Floyd looking at Vietnam on the globe
Floyd's Story
I went in in ’68.
I had four weeks of training for a job as a cook. And then I went to
training for supply clerk; that was what I wanted for my MOS.
You have your first MOS and then your have a secondary MOS; so my first
choice was supply and then my second one was cook.
It seemed like anywhere we went there more than enough of what they had. So then I went from a cook into S4, which was supply.
And one day I was doing’ KP and this guy comes running’ through
there. “Floyd,” he said,
“man, you’re lucky.”
I
said, “Wha’d’ya mean, lucky?”
Floyd looking at Vietnam on the globe
He
said, “You got orders coming’ down.”
“Orders
for what?”
“Vietnam.”
I
looked at him and said, “I’m not lucky.”
We didn’t go there [Vietnam]
directly. We went to California;
then we went to Hawaii. Then we
went to Ben Warr in Vietnam. I
didn’t think I would get forward duty ‘cause of my MOS.
But I get to Ben Warr and come to find out they have too many supply
clerks (laughs). Ah, that happened
to me all the way, they had too many, and too many and too many, you know.
So, I moved up because the guy was getting short[1]
and he was on his way back. It
seemed like the further I moved up in supply the further I got away from supply,
and the closer I got to weapons and tanks and APC’s and all that kind of
stuff. My whole MOS has
changed—no cooking’, no supply.
There
were a couple incidents over there that I think were my fault ‘cause I was in
charge of the tracks. You cain’t
blame yourself. They say during
wartime you cain’t, you shouldn’t. But
I never been able to get that out of my mind because it happened.
Now
I kind of liked the service. I like
what it stood for; I liked the discipline about it.
The mindset kind of changed out there [in Vietnam], but the service was
pretty good to me. What I didn’t
like is the way we were treated when we got back from Vietnam. Its like we
weren’t appreciated. We lost over
50,000 people, 50,000 young men and women in that war, and it wasn’t
appreciated. It’s very disturbing
for a person who’s been through that situation and doesn’t get appreciated. We didn’t realize there was another fight over here [US]
against us for being over there [Vietnam].
And I want them to know I was a Cav.
I was a Blackhorse; that was the unit I was with over there.
When they put that wall up that helped a whole lot.
That wall is my friends. I
took my son to see that wall and there was a lot of people written there that
you loved.
When
I came back I was in Kansas and I went into a bar.
I had my uniform on and I had my Blackhorse patch on.
If it hadn’t been for a young lady in there, and she didn’t know me,
but she came over to sit with me to keep me from getting hurt, I guess.
She figured if she came over to sit and then got to know me then they
wouldn’t bother me. And you know
they [people in the bar] were talking and the more they were talking the louder
they were getting. And me and my
Vietnam self, I was there, “You bring it on, Buddy.”
The only thing that stop them was that lady.
And she sat there with me and told me, “Sir, I’m gonna tell you
something, my brother just went over there.
And I’m gonna tell you right now, if I was you, after I drank this beer
I would get up and leave.” But
you know I was stubborn, so I said, “I’m gonna have me another.”
But after that beer I heard what she said because she was nice; she
actually walked me on out the door. They
didn’t bother us, because whoever she was they must of known to stay away from
her.
Then
you had the moms and a lot of sisters who wanted to know how it was because they
know somebody over there. Now those
the ones I tried to stay away from as much as I could.
Sometimes you just can’t tell them how it is in one area versus the
other areas. But then they called
us baby killers and all this kind of stuff.
We no baby killers, not that I know of.
[1] “Short” is slang for Army terminology, short time, which referred to the number of days before a soldier left Vietnam.