(light music) - [Narrator] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar, an arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West-Central Minnesota.

On the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits.

96.7 KRAM, online at 967kram.com.

(cassette clicking) (helicopters thumping) (dramatic orchestral music) - I'm Craig Tschetter.

I served in Vietnam from November 23rd, 1967 through July 27, 1969.

Following Vietnam, I was a Marine Corps drill instructor in San Diego, California training recruits until June of 1971.

When I was born in 1948, I was raised in a typical post World War II blue collar family.

We were relatively poor.

But the one thing that was so prominent in our home was the Christian faith that my family had.

And the way I was raised in that Mennonite faith background, it proved to be somewhat difficult for me as time went on.

Because the older I got, in middle school, high school, when you can't go to dances, and you can't go to movies, and even using a deck of regular playing cards was a sin.

I loved my parents and I don't really want to say I rebelled against my parents, I didn't.

I just wanted to be on my own and do something different.

So I saw the military as probably a way in which I could get away.

I knew that the recruiters were on the second story of our post office in my home town.

So unannounced one day I walked up there.

And the Army's door was closed and locked.

The Air Force's door had a sign that said out to lunch.

So there I stood.

And I looked down the hallway and there was a man in a white uniform with the door wide open, so I walked in.

And I said to this Navy recruiter, after I introduced myself, what would be the quickest way to get to Vietnam?

So he picked up the phone and he dialed a number and handed me the receiver and said, here, you're talkin' to the United States Marine Corps.

(rock music) Marine Corps boot camp was only eight weeks.

It was condensed.

All our training was condensed because they needed people to go to Vietnam.

I got there in November on the 23rd, one day after I turned 19.

I was then, according to the Pentagon, part of 464,000 troops in Vietnam.

I did not know that only 70,000 of that number were chasing the enemy every day.

Within a matter of hours, I would be assigned to the 3rd Battalion 5th Marines and they were members of that 70,000 club.

My squad leader's name was Corporal Clinger.

Corporal Clinger introduced me to the rest of the men in the platoon, or the squad, excuse me, which is 12 guys.

They seemed very cold to me because I'm new, I don't know anything.

But then Clinger sat me down on my cot and he started to brief me on things that I needed to know.

He said, Marine, you need to understand something and you need to understand it now.

You will get hit.

It's not a matter of if.

It's not a matter of when.

It's just gonna be a matter of how bad.

But you're gonna get hit.

So you need to know that.

And he walked out.

(suspenseful music) On the 27th of December, 1967, basically a month after I got there... Now I had been on patrols and been on ambushes.

But never once did we make any kind of contact.

That came on Operation Auburn.

And my first firefight was so fast, the adrenalin rush that I received out of that, I can't even begin to explain to you.

We were in a rice patty and we were down behind a dike, which is about three feet tall maybe.

And the machine gun rounds were literally pinging dirt off the top of the dike.

And we would lift up and fire our weapons into the treeline and I had no idea what I was firing at, none.

I just know that that whole experience, which didn't last very long, maybe 10 minutes at the most, was such a confused, high adrenalin type experience for me.

But the end result was the people that I was serving with, that I had to prove myself to, knew that I could do what I was brought there to do.

On January 30th, about a month later, which was the start of the Tet Offensive, which we didn't know, our company was sent out to a position that supposedly there was over 200 soldiers, enemy soldiers, on the end of a peninsula ready to rocket the Da Nang Air Base.

We pinched 'em and had 'em trapped on the end of that peninsula.

That night when we threw artillery on top of 'em, they came over top us.

We ended up killing 102 and captured 88 the next day.

There was 17 bodies piled up in front of the foxhole I was in along with two other people.

The very first person I killed in my life was that night.

And when day came, daylight came, and everything was settled down, I walked over to this young man and looked at his body.

And he was very young, very young.

We searched their pockets.

He had a sock filled with rice.

His pack had been blown apart.

For me, the first personal, what they identify as a personal kill, was a experience that is part of my ghosts of war.

It's a face I see, okay.

It's a face I see.

I was a rifleman when I went to Vietnam, meaning I did the same thing any old grunt did.

And I got tired of walkin' point.

Tired of it, I only walked point three times.

But I walked point enough to know that this was not the place to be.

I told my squad leader, I want to carry the radio.

'Cause nobody wanted to carry a radio.

It weighed 23 pounds.

It carried a lot of responsibility.

You were a target and I understood all that.

But I decided, I don't want to be on point anymore, so I'll carry the radio.

I moved up to the platoon commander's radio operator, and then eventually became a company commander's radio operator.

On February 29th, 1968, our company platoon, 2nd platoon, and I was Lieutenant Saal's radio operator.

Went on a routine patrol that day.

For some unknown reason at the time, my Lieutenant took off running up a hill and I took off after him.

It was just a bald hill.

Before we could catch the Lieutenant, there was this huge explosion and he had stepped on a Bouncing Betty.

It blew him apart and laid him up on a rock.

His legs were literally shredded.

And he's alive.

Doc Dixon gets up there and when we're all there, somebody else steps on another Bouncing Betty.

And that one comes out of the ground and just white smoke and lays there as a dud.

Then we started looking around and we could see these three metal prongs sticking up in various places.

And we realized we were in a minefield.

Before I could go to the frequencies to find the right medevac helicopter frequency I needed to get on, I just looked up in the sky and there was a CH-34 chopper flying by slowly.

And I said, we have an emergency medevac.

I'm in your vicinity.

I see you, I have you in my sight.

It's our O2, which is a Lieutenant.

I need you to come in.

And he said, I'm just a mail bird.

We have no guns.

We have nothing.

I said, turn that chopper around and put it on a heading of such and such.

And when you get close, I'll pop smoke.

He only wanted to know if it was secure, the LZ was secure, and so forth.

I lied.

I literally landed that chopper in what was an unknown minefield at that time.

I don't to this day know, none of us do, how we got him on that chopper without stepping on another mine and how that chopper took off and got out of there.

When we got back to the base camp later that day, Doc Dixon told the company commander that I don't think he's gonna make it.

30 some years later, I met Lieutenant Saal at a Battalion reunion.

He said, what happened?

I don't even know what happened that day.

And I told him what happened.

I couldn't believe it was all these years and he never knew.

The end result was that he said to me, well then, you saved my life.

I said no, not really.

Doc Dixon saved your life.

I just got you on a chopper and got you out of there.

And we hugged and we shed tears.

We were in the bush 15 days at a crack and then you'd come back and get mail or whatever and have a couple days of respite.

My mail would come in a rubber band.

And it would be maybe this thick of letters.

And one day I got a letter that was return address Virgil, South Dakota.

And I read the letter and it was from a girl that I knew when I was just probably five or six years old.

I had no clue why this woman would write me, why this girl would write me.

She was goin' to South Coast State University at the time.

And I found out that my Aunt Marie mentioned to her one day, when her and her mother visited my aunt, she said, you remember Craig.

You know, he's in Vietnam.

Why don't you write him a letter?

Well she was dating a guy pretty steady at the time but decided, well, you know, I can do that, so she did.

When I came back on my first 30 day, 30 days leave between tours, I looked her up.

And I told the couple that we were with that I'm gonna marry that girl someday, I am.

And this coming July 17th of this year, we'll have been married 49 years.

On June 15th, 1968, we were in heavy combat.

We had pulled back our position and we had started to call in artillery that would walk its way closer to our lines.

And what we didn't realize at the time was that one of those six guns that was firing was calibrated 50 yards short.

And when we called in danger close, which is the last volley to come, five of the guns landed where they should have.

One of 'em landed five feet from me.

Fortunately, I was prone in the downward position, laying on my stomach.

But that single round killed our company commander, two lieutenants, our company gunnery sergeant, and two other Marines and wounded several of us.

I guess I could tell you that I learned the core reality of war isn't that you're gonna get killed out there.

It's that you're guaranteed you're gonna lose a friend and I believe that.

I lost friends that day.

I lost my company commander.

He died in my arms.

When I got out of the Marine Corps, the very first thing I wanted to do was get an education and of course get married and I did.

We got married first.

Della had already graduated from college, South Coast State.

And I knew what I wanted to do.

I wanted to go into funeral service.

Nobody I think in my classes knew I was a Vietnam vet.

Here I sit, a former Marine Corps Sergeant who had spent 20 months in Vietnam chasin' an enemy.

I had trained over 500 recruits in the Marine Corps to become United States Marines.

And I thought, you know, you young snots.

This is all you have to do.

And that's kinda sad in a way but yet that's how I felt.

I mean, I took the high road though because I didn't want to get involved with anything.

I told my wife, I said, Della, I'm not goin' to these protest things.

I'm not gettin' involved.

I'm not sayin' anything.

I'm just gonna be my person and nobody knows anything.

I should have known though, because of a few things that happened early in my life there in college where I was headed when it come to PTSD and that kind of thing.

I should have identified it then, but I didn't.

There was one incident that happened that it was an identifying piece for me that told me in...

It told me I still had the ability in me to do something or to harm somebody.

He was saying things that were not true about Vietnam.

And it had me to a point where I was really frustrated.

And I slowly reached over and took a ketchup bottle that was sitting on the table and I held it by the neck and I had it in my hand, and he's sitting right here.

And I had intended to take that ketchup bottle and literally whip it right across his face.

He had me that frustrated.

I don't know why, I honestly don't.

But I put the bottle down, I got up.

I did not excuse myself.

I just walked outside.

And I stood by my car and I cried, and cried, and cried.

When I look back on after I got out of the military, and up till 1980, if I could compress that, I would tell you that in 1973 when we started pullin' troops out, I felt we failed to contain communism.

In 1975, I knew I had been duped.

Because Saigon fell and I knew it was all for not, everything we did, all the people that were killed.

In 1977, when 2.7 million American soldiers were slapped right across the face, as far as I was concerned by President Carter, when he gave amnesty to over 100,000 draft dodgers, I knew then it's for certain, we were played for fools.

But it was in 1980 when all across the country the headlines on newspapers were the Iranian hostages, and how this country put their arms out, their loving arms, and wrapped them around this Iranian hostages, they tied yellow ribbons around trees, and they opened their hearts to them.

Ironically, it was those same exact yellow ribbons that threw me down into a deep dark hole of depression to the point where I got to where I felt the only way I could end this whole thing, stop seeing faces, stop seeing things we did, events, incidents that happened, all that stuff that kept coming and flooding my mind, was to end my life.

And I honestly, I can't tell you today why I got in that car unannounced and drove to a VA hospital.

I was very emotional that day when I walked in there.

I know that and they turned me over to a psychiatrist.

And he listened to my story and he said, Craig, I can help you.

But before I do, you have to understand something.

And that is that everything you think about every day is never ever gonna leave you.

It's gonna be with you.

And as soon as you begin to understand that is when you will begin to start to have some form of a life that's normal, as normal as can be.

I realized then, right then and there, that I could make something yet of my life.

I didn't have to give it all up.

I wouldn't be sittin' here talkin' to you.

I would not be sittin' here doing this today if it hadn't been for the help I got at the VA.

I developed cancer in 2015.

And actually it was two or three years before that that I decided I needed to write a book and put things down on paper.

And I did it because of my children.

I did it because I thought I could heal my ghosts of war.

Because other veterans said, if you write things down, and psychiatrists and psychologists told me, if you just put things on paper, it'll help you.

I took that literally thinkin' it might go away.

But I found out that's not true.

And I did it for posterity reasons, for helping people, okay.

But what really triggered it was I had read a quote one day that really put things into perspective for me because I never felt guilty.

But yet, I wondered why.

Why am I living?

Why am I not part of 58,317 names chiseled in black granite?

And I bet you every veteran that's ever been in combat has asked themselves that question.

This quote was, combat is fast.

It's unfairly cruel and it's dirty.

But it's designed to be that way because it imprints in your brain for those that are fortunate enough to survive what happened so that they can go home and tell other people who just might want to try it.

That's my mission.

That's where I'm at.

That's one of the reasons I wrote the book.

When I speak at the high school to a literature class, I can see the grandeur in their eyes.

I can see it.

They want to be Army Rangers.

They want to be Delta Force.

They want to be Marines, whatever it is.

But they don't understand what they're gettin' into.

People have often asked me why the title.

People always saying to me, for years, Craig, I didn't know you were in Vietnam.

And I usually show them the dates that I was there.

But 15 minutes ago is the unspoken answer to the question.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar.

An arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West-Central Minnesota, on the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits.

96.7 KRAM, online at 967kram.com.

(upbeat music)