Transcripts

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SPEAKER 1: When you heard about the book coming out and that being said that way, what was your reaction?

SPEAKER 2: My reaction was, as a person from the opposite end of Robert McNamara, I was at the bayonet point of his foreign policy. And for him to say that was wrong was something that we knew all along. And so I thought the things he said was too little and too late, much like our welcome back to the United states, too little and too late.

I think as he gets older and gets closer to his death, he's trying to clean the slate. And I think it's impossible for him to clean the slate on Vietnam with one book. He's had all those years at the World Bank when he could have been making amends to veterans or their families. And he chose not to.

So now he has a book that's going into it's-- already going into its second reprint. And it's my hope that he would use the profits from that book to apologize to the families that were involved, the veterans in the hospitals yet that are still messed up from the war.

SPEAKER 1: At least one local writer has said the Vietnam War was the most brutal war, the deprivation, the psychological toll of the guerrilla nature of war. That's quite a statement given what we know about World War I, World War II, Korea. What's your reaction to his assertion?

SPEAKER 2: Well, I've actually only been in one war, so I can't really say if it is the most brutal or not. My definition of war is if one person is shooting at you, after that, it just gets to be relative. Yes, we did go without food. We did go without water, without sleep.

I was on the alert for an incoming mortar round or whatever. So there was a huge price paid. But I think all people who are in a war pay a similar price, the people in Dresden that were firebombed, the atomic bomb survivors. I think anyone who's involved in war, even as it goes on today around the world, one person shooting at you, that makes it brutal. That makes it a war.

SPEAKER 1: Is your writing about the war a personal journey to explain things to yourself or to us or both?

SPEAKER 2: I think to both. For me, it is a way of getting it out of my head and down on the page. And then I felt like I could close the book on that chapter. So it was stress relieving to write the things I've written about Vietnam.

SPEAKER 1: I haven't been to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, the wall. I haven't seen it. What's it like to be there and to see it and to see and meet other veterans?

SPEAKER 2: At first, I used to go for the dead, just to look for the dead guys that I knew. The last few times I've gone, it's for the living, just to say to the other vets, I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're alive. Welcome home. And then to hear the same things in return.

SPEAKER 1: Does it seem like that those of us who weren't in Vietnam are making any progress in understanding what it was like for people who were there?

SPEAKER 2: Once again, I have no way of judging progress. I know it's something that I say with a bit of pride now that I did serve in Vietnam. I served my country in Vietnam. And for the first 15 years after the war, I denied it. So if that's a measure of progress, then yes.

SPEAKER 1: What's the value of keeping the discussion open, of keeping talking, reading about the war?

SPEAKER 2: Well, of course, there's the unresolved issue of the POWs and the MIAs. I think that needs to be addressed, the value of keeping it open. Maybe if it prevents some kind of young person from joining the military to go fight in a glorious war, then the words I have written would be worth it.

SPEAKER 1: Marine infantry, is that right?

SPEAKER 2: Yes, I joined in 1961, right out of high school. And the first taste of what war would be like was when I went to Cuba in '62 during the Missile Crisis. We went down from California through the Panama Canal. And we practiced invading the island. And so I was a young automatic rifleman. And they told us our mission was to take the first row of bunkers.

And so I said, well, what do we do after that? What's our next mission? And the person giving the briefing said something like, you'll be no longer effective as a fighting force. And freely translated to me, that means we all would have been dead or wounded. The fear at the time was the missiles, the missiles that could reach half of the United States from the island of Cuba.

SPEAKER 1: That was a powerful fear. I was a schoolchild. I was in elementary school. And we, of course-- I remember very vividly the day of sitting in my school lunchroom, snow falling outside the windows. And we had heard already just before school lunch that the standoff had occurred between the ships, the one ship from the Soviet Union that Khrushchev had sent over, and then President Kennedy ordering that ship to be stopped. So we all thought, of course, that this was it, war was starting.

SPEAKER 2: We thought it was war also. We were on a war footing. They get to the point where we got steak and eggs, the traditional warriors send-off, clean uniforms because there's less chance of an infection if an object passes through a clean uniform as opposed to a dirty one. So we thought we were going in.

SPEAKER 1: When did you discover? When did you have the inklings? When did you have the first signs that you were either a storyteller or a writer?

SPEAKER 2: Oh, I think the storyteller came first. Growing up on the reservation without electricity, no radio, no television, it was one of the ways we entertained ourselves. Anytime there was more than two people gathered, somebody would start telling a story.

And over the years, you learn who the good storytellers are. And you try to emulate their actions. And if you weren't doing it right, somebody would jump in and finish your story. It's called walking on your story. And after it happens a few times, you learn how to hold the audience's attention.

SPEAKER 1: So this is pretty high-powered competitive storytelling?

SPEAKER 2: Yes, these are stories of the old days among the Anishinaabe, the prediction stories that said that the White man was coming to this continent, that we would live through a long, hard time. But eventually, the White man would come to us for advice on how to successfully live here.

SPEAKER 1: What are the new stories saying about the future in the sense, I don't know, that you consider them prophecy or future telling? But what are the new stories saying?

SPEAKER 2: Right now, any group I gather and talk with, the subject of gambling comes up. It's always gambling. It's either playing at the casino or working at the casino. But everybody is talking about gambling.

And being the natural skeptic I am, I'm wondering, OK, if we're all looking over here at this subject called gambling, what else is happening over here that we should be watching, like treaty rights, for example.

SPEAKER 1: We hear the reservations are both better and worse off than before casino gaming came along. We hear about schools, jobs from casino money. And then, of course, we hear the infant mortality rate, the poverty rate is still very high on some reservations. How is it these coexist at the same time?

SPEAKER 2: Gambling is relatively new. I always like that part of it. They never call it gambling. They call it gaming. I think it's a nice fluffy word. But it's really gambling. Gambling I see as a two-edged sword. On one hand, it provides jobs. It provides us with capital, something that's very important in the white world.

But on the other hand, it increases the opportunity for corruption. I think everybody has an honesty limit. And if you're handling $50,000 every day and your honesty limit is $60,000, it's easy to stray across that line. We've had some experience with that on my reservation where people were honest up to a certain point.

I think it's creating new stereotypes for us in that we're all getting rich from our casinos. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think it's something like maybe 5% at the most of the Native Americans in Minnesota actually get money from their casinos. And the rest of us are just continuing life as before.