WILLIAM HALLAM INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM HALLAM

Conducted in the fall of 2001 by Aaron Cluka, Monmouth College, '02

William Hallam enlisted and served two tours in Vietnam (December 1966-September in Chu Lai, and January-October 1968 in Phu Bai) as a Navy Seabee.

Cluka: I think that I would like to begin this interview with some basic information: where were you stationed, how long were you there, and what did you do while over in Vietnam?

Hallam: I was in Vietnam twice. I entered the service in January of 1966. I went to Vietnam the first time, we left in December of `66. We went to Chu Lai in South Vietnam, which is about as far from here to the Quad cities south of Da Nang [about an hour]. It was in the Northern part of South Vietnam. I was there until September of 1967. I came back to the States until late January of 1968, then we again left and went to South Vietnam. At that time, I was in the Hue-Phu Bai area and was until early October of 1968. So I had about nineteen months in Vietnam.

I was in the Seabees. We like to say the navy is a small branch of the Seabees. Seabees comes from the initials of construction battalion. I was a construction electrician. The Seabees are made up people from different trades. There were electricians, plumbers, equipment operators, mechanics, carpenters, steel workers. We held security in areas where we were and did construction on projects such as roads, bridges, camps, hospitals, some MASH-type units, airfields, sand wrap facilities for LSTs which are navy supply ship camps, reconstruction of bridges that were destroyed by different segments of the war, that type of activity.

Cluka: When did you first hear of Vietnam?

Hallam: I first heard of Vietnam in high school. There was starting to be a build up in the late 1950s. I believe the first advisors were sent to Vietnam then, and through the 1960s our involvement continued to escalate slightly and you began to hear more and more about the fighting between the South Vietnamese army forces and the Vietcong which were the North Vietnamese regular army. They were starting to be more and more on television.

Of course at that time, there was a draft so you either had a deferment to go to school, you had a deferment due to a physical problem, or if you were married and had a family, you could get a deferment. Otherwise, you had to register for the draft and you came up for a physical. If you were classified 1A, it was just a matter of time for your number to come up. I went for my first physical in 1964 and was classified 1A and in late 1965, they called me up for another physical and I knew at that time that my number was about to come up. So since I was working as an electrician, I went around to see different recruiters and I enlisted in the Seabees thinking that that might be a little wiser decision. I ended up making two appointments to Vietnam and spending nineteen months there so I really didn’t avoid anything at all

Cluka: So instead of being drafted, you enlisted?

Hallam: If you were 1A, you were either going to be drafted or you were going to enlist. By enlisting, you got a little bit of a choice over what branch of the service you went into and perhaps what rate or trade you would do in the service. If you enlisted, it was four years and if you were drafted, it was two years and you had no choice over where you went. At that time, draftees were being taken by the Army, the Marines, and the Navy.

Cluka: Was being 1A a narrow field?

Hallam: No, when you went for that physical, the joke at the time was if you got to ride a train up to Chicago and stay on your feet all day during the physical, you were probably going to be classified 1A. You had to have extreme impairment of vision or hearing or some type of a handicap that would keep you from performing the duties in the service. If you got called, unless you had a major problem, you were going to be classified 1A.

Cluka: So it was basically, “in our records, we know you are going to go.”

Hallam: Right

Cluka: So what was your first tour like? You said you went over in `67?

Hallam: I went over in late `66, I believe. The first time we went over, we left about the first of December, we boarded a C-41 cargo plane in Southern California. There were a hundred and fifty men on that flight. We were a twelve hundred man battalion and we went over in eight flights with a hundred and fifty men and all their gear all each of the flights. We flew to Hawaii, then to Wake Island, Clark Airforce base in the Philippines, and then on the Chu Lai. It was a two-day flight. The first time you went over, you had some what of a feeling of eagerness to go. It was something you had heard about for a long time, it was the unknown, and you really didn’t mind going.

The camp that we went to was forty miles south of Da Nang. We lived in plywood huts and it was right next to the ocean. Between the huts, there were mortar holes and sand bags surrounding the holes. In the huts, there were a lot of rats, snakes, and general filth. That was where you spent your nine months. I spend Christmas of 1966 in Chu Lai and I also celebrated my twenty-first birthday there. We traveled mostly by truck around the areas and job sites. At one point, we went across a river south of Da Nang out to the first battalion of the 7^th Marines to build some housing for them and their outlying camps. When we got off the boat, the guy who was running the ferry to get our two trucks across yelled at us as we started to get off the boat and drive off. There was a woman and two children whom we had seen in front of us as we were getting off. She knelt down and had a pole over her shoulder with a basket at each end. She had waited for them to land the boat and as soon as she knew where we were coming, she knelt down and planted a land mine for us. He saw it and stopped us. So we took her into custody. You didn’t know if she was Vietcong, there was no way to tell. We took her with us up the road to the Korean army camp and turned her over to them since we had no way to deal with prisoners.

The Chu Lai appointment was the easier of the two appointments that we had. By easy, all things being relevant, in the C-Bs, you worked twelve to fourteen hours a day on the job and you also stood watch four to six hours every two to three nights, depending on the rotation. The first time I went to Vietnam, I weighed a hundred and ninety pounds and when I came back, I weighed a hundred and forty. So I lost fifty pounds when I was in county. It was a great diet but I wouldn’t recommend it. Although the first appointment when we were there was easier, it was also the one where two of my friends were killed. They were both killed by a rocket attack; one at our main camp and one at one of our job sites in the outlining area. So an easier appointment overall but a tough one in losing the friends.

Another thing that was tough about being in Vietnam at that time was learning, through the letters from home and through the armed forces radio and newspapers that people had sent us, about the anti-war demonstrations back in the states. It is a little tough being in that situation. Even though the anti-war demonstrations were only being done by a small percentage of the people, it was still an undermining feeling; it wasn’t a good feeling to put up with that at that point.

As I said, we worked on a lot of projects over there. We drove back and forth to those and stayed out at some of the projects and outlying areas. We built camps for the Marines to hold security around the airfield. We built a MASH-type hospital there at Chew Lie; we put up a large dairy plant where they could reconstitute milk products for the forces over there. We built an ice plant, we built a chapel and the barracks at one of the navy facilities as well as the sand facility for the boats that came in with the supplies. Another electrician and I were up on forty foot poles as we were building that camp. There were two story barracks that we built right beside these poles. We were pulling wires up onto the poles. When we looked down, everyone below us was gone. Then we got to paying attention—there were snipers shooting at us while we on the poles. We weren’t aware of it because we were working but the guys down below could hear it because they were far enough away from the noise of the work. So there were things like that that went on.

Cluka: Wow, that is really something. So did you just get out of the way?

Hallam: The other person who worked with me was a utility person, a man from Ohio named John Bolt. So he was a lot more at home on a pair of hooks on a pole. He kicked his hooks out and made about two stabs at the pole on the way down and he was down in no time flat. I came down pretty fast but not near as fast as he did. They were shooting at us from across a river. Luckily, their aim wasn’t very good and there were a lot of rounds that went around us. The biggest problem, for the first appointment, was the rockets and the mortars. Like I said, that was what killed my two friends and that usually was at night. Just harassment.

Cluka: So what were the daytime attacks?

Hallam: Daytime attacks would be an ambush if you were out moving from camp to camp. You might run across an ambush of sniper fire, land mines, and that type of thing.

Cluka: So when you first returned back to the States, how long were you over there and back here?

Hallam: We went over for nine months and were home for six months. We came back and we got a thirty day leave to go home. Then we went back to California and started through military training again to get ready to go into our second deployment. While we were in the States, since I was an electrician, I got some more training, then we went back to military training again. Then there was a break for Christmas. In late January of 1968, we again left for Vietnam.

Cluka: How was it like coming back the first time?

Hallam: It was interesting. Each time that we came back, we start out in our uniforms. Then we would pay a full fare stop and change into civilian clothes because of the protests and the insults that would be hurled at you and our tolerance wasn’t very good for that. So it was just easier to pay full fare and fly in civilian clothes to not put up with the aggravation from the anti-war people.

Cluka: Did you receive any insults?

Hallam: Oh, yes. There were things about baby-killers because of the napalm and other things that went on in Vietnam. At the base in California, they had a liberty bus that would hall you downtown. One night, there was a fishing harpoon gun that shot into the bus. There would be people at railroad stations--like Union Station in Chicago--there would be people that would yell at you. Sometimes they would even try to spit on you. That happened to me once up there in the train station waiting to come down. So a very small percentage of people did this but it was very irritating.

Cluka: When you came back to Monmouth for the thirty-day leave, how did you feel? What were reactions like in town with people whom you knew and lived with?

Hallam: The people you lived with weren’t a problem. I graduated from high school in 1964 and I had gone into the service in January of `66. The people I had been in high school with, when you ran into them, they were very uneasy about asking about it and I didn’t offer too much about it. It was a subject that we just avoided. People had very strong feelings on both sides of the issue. So usually it was something that was just avoided. You came back, you visited your family, visited your friends, rested up, but you really didn’t discuss it too much.

Cluka: Did you have friends at Monmouth College? We were talking earlier in our class about how the population of Monmouth College doubled because a lot of people were seeking deferments by getting into college so they didn’t have to go over. Did you ever have friends who went to Monmouth College?

Hallam: I had friends who were attending colleges and I didn’t recall specifically if it was Monmouth College. Being in the service and being a Vietnam veteran, you would not have chosen to have contact with somebody… Many of the people in college were not anti-war, but a high number of people strongly opposed the war. So you felt that your presence in a situation like that was something for which no good would come. So you tried to avoid it.

Cluka: When did you start on your second tour, you said it was late January?

Hallam: We left in late January of 1968 leaving California and hopping across the Pacific. Many people of my battalion had been there the first time. I had mentioned the eagerness, the unknown—well that was all gone. None of us was very excited about going back. And all of us had a real uneasiness about going. You had been there and you had been through it, you had lost a couple of friends. And you knew that going back over, there would be other people you knew that would be killed.

Cluka: You were kind of pressing your luck.

Hallam: Yeah, it really was. If I had it to do over, I would have rather have gone and stayed for nineteen months in one shot than to have gone for nine months, gone home for six, and gone back again. That second flight was a long, long, flight. When we left in January of `68 the Vietnam War was going on, but nothing other than ordinary. And the plane again stopped at Hawaii, Wake Island, and Clark Air Force base. At Clark Air Force base, we knew we were going up to the ancient capital of Hue the second time around. We knew that was where our camp would be. We knew that the airfield was not big enough for jets so we transferred off a jet at Clark Air Force base in the Philippines onto an old C21 four-engine prop, WWII vintage plane. That was going to fly us on up. They kept us waiting at the end of the runway for several hours. We could see the plane that we were going to use and we couldn’t understand what was going on. Then they finally told us that they were patching the holes from the plane that the Communists had got that morning as it flew out of Hue. Well from the time that we had left California and got to the Philippines, the TET offensive had started. And they had actually held Hue at the time that we flew into the Hue Airfield.

Cluka: So you were at Hue during TET?

Hallam: We landed at the Hue airfield. The airfield was actually in Phu Bai, south of Hue. The Communists held Hue. We landed on that runway at Phu Bai and they were shelling the field and it was raining. The pilot announced to us that they were going to bring the plane down as quickly as they could and we were to run off the right side of the plane carrying our gear with us. Well, when we were at Clark Air Force base, they issued us eighty rounds of ammunition, gas masks, 782 gear, which is your helmet, flat jacket, and six hand grenades for each one of us. Normally, they don’t issue you anything until you get to your camp, so we knew going into it that something was going on.

I still remember when we landed that plane that there was a young officer who had just got out of officer school that was in charge of our flight. He had never been to Vietnam before. When the plane stopped, he jumped up and looked out the front and they were shelling the field. Then he turned back and looked at us, turned and looked out the front and started to run down the ramp down the front of the plane because it was a plane that had opened up with a ramp. He just kind of yelled something to the effect that it was every man for himself. So we got off the plane and just scattered. I took a guy with me who hadn’t been there before and we went over and got into a ditch at the end of the runway. We saw one of our trucks go by. It had a Seabees decal on one of the doors with a red diamond on the front bumper with a white eight so I knew that it was one of our trucks. So we flagged it down and jumped on it and got hauled out to the base on that.

Cluka: So from Phu Bai, did you wait to go into Hue until after we had retaken it?

Hallam: Our camp was between Phu Bai and Hue. It was about three to four miles up Route One then back toward the hills. Our camp was what stood between Hue and Phu Bai. So when we got back to the camp, we were on the line for two and a half weeks, day and night in the trenches. There were only twelve hundred of us. And there were several thousand North Vietnamese regulars in Hue at that time.

Cluka: That is really interesting because in our class, we have to read a series of books. The first one was Phase Line Green and it was about the battle of Hue. Phu Bai and Route One were mentioned so I know kind of where you are talking about. It is really interesting that you were actually somewhere that we read about in a book! Did you ever go into Hue after it was liberated?

Hallam: We got sent into Hue before it was liberated. They needed jet fuel at the airfield. As soon as they had taken the portion of Hue south of the river that runs right through Hue, they sent thirty-nine of us up there to lay twenty-one miles of six-inch steel jet fuel line along highway one. We set up a camp in an old bicycle racing stadium that was just off Route One and south of the main bridge. It was across from the main university in Hue. We laid pipeline all day long. When it got dark, we would go back to our three tents in the corner of the stadium. When you went to sleep, you left your helmet and rifle on the edge where they could see it. Every other person would go to sleep but you left your rifle and helmet up there so they couldn’t figure how many people were there. Because we knew that if they figured out that there was only thirty-nine of us, they would try to attack us. We were up there for nearly two weeks and they never tried to attack us. But it was really unnerving.

Cluka: So after Hue, did you stay in the area?

Hallam: We worked all that deployment near Hue and Phu Bai and built another sand wrap activity around Tan Mai island for supplies for navy ships. We built the whole camp and its barracks. We built a number of timber bridges. We did about fourteen miles of road, built it up out of the rice paddies. There was constant harassment and sniper fire, mortars, and rockets at our main camp. As I said, the first tour was much easier than the second one. The second one was much more difficult with more enemy activity.

Cluka: How did you deal with that, constant fire while you are trying to do your job?

Hallam: Well, you look at it from this point. We were getting the fire when they would come and bother us or when there were rockets in our camp. There were people over there in the Marine Corp and in the 82nd or the 101st Airborne were right up there in the same area. Those guys were having to go out and having a lot worse time than we were. So you justified it in your mind that you were having lot less than others. So you just had to put it in perspective and remember that there are no choices. You are there and going to be there until the deployment is up and you will have to take what comes along.

Cluka: Did you count the days?

Hallam: Oh, yes, we knew when we got there… you have to remember that the Vietnam War was not a war, it was a police action. I can’t imagine in WWII, the people who served were going to be in it until it was over. They were in it and the whole world was disturbed. We knew that we were going over and be there a little over eight months and would come back home. Then we knew that we would have to go back over again. Then when we came home that time, they couldn’t send us back again. Yeah, you counted the days and you kept track very closely.

Cluka: So your deployment was different from someone that was drafted because you were gone for eight and a half months each time. When we read about other people who were drafted, they were there for twelve or thirteen months.

Hallam: They needed Seabees very badly. If you went (it didn’t matter if you were in the Navy, the Army, or the Marines) it didn’t matter if you went over for a twelve-month deployment, they had to assign you somewhere else instead of sending you back unless you volunteered. In the C-Bs, they way around it was they took you over for eight and a half months and brought you over for six, then they could take you back over for another eight and a half. So it was there way of getting more time out of you. That was the reason. It would have been more sensible from an economic standpoint to take us there once and leave us there. But then they would get twelve months out of us instead of nineteen months.

Cluka: I see. So that way, they kept you a lot longer than the normal person.

Hallam: Yes.

Cluka: Were there any similarities in the two tours?

Hallam: You never really slept. I think I told you that I lost a lot of weight the first time. The second time, I was up over two hundred pounds and dropped down to a hundred thirty-five. You never really rested or slept. I can remember at two o’clock in the morning and you would be asleep in the tent and somebody would ask what time it was and two or three people would answer. No body slept soundly. I have a copy of the Vietcong Code of Conduct and Oath of Honor. Their whole philosophy was to harass and not to confront you straight up. We had a couple of ground assaults the second time I was over there, where they actually assaulted our lines at night. Mostly, it was harassment, sniper fire, land mines, that type of thing, both times. The second time, we were out in a more open area and more exposed to it than the first time. But the similarity would be their way of aggression was the same both times.

Cluka: When you came home for the second time, what was that like? How was it different from the first time you came home? Obviously you knew that you weren’t going back. What were some of the changes between the first time and the second time?

Hallam: Between the first and the second time, the anti-war volume had been turned up. It was much more noticeable. There was also more conversation, by late 1968, of anti-war activity in Congress. There were more people discussing it and you could tell that there was beginning to be a lack of support for what you were doing. I think that everybody who was there--at least I know I am--was very offended by this. The lives of Joe Miller and Mike Lustalk had been wiped out by the decision of our country to become involved. Then when you felt that sliding away, your first reaction was “It is too late to change this decision. Fifty-eight thousand people are dead.”

A couple of interesting things, when I got back after the second deployment, they made a military training instructor out of me. So I instructed classes of people who were getting ready to go to Vietnam. A couple of the interesting things that I found out was that when the French were defeated at Dienbienphu in 1954, when they were surrounded, they asked the U.S. for aid. They wanted air support to bring supplies in to help them. We refused that in 1954. Some of the politicians who were involved in that decision were Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower. All four of those people were President of the United States during some portion of the Vietnam conflict. I find it ironic that they were all involved in government at the time that we said “No” to the French, which might have spared us involvement just a few years down the road. That was interesting. About two years ago, they had a Mid-East policy meeting at a University in Ohio. On television, they claimed they were surprised by the resistance and protests that went on during that meeting. To me, I go back and I look at that and think about the Kent State incident during the Vietnam War. Then I wonder how could our politicians today be surprised that they would meet resistance in that peace meeting in Ohio, when there were mass riots and demonstrations on those campuses years before?

Cluka: How did you feel about Kent State?

Hallam: When I look back on it thirty years later, the whole thing is kind of a tragedy. We lost the war, we laid down over fifty-eight thousand lives. Then we had people killed here who were protesting. Should they have been protesting? It is well within their rights. I guess I think that if the National Guard was there and there was all this hostility and you put yourself out in all that hostility, nothing good will come of it. But what a shame that all these lives were lost. I talked a couple of years ago at a junior high school. I mentioned that over fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Vietnam in that conflict. The total population of Warren and Fulton county is fifty-seven thousand, two hundred and sixty one. That made them think. I don’t know, it is hard to look back on it and justify what went on mainly because we lost the support and I feel that we started playing politics. We tried to fight a war on opinion poles and at the voting booths. Once a decision is made, you can’t do that because you give power to your enemy when they know that your resolve is starting to fall apart. Then they will hold out, and that is just the way things are going to be. If you are going to do it, do it. If you think for a second that you aren’t going to do it, then get away from it.

Cluka: So you are not a fan of the rules of engagement then?

Hallam: I really feel that in Vietnam, it was justified. I still think that to this day. By us being there, we had been asked by the government for help. We had committed that through four presidents, it started with Eisenhower’s administration. When I was over there, there were times I saw young children, grade school age boys and girls who had been cut up by the Vietcong or sometimes killed because their mother or father was a supporter of the South Vietnamese government. The Vietcong were ruthless and supposedly so even with their own people. The South Vietnamese people turned to us for help. Those children were taken to the hospitals that we built to be cared for. When did we leave all those people? We lost fifty-eight thousand Americans and then we turned our back to the very people we had been there to help, who had asked us to help and to whom we had committed ourselves. Something that is kind of interesting. In all of Vietnam’s two thousand years of history they have ruled themselves for only twelve years.

Cluka: At the beginning of the course, we had to learn the pre-history before the American involvement and it was just amazing. The Chinese took them over, then the French took over, and all of a sudden the Americans were in there.

Hallam: In the middle of it, Japan occupied it during WWII. Ho Chi Minh was an ally to the United States during WWII. We supplied him with ammunition and rifles. Ho Chi Minh was never in Vietnam. From the time he was a small child, he was educated in Paris and spent most of his time in his adult life in Communist-ruled countries drumming up support for the Vietminh and then the Vietcong in Vietnam.

Cluka: I was going to ask if you have any personal stories about your time.

Hallam: We kept getting sniper fire in our camp from a village that was down the road a ways, just harassment-type fire to demoralize you. Well, they killed one of our men with that sniper fire one night. The next morning, our commanding officer, as we were starting to fall into formation for quarters to go to work came out at the front gate of our camp on an international TE24 bulldozer, like a big Caterpillar bulldozer. He had the blade about six inches to the ground. He went down to the village and shoved it back about a quarter of a mile. Then he backed up and pushed the next section back. He pushed the whole village back so they couldn’t do that to us anymore. We pleaded with him not to do it. He didn’t want to have men under his command killed from that activity. He was relieved of command about two weeks later. This was during the second tour.

During the second tour, one night a man came up to me. We had two roles of barbed wire out in front of us and between them we had anti-personal mines. This kid came up to me and said that he thought someone was out there. So I called for an elimination round and the mortar crew set it up. I looked out there and I thought it was a rock. A half hour later, he came back and said he heard something. So I called for another elimination round and they sent another one up. Then we both looked out there and he said “your rock moved.” They had crawled through between our lines and were turning the mines around so if we detonated the mines, they would fire back at us. So that was kind of a humorous evening.

There was a man in our battalion, Randy, who was either a steel worker or a carpenter. One day our camp was overrun with news correspondents. Randy’s last name was Agnew and his father was [Richard Nixon’s vice president] Spiro T. Agnew. He had enlisted man and volunteered to go to Vietnam because he didn’t want to be shown special privilege. I remember walking by and they had one of our officers stopped and asked what the men thought about his father being vice-president. And the officer had cameras pointing at him and the people were standing around. “Well, I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think that they hold it against him any.”

The other thing that sticks in my mind and is probably a closing point if we need to get to one. I remember a twelve hundred man battalion standing on a parade field in Fort Hueneme, California after our first appointment. The day would have been October 14, 1967. We were in formation. The mother and father of Mike Lustalk and his wife and their baby were there to receive his metals. I can still remember twelve hundred people standing there and it was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop as they presented those medals to his mother and father. Over the years, as I have watched my daughters grow up, I often think about that and the fact that he missed out on it. Every time I hear the national anthem, I think of Mike Lustalk and Joe Miller. Two of the fifty-eight thousand that never came home. We were just getting ready to leave Fort Hueneme to get on the plane to go over to Vietnam. And Joe Miller’s girlfriend just absolutely went crazy. She started screaming, “Don’t go, you are not going to come back, I don’t want you to get on that plane.” A couple of the other people’s wives had to get a hold of her and of course he was upset and we were all upset. Then off to Vietnam we went. Joe went out on a detachment away from the main camp and was killed. The night they told the rest of us that he was killed, every one of us thought of her. To this day, I can see her standing there with the other two women holding her and pleading with him not to go. So I remember that. She was right.

The North Vietnamese knew how Americans felt and they had no respect for life whatsoever. They killed women and children. They would strap explosives on grade school age children and send them to your line and knew that we would be reluctant to kill them. Your options were you kill them or let them get close enough to set off the explosives. They talked about the Lt. Calley in the My Lai incident and about us killing the villagers. I told you that I was a military training instructor after. One of the techniques that we taught was village search and seizure. You take a platoon or company and set one platoon behind the village in ambush and you came in with the other two on the other side making a lot of noise to drive the people out the side and ambush them. That was a top procedure. Everybody knew it. A lieutenant does not make a decision like that. He carried out the orders from someone above him. The thing that people have to remember, and it is an old worn out saying, “War is Hell.”

There are things that happened that aren’t fair. I mentioned that the Vietcong would sent children in knowing that we wouldn’t shot them and they would murder children because their parents were supporters of the South Vietnamese government. Probably the harshest people in Vietnam, of anybody that I ever saw, were the men of the South Korean army, the Republic of Korea (one of the allies that we had there). Those Korean soldiers took nothing from anyone. I saw a convoy go down the road one day. As they started to cross a bridge, the Vietcong opened up on them in an ambush. They returned fire from machine guns mounted on the trucks and they killed women, children, water buffalo, dogs, cats, etc. If it moved, they killed it.

After it was over, I asked one of the ones who spoke English “How could you do that.” He said, “Well, we got the persons who shot at us. All the rest of them watched them set up to murder us without giving warning. So in our minds, one is as guilty as the other.” But you have to remember, this was in the late 1960s. Those people in the Korean army at that time had grown up in their childhood with that going on in their home. They had no tolerance at all for that activity. They were just absolutely ruthless about any kind of an attack against them or any of their people. Normally, if you were in an area and a Korean company came in, within a few days, it was going to be pretty quick for a while because the Vietcong and the NVA didn’t want have any part in dealing with them.

One more thing. During the TET offensive, we were on the line one night and I was a squad leader. We watched this guy in his black pajamas with a couple of people with him go out across carrying a machine gun and a mortar tube. There were twelve hundred men in our battalion and we were all alert and on the line. It was getting dark and the graveyards out there are mounds with a trench around them. They walked across--I mean they are quite a ways in front of us--and went down into one of these pits and started setting this up. So I called back to the CP and wanted permission to open fire on him. They said you can’t do that, he might be a friendly farmer. I said, “friendly farmer? There in front of us at this time of night? He is no friendly farmer.” They told me that we couldn’t fire at him. So in about a half hour, it got dark and here come the mortars and the rounds off the machinegun. And I called them back again and said that the “friendly farmer is shooting at us--can we return the fire?” And they said that we can’t do that. They asked what he looked like. I told them that I wasn’t going to crawl out there and ask him for ID but he was shooting at us. But they still wouldn’t allow us to return fire. There was a guy named Bryson Moore and he ran the M79 grenade launcher. About the fourth time I was on the phone trying to get permission to return fire, I heard the grenade launcher go off. He was able to blow up the guys who were firing at us. They asked on the phone what that was. I said, “That was nothing.” That was the end of the conversation. Nobody was going to give us permission to return fire on that person but no body was going to question what they obviously knew had happened. The politics had got to the point that there was no way for us to win in that situation. When you have to watch somebody go out and set up to shoot at you but you can’t shoot back…..

Cluka: That would make me go crazy just sitting there and knowing that later they will be shooting at you.

Hallam: This was TET offensive. There were twelve hundred men waiting on the line. Who else is going to walk in front of all that?

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