Interview with Roger Amis

KLINGEMANN: And so, if you get to a point where you need to take a break, let me know and then we’ll stop. And thanks so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. This is John Klingemann. I’m chair, Department of History at Angelo State University. I’m interviewing Roger Amis, and we’re going to start off with a set of questions. It is Friday … 13th—

AMIS: Twelfth.

KLINGEMANN: No, twelfth. Excuse me. Friday the 12th of June, and it is exactly 2:01 p.m. Okay. Please state your full name.

AMIS: Roger Lee Amis.

KLINGEMANN: Okay. Can you give us your date of birth?

AMIS: November 16, 1945.

KLINGEMANN: Okay, and where were you born?

AMIS: St. Louis, Missouri.

KLINGEMANN: Okay. Tell me a little about your life growing up. Where did you grow up?

How was it? Anything you remember in particular?

AMIS: I was born in St. Louis Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, November 16, 1945 … if I remember, approximately 3:15 in the afternoon. I was number seven of seven children … [exhales] Haven’t thought about this in a long time. The first one was my brother Thomas R. Amis, born November 3rd, 1932. Tom and I were the only living, surviving sons. [Exhales] If you think about the time frame, we’re talking 1932 to 1945. Child … survival rates at that time were not as they are now. So, losing children in … at childbirth or within the next three to four years after childbirth was common occurrence, although my dear mother, having seven children was enough. She lost the five in between either at birth … we had two sets of twins and one solo, and my brother Tom and myself.

I grew up in a foreign country around St. Charles … St. James, Missouri until about 1949. We moved to St. Louis, Missouri and my father was a police officer in the St. Louis Police Department for a period of time. In the ’30s and ’40s, became a plumber and then a sheet metal technician, eventually, with McDonnell Aircraft, prior to becoming McDonnell Douglas. My formative years were in St. Louis around Lambert Airport … At this time, I guess, Lambert International Airport. And then St. Charles, Missouri is where I went to grade … a major part of my grade school and high school. Graduated, strangely enough, in about the top twenty of the class purely because I had a girlfriend with a brain. And that was in June 1963. June 19, 1963, I entered the United States Army in the category … classification is airborne unassigned. I went to the paratroops and ended up in an artillery school and became an artillery surveyor. And

that … They survey artillery positions for the artillery battalion headquarters so that each firing battery—A, B, C—are located specifically and those points are plotted on maps. We did that, similar to what surveyors do now; they survey a point on the earth’s surface. Although we were running an M2 aiming circle, a T-16 satellite, and a hundred-meter steel tape. I ran a security … I ran with security teams. I also ran with the actual survey team itself, being a surveyor.

Went to Vietnam in early June 1965. First Brigade 101st Airborne Division. Departed

California for the Republic of South Vietnam on the USNS General LeRoy Eltinge III. It was a

troop ship for World War II. There were about 2,000 to 2,500 of us on the troop ship. I was

in … First I was in C Battery, 2^nd, 320th, then I went to headquarters … Headquarters Battery because I was a trained surveyor and they needed a surveyor slot filled. Before going to Vietnam, they inoculated us for everything on the face of the planet and there was more than one time we went from the medic section back to our billets bleeding down both arms and both cheeks of our butt because the types of injections and inoculations we were getting. The Eltingebroke down in the Pacific about three times and we had just enough power for steerage and that was it. Went into Subic Bay, the Philippines, a naval base. Stayed overnight. Stayed there for about three or four nights. We weren’t allowed out of Subic Bay Naval Base. They had the SPs, Shore Patrol army, military police, marine military police. I think they even drafted the air police from the local air base to come in and keep us confined.

KLINGEMANN: Why would they do that?

AMIS: We’d been on a troop ship for twenty-five days. Food, booze was high … it was like one and two, and two and one on the list of things to do. First was get off the ship. A lot of guys had to be carried back on the ship because they were blind drunk. I wasn’t one of them. Although I did a couple of beers, I got back there on my own power. One of the interesting things, when we got into the South China Sea—I cannot document this although I’ve talked to some mariners that were there at the time, but—we picked up diesel submarine boats as escorts coming into the South China Sea. I know this for one reason: I was on deck one night about two o’clock in the morning and I saw a set of lights. I saw something come up out of the water. Nice moonlit night, then running lights appeared. There was basically no sound other than the boat’s engines that were on the boat. And what in the hell is that? A submarine. And one of the officers told me to get the hell off of the … off the deck and get below where I was supposed to be. So, I just went to the other side of the boat and saw the other submarine. We picked up a diesel boat escort. 

KLINGEMANN: Do you mind … Can I ask you why it was that you joined the Army instead of any of the other branches?

AMIS: At age fifteen, I was an adventurous kid and I got involved with some paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. They ran a skydiving school and skydiving club. I got involved with them. And when I was sixteen, sixteen and a half, I was doing skydiving exhibitions and did that up until I graduated from high school when I was eighteen, and it just became something I liked doing. It was fun. There was an adrenaline rush. Step out an airplane at 12,000 feet and don’t open your parachute until you’re 2,500 feet above the ground, twelve to fifteen … whatever the time frame was. I forget. You got about a twenty-second drop. Twenty-second free fall, and that’s … that’s a rush. That’s an adrenaline rush. And once you start doing things like that and become—I don’t want to say desensitized; you just can’t desensitize yourself to that—but you come to like that. And you like to push the edge and you like to step into the danger zone. It’s wild. And once you go there and you conquer the fear—because there’s fear—it’s … oh, gosh. I don’t know how to explain it. It just gives you something additional. Once you walk on the wild side, it’s there. You can never get away from it.

KLINGEMANN: So, when you signed up for the Army, you specifically wanted to go …

AMIS: I wanted to go to airborne school.

KLINGEMANN: Airborne school.

AMIS: The reason I ended up in the surveyor … in the survey school, in the artillery survey school … in high school, I took three years mathematics, three years of science, three years of English. Math, science … math, science, English … Gosh, I forget what the fourth one was. But I had … In the four years in high school, I had four and a half years of science. My senior year, I went back and took a physics course—college freshman physics course from Princeton—and it was given at seven o’clock in the morning by our physics teacher. So, senior year, I was going to school at 6:45 in the morning so I could go this physics class. And then I took math: basic algebra, geometry… plain as allgeometry, algebra II my junior year; mathematical analysis, trigonometry, calculus my senior year. And then the math I needed for the physics class, for the advanced physics class, I was getting about two to three weeks before in the math classes, so it would dovetail right into the physics. And when I took the entrance exam to get into the Army, apparently my math scores were extremely high. I have no idea what they are. But I was told later, because I had the math scores that were so high, they put me in artillery surveyor because they needed the math skills.

KLINGEMANN: And you joined the military in what year?

AMIS: Nineteen sixty … June 1964.

KLINGEMANN: So, that’s when Vietnam was actually starting to escalate.

AMIS: Starting to wind up. 

KLINGEMANN: Starting to escalate. So, you fully understood that as a citizen of the United

States, if you were to enlist in the Army, that the chances were that you would eventually be

deployed, perhaps to Vietnam.

AMIS: In the back of my mind, I knew I was going to ’Nam. It wasn’t in the front, but I just

accepted it. Several months … Well, actually, this was last year. A friend of mine made a comment. It was Veterans Day or something like that. He thanked me for my service, and I … My response was, “My honor, my duty, my country.” So, it was something I signed up to do. I volunteered for this. Three times I volunteered … reenlisted in the Army—and we’ll get into that later—and went to Vietnam. And … go in late June, the ship pulled into Cam Ranh Bay. We disembarked there and we set up a small base camp at Cam Ranh and we were waiting. The advance party and the rear party from the 101st at Fort Campbell were there before us. The advance party was in there and then the rear party had stayed behind to close the barracks and everything down. Flew over, and then they all met us on the beach and they got us in trucks and everything. And once we got off the ship—I want to say boat, but it was ship—we were told immediately … we already loaded the magazines and nobody could carry a magazine in the weapon until we hit the beach. And once we were in the trucks, sergeant said, “Lock and load.”

KLINGEMANN: So, was that the first time in the military that you proceeded down that path? I mean, where you locked and loaded?

AMIS: Yeah, lock and load.

KLINGEMANN: When you … what was that first day at basic like for you?

AMIS: I …

KLIGEMANN: You’re an eighteen-year-old kid …

AMIS: I was eighteen-years-old. We went down to the recruiters, the Army reception station in St. Louis, the recruiter took me down there. The recruiter was—oh, gosh—a master sergeant, Special Forces … Airborne Special Forces, and he was the one that got me in. He didn’t lie to me or anything. Didn’t give me any nonsense. He just told me what it was. And originally, I wanted to be a helicopter pilot, but I “didn’t have the education for that.” And it … I just said, “Okay, fine. I just want airborne,” and got assigned what I got. And I got lucky; I got in the artillery. There was nothing wrong with that. The math skills I had did quite well. I ended up tutoring a bunch of guys in Advanced Individual Training, AIT, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma in the math. Because I was sitting in class and the instructor is instructing this stuff, and he’s looking at me. He says, “Amis, what’s wrong?” I said, “Easy. You go this, this, this, and this. And this is what you’re going to get.” And he said, “How do you know this?” I said, “It’s simple geometry and simple trig.” And I didn’t say “simple trigonometry.” I said, “Simple trig. Anybody can figure this out.” And he’s just looking at me and he says, “I’ll see you after class.” So, I became kind of a tutor for some of the other guys who didn’t have the math skills to understand it. And I would sit there and talk to them, and show them, “Okay this is how. This is the easy way to do this. I’m going to teach you a little bit of algebra and I’m going to teach you the geometry part. And then we’ll get into the trigonometry part. But don’t let those big words mess with you, because it’s just simple math.”

KLINGEMANN: Right.

AMIS: “Because all math is is addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. And multiplication and division come out of the whole addition and subtraction.” And he just

looked at me like I was from some other planet because I could understand it. But, anyhow … 

KLINGEMANN: So, that first day of basic …

AMIS: Okay, at basic, we were … We got to … We left there … We left St. Louis and it was like four o’clock in the afternoon on a bus. Got to Fort Leonard, Missouri. It was about a three-and-a-half hour, four hour drive away. So, it was dark. We get off the bus and line up. And we had the reception DIs, Drill Instructors, helping us out and assisting us with how we were supposed to act. And it was not a friendly get down and get together. It was, “You will do this, this, this, and this. Keep your mouth shut. You don’t know a darn thing.” And we finally got

to … got to bed at one o’clock in the morning. You get a cot and a blanket. That was it. They said, “You guys are from St. Louis. Yeah, turn over all your knives. No knives.” This guy was walking around with a box and everybody, including me, had to take their pocket knife out and put it in a box and we couldn’t have a knife. Later, they changed that and I got a knife. Always carried a blade. But it was … It was one of those things.

From then on, it was purely structured living from six o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night. And even at ten o’clock at night, there was a DI running loose someplace. So, you were in that rack, in the bunk, or you were being counseled. After we got out of the reception station, got into the actual basic training company, things lightened up a little bit. They were on us consistently, but as long as we were doing what we were supposed to do, we got where we needed to be on time, into class, progressing and functioning as a basic trainee … I won’t say it was easy but it was one of those things of … It wasn’t hard. For me, it wasn’t difficult. And the platoon sergeant and platoon leader found out that I was going to airborne class, ended up going to airborne school, so I was given additional assistance and training. That meant more running and more pushups, and more running and more pushups. I just looked at him like, “Well, why?” And he said, “To make sure you’re ready for jump school. You have to be able to do this.”

“Yes …” The first time I called a sergeant “sir,” I was counseled about that. They weren’t sirs; they were sergeants. They worked for a living. But it wasn’t that bad. To me, it wasn’t rough. It wasn’t hard. It was just doing it and that was it.

KLINGEMANN: Were you an athlete in high school?

AMIS: Oh, no. Oh, I won’t say I was an athlete or a jock but I did … I was on the track team and I was B-team, football reserve squad. I never played first string. I wasn’t varsity.

KLINGEMANN: But you were athletic.

AMIS: Athletic to a point. I could run. Not a … I wasn’t a sprinter but I could do distance really

well. I was on the track team. I threw the discus because I didn’t have enough speed or

endurance for the distance, for the main … for the sprinters or the distance runners. I just didn’t have it.

KLINGEMANN: So, basic was … The physical aspect, was it overwhelming for you?

AMIS: No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t that bad. It was … I won’t say difficult, but it was a challenge. I just met the challenge. And they said it was red if it was red. If they said it was white, it was white. And if they wanted it round, it was round. The most memorable … besides the platoon sergeant, he was pretty cool. He didn’t abuse us. He didn’t yell and scream and all that stuff. If you got stupid and did something dumb, he counseled you on it, and it was kind of a private consultation in the boiler room. And usually, these guys were pretty big and pretty well-built, so they could carry out what they had in mind. Memorable people besides him was the company first sergeant. He was Filipino. Guy had to be about 5’9” or 5’10”—I’m barely 5’8”—and slender. But his voice, I had a hard time understanding because of the particular accent that he had. I really had to pay attention to him. I couldn’t just normally listen to him. I had to really pay attention because of the voice inflection and the accent. He was an extremely sharp individual. And the other guy that stands out, I still see his face. I have no idea what his name was. But I saw a pair of wings he had on, and they were glider wings from World War II.

KLINGEMANN: World War II.

AMIS: And he had two little stars. That meant he made two glider assaults. You’ll probably edit this out. They had a pair of balls. They got big brass balls, like soccer balls. I mean, this guy’s

just … gosh. I thought I was good stepping out of an airplane but holy crap. But …

KLINGEMANN: So, you graduated from basic.

AMIS: Graduated from basic July … August. August … latter part of August sometime. Later part of August. Went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for advanced individual training as an artillery surveyor. Stayed there for four weeks, graduated. Actually, I was there six weeks. I ended up in the hospital because I had the measles. They put me back two weeks. I was in quarantine for a week-and-a-half … two weeks … a-week-and-a-half, then they put me right back in with another company, training company. And it was right back to the same thing. I was doing a tutoring thing for math, which is fine with me. It was easy.

Went from there to Fort Benning, Georgia by railroad train and they picked us up someplace in Alabama … Georgia? Georgia, and then bussed us to Fort Benning, Georgia. The guys were going on to jump school. Fort Benning was not just jump school. It was the infantry school. That’s where everybody went through basic infantry for their infantry skills, their AIT. So, we had guys on the train going to jump school and then from their basic training companies, going to AIT infantry. I think the MOS was 11C. 11A, B, and C. 11B was infantry. Soon as we got off the bus, they said, “Okay, everyone going to jump school, over here. Everybody going to basic, over there.” So, we had divided out. We were four companies … four platoons of airborne trainees.

Got into there … it was like a Saturday. We got there Sunday. We got in our billets, we got settled down. Monday, we were out on the … on the hard surface tarmac and marched off to our first class in jump school. First week was called “ground week,” and once they turned us to a column to march, it was double time, and we ran everywhere. The only time we didn’t run at double time was from the mess hall back to our billet. Once you step foot inside there, back outside, you ran. You didn’t walk. And every time you saw an officer, you’d walk and say, “Airborne, sir.” He’d say, “All the way.” And then once he said that, you dropped the salute and you were running again. You did not walk. We spent a week in ground week. And that was the thirty-four-foot tower. They had us in a harness and … jump harness. We were learning to exit from a simulated aircraft door and once we jumped out of the tower, we were on a long suspension line … with the harness and the suspension line. And a long cable ran 200 feet … 100 meters … 100 meters to a berm about fifteen feet off the ground, and that’s where they caught you. And you would get out of the harness and, immediately, you were given a rope that was hooked to the harness. You ran that harness all the way back to the thirty-four-foot tower. You got back in line, and you did this time after time after time after time until they were satisfied with you. If you weren’t doing that, you were doing what they called a PLF, a Parachute Landing Fall. And that was off of a four-foot platform into sand … or … into sand. And if it was wet sand, it was wet sand. And you had to land specifically correct.

KLINGEMANN: Did you ever see anybody get hurt?

AMIS: Turned ankle, turned knee. Not that much during the … That was the first week. The second week, we went to tower week. And there, we ended up going from what they called a 250-foot free tower. It was a parachute that went up in a frame. You got in your harness, hooked to the parachute, and went up 250-foot off the ground. The instructors would yell if you were ready and you’d say, “Airborne, sir.” And you got a whole suspension line and risers that come up from the harness to the shroud lines up to the chute. And then they would tell you to pull the shroud lines away from the tower and “You ready?” And they cut you loose and you floated down to the ground. And you had to land correctly. We also had what they called “the wind machine.” They have us in a harness with a parachute on, and they’d start the wind machine up. And it was to teach you if you were being dragged by the … in the harness in the parachute to release the parachute portion of it. The parachute would collapse and you would get up and go do your thing. We did that and had suspended agony. They put you in a harness and you … They hoist the harness up off the ground about three feet and then you practice climbing the risers to be able to control the parachute. You climb the right front riser, the chute would rotate to the right. Left front, rotate left. Climb the rear risers, backwards. And we actually tilt to go backwards. So, they would teach you. You get to do that. We call it “suspended agony.” You could be in that thing for thirty-five to forty minutes. And you had to have it tight or else it became very uncomfortable. You talk with a soprano voice for a while.

At the end of that … at the end of the second week, we were running a five-mile run in the morning and it was a sand track. It was like a long … like a race track except we ended up running five miles on that thing. And we would have … we would be running in platoons and companies and so on. Guys would drop out and throw up and then get back up and start running again. And that kind of pulled a lot of people out. They just didn’t have the desire or the drive to complete it. At the end of that, I ended up having to go to the medics because I had a lot of pain coming out of my right leg. And … went to the medics and they said I had shin splints. It’s just small cracks in the shins. And it was like a Friday afternoon. They put a cast on me, kept me in another barracks until Monday morning. I went back, saw the doctor. They took the cast off and he said, “You’re ready to go back to jump school … back into school? Or are you going to be put back or whatever?” I said, “I’m ready to go.” He squeezed my foot and I didn’t scream but it hurt. He said “okay” and signed a release and everything. Walked out, he said, “Are you lying to me?” I said, “Sir, I would never lie to you.” And he said, “Get your ass out of here.”

And on a dead run, I caught up with the company. We were going to do our first jump and I caught up with them. They looked at me and said, “Are you going?” I said, “Yeah, I’m going.” He said, “Get in your chute.” So, got into my chute. I got everything on. The first jump is what they call the “cherry jump.” It was a Hollywood jump. That means we didn’t jump with any packs or anything, just the main chute and the reserve chute in front. But it was everything else … the helmet, the jump helmet, the webbing on the helmet … everything was there. The first jump was out of the … the Air Force C-119 Boxcar, and it didn’t get off the ground first time. We had to taxi back and try again. He could barely get off the ground the second time. We fool around for about two hours. And guys were throwing up. I’m sitting back there, “This is cool.” It was like I could look out the door because the flying boxcar, it doesn’t have a square back end. It has a canoe-type back end, and there were doors right in front of this opening and they were on the sides and I was sitting across diagonally from a door. I could look outside like, “This is cool. I like this.” We were running 300 feet off the ground.

KLINGEMANN: But you already had been skydiving since you were sixteen.

AMIS: I had already been skydiving. It didn’t bother me. And these other guys, they were turning white. They were puking. And I’m over there going, “[Whistles] When is this going to get going?” And we got up and we just started to … I was the first guy in the stick. And the groups that are going out there called the stick and they line … hook up, get all the equipment checked and everything, and you stand there. The first guy stands in the door. I was standing in the door, and I’m going out further and further, and the instructor pulled me back and said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m enjoying this. This is cool. I like this.” And he’s pulling me back in and said, “You’re eager, aren’t you?”

“Yes sir. Let’s get it on. Let’s do it.” The other guys behind me were shaking their heads. They didn’t know what they wanted to do. This was the first time. This was the first jump. And we did the first one and they dropped us at … stateside non-combat jump was about 800 feet above the ground, and we made the first jump. It was great. It was just … everybody was falling out of the airplane, so it was fun. Got on the ground, picked everything up, got hooked back, and then the next day, we made the next jump. And I think it was the C-130 Hercules—and that was because it was faster—and we flew around for about an hour-and-a-half, two hours and they dropped us. This time, we were jumping with twenty-pound packs underneath the reserve chute, and it was that way all the way along; two through five, we were all with combat packs on—no weapons, just pack—and waiting there to give you the idea of what the jump was actually like and what was going to happen when you hit the ground. And the landing was never the same. One landing could be like stepping off the curb into the street. The next one could be like stepping off the curb into the street in front of a truck and you’d get hit hard. It depended on the wind … the type of drops zones you went into. It was … they were all fun. They were all interesting.

I graduated from jump school on a Friday. They bussed us. I went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. I’ll be darned if I can remember how I got there. I think it was by train … I think. And got in there and got into … That was November of ’64. Freezing … It was cold. I got into the reception station there. Two days later, they send me to the 2nd Battalion 320th Airborne Artillery, and they said they didn’t have any surveyor slots open, so they stuck me in C Battery in the 2nd Battalion 320th. And I became a gun bunny, a can and cocker gun bunny. I was working on a 105 towed howitzer and eventually ended up driving the tow vehicle for it. It was a three-quarter-ton truck, an M39 three-quarter-ton truck. And uh I just towed those things around until we got ready to go to Vietnam and they needed … What they were doing is they took all the people out of the battalion that had less than a year or two served in the Army, and it left several spots in the survey platoon open. So, they pulled me out of the C Battery and put me in Headquarters Battery, and I deployed with Headquarters Battery.

KLINGEMANN: What did you think about whenever you got that news?

AMIS: That’s what I’m here for. I signed up to be an airborne trooper and that’s what it was. That’s all it was.

KLINGEMANN: Did you get an official notice? Was it a telegram or was it just an invite, you know, something over the loudspeakers? Or how did they actually … or when you were in formation, maybe?

AMIS: We were in formation. We were told that we would be deploying. We knew … They wouldn’t tell us it was ’Nam. We were going to be deploying and setting everything up to move to a different place. We knew it was Vietnam. Some the guys that I was with, they weren’t the brightest things to fall off the tree. And I’m not the smartest … I wasn’t the smartest guy in that block either.

KLINGEMANN: You were a mathematician.

AMIS: I was lucky. [Both laugh] I just got to where the numbers were neat, and it worked. And I’m not an accountant but I can work numbers. Even in flying right now, I can use all the whiz-bang stuff as a pilot. The GPS and all of this stuff, it does great calculations in a split second but I still go back and use the pencil and paper and the little hand calculator circular slide rule because I can work that with my hand, one-handed. I can work ratios and proportions on that. If I’m going to go a certain speed, I’m going to go a certain distance in a certain time. If I increase the speed, I decrease the time from the same distance. Okay. Fuel calculations are the same way. I can do them, basically, in the back of my head. But I can do ratios and proportions on the circular slide rule. It’s … It’s still math. I love it. I still got my original slide rule. No, I don’t. That one got trashed. I’ve got an engineering slide rule that I picked up when I was in the Army. And …

KLINGEMANN: So, you guys knew that you were going to get deployed and you knew it was Vietnam?

AMIS: Yep.

KLINGEMANN: So, now, take me back to the beach, then, as soon as you hit lock and load.

AMIS: We knew we were there. And the smell … The odor was different.

KLINGEMANN: In what sense?

AMIS: It was a … We were right on the ocean. We were in a bay, and there was the odors from the ocean, the sea there and then the type of cooking that is done in Vietnam, the type of fires, the spices and all. And a lot of that was fresh, open-air stuff, so these odors from this would go into the air. And the … the odor from the place itself … and there’s nothing … there’s nothing derogatory about it. But I went back on my second tour, I got off the 707—a Boeing 707—walked down the gangplank, down the stairs. Halfway across the tarmac, I made one sniff. I’m back. And then everything kicked back. The survival instinct kicked back into looking around to see what’s going on. What’s happening, not just five feet away, ten feet away; a quarter mile away from me. And watching … We learned that the first time I was there was when I learned it.

KLINGEMANN: So, you were nineteen when you landed the first time?

AMIS: I was nineteen when I got there in late June. I turned twenty in November.

KLINGEMANN: So, here you are in a combat zone and you can’t even buy beer, can’t buy alcohol. You can vote.

AMIS: Not here. Not here in the States, but over there …

KLINGEMANN: Over there, you could?

AMIS: Over there, they gave it away.

KLINGEMANN: Yeah, but here in the United States, you couldn’t even buy beer.

AMIS: Well, on post, we could.

KLINGEMANN: Okay.

AMIS: We went to the … Obviously, the O Club, Officer’s Club, was off limits to us. The NCO Club was off limits. But we had the M Clubs and, there, we could buy beer. You could buy hard liquor. You know, the hard stuff and all.

KLINGEMANN: Right.

AMIS: And I had my first taste of scotch in one of those things and I couldn’t figure out why anybody would ever want to drink that. It didn’t taste like something I wanted to taste. And oh, my God, I paid how much for this and yuck. It was almost like turpentine or something. I don’t know what it was. But some of my other buddies were much more, oh … much more worldly than me. “Oh, that’s the greatest stuff in here. You got to try that.”

“Give me a beer.” [Laughs] That was it. But over there, we had beer. You could pick up beer. Hard stuff was not easy to get. Beer, you could get. There were several different kinds. There was Pam’s. Uh Budweiser, I think, was over there. Coors was there, I think. There was some stuff from Australia. And then there was local stuff: Biere Larue, Tiger, Ba Muoi Ba 33. And these came in big bottles, too. You could drink one of those things and it didn’t make any difference. With the temperature and the humidity, you sweat it right back out. I used to drink that, and it was a fluid. It went right in and right back out; you’d sweat it out.

KLINGEMANN: So, that first night in Vietnam … tell me about that.

AMIS: Like being in a horror show. You were scared shitless. Didn’t know what was going to happen. Didn’t know what was going to come out.

KLINGEMANN: Well, where did you end up?

AMIS: In a small base camp area in a tent. And luckily, it was before the monsoons and we had a perimeter set up. We set up barbed wire perimeters. There was a hundred-meter zone in front of the free-fire zone in front of us. So, we could see anything coming … hopefully. They had termite mounds over there. They were fifteen, twenty, thirty feet high. And to get those down, you had to either go out and get a pick and shovel. You spent all day on top of a termite mound with a pick and shovel, and you might get two feet off of it. It was like concrete.

KLINGEMANN: Oh my gosh.

AMIS: I’m serious. And we’d sit there, the sergeant or NCO would bring some beer out and we’d get water and beer, drink that and sweat it right out, and just go over behind a scrawny ass bush and whiz. And you’d still … At the end of the day; you may have two or three feet off the top of that thing. So, they said, “Well, we got to get rid of these things.” We didn’t have combat engineers to come do it. To come every place, it’s not possible. You know, we had a finite number of those and they were used someplace else. And you got to clear your own zone in front of you, so one of them says, “How hard is this dirt to dig through? These things are going to take us a month to get through.” And we just couldn’t do it. It was just … there was too much. Like I said, it’s like going through concrete. And we’d dig down under … we tunneled under the things. And I am no explosives expert, not in my imagination. And believe me, John, I have an imagination, a good one. I’ve gotten things that I’ve never even thought or dreamed of, and I ended up doing this. And we tunneled underneath the termite mound, built a shelf, put thirty-pound … thirty blocks of C-4 in there, put a quarter-pound block of TNT in the middle of it. Shoved a blasting cap and a fuse into it, backed out of it, and put dirt back in … tamped it back in. Basically, we made a shape charge. Got back out and yelled up and down the line for five minutes: “Fire in the hole.” We set that thing off. That termite mound went 200 feet in the air … in pieces. It was raining all over the place. But we had a free shot. Two hours later, it was—boom!—going off all over the place.

I was walking through concertina wire in combat fatigues. We had big cargo pockets and the shirt had pockets all over. And in the cargo pocket, I was carrying four-pound … four blocks of C-4 in my right cargo pocket. Four blocks of C-4 in the left cargo pocket. Quarter-pound blocks of TNT in each of the shoulder … in each of the shirt pockets on the bottom. Fuses in the right top pocket and blasting caps in the top left. I was a walking bomb, and we didn’t care. It

didn’t … Well, I won’t say we didn’t care. It just didn’t … I didn’t realize it. I realized later, if I’d have tripped, I’d have blown us all up because I had the blasting caps right over my heart. One round from a sniper, and we would have been gone. But we got rid of the damn things. And then the termite mounds … these were not active termite mounds. These were dead ones. They were not used. We took and used one of them. We cut the top of it off with explosives and then cut a standing spot and then the shelf and everything. We put holes down and put a roof over the thing and this was our bunker. You had to have an RPG to blow the thing up. We put a machine gun up there and then we had other bunkers of sandbags and stuff. But we were sleeping right behind these things, and that was my duty was to be up there. And we had these idiots that would come by and they would check us at night to see if we were awake. And they would creep along and we had little signals between one bunk and the next, and it was somebody whistled or something like that or… little whistle. They’d go “[clicking noise]” if somebody was coming.

KLINGEMANN: Oh.

AMIS: And you’d hear the sergeants come and check if we were sleeping. We cured them of that habit. They’d come up and they’d find nobody in the bunker. We were standing behind them with loaded M16s.

KLINGEMANN: “Who are you?”

AMIS: Don’t ever do that again. Because instead of staying in the bunker, we’d sit off to the side and you wouldn’t be seen. And so, if you’re going to come talk to us, fine, but don’t do this because somebody’s going to get hurt. And out in my bunker, I had gotten diarrhea, and you couldn’t make it to the latrine. There was no way. Because once you had diarrhea, you went. You went. I dug little cat holes. During the day, I dug cat holes, and I put a little thing around them and dirt and everything. And when I had to go, go over, go to the cat hole, do your thing, clean up, fill up. I told them, “Don’t do this because you’re going to fall in one of these cat holes. You’re going to either break an ankle or you’re going to get …” anyhow. So, we cured them of that. And then the battalion deployed north to Quảng Tri. I’d have to look at a map again. We deployed north into I Corps because we were in II Corps. And they got into a whole bunch of battles up there and they brought the rest of the group up. We closed down the base where we were at, we went north, hooked back up with the battalion. Got into a bunch of firefights, artillery barrages and stuff. And since I had been a surveyor, I ran security for the steel tape team, for the survey teams. And I was never trained on an M60, yet I’m humping an M60 and 200 rounds of ammunition.

KLINGEMANN: That’s heavy.

AMIS: And it was OJT[1]. This is how this works. Oh, thank you. And plus, my M16, I had to carry. We did that and …

KLINGEMANN: You said you were in a couple of firefights already?

AMIS: We’d get into firefights and it was scarier than hell.

KLINGEMANN: What was the first time like? How was that?

AMIS: It just happened.

KLINGEMANN: Just happened?

AMIS: Yep. We were sitting on the perimeter of the fire support base where we were at and just got opened up on. And once it starts … if it’s at night, tracers are going back and forth. AK tracers are green; M16, M60 tracers are orange. 12.7 white … 12.7 Russian is white. That’s … 12.7 millimeters is 50 caliber, .5 inch—a half-inch—and they were white.

KLINGEMANN: Wow.

AMIS: And you figure tracers, American tracers, are every fifth or every seventh round. The Russians were about the same, I think. Probably every fifth round.

KLINGEMANN: Okay.

AMIS: Scary shit. Because you see the tracer there, but what’s in between it?

KLINGEMANN: But you know, that’s interesting, Rog, because you say that it just happened. And so, your training kicked in?

AMIS: Training kicks in. Basically, it’s let your buttons get in the way, because you got to get down. Got to get down fast. And generally, you don’t know where it’s at, where it’s coming from. It could be some guy taking a couple of pot shots at you, or they opened up with AK-47s and machine guns. They had another machine gun over there. It was 7.62 by 54R Russian round, equivalent to just a little bit less than a 30-06. Still just nasty. And the same round they used in World War II. Nasty round. But its every fifth or every seventh was a tracer. And it’s got a … I don’t remember if that one had a five or six hundred, 650 round per minute rate of fire. First time I got shot at, I was sitting in front of a bunker. Brilliant nineteen-year-old here, and I was sitting in front of the bunker. And I was not as well developed as I am now, about 170 to 175 pounds, skinnier than a rail. And the firing port on the bunker was three to three-and-a-half feet long and about eighteen inches high. And not in the dead center, but off … well, dead center was the machine gun, the M60 machine gun, and that’s where my M16 was. And somebody fired at us and I took … two rounds hit right … one round hit between my feet and the other one hit to the left side … to my left side about a foot away. And in … from my sitting position in a little chair I had built out of nothing, I went up through the gun port, the machine gun port and was on the inside of the bunker, and rolled back to a standing position, back up to where I could get to a gun. And by that time, little buggers had run away. They didn’t want to stay and fight. Scared the living crap out of me.

KLINGEMANN: Yeah, I bet.

AMIS: I was shaking. After it was all over, I was shaking like crazy. I couldn’t do anything. I could hardly talk. Adrenaline was going through. You got the adrenaline shakes. And what happened was … “He shot at me.”

“Where?”

“See? There.” Your eyes are as big as tea cups, ears sticking straight out, white. Almost dead white. I was scared. I’ll be the first to admit it. A guy tells you, “I was never scared in combat,” in my opinion—in mine only—lying through his teeth or he’s lying to himself. You got to have some kind of reaction to that. That is not a normal thing people want to … are expecting the first time. Now, the second time’s a little easier. A little bit easier … maybe a fraction easier. After a while, you get to understand what’s going on and you react better. You react faster and are more confident in what you’re doing at that point. Saying completely, one-hundred percent, used to getting shot at in combat? No, I don’t think anybody does.

KLINGEMANN: Was this a … this was just a part of everyday life?

AMIS: It was everyday life. We went north to I Corps. We deployed back south to a place called Phan Rang. P-H-A-N-G capital R-A-N-G. And the Air Force ended up building an Air Force … an air base there, and we provided … helped provide security with them and then we had our own fire support base. And I turned … my twentieth birthday was in November of ’65, there in a long … my birthday was in … that evening was in a long GP large tent in our battery headquarters club and it was … the officers were in there, NCOs … everybody was there. That’s where I had my twentieth birthday, and uh … the song was the Beach Boys’ “California Girl.”

And one of the things … and down around Cam Ranh Bay, we had a ROK, Republic of Korea, company next to us and we talked to the guys. Some of those guys … some of the Koreans spoke English, and we were talking back and forth. And I thought, you know, “Airborne trooper, I can go over and, you know, mess with these guys and be okay.” Well, they are a different bunch, believe me. A completely different mindset. A ROK sergeant tells somebody to jump to attention … when he speaks to somebody, that person goes to attention. If they don’t do it fast enough, they’re on their butt. They’d knock them on their ass. I’ve seen it. And they are strict. I mean, they toe the line and they’re a hard bunch. But they … when they weren’t doing their thing, they were easy to talk to. And I would go over and work out with them. I thought I was pretty tough. They used to whoop my ass. They’d use me as a warm-up so they could go do their thing. I got my ass whooped I don’t know how many times. They didn’t beat me up or anything or break anything, but they bounced my ass all over the place. I kept being an idiot. I went back for more. I learned a little bit, but they were a hard bunch.

We ran into the same general bunch around Phan Rang, and they would come in and we would get the information, and they would tell us, “Do not go into this area.” They’d give us a block area, because the ROK marines are going to begin clearing that area. And when they went through an area, they were … they were brutal. They were in there to do one thing, and that was to clean it out. There was only one group of people who ever beat the NVA or the VC at their own game—and that was in the French Foreign Legion and it was prior to Điện Biên Phủ in 1954— and they were Waffen-SS. Some of the … many of the SS troopers—both troops, NCOs, and officers—post-World War II made it out of Russia, out of Germany, into France, and they enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. Well, that cut off their background. That stopped right there.

Originally, they went into Algeria and then they put them into Vietnam and they found out that the tactics that the French Foreign Regular Legion was using weren’t adequate. They weren’t making it. They were taking too many casualties. They were getting … They were getting run over. And they started using the tactics of the VC and the NVA … were using, and they were feared by the VC. They … the Waffen SS would come in there and they were just like everybody else, but they … an entirely different mindset. And they would use the VC tactics against them. And they would get a convoy from point A to point B without being ambushed. If they were ambushed, God help them, because these people were … They were … They were there to do one thing, and it was to fight. It was not to win their hearts and minds; it was to fight. But the ROK marines were pretty rough. They were pretty tough and I had a lot of respect for them. They … They got in there and did their job.

KLINGEMANN: What was daily life in the camps? You know …

AMIS: It was pretty easy.

KLINGEMANN: … you’d have the firefights …

AMIS: You had the firefights.

KLINGEMANN: … but what was the remainder of the time … ?

AMIS: It was get up in the morning at 6:30, seven o’clock in the morning; get cleaned up; hit the mess hall; take care of your equipment. If I was out running with an FO team, a Forward Observer team, then we would hit the brush.

KLINGEMANN: So, you would actually go through the wire and out into the brush?

AMIS: Out into the brush and got to a point and we’d start looking for targets. I got … Me and a couple other guys got helicoptered into hilltops with a compass and a map. And said, “Well, you’re here.” And a radio. And we would set up our artillery spotting firing locations and what they call a “registration site.” We’d give them … they’d fire a point. We’d give them a registration on … “This set of coordinates is this. You’re at 200 meters high. Drop 200 meters. Left 500 meters. Fire one round.” And then we would get them into this one spot, one geographic spot on the map.

KLINGEMANN: You’d be pinpointing the artillery.

AMIS: And from then on, they had a spot to fire from that was accurate. And we would see people a mile and a half away with binoculars, troops in … on march. We’d identify them as hostile by carrying weapons, by … by being male. Because you can pretty much tell … from a distance, you can still tell female and male. And no kids. I never dropped ordinance on kids … or females if I could help it. If I was being shot at, different story. But we would catch these people out. They’d be running a column, carrying supplies and stuff there. We’d just lay the artillery on them were they enemy combatants. And that was … That was a …

KLINGEMANN: These were three-man teams that you were on?

AMIS: I was solo.

KLINGEMANN: Solo. So, they would drop you …

AMIS: Me and another guy on another hilltop a mile away. We’d go in by helicopter. And

this … These weren’t the Hueys. They were Bell H-13s. And we’d be sitting in the helicopter. The pilot was on the right side, we were on the left side. He skids with the ground, he says, “Out,” and that meant right then. He wasn’t staying. So, I’d get out of the helicopter, pull my equipment out real quick—what little I had—flat on the ground, and he was off. He’d give me a minute, and I had to be out and away.

KLINGEMANN: So, you were there by yourself?

AMIS: There by myself. And then …

KLINGEMANN: How far from the base were you usually?

AMIS: A couple miles.

KLINGEMANN: Okay.

AMIS: And they would call us to be ready for the helicopter to pick you up in thirty minutes. That meant get your stuff ready, he hits the ground, pack it up, get it on there, and strap down, because he ain’t waiting. He will not wait. And later, I understood why when I became a little older and a little bit wiser. But that was a …

KLINGEMANN: Did you ever have any hairy experiences by yourself there?

AMIS: Not that, but we were on a mountain top one night—there was three of us—and we had them coming up one side of the mountain. So, we called artillery on the mountaintop, on the mountainside, and we rang them out because we could. You could call it accurate enough. And that stopped the advance from the bottom up. And we went down in the morning. We got out of there fast as we could. And …

KLINGEMANN: How did you know they were coming?

AMIS: Heard them. You could hear them talking. Hear them …

KLINGEMANN: Can you hear voices in the jungle at a long distance?

AMIS: Yeah.

KLINGEMANN: I’ve been in the Costa Rican jungle. I’ve been in the Mexican jungle, you know, the southern Mexican jungle. And … But you can hear the voices.

AMIS: You can hear it, and you hear the sound. The sounds change. And when people start moving through an area, animal sounds stop.

KLINGEMANN: Ah.

AMIS: Or you’ll hear a loud flush of noise and then you don’t hear any animal sounds. And then you start picking up on the … the movement and the sound that’s not normal area. And it’s … it’s a feeling you … You start picking up the feeling and … Well, it’s a feeling. I feel what’s happening. What it is, you’re taking in sensory reception of sound and movement, and differentiate those points from what normal sound was.

KLINGEMANN: So, this was part of your education process?

AMIS: Yeah, and it’s one of those things you don’t think about, but you end up acquiring. It … And it’s an education process. You learn that. And if you learn it, you live, and if you don’t learn it, you die. And luckily, we learned it. About six months … Eight months after I got in country, the battalion executive officer … his name was Major Lamp. We call him “Carbide.” Obviously, carbide lamp. “Here comes Carbide.” Okay. I was working on a jeep or something like that, and he says, “Amis, I need to talk to you.”

“Yes, sir.” You know, and this was in camp. “Yes, sir” [unintelligible]. Okay, no big deal. He says, “I’m being transferred to the headquarter support … brigade headquarters support battalion. Do you want to go?” And I said, “Well, doing what?”

“Well, you’d be a clerk.”

“Well, sir, I’m not a clerk. I’m not a typist or anything like that. I can type but I’m not a corps typist.” He said, “Well, what I need is a driver, a bodyguard. Somebody to look after my equipment. And you need to be … become a clerk typist … a clerk.” I said, “Do I got to go back to the bush?” He says, “No.”

“When do we go?” So, I went over to the headquarters support battalion and took all I owned in a GP large tent with a plywood pallet floor and mosquito netting and everything. It was great. And all I did, I was up at six o’clock in the morning and I went and put this guy’s clothes out for him like a British Batman for a British officer, and got his laundry and put his poker winnings in his box and separated all his money out and kept a ledger of that. Did my clerk stuff, ran into town, ran errands for him. [Coughs] Excuse me. Basically, I was a bodyguard, driver, gofer until I returned to the States.

KLINGEMANN: So, your stress level went down considerably?

AMIS: Tremendously, except when I went outside the gate. When I went outside the wire into the local city, local towns, the … the stress meter went straight up because I knew out there, I was going to get hit. One of the funny things, we had an officer. Usually, officers came over … I was a PFC, a Private First Class, E-3. And so, obviously, I had no authority or responsibility or anything. But I was working with an FO, a Forward Observer team, because I knew maps, compasses, and stuff like that. And this lieutenant came in. He was taking over the FO team

and … introduced him. They came and introduced him to us and all. And after all of the formalities were over, he said, “I need to talk to you guys.” And we figured, “Okay, here it comes, Mr. Know It All.” He’s just our artillery lieutenant. He knows about compasses, and maps, and jump school. And he’s been through artillery officer school and all this stuff. And … “Okay, here it comes. He’s going to tell us how it’s all done.” He hadn’t been in country a week, so he gets us all off to the side, he says, “Okay, I have 360 days to go. How do I stay alive?”

KLINGEMANN: Very Honest.

AMIS: “Well, what do you mean?” He says, “I have 360 days to go. You guys have been in this thing for six months now. How do I stay alive? I want to go home.”

“A year from now? Are you bullshitting us?”

“No.”

“Okay, when you’re here … When we’re here at base camp, you’re the officer, and we say ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir.’ Now, if we’re near that wire, don’t salute. Nothing. Once we’re beyond the wire, I’m in charge.” This is our sergeant talking. He says, “What do you mean?” I said, “Okay, see all your lieutenant bars and all this stuff?” This was before we had the subdued insignia. We were subduing our insignia with magic markers. He said, “Okay.”

“When we hit that brush, when we’re out of sight, all this comes off, and no salute, no ‘sir.’ You keep your voice down. You’ll stay three people back. You’ll stay with me. We have a point man. We have a trio. ‘Tailing Charlie.’ You’ll be with a radio man and we will walk through this.” And he says, “Well, what do you mean?” I said, “You’ll die out there inside of ten days or get most of us killed if you don’t do what we tell you.” And he says, “I want to go home in a year. Teach me.”

KLINGEMANN: Did you find that that was rare with officers?

AMIS: We found that rare in the point that very few people … very few officers would use that approach. Some of them were there you know, he’s the officer, but he would look to the sergeant to do the leading. Kind of an informal “Okay, you’re in charge right now.” Not a “Okay, you’re it. I’m learning.” We saw very little of that type. A little bit of the … the nonchalant or the side look of saying, “Okay, you’re here. You’ve been here. Show me how this is done.”

KLINGEMANN: Right.

AMIS: And then we had a few that would come in and want to lead from the front and everything, and we go, “Oh, crap, we got to …” Then it was twice as hard, three times as hard, sometimes because you had to not only watch your backside and everybody else, but you had to watch him. Make sure he didn’t do something stupid.

KLINGEMANN: Babysitting.

AMIS: And that was it. And in some cases, it caused a lot of friction. And we came to, “I’m the lieutenant. I’m in charge. You’re the PFC. Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the guy who’s been here six and a half, eight months, and I’m still alive.” And it came down to that sometimes. And they would go to the company commander, or they’d go to the brigade commander, and the brigade commander would say, “Look, you don’t understand. These guys have been here. They know what they’re doing. Listen to them and learn or you’re going to go in a body bag.” And we got a lot of that, where they would come down and flat tell the brand-new lieutenant or captain that this is how this is going to be done.

KLINGEMANN: So, your life was basically boiled down to I have to deal with this person because it means my life, and your stress level was just through the roof?

AMIS: Yep. It’s … you’re watertight, and tighter than a six-string banjo on a Saturday night. I mean, you’re just … you’re just … anything goes. We’d have to tell these people, they would come in smelling nice, “Okay, that’s great for parties and stuff. Don’t wear that garbage out in the brush.” They’d start to peel out a cigarette. “No, no. Don’t do that. Those cigarettes smell different than those cigarettes.” The soap smells different. It smells nice and pretty, but that’s not the same soap that these guys use. And you can smell those differences in a jungle.

KLINGEMANN: Really?

AMIS: And I don’t know how far or the distance or anything like that. It depends on the winds, and the humidity, and temperature, but you can smell those things. And I’ll tell you about a different group later and I’ll show that emphasis, and you’ll understand it then. But we had to tell these people these differences. These were nuances that we learned, that we picked up. And it wasn’t one of t