Gary Cranor and David Cranor

David Cranor and his father Gary Cranor introduce themselves.

David suggests they begin with Gary’s time in Vietnam. He asks when Gary first heard about it. Gary says 1965.

At that point, they were moving in select forces to train the South Vietnamese to take care of themselves. He was 25 years old. Gary never thought he’d be involved, because he was in college.

David asks when it became clear that Gary would become involved. Gary says 1964, and realizes he got his dates confused. He first heard about it in 1962, and in ’64 he realized he’d probably go, even though he was in college and had a wife and two kids.

External reasons for Gary going: First, his father never went to World War II, and beat himself up about it his whole life, and was ribbed by his family about it.

Second, Gary didn’t believe the rhetoric he was hearing about it, so he wanted to go see for himself what it was all about. David asks whether it was like an adventure.** Gary says it was more curiosity than adventure.

David clarifies that Gary volunteered, and Gary says he fought to be there. He was in the ROTC, so he could go directly to the Army as an officer. Previously, he’d used the ROTC to stay out of the war, when he entered college in ’58. He finished college in ’65, and took a commission in the military.

After he got his commission, he had to go to Virginia to get his commission. He’d been an engineer, so he became a combat engineer. He didn’t have much say in it.

From Fort Belmore, he went to Fort Polk, LA, where he had more say in what he’d get to do, limiting his assignments to the South. David asks what G did in Ft. Polk; he was in charge of the firing ranges, teaching people to shoot their weapons and so on, while he was waiting to go to Vietnam. They wouldn’t take officers until they had a year of experience under their belts.

Then he went to Vietnam. He sent his wife up to Chicago so she could be close to her family, found a place for the family in Zion, IL, and then he shipped out to Vietnam from Zion. David asks how the war was going at that time, and G says they were “ramping up” in ’67. That was the time of the “first big go-around in Tet.”

David asks how Gary felt about the war at that point. Gary says you can’t be scared. You have to believe “nothing’s going to happen to me.”** His job was to help build a highway to Hanoi, as they had no roads, so his group was doing some good, but it wasn’t easy; they were being “messed with.”

G had a survey crew and an EOD (explosive demolition) team. Every morning they’d go out into the road and dig up a bunch of #10 cans in order to find a “bouncing Betty” grenade, because they’d plant decoys. They’d spend 2 hours every morning with bayonets trying to locate the grenades.

D asks what G’s thoughts were about the war before he got into it. G says he had doubts about what the US was there to accomplish, and doubts about why, when he was fired on, he had to call headquarters to see whether he could fire back. Then he found out that the villages they “were fooling with” were harboring “friendlies.” But at night they let the “non-friendlies” come in and plant the bouncing Betties.

It was explained to G by some higher-ups that they were fighting a defensive, not an offensive war. “They didn’t want to do Japan all over again,” where they’d destroy it and then have to rebuild the entire infrastructure. They thought if they fought a defensive war, they could walk away at the end of a few years, and that made sense to G.

D asks whether G was in favor of the war, and G says he was neutral. He wasn’t sure he believed the anti-Communist talk.

D asks G’s first memory, walking off the plane in Vietnam. G says it was just like getting off any other plane, but on the bus to the compound, he thought everyone was wearing black pajamas, and he was very nervous because he had no weapon.

D asks about the flight. G says he flew from Chicago to San Francisco, where they “mustered up,” then flew to Guam, and then to Vietnam. The entry was like a 90 degree drop, because they were getting shot at.*

D asks what else G remembers about acclimating to Vietnam. G says it looked similar to what they’d built to simulate Vietnam in training in the US. One “big lesson” that they tried to teach everyone when they came back was that they didn’t really know each other. He didn’t know his fellow soldiers, because he hadn’t trained with them. He points out that with all the movements in Iraq and the Gulf War, they listened to the Vietnam vets and sent the groups together.

D asks what G remembers of his original introduction to the country. G says he was counting down the days. He describes his calendar with the naked woman on it.

D asks how the war changed him. G says he has to think about that. D asks if G can recall times he was afraid or happy, and times when he felt he had accomplished something. G says they exceeded their goals.

He found out during Tet that an enemy battalion surrounded his company, but then realized that they had napalm all around the outside of their company. They ran a heard of elephants through their company, and they burned all of the elephants up, along with a bunch of the soldiers.* They knew if they tried to run a battalion through, they’d suffer damages.

D asks G to characterize what napalm is, exactly, and he explains. G says he wasn’t concerned for his life, but he did realize what it was like to be thirsty. They’d consumed all of their drinking water. One cup a day, half a cup of water a day, and it was hot. They got so thirsty that they put together a convoy to get out of the camp to fetch fresh drinking water. So they loaded up 3 Jeeps and a 50 Caliber, and they got to Camron Bay and back safely.

D asks when G was most afraid. G says his first three days. His company was bombed every night. D asks whether it was the most dangerous or if he was just new to it. G says because he was new to it. After his third day, he realized he had to decide nothing was going to happen to him.*

D asks what else G did besides build roads. G says the worst part of his job was negotiating with each village. He’d have to go meet with a village chief and tell him what they were planning on doing: building roads by tearing down villages. They’d negotiate sacks of cements and sheets of sheet metal and 2x4s with each one, and then at the end of it, you’d have to eat dinner with the village chief, and G hated that food, but he didn’t want to offend the village chief and his wife. He ate seconds.

D asks what an average day in Vietnam would have been life. G says he’d work on the road with the EOD team, acting like a regular soldier so he wouldn’t stand out as a leader, so he wouldn’t be singled out and shot. Then they’d eat breakfast at 6 am, and then he’d have meetings or conversations with Special Forces—who didn’t provide much protection but definitely provided entertainment, and with whom his company traded for whiskey and meat and so on.

Then they’d have lunch, and go back out and work on the road. They spent a lot of time looking for gravel. They didn’t have any gravel in Vietnam, but they would look for it, going out to the mountains and doing soil samples to find a base material. They ended up barging in gravel from Korea and hauling it in from Camron Bay. Most of it was shale, and he doesn’t understand why, because to his knowledge no one was drilling for oil in Vietnam. But he still suspects the war was about oil, in part.

D asks where they ate lunch, and G says they set up a tent 20 miles up the road. 10 miles up was a construction company with a rock crusher. They mined rock, and brought it to the rock crusher to make gravel for asphalt.

One side product of Vietnam was charcoal manufacturing. They cut a 55-gallon drum in half and made hooch. His officer’s hooch was a ConEx container that he set in a shallow part of the ground and covered it with dirt and stuff like a cave, with dirt on three sides and a top, with a door and a window. There were other hideouts around built of other materials, in a circle. So they’d take a 55-gallon drum and grill meat on it every night.

Daytime was working. G tells a surveying story. There was one friendly village that negotiated not to be torn down, so they had to detour around it. So they’re surveying around it, when lo and behold they run into three CBs (Navy guys). They’d built a 175-foot bridge out of concrete. They’d been there three years building a bridge, waiting for them to get there with their road. They hadn’t had a clue what they’d do when they got to the river; they thought they’d run a cover pipe. But they’d built a 175-foot concrete bridge.

D asks whether G worked the whole time on that one road. G says yes, they built 12 miles of road the size of an interstate highway. D asks whether G had any chance to travel, and G says they had an opportunity for R&R, but he didn’t want to have to see his wife and then go back to war.

He went in the doctor’s office one day to see him about rashes on his hands, and mentioned he also had a knot on his chest that itched. The doctor said, “Oh my God, you got cancer,” and shipped him away. 2 days later, G was on a plane to Japan. It turned out it was benign, probably a knot of fat that grew around an infection. But while he was in Japan he got to ride the bullet train, to visit Hiroshima.

It was flattened then, but in the process of becoming a major metropolitan area. There was a kid there who’d gotten locked in (?) who’d called in an air strike on his own position because he couldn’t take it anymore. He had to have the bullet holes in his chest scraped out every day, which was excruciatingly painful. So G and his friends brought the kid to the officers’ club. G brings up Nurse Ramirez, who used to wear red underwear under her uniform and then “thump” any patient who got an erection.

It was on Nurse Ramirez’s watch that they took this guy Lewis to the NCO club and got him drunk and had a good time. The doctors came in and didn’t see any patients, and so Ramirez got in trouble.

The other bad thing was watching television, which they couldn’t understand because it was all in Japanese, so they watched baseball. He also remembers a John Wayne movie. G imitates the Japanese voiceover for John Wayne.

D asks whether it was common for people to go to Hawaii. G says yes, but they also used to go to another place. D asks whether, outside G’s time in Tokyo, he took any other R&R time.

G says his doctor said he could go home if he wanted to, but his tour wouldn’t count, because he wasn’t there long enough. But G opted to go back to Vietnam and finish his three months.

D asks how much in contact G was with D’s mother, G’s wife. G says they wrote letters every day and sometimes taped messages on a cassette recorder every three or four days. They only spoke on the phone once, when G found out he didn’t have cancer. “And she was madder’n hell about that.”* He didn’t have any opportunity to talk to her any other place. “She was just dumbstruck,” because he’d always said he wouldn’t call. “Just one of the weird ones, I guess.”*

D asks about G visiting Hawaii, and he talks about it for a moment.

D asks about G’s friends. G says he made good friends, and only lost one. D asks what lessons G takes from that. G says the treatment he got when he got home, is you try to teach people to love the warrior even though you hate the war.** He also realized that his main talent was dealing with people, not things, unlike most engineers.

He learned it at Fort Polk. The stockade was next to the range office, and he was shorthanded, so he went to the colonel and asked for the guys who were hanging out at the stockade. The colonel wouldn’t let him, because those guys were there because they were AWOL. G said he wouldn’t let them run, because he’d tell them he’d “shoot their ass.” He found out then that most of those guys were there because they “couldn’t handle authority,” so he told them they were in charge, and to call him if they needed something, but that they were in charge. They took charge, and were glad for the authority. When he went to Vietnam he did the same thing, took guys out of the stockade and gave them responsibility and told them he’d shoot them if they left. “And it worked, every time.

D asks what areas G went to while he was there. G says he came into Camron Bay, and then was assigned the old capitol. Then he worked 15-20 miles north of there on highway. He’d go to Qinyan to get his hair cut because he didn’t trust the other guys. Vietnamese cut hair with a straight razor, and he didn’t like the idea of getting his throat cut during a hairdo.

Side story: G used to pick on a priest in Texas because he was Vietnamese. G put two and two together and brought up these kids he used to see begging on the streets of Quinyan, whom he’d give little gifts. G realized this priest was about 10 years old during that time, and G realized he was actually one of those kids on the street. Qinan is as far north as G got.

D asks about the Special Forces G listened to on the radio and what kind of crazy things they were doing. G says they were killing people, and that they all had nicknames. It was entertaining to listen to them give updates about their positions, and use their names. You could hear them shooting, and then you’d hear them ask for someone to come pick up the corpses. They used piano wire to pop off the heads of these men, and then hang them upside-down in the villages to warn the rest.

If they had a big enough crew, they’d call in “Spooky,” the helicopters that didn’t make noise, and they’d pour down tracer bullets. “Looked like somebody pissing out of a big old plane.” “That was visual entertainment.” They dragged all the dead out of the jungle and hung them on fences in the villages. When the body counts came up, you could verify them.

D asks what G remembers about leaving Vietnam. G remembers having a few friends who had three more days, so he stayed three days with them so they could leave together. Al Coltrane was one, and Wayne Jones was another.

When they got on the plane, they went 90 degrees straight up because they were getting shot at. The hostesses had on miniskirts, and they handed out Playboy magazines, and some of them had snuck on some Jack Daniels. D asks whether G felt he’d accomplished anything, and G says yes. The road’s still there. People have been back.

They use the compound G helped build as a training facility. They won’t let you in. But they did feel they’d accomplished something, and brought back advice for what never to do again.*

D asks whether G feels the war ended badly, and G says yes, “because the politicians ended it, and we didn’t.” It was “a bloodbath,” but when G left in ’68, it was 7 years before it would be over, but even so the military wasn’t ready for it to be shut down. They would have needed 3 more years.

G never wants to go back. It was a “nightmare.” D asks how the war changed G. G says he realized he didn’t want to be an engineer, he wanted to manage people. So that meant a career change. And he’d imagined being in the military forever, but a few officers were unkind to his wife. “You can’t get to be a general without politics being involved,” and he didn’t want to “play their game.”