The Vietnam Journey of John Musgrave - Part 1, Encore; Unknown

that's rare and welcome to keep your presents i'm j mcintyre on today's program the education of corporal jon musgrave vietnam and its aftermath that's the title of a new memoir by a vietnam veteran john musgrave of baldwin relief this month by cannot random house musgrave served in the marines from nineteen sixty six to nineteen sixty nine he received two purple hearts and to be enemies crosses of gallantry for injuries he sustained in the vietnam war his previous book notes to the man who shot me vietnam war poems was published in two thousand three by coal city review i had the privilege of interviewing john musgrave into thousand seventeen when he was featured prominently in the documentary vietnam will hear that conversation in its entirety in just a minute but first

filmmakers ken burns and lynn novick talk about musgrave and the role he played in their documentary i've always said that if found some evil genie went and took away all of our hundreds of interviews and left us with just one eye would pick john huskey the title the film education john musgrave these incredibly brave and courageous human being a marine when we focus on worries wheaton times tend to forget that i'm the conflicts are not just between tribes and armies and nations but within people and the battles that we do within ourselves or a hugely important part of and consequences of war and john has been extraordinarily generous in sharing with us the whole arc of his experiences as he traveled through time and space dealing with vietnam and its members and its ghosts and he's incredibly honest person he's incredibly good man and i've spent my entire life studying americans and many many amazing americans and i

don't know anyone who's more amazing job it was eric rabe good fortune sometimes we get lucky enough i felt like that said that this was a reality many times over that time our colleague sarah paulson is the producer of the series her ex husband works with veterans have been traveling the country to a variety of things and he met john musgrave an event that he did in two thousand and he told his wife since then where sereno i'm just at the center need to talk to him and you know it doesn't that was not something he did all the time jimmy lot of veterans so we took notice and i spoke with tarp over the phone and had a great conversation with him and thought you know the special instead think that we should be so we had a meeting and after that meeting he agreed to be interviewed for the film and he was willing to continue working to be there because for a variety of reasons that made sense for us and i think that was in two thousand a lot of us quite a long time ago and i mean he knows who he worries familiar with and other fellows and he knew he was getting into and of that we understood at the time how powerful

this interview would be and how profound how generous he was going to be how important history is to art overall narrative of the war i don't give away too much but he's tremendously powerful voice among many in this town and down we can't really say enough about homeless we are grateful to him for telling us his story for service your country for his honesty about what the war was really like and for letting us are our window into his journey it's been a profound experience for everybody on the stone and i just we often safely you know if something terrible happened last all the material we felt for this family had one thing that was on the states it would be ok that's filmmaker is lynn novick and ken burns talking about vietnam veteran john musgrave who featured prominently in their two thousand seventeen documentary vietnam musgrave tells his story in a new memoir the education of corporal jon musgrave and in this conversation which originally aired on

k pr presents on october first two thousand seventeen pose a son of working class parents i'm much older than the teenage pilot and more to in the army air force he met my mother working in a defense plant where they were building bomb which shows both of my purse to serve their country and the second world war ii generation was fortunate and that if we were looking for heroes so we had to do is look across the dinner table and we saw people who help save the world and i was inspired by those people are all around my email contacts adults were veterans mostly for more war to some from korea and some of my teachers had been served the country during with the draft during the cold war but they'd all served end

the baby boomer generation that's who we are with a welcome our money get we grew up we were the first generation girl up with the draft as it was an institution that was a part of our lives from the time we were old enough to understand the definitions of words like duty and obligation and in evident bill adee we knew as males we owe to our country to years of church and it didn't matter where there was war peace so we owe that to our country we had real enemies the russians in there and chinese who were terrified we did fire drills we get tornadoes drills and we did nuclear attack drills duck and cover our great school

became the first community bomb shelter in our community so we were thinking about the bomb and the communist all of rock and in high school the cuban missile crisis where the world was literally on the brink of annihilation and i remember wondering i think i was a sophomore in high school i might've been a freshman but i remember wondering if i was going to live long enough to consider i don't remember how old i was when i decided that i was going to be a marine back quite a while back home i was looking forward to it military service to me was going to be a shortcut to manhood it was if i was tired of not counting i've been treated yourself i have nothing positive to offer to my country or my community how my opinions were

sought or listen to and i knew that i had something to give but it's seventeen year avenues are very limited in the military for me was a way to give to my country and it was something much more it was something that at that time was respectable and it was particularly my neighborhood i'd been warning uniform since i was eight years old i became a cub scout and i went through a cub scouts and i one and the boy scouts and i went through boy scouts and i was an eagle scout probably still am and throughout scouting your for being prepared for or adulthood and service to the community and your country so these were stepped on a journey and it wasn't out of character and it wasn't like i was

stepping off a path that i've been on since childhood it was the next step to another uniform and i'm just a more serious type of church rock to my country i knew i wasn't going to be a man but i knew that once i graduate from boot camp i was going to be a marine and that was enough for me i do remember worrying about what hand history was going to deal me or fade i wondered am i going to be in the church during a time of peace where maybe i'll be at camp was your camp pendleton and i'll be bored to tears for four years or will it be a war and i'll be excited and i'll be a hero and i'll be a mayor for ever

respected know i'll be like my dad i'd be like all those men that were my dad's friends that i admired finally i would step out of their shadow stand beside them i i wanted that very much in the communist where the enemy show this enemy that i had had all of my life that i had feared all of my life now wears a literal enemy in southeast asia and my president we're selling me that we needed to fight communism in asia and while i wasn't fighting the russians i was fighting their students so again it was just another step on that path that it started first far back as i can remember

from one uniform to another one constant enemy and then immediately an enemy to my family an enemy to my country and i could point when i listed a one of the room when i volunteered for the infantry and volunteered to go to vietnam i know i was going to be a hero after my first firefight with the north vietnamese army only that he was a survivor i was just an american teenager who loved the beach boys and the beatles too love the kansas city athletics girl know i was an athlete at all but i had grown up with a sense of citizenship and are a realization that i had lived

seventeen years of freedom and seventeen years of protection seventeen years of the privilege of living in a free democratic society and being mashed does serve that society in a time of war did not seem like an outrageous request to make it just all makes it to me that when you first landed in vietnam i won over a troop ship which was an exciting experience in and of itself most casual over on airliners but the thirty three days to see a lot more to liberty ship worse living conditions ever had until i was in the jungle but it was thrilling to me because marines or soldiers of the sea and we'd always go on the war from ships and i was going to war the way in the marines

have always gone to show for young kid with a sense of history it was great and when i arrived in vietnam my first experience was to be assaulted by the the physical and a sensual experience that was vietnam and that was an intense heat and smells guy things i smelled the other had never smelled before and other smells i'd never smelled is great ending concert with all these other schmelzer with vietnam just had a smell that was completely foreign to me and while i went down the nets and gotten the landing craft just like those brave young marines headed tower was and payload you jima one of the gates dropped on their shifts and rush to shore

i wasn't under fire there were people offering me coaxing and books have an explicit sexual nature that it certainly didn't seem and principles are climbed on a truck that had girl my units number on it and started driving down these roads in the villages i mean that's changed villages and people literally relieving themselves by the side of the road of both sexes people with their teeth were black and it looked like they were spitting blood and it should be to let which is a mild narcotic that that they truly an inter city black and the saliva this generated is blood red so all these things are assaulting think you know kid from middle america and i just thought i might as well ban on the moon was so foreign to me and i remember literally thinking i kind of places for foreigners and it didn't dawn on

me for a little bit the hell that he was for foreigners and i was one of them and i was a replacement that means i didn't go over with my unit for didn't arrive with my unit have my buddies all around me the guys i went over with i'd been training with some sign listed and they were as close to me as my own family but then we got separated and we went to fill the vacancies in other units and i was told that i was filling the vacancies or marine who'd been killed and i was not only judged against what he had been i was considered a threat because i was an unknown and i was on blood is a very lonely feeling because these kids that i was joining were dealing with the ultimate realities of life and death and your future

lives really depended on the man standing next to you needed no mi amor it was really thrilling <unk> come on was that before you face your first battle was my third night in countries we took fire oh my first night patrol and no it was not a big deal in retrospect but at the time that it happened to me it was the biggest thing in my life for incoming treasury should look a whole lot different than not going through church and i discovered what it was like to be under fire and i did not i did not do well

that all my dreams of glory in all my dreams of how i was going to react under fire evaporated <unk> flooded with here i suddenly became a kid a little kid i wanted to go home the tummy they experience from from there on i arrived i was in the first marine division and i'd been assigned to a military pink to tie in which was us dollar to me because i was an effort a rifle and not i don't wanna be an mp and it turned out that the unit that i was an art wasn't we were part of an old military police battalion but our company was really just reinforced rifle platoon and we were the combat reaction force for

what was an area called the da nang the huge compound and we ran day and night patrols a distributor true were denied patrols and ambushes the roadblocks security for high value targets and if anyone made contact anywhere in our ao or area of operation and required assistance we were the under fire brigade the reaction force we would react to there are contacting go out in the system i didn't like the job because it wasn't the role that i had imagined myself fulfilling while i was doing infantry work i was operating in a oh that was heavily populated and we were operating under tremendous number of restrictions that for different level to our safety don't fire unless fired

upon a lot of restrictions on how to deal with the civilian population it was not a role i pictured myself sailing i wanted to be in the varsity in this was not the varsity to me by then the marine corps has started moving north i'd been damning the dining area with the third marine division had gone up north of the demilitarized zone that sector is a between northam says vietnam and were fighting the north vietnamese army not viet cong that's where i wanted to be and i was giving up till you volunteer to go out there and i did once again having no real concept i'd been under fire a few times so i thought i know what this is all about that in the third marine division we were fighting an enemy that was conventional in division strength not just handfuls of people here and there we

were fighting a conventional enemy who maneuvered in regimental in division shrink that's horrible people they would make it as alicia outnumbered of and we discovered that our role was we were buried they would send us out in small patrols squad sized platoon size or even company size patrols in areas where the enemy was known to be encouraging the enemy to attack us so when the enemy attack this we could then call in all of our muscle and with heavy artillery and air especially share the one thing that we had that the enemy didn't wish jets can we call it god calling in god to bring hail from the heavens shine saved our lives countless times

so i grew up fishing and we would fish using memos from day we would stick the hook under the minnows spine so i could swim to invite the big fish to attack it hit didn't take long for us to realize that we were the meadow and we knew even when you caught the big fish the minnow gut connection now the enemy also realized what we were doing and they had a strategy to counter our strength their strategy was exhibited by a phrase called when you fight the americans hang on to their belts that meant they wouldn't initiate contact or with us until one day vastly

outnumbered us into they would initiate contact until we were very close and they would immediately try to penetrate our what we call uni of integrity try to get in a monstrous so that if we want to call in air and artillery we had to call it in ourselves and he came down to their shoe they countered are strings of territory in there by getting a magician fight and making it difficult for osha to do going down that increased the horror factor of a firefight tremendously the best way i can describe it is they were intimate reading call those firefights would call them brawls

and they were the enemy was on all the manned automatic weapons and our government and foerster rightful ownership in the work there are thousands of names engraved in a black wall and washed in dc who died because the rifle their government gave them to protect themselves and serve their country could not be dependent upon american fighting man children who would be executed because their rifles were jammed and they couldn't fight if i sound better about that it's because i am i will never forgive this country from doing that because there was no excuse for all the enemy was carrying the most strip and double assault rifle on the face of this for the eye at forty seven

which is still in the hands of our enemies today and still working but we couldn't come on and that was just one of a number of things that convinced me very early on that no matter what we did as the young warriors our country was determined to lose that war because we couldn't fight it the way they were making a slide and when or if the real estate business you take property from your enemy you deny them to be the year strategic access whatever the benefits are of that property to them militarily you're denying that the natural resources your denying that to the human resources if you're denying that to them i'm in vietnam we would fight for something and then when the enemy would leave or

we kill or we leave the comeback we go back we were constantly reacting to them and it was disconcerting for me to be wounded in places that i knew that maybe i'd already fought in or i knew other american ship for him and that's no way to win a war that's a remedy for failure to church so is young average women just looking at the profession i was a disappointment and discouraged knowing that what we were going through i couldn't see anyway that any of our suffering would have any positive result for our country for the self image that we were supposedly

defending and i was there and luckily for me i was there and we were still bombing the hell out of north vietnam laos and cambodia and we knew that it was possible theoretically possible strategic clay absolutely necessary that one day they're going to give us the ordered across the dmz and invading north vietnam and that really stayed away from the communists oh i was in the hospital that right after it out of the hospital prison mixing came on tv and announced that we were going to begin a withdrawal every american that went to vietnam or worse in vietnam after he made that speech i knew that they were fighting for a

defeat that no matter what they were going to be asked to sacrifice this country had already notified the enemy that this is not worth winning the us and we're going to leave but in the meantime all those brave hit all of americans children although poor and working class kids that nobody valued except their families who were in vietnam knew that if they died he was would be for anything except their buttocks and i reached the inescapable conclusion as a vietnam veteran and as an american citizen but then i had to do something to really bring that were to close at least for my country which you mean by that i mean i'm sure when vietnam veterans against the war and i worked actively to end the war in which i'd

fall and it was the most difficult decision i remain my life i knew i was going to disappoint some people that loved me very much that we're going to find it difficult to understand i knew that there would be people that i had admired that one might consider me a traitor i knew there were marines that i loved that might think i was stabbed him in the back i knew that my president was going to treat me like i was a criminal i do but the way i felt when i enlisted was this this was something a whole lot bigger than me and it was my duty that's why i enlisted

oh now i wish wishing that or again realizing that this is a whole lot bigger than me and just now it's my duty or an so i became an outspoken generally in europe twenty years at the time yes i was out of the marine corps before i was old enough to vote or considered responsible enough to drink beer i can remember being told that you've been in combat it'll make a manatee did you grow up in combat but i i didn't find it to be true when i found to be true is that you grow i remember guys saying the fridge and i showed it in in this is the way i would say well i was born in missouri but i grew up in vietnam when

we were teenagers we were dealing with what most people don't deal with and teller in their late sixties and seventies and thats the deaths of friends and facing near owned and theoretically if you don't confront those things until you're older because we live in thank god a very safe society but those of us who were in the bush we were dealing with that as horrific reality death became a constant for us a reality a real flesh and blood literally reality we lived by brats not my

day jd not by hours it takes a second to be disable it takes a second to be killed and we lived there when you think of how many seconds there aren't thirteen much because the marine corps everybody else should talk much more by god that's not enough for the marine corps order serve an extra month will show those other dutch flemish a concern that extra month how many brave young marines died when they should've been all like their brothers in the air force and the navy and the army in the coast guard i love the marine corps i did vanish to do iowa the marine corps more than i could ever hope to repay that was trista sure the other branches make sure

wear worship so chronologically i was in my early twenties twenty two maybe when i joined the leader mean i feel like if you're just joining us today on k pr presents it's a conversation with vietnam veteran john musgrave musgrave tells his story in the education of corporal jon musgrave vietnam and its aftermath published by cannot random house i'm j mcintyre my conversation with john musgrave will continue right after this