John Sroufe and Diane DiSanto

[00:05] JOHN SROUFE: Hi, my name is John Sroufe S r o u f e. My age. I'm 74 and ten months, almost 75. Today's date is. When is it?

[00:23] DIANE DISANTO: October 24.

[00:25] JOHN SROUFE: September 24, 2023. And we are in Anchorage, Alaska. And my partner today is my wife, Diane DiSanto

[00:38] DIANE DISANTO: And I'm Diane DiSanto and I'm 74. And today's September 24, 2023. And I'm in Anchorage, and I am spouse of John. And I'm going to talk to John because we've been married since 1988, and we know each other since 1983. And there's a lot of reasons why I thought it would be good for John to talk about his Air Force service. And I was interested also because when I worked in Washington, DC, I worked on the veterans Senate committee and just really got to go to Walter Reed and really see what veterans and military go through. So. So, John, I want to ask you, because I remember when we were at events, the military kind of stand up like, and they'd have, like, the army song and, you know, and then the Air Force song would come on. I forgot what it is over there, you know, and you didn't want to stand up. And I was, like, so proud that, you know, John was in the air force for four years, and he just didn't want to do it. So tell me why.

[02:03] JOHN SROUFE: Well, it was Vietnam back in. I enlisted in 1968, and Vietnam was not a popular war in any. Any stretch of the imagination. It was unpopular, and the majority of my friends and people I associated with in school and high school did not serve. So it was. I was kind of feeling odd whenever that would come up. It was like, okay, I'm the only one here. All right. Yeah. I was not very proud of the time I served. It was, you know, fighting the Vietnamese, and I was in the air force. I did not actually participate in combat situations, but I was responsible for the deaths of a lot of people. And it was reconnaissance, photographic reconnaissance. And I just. I just. I know there was a lot of people who were killed as a result of the good work that I did.

[03:18] DIANE DISANTO: So I want to go back just a little bit before we get into what you did there and Agent Orange and all. So this was during the draft, and, you know, you could have got drafted, but. So tell me, like, how you winded up there.

[03:38] JOHN SROUFE: Well, there were three boys in our family. Parker was the oldest. Russell was the middle child, and I was the youngest. And I was closer to Russell, my middle brother. Parker was eight years older than me, and Russ was only three years older, so he and I kind of stayed in touch and were pretty close at that time. In 1968, I flunked out of college, and so did my brother Russ. And we got our draft notices immediately. And so Russ comes to me and he says, hey, I've got a great idea. Why don't you and I join together on the buddy system, and we can go through four years of air force time and stay together? And I said, well, first of all, you're asking me to enlist. I haven't decided to do that. And he said, well, okay, if you're not going to do it, then I've got a friend, Tom, who I know Tom. Tom will join with me. I said, well, let me think about it. So I went off.

[04:56] DIANE DISANTO: Did you think of going to Canada?

[04:58] JOHN SROUFE: Well, I went off. My great uncle Ward has a gold mine. Had a gold mine here. He died, and it was way out in the backcountry. And so I told Russ that I'm going to go up to the cabin and spend some time up there, and I'll make my decision and I'll come back and let you know. And so I went up there and stayed three weeks. Nobody to talk to. Completely isolated. I stayed three weeks, and I decided, well, I was. I was debating, do I go to Canada? Do I try to get a conscientious objector? Do I try to do. I was pretty healthy, but do I try to fake an illness and get out that way, or do I enlist? And I decided I would. I would enlist. I just did. I didn't have the wherewithal to pull off those other things. I don't think I could have done it, but losing my train of thought. Okay, so I come back and I tell Russ that, okay, let's you and I do it. And so we went down to the, what do they call that?

[06:15] DIANE DISANTO: Enlisting?

[06:16] JOHN SROUFE: Enlisting place. And we started. We started a series of tests. They test you when you go down there, physical test, mental test. And the whole thing took about three days of testing. And on about the second day, Russ would wait for me. On the first day, he was waiting, and we went. We walked home together. On the second day, I came out after finishing my time testing, and Russ wasn't there. So I walked on home, and he was home, and he says, I've got great news. And I said, what? He says, well, they rejected me. And I said, they rejected you? Why? Why did they reject you? He says, well, I don't know, but I think they think I'm crazy. And I said, why would they think that? And he said, well, I guess maybe I was trying to act crazy. I said, why would you do that? You talked me into this. This was your idea, and now you're saying you're not going at all? At all. And I'm. So he got me into it. And turns out Russ, my brother Russ, was schizophrenic. We didn't know it at the time, but he was schizophrenic. And within a year of that event of trying to enlist, he was in over his head with mental illness, and it was really bad. But I believed up until that, actually, beyond that, I believed that he faked it. And he did that knowing that I was still going to go. And I believed that he faked it. At the time. I don't think that anymore. That was what happened. That's how I enlisted.

[08:12] DIANE DISANTO: And then where did you wind up going for training before that?

[08:18] JOHN SROUFE: I'm just curious, can you talk a little bit about how you felt when you knew that your brother was going to be enlisting with you and then how it felt knowing that you were going to have to do this without him and on your own, what that was like? Yeah, it was, uh, it was very scary at that point. Uh, it shouldn't have been. I mean, if. If he hadn't. If my brother Russ hadn't initiated this whole idea, uh, and I then I may have gone ahead and enlisted myself and everything would have been okay. But the way I came into it, after he told me that he faked, as if they rejected him, I felt like, oh, damn, now I'm going to be all alone. And normally, that is what happens when you enlist. You're alone, you're on your own, and you're in basic training. And that was my feeling at the time. And I was also very, very angry with my brother. So I went ahead and enlisted and went down to basic training in Texas at Lachlan Air Force Base. I was there in November and part of December, and at the end of our training, at the end of basic training, you could go home and take, I think it was two weeks vacation, two weeks leave. I chose to go on to my next base, which was Denver, Colorado. And one of the reasons I did that is because I was so pissed off at my family for getting me into this situation. I didn't have good counsel from my mother and father. They were wrapped up in my brother's mental illness, and they were, they were not aware of what was going on with me at the time. So nobody was saying, hey, you know, have you thought this through. Maybe you don't need to do this. Maybe why don't you go back to school? I didn't do that.

[10:37] DIANE DISANTO: No. So they were like, there, there was so many of people your age, guys who were dying, and you think like, your parents would be like, oh, my God, we got to find some mother. We don't want you to go over there.

[10:49] JOHN SROUFE: You would think, and that was my thinking, that, why am I not getting any counsel from my dad? My dad was a veteran. I don't recall ever hearing him talk to me about it at all.

[11:03] DIANE DISANTO: So, yeah, okay, so then you were. Then you went to Colorado.

[11:09] JOHN SROUFE: I went to basic training. And then after that, I spent Christmas in Denver, Colorado, alone with a bunch of people I didn't know. And it was cold, cold, cold, just like here and snowy. And to be honest, when I got to Denver, to Lowry, Lowry Air force base, it was dark, cold. And they had us, because we were out of training, we were out of basic, and we hadn't started our next group of training. They had us doing all kinds of ridiculous things, what they tried to do in the military. And I came away every day getting a feeling that was sort of like, this is an extreme thing to think, but it was sort of like the Holocaust. We'd stand at attention at like 06:00 in the morning, out in the freezing cold and snowing in Denver. And the guy who was in charge of this group, who were waiting for our training, just seemed to enjoy harassing everybody. And so it was not a very popular time. Not a very.

[12:25] DIANE DISANTO: And you were like 1819 years old.

[12:28] JOHN SROUFE: I was 19. Yeah, yeah, I had, I, in fact, I turned 20 in basic training. So.

[12:40] DIANE DISANTO: And then what did you wind up then? Did you get a choice of what you would train for or they just.

[12:44] JOHN SROUFE: Told you, you do, you do get a choice. And they ignore that usually, but you do get a choice. And I think I, I put in, I wanted to be a firemande and I was in photography. I mean, that was what they trained me for. And I had never considered photography as anything I wanted to do. It was a very advanced photography class. We learned all the chemistry, we learned all the math and everything. And the job was we had aircraft jets that had five cameras built into the jet and different views from the cameras, and each camera had like a hundred foot roll of film in it. And they would fly out and take pictures of targets like trucks on the Ho Chi Minh trailhead, and encampments, and petroleum and oil deposits. And so anyway, the cameras took pictures of the targets. And then they would fly back to base, and they would bring the film over to us, and we would develop the film, and then we roll it out on a light table, 100 foot roll film. And we meet with the pilot, and we'd roll the film out, and the pilot would be looking at it, and it's in negative. It's in black and white negative. And you learn to. To read the film, the negative film, like you. Like you would if it was a positive. But we learned to look at the negative and really be able to, you could tell what was going on down there. And so then we identified what the target, the pilot would say, go take it across a little more. A little more. Roll it a little more. Okay, right there. See that? That's a truck on the Ho Chi Minh trail. And the idea was, we now we want to go out and bomb that truck. And where there's one truck, there's probably more trucks, and there's probably people. We're going to bomb those people and those trucks. So then we would put together photo images of the target, and we'd circle it and bring in another pilot who would fly a bomber and not. Not a photo plane, but the bomber.

[15:24] DIANE DISANTO: And we didn't say where this was.

[15:26] JOHN SROUFE: Thailand. I was stationed in Thailand, northeast corner of Thailand, for a year at Udorn air force, Royal Thai Air force base. And so we'd send out a bomber who would bomb the target. And all this takes place so that we could be on time. It all took place within a period of probably about four to five, 6 hours from receiving the film to sending the bomber out. So it's pretty, pretty responsive in that sense. Yeah.

[16:07] DIANE DISANTO: So you. So I know that you were diagnosed with multiple myeloma with cancer. And before that, when we were in Washington, DC, you got on the register for Agent Orange. And so can you talk about, like, that base and what they were spraying?

[16:24] JOHN SROUFE: Well, yeah, agent orange, it was a Yde herbicide, I believe they call it herbicide. It was a chemical that was developed to kill trees, plants, everything, anything that grows. And the reason and what they did was spray around the perimeter of our base. The reason they did that is because they wanted to keep the growth of the trees and bushes and grab down around the perimeter of the base, because that way we could see if anybody was trying to get in and sappers might be trying to get in and cause damage. So there was a time Agent Orange was declared presumptive illness, I believe it was called for everybody who was in Vietnam, and I know I was not in Vietnam. I was in Thailand. And they said, no, we never used Agent Orange in Thailand. We never did it. And come to find out they did, they lied. And so in order to, so in order to get compensation, potentials compensation, at that time I did not have a diagnosis of cancer. But the VA Veterans association said you need to document your time on Udoran air force base and describe how you would have been exposed. And the odds are most people in Thailand would not be exposed. You had to have been working and living near the perimeter because they would drive around the base with a truck and about a 300 gallon tank of Agent Orange and they would spray it with a hose. My unit was stationed within 25ft of the perimeter of the base. And so I was able to document that. I had aerial photos of our base and I used those photos to document it and they came back and said, yes, you would have been exposed. And then it comes out that, okay, everybody in Thailand, every base in Thailand that the US occupied during Vietnam war was exposed to Agent Orange.

[19:04] DIANE DISANTO: So 50 years ago you're exposed. And it comes out now because, you know, like with most people your age from that Vietnam generation, and I mean, most of them are dead, I mean from some kind of cancer. So. And so now you're at the stage where do you still have a lot of resentment towards the war? Cause I know you told me once that you, you winded up cleaning a bathroom instead of.

[19:36] JOHN SROUFE: Well, yeah, that's two questions there. What was the first question?

[19:44] DIANE DISANTO: Just do you can just talk about whatever you want?

[19:46] JOHN SROUFE: Well, okay. So I don't have a lot of anger about it anymore. I do have some, but not a lot. I mean, I don't dwell on it and I don't have a huge amount of PTSD, but it's just some. And going in advance, going ahead a little too much. But just once I, once I left Thailand, I got stationed in Springfield, Massachusetts. And that was our unit. We no longer were doing aerial reconnaissance with jets. We were now doing reconnaissance with satellites and U two and U two aircraft. And also the SR 71. Yeah, SR 71. And so when I got to my new base in Springfield, I worked and worked and did a good job and. But we were actually, I suppose I could say this. We were smoking a lot of drugs, marijuana and hash and using other drugs. And eventually somebody you could say squealed on us. But, you know, it wasn't bad, but they did. And so we, me and several other people were pulled off. We lost our security clearance temporarily and we were pulled off our jobs and put on other work. And they then moved to get those of us. They dropped the case because I don't know why they dropped the case. And so they decided, well, everybody who was involved in that case, we're going to ship them out. We don't want them here on our base anymore. They can't do their job. So I got sent then down to South Carolina, Sumter Air force Base in South Carolina. Once I got to South Carolina, I made a decision. I was not going to do this kind of work anymore. I was not going to be part of the machine that targets and bombs people the way we did. And so my squadron commander.

[22:33] DIANE DISANTO: So you decided you were protesting, and I was protesting at the same time because that's what we did and I never believed in. But meanwhile, I'm married to somebody who actually was experiencing, you know, what happens with. With war. Like, really, you felt like you contributed?

[22:54] JOHN SROUFE: So I felt. I felt like I could. I could do something else. And so I approached the commander, our colonel, and I said, I told him, I don't want to.

[23:12] DIANE DISANTO: You don't want to contribute to the war anymore.

[23:14] JOHN SROUFE: I don't want to be part of that anymore. And he said, well, that's a problem. What am I going to do with you? And I said, well, here's the deal. I know that you struggle to keep this building clean. You have. You have to pick people every week to do the KP job of cleaning the building, the floors and dusting and all that shit. And I said, I will do that for permanent until I'm discharged, until I leave. And he said, well, that. I don't know about that. And I said, no, seriously, this is good. And he said, oh, okay. Okay, we'll do it. And so from that point forward, until I got discharged, I was a full time janitor in our facility in the 363rd combat support group. But going back. Yeah, I did not. I was awarded a Air Force commendation medal because I did such a good job. Very few people get an Air Force accommodation medal, and I didn't want to. I felt like they were awarding me for killing so many people. And so I was trying to deal with that at the time.

[25:01] DIANE DISANTO: And so when you came back, because you hardly went home, even when you had leave, you wouldn't go home. You were, you know, angry at your parents and your brother. So then you get discharged and you actually came back to Alaska, right?

[25:15] JOHN SROUFE: I did. And I came back to Anchorage. My brother was almost unrecognizable. I couldn't. He was not the same person when I left. And I even thought then, well, he's faking it. He's faking it. He said. He fooled him. He said that he was faking it. But, I mean, I looked at him and, yeah, he was in schizophrenia. He was hallucinating. He was hearing things. I thought he was faking it. Even four years later, after I got out of the service, I believed that he was still faking it. It didn't take me long. Once I was out and I was exposed to my brother for long periods of time, it didn't take me long to realize that, no, he's not faking that. He is mentally ill. And apparently the doctor where we enlisted was able to recognize signs. At that point, nobody in my family recognized it, and it was a shock to everybody. So.

[26:34] DIANE DISANTO: So you came back here and to a. To a military town.

[26:39] JOHN SROUFE: Yeah.

[26:39] DIANE DISANTO: You know, these bases everywhere and military people. And. And was that when the war was winding down?

[26:46] JOHN SROUFE: Sort of. It was winding down. I didn't. I never really talked to a lot of people, even veterans, about my time in the service. And one of the reasons why is because I was. I enlisted in the air force, and so many of the veterans were probably army or marine. There were a lot of air force, but they. I think they were a minority of the draftee enlistees in the Vietnam war. Air Force was a minority. I felt like maybe I could have done more. It was a real dilemma. I could have done more. I felt like if I talked to people who served, that their experiences were probably more difficult than mine. And so I never really talked about it, much along with the fact that I was embarrassed about all the action I did.

[27:48] DIANE DISANTO: But you talked about, like, your friends who went to college and how there were so many of them even now, like, at your age, with that, they're. They make excuses for why. Oh, no, they couldn't go and fight because, you know, they had to go to college. And so they. They probably have that same degree of shame or embarrassment, but a different cause. They never even. They got out of it.

[28:14] JOHN SROUFE: I had one guy. We weren't really friends, but it was the epitome of that kind of behavior. We were talking in a group of guys, and we were talking about the Vietnam war, and this guy says, I support President Nixon. I support everything we're doing in Vietnam, and it's something that we need to do. And I said, oh, did you serve over there? And he said, no, no, I didn't serve. It was. This was what he said. It was very important for me to go to college. And so I stayed with college, and I thought, oh, okay, yeah, it was important for him to go to college. What about me? And of course, I made my own decisions. I made my decisions, but I never once thought that I needed to go to college and avoid this. It was not part of my thinking. And I thought, well, that is bullshit to say that you couldn't defend. You defend your country, which we weren't doing, but you couldn't defend your country because you had to go to college. Well, anyway, I never felt we were defending our country. We were all. We spent the entire time in a foreign country. Of course, people did that in world War Two. They were over in Europe, but I never felt we were defending our country at that point. It was all about communism and communism taking over Southeast Asia. It never seemed to be an issue for me.

[30:01] DIANE DISANTO: Well, do you have any other. I mean, I know through the years, we've been together a long time, and there's every once in a while. Tell me another story. And I know you wrote that you were writing a book and decided, you know, not to, but I think if. Is there anything else that you feel like, you know, you wanted this, um, to talk about that. That time and, I mean, regard, you know, the Agent orange and what you're going through now. I mean, it's with you every day.

[30:34] JOHN SROUFE: Yeah.

[30:34] DIANE DISANTO: So it doesn't go away. And I think that's the big difference.

[30:38] JOHN SROUFE: Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, the. The Agent orange thing that all came about. Of course, afterwards, you know, they didn't. They knew what was going on, but they didn't admit it. I didn't pay a lot of attention to Agent Orange right after I got out because I had no idea, no idea what they were doing with Agent Orange. I didn't know. So I pretty much ignored it until probably about ten years after I was separated. Another. Another story that I could tell is we would. The pilots would come back, and the film pilots would come back, and their planes were unarmed, and they were flying f four jets, and their job was to fly in and fly over the target area and take pictures of it. And who in the world wants to do that? Well, these guys seem to think it was fun. So that's what the pilots did. They had to do. It was. It's not joking, but they had to fly over. And the other planes were all loaded with armament, guns and bombs. And. And when they went in, they could fly over and drop their bombs and shoot their guns and. And fly away. Well, these guys, the film pilots, had to take their pictures. So this one group came back, they had AAA site anti aircraft. There was an anti aircraft site out there and that shot at them. And we lost a lot of planes as a result of anti aircraft site. So they took a picture of the, the anti aircraft site and brought back on the film. And I took the film in and developed it and I made a mistake somewhere and I ruined the film, the whole role. And so the pilot's waiting for me out in the, by the light table. I come out and I say, I got bad news. The film got destroyed. And he said, what? It got destroyed? How did it get destroyed? And I said, well, I made a mistake when I added chemicals to the, to the works. And he said, you made a mistake? You know what? Now, now I have to get back in my plane, fly back out there and take pictures of that again and I might get shot down and it's going to be your fault. I felt so bad about that. I was scared.

[33:36] DIANE DISANTO: Did he come back?

[33:37] JOHN SROUFE: Yeah. Good.

[33:42] DIANE DISANTO: Well, I know you don't like to hear this, but you never like when people say thank you for your service, but, you know, I, most of them.

[33:53] JOHN SROUFE: Don'T know anything about it. Why would they thank each other?

[33:56] DIANE DISANTO: It's just an automatic thing. And I got to go to Vietnam for work and for the missing in action. And there's still pilots out there, both sides, North Vietnamese, and there's just the sites and they're still looking for teeny little, whether it's teeth or whatever, and then seeing all the people, 3rd, 4th generation who were affected by Agent Orange and Vietnamese and they're doing nothing for that either. So how much time do we have?

[34:33] JOHN SROUFE: So five minutes?

[34:34] DIANE DISANTO: Yeah. Yeah.

[34:35] JOHN SROUFE: I want to say, talk about one thing. Yeah. I had a friend in my first year of college when I flunked out who was a good friend. And he, he, after I left school and came back to Anchorage and then enlisted, I lost track of my friend Greg. And turns out, Greg, on your dog tags you have your religion listed. And he was listed as a Buddhist. And because his roommate in college was a practicing buddhist and I was aware that they both were practicing Buddhists. And so later on, later he enlisted in the army and what became a pilot, a helicopter pilot. So about ten years after that here in Anchorage, I was reading the newspaper and there was a story about a woman who lived here in Alaska and her brother was a pilot and he was shot down and they never recovered his body. They did go back about 20 years later and they recovered one tooth that they were able to say was his tooth. And so they said, okay, he's dead. And up until that point, he was missing in action, and now they say he's dead based on one tooth. And. And the family was just outraged. They said, you cannot do that. That tooth could have been knocked out of his mouth, and he could be out there somewhere. And the family argued this. So, anyway, I read it, and they came back in the article. It said it was Greg Crandall. And I said, that's Greg Crandall. That's my friend. And they buried that tooth in a coffin, and that's all they had. It blew up, burned.

[36:53] DIANE DISANTO: I know this is really hard, but I just felt like it was pretty. It was important for you to get these words down, and so I appreciate you.

[37:04] JOHN SROUFE: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all so much for taking the time to do that. If it's okay, I just have one question before we wrap up. We do have a couple more minutes, and you all referenced this a little bit, but I'm wondering if you can talk about how the two of you met, because it seemed like, you know, your values really aligned during this, this time in your life. And I'm curious how you two found each other, if you're willing to talk about it. I became a land surveyor after I got out of the service, and I was a surveyor my entire working career. At 1.1 of the guys I worked with was teaching surveying at the Anchorage community College college. And he had to leave for an extended period, and he asked me to take over his class and teach his class, and it was introduction to land surveying. And I said, okay, I'll do that. And so I showed up at the community college, at the surveying department, and that's where Diane was the secretary in the surveying department office, because you got.

[38:25] DIANE DISANTO: To go to school for free at that time if you worked for the school. And I was going to a social worker, so. And so he was love at first sight. He walked in, and it's like, whoa. So I had my friend Jeannie check him out on, because she worked in human resources, find out if he's married, so I can. So he was divorced. So, yeah, yeah, that's how we met.

[38:53] JOHN SROUFE: And that would have been about 19, 83, 83 in maybe October, September, October. I didn't ask you. I didn't ask you out. You asked me out back in about three months later.

[39:09] DIANE DISANTO: Well, it took him forever. He's a little shy and loner, and I'm like, I'm extravert. He's introvert. So, you know. Yeah.

[39:18] JOHN SROUFE: It was three months, and finally she asked me out.

[39:22] DIANE DISANTO: So that's how.

[39:24] JOHN SROUFE: Thank you so much for sharing that. I appreciate it. All right, so we're gonna wrap up now. We're just gonna do 10 seconds of silence, and then I'll stop.