Eggers and Semler, a native of Stockton, California, were both hit by a burst of fire from the same weapon.
Semler got shot in the neck somewhere, and he went down and I went down. The only thing I remember about it is this force picking me up—I was hit in the arm—picking me up off the ground and spinning me around. And when I came down, my M16 was halfway underneath me in the water and this arm was over my eyes, and I’m underneath the water. I thought I was dead.
I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, and I could feel nothing, because the pain hadn’t hit me yet. And so I actually said, “Oh, shit, I’m dead,” and then the arm flopped down in the water, and the pain hit me. I have never felt pain like that—never. When a bullet hits you, hits bone, it shatters everything. How I still have movement in this hand, as far as I’m concerned, is a miracle of God. God wanted me to have both hands still. Because it blew the entire back of my arm out, all of it out.
After what seemed like an eternity, a medic emerged, wrapped his arm, gave him a shot of morphine, and moved on. As the firing decreased and he began to move, he could hear North Vietnamese bullets striking the paddy dike against which he rested. He watched a South Vietnamese Air Force propeller-driven aircraft drop napalm on the tree line where the rounds had come from. From a hundred yards away he could feel the heat of the exploding napalm. All of a sudden he heard the sound of a helicopter that seemed to come to a dead stop almost on top of him.
And out hops the door gunner and the crew chief, pick me up, throw me in on top of ammo cases, arm banging around like hell, and I say, “Don’t forget him,” and the guys say, “Nope.” That was my radio operator. And we picked off the ground and I can remember looking out, and I’m seeing [Semler]; he’s just, he’s lying there in the rice paddy like this—his eyes wide open and he’s dead, just wide open like this, just like a crucifix, just lying there, like this. I can see his face here today. I actually heard him die. I could hear him dying; he was drowning in his own blood. He didn’t move—there was no movement at all. I think the bullet went in and hit his spine and severed his spine, so there was no feeling … but he had to have known that he was drowning.
At the battalion aid station they wanted Eggers to walk out of the helicopter, but he couldn’t. He was bleeding too badly. Someone quickly hit him with more morphine, and then he had to wait. As soon as someone did speak to him, Eggers remembers insisting that the doctors patch him up and send him back to his unit. Whoever was attending him told him, “Lieutenant, you ain’t going anywhere but home.” They took his helmet, weapon, and ammunition and placed him in a helicopter to fly him elsewhere for more medical aid. He remembers nearly falling out of the helicopter as it flew to the Eighty-Fifth Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon.
After debridement—a surgical procedure in which doctors and nurses attempt to remove foreign matter like dirt and other material from the wound—his arm was placed into a cast. The following day he was flown to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The next thing he remembers is a bank of telephones they wheeled in so that he could call home.
My wife answered the phone, “Hello.” And I said, “Hi”; there was this pause at the other end of the phone; she says, “Oh, hi, how you doing? How are you? Good to hear your voice.” I said, “Well, let’s put it this way. I was wounded.” There’s this long pause. “But you’re talking to me, right?” I said, “Yeah, I’m talking to you and I’m on my way home.” She says, “Okay.” That’s all she had to know. She never asked me where I was wounded. She never asked me how bad it was. She knew that I called her. I sounded like me, and I was on my way home. And that impressed me. Not then, but years later, thinking about it.
And I spoke with my father-in-law. Now, he was a vet from World War II; had landed at D-day, had his unit hit very badly; he was wounded, he had some nerve damage, he twitched, like that. And he was a tank commander. He was a major; he was the commander of a squadron of tanks or something like that. And he got on the phone and he asked me all kinds of questions, and I just … it was like a five-minute phone call, just that was it, that small, that short, and … done.
When it was time to go home, he was loaded onto a C-141 Starlifter aircraft and given new clothing. From there it was on to Hawaii, then Texas, then McGuire Air Force Base, and finally Valley Forge General Hospital in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. By the time he arrived back in the United States, Eggers had dropped from his original weight of 183 to 155 pounds. His wound was extremely painful, and he had to have further surgery. He was hospitalized for much of the spring of 1966, often in traction. There is now a one-inch difference in the length of his two arms, the result of the destruction of the bone. And even now his arm aches when it gets cold outside.
There were other wounded soldiers at Valley Forge whom he will never forget, including a man with a spinal wound who had been hit by a .50-caliber round. He also remembers watching a young man get out of his hospital wheelchair and learn to walk all over again.
Talk about sheer guts and determination to live and go on. That impressed me so much. I can still see it in my mind’s eye.
Witnessing the will of those soldiers moved Eggers deeply, and he left with a determination to get on with his life, despite his wound. To this day he considers himself fortunate to have gotten out of Vietnam alive with all his parts, even if they were banged up a bit.
He had only been in Vietnam for thirty-five days, but when he saw his wife for the first time, he had been through a lot. It was a relief to see her. By March 1966 he was being allowed day passes to visit his wife and family outside the hospital. Eventually, the hospital arranged an overnight trip to Atlantic City. In contrast to the experience of some other veterans, Eggers recalls being treated like royalty by a tourist association there.
Like Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, Eggers was invited by his hometown to be the grand marshal of the Memorial Day Parade. He agreed. The parade was the impetus for him to make his first visit back to Larchmont, and he has very warm memories of what took place. As he was dropped off at the arranged meeting place where the parade would begin, you would’ve thought God walked in.
He remembers being saluted and the pride that his father and father-in-law expressed.
I was proud, too. What the hell. I didn’t know why I was there. I thought there were other people a lot more deserving of it than me. But there I was, the grand marshal of the blasted parade!
Eggers was not given a medical discharge. Apparently, his arm was not damaged enough, and he had time left on his military commitment. In early June 1966 he got orders to head to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he became a company commander. And he loved it. Still, as he puts it, he was prime meat to go back to Vietnam, and he didn’t want to.
He could have stayed in. He and his wife discussed it, but he had had enough of dead bodies. In addition, the Eggerses’ second child had a serious case of bacterial pneumonia, and he just didn’t want to be apart from his family at that time.
I liked the concept of the service; I was good at it; I was comfortable in it; my wife liked it too. We got to travel a little bit and do this and do that.
But Eggers was having doubts about America’s involvement in the war. To him, it didn’t seem that the country was committed to winning. He says:
The only way that this was going to be stopped was that we had to virtually take out Hanoi. If you want to kill the spider, you’ve got to get the spider in his nest. But there wasn’t anybody out there who wanted to do it. That political risk internationally was way too big.
So, in early January 1968, he left the Army. Eggers went on to work for an insulation company and bought a home in Rockland County, New York. For the better part of two decades he didn’t tell anyone he had served in Vietnam. If somebody started to talk about it in a conversation, I just sat there. I never said I was or wasn’t.
Eggers didn’t want to get into a political discussion with anyone. He was just happy that his war had ended and that he had survived. Then things c
hanged a little. The war ended in 1975, and Eggers’s brother-in-law returned from Vietnam. He had had a very bad time as a medic, though Eggers declines to say more, and died at age forty-five.
His brother-in-law’s struggles led Eggers to begin talking more about his experiences. He took some goading and at times had to defend himself: I said, “Look, I was just a soldier. I didn’t kill any babies that I know of; I was just a soldier; that’s all I was.”
Though he was no longer silent about his combat experience, Vietnam was still mostly out of his everyday thoughts until 1991, when several things happened. First, the Gulf War began. It seemed to Eggers that the country was entering the Gulf War with the determination to win quickly and definitively that he hadn’t sensed in Vietnam. He remembers imagining what it would be like to return to the service.
That triggered something deep, deep inside of me, that I could no longer deny that part of my life.
Another factor was Eggers’s younger son, who was learning about the Vietnam War in high school and asked his father to tell him more about his experiences.
For the first time, I said, “Okay, but you better have some time.” And I don’t know how many hours we talked. Over time I seemed to find a place inside of me that was more accessible. Gradually, it began to come out of me, and I began to talk about it to other people, if they asked. It became a source of pride eventually. But it was hard fought.
In the late 1990s he got a Purple Heart license plate for his car. Not long after, men from his unit began to contact him.
Today, he says that he is proud to have participated in the Vietnam War and that he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do. At the same time, he doesn’t seek out veterans’ reunions or other veterans’ events. He doesn’t want his veteran’s status to define him, instead choosing to be oriented toward his family and his church. He is the father of five and has been married for more than forty-five years.
I don’t want it to consume me. Some of these guys are consumed.
Looking back, Eggers associates military service with the virtues of leadership he believes he’s displayed as an owner or manager of small businesses. He recalls being under fire and the instinctive effort to do his job without panic, knowing that mistakes could be costly. He and Semler were the only casualties during the time he led the platoon. And while the majority of the men in his unit were African American, he also had whites and Latinos and remembers that everyone got along. There was never a need to take disciplinary action.
At the end of our discussion, Eggers came to a realization:
I never thought about that, but here we are in the middle of a rice paddy, and I had a choice to go forward or back, and I went forward literally into a hail of machine gun bullets rather than go back. That was a conscious choice because I saw this dry spot and I figured I could get up onto it and be able to direct fire.
Leadership always presents difficult choices. And although Eggers’s decision would lead to an injury and the death of PFC Semler, he felt it was the best decision to make for the platoon. His decision to be in the military was the right way to serve his country. For Eggers, every choice has its cost, but if it’s the right one, the cost is well worth it.
Eggers argues that we never understood the enemy in Vietnam.
I think our presidents were in some way responding to generals who wanted notches on their rifle butts for further promotions. We were responding to the defense industry; they had to try new things like the concept of helicopter warfare.
Nevertheless, he asserts that politics aside, I trained more young men to go over there, and I trained them the very best I could.
Knowing what he does now, Eggers says he respects people who made the decision to resist service and flee to places like Canada, but that was not his nature. He couldn’t have done it in 1965, and he would not do it today. For him, war is obedience to orders; war is accomplishing your mission. The old phrase goes, “Ours is not to reason why. Ours is to do or die.” And that’s what we did. All of us did.
3
FUTILITY: SUE O’NEILL
Soldiers—men and women alike—tell their Vietnam stories through the lens of their political and social viewpoints. Some came to see the American odyssey in Vietnam in terms that Richard Eggers might reject—as an effort that was pointless at best, barbaric at worst. While morale remained high throughout the armed forces during the first half of the war, after 1968, writes the historian James Westheider, “morale, cohesion, and discipline throughout the U.S. military establishment began to deteriorate.”1 Susan O’Neill’s recollection of her time in Vietnam would bear out this assertion. What she remembers best is the futility of the war. But like Eggers, she found that the experience of serving a larger cause, in her case as a combat nurse working to save lives, shaped the remainder of her life profoundly.
For women as for African Americans, the 1960s was a time of widespread cultural change. Efforts were made to integrate women in the workplace more readily, to pay them more fairly, and to reform policies regarding sexual harassment and domestic violence. The decade also saw the development of the first reliable oral method of birth control, giving women command of their reproductive systems and therefore more influence over their futures. Like any other institution, the American military began responding to these changing realities. Recent writing on the history of American nurses during the Vietnam era argues that “the war both advanced the position of women and nurses in the army and preserved their subordinate status at the same time.”2 Female nurses gained new experiences and achieved dramatic gains in professional status while still occupying a second tier within the military bureaucracy.
Because women were not subject to the draft, all women who served in the U.S. Army volunteered. For O’Neill—née Kramer—military service was not a civic duty but rather a matter of expedience. She felt a strong financial obligation to her family, who had strained to put her through years of private Catholic schooling.
O’Neill became a New Yorker later in life than many of the other men and women I interviewed, having moved to the city to be close to her children in the past decade. She was born in 1947 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom, and her father worked in a factory; they were devout Catholics. While she had an older brother, O’Neill quickly became the “responsible” child, obligated to take care of her three younger siblings. Her parents were not well-off, but nevertheless wanted their children to acquire skills that would help them earn a good living. Unable to pay for college, they committed to making trade school educations available for all five children.
Her nursing career actually began early in life. The O’Neill children were divided between two bedrooms, with the girls sharing one room and the boys another. One of her younger sisters was often sick during the night, vomiting on the others in the bottom bunk. O’Neill would dutifully march into her parents’ bedroom to announce that her youngest sister had been sick again. Often her mother would tell her to simply clean it up. A middling student, O’Neill did not work very hard at her academics during high school. However, given her parents’ commitment to practical professions, along with a strong desire to leave Fort Wayne, she decided upon nursing school. She had no intention of becoming a secretary, and technology did not interest her. When she graduated from high school in 1965, she thought, “Well, I can clean up after my sister, I can be a nurse.” So she chose nursing school.
O’Neill enrolled in a three-year program at Holy Cross School of Nursing in South Bend, Indiana, which at the time was known as a service school. Students worked in hospitals in exchange for their education. While they still paid a tuition, it was much lower than it would have been otherwise, and it provided specialty training that sent students to institutions in other cities. Consequently, she spent time in both Louisville, Kentucky, at the Our Lady of Peace mental hospital, and Indianapolis, at the Riley Memorial Children’s Hospital, where she trained in pediatrics.
One of Sue’s good
friends at school, Judy Kuchar, came from a conservative military family. Her father had been in active service, and her brother was enrolled in a military academy. Kuchar planned on following the family tradition and would eventually volunteer for the Army after completing nursing school. Despite this connection, serving in the military was, Sue says, the furthest thing from her mind. She was spending her time singing in South Bend, Indiana, coffeehouses, doing community theater, and working on the 1968 presidential campaign to elect Eugene McCarthy, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.
When Kuchar decided to enlist, she made plans to travel to Chicago to sign up for the Army Nurse Corps. Tempted by the idea of a visit to a big city, O’Neill decided to go along for the ride but had no plans to enlist. She soon found herself in a room full of enthusiastic recruiters. According to O’Neill, the recruiters weren’t exactly picky. She jokes that they were passing a mirror under her nose to make sure she was alive. That was the extent of the examination they gave her.
The recruiter turned to O’Neill and said, “Well, what about you?”
O’Neill’s response was rather blunt. “You’ve got the wrong person,” she told him.
But the recruiter went on, appealing to her one vulnerability—her wish for financial independence. He explained that if she committed herself to joining the Army Nurse Corps, the military would give her a monthly stipend in her last year of nursing school. This tapped into her—as she terms it—Catholic guilt. She felt she owed her parents for her expensive education. She quickly figured out that she would be able to pay her parents back for at least one year of tuition. Further, as some recruiters did at the time, he tempted her with visions of international travel. “You could go to Japan; you could go to Germany. We have all these places you can go, including Hawaii,” he told her.
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