Bloods (13 page)

I was the bag man. They allowed me to carry the money because of my temperament. After having been in that fire fight when we were overrun, I would rather shoot than hold a conversation. I think maybe I kind of went off a little bit.

I was playing poker one evening with four other people. And I thought they were cheating. We were all drinking. And I just pulled out a .38. There was a guy right in front of me. I said, “You ought to be ashamed.” And I just fired. He moved out of the way. If he hadn’t, I would’ve killed him.

After a while, nobody really wanted to play with me. They said, “You carry the money.”

One time I was outside drinkin’ beer. These two guys came up and told me to give them the suitcase the money was in. I told them, “Okay. You can have it.”

I gave them the suitcase.

Then I just reached in my coat and said, “Now you can take it wherever you want to, after I shoot you.”

They put the suitcase down and ran down the road.

Actually I made more than Garrett and the others did. Even though 10 percent wasn’t much. I kept it. And I’d lend it to them. If I lent them $100, they had to give me $200. They knew that they had to pay me, because if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be nothin’ for their demise to come during that period of my life.

When we had five days left in Vietnam, we flew into Danang to wait for the flight to Saigon going back to America.

Garrett and Fully Love got into an argument. Garrett always said that he could beat him anytime, but they never gambled against each other. Garrett and Fully Love decided that they gonna have the crap shoot of the century. So they get this room in the Danang Hotel.

Garrett went over to Camp Tien Sha to get all the money he had coming in from dispersing.

Whenever one of them went to the bathroom, they paid somebody to watch the other roll.

Garrett lost his money. So I lent him $500. He lost that. He had two SLR cameras. He had a Colt Cobra. He had two cashmere coats. He had special shoes he had made. He had an enormous amount of suits. Him and Fully Love happened to be the same size. And Fully Love took all of that, too. He even took the diamond ring Garrett had on his hand. Everything Garrett owned. Clothes, cameras, $3,000, and the ring.

Garrett was really hurt.

His pride—everything he had—was lost.

After I got home, I forgot about the voice I heard those two times. I was not the Christian then that I am today. Nowhere near.

But in ’75 I was sittin’ in a room at the Naval Regional Medical Center in Norfolk. This man opened the door, walked in, and sat down next to me. He was a commissioned officer in the United States Navy. A lieutenant. A white guy. I never saw him before in my life. And he said, “God wants you to get started. God wants you to go to work for Him now.”

I said, “Did He tell you what He wanted me to do?”

He said, “No. He just told me to come and tell you that He wanted you to get started.”

So I went to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Norfolk and one of the ministers asked me, “Would you be interested in working in a youth program?” I wasn’t so sure at first, but we started a Bible study program that was the best the church ever had. It was my first ministry. Then I got transferred, and the program disintegrated.

I heard the voice again on August 1, 1981, the day I retired from the Navy. I was a chief petty officer by then. I was drivin’ home from Jacksonville, North Carolina, maybe 20 miles from Norfolk.

I got no physical sound at all. Just the sensation.

He told me to teach His people.

So I went to the National Theological Seminary and College out in Baltimore to finish my bachelor of arts in religion. I was licensed as a minister in the Baptist church, and now I am teaching three Bible study classes as one of the ministers at Ebenezer.

I believe that a man, even a preacher, cannot preach beyond his experience. How can a individual tell you how the Lord helped him to get over the crisis in life if he hasn’t had a certain amount of experience in order to be able to relate to the people he’s preaching to?

America hurt so many young men by putting them over in Vietnam to be introduced to prostitution, gamblin’, drinkin’, drugs. To fear. To terror. To killin’. To they own death.

I think God meant for me to overcome those things.

There is no doubt in my mind that He protected me.

When you think that a B-40 rocket blows up underneath you and the only thing you suffer is your fillings falling out of your mouth, you know it is true. And the fillings is the only unnatural thing attached to you. And the other individual who was almost back to back to me sustained all kinds of wounds.

It lets you know what the power of God is really like.

I expected the Vietnamese to give me hell sometimes. That came with the job. But some of my own people hated me. Guys would call me gook lover. Sometimes worse. They would call me turncoat or traitor. That was the worst part. You never get over that.

The Army sent me to language school to learn Vietnamese, even though I only finished the eighth grade. Everybody in my class had been to college, but I got my GED by the time I graduated and shipped out to Vietnam.

I went over with the Three Quarter Cav of the 25th Infantry Division in 1966. I was invited to work with other units, but I never left the Cav. I spent part of the time as an interrogator and part of the time in civic action. When we got into combat, I would drive an APC, or I would fly with the spotter, directing artillery. Or I would go down into a battle in a helicopter. And while the helicopter circled around, I would broadcast in Vietnamese for the
enemy to give up their arms and come over to our side. That was the
chieu hoi
program.

That’s not what made people mad, though. We had a policy of paying out money if we accidentally killed someone or destroyed their home. The Cav was a fighting unit. That’s where the tanks were. So they were destroying quite a bit of stuff. Without me, they would make payments only once in a while. But I would go out of my way to let Division hear about anything the Cav did. I would tell them we destroyed this or we killed that, so we must pay it. In one month the whole division paid out 200,000 piasters, but 194,000 of that was for what the Cav did. The Cav didn’t like getting that reputation, so the guys blamed me. They thought that all I was doing was helping to build the people right back up.

But if I didn’t do it, the people wouldn’t get any help for something we did. I passed up promotion three times to stay in the position where I could get those payments. But one time, my commander gave me a promotion anyway. And I extended my tour for six months four times to keep helping those people.

So some guys took it that I was a VC sympathizer. Every morning somebody would have to ask me, “What are you going to do today? Go out and give them gooks more money?”

But when I did make the payment, it made us look cheap. For somebody dead, 4,000 piasters. That’s not even $40. If I pushed hard enough, I could get it up to 6,000. If the survivors were real poor, I would push it. But we would get calls down from JAG saying you shouldn’t do that. You should only pay 4,000. You better take it easy.

We got 1,000 piasters for a house. The people had to fill out claim papers, and maybe it would come through five months later. That’s only about $9. You can’t build a house on that. That’s not half of what the poorest one costs. Then they would have to scrounge for what they could. It got next to me, really.

Sometimes I would collect food that we didn’t eat to take to an orphanage or give to refugees. When I went to the mess hall to get some one day, this first sergeant, a LURP, jumped down on me. He started yelling, “Give
them gooks everything. Make ’em fat. Raise ’em up so my kid will have to grow up and come over here to fight ’em, too.” But the mess sergeant, who was from Alaska, said, “This is my mess hall. I run it. What I don’t eat, I’m giving to him. I take care of this place. You take care of your place.”

I got real close to the people. I taught English to the orphans. If a house was destroyed someplace, me and my driver and some Vietnamese would rebuild the building. People got hurt, we’d go there and sit and eat and drink with them. If somebody got killed, it would get real tough, though. I would go to the wake or funeral, and they would all be looking at me. And they’re sad, and there’s the body in the casket. I would try to make the payment as quickly as possible. They wouldn’t refuse it. It became their custom. Sometimes they would say “thank you,” but mostly they were very angry.

One time, one of our tanks made a mistake and fired on this woman and her daughter. The daughter got killed. The woman was running from her village because a stray round from another tank had killed her brother. Later on that night, we fired an illumination round over the village. It didn’t explode like it was suppose to, and it fell through the roof of this hut and killed an old woman. When I heard about everything that happened, I took some money out to the village. When I got there, the relatives of all three of those people that got killed started beating on me and yelling, “American get out.”

The Americans were amazed, you know, at the way I was able to move around. Like I would go places where you couldn’t take a tank. The whole time I was there I was only ambushed once And I thought it was a mistake. The VC had to know who I was and what I did. So I thought maybe these VC didn’t know who we were. We were going to take some lumber to rebuild some houses. But nobody got hurt. I was sure it was a mistake, because I could go and come as I pleased.

Not everything we did bad to the people was a mistake. Many times it was on purpose. You see, a lot of GIs felt they shouldn’t be there, so they took it out on the people. Like this APC. Every day for a week, it came in town early in the morning, just at market time. Maybe 2,000
people were shopping. And this GI on the APC took tear-gas grenades and threw them into the crowd. Little children passed out. And this old man passed out. We got the guy who did it that time. Reported him to the commanding general, and he was court-martialed. But that type of thing went on all the time.

There was this GI who sat on the bridge from Cu Chi to Phuoc Vinh shooting the people with a slingshot. He used the links that hold .50-caliber rounds together. We also had this MP who sat on that bridge all day and shot the people going to work with his BB gun. I rode behind him once, and he shot at everybody for 5 miles. There was nothing I could do but follow it and watch.

Sometimes a guy would get tired or bored. Then he would want to do something mischievous. I was on a couple of sweeps, and the guys would be checking wallets for IDs. But they would keep the people’s pictures, for no good reason.

During the Tet Offensive, they were doing a lot of looting down in Cholon. You could say the ARVNs were looting, too. The Americans were taking TVs. They were taking motorbikes. It was ridiculous. They couldn’t keep them. They would drive them for a few blocks and drop them. Mostly they took whiskey, beer, and money. They should have been more disciplined.

A lot of times they raped the women in the villages they were suppose to be protecting. That happened quite a bit, and nobody said anything about it. Even the lieutenant who was in charge of a platoon let it happen. He’s about their age, not experienced enough to control them. He goes along with it. He’d be crazy if he went against his own platoon. He doesn’t want to criticize his men; he wants one big happy family. So he’s right in it. He got his first. It was standard operational procedure. And the Vietnamese police couldn’t do anything about it as long as the Americans were there with the women.

But I had one experience I won’t forget. One day, after medcap, we passed this big crowd. This jeep had come by with three Americans. They saw this boy sitting there on a water buffalo. They just wanted to scare him, so they just fired a ’16 out there. One round ricocheted and hit the boy in the back and came out through his chest.
He looked like he was about ten. We did all we could, and the boy died of shock just right there. I’ll never forget that. That was the first time I seen a kid killed for nothin’. And no one could prove anything, because the three Americans would stick together. They were advisers to the Vietnamese. But once they had been drinking and got their heads bad, they would do this sort of thing. It happened everywhere.

Black people seemed to get along better with the Vietnamese, even though they fought the Communists harder than the white GIs. Two or three of the NVAs I interrogated told me they knew when black soldiers were in action, because they would throw everything they could get their hands on—grenades, tear gas, anything. They feared the black soldier more than the white soldier, because the black soldier fought more fiercely, with more abandonment.

But I think blacks got along better with the Vietnamese people, because they knew the hardships the Vietnamese went through. The majority of the people who came over there looked down on the Vietnamese. They considered them ragged, poor, stupid. They just didn’t respect them. I could understand poverty. I had five brothers and three sisters. My mother worked, still works, in an old folks’ home. An attendant, changing beds and stuff. My father works in a garage in New York. They are separated, and I had to leave school after the eighth grade to work in North Carolina.