(melodic music) (dark music) - [Royal] You look at yourself in the mirror, and you see a face that's totally void of all emotion.

You don't see a 19 year old kid anymore.

You just look at a face that looks like he's 40 years old now all of a sudden.

(dark music) - [Charlie] I never had camaraderie with another man like I did in Vietnam.

It's that kind of a closeness that you had with everybody.

(dark music) (helicopter blades whirring) (dark music) (birds chirping) - I was going to a security police tech school at the time, and they came in and said they needed 25 volunteers to go to dog school.

They put us in a large room, and said that 25 people will volunteer, and they had you sign a piece of note paper that stated, "I volunteered," and then once you sign that, they said, "You've got the rest of the day off now."

So I remember I wasn't exactly too eager right away at first.

I think I was volunteer number 16 or something like that.

My name is Royal Hettling, and I was assigned to the 483rd Security Police Squadron stationed at Cam Ranh Bay Airbase in 1970, '71 to the canine unit.

When we arrived there in August when the plane landed, the gate kennelman was there and greeted us.

On our way over to the east side, the truck pulled over in front of what was called a naval air facility.

He pointed across the road to a little village we called Mica Village.

He said, "12 Vietcong snipers came out of there, destroyed this guard shack over here and that observation tower, killed about three naval people, and attacked that naval facility.

This is what your tour is gonna be like here.

Welcome to Vietnam."

(helicopter blades whirring) (weapon firing) (helicopter blades whirring) (helicopter blades whirring) - [Interviewer] Were you drafted?

- I was going to be, and then when I found out I was gonna get drafted, your number comes up, and then all of a sudden they quit taking the number.

My boss told me, "Let me know about a month and a half before you go, 'cause I need to get somebody to replace you, and it's gonna take me a while, so I told him, "You better get somebody.

They're taking 'em really fast.

They're taking like, 20 a month."

Then as soon as I got to somebody, they dropped down to two a month.

So now it's a long way's gonna be, they're not taking nobody now.

So that's gonna be forever before I go, and I don't have a job, I got nothing, so went down to try to file for unemployment, 'cause my friend did that and he got it.

I filed, and the guy gets done, he says, "I hope you're not planning on drawing compensation."

I said, "Well, I was hoping so."

"Oh, we'll find a job for you."

I said, "Don't bother.

I'm getting ready to be drafted into the Army."

"Oh, you're gonna go in the Army?"

He looks at my thing and says, "Oh, have you ever thought about the Marine Corps?

Looks by your credentials, you're just the kind of guy they're looking for, and it just so happens my son's the Marine recruiter in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Should I have him come and see you?"

"Might as well," I said.

So I left the unemployment office in Marshall, and I just drove in the yard at home.

Mom comes out and says, "Hey, somebody from Sioux Falls is on the phone for you."

(chuckling) I barely got home, they're already calling, wants to meet.

So that's how I got in, and then got sent to bootcamp, and I thought I'd made the biggest mistake of my life, 'cause I thought the world would come then end.

(intense rock music) I was in the United States Marine Corps in Vietnam with the Second Battalion Infantry Unit, Second Battalion, Fifth Marine from April 1966 to about April of 1967.

We did just about everything, but I was in forward area all the time, and you could be hit almost any time.

(automatic weapons firing) I never had camaraderie with another man like I did in Vietnam in the infantry.

I could meet like, you and I never met before, and I'd be out on perimeter watch, and you'd come along and say, "Is this position 34?"

And I'd say, "Yes it is."

You'd say, "Well, I got it with you."

So we'd sit down there all night.

It'd be like we never seen each other before, and we talked like we're just like that, personal stuff, and then in the morning, what?

And I don't even know your name, I can't remember your name.

And you take off with your company, 'cause you're in a different company, and you went on a different mission than I did, so we'd never see each other again, but it's that kind of a closeness that you had with everybody.

(dramatic music) - The story about canines in Vietnam, a lot of people don't realize that in 1965, the military brought 4,000 dogs to Vietnam under Operation Top Dog, and these are meeting three main roles, scouts, trackers, and sentries.

I think the first use of dogs actually started back in World War I. I don't exactly know exact history, but I think it was more incidental.

It was a dog named Stubby, I believe, who started more as a pet, then it turned out that the pet was found to have some military value.

Then during World War II, the Doberman Pinscher, especially in South Pacific Islands and in Korea, they used them more so, and in Vietnam more so too.

Unfortunately, the first dog I was assigned to was a shepherd black lab mix named Pepper.

Pepper and I did not exactly get along too good, but my sergeant at the time kept saying, "Keep trying, he'll come around, keep trying.

Here's some dog treats.

Just play with him in his kennel today, and just get on his good side."

So I said, "Okay."

He let me in his kennel run right away, 'cause he knew when I had those dog treats.

So I'm breaking those dog treats in little pieces, giving it to him a little piece at a time, and I'm down to my last little tidbit, I'm on the far end of his run.

Then I heard a little faint growl.

I thought, "Uh-oh, I'm in trouble."

And it's a good thing what was very popular at the time was what they called the under the wrist watch.

It was a watch you wore under the wrist, had a wide band, and it had two buckles on the top side of your wrist.

He came at me, and I saw those big four big canine teeth coming, so I just shoved my wrist in his mouth, and he chomped down on that band, and the first chomp, he had that band completely off, and he was chomping down on my wrist, so I'm trying to grab my other hand to get that gate open to get out.

I got out, got the gate shut, and I looked at my wrist, and he had bitten me several times.

The kennelman kinda walked over and said, "He got ya?"

I said, "Yep, he got me."

Right away, the medic said, "Okay."

He said, "This qualifies for the Purple Heart."

I said, "Oh, you gotta be kidding, forget it."

I says, "Don't even write this up."

I said, "This is embarrassing.

You're a dog handler, and you get bit by your own dog?"

I said, "I'm not gonna live this one down."

By the time I got back to my hooch, right away, it was all up and down the kennelmen, "Hey, I hear Pepper got the new guy."

Then a kennelman says, "Well don't feel too bad about it.

You're only the eighth one he's bitten."

About a day or two later, I was reassigned to another dog named Thunder, and we bonded immediately, and he was a real winner.

Thunder was a sentry dog.

We would go out at night from the time the sun went down to the time the sun came up in the morning, and we would secure such things as camp perimeters or any target that was considered to be of high priority that the VC would likely try and destroy.

(intense rock music) - You had to be ready all the time, even though nothing was happening.

But it wasn't like the movie show where they're like, Rambo showing bodies flying all over, and he's attacking.

People could never get by with that in real life.

What I experienced wasn't nothing like that.

It was more like you're alert all the time and waiting for something to happen.

Two months, nothing would happen, then all of a sudden, bang, something would happen.

(thunder booming) We were on a perimeter watch, and we had not really heavy rain, just a light mist.

The sky was lit up 50% of the time with flashes, and then it'd be dark, flashes, dark, and the Vietcong hit the side of the hill.

It was about seven or eight, 10 shots, and then we'd shoot back.

Hundreds of rounds were going back, and the Vietcongos would say, "Yeah, the Americans got many bullets," and I guess that one night proved it.

Not everybody had a radio, and I was one that had a radio in my position, and so the command bunker's calling, 'cause they're hearing all this shooting on our side.

"What's going on out there?

Do you need reinforcements, do you need help?"

And I said, "No sir, I think we're gonna be okay.

I think it's just a harassment attack."

I see this flash of light that's so bright, it was white, for just a 10th of a second, and that's all I remember.

And I'm just laying there, and I'm thinking, "They shot a mortar round, a mortar round.

I've been hit with a mortar, and I'm dead now, I'm killed."

Then I lay there a while, I get a most calm feeling, and then the more I'm thinking, I thought, "You know, I think I'm still in Vietnam."

I didn't know you stayed in Vietnam when you were dead.

I thought you went someplace else, and then I started getting scared, and I thought, "Maybe I'm still alive."

Still didn't know what was going on, and there's a guy next to me, and I said something about, "Brown, did you feel something just a little bit ago?"

He says, "God, it felt like somebody hit me in the head with a two by four."

We didn't know what happened.

We thought we were both, you know, like a mortar round had hit me.

Like, we're still thinking that.

And then we started feeling, 'cause it's supposed to be a third one with this.

We couldn't find him, and he wasn't dead in the bottom of a hole that we dug.

We couldn't find his body or nothing, so I started saying his name out, and then pretty soon, here he comes, he's under a bush about 25 feet from us in the rain.

I said, "What in the world are you doing out there?

Why didn't you come back?"

And he said, "Well, you scared the heck outta me."

He said, "You lit up like a Christmas tree, and sparks were flying all over you, and I didn't know what to do, so I got the heck outta here."

And then we kind of determined it was lightning, 'cause we heard on the radio that somebody said, "God, did you see that lightning bolt just a little bit ago?"

Then we determined that, and the lightning had hit my radio is what happened, and it went through my ear, and tried to go out my feet and my fingers, but it couldn't.

It went out the top of my head, and blew a hole in my scalp about the size of a 50 cent piece.

I did find out later on that five other ones were hit by lightning, and they all died.

(melancholy music) - One funny story there, if you wanna call it funny here, I was supposed to be kinda securing part of the control tower, and we came under a rocket attack that night, and you're still in fairly new country there, so this is you're still part of that learning curve.

You know, you're kinda learn how things do, and I'm starting to watch the rounds coming in.

You know, they're coming in, and I'm kinda watching 'em.

They're coming in a little closer and closer, and a little closer, and it finally dawns in you that, "Hey, you know, these things are getting a little close.

I should think about taking cover here."

So in your inexperience here, you kinda look around real quick.

You know, "Where's my best cover?"

And there's a lot of sand, you know, sand blows around like snow drifts here do, and I saw a little, a small tree, and there's like a little crater that formed around that tree.

It was about 20 feet away from me, so I covered in about two or three steps, and I dove in behind it, and as I picked my head up, here, I saw my rifle, I firmly planted the muzzle in the sand, and I quickly pulled it out, and it had plugged the muzzle with sand.

So I had to quickly break it down, and putting the cleaning rod through to clear all the sand out.

All this time, here's Thunder standing on top of the sand dune, just looking at me, and if you could read a dog's mind, it' like he's saying, "Where did they get this guy from?

Man, I got my hands full if I gotta look out for him this entire year.

Yeah, I've got my paws full," you know?

(chuckles) (melancholy music) Now, when we were there, they would like to have you walk across the patrol to your assigned area.

It's like walking a beat.

What I found best is that Victor Charlie, he knows you're there.

Why do you wanna make yourself that visible to 'em?

I like darkness and shadows.

He likes darkness and shadows and cover.

So I tried to adopt as much as his tactics as I could for myself.

I'd be always asking myself, "Now, if I was Mr. Victor Charlie, if I was gonna come through here, where would I choose to come through?"

Some nights, the stress level would be rather high, 'cause you know, your dog would be alerting.

That's when you kinda know, "Okay, now it's the mind game.

Now he's now playing with me.

He knows I'm here somewhere.

Now let him try and figure out where I'm at."

You just kneel down by Thunder, and you just talk to him, and say, "Thunder, if you can just give one second.

Just give one second, that's all I need is one second."

Then you just pat him a little bit and tell him what a good dog he is, and you just stand up, and you check your rifle over again, just to make sure that's working okay, check the magazine, you know, you feel that spring in the bottom, you know?

Reload that magazine in it, and you put a chamber in the round, and then you put your selector to full automatic, 'cause you know that if they're gonna come through there, you're not gonna have any time to get any radio message off or anything like that.

The only way you're gonna be able to warn anybody, you see how long you can hold your finger on that trigger.

And so then you just start walking down that narrow lane, and your mouth is so dry you can't swallow, your heart is not beating in your chest, it's pounding in your chest, and you're trying your darnedest to walk on air.

And once you reach the other end of your area into the clearing, you see the reflection of your own shadow, and you darn near empty your clip into it.

That's how tense you are, but you catch yourself just short of doing it.

Then you look, and you just say, "God, you know I'm way out over here.

Everyone else is way back over there.

My only way to get back over there to wherever anyone else is, I gotta go back down that same lane again."

So you go back through the same emotion again going back down that lane again, thinking, "Well, they weren't there the first time.

They may be there this time."

So you go back through that again.

Well, you make it through there the first time.

When you get back there, now they tell you keep going, keep doing it.

For the next several hours, you're doing that.

Well, turns out that you were okay that night, and nothing happened that night.

It was all over where you were the night before.

But you come in in the morning, you climb into your bunk, you really don't sleep good, 'cause you're just so wound up yet.

You get up, you head to the latrine, you look at yourself in the mirror, and you see a face that's totally void of all emotion.

You don't see a 19 year old kid anymore.

You just look at a face that looks like he's 40 years old now all of a sudden.

(upbeat music) - I was looking forward to coming back here.

I was gonna be farming, gonna be doing this and that.

That was gonna be, and we had everything planned out.

I thought, "God, this is gonna be great.

I mean, everything's over.

I've done everything right the right way, and everything's turning out."

When I come back, everything went to pot.

Nobody liked you, everybody's protesting.

Everything was wrong with what you did.

You know, you're almost like, because you went to Vietnam, now you're, oh, I don't know what the word for it, but you're a bad person now, 'cause you went to Vietnam.

But my choice was go to Vietnam, or go to prison, or go to Canada, the three choices I had at that time, so most of 'em went in the military, went to Vietnam.

- When I came back, the public, the country was divided right down the middle, and you didn't want to talk about it for the simple fact that you did not know the person that you were talking to, what their opinion of it was, and so you never brought the subject up.

Over the years, talking with other Vietnam vets, I always got the sense that a lot of 'em were lacking that closure.

- Every day of my life I come back, I thought about Vietnam, not maybe a lot, sometimes it's just like, for five minutes.

Other times, most of the day I dwell on it like, 'cause here, nobody likes you.

Everybody's mad at you when you come back, and so it's just like, where do I belong?

I don't know where I belong, if I belong over there or I belong here, you know?

It was really a state of confusion, mixed up.

I wanted to go back, but yet I felt scared every time I went back.

I felt like, very uncomfortable, but yet I was still missing it.

But I went back with a tour group first, 'cause I was scared to go back by myself.

(upbeat music) And when I went back to Vietnam I thought, "God, I know a lot about Vietnam.

I spent a year in the Marine Corps infantry."

When I got back to Vietnam, I found out I didn't know squat.

When you went with the tour, you had to go where everybody wanted to, and I was the only one that wanted to go to the places I was at.

Then when I got my interpreter, I found out how to get there, and then I could spend all day there.

So I started going back on my own.

I could do it cheaper then when I found out how to do things.

So then it'd stay a month each time.

Then I started bringing back this stuff.

(upbeat music) - I wanted to do something to remember those guys who did not go home, and so I just did not want their names just to become a name on a bulletin board and nothing more about 'em.

Tom Bradley, Army vet, he had 57 days left when he was killed, and this is the last letter he wrote to his parents on June 18th.

He was killed the following day, and well, it's kinda emotional there.

The last postscript he put on here was to his dad, and he said, "Dad, I'm sorry I didn't send anything for Father's Day, I couldn't get into Cu Chi to get it," and in his letter, he apologized for not writing more often, and he said, "I'll try and do better."

Death notices were usually given within two to three days from day of casualty.

Mail service at best was four to five days.

So they got this letter probably two to three days after they got the death notice.

Can you imagine how traumatic that could be for the family?

(melancholy music) - [Charlie] Royal got the wall to come here, and it started with that, and then pretty soon, they started getting more stuff every time I went back, bringing back some of these, and labeling what they were.

- So Charlie kind of had this idea here about doing this, and memorializing 'em here too, but he kinda wanted to go much more than just remembering them.

He wanted to cover more of the history of how we got involved there, and and tell people the story of the Vietnam and what all happened there.

- These marble portraits, I got the idea, went over there, and somebody, a friend of mine had one made, and it looked pretty nice and cool, so I thought, "God, that looks pretty, like something unique."

The only problem is they're a little hard to come back, 'cause they're heavy.

I can only do about three at a time, 'cause that's all I can carry.

I think I made 60 some portraits of them, of everything I go through, of the ones that were killed in action, and these ones these stories were telling.

I had to go through an interpreter for everything, so I learned a lot from her.

That's why I did her story, 'cause that's all stories about her then, and there's about 10 different stories, how it affects her on the way as a kid growing up, and what she's seeing with the Vietcong, and how she gets involved with them, and tried to sneak outta the country, and didn't make it.

Then here she's going to prison now for trying to get out.

They were in a prison and she had her kid with her, but she gave the kid up because she didn't think it was a good place for 'em, and the other women in the prison said, "You fool, you shouldn't have done that."

They would've let you go, 'cause all you did was try to get out of Vietnam.

You didn't rob nobody or you didn't kill nobody.

But she planned to escape, 'cause she found this hollow tree before, this big hole, but there's all red ants in it.

Said, "If we come back again, I'm gonna try to sneak out."

She started making her plan to get out.

So just before they were gonna take 'em back when the guards weren't looking, she crawled in that hollow tree, and she said, "It was just big enough so I could sit all the way down in and hide with my head way down."

She had her raincoat on, and she put papers in her nose and in her ears to keep the red ants outta her nose and ears.

But she's in there a while.

She said, "I didn't know how long I could take it."

They were biting her so bad, and then finally they left.

So she said, "I went out and laid in the ocean for about two or three hours.

That felt better, but my skin was just on fire from those bites.

That night, I got out and started walking, and when morning come, I come to this place, and the sun was coming up, and my skin was on fire, and the sun just made it burn more."

So she said, "I'm gonna die here."

So she said, "I just passed out and laid there," and she said, "I thought that was it, I was dead.

Then I wake up laying in the water by the boat," and here, these four boys were illegally cutting wood on the island, and they found her, and they put her in the water, and they knew what kind of jungle thing, ointment to rub on her to help the red ant bites, so they got that to rub on her.

And so they built a little chamber for her on their boats on the bottom, and put the wood over it to hide her, and took her back to Ho Chi Minh City.

And they knew somebody that worked for the South Vietnamese soldiers, a doctor, so they took her to him.

(intriguing music) This is a North Vietnamese soldier's mess kit, you know, so it just shows that he was thinking about this woman that he had up north, and he drew a picture of a flower and a butterfly on his mess kit, and their initials on the mess kit, with his province that he was fighting in in the south on the cover.

So just goes to show that they're people just like anybody else, they got feelings and emotions too.

Sometimes we like to demonize the other side like they're no good or they're, just kind of wanted to show a different side of things.

If you only tell one side, it gets pretty lopsided.

(intriguing music) - So a person wants to come in and browse, they can browse for some time here.

Some people come in, and they'll tell us that they've learned more than what they've ever known before.

Hopefully, it'll be around for years to come.

We know we won't be, but hopefully it will be, so we hope there'll be a legacy here somewhere.

(melancholy music) - My interpreter had her boyfriend who's a Marine, he had a dog, and when he left, he couldn't take the dog with him, so he gave her the dog.

Approximately May 17th, 1975, now Vietnam's fallen, and that's her there, and now the police are going through the house.

You can't have anything that's related to South Vietnam or America.

That's the police in the brown, the soldiers, the North Vietnamese soldiers in green, and they're searching all your stuff and burning it that you can't have.

And I asked her, that's her and her mother and her little sister.

I said, "Were you scared?"

She said, "Yeah, because all you'd do is sit there and say nothing.

You couldn't ask a question, you couldn't do nothing, just let them do what they wanted with your stuff and burn it."

And then the picture fell outta one of the books, and the police say, "That's the same dog that's in the picture.

That's an American dog."

So being they couldn't have anything American, they took the dog out and shot it.

(melancholy music) - Out of those 4,000 dogs that were brought there, in are hurry to get out, the only brought 204 out, and the rest, they gave the veterinarians and vet techs just two options.

Either turn 'em over to the South Vietnamese military where faced an uncertain fate, or they were to be destroyed.

And unfortunately, Thunder was ordered to be destroyed about a year after I left.

(melancholy music) I always viewed him as being my dog.

He wasn't the person's who had him before me, and he wasn't the person's that took him over after me.

He was mine, and I guess that's the way I will always remember him as that.

I do think that that's the only reason I survived is because of him.

What I did there, without a dog, I don't think I'd be here today.

(melancholy music) - The last place I was happy was Vietnam.

When I left there, and I haven't been happy since.

I really felt like I was doing something or accomplishing something or doing something constructive, and I had friends that I knew over there and that, and like, I just felt like, a sense of worthwhile-ness, and I always did my job good, and always never did anything that I can regret.

(melancholy music) I went back to Vietnam 33 times, said I was looking for the good memories, like the camaraderie that I had and some of the, 'cause I only had good memories when it was over there.

I was looking for those more.

(melancholy music) ♪ Clearly, I am hoping for a scout ♪ ♪ To come and take me by the hand ♪ ♪ Lead me through the forest deep ♪ ♪ And drop me off upon the sand ♪ ♪ I'm only just a boy trying to get home ♪ ♪ I can feel the silence of the cold ♪ ♪ Things have not turned out as planned ♪ - [Announcer] This program is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

♪ I'm only just a boy trying to get home ♪