EVAC: Experiencing Veterans & Artists Collaboration

Veteran: Tim, Air Force, Vietnam. "We got a call from the control tower saying that an American plane from the nearby base had gone down not too far from us. We got out to the crash site, and the only thing you could see was the tail section, it actually went straight into the ground like a log." 

Veteran: Bob, Army, Vietnam.  "They would hide in the tunnels, and they had trap doors leading off them. They had rooms as big as our cafeteria so they could hide a whole company of soldiers underground. It’s a swamp, it’s not like you can dig anything hard out of the ground because if you dig more than a couple of feet in Vietnam you’re going to hit water.

I was assigned to an engineering company. I went as a truck driver and when I hit a land line and blew my truck up I volunteered to work in demolitions. I had never worked in demolitions before. Well that and I didn’t want to spend time on base because of some problems I had, so that’s how I got to be in the tunnels. I got to be in the tunnels to actually blow them up."

Veteran:  Lewis, Marine, WWII. “I remember going into the jungle to find bananas. The plane I was assigned to work on got shot down, so I had a lot of free time on my hands to explore.  Lots of the guys would go off into the jungle looking, it wasn’t uncommon.  I came across an area marked with red and blue wires sticking up from the ground, all over the place, and I walked straight through it.  I found out later it was an active mine field, some of the mines had been removed, but not all of them. I was lucky I didn’t get blown up.  And I never did find any bananas.”

Veteran: Bill, Marine, WWII.  "Back in those days they didn’t have all the restrictions you got now. We had to pass a swimming test that I never did, and we had to pass a rifle test that I never did. I was a good typist and stuff, but I wasn’t a very damn good rifleman.

When I went in you did what you were told. You didn’t have any say so over anything. I really thought I was being shipped out ‘cause I told my mother “I’m going to Korea or somewhere.” I didn’t know where the hell I was going, then I didn’t go anywhere - and I was right there in the 3rd Battalion, right across from the drive-in theatre, so I went to a movie every night."

Veteran: Justin, Marine, Iraq /Afghanistan.  ‘“I absolutely hated you when I came here. I was a Sergeant, I was told everything bad about you, the MASS (Marine Air Support Squadron) Sergeant didn’t like you,’” and he told me that my command hated me, and he was like, ‘but I respect you.’ That meant a lot to me because I basically changed his heart and mind about me, once he got to see who the real Justin was, or who the real Corporal Anthony was, in a sense like I just have pride and I care about the people around me so, yeah, I will buck the system if it is the benefit of those around me. And he respected me for that. My last year, in a sense was actually pretty good, but I had to take two years of fighting tooth and nail basically, with command, until I felt that I wore them out;  little did they know that I was worn out too.”

Veteran: Terry, Air Force, Iraq/Afghanistan. “The digital computers were the worst stations, at that point there were only three in the world that existed, and two were at the CIA and one was at SAC, Strategic Air Command, a big player, and back in those days they had a huge budget. We had one station that was so large it had 200 hundred people, so you didn’t get to look at the computer for long.  We had one copy that was the old style roll of satellite imagery and we had light tables. We’d lay them on there and you’d look with the optics and microscope. The film was on the satellite itself and they would take it and literally drop it off the satellite down to Earth. A parachute would come out and the team out in Hawaii would go and capture that film and bring it back and ship it off to D.C.,  process the imagery and make copies and send it all around the world so analysts could do their exploitation.” 

Veteran: Dan, Marine, 1983-1994.  “There's several things I learned from my time in the Corps. First one is that teamwork works, as long as everybody's committed to doing what they're doing. I would say that my service gave me a lot of valuable life lessons I needed to learn and, fortunately, I learned them without getting killed. But, I think the main thing the service taught me that I still use to this day and that I impart to my own kids and anybody that'll listen is, do your research and plan if you want to do something, don't just say, "Hell, I'm gonna climb Mount Everest." Everybody says that, but doing it is different. You gotta go climb smaller mountains first, you gotta get your equipment together, you gotta know what you're doing, you gotta talk to people who have done it before. You know, I call it the seven P's - Prior Proper Planning Prevents Pitifully Piss Poor Performance. But, that's kind of the main thing, and I have stories to tell my kids and my grandkids, you know? There are some stories I'll never tell them, just 'cause there's only three people that need to know about them - and that's the enemy, me, and my God.”

Veteran: Christy, Army, 1985-2007.  "And to this day it is still a man's Army. Even when I progressed through the ranks and became a Sergeant Major - the highest enlisted rank - you still felt the differences between men and women. You always felt you had to test yourself better than a man. Physical training was one way that I always proved myself. Not that I wanted to be equal, and I'm not saying I wanted to be a Navy SEAL. That's something that never appealed to me. But it got rid of some of those people with the idea that "women shouldn't be in the service," or "women aren't as good as men." I was always dealing with that constantly - you know, like the old days when guys would call women "Sweetie" and "Honey." Sometimes you had to have a thick skin, and sometimes you had to put them in their place."

Gold Star Parent: Cathleen MacFarlane  “I was at the computer, talking to a friend in Texas, trying to figure out why we couldn’t get him on the computer. Something’s up. We heard a knock, but I couldn’t see the front door from where I was. My husband said “Cath, you’d better come here.”

When they came in the door, my husband didn’t quite understand why the first guy came in. The second guy had the Chaplain’s Cross, and then he knew right away. This is not good because they’re sending the Chaplain.

I’ll never forget those words, “your son has been killed.””

Veteran: Lauren, Army, Vietnam.  "When I got back from Vietnam, I think when all of us got back, there was a certain hollowness in the return. Now maybe I should say I came back knowing I was going to be discharged, others came back knowing they were going to another duty station, and going to that duty station provided them with a support network again. I expected a welcome. I thought that's what it was all about. When our plane landed there was a gaggle of women on the other side of the chain link fence, and I thought wow this is great, a welcome. Well it was welcome in terms of jeers, accusations of baby killer, of spitting. Being gone one month short of four years, I hadn't had any knowledge of the animis that existed against Vietnam, U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and directed at the Vietnam veterans."

Veteran: Bill, Army, Vietnam.  "There was this very small cane that a few of them carried. The thing was probably between a foot and eighteen inches long and had a little dragon's head on it. It was made of bamboo, carved very nicely and stained. A real pretty little thing. It was what they called a short timer's stick. You started carrying it around when you had less than six months to go on your tour, less time than you'd already put in. It was kind of a, you know, a badge of honor when you carried that thing around."

Veteran: Robert Croom, Army, Vietnam. "My first MOS was wire work. The reason being I had worked for Ohio Bell. I listened to Morse code and typed it. Then we had to climb poles. It was a lot better than boot camp."

Veteran:  Mitch, Army, Vietnam. “I had one of the guys go over and take a sample - scoop up all the maggots he could find. He brought the maggots back and I put them on my arms and legs. And they started eating dead tissue, which stopped the bleeding.  That lasted until the evacuation helicopters came and got us - everybody that was wounded. They got put in the chopper and the medic looked at me and seen the maggots and thought I was already dead.”

Veteran: Edgardo, Army, Vietnam.  “The war was really scaling up and so I can't tell you how many letters of condolences I had to write because I was the letter writer. You know, "Your son was blah, blah, blah. Dear Mrs." The Colonel would sign off on them. But that was my job, to write them.

I had to, like, sometimes, make up how they died because I didn't know it all at the time. I had to talk to a lot of guys to tell me exactly what went on. You had to, like, note-take everything that happened. That went on in battle and this is what happened. These guys were involved. Just in case in somebody needed a bronze star, you had to write all that stuff. So, I was, like, I was the scribe. I was the narrator for all that stuff.”

Veteran: James, Army, Desert Storm.  "We took a team and we snuck across the border and got within a reasonable distance. He had this, I don’t even know what it was, it looked like something out of a Star Wars movie, he sets this thing up. I’m looking with my night vision goggles and as I’m looking at a little building over there you could see the guns sticking up. And then I see this red bright light and I’m thinking “what is that?” and it’s a guy smoking a cigarette."

Veteran:  Jim Roberts, Army, Vietnam.  "The real advantage with being Sergeant is that you had a private little room at the end of the barracks. I remember as a present for my mother, I thought it would be nice to have an oil painting done of myself, and I had it in my room. Well one night the guys came in, and it was gone, I was off having a Coke or something. They got to my painting and hung it up in a tree, right along the row of toilets."

Veteran: Sherri, Air Force, 1990’s.  "Temporary Duty, it's kind of like you get to travel because it's almost like photojournalism. Everybody wanted to go to Thailand, you know what I mean? They wanted to see the world. So it was kind of like if you fight us, if you argue with us, or if you call us out on what we're doing, then you won't go. They pretty much said you won't go anywhere. So I got stuck in the dungeon, me and a couple of the other female sergeants that didn't play by their rules. The dungeon was the archive room where we archived all the photos and slides. Anybody who instead played their game got to travel."

Veteran: Mike, Navy, 1990’s.  "After months and months at sea and finally coming home, it’s bigger than life to see land coming in and see the base.  I had no idea that all the family and stuff would be there—I mean, I guess I did — but I didn’t think about the enormity of how that event would be. All hands are on deck at parade rest and we were cruising into port. It was really neat seeing land and seeing people back at home. To see the flags waving and the band playing was a good experience, a really good experience."

Veteran: Ken, Marine, Korea. "I was on the switch board. We had these switchboards every ten miles, they had to. I had it fixed up when that telegram came into headquarters I was to get a quick phone call. The next day I went up to the headquarters to pick up the telegram and while I was there the headquarters was calling back for me to come up because I had a telegram. The telegram said “you’re a father.” So I passed out the cigars I’d been collecting to some of the guys that I was in with. I think I sent one to the big cheese back in communication headquarters. And of course George got one, George Burns, not George Burns and Gracie, but George Burns the guy from Michigan, he was the cook."

Veteran: Joe, Army, WWII.  "My job was to get up in the morning, have breakfast, and go to the motor pool, and stay there until about 6 o’clock and go to sleep. That was my basic training. I did that for a period of time. From England we went to Belgium. We were going to build an airfield in a little town. We took over a tremendous cabbage patch. There was cabbage as far as the eye could see. Our job was to strip that and make runways out of it."

Veteran: James, Army, Iraq/Afghanistan.  “At that point they were starting to concentrate their fire on the wall, right where we were at, and they were hitting it with RPGs. You’d be sitting there and all of a sudden cinder blocks would fly everywhere. We’ve got small arms fire going out and small arms fire coming in, I’m on the radio trying to get some soldiers up here to defend this perimeter. And nobody was coming. People were taking cover because there was so much fire coming in. These guys had launched this Hellfire on this one area. So for the first five or ten minutes we’re the only ones there and we’re pushing them back. Once again we’re at the apex.”

Veteran:  Thomas, Marine, Vietnam.  "The other two guys had been shot as well, and one guy over here he ain’t there anymore, I don’t know where he went. I never saw him again. I pushed myself off and landed on my face and the other two guys had just rolled off or fallen off - whatever - they were on the ground. One had crawled around to the front and tried to crawl underneath the track. The other one was just laying there. I don’t even know what their names were, just the other two new guys."