My Father's Vietnam Page #3
- NOT RATED
- Year:
- 2015
- 79 min
- 28 Views
and I figured I wasn't
gonna make it 24 hours.
I figured the environment or the
temperature was going to do me in.
I wasn't going to make it
because of the weather.
[Elizabeth] I was scared that
something might happen.
I knew he wasn't going to be in the
jungle, that would have freaked me out.
I guess I didn't constantly fear the way I
would if he had been in combat or a Marine.
And then at night, I remember there was
some kind of either an arc: light,
which is a B-52 drop,
or there was a firefight, something
going on in the mountains.
And I remember looking, coming out of the
hoooh and looking toward the mountains,
and it was like there
was a large thunderstorm.
You'd see a flash and then
there'd be a four-minute delay
and then you'd feel
the concussion.
It brought home that
you know where you are,
and then tomorrow or the next
day, the day after that,
you're going to be closer
to what's going on there.
Loring was assigned to an infantry
brigade, an infantry battalion.
I was assigned to an
engineer company,
and essentially he went off and did his
thing and I went off and did my thing.
His first letter
indicated that he had,
on the day of his arrival, that
night, they went out on a snake.
That was a case of where
you blackened your faces,
you're heavily armored,
and he was with
and they set up
a blocking force.
And he said, the blocking force,
we were there,
but nothing occurred.
[Peter] From Cam Ranh
Bay orders to Chu Lai,
which is the military
headquarters company
or headquarters
for the Americal Division,
and it was there, they have what
they call the Combat Center,
which is like graduate school,
and for a week you were there to acclimatize
yourself and also go through a quick kill course,
where you had a BB gun and had
to shoot at pop-up targets,
booby traps and mines
and try not to set them off.
Everybody set off something,
which is kind of debilitating...
Warning lectures on drugs.
All the hooches had
essentially plywood walls,
screens, and then
corrugated tin roofs.
And then attached,
or very close by,
there were culverts or half
shells covered with sandbags
which were for rocket
attacks or incoming...
The defensive
positions essentially.
The first night I was there,
we had incoming rockets.
There was an explosion.
We were green. We were looking
at each other, what was that?
And finally somebody came
running through the hooch
and said, "Everybody in the shelter,"
and we all got in the shelter.
There were three or four more
rockets that came in that night.
So the first night that I was in Chu
Lai, we received rocket attacks,
probably B-1 Os
or Soviet-made rockets.
They were just set up with bamboo
stakes out in the hinterlands
and they were launched
towards the American base.
any casualties or anything,
but that was my
introduction to incoming.
From there, we got orders
to Duc Pho, which is about
on the coast,
it's in Quang Ni Province.
I was assigned to the
engineers, from the engineers
or Landing Zone Liz,
which was a forward
fire support base.
And there were three mountains, one
large lump where the LZ was located.
There were a couple of howitzers there, and I
stayed there for four months or so, five months,
doing mine sweeps
and construction.
[Soren] For soldiers of the
Vietnam era and their loved ones,
letter writing was the most
useful method of communication.
As much as pictures tell us what the
war was like for these young men,
their letters home are as remarkable,
not only for what was written,
but also for what was left out.
[Rik] He wrote to us
to protect us.
He wrote to us and tried
to look at the light side.
He wrote a letter about a duckling
that he took with him for three days,
a little duckling that he carried on heli-
copter rides and finally let go somewhere.
There was Pete the puppy clog who followed
them around. He wrote about micro frogs.
[Loring Sr.] Oh, he was upbeat.
It was an upbeat deal.
He made it that way. I could tell you
one letter that he sent to his wife,
three or four paragraphs of
disassembling and assembling...
a machine gun,
a 50-caliber machine gun.
I don't think he copied it out of the
manual, but it was very, very close.
And he wrote this...
"Also, saw an enormous
python the other day."
Those exciting animal names grow
a bit meaningless or prosaic
when we think of them as automobile
models or can opener trademarks.
"But a real python opens your eyes and gives
new meaning and respect to the name."
He was in a God awful
environment...
just hideous.
[Peter] He was carrying 70 pounds of pack,
and then going from place to place,
and at night
setting up ambushes.
If it was the monsoon season,
you were wet to the bone,
48 hours, three days,
four or five days at a time.
Elizabeth, I wrote once a day. If I
missed a day I used to write two.
I probably got back
an equal amount.
It wasn't like World War ll where everybody
wrote, and everybody sent cookies,
and everybody did this. It was fairly confined
to the closest relatives and closest friends.
So you didn't get groundswells of mail, but the
ones I counted on obviously were Elizabeth's,
and friends.
I wrote him a letter
every day and did that.
But when he was gone,
he left in September
and at Christmas, which was a big family
gathering around the Christmas table
with my parents and Aunt Susie and Uncle
Atwood and all of the cousins and everybody.
And here I was having
been married one month.
And he left in September
and it was Christmas.
through the entire Christmas dinner
he was not toasted.
He was not... it just
wasn't in their conscious.
Part of our job was
to get up, very punctual,
so that the enemy knew
we were coming.
But there was at least
eight of us,
this parade of people
going down the road.
We did the sweep, and then
at the end of the sweep,
what would happen was a five-ton dump
truck would be filled up with sand.
It was called pressure testing,
and it would back down the road,
so anything that we missed electronically,
theoretically the clump truck would set off.
We did this one day,
got onto the truck,
because the pressure testing had been done,
and they would drive us back up to LZ Liz.
And on this particular day, we were working
on bunkers and then all of a sudden
we heard an explosion
down toward the road.
It was after the monsoon,
so they were repairing the road.
Anyway, we got down there and
the medevac was just leaving.
The dump truck driver...
The mine went off right under
the cab and it blew his eye out.
He had other injuries, but we had to
do another mine sweep of the road.
So this is the second mine sweep
within four hours, five hours,
and they did another
pressure test.
Translation
Translate and read this script in other languages:
Select another language:
- - Select -
- 简体中文 (Chinese - Simplified)
- 繁體中文 (Chinese - Traditional)
- Español (Spanish)
- Esperanto (Esperanto)
- 日本語 (Japanese)
- Português (Portuguese)
- Deutsch (German)
- العربية (Arabic)
- Français (French)
- Русский (Russian)
- ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada)
- 한국어 (Korean)
- עברית (Hebrew)
- Gaeilge (Irish)
- Українська (Ukrainian)
- اردو (Urdu)
- Magyar (Hungarian)
- मानक हिन्दी (Hindi)
- Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Italiano (Italian)
- தமிழ் (Tamil)
- Türkçe (Turkish)
- తెలుగు (Telugu)
- ภาษาไทย (Thai)
- Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
- Čeština (Czech)
- Polski (Polish)
- Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Românește (Romanian)
- Nederlands (Dutch)
- Ελληνικά (Greek)
- Latinum (Latin)
- Svenska (Swedish)
- Dansk (Danish)
- Suomi (Finnish)
- فارسی (Persian)
- ייִדיש (Yiddish)
- հայերեն (Armenian)
- Norsk (Norwegian)
- English (English)
Citation
Use the citation below to add this screenplay to your bibliography:
Style:MLAChicagoAPA
"My Father's Vietnam" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/my_father's_vietnam_14329>.
Discuss this script with the community:
Report Comment
We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.
If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly.
Attachment
You need to be logged in to favorite.
Log In