- I got the M-60 and I start firing.

You know.

And I was firing everywhere like this, just wiping everything out.

- But it was him or me.

No time to think about it.

No hesitation at all.

- Somebody would pop up out of a spider hole and take a shot at you.

All of a sudden, you had a sniper shooting at you.

- Yeah, I've stuck my fingers and thumb in holes to stop the bleeding.

- I did suffer from PTSD, you know, and I isolated myself, you know, and I would try like self-medications, you know.

(slow orchestral horns and snare drums) - I was born in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico.

I never went to school here in the United States.

Never went to school.

I probably went for one month, but I was too old to be in first grade and too young to be in high school, so I never went to school, I had to work.

- I was born in Porterville, Arizona.

Going to school, we were not allowed to speak Spanish.

Most of my friends left school before they got to the eighth grade.

You start working at the age of seven or eight out in the fields during the summers, and you learn to adjust.

- My first four years, I grew up in Mexico.

On the fourth of August of 1954, my dad brought my mom, my two younger brothers, and my sister to America.

We immigrated through the Port of Nogales.

- I was born in Nogales, Arizona.

We went to Sarita for the first two years.

Then we moved to Tucson.

I started in Tucson in third grade.

And I graduated from Pueblo High School in 1965.

- [Narrator] Arizona's population in 1965 was about one and a half million.

Most of them, including the third who were under 18, were inattentive or unaware of the Vietnam War 8500 miles away.

That soon changed.

And before it was over a decade later, more than 600 would die in combat leaving bereaved families and devastated communities in every corner of the state.

- Arizona was in transition.

I mean, Phoenix was still not nearly this size and population, nor Tucson.

A lot of people were still, they didn't want to move to Phoenix 'cause they didn't want to endure the summers nor Tucson.

So you saw a little more diverse of a population spread out among the mining towns, Flag, Yuma.

And, again, Arizona, if you look just in terms of population-wise was not a very big state.

I think it was much more diverse.

You also saw, in percentage-wise, more of a Mexican-American population percentage, on a per-capita basis before you saw large numbers of people start moving in from the Midwest and the Northeast that occurred after the creation of air conditioning sort of changed the dynamic in many ways.

- Douglas, at the time, was a small town, about 12,000 people.

I used to run the barge and shine shoes.

And when you're out there, you know you can do no wrong.

You can't go around stealing from the stores or shoplift or anything like that because it would reflect upon you and your family.

But anyway, Douglas was such a small town that if we did something wrong, the word would get to your parents and you would to have to answer for it, you know?

- I was born and raised in Douglas, Arizona.

Went to school here and graduated from Douglas High School in 1967.

Back in those days, we had Phelps Dodge going.

The smelter was going strong, the railroad was going.

There was always something to do on a Saturday, go to the movies, ride our bikes, pick up baseball games, it was, for me, a great place to grow up, in Douglas.

- For myself, Vietnam started when I was in junior high, back in '64, '65.

- [Radio Announcer] In just the last four weeks, they have suffered over 70 dead, 1,000 wounded.

- You might remember Vietnam was almost nightly in the news.

Tet offensive started January 31st, 1968.

But by that time, there were quite a few guys and some women from Douglas who had already served or were serving in country, in Vietnam.

And by that time, sadly, about seven or eight of the young men from Douglas had died in Vietnam.

- [Narrator] Arizona's first casualty during the Vietnam War was in March of 1963, an army private from the tiny town of Whiteriver.

Rural communities were ready suppliers of new soldiers, whether through enlistment or the draft.

- They're from, primarily, lower middle-class, working class groups because they didn't have the tools available to them to avoid the draft.

But, generally, the draft is gonna pick up the young men that are not going off to college, that will not have the deferments, they don't know how to manipulate those deferments like so many more affluent, well-educated people do.

In many cases, in these rural areas, they knew the draft was gonna get them, so many of them volunteered.

Now, they're also driven by many other factors.

It's not just the draft, they're driven by, they wanna be just like their fathers and serve their country, many of their fathers served in World War II.

They want to be like their uncles.

They want to be like many of the people in their communities.

- A lot of people from Douglas were being drafted, got a lot of people volunteered also and a lot of people went straight to Vietnam after training.

- I wanted to join the Marine Corps and, back in those days, our recruiter was at the post office and so I had gone in to see the Marine Corps recruiter.

I had Coke bottle glasses and the recruiter, he says, "Man, you're, we can't take you," because my eyesight was so poor.

He says, "If you join the Navy "and you score well," on what we call the basic battery test, back in then, aptitude test, "you do that, you score well "and you ask to go into Naval Corps school."

He says, "I guarantee you, you'll end up "with the Marine Corps."

He didn't lie.

So, all worked out just like he said.

- First, they'd take us to Phoenix and that's where we got inducted.

And you raised your right hand, took a physical, the works and then you raised your right hand, you take a step forward and from then you board a plane and ended up in Fort Ord, California.

- [Commander] On the double, move out!

- [Hector] By the way they told us we're going to Vietnam, right away.

First thing they did, you going to Vietnam.

- To us, it was a death sentence.

It was the senior's trip, you know, right out of high school and into Vietnam and it was a death sentence, you were 18-years-old, you had registered for the draft, if you were drafted, ended up in Vietnam.

It was a death sentence.

- When I graduated from high school, back in May of '69, just a few days before I graduated, I was told that I had an offer, baseball scholarship offer, to Cochise College, so I took it.

I applied for a college deferment and I got it.

It was a 4-F, which meant the Army was gonna not touch me for four years.

Well, soon after I was in college, I got another notice.

I was suddenly reclassified 1-A, meaning I was eligible for the draft or whatever.

It was because more men were needed.

So I told my girlfriend that I was gonna join the Reserves, which I did, and I was in the Reserves for two-and-a-half years.

By that time, 13 men from Douglas had made the ultimate sacrifice in Vietnam.

- [Narrator] Many joined the Reserves or National Guard as a way to avoid combat in Vietnam and to serve in other ways and in other countries.

However, over 5,700 Reservists died during the war.

Whether drafted or enlisted, after training, their journey to the jungle was relatively swift and lasted a year.

- We landed in Bien Hoa, in South Vietnam, and then we had to go around twice or three times 'cause they were being bombed at that time.

It was kind of scary at the beginning because what's it gonna be, a year, from the first day all the way to last day, fighting and all that.

So, it was kind of scary.

- From Phoenix, I just went, went to Texas.

Fort Bliss, Texas where I was trained for jungle warfare and for the basic training and all that.

They used to call us drawing guns because we would travel, hit and run, hit and run.

Every so often, we would stop, make a perimeter, start firing, then we moved, start firing again.

And the Vietcong was constantly after us.

Sometimes you would sleep 20 minutes, half-an-hour, maybe an hour.

It was constantly moving.

- It was like being a fireman, you were on-call 24/7.

And that's all you did, was shoot the gun and maintain the gun.

You might get up at four in the morning, five in the morning, shoot the gun, and then maybe go and then maybe not shoot the whole day.

Like one time we shot the gun in Operation Lamar Plain, we shot the gun for about three weeks.

You would just sleep by the gun and you shoot the gun.

- [Gunner] We have unidentified movement over here, I suggest you bring the patrol up on lines.

- What we really encountered were booby traps and the reason they used a lot of booby traps in that area was because they didn't want us to discover their tunnel complexes and their bunker complexes.

And sometimes it would be as simple as two small pieces of shiny wire that was sticking out of the ground, that if you went over there very carefully and lifted those wires, the top of a bunker would open up.

One bunker we had discovered was a underground hospital and they had medical supplies and beds and everything set up.

Some of the supplies were actually donated to them from the students of Berkeley University, in California.

And they were labeled as such, too.

Donated to the people in North Vietnam by the student body at Berkeley.

- We ended up in a temple in Vietnam and it was a Buddhist temple.

And there was 12 dead bodies there, enemies in that temple.

We were being ambushed by the enemy and we had to stay there for about, I wanna say about six hours.

And what happened, those dead bodies, we smelled the real bad smell of the bodies and that smell it got into me for a long, long time, many years.

- [Narrator] Injured marines were taken care of first by Navy Corps men, carrying medical supplies and armed with a side arm and an M16.

Corps men accompanied the marine units on daily and nightly patrols.

- Our whole mission during that period was search and destroy.

Daily patrols, nighttime ambushes.

Usually, a squad would leave the compound, you know, daybreak and anywhere from 12 to 15 men in a squad.

You would go on patrol and the point men would be up front with a stick, probing the ground in front of them.

The guy behind him was actually his eyes 'cause he had his eyes on the ground, looking for booby traps.

We went into what was called Pipestone Canyon, it was an operation.

We went in with 150 men, 66 were wounded, not gravely, no, they were still walking, they could hit and everything, but of those 66, only six of them were gunshot wounds, they were all booby traps in that particular operation.

- You were thirsty all the time and you had a very hard time keeping track of time because you don't know if you had been walking for hour-and-a-half or three hours.

You'd set up your ambush then you would wait.

Normally, you would just listen.

You would put up with the bugs that landed on your face and your nose, and ears, and lips, and that 'cause you didn't want to make a rapid move to swat 'em.

You didn't want to wear any kind of mosquito repellent on an ambush site 'cause the Vietcong or the NVA could smell you.

And you heard everything.

You would literally hear bugs settling in for the night on leaves.

Big butterflies, moths, shutting down for the night.

And it was a corporal's war.

I would take my squad out, we were supposed to find, engage, and kill and that's what we were doing but we were pretty young.

And there wasn't anybody there above the rank of corporal.

It was me.

And it was night after night after night.

- Security and then a patrol, overnight patrol or go out on patrol for week, two weeks, and 30 days and then come back.

And then we go in a chopper, chopper flights, where there'd be seven, eight these choppers where they'd take us out, drop us off, and we'd be out there and they'd bring us back in.

You depend on each other.

You become brothers.

You become brothers, become very close.

You're all in the same, you're all in the same.

You're in the same fight.

You depend on each other, you trust each other.

Or, most of 'em.

- [Narrator] Racial segregation had existed in Arizona since before becoming a state in 1912.

The National Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson, with prominent Arizona senator, Barry Goldwater, voting against its passage.

A month earlier, in June, Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken about the act to over 8,000 people at Arizona State University and King had already given speeches twice in Tucson.

- I mean, it was a very racial time, in our history.

And it carried over into our military, as well.

And if it was a situation where the blacks had their get together over here, the white has theirs, usually the Indian guys would hang together, Mexican guys would hang together.

So, it was very, it was prolific, it wasn't just one or two incidents.

The race relationships back then were pretty bad.

- Many young men coming out of places like Ajo and places, one, they'd never seen an African-American until they get to bootcamp or basic training.

They had not interacted with city boys from Cincinnati or Seattle or LA.

And, so, you know, it was a transformation but just like most everyone else, they knew they had to adjust and adapt and survive.

And usually where racism existed most was in the rear areas.

'Cause on the frontlines, all you cared about was making sure the guy next to you survived so that he could make sure you survived.

So, the racism, a lot of times, dissipated in the frontlines but was very present in the rear echelon areas.

- Well, in one situation, I heard some talking that if you weren't white, you weren't right.

And, I mean, that was hard, I couldn't believe it.

In the frontlines, it seemed like there was more minority.

More minority, fighting in the frontline.

Maybe a lot of it didn't have a college education, a lot of 'em didn't have, maybe, a high school education.

Maybe they come from families that were underprivileged .

That's my way of thinking, but I don't know why but that's a way, in the Army, in our unit, that's the way it was.

- [Narrator] On May 13th, 1975, an Air Force sergeant from Helena was the last of Arizona's Vietnam War fatalities.

But there were the many others who returned home with injuries to their bodies and minds.

With their tours of duty nearing an end, these survivors with uncertain futures were shipped home to struggle in different kinds of personal battles, for years to come.

Those with just a few days left were called short, for short-timers.

- And I remember, they used to call me, like, nicknames.

I said, "Okay, call me anything you want, "but in three days, call me long distance."

(laughs) They didn't like that.

'Cause, you know, I was short, I was coming home.

- They just didn't have much of an option to come back and, you know, really, just had to go back to work, some did go to school and they had to reintegrate quickly because, for the most part, the country didn't care.

The best characterization is not the ones that I think of, where you hear about the spitting image, that they were spit upon.

What I think was actually worse is basically just the, a term that is used by one historian is, a collective amnesia, where people just wanted to forget it and put it behind them.

So they didn't get parades, rarely.

They didn't get honors, they didn't get memorials.

They had to build their own in 1980s.

- I didn't realize how much the people in this country didn't support us until I actually got home.

I just assumed that we had the support of the people here.

At the time, we were America's best, you know?

I felt that in my heart then, I feel it in my heart today.

- When I came in, we were on strike.

There was nothing, the town was dead.

But that's okay.

I was home, I had my wife and my child to take care of.

I didn't worry about it.

- Back in '69, '70, 15th Street Park is where a lot of these guys used to hang around.

And I got to talk to some of them.

They were very mellow in their conversations and I got to the point of once I heard their stories and I told them that I felt guilty.

Guilty because I didn't go, or I was eligible and I chose not to.

And they said, "No, you made the right decision."

- First of all, I didn't want to get drafted because I was a little wild, on the wild side.

And when I went in in the military then it was so strict and everything.

They made me think, "Hey, this is the real world.

"You're not a teenager anymore."

It was so good.

I think the draft was perfect for me, probably for a lot of soldiers.

- I don't think I could sleep at all for eight days.

Eight days straight, did not get any sleep at all.

So, what happened, in order for me to get tired or something, I went to work to pick chile, to pick chile, red chile out in Au Prieta area.

I went to pick up chile and it was hard work, very hard work.

You just picking up chile, red chile.

And I remember, when I was picking up chile, a plane broke the, you know the sound barrier?

When it broke the sound barrier, it just went, "Boom, boom, boom."

And I just (vocalizes), hit the ground.

And then I kind of looked up, I was expecting to see dust, smoke, you know, like when I was in Vietnam.

What do I see?

People looking at me, laughing.

"What are you doing, you're crazy?"

I said, "Eight days ago, I was in Vietnam."

I thought I was, we were being hit.

I say, "I thought we were being, "you know, hit and that's why I hit the ground."

I just look out, about ten people of the people that were looking at me, they apologized.

- I would say, it matured me faster.

It made me, I would say, a real man, at a young age where I could not vote, I could not consume alcohol.

It made me realize how precious life is and not to take life for granted, to be thankful, be more charitable, to help those that less fortunate.

I think it made me a better person.

More religious person, it is not something you can forget.

Something you'd want to wish on your worst enemy.

You cannot forget.

- I was married to another, to my first wife, okay?

And when I came home, I wanted to see, 'cause I had a daughter, she was born about a month before I left.

And when I came back, my wife, at that time, she was eight months pregnant, by somebody else.

So, I never saw her again.

- I loved being home, I loved seeing my parents.

When I came out of the service in '71, I only stayed for a while and then I went to ASU and graduated in '75 and came back to Douglas in '76 to start teaching.

The young men and women from Douglas have always stood up and gone.

You know, we had some tragic losses, I mean, I think six of the guys we lost were in my graduating class.

I am a patriot and I'm proud of my military service, just like so many of us are.

I'm glad that there are people around that are finally looking at us Vietnam veterans in a different light and even though it was an unpopular time, hundreds of thousands of us served.

- It's a good experience for me to be a Vietnam veteran.

And, also, looking back, I served my country.

It hurt a lot but it was a good thing for me to do.

I'd look back at it now and I'm proud of it, very proud.

(gentle orchestral music)