The Tuskegee Airmen

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A Tribute to Thomas A. Kindre, ROHA Founder

Thomas A. Kindre (1921-2012)Founder of the Rutgers Oral History Archives Tom serving in Italy during World War II. Tom (right) marching in the Rutgers Alumni Parade during the Rutgers Reunion in 1999. Rutgers President Richard L. McCormick, Tom Brokaw and Tom Kindre on the occasion of Tom Brokaw becoming the first recipient of the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award in 2005. Tom speaking at the dedication of the Rutgers WWII Memorial Plaza in 2008. The Rutgers Oral History Archives (ROHA) celebrates the life and achievements of Tom Kindre (1921- 2012), the man who envisioned, inspired and established this world-class oral history program. We encourage all to read Tom's oral histories, learn more about his life, particularly his tireless dedication to ROHA, below, and find out what generations of Rutgers alumni, faculty and staff have to say about his legacy. We also invite you to attend a memorial service honoring Tom to be held on Sunday, October 14, 2012, at 12 noon at Kirkpatrick Chapel on the Rutgers College Avenue Campus, 85 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ. A Man of Vision Tom helped give a 'voice' in the annals of history to thousands of people.  In the early 1990s, Tom, as the Rutgers College Class of 1942 class historian, attempted to get his classmates to publish a book on their generation.  Each alumnus was encouraged to submit a piece.  "When I got back only 17 responses," Tom recalled, "I knew we didn't have enough material for a book.  My next thought was, 'They may be afraid to write, but they might not be afraid to talk.'"  Tom, having read the works of Studs Terkel, latched onto oral history as a means of recording their stories.  He and his fellow Class of '42 officers met with faculty at the Rutgers History Department, visiting professor Dr. Stephen E. Ambrose, and the Dean of Rutgers College.  With their assistance, they established and provided the initial funding for the Rutgers Oral History Archives as an affiliated center of the History Department.  Since 1994, the scope of the Rutgers Oral History Archives' interview collection has expanded to include all Rutgers alumni, faculty and staff and residents around the State of New Jersey.  The program was formally dedicated in a ceremony at Alexander Library on the Rutgers-New Brunswick Campus in 1999 during the Rutgers Reunion Weekend. In 2005, Tom wrote a book called The Boys From New Jersey, based upon dozens of oral histories collected by the Rutgers Oral History Archives.  The book became one of the texts studied by Rutgers undergraduates in the senior seminar, "Oral History and the American Experience in World War II," taught by Dr. John W. Chambers, II, of the Rutgers History Department.  Tom spoke to the seminar each semester about his book and his own experiences in World War II.  Hundreds of Rutgers undergraduates fondly recall Tom's fascinating talks. Since the founding of ROHA in 1994, Tom was instrumental in seeing it thrive by leading alumni efforts to raise funds to support the program.  In 2002, he established the Rutgers Living History Society, an honor society for those who participate in and support ROHA, now part of the Rutgers University Alumni Association, and served as its first President.  In 2005, Tom led the RLHS in creating the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award, which has been awarded to many distinguished figures who have made major contributions to studying history through the use of eyewitness testimonies.   In 2007, Rutgers University honored Tom with the Rutgers Medal, its highest non-academic honor.  In 2008, Tom and his 1942 classmates made another major contribution to the Rutgers Campus when they dedicated the World War II Memorial Plaza on Voorhees Mall on the College Avenue Campus, paying tribute to the hundreds of Rutgers men and women who gave their lives during that conflict. A Life of Accomplishment Tom passed away on Tuesday, September 11, 2012. Born in Rahway, NJ, on May 19, 1921, he had lived in Maplewood and Monroe Township before moving to Brielle, where he lived for the past thirty-seven years. Tom studied journalism at Rutgers University, graduating in 1942 with a Litt. B degree.  Earning his commission through the Rutgers Army ROTC, Tom served in North Africa and Italy during World War II with the 34th Infantry Division, earning five Battle Stars in the Italian campaign. Tom worked for Hill and Knowlton, Inc., the Manhattan-based international public relations firm, for thirty-five years.  He retired in 1981 as Senior Vice President and Creative Director. At the age of eighty-one, Tom joined the crew of the replica Irish famine ship Jeanie Johnston for its transatlantic maiden voyage, an adventure he chronicled in his book Jeanie Johnston: A Voyage Against All Odds.  He was a member of the US Coast Guard Auxiliary and served as Flotilla and Division Public Affairs and Publications Officer. Tom served the Rutgers Class of 1942 loyally for many years as class correspondent and in class leadership positions, including class president.  He was honored by the Rutgers Alumni Association with its Loyal Sons and Daughters Award.   Tom is survived by his wife, Marie Luckhurst, his son, John, daughter, Nancy Luckhurst and two grandchildren, Caroline and Diana. A Legacy of Service "Tom's vision and hard work over the past eighteen years brought the Rutgers Oral History Archives to an astounding level of prominence.  Meeting Tom and learning from him as a student was one of the highlights of my undergraduate days and I enjoyed watching hundreds of other young Rutgers men and women share in that experience with Tom over the years.  He was a great friend and mentor and we will all miss him."--Shaun Illingworth, RC '01, Director, Rutgers Oral History Archives "Without Tom's guidance, the Program would not have achieved the world wide acclaim it so deservedly has. If one were to define what a 'Loyal Son of Rutgers' is, all one has to do is mention TOM KINDRE!"--Bart Klion, RC '48, President, Rutgers Living History Society "Tom will be greatly missed but his legacy will live on through ROHA."--Dan Ruggiero, UCNB '10, Former ROHA Public History Intern

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Wallace E. Felldin, U.S. Army, World War II

-On being a part of the 71st Infantry Division's liberation of Gunskirchen Lager, a concentration camp in the Mauthausen complex, in Austria in May 1945:… Now, you're into May, and we went and we found this dirt road going through the woods. So, we would get more of our troops going along the road, on both sides of the road, walking straight ahead, and then, the others on the side, doing the sweeping. … You could smell something, and it wasn't a very pleasant smell. What we were smelling was Gunskirchen Lager, and I guess the town would be Lambach, but there's also a town of Gunskirchen, so, it was known as Gunskirchen Lager, and we ultimately came upon this camp, with all the wire around it. No guards; they had left maybe forty-eight hours before us. We had begun to encounter a straggler or two in rags, you know, emaciated, crying for help. All we could do was report back to battalion on the phone. … This was a huge camp. It turned out to have eighteen thousand Hungarians Jews in it, and a lot of them were intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, professors or whatever, but, for us, we reported back so that medical help could arrive, so that arrangements could be made. The dead were sleeping outside; I mean, they hadn't been buried. They had just been left there. … You never forget the smell. It's unworldly. You never forget the skeletons, the living sleeping in with the dead. They had no strength. When the [German] SS left, the prisoners knew where the food supplies were. It was all locked, of course. Well, some of them were frenzied enough and had enough strength left to break open [the lock], find food and eat it on the spot, cold, and dropped dead. Bodies can't handle anything like that; it's impossible. Fortunately, there were several hundred young people, I'm talking about eight, nine, ten-year-olds, and so forth, they had survived up to this point. They were very close to death. I mean, a couple of more days and … everybody would have been finished. … Division Headquarters sent down medics, nurses, went into Gunskirchen, got civilians, got German prisoners that we already … had taken, because they were surrendering to us, brought the prisoners back, so [that] they could have a burial for all these people. All they did was [dig] a big, common trench and dump all the stiff bodies in there, at least to clear up the area. … The hospitals that were around, wherever the towns were, took the young children to the different hospitals, if they could be saved. … There are guys who like to sit around and talk about the war, and I've never been one of them. It happened. I was able to get out in one piece and resume a normal life, other than the horror of Gunskirchen Lager. That will always stay with me. That was the worst thing that ever happened, that I ever saw in my life.

Lloyd Kalugin, Rutgers Graduate School of Education '75, U.S. Army, World War II

-On being a part of an Army unit that liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp during World War II:After we captured Wiesbaden, we were mounted on tanks and ... chasing the fleeing Germans. At some point, one of our objectives was to capture the ... V-2 underground rocket factories ... that were producing the rockets that were bombing England. ... I guess we knew pretty well where they were, and it was just a question of finding them. I was on a patrol with the Fourth Armored Division. It was their tanks and ... we supplied the infantry support, and we mounted the tanks that morning, and we were going off to where we felt the factories were. We reached the top of the hill and started to smell something burning. We still didn't know what it was, and as we went further up the hill, we were able to look down. We saw smoke and the odor was overwhelming. We saw a camp and we felt we had to look at this camp. So, the tankers took off, with us on them. ... And, as we approached the camp, we started to see fires. ... The lead tank, I was on the second tank, ... broke through the gate and we all dismounted and went in right after the tank. ... We saw bodies burning on ... wooden railroad tracks and dead bodies were all over the place. One of the barracks was burning, and the lead tank sheared off the front of the building, to allow us to try to help the people out. ... We went into the building and there must have been, maybe, what I heard [and] found out later, ... seventy-five or a hundred people left still alive. Most of them were in very bad physical shape. ... We were able to put the fire out and we tried to help many of the people as much as we could. I asked one person, who was Jewish, I asked him in Yiddish, "What happened?" ... He said, "As soon as the Germans heard that the Americans were coming, they killed as many prisoners as they could." ... I found out later that this was orders from Hitler, so that there would be no evidence. But, they couldn't do it fast enough, so they locked the rest of the people in the barracks and set the barracks on fire. … We got there in time at least to save ... those people. And, it's interesting that this was not our objective. ... We didn't know it was there. I don't know if the high command knew it was. …[It was] very shocking, because we were all in a state of shock. I mean, ... this big sergeant, that I was friendly with, started to cry. He said, "How could people be so cruel?" ... We were all wandering around, you know, "How could this happen?" I was in a state of shock for fifty years.

Albert S. Porter, Jr., Rutgers-Newark '48, Army Air Forces, World War II

-On a harrowing mission over Hamburg when he served as a turret gunner on a B-17:… We flew our first and on our second, … the second mission is our co-pilot's first mission, because, the first mission, they always sent an experienced co-pilot along with you. They want to make sure that our pilot knew what he was doing after all the training, and so, this was his first mission and we were over Hamburg and we got hit with flak, a major hit, and it just so happened, I had the turret in such a position, luckily, that I saw it happen. All of a sudden, there's a gigantic hole between number one and two engines in the wing and a shell had gone right straight through the wing and did not explode. If it [had] exploded, I wouldn't be here. Anyway, it knocked down one and two engines and all the oil came out, hit the turret, and the plane started straight down, straight down. Now, I have never experienced anything like this in my life, but the vibration caused by the two engines that were knocked out, had what they called runaway props, were spinning and causing such a vibration, it felt like the plane's going to tear itself apart, with no exaggeration. I thought that [it] was going to go any minute. Through the intercom, the pilot is screaming, "Prepare to bail out, prepare to bail out." Now, I came out of that turret like I was shot out of a cannon and I forgot all about the oxygen connections, the electrical connections. All I knew was, "Hey, we're going down," you know, and, now, … I didn't have room in the turret for a parachute. So, I put the parachute alongside the turret, so [that] when I come out, I could grab it [and] put it on. Well, when the plane started straight down, the chutes took off. So, when I came out of the turret, the chute wasn't there. I didn't have sense enough to try to tie it to the turret in some way. Right now, we're supposed to be a well-trained, well-disciplined crew; forget it. It was absolute [chaos] and, I mean, seriously, it was chaotic. We thought we were gone and our radio operator got so excited, he came out of the radio room and forgot his chute and saw this chute lying on the floor and grabbed it. It was mine. [laughter] The waist gunner; we had what we called chest chutes that hooked on the front, and they said to make sure that the ripcord handle is on the right-hand side, because, if it's on the left-hand side, when it opens, it will get all tangled up and wrap around you. He's on the floor. He's got it on wrong and he's trying to get it off and you've got to remember, we're in twenty-five, thirty below zero temperatures, gloves, you know. So, we dropped straight down fifteen thousand feet and you have no idea the pressure that a dive like that causes against the controls of the plane and … it's awful to try to get [strength] enough to try to pull this doggone airplane out of its dive and, as Lonnie, our pilot, said, if it hadn't been for Bob Cochran, who was a big guy and strong, if he had been as small as I was, we couldn't have pulled the plane out and, finally, [they] pulled it out of the dive, got it leveled. Now, we only have two engines and we can't maintain altitude and, of course, we're out of the formation and you're always afraid; the Germans always looked for stragglers to knock off, and so, we were afraid of that and we couldn't stay in the air. So, he said, "Get me," to the navigator, "get me the nearest safe spot." It happened to be Brussels. Belgium was reoccupied at that time. So, we came down in Brussels, in a half-baked landing, but made it okay. Now, we're all out of the airplane, thanking our lucky stars that we made it, and our bombardier had forgotten to lock his nose guns, which were supposed to be in [the] locked position, pointing up to the sky. Now, we're all around the nose with these .50-caliber machine guns over our heads. He got in the nose and lost his balance, fell up against the trigger switches and these two .50s took off and we hit the ground, like we thought we're going to get wiped out, and so, he came out of the plane. He thought he wiped out the whole crew. So, then, when things got calmed down, I said, "Okay, who took my parachute?" and the radio operator said, "Oh, my God, Bud, I'm sorry, I did." … [laughter]

Daniel Martin, Rutgers College '50, U.S. Air Force, Korean War

-On his first day stationed at Yokota Air Base in Japan during the Korean War, when he served on the crew of a B-50:Now, we’ve got an airplane full of World War II veterans, and they are very careful. Everybody’s careful. We landed … One of our squadrons’ planes was at Yokota at a time, … and we relieved each other. So the plane before us had flown probably the same number of combat missions as we did, twenty-five, twenty-seven. We flew twenty-seven. They’re waiting for us anxiously to get there, because when we get there, they fly no more missions. That’s the end. If we don’t get there, they have to fly another one … So we get there, and we’re all in the bar at the officer’s club together. This is the very first night. Suddenly, there is this loud explosion. I mean, it rocked the ground, rocked the building, tremendous explosion. We had a lot of B-29s on that base. They were bombers, and we were search, reconnaissance. We all walk outside, now I wasn’t sure of this, I thought I dreamed this. It is true. We all walk outside, run outside, and at the end of the runway there is this huge ball of fire, a B-29 had crashed on takeoff with all bombs onboard. Now, you can imagine the hole. We stood there just watching; there’s nothing you can do. So one by one we went back into the bar and drank. We were relieving this crew, and they’re happy it wasn’t them, they were happy to be going home. We were a little bit shook. I thought this was a dream, until I went to my first SAC [Strategic Air Command] reunion in 1989, in New Orleans. … I never knew that SAC, the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing of SAC, I never knew we had reunions. I finally discovered it through American Legion Magazine and Air Force Magazine. … I find [that] the copilot, Charlie Ward, is there. The head navigator, Hoss Walker, Major Walker, was there, and at another reunion, Gordon Storm showed up. He’s one of the others. I mean, you really do know these people. So we’re standing, when I first got there in New Orleans, we’re standing around the bar, and all the guys are talking. Now, I find myself with Hoss Walker and Charlie Ward and about three other guys, and Charlie Ward … starts talking about the first day that our crew got to Yokota. … He said, and it was his practice, being a very careful pilot, he always went to the control tower of any new field we got to, to check out conditions, get to meet the traffic controllers, or whomever was in charge of it, you know, just to know where the hills were, because you always wanted to be sure that if you had problems that you didn’t go toward the hill. You wanted to land on flat [ground]. So he starts talking about the first night we were there, and he’s up in the control tower, and this B-29 takes off and aborts, but crash lands right at the end of the runway, and I looked at him. I practically had to cry. I said, “Charlie, you have just answered. I always thought …” I wrote about this. I wrote a story in the early ‘60s, just to get it out of my head, about a young lieutenant and the same thing that it happened to, and I had an ending line and everything. He said, “Dan, that’s just as true." … This is not nice, so I put that behind me. I never thought of that. I mean, it came up much later. I would dream of it. “Was that real?” Well, obviously it was real … and that happened.

William Prout, Rutgers College '43, Army Air Forces, World War II, U.S. Army, Korean War, U.S. Army, Vietnam

-On serving in the Korean War:I went directly from [Japan] to Korea and I joined the Seventh Division. The Seventh Division ... had been heavily drained ... of some of its personnel and equipment to put the first couple of divisions into Korea when the North Koreans came across the 38th, but, when I joined the Seventh, it was in August of ‘50. We were staging at Mt. Fuji, Camp Fuji, on Mt. Fujiyama, not too far north of Tokyo, and then, we loaded aboard ship, and the Seventh US Infantry Division and the First Marine Division made the Inchon landing on 15 September, 1950. So, I was early into Korea and Korea was the one war that I was with the infantry. I commanded the Seventh Division Signal Company, a company of about 380 men, eighty-five vehicles. We were scattered everywhere, from, sometimes, forward outposts to regiment [or] division [headquarters]. ... After the Inchon landing, we cleaned up around Inchon and Seoul, moved over land to Pusan, where we then made ... another landing, north, ... near Wonson Beach, and then, from there to the Yalu River, and, in November of ‘50, we were already getting thirty degrees below zero. We weren’t equipped for the heavy weather, the cold weather, fully. So, it was an interesting time, and the Chinese came in, we had to pull back off the Yalu, drop back to the Hamhung-Hungnam perimeter, and, finally, we were evacuated from there. I was one of the last off the beach, the 24th of December, and I landed, again, at Pusan, got a jeep, and moved back up land to join my unit. ... It was Christmas Eve, and I went down and got a whole bundle of mail, and one of the packages was from my father-in-law, a little, metal cake tin with a plywood top taped to it, packed with cotton and a bottle of bourbon. So, I celebrated Christmas Eve, 1950, having survived a very interesting and difficult time in North Korea. We stayed there, and rolled with the punches, and chased the Chinese back up after a long period of time, and I finally came home in the Summer of ‘51.-On being a part of the Inchon landing on September 15, 1950:Most people, I think, have forgotten about the Inchon landing. ... The North Koreans had come in and pushed the South Koreans and [the] small handful of American troops that we could muster, both from in-country and from Japan, in a hurry to a perimeter around Pusan and General MacArthur decided to use what troops we had left, one Marine division and, basically, two regiments of one infantry division. The Seventh only had two regiments left, the one had been decimated of personnel to fill the others, and the Inchon landing was made in Inchon Harbor, that had thirty-five foot tides. So, we came into the narrows, through the island chain, and it had to be at flood tide to get the landing craft to the ... beaches, and as soon as the tide went out, there wasn’t going to be another flood tide for perhaps another thirty days. So, it had to be done in one fell swoop, and every LST and landing craft that they could muster in the Orient made the landing with as many of the two divisions as they could put ashore. ... The next morning, I looked, and some of the landing craft that had disgorged and put people and equipment ashore couldn’t get back off in time, and there they sat, thirty-five feet out of the water, sitting ... across docks, and on rock piles, and whatever. So, it was quite an interesting operation.

Robert Billian, Rutgers College '49, U.S. Air Force, Korean War

-On the development of napalm bombing during the Korean War, when he served aboard a B-29:… You heard about the napalm in Vietnam, twern’t nothing to what we did in Korea, and I don't think they even heard about it. ... We perfected the technique. We used these transports, which normally, when we had a re-supply drop, you'd have these things on plywood pallets on conveyer rollers. And, when you hit your drop zone, you'd pull the nose up, and you released the cable, and all the stuff would roll down the rollers and out the back end of the airplane. And then, the parachutes would open up and the stuff would descend to where you were trying to drop it. We perfected the deal where they put four fifty-gallon drums on each plywood palette and we had thirty-six planes in our troop carrier wing and we would go out and, on test flights, we'd drop four fifty-gallon napalm barrels, and, we ... obliterated one of the small Japanese islands. We perfected a thing that we could drop the napalm, because the fighters at that time, the F-80s, ... the range was so limited that they couldn't carry much napalm, to speak of. So, ... they put ... fifty gallons of napalm on our planes. Then what they did is, they flew in large formations, each plane carrying fifty gallons, fifty ... gallon drums and we used B-29 call signs, the bomber call signs, so that the enemy would think that it was bomber group coming in. They went after personnel centers, where they congregated the troops in North Korea. When they came over ... they would let go with thirty-six times fifty, fifty gallon drums. And, they figured they killed thousands of North Koreans. Not burning them, they suffocated them, because it burned all the oxygen up in the immediate area. So, there was ... a lot of napalm dropped. It was supposed to be top secret. ... I think people were getting letters back from home saying, “We saw on television where you guys are experimenting with Operation Snowball.” And, we'd shake our head, we thought it was top secret and here it was being shown on the TV back here.

Francis J. Brennan, Jr., Rutgers College '51, U.S. Army, Korean War

-On his first combat patrol as a platoon leader in Korea:It was one of those things where you think, at least, "Here's the inevitable; you're going there," and the rifle platoon leader, in those days, was living on-line. We were on-line; we were living in a hooch. I have pictures, if you ever want to see them, of a sandbag hooch, three guys in a hooch, platoon leader, assistant platoon leader, who's a sergeant, and his assistant, radio, that's it. … The first thing you could see out of the hooch, over the top of the hill, would be barbed wire, on a minefield, and paths through the minefield, and that's the way it looked. … There wasn't much time to worry about it, I mean, waiting for your first assignment, your first patrol. The mission, in those days, was to recon and get a prisoner. That was the main mission, and so, when you were sent out, that's what you were going to do. You're going to recon the area in front of your platoon and, if possible, bring back a prisoner, alive, dead, didn't make any difference, but alive is better. So, that was where we were at that time.... [The first] patrol [was] about maybe eight or ten guys, radio operator and a dog. In those days, there were scout dogs and very, very, sensitive, particularly to the smell of the enemy. So, I was real happy I have a dog and not as happy to have the radio operator, because I always kept the radio operator well away from me, because, if the Chinese were shooting, they were shooting at a radio antenna. So nothing against him, but I didn't want to be in the same vicinity. … We spent my birthday, I remember, in July of '52 it was, out on patrol.

Arthur L. Snyder, Rutgers College '51, U.S. Air Force, Korean War

-On his initial flight to Korea, piloting a B-26 during the Korean War:To start with, the B-26B is the hard-nose. It has eight guns in the nose and three in each wing, fourteen forward firing .50s, and it did not have a bombardier. I really never flew the B-26C, which was the soft-nose with the Norden bombsight in it. So, I never had a bombardier, but, you know, you had a navigator who flew the right seat and he was kind of the co-pilot and the navigator, yes. We had a three-man crew, with an enlisted man, and, yes, we had a lot of training together. We went through combat crew training at Langley as a team. We went to Stead Air Force Base in Reno, Nevada, survival school, as a team. Then, we went to California and practiced some more bombing in the Sacramento Valley. We went to Travis Air Force Base outside of San Francisco. Flying B-26s to Korea was an extremely difficult job. We had to get the planes flying very efficiently, from a fuel point of view. So, we had to keep flying them until we got them fairly lean on fuel usage. We had to have at least, not a headwind, but preferably a tailwind, and, if you can visualize this, the primary wind direction is from west to east in the United States, but we needed an east to west wind to make Hickam in Hawaii and we needed good visibility, because the B-26 has no navigation equipment on it and a C-54 would be our lead ship. We were going to have twelve B-26s fly to Korea. The longest leg was the first one, from Travis to Hickam. We needed good weather, good wind, the plane in good shape and to follow the mother ship with the navigation equipment. We knew we were going to be in the seat for twelve hours without being able to get out, go to the bathroom or anything else, and one other thing, the B-26 is nose heavy. You cannot ditch a B-26. It has never stayed afloat longer than thirty seconds. It hits the water, dives. So, we knew that if we had to bail out, if we’re going to go down, we had to bail out; we couldn’t ditch. So, we finally got, after a long period of time, everything right and we flew to Hickam, and then, to Johnson and Guam and Wake, Okinawa, and, eventually, to K-9 in Korea. It was a tough flight.

Carl Burns, Rutgers College '64, U.S. Army, Vietnam

-On being reunited with his wife in Vietnam:Ruth Ann and I, again, as I said, we got married on Labor Day of '65, at her insistence, just in terms of the date, not in terms of the relationship, I mean. [laughter] She swore she was going to come to Vietnam for our first anniversary and I swore she wasn't … and she was going to bring the top of our wedding cake, which she did, with dry ice, and, as that article kind of explains, she got accredited as a correspondent, that Parade Magazine article, the Star-Ledger, what was then the Daily Home News, but, then, couldn't get any approval to go and she went up through Congressmen and all the way to President Lyndon Johnson. … Of course, her parents were not behind this at all and I wasn't. My colonel, Colonel Peterson, was very supportive, but, then, he comes to me the day before and says, "Your wife can't come. They won't give her any credentials," or what have you. I said, "Fine." She actually got a telegram from the White House saying she couldn't go, and you know Ruth Ann, [she] hid it away some place and hopped on the airplane.… So, I found out … she was coming, and then, the Colonel is very good, he says, "I'll give you a helicopter. Russ and Dennis," again, my two friends from armor school and flight school, "they'll take you down to Saigon." Another fraternity brother ... got us a hotel, … the Majestic Hotel on Tu Do Street, [now Dong Khoi Street] I think is the answer. So, she got there. We got together and rode some old, dirty bus from Tan Son Nhut to downtown Saigon and she brought some cameras, which she borrowed from a photographer in one of the papers, and we left the cameras on the bus. [laughter] This is before I was a photographer. This is the beginning of my photographic interest. We left the cameras and we got to our hotel and we're fine, and then, the next morning, we go down and the desk clerk says, "I have a note for you," and it says, "I have your cameras. Come see me at." I said, "Oh, God, my wife's first day in Vietnam. Am I being ambushed here? What the heck?" but, no, it was a very nice guy, found the cameras and, somehow, found, I don't know what [it] was, it must have been a tag or something on the bags that he found us [through]. So, she spent two weeks. As I said, everybody else, … all my buddies, got to go to Bangkok or Hong Kong, and I got to spend two weeks in Saigon. [laughter]

Anthony Villanueva, Rutgers Newark College of Arts and Sciences '73, U.S. Navy, Vietnam War

-On returning to civilian life after service in Vietnam:It was like I was invisible. People didn't know how to act around me, and it wasn't just my experience. A lot of the veterans that I spoke to at the time felt the same way. They felt like you're here, but you're not here. People were tippy-toeing around you. Once they knew you returned from Vietnam, they wouldn't look you straight in the eye. They would like look off to the side if they had to talk to you about anything. … The only people that I didn't feel uncomfortable around were other veterans. … Even to this day, there are some guys that we still keep in touch. We've had reunions, a couple of reunions, but the numbers are dwindling. A lot of the guys have died. Over the last fifty years, there's been a network of about--first, there was about twenty guys. Now, it's down to about four or five, but we always stay in touch. … That was very beneficial, but I also think that it isolated me from properly assimilating back into civilian life. See, back in the early '70s, PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], they didn't know what [it was]. Nobody called it PTSD. They just called it battle fatigue. Keep in mind that during the '70s, I was a police officer, so by extension, it was my Vietnam. It was the same adrenaline, the same jumping in and out of cars, arresting people, getting involved in situations. So, it kept the adrenaline going, but I didn't know that I was suffering from severe PTSD. It wasn't until late in the '70s that I went to the Veterans Administration and was tested, and it was determined that I had very bad PTSD. … At first, I said to myself, "I feel the same," and that was my first mistake, thinking, "Hey, I'm okay." I'm not okay, wasn't okay. It wasn't until I learned more about the illness and how to recognize triggers, things that set me off. I understood why I liked to be alone, don't want to be around people. I mean, I was in therapy for a good six or seven years--at various times for a total of about six or seven years--until I really understand all the ramifications of PTSD and how it affected me and how the therapy helped.

Tan "Joe" Nguyen, U.S. Marine Corps, Persian Gulf War

-On being a part of Operation Desert Sabre, when United Nations-coalition forces liberated Kuwait from Iraqi occupation:… We pressed on, and here it is; all of sudden, we're pushing through, and the vehicle commander tells us, "Enemy contact front, enemy contact front," he's yelling loud to us, and the back of the vehicle, the whole door drops, and of course, I was in the first fire team, so they sent us out to go and actually engage. So, here's the enemy in plain view. Keep in mind, you're in the desert, so you can see kind of farther away. It wasn't like a triple canopy jungle or a wooded area, like a covered concealment; this is just an open plain field, but here it is; my first engagement with an enemy. Someone is trying to kill me. We got out there, weapons pointed down range, we did our maneuvering, and sure enough, I see movement; I see Iraqis coming towards us, but there's rules of engagement. Of course, I see a lot of white flags too. They're holding white flags, ribbons, even sticks with toilet paper streamers as a form of white flag, which means that they're surrendering. So, if they're doing that obviously rules of engagement doesn't allow you to engage, and they were giving up. We took precaution and searched them, took their weapons away and corralled them etc., and then, behind us there's trucks back there that would take the POWs [prisoners of war] that were giving up, and that process went on just about all day, the first day of the war. Again, here we're trained to fight this fierce enemy, Iraqi Republican Guard, which is their elite force, and they were the aggressors. They drove out the Kuwaitis, so we're expecting opposition, and it wasn't so. They were just coming to us hands up, and they were just surrendering by the thousands. I can't remember how many prisoners I processed that day, but again, with every group of prisoners that come up there, you've got to be careful.

Taylor Lorchak, Rutgers School of Nursing-Camden '20, Army National Guard

-On her National Guard unit being activated and deployed to a veterans nursing home in April 2020 as a part of the state's emergency response to COVID:… It was a nursing home, but it's just for veterans. All the patients there either were veterans or were a spouse of a veteran. Specifically because it was a nursing home, all of the patients there were immunocompromised because of their age. That's really where Covid hit hard was any nursing home in general. Every nursing home was short on staff, was one example, so it wasn't really different from other nursing homes in that sense. … All of us would work there pretty much every day. They would split us into different groups for each different unit. They had a bunch of different units and wings there. So, a couple of us would be on one unit and then a couple of us would be on the other unit, but we pretty much stayed, whatever unit we started with, we stayed there the whole time. … Since all of us were combat medics, we would basically function as assistants to the nursing assistant. It was pretty much the same thing I did as a nursing student in clinical. I would help with patient hygiene. Also, we were in our uniform every day, so I think that [for] the veterans there, definitely it was a morale booster for them to see us there. We would basically just help both the nursing assistants and nurses in whatever way that we could. … As soon as [the residents of the nursing home] saw us there in uniform, it automatically brought a smile to their face. That generation, they don't really talk about their military service as much as people do today, but I think that the fact that they saw us there in uniform made them a little more open to sharing some of their stories that they had or what rank they were, or if they were the spouse of somebody, they would talk about their spouse.

Helen Walkinshaw, New Jersey College for Women '52, U.S. Navy, World War II

-On the development of the GI Bill while she was in the Navy during World War II:I knew about the GI Bill kind of directly from the inside. I was still in naval civil liaison when they were working on the legislation in Congress, which we were maintaining our liaison with. So, in fact, we were called upon to develop some ideas about how it should take place, and what the requirements should be. We were also directly involved in the reformulation of the naval reserve which was part of that same thing, post World War [II] Unification Act, and reformulation and restructuring of the naval reserve, and all of the other military branches, of course. And the final formulation of the context and the provisions of the GI Bill. So we were sitting there in that liaison office, and I knew about it happening even as I was still in the Navy and I had another two years to go, and I said, "Well that's great. I'll still keep saving my money and we'll be ahead of ourselves." When I came off active duty [in 1948] and went back to Douglass, and stayed in the reserve, of course, I simply bought myself a car and decided I was going to commute instead of living on campus. I figured after five years in the Navy, living in barracks and government quarters, living in a college dormitory was going to be no source of education that I really hadn't had thoroughly worked over in communal living by that time. [laughter]-On the advantage of having served in the military and then attending NJC on the GI Bill:[College] was much easier than the Navy. Intellectually, it was fine. It was just a romp, and I was ready for it and I was ready to relax, and spread myself over things like that. I think I never opened a book, even a math book, until my senior year. I mean, all I did was take my class notes and riffle through. I didn't have to study at all. No, it was true. Most people who came through World War II had such a mature vision about things and who particularly knew how to organize their time efficiently, that they had such a terrific head start on anyone who was coming out of high school, you know, that of course it was easy for most of us.

Irvin Baker

John Berglund

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