First Hand History

"The biggest take away that I have is that most people in the world are good, and most people in the world have, you know, they just want to be safe, and live, and let their kids grow, and have a life. I think that this would knock down a lot of these crazy political walls that we put up between each other."

"At eight o'clock at night on a Sunday... They called me over and said, 'You're going to the Russian border.'"

"I was an enlisted man when I first joined."

"It probably had a lot to do with who I am today."

"So it would be like the middle of the night and we'd be trying to call home."

"A computer back then was the size of a garage, and had less power than your cellphone."

"I think that if women can prove that they are physically capable of doing a job, they should be able to do anything that they want to do"

"If just tapped the brakes the propeller would curl up."

"Somebody had to do it, and I just happened to be one of the knumbskulls that decided to."

"You wouldn't think that something so small could do much harm."

"It was the most beautiful green I’d ever seen in my life…"

"I was I wild, crazy fool."

"And it just seemed impossible, it seemed impossible that we weren't just coming under attack everyday."

"We were not very popular when we came home and less and less is that the situation now. I think people have come to realize that you don't blame the soldier for the war."

"So we were down and they were trying to find us and we had gone into a corner of the Bermuda Triangle Cause when we went through a corner part of the triangle and we lost all our sonar, we lost our navigational equipment was all going haywire until we came out of the Triangle and then everything came back up. "

"The Chinese had come into the war in support of North Korea, and they were everywhere."

"To be honest, it's a nightmare to dream about my military service days."

"There's really no difference we are all the same on the inside"

"And we got it on the ground, but it was really really a busy few minutes."

"The Vietcong would go into a village and capture all the little ones and all the men that could fight and they gave them a gun and said 'You're gonna fight or were gonna kill you.' "

"I looked down and I saw his name and there was an asterisk by his name. So I said, 'what does that mean?' And I went down and the asterisk meant guys who died in captivity. "

"He had a goat: a sacrificial goat."

"It was such a relief -- my grandmother had died."

"Me, as an officer, I need to be forearmed, day and night, and with a combat suit, even during sleep."

"And one of the things I did is threw my ribbons back across the divider and said: No, I’m not going to be a part of the glorification of this war."

"There was a draft for Vietnam, but what they needed was a lot of soldiers, but they also needed blood."

"I was poor. I was so poor I lived in an apartment that cost me eighty dollars a month."

"Even if you put the clock in front of me, I wouldn't turn it back."

"If I hadn’t overslept, I might have not come back."

"The take away from all that is the bottom line, for just about everyone we talked to was, 'is there a particular country in the world that you feel closest to?' and they said they all said 'yes, the United states.'"

"I served a year in Vietnam in 1968, and that was a very active period over there."