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Vietnam War veteran Bill Letcher, 56, is dying. The voice from his cancer-riddled throat comes gravelly and rich; his laugh is guttural, knowing. His grandson is home today, so Blues Clues songs filter into the tidy living room from the bedroom. Bill wears a Vietnam hat bearing silhouette figures of choppers, palms, a crouching man cradling a gun. There are two pins on it. He points to them in turn.
I’m proud of this. That’s a combat CIB, a combat infantry badge. The only time you get this is when you’re in combat. And I’m proud of this.
This is my unit, 4th Infantry Division.
I got drafted in November ’67. I was 18. They actually said there was a lottery. I don’t know about the lottery part. I just know if you was classified as 1A you was going.
They would send you a letter in the mail. I think I got mine around June, July — it might even have been August.
It would say, “Greetings, you are now being inducted into the armed services.” That was it. It would tell you what date for you to be down to take your physical.
I had to be downtown at the Federal Building there at 6 o’clock in the morning. I caught the bus and went down. You didn’t take nothin’ but the clothes you were wearing. November 21, 1967.
Was your wife crying?
Uh-huh.
Were you crying?
Not really, because I actually didn’t think I’d be inducted, because my wife was seven months pregnant. My wife had already lost a baby the year before that, our first baby. So I thought I was coming back home. And I told my wife what I wanted for dinner that evening.
I thought I was gonna get a deferment (but) I didn’t really feel that bad because most of the guys I was down there with I knew.
There was a lot of us, if we had the money, we woulda went to Canada, like a lot of them did.
I don’t know, though, because my daddy was in World War II. (He) was the type of person that he believed that you should serve your country.
I didn’t know nobody that went to Canada. Most of them I know, we went to Nam. We didn’t have a choice. Oh, yes we did, we had a choice — it was either be drafted or go to jail.
‘How many did I kill?’
They gave us a physical. Once you pass the physical, they swore you in. They fed you lunch. Then they fed you dinner. Then they put you on the buses to whatever fort you was going to. I was on the bus going to Fort Benning, Ga. It took us about eight or nine hours.
I went to Vietnam May 6. I was over there for a year, and then I extended a year. Because I had six other brothers, and five of them could be drafted too, and so as long as I was over there I kept them from having to come over there. They still came into the service, but none of them ever wound up in Vietnam.
I was in infantry, and that’s front line. I was up in the Central Highlands. My company was Company B, 1st of 12th Battalion. In my company, about 135, I would say, friends that was lost. Once you was there, everybody became your friend. In my company, probably around a hundred-some. Not all at one time, no. When we got in a firefight, and we lost 10 or 15, we’d go back to base camp and get 15 more.
I been in firefights and lost more than that. You know the guys, but once they’re dead and you put their body on the chopper to send it back to base camp, then at base camp they transfer it to Cam Ranh Bay — and Cam Ranh Bay was the base where they shipped all the bodies off — it hurts when you lose ’em because you all been together so long, and you become like family. But then you know you gotta go to base camp and get replacements and replace them, and that’s what you do.
If it had been me, it made no difference to me. You got to the point, after a while life and death really didn’t mean nothing. It was all right if you was alive, it was all right if you was dead.
How many did I kill? I couldn’t rightly tell you, because most of the time you didn’t have time to count them; you just kill them. But I can say for sure — the ones I know I killed for sure — I would say about 12 or 13. But that meant that I was right there and I seen myself shoot them. But if we was in a firefight or something, you never knew how many you killed.
Well, after a while you get to the point it’s like a job, to where you look forward to getting up in the morning and going out and kill the enemy. Became like an everyday job. And then you don’t really have no feelings. Because it’s either kill or be killed. You don’t wanna do it, but then you know if you don’t do it, they gonna kill you.
I knew guys even killed theyselves. Blew their own brains out. But I got to the point to where if I made it back, it was all right; if I didn’t, it was all right. You get in that type of mood after a while. And then you just deal with, you just go with it, day by day, that’s it.
But we had guys that, I don’t know if you’d call them conscientious objectors, but they just didn’t believe in carrying guns. We had medics that would ride right out in combat, in the thick of things, right there with us, that did not carry guns. They didn’t believe in killing.
I didn’t have no choice to become no medic, because when you got drafted you don’t have a choice. They gonna stick you where they want to put you. So I was in infantry, front line. That’s where they needed me, that’s where they put me.
Me being brought up in church — I was raised Baptist, which I still am, Baptist — well, there was one verse that I would say every day, three times a day. It’s the 23rd Psalm. Do you know what the 23rd Psalm is? It goes like this: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want … Thou preparest a table before me in the middle of my enemies.” Now, that verse brought me through Vietnam.
‘They threw us back’
When I came back May 6 of 1969, they were demonstrating on Fountain Square against the Vietnam War. I stepped out of the taxicab on Fountain Square, waiting for my brother to come down and pick me up. And a guy walked up to me and spit on my uniform and called me a rapist and a baby killer.
How did you react?
Guilty. See, ’cause all my life I’d been brought up that thou shall not kill. But over there, I killed. And I always thought that that was wrong. So when I came back I felt guilty and everything else.
I guess it made me angry but more disappointed. Because we didn’t ask to go there. We were sent.
I went home, took that uniform off and never did put it back on again.
For the first five years when I come back, I was in and out of (Veterans Administration) mental wards. Seeing a psychiatrist because you felt the guilt. A lot of us felt guilty when we come back.
I guess what really messed us up, instead of them trying to rehabilitate us back into society, they just threw us back into society, not realizing that we wasn’t the same as we was when we left, and a lot of us couldn’t go with it.
I met this one psychiatrist, he more or less explained to me what my problem was, that I had post-traumatic stress syndrome. And once he started working with me on that, everything seemed to come together.
A lot of us had it hard back then, but a lot of us came out of it.
I’m 100 percent disabled from VA and plus I’m dying of cancer — throat, lungs and ain’t no telling where else. I know it’s not getting no better. Which I’ve already more or less resigned myself to that, that it’s gonna come to an end soon, so I can’t complain. But hey, no big thing. We all gotta do it one day, babe.
And my life ain’t been bad. This is my third wife, and this is the longest I’ve ever been married. We’ve been married 17 years. And I’m in school right now. I go to UC. Hopefully this summer I’ll have my bachelor’s in information systems. Now what I want to do, even before I graduate, I want to open up my own computer store. I already got a business plan and everything. Bill’s Outlet.
Whatever time I got left, I’m gonna try to accomplish my goals that I want to accomplish.
What if your grandson wants go into the military?
I would tell him that’s his decision. See, that’s one thing I wouldn’t do, I wouldn’t make no decisions for none of them. They have to make their own decision. I know some people go into the military and like the military. Then you got some that go in there and don’t like the military. But that’s with anything in life.
Thank you so much.
It ain’t no problem. One of the things (the doctor said) that would help me, if I did talk about it. Once I started talking about it, I felt better. ©
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2004.