Monmouth College
Department of History 

INTERVIEW WITH SPERO ARGYRIS 

Conducted in the fall of 2000 by Michelle Kallas 

Kallas: How old were you when you were drafted?

 

Argyris: Just turned 20.

 

Kallas: Do you remember the date?

 

Argyris: It was December 26 of 1967.

 

Kallas: Oh, right after Christmas.

 

Argyris: No, excuse me, it was June 26. I am thinking of a leave that I had right around that time before then. No, it was June 26, 1967.

 

Kallas: What happened when you were drafted? Did you get a letter in the mail?

 

Argyris: Well, mine is a little different situation. I am the only male in the family. My mother had myself and my sister, and I was going to college but I had no objective in mind at school. The Vietnam conflict was always in the papers and the news and the draft was hot and heavy at that point in time. Rather than me waiting to be drafted, I went to the draft board and asked if my number could be moved up to the top of the scale. So actually, I volunteered through the process of having my number pulled first.

 

Kallas: Why did you do that?

 

Argyris: Well, I wasn’t really ready for college and I felt a certain duty to serve my country. I didn’t want to look at college as a means of avoiding the draft.

 

Kallas: So how long was it before you went to Vietnam?

 

Argyris: It was about three or four months from the time I upped my number. It was in early spring of `67. Ironically at that time, I was also dating my future bride.

 

Kallas: That was going to one of my future questions. What happened in those months? Did you have to report somewhere or did you just wait?

 

Argyris: Really, I didn’t know when they were going to call me. I didn’t even say anything to Pam that I had upped my number until some time later. My mother didn’t even know. She wouldn’t find this out until much later on. I think that my notice came in four weeks prior to being drafted. At the time, Pam and I were getting pretty serious and when I broke the news to her, obviously she was pretty devastated and my mother was too. But I never let on what I did.

 

Kallas: When you left, did you go somewhere for boot camp then go to Vietnam?

 

Argyris: Well, every inductee has to go through boot camp and that was eight weeks. Boot camp started in June when I was inducted. I was inducted right here in downtown Chicago. They put us in a train. I did my boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri in eight weeks through August.  I was on a thirty-day furlough period. Actually, I take that back. Right after boot camp, I was given orders to go to medical school. I was a medic and that was what they trained me for. So I was shipped to San Antonio, Texas, for eight or ten weeks training as a medical core man. My medical training ended sometime in November and then I had a thirty-day furlough before being shipped off to Vietnam. I was shipped off to Vietnam right after the Christmas holiday just before New Years. It seems so long ago, sometimes it is hard to put dates together. It may have been a week before or a week after Christmas that I was shipped to Vietnam by air. They flew us over there. It was a twenty-four hour travel time. I flew to Hon Gai, which was the main base where the first Calvary division was stationed. That was what they called the highlands of Vietnam, the Northern highlands. From Hon Gai, I was waiting three weeks until they shipped me out to my unit. I joined my unit in Phan Thiet, which was along the South Gulf of Token. The camp was called Camp Edwards. I joined up with my unit which was the second battalion of the seventh infantry of the first air cavalry division and I was part of the second platoon.

 

Kallas: So what were your feelings when you were heading over?

 

Argyris: Kind of mixed.  I was anxious. I wanted to do my part. I felt this duty of patriotism. Of course I was scared because you hear about the casualties that we suffered but I was prepared to do my part.

 

Kallas: You were a medic. Why did they choose to have you do that? Were you studying medicine or do it just come naturally to you there?

 

Argyris: Well, I was a biology major and maybe that was a correlation. To this day, I don’t understand how they did that but they needed core men real bad. My training as a core man was pretty extensive. It was treating soldiers who suffered for wounds in action. So I was a front line medical core man.

 

Kallas: Did you have medical instruments?  How did you keep them sterile at the front line?

 

Argyris: Well, I didn’t do surgery. Medical core men were the first line of aid to a wounded soldier. Basically to treat for severe wounds, shock, blood loss, to stabilize the soldier for medical evacuation by helicopter back to a base camp battalion aid station where the real doctors worked on them. So I treated soldiers who lost amputated limbs, gun shot wounds…we took a lot of casualties through booby traps and they were pretty nasty.  More often then not, there were soldiers with sucking wounds of the chest beside potential amputations. Unfortunately, some of the guys that I treated never made it, and that is something that you live with for a long time. The enemy was good at what they did. Many times, they would set up ambush for us. In one area, we lost a lot of point men to ambush….it was always a wound to the head and you could never bring a guy out of that. I had seen two guys in the period of two days dropped from that kind of a situation.

 

Kallas: So what was Vietnam like when you were there?

 

Argyris: Well, we landed at an airbase and you see nothing but military hardware from jet planes to helicopters of military supplies being shipped from one area to another. It was a busy place. I remember landing there and a group of veteran soldiers look at us and commented that we were “fresh meat” or “new guys on the block.”  One guy yelled out “short timer, two days” indicating how much more time he had before he was going to be shipped home. Some of the guys were sympathizing and wishing us well. It was just part of the camaraderie that I would find later on. One way of passing each day in Vietnam was a count down to how soon you would be going home again.

 

When we were bused out of the area, we went through a deserted town. It was very early in the morning and you could see the little shanties on each side of the dirt road. We finally came to the base camp where we would be receive some additional in-country training by going out into the bushes and walking through what we would eventually be walking through. It wasn’t a safe zone, we carried actual arms because no place in Vietnam was safe. So you thought that you were going out in a training session but you could meet up with hostile force. We didn’t that night so we were fortunate, but every guy out there was up because it was difficult to sleep not knowing what could be coming out. And you could hear all the sounds of the night. It was very odd coming from the safety of your home and within twenty-four or thirty-six hours, everywhere you go someone is carrying a firearm. That was a way of life. Three weeks for me at Hon Gai was a long stay.

 

Why it took so long to assign us to our units, I don’t know, but we were anxious. We didn’t want the rear activity, we wanted to get into our unit and be a part of a group of guys and learn who you were going to be with and get to know your buddies. That was a part of what I wanted to get into right away. I didn’t like the stay, it made me very anxious to be waiting to be called to my unit. When I finally got my orders and they shipped me down to Phan Thiet, right along the coast of the Gulf of Tonkin, it looked like a friendly enough town. Even our own soldiers during the day have leave down there. There were the villagers selling all kinds of trinkets to the GI’s but it was also an area that wasn’t necessarily safe. The first calvary division did an excellent job of securing their zones of fire and their territory so we had the rare freedom of going into the town and having a luxury of having a cup of coffee by a waiter or waitress.

 

But Camp Edwards was a tour of duty. When you were back in the camp, you had your regular camp and latrine duties and every thing else you had to do. Then you would rest for two or three days until you were helicoptered out into the bush to patrol. The idea of patrol was to not give the enemy any time to recoup and plan for attack on the base camp or allow for them to lure us into an ambush. It happened like two or three weeks before I got there. There was a heavy firefight; Charlie was waiting for a situation where they could conflict heavy casualties in a certain area to draw in the attention of choppers to come in. So there were some heavy casualties that I found out about. They lost one or two fellows and I don’t know how many guys got wounded. Some of the guys were out there for three or four hours before they could be evacuated. So the guys that I joined in my platoon had lost some good friends there.

 

That was my first encounter, if you will, hearing combat stories, but soon after that I would be in the real thing. Going from comfort of home to military base now to a secured base camp that was fairly secure then out to the bush. It was kind of surreal in a way. It was really weird but that would be a way of life for any infantry GI that went in.

 

Kallas: You said before that you didn’t get much sleep the first couple of weeks that you were there. Did you get much sleep at all while you were in Vietnam?

 

Argyris: You learn to rest all the time. You don’t really rest at night unless you are in a rear base camp that is really secure. You sleep maybe two or three hours and you also go on duty if you are out in the bush, you man the machine gun. As medic, I didn’t have to do this, but I wanted to be there with one of the guys who was securing a particular zone of fire. So I would sit down with the machine gunner for two hours on his shift then I would go back and get some sleep. If I was restless again, I might sit down with another guy at that post. Sometimes I even played guard duty myself so the guys could get some sleep. I was a medic and was there to save lives and here I was ready to take a life. I didn’t carry any arms. Some medics got to carry a rifle. The only thing that I carried was a 45 side arm. I did give it away though because if you are running through the bush and going to aid a soldier...if they would get caught on a branch or something, I just carried a knife to do the job with the wound or whatever. I knew that my buddies were there to protect me. I relied on them and not my side arm. I was going in to help a wounded soldier.

 

Kallas: It was wonderful that you had that much faith--and they did an excellent job, I guess.

 

Argyris: Yeah, they did. We were there to support each other. You established strong friendships with the guys you served with and these guys in the second platoon, Charlie Company, that I was what I was in, we had frequent reunions up until four or five years ago. Some of the guys that left us because the good Lord took them and some fellows just don’t want to get together anymore because the war is over for them. For some guys, the war still continues in their mind. It was a buddy system over there. No matter what was your color or if you just started the unit or two days before leaving to go back home; you were there to protect each other and support each other mentally as well as in the event of a firefight.

 

Kallas: Did they only have one per battalion? Did you have to take care of men who weren’t part of your battalion as well or were you basically taking care of your group of guys?

 

Argyris: Well, when we moved out, we had different patrols. I was with Charlie Company. I believe a company of soldiers is 120 men. There were four platoons, each one made up two squads. So if you had 120 men in a company and four squads, that was thirty guys in a platoon and two or four squads in each of the platoons. I was assigned to a platoon that was thirty guys initially. I would follow the leader of that platoon, which is usually a first lieutenant and his radio operator. So the platoons would go out and I would always be with the radio operator because in the event that somebody got hurt, the radio operator got the word and I was told were to go. So my responsibility was to those thirty guys.

 

Each platoon had a medic and the battalion leader--usually a captain--his radio operator and his medic for his small staff. So we moved out and did our sweeps as platoons and had certain zones to cover. If we wanted company strength, then we moved out as a company in a particular area that we were called to do a search or lure the enemy out looking for us. We were the bait, but we also tried to set up an ambush in that process. There were night patrols usually as a platoon or squad and anytime that you went out on a night, one medic was always required to go with the squad. So I pulled duty in the platoon, within the squad if the squad was going out on a particular night ambush, and I moved up to the battalion medic along with the captain. The battalion medic didn’t see as much action but would be called into action if the activity was directly in front of him, if you are substitute for a lost medic in a particular platoon. So I pulled those duties.

 

The hardest part for me, when I was battalion medic was to hear on the radio that the platoon that I was formerly assigned to went out on a sweep mission and three of my closest buddies were hit by a mortar bobby trap. One guy lost a leg and the other guy died. One guy was wounded but not seriously, and I couldn’t get to them. They were too far out but they were able to evacuate them but there was no way that I could get to them. At a reunion I did get to see the fellow who lost his foot. That was in the summer of 1988. It seems so long ago. We met in Pennsylvania at a reunion. He was wearing an artificial leg from the knee down. But he was alive. Smitty, the guy who died, was very close to the guy with the lost foot. They were both from New York. That was hard because when I was with the platoon, we suffered no casualties. We were very fortunate. If anything, I was helping another platoon with their guys who got hurt. There were all kinds of missions; they all kind of fall together in my mind. I can’t really remember one mission from another. We all saw all kinds of stuff.

 

Kallas: Were there times that you knew that the soldier wasn't going to make it but you just tried to make them comfortable?

 

Argyris: Yeah, there were a number of situations like that. I was called in to assist another platoon. We were trying to move the enemy out and the sniper must have only been ten to twenty feet away from the point man. He always shot to the head. You would be rushed up to that point and you saw a soldier dying and gasping for air. There is nothing that you can do for them. You can’t comfort them, and you don’t know what is going on.

 

There was a situation where a guy threw a grenade in a heavy bush and shouldn’t have. It bounced off the tree and came back and went off. He caught it in the belly and some other guys got hit too. When I got to him and tried to evacuate out, all he could say to me was “Doc, am I going to make it?” and he died of shock. We couldn’t get him stabilized and couldn’t get him to relax.

 

There were other guys who were hit, amputees that couldn’t find a leg or arm. You just try to stop the bleeding, call in the chopper, get them on the chopper and get them home. There were times when I was in rear camp...the American people didn’t know we were in Cambodia but we were. We were doing missions out there and I was in a rear base camp and had only less then a month before coming home. They asked me to help in the battalion aid station. I remember going into a tent and there were just piles of American bodies in this one tent. I found out later that it was in my platoon in my unit that caught it. Those memories are still there.

 

Kallas: So how long were you there?

 

Argyris: The tour of duty was generally twelve months, no more. For a medic, the usual tour of duty was six to nine months. Mine was approximately ten to eleven months. When I joined my unit at Phan Thiet and we moved out of there because the first infantry division took over Camp Edwards, we moved up to Bong Son and don’t ask me where that is right now because I can’t think of where that is. We guarded a bridge there. We also went into another campsite, but I can’t remember where it was at the time of the TET offensive. But we weren’t far and our camp was being mortared as a diversion for the enemy to attack the town of Hue. There were all kinds of fire works going on, and one of our choppers was literally shook down. It was at nighttime, which is rare to see choppers in the sky at nighttime unless they were going out on a reconnaissance. Chopper pilots would draw fire from the enemy down below while another chopper higher up would see where the fire was coming from and shoot down at them. I think that this particular group of choppers that were coming in were coming back from such a maneuver.  When choppers got hit, it was one ball of white fire.

 

That night, we saw the choppers go out and there wasn’t much left of the chopper that we saw. There may have been a unit out there that did an evacuation of the bodies, I don’t know. But the choppers were the First Cavalry Division’s work horse. That was our horse, it got us around. Any time that we went out into the field, it is an experience unlike the previous duty that you did because the lay of the land was always so different. Our unit got around a lot that year that I was in there. We were along the coast and up in the highlands and we were in areas where we could see how the enemy made major highways out of the jungle where they transported their military supplies, fresh soldiers coming in or leaving toward North Vietnam, past the parallel.

 

I remember the most unreal place for me was Khe Sanh when we went in to liberate the Marines. There were a lot of B52 bomber strikes up there and the land was just wasted. There was a lot of napalm used and it was unbelievable. We went to an area during our sweep as we were moving toward Khe Sanh where a Marine patrol had been out there. Unfortunately, the Marines didn’t do enough patrolling. If they had patrolled more around the base camp, there would not have been the amount of tunnels that were built or trenches around the whole perimeter of Khe Sanh. But this one unit of Marines that were out there, you could see where they had a fire fight and the medics set up a temporary area to treat the wounded. We saw bandages all over the place and boots with men's feet in it. They really hit it hard, but they didn’t have a chance.

 

The North Vietnamese were well entrenched by that time and that was why they stayed in the base camp. They didn’t let any more patrols go out there. Had they gone out and patrolled more...Khe Sanh should have never happened but it did. That is my own opinion but we saw it. They didn’t like us very much. Marines and the Army don’t get along very much, I guess. But again, you are still one brotherhood. I guess they were pretty astonished to see us walk in from where they were. But by that time, the enemy had left. They left a force and we hit some resistance and pretty much took care of it. When we went into liberate the Marines, there were hundreds of helicopters in the air. It was just awesome the kind of fire power that was out there. That is probably something that will live with me for a long time. I don’t lose sleep over it but when you are actually there and see that kind of firepower, it is awesome. I wouldn’t want to be a North Vietnamese soldier in that area. But they were smart; they knew how to fight the war and how we fought. You had to respect them too. They were tried and hard core soldiers.

 

Kallas: You mentioned the difference between TV and being there. Did the news or our leaders portray the war differently than what you say? Did they cover things up?

 

Argyris: It is hard to put that in perspective. Before being inducted, you said things and you felt things. Being there and then coming back home, you see it again in a different perspective; people were only getting the gory glimpse of what was going on. As far as our leaders are concerned, hopefully the memory of Vietnam and negotiating as they did……I think that we negotiated too much. If we would have gone in there to fight a war and soldiers would die, then the matter of a cease fire and allowing the enemy time to recuperate and lay more booby traps wouldn’t have happened. Because they knew every time a GI got hurt, slowed down a unit, or conflicted heavy casualties, it allowed for more resistance.

 

The American people were also getting tired of this whole scenario. Meanwhile the guy in the trenches was trying to do his job the best he could to get home in one piece. To me, if we were really going to win the war, we should let the generals fight the war, not the politicians. The Hue offensive was how the American were learning how the enemy operated and we were breaking through their infrastructure. The Vietcong lost a lost of soldiers. We had them more or less on the run where all they could do was hit and run. We should have gone in to win the war and let the generals direct us instead of having no-fire zones here or there; it made it difficult and frustrating at times to fight and it showed.

 

I know situations where some of the guys I served with were doing things that they shouldn’t have been doing. It was just a matter of frustration on their part to cope with losing a friend and questioning why were we in the war if we couldn’t fight the enemy the way we should be fighting them. That is my point of view. We should have never had the war drag on almost eight or nine years. In fact, it goes farther than that. Maybe in 1954, I guess it was when we started allowing advisors going over. Then it escalated obviously in 1964 or 1965 when more soldiers were committed and more casualties.

 

When you talk to guys from all branches of service who were there, there is certainly a brotherhood. Each guy knew what the other was thinking or feeling. To this day, I still see and meet guys from Nam and we talk. I have pretty much put the war behind me. This is the first time that I have probably [really] talked about the war ever, even with the guys that served.  [With them] you ask “what unit were you in” and “what did you do?” You usually tell a couple of war stories then you move on. I think that Vietnam soldiers were good and tough soldiers from all walks of life: from the slums, the cities, to farm boys, ranch boys, intercity schools. We all were there and we all got along. The Vietnam war made some major impact on these fellows and gals, I might add. You can’t forget the women who served there too. I think that we came away a lot wiser from that. Hopefully our military has learned that when you go in a war, people will be killed but you have to go in with the one objective to win the war. I hope that we have learned from that experience before we commit American men and women to hostile fire.

 

Kallas: What affect did the war have on your life?

 

Argyris: I was pretty quiet about it. I wouldn’t talk about it for at least eight or nine years. People knew I was a Vietnam veteran and asked how was it over there. The biggest impact for me was when we started having these reunions and got together after so many years. Some of us then were young kids and you got together to see the kids grow up. We tell jokes. We didn’t talk much about the war probably after the first of second reunion. Some guys were definitely scared by it and didn’t want to come back to the reunions because they want to put it behind them. I talk to probably one or two guys now. We have ceased having reunions for more than six years. I have been to two and there were a total of four or five. One of the guys in Wyoming wants to have another one now that our kids are grown up. What brought us together is friendship and that we are home again.

 

Kallas: Did you support the war and have you views changed over time?

 

Argyris: Well, I supported the war obviously because that was why I upped my number. As far as coming away from the war, I didn’t meet any hostility like some GIs did. Some people were very understanding and said thank you. But my views of Vietnam are very strong in the sense that I would never want to see my son fight that kind of a war or allow my government to not commit itself to backing its military. It was a waste of life without the one objective to win the war. There should be no wars. They are a lose-lose situation, no matter how you look at it. War is an objective to overcome a military force. What is going on in Kosovo now and the situation that could draw us into the Israeli situation in Palestine….that scares me. But I hope that we learned our lesson in Vietnam. I think that real healing started with the Vietnam vets started parading. I remember being in a parade in Chicago. I didn’t march in the parade because for me, the war was over, but to see the guys and gals walking in the parade, it was a good cleansing for them and guys like myself who were sitting on the sidelines.

 

Kallas: How did the war affect your community? Were there changes when you came home? Were there changes in the way you were treated when you came home?

 

Argyris: Well, it is a radical thing. Once you are leaving Vietnam and looking forward to coming home there are some adjustments. I think that my faith in God helped me get through it all. I didn’t have that many mental scares. The community welcomed me. I just came home, met my bride-to- be, lived with my mom and sister before we got married, and went back to work. That was how quickly I adjusted again. There was no time to dwell [on it]. It was better to get back to usual, the quicker the better. Some other guys found that it wasn’t that easy.

 

Kallas: Were there changes to the community? Did you expect something different?

 

Argyris: I was just happy to be home. The neighborhood didn’t change much. No for me, it wasn’t that traumatic. It was just going one extreme to another and trying to fit in back to the environment at home again. I had a job again; the same people that I worked for when I was part time going to college. They hired me back as assistant manager. In a couple of weeks, I was managing a store.

 

Kallas: Well, thank you for this. I really appreciate it. I know that it must have been hard.

 

Argyris: Well, I appreciate you taking the time to interview me. I hope the material that I am leaving you with might give a little flavor. It is hard sometimes trying to retain some of the things and explain some of the language that we used back then. For me, it is almost thirty-one years since Vietnam. I think that Vietnam has helped me to any challenge that is in front of me now. I realize that it isn’t life-or-death threatening. It has prepared me to accept the things that are before me, even to this day. It had been a life experience, one that I have tried to take out of memory and this helped me try to refresh some of the things. I hope this is some help to you and your classmates and to others.  

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