Monmouth College
Department of History 

INTERVIEW WITH DAN TANSEY 

Conducted in the fall of 2000 by Maggie Hawk 

Hawk: So let’s start out with the years that you were over there.

Tansey: I went to Vietnam in September of 1967 and I was there until January of 1968. I left then because I was injured during the TET offensive.

Hawk: How did you get injured?

Tansey: I was a gunner on a helicopter and we were stationed between Cambodia and Saigon. North Vietnamese soldiers at that time were coming up through Cambodia. It was a political part of the war where I was located. It was a small landing zone by a rubber plantation. They could hide in there, but we couldn’t bomb or ask for artillery support because that plantation had work for the people in the South. We were told that we were completely surrounded by regiments of North Vietnamese soldiers and they were supposedly on their way to Saigon for the TET offensive. Like I said, it was in January that I was hurt and their New Year starts in January. One night, they decided they were going to overtake our landing zone, and there wasn’t anything that we could do to stop them. There wasn’t enough of us and [there were] too many of them. We couldn’t ask for air support or artillery support. There were three hundred and fifty people on that landing zone, but only thirty people got off alive after it was all over with.

Hawk: Did you support the war at the time and have your views changed since then?

Tansey: I grew up in the sixties and graduated from high school in 1965. Of course, that was the year that President Johnson started putting all the troops over there. At the beginning of the war, it was popular because people were concerned about communism and they believed in the domino effect, which said if we didn’t beat communism, it was going to start coming toward us. Being a young man and my dad had served in World War II, he supported the war and I did too. There wasn’t a lot of resentment at first. Even after the resentment started, I still supported the war and I still supported the people that were there. I obviously ended up there myself, but after I got there and saw it for myself, I saw that we had no intention of really winning the war. We could have won the war in a matter of a months if we would have used all our military might, but we couldn’t do that. When I first got there, if you got shot at, we had to call back for permission to shoot back. I saw more people die, a lot of kids, women, and a lot of my friends. After I was injured and came back to the United States, I couldn’t stand all the protesting that had began. My girlfriend at that time was going up to the University of Iowa. I remember that I had to put a hat on because it was clear that I had my head shaved, and it wouldn’t have been safe for somebody to be up there that they knew was in the service. I had to hide the fact that I had even been there, and that made me mad. I still supported the effort, it was just that I thought we should get in there and get it over with so more people didn’t have to die. To this day,

I understand the reasons more now than I did then. As far as what my views would be on it now, we should never send our men and women any place in harm's way when we don’t have full intention of backing them with all the military power that we have. That is the reason that I think Desert Storm was a good deal. The Kosovo thing, the bombing, and supporting our people before they had to go in there was good. That is the way it should be done; that was the way it have been done in Vietnam and I don’t think that it ever will be done again because of Vietnam.

Hawk: In what ways did the war affect your community?

Tansey: I grew up in Burlington, Iowa. Like I said, I graduated high school in 1965 and that was when President Johnson started building up. That was the year he put a half a million men and some women over there. So I knew that it would be a matter of time before I would have to go. A lot of the boys that I went to high school with had to go too. It affected the community because you had a lot of young men over there and their lives were very much in jeopardy. There were only three people from Des Monies County, Iowa who were killed in Vietnam, but I was the first person who was injured in the war. It had the same effects that it had in most communities. You had the young people who were resenting the war and not wanting to go. By that time, all the protesting had started. It tore friendships apart; there was one person who really supported it and the other person wouldn’t. It was just a real conflict, depending on which way you felt. The biggest effect that it probably had on the community was the men and women (but I don’t remember any women from my class that went over) going over there and obviously their parents were concerned that they wouldn’t come back home alive again.

Hawk: When you found out…you were drafted to the war?

Tansey: I was drafted to go to war.

Hawk: When you found out you were going there, were you scared?

Tansey: To be honest with you, I was one of the lucky ones. I was first sent to Germany after my training and could have probably stayed in Germany, but I actually volunteered to go to Vietnam from Germany. I did that because I wanted to know what it was like since I was giving up two or three years of my life anyway; I wanted to be a part of that. As far as being scared, sure. I was scared, but I was young and my father had been in World War II and I heard a lot of stories through him. I saw a lot of war movies all my life, and there was a little bit of excitement about it. When you are eighteen or nineteen years old, you don’t think that you are ever going to die. So you really didn’t look at it in terms of that, but once you got over there, it was different. You saw groups of people being killed everyday or seeing their legs or arms blown off. It was exciting and I did look forward to it, and a lot of people didn’t understand why I didn’t stay in Germany and be safe; however, I wanted to go. I think that I did that because of my dad and being involved in combat. I wanted to know more about what he felt and experienced. I didn’t think that I could ever feel that unless I was actually there myself.

Hawk: What was camp life like?

Tansey: Depending on where you were, there was a rule that you spent thirty days in the field and thirty days back on the larger bases. With the exception of Saigon and Long Binh where most of the military people came into the country, there were not a lot of big cities around besides Da Nang and Cam Rahn Bay. When you were back, there wasn’t any line of the war. You are used to watching a war movie where the enemy would be one place and the Americans would be another. No matter where you were, you were always vulnerable because of the mortars and rockets that were shot everyday. When you were back at one of the more secure places for thirty days, you obviously didn’t have the fears that you had when out into the jungle. Out there, you feared for your life every minute because you never knew what or when something was going to happen, but you did know that it was going to happen. So you didn’t sleep; I remember going days and days and days without sleeping at all. When you were in a foxhole at night, you were so tired and wanted to sleep but you know those guys are out there. There was a lot of camaraderie. Just like in any situation, you met certain people that you liked and certain people that you didn’t like.

I think one thing for people of your age to understand was not only the war and the protesting back home, flag burning, and long hair, but you also had the black movement that had started. There was a lot of racial tension in Vietnam. The whites usually hung out with the whites and the blacks hung out with the blacks. Of course you had people from the South that had never had to be with the blacks before. Martin Luther King’s death and the black power movement was going on; not only were you at war with the enemy, but you were also at war with your own people because of your color or race. I was a NCO, a noncommissioned officer, which means that I was a head of a squad. I was actually told if any of the black soldiers were smoking dope, once a fire fight started, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference whether you were shot behind the head or in front. No one would look and they just threw you in a body bag. The white kids told the black guys the same thing. Being from the Midwest, I had never experienced much of that. Burlington wasn’t a segregated city. When you got thrown in with people from all areas of the country and from larger cities where segregation was a big thing, you had two complexes that you were fighting everyday. You were fighting and afraid of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, while also being scared of the strong racial tension behind you and in front of you.

Hawk: When you were over in Vietnam, what was your biggest fear? Was it being killed or not being able to see your family again?

Tansey: I think that once you got over there and experienced what it has all about…I mentioned once that I don’t think that kids really fear death. Once you got over there and saw the things that were happening, you realized that your life was very much in danger and obviously that was what you feared the most. When you go through villages and there would be a little kid that would come up from one of the villages that had a grenade and blow himself up as well as several of us.  The women that were in the villages, you couldn’t trust them as you were going through either. Obviously their men were on the Communist side and in the Vietcong. Every place you went, your life was threatened and there was no place where you did not feel threatened; that was obviously the thing that scared you the most. You wanted to live and come back home, but also didn’t want to be maimed. I think that I worried about that as much as death. When I saw men with both their arms and legs blown off, obviously no one wants to spend the rest of their life at such a young age like that. That is what I worried about the most. I also hated the fact that my parents, especially my mother, was going through the agony of knowing that I was over there and never knowing for sure if I was safe or not.

Hawk: Do you agree with the decisions that the U.S. made during the war?

Tansey: I believe that if the unrest had not happened back in the United States because everything in the mid sixties was going crazy….. People were smoking marijuana and everyone was stoned all the time. The music was going crazy and all those type of things. I think that the media was publicizing it all the time and all these protests. I do believe and still believe that what we went over there was right for that time. It may not be right for this time, but it was right for that time.  For instance, when they stopped the bombing north of a certain parallel, we had people like Jane Fonda and Robert McNamara…. At one time, McNamara was Secretary of Defense of the country and they went to North Vietnam and pictures were taken with North Vietnamese soldiers that were holding guns that had killed American men. That part of it was wrong and should never had been allowed. I feel that we should have gone over there, won the war, and come back home. The way the United States behaved was wrong; they strung it out way too long, and if they didn’t have any intention of winning, so they should never allowed it to go as long as it did. At least a portion of the 58,000 boys that died there would not have died in vain. That, in essence, is what happened; they died in vain and they accomplished nothing.

Hawk: I don’t understand about this Jane Fonda going over to…

Tansey: The media thrived on protests in colleges and the burning down of buildings by the students. At the same time, there were a lot of people who were starting to question the war. Jane Fonda was a young actress at the time, and she was very much against the war. Robert McNamara at one time was Secretary of Defense, I think under President Kennedy. These people went to Hanoi, which was the capital of North Vietnam, and sided with the enemy. There were pictures of them on the television and newspapers of them with their arms around the North Vietnamese soldiers with the big guns in the background that they were using to shoot our planes out of the sky and kill our people. At the same time that they did this, the North Vietnamese were holding many American men in prison (some as long as seven or eight years). Obviously, I do not watch any of Jane Fonda’s movies and will never watch any. I think most people who were also involved in the combat portion will also feel the same way about her. She tried to make an apology several years ago to the Veterans Administration, saying that she was wrong and didn’t mean anything by it. But it was the sign of the times. Back here, you saw pictures all the time of people with Vietnamese flags instead of our own flag, or burning our flag and having the Vietnamese flag. You didn’t understand what was going on, it was really crazy.

Hawk: I never heard anything about that. That is really interesting. Did you have anyone close to you pass away or get seriously injured?

Tansey: Yes, like I said, I had many friends that I had gotten to know that were injured more seriously than I was injured. I had at least a dozen close friends that weren’t as fortunate as I was and were killed. The night that I was injured, this boy from the state of Washington and I were together. We get running back and back and they get coming. There was a big explosion and I was left holding his arm because that was all that was left of him. You see things like that and it makes you sick to your stomach. Yes, there were a lot of people that you become very close to and you saw a lot of bad things happen to. This particular person that I am taking about, I hated his death more than the rest because he was a father. He was married and had a child at home that he had never seen. The baby was born when he was over there. When I got back to the United States, I actually traveled up to Washington to meet his wife and see his kid.

Hawk: Explain your feelings about the TET offensive.

Tansey: I was hurt during the month of January and that is when the TET holiday happened. It was a show of strength by the Communists. The worst one that happened was in `66 and there was actual fighting in Saigon. At that time, that was unheard of because Saigon was the capital of South Vietnam. You didn’t think that there was that much infiltration that far south, but you learned at that time that it was not always the North Vietnamese because it was also the Vietcong or the VC--local people from the South who fought on side of the North. 

Hawk: Back to the media, do you think that Americans were kept in the dark concerning what was really going on in Vietnam?

Tansey: The media let the American people see what they wanted them to see. The American was always shown as the aggressor. If they didn’t show the scenes of men being hung, bayonets stuck in them, and literal massacres of Americans, it was always slanted toward the poor Vietnamese and how the big, fat American was over there and doing mean things to them. The media was really slanted toward Vietnam and getting people out of there because they didn’t belong there.

Hawk: How do you feel about Agent Orange?

Tansey: I knew what Agent Orange was at the time and knew what it was when I got out of the service. As we sit here tonight and as you know from knowing our family so long, I had a tumor removed from me in February of this year. It is a tumor that they believe to be caused from my exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Hawk: Are you going to do anything about that?

Tansey: I have asked for compensation from the government for it. I have more or less sued the Veterans Administration and it is still in arbitration. Agent Orange was a really bad thing. Vietnam was a country that was nothing but a jungle and they used it to make the landing zones right in the middle of the jungle and that sort of thing. At the same time, they didn’t know or care what it would do to the health of those exposed, including the South Vietnamese. There were a lot of innocent people who were hurt by that stuff. Agent Orange was made by Dow Chemical Company and it was then and is now a big corporation. The financial liability against that corporation could be affected if they ever came out and admitted that it did all those terrible things to the people. One of the things that North Vietnam has asked for our doctors to tell them about Agent Orange and what it can do because many of their own people have died and you can pass it on for generations and generations.

Hawk: What affect did the war have on your life as of now? Do you still have flashbacks or do you act any differently that you think you would if you hadn’t gone to war?

Tansey: Anybody who has ever been in combat situation and saw the horrors of war, the killing of innocent people and some of it at our own hands, would be bothered. I saw American men raping women and I saw American men shooting little kids just to be shooting them. You see a lot of innocent people die who were not associated with the war. They just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. All of those things plus the picture that I painted a little while ago about losing the friend that I had and was left with his arm, those are not things that you see in normal life and they affect you. There are a lot of people that I know personally, right here in Monmouth who belong to the American Legion and the VFW who have had a lot of mental trauma. Some of them can’t even work because of it. Nine years ago, I spent a week in a mental part of the veterans’ hospital in Iowa City, Iowa. That was when it came back to me. It came back all of a sudden and I would try to hide it from my wife, but she would wake up and find me in different places in the house. It got to the point that I couldn’t leave the house anymore because I was afraid. This was after twenty or twenty-five years and I needed help and medicine. I still go to Iowa City for counseling and medication for that. It does affect you and those scenes will never go away from you. There is always something that will bring them back like a military action on TV or different situations that you might find yourself in that might bring a flashback. It does affect you and it will affect me for the rest of my life.

Hawk: We have been reading books in class that discuss the homecoming and how returning soldiers were treated. How were you treated when you came back?

Tansey: When you came back, the only people you wanted to know that you were over there was your family. By the time I came home, there was such an anti-war atmosphere that you almost felt guilty for being over there and serving your country. Because of that feeling and not wanting to go to the same places that I had gone prior to going to Vietnam...I could have came back and gone to Iowa City for rehabilitation and have been close to home. But I wanted to go to California because I just didn’t want to be around people that I used to know, and I didn’t want them to know that I had been there. It was really funny, the men from WWII came home to praise, including my father. We didn’t have that after coming home from Vietnam. You were forced into being ashamed of being there and being a part of it. You were constantly reminded of it everyday because of another demonstration or another burned school. Someone would also say things to you because they could tell by your hair that you were in the military because everyone had long hair then. I didn’t want to go through that, so I spent a year in California before coming back home.

Hawk: I guess I don’t understand how people can be like that--it was not that you had a choice.

Tansey: People perceived that you did have a choice because there were a lot of men my age who wouldn’t go. So they decided to go to Canada and different places in Europe where they couldn’t be forced into the service. They had seen all the pictures of all the dead babies and women, and had read about all the war stories. That naturally felt that if you had been there, you were a part of that. It wasn’t fun. It would have been more fun staying over there than going back home. But after I was back for a year or so, I was able to learn to take the snide remarks and pass them off. The war was very unpopular, especially among your peers. Many were lucky that they didn’t have to go into service and a lot of girls that I went to high school with didn’t want to have anything to do with me because I went to Vietnam.

Hawk: Has you outlook on that changed? Before you didn’t want people to know that you were in Vietnam--are you proud of it now?

Tansey: I am proud that I served my country in the time that I was asked to go. I will always be proud of that and that is why I work a lot out at the American Legion. I wish that I would have gone in a different time and a different situation because Vietnam was very unpopular. People say that Vietnam is the only war that America lost. Well, America didn’t lose that war. American soldiers didn’t lose that war, it was the American people who lost the war for the soldiers. We were never allowed to defend ourselves and do the things that we needed to do to win the war. I will always be proud that I served in the military and served my country. I am also proud that I went to Vietnam, but not proud of the situation. That divided the country more than it had been divided since the Civil War and that was what exactly happened. If I had to do it over again, I would much rather be in Desert Storm or one of those places where people stood behind you and worked, waving flags instead of flipping out.

Hank: Is there anything that we didn’t cover that you want to talk about?

Tansey: Just don’t let anyone tell you that the Americans lost the Vietnam War because we did not. The American people and the American press lost the Vietnam War. There wouldn’t have had to have been 58,000 boys who died over there. We were at that time, as we are now, the strongest military power. They just wouldn’t use that military power to do what needed to be done to get us out of there. A very small portion of those kids had to die. That is the sad part of the whole thing. I don’t know if you went to the wall when it was over in Knoxville [Illinois]. I went there to see the names of all those boys. You think to yourself that there wouldn’t have been a third of the 58,000 casualties if we would have done what we were supposed to do if the American government would have truly wanted to win the war and bring us back home. That is a big thing with me because a lot of people feel that we lost the war. It isn’t a fair statement to make because we never had a chance to win.          

Return to Monmouth College's Vietnam homepage.