ROBERT THOMPSON

VIETNAM VETERAN

With the playful chattering of his three grandchildren in the next room, along with the buzz of cartoons on the television, Robert Thompson and I started our dialogue. I discovered that he is a kindhearted and gentle family man who looks optimistically upon all the negative happenings of his life. He revealed his true kindness when his grandchildren wandered noisily into the kitchen as our conversation continued; but rather than getting angry, he merely asked them politely to play in the other room with a heartfelt “thanks” as they obeyed.

I was born in Girard, Kansas in 1948 *[on] November 15 at Girard Hospital. I am one of six kids. I have an older brother, two older sisters, and a younger brother and sister. My oldest brother is fifty-seven, my oldest sister is fifty-six, the next sister is fifty-five, I’m fifty-four, my youngest sister is fifty and my youngest brother is forty-nine. [During my childhood], we moved around quite a bit [because] neither one of [my parent’s] had much of an education and they had to go where jobs were available. They were fifteen and sixteen when they got married, and both of them didn’t finish high school. My dad worked a lot of jobs. He was a fireman, he was a truck driver, he worked for the railroad and as a laborer, but truck driver was his main stay; it paid pretty well. My mom was always in the restaurant business. She cooked in different restaurants and waited tables. They owned a restaurant at one time in Illinois. We lived here in town quite a few different places, lived in Kansas City, [and lived] in about four different areas in Illinois. [As children], we had a lot of fun. We had built in playmates and half of a baseball team, [which was the] the fortunate thing [when we were moving around].

My grandfather, on my dad’s side, was a real mentor and role model for me as a child. I connected with him a lot. He was a real influence on me as far as stability and how to conduct myself as an adult. [Family has played a big part in my life], both positive and negative. I think that’s true in all families. There’s always some good stuff that you can gleam. There’s always some stuff that you want to avoid or overcome or outgrow. Because of my folks’ lifestyle, moving around on a shoestring and living pretty low [on the] economical scale, we learned to survive a lot. They’re pretty good skills to have--survival skills. Knowing that you can do without and knowing that you can postpone gratification. You can wait until you can earn the money to get what you want; and my folks were not afraid to pick up and try new things. It’s been real beneficial to me that I can adapt real well in new situations. I’m not afraid to change things if I have to and know that I can survive. My folks had a real good sense of humor. That was a real benefit to them and it is to me, too, in life to have a sense of humor. They had an ability to find some humor even in the midst of the crisis.

There’s a lot of alcoholism in my dad’s side of the family. My dad was an alcoholic, pretty abusive and he’d leave for periods of time. Those are the negative sides of my life that can affect a person in a negative or positive way. You can use what happened to better yourself, or you can use it as an excuse to be less than what you can be. That has served me well to measure against what I don’t want to be as opposed to what it was.

During high school I worked in a filling station, pumping gas, working on cars. I think we made a whopping ninety cents an hour. My senior year my folks moved from the town that I was going to school in and moved to a different town. I stayed in that school and got a little efficiency apartment. I think I paid forty bucks a month for a bed, a dresser, a little room, and it shared a refrigerator in the hall and a bathroom down at the end. I graduated from high school in 1966 [at] seventeen. I couldn’t really go to work until eighteen. Nobody would hire anybody until you were eighteen. One of the guys that I worked with said something about Western Union was a good place to work. So, I went into Kansas City, Missouri and put in an application at Western Union. Shortly after my eighteenth birthday they gave me a call and wanted me to go to work in Van Horn, Texas. I worked for them for probably six months or so. I got terribly homesick. But I enjoyed the work; it was lots of fun. We were working outside all the time tearing down all the cable from the telephone poles and copper wire. We’d work in one town for about a week or so then we’d move to another town [staying] in motels. It was always living out of a suitcase and eating in restaurants, which was right up my alley at that age. The old man that was the boss kind of took me under his wing and made sure I stayed out of trouble. [The guys I worked with], most of them were older. A couple of them were pretty nice and a couple of them were pretty rude and crude. But that old man kind of took care of me. Didn’t let things get out of hand too much.

I worked at an ammunition plant, after I left Western Union, in Lawrence. I worked there for about a year. I got drafted, passed my physical and off to [training]. It was kind of exciting. I don’t remember being scared, just apprehensive of the unknown. I had a roommate that was in the marines and he was probably ten years older than I was, so he gave me an idea of what to expect, which helped a lot. I got drafted into the Marine Corps and went out to San Diego and had three months of boot camp and what they call ITR, which was Infantry Training Regimen. Training took place [at the] MCRD, Marine Corps Recruit Depot, for thirty days, and then [at] Camp Pindleton for the next sixty days. [Boot camp] was scary. They are really in your face, screaming. Up all hours of the day and night. It’s pretty intimidating and tremendous amounts of physical exercise. I came home on leave for about thirty days, and then I went to Twenty-nine Palms, California, which was a base, an artillery range. Went out there and was there for six months. Then I got orders to go to Vietnam; came back home on short leave, and shipped over to Vietnam.

[In the war] I was in motor transport [at a] war camp probably twenty miles from Da Nang.

Robert Thompson standing next to a motor transport vehicle in Vietnam.

We were responsible for [delivering] armament, ammunitions, food supplies, fuel [and] water [to] about five different groups from our company. When I first got over there, I had a water run that I made every day to Hill 327. I filled up a big tanker full of water, and I hauled it up four or five times a day. They had big rubber bladders that they stored their water in [because] they didn’t have any water piped up to them. [It] wasn’t more than ten miles [between my camp and] Hill 327. [I might] pick up an assignment to go to load stuff from off the docks in Da Nang, off the ships. [Once a month] we took convoys [to] units up north by the DMZ, demilitarized zone, probably seventy-five, eighty miles [away].

Mass confusion on the roads [was common in] the cities. They were very small roads [with] big American trucks and tanks trying to make it down. Then there were thousands of Vietnamese, bicycles, scooters and buses trying to occupy the same road.

[I didn’t witness any fighting] like the grunts did. That’s what they called the foot soldier, the guys who were out in the jungle. I didn’t do a whole lot. It was pretty boring. It was ninety percent boring, and ten percent terrifying. When you first got in country, the first time you heard that noise [of the rockets], you were scared and you ran toward the bunker. After you’d been in country for awhile, you realized that you had time, because what they would do, they would walk them in. They would start out here, maybe a mile away from you, and then they’d just steadily keep getting closer. So you knew by the sound of them, how close they were getting and when you needed to go to the bunker. During the rocket attacks, when they were real close and when they’d hit, it was real terrifying. It was chaos; and adrenaline would get real high and people would be screaming and then it’d be over. There’d be some casualties and clean up and fires.

[After an attack], they would usually double the guards. Usually guard duty was taken on by the new people in country. When they first came in, they got stuck on guard duty; so after you had been there for awhile, you were off guard duty. Everybody had guard duty when they first got there. [The rocket attacks] came sporadically. Sometimes they would come every night for two or three weeks, and then they’d stop for a week or two or three. Most of [the attacks] were at night, after people were in bed asleep [so] they could go around undetected a lot better.

We all did what we were asked to do, and assigned to do. [We] tried to have as much fun as we could. We tried to be as responsible as we could, stay alive [and] get back home. We were all like eighteen, nineteen [and] twenty. We were all a bunch of goof-offs. We really didn’t want to be there. There wasn’t the patriotism feeling that there is with the war that’s coming up; or hopefully, not coming up. It felt you were obligated to be there. By the time you’d been in country for awhile…it was just trying to survive to get out. We did lots of crazy stuff. Did a lot of drinking. We had a lot of fun, as drunks do. It was a lot of boring times, we made it as much fun as we could. There were lots of enlisted men clubs and officer’s clubs that were setup and alcohol was cheap. They had shows [of] mostly Korean and Phillippine bands that would come into different clubs and play. That was a big hit with troops. They would go there, and they’d

get sloshed and listen to bad American songs. Good songs, but bad English; but after a few drinks you didn’t care. They had a USO club in Da Nang and we’d go there once in a while. But there wasn’t much to do. They had pool tables and ping pong tables. It was kind of boring to me. A lot of guys would go there and hang out. The USO show was just thousands of guys sitting around waiting for shows.

[Visiting] the orphanages was probably the best thing that we did, and that’s probably the brightest spot. It made you feel connected to humanity. It was good for the military people to have something to focus on other than themselves. When you’re over there, you get to feeling sorry for yourself.

Then, when you find somebody that is obviously much worse off than you are, [it] kind of keeps things in

Vietnamese orphans.

perspective. These kids really looked forward to seeing you. We just played, and they just climbed all over us and they hung on us. They just wanted attention, just like my grandkids want attention. You just played with them, and had fun and you’d feel guilty as

heck. On our own, back at base, we’d get to whining and crying about, “We’re over here, and we don’t have anything, and poor, poor pitiful us.” But when you go to the orphanages, you see how little those little kids have and how happy they are with what they have. You feel like, “What the heck am I whining about?” There was usually around forty or fifty, four to ten, twelve [year old] kids per orphanage. We went to about three different orphanages. They were very clean. The kids were clean. They didn’t have great clothes, but they were clean and well-fed and taken care of. And the orphanages seemed to be real clean.

I did run onto one kid that I was in school with, in my high school, when I was over in Vietnam. I just happened on him one day. I was driving a truck up this mountain to deliver some stuff and that’s where his post was. We just happened to be walking across the compound and saw each other; and that was kind of neat. He was getting the hometown newspaper sent to him all the time, and so when I’d get a chance to go up there he’d always give me the latest newspaper and stuff. I could kinda keep up on what was happening. It was kinda nice to talk about some of the old stuff that we’d do.

I got to see a lot of Vietnam [working in motor transport]. It’s a beautiful country. It’s lush and green and mountainous, and it’s a really beautiful country. It was extremely hot and extremely humid. In the monsoon it rained everyday. Then it’d stop raining and then the sun would come out and it’d get just real humid. [The monsoon] lasted like about three months. It was kind of like the wintertime. Everything was wet. Your clothes were soaked. You never could get dry. A lot of problems with, we called it, jungle rot. There’s a better name for

it. It was from your skin just not being dry. It was always wet. There were some [illnesses], but it was all maintainable. If you could get dry long enough, you could cure it. There was a lot of malaria because of mosquitoes and stuff. I was really pretty fortunate. I never did get sick. It just rained all the time, and that’s why the country was so lush and green and pretty. It was tropical climate. It was nice.

Vietnam Landscape.

[Vietnam] was a very unpopular war. I was very naïve, uninformed, and didn’t have much of an opinion about it. I thought it was the patriotic thing to do. I didn’t get into the politics of it much and asking myself questions about whether I agreed or disagreed with it. Until I got back I didn’t really feel the impact of the difference of views of the war. When I got back in the states, there were people who would get up and move when I sat down if I was in uniform. There was a time that I got spit on because of who I was representing in uniform. It really hurt, and it was confusing. I was probably less than a week from being in the bush to being back on the streets of the United States, so my mind hadn’t even caught up with me yet. I went to college after I got out of the service. There, too,

was a distinction. The veterans were singled out and looked at as different than regular people. They were kind of looked down on so it was hard for a lot of Vietnam veterans to overcome, and to figure out, and to assimilate into their psyche what the heck was going on.

When I got out I was an E-4, which was corporal. I met my first wife probably a year after I got back. Got married about a year later, and we were married about a year. I didn’t meet Rhonda until [February 1977]. We’ve been married [almost] twenty-two years. I have a daughter, twenty-seven, and then Brian is seventeen.

I’ve been in the upholstery business for twenty-eight years now. So, I was doing upholstery work when we got married. I needed a job, and the guy who owned the business at that time hired me and I started working for him. I used to own a building downtown [for] about eleven years. Then we sold that building and bought this house and garage, and turned the garage into the shop. I’ve been there seventeen years now. I do all kinds of upholstery work, and stay fairly busy. Over the years I’ve built up clientele. I do automotive upholstery, furniture, boats, truck seats and tractor seats. I do work for farmers. I do work for car dealers. I do work for First State Bank. I did their lobby furniture. I do work for List & Clark; they’re heavy equipment operation on Country Club Road. Big bulldozers and stuff, I do all their seat work. Pittsburg Ford, I do their work. I just work for lots of different folks and individuals. Stay pretty busy.

Interview conducted by Tiffany Hale, spring 2003.

*Indicates words not said by interviewee.