(gentle music) - [Narrator] Tonight on stage, take a front row seat for the inspiration, connection, and joy you've been missing.

The Telling Project, five Minnesotans perform an original play based on their experiences with the Vietnam War.

(crowd applauds) (serene music) - The Telling Project is a performing arts non-profit.

And what we have been doing since 2007, is working in communities with groups of military veterans and military family members.

To facilitate their performing their stories of life in and around the military, we interview veterans, and family members, extensively about their experiences.

And then all of their stories are condensed into a three-act script.

Well, this production is working with people who all have some relationship to the Vietnam War.

What these folks have to say is extraordinarily rich.

It's incredibly important.

It reflects on all of us.

(exotic mid tempo music) - The Western Pacific.

- Bien Hoa.

- An Khe.

- Da Nang.

- Twin Cities, Minnesota.

- The beach.

- The ward.

- The sky.

- The grave.

- Memory.

I was born in a refugee camp in Thailand because there was a war is Laos.

That's where my father's from.

I was brought here to the United States in 1981 when I was only 10 months old.

I have this reoccurring dream or this image that pops into my head sometimes of a red roof.

I have told my parents this and they said there's no way you can remember that because in the refugee camp, there was a building with a red shingle roof.

Now, growing up I knew that my father had been a soldier.

But the war he's fought in, we simply knew it as the Vietnam War, and as kids we were like okay, so that was a part of history.

But eventually, my curiosity was sparked, and I start to ask my father, tell me about your past, tell me your history.

I want to know who you are or were and what happened.

- When I was young, my favorite aunt took me to get my shots, the doctor was white.

He asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

I said, "A pilot."

He looked at me and he said, "You should try "to be something that you have a chance of being" I don't remember that incident, but my aunt really took it to heart.

I joined the army in December of 1968.

40% of it was because of family history of military service.

60% was because I wanted to fly.

- In 68, I quit my job at the post office.

I was at loose ends.

I didn't want to get drafted into the Marine Corps, or the Army, so I decided to join the Navy.

I had a mid westerner's naive idea that if I joined the Navy, I'd be on a ship.

(light laughter) Also there was this poster of this handsome man wearing his dress blues, and I remember at the time bell bottoms were in style.

- I think it was probably around the Tet Offensive.

I had a cousin, a Marine, who was killed by friendly fire.

I was a junior, studying nursing.

I remember going to his funeral.

I think that's what got me started thinking.

I also was working as an aide at a VA hospital on an orthopedic floor.

A lot of the kids were coming back missing limbs.

There are many aspects to being a nurse.

You can't be afraid of very much.

You have to be able to stand the sight of blood.

But to be a good nurse, there's one thing that you have to have, and that's empathy.

You have to be caring.

I think I was born to be a nurse.

I joined the Army Nurse Corps in 1969.

- I was pursuing an education to become eye pathologist.

I remember I was working two jobs to work my way through college.

I loaned some tuition money to my parents.

Ended up having to take a semester off, and my lottery number came up.

No, it wasn't the Power ball, I was drafted.

So I figured with my college education, I'd get myself a great job in an elite organization.

So in 1969, I joined the Marines.

(speaking Hmong ) - One night, when my father was 12 years old, an old man with a long white beard came to visit him in a dream.

He told my father, "Tomorrow, the king of the Eagles "is gonna come and take you to go live "with the black eagles."

Of course my dad didn't know what that meant.

However, the next day around noon, one of his older brothers came and shouted to him, "You are gonna go with us, we're going to go join "the Royal Lao Army so we'll have a little spending money."

That was in 1961.

- I remember my first day in the Navy.

My father, brought me down to the old federal building in Minneapolis, that's where me and 100 other guys from Minnesota and Wisconsin were getting processed into the Navy.

Unbeknownst to us, there was a protest outside and during the protest a woman took all her clothes off and proceeded to slice a melon on the steps.

To this day I don't know what it meant, maybe the melon meant Vietnam.

Anyhow, we flew out to San Diego.

It was beautiful and sunny after being in cold Minnesota.

I remember seeing palm trees for the first time.

It seemed like paradise until they started screaming at us.

- They cut off all our hair, took all our clothes, we were standing there naked with 100 men.

They fed us greasy hamburgers.

They yelled and screamed and screamed and yelled.

About seven in the morning, they took us to these barracks and they said, "Sleep!"

I was so overwhelmed, I got up in the top bunk and I put my head in a pillow and I cried.

The guy down below me said, "Are you alright?"

I go, "No!"

(audience laughs) He said, "You want a cigarette?"

and I go, "Yeah."

So we go out on the back porch, steps really, and we have our cigarette.

His name was Tom Burnett.

We went through basic training together, flight school together, he was my best best friend ever.

- From Basic Training we went on to Advanced Infantry Training to prepare us for Vietnam.

I remember our three drill instructors were all recent Vietnam Vets and set up realistic villages and POW camps, and they were teaching us to go through trails without setting off mines or setting off booby traps.

They used live ammunition for some of the training, and I remember going under some barbed wire and a landmine went off and it blew out my left ear.

Well I ended up in the hospital.

I finally finished AIT, but missed my what was going to be my school house to train to take care of paychecks for Marines.

Well, I was reclassified and ordered to report to Camp Lejeune Public Affairs Office.

(speaking Hmong) - The CIA had dropped stock piles of artillery and my father told me that they had taught him how to take these weapons apart and put them back together again.

He learned how to shoot.

When he was laying flat on the ground, he can shoot fine.

But when he stood up and put the gun against his shoulder, the barrel would drop every single time.

So then the Lieutenant took his gun away, told him that he was too young, and he sent my father to go live with General Vang Pao.

He lived with the General for 15 years and they grew very close.

- Basic training was six weeks long.

It used to be longer, but they needed nurses in Vietnam so they shortened it.

Most of us were in the same boat.

Many had just graduated from college.

My basic training class was 300.

It had doctors, nurses, dieticians, and administrative people.

They tried to make us into the military, but it didn't work.

They had us marching around, which was kind of silly but we all learned to play the game.

- When we knew we were graduating from flight school, my aunt Callie, went and found that white doctor and told him that I had become a pilot.

(audience laughs) Tom and I were standing in formation together when we were told that we were all going to Vietnam.

Off hand, one of our training officers said, "If you die and you want to get your friend "out of Vietnam for a while, tell your mother "or your wife, that you want your "buddy to be your escort officer."

So Tom and I looked at each other and I said, "I'm gonna tell my mom," and he said, "I'm gonna tell my mom."

We were going to war, anything could happen.

(quick tempo electronic music) (speaking Hmong) - In 1966, two CIA agents Tony and Vin had decided to make my father the leader of a group of 12 men to be trained in Thailand to do reconnaissance work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Now the Ho Chi Minh Trail is a communist supply route that connected North Vietnam with the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao.

They trained for three months.

They learned everything from how to survive in the jungle, to reading compasses and maps, to breaking arms and necks.

(speaking Hmong) They only had one practice mission before Tony and Vin decided to drop my father and his men off near the border of South Vietnam on the Laos side.

They gave him coordinates and told him to go find the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

They crossed into Vietnam.

They followed the coordinates for five days and they couldn't find it.

Now, the North Vietnamese knew that troops had been sent in and so then, they sent in dogs after them.

My father and his men had no other choice but to run back towards Laos, and as they were running, one of their soldiers was shot.

His name was Jao.

So then they carried him for four or five hours before Jao said, "I don't want to hold you back.

"Just leave me here with some food, "my rifle, and two grenades."

And so then, they found a spot at the base of a large tree.

They laid down some bamboo leaves and they saluted him, and then they left.

About an hour later, they heard a grenade explosion.

They don't know if it was the communists or if he used the grenade to kill himself, but it was just the sound of a single grenade.

(speaking Hmong) It took my father and his men 17 days to get back to Laos.

- So they threw a camera at my chest, issued me a portable typewriter, gave me some pens and some notepads and I was to cover operations throughout the Atlantic, all the way from Norway through the horn of Africa, covering training missions and humanitarian assignments.

I remember in one operation, was in a chopper, and a Marine fired off a light anti tank weapon and the back blast caught me in the right ear.

I ended up in the hospital again.

Well, you learn pretty quickly that your first job is as an infantry man in the Marine Corps.

I was ordered to put down my camera, go to the armory and draw my M-14.

Two companies of Marines headed to Washington DC, thousands of war protesters were toppling statues and destroying government property, so along with seven other Marines we went to the rooftops and our job was to protect the Marines encircling the monuments, and around them were policemen on Vespa motorcycles swinging Billy clubs to keep the crowds back.

Thank God they were able to do their job.

Another one of my assignments was to cover stories about Marines who were learning different recreation sports activities at the base recreation center.

They were learning to fence, learning to jump horses, riding in the rodeo.

I remember I became quite interested in some of these sports myself and I learned how to fence, I learned how to jump horses.

I even got to ride in the Camp Lejeune Rodeo.

- Ye haw!

(audience laughs) Well, I reenlisted.

For three years, recruiting duty, public affairs, non commissioned officer in Nashville, Tennessee.

Our job was to go out and find motivated young men and women to enlist in the Marine Corps in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

All too often however, another one of our assignments was as funeral detail, and, we would render honors to Marines coming home in red, white, and blue draped caskets.

We put them in boots and then we buried them.

The commercial theme song for the Marine Corps at that time was I Beg Your Pardon.

We never promised you a rose garden.

Yeah.

- In Vietnam I was stationed at a place called Bien Hoa.

I was a Huey Helicopter Pilot.

We did combat support missions where we would carry everything you could think of, water, bullets, in the back of our helicopter.

Then we would also fly combat assaults.

We'd fly 10, 15, 20 helicopters going to a pickup point to pick up five to 10 troops each and we would fly in formation and drop them off at the LZ.

Every now and then we'd take small arms fire, large caliber weapons fire, and RPGs, and every now and then we'd have artillery strikes and air strikes to clear the way.

As you were coming in, we would have door gunners shooting out the right side, and your crew chief shooting out the left side.

It was noisy, chaotic.

It seemed that way but it really wasn't.

We were 100% focused.

Every now and then, I'd have a cigarette hanging out of my mouth.

We weren't allowed to smoke when we were on short final.

So I would take the cigarette out of my mouth and put it in the ashtray and close it up.

We would be working really hard using all our skills flying close formation to get all the troops down at the same time.

Then I would take the cigarette out soon as we got up back in the air and take a long draw, (sucks air through teeth).

(sighs) We had ways to cope with things.

About four months into my tour, I got called into Operations.

The Operations Officer said, "Do you know Tom Burnett?"

I went, "Yeah."

I had talked to Tom about three weeks before that, he was up in Pleiku.

He was a Gunner Copilot on a Cobra.

He sat up front, the Air Craft Commander sat in the back.

The Operations Officer said, "Tom got killed."

I go, "Uh."

Tom had been called out on a late day mission to do gun runs on a VC position.

He had taken a 51 caliber round through his front windshield, through his armor plating and into his chest.

Helicopter crashed.

They evacuated, he was still alive, he was in the hospital but they couldn't keep fluids out of his lungs so three days later, he died.

The Operations Officer said to me, "Pack your bags, you got 30 minutes to catch an airplane."

Being Tom's escort officer was the hardest thing I've ever done.

We flew to San Francisco.

Once we got there, I got a new Class A uniform, they gave me a class on how to be an escort officer.

I signed for his remains, and I signed for his belongings.

I was enveloped by the whole thought of getting my friend back to his family in Tennessee.

We had two stops.

I'd get off the airplane first, and I'd go around and as they would take the casket off the airplane to transfer it, I'd put an American flag over it and stand and salute.

Nobody would look at us.

It was like I was invisible.

It was like I wasn't there, this wasn't happening.

I felt like that the whole way that I went to Tennessee.

Once we got to Tennessee, the funeral director opened the casket, I had to identify Tom's remains before he could sign it over.

At the funeral, I was the guy at the end of the line as they folded the flag.

I walked over and I have the flag to Tom's mother and I said, "This is a token of appreciation "from a grateful nation, for your sacrifice."

Tom's mother cried, I cried, it was so hard to keep decorum.

So, as for the Vietnam War, in my heart, in my mind, in my being, it was tough, it was terrible.

What was that war all about?

My best friend.

- Fresh from college with my six weeks basic training.

I received orders for Walter Reed.

I was there four months when I got my orders for Vietnam.

I thought, I don't think I'm ready, I don't think I have enough experience.

I remember I left on a Friday.

My father and my sister took me to the airport.

My mother was too devastated to come.

She was sending a daughter off to war.

I remember sitting on the airplane.

I had my sunglasses on and I was crying.

There I was in my little uniform, tears streaming down my face and nobody said a word to me.

Nobody.

I spent nine months in Unikey.

The hospital there had 125 beds, two ORs, we were in support of the fourth division, 25,000 soldiers.

The hospital itself was Quonset huts with a central corridor.

Cold running water, no flush toilets.

Across the street was our Officer's Club.

It consisted of a cement slab, a parachute over it, one item on the menu, steak.

The first few months I spent on a medicine ward.

The kinds of patients we cared for there had either malaria, hepatitis, or punji stick wounds.

Punji sticks are pieces of bamboo that are sharpened by the Viet Cong, they are then contaminated with feces and are placed in various places, usually in fields, where the GIs are not going to see them.

They then would strike GIs above where there boots come and they would come into our hospital with very contaminated wounds.

The wounds would be cleaned out and they'd be started on IV antibiotics.

Occasionally, we would get a psychiatric patient.

We had no psychiatrists around.

I remember this one patient in particular.

I think even the Corpsmen were scared of him.

I remember walking by him one night, he said to me, "Your lipstick obsesses me."

I knew then we were probably going to have a run for our money that night.

He proceeded to take apart his cassette player and threw it piece by piece at me for the rest of the night.

We had a separate Vietnamese ward, because occasionally, we would care for Viet Cong or North Vietnamese patients.

Whenever we had one of them, we always had MP guards with them.

I treated them as any other patient.

I think some other nurses felt differently.

We'd get them halfway well, and then they'd be taken away.

We never knew what happened to them after that.

I guess that's the way of war.

- Well you know, Mary Beth, you get five choices in bootcamp as to what you want to do in the Navy.

I remember making all five choices, then the personnel man talked me into a sixth choice.

Cook.

The Navy needed cooks, so that's what they made me.

After A school, I got orders to the De Nang, Naval Support Activity Hospital.

So much for being on a ship.

But anyhow, I remember the first day that I went there and got a tour from this guy named Red.

We got done with the tour, and he's saying we live in that Quonset hut over there, and I looked at the Quonset hut and looked at it, and I said, "Hey Red, what are those patches on the roof?"

"Oh, Ken, those patches, we got hit by a mortar "a couple weeks ago, luckily everyone was "taking a shower, or watching the movie."

And I looked and nonchalantly said to him, "Oh okay," but inside I was going, "Wah!"

(audience laughs) Now the first thing I did when I was in Vietnam, I was a Navy cook.

I used to look for products to see if they were from Minnesota, you know, you're homesick.

I remember we had Land O Lakes butter.

We had this flour from Minnesota that one night we were gonna make cake with.

Trouble was, we opened up this bag of flour and it was just alive with weevils.

I thought we should get better flour but the third class said, "We're gonna use this flour."

So we made this cake.

The next day when I was in the chow line, I looked at a piece of that white cake and they weren't raisins.

They weren't chopped nuts.

They weren't any kind of little bitty chocolate chips.

They were dead baked weevils.

So I passed at having a piece of cake that day.

I remember all our holiday meals seemed to be a disaster.

The meal I remember the most was Thanksgiving.

We had these two gorgeous turkeys on display, one on either line, freshly baked turkeys, you could smell the aroma of turkey.

They looked gorgeous.

We also had these Marines that guarded our perimeter.

Every night they had cold cuts, cold cuts, cold cuts, imagine eating cold cuts night after night, day after day, week after week.

They were sick of eating cold cuts.

So they hatched a plan, they had a getaway jeep, and one of the Marines went and lifted it up and starts bogeying, and I remember a guy saying, "Hey your turkey's making a run for it."

Needless to say with that much weight, he didn't get very far, they got caught.

I don't remember if they got into any trouble, but to this day, I feel they should have had that turkey, they should have enjoyed a fresh hot meal that night and I hope they did.

Now, our entire hospital is practically built on sand.

We had walkways because patients could not walk through the sand if they weren't not ambulatory and we were about a half a mile inland and we could go to the beach on our days off.

Well at that time I got into collecting records.

I'd go to the PX hoping there'd be a good record to buy, and you know at the head, they had something like George Burns sings the hits of the day.

Who wants to listen to George Burns sing Yesterday, so I joined a record club, and I would send away for the Stones, the Beatles, Judy Collins, Dionne Warwick, I was into all types of music.

Jazz, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, soul, and I had a tiny portable record player, it was plastic.

Well I decided I was gonna take it to the beach one day.

I grabbed one of my favorite albums, Aretha Franklin's greatest hits, portable record player, and I'm going out to the beach and I'm gonna listen to some tunes while I'm laying in the sun.

I put that record player down, I pulled the record out of the sleeve, I put it on the turn table, turn on it, put the needle on.

♪ Chain chain chain ♪ ♪ Chain of fools ♪ ♪ For five long years ♪ ♪ I thought you were my man ♪ Aretha's belting away, but all of a sudden her voice is kind of wobbly and I'm looking at the record.

What's happening?

It's melting, crap!

(audience laughs) It warped right there in front of my eyes, turned into a bowl, (audience laughs) a bowl with a hole, worthless bowl.

I decided after that, no more records brought to the beach.

Now there was other things we did at the beach, some of us would go body surfing.

I mean it was a gorgeous beach.

We'd lay out in the nude.

We had that hot nice warm Vietnamese sun and we'd be toasting our buns and that was enjoyable, but one day I got done sunbathing, it's time to go back to the base, we had a bus that went from the base to the beach, and I decided it was time to catch the bus.

So there was still some guys there laying out in the nude and I turned to go and we had this pavilion and there were nurses and doctors having a picnic.

The nurses had a pair of binoculars.

(audience laughs) Guess where they were looking?

Right where I had just left, yes.

And they were passing the binoculars nurse to nurse, to nurse, naughty nurse.

(audience laughs) - We were under attack every so often.

In May, it seemed like it happened every other day for two weeks.

We'd hear sirens, an MP coming around knocking on our doors, we'd hear small arms fire.

We'd put on our helmets and our flack jackets over our pajamas, go down to the hospital, evacuate all the patients into bunkers and we'd sit on the cement floor until it was time to move them back to the hospital, then we'd go back to our rooms, get dressed, put our fatigues on, and then it was back to work again.

When I went to Vietnam, I knew I was going to be taking care of adults, GIs at least, an occasional airman, occasional VC or a North Vietnamese soldier.

I never dreamed I'd be taking care of children.

We did deal with children.

We took care of kids who came in who had yellow fever, rabies, tetanus, things that we never even see in this country.

Many of the Vietnamese people had kerosene in their homes and would have an occasional house fire.

After that then the children would come in with burns.

In July and August I worked in the ER.

After a MASCAL, we got some Vietnamese people in.

I remember a small girl coming in who had been shut in the stomach.

I removed the dressing over her abdomen, and her intestines spilled out.

She did not make it.

The next person I saw was a young woman, she had a head wound and she did make it.

I used to cry in the shower.

There was only one time that I cried at work.

We had had a tiny baby come in who had an FUO, fever of unknown origin.

The baby ended up dying.

During the time she had been with us, her papasan had stayed with her.

The baby died, and the papasan knelt down on the floor and started sobbing.

At that time one of our big hulking Corpsman from Michigan named Hill, went over to him and put his big arms around the little papasan and hugged him and it was such an act of empathy and caring and love, that I started crying.

That was the first and the last time that I ever cried at work.

After that I was too busy.

(lightly sniffing) We also needed laughter.

Everyone needs laughter in their lives.

My father had sent me a 10 pound box of bubblegum.

And so, we would have bubble blowing contests to see who could blow the biggest one.

This was the Corpsmen and the nurses of course doing this.

When I went home and went to the dentist for the first time, he asked me if I ate a lot of caramels because my fillings were all loose.

Music was an important part of our lives in Vietnam too.

The song Save the Country was a really big part.

On the Vietnamese floor, twice a day, we would have the changing of the guard.

We would dance in the aisle and in between the beds of the patients and the Corpsmen and the nurses would dance to that song.

We'd do it to a dance that was created by one of our Corpsmen, named Roy White, and that was also the name of the dance.

♪ Come on people ♪ ♪ Come on children ♪ ♪ Come on down to the ♪ ♪ Loyal river ♪ ♪ Gonna wash it up ♪ ♪ And wash it down ♪ ♪ Gonna lay the devil down ♪ ♪ Gonna lay that devil down ♪ (humming) - In 1973, Peace Treaty was signed, Paris.

North Vietnam was to return all the POWs.

I remember 26 Marines coming back home.

But 120 were still MIA.

For the next two years there was still flair ups throughout Southeast Asia.

And in 1973, while on recruiting duty, I became engaged.

You want to make God laugh, you tell him your plans.

I get orders to West Pac, the Western Pacific.

So, canceled buying the house, put a stop to the marriage, I just didn't know what was on the horizon.

I had just gotten a Polaroid picture from my cousin Clinny, from Vietnam, all bandaged up and on the back on that Polaroid picture he had put, "Ken whatever the hell you do, "stay out of here."

Well.

I packed up my duffle bag and packed up my typewriter and my camera.

On our combat correspondence patch, in yellow stitchery, our motto, First to Go, Last to Know.

A pen, a quill, portable typewriter, and a bunch of grapes symbolizing bonding, brotherhood.

Leave no Marine behind.

I reported.

Got a promotion to Staff Sergeant.

I was a correspondent now.

Covered operations all over the Western Pacific.

Went out on troop transport ship Went out with various military aircraft wings, and provided both news coverage, and on occasion, I also had the job of covering and documenting classified operations where I'd get my large format camera and I remember the last operation, met up with some Allied Forces and teamed up with an insertion team, and it was our job to document and locate MIA.

So the last known position, we went in.

(thud) We were ambushed, both sides.

I remember waking up.

My hand was tied behind my back.

My mouth bound with a belt.

I was beaten and raped, and tortured over and over and over again.

Suddenly a board met my forehead.

It was like the sound of a baseball bat.

(loud thud) Home run.

When I awoke.

My nose was pressed against what seemed like cold wet cement and my chin was just above a thick soup of what smelled like feces.

I had no feeling from my back to my toes.

It was totally dark.

And I was pounding and pounding and pounding on my enclosure until finally I was able to get my fingers up and grabbed a slab and was able to pull it aside, pulling myself up and out of what was to be my grave.

I remember I crawled and crawled and crawled all night, on both sides of my body, until I came to a village and started knocking on the doors.

Nobody was answering, knocking over and over again.

Door to door I crawled, until finally, a woman, a child, and an elderly man came to my aid.

The next time I woke, my head was the size of a watermelon.

I had a Army medic leaning over me, screaming at me, "Hey, what's your name?

"What's your rank?

Who are you with?"

And I said, "Kenneth Plant, Staff Sergeant, US Marine Corp." (dramatic slow tempo music) (speaking Hmong) - One of my greatest missions was to bring General Vang Pao and CIA agent Jerry to safety.

In May of 1975, the Peace Accords had already been signed.

General Vang Pao and his soldiers guarded the King's palace.

But General Vang Pao did not agree with the Peace Accords, for he knew that if the Pathet Lao were proprietors of Laos, life for the Hmong people would be unbearable.

CIA agent Jerry tells General Vang Pao, "If you don't stop fighting, we will pull your support."

General Vang Pao says, "If you pull our support, "you will need to take me and my "soldiers out of this country."

They agreed that they will take the Officers and their families out first.

On May 11th, Officers and their families began being transported out of the country.

On May 12th, the Pathet Lao are threatening Long Cheng, but General Vang Pao refuses to leave until all of his officers are safe.

May 13, the Pathet Lao are now in Long Cheng.

General Vang Pao tells me, "You and your soldiers "must stay and protect us."

Flying the General and CIA Jerry out was no longer a possibility, for they would be stopped by the Pathet Lao at the airport.

Walking out would not be an option either because there were 10's of thousands of Hmong people fleeing and there were Pathet Lao assassins disguised amongst them.

So at four o clock in the morning on May 14, I snuck General Vang Pao out to the CIA compound.

It was dark, Long Cheng was very quiet.

From the compound we ran a few hundred yards to a vehicle that General Vang Pao's son was driving.

We drove to a secret location, from there, we radioed a helicopter, dropped a smoke signal.

The helicopter came and picked up the General, his son, and a Thai Officer.

That's when I went back to get CIA agent Jerry and we were all able to leave.

May 14, 1975, I left Laos.

(dramatic exotic music) - I went home with my best friend Pam from Unikey.

As usual we were the only two women on the plane.

You would expect a plane leaving Vietnam to have everybody woopdy-doing on it, but not this one.

Everything was very quiet.

It was like letting air out of a balloon, very quiet.

We landed in Seattle and Pam had a connecting flight then to Phoenix, I had to kind of hang around the airport for a while before my plane was ready to leave for Minnesota.

I remember feeling kind of oddly, like people were sort of staring at me.

I had a Vietnamese campaign ribbon on my uniform and I think that might have been what people were looking at.

I don't think many people knew that there were women who were in Vietnam, and I think they were wondering why I had that.

There were somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 women who served in Vietnam, not even our government knew for sure who had been there.

When I returned from Vietnam I never said anything about it.

I don't think anybody was interested.

I don't think they really wanted to hear anything.

So I didn't bother.

- I out processed from the Corps from California and took a commercial flight to Tennessee.

I struck up a deal with the Veterans Organization that I would write and take care of articles for our monthly newspaper in exchange for a cabin, way up in the hills of Smyrna, and some food, and some fuel oil for my lantern, TP for my outhouse.

So, I knocked out the articles.

Self prescribed medication, kept myself pretty comfortably numb.

I just didn't have it together.

People's ability to be so horrifically inhumane to one another was just beyond my comprehension.

I lost all spirituality, I was just consumed with hate and resentments.

I totally lost my capacity to deal with humanity.

- First few days I was back home from my tour in Vietnam, I didn't leave the house.

I watched the news, I'd look for my unit on TV, and I felt I shouldn't have left them there.

Tom was dead and I'm still alive.

Some people thought Vietnam Veterans had committed atrocities.

They thought we were all on some kind of drugs, that we were unstable mentally.

But after a time I would take my MGB, GT little sports car, and I'd explore Philadelphia, Atlantic City, I'd go out to the ocean, I'd feel the breeze and feel the sun kind of wash over me.

I really got into Cat Stevens.

I discovered Cat Stevens music.

♪ We've come a long way ♪ ♪ We're changing day to day ♪ ♪ So tell me where ♪ do the children play He sang about love and hope and giving and I really started my healing right then.

- You know, I had a big secret when I was in the Navy, a secret I have finally gotten rid of but, I don't know if you remember, on our enlistment form it had a box and in that box it said, "Do you have homosexual tendencies?"

Well I lied, I wanted to serve my country.

After Vietnam, I got orders, I asked for the Mediterranean.

They sent me to Asmara, Ethiopia.

They had a Naval Communications Station there.

Then after that, my last duty station was Dam Neck, Virginia.

I got a Maverick, a red Maverick with a black vinyl roof and I learned how to drive and I discovered the bars of Norfolk, Virginia, the gay bars, because I was gonna have a good time.

Now, I met this Italian one night, he had gorgeous brown eyes, and he lived in Washington DC.

He invited me up for a weekend, so I went up there.

We had a great time, we went to the disco and we're dancing.

I met this gay Officer who was in the Navy and I pointed at him and said, "Officers cannot be gay."

I went back to my base in Dam Neck, Virginia and I had some souvenirs with me, souvenirs I didn't pay for, souvenirs I didn't know I had, there were hickeys all down my neck, and everyone started asking me who is she?

What's her name?

Is she a blonde?

A brunette?

A red head?

One wag asked, "Hey did you have to pay for it?"

I didn't know how to answer.

So I just told him this first class that I worked for, you know that woman everyone thinks I had sex with?

Well she was not a woman.

I didn't even know how to say I was gay back then.

He bumped it up the chain of command, I had to go to Portsmouth and get interviewed by the shrink, I waited longer for the interview than the interview took.

He sat on his desk and said, "Oh you think you're a homosexual?"

And I said, "Yes," and that was about it.

Well that was May of 1972.

They kept me all that summer and September 15th of 1972, I was discharged from the Navy, I remember that day really well.

The Master-at-Arms came, took all my Navy clothes.

To this day, I miss having my dress blues.

I would have loved to have kept those.

That was the hardest part.

That was the end of my Navy career.

I went back home, drove my Maverick back to Minnesota.

You know, Mary Beth, it was a very closeted time, wasn't it?

- You know when we first got to this country, we actually started out in public housing.

Our living situation was a little complex.

Because my dad had three wives when he came.

(audience snickers) - Three wives?

- Yeah.

(laughs) You know the war had killed off so many of the men, that this was quite common in the old country.

Of course my parents told me never to tell anybody, but I was like, my dad was only legally married to one of his wives.

My friends would say, "Hey Kang, "ask your mom if you can come over."

Ad I'd be like, which mom?

(audience laughs) And then they'd be like, "Dude that is so weird."

It was really hard to explain these things to Americans.

But us kids, we were like the, I guess you could call them the in between people.

We would fill out paperwork for my parents.

Here, I am, a fifth grader, in a hospital, translating what the doctor is saying to my parents.

We had to fill these really complex forms for them.

Check this, check that, sign here.

But I knew that it was really difficult for my father, you know, because in Laos, he was this giant leader, he watched over the life of the King with General Vang Pao.

And then coming to this country, he cleaned houses.

In the old country, kings knew his name.

And here, he cleaned toilets for a living.

There's a story that my father told me, and it's not something that I quite recall, because I was probably in the first grade when this happened.

See, my father had taken all of us kids and put us in the car, and he told us that we were gonna go to McDonald's so we were happy, we were so excited.

But little did we know that, he had become so depressed, he couldn't stand being here anymore, he couldn't stand being who he had become.

And so then he told us that he was gonna drive us off the bridge and into the Mississippi River.

So that at least we could all die together.

Of course we started crying, and I think that's when he realized that we hadn't even had a chance yet.

And he wanted to see what we were going to be capable of.

So then he turned the car around and brought us home.

But then there's this one time in junior high, my father had brought me and my younger brother to this Hmong Veterans meeting, the first one I've ever been to.

There were these angry Hmong men just shouting and screaming and then suddenly General Vang Pao walks in, and everybody stood up, and they were quiet.

It was dead silence, as the General walked up to the podium and made a speech.

Afterwards I asked my dad, "Dad who is that guy?"

My dad was like, "That's General Vang Pao.

"He's the leader of our people, "he's the one that brought us here to this country."

I had no idea that we had so much history.

It felt almost fictional.

There's the war, the CIA, you know, I mean everything.

Of course I had more questions you know and especially after General Vang Pao passed away my father became more vulnerable and he was able to talk to me about whatever it is I needed to know.

But the General's passing was such a big burden for my father.

Now, everyone came to him for leadership.

Everybody came to him for wisdom.

But I knew my father is one who's not just a wise person or a leader.

When we were young, really young, when we first came to this country, we were labor workers on a farm.

There's this one time, my dad had taught me how to drive this huge tractor at like two or three miles an hour and I was just trying to keep it straight while my moms and my dad and my older brother would pick corn and tomatoes and fill them into these huge hundred pound sacks, and toss them into the back of the tractor.

It was back breaking work for like maybe 50 bucks a day.

But, we were happy then.

My dad was happy.

He was providing for his family and he was doing something honorable.

- My family over here, my kid over here, my life's over here, that's it.

Forget my country, that's it, poor country.

- I ended up doing 21.7 years in the Army.

I retired in 1990 and came to live in Minnesota.

At home, on my I love me wall, I have a picture of myself sitting between Tom and this other guy, Steven Meyer, it was at our graduation.

We looked like babies.

Steve got killed when his aircraft took sniper rounds over Saigon.

Steven died, Tom died, they were great pilots and I'm still alive.

I'm over the remorse of having survived.

I have a wife that is just wonderful, I have a step son who's amazing, I have two beautiful wonderful daughters, and I have a granddaughter and she wouldn't be here if I hadn't have survived.

I also have two rubbings of Tom's name and Steve's name from the Vietnam Memorial.

I think about those guys almost every day.

- The Vietnam Women's Memorial Project started collecting money to place the statue of a woman near the Vietnam Wall.

They asked me if I'd be willing to start speaking about my experiences in Vietnam and I told them I'd try.

The first time I spoke was at my niece's high school.

I started out speaking and in five minutes I found myself sobbing.

I really didn't know where that was coming from.

I somehow got through what I wanted to say and afterwards the kids came up and told me that they had had some GIs talk to them before who read from type written papers.

They told me that none of them had ever shown any emotion at all and that they felt that I was the first one who at least was being honest about what being through a war was like.

I think the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project brought women from all over the country together and did more for us than probably what our government did for us afterwards.

I think we learned how to help each other and in turn how to heal ourselves.

- In later years, I started supporting an organization known as Service Members Legal Defense Network, or SLDN, they were helping gays and lesbians deal with the new Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy and all its legal ramifications.

At one point, they decided to lobby congress to repeal the policy, and years later it happened and I remember Obama signing that bill and on the stage there were people I had lobbied congress with, it made me tear up when I saw that video.

There was a big party the day it officially ended, September 20th, 2011 and I went to it, it was DC, sponsored by SLDN.

I was overjoyed because not only did Don't Ask Don't Tell end, it also happened to be my birthday so I was celebrating two things at the same time.

It was probably the best birthday of my life.

Now, being a Veteran is something you don't really aspire to, you just sort of become one, you volunteer, or you're drafted, some people may think you're a war monger, some people may think you're a hero, but to most of us who have served, we just feel that we are doing our duty for our country.

Lately, I've discovered that on the holidays most associated with Veterans, Memorial Day, and Veterans day, a lot of restaurants give you a free meal or a discount and the same with a lot of merchants.

I didn't start taking advantage of these things til a few years ago, but after giving up four years of my freedom to serve my country, I feel I deserve a few perks.

(audience laughs) - I finally came down from that, the hills of Tennessee, and I went from job to job.

Relationship to relationship.

College to college, to college to college.

(audience laughs) I still didn't have my act together.

Well, in 1979, I met my wife Sheryl.

I call her General Plant, and in 1980 we got married, and then a few years after that, had a beautiful daughter, Kendra.

I never really spent a lot of time, on sharing with my family.

But, in 1983, I became Chief of Advertising for the Army.

They were looking for a few good men to help people be all they could be.

(audience laughs) In work, one can find, pretty good escape.

And I escaped into my work.

In the Army we had all this training about suicide prevention, sexual assault workshops, it finally got me to thinking and I started to make some changes.

20 years of pain management, physical therapy, and thanks to the Saint Cloud of Minneapolis VA, my life has turned around.

I'm starting to live in the moment.

Letting go, and letting God.

I retired in 2016.

I don't know what I'm gonna do with chapter three of my life.

I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm 67 and sometimes I feel like I'm 27.

- My father's shoes are big shoes to fill.

But everything that I do, you know, the film making, the music, the writing, everything I do, I always ask these two questions, one, will it benefit the community, and two, is this something that my father would approve of?

I have this crazy idea of this film, it's about a handful of Hmong farmers on the side of the mountain that takes on one of the most powerful armies in the world, and of course it'll have to be a multimillion dollar budget.

But I have no idea where I'm gonna get that money.

So figure, I'm gonna make these smaller films and eventually work my way up to it.

But, this film, this story, is the ghost that haunts me.

Maybe one day, when I'm able to make this film, I can finally let go of these demons, and finally, finally, live my life too.

My name is Kang Vang.

- My name is Mary Beth Crowley.

- My name is Raymond Wilson.

- My name is Ken Plant.

- My name is Ken Sholes.

(audience applauds) - [Announcer] "Stage" is made possible by the Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund, the citizens of Minnesota, and by viewers like you.