing compared to Tokyo.

Where did you go when you left Japan? I went to Tacoma, Washington, and somehow or other I was nominated to be a General’s aid. I stayed in Washington about three months and then went to Colorado Springs in Colorado at Ent Air Force Base. It had no flight lines and no airplanes, it was the North American Air Defense Headquarters. In my squadron, we had maybe thirty-five enlisted men and twenty-three Generals. I was kind of a ‘doughboy’ for a couple of Generals.

I worked for General Bell. He was a pilot, and we had another Air Force base about twenty miles away called Peterson Field. He had to fly a certain number of hours to keep his flying status so when he would leave, sometimes for a month, I didn’t have a job, so I got one downtown cooking hamburgers. The owner had four hamburger places, one on each main road going into the city. Hamburgers at that time were fifteen cents. I was there during the Cuban crisis. General Bell was supposed to retire but he was the main person in what was called ‘the war room.’ So,

72 Greg Mclntyre all the U2 planes flying over Cuba taking pictures of the missile sites came back to McCord Air Force Base and they would send the film to a photo lab on base. That was something I respected about President Kennedy, when he said about the missile sites, take them down or we go to war, and they took them down.

I saw the U2 in Japan at Misawa Air Force Base. Colonel Powers had run out of fuel over Russia which wasn’t a hundred miles from where we were and he brought the plane down there. He said he could glide it to Hawaii but they told him no, go to Misawa. That thing could glide a long way. The second it hit the runway they covered it up so no one could see it, but I worked for the base commander Colonel Backus, so I saw it.

I had some other interesting jobs in Japan. One time the Japanese Air Force were going to buy some planes from the United States, so a pilot and his crew were trying out different planes that the US had declared surplus. It was my job to look after them.

So, after you got out did you miss it? Well, while I was still in Colorado I was supposed to get my discharge there after my four years was up, and as I said, the General was supposed to retire also but couldn’t and he said to me, if I can’t get out, you can’t either; I guess I was an involuntary extended. I stayed well over a year while that was going on, so I decided if I’m going to stay in I’m going to get some re-enlistment money. I re-enlisted and got several thousand dollars. When General Bell retired, he asked me where I’d like to be stationed, and I said I’d like to go back to Cape Cod, so that’s what happened. I was right there during the Kennedy days. I

73 HOMETOWN HEROES met a lot of interesting people there, I met pretty much all the Kennedys.

You met the Kennedys? Yes, including President Kennedy.

Did you drive Kennedy around? No, he had the secret service but I did drive a lot of the dignitaries that would travel with him. Pierre Salinger was the press secretary and I sat and talked to him a lot of times. I met a lot of the secret service people who hung out at the Kennedy compound down on the Cape. Many of the Congressmen and Senators when Kennedy would come, lived in that area and they would come in on Air Force One and we would take them to their houses. When they came up, it didn’t matter if it was a weekend or night, you had to work.

Did you ever meet Jackie Kennedy? Not face to face. I was at the hospital with some news people on base when Jackie had the baby that died. I saw them take her out the back of the hospital and put her in an ambulance. They took her from there to Boston, which was over sixty miles because they knew she was having problems with the baby and it wasn’t expected to live.

I don’t remember who it was I was driving around but we went to Ted Kennedy’s church where one of his kids was being christened and all the Kennedys were there including the President. I remember the President came out and I met him again, and then little Caroline and John John, the little boy, they came out and got into a fight on the steps. If I’d had a camera!

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I saw her yesterday on television and I thought about that little fight.

After you got out what did you do? Before I got out, General Bell had told me if I ever needed any help to call him. He was still in Colorado Springs, so after a while I called him and told him my Daddy had just had a heart attack and I would like to get out to help him. He said he would talk to some people. He called me the next day and said I needed a letterhead from the bank where my daddy did his banking, a statement he had had a heart attack, and a letter from the family preacher. I did that when I was on leave and when I went back to Cape Cod, three days later I was discharged.

Do you think your time serving in the military benefitted you? It taught me to take care of myself. You don’t have mom and dad to help you out. If you don’t wash your own clothes you wear them dirty.

I’ve had old timers tell me the world would be a better place if everyone served in the military. I believe that.

I think it pushes people to become independent and grow up. Earl, thank you for hanging out with me, for your service and for talking about your six years active service in the Air Force.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

Greg Mclntyre

Story 6

DR FRANK SINCOX Physician and Flight Surgeon in the US Navy aboard the USS Randolph

You already have a warm spot in my heart because you were in the Navy, and spent time on aircraft carriers. I like to say there is no better uniform out there than dress blues. I like dress whites.

You like the dress whites better? Yes.

You were on the CVS15 USS Randolph, that was a big carrier. I was on the Nimitz and the Constellation. I want to say the Constellation was CVN64, and I think the Nimitz was CVN68. The difference was the Constellation was a diesel, and the Nimitz was a nuclear carrier. The Randolph I’ll bet was a conventional diesel. It is. It’s basically Essex class, left over from World War II.

On the picture of the Randolph you can see more advanced aircraft. They had hydraulic catapults. They can’t handle the weight of new aircraft. They require steam catapults. There’s more energy in steam.

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Dr. Frank Sincox in uniform

Now there is a new catapult system? Yes, there is electromagnetic.

Like a rail gun kind of thing in the new, is it the Reagan class? I’m not sure.

I think they’re going to shift to those. I remember sleeping in a ninety-man berthing on the Constellation and the Nimitz, right below the flight deck essentially. In that front area of the carrier on the hangar deck, one level up in the front, they had the steam catapults going off. You just learned to sleep through it. My sleeping area or berthing compartment had the same thing, it was on the 02 level and all night long you could hear that catapult, CABOOM, and the whole ship shakes. Tremendous amount of energy.

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I don’t ever remember not sleeping because of it though. I just got used to it. Yeah, it’s like living in a town close to the railroad tracks, you get used to it.

And it is like living in a town. You’ve got a ship full of five thousand men, or men and women now, it’s like living in a town. It is.

So, you live in Kings Mountain and practiced your career there? Since leaving the Navy.

You were born in Michigan and moved around with your parents, and you have gone through experiences with different levels of service. I think this shows a great example of how the military can assist you. You may have been a physician without being in the military, but it doesn’t matter where you come from, or what you are doing. The military can assist you as long as you have the drive and the intelligence to do it. You were closely affiliated with the military from a very young age? I was. My dad was in the Navy in World War I. He was on a couple of different ships. I think what veterans have given this country, and people of this country, is not fully appreciated by the young people today. They take it for granted that all these freedoms somehow descended from heaven and weren’t earned.

There are people like me who served and came back, and there are people who served and didn’t come back. We talk about the national debt but there is a debt that everyone is this country owes to veterans as a group. Those who served in combat and those who didn’t serve in combat but at any time could have, it’s

79 HOMETOWN HEROES not like I respect them any less. Anyone who was a store keeper or worked in a warehouse could have been pulled and sent to the front lines at any time. I don’t think there should be a distinction between combat veterans and non-combat veterans. I think organizations like the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and many others need our support. They try and tell people what veterans did for them.

Current picture of Dr. Frank Sincox in uniform

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I agree. When you sign a contract to enlist or be commissioned into our armed services, you are basically signing your life away. You’re saying, do with me what you will, I’m willing to sacrifice my life. In exchange, the military gives you certain benefits. Sometimes this includes healthcare and paying for college. I think one of the biggest benefits is there are so many young people growing up who don’t have good role models or no goal orientation. They’re just drifting around. The military is not for everyone but you learn self-discipline, goal orientation and the satisfaction of a job performed well.

Pictures of the 5 ships Dr. Sincox was on with a cap mounted over that ship. USS Tripoli, USS Juneau, USS Fletcher, USS Antietam, and USS Randolph

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I think another big thing for me is, when you’re a kid going in, you don’t like dealing with things, people don’t, but you learn to. I learned to operate within their system and accomplish goals. That was a big part of it. Some of the things in the military system, such as taking orders, well, if you don’t like it, and you get out and get a job, guess what? You have to take orders there too.

Medals – The medal most important to Dr. Sincox is the Navy Combat Action Medal.

I have my own business and a ton of bosses to contend with. First my wife, my employees, judges, clerks, and systems that I may not always agree with, but I learn to operate within them to be successful. That is one of the advantages of military service; you learn there are some great bosses and great leaders, and there are some that aren’t so great. You learn how to get along with them

82 Greg Mclntyre and do your job. Another benefit of being in the service is goal orientation.

And it’s the same in civilian life. People conduct their lives around habits. Self-discipline is another thing. I had junior ROTC and ROTC.

So, you started off in high school in junior ROTC when the Korean war was going on? You march and you drill, and say why is this important? You learn how to do something with a group of people. I really didn’t like the marching and drilling until I had done it a while, and then it was like, this is how you work as a unit. In the military you have to work as a unit but in civilian life you also have to.

You have to work with people. Some people will say, I couldn’t go into the military. When I hear that I chuckle. I wonder how you conduct yourself with your regular job. Can you perform well for your clients, or employees, or your boss? In the Navy, you stood watches and showed up on your watch ten minutes before duty time. If you’re not on time, you’re in trouble. If you don’t like that, go into civilian life and show up to your job not on time, pretty soon you won’t have a job. There’s not a lot of difference.

After the junior ROTC, you were in the US Navy reserves inactive during your first two years of medical school. You said you went to medical school from 1954 to 1956 at Emory University in Atlanta. In 1956 to 1957 the rules changed and you were allowed to join the US Naval Reserve. One weekend a month, and two weeks in summer.

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And 1957 to 1958 you were active duty? I had a chance to go on active duty and get Ensign’s pay. That helped with my medical school expenses. It also incurred another one year obligation.

You had to pay back the military? Yes.

Injured man Dr. Sincox (picture far left) was treating while transporting to a hospital.

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So, the military paid for your medical school? No. Now they pay for it all. Then they didn’t pay for med school, but I got a monthly check.

The military paid for my undergrad. When I got out I went through the GI Bill and got about a thousand a month. That paid for my mortgage and some groceries. It allowed me to complete my education. The GI Bill has helped a lot of people. None of what I was on was GI Bill. The military is a great opportunity for our young people. Whether you stay in it for a two year reserve, or four years active duty, it can help in civilian life. Sometimes you go in and have a job that has a close connection to a civilian job. Other times there is no connection. If you were on a carrier and you’re loading bombs, well there’s no civilian job like that. There are hazardous material jobs so it can be useful.

It would be like the AO’s (Aviation Ordnanceman), or red shirts. I would walk past the AO stations on my way to breakfast or wherever, and there were the bombs, right beneath where we slept. I never thought about it then, but if one of those had gone up, the whole thing would have. You wind up having so much trust in your fellow shipmate. You feel safe because this guy took fire training and knows how to put out a fire. It is said that in actual combat, the usual fear is not of getting injured or dying. For the average guy in combat, his biggest fear is that he will let his buddy down. There is such a bond in combat and even in practice for combat. There is a pride and a bond that makes you proud that you’ve done that.

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You have had a distinguished career. During the cold war you were on the USS Randolph aircraft carrier which was a sub hunting aircraft carrier. You told me you were patrolling the Atlantic and between Cuba and the North Sea ports of Russia. The Russian subs we were concerned about were the guided missile subs. They had sixteen nuclear weapons, that’s sixteen American cities. Each sub could destroy that. We knew we couldn’t get all of them but the one we got would save sixteen cities. The submarines would come out of the North Sea ports and transect the Atlantic to be near our coast and go down to Cuba to refuel. We could destroy them but we sure wanted to keep track of them. We also kept track of the ships going to Cuba. We would take pictures of them. One time we took a picture of one of them and right on the deck was a missile. Then we knew Russia was sending missiles to Cuba. That was when President Kennedy came in.

USS Randolph within a convoy of ships

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1960’s Navy aviator helmet with oxygen mask

The Cuban Missile Crisis. Yes. From your time at sea, you realize, that ocean is big. You get on a ship and you figure it’s going twenty knots, that’s twenty two miles an hour. You go for a day, that’s four hundred miles. Two days, that’s eight hundred miles. You don’t see another ship, you don’t see anything, just the sea. That’s a big ocean.

They’re a lot faster now. I would think the fastest ship would be a carrier, that’s my guess. Well, some of those new subs are pretty fast too.

I don’t consider those ships though, they sink. Who would get on a ship that sinks. For us, subs weren’t ships, they were targets, but to them we were targets. The submariners say, there are two kinds of ships, submarines and targets.

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I met some of our submariners at a Military extravaganza recently; they had a booth. They told me they were called bubble heads. I didn’t realize that was the nickname. They affectionately call themselves bubble heads. We were like the geeks who worked on the electronic circuitry. It was good experience troubleshooting problems. When you troubleshoot a radar set, there are certain steps you go through like a logarithm. I’m sure how you troubleshoot a problem has helped you through school and in your job.

1940’s aviator helmet

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It helped me troubleshoot skills as well as discipline. I imagine troubleshooting a human being isn’t too far off. Same thing. You say, these are the possibilities, so how am I going to separate which is which? Problem solving is the same whether it’s legal or medical.

It’s just simply problem solving, and you can get really creative even within the discipline of that. You were a Flight Surgeon in the Navy and you told me you were involved in some of the NASA pick- ups, such as John Glenn? Well, he came back to the carrier but I wasn’t directly involved. I was aboard the ship.

If you were aboard the ship you were involved. Well, what happened is, the NASA physicians came up and they sort of took over our sick bay area, our medical area. When John Glenn came aboard, I was all excited and wanted to offer my help as a Navy Flight Surgeon. I said, “What can I do,” and they said, “You can get out of here and leave us alone.” They chased me away, didn’t want anything to do with me.

I only remember one time going to sick bay on the aircraft carrier. I was walking through the hangar bay one evening. It had been a long day, (we worked twelve hour shifts), and there was an F18 Hornet rear wing that I didn’t see. I walked right into it and it split my head open. I have a scar on my head from it. I had to go get a shave and stitched up. Like you said, an aircraft carrier is like a city, and just like in any city there are accidents. If you cut your head, I would be the one who stitches you up.

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I might have had some dental work also. The sick bay aboard ship is just a couple of rooms where you could examine people. There’s an operating room and about twenty beds for sick people, but there is another area of about a hundred beds.

We talk about a carrier fighting wars but if there is volcanic activity, or a hurricane, or typhoon in one of the Pacific islands, you send a carrier down there. They can distill and produce enough fresh water for a town of ten thousand people. They can serve ten thousand meals a day to people and provide hospitalization and care for several hundred people. It’s a war machine but it can be used as an instrument of peace too, so when there is a natural disaster, just send your carriers there. How many other countries do that?

Parachute harness

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Not a lot. There’s not many with that type of capability. Other countries would too but most don’t have aircraft carriers.

The US, Britain, Russia, France and now China have them. It can be used as an instrument of war and has a tremendous destructive capability but can be used as an instrument of peace too.

It also has political capabilities. You can park a carrier in Hong Kong Bay to protect and intimidate. The one that first came out with that was a great president, Teddy Roosevelt. He came out with what he called the Great White Fleet. He painted his ships white so they would stand out. He would send them to foreign ports to say, “Hey, this is the United States Navy, don’t mess with us.” Speak softly and carry a big stick. The white fleet was his big stick, and today our carriers are our big stick for war, but also for peace.

You guys also picked up Gus Grissom right? Yes. John Glenn was supposed to land close to the carrier but he actually landed near a destroyer, the USS Noah. They picked him up and brought him to us because that was where the media was, people such as Walter Cronkite, and the NASA physicians. We picked up Gus Grissom directly. That was an exciting thing to be a part of.

You know how crowded it is aboard ship, but imagine you bring your whole group with you. There’s about five or six thousand men and then you bring in five hundred media and

91 HOMETOWN HEROES press and NASA and everybody else. Everyone gets sandwiched in like sardines in a can.

They would bring people on ship from time to time, movie stars and such people, and the press, and it was crowded. I never felt too crowded when aboard, even though we had two or three berthing. I always managed to get top bunk. Let me tell you another story of peace time. One time I was aboard the carrier in the sick bay and we had to do an inventory of all our surgical instruments. We had a bunch of surgical

Altitude compression flight suit

instruments, but way down in the hold of the ship we had tons more of them, and we had to do an inventory.

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Why? You had to do it periodically. So, I went down there.

Into the bowels of the ship? Yeah.

That always made me nervous the lower I went. There were all these surgical instruments ready to be sterilized. There were forceps used to deliver babies. We didn’t have women aboard ship then. I said, “What in the world is someone thinking, putting all these things aboard ship.” There were boxes there, and I’m thinking, they don’t know what they’re doing. Why would they do this? Well, a couple of months later we were cruising around, and the dictator of the Dominican Republic got shot. They thought there would be a civil war, so we went full speed towards the port. Our job was to evacuate American citizens, and I said, “You know, some of them might be pregnant women.” So the people who provided those instruments weren’t so dumb after all. I was the dumb one, I didn’t think. I thought it was a fighting ship. I never thought it might have a mission of evacuating civilians from a civil war in a foreign country. Things that look like they don’t make sense, may make sense after all.

I’m sure during your career you got an order and you thought that doesn’t make sense, they don’t know what they’re doing, and later you found out that the one who didn’t know was you.

You were called back up for service in the Gulf War as well. Did you go to Iraq?

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We went over and were about twenty miles from the Iraq border. We were in Saudi Arabia which was friendly to us. We flew Cobra helicopters over there. They were basically tank killers. Saddam had tanks but someone had got there before us and most of the tanks were smoldering ruins. That was a war that was over almost before it started.

We faced the possibility of doing an amphibious invasion on the beaches of Kuwait to push Saddam out. We knew the beaches were mined, and from a medical side we were looking at five to ten thousand casualties first day from mines, but it never happened. We didn’t have to invade, so we didn’t get the casualties, but you had to prepare for it. It seems after every war, we just tear down our military and then something happens, and we’re caught unprepared. We need to keep ready, not just stand down.

I agree, we need to be ready. Thank you so much for talking with me and for your years of service to our country.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Story 7

THE SCHENK BROTHERS

The stories we tell about our time in the service can impact the younger generation of today. There’s some history there and some inspiration also. Some of us have good experiences of the military and some of us do not, it goes both ways, but the education and perspective you get from leaving your home town and joining up is often-times more powerful than going to college. I have heard stories about the Schenk brothers, all of whom served in the military. The oldest brother is Gene, and he went in the military first. Gene, how old were you when you joined? Gene: Seventeen.

Did you need a waiver to join? Gene: My parents had to sign.

Your mom is here with us. What’s your name ma’am? Lula S: Lula Lois Rae Schenk.

And you have six boys. Any girls? Lula S: One girl. Three were in Vietnam at the same time.

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So, Gene, what year did you join? Gene: In 1960 I joined the Air Force.

Why did you join the Air Force? Gene: Well, I saw the cotton fields, and the military was a way of getting away from it. I thought it would be a lot better to travel the world.

A lot of the veterans I’ve spoken to and interviewed have said the same thing. They thought it was a better opportunity than hanging around in their home town. I grew up in Shelby, and getting out gave me a much broader perspective of life. I realized the world is a much bigger place than how we think when living in Cleveland County. You’ve told us why you went in the military, can you tell me about your experience of being in the Air Force? Gene: When I went to join up, I wanted to be a Marine. But when I went for my interview, this boy had forgotten his birth certificate and the Marine Sergeant was cussing him up and down. I thought, I don’t need this, so I went to the Air Force recruitment office and the man said, “Young man, you want a coke?” and I said, “Yeah,” then he said, “You smoke?” and I said, “Yeah,” and then he said, “Well, come on in and talk with me for a minute.” I drank my coke, and he asked if I wanted to join the Air Force, and I said, “Yeah,” because they were a lot nicer you know. So, before we did the pledge, we were playing cards and drinking cokes, and then we went to pledge allegiance to the flag, and thought we were going to go back and play cards and drink cokes. Well, the man came in and cussed us out. He told us to get on our feet. No more cokes and no more smokes.

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3 of the brothers in Vietnam

How long were you in the Air Force? Gene: Four years.

And what was your job in the Air Force? Gene: Air Policeman.

Keeping everyone straight on the base. What did you do when you got out? Gene: Little bit of everything.

Do you think your service in the Air Force prepared you for civilian life? Gene: Well, I learned you can’t get mad and do what you want to without consequences. I learned respect for other folks. That’s about it.

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So, respect for others, work hard and there are always consequences for bad actions. Is there anything in particular you remember about your time in the military? Gene: I almost lost my leg in 62. They said it was a staph infection. They were going to cut it off at seven the next morning, but I talked to the commander at the hospital and he said they would try something else to save it. I was in the hospital for three months.

Did you serve overseas at all? Gene: I was based on an Air Force Base in Newfoundland.

How was that? Gene: Cold! Sometimes forty below zero. There were snow drifts along the roads, sometimes eighteen feet high.

That is unreal. Gene: I thought so too.

Were you stationed anywhere else? Gene: I was in Texas for boot camp. After that, the first place I went was Mississippi. That wasn’t good.

Why wasn’t it good? Gene: They had the freedom marches, human rights stuff. We were mostly restricted to base on account of what was going on.

How long were you in Mississippi? Gene: A year and a half.

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From Mississippi you went to Newfoundland. That’s a pretty big change. So, you joined in 1960, and came out in 1964. Can you tell me anything about being an Air Policeman that you liked? Gene: In Newfoundland I worked with the Mounties. I was writing tickets mostly.

I always say, whatever work you find in civilian life, there’s a job for in the military. Thank you for your service Gene. After you, which of your brothers went in the military next? Gene: Charles.

Charles, what area of the military were you in? Charles: The Air Force.

Did you join the Air Force because Gene was in the Air Force, following in his footsteps? Charles: No, I was following mine, but the point is, I worked over time and brought home only forty three dollars, so I had the boys take me to Shelby, and I passed all four tests. The only reason I didn’t want to go in the Navy was because I couldn’t swim.

I remember Navy boot camp, they make you jump off the high dive into a swimming pool to see if you could swim. Charles: I passed by that thing. You see, I knew I couldn’t swim. You join the Army and you get shot at, so I went in the Air Force. All I had to do was direct traffic. At Charles Hall we were two to a room. I told my mother, I’d joined a chain gang without knowing it.

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Where was your basic training? Charles: San Antonio, Texas. I went to the Air Police Academy and graduated from there. We rented a sixty-five Mustang. We would ride that baby.

Where did you go? You went to Mexico? What was there to do in Mexico? Charles: Anything we wanted to do.

As long as you can say it in front of your mother, right? Charles: Those Mexicans ain’t tall, and I’m not tall.

Did you feel taller down there? Charles: Oh yeah, compared to them, but they carry those switch blades and knives. That Mustang’s still over there somewhere.

You left the Mustang over there? Did you smuggle yourself back across the border? Charles: All five of us, and we were just running.

You ran over the Rio Grand or something? Charles: Yeah, we just ran through the water and jumped past those ducks and along come the Air Force right down the line. We hopped on a bus, and you want to talk about sitting at the back of the bus, each of us sitting in the back seat. We didn’t stop at the front, we went to the back. They closed the door and off we went.

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But the Air Force took care of you? Charles: We got back to the base, but I had fun messing up. The other part I didn’t like was the Vietnam War. They asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to go to Vietnam. I said, you’re crazy, I’m going home to see my Momma.

Well Charles, thank you for your service.

So, who went in the military next? Donald: That would be me.

A Vietnam veteran as your hat says. Donald Schenk. Donald: Yep, that would be me. I started school in ‘54, the same year my uncle was drafted into the Army, and I always said I was going to go in the Army. Twelve years later I joined the Air Force. He was drafted on the 16th of June and I ended up joining on the 16th of June 1966. My reason for going was to get away from the farm. I became a Security Policeman. I went for basic training, and then went to McCoy Air Force Base in Florida. Then I went to Vietnam. They had to medivac me out. I wasn’t hurt or anything, I got sick. I was at Charleston for a little over a month and then went to Andrews Air Force Base, where I was in the Security Police.

Is that the same as the Air Police? Donald: They changed it. When I first went in it was Air Police, then they changed it to Security Police. All I had to do in Florida was look out and see the heat waves. You stood there waiting for the shade. Anyway, I volunteered to go to Vietnam to get away from Florida.

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You volunteered to go to Vietnam? Why would you do that? Donald: I just wanted to get away from the farm. Not only that but even when I left here, things were segregated, and when I got to Florida it was the first time I had discrimination hit me directly. I was held back from promotion, and there was stuff done directly to me. It was the first time I had experienced that. I volunteered to go to Vietnam to get away from it. I put in for Thailand and Guam I think it was.

Now, let me ask you a question. You are an African American family, you’re in the military in the sixties, talk about civil rights and going down to Mississippi. I’m interested in what your experience was, and if there was discrimination in the military at that time. Was it as prevalent as it was in civilian society at that time? I know Gene said his base commander down in Mississippi didn’t allow the kind of thing going on in Mississippi on to the base. He had a base to run, right? Gene: He had a meeting for the whole base.

And the commander was a white guy? Gene: Yes. He told us, anybody calls us a name, send them to the hospital.

So stand up for yourself, don’t allow that to happen, and I’ll back you up. Gene: He basically just told us to beat him up. I knew a man who went away, and when he came back to Mississippi, he thought things would have changed a little, but they hadn’t. We went to a restaurant to get a hamburger and they said we couldn’t come in. We could order a hamburger, but we had to go to the back and get it.

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That was how they treated you in town? Gene: Yes.

Did you get treated that way on the base? Gene: No.

Were you treated that way here in Cleveland County during that time? Gene: No.

But the military base did not discriminate? Gene: That one didn’t.

You had a different experience Donald? Donald: It wasn’t the base itself. When we got there, there was a newcomer briefing that you had to go to. He told us, the blacks, that we needed to be careful where we go. When that happened to me not getting the promotion, it hurt. You’re doing what you’re supposed to do.

You went from Florida to Vietnam voluntarily. Did you think there might be more opportunity in Vietnam for you? Or were you just so tired of all the discrimination? Donald: You walk for eight hours a day around two KC135’s, and you look at that heat wave and there’s no shade anyway, that’s what I did. I got to Vietnam and it was a little better there.

I was in Vietnam for probably about eight or nine months, and we had a black flight chief. That was the first time I had seen a Security Policeman with the rank of E6. He came out on the post and wanted to know why I hadn’t got my five level. He was

103 HOMETOWN HEROES looking at my training, but didn’t see any reason why I didn’t have it. When I explained to him what happened, he said, they were holding you back then, now you’re holding yourself back. You shouldn’t let that happen.

After he left I thought about what he said. I decided to go back and get what they called OJT (on the job training). I did that for about two months.

One night, me and Frank got together, and the guys found out we were brothers.

We’re you guys on the same base? Donald: They were at South Beach, they called it. The bases were about eight to ten miles apart, something like that. I was at Cam Ranh Bay Air Force Base.

Did you know they were already there when you volunteered to go to Vietnam? Donald: No, you see, he was out in the field when I got over there. That night they found out we were brothers, we couldn’t buy a ten cents can of beer or thirty cents shot. We just sat there with a table full, everybody was buying, you know. Frank just left me. He went down to the village and William stayed and took care of me. I was sick, throwing up. He called the air base, and this guy from maintenance picked me up. I had to take a test the next day, and a friend of mine, who was in the Army, and got hurt, they thought he was with us, but he was AWOL. He was staying with us and we were cops. He stayed up all night long to make sure I got up to take the test the next morning. When I took the test, my head was so bad I had to sit up and hold the paper up, then put it down to answer.

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How did you do on the test? Donald: The test was on a percentile basis. The maximum you could get was a ninety five and I got a ninety odd. Then two weeks later I got sick. I had less than ninety days to go and was in the hospital for thirty days so they automatically medivac. Then I went to Andrews Air Force Base and got a chance to work law enforcement. When I got that chance, I liked it.

I was in law enforcement for a while and then I was in security, and I didn’t mind the security there. We guarded the communication and support aircraft, and they had another squadron that guarded Air Force One itself. I was going to stay in until I got an overseas assignment and they said they couldn’t do that, they could only guarantee stateside, so I got out. I thought if I could get out, I could tell someone where to go if I don’t like something, but like Gene said, if you have a job worth having, where it’s worth going to, people are going to check your references. You realize no matter where you go you take orders. I came back and worked at PPG for six months, then I got laid off. Then I went back to visit DC and I got a job driving a bus for two years until they fired me. They said I was accident prone. Nothing worked for me. I came back home and was thinking of going back into the military. I knew the Air Force wouldn’t take me because I’d been out for more than three years. My father and I were sitting in the basement talking one evening and he said about going back in the service. At least you don’t have to look for a job when you move around. I was already thinking it, I was just waiting for somebody to validate it.

A friend came around and said he would take me by the Army recruiting station. They said I needed to get my 2-14, and I had it in my wallet, so I took the test. I was supposed to leave

105 HOMETOWN HEROES the 2nd of February but they said I had to have a waiver because I was divorced and had two kids under eighteen. I waited for the waiver and they asked me when I wanted to go. I said, “Well, when can I go?” He said, “The 1st of April,” so, I went in the 1st of April. Lord if I didn’t know, if I’d gone in a day later I would have had to go through basic training again. But it worked out.

I went back in as a Lance Missile Crewman, and went to Fort Sill, where I did AIT (Advanced Individual Training), that was my first duty station. From there I went to Italy for two years. I came back to Fort Sill for six months or so, and then I was on recruiter duty for four years in Pittsburgh, then to Fort Bragg. When I went for recruiter duty they classified me with what they called Thirteen Bravo Cannon Crewman. Then I went to Hawaii for two years, and then to Fort Carson, Colorado. After that, I went to Korea, back to Fort Eustace, Virginia, and then back to Fort Bragg.

How many years were you in? Donald: I did twenty one and a half years.

Well Donald, thank you for your service. That’s a lot of service for your country. Donald: To me, the military was good, and since I’ve got out, the VA has been good to me. I guess I was good to myself to stay on. Like I said, going in was a different way of life.

And your name sir? William: William Henry Schenk.

I assume you went into the military after Donald? William: That’s right. I went in on July 13th 1966.

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That’s only about a month after Donald. What made you join up at that time? William: Messing up and all, so I decided to do something. My brothers were already in, so I decided to do the same for the experience. There was a bunch of us back then. We had the draft board and a bus load of us would be down at the bus station going into Charlotte to have the test. I joined in July. The day after, I wished I had never done it. I wanted to be a paratrooper. The recruiter was trying to get me for three years, but I only got two because I volunteered for the draft. I didn’t know that until after I got in there. It made me mad, him trying to take a full year from someone.

After we did our basic training, they told us if you had only two years, you had to sign for another year if you wanted to go to jump school, but in jump school there were people with only two years. So, you had people sign for another year because that’s what they thought they had to do.

We got our orders for Fort Jackson, then we were shipped to Fort Moore, Georgia, then to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for AIT. I trained in artillery there. I left Fort Sill for Fort Benning, Georgia for jump school. Then to Fort Bragg and Fort Campbell, Kentucky for jungle training, before I got my orders for Vietnam.

They gave us all fifteen days leave. My brothers were home at the same time, and knew about my orders. I was going in December. I was told I didn’t have to go because my wife was pregnant, but I wanted to go anyway. We left 6th of December, 1967, for Vietnam with the rest of the 101st Airborne. Most were already in Vietnam. That was about it before we came back from Vietnam.

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When I was over there, I wanted to stay but the guys who’d been there over a year wanted to leave. They were talking about turnover and I said I had a brother in country, and they said, if they had a brother in country, they’d leave me. Anyway, I started processing, trying to get out of there because we were losing people. It took a while. Meanwhile, my mother wrote and told me they had drafted Frank. I don’t know what his age was at the time.

Frank: I was twenty-three when I got in Nam. I was drafted at twenty-two, and three days later I was twenty-three.

William: I know Frank had been trying to get in there but couldn’t, and I said to myself, “We must be losing if they’ve drafted Frank.” Anyhow, they said, even if he’s in Vietnam, there’s still no work. At the time I had come out of the field and got processed out to go overseas, except they were going to send me stateside until my date of separation. They attached me to the 97 MP Battalion in Cam Ranh Bay. I got my orders and they flew me to Cam Ranh Bay. I couldn’t believe it was just like around here. There were paved streets and night lights and stuff like that. In comparison, in the field you couldn’t even light a cigarette up at night without them aiming in on your head. Anyway, I think there were five piers down there where the ships came in. One was bringing ammunition, and one was bringing in food, but my ship was H8. There was a guard house where we had to check ID going in. Our company commander said, don’t take no junk from anybody. I had a 45, and an M16.

You were working the gate on base in Vietnam? William: Yeah. One particular morning, people were coming off the boat and they were showing ID cards except this one person. He walked by like he owned the place. I unhooked my

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45 and said, “Hey soldier,” and he kept walking, so I said, “Hey soldier,” and he kept going. He was in the shadows, so I walked up to him, and looked, and said, “Frank?” and he said, “Who are you?” I said, “It’s William,” and he pulled up my hat and said, “Boy, I was going to mess you up.” That’s how I met Frank over there. Everything went downhill after that.

The only bad experience I had out there was when General Blackjack Pershing’s grandson got killed while he was in my outfit. We were getting out of the helicopters. The Chinooks couldn’t land because they would sink into the rice paddies, so they would hover, and we had to jump out. We were getting fired upon and this medic got hit and General Pershing’s grandson got hit. The medic cut the clothes and boots off and I pulled him back as best I could because in a rice paddy you’re just slipping. When we fired into the jungle and didn’t get any return fire, we went to rest, then they fired upon us. I put him down and got help, and they helped pull him back. We didn’t know about the story until a magazine came out. The commander had told us not to say anything.

Do you think your military service prepared you for civilian life after you got out? William: I don’t think being a rifleman helped me in work or anything. I don’t think I could use any of it to tell the truth.

Well sir, thank you for your service.

So, Frank, you’re next. You were drafted into the Army? Frank: Yes.

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And what’s your full name? Frank: Franklin Howard Schenk.

What year were you drafted? Frank: 68.

How did you feel about that? Frank: I didn’t like it. They were always hollering at me and I couldn’t take it. When I wanted to go they wouldn’t take me. You do what you have to to survive.

How long were you in the military? Frank: Two years. I went for my basic at Fort Bragg, then to Fort Jackson, and from there to Vietnam. I hated every minute of it, and still do, thinking about it. I was a duty soldier. They put me in where they wanted to. I did anything I had to do. When they put you in the infantry, they can do anything they want to do with you. But I got out, went to work and that was it.

Was there anything that you got out of the military that carried over in to your civilian life? Frank: No, even when I was over there, I was a longshoreman. There’s no ships around here.

When I was in the military, I never loved the fact that whatever I was told to do by whoever it was, no matter what I thought about it, I still had to do it or face the consequences. For me, part of the way that carried over into civilian life was, I don’t know if it’s much different. I have clients I work for, I have bosses who are judges, and ultimately I work for my wife. I guess my experience in the military taught me to take it. I think that has

110 Greg Mclntyre helped in how I handle relationships and life now, but it took a lot. I had to grow up, and the military helped me to do that. William: Chain of command.

Yes, that’s true, that stuck with me too. It taught me to go to that person and address whatever grievance I have with them if I can, before I run to the next guy up the chain, because they don’t have time for it and the interruption will make them mad. So, I learned to use the chain of command. Well, Frank, thank you for your service. And what is your full name sir? Sherrill: Sherrill Cornelius Schenk.

Now, you’re the youngest and you were in the Army? Sherrill: Yes.

When did you join. Sherrill: I volunteered because I was the last of us, and they didn’t set a good track record. Also, Dad wouldn’t sign for me to get a car, so I decided to go in the service. I passed the test and everything, and they asked me when I wanted to leave. I said I’d leave that Sunday, because I knew they were moving into the new house that Monday, so I left for Fort Jackson for basic training. After basic training, things got a little better. I had a pass to go home, but I decided not to go. I just hung around. You know you’re not supposed to associate with the NCO’s being a private, but me and the Dress Sergeant were pretty close. We drank up the beer. That Monday morning in the mess hall I heard the Captain talking, and I thought he was talking about me being AWOL. All the NCO’s were at a table together, and the Sergeant didn’t say we weren’t together, he said, I heard he was still on

111 HOMETOWN HEROES base and didn’t even go home. You were supposed to sign in when you went on leave, but as I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t see that I had to sign in. As I had a pass, he thought I was gone.

From there I went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for my duty station in artillery, and from there I went to Vietnam. I spent eleven months and fifteen days in Vietnam. I didn’t get to take R&R. Some saved their R&R to the end. I saved mine to the end and was going to go to Bangkok, but the war was coming to an end. Nixon was making a speech and we were deactivating. If you were deactivating you couldn’t go on R&R, so I didn’t get to go.

After I came home, my next duty station was Seattle, Washington. I got there in January, and I was in the day room and saw a sign that said, If you join the National Guard for guard duty you can get out, so that’s what I did. I came out on the 23rd of January and joined the National Guard. I thought that was it for a while. I had to come to kings Mountain once a month for guard duty for a weekend. I didn’t like that. I missed at least one, and made an excuse, and the next time I missed one, I went to the doctor’s office pretending I was sick. He left a little pad there, and before the doc came back, I tore a piece off with his letterhead on it. I scribbled on it, because you can’t read what a doctor writes anyway, and carried it back to the National Guard. The next time it came around I still wouldn’t go in. That was the last time. I had to go back in and do six months to clean the slate. I went back in June 1973 and got out in November 73 at Fort Richardson, Alaska.

Do you think military life prepared you for civilian life? Sherrill: Oh Lord yes, best thing that happened to me.

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Why is that? Sherrill: Well, one thing, I got away from the boys.

Your friends or your brothers? Sherrill: Friends. There’s more to life than where you live. Even when you can drink a sixteen ounce beer, I never drank another since I came out the service. The best lesson I learned from being in the service, was when I’d come home and was hanging out with the boys behind the liquor store. When I’d run out of money I’d have to go to Fort Jackson to get pay in order to get back to my duty station. Anyway, we were standing there counting up the money, and they go, let’s go buy some liquor. I realized I was wasting all my money on these jokers. That told me right then, I don’t need you. That was the end of it.

Well sir, thank you for your service. I want to thank you all for allowing me into your home and your experiences.

Greg interviewing all the Schenk Brothers... Their mother was there and loved hearing the stories

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Greg Mclntyre

Story 8

MICHAEL CARPENTER, MARINE, BARRY CARPENTER, AIR FORCE

Michael and Barry Carpenter are father and son and were both in the military.

I love to hear veteran’s stories and preserve them for future generations. So, Michael, you were in the Marines, and Barry you were in the Air Force? MC: Yes.

BC: Nine and a half years, Special Operations in the Airforce.

Michael, how long were you in the Marines? MC: Four years.

Four and no more. What does Marine stand for? MC: First in, last out.

Navy was ‘Never Again Volunteer Yourself.’ We had a lot of Marines and Marine squadrons who were on the aircraft carrier providing Marine security on deployment. Why did you join the Marines? MC: I came out of high school and went to work in a mill.

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Are you from this area? MC: Yes, born and raised in Gastonia. I went to work in a mill for about six weeks or so, and I said, there has got to be something better. So, I signed my name, took an oath, and after I got to Parris Island, I said, what am I doing here? That was October 1961. I graduated December 14th, 1961.

Weren’t parts of An Officer and a Gentleman and Full Metal Jacket filmed there? MC: Yes, a lot of them were. Hamburger Hill, Pork Chop Hill, a lot of movies were filmed there. There was a place down there on the coast, it was like a war zone. It looked like the trees and everything were all black, like a lagoon but you walk out on it and wonder, is this part of the United States?

Why does it look that way? MC: I guess all the training they had in that area.

How was Marine bootcamp? MC: Today some of the guys I’ve talked with, they kind of say it’s a boy scout camp. They’re not as rough on them now as they were back then. Basic training was ten weeks and we were up at four thirty in the morning, lights out at ten and you were constantly moving, constantly on the go. All kinds of physical training.

The first few weeks were book training, learning what you were going to apply yourself for. After basic, we went to Camp Geiger for infantry training. It was in January when we were there, and we spent one week out in the field. It did something

116 Greg Mclntyre different every day, rained, sleeted, snowed, it was just a survival course for that week which we all came through.

After that we went to do duty wherever we were sent. I was a truck driver, got trained, and then went back to Camp Geiger, where I drove the trainer bus, as they called them, to haul troops out to the training fields. I really enjoyed that after I’d gone through it all, knowing what they had coming. One of my favorite places was the gas chamber. I would go in there any chance I got and get my mask on. I would keep my mask on but not everyone else did. There was a tree outside the door with bark only on one side because they would come running out, eyes closed without their masks on and run straight in to it.

I learned to maintain and fire all the weapons. My last year in, I was stationed in Okinawa. That was an experience, a new culture. We would see how they lived, what they did, their work, the houses they lived in. There were times I wanted to go back and see what it’s like now.

We went back to Parris Island in 2000. It was a totally different place. All the old barracks had been pulled down, and new barracks had been built up. I watched one of the platoons and what the drill instructor was saying, and I reminisced back to when I was there. The drill instructor was lecturing on one of them, but he wasn’t lecturing the way we were lectured. I would say they were more assertive when I was there. It was an experience. I learned a lot, I matured, enjoyed every minute of it, and served.

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I have never been to Okinawa, but I was in mainland Japan. MC: When I went over, I went from San Diego to Camp Pendleton, and from there we got on an MSTS, Military Sea Transport Service. From there we went to Hawaii and docked in Pearl Harbor, right across from the Arizona. Then we went to Japan, then out to Okinawa. We arrived there in mid-December 1963, and left last week of December 1964. The boat ride going over was something else. We sailed into a storm going over. We were in the storm for two days, lots of sick people. Coming back was more pleasant. We left Okinawa and went down to Taiwan, back to Japan, docked in Honolulu, then back to San Diego. It was about an eighteen day trip both ways.

I went from San Diego to Hawaii and then to Japan on aircraft carriers. MC: Which carriers?

I was on the Constellation and the Nimitz. MC: I saw the Constellation when I was in Okinawa. The port was too shallow for it to come in to the dock. She was anchored probably five or six miles off shore.

We docked in Hong Kong bay and had to use transport boats to get in. What do you think you took out of being in the Marines? MC: Discipline, maturity and ambition.

How did you take ambition from being in the Marines? MC: Seeing a problem, recognizing what to do with it and fixing it.

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I was enlisted in the Navy and found out from myself and my father, who was also enlisted, that the only difference between an officer and an enlisted man is a piece of paper, a college degree. That gave me a ton of ambition to go ahead and complete my degree. After you left the Marines you were a machinist, right? MC: After I left the Marines I worked in several different shops around Gastonia and Charlotte. I got an offer up here for full time in December, 1977, and I’ve been there since. I got a good job that nobody wants. I call that job security. The product we run, and the machines that we make are sent worldwide. Some of those parts we make on the machine, and I am the only person in the country that makes those parts. Some of the other guys might make one now and then but I’ve made thousands of them. They get sent out to Japan, China, Pakistan, Australia, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Denmark, England, Germany, Canada and Mexico.

You’ve had a worldwide influence. That’s impressive. Being a machinist is a combination of using your head, mathematics and a hands-on job. Did you learn those skills in the military? MC: No, when I got out. They say in the shop, engineers went to school and have it up there, but you put one in a shop, they can’t get that knowledge from their head to a practical application. The philosophy is, they need to be in the shop five years before they become engineers.

Was that on-the-job training? MC: On-the-job training and some people would call it R and D, research and development. I called it T and E, trial and error.

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That’s the best way to learn. MC: If you’re not making a mistake, you’re not doing anything.

I feel like we live in a world where we’re not allowed to fail, where you can’t make a mistake. We, as parents, many times prevent our kids from making mistakes and learning from those mistakes, but the best way to learn is trial and error. MC: Experience is the best teacher.

There’s a CEO called Thomas J Watson, who said, “if you want to fast track yourself to success, you must double your rate of failure.” That means you are out there trying new things and learning by doing to get it right. You also must be persistent. You can’t give up when you make a mistake or fail. You fix it and learn the right way. Would you go into the military again if you could do it over? MC: That was one thing that; I got my four years and I’m out of there. A few years later, I thought, if I had put in twenty or thirty?

I have the same thoughts. I would have been retired by now after twenty years. MC: I went to grade school with this guy, and he went in to the Marine Corps a year before I did. He put in thirty years and was a Master Gunnery Sergeant. The last time I saw him was in 1963 until 1990. He was eighty-nine at that time. I asked him how’s pay now, and at that time his base pay was thirty-two hundred a month. That’s not too bad, but I’ve got my family, four children, seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

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Sounds like things turned out great. Now the other mister Carpenter, Barry Scott Carpenter, you were in the Air Force, Special Operations. What does that mean? BC: It comes down to, you go, you do, and you’re never seen. You’re in and out. If you were in a situation and were caught, or you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, nobody knew you were there. It was kind of like the Green Berets, the Seals, similar to that type of thing. You did what you had to and got out as quick as you could. My whole career was not in Special Operations, that was the last three to four years.

I went in July, 1987, to San Antonio and did six weeks of basic there, then went to Wichita Falls for my technical school, which at the time was metal fabrication. So, whatever had to be fixed on the aircraft or vehicles, you repaired it, painted it and got it back out as quickly as you could. Then I went in to cross training, so you were versatile for different areas if they needed you to go, which is where the Special Operations came in.

I went to Charleston, South Carolina Air Base, next to the Navy Base. I used to go over there all the time. From there I went to RAF Lakenheath in England, and I did four years over there. Then I went to Fort Walton Beach where I did my last couple of years in the Special Operations branch. I saw a lot of changes in the military, a lot of different aircraft and weaponry, different equipment for the Humvees. I was in Kuwait and Tel Aviv. That kind of tested your sense of being human. What you had to go through and what you saw over there, it was unbelievable. It was a short war. Everyone thought it would last longer than it did. Thank God I never had any post traumatic syndrome or anything like that. I think God got me through a lot of it, otherwise it might have been a different story.

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We left there and went to Incirlik, Turkey, for six months in case anything started back up, so we could run across the border and shoot back. I was in Kuwait and met King Fahd and was given a gold coin which I have to this day, as a representation of what happened.

The different types of things I saw, the cultures and experiences made me grow up a lot. It was like night and day for me. I knew I had to make decisions that would make a better me and better my future. Being in the military helped me be a more proficient, practical person, and I came through with valuable experience. I got out in 1997 and tried civilian life and I regretted not going back in. I had nine and a half years in, so just a few more years and I could have retired.

When I got out of the military I had some experiences in different careers but they weren’t really what I wanted to do until I went to truck driving school and got my CDL to drive a tractor trailer. I’ve been doing that since 2010. It’s rewarding and challenging at times. There are a lot of hazardous conditions you go through which tests your mental and physical endurance and capabilities. I wouldn’t trade anything I’ve done. Would I go back and do everything over again? Yes, definitely.

Schooling in the military is rewarding. There’s no place else you can go for free and go to school and have a degree when you leave. For people who have never served, it’s something I think everyone should try and experience. It will reward you, make you grow a lot and give you extra responsibility.

My dad is my hero. My other hero is me, because only I can look forward X amount of months and say, where am I going to

122 Greg Mclntyre be? How can I better myself? I try to do this every three or four months, and try to out-do what I’ve already done. So far it’s working out pretty good. I set goals and accomplish them. Thank God for everything I have and haven’t got yet because I know there is a place for everything to happen in the world.

It sounds like you have your act together. BC: I try.

Gratitude is so important, as well as recognizing our accomplishments. For your dad to be your hero, that is awesome. My dad is my hero also. If I could be half the man he is, I’d be doing alright. I want to thank you both for your service.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Greg Mclntyre

Story 9

DAVID ROSE US Army Veteran and Tech Inspector

Taking pride in one’s work is big in this interview- Being meticulous, striving for perfection, and only putting your name to a job well done

David Rose and Hayden Soloway are cousins.

So, Hayden, what do you know about your cousin’s military service? HS: Mostly what he sent me. David was older than me, so he was a BMOC before I went to high school. He was well known among the students, fantastic baseball player. He had status there. He was someone I admired, so I am interested to hear about his service.

GM: What’s a BMOC? HS: Big man on campus.

GM: I did not know that. I’m looking at a picture of an L20 U6A Beaver. So, you were in the Air Force? No, I was in the Army.

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GM: You went from BMOC, to being in the Army, to working on Beavers in the Air Force? Right. The Army and Air Force had Beavers. The Air Force called them U6A Beavers. The U stands for Utility. It could hold six people, or you could take all the back seats out and fill it up with cargo. DeHavilland built it in Canada, and initially it was used by bush pilots for people going in and out for fishing expeditions. Most had floats so they could land on water. Their strength was being rugged, very dependable and could get into areas where there wasn’t much room for take offs and landings. GM: You were a tech inspector? What does a tech inspector do with a U6A Beaver? When I joined the Army, I joined for the aviation, or to be an aviation mechanic because my brother Joe was in the Air Force and he guided me towards aviation. I liked airplanes and was mechanically inclined. We went for basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for eight weeks, and then to Fort Worth, Alabama, for mechanic school. The Vietnam War was just getting cranked up.

GM: What year was that? I went in August of 63. We were there when Kennedy was assassinated, and right up to end of March, 1964. All of us at graduation from aviation school were going to be sent to Vietnam. I didn’t want to go to Vietnam, so a friend and I went around to some of the other branches, the Rangers, Special Forces, the guys who jump out of airplanes, not thinking that they would be the first ones to be sent to Vietnam. But we were turned down, so we were all sent to our facilities and I went to Fort Riley, Kansas.

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GM: I have a question for you. You were a baseball player, what was your position? I played short stop, third base and left field. I had a paper route, and I’d gone out for the American Legion team and had someone substitute for my paper route. My dad came out to the field and said, “Dave you need to be working,” so I didn’t get to play. I played in the Army, that was where I really played baseball.

GM: So, you came out of high school, you knew you were going to be drafted, so you get ahead of the game by joining up, is that correct? Well, I went to college in 58 at Marion College in Marion, Indiana. I lasted until Christmas but had a stomach problem so I came home. I worked back in Shelby, from 61 to 62, then I went back to college. When I came back, I knew I was going to be drafted.

Initially, I wanted to go into the Navy, into the nuclear submarine program. The Navy recruiter had taken me to movies and basketball, and lunch and dinners. I was sure I was going in, and then the USS Thresher sank. I think they had two nuclear submarines sink in that era, so the night before they were supposed to pick me up and take me to Columbia, I called and said I’m not going. So, I joined the Army to get in the aviation program.

GM: You’re coming from Shelby, North Carolina, you’ve been to college, you join the Army and go to boot camp, how was that experience? It was wonderful. In high school I was in the band, and in the band you march, in the Army you march; At Fort Jackson we were put in a company. We were in the presence of the Drill

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Instructors, and they took us upstairs into a barracks, beds two high, and said, we need to get these beds lined up. Well, nobody really wanted to do it, so I said, come on guys we need to get this done because we have to do it, then we can go off. This Drill Sergeant was on the stairs listening and heard me, for lack of better words, take charge. For that, and the fact that I knew how to march, I was made a squad leader. I didn’t have to do KP, I didn’t have to do guard duty, I didn’t have to do any of the functions the others had to because I was their leader.

GM: I had a similar situation in boot camp. I was the A-Rod. The A-Rod was the second in command of the division. That person marches everyone around. I was a young kid from the South, we were in Chicago, Great Lakes for boot camp, I could sing and I got fed up with people messing up the first week, so I stepped up. That gave me rank coming out and leadership possibilities. It also got me off certain duties. Squad leader had what we called ‘acting jacks,’ which were bands on our arms with corporal stripes on them, so they were temporary. I still have those.

GM: So you enjoyed boot camp? I did too. Most people don’t say they enjoyed boot camp. I may not have enjoyed it as far as what everybody else had to do, KP, guard duty and things like that.

GM: You graduated from there, then what? Fort Rucker, Alabama Aviation School and then to Fort Riley, Kansas. We were supposed to work on the airplanes when we graduated, as the school was thorough and I was first in my class at tech. There was a guy there from Florida, and he had gotten an air frame and engine degree from Emory University. We were

128 Greg Mclntyre just neck and neck the whole time. I was first, he was second, he was first, I was second. In the final exam, the question he missed which put me in first place was, “If the engine has fluctuating oil pressure, what does it cause?” It had, low oil levels, or bubbles in the oil, which was the answer, and I think he answered low oil, which gave me first. That was one of my claims to fame.

GM: How did you get assigned to a squadron of Beavers? At Fort Riley we were just mechanics. We weren’t assigned any particular airplane. The unusual thing at Fort Riley was there were a number of civilian mechanics. Those mechanics didn’t want us Army guys infringing on their time. They didn’t want us to take their jobs, so we did other things. I shot on the rifle team for special troops, I played baseball for special troops, I drove the Jeep for the company commander and hardly ever worked on an airplane until orders came to go to tech inspectors school at Fort Eustace, Virginia. From tech inspectors school I was sent to Korea, and that’s where the Beavers were. My airplane was five-one-one-six-eight-four-zero (5116840). It was Army green. Later on they started camouflaging them with tan, green, blue and things like that.

In Korea, basically all we had at our facility were Beavers and the L19, which was called the Bird-Dog. It was a two seater, single engine aircraft, one person in front, and one in back. We had a lot of Beavers and Bird-Dogs, and on the other side we had helicopters. I just became infatuated with the Beavers and chose that aircraft to be mine. Finally, I was made crew chief of that airplane.

The funny thing is, when they flew my airplane, they would say, “Why does your airplane fly faster than the other ones we

129 HOMETOWN HEROES fly?” Something like seventeen hundred and fifty (1750) RPMs for cruising. There would be an indicator for speed and it might be ten to twelve miles an hour faster than another one. “Well,” I said, “I wax the leading edge of the rails.” “At the school, TBAVN7, technical bulletin aviation seven says, you do not wax airplanes,” and I said, “I know that,” and they said, “TBAVN7 says you don’t wax them,” and I said, “Why does it say it?” They said, “You don’t need to know that, that’s the law.” Instead of waxing the airplane, I just waxed the leading edge of everything, the landing gear, the wings and it made it fly faster.

GM: Do you know why you can’t wax an airplane? You can’t because TBAVN7 said you can’t.

GM: How was your duty in Korea? Korea was good. The thing about being in aviation is you always have to be close to an improved facility. You must have water, electricity, air compressors, for whatever you do in the field. We did on occasion bivouac like the regular soldiers once or twice a year. There was a grass strip behind the hangar. We would pitch our tents there and they would come over and drop flour bags to simulate bombs and bring food out to us, so that was our tough living.

GM: Did you have any experiences in Korea that were memorable? Yeah, one of them is tough. At my base I was crew chief. They sent me down to Daegu to a facility that was a Korean Air Force base with the US Air Force and the US Army. In that facility, we would take the airplanes apart, disassemble them. You have to do this every few years, or after so many flying hours, then check everything and put it back together.

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GM: Did you ever put it back together and were left with one part? No, there were no left over parts. So, it was payday on the last day of the month in September 65, and the Koreans on the other side had just finished rebuilding an F80, the T33 which is the trainer version and carries two people. Well, a Korean guy came in my office and said, “Rose, they’re about ready to test the T33, you want to go fly in a jet?” I said, “Yes, I do.” I got my helmet and was all ready to go. They left me by myself as the airplane was gone through and I thought, I probably shouldn’t go, so I said, “Tell them to go on, maybe some other time.” In about twenty minutes, there was sirens and all hell broke loose. The plane had taken off and was supposed to make a left turn after take-off but instead it took a right turn and crashed into a mountain. The pilot was killed of course. I called my headquarters and told them what had happened. They brought the pilot down and someone who was there said, “Glad you didn’t go.” By doing my duty and staying there, it saved my life.

GM: That’s a powerful story. Glad you didn’t make that flight. Exactly. That was the worst thing that happened. Everything else was wonderful. The good thing is, and I like to tell this story, all the planes I worked on or inspected, I never had one that couldn’t take off when it was supposed to, couldn’t complete its mission, or had to make a forced landing. That was perfect, I like that.

GM: As a tech inspector, that’s your job to make sure the aircraft works properly? If you were to work on say, the prop, or do something with the end of the flight controls, that’s known as a safety flying

131 HOMETOWN HEROES condition, I had to go behind you and look at your work, then sign off on it by signing my name that everything was okay. When you sign your name, you really wanted to make sure everything was okay.

GM: How long were you in the Army? Three years.

GM: During that time, you played baseball? That was when we couldn’t work on airplanes because of the civilians. I had nothing else to do, and I was on the special troops baseball team.

GM: You got paid to play on the special troops baseball team? Well, Army pay, yes, and we were undefeated, but I hurt my knee sliding, and hurt my hip sliding, so I decided I wasn’t going to slide anymore. I was so fast I could steal second base and not slide.

GM: So, you go to Korea, work on the U6A Beaver and you had a spotless track record there, an eye for perfectionism and being meticulous, which I guess you have to be. Then you came out of the military, where do you go in civilian life? Well, there’s still Vietnam. When I came back from Korea, I was sent to Fort Belvoir, Virginia as a tech inspector. They were starting a new aviation company in Thailand, and I was the only unmarried tech inspector at Fort Belvoir, so I got volunteered to go to Thailand for four hundred and twenty days TDY (temporary duty).

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I think I sent Hayden a copy of the letter of commendation that I got for two engine changes, which is pretty technical on U6As. One night in the company area, one of the Captains said, “Rose, pack your bags for ten days, we’re going to Saigon.” Then he said, “And go to the supply sergeant and get yourself a pistol.“ I’d never shot a pistol before in the Army, and the supply Sergeant said, “Are you qualified to fire one of these?” I said, “No,” and he said, “Well, you can take the pistol but I can’t give you any ammunition,” so I said, “What do I need a pistol for if I don’t have any bullets?” One of the Captains said, “Here, I’ve got bullets for everyone.” He had a whole flack bag full of bullets and we got on the airplane.

The deal was, we were flying two airplanes to Saigon and leaving one there. There was another plane that came in from Corpus Christi, Texas, in a box. It had been delivered to Saigon. We went over to put it together, test fly it and fly it back to Thailand. It took us ten days to do that. I didn’t get out of Saigon to look around but it was a pretty place. One night I was on the roof of the USO building watching a movie called ‘The Ugly American,’ and while we watched that movie you could hear in the distance, boom, boom, from the sound of artillery. It was an unreal situation. That was my Vietnam experience.

Another thing, there was this fellow I knew who was a helicopter mechanic at Fort Eustace. We got word that he was killed in an accident in Colorado. When we pulled up after landing in Saigon, there was a guy giving us the signals to come in, and it was that guy, it was fake news. I said to him, “Hey, you’re supposed to be dead,” and he said, “What?” I said, “We got word you were killed in an accident in Colorado.” It was obviously false news. He came up to me later and said, “Would you like to go

133 HOMETOWN HEROES out on a mission tonight as a gunner on a Hughey?” That’s the UH1 helicopter they used in Vietnam. I said, “Yeah, that sounds like fun.” Then I started to think, if I’m shooting at somebody, they’re probably going to be shooting back at me, so I declined.

GM: I always tell people, anything you have in the civilian world, the military has it. We interviewed a guy recently called Martin Mongiello. He had been to hotel management school in the Navy, and was a cook in the Navy. He ended up cooking at the White House and Camp David. Anything you want to do in the civilian world you can learn in the military, and they will pay you for it. I could have come out of the Navy working on electronics or aviation electronics. I could have gone private sector and come back as a contractor, or gone to work for Boeing, or someone like that. I decided on a different direction. So, what did you do when you got out of the military? I should have continued in aviation but I didn’t. I went to work for a life insurance company in Virginia. My Dad was in the insurance business all his life. He sort of led me that way. I knew quite quickly that it wasn’t for me. I started in August of sixty-six until May of sixty-seven, when I started working for Nabisco. I worked there until seventy-nine. That was a good job, it was very labor intensive. Then I worked for a company out of St Louis, Missouri, and then worked for Panasonic from eighty-four until ninety-one.

GM: So, how do you think the military shaped your life? My job as a tech inspector gave me more confidence. I thought when I came out, I was a changed person. I was more confident, I interacted with people better. I grew up, I guess you would say. It did me good.

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GM: It is amazing the responsibility the military puts on the shoulders of young kids. I think every person should spend some time in the military, whether it be a year or two. I think everybody needs that experience.

GM: Get away from home, grow up a little bit, take more responsibility. You learn about yourself more than anything. Whether you stay in for the rest of your life or not, is not relevant. You could, but you don’t have to. You learn to be more confident and will carry that confidence with you. I thought, these military schools are there for me to pass and do well, if I put my time and effort into it. Then you apply that to college or law school, or anything, and you have the confidence to do it. I could live on my own without having to rely on my mom or dad all the time. Kids live at home now until they’re thirty. HS: My grandson came out of the military an entirely different person. He was one of those who just got carried along through school and didn’t make great grades. He was first or second in the competitions he was in when in the military and just came out totally different. He’s goal driven and wants to be a teacher and a coach. He never would have had the confidence or the inclination to do it otherwise. GM: I think there is a misconception about being in the military. You can complete your education and come out with money and continue in further education. There are a lot of benefits to being in the military. Everything is available to you in the military, just pay attention and take advantage of what they offer you.

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GM: I think getting outside your town, whether Shelby or a larger place, and learning that it’s a great big world adds to how you think and how you see the world. That’s important. Going from Shelby, North Carolina, to meeting someone from California is strange. And if you’re from North Carolina and you’re in Korea and meet somebody from Fayetteville, you think of them as brothers.

GM: I spent a lot of time in Asia when I was in the Navy. We went to South Korea but never made it out to where you were. We were in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and hit Australia a couple of times. We were in the Middle East and we were at Bahrain, Abu-Dhabi and Dubai. So, you have seen the world.

GM: It’s an eye-opening experience just to get out of town and see the world. Thank you for talking with me. It’s been a pleasure and thank you for your service.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Story 10

BOB CABINESS Vietnam Veteran, Marine, Army National Guard, Air Force National Guard

When you walk into Graceland, you walk in the door and there’s a hallway with a balcony. Elvis and Ann Margaret were standing on the balcony.

He’d sent his guys to the base and they said he was having a big party at his house, and if any Marine showed up in their dress uniform, they would be invited to the party.

So, me and 3 other guys had dress blues, so we got a car to get out there.

We walked in and said hello, and walked on through the house to the backyard. There was a barbecue set up, hamburgers and stuff. So, we ate hamburgers and hung around…

We stayed for about 2 hours and were getting ready to leave, and he sent his guys out to ask, who wants to play touch football?

So, we’ve got dress blues on right? That was the most expensive clothes a Marine had, and back then, the front lawn didn’t have any of these big oak trees on it, so we played touch football on the front lawn of Graceland with Elvis.

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You were in Millington, Tennessee, the same place I was stationed for training for AT school? AE school was in Jacksonville, Florida. I went to AE school, myself and my buddy, Dick Wells, then went to our next squadron which was New River NC. We had our choice of squadrons. So, the base commander said, “What squadron do you want?” Well, we had no idea. He said, “Well there’s one that’s going to Spain and France and England.” Dick and I looked at each other and said, “That’s the one.” So we got in it. We found out about a year later when you’re in your first squadron, you couldn’t get out. I don’t know if they had this planned then or not, but we were going to Vietnam as a squadron.

We took over from the group that was over there for about 8 months. We took over their helicopters but we went as a group, so we all knew each other. When I got to the squadron, the commander said that all crew chiefs were mechanics, but they needed a crew chief who was an electrical guy because of all the problems they were getting, so they chose me, and I was sent back to AT school, so I was AE and AT.

So, you’re a Vietnam vet as a Marine, but then you’ve been in multiple branches of the services. “Right. Army National Guard and the Air Force National Guard.”

How does that happen? I really intended to stay in the Marine Corps. When the reenlistment lecture came around, I asked the commanding officer, (because I had the Purple Hearts, and wound up in the Naval Hospital in Key West convalescing from my wounds; we

138 Greg Mclntyre got shot up a lot over there,) “If I reenlist in the Marine Corps, am I going back to Vietnam?” And he said, “Oh yeah.” So I was thinking, “Oh no.” They tried to kill me the first time, so I thought about it and considered it, and got completely out of the military and went to work for RCA.

You were awarded two Purple Hearts? The first Purple Heart was what I call my John Wayne wound. I was in four helicopters in Vietnam, and this one was, I think, the second one. We got shot up and landed hard. I thought I’d snagged my flight suit getting out of the helicopter, because my arm wouldn’t quit bleeding. I didn’t think much of it but I finally went to the doctor and said, “Why does this thing keep bleeding,?” He started digging around and pulled shrapnel out and he said, “My god, you’ve been wounded.” He was pulling these little fibers out that looked like stranded electrical wire where the strands have come out. He pulled out about 5 or 6 of them. He said, “I’ll put you in for a Purple Heart.” Now it looks like a vaccination scar. My buddy, Mitch Carpenter got wounded also. He got hit across the bridge of the nose.

A month later they had us line up and infantry Marines give us Purple Hearts. So, the airwing of the Marine Corps, the infantry Marines, consider us to be almost Air Force. So, this Colonel is giving out the Purple Hearts and he stopped in front of these guys who really got hurt. One guy had his arm all bandaged up, and the Colonel said, “So son, how are you wounded?” And he said, “I stepped on a land mine.” He really got hurt. So, the Colonel went down the line and got to Mitch. Now in the Airwing, we were working on these old piston engine helicopters, and they were nasty. Our uniforms were all oily, we just looked bad, hair down to here. In early Vietnam, you couldn’t get food or anything.

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Our uniforms were rotting off us, literally, because of the damp, they never got dry. So, we’re looking like someone’s rear end, and he walks in front of Mitch and said, “Son where were you wounded,” and Mitch said, “Right across the bridge of my nose sir,” and the Colonel said, “Where?” Mitch went, “Right here sir,” and the Colonel said, “Oh yeah.” Then he looked up and down and said, “You’re in the airwing aren’t you?” “Yes sir,” and he pinned the Purple Heart on him. Then he walked up to me and he said, “Son, how were you wounded,” and I said, “Shrapnel in the back of my arm sir,” and he said, “You’re in the airwing too aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, sir,” and he pinned it on me. Some on these guys were really hurt, and some of them got sent back to the states. It was embarrassing for Mitch and me, we wanted to crawl under the nearest rock.

The second time they sent me home. Anyway, it was 52 years ago. A Long time.

So, how did you end up back in the service? I was out for about 5 or 6 years, and I missed the military. I also wanted to buy an airplane, but I didn’t want to spend family money, so I checked out the Air Guard because they had airplanes but they didn’t have any openings, they were completely full. Back in the 50’s, my dad was commanding officer of the Army National Guard Unit in Shelby so I checked out the Army Guard.

I walked in the door and there behind the desk was a man named Gus Gregory, a wonderful guy. I walked in, and I remembered Gus from my dad, and I said, “Sergeant Gregory,” and he said “Yeah, who are you?” “Bob Cabiness.” He said, “Bobby Cabiness,” cause when I was a little boy they called me Bobby, and he’d known me since I was a little boy. He asked

140 Greg Mclntyre me what I was doing there? I told him I was down to see about enrolling in the Army Guard, but I said, “You guys don’t have any airplanes out there. What would I be doing?” He said, “Just come down and look around, if you see something you like, just let me know.” I said, “Where do I sign up?”

I was in the Army Guard for 12 or 13 years in Shelby, then I went to the Air Guard in Charlotte and they had an opening in avionics. They said I had to be discharged from the Army and take the ASVAB test, so that’s what I did. I loved the Army but the Air Guard is a whole other world. They’re very professional, and I went all over the world. The first Gulf War, Bosnia, Panama, we did a lot of stuff the Army guys just didn’t get to do.

I wound up as First Sergeant. First Sergeant is like Master Chief, in charge of all the enlisted guys. The commanding officer called me up to the office one day and he said, “I’d like you to be my First Sergeant.” I said, “You know my reputation?” He said, “Oh I know your reputation.” I asked, “What do you know about it?” He said, “You despise officers,” and I said, “I do.” He said, “Well, you’re not going to be with the officers, you’ll be over with the enlisted guys.” I asked him, “Why did you choose me to be First Sergeant?” He said, “Because you were in the Army. We need someone to straighten this place out.”

In the Air Force, and Air Guard, everyone had different colored ballcaps to differentiate the shop you were in. The engine shop wore blue ballcaps, the electronic guys wore green ballcaps. I became First Sergeant when we switched over from green uniforms to the camouflage stuff, so we had to get rid of all that and wear the camouflaged BDU cap, which I hated. That was one of my deals, to make sure you were wearing proper uniform.

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You had to blouse your boots and wear the proper uniform. I was really tough on them. I was going around snatching hats off them, you can’t do this, can’t do that.

I knew we were getting a new commanding officer, and I was standing in formation one Sunday, with all these people out there. First Sergeant goes out and brings everybody to attention, and the XO (Executive Officer) comes out and gives the squadron to him, then you go stand behind the squadron with the Chief. So, I’m standing behind the squadron and I look, and there’s some guy with a mesh black ballcap on, right in the middle of my squadron. The base commander is up there talking, and so I slipped down there and ease behind him and said, “You get your butt in my office.” So, I looked down, and the guy was a Major. I said, “Sir, what are you doing standing in formation with my enlisted men?” And he said, “I thought that’s where I should stand with a new commanding officer.” I said, “Sir, you don’t stand in formation with the enlisted men, come stand with me.” Come to find out he’d never done anything but be an Air Force flyer. He had no clue. He came back and stood next to me, and said, “I think I need to come to your office and you can teach me how to do my job.” I said, “Sir, we’re going to get along just fine.”

I’m sure there’s a lot of truth to that. I’m sure that officers are dependent on the enlisted. I told my new commanding officer, “When you get a new butter bar” (that’s a guy right out of school), an ensign to you, “How about sending him through my office before you send him out to his job?” And he said, “Why?” And I said, “I just need to talk to him.”

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These guys would come in and always get put over at the shop, the engine shop, avionics or something. They’d bring them in to me, and I’d say, “Sir, you’re a brand new officer, congratulations. You’re going to be the OIC (Officer in Charge) down at the engine shop. Now Chief Jones has been the Chief down at the engine shop for 15 years, he pretty much knows what’s going on. Do yourself a favor, go down there, introduce yourself to Chief Jones and say, I’m here for you to teach me how to do my job. If you do that, you’ll do fine. If you go and start throwing your weight around, next thing you know, Chief Jones is going to be on the phone to a buddy in the Pentagon, and you’re going to wind up in Alaska. Just you remember, these Chiefs, they know everybody. They all owe each other favors. All they’ve got to do is pick up the phone book and they can make your life miserable.”

My dad died when I was 13, and my mom died when I was 16. So, I’ve been on my own since I was 16. Had it not been for the Marine Corps, there’s no telling what might have been. The Marine Corps set my future, you might say. I just went to Parris Island a few weeks ago with my grandson who graduated from there, and driving on base was almost emotional for me, and it still is to this day.

I feel the same way about the Navy. I got to see the world in the Navy. I spent a lot of time in the Middle East, Asia, and I was stationed in San Diego. When I first got in the Marine Corps, when I first got situated, some old salt had written on the sea bag everywhere he went. I thought that was pretty cool, I need to do that. I got the guys in paraloft to make me a clothing bag, and I wrote on there all the places that I’d been. When I go through an airport with that

143 HOMETOWN HEROES clothing bag on my shoulder, everybody stops and stares, and say, look at that guy, because all these years I’ve been in the military, it’s 33 years, I’ve been gone all the time. Before my grandson joined the Marine Corps, I pulled that bag out and said, I want you to see this. This is what you can do.

The Navy allowed me to become independent and grow up a little bit, and get out on my own. My dad was in the Navy at San Diego too. He worked on subs as an ES Second Class Petty Officer. One of the things he always said, which I realized to be true, was I was enlisted, I went in enlisted, and the only difference between myself and the officer was a piece of paper. So, that inspired him to come straight out and get his engineering degree, which made a great life for us. My grandson lived with us his senior year in high school. My wife, who I love dearly, said to him, “Let’s go upstairs, I want to show you your papa’s armoire.” She opened it up and all my t-shirts were folded as so, and my socks and everything. That’s what the Marine Corps does for you. She said to him, “When we first got married, he had to show me how to fold his underwear, because if it wasn’t folded just so, he would just refold it.”

I used to iron my underwear. My wife just freaked out, boxer shorts with creases on them. I was telling my grandson, they do things differently when you’re in boot camp. They issue everything to you. All your field gear, all issued to you, so you’ve got to haul that mess around every time you go somewhere. And I said, “Did they show you how to pack a sea bag?” He said, “Well, no.” “They didn’t show you how to pack a sea bag? Well, I’ll show you how to pack a sea bag so you can get all your stuff in it.” I started rolling everything up and putting it in there, and I said, “You wouldn’t believe what

144 Greg Mclntyre you can get in a sea bag if you do it right. You can get so much in here you can’t pick the thing up.”

Then I said, “Did they not show you how to fold your dress uniform?” He said, “No.” So, I said, “Let me show you. You tuck one sleeve into the other sleeve, then you roll the thing inside out so it’s not all wrinkly. Somebody is going to teach you how to do this sooner or later. And when you have ‘junk on a bunk’, a clothing inspection, you just unroll it and it’s not wrinkled, it’s looks good, whereas if you just stuff it in a bag, it’s going to look horrible. And you can’t fold it, because folding it leaves creases.”

I think our society is lot more casual now also. I wound up being a high school teacher. I taught electronics and physics at Burns. When I first started teaching, at the end of their senior year, the kids have their final exam, and the last question on all my final exams was, ‘What do you like, and what do you not like?’ I can’t tell you how many times they answered, we enjoy the discipline in your classroom. I thought, of all the things. So I asked the kids, “Why is that?” And they said, “Because when we come in your classroom, we know how far we can go. We know we can go up to the line. In other classrooms, we don’t know, and it creates stress because we don’t know how far we can go.”

Society as a whole and the school systems need to back that up, because it doesn’t do kids any good if you can’t give them some discipline. My discipline was, I will never send you to the office. I don’t care what you do, I’m going to take care of it right here, right now. I never sent a kid to the office in 30 years, because the kids knew. I think they respected me enough, No.1, not to pull

145 HOMETOWN HEROES any crazy stuff. I would say, “If you want to play a practical joke on me, I’m all for it, as long as you don’t hurt anybody and you don’t damage any equipment. Make it a good one, because I’ve seen all of them, and I’ll laugh as hard as you.” My thing was, if you’re late coming to classroom, and late means your butt is not on the seat, don’t say a word to me, just go to the back of the room, drop down, and give me 25 push-ups. That’s the first time, second time it’s 50, and third time it’s a 100.

That’s a lot of Push-ups. Young kids especially would say, “I can’t do 25 push-ups.” I’d say, “I tell you what partner, I’ll do a one arm push up for every two arm push up you do.” So, I’d say, “Show me what you can do.” They’d do 25 push-ups even if it killed them, even if it broke their back so they could see me do 25 one arm push-ups.

Thank you for your service.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Story 11

GENE RAMSEY Vietnam Veteran and Bronze Star Recipient

Gene Ramsey is the head of the VFW (Veteran of Foreign Wars) and has some very interesting stories. He’s a real advocate for veterans, and is out there pursuing veteran’s disability issues. A few weeks ago, we were at the VFW and there was a representative there from Senator Thom Tillis office.

It was a good meeting, and I had good feedback from some of the veterans from the Vietnam era. I’m going to formally tell you about my journey for the last 50 years in the service.

This week, being a reflection of 50 years ago, I was in a fire fight. We were running a convoy down there on Khe Pass, or Highway 19, and about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we took fire, and the wrecker I was riding shotgun on got hit. That day we had 14 casualties of the 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion, and engaged the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) in a fire fight. I ended up saving a guy’s life and trying to save a couple of other people’s lives that got into a fire fight ambush.

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That day 50 years ago, it was a different time frame here in Shelby. My dad was a World War II vet, and my two brothers served. About thirty days after this incident, I got a letter from my mom who said she woke up in the late morning hours at the same time of the fire fight, praying for my life, a sixth sense if you will. I brought the commendation letter from my senior officer to recognize that God answers prayers. He took care of me that day, and the other 300 days plus that I served in Vietnam.

Two medals – one for a tour of duty in Vietnam and the other for being in combat situations.

The Bronze Star is about the third highest medal you can get in service, so I was blessed to have comrades and everybody else involved with that commendation letter that we got.

I’m telling you this story because I didn’t realize at the time, with the 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion, (and sometimes I flew as gunner to fill in at different times) that we experienced a thing called Agent Orange. As we went into a hot LZ (Landing Zone), they would spray that. We didn’t know what it was. Then when I was pulling latrine duty and other things, and I didn’t realize some of that was burning the fuel from Agent Orange to get rid of things we needed to get rid of. I didn’t have a problem with

148 Greg Mclntyre that. I came back and went straight into Gardner Webb for 4 years right out of the jungle of Vietnam. I had 4 years of education that the government paid for.

The GI bill? The GI bill, one of the best things that ever happened to me. Sometime around 1986, I got a letter from Senator Roy Hill telling me a little about Agent Orange. I went ahead and applied to the VA because I’d developed a diabetic condition related to Agent Orange. It took a time to get a response. I went on working my business as a district manager at Western Southern Life Insurance Company for about 40 years. I had the top agency at Western Southern and got along extremely well. This is when I became involved in thinking about myself and my comrades that had been exposed to Agent Orange.

I did some research and during that time I contacted my congressman explaining that we were probably going to have problems down the road. I wanted to make sure I was looked after, as well as my family. So, I became commander of the VFW post and the Am Vets for a number of years, a life member there, and the DAV (Disabled American Veterans) as well as the American Legion. I kind of got out of that as I was moving my insurance business to get ready for retirement.

This past year I had an incident with one of my veterans from the VFW post. Within 15 minutes the VFW raised about $1100 for this individual. I said, man, I need to be a part of that again because I was retired, so I took over as commander of the VFW. Since that point in time, I’ve had letters from Senator Tom Tillis, Patrick McHenry, and Senator Richard Burr, all helping with these veterans. I became 100% compensated for my disability

149 HOMETOWN HEROES with Agent Orange, and some Post Traumatic Stress which most of us who had been in combat had.

Then I started working with veterans at the VFW post going down the line to see how we could help these veterans. Since then, I’ve had a folder put together at the VFW that will help us with the local Veteran’s Affairs officer, Debra Conn. I’m working right now on seven other cases where Debra and myself are hoping they get paid for Post Traumatic Stress because they were in the same situation, or similar situation as I was.

Also through the Am Vets, there’s a national Am Vets out of Winston Salem, that’s another route we can take to help these veterans. So, I’m trying to pay back for the things that I’ve been blessed to receive. That’s been the journey now.

I was interviewed by the Shelby Star about 15 years ago about how it feels, and how did it feel? It was then I realized my dad was probably exposed to Post Traumatic Stress due to his World War II experiences. He also received the Bronze Star.

As I dig into this more, I’m finding there are a lot of veterans who don’t want to ask for benefits that are due compensation. My goal is to work with them and the VFW to help them get what they deserve.

Absolutely, and there is compensation out there for disability, Agent Orange and other service connected disabilities. That’s a veteran benefit that you work on first hand all the time. Yes, I’m pretty much involved. I’ve got some other people involved also. I’ve even got a letter from Senator John McCain and a Senator from Georgia.

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There’s also veterans Aid and Attendance, which is something we do at my firm on a regular basis. Aid and Attendance helps seniors who are veterans, the spouse of a veteran, or the spouse of a deceased veteran receive monthly pension benefits for the rest of their lives. That compensation has already started with the individual I mentioned. Her husband was in World War II. You brought it to my attention at a VFW benefit, along with Ladybird Deeds and Power of Attorneys and things like that. Since then, I’ve become involved making these things happen. When I do something, I kind of get involved and I walk the walk, I just don’t talk about it.

I see that. I was impressed coming over the VFW a couple of weeks ago. A good group of people there and Senator Thom Tillis’ representative was there from his office. He was very good. We couldn’t have asked for a more professional young man. Yeah, it was kind of fun to get involved, because I was getting a little bored playing golf five days a week. This has given me an outlet to pay back some benefits I’ve received through the government.

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I appreciate your service you have given to our country, and the Bronze Star, that’s huge. Well, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the time I was needed, but blessed to be back and have lived a good life.

Gene, 11/24/1967 – He was in an ambush that day. He took weapons from NVA, killed NVA, saved two soldiers’ lives, captured 2 NVA, and ultimately was awarded the Bronze Star.

We don’t know how lucky we are in the safety of our communities and homes. We’re afforded that by good people like yourself who have gone out there and really helped our country. There was a nice article in the Shelby Star about how many veterans the VA has taken care of, and how many fell in World War I and II. There were almost 60,000 in Vietnam killed but we don’t know how many have died since then, because we have a lot of Post Traumatic Stress. I think most people are aware that about 22 veterans a day commit suicide.

A lot of these soldiers have come back from the Persian Gulf wars. They’re probably exposed to more things than we’re aware of. It doesn’t hit you until later in life. Some of these things seem to slip back on you.

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I spoke with Evan Thompson last week, who is the Post Commander of Post 82 American Legion in North Carolina about the Legion and the importance of getting involved with groups like the American Legion and the VFW. You are a huge proponent for the VFW. That’s a great group, ready-made for veterans returning from overseas to plug into. They get to meet people from different war eras, and their own war era, and get to understand what they went through. Or put a plug in for the Vietnam War veterans that you were privileged to sit with in Kings Mountain.

Absolutely. I think we’ve got 114 members now. We meet on the second Monday of every month at 8:30 in Kings Mountain. Jim Medelin is doing a great job bringing us together. They started out with five people about five years ago and now we have one hundred and fourteen members. That’s an awesome thing he started. Some veterans are not part of the VFW, Am Vets and other organizations, but hopefully we can attract them and help them realize we’ve got things they may not be aware of.

There are members who understand what veterans are going through. People who can help you and make you feel part of the brotherhood you felt while in the military. That’s why we join. You think about coming from a war zone where horrible stuff is going on, maybe in the Middle East, and trying to sit in a college classroom. You did it. I’m sure that was quite an adjustment. It was a shock actually.

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Can you tell me about that? Well, the first thing I remember was I was coming out from the jungles of Vietnam and then into Gardner Webb College, which is a Baptist school. I remember thinking, “Man how am I going to go about this?” It was a goal of mine to finish college. One of the reasons I volunteered for the draft was to get the GI bill. I remember going into the first class and Paul Stacy was my biology professor, probably the hardest class I ever took. I took it in summer school just so I could get it out of the way, and thank goodness he understood what being a veteran was, what it meant. He took me aside and mentored me in how to study, to focus on that for the time I needed to, and make sure I made the grades I needed to get a college degree. So, it was a shock, but I adjusted fairly well.

My thoughts are: You’re in the jungles of Vietnam, or you’re in the deserts of Iraq or Afghanistan, and your mind is racing a mile a minute I’m sure. When you’re in those pressure stress times of a fire fight, you’re with this band of brothers, weaponry is part of your life, fighting is your life. Suddenly you’re out the jungles of Vietnam and in college sitting beside some kids who did not have those experiences. You’re expected to behave the same way as those who didn’t have your experience. I have found myself saying in my mind, this person is full of crap, or they’re babies, they don’t know. It kind of felt that way when I first came back but I was able to put that behind me. I had a couple of buddies who came back and went to Gardner Webb at the same time, so we had a kind of a brotherhood as you say. Coming out of Vietnam, we also had the many changes that were going on in America where people weren’t happy about the Vietnam war. It was hard for us

154 Greg Mclntyre to suck it up and ignore them to some degree, but fortunately, in a smaller town, we didn’t face as much adversity as we did at Fort Washington where we came back to debrief for a couple of days. There was a lot of protests and things going on, but we put that aside and made some friends.

So, you’re not moving to Canada? No, but I’ve got a good story to tell you. I had a younger brother who went to Germany. I recommended he go in the service for the discipline, and he ended up getting in the National Guard. He came to my dad one day and said, “I think I’m just going to Canada,” and my dad looked at him and said, “Why don’t you look in that mirror right there.” My brother said, “What do you mean?” and my dad said, “You want to see a coward looking in that mirror, you go to Canada, you don’t come home.” So, he went on and joined the National Guard and finished his 6 years.

There were a lot of different opinions at that time, as there is today, but it is a big change today as it was 50 years ago. The military has changed tremendously. In fact, one of my goals this year is to go back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where I took my basic training for 10 weeks, and then go to Fort Jackson, because I haven’t been there since I got out. It’s on my bucket list. I want to check it out and see how much they have advanced since I was in there.

I would love to hear about the contrast between the military today and then. I imagine it was pretty rough? Boot camp was 10 weeks out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. You always heard about volunteering, so I volunteered to be a fireman about the third week in. I thought I would be on the back of a fire truck. I didn’t realize I would be shoveling coal at

155 HOMETOWN HEROES night on duty. So, I learned to not volunteer for a lot of things in basic training.

What does the Navy stand for? Never Again Volunteer Yourself. That’s right.

Thank you for your service and talking about your stories.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Story 12

RAY KALE The Real ‘Platoon’ Vietnam Story

We got ambushed going up a hill one night, it was real late. We should already have been set up, and we shouldn’t have been on a trail either, but it was all trails. That jet came down and I saw it firing across the wings, sparks coming out from them.

Ray Kale is a Vietnam veteran and his wife Connie is a part of his story. So, you were drafted into Vietnam. Where are you from originally? RK: I was drafted April 26th 1966. My best friend since sixth grade, Tommy, was drafted with me. We went to the induction center in Charlotte, and I thought we would be able to go back home but they sent us straight to Fort Jackson. After one week at Fort Jackson, they sent us to Fort Riley, Kansas. I did six weeks of basic training and then six weeks of advanced infantry training.

Did they send you directly to Vietnam after basic? RK: I got to come home for a leave after infantry training for thirty days; that was in August, then went back. While I was doing the last bit of training in the field, I got a call saying my father was sick, so I went home but he’d already died. We left the first half of December and went to California. We were on

157 HOMETOWN HEROES a ship for twenty-one days, and I was sick for twenty one days. That was a long trip. The day before we landed they put us on a landing craft loaded with live ammunition, grenades, rifles, machine guns and everything. There wasn’t a word spoken all the way to shore. We were all scared to death.

You didn’t know what to expect. RK: Right. When the ramp went down, there was a band playing welcoming us there. They loaded us on trucks. There were about two thousand of us in a long convoy of trucks, tanks and ACP carriers. The area had already been secured, I think by the 71st Airborne but I’m not sure, so when we got there, it was just dirt with a berm around it. From there we started to make a couple of patrols. On the same patrols two people got killed. I’m not so sure there was any enemy out there but we had a big ceremony, and people really made up the stories. If they don’t know what happens out there, they put a story with death or something in it.

Then we went to, well, I don’t know where we were. I was in recon, a thirty-man squad. We wore soft hats, we didn’t wear the helmets, and basically all we had were rifles and some grenades. Tommy was in the same company, Echo Company, in Kansas. He was in the mortar platoon. Halfway through our tour I went to the 450th up north. I think I was in Charlie Company and Tommy went to the Mekong Delta. They put him in the infantry there. They didn’t want everyone going home at the same time you see. I stayed a year.

There was something every day, different highs every day and night. We didn’t get any rest. What people don’t realize is that it rained for six months. You basically never saw the sun;

158 Greg Mclntyre then it’s clear for six months; you never saw a cloud. It was dusty half the year and muddy the other half.

We would ride on tanks or we were walking, that’s how we got around. Everyone would put a handkerchief around their face, but you would be covered in red dust anyway. Your face looked like you had a red mask on.

I came home in April and went back to work. I was working before at Walmers Business Firms, and Connie came to work there. Actually it was a different job but the same department she was working in. That’s how I met her. She was engaged to be married and got married a while after that. Her husband, Dwayne, went to Vietnam and he got killed July 28th. He was there three months in the 196th Infantry.

Man, war is hard isn’t it? RK: That day I was working and my supervisor came up and said, they sent her to the front office and told her her husband got killed. That’s how it happened.

I don’t know how many got killed, I know it was a lot. In my platoon there were thirty of us. Five got killed and ten or fifteen wounded. I was sick for one day the whole time I was there. I always wanted to get malaria cause then you got out of the field for one month, but I got it after I came home. I was at Fort Eustace, Virginia and I got malaria and stayed in the hospital.

How did you get malaria when you came home? RK: I don’t know. You would take the iodine pills and put them in your water and it makes your water bitter. A lot of people wouldn’t do it. I don’t know if that was why but I didn’t get it. I

159 HOMETOWN HEROES did everything they told me to, but I got malaria my last month and then when I got home I got malaria again. I went to the VA in Salisbury, because the doctor here couldn’t treat me.

I wonder how the natives in Vietnam deal with it? I guess they’re used to it? RK: I don’t know, but malaria is terrible. It makes you so weak.

And you got it more than once? CK: I guess something stays in your body. He would get really hot in the summertime.

RK: Yeah, I got sick at work one day. It was July, so it was really hot. I got in my car and my teeth were chattering. I had the heater on in my car. Then I got sick at Fort Eustace and about died in my room before somebody came in. I bided my time up there.

CK: Maybe it was the leeches.

RK: Yeah, we had leeches.

When you went in the water? RK: You don’t have to be in water, they can be on the land. You would think it was mosquitos, but I have more mosquitos in my back yard. The leeches would get all over you. You had to burn them off with a cigarette. You would have to put your boots inside your pants, otherwise they would come right up on you, but they still get on you. I’m trying to think of other things.

CK: You were supposed to be dead.

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RK: Oh yeah. I went to a forward base camp. They were all forward base camps because we never came out of the field. I slept on the ground at least fifty weeks of the fifty-two I was there. They would come out to resupply us, and the helicopters wouldn’t even land, they would just kick it off, take our mail and they were gone.

The radio was quite heavy, and someone had to carry it. This was when I was still in the 9th Infantry Recon Platoon, and there were thirty in that platoon. A normal platoon was about forty-four or something, so we split up three ways. We weren’t that far apart, but we couldn’t see each other for the brush and jungle. I asked this guy, “Will you carry this radio? I’ll give you five dollars if you carry it.” Well, you’re not supposed to switch your squads, you stay where you were assigned. He agreed to carry it and he went in my squad and I went in his. Well they got ambushed. We heard the explosions and firing and everything, and we got all split up. So I’m by myself and scared to death, and I heard someone coming through the brush. It was the Sergeant. He had blood on his face and ears, and he said, “They’re all dead.” They weren’t all dead, but he thought they were. They all got wounded. So, I went with him and this guy was on the ground dead and the rest were wounded, but he had that radio. The wire so you can speak was cut, and he had a spot of blood on his chest. That was the only mark on him, but he was dead. Me and another guy had to carry him to a river because there was no clearing. We didn’t have time to clear, so we had to carry him to where the helicopters could come in and get him.

They called back to the camp and Tommy was there. They called out the names of the wounded and KIA’s and they had me as a KIA, because that was where I was supposed to be. When

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I went to Washington DC to the monument, the first person I looked up was that guy. For five dollars he lost his life. I saw that happen at other times too, where people went where they weren’t supposed to.

I guess the worst thing that happened to me was guarding artillery, eight inch guns. You can’t hide from jets and artillery. Our artillery is fearsome. There was a one-seven-five (175) and a one-five-five (155). They were the biggest guns we had, so they were always subject to attack. This was when I was with the 4th Division. It was a company of about two hundred, and we had to build a perimeter around with foxholes. The artillery people didn’t dig foxholes. I took out what’s called a listening post. The part I remember was, you sent out the listening posts. You have two guys and you sent them out in different directions from your camp. You send them way out there, and if the enemy comes up, they’re supposed to run back, or they get killed. It was like a chicken in a cage out there.

They didn’t have a radio or anything? RK: Nope, no radio, they didn’t have anything, just a rifle. If it’s raining, which it was a lot of the time, you just lay on the ground. Someone always had to be guarding. Whatever your position was, always one of you had to be awake, usually an hour at a time and then you rotate. Anyway, that night I was in a tent. We put up a tent made of two ponchos in front of the bunker and I took these guys out. That night about one o’clock, there was a misty rain and it was pitch black, and we started to get mortared. The LP’s, the two I set up, came running back in, and the guy who was on guard pulled me by my feet into the bunker. We would all have got killed if it weren’t for the bunkers because of the mortars. Then they tried to come in. I don’t know

162 Greg Mclntyre how many there were of them, at least several hundred because they wouldn’t have tried to attack the camp unless there was a bunch of them. It was such a roar, the noise.

When you get to the point where you’re afraid of being overrun, they take the guns and shoot beehive rounds which have hundreds of steel darts and shoot straight into the jungle. Just point blank shoot them. Then we always had artillery protection too. They’re always set so all they have to do is fire for the effect, a fire barrage. So the artillery strike was coming in, and the two LP’s in front of me were, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” because the artillery was getting close to them. There were what we called pom pom guns, two guns on a tank beside me, and they cranked up and went over to reinforce that side where the enemy had come in.

The next morning, the Sergeant told me, you need to go over, take your men, your squad and piece up the bodies. Many times, things happened and you didn’t see the enemy. I went over and there were dead everywhere, blood everywhere, they were just mangled, just mowed down. So we dragged them out.

In Vietnam, the goal was not to capture property, we didn’t take territory, all we did was look for the dead bodies. That’s what they were going by, the kill, so we always had to count bodies. Even the artillery kill we still had to count and call them back in. The kill ratio in Vietnam then was twelve to one, twelve Vietnamese to one American. We took them out and lined them up on the ground. I can picture it. There was one still living, and they asked a medic to look at him, and they said, “Don’t worry about him, he’s not going to make it.” So, we had an interpreter and he asked the guy what was going on. All he said was, “We

163 HOMETOWN HEROES walked into a wall of steel.” That was it. He was one of the thirty- seven bodies we laid out, but I know there was a lot more killed. There was just so much blood, and there was a trail of blood down the trail. We didn’t go and check or anything. We loaded everything up, and that day we pulled out.

There was two artillery guys killed and a helicopter that tried to come in and take the wounded out got shot down, so those four on it were killed. I didn’t see that, someone else saw it. The guy in the bunker, he got wounded, shot. I got shrapnel. They were moving ammunition to the next foxhole, and the Sergeant told me to send some more. I was E5, he was E6, you’ve got to do what they tell you. So, I told this guy who was spec 4, and he said, “I’m not going over there,” and I said, “You’ve got to go, I’m E5, you’re Spec 4,” so he ran over, got it and ran back. It was pitch black and I could feel my arm was all wet, warm and sticky like blood. When I woke up the next morning, I went over to get the bodies and there was smoke and that smell. Charges on our side were on fire, it looked like the forth of July. It was shooting out sparks and everything, lighting up the place. I was afraid it was going to blow up. The day after that you just move on wherever they take you. That was the worst thing. We did get ambushed, and people got killed by friendly fire.

I imagine it would be really confusing with everything going on. RK: We didn’t even know where we were. They didn’t tell you where you were going, they’d just say, load up, the helicopters or transport will pick you up (especially helicopters). We were waiting on a runway in an operation and they always told us, one round will get you home, that’s what the saying was. I told my friend, “You know, it’s kind of dangerous us lying here all together waiting for the helicopters to come and get us.” There

164 Greg Mclntyre was a roadway they were going to build. All they had was the dirt, the jungle was cleared out. We were sitting there waiting to be picked up, and I said to my friend Ben, “We better go on the other side of the road where there’s no one else.” I feared if you’re going to shoot somebody, you’re going to look where the crowd is. So we went over there. Just then a helicopter came over and they were firing because they were supporting another unit that was under fire. I saw the smoke coming out of the guns and they were firing and went straight over us and killed the guy over in the group who had been sitting beside me. So it was a good thing we went over to the other side.

Wow. RK: Vietnam was laying in the mud and the rain. It was just being dirty the whole time, missing family mostly. The best part was when we came home. I was on Interstate 85 sitting in a car with my mother and brother. My father had already died. I got to go home and sleep in my bed for the first time. I will always remember that, that was the best part.

CK: You have pictures that you would have to be in a totally different frame of mind to take. In our society it’s not something you would take pictures of. That always blew my mind.

RK: I told Connie, I didn’t get emotional about anything. That’s what you do when you’re on patrol. The Sergeant, he has to figure out where you’re going.

CK: He gets more emotional now in his old age.

RK: I do. When I came out of there I didn’t care. We followed this unit, there was two hundred of us. I don’t know how many of

165 HOMETOWN HEROES them, a bunch of them. Artillery was always bombing stuff and they just buried their dead in their foxholes, so we had to dig them up and count them.

I’ll bet half of the people I served with are dead now.

Just doesn’t seem like that long ago. You were young when you went. It seems like it was an absolutely crazy year. RK: Yeah, but I’ll bet half of them are dead now. A Chinook took me out in the field for the last time and about crashed into a dead tree. They started walking and I thought, “Oh gosh, don’t let me die now.”

A lot of times I’ll interview veterans who spent a lot of their time learning a trade or they’re a doctor, your story is a lot different. You were drafted, went to boot camp, and dropped off to fight a war. RK: Sometimes I’m a little bitter.

I don’t know how something like that can positively affect the rest of your life. RK: Nothing did, apart from Connie and I got married in 1970. I didn’t think much about it, but the older you get, the more sentimental you get. I think about the people who didn’t come home, like Connie’s first husband Dwayne. You have your life cut off at twenty years old. They had a song out, Fortunate Son, talking about the ones who didn’t have to go. You look at the last four Presidents, they didn’t have to go over there. I had a life that I didn’t want to give up but you get snatched up.

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CK: Dwayne was in college at Eastern Carolina and he came home. He was going to Gaston college, and he took a break, and they got him.

RK: My brother didn’t go. He stayed in college. I’ll be honest with you, I tried to get out of going to Vietnam. I was trying to get out because my father had died. I don’t think that was right. I didn’t get to be with my father for the last six months of his life. For my mother, my father died, I went to Vietnam, my brother was at Western Carolina, my sister had a baby born dead, and my mother had started to work. She was forty-two years old, and I’m gone. I couldn’t help. I could have been there with her because she needed moral support. I’m not bitter, but sometimes it doesn’t seem fair. I can picture a family worrying about their children who are in a war. I can say it was a good experience now that it’s over.

I don’t know about that. I’m going to say, war is bad. But what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger maybe? CK: The main part about it was how they just left and came home.

Just left it unresolved. CK: We watched a documentary the other day, The Last Days of Vietnam. The Vietnamese people were running trying to get on the airplanes because they didn’t want to be left there. They helped the Americans and knew they were going to be in trouble for it.

RK: I had a chance to kill two guys and I didn’t do it. They didn’t see me and they had shot down a helicopter. We would have had to go back to the village and look for whoever shot it

167 HOMETOWN HEROES down. I saw them, and they were in green uniforms. You can’t spot anybody in those green uniforms, you just can’t see them. I could have picked them off with my rifle easily but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. Other people opened fire on them. There was a little fence made out of sticks and a helicopter gunship came in and started firing rockets into the place they went. I know they got killed. We didn’t check it out, it would take too much time.

All that stuff is a lot louder in real life. It’s a lot more dramatic when you see a jet come over a tree line and you can see the pilot in there and the five-hundred pound bomb tumble out of it. We got ambushed going up a hill one night, it was real late. We should already have been set up for a start, and we shouldn’t have been on a trail either, but it was all trails. That jet came down, and I saw it firing across the wings, sparks coming out from them. It could have got us. One of the guys I was with put his rifle to the Captain’s head and said, “If I get killed, I’m going to blow your brains out. If I get hit, I’m going to blow your brains out.” We needed to get away or stop the firing. They had already cleared the hill for artillery. The artillery was awesome, just awesome what they could do. I could see why people in World War II got shell shock by the artillery though. It sounds nothing like it does on TV.

CK: Ray was saying, he has never seen a movie that really depicts how it was. All this rough talking, it was never like that.

RK: Those guys didn’t use foul language. All that extra stuff they wear, we had to stay in uniform, we had to shave every morning, no matter where you were, first thing in the morning so everybody is clean cut. We didn’t have to shine our boots though, but the helicopter pilots, people like them, spit shine

168 Greg Mclntyre boots, pressed uniforms, all that stuff. You’re still in the military when you’re there. You’re not free to do what you want.

It doesn’t matter how you feel, you still have to get up and shave in the morning. RK: I can’t tell you how many ambushes I was on where everybody was asleep but me. There was probably twenty of us, may be thirty. We were on the side of the road and I saw them coming, probably about a hundred of them. The North Vietnamese army was walking down the road and they weren’t very far from us. We were up there in the brush, and all I can hear was the guy next to me snoring like crazy. So I’m trying to wake him up and keep him quiet and I’m the only one awake. I can’t call it in on the radio, I don’t know where the heck I am, I can’t call in artillery.

Another time we set one group up on the road and another group here, it was at night. It was right on the edge of the road, and they came this way and you’re supposed to call up to the other group so they’re prepared so they could shoot them when they came by. Well, I’m calling and nobody answers. I was the only one awake. Then a whole herd of water buffalo came over and almost trampled me to death, breathing over me, blowing air out.

I’ll tell you one more thing: All we did all day long was patrol, then we stopped in the evening where there was water, and there was plenty of water. We would be on high ground and dig a perimeter with foxholes. There was four to a foxhole, four feet deep and six feet long and two feet wide, just so all four could fit in there. I’m talking about the work. After walking all day with a fifty pound pack, then you had to clear a field of fire with a machete, cut down trees and take the logs, you fill up sand bags

169 HOMETOWN HEROES and put them on each side, put the logs across them, then sand bags across the logs, then set up the trip wires with claymore mines, and then the next morning, you take it all back down. You had to put the sand from the sandbags back in the foxhole, roll them all up, pack and go eat something. C rations, that’s all we had. The whole year I was there I did not eat ice cream, I did not have alcohol or eggs, only C rations.

CK: They would send them stuff.

RK: They would send us drinks but the people in camp would just send us the off-brand stuff. They would keep the cokes and stuff and send us the Canada Dry Winks, we loved those. And we had to drink them hot, you know.

Winks? RK: Winks, W.I.N.K.

CK: It came in a green bottle.

RK: They sent them to us in cans.

I know Canada Dry Ginger Ale. RK: Well, Canada Dry makes Wink. It’s sort of like a Mountain Dew but they would give us all the crappy stuff and take all the good stuff out. We were treated like dirt. We were called grunts, the grunts were treated like dirt. They took us out one time in trucks and dropped us off, and we said, “Can we have one of those cold packs?” they said, “No you can’t have one.” So, one day they said, “Get off the truck,” and one guy grabbed the cooler and we took it with us.

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They hated to see us coming. If we came into a big camp, they knew we would rob them. They knew we would take their stuff.

I’ll tell you, I love to hear these stories but that was a tough story, that was a tough experience. RK: I think about my grandson, I would be going crazy thinking about it. At least in Vietnam, it was daylight there when it was dark over here.

CK: If it comes to my grandson, I’m grabbing him and running.

RK: The only time I got emotional was when those two artillery guys got killed. They were separating their personal stuff from their military stuff so they could send the personal stuff home. I thought, “You know, here it is, it’s midnight back home and their families don’t know they’re dead. They don’t know they’re dead yet.”

CK: Dwayne was dead a month before I knew it. I was still sending letters, and it took a month to get the information to me. For weeks after that I would get packages in the mail where they were sending things back.

RK: We sent letters, not that they got everything but we did send letters. My mother always sent me care packages. I appreciated all the people who sent me stuff. It made the C rations a little better, Texas Pete and all that, try to doctor it up a little bit. My father died September 27th. When I went home he had already died. When I got back, I think I was there a week back at camp and they gave me my mail, and it was from him.

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I got so confused. How can I be getting mail, he’s dead. Also somebody broke in to my locker while I was gone and stole my stuff. There are thieves in the military too.

I really appreciate your time and I want to thank you both for what you gave to our country, for your service and for your stories.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Story 13

Bill Hardin, Marine & Larry Gamble, Navy Their stories were connected by some interesting twists and turns of the feminine variety

Recent photo of Bill and Larry at their “Interview with a Veteran”

How did you meet? BH: We went to Shelby high school. I graduated one year after Larry.

So, you knew each other in high school. LG: No. In August of 1967 I joined the Navy and went to boot camp. Well, I had a girlfriend.

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When I came back from boot camp in February 68, she picked me up. We came up on the police station, and I saw this blue Volkswagen across the intersection looking at me. I said, “Who’s that?” and of course Bill, was also saying, “Who’s that,” because he wanted to know who was in her car. That was our first meeting. I didn’t know him in school and he didn’t know me. We fought back and forth for several months, and she just played us both.

So, you were both dating the same girl. LG: Yeah. The night of my birthday, me and her went out. Well, Bill came to pick her up, and her mother said, “She’s gone out with Larry.”

BH: I’d taken her out the night before on her birthday.

LG: Yeah. I guess Bill found out then that I was in the Navy, and he was in the process of going into the Marines, so he went off to boot camp. Truly, I joined the Navy because I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. So I go down to get my orders at Charleston in May 69, and lo and behold, they said, you’re going to Vietnam. I believe I left June 7th 69. Bill didn’t know I was going to Vietnam, and he was going to Vietnam on June 10th.

I’d been there almost a week, and it’s a Sunday. I’m in the bulk fuel depot. I work in an office. Well, I’m going to mail a letter to my girlfriend at the Marine Post Office.

BH: Our girlfriend.

LG: Right, so, I go to drop my letter in, and I can see it like it was yesterday: I look over to my left and there’s Bill in the back of the post office. I thought, you’ve got to be kidding me. So, I go

174 Greg Mclntyre back to my barracks and I said, “You’re not going to believe this, my biggest enemy in the whole wide world is at the Marine post office.” By the end of that day I’d thought about it, and decided to go see what I could find out about this guy. So, I go back over there and I ask for him, and they said, he’s off work.

Bill Hardin in 1969

BH: All of a sudden someone comes into my Hooch, which is a place you stay, and says, “Hey Hardin, there’s some Navy guy wants to see you.” I’m thinking, I don’t know anyone in the Navy, and all a sudden Larry walks in. My worst enemy in the world is standing in front of me. I didn’t know whether to get up and hug him or slap him. I mean, there’s the guy who had been with

175 HOMETOWN HEROES my girlfriend. Anyway, we got talking, and the subject comes up, “Have you heard from this girl?” Larry said, “Yes, I hear from her all the time.” He said, “Have you?” I said, “Yes.” So, we got our letters out. They looked almost identical, except for the name. So, we decided right there it was time to break the ties with her. We became really good friends. We were half way around the world and had things in common.

At Christmas time, Larry got a letter from one of his friends that said, “One of you two is going to get a package from Shelby, because this girl is mailing a package to Vietnam.” Well, we waited for the package and neither one of us got it.

LG: We found out later it went to a guy in the Army.

BH: We saw each other most of the year but Larry got transferred down south.

LG: After 10 months, I got transferred to Saigon. I was on a YRBM (Yard Repair Berthing and Messing), which is a ship without a motor. The only motor it’s got is to turn the back so it can land helicopters. We had two helicopter pads on top of it, and 20 or 30 PBR’s (River Patrol Boats) hooked up to it at one time.

PBR’s are patrol boats? LG: Yeah. There were 3 YRBM’s in the Mekong Delta, I was on number 2. When Nixon ordered us into Cambodia, I was on the second one. I had 2 months left, and here I am, 19 years old, scared to death, standing watch at night, with red tracers going over my head. But my facilities were much nicer than Bills.

BH: He had flushable commodes. Now, when I got over there, Marine, Army, Navy, whatever, every branch, and I’m not

176 Greg Mclntyre sure how to say this, but we had a one holer. Your job when first getting in country is when the Sergeant tells you to go burn the sh*##ers. You pull the can out from the latrine, dump it and pour diesel fuel on it and burn it. It was a terrible smell but that’s all we had. Everybody used it. A guy just in country got called to go burn the sh*##ers. We were out there doing whatever, and the next thing, we look around and the whole thing is on fire.

The whole toilet? BH: He poured diesel fuel on the building and burned it down. He didn’t know what the Sergeant meant. It looked like it needed to be burned down. So, we had a whole new latrine

Larry Gamble in 1969

177 HOMETOWN HEROES built, and we got a five or six holer, a nice one, but we didn’t have flushable commodes.

LG: We worked basically every day of the ten months before I left, and every night we would go to the movie house to see ‘The Graduate’. We saw ‘The Graduate’ at least fifty times in a nice tin building.

BH: When in the field, the CO’s had a hooch tent, and we had a lean-to. I would go out in the bush either by helicopter or track vehicle, and while we were out, they captured some VC. The South Vietnamese would put mailbags around their heads, so they couldn’t see where they were going. Many times, they would take these prisoners up in a helicopter, and the South Vietnamese soldiers would interrogate them. They would try and talk to them and get them to talk, but nobody would say anything, so they would take the mailbags off of a few of them while they sat on the back of a CH46 helicopter and leave two with mailbags still on their heads and interrogate them. If nobody said anything, and the ones with the bags on their heads didn’t answer, they would pitch them out the back of the helicopter. When they did that, the ones without the bags on their heads would start talking. That was the South Vietnamese doing the interrogating.

You guys experienced a ton over there.

BH: We saw quite a bit. Larry was with bulk fuel. They had these huge tanks of airplane fuel in the field quite close to where I was. The Vietnamese would rocket them.

LG: They would put a rocket right in the middle of those things and blow them up.

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BH: It would just shake everything, it was terrible. We got rocketed all the time.

LG: Each barracks had a bunker outside and we got in those things at least every other night. We had a lot of fires.

You were like a bunch of kids running about out there in Vietnam. BH: We were. I was eighteen years old. They had really beautiful beaches when you got to see them. They would have concertina wire set up all around the beach.

Bill and Larry in 1969

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LG: There was concertina wire everywhere to keep people from coming in on us. We had no liberty in DaNang. We had to stay on base. When I went down south, there was liberty down there. You could go out on the town.

Was concertina wire the same as barbed wire? BH: It was barbed razor wire. In the field, each compound had layers of barbed wire wrapped around with razors. They would take beer cans and hook them on with little rocks in them, and hang them all around the perimeter. Then you had the guards at night. It was a free fire zone, which meant if you see anything, you shoot, it doesn’t matter, you don’t ask questions. If you hear anything in the cans rattling, you shoot, and the next morning you could go out and find out what it was.

Some of the Vietnamese people, called sappers, basically on a suicide mission, would strap explosives on their body, usually naked, and grease themselves to get through the wires as fast as possible to get into our compound and set themselves off. When you heard the cans shaking on the barbed wire, you shoot and not worry about what it was until morning. In the bush, they had Rock Apes, like little monkeys. They would get in and be shaking the barbed wire and the next morning you would find these little monkeys hanging on the barbed wire.

That had to be nerve wracking the whole time. BH: The whole thing was, because you never knew. Also you never knew who was VC. You couldn’t tell the North and South Vietnamese apart. The NVA soldiers had uniforms on, but the Vietcong, they worked among you. We had a general that was on the first Marine Compound and his barber was caught one night carrying rockets. He was VC. So, you never knew who was who.

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LG: We were ninety miles from the DMZ.

Well, with the times, in the Middle East, we have wars with blurry lines now. It seems after World War II things got a little different. BH: Yeah, a different kind of war. In Vietnam, you didn’t have a clue who you were fighting, and you didn’t have backing from Washington either. The whole thing was political. We didn’t hear a lot of news over there, or a lot of what was going on back home. I remember in July 69, somebody told me there was a man on the moon, I said, “Really, what have you been smoking?” I remember standing there looking up at the moon, and I said, “Surely there’s nobody up there,” because I didn’t believe the guy.

Larry in the barracks in 1969

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Korea may have been in the same category too.

When we came home, the Vietnam veteran was not treated like the World War II veterans. I landed in San Francisco coming home, and had my uniform on. When we landed, there were these people who had flowers and I thought, this is pretty neat, they’re going to have a ceremony for us. We didn’t know. They had a ceremony all right, they called us every name in the book, they spit on us, it was not a welcome home, I can tell you that.

I left San Francisco and went to Los Angeles, then from LA to Chicago. By the time I got to Chicago, I wanted to take my uniform off. I felt like people were really down on us but I had to go all the way back to Atlanta to get in, and then go to Charlotte. We were not given any sort of welcome home. So, when you hear Vietnam veterans saying, ‘welcome home’ to another Vietnam veteran, that’s because we didn’t get that.

I’m glad things have changed. People have changed. If you have anything on that says ‘Veteran’, people go out of their way to come up to you and say, thank you for your service. I am so thankful that they do that.

Vietnam was a tough war and a tough time. It’s not fair to be under that much pressure and stress and go through everything Vietnam vets went through, then come home and be treated like crap. Regardless of your opinion on the war, it’s not an eighteen or nineteen year old kid’s fault. They just got drafted and were under orders. You served. BH: Exactly, you served.

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It takes a certain person to serve and sacrifice. I feel Vietnam veterans are still fighting for the legitimacy of their service. That’s not right. BH: I think you’re right. As I said, anywhere you go, if you have something on that says ‘Veteran’ on it, people acknowledge it, young people who weren’t even here at that time.

Well, I appreciate and thank you both for your service.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Greg Mclntyre

Story 14

ROGER WUEST Vietnam Veteran and Field Artillery Officer

So, how did you get involved with the military? Well, when I went to college at Hardin Simmons University, I decided to join the ROTC and went through four years of ROTC, but I did not have my degree. Things were getting tough at school and Vietnam was going heavy. I had the equivalent of a degree and the Army said, we’ll give you your commission if you choose three combat arms choices, so I did and went on active duty in 1967.

So, in 1967 you went in and were commissioned as an Army Field Artillery officer? Yes, I was commissioned at school and then went to Fort Sill for my officer basic. Then I went to Fort Lewis for nine months and found out I wasn’t bound for Vietnam. I wasn’t married, so I volunteered and went to Vietnam. I have an interesting story from there.

Where are you from originally? Billings, Montana.

Were you commissioned from Billings Montana? No, from Abilene, Texas, from Hardin Simmons University.

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So, you went to Vietnam. What was your story? I went out as a forward observer. I was supposed to be out six months.

Don’t forward observers have a short life span? Well, yes and no. It depends upon if you get totally run over by the enemy or not. We didn’t, but a year before some of them did. I was supposed to be out for six months. Three months in, we came in under this hospital. It wasn’t being used as a hospital at the time, but it could be used again. The infantry Captain wanted to take it out, so I said, “Sir there’s a problem,” he said, “What is it?” We would have to fire at high angle, and he said, “Call it in Lieutenant,” so I said, “Yes sir.” I called it in. Five minutes later a call comes back and he says, “Lieutenant, you want to do what? Are you wanting to risk your bars on it?” Without a moment’s hesitation I said, “Yes sir,” and he said, “I’ll get back to you.” He came back about ten minutes later and said, “Are you still willing to risk your bars on it?” I said, “Yes sir.” We fired, and it worked. Two weeks later I get orders to go back to the battery as the Executive Officer, not as a Fire Direction Officer, but as an Executive Officer. The Captain didn’t even know why I’d come back. The Major rewarded me because I was willing to risk my bars for what worked.

You were willing to make a decision. Make a tough decision, so he rewarded me. Some of the other Lieutenants were not happy because they should have come in before me.

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They were thinking, this guy can make tough decisions for us. But then we got fired on more back at the battery every day, because if they knocked us out they could just walk over. Then the Division Commander decided we were going to have a competition between the batteries, because during day time you weren’t doing much. We would do some dry firing but whichever battery won that month, the General and the Colonel would come out and share a bottle of wine with them. Well, the first month my gun crew wins. Then the second month my gun crew wins, and these are two different gun crews. The third month my gun crew wins, and they said, somethings wrong here, so, they had a retest, and my crew won again. The fourth time they won I went home, but I heard they won the fifth competition too, and so the competition was finally stopped. It was just about how well your crews worked together.

When I came back, I didn’t want to go back to field artillery school, I wanted to go to Germany, so I extended. That’s where I got married, in Germany. I flew my girl over there and we got married. My marriage license is actually in Germany.

It sounds like you were a pretty good manager. Management requires taking responsibility and making tough decisions. I saw something the other day that made a lot of sense to me. The difference between where your business is now, and where it needs to be, is ten minutes of guts a day. In those ten minutes, you move the big rocks, not the sand. How old were you when you were making those tough decisions in Vietnam? I was twenty two or twenty three.

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You really had people’s lives in your hands. Right.

So, what did you do in civilian life when you came back? I hoped when I got out I would go back to college and get my degree in biology with a minor in chemistry, but I didn’t do that. I went to work for Robert Hall clothes for about two years until they closed. Then I went to work for a small company which was also clothing, and from there after about a year and a half I went to Red Arrow Freight lines in San Antonio, Texas. I worked for them for nine and a half years. The first two years I was a counter claims investigator, then I got promoted to assistant manager of claims and customer service. I was still doing the large cargo claims, but I was also managing people. For those seven years I wound up managing twelve ladies and two men, needless to say it was interesting.

Sounds like you were out-numbered. Would you say the things you learned in the military helped you in civilian life? Definitely, yes. You stick with something. If you take it on you better finish it.

And the military is not for everyone of course. You may not have had a choice of going in the military with Vietnam bearing down. As long as my grades were okay, I was okay in school.

But you choose to volunteer and go? Yes, I choose to volunteer and go.

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Why did you do that? Like I said, I was paying for my own schooling and it was getting very tough. I was working in the cafeteria, and I worked my way up to cooking. If they said, Roger we need you to go cook, I had to go cook.

It was difficult to do both? Yeah, it was getting that way.

Did the military help pay for your college when you got out? Yes, they did, they helped me pay for the rest of it.

Aren’t you a VA liaison? What I do is volunteer at the clinic in Rutherfordton, but I started out volunteering as a driver taking people up to the hospital.

Yes, there’s a van that goes up there. It goes on Tuesdays and Thursdays from the DAV, the county office building across from the court house on Marion Street in Shelby at 7:00a.m. We take people up there who don’t have a way to go. They must have an appointment at the hospital to ride the van. I had to stop doing that when I got my pacemaker.

Thank you for your service in the military and for what you give to the community with the VA.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Greg Mclntyre

Story 15

TOM HAINES Vietnam Veteran, Night Club Owner and Comedy Circuit Aficionado

Tom Haines (not Tom Hanks) is the author of ‘SNAFU My Vietnam Vacation – 1969.’ The cover on the book shows Tom standing as the peace symbol while holding a big gun.

That’s an M60.

And the ammunition. That’s some heavy stuff. The rucksack that we carried was sixty pounds, then whatever else we carried was additional weight, boonies for an entire day. Being designated as the bearer of M60 ammunition and at six foot three and one hundred-sixty- five pounds, it wasn’t easy.

My grandfather was part of a three man machine gun unit in World War II marching from Le Havre, France into the battle of the Bulge. Three of them would split up that gun and carry it. Did you have a team you carried that with? No, but let me start from the beginning. I got my diploma and a BS in Marketing from Gannon University in one hand and my draft notice in the other.

191 HOMETOWN HEROES

Mr. Tom Haines in his uniform. This uniform is from 1969. This photo was taken in 2015 & the uniform still fits.

Where’s Gannon University? Erie, Pennsylvania. I graduated in 1967. My dad was in the post office and I hadn’t got my draft notice handed to me but he knew I was on the list. He gave me a heads up and said, “Well, now you’ve got your choice. You can go into the Marines, or Coast Guard, or Navy, or Air Force, or Army, whatever, and pick out what it is you want to do. That way you’re not stuck on going straight to combat for your training.” Without a lot of thought I choose the Army, because that was what my dad was in during World War II. In fact, he was shot in battle which took him out of action for six months.

192 Greg Mclntyre

So, I picked the Army, and then as far as what branch I wanted to go into, I got to the induction at the recruitment center and the gentleman there said, you’re perfect material to be an officer.

What I did was, I ended up being accepted at the officer candidate school at Fort Benning. I went to Fort Dix and went through basic training and then went through advanced infantry training. Then I was sent to Fort Benning for twelve weeks of officer candidate infantry training, so I was really qualified for the infantry. I decided to shorten my stay in the twelfth week along with seven other guys that quit as well. We were headed to the center for sending you to Vietnam. We were going to that compound, and there was a First Sergeant behind a building looking around the corner like something out of a B-Movie going, ‘Pssst, psssst,’ he was giving us the sign of, come over here, I need to talk with you. So, we went over. He said, “Guys, I’m the First Sergeant of the Scout Dog Unit, I need four scout dog handlers. The training will take an extra twelve weeks and who knows, the war may be over by then.” I remembered the only advice my dad gave me, don’t ever volunteer. So, what did I do, I volunteered.

They took us to the scout dog unit and next morning he calls us in to give us our assignments. He said, “Guys, I lied to you.” We all went, “Oh no.” He said, “I don’t need any scout dog handlers, what I need is a truck dispatcher, a veterinary technician, a clerk typist, and a supply specialist.” Luckily each one of us picked the one we wanted and there were no conflicts. So, for the next year I was at Fort Benning in the scout dog unit.

I had about nine months left in service, and every time my orders came down from Vietnam my First Sergeant would pull

193 HOMETOWN HEROES them. He said, “I can’t let this guy go, he’s too crucial to the running of this unit.” Well, he was on vacation when the orders came in, so there was no one to pull them, and we got our orders to go to Vietnam.

When I got there, I had three days for my processing, and when that was done we went to this one room and everyone there was saying, “The guy behind that door is going to send everyone in this room to somewhere in Vietnam.” We had no idea where, whether it was safe or not, and of course there was nowhere safe in Vietnam, but it was up to that guy.

So it came my turn to go in that room. The guy had his head down doing some paperwork, and then he looked up. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He was one of the other four guys who didn’t volunteer for the scout dog unit. He said he got off the plane and they saw he had a college degree. They sat him there, and he hadn’t been more than a mile from that building the whole time. So he said, “Where do you want to go?” And I said, “Some place safe.” He said, “I can’t make you as safe as the gold in Fort Knox, but I can send you to some place that’s not showing much action right now. I’ll send you to Pleiku.”

At Pleiku, I went to sign in with another First Sergeant, and he looked at my orders and just about blew it. He said, “What shit for brains sent you here as a specialist for supply?” I said, “I don’t know why, this is what they gave me.” So, he said, “I don’t need you in supply, let’s look at your records. What’s your secondary MOS (Military Occupational Specialty)?” Well, I was more qualified for the infantry than almost 95% of people in Vietnam. He asked me, “Do you have a military driving license?” “No.” “Do you know anything about engines?” “I can’t tell the

194 Greg Mclntyre front from the back.” “Can you drive a jeep?” “Not really.” And he said, “You’re not making this easy for me son.” Then he said, “Do you know where to put gas in a jeep?” I said, “Yeah, there’s a hole in the front next to the driver on the side.” “You’re my man, CO’s driver, you start tomorrow.”

That was twice I was taken out of the infantry because of my college degree. At one point while I was there, I got really irritated because I was pulling guard anti-reaction, all these things where you’re on the ready to go out into the field if needed at the last second, which happened once, the rest of the time I was driving, but I didn’t do much of that because I kept getting put on the list. Well, that first sergeant was walking up the plank and I had a bar of soap in my hand and I slammed it on the ground, and he looked at me and said, “You got a problem son?” I said, “Yeah, when was the last time you saw me?” He said, “I don’t know, a week or two,” I said, “Yeah, because I go on guard duty, right to reaction and back to guard duty, that’s not what I’m trained for. I want to go out in the field.” He said, “No, what I’ll do is send you somewhere about sixty miles away back in supply.” Again, this was because I had a college degree. A lot of people said that didn’t take place, but it did, a lot.

Being a driver ended up being a minus because I was all over the II Corps area of Vietnam where I was exposed to agent orange, and I’m now suffering from that exposure.

So, what’s the moral of this story? Get your education.

The military is selective on who they send out and put in harm’s way.

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I joined the Navy before I finished my college degree and finished while I was in. My main motivation to knock that out and move forward was, I knew the only difference between me and an officer was essentially a college degree. That’s important, it sounds like it had an effect on what happened to you but you weren’t satisfied with that, you wanted to see some action. Yeah, I was in that category. I was 23 years old, I was invincible, and it’s amazing how many people think that. When I was a kid I played war with those little green plastic men, but none of those guys were dead. They were alive and aiming their rifles. It might be in the back of your mind but you don’t really think, I might actually get killed.

My dad might easily have died. He got shot in the back in a crossfire sniper attack, and the bullet ricocheted off his trenching tool and missed his heart by this much. I knew that, and if you’re going to be in a battle, there is a chance you’re not coming back.

I made a lot of impetuous decisions. The reason I dropped out of OCS was because it dawned on me that I was going to be responsible for the lives of 43 other people and I wasn’t prepared for that.

They showed that in the movies, ‘Full Metal Jacket’, ‘Platoon’, there was a series at one time about Vietnam where they put this green officer out there with the enlisted grizzled war vets. If you didn’t do your job, there was a chance your own men would take you out. That happened more than once. My room- mate who went through all this with me until we got to that little room, they put him in an MP unit. I’m not sure where it was but

196 Greg Mclntyre he told me some stories where you just shake your head and say, this is insane. The war was insane in itself, there was no reason for us to be there.

The reason for being in Vietnam changed a number of times. Now we’re here for this reason, now we’ve got to stay because of this reason.

Now, I wasn’t actually alive at that time but from what I’ve read, the initial reason to go in, or at least the way it was sold to the American people, was to fight the spread of communism, to hold that line between North and South Vietnam. That was the initial reason. It changed because the head of the country, Diem, died and the new guy coming in made everything worse. It was basically a civil war between North and South. We were fighting it as a regional kind of thing and afraid that communism would overtake the entire region and thus make our situation a lot worse.

That seemed to be the legitimate reason to be there in the beginning perhaps. Then we didn’t fight the war to win it.

In fact, it was never declared an official war. It was not a war, it was a conflict. What I got out of it was really interesting stories. I was only there for 5 months, 13 days, 12 hours, 7 minutes and 6 seconds, give or take a second, because I was short going over and they allowed you to get out of the Army early to go back to school. I didn’t want a Masters, so I went to East Carolina University to their School of Art. I have a BFA candidate (Bachelor of Fine Arts), and the reason for that is, I did all my course work, everything done, but I never did my

197 HOMETOWN HEROES senior show which was a requirement to get your degree. That was because I went into the night club business and it started eating up all my time.

Looking at your bio, it’s very interesting going from college in Pennsylvania to Vietnam, to college in ECU and then to being in the night club business hanging out with all these cool cats in the day. The reason I ended up in the night club business was they tripled tuition for out of state students. I’m from upstate New York from a village called Endicott, the home of IBM. So, my tuition was going to triple, and I couldn’t afford that, but if I dropped out of school and worked for six months in North Carolina, I could become a resident. So, I went looking for work and found this night club that was closed. It was big, capacity was close to eight hundred. I got an appointment with the owner and I said, “I know what beer tastes like, I know what rock and roll sounds like, I’m your man.” He said, “Okay, you’ll work on commission won’t you?” So, I did. We struggled for a year or two but the club stayed open for thirty years and a week. The main reason for that was, we decided we weren’t just going to be a rock club. We had jazz, beach music, heavy metal, punk, pop, and even Christian music two or three times a week.

Did you evolve with the times? We didn’t change with the times because we never got involved with disco. We picked the music we were going to do. We never did rap or country, but we did country rock and blue grass. Then we latched onto comedy and starting doing that, and that got me into the comedy business after twenty years at the Attic.

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I switched from music to comedy and came to Charlotte and worked with the Comedy Zones, the largest comedy club. I was part club owner and did most of the booking. Between me and one other guy, we booked more comedians than any agency on earth.

“Pooch in a pouch.” This photo was taken in 1969. The dogs name was pooch!

Who are some of the people you met? Ellen DeGeneres, Steve Harvey, Greg Allman, the list was quite extensive. We did the Pointer Sisters when we were selected to do a concert on NBC primetime. It was called the Blue Jean Network, and we were the only night club in the history of the state to have a full concert on national primetime TV. That was a feather in the cap. A few years later, Playboy magazine selected us as one of the top one hundred college bars in the country.

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That was the Attic in Greenville, North Carolina? Yeah. We were also on the cover of Performance magazine which was the international magazine for the industry.

It’s not your standard career path getting involved in night clubs, promotion and management but a career path and quite fun I guess. Yeah, it was. You mentioned earlier Tom Hanks, I used to call Hollywood regularly, and when the secretary answered the phone, I’d say, “Tell them Tom Haines is calling,” and they heard Tom Hanks. I never had a problem getting through to anybody.

There’s a couple of things that interest me about military service, and the Vietnam War in particular. One is the experiences, and the other is the psychological effects of what was going on between the different movements, the peace movement and the movement to end the war. You were over there at the time, right? It started before I went, the ‘summer of love’.

So, you were affected by that prior to going? Right. We were called into formation one morning but not at formation time. Usually it was a First Sergeant or Lieutenant who would talk to us, but it was the Captain. He said, gentlemen, the rest of our day we will focus on riot control. Then he said, we’re headed to a college campus, but it ended up not happening, thank God.

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The whole country was behind World War II veterans but Vietnam veterans didn’t get that. The views of whether this was a just war, or what the purpose was, did that affect you as a soldier, or did you not worry about it? One of the key elements of the war was, it was a guerilla war which gave us a slim chance of winning.

I’ve spoken with people who said during the day they worked with people who might actually be involved with the movement on the other side, who you would be fighting at night. I was driving back from somewhere in a two ton truck, and there was this little boy walking down the road dragging this box behind him. He was thin and pitiful looking, and I stopped. I didn’t know there was a little girl straddling the ditch urinating, and she just jumped up and started bolting across this field. She thought I was going to molest her. There were all kinds of feelings of the Vietnamese people towards Americans, and the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong, and even the French before we got there. They’d been at war for three hundred years.

The kid was kind of startled, and I said, “You want a ride,” and he recognized the word ride and said, “Yeah, yeah, take home,” and I said, “Yeah, I’ll take you home.” I had a sub sandwich on the seat and he kept eyeing it. I said, “Hungry?” He went into that thing. It was gone in seconds. When I picked him up, you know when you pick up a gallon a milk when you don’t know it’s empty, that’s how it was when I picked him up. I threw him into the air because I thought I would need the strength. He got a kick out of that. So, we drove down into Pleiku, and he said, “House,” and I said, “I can’t take you there, it’s off limits.” He didn’t understand. There was a sign that said, “No military personnel beyond this point.” Well, rules are meant to be broken, and so I

201 HOMETOWN HEROES broke a rule and turned into the neighborhood, so to speak. It was an unbelievable third world.

The Vietnamese took care of their homes very nicely, but outside the house, there was garbage everywhere, and it smelled bad.

So, I’m driving and suddenly this kid hits the floor of the truck, covered his head and said, “VC! VC!” I looked out and there’s a guy with a package in his hand, and our eyes locked. I’m feeling for my M16, and this water buffalo was crossing the road. We just stared. The buffalo made it across and I started up again, and in the rearview mirror he was just staring the whole time. I said, “You sure he was VC?” He nodded. He was very insistent. The people in Pleiku knew who were VC and who weren’t. That’s what made things difficult, it was guerilla war.

Somebody said to me, you were pretty safe in Pleiku during the war? No. Rocket attacks took place and always that fear of death. Most people accepted they’d get by. I ended up with about thirty percent PTSD from the experiences I encountered.

Do you go into all those in your book SNAFU? Oh yeah.

I was reading the book and you have a very funny writing style. I was in the comedy business for twenty years and wore all the hats. I was club owner, booker, I wrote comedy. I ended up on Jay Leno’s facts team, and he closed with one of my jokes one night. I wrote for Carrot Top and a bunch of comedians, and managed comedians. I co-managed Rodney Carrington, and I was on Carrot Top’s management team.

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How do you think your military experience affected your life? It set me on a different course. I want to tell you one more story. I had just gone on twenty-four hour guard duty. I had an eight or nine day beard growth because I was never in base camp, and some guy came in and said, “Can you type?” I said, “Yeah.” He had me type up death reports of two guys. It was a helicopter accident. They assigned me to work with this looney toon. He was going through the guy’s things to either go home or be thrown away, but he reversed it. He took condoms and a Playboy magazine to go home, and letters written to the parents to get thrown away. I made him change it over. While I was finishing, this guy comes in and says, “Your name Haines?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “CO’s got a detail for you.” I said, “Tell the CO to find someone else.” He said, “You can’t do that.” So, I went and knocked on the door hard and immediately said, “Sir whatever assignment you had, I’m not doing it,” and he said, “Okay.” Now, when someone says to their CO, I’m not doing it, and the CO says, okay, that’s not right, so I turned and said, “Just out of curiosity what did you want me to do?” He said, “Well, you’re from New York, and Miss America and her runners-up are coming here. I thought you could escort Miss New York state, but you said you weren’t interested.” Then he said, “Sit down.” He looked at me and said, “When did I last see you?” (because of my beard). “Take two days off and make shaving part of that detail.”

The girls flew in on a helicopter, and it was noisy. They were trying to introduce each other, and I shouted, “Which Miss state are you?” And she said, “Which mistake am I?” I said, “No, which Miss state?” She was Miss Kentucky. I said, “I’m from New York,” and she grabbed this other girl and pulls her over. She said, “This is Patricia Burmeister, she’s Miss New York state.”

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We were their escorts the whole time. They were putting on a big show one night, and I checked the duty board and my name was down for guard duty. I thought, “That ain’t happening.” So, I went to her and said, “I’d like to see your show tonight but I was put on guard duty.” She said, “I think I can talk to someone,” and she got me off. I watched the show and had guard duty the next morning.

The book is called SNAFU. You can go to Tom’s website www. thebooksnafu.com where you can read three chapters. Tom, thank you for your service.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Story 16

EVAN THOMPSON Veteran of the US Army, Post Commander of Post 82 of the American Legion in Shelby, North Carolina, and District Commander of the Western District of North Carolina

It really covers 2 counties. I’m also a veteran of the Marine Corps, spent active time in the Marine Corps, spent time in the National Guard, the Marine Corps Reserves, the Army Reserves, and active Army, that about covers it.

I missed a couple of things then. Active duty Marine, Army, Air National Guard, and the Army and Marine Reserve. That’s impressive, that’s a lot of military activity. 23 years.

That’s a career in the military. And you’re retired? I’m retired active from the Army as Command Sergeant Major.

And you have a beautiful daughter. (By the way, Evan is my father-in-law.) Yes, I do.

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So, what made you want to join the military? Well, I didn’t actually join. I was in college from 65 to 69, and they were still drafting individuals at that time. Also during that time, they put out this test that you had to take, which determined whether you could stay in college or whether they were going to draft you.

Evan Thompson’s campaign photo for the position of Commander of the Depart- ment of North Carolina American Legion.

Was that the ASVAB? No, it wasn’t the ASVAB, it was another special test. It was eventually ruled unconstitutional, as a matter of fact, so it was never actually used. But then they came up with a lottery system. They drew dates of the year out, and depending when your

206 Greg Mclntyre birthday was drawn out, that was where you were in line to be drafted into the military. Well I was the 4th recipient of having my number drawn, number twelve. So, I won the lottery big time. I was so close to being drafted, I volunteered for the draft. I was still in college at the time but I went down and had a preliminary physical and went back to college. I had 3 months of college left, and I got this letter saying, greetings, we want you now. I sent a letter back to my local draft board and said, “I’m not doing this. I’ve got 3 months left, and I’m going to graduate from college, then I’ll be glad to come.” So, I graduated on May 9th 1969, and I was drafted on June 9th 1969.

They let you finish college? They let me finish college.

I’ve made hard stands with the military and not come out so great. I’ll tell you a story about that later. Well, I wasn’t in the military yet. I got down to Charlotte to the entrance of examinations stage. I can’t recall it now, but I got down there and sometime during the day they said they were going to take two marines, or they wanted volunteers for the Marine Corps. Nobody volunteered. So, the day went on and on. About 2 o’clock in the afternoon, all of a sudden my name is called, along with this other young man, his name was Goins. He was from up around Blowing Rock or Boone. We went up front and there was this lieutenant, I still remember his name too, Lieutenant Strange. He said to us, “Well guys, you’ve been chosen to go in the Marine Corps, I’m sure you’ll make good soldiers, go over there and get processed in.” I looked at him and thought, you’re crazy, you’re absolutely crazy, so I went back and sat down for a minute.

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You had to think about it. I had to think about it. I thought, no, this can’t be happening to me. So anyhow, I finally walked over to this lady, and she said, “Oh, you’re going to be in the best branch of service anyway.” So, I was drafted into the Marines. I wanted to say to her, “How do you know, you’ve never been there.” I didn’t because I was shocked. Anyway, they swore us all in that day. They took all the Army guys and put them on a bus and sent them to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. They didn’t have enough Marines yet to send us out to Parris Island, so, we got to spend the night in Charlotte at an old hotel called The White House Inn. I still remembered that night. I called my mother, and she said, “Where are you?” I said, “I’m in Charlotte,” and she said, “Why are you there?” I said, “Well, I’ve been drafted into the Marine Corps.” I remember her words, and I laugh about them today, she said, “Oh they’ll kill you.” It was funny at the time. I thought, “No, they’re not going to kill me.” So, later the next day they put us on a bus and we got into Parris Island during the night.

I’ve seen the movie, An Officer and a Gentleman. Well, kind of like that, it was pretty rough. They come on the bus hollering at you, calling you all kinds of names and telling you, you better get off that bus and get on those yellow footprints, and then it all started. They shaved our heads, and I swore if I ever lost my hair I would get a toupee, because I never want to look like that again. Half way through basic, when we had about a quarter inch of hair, they shaved us again.

But I had another interesting experience during basic training. I was given a set of orders about midway through basic training which said I was going to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to become an FO. Well, I didn’t know what an FO was at the time,

208 Greg Mclntyre but I learned that was a Forward Observer. I had heard about forward observers for a while.

Meeting with Speaker of the NC House Tim Moore on American Legion Legislative Day in Raleigh.

They go ahead of everybody. Exactly, they had a short life span. So, I thought, oh my gosh, but when I’d gotten to Parris Island that very first or second day, they asked some of us if we wanted to take a typing test, and I volunteered to take the typing test. I had just gotten out of college and had had typing in college. I typed all my term papers and all those kinds of things. Anyway, the day I was graduating from Parris Island basic training, my drill sergeant called me up to the front of the room in the middle of the day and he said, “Private Thompson, where are you going when you leave Camp Geiger?” I said, “I’m going to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, sir, and then on to Westpac,” because that’s what it was called, western pacific.

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Anyhow, he said, “No, you’re not going there,” I said, “Yes I am,” he said, “No, you’re not private, you’re coming back to Parris Island.” That really deflated me, because I thought, I have spent enough time at this place. I did not want to go back to Parris Island. But what happened was, they got a set of orders after I had finished infantry training to send me back to Parris Island where I went to admin school. So, I spent my whole time in the Marine Corps sitting in an office every day at Beaufort, South Carolina, which was a Marine Corps Air Station.

That was my first 2 years in the military. I was very fortunate I didn’t go to Vietnam. I had the opportunity, right near the end of my 2 years. I got a set of orders to Vietnam, but I didn’t have enough time left to execute the orders without extending. I didn’t want to extend. Everybody talked about lifers like they were bad people. If you decided to stay in, you were given the term lifer, and I didn’t want to be a lifer. That was a big mistake at the time, I wish I had.

If I had been a lifer I could have already retired. I could be drawing a pension. I could still have done my law degree and practiced while I was in. There were a lot of options I had, but I couldn’t see it at that time. I had to get out after 4 years and go and do my law degree. Well, I got out and the very day I got out, I went back to graduate school and got my masters. My brother talked me into joining the Air National Guard. Big mistake. I’d been a Marine, I had not been what I called sissy fly boys. Me and the Air National Guard didn’t get along because they weren’t disciplined enough, and your uniform wasn’t striking. In the Marine Corps you always had good looking uniforms and kept them nice, clean, and pressed. The Air National Guard wasn’t that way, so after a year

210 Greg Mclntyre

Promotion to Command Sergeant Major

I told them goodbye, and I went to the Marine Corps Reserve. All the while I was still in graduate school.

So, I spent about a year in the Marine Corps Reserves and pulled at least one annual training with them. I still recall that annual training. I went down to Camp Lejeune, and if you think about it, I was a civilian at the time because I was in graduate school. I went to check into my barracks down there for the two weeks I was going to be there, and this First Sergeant saw me. He said, “If you’re going to live in my barracks, boy, you’re going to get a haircut,” and I said, “Well, I’m just not going to live in your barracks.” So, I went out and got me a place to live in town. I just came in to work for the two weeks at the office at Camp Lejeune and then went back home. After about a year, I had a friend here

211 HOMETOWN HEROES in Shelby who said, “Why don’t you join the Army Reserves?” I said, “Okay,” so I joined the Army Reserves.

The nice thing about joining the Army Reserves is they got rank so much faster. When I joined the Marine Corps Reserves I became Sergeant E5. I got to the Army Reserves, and about 6 months later I became a Staff Sergeant. After about a year, I became Sergeant First Class, and then after another year or two I was put into a First Sergeant’s position. I couldn’t be promoted from First Sergeant because I didn’t have enough time in service yet. So, I followed that through and finally I was promoted to First Sergeant. Then I thought, I’d like to become a Sergeant Major. The Army had just started a program out in Fort Bliss, Texas, called the Sergeants Major Academy, and they were putting a requirement that if you wanted to make Sergeant Major, you had to go to that academy, so, I went to Fort Bliss, Texas, to Sergeant’s Major Academy.

I became a Sergeant Major, and then ultimately during the time I was in the Army Reserves, I went on active duty on two different occasions. I went on active duty at Fort Jackson and I was First Sergeant of a basic training company in the 2nd battalion down there. That was the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. We worked, on the average, one hundred to one hundred and five hours a week, every week. That was something I didn’t really enjoy that much. It was great to see those young kids become soldiers but it was tough duty, because you didn’t get any sleep. You were always watching over those guys and gals, because I had a platoon of females also. That was a tough job.

212 Greg Mclntyre

Later on, I went on active duty with the Army and went to Aniston, Alabama. I was either First Sergeant or Sergeant Major of the NBC school. That was a very interesting experience because you were down there with all the nuclear, bacteriological and chemical at the home of the Nuclear, Bacterial and Chemical Warfare school. That was really interesting. Finally I became a Brigade Sergeant Major down at Fort Jackson, and that’s where I retired from.

I had a very diverse career, and a lot of interesting events in my life. I still have friends I keep in contact with.

In the meantime though, you got your education. Right, in the meantime I got my education. I have an associate’s, a bachelor’s, a master’s, an EDS and about halfway through a doctorate. I’ve been a professor, I’ve been a college dean, I’ve done all kinds of things.

And the military helped pay for that education? That’s right. And while we are talking about that, the military did pay for the education. The American Legion is the organization responsible for the GI bill. They presented it before Congress and ultimately got it passed. Many military people have had the advantage of having the GI bill and getting their education.

Not just the GI bill. When I was active duty, the Navy paid for two thirds of the classes I took while enlisted. And the CLEP Test, which was a test for almost any college class out there. CLEP means, College Level Examination Program.

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And if you test well on that, you can receive credit for the class. Now you can challenge. This comes from somewhere back in ancient Greece where you could challenge your professor. And you can still do that at any college or true university. You should be able to walk into class, challenge your professor, test out of that class and demonstrate core competence out of that class. A CLEP test is in that vein. If you take that test and demonstrate core competency in that class, you get a grade for that class. I think I got 23 or 26 credits undergrad with the CLEP test. Anybody looking at how to put your college career together, or undergrad together, I would do a lot of this while I was on an aircraft carrier. I would buy the text book, read it, and commit to memory, and take the test. That would be my college credit for that. I probably studied more for those tests than most undergrads do the first few years at college. That’s what I would do in my spare time. In the Navy, there was an education department on the base and on the ship. They were happy to help me. I had an idea how I wanted to put it all together at the end in a degree package. Any college that is affiliated with the military accepts transfer credits. There’s a ton of colleges out there affiliated with the military. Before I ever went to the military, I graduated from high school in 1965 and didn’t know what I was going to do. About 3 months before I graduated, a neighbor of mine said, “What are you going to do,” and I said, “I think I’m going to join the Air Force and do whatever I can do in the Air Force.” He said, “Why don’t you go to college.” Well, I came from a very poor family, I had no money to go to college. He said, “Why don’t you apply to these two college’s, Warren Wilson College and Berea College, they will allow you to work and pay your way as you go.” I applied to both and I got accepted to both. Fortunately, I was able to

214 Greg Mclntyre get my bachelor’s degree, and when I graduated, I owed $400 dollars. Most students would be very happy if they graduated and owed $400 dollars.

I was fortunate when I got out of the Marine Corps, I went right back to get my graduate degree and used the GI bill. That’s why I praise the American Legion so much, because they are such a great organization and have helped veterans to a large degree. Our veteran’s healthcare system that we have, and I know there are a lot of complaints about it, but at least we have it. A lot of elements about it are very good. I’ve never had any tremendous problems with it.

Evan at the National American Legion College. He Graduated in the 2016 class.

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I have complained about it but I’m lucky to have it. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t work to improve it. The American Legion was responsible for getting the VA healthcare system started.

The American Legion needs younger veterans to come in. That’s right, so many of the American legion members are older veterans. Most of them right now are Vietnam era, but we need Persian Gulf and Iraq veterans.

And they need the American Legion too. You know, coming back and assimilating back into society, going to college with a bunch of kids who have not been in the Middle East getting shot at, or camping out in the desert, that’s a big difference coming back. The American Legion can help with that, the camaraderie, and feeling like you belong. The American Legion knows that things are different between the culture of a Vietnam veteran and a Persian Gulf Veteran. I know Persian Gulf vets don’t want to come into the American Legion and hear a bunch of war stories from a bunch of old fellows back from Vietnam.

But I tell you what, just talking about it, to relate, to be with people who understand what you went through, that can literally be the difference between life and death for some veterans. The suicide rate today for veterans is about 20 per day. That’s horrendous but it’s happening. In 2014 there were 50,000 homeless veterans, so something has to be done. The American Legion is working very hard to do what they can, but our commander goes before congress once a year to try and lobby for veterans and try to get the laws and policies changed to help

216 Greg Mclntyre veterans. That is another reason why all veterans should become a part of a Veteran’s Service Organization, because they are out there to help veterans, that’s what they are all about. I preach it all the time. I love the American Legion. I love what it stands for and the things it is trying to do. I encourage any veteran to become a member of the American Legion.

You want to come back and get plugged in to the community too. How to prosper in your career in your community. You will automatically get a ton of people in your network. How many members are in the American Legion in Shelby? Our local post has around 250 members.

Not all of them come to every meeting but we do have 50 plus people there. We have 50 or 60 every meeting. So you have a lot of people to network with, and that is another thing about the Legion is the networking. We also have programs every month to give veterans information, not only about the American Legion but about the community itself.

Do you think you may have a little bit of wisdom to impart on a young man coming out of the military from the Middle East? Off the top of your head, you need to get an education, right? If you’re interested in doing that, I don’t care if it’s university or trade, you can do it, and do it with benefits from the military. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to be a welder, or apply something you learned in the military. Well, I wish I could go back and change some of the things I did, and I wish I was younger and had the knowledge I have today, so I could use it back then to help.

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That’s the benefit of me talking to you, or an organization like the American Legion. Other people can have the benefit of your knowledge. We all make mistakes that we, and others can benefit from. For example, before I married Stefanie, she had come to visit me. You said the military let you wait to be drafted until you graduated, well, I was getting ready to take the GMAT, which is a test to go to MBA school. San Diego university was where I was taking it. I wanted to get out of the military and go directly into law school, and I wanted to get my MBA. The Chief wanted me to go to fire-fighting school. I had been to this fire-fighting school about 50 times, and I had lots of sea time in. Now, I should have gone to the fire-fighting school but it conflicted with the GMAT, and I had paid for the GMAT. I was supposed to take it. I talked to the Chief ahead of time, but he wouldn’t let me off. I went and took the GMAT. He was not happy with me. He confined me to base for 30 days, and I didn’t live on base, I lived out in San Diego. I ended up getting married to your daughter while I was confined to base in San Diego. So, the Navy wasn’t that flexible with my education. Well, I was determined. I was not going until I had graduated from college. I thought, why waste three and three quarters years and not get that last semester in.

We live and learn. Thank you for your service.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Story 17

LUDY MARVIN WILKIE The World’s Greatest Undiscovered Playwright!

This photo of Ludy Wilkie was taken in late autumn of 1969 in Boston, Mass, at the Kennedy Center. He went into town on a pass and some new friends took it. A family named Wentworth, who he had met at church. He just arrived at Fort Devens, Mass., a training center for the Army Security Center. Among people he met was a Mayflower Descendant. Elizabeth Frye Leach, descended from John Alden and Priscilla Melton.

Now, the reason we do this is first to showcase veterans, and second, I think by preserving and hearing these stories, not only are they entertaining but they can encourage young people to explore their dreams within the military. So Ludy, could you tell us your story? Well, the military certainly helped me. I finished college in 1969 at Western Carolina. I wanted to go on to graduate school but just did not have the money, and the only option that seemed available was enlisting in the Army and getting the G.I Bill of Rights. I worked for a short time that summer after I graduated,

219 HOMETOWN HEROES at a radio station, but Uncle Sam was always tugging at my coat tails. A friend of mine who’s a member of our American Legion advised me, get Uncle Sam before he gets you. I got interested in military journalism and the Armed Forces radio and TV, and one group that thought they could get that for me was the Army Security Agency.

Now, the ASA, as it was called, required a four-year enlistment. I did that, and it was interesting. A few weeks earlier I had been in college discussing Emerson, and then after entering the Army we were pounding up the trails at old Fort Jackson, and it was an experience. At first, when I enlisted, I found the opportunities for journalism were closed, but a lieutenant at Fort Devens, Massachusetts took an interest in my case. It was arranged that I would go to a Department of Defense Information School located in Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. After that, I went on to Okinawa where I was a military journalist.

I wrote articles for hometown newspapers, such as, so-and-so got promoted, such a person got a medal, and I wrote for newspapers on Okinawa, civilian newspapers as well as military, and for the Hallmark. Hallmark Magazine is the official magazine of the US Army Security Agency. I was one of the first and only correspondents to get a byline in one of the stories I wrote. For my efforts as a military journalist and for my work in the post chapel helping put on dramas and plays, I was fortunate enough to get the Army Commendation Medal.

How long were you on Okinawa? Two years, and it should have been longer. I was there from 1970 to 1972.

220 Greg Mclntyre

That was during the time there was a big rebellion there. There was a lot of tension on Okinawa. It’s a small island, nineteen miles by sixty miles, and American military bases make up about one third of the bottom half of the island. The Okinawans were very sensitive about that. Our extensive use of their land, and with the Vietnam war going on, they were afraid of getting drawn in to another war. The stationing of B-52’s on Okinawa also become an issue. It was just a very tense time, and there was some anti-American resentment.

I remember during my first year there, an American driver accidentally hit an Okinawan pedestrian but the Okinawans could tell it was an American car because we had different colored car tags. In retaliation, they started attacking American cars and setting them on fire. We were restricted to base until that settled down. The riots made the newspapers here in America. There was a lot of tension going on.

I remember the ASA required enlistment of four years but as I walked into our headquarters building, a fellow soldier from Sylva, North Carolina, called Guy Hall called me over. He said, “Have you heard Ludy? They’re cancelling the four year enlistments, we can get out with only three.” This was very good news. I got to come home a year earlier than I thought, but yes, Okinawa was a very tense place, but a very interesting place.

During World War II when American forces invaded, the battle of Okinawa destroyed about eighty percent of everything above ground on the lower part of the island. This was one reason the Okinawans were fearful of getting drawn into another war.

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I was on Okinawa when it reverted to Japan. It had been decided since the Eisenhower administration that Japan would eventually take over the island. I was there when that happened. I believe the then Vice President Agnew made a visit to the island. For many years I had, the civilian newspaper, ‘The Morning Star’, opened up, which said ‘Welcome to Japan’. There were places flying the Japanese flag, and the Japanese Yen was one of the accepted currencies off post.

Now this was interesting. Prior to the reversion, Americans were told to patronize only the establishments which featured an ‘A’ sign in restaurants and such. That meant they met certain standards of hospitality, fair business practice and hygiene, and welcomed American patronage. After the reversion, that could not be enforced, but establishments such as restaurants were still asked to display an ‘A’ sign anyway, indicating they welcomed American patronage. Some places did not.

It was quite an experience to change money into Yen. Technically we weren’t allowed to before we left the island, but we could always go off post and do that. It was quite an experience when Okinawa was given back to the Japanese.

It sounds like they were not happy about the American occupation at that point in their history. I spent some time on the Naval base, Port Yokosuka in Japan, and I visited Tokyo and found the people were very friendly, well maybe not friendly but civil, and sharp and clean. I’ve been to places where the people were very friendly. The Japanese certainly have a rich culture, and are very smart but are not super friendly to outsiders. We have a huge debate about immigration in the US right now. I don’t think that’s a problem in Japan. My eldest son and I were

222 Greg Mclntyre looking at statistics on Japan and he was telling me there are very few people from other cultures who live there permanently. The Okinawans individually were very courteous and friendly to the individual American, but they resented the military presence being there occupying much of their property. Okinawa had once, centuries back, been an independent kingdom but was never left in isolation. China and Japan would vie for control of it. China recognized Japan’s sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands, and the Okinawan king was given some rank in Japanese nobility, but the Japanese tended to look down on the Okinawans as their poor neighbors. The Okinawans opposed the reversion. They would have pamphlets in English saying, “Japan is not our fatherland,” even though they had to learn the Japanese language. It was such a small island that it would have been difficult for them to defend against foreign invaders. The Okinawans had always been dominated and influenced by other cultures. They had never been left alone. It was given back to Japan because we took it from them during World War II. The battle of Okinawa was the last major battle of World War II, and some of the Japanese later admitted when they heard Okinawa had fallen, they knew it was all over. It was the last outpost between the American forces and mainland Japan. It was called ‘the keystone of the Pacific’ because out of there we had other bases.

You were mentioning some of the Asian people being friendly, I went on leave for nine days to Taiwan. The people of Taiwan were very friendly. Chiang Kai-shek was still alive then but they knew if the Americans were not there, the Republic of China would be coming over to get them, so that was one place Americans were very welcome. They would walk up to you on the street and start a conversation. A professor invited me to dinner in his home but I didn’t get to go. They were great believers

223 HOMETOWN HEROES in international relations. In little Taiwan, capitalist Taiwan out-produced red China. One time I was at a PX to cash a check and there were sirens passing by. It was General Chiang Kai-shek on his way to work. He had not left the country since becoming the ruler. I shouldn’t tell this but I will, the Chinese did pirating. They would pirate American books and records and reproduce them illegally, despite the copyright. We were not supposed to send them through mail but you could hand carry them out of the country and bring them home. I brought home some books and records and such, and two of the books were text books one of my professors at Oklahoma University had contributed to. I never told him I had pirate copies of that book. People would go there and get teak wood furniture and bring it back.

Taiwan is a real holdout in that region for capitalism and free market enterprise. Getting back to Okinawa, one thing we experienced a couple of summers there was the drought. It would get very dry, and we would have to ration water, and sometimes you could buy jugs of water, but to purify it you had to put chlorine bleach in it. We would pray for rain or a typhoon to hit. One typhoon did hit, typhoon Vera, but it only filled up the reservoir a little bit. They had a problem with water rationing which was odd being surrounded by the ocean on all sides.

Water, water everywhere. But not a drop to drink. We should have practiced some desalinization somewhere for fresh water.

224 Greg Mclntyre

It doesn’t sound very healthy to drink the chlorine bleach water. We just put a few drops in. We put chlorine in the pools, it’s the same type principle. The island was very poor, they still had open ditches where they dumped their sewage. It was right out there in the open. We had to get accustomed to that.

Have you been back to Okinawa anytime? No, I haven’t.

That would be a neat experience. I wonder how things are in comparison? I believe they have closed a number of smaller bases but I think there’s still a lot of anti-American tension over there. The locals do have jobs on American bases, and this resulted in a higher standard of living, so they have a Catch-22 type situation. They don’t like the Americans but the bases provide them with jobs.

It sounds like they don’t like the Japanese either. Some of the Okinawans who remembered being drafted into the Japanese army during World War II certainly don’t. Incidentally, while I was there they found the last Japanese soldier to surrender, I think on the Philippines. On Okinawa, the last one to surrender was in 1959. He was a holdout. He did his duty to the emperor and had not surrendered.

That is nuts. They were just living in caves or something? Certainly living in caves and the wilderness areas. They were dedicated. They would not surrender. On Okinawa, one place to visit was suicide cliffs where the Japanese Generals refused General Buckner’s invitation to surrender. They drank a toast to

225 HOMETOWN HEROES the emperor and committed hara-kiri. The lesser officers had to be the ones who surrendered.

That was one thing that made the Japanese so fierce in World War II. A commitment to country and the emperor all the way to death. I think that is almost unparalleled. It was, and even while I was there they had a company that had to explode ordnance because unexploded ordnance, shells, bombs, and grenades were still found all over the island from World War II. Old but still deadly. There was a special unit assigned to do just that. That would have been a very frightening job, going out and recovering old shells and bombs.

During low tide you could see where American soldiers had fallen through the coral during the invasion. American Marines died there. They still had some old Japanese bunkers and such, which was a vivid reminder of World War II.

How the world changes so quickly. Now Japan is a great ally, and we certainly reinvested in rebuilding Japan, there’s no denying it. It would have changed a lot from the time my father was there during World War II. He talked to me about it up to the time I was there. He knew the mayor of one of the towns over there, after the Japanese had surrendered, but their ways were somewhat different from ours.

One interesting thing that people loved to do and I did, was to go to a restaurant that served Kobe beef. They would marinate and cook it in front of you. They would ask how you liked your steak. Some people argued it wasn’t true Kobe beef which originated in Korea, and is beef raised on beer. They would

226 Greg Mclntyre take the young calf and raise it on beer, just beer. There were two places that did that, Sam’s Anchor Inn, and Oseki’s, I think in Koza. I did not visit this place, but there was a small colony or something, an orphanage which had been a small leper colony. Some of the American soldiers would visit those orphanages and help take care of them.

You were a journalist and in the military, and still found time to do many creative things such as writing and acting, the world’s greatest playwright. The world’s greatest undiscovered playwright. We have a playwright’s group that I helped found and meets in Hendersonville, The Lost Playwrights. We are expecting to do some promotions for the Hendersonville Library. Some people from Shelby have gone to that, Brendan LeGrand who does documentaries, and Tom Bennett from Kings Mountain who writes plays.

How many plays have you written? I would have to stop and count, but some have been produced. Once in Rutherford County, once at Crest High School, The Diary of Faust, with gypsies and werewolves; a secret society with The Book Of Forbidden Knowledge. There was the play, The Ballard of Nancy Hanks, which has been done twice. We proved that Abe Lincoln was born in Bostic and not in Kentucky. That one has been done.

I started out doing Readers Theaters based on the Book of Luke and the Book of Ruth. I got permission from the Thomas Nelson people to use the New King James Version for the Book of Luke, and the American Bible Society to use the Good News Bible for the Book of Ruth. We did an O. Henry trilogy, basically stage readings of three O. Henry stories. We had his next of kin

227 HOMETOWN HEROES up there at the time. Pastor Paul Porter gave a talk about O. Henry. Here in Shelby for the season opener for the community theater we did one of my plays, Hello Johnny Appleseed, and I did a series of five one act musicals and the Three Jolly Coachmen.

You’ve written hymns as well? Oh yes. I did a play at the Lutheran Church about children who build a nativity scene but can’t get permission to put it up anywhere. We did two hymns from that. Peter Strickland, who teaches music at Crest High School, did the arrangements for some of these.

Most people think the military is just people with guns but it’s much more than that. I always try to tell people how much of a benefit it has been in my life. It helped me get away from home and see the world. Just that expanded my vision of what the world is far more than what you get from watching television. It was very good for me. Also, you can do virtually any job you want in the military, such as the work you did as a military journalist. Do you think that it benefitted you in any way? Absolutely, it was a fantastic experience. I had a feeling of success. I was, in a sense, a published writer, and I have great stories about interesting people. One fellow was a volunteer Boy Scout leader and we did stories on him. There were just all sorts of fascinating stories when you get into this.

Talking about wanting to travel, I was stationed for a while at Fort Deven, Massachusetts. We would go into Boston on weekends and visit the historic sites. I got to see some theater, and I saw Pearl Bailey in Hello Dolly, for example. I met a lady who was one of the Mayflower descendants, and I have an autographed copy of her book, Boston In My Blood, bought at

228 Greg Mclntyre the oldest continuous bookstore in the United States. Then I was at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana.

I wonder if Ben Franklin ever used that bookstore? Well, I wouldn’t be surprised.

He was such an avid reader, but he didn’t stay in Boston. I think he left Boston when he was something like thirteen. I bought some interesting books there. I got a copy of ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and the book, ‘Gone With The Wind’ with scenes from the movie. I met one of the actors, Rand Brooks, who played Scarlett’s first husband, and he autographed it for me. Being around the historic parts of Boston was an experience.

When you have gotten out of your home town and travelled, and especially when you live in other places, I think it does something for you that you can’t get otherwise. You just bring back a different perspective. After I left the military to get my masters at the University of Oklahoma, and the G.I bill made that possible, some of my friends, fellow English majors, were sitting talking. It was tough being in the military, but one of them said, well, the military is an experience; you have to live through MASH to write about it. This goes back to exactly what you’re saying, the folks who had been veterans in college had different perspectives on life than the kids who came there right out of high school. They had seen some of the good and bad parts of the world.

Plus, they had had a job for a few years and had some maturity under their belt. And responsibility and such things.

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I figured quickly as an enlisted Navy guy that whether I was smart enough or not, that wasn’t going to get me into an officer’s position unless I got that degree. This was something that become really important to me. My father said the same thing about his enlisted experience. I can say that about mine. I was determined to go on and get my Master’s degree after the military. This made it possible. We used to have a joke among the enlisted men, that the difference between the enlisted men and the officer was the enlisted men worked for a living.

I knew the same joke in the Navy. We had some Navy men stationed where we were, and I got to be good friends with them and respected them very much. They were people who knew their trades and knew them well.

So, it sounds like the military for you was to get a head up by enlisting and controlling your fate, and get something out of it as well. In exchange for you saying, look, you can use my talents for so many years in enlistment or commission, and I might put my life on the line, but in exchange, I get the G.I bill. You get your graduate degree and could pay for it. I used the G.I bill to get my Juris Doctorate and my MBA. I have veteran’s health care benefits also because I served during war time and was in a war zone. There are tons of different benefits you can get by being in the military, and they can last you for the rest of your life. I’m an admirer of how prolific a writer you are. I’ve written a couple of books, Saving the Farm and RockStar Lawyer, so I understand some of the difficulties involved with writing but I’m nowhere near the number you’ve poured your heart and

230 Greg Mclntyre soul into. Something else we have in common is the American Legion, you’re a leader of our post here in Shelby. Well, I work with their oratorical contest which is very important. High school students get to participate in this contest, where they give a speech about the US Constitution and an impromptu speech about one of the Amendments. There are no losers in that contest. Everyone who participates is a winner.

If someone wants to contact you to see your plays or find out more about what you do, how can they do that?

They can contact me at [email protected].

I want to thank you for everything you do for our American Legion Post and for your service. Thank you.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Greg Mclntyre

Story 18

JIM QUINLAN Marine and Former National Director of American Legion Baseball

Jim Quinlan is a Marine and a member of Post 82 American Legion. He has been heavily involved in American Legion baseball. Yeah, I literally got out of the Marine Corps, and got my degree under the G.I bill. I ended up working for the American Legion back in Iowa where we did baseball, Boys State, oratorical, all the youth programs. In 1986, I got hired into the national headquarters and ran the American Legion Baseball program. We had fifty-five hundred teams nationwide, and did the World Series in twenty-five cities over that career time, so I put a lot of work into the American Legion.

When did you go into the Marines? I went in October, 1971, and was put into personnel.

I was born in January 1975. I was in and out before you were even born. I was a personnel chief. My job started off as a mail clerk. The mail comes into the troops, and you sort it out by the different sections, S1, supply, operations, whatever it was. We had to type up a lot of orders. Whenever someone flew, they had to go on flight pay, because flying is hazardous, so every month if you have two thousand

233 HOMETOWN HEROES people you had to put on flight pay, at the end of the month you had to take them off, and then you have to put them back on. Whenever someone got transferred, or got promoted, all that stuff had to be paper worked.

I didn’t have flight pay, but I had sea pay, and then we had hazardous duty pay when we went into a war zone, tax free. I imagine someone in the payroll department had to make those changes every time. Somebody in administration had to say, here’s a list of people who are now qualified for combat pay, hazardous duty pay, or flight pay. Even if the troop wanted to get sunglasses, which were authorized for troops who were flying, again you had to cut a special paragraph one order. He had to take it up to the base PX, and they would order out his sunglasses, especially if he had prescription sunglasses.

I think most people think of the military as being on the front lines but that’s not true. I say it all the time, any job you find in the civilian world, you find in the military. Exactly. People have to fix and run computers, and people have to do the payroll. Back then you didn’t get a check in the military, you got cash. Every month you had a dispersing officer come down and count out your pay. Then we had to have all that stuff typed up, and you had to sign to get your cash. When you were on deployment you got extra pay, and again you had to go to the dispersing office and someone had to type it up. They didn’t have computers, or even electric typewriters back then, it was all done with a manual typewriter.

234 Greg Mclntyre

I used a Remington Raider. Electric typewriters were just coming in, but again, because our squadron was deployable, you may be going overseas, you may be going somewhere where there’s no electricity and you can’t plug in, so everything was done with the old manual. Hit the carriage return, type away, hit the carriage return.

What if you made a mistake? Then you had to retype everything over. We would handle CO office orders. We had to go through and type a perfect document, except we would deliberately make three mistakes. One was in the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end. The defendant who was being charged with these usually minor infractions would have to go through and find that mistake, fix it, and initial it. That way, for legal documentation later, it proved he read it because here are his initials on every page that had those three mistakes. So, if you made a mistake, you had to start all over, you couldn’t use white out because everything was done with carbon paper. We had carbonless forms on paper back behind on everything, so if you made a mistake it appeared back behind too. It was a slow process.

Now the stuff is computerized, so you enter it in and it immediately goes to stores or supply.

The advantage was you worked with the First Sergeant, you got to work with the Commanding Officer and the XO. I was fortunate enough to get to know those people. They were the people who could recommend you for a promotion.

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And I guess that would help you develop people skills also? It did. When the First Sergeant chewed somebody out, you could learn an awful lot about how diplomatically he did it so they didn’t make that mistake again.

Right, do it without breaking them. There are always different ways of doing that. Bring them into line.

That’s something that is hard to learn. When you are trying to discipline someone so they know they did wrong but make them want to do better without just yelling, that’s a skill. Anybody can yell.

Yeah, how do I get them to buy in? And this is not going to be tolerated anymore. You’re going to do a better job because you are capable of doing a better job.

One thing that comes up that always amazes me is the military will give a ridiculous amount of responsibility to an eighteen or nineteen year old without thinking twice about it. Once upon a time we had an American Legion conference, and we had the Captain of the USS Iowa there. He’s got twenty two hundred people on board, it’s a small city, and he says three fourths of them are teenagers. They fire the sixteen inch shell, they’ve got the radar going, they’ve got all these things going on, and they’re eighteen or nineteen years old.

That’s the big difference between the private world and the military world. Most businesses or people, wouldn’t think about hiring a teenager and giving them much responsibility at all.

236 Greg Mclntyre

In the military, one of the things you learn is that you’re going to be on time. The First Sergeant didn’t let you sleep in because you wanted to sleep in. If you were supposed to report for muster at 0700, you do it or you’re in trouble. There are consequences. The military regiments cut into real life every day. Working with American Legion baseball teams, there’s these teenagers and you say, “Hey, you’ve got curfew at midnight,” but they’re not used to going to bed. We would say, “You have an option, you can either go to bed or we’ll take you to the airport for your airline tickets in the morning.” They get your message real quick.

When the team is working hard together, we rarely had problems, but every once in a while they’d say, “What are you going to do, send us home?” We’d go, “Yeah. You can sleep in your beds tonight or you can sleep at the airport.” They got the message.

With the military, those skills of being organized, being on time, getting things going, they work. We would have an American Legion tournament, and one of the things the American Legion does like other youth programs, when a team wins that state tournament, the American Legion steps in and takes care of all those expenses; airfares, hotels, meals, baseball, umpires all were pre-arranged. Like with the team from Alaska. We know they fly out of Anchorage but you don’t know who’s coming until forty-eight hours ahead of time. You must have twenty airline tickets waiting up in Alaska for the team who wins and flies down to maybe Portland, Oregon, or it might be the corner of Washington, or it could be in Shelby. All that stuff needed to be pre-arranged. We would end up flying or busing around fourteen hundred kids all in one day, and checking into hotels.

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That was always the pat on the back we gave ourselves, that was our success getting all that coordinated.

You were the national director of the American Legion Baseball operations from 1986 to when? 1986 to 2012 when I retired. Twenty-eight years there, and seven back in Iowa doing similar type stuff but on a state level.

And now Shelby is the home of the American Legion World Series. Again, totally changed the impact of American Legion Baseball World Series. We went to some great cities, Fargo, North Dakota, nicest people in the world, Rapid City, South Dakota, Spokane, Washington, we went all over the place. Middletown, Connecticut, great people who worked their hearts out for a year, but after a year we had to start all over. So, you end up at Middletown, Connecticut in 1988 and you’re going to Millington, Tennessee in 1989. A whole new committee had to start over. You had to educate them and say, this is what has to happen.

Back then, those teams worked their fanny off, and if there was any money left over, that money would go into the team coffers to help next year’s team. Here in Shelby, we can build on the success year after year. Quite frankly, the World Series barely breaks even. If it wasn’t for our sponsors we probably wouldn’t be able to pay all the bills. It gives us a chance to build on the success. We never had a concert down town in Shelby five years ago, and now we do. It keeps on growing, the attendance has been outstanding and it continues to grow every year.

Fargo North Dakota, their team actually got into the World Series, and they averaged almost two thousand people a game.

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Shelby averages almost seven thousand people a game, and they don’t have a team in it yet.

We have some good teams, we just need to win that championship. Well, it’s tough. In ninety years, I think there are seven teams who have hosted a tournament and won. Back in the thirties and forties there used to be just two teams in there. You have one year it’s in the east, the next it’s in the west, a best of three. Starting in 1944, that’s when they started the double elimination tournament and it was rare for a team to win the state tournament, then go regional and go on to host a World Series and be there in the tournament. It is extremely tough.

So, you think the organization skills and discipline you learned in the military translated to your career? Absolutely.

You got the G.I bill, right? I was hurt when I went in the Marines. I hurt my knee real bad, so I went to school under what we called VOC Rehab. I probably got fifty dollars less a month than the G.I bill guy, but it paid for books and tuition, so that money could be used for grant, food, electricity and everything.

That’s what the G.I bill paid for me, rent and groceries but that allowed me to step out of the job I was doing and get my education. All those skills, and I came from before computers were used. I’m not intimidated by computers so I hopped right in, because it was so much nicer than doing it with the old carbon forms. You had to make six copies, and if you made a mistake you

239 HOMETOWN HEROES had to start all over again. The commanding officer doesn’t like typos on their paperwork. And in the military, you would have the inspector general come around every year, so your paperwork was in fact judged. They came through and they would be looking for mistakes and in the end those mistakes would count against your squadrons. It made a big difference.

Well, I want to thank you for your service and your contributions to the American Legion and Post 82. I am honored to be a member of Post 82. Post 82 does a much better job. They had a kid who was a champion at the oratorical last year, and five kids are going on to Boys State. They’re sending a young man off to the Student Trooper, which is like highway patrol class for a week. They’re doing a lot of good over there.

And they’re starting a biker club. Yes, American Legion Riders.

They do a ton of fund raising. They raised, I want to say, $1.7 million which goes into a scholarship trust. That money goes to kids whose parents were killed on active duty since 911, or if you’re a fifty percent or more disabled veteran you can draw scholarship money. It’s all put in a trust so the interest is earned and goes to those kids or veterans.

American Legion does a ton, and in our last meeting it was the Legion’s ninety-eighth birthday. We talked about how it began and the monumental things it’s done. I think it was the first million plus donor to the Heart Association. The Cancer Society also, and they are a big contributor each year to the Ronald McDonald houses.

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Most people out there probably think only of American Legion Baseball, but the Legion does a ton of stuff. If you are a veteran, we need younger veterans in there. I know there are a lot of younger veterans who could benefit from the camaraderie and fellowship of the Post 82 members and their support. The ridiculous number of young veterans coming back with real problems for real reasons, I think these things can be somewhat offset by a support group. The members have been through similar things. When I sit down and talk to Vietnam vets, I realize my service was not dangerous or hard at all. The veterans of today are going through some very dangerous and tough situations with injuries and trauma, but that support can help. It certainly can’t hurt. There was a chaplain in the National Guard who came and talked at the American Legion. He said, you need to get these young guys in, because when the World War I and World War II boys came back, they called it combat fatigue, but it was post- traumatic stress; get them in with other veterans. If old Joe talked about when he was in Korea or Vietnam, and he related some of that combat, that can help younger guys think, he can talk about it, so I can talk about it, it does relieve stress.

You talked about the G.I bill, it was a Legionnaire called Harry Colmery, a past national commander and member of Congress who wrote the G.I bill. The American Legion got that passed by one vote. It was opposed by some other organizations who wanted the money to go strictly into hospitals.

I believe the American Legion is the only non-profit that can lobby Congress. For the most part, but the other organizations can too. There‘s the DAV, and the VFW. I’m not sure how it works but they

241 HOMETOWN HEROES have a political action arm. With the American Legion, we don’t care if they’re Republican or Democrat, the issue is the issue, and that’s what we are going to argue about.

The American Legion is a non-profit, charter organization. Any veteran who needs to put in a claim, we will take that at no charge to them, put in the paperwork and send it on up through our chain of command.

I urge any veteran out there to look to their American Legion Post and get involved. Any time you go into a room full of veterans and you are a veteran, there is an instant connection and you feel at home. Thank you for service.

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Story 19

MARTHA BRIDGES The Real G.I Jane

Martha Bridges gave 22 years of service to our nation.

Are you from Shelby originally? No, I’m from Concord. I grew up and was raised there until I went to school in Appalachia in 1970. I graduated high school in 70. In 73 I heard about the College Junior program. I wasn’t going to summer school, and I wasn’t going to get a job, so I decided to see if I could do it, and I could. They took us in July of 73 to Fort McClellan, Alabama, for four weeks.

You were a very progressive lady, especially in 1973. How many women were in the military at that point? I don’t know. There weren’t a lot. After the four weeks, if you wanted to, you could go back and finish your senior year, then you would go back in the Army as a Second Lieutenant.

When you invest that much in your education (and I wanted to be a teacher) I decided that was something not to do. At that point in time it wasn’t for me, but it was an interesting experience.

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So you went to college to be a teacher? I went back for my senior year and I think it was 1974, because I went on to get my Masters. In the summer, I had the National Guard come and they said, we want you to join. They were looking for women for the military, but they said I would need to go through basic training. I thought, no, I don’t want to do that again. Then the Army Reserve came and they said, your four weeks will count as your basic training, because at that time they were trying to get women into the military. They had a program called CASP, Civilian Acquired Skills Program, and they went for two weeks basic training. Well, I’d done four, and it counted. Years later when I started to pull my paperwork together, it was daunting the amount of paperwork the Sergeant Major had to do to get that approved, to get my four weeks approved for my basic training. It was approved, and I went into the Army Reserve as a Spc 4 (Specialist 4) because when you went through the College Junior Program you were a Spc 4. I was in the 1st of the 485th of the 108th Division.

The Pallas Athena medal – Martha is very proud of this medal. It was worn on the lapel of the Women’s Air Corps members uniform.

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We’ve always had women involved in wars and military effort but not as much with regular military service. Now it’s very common. Did you get any push back as a woman going into the military? Only from my father. My father didn’t like it. He was in the Navy and was in World War II. Women didn’t have the reputation, the honorable reputation he envisioned, and so he took it as a negative. But as far as anything else, he did not dissuade me, nor did any others. When I went into my unit, there weren’t but a half-dozen women in there. It was a Drill Sergeant Unit, and the only position women had was clerk typist. So I started out as a clerk typist.

Now you could serve in combat on the front lines. Absolutely, and being a Drill Sergeant Unit, people say, why don’t you get your Drill Sergeant certification? I did not want to do that. By the time women were doing that, I had a family and I didn’t want to take away from it. It was enough to take away one weekend a month and two weeks a year annual training.

That’s the Reserves, and the Reserves can be great as an alternative to going active duty for men and women alike. What did the Reserves do for you? The benefits? Right now, yes. I retired one day short of twenty-two years, because I did not want to go to AT. I was tired. Now I have retirement, I’ve got Tri-care, the military healthcare, and went on Medicare in December. When people call and ask, “Do you have a supplement?” I say, “I have tri-care,” and they say, “You’re good.”

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Did the military help you with your education? No. At that point in time when I enlisted, I’d already had my education. Eventually they would have rules and regulations that if you would re-enlist for six years you would get a bonus, but in the Reserves you never got the educational bonus. It was only for those who were re-enlisting for the first time.

Were you ever called to active duty? Yes, we were called up. I remember because we were out of school for Martin Luther King Holiday, and got the call from the unit that said we had been activated. We were one of the first in any of the 108th Division to be activated. So, we went for three months to Fort Jackson. Being a Drill Sergeant Unit, they would take people from the IRR.

I was in the IRR for four years after being active, the Individual Ready Reserves. They took them and brought them back in. The Drill Sergeants would get them back to speed again and send them to Saudi, in Desert Storm. We were there for three months. That was stressful for a lot of people. We had two of our people die while at Fort Jackson, and when we got back, one went AWOL. It was very hard on the families, because being in the military, you’re in another world. When you go to AT, you’re putting your civilian world aside and you’re going into the military world.

You’re doing a job as a teacher and all of a sudden you’ve got to drop everything and go where they tell you to go? How did you do that? Well, I called my husband. My daughter was in 4th grade and my son was in 2nd, and we went to the county office and

246 Greg Mclntyre did all the paperwork. We did the Power of Attorney and all the paperwork needed so I could go on leave. I told my principal and they had to find someone to cover my position while I was gone.

Retention NCO of the Year 1993 – Photo in paper – The article states Martha Bridges was being honored as one of only five Retention NCOs of the Year who were described as the “number one, the best, and the cherry-on-top-of-the-whip- cream Retention NCOs in the USAR.”

What was your rank? I went in as an E-4 and I retired as an E-7.

What is that considered in the Army? Sergeant First Class.

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Man, twenty-two years is a long time. I was born in 1975. I was married in 1979.

It would be hard for me to still be in the Reserves and just pick up and go. You know, being in the Reserves is the smartest thing for anyone coming off active duty. If they don’t do twenty years in active duty, the smartest thing they could do would be to go in a Reserve unit in any military branch. Do your twenty years.

Take your retirement, take the benefits. Absolutely. My husband hated me being gone, but he never gave me the ultimatum, and right now it has really paid off. Just Tri-Care alone has really paid off.

These are the medals you received. Two Meritorious Service Medals with Oakleaf Cluster, the Army Commendation medal with Three Oakleaf Clusters. I received four commendations.

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The Army Achievement medal with Two Oakleaf Clusters, Army Reserve Components Achievement medal, and the National Defense Service Medal. Then there is the Armed Forces Reserve Medal, the NCO Professional Development Ribbon, and Army Service Ribbon. Which one is your favorite? Meritorious Service. I cannot remember the year, they had a position, an MOS(Military Occupation Specialties) 79 Delta. It was retention NCO. The first time they did this we went for Second Army, they had competitions, and I won Second Army. You had to go to Forces Command in Atlanta but they did away with it because of Desert Storm. The next time they did this I won Second Army again and went to Atlanta. The competition was from all over the United States. After the interview, I went upstairs and talked to my husband and said, “We might as well go now, I did horribly.” The one thing I remember they asked me was, “Where the page number of a map was.” I didn’t know. It had been years since I’d had it. For some girl just coming out of basic,

Martha receiving award from Richard Kidd, Sgt. Major of the Army, for Retention NCO of the year.

249 HOMETOWN HEROES she would know all of this, but this was a retention competition. But, we went back down and they announced I’d won. We got to go to the Pentagon and accept the award.

That is awesome. That was my crowning achievement, to win a national competition, and it was the first time, so I was the first winner.

So twenty-two years in the Army Reserves with active duty time mixed in, and a career as a teacher. What did you teach? I taught reading, education and then technology at Casar for thirty-three years.

After all that, what advice would you give to a young lady out there who maybe hadn’t considered going into the military? How could going into the military help a young man or lady? It gives you discipline, and if you don’t know what you want to do in life this is a way to find out quickly. It gives you a socialization with other people, a different way of life and because the military is a different world, you view things differently. It has such heavy discipline going through basic, but don’t let that discourage you. Basic is designed to weed out the weaker and designed to make you stronger. It will either make you or break you. If you are a strong person, it will only make you stronger. And then (after basic) you’ve got options. How many people can leave school, go into the military for twenty years, retire, many times by forty, and start another career? After those twenty years you get retirement, medical, you get such great benefits, and being a veteran.

Regular Army didn’t appreciate Reserves; we were weekend warriors, and you didn’t feel appreciated. I remember when I got

250 Greg Mclntyre into the post, it made me feel like, yes, I am a veteran, I did serve, I did something. To stand up and say, I’m a veteran and salute the flag, and hear the Star Spangled Banner and salute instead of putting your hand over your heart, I’m really proud of it, I’m proud of my service.

Well thank you for your service.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Greg Mclntyre

Story 20

MARTIN CJ MONGIELLO 30 Year Retired Military Veteran, Chef to Presidents, Stars and a Lucky Few under the Polar Ice Cap

Martin Mongiello is Executive Director of the United States Presidential Service Center and owner of The Inn of the Patriots in Grover, North Carolina.

So, how does a young guy say to himself, I want to do this, and the military is going to be a part of it? I was seventeen and didn’t want to waste away, but I was smart enough to get out of town. I was in San Diego for boot camp, just putting one foot in front of the other, and swore I would not sign up for anything beyond four years. It was scary to me.

I was afraid to travel the world. For the first ten years, the military offer you things like, go live in Japan, all expenses paid, or you can live in Europe, and I was like, there is no way I’m leaving where I’m from and my family. How silly was that? It took ten years to get past that. I lived out on Point Loma, that’s the nice part of San Diego.

People don’t understand about military bases. The bases I was on, like the Naval Air Station on North Island, the golf course there looks like something out of a pro golf tournament. You’ve got beautiful weather, the ocean, and Point Loma has the yachts. People have weddings out there if they’re in the military.

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I remember the gym on North Island. It was several hangars strung together, and they would open the hangar doors. I always had time to work out during my day. I would look out at the aircraft carriers parked across the road with the City of San Diego in the back ground. It was a heck of a view and that view was your day. I was surface warfare qualified and submarine warfare qualified. I also had a weird opportunity where I never even knew I was interviewed by the White House Military Office for a job. Where I was going, Camp David, was a Seabee-run command, so I was a Seabee for a couple of years without having any Seabee training.

Seabees are the people who put up construction. Airstrips and such. Camp David was always in need of construction. We built a few cabins while I was there and kept up the facility. It is on top of a mountain after all.

We build, we fight. Yeah. Who knew I was going to be a Seabee. I never planned on that.

But food is your life. People who aren’t in the military may not know, but my suspicions are the Navy has some of the best food. Even going out on aircraft carriers, the cooks are serious about their job. It’s one of the best-run departments on the ship. They will fry up an omelet with anything you want in it, and you learn to order fast because they are servicing so many people. Food has certainly gotten better in the military.

I heard submarines have some of the best food.

254 Greg Mclntyre

They do. We get more money. You can get fifty-five or so cents more per person per day. I know seven dollars fourteen cents doesn’t sound like a lot but that’s what food costs the US Government. When I first went in the Navy in eighty-three, we had a lot of junk food. We had third world butter and stuff that was clearly marked for donation by the US Aid program. That was what we fed sailors and Marines, some of the worst products. In the beginning, when I first came in, we used animal lard, and the Navy was very proud we were switching to Crisco. What we now know is eating Crisco is also not a good thing. Crisco is kind of horrific. But you get smarter and you change what you’re doing. The food has come a long way.

About that ten-year mark in the Navy, when I was recruited by the White House Military Office, just as I started doing a lot more than managing hotels, I started managing private homes.

You went into the military, and you were a Seabee. Did you start cooking in the military? Yes. I always loved cooking, so when I joined the military that was a huge aspiration. To pay for my private all-boys catholic high school, which was expensive, I worked in Italian restaurants and IHop all summer to save enough. In my senior year I worked full time at IHop. Twenty-one years later when I retired, the CEO of IHop sent me an apron, hat and a letter to my retirement ceremony. That’s how I got cooking, and it led me to hotel management school in the Navy.

Why would the Navy have hotel management school? Because of barracks housing millions of sailors on land every year. As soon as I graduated from that, I did four years at sea. When you’ve done that, you get to come on land. My first

255 HOMETOWN HEROES duty station on land was a huge resort in Pensacola, Florida. I had a fifteen hundred room hotel I was helping to manage, and I was on-duty general manager of the resort. That was a massive responsibility for a twenty something year old. That’s how the military works.

They give you massive responsibilities at a young age. The military philosophy is, push the most responsibility possible onto the eighteen year olds back, neck and face. If it’s not something that’s unsafe, it will be pushed down onto them. I was acquainted with the philosophy of, here’s how we will know if you are a good chief or not: When you go on thirty-day leave, if everything runs like a clock and no-one can tell you’re gone for a month, and we don’t need to call to ask one single thing or send an email or text, you have done your job as Chief Petty Officer. If stuff goes out of control or haywire, then you’ve not done your job.

The military teaches you not to hide information or skills. You will immediately take the knowledge you bring to the workforce and give it to the eighteen-year old, which is different than in civilian life. People hide information for job security. They won’t teach everything to some snot-nose kid.

You make a great point. The military does not care that you’re eighteen, they expect you to accept the training and responsibility, step up and get it done. They will show you how it’s done, and if you do it wrong, they will let you know. I think there is some of what you say in the private sector but I think there is too much coddling. Kids stay home too long, then they go to college and get coddled there. We should put more responsibility and faith in young people like the military does.

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The mass proliferation of the computer was not where we needed it, not like today. Today a child can attend college with just a laptop while living in Australia working at the American Embassy on a two-year program but still be in college in the US. You could send a kid to Zaire with the church while the kid is in college doing his or her degree online.

We need to put more responsibility and faith in our kids. The military puts that faith in you and expects you to step up. You’re tested so they know your aptitude and puts you in a job that coincides with that. Do you think that was a good thing to put that responsibility on your back to start with? I didn’t appreciate it then like I do now. I worked one hundred and twenty-six hours per week, because when you’re at sea, you’re either working, training, or doing your watch.

We were on twelve hour shifts unless there was an emergency. When I started, I worked on Hawkeye radar systems. I’d go out with a senior tech who knew the system like the back of his hand. We supported an airwing of four planes. Each was up twelve hours then switched out. We kept the radar part of the aircraft up and running. That was our job. If we didn’t have it running, essentially the whole carrier group was blind. That was on the heads of some young guys. That kind of responsibility is put on you. Let’s get back to this. How did you learn to cook? Were you a chef in the military as well? Yes.

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At what point when you were managing these hotels did you become a full-time chef in the military? As soon as I graduated basic cook school in San Diego, the guys came through and said they were recruiting for a new submarine. I was eighteen.

Boot camp, then cook school, then I flew to nuclear submarine school in Groton, Connecticut. I graduated that and went to my first boat, the USS Sunfish, and I was living in Charleston for four years. Under water, there is nothing else to do. It’s seven days a week, eighteen hours a day just cooking. It’s easy to rack up one hundred and twenty-six hours a week.

That’s really where I learned how to cook the best. In fact, Hillary Clinton used to ask me in her kitchen, “Where did you learn to cook all this gourmet food?” and I would tell her, “Self- taught in a sewer pipe first lady.” She would say, “In a what?” “Inside a sewer pipe with one hundred and fourteen other men who generally used F and MF every third word.” That’s where the learning center was. I never went to culinary school. That was my big dream when I retired was to go to college. I graduated from Charlotte in 2010 summa cum laude at the Arts Institute with a bachelor’s degree. I used the post-911 G.I bill. I was the first duel enrolled student for the art institute in history under the bill.

What’s different about the post 911 G.I Bill? In the sixties and seventies there was VEAP, Veterans Education Assistance Program, and I was on VEAP. It was kind of like, you put in a dollar, we’ll give you two. So, you could rack up three times the amounts.

258 Greg Mclntyre

With classes while in the military I think I had to pay for a third. I did, too, while I was in, but I didn’t have enough to get a degree. The new post 911 G.I Bill has some requirements, and it’s based on percentages. I was one hundred percent qualified because I exceeded the three years in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. And for the first time, it said you should be able to attend some courses online. The biggest thing is the payment for a certain amount of money for a housing allowance, so someone can go to college and still pay their rent. That had never been granted before.

You talked very casually about talking to Hillary Clinton in her kitchen. Can you tell me more about being a chef to Presidents? How does that happen? Only the Navy works in the White House staff mess, and only the Navy runs two restaurants underneath the Oval Office. Reservations are booked thirty to ninety days in advance at every table. The Navy also runs a take-out counter, sometimes up to a thousand gourmet lunches a day for staffers. Obama had four hundred and seventy-three people on his staff. Those people get hungry. The worst thing those staffers could do would be to go out for lunch, because you would have to go through security to get to your car which is super far away.

So, you were recruited to work in the White House? Yes, I did State dinners and special events in the White House. I never knew the Navy did all the cooking. No other service is allowed. My Captain was explaining this to me one day. He said, “We also run the Camp David resort. With you having graduated first in your class for law enforcement academy and doing all these special schools with the Marine Corps and Anti-Terrorism,

259 HOMETOWN HEROES and being a cook and having graduated from hotel management school, we think you’re the perfect candidate for Secretary of the Navy to nominate for Presidential duty.” I was like, “Alright, sir, yes sir.” It was weird being invited into his State Room. I had never been in that man’s State Room other than to clean the baseboard and dust.

But they had a job to fill and because of all that training you were the one who came up. It was God’s plan.

So, you go to the White House and then get sent to Camp David? I knew I was going to Camp David to work from the beginning. It took about a year and a half, so it was under H.W Bush when I was initially interviewed and selected. There were fifty-six chefs that went through the interview that day, and they picked three. About a year and a half later it was down to two of us. This was where the United States will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to investigate both sides of your family. You can get bumped by close family members. It’s not just about you anymore.

That makes sense. You might end up cooking and serving food to the President of the United States, that’s a big deal. And people there know who you are and where you are.

I’m sure they watch you. You must know what to do. They might test you to see if you would take a bribe in the Lowe’s men’s room for eighty thousand dollars in tens and see if you call it in on the phone within an hour and report it like you were taught by the CIA. They’ll tell

260 Greg Mclntyre you, “Oh yeah, we were just testing you 14592. Don’t worry, we will meet you, just make sure you don’t touch the five thousand with the purple band or take anything.” But it’s the people who don’t call it in.

We had a thing at Camp David called the Sequoia Express. It was a blacked out car which would drive up and the agents would get out and everyone would start to scurry. They would have a magistrate’s order, and you could see it had a gold embossed seal. They would say they were here to pick somebody up, and it would be a sailor or marine, and it’s like, you’ve got to be kidding me, that guy has been in the military for twenty-seven years, what did he do? You might hear later that they went to his house that night, cleared his children out of school, trucks down there, emptied the house out, his wife and everything gone by morning. They had a social services lady there to interact for him to say goodbye to the children for an hour.

So, quick question, how many Presidents did you serve under? I served four Presidents. I was hired under H.W Bush, Bill and Hilary Clinton, they did not allow a lot of people in the house ever. There were other Presidents who would visit the White House from different countries, and you cook for them and take care of them. Famous stars and CEO’s would sleep over at the White House too. One night, a guy I really liked, Steve Jobs was there for dinner, and the White House Usher told me, “Oh he’s staying overnight too.” That’s unbelievable, cooking for Steve Jobs.

So you met Steve Jobs? I didn’t meet him or shake his hand because you don’t bother them, that’s not your place.

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You’re not there to be seen. But it was still cool to be cooking for Steve Jobs, and then he was hanging out staying the night. I had one question at the time; I said, “On the paper why does it say PIXAR? What is that?” “Oh, you didn’t hear, you didn’t know? He was thrown out of Apple.” I’m like, “What, Steve Jobs?” And he said, “You don’t need to keep saying the man’s name. They’ll probably make a movie about what happened in ten or twenty years.” Did you watch the movie?

Oh sure. Just guests like that, it was unbelievable. From there I went to Japan and cooked for Prime Minister Hashimoto, and I went into the deserts to cook for King Abdullah the second and his wife, Queen Rania. I worked at NATO cooking for the United States and United States Embassy.

And now you employ those talents at The Inn of the Patriots in Grover, North Carolina. Our bed and breakfast is called The Inn of the Patriots. There is a museum inside and a Presidential center. We have two gift shops there, the culinary school and we do consulting for resorts and private homes.

Thank you for sharing your stories and talking with me about your incredible service, it’s a real honor.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

262 Greg Mclntyre

Story 21

ARTHUR ‘Art’ GORDON Air Force Veteran of 28 Years

You’re a veteran of the U.S Air Force, and served for 28 years as an aircraft mechanic, I would think you took many benefits from that time. You worked in seven states, South Dakota, Alaska, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, and New Mexico during that 28 years? And many deployments within that time also.

You weren’t in Area 51 were you? No.

You probably couldn’t tell me even if you were. Now, you’re with Curtiss Wright inspecting aircraft parts. Yes, I work for the Department of Defense and my office is at Curtiss Wright.

Department of Defense? Yes, they make parts for the F35 Joint Strike fighter, and my job is to inspect the parts. I approve them for the government and they’re installed on an aircraft. I enjoy it. I’ve been there a little over two years.

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That’s cool, to work for the Department of Defense. It’s nice. I retired in 2011 and worked in the private sector for three years, then got back in to the DoD back in January 2015, and I’ve been here ever since.

Working on parts for the F35 strike fighter. That’s a big deal. Is that the Raptor? The Raptor is the F22.

The F35 is even more advanced? It’s the Lightening 2, I think that’s what the nickname is.

Is that the one that had the overruns and they tried to bring down the costs? Yes.

Are they in full production? They’re not in full production but Curtiss Wright is one of many contractors for Lockheed Martin and they do an excellent job.

The F35 is going to be the most advanced fighter on planet Earth, right? Yes.

So, where are you from originally? I’m from North Carolina. You ever watch the Andy Griffith show? They mention Mount Pilot, that’s where I’m from.

Is that in the mountains? Yes, it’s two and half hours from here, northwest of Salem.

264 Greg Mclntyre

So, with the Air Force, it sounds like you were able to travel. Yes, I don’t know how many countries I’ve been to. Back in the eighties when I came in, the cold war was still going on, so the biggest thing we had to look at was Russia. They were the number one enemy we had back then. Then in 1992 the Cold War stopped.

You listen to the news now and it sounds like we’re in one today. Yes. In 1992 they had a massive reorganization after Desert Storm and got rid of some major commands. By then, ‘Terrorist’ was the biggest thing on the block. I have deployed quite a few places. I spent a year in Iraq, that was 2007-2008 and been around the world a few times. I love my job. You don’t join the military to get rich, you join for your service.

It has good benefits? Yes, but they’re not as good as they used to be. You get fifty percent (50%) when you retire after 20 years, and thirty years it’s seventy five percent (75%). For enlisted, thirty years is the most you can stay in. That’s unless you’re Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, then it’s a few after that. They get paid a little more, the retirement is a little more. I got to travel a lot, and I did miss a lot of my kid’s birthdays and a few anniversaries. I missed my daughter being born. I was in Saudi Arabia for that one. That was in 1994. She was born in October. I got to meet her at the end of November.

Did you have any idea when you joined that you would be in so long and travel so much? No. I knew what I wanted to do when I went in, I wanted to be an aircraft maintenance person. I went to the recruiter in April

265 HOMETOWN HEROES of 1983 and got orders to Guam. It was a nice place. It was hot with palm trees and coconuts. I can’t remember the reason why, but they cancelled those orders and sent me to South Dakota instead.

It’s pretty though isn’t it? Pretty cold. When I first went there in 1983, the chill factor was one hundred below zero. I thought it was cold in North Carolina, but it’s not.

It just cuts through your clothes. Oh yeah. They give you excellent cold weather gear. That winter the whole state of South Dakota was shut down. We all knew it was coming. Go to the grocery store, get all your stuff and then they closed the base down. The biggest thing out there was the wind and snow drifts. It was flat land, you could have an inch of snow on one side of your car and the other side a foot. I didn’t mind it there but it wasn’t North Carolina. I met a lot of good friends there, I keep in touch with them. I’ve been gone from there since 1990.

In the Navy I worked on E2C Hawkeye Radar systems. They would send them to my shop and we’d work on them there. Then I was deployed out on a couple of carriers. I circumnavigated the globe on the Nimitz, or maybe it was the Constellation. One of them went to Westpac and the other went all the way around. They were big ships. We fixed everything on the ship. We weren’t that far removed from what you did, but I guess for aircraft mechanics it depended on what you worked on. Yeah, as Crew Chief, I was a jack of all trades, master of none. We knew a lot about a lot of things but if something major happened to a component, we would trouble shoot and get what

266 Greg Mclntyre were called Specialists to come out and look at the aircraft. We always flew with the aircraft when it left home station. If it was just a local sortie we wouldn’t, but if it was going TDY (Temporary Duty Yonder) we would go with the aircraft. Usually it had two or three people. I worked on a KC135 for seven years in South Dakota, then I went up to Alaska. Up there I worked on RC’s, they were reconnaissance aircraft. We were stationed in Eielson AFB just south of Fairbanks. It was pretty cold up there too but nothing like South Dakota.

We were stationed up there but the aircraft always stayed at Eareckson Air Station in the Bering Sea, on the island of Shemya. I went up there a couple of times and it was a good time. It was a very small place. We called it the rock, and you lived in a hangar. They would stay in the hangar until the klaxon went off, any time, day or night. We would back the aircraft out, they would take off, do their mission, and when it came back we would recover it, put caps on it, pre-flight it and stick it back in the hangar. It would stay there until needed again.

We were still flying around Russia, that was a fun, real world mission, then the Gulf War started. I was supposed to go to Turkey but I didn’t go. Then they closed the base and moved the aircraft to Nebraska. Certain ranks had choices where they could be stationed. I went there on a four year tour but only stayed two years. With my rank my choices were California, Nebraska, and Louisiana, so I choose Louisiana. It was closer to home and my wife didn’t like cold weather. When we got there, it was 100% humidity and I almost died. I was there for two years.

The mission for the base changed. They got rid of the tankers, and I left in 1994 for McGuire AFB in New Jersey. I was

267 HOMETOWN HEROES there for eleven years and I loved it. When I first got there the base was run down. It had been on the closure list for a long time, but they slowly brought up the standards. I met a lot of good friends there who I still keep in touch with. If you left the base and went a couple of miles, you would never know there was a military base. New Jersey is called the Garden State, and I loved it, but it was expensive. The insurance was No.1 in the nation. I was on a KC10, a newer aircraft, a tanker, and a lot bigger, compared to the DC10.

When you say a tanker, you mean a refueling plane? Yes, a re-fueler, that’s what I worked on. The KC10 was a nice aircraft.

Those things are big, right? Big fuel tanks. Yes, that’s all it is. It could hold cargo. My aircraft up there was the very first one, built in 1979. The last that I worked on was a KC135. It was like going from a Volkswagen to a Cadillac. Everything was just so up to date. If you had issues it would almost trouble shoot itself. The thing I didn’t like is they could hold a lot of gas. My first tour from there, we flew from New Jersey to Saudi Arabia. That was in October. When we left New Jersey it was cold, and I had long johns on. I fell asleep after we took off and slept most of the way over there. When the door was opened after we landed, it was like being in an oven. It was pretty hot.

We were there for two or three weeks and then they sent me and my aircraft to the United Arab Emirates.

I spent a lot of time in UAE. I liked it there, it’s westernized.

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We were at port in Abu Dhabi, and I want to say it was a forty- five minute ride up the highway to Dubai. I remember big highways rolling through the desert, and you see this big city coming up in the distance. Nice golf courses. You’d see animals walking around in the desert.

It’s not what most people think the Middle East is like. My perception of the Middle East, growing up in a small town Shelby, North Carolina, did not include the United Arab Emirates. I didn’t spend any time in Saudi Arabia. I guess it’s more westernized also. Yes, both of them are.

Bahrain too. Yes, I’ve been there too. Saudi has a lot of western stuff but they’re more traditional. There was no alcohol or anything.

And at Ramadan, a Muslim holiday which includes fasting, you have to go and hide to eat. That’s what we would do. Yes. My first time over there I had no idea what to expect. Like you said, it was different from my perception. Most people speak English. We would eat downtown on Thursday, and they would say to us, watch out what you eat downtown, but the first time I ate on base I got food poisoning. The food downtown was better.

They’re cooking even beef or lamb or maybe chicken. Yeah, they have chicken, you just don’t see pork over there. There was bacon, but it was beef bacon. It was good. They have western restaurants like Chilis, but it’s not the same.

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Then there was the gold. It gives you some perspective on what the mark up is on jewelry. Dubai was like another planet. It’s like the future or something. You don’t understand it unless you go there. The money, the size. The mosques are beautiful.

We went to a shopping mall and skied inside the mall at an indoor ski resort, and crazy things like that. The architecture is great. Yes, futuristic.

The sailboat hotel (Burj Al Arab Hotel) in the UAE was unreal. Growing up in the US, we like to think we have the best of everything. Most Americans do.

People just don’t get it until they go to other places. Go to Japan, talk about futuristic. I remember how clean the subways and trains were, it was like a big system that ran without much disharmony. I was amazed at how reverent they were. My daughter and her husband are over in Japan now. They’ve been there a couple of months and love it already. They’re on Okinawa.

They have their own culture. The Okinawans are not necessarily Japanese. It’s different than it is on the mainland.

When I’ve spoken to people, most have had a good experience in the military, but it’s like most things, there were things I liked about the military and things I did not like. I probably would

270 Greg Mclntyre not be an attorney now if I hadn’t had a chance to grow up in the military. I got a great education, and they paid for most of my undergrad. Yeah, they paid for my bachelor’s degree. That was awesome. That’s what I tell anyone who’s going in, take full advantage.

When people tell me they can’t afford college, there are ways to do that, and the military is one of them. They have tuition assistance.

When we went out on the ship we had professors go out, so there was continuity. I was stationed in New Mexico before I retired, and I deployed to Qatar. I was finishing up a class while deployed. Once a week I would video with my instructor in New Mexico, and I would email him my homework. The technology is so advanced now that it was easy.

I did most of my undergrad while I was in, then I used the GI bill to go to law school. Now, there’s the post 911 GI Bill. If you’re in for a certain amount of time, you can transfer the GI Bill to your kids. I split it up between mine. I loved my career, I still miss it.

I made a ton of friends in the military. Yes, the camaraderie is so different than for someone who has never been in the military.

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And you miss it because you don’t have those same types of friendships otherwise. You’re all in it together and on the same team. Do you think it was a good idea to join the military? Oh yeah. I knew what I wanted to do when I graduated from high school. I went to a school around Piedmont Airlines in Winston Salem, NC, but before I could take my final exam with the FAA, I joined the Air Force. It wasn’t until I was stationed in New Jersey in early 2000 that I finally went back through. Instead of just taking the test, because I had forgotten a lot of stuff, I went through the class again and I was able to get my license. If I wanted or needed to, I could work on aircraft for an airline now.

I could have come out and worked for the DoD as a private contractor and worked in the same shop in San Diego doing the same job I had in the military. They have, after all, provided you with all the training, and kept you up to date. They can use you as a resource to the new guys coming in. I was in Iraq with a Lockheed Martin Representative out of Curtiss Wright, and he was a retired Marine, been doing this for quite a while, very knowledgeable person.

Yeah, the Marines have the same thing. I was in school in Millington with Marines, and they would go out with the aircraft they specialized on. My aircraft school was in Wichita Falls, Texas. I think I was there for six weeks. From there I went to Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana. Now it’s a reserve base, but it was a huge base back in the eighties. It was turned over to the Reserves in ninety-two. It’s a nice sized base, just not active duty anymore.

272 Greg Mclntyre

I think Millington is a records space now. A lot has changed since ninety-two, some good, some bad, but I wouldn’t trade anything. Even the worst stuff I learned something from.

Most people are enriched by the experience. They come out of it better and make whole careers from the experience whether two, three, four or more years. It gives you drive and direction. When I was in high school, my family had a tobacco farm, so I worked on a tobacco farm. Now that’s gone. There are very few people who grow tobacco.

I tell my eighteen year old son who is as smart as a whip and really driven, I’ll buy you the plane ticket to London. Go around Europe, travel around Asia, but go. Just getting out there and travelling gives you a new perspective. A lot of people in our society feel like they’re ‘entitled’ instead of having to earn it. It’s the ‘You Owe Me’ mentality. That’s not the right way to think. People need to earn it, not walk about with their hand out expecting to be given it.

Joining the military and getting that global perspective really adds to who you are and how you view things. The first time I came home on leave, (I went in in April and I came home for the first time in August), and I love my friends, but they were all doing the same thing, and I had changed. I didn’t want to hang out with them, I was bored because nothing had changed.

If you expand your knowledge and view of the world, it gives you something else. Going straight into university from high school and picking a degree to study, how can you do that effectively

273 HOMETOWN HEROES without any experience or difference in perspective of the world? You would have no tangible, real-world knowledge. You may as well put on a blindfold and throw a dart at which subject to study because you really wouldn’t know. Thank you for talking to me about your time in the military and for your service.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

274 Greg Mclntyre

Story 22

RIT VARRIALE Controversial State of the Nation Address

Dr. Rit Varriale is a veteran and a pastor of Elizabeth Baptist Church here in Shelby, North Carolina. Dr Varriale graduated from The Citadel, (the Millitary College of south Carolina), Campbell, Duke and Princeton.

You’re not only a veteran, you’re an Army Ranger? I went to Ranger school, Ranger class 2/93. We finished up January 22nd of 1993, and from there I went to the 82nd Airborne Division as a Scout Platoon Leader for Division Scouts.

When I was in the configuration for the division, every infantry battalion had a scout platoon. Then the division had three scout platoons that were attached to the aviation brigade, and I was one of the leaders for division scouts for two years. Great privilege, great opportunity to be a scout platoon leader for that long. Then I was executive officer of division scouts for eight years, so I had a great time.

I’ll bet, and stayed in great shape. Yes, and I still like to work out so, chalk that up to the Army.

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I know you do a workout program here in the community called F-3? F-3, fitness, fellowship and faith. Basically what we say is, in order for a man to reach his full potential, he has to bond with other guys committed to those same things. They commit to fitness, physical and mental fitness. They are committed to fellowship with one another, and they are committed to faith which is really the most important thing.

And it’s from 5:15 a.m to 6:00 a.m. 5:15 sharp and the claim to fame is it’s free, it’s not going to cost you anything, it is all guys and is outside, regardless of the weather conditions, rain, sleet, or snow. We have been going for almost two-and-a-half years now, and we’ve not missed a weekday workout. Even in times when there has been an ice or snow storm, at least one guy has shown up at the workout site, called AO’s, and has worked out on his own and posted a workout, a two-and-a-half year streak working out every morning. I’ve missed a few, and everyone has missed a few, but the guys have kept it going. That’s part of the camaraderie of the fellowship.

Do the workout sites change? The workout sites change. We are at the City Park and recreation center Monday and Thursday mornings at 5:15 a.m sharp. We start doing our calisthenics and then go into the workout. On Tuesdays and Fridays, those are our run days. On Tuesday, we meet downtown at the Earl Scruggs center where we do light calisthenics and stretching, and then boom, we hit the road running. Guys go in different directions because they have different skill levels with running, so you go at your own pace. Some just walk around the court square and do exercises around

276 Greg Mclntyre there. On Friday morning we just changed our AO to the new First Broad River Park. That has a trail running to Ingles on the west side of town. If you start at the parking lot and run to Ingles and back, it’s right at three miles. Wednesdays, we meet at the local Community College and that’s another boot-camp workout. So, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday are boot-camp workouts, Tuesday and Friday are run days. It’s a nice, balanced workout.

If someone wants more information they can check Facebook? Yeah, you can go to F3 on Facebook or Twitter, and F3 Nation on the web, then you can find your local F3 groups.

It sounds like the Army Ranger fitness has carried on throughout the rest of your life. I think that’s important. Did you get that from the military, or were you into fitness and sports before that? In high school I played football, wrestled and did track, and I also spent a lot of time outdoors skiing, hunting and hiking. All that was already part of my life. I think that was what had me gravitate towards the military and the Army in particular, so when I got to The Citadel it was a natural fit. I liked the regimented lifestyle. It worked well for me. I liked The Citadel after the first year.

I’ve read the forbidden book ‘Lords of Discipline.’ So you go to The Citadel and you’re an athlete in high school. How did you head towards being a pastor? That really started with a transition in my father’s life. When I was nine going on ten, my father went through a pretty radical conversion experience. He wasn’t a hell-raiser, he was with GE, very responsible, committed to his work, committed to bringing home resources for his family, but he was more committed to

277 HOMETOWN HEROES himself outside of work and those responsibilities than anything else. In his own words, the person he loved most in life was himself. He still loved my mother, and he loved me, but there was a lot going on in his life that God needed to work on. Until then, our family was not as stable as it needed to be. When God got hold of my dad, it was a pretty amazing transformation. Even as a child, I couldn’t deny the change that was taking place that I was watching unfold before my eyes. That instilled in me that the relationship with God was real, and the relationship with God was powerful, and the relationship with God was needed for families to be all they could be, for men to be all they could be.

Growing up with that appreciation for what God did in my dad kept me in a closer relationship with God than otherwise. If my dad hadn’t gone through that, if my parents had split up, there is no telling which direction my life would have gone. So, when I left home, I had instilled in me this sense of God and country: you honor God with your life, you seek to serve God with your life, none of us is perfect, but God is there and he cares and can make a difference. That was very much instilled in me going to The Citadel. As I went through The Citadel I grew in my relationship with the Lord.

I think it was during that time that I realized my relationship with God had to become my relationship with God, and I couldn’t live off my dad’s spiritual coattails. I had to establish this sense of understanding and commitment to God on my own.

The neat thing was my wife. I didn’t know at the time of my senior year, which was a year of spiritual formation for me, and was the year I met her. She was going through a similar process in her life where she wanted to draw closer to God. She

278 Greg Mclntyre wanted the faith to become more real to her. We met in the fall of 1991 in Charleston, and God just took that relationship and really did some wonderful things with it. When we got married shortly after I finished my Army Observer basic course, I went to regular school. After that she and I went back to Fort Knox, Kentucky. I did a scout platoon leaders course, then I went to Fort Bragg. One of the very things we wanted to do was get plugged in to a good church. We had a church family at Fort Bragg which was absolutely wonderful. The pastor of that church asked me if I would start doing a home Bible study at our house on Fort Bragg. I was reluctant, because I didn’t feel I knew enough about the Bible to do that, and he said, well you just pray about it. In my time of deliberation I felt God was saying, the day you think you know enough on your own and stand up to represent me is the day you need to sit down and shut up. You will never know enough about me to represent me in your own strength. You go with what I have given you and go with it. So, I went back to my pastor and said, I’ll start Bible study and just go with what I’ve got. We’ll let the Lord build on it from there.

That Bible study was the beginning of the end of my military career, even though I didn’t know it, because my love for studying the Bible, and the thrill of watching people grow in their relationships with the Lord, especially those people who come to Christ for the first time, that started to supersede my love for the military.

I can remember, it was just before I felt the call out of the military into the ministry that there was a parachute jump going on at Fort Bragg. It was just a training jump, and the aircraft wasn’t filled. Whenever that would happen they would put a call out to unit commanders, “Hey, we need jumpers to fill this

279 HOMETOWN HEROES aircraft.” My commander said, “We need to fill an aircraft, so grab your gear, we are going to jump tonight.” Well, I told him, “Sir, this is Bible study night,” and he said, “We’re not being paid to Bible study, we’re paid to jump, so get your gear, we’re jumping.” I remember being so frustrated that I was going to miss Bible study. I was looking forward to it, and I had prepared for it. It hit me that day that something was going on here because years ago, if someone had put out the word there were extra seats and we we’re able to jump those seats, I would have told someone to fill in for me because my desire would have been to jump. In that time, my desires changed. I was called into the ministry. In 1996 I left the military and went into the ministry.

I had a similar experience with a fire school I was supposed to go to. I had a test set up for GMATS to go to MBA school at San Diego State when I came out of the military. I had a Chief who dressed me down because my desires were to further my education and not go to fire-fighting school. I was saying, but Chief, I’m getting out shortly after this six-month cruise and I want to go to school. They’re not so concerned with that. Yeah, sometimes you get that attitude, and those of you who are veterans have probably felt those same frustrations. They don’t necessarily want you to be pro-active and think about what you’re going to do, they want you to do what you are told to do. There’s a reason for that but it can be frustrating.

That’s true. My desire to further my education did not match up with what the Navy had in mind for me. That doesn’t mean I could not have crafted a path within the military, I could have, many do. I would have ended up as an attorney and in the military. You have to seek the right path and talk to the right people.

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So at that time, you had done your under-grad at The Citadel but not done your doctoral work? At that point I had just gone to The Citadel and graduated from there in 1992. My plan was to traipse through all the military programs because I had no plans on getting out. When I got out the military, I knew I wanted to go to an institution where I could enhance my theological understanding. To me, the degree wasn’t the primary motive, it was the learning to really get an understanding of God’s word, Old Testament, New Testament, and the history of Christianity. My thinking was, if you are going to lead the church, just like if you’re going to lead troops, and especially elite troops, you must be prepared, you must know your stuff. I felt the same way about the ministry. If I’m going to lead in church, I want to be prepared and understand Christian history and the debates that have circled around Christian theology throughout the ages. I wanted to look up things in the Old and New Testaments and have a measure of independence doing those things and studying and researching. That is why I started to work on my graduate programs in theology.

You went through several graduate programs? Yeah. Up until my Masters in Divinity at Campbell, school was a means to an end, whether it was high school, or The Citadel, it was always, I have to do this to get where I eventually want to go. When I started studying theology, the study became an end unto itself. My wife used to say, you’re definitely a nerd, because you’re the only person I know who at the beginning of the semester you come home with more books than what’s on the reading list.

For me I found that when I went to Campbell, my studies were kind of therapeutic. For the ministry I think it is very important for ministers to have that ability to pull away from

281 HOMETOWN HEROES the busyness of a congregation, from the sorrows, stresses, the funerals and negative diagnoses from doctors, and be able to recharge your batteries. Not only do you have to bear the sorrows and unfortunate situations of life for the congregation, you also have the highlights: the birth of children, the weddings, things like that. There are a lot of emotions flying about. If a minister doesn’t have that ability to pull away, they’re going to burn out. I found my studies were something that forced me to pull away. In doing so, it was therapy for me.

You have written a book called ‘Reformation In Responsibility,’ and you’re coming out with a second book called ‘God Before Government.’ Did you always know you would start writing books or did that just happen? Once I found reading and researching to be therapeutic from a ministry perspective. The same thing happened from a social perspective while watching the radical changes taking place in our nation since the World War II era. This shift where the Judeo-Christian ethic was a respected driving force of the nation, from World War II until now, the Judeo-Christian ethic is almost viewed as a racist attitude, or oral view, that needs to be subjugated to this general notion of liberal secularism. I found I wanted to weigh in on the conversation and write something, so what was laid out in my heart was this concept of a reformation.

Roughly every five hundred years a pendulum in a society needs to swing, because we need course corrections as human beings. One generation will get fixated on a certain course heading and the next generation picks that up and drives it further, and the next even further, until they realize, you know what, back when this started, this course heading was good, it was a good correction, but now that we’ve forced this same

282 Greg Mclntyre course heading for three or four hundred years, it’s become counter-productive.

To put some hands and feet to that, the hyper-individualism of our current culture is a perfect example of that. The focus on the individual that was a part of the enlightenment which was the dominant thinking in the time our nation was birthed, was good. Coming out of medieval Europe, late medieval period, a renaissance period leading to the enlightenment period, this idea that every person has worth and value, not just royalty, everybody, we’re one hundred percent on board with that. That was a good course correction, but when you start forcing the issue of individualism and individual rights to the extent that we are at today, it becomes counter-productive to the society. It’s no longer good for the whole approach. It now becomes where the larger sentiment, the majority, is subjugated to the minority sentiment. Why? Because we have adopted, without thinking it right the way through, that the minority must always be protected from the majority. Any situation where a particular ideology or minority group is being disenfranchised by the majority sentiment, immediately there is the rule of government to silence that majority sentiment, to handcuff it and give free voice and free reign to the minority segment. We have been on that course heading for a long time now. We are now just starting to see that a course correction is needed. If we don’t make that correction, things will be highly problematic for our country.

By highly problematic, you mean destabilizing? It is scary to think whether we can survive some of the things we are going through, and will it rip us apart? You can see the clash coming. And it happens so fast. Those of you who are interested in this conversation and want to take it a little bit further, get on

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Google and simply search ‘Roosevelt Bible.’ When you do that, just go to images. Right there in the first ten or fifteen images, you will see a Bible come up. What that is, is the Navy Edition Bible, the service member’s Bible that President Roosevelt commissioned during World War II. When you consider the fact that, the President of the United States commissioned that every service member of all armed forces be given a Bible as they prepared to defend our nation, that in itself speaks volumes compared to the attitude many of our leaders have today toward Christianity. Then when you look closer at the image of that Bible, it has the Christian flag above the American flag.

The President of the United States endorsed that Bible. And then it says right below the American flag, ‘The church pennant is the only flag ever to be hoisted over the flag, and it is to be hoisted during divine services.’ Now you ask yourself this question, Was the President a smart man? Yes, he was, a very smart man. Was he aware that in the 1940’s there were Muslims in America? Yes. Was he aware that there were atheists in America? Yes. But, was he also aware that, if this is going to be a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and the vast majority of the people were Christians, then a display like this of the Christian Church flag, the only flag that can be put over the American flag, the President of the United States said that. He put his signature to it. People are flabbergasted to know we even have these Bibles, and that in such a short period of time things have changed.

I guess things always change but it’s like you can confess almost anything but your Christian beliefs. Any other belief is okay and you can voice that. Not only that but you can be violent and radical about it. That’s looked upon as okay. However, to voice a

284 Greg Mclntyre mainstream or opposing religious belief about any issue, that’s something you can be fined over, taxed over or put in jail over, and it happens. Right, and what we have forgotten again is, I did a piece with PRI, Public Radio International, leading up to the election. I was talking to them about evangelicalism and the 2016 election and in that conversation, I made the statement to the editor I was talking to that the irony is that those who are known in our culture for being open minded and diverse are not seeking diversity and open mindedness, they are seeking conformity, and they want to silence anyone who doesn’t agree with them. They want freedom of speech except for you. They want everyone to live out their values except for this group. It is highly inconsistent. This was the statement I made on PRI; if you are really going to promote diversity, then that means you must allow people to think differently, and you have to respect the diversity of opinions out there. Individuals think differently, and they influence one another. You will have communities who think differently from one another, which means you will have regions who think differently, and states that think differently.

Which is how our government was originally set up to run, not with this federal oversight that makes everyone think the same way. Exactly. There should be a diversity of thought and practice from one state to another. Those who promote that are the ones who are truly promoting diversity. Those who resist and fight, they are the ones who are seeking conformity. So the great irony is, the left that seeks conformity, it’s the conservative right that gives way to diversity.

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It’s a discussion that has not had much air time. A few lesser known media outlets will discuss that. I think the media, at this point, has lost all sense of credibility for the most part. I enjoy switching on and catching up on politics, but I flip through all the channels and get the different points of view just so I know where they are coming from. I try to formulate what the truth is. It is hard to do because you have this whole propaganda machine pushing an agenda that is being pushed on to an entire nation. The development of social media is very beneficial in some way. One of the positives is to get information out that is more accurate than what the once-trusted mainstream media is putting out. You can get information out quickly to a large group of people to counter the false narrative that’s already out there. Do I think the President should tweet as much as he does on so many things? He should probably reign it in a little bit, but there is still a legitimacy.

Roosevelt went straight for people with his fireside chats and was extremely partisan with those to get the message out directly to the people. Right into the home with new technology. The only difference between how Roosevelt used the media and twitter is Roosevelt’s chat had to be scheduled well ahead of air time. With social media, you think it, you type it, you put it out there.

Certainly the media doesn’t love that. How can they control that? For me, I’m optimistic because I hope that it does force truth. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are going to say

286 Greg Mclntyre something that is blatantly false, then the reality of that falsehood is probably going to be brought to the surface quickly. I think that is a good thing.

I couldn’t agree more. You hear a lot of hearings and spin from political outlets in Washington and elsewhere, and then you can look at individuals who are putting out information about that subject and see an overall picture to light up the whole scene. Now, you have actually flown the Christian flag over the American flag. I was at a ceremony where you did that. You made national news for doing that. You were on Fox News, right? They were hard on you. I was surprised, but you really held your own. I was very proud. There were a lot of good lessons learned there. I have not really talked about it publicly, but you are right. When they contacted me on the days leading up to being on Fox News, the enthusiasm they had and the excitement they had seemed to suggest it was going to be a positive conversation. Those people who have been in the media and done interviews know what I’m talking about here.

When you are speaking from a remote location, (I went to the Fox studio in Charlotte, not Fox46 but they’ve got another small studio where they do feeds to New York), you’re in a room that is very small, and you are looking just at the camera. You can’t see what’s taking place on Fox News. You have an ear piece in so you can hear the individuals that are talking, and then the producers and the behind the scenes technology gurus, they can talk to you as well. So they’re telling you, okay, you’re going to be on in twenty seconds. You can hear the commercials and the people on Fox talking to each other, and then they will give you a countdown, five, four, three, two , one, Boom! and I was

287 HOMETOWN HEROES really expecting a cordial conversation, God and Country, but they threw it out there by saying, this is creating outrage. Is this a display of patriotism or what? I’ll tell you what, here is a lesson for everyone, and this really sunk in, I wish I had had this Roosevelt Bible knowledge before we did the flag thing.

I thought that’s what sparked it for you. I didn’t know about it. If I had known about that Bible, I would have brought it on Fox News with me but here’s the lesson: when something is right and you step out and do it, even if you do not have all your ducks in a row, even if you don’t have all your research that could really help you, the reality is, if it’s right, it will prove itself to be right in the end.

As soon as we did it, even though the media was casting it as an outrage, we tracked the number of comments coming in on Facebook, on our church message lines. Seventy-five percent of the people were thumbs up, God and Country all the way. Twenty- five percent were vehemently against it. They were militant in some cases, very threatening.

I think for the left, a lot of times when they try to say conservatives have phobias. Let’s say you don’t agree with the issue of homosexuality, it’s not that you have a certain ethic that you are trying to uphold, no, no, it’s not that, you’re a homophobe. There’s a fear there, but when you step back and look at it, the ones who act the most fearful are the ones who are pushing the progressive agenda. I think there is a legitimacy to the fear. That is, if the American people were to wake up to such things as the Roosevelt Bible, and if the people would stand up to the courts at times, I think the left knows it’s game over, because now you have unleashed the sentiment of the majority, the power of the

288 Greg Mclntyre people. The reality is, even though they claim to be the people’s party, the last thing they want is for the people to act on their power. The freedom of choice.

Say an activist judge issues an opinion that was against one’s religious beliefs. On the grounds of freedom of speech and freedom to practice our religion, you refuse to carry out an order that was against the US Constitution, here’s a question: Would that be patriotic or not? You would be saying, no judge, you have issued an illegal order that I will not carry out. It’s like the old Revolutionary War slogan, “Defiance to tyrants is obedience to God.” Even the Bill of Rights, everybody knows the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but then, just a few lines below it the more relevant and important line from the Declaration of Independence for our time, is the notion that “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends” (those ends being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), it says, “It is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”

Then it goes on to say that, (and we are living proof of this), history has proven that people are more willing to suffer evils while they are tolerable than to right the wrongs to which they have come accustomed. The Declaration itself says that we have the unalienable rights from God and that is what gives us the authority, at times, to say “no” to the authorities.

I remember watching a debate between a conservative judge and Andrew Cuomo on CNN. Cuomo kept saying, come on judge, our rights don’t come from God, they come from people, let’s be practical about this. It was interesting that they never got to the crux of the conversation. It’s not about so much the law

289 HOMETOWN HEROES written on paper, it’s about the ideology behind the law. If your ideology is, the only authority in life is the human authorities over you, what are you going to do when there are tyrants? What are you going to do when they’re wrong? But if you believe there is a higher authority and it is that higher authority, that gives you the ability to ascertain whether those human authorities are right or wrong based on what you know of the higher authority, then not only does it give you that ability to ascertain whether what they’re doing is right or wrong, it also gives you the legitimacy to stand up and say “no” to them.

Here is a great irony of our culture and our day and age. Take NC Governor Roy Cooper. One of the reasons the left wins is because they are more tenacious at fighting. When Cooper did not like Amendment One, he flat out said, I am not going to obey the law. I am not going to enforce the law. And he’s Governor. Why is he Governor? Well, he who dares wins. His base knows that when push comes to shove they hammer down. But when conservatives come down to that, they haven’t been willing to take that same strong stand.

I don’t know if the conservatives and the outspoken part, the rebel conservatives always go together but we do need more outspoken conservatives who can articulate the message in a healthy, positive way to influence people. And the reality is, heck, I don’t agree with myself a lot of the time, so I don’t expect anyone else to agree with me all the time.

So you flew the Christian flag over the American flag, and you’ve written this great book, ‘Reformation In Responsibility,’ and you have another book coming out shortly.

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It is supposed to be out, but you know how that is. The book is called ‘God Before Government,’ and here’s the issue in that: We tell people to pay attention to the words because the words are important. It’s not God before country, because we love our country, and we respect our government but when you sit down and look at it from a Biblical perspective, Old and New Testaments, any time a human authority asks you to dishonor your commitment to God, your commitment to God has to trump your obedience to that human authority.

But what about my family, what about my pension, what about my paycheck? Those are questions you will hear. Our commitment to Christianity is not necessarily about what is practical, it’s about what’s right. There was no bigger rebel than Jesus Christ. Yeah, and that’s the point, if you stop and think about it, what sent Jesus to the cross? It was civil disobedience. Had he simply toed the line with his teachings and respected the temple in Jerusalem and the leading Pharisees in the local synagogues in the area, had he simply fallen in line with them and marched to their orders, he would never have gone to the cross.

The people who were worried about their lives were the people who denied Him. Which is hard for us as humans, He is the Lord and he demonstrated that kind of courage and conviction doing always those things that pleased the Father. We are human beings, and even though we may have the zeal and courage of a Peter, that at one moment says look, if everyone abandons you, I will die with you, in twenty-four hours we can find we’re denying Him three times in a row and that’s our human weakness.

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The real question for me is, what do you do as a Christian when you carry out orders of the court, orders of the government that go against everything that Christianity is? Is that what you do? Certainly, different scenarios require different responses. Should there be limits to religious freedom? Everybody would say yes. Should we be able to go out and sacrifice animals? No. So, we believe there should be a limit to religious freedom. You don’t have a blank check to say, this is what I believe theologically, and therefore, I have the right to do it, because this is what my God says. No, that would be chaos. The question that we are wrestling with today isn’t, what are the limits of religious freedom? The question we’re wrestling with today is, what are the limits of secularism? To what extent does secularism have the right to go into the public school system, to go into private businesses, and into every nook and cranny of society and say, this is my domain and if you are going to play here, then you are going to check your religious beliefs at the door? The issue is, rolling back the overreach of secularism. We have well defined the limits of religion in this country.

You’re not saying everybody has to believe a certain thing, or do it a certain way just because you do, we now no longer have the right to do it a certain way. The brilliance of the founding fathers’ statehood and having differences of opinion and practice one state to another is part of the solution. The longer we go down this road of a zero-sum game, winner takes all with respect to ethics and society in America is a recipe for complete disaster.

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It is a recipe for disaster, revolution and chaos. I want to say the Roman empire had a similar end with vast corruption and pushing secular agendas. Let people live and let live. Most conservatives, most evangelicals I know here in North Carolina, they have no desire to tell people in California, or New Hampshire what to do with their lives and how to live them, but at the same time, they have no desire for the people of California and New Hampshire to tell us how we are going to live our lives. Can we still come together for a larger common good with respect to finance systems and the military for the country? Sure, yes we can. But the more we try to push this winner-take-all approach into the most personal areas of our lives, such as religion, the more dangerous the course we are on as a nation.

Thank you, because who would have thought a Southern Baptist minister could be such a rebel? You are so smart and articulate. I don’t know about that.

I think you have definitely followed in the steps of Christ because I identify with that part of his life when I think about going against the system. That’s hard to do. It’s hard for me to go against the system, because I feel that pressure. I think about it at night. Is this the right decision for different things in my life, those things where I decided to go against the grain. I think you are right, people who stand up and are bold enough to act how they believe will certainly energize people around them and more readily achieve their goals. Just like the Governor of North Carolina. Exactly. He who dares wins. If you believe in your way of thinking and living, then give people the ability to do what they

293 HOMETOWN HEROES believe in. Then in the end, let’s see how it all pans out. I think that is a better approach. If any other state wants to take a completely different course from North Carolina, go at it. If you’ve got the votes, you’ve got the people, go at it. And if North Carolina wants to march to the beat of a different drum, great, we’ll check the results twenty five years from now. Let’s see what your schools, families, finances look like and then we’ll compare.

Families are in such trouble in the United States, it hurts my heart. This goes back to the whole notion of reformation and responsibility. The premise of it was it’s not that God and society are responsible to the individual. Individuals are responsible to God and to society, starting with their families. So, where we needed that reformation in the sense of our responsibilities is all upside down right now. We act as though God owes the most dysfunctional individual something, and likewise, the larger society owes the most dysfunctional individual the right to be as dysfunctional as he or she wants to be. If we start looking at it from the perspective of, we each have roles and responsibilities to play; my life is not my own; I should seek to honor something more than myself, than my own pleasures and my own desires. That starts with honoring God and then immediately spills over to honoring my family by fulfilling my responsibilities to my family. We have lost that. We go to Jerusalem every year, and I got my wedding ring in Jerusalem. It’s a great reminder of my wife Shannon. It says, ‘My love, you are as beautiful as Jerusalem’, but it’s in Hebrew.

I want to thank you for your service and everything else. Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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Story 23

GREG MCINTYRE Navy Veteran and Elder Law Attorney

I’m Stefanie McIntyre and I will be interviewing Greg McIntyre about his time in the United States Navy. Memorial day is an appropriate day to have lunch with a veteran because we want to honor those who served and died to protect our freedoms. We have freedom of speech, and freedom to exercise our religion and live in this great country. We take these things for granted, but they are paid for in blood by hard working and fighting men and women. That’s what we honor on Memorial day.

Why don’t you tell us a little bit about why you joined the military? I decided to join the military because I wanted to get out of town, I wanted to do something productive. I would like to say I had this overwhelming commitment to serve my country, but that sense of purpose came later. It was really because I wanted to get out and see the world. I wanted to get out of Shelby, North Carolina. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Shelby, I live here now and love it, but at the time I was bored. I was patriotic, mind you. My grandfather was a machine gunner in the military in the Second World War, and I heard his stories when I was young. My

295 HOMETOWN HEROES dad, who was my hero, Big Ted McIntyre, a very cool guy, was one of your heroes also, right?

Yes, he’s amazing. My dad was in the Navy and very successful. He was one of six children and they weren’t dirt poor but they had to work hard for everything. The G.I bill paid for him to go to school and get an engineering degree, and he had a great career as an engineer. He’s now retired. So, I saw that, I saw his success and saw that might be a good place for me to go and follow in his footsteps. I was not ready to go to college at that time.

How old were you? I was almost twenty-one. I didn’t want to sit at home. I don’t know if anyone young out there can identify with that. I knew a few kids when I was growing up who knew exactly what they wanted to do. That’s great and I wish I had had that but I didn’t.

People are different. Yes, but in today’s world you’re not allowed to be different. I think there is a lot of pressure. You must fit this mold. You’ve got to go to college right out of high school. You have to make a certain score on the SAT’s. I feel our world would be better served, young people would be better served either going into the military or taking a year off and back pack across Europe, or motorcycle across China. I say that because being independent and seeing the world and how big it is, and the different people and cultures out there, adds to how you think and how you perceive the world. The Navy allowed me to do that and get a different perspective. We believe we’re going to make our kids amazing people because we send them to these huge universities that just get billions of tax dollars and build big stadiums, but it’s

296 Greg Mclntyre not for the kids to compete, it’s for a select few. The university environment is a strange place. Even though I liked college and I excelled there, it’s odd.

Why join the Navy? I just went to the Navy recruiter and joined. I was working a job in town building trusses for about nine months, and I went to the Navy recruiter to talk to them and I just joined. I took the ASVAB test and scored well on it. They said that I could go into electronics or be a nuclear engineer. I’d always liked electronics. I took apart circuit boards and toys and put them back together when I was a kid. My parents would buy me these little kits with tools and everything in them. I liked computer programming as well, so I thought the electronics route would be the way to go.

I could get paid, get some credit for college, get rank, go to boot camp, and stay in shape and go to San Diego in California. I would drive to Coronado Island every day for my job. I worked in the Naval Air Station in a shop working on electronics for E2C Hawkeye Radar Systems, the transmit portion. It helped me with problem solving. It just fit: problem solving, trouble shooting, it was very analytical and methodical and it worked with who I was.

Bootcamp was fine; It was in Chicago at the Great Lakes. I was the A-Roc. After a week or so in boot camp, I got tired of marching around with people who had no rhythm and couldn’t sing. That’s how it worked. We tried a ton of people out and I felt like I could do it.

What is an A-Roc? An A-Roc is the second in command of the division in boot camp. You march along side of the division and you’re the heart

297 HOMETOWN HEROES and soul of the march. You keep them marching to a beat from one place to another.

We were out doing some training away from where we lived, there were two Drill Sergeants, and I said, give me a shot, I want to march them back. I did, and I stayed the A-Roc the whole time and got rank out of boot camp. This meant more pay, because I was in the top command at boot camp.

I know there is footage of you calling cadence on the website. Yes, that’s what it’s called, calling cadence. It was fun.

Why don’t you tell us about your time at sea? I have about a year and a half of sea time on aircraft carriers, the USS Nimitz and the USS Constellation. I did a couple of WestPacs, one in 1996 and 1997 and a world cruise which started in July of 1999. I would start out at San Diego and travel over to the Gulf in the Middle East and travel back. On the world cruise we went to the Persian Gulf, the Suez Canal and travelled all around to Norfolk, Virginia.

Didn’t you also go to Asia and Australia? Well technically the Persian Gulf is Asia, but I went to other parts of Asia too. Sometimes the Suez canal was thinner than the deck of the ship, so when you’re going through it on an aircraft carrier you could look out and it looks like you’re cruising through the desert. I ran the Suez 5K. They marked off a 5K on the flight deck while we were going through the canal.

I’ve seen the ships and they are enormous. How many times around the deck would that be?

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They are big. It’s a floating city, around five thousand people. I don’t remember how many times but I got a t-shirt. You could see remnants of the Six Day War when Egypt tried to attack Israel in the seventies. Israel basically killed all Egypt’s tanks and stopped it very quickly. Then they lined them up on the Gaza Strip side of the Suez for the Egyptians to see.

As a reminder not to do it again? I guess. On the Egypt side, you’d see stations with 50 caliber machine guns.

In Asia we went to Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and Hong Kong. I was in Hong Kong before the hundred year lease was up in 1997, and it was under British control, and I was there in 1999 after the handover to Chinese control. They had Chinese New Year celebrations at the time, and it was really cool.

We would park this huge ship in the bay. It’s a really intimidating thing, but also reassuring for allies.

When you took me to the Navy base on North Island to see the aircraft carrier, I was totally floored by the sheer size of the ship. Didn’t you accidently run into a plane on board? I did, yes, I have had stitches in my head from when I ran into the back of an F18 Hornet. It was dimly lit and I was tired and just about knocked myself out on the back fin. I was walking back with a friend, and all of a sudden, I was on the ground. That was my military injury.

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Seeing all these different cultures was amazing. I was amazed at how advanced the Japanese were, and Singapore was so nice and clean.

You sent me Polaroids. I did send you Polaroids, that’s right. The Middle East amazed me also. I thought it was just going to be desert and camels. There is a lot of desert but there are also the modern cities like Manama in Bahrain and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. We would stop in port at Abu Dhabi and drive in to Dubai. There were Mercedes as taxis, and you could ski inside the mall.

You mean, snow ski in the mall? Yes, snow ski. It’s an amazing place because they have money coming out of the ground. The most modern city I have ever been to is Dubai. There are a lot of Europeans, Australians and Americans living there. If you haven’t been to Dubai, go there, it’s a treat. We were there to offer air support in Iraq for Desert Shield.

Did you have any scares? The chemical weapon threat was always there. There was always a thought that Iraq was going to launch chemical weapons at us, so we would carry around gas masks all the time, even in the shower. That was tense because it made you think. You never knew, but I would work out regularly. I was in the best shape of my life on that second cruise when I got home to see you. I worked out every day for six months and ran, and I went to school when I wasn’t working on electronics.

The Navy was a great experience for me. I got to see the world and live in an amazing place. I would love to go and live

300 Greg Mclntyre in San Diego again, visit the old places. We spent a lot of time there when we were dating and when we were first married. I met you when I was home on leave. You lived in my home town. We hung out in San Diego and were married out there. We’ve been married for eighteen years on June 1st 2017.

I’ve been very blessed. I liked the brotherhood and the people I worked with in the Navy. I liked boot camp and all the friends I made.

It was a different type of friendship. As you said, there was camaraderie between the guys in the shop. Some of those guys I’ve been friends with since boot camp. Now I’m in the American Legion, I’m the Judge Advocate, and your dad is the post commander. I am an attorney and the Navy helped with that. They paid for our house payments and groceries.

They did, and the GI bill helped us while you were in grad school. Yes. I liked the camaraderie, the service aspect and the sense of community. I played a lot of softball in the military also.

I remember the tournaments. You were base champions, right? Yes. I realized pretty quickly that the only difference between me and the officers was education, a degree.

You got out of the military December 1999, or January 1st 2000, and you had your degree shortly after that. We had a new baby at the same time you got your undergraduate degree. Then we moved to Cary, where I was a computer programmer, and you worked as a teacher.

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I did, I called myself a pre-school specialist. I loved doing that, and then I went on to law school in 2002 and finished my dream. Six children later, here we are. I don’t think I could have done all this without some growing up in the military and having some structure and discipline. They paid me to see the world, which was awesome. I had a great experience and I think it would be great for everyone to go.

As an elder law attorney and a certified attorney with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, I identify with veterans. I’ve been where they were. It gives me a sense of service and purpose.

Go to the following link to watch a video of this interview: mcelderlaw.com/hometownheroes/interviews

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VETERANS BENEFITS Aid and Attendance

VA Aid and Attendance is a program where a veteran, the spouse of a veteran, or spouse of a deceased veteran who needs day-to-day care can get a monthly monetary benefit paid to them.

The term is self-explanatory as it only applies to individuals who need the aid and attendance of another person to help them with daily activities.

Aid and Attendance is a monthly payment paid in addition to an individual’s pension, so to receive the Aid and Attendance benefit, the person must first begin to receive a pension.

To qualify, one must meet certain requirements. A doctor can be involved in the qualification decision, but if the veteran is in assisted living or a nursing home, they automatically meet the initial requirements. After the initial qualification, further criteria still need to be met.

There are three tiers of additional aid that are offered to veterans and the people that meet the requirements.

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The Third Tier: Aid And Attendance According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, at least one of the following is needed for an individual to qualify to receive the additional payment of Aid and Attendance:

}} The individual must prove that he/she requires the aid and attendance of someone else to carry out basic daily functions, such as bathing and getting dressed. }} The individual must be disabled to the point of being bedridden. }} The individual must be admitted to a nursing home due to the inability to provide basic care for himself/herself. }} The individual must record an eyesight of 5/200 or below in both eyes. Individual must therefore be significantly visually impaired.

Of course, the maximum amount individuals will receive once qualified for Aid and Attendance differs on a case-by-case basis. Below is a table of the current maximum monthly benefit amounts:

Status Monthly benefit Amount Surviving spouse $1,176 Single veteran $1,830 Married Veteran $2,169 Two vets married $2,903

* These benefits are accurate as of the date of drafting (2018) unless otherwise indicated.

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The Asset Level Threshold This is another requirement needed to qualify for Aid and Attendance assistance. The rule of thumb for the threshold is generally accepted as being below $80,000, but we believe it’s really around $20,000. However, there are ways around the rules to position assets and still qualify for Aid and Attendance assistance. So you can make smart decisions to hold on to your hard-earned money and property while still enjoying the benefits of the extra income.

One (1) day of war time duty If you’re a veteran, and have served ninety (90) days of active duty, one (1) day beginning or ending during a period of War, you may be eligible for the Aid and Attendance benefit.

Here is a link to all war time events that the Veterans Administration has designated for A&A benefits: http://www. veteranaid.org/docs/Periods_of_War.pdf

Example: I would qualify because I was in the military during the window for the Gulf War. That qualifies me for Aid and Attendance if I ever needed it. It also qualifies my spouse, and even if I passed away, she’d still be eligible for that benefit through me.

Of course, that’s just me. You should check the resources to see if you qualify for this very beneficial program. Eligibility must be proven by filing the proper Veterans Application for Pension or Compensation.

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This application will require:

}} A copy of DD-214 or separation papers }} Medical Evaluation from a physician }} Current medical issues }} Net worth limitations }} Net income }} Out-of-pocket Medical Expenses. To qualify (financially), an applicant must have on average less than $80,000 in assets, excluding their home and vehicles.

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Checklist for Veterans Aid & Attendance Benefits:

1. Veteran? Spouse of Veteran? Spouse of deceased veteran? At least 90 days of active duty service

2. At least one day of active duty service during a wartime event. Service does not have to be in a combat theater.

3. Under $20,000 in assets, excluding home. Consult an Elder Law Attorney for strategic legal planning and advice.

4. A current need: At least 2 out of 6 standard ADLs impaired*: Activities of Daily Living: }} Eating? }} Preparing Meals? }} Walking? }} Dressing? }} Bathing? }} Toileting? * A physician must sign an FL2 form confirming current need.

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Surviving Spouses A question I often get concerns the surviving spouses of veterans.

What happens if the veteran in the family is of good health, yet the spouse is having healthcare problems and incurs staggering medical bills?

There is support available for spouses. According to veteranaid.org, the spouse of a veteran who incurs healthcare costs is eligible to receive no more than $1,176 each month. Similarly, a veteran with a sick spouse is eligible to receive no more than $1,436 each month. Please note these figures were made available as of January 1, 2018.

Veterans Improved Pension: Other Tiers As mentioned, there are three tiers within the Veterans Improved Pension program, the Third Tier being the Aid and Attendance pension benefit.

The First Tier is known as the Basic Pension which extends to veterans over the age of 65 who are disabled. The Basic Pension also extends to the surviving spouse of the veteran if he/she meets the income qualifications.

The following are the countable income requirements a veteran must meet for the Basic Pension. Please note these are figures given by VeteranAid.org as of January 1, 2015.

}} The joint countable income of a veteran and their spouse must be less than the pension amount for which they are eligible. For example, a married veteran in

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2017 is eligible for $25,525 in pension; if their countable income is $10,000, then they are eligible to receive an additional $15,525 / year in pension. The Second Tier is known as the Housebound Pension. Just like the other tiers, there are qualifications to meet to be eligible for the monthly amount.

Housebound Pension recipients must prove they require assistance of another individual in their home. They do this by having their primary physician sign off that they need the help, but they are not as limited in their day-to-day actions as those receiving the Aid and Attendance Pension.

These are the conditions that must be met for countable income for Housebound Pension:

}} The joint countable income of a veteran and their spouse must be less than the pension amount for which they are eligible. For example, a married veteran in 2017 is eligible for $25,525 in pension; if their countable income is $10,000, then they are eligible to receive an additional $15,525 / year in pension. When speaking about countable income, it is imperative you record all your expenses. The VA discourages individuals from paying various expenses in cash, this way you maintain a paper trail and can add this to some of your countable income.

If you are unclear how to calculate your countable income, please refer to the next section which shows you step by step how to do so.

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Calculating your Countable Income Thanks to VeteranAid.org, there is a comprehensive chart you can download from their website and print out if you want to do some of the arithmetic the classic way, with pen and paper. I have reproduced the information below for your convenience.

The First Step is to estimate the total annual income of the veteran whether single or married. When figuring this total, you are to consider the following:

What to include in the calculation }} All income including social security, pension, interest income, dividends, income from rental properties, etc. }} CDs, annuities, stocks, bonds, savings/checking, IRAs, etc. }} Assets owned by the spouse What NOT to include in the calculation }} Residence or vehicle when calculating net worth }} Life insurance policy

When the above is taken into consideration, you get the estimated annual income of the veteran.

The Second Step is to add up all the recurring healthcare expenses incurred by the veteran each month. This includes the following:

}} Assisted Living costs }} Nursing home costs }} Home Care service costs }} Health Insurance premium

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}} Medicare premium }} Monthly prescription costs

The individual thus adds up these monthly costs and multiplies by 12 to get the annual healthcare expenses.

The Third Step is to subtract the annual healthcare expenses from the annual income.

Total annual income – Total annual healthcare expenses =Countable Income.

This amount is used to determine the veteran’s eligibility for one of the three tiers of the Pension program.

Proposed Changes to the VA Pension Eligibility Rules I am an extremely proud American. I have served my country and continue to do well by my fellow citizens by providing information and services to guarantee preparedness in the event of a healthcare crisis. For this reason, I believe it is a basic American right to know when legislation is introduced that affects a large group of people. That group should know the ins and outs of what is written and how it affects them.

In this case, I’m speaking specifically about the proposed changes to the VA Pension Eligibility. These proposed changes were on the table January 23 2015, by the Department of Veteran Affairs.

As many of you may know, the VA Pension Eligibility is a needs-based program. The benefits awarded to veterans and their families have provided help to these individuals throughout

311 HOMETOWN HEROES the years. We want to take care of our elderly veterans who risked their lives to ensure we sleep soundly at night.

Below are the proposed changes and how they may impact you if you are a veteran, or the family member of a veteran.

Current Reading of the Law Since 1980, the law has read that to qualify for the Aid and Attendance benefits, a veteran must have served a minimum of 24 months. At least one of those days must have been actively served during a “wartime period”. Veterans who have been dishonorably discharged do not qualify. Allowances can be made for veterans 65 years of age and older who have a permanent disability.

In terms of income, the veteran’s household income cannot exceed the amount the veteran is trying to qualify for in assistance and benefits. Much of the language regarding income has to do with countable income. If you are unsure how to calculate this figure, refer to the table later in this chapter for an example of how to find your countable income figure.

So now we know the current legislation, let’s get to the proposed changes.

What Might Change Below are some proposed changes rumored for Veterans Aid and Attendance benefits qualifications. These changes, if imposed, would make it harder for a veteran to qualify and allow the veteran to keep and protect less money and property.

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Examine the list of proposed changes below: }} A clear net worth limit. The VA proposed that the net worth limit a veteran can claim when applying for the Eligibility program cannot exceed $119,220. This is the same amount a community spouse is allowed when applying for Medicaid. }} Income and net worth calculation. The Federal Register has very graciously provided an example breakdown of how calculations will be made. First off, the VA will calculate income to establish the pension entitlement, and will “subtract all applicable deductible expenses to include appropriate prospective medical expenses”. When calculating the net worth, the VA will take the annual income and add it to the assets. For instance, let’s say a veteran’s net worth limit is $115,000. The annual income of the spouse is $7,000 and the total assets are $116,000. The total net worth would come to $123,000, which exceeds the net worth limit by $8,000. }} Exempt asset. A primary residence will not be included as an asset in the calculation of net worth as long as the residence sits on an area that does not exceed 2 acres. Right now, there is no limit on the acreage of the primary residence and it is exempt from the net worth calculation. If you want to read the full legislation, go to FederalRegister. gov and read their article entitled “Net Worth, Asset Transfers, and Income Exclusions for Needs-Based Benefits”.

I strongly urge you, if you are a veteran, or you are the spouse or child of one, to sift through the newly proposed changes to see how you might be impacted.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg McIntyre lives in Shelby, North Carolina (outside of Charlotte, NC) with his wife, Stefanie, of 19 years and their 6 children. Greg initially became a lawyer to fight courtroom battles which he did for years. However, after working that environment where the focus was always on the next billable hour, he started his own practice because he was interested in being more than just a lawyer. Greg wanted to make a profound difference in his client’s lives.

Being a husband and a father taught Greg what was really important in life. He takes pride in building trust with his clients and strives to help leave a legacy to be preserved and to have a guiding hand in shaping their families’ lives

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Memberships and Associations. Greg is a veteran of the United State’s Navy and a member of the North Carolina State Bar Association. He is a member of Elder Counsel, a national network focused specifically on estate planning & wealth preservation. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Boys & Girls Club, Cleveland County Council on Aging, Journey and ACCES. He is a proud member of Shelby Presbyterian Church, where he and his family find fellowship and spiritual refreshment.

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