Michael Donio

John: It is July 20th, 2016, approximately 1:10 pm. I'm John Pettegrew with Evan Reibsome, interviewing Michael Donio, D-O-N-I-O, for the Veterans Empathy Project website. Good to speak with you.

Michael: Thank you, John. My pleasure to be joining you and Evan today, and hopefully contributing to the project that you're organizing and carrying out.

John: When and where were you born?

Michael: I am from South-Central Pennsylvania, lower Susquehanna Valley. It is York county, I was born in the city of York, which is about 50 miles north of Baltimore. And of course I'm right in the mid-decade of the 40s. So I was probably just the proper age for Vietnam.

John: Were you aware growing up of that huge conflict of the Second World War that had just finished as you were coming of age or being 1:00born?

Michael: Yeah, well, not at the time. I really didn't get the concept of World War II, I think, until I was maybe, I mean, I heard about it. But I think I learned more about it from the time maybe, like, I was seven, eight, nine, 'cause my dad was of an age where he was a little too old when the war started because they weren't drafting men over a certain age. But then I think he told me in '44 he was called up. But he was also working in the defense industry. So that could have forestalled some of it. But he was called up. But then before they were gonna head out to wherever for basic, they told everyone, "Do not report" over a certain age, 'cause that time he was already 34. And I guess they considered them too old. But we do, because I have an Italian family, there were two brothers who came over from a little town 2:00outside of Naples known as Longano, Francesco and Sabatino. Sabatino was my grandfather. Francesco was his brother, who lit out for America in 1885 because he had to report to the Italian army and he didn't want to go. But my grandfather went in his place. And I remember as a kid, he would tell us stories because he became a cook. And he had stories that would curl your hair because of the kind of food that he made. Short story is, he totally enjoyed it. Then he came to America in 1888 and then rejoined his brother in Philadelphia.

John: Where did you go to high school?

Michael: I went to York Catholic High, which is obviously in York. It was a relatively small school. I went through Catholic school all my life. So I had the training of the nuns, which sort of prepared me for later in life. They were like D.I.'s at the time. It was a school of 3:00maybe 600. We had four grades because we run nine through 12 for high school.

John: Both girls and boys?

Michael: Yes, yeah, we were coed.

John: What kind of activities did you participate in in high school?

Michael: I, well, I tried to participate in baseball. But I was all leather and no stick. I could field, you know, slick, I could throw, but there was something about the ability to put the wood on the ball. And so I get through the first two cuts and then the coach would say, "I need offense, I don't need defense." (chuckles) I was also involved in the school newspaper. And it was at that time that I also got into amateur radio. We had a club that had been established by one of the nuns who worked with a local physician who was also a ham. 4:00This thing had started long before I got into high school. But it was something that always interested me, some type of electronics, because my generation was also the Sputnik generation. And the whole concept was that, if you don't learn technical skills, if you don't study hard, those Russkies are gonna bypass us and you know, instead of the church steeples, we'll be saluting the hammer and sickle. So those were other things that were growing at the same time as you become more aware of what's going on in society, internationally. And my family was also rather political. I found out that my other grandmother had been a suffragette and my family had always been interested in politics. My one crazy uncle was Sicilian. He was very much into politics as well, knew a lot of politicians, and he was also a barber. So as a kid, you'd go to the barbershop and he knows everyone. They all come in. And whether it's the mayor, city council, congressman, local 5:00legislator, you just sort of, I listened to the conversation and I picked up on this political event. So I might have been preset to really tune into that and get a sense of, what are these people talking about? What's policy? Why they doing this? Why does one say social security is great and the other one says, "Oh, it's all communist, "it's socialist."

John: Is your family attached to a particular political party?

Michael: Yes, I think you could say that our family was very democratic because in our house there were three pictures on the wall. One was FDR, another was the current pope, and later on it was JFK.

John: What happened after high school? What did yo do then?

Michael: Well, like everyone, at the time, I think it was probably junior or senior year of high school that we had career days. And there would always be someone from the military branches. And because my friends and I in the radio club, we had our radio licenses at that time, we felt electronics would be good and maybe the Air Force. So we'd chatter with them quite a bit. So that was always in the background if I 6:00don't go to college. But I decided I did wanna go to college. So I enrolled and got my deferment. And I thought, "Well, I don't know exactly "what I wanna major in." That was one of the problems. So I just took general business course initially.

John: This is, like, fall 1963?

Michael: '64.

John: '64.

Michael: Yes.

John: And what college did you enroll in?

Michael: I started at York College. I met a professor there who taught business courses and I said, "You know, in a couple years, "I need to transfer." And he said, "I've got a good friend. "We taught together at Franklin and Marshall. "He's now head, he heads the business department "at Marshall University," which was then, is in Huntington, West Virginia. So he wrote to him, introduced me. I sent off some things and, like, in three months, I had my acceptance. So I headed out to Marshall. And that's when I sort of focused more on what today 7:00would be called communications, communication arts, because I was in business administration, broadcasting, journalism and marketing. So that was my core. At the time, I knew that as graduation was approaching, in '68, that, with the war obviously very, very hot, and draft numbers going very high, that I had to do something. So once again, I checked out the Air Force because my brother-in-law at that time was an Air Force pilot. He flew transport planes. And he said, I had some vision problems so I couldn't get to be in pilot school. But he said, "You can probably be a navigator." So I went through and took the test. But once again, I just missed the vision requirements. So that was a pathway that was blocked. So then I really honestly did not know what to do. I interviewed for some positions. I had potential job 8:00offers, because they always ended the interview with, "Well, that's good, we have a job for you. "But call us if you don't get drafted." Always that caveat at the end. And then at some point I realized, "There's no way I'm gonna get a job "because I would probably be drafted shortly," which I was. And I decided, "Okay, I'll just go do my two years "and then, you know, forget about it." But that's not exactly how it turned out.

John: To go back briefly to early years in college, '64, '65, had you ever heard of Vietnam?

Michael: Oh yes. Yes. As I mentioned, my family had a lot of interest in politics, policy, what was going on. And as I say, living just a little bit north of Baltimore, we always got the Philadelphia Enquirer, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post. And I noticed my dad always read all the editorial and the commentary pages, the op eds as they're called. And I recall one Sunday, I was reading the editorial 9:00and op ed piece in the Philadelphia Enquirer, and I saw a little article about something happening in French Indochina, as that region was called at that time. Because if you look at the way Vietnam was laid out, there were three sections. There was, brain just went blank. The upper section was called Cochinchina, which wi the north. And there were two other sections. And I remember specifically it talked about the proposed elections, I think they were gonna be held in 1956. But as I came to learn as I read this article, that the then-current Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had blocked the elections because there was a fear that Ho Chi Minh would win the election. That 10:00was the first time, I think I was maybe 11 or 12, when I really heard about Indochina and the war.

John: Was there much tension to American presence in Vietnam at Marshall University in the mid-60s?

Michael: Hm. There was a little bit. Because it was basically in what some people might say would be a Southern state, there was a lot of the attitude that, if you were against the war or were counterculture, you were a hippie and you were a communist and you didn't love America. So there was an underground that was going on and there were some debates on it but not a lot because people had to be very careful. You had to appear that, "Oh yes, "I've got the red, white and blue tattooed right here." But behind the curtain, you could really 11:00talk about what the issues were. We had a very small peace movement that was growing. But as a student, with a student deferment, you had to be very careful because some draft boards would look at things like that. And I happen to come from one in York county where the woman who was the secretary told me face to face when I was questioning why she was gonna pull my student deferment, she said, "I don't like college students."

John: When exactly were you drafted?

Michael: I was drafted in, I graduated from Marshall in May of '68. Two weeks later, in June, my draft notice appeared and I was to report, I think, the beginning of August. At that point, I had three choices, as a lot of people did. You could report for the draft. You could go to Canada. Or you could just refuse and take your chances and go to jail. Well, in my thinking, options two and three were not reasonable, 12:00just did not make any sense. So I thought, "Well, I'll go, I'll do two years, "and that will be it. "You know, how bad can it be?" Sort of like an optimist. And then I went in the beginning of August of '68.

John: Where?

Michael: I reported to Fort Dix, New Jersey, which in some ways was good because having a large family, I had relatives living in New Jersey a little bit north of there. So if we got a pass during basic training, my cousin's husband would come down for me and I could spend a weekend with them and then get back to Fort Dix. It was at Fort Dix and what they call Reception Center, it's a week where they sort of orient you to the Army. Now, you know, I'd never been around too much military. I mean, I'd been in the Scouts, you know, Cub Scouts, Boy 13:00Scout, what some people think as sort of paramilitary. But I don't really think it is. And I really didn't know a whole lot about it other than what my brother-in-law had told me. 'Cause I said, "Maybe I'll just goof off or do something," and he said, "Don't do that because then "you become a yard bird "and you'll get every dirty detail "that they could think of." So with that in mind, at the Reception Center, I heard some guys speaking about OCS and I said, "What's that?" "Well," they said, "that's officer school." They were in a program, I think it was called College Op for OCS. And I thought, "Oh, that sounds rather interesting." And about that time, they pulled us aside, put us in a classroom and handed out a paper and said, "Take this test. "We'll determine if you can go to officer school." And I'll never forget we had a WAC E7 sergeant first class. And as she handed out everything, she stood in the front and she said, "Gentlemen, the Army is looking 14:00for liars "and BS experts to be officers. "Good luck." (chuckles) So we had a chuckle at that. And I must have answered enough questions correctly because then we got notified that we qualified, and then they gave us three choices. They said, "You can go to infantry, "artillery, or engineer OCS." Well, not knowing a lot about the military, I thought, "Infantry sounds kind of dangerous. "Artillery is definitely noisy. "Engineer, how bad can it be? "Build a road, build a bridge, build a culvert." What I didn't understand was it was combat engineer. You're the guys who breached the fortifications. You're the guys who put in the mine fields. You're the guys who build the bridges across the streams or across the gullies. And it was, you had to go out there, literally, before the infantry got there so they could cross those things. As it turned out, I never got to engineer OCS because there had been some problem at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

John: For that, though, you went through basic training.

Michael: I went through basic training in Fort Dix. Yes.

John: What was that like physically--

Michael: Physically--

John: Culturally?

Michael: Yeah, you know, one thing about the military, and I think it's something that's missing in today's culture is, even though we talk about diversity, and in some ways, I'm tired of hearing about it because if you look at a map of the world, we're very diverse. You meet people from all walks of life. So I don't know why this sudden emphasis that we've discovered, "Oh God, there's diversity." It was very interesting because at that time, it was '68, it was the height of drafting, and they were pulling everyone in, which meant that most of the training companies were filling with at least 50% of the guys being college graduates. So for the first time, you had college graduates 16:00at a majority in most of these training companies and you're meeting with some people who may not have had as much education. I actually for the first time that I can remember, I met people my age who could neither read nor write. This was, you know, totally new to me. I just, I knew there were older people, you know, back in the day, who maybe didn't get to school. But this was the 50s and 60s. How could people not go to school? How could they not learn to read and write? And that was sort of an eye opener. But it was very challenging, since the most physical thing I did was, like, P.E. in college. I played pickup baseball and volleyball and those types of things. But I was never ready for all the physical demands. And if you think about it, I looked around the thing and we're all about the same size. Maybe 17:00some of the guys weighed 160 pounds but most of us weighed between 125 and 140, and that was on a good day. So it was initially demanding. But after a while because the D.I.'s, the way they work you and the physical training, you sort of get into this routine. And you can really see how you go from, like, scattered, like iron filings, just throw 'em down, to suddenly when you put the magnet there, it starts drawing into uniform shapes.

John: There's a logic to it.

Michael: There's a logic to it, yes. It was sort of interesting. And now, I had gone hunting as a teen because once again, my dad and his brother and cousins and uncles, we all went small game hunting. So I fired that. But I never fired any high powered weapon like an assault rifle. So that was something new. It was an education, so to speak. (chuckles)

John: What after basic training, then?

Michael: Well then, because I put in for engineer OCS and been approved, I was sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for engineer school, which turned out to be basic combat engineering. We filled, I'm trying to think, we had three platoons. But I don't, offhand I think maybe we had 115 people all together. I don't, I can't recall. That was basically learning how to, strange as it sounds, tie knots. Because as an engineer, you may have to construct some things and you need to know if you only have rope, you have to know how to tie knots so they're going to hold. And then you progressed to where you learned how to put in land mines as well as how to disarm them. And the type of land mines were either antivehicular, like antitank, antitruck, as well as antipersonnel mines, where you have Claymores and Bouncing Betties. 19:00So we learned that. And then we learned bridge construction. Well, there was a bridge that was developed in World War II by a British engineer called, I think his name was Bailey, 'cause the bridge is called the Bailey Bridge, somewhat logically. It essentially is iron frames. And each of the units weighs somewhere around 500 pounds. But it can be moved if you got, like, five guys moving it. And they showed us how to construct it. I think it went together with a lot of pins and you'd have to hammer them together, almost like a, I don't know how many people remember Tinker Toys, like, maybe there's a better example that I can cite. But essentially you put this together, then you put in decking. And it's also built on rollers and it serves like a fulcrum. So you build some sections, you push it out, and it's still balanced. And you push it far enough that it hits the other side and comes down and then you have a bridge. And you can run tanks 20:00over it, jeeps. But it's built to also handle whatever our tank was. And I can't remember, I think it was MBT-60, the Main Battle Tank 60. I don't remember the entire weight of it. But I know that this bridge would support a tank going across it. I don't think you could put two at a time, but I think it would handle one.

John: Back to the other kind of training, were you working with live explosives in the training?

Michael: In some of it, we were. We were working with TNT because you had to learn how to obviously blow up some type of blockage. You also had to learn how to use explosives if you wanted to build tank traps, if you wanted to block a road, where to put 'em on the sides of the, if you only had obviously trees to use so the explosion would knock the trees crossing on the roads to block tank traffic or any other vehicular type of traffic.

John: So we must be now into late fall of 1968, after the engineering training. What happened after that?

Michael: Well, after that, as we were nearing the end of training, and this would have been in December of '68, we were waiting to get our OCS assignments because I had some other platoon mates who were going to Fort Belvoir and some other guys were going to infantry at Benning and some others were going to artillery at Fort Sill. So I'm waiting around and starting dates are not showing up. A few guys got them and everyone else, they said, "Well, wait." So we're just curious what's going to happen to us. And by that time, I can't remember exactly how 22:00it happened, but toward the end of my training, the first sergeant was looking for additional guys to help in what's called the orderly room. It's basically the office of the company. And somehow I got recruited. I don't remember how. But they were brought in and said, "You're gonna process this, this and this." During that time, I said something to the first sergeant. I said, "You know, we haven't received our OCS assignments." And he was a big, gruff old bear of a guy, an E8, first sergeant, with a star on his chevrons, and he said, "I'll find out." Sergeant Hart could get things done. And he looked at us and he said, "I can't find out any information." So we're sitting there, thinking, "Well, what's going to happen to us? "We have no assignment. "What are they gonna do with us?" And he said, "Well, we're gonna assign you "to a holding company "where other guys are waiting for starting dates "for different types of schools." And as it turned out, when we got over there, the commanding officer there had said the same thing. "I have no information on when you guys will go 23:00wherever. "But what we're gonna do is, we're gonna farm you out "to a lot of the training companies." So we got promoted to E5s. And I got back to my former training company as acting cadre. So for at least one and a half cycles, I helped process paperwork for trainees. I learned a lot from the first sergeant and also our company commander, Captain Riley. It almost got to the point where I learned more about the Army from those two people than I would have learned had I just gone right to OCS. And looking back, I now see that I would have probably been lost and maybe never even finished the program. But because of what they had taught me how the Army works, the little intricacies of how you get a DF form, a distribution form, and how you request things, you sort of learn the ins and outs a lot better. So 24:00I ended up being in that company until April of '69 before I finally got called to the battalion headquarters. And this specialist said, "I got your OCS starting date," I said, "Okay, I gotta pack my suitcase. "I'm going to Fort Belvoir, just south of Washington." And he said, "No, you're going to Benning." (chuckles) That was an eye opener. But I thought, "I've come this far. "Where do I sign?" Then April of that year, I showed up at Fort Benning.

John: We should clarify even though it's related, OCS is officer--

Michael: Officer candidate school, yes.

John: At Fort Benning--

Michael: At Fort Benning, yes. Fort Benning is also the home of the infantry. OCS was established for in-service, yeah, people who were in 25:00service or prior service, to go to officer school. During World War II, it had started when they needed lieutenants. And then they did it in, like, three months, the same type of training, where ours was more extensive 'cause we had a lot more training to get done. It was a good opportunity because you'd get there, a lot of us had come from basic training or had been held over in some other area, and we're suddenly meeting other candidates who had been E5s, E6s, E7s. My company alone had about 30% of prior service, and about half of those guys had been Green Beret. So it was quite an interesting company. We filled 236 people and we graduated 132.

John: How long did that last, OCS?

Michael: It's a six-month course. It's very concentrated. From the very first day, you have no walking privileges, so you have to double 26:00time or run everywhere. It gets to be fun when you're carrying an M-14 rifle, a clipboard, and books to run to what we call Infantry Hall, which is the large training center, the large classroom center, at Fort Benning. That was also an eye opener because there's this huge building and you put all your things outside, stack your rifles, and go into the classrooms. I mean, you look up and down the hall, you see officers from all over the world. There was one, because they have a lot of advanced courses as well. And I remember we were watching one day and we saw Israeli officers going in one door to this classroom and Jordanian officers going in the other door to the same classroom. And there were officers from Egypt, from Venezuela, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, there were NATO officers who where there as well, as 27:00well as Australians and New Zealanders and Vietnamese, Cambodian and Thai and South Korean.

John: What's it like to be trained on an M-14, to hold it and shoot live rounds?

Michael: Well, it's an experience. I have to tell you, the M-14 I believe is a, well, compared to the M-1, I think that's a little bit lighter than an M-1. And it has a much better mechanism. You have a lot less problems with putting in the magazine and loading a round. It can get a little heavy when you're running and trying to carry four, five books along with the clipboard. But when you get on the range, the first time you fire it, it's, like, "Hope my shoulder stayed in place," 'cause it packs a wallop. 'Cause it is a 30 caliber weapon. And 28:00then gradually, you zero it in and you start hitting the targets. It's one of those, I don't know how to really explain this, but after a while, you start thinking, "I can really bring the heat, I can bring the power," because you squeeze off a round and it's semiautomatic. So you just click, click, click, and it firing rounds. Now, the M-14 can also be put on full automatic. And there is a version of it where you have a bipod on the rifle barrel, and the magazine usually is a 30-round clip. The normal round is 20, each magazine holds about 20. So you can squeeze those off rather quickly. But it was a lot of fun firing that because it packed quite a wallop.

John: Was part of your OCS training about leading and working with and managing men beneath you? That is, the psychology and the 29:00strategies, the do's and don'ts of being an officer and being responsible for other people?

Michael: Yeah, so that was, I would say, if anything, that was the primary mission of OCS, was to train me to be a leader. And the biggest thing they always used was that word you had used, responsibility. They told you every day, "You are responsible "for the 34 or 44 men assigned to your platoon," because trained as second lieutenants, you are in essence a platoon leader. You're probably in a company headed by a captain, most likely. And as a junior officer, you have responsibility for a platoon. And they made it very clear that you, during our 30:00training, we had to learn the function of every member of that platoon, broken down by squads so that you knew what everyone was required to do. But everything was, you not only had to know obviously the tactical, the strategy and then the tactics you employ, but you also had to know all the administrative aspects down to paperwork. How do you request more paper clips and staples? You know, I know some people, I happen to be a science fiction fan. You know, Star Trek and that type of thing. People would watch the captain, who would speak to whoever in whatever department and would know exactly what's going on. And someone once said, "Does the captain really know all that?" I said, "Well, based upon my experience in the Army, "as you move up the ranks, "you definitely need to know everything. "You need to know if that 31:00supply clerk "is telling you the truth "or if he's just trying to make up something." So you really need to know almost down to the nuts and bolts. And other than the tactical training we received, that was also a very important aspect because we had many courses on leadership. What makes a leader? How do you command 35 to 44, 45 men? And what do you do to show that you know what's going on and to have the confidence to be able to order someone. You say, "Smuckatelli, I want you to cross that swamp "and set up your machine gun." And you have to have enough belief in yourself to order someone to do that.

John: After OCS?

Michael: Well, once again, it just seemed that I was, I keep saying I can't believe how fortunate I became because partway through the program, in the Army, one of the best things you have is the rumor mill. I mean, it is, (chuckles) it's better than Hollywood gossip. You 32:00learn everything. And someone had said, "Hey, I heard that 62nd Company," I was in 63rd Company in the sixth Battalion of the Candidade Brigade. And they said, "Hey, I heard that company "received branch transfers." And I (mumbles), "Branch transfers? "Get out of the infantry?" So right away this raised a red flag and we went right to the captain. And of course he said, "Well, "that doesn't happen all the time. "And we have no levy for transfers." And then a month later, he came out, he called an assembly and he said, "I just got word "that we do have branch transfers available." I think there were some for armor, artillery, when I heard signal corps, my antennae went up 33:00because, as I mentioned earlier, in high school I got an amateur radio license, so I'm a ham radio operator. And because my friends and I also had an interest in commercial broadcasting, we went on and received at that time what were called commercial licenses. You had to go to the FCC offices to take these tests. And since I'd lived 50 miles north of Baltimore, that was the closest FCC office. So we studied our theory, electronic theory, went down, took our test, and I had gotten what's known as a first class commercial. So with those two licenses, I put in my application and I was approved for transfer to the signal corps. And upon finishing OCS, my next assignment was at Fort Gordon, which is in Augusta, Georgia, for basic signal officer school.

John: Can you briefly explain what the signal corps is within the US Army? What is its primary function?

Michael: Its primary function is communications, to keep units informed, to allow commanders, you hear that term a lot, command and 34:00control. Well, if you don't have communications, you're not going to have either. So the signal corps, at that time, now it's so advanced over what I went through, but we looked at communications within a company, communications within a platoon, first the platoon, or the squad, the platoon, the company, and then the battalion and then the brigade and then whatever the next higher command is. It could be a division or it could be a larger brigade. It just depends on the hierarchy. And it's not just radio communications but it's also telephone. We had to learn how to set up telephone systems. We had to learn not only voice communications by we had teletype. And just about that time we were also getting into the early, what could be the early phase, of almost like packet radio, because DARPA had been working on things. 35:00I think DARPA set up the first Internet in 1968. And some of that technology came into the signal corps because we had some new scrambler-type radio systems. We had something what's called spread spectrum. So we had to know all those things as well. We also were responsible for some of the listening devices that were used, passive. It might look like a tin can along the side of the road. But it was measuring for vibrations so you could tell if troops were moving. And we have some contact with that as signal corps officers. But our main thing was, make sure commanders can communicate with their units effectively so they can carry out their mission.

John: As you're finishing OCS and you're assigned to the signal corps, we're into first part of 1969, these are very critical months in the 36:00Vietnam War, history of the Vietnam War and the history of how the United States is responding to this escalating war. President Johnson decides not to run for reelection, the growing antiwar movement is, well, is growing and really taking hold. But here you are in the Army, going through this very intense and specific training. Is there an awareness, is there the ability for you, if you are interested, to know what's going on out in the larger world, especially in terms of the US Army and the war in Southeast Asia? Are you aware of the growing 37:00controversy and difficulty the United States is having in this war as you're inevitably inching your way towards that, whether you knew it or not at the time? We do know now that that's where you're headed. Talk about that for a little bit.

Michael: Yeah, I would say there was a lot of awareness. There was definitely tension within the military. The old timers, the guys who had done, now when I was in, we still had some guys left over from World War II, the closing years of World War II. They also caught Korea. So they were staunch anti-communists. There were a lot of us who thought, "Well, how bad is Ho Chi Minh? "You know, what do we really know about him?" What did we really know about Vietnam? We had been bombing the north for quite some time. We'd also been bombing in the south. 38:00You know, looking at everything that was going on in society, we started to learn belatedly that Lyndon Johnson absolutely lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The destroyers Maddox and Sullivan were never really attacked. There were some small patrol boats from North Vietnam. But they were no threat. I mean, a five-inch gun would've taken those things out (fingers snap) at the snap of a finger. So there was awareness that civilian society was questioning what we were doing. There was also some questions with the launch of the McCarthy candidacy, Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota challenging Johnson. And those pressures and that attitude was filtering in through the military because when you get to a base, as I mentioned, I went to, right after OCS I went to Fort Gordon, Georgia in Augusta, for a basic signal 39:00course which started, I think, a week after I finished OCS. And we finished some time in late December of 1969. And it was during that time that I got my orders, 'cause none of us knew where we were going, and I was assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I was initially assigned to a signal battalion and then a company within that battalion. So I show up, I meet the captain, and it's the holiday and he said, "Eh, you know, go home, "come back after the first of the year "and we'll get you situated." But 'course going back home, I hear what people are saying and I know that there are peace demonstrations. We know that the long-awaited peace talks in Paris with, by now it's Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho are going nowhere. But we know that Nixon has this secret plan to end the war. And that was filtering in 40:00because especially the junior officer corps had begun to question. The Army, not, there was some, but there wasn't quite as much as in the Navy. The Navy had a dedicated program called The Concerned Officers' Movement that began challenging. At the same time for the Navy, they had a new CNO, Chief of Naval Operations, by the name of Elmo Zumwalt, who had taken over the Navy. And he had a slightly different attitude and idea. He's the one who went back to allowing sailors to wear beards. He was also reforming this strictly "because I said, do that, Smuckatelli, do it." He was trying to get more, not exactly collegial, because when you're in a war the last thing you need is, "Well, maybe we should not do that today." No, it was just to make junior officers aware that your opinion counts for something and to try 41:00to let your soldiers know that you care about what they're doing because if they can't perform, you're not going to accomplish your mission. Now, one of the other overriding things in the Army and every military is that, if you look at the mission or your men, what's the most important? Mission. If you lose 200 men but you accomplish your mission you've set out to do, and you've done what you've set out to do.

John: So when are you deployed to Vietnam?

Michael: Well, I was, when I went back to Fort Bragg, I was assigned to a signal company. And I was there maybe two weeks and I thought, "I don't like this. "It's not what I wanted to do." I said, "I really wanna be in public affairs." And I just happened to run into someone from the information office, as it's called in the Army, and I said, "Okay, where do you work, who do you work for? "Gimme the phone number." So I called the major and he said, "Wait a minute. "Let me speak with another lieutenant," who was the public information officer, 42:00and he said, "Can you meet us tomorrow," which I did. I told 'em my background and he said, "Yeah," 'cause the other lieutenant was moving on, he said, "I need a replacement so I'll have you transferred." So I spent two weeks in the signal company and got transferred to 18th Airborne corps headquarters at Fort Bragg in the information office and I became the public information officer. So then I had journalists, writers, I had a radio/TV unit, and we essentially put out public information. We would record programs and send them out to various radio stations. We also did what's known as hometown news release. Those are those little things where you see in the newspapers with the little, you know, head and shoulders shot of a solider and it describes. Those all come from the information officer, from the information office. I was in my position a few weeks when one of the biggest stories on the East Coast broke. And that was a Green Beret captain by the name of 43:00Jeffrey MacDonald, who was a physician, was involved in an incident where his wife and two daughters, his pregnant wife and two daughters, were murdered. As things developed, it ended up that he was eventually discharged from the Army. He was suspected of killing his wife and two daughters. So that was one of the first big stories that I was involved in in terms of what I, now, I didn't respond to the media, 'cause they descended on us like locust on a field. I only said what my boss, the major who was the I.O., would give me permission to say. 'Cause I'm still just a lieutenant. And no on trusts a lieutenant. So I was very cautious. But I was shown all the medical documentation. In the Army, a lot of people know NCIS. Well, the Army has the same thing. It's called CID, Criminal Investigation Division. And they laid 44:00out all the evidence and they concluded that he killed his wife, his daughters, and also did the self-inflicted wounds on his shoulders. Because we met with the hospital commander. And they're showing us pictures, they're showing us diagrams. And I remember asking the colonel, "Well, you know, someone was stabbing him." And he said, "The angle of the blade and the depth, "that was self-inflicted." So that was the first big thing that I walked into.

John: You stayed in that position some time. But I take it then you were shipped off to--

Michael: Well, before that, I was very comfortable in the information office and thought, "Oh, this is great." And one day, someone came in from the administrative office, a Sergeant Parks. I remember his name for a reason. I'll get to that later. And he said, "Sir, I have your 45:00orders." So I'm looking at it and it says, "Dong Baht Ten, RVM," Republic of Vietnam. I had no idea where that was. But it says before that, I was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for another signal corps course. I was sent out there to an advanced signal course that is called communications and staff officer. I was being sent out there to learn how to be a battalion or a brigade (mumbles) officer, where I would be in charge of all communications. So in June of that year, I had to leave Fort Bragg and head for Oklahoma. And that was through most of August of 1970. And then I went on leave for about three weeks or four and then boarded a plane in Maguire Air Force Base right next to Fort Dix in New Jersey for the flight to Vietnam.

John: Where did you land?

Michael: Well, we had a couple of stops. The first stop was in Anchorage, Alaska. And then from Anchorage we flew in to Yokota Airbase in 46:00Tokyo, Japan. And then from there we flew down to Bien Hoa Airbase, which is about 20 miles northeast of Saigon. And my ultimate destination was Long Bin, which was sort of the, it was the home of what we call USARV, United States Army Republic of Vietnam. And I was gonna be assigned to some unit there, or that's what I thought. But when I went over my orders, every day they would say, "Look on the list "and if your orders are in, your name will be there." Well, my name didn't show up for a couple of days. And I thought once again I'm in this, "What's with me? "Every time I go someplace, I have to wait for orders." But eventually my name showed up and I went to pick up my orders and they said, "You're not going anywhere. "You're staying right here at the Saigon Support Command." So I thought, "Oh, well, this 47:00is good. "It sounds better than going up north someplace "that I didn't know where it even existed." So I was assigned to the Saigon Support Command. And once again, they really had no assignment for me. We had a huge depo. I can't remember if there were, like, 15 different commands in the Sa-, it was a lot of logistics, supplies, that type of thing, materials. And they sent me to this depo. And I'm looking around. There must have been 100s of Vietnamese workers, mostly women, some men. They were sorting electronic parts and other things. And I thought, "This is boring," 'cause when I spoke with the one captain, she was a WAC captain in personnel, I said, "Well, send me over to the information office "because I have that MOS," military occupational specialty. And she said, "I can't do that." I said, "Yeah, you can, it's right over there." I always pushed a little bit. So after a while, she said, "Okay, "maybe I can get you transferred." 48:00And in about two weeks, she had me transferred over to the information office because the current I.O. came out to meet with me and he said, "Yeah, we'll see if we can put the paperwork in "a little bit faster." So I ended up as the information officer of the Saigon Support Command, which is, once again, about 15 miles northeast of Saigon.

John: At this point, who are you creating information for? I mean, now you're in country, you're not supplying necessarily those short articles for hometown news.

Michael: Well actually, we are.

John: You are?

Michael: Yeah. That was, the first thing is, I reported to the general. At that time was General Gibson, a major general, really nice guy. One of the finest officers I think I ever met. The function was to put out the public information and the big part of that was the hometown 49:00news release. Keep the soldier connected to the community, let people know that he's here or doing this. The next thing was any information involving activities that might get known generally or publicly and there might be a news release, it would come from my office. Once again I had, everything had to be cleared. They just didn't let me write a news release, "Okay lieutenant, put that out." No, I had to go through the assistant unit commander, who was really great, Colonel Rogers. Why I remember names to this day I have no idea. But he was really, he was a great guy. And once it was cleared, then I could release it to the media, because we had a lot of media in Vietnam. The other thing that I did was, we tried to be cooperative. So if someone from one of the networks or any of the wire services, AP, UPI, Reuters, we also 50:00had ABC, NBC, CBS, Group W, Westinghouse, were in country. So we provided press escort. If they were coming in, they want to go visit one of our units or interview people, that was my job to make all the arrangements, if they wanted to speak with one of the commanders of the depo about something, I'd call, say, "I'm bringing in," in this case I did, it was George Lewis, an NBC correspondent. I took him down there. He interviewed and I had to stand by just in case he had other questions or whoever he was interviewing didn't like some of the questions and try to smooth things over. And that was the other thing that we basically did. And then the last thing we did is, we published our own newsletter, or news, it was more like a newsletter, a small newspaper that was published monthly. And we had to do articles. So we featured some of the people in the commands or we spoke about the missions. Like the colonel, the colonel who was in charge 51:00of fuel. I think his name was Colonel Brooks. This is synchronicity in some ways. Every morning, we had our staff meeting at 7:00 am on the dot. So you had to get in place before that. And then the sergeant major would come in and say, "Gentlemen, the commanding general." Everybody pops up like a jack-in-the-box. And then he would call on you to give your report for that particular day. And I remember the colonel who was doing fuels would always say how much jet fuel was in, how much this fuel, how much gasoline, how much this, how much that. Well, fast forward about 30 years, and this Colonel Brooks is now the managing director in Philadelphia for Major Wilson Goode during the time of the MOVE incident. And it was Colonel Brooks who decided to drop the bomb. But my days were mainly spent in handling the news 52:00releases, the hometown news releases, anything the general might want on other units, being prepared to do press escort.

John: Did you notice in this work any distance between the content of the press releases and other information you communicated and what you took to be the (mumbles) real truth? Was there a noticeable order placed on you to make things look good, certainly, but to not report, 53:00not communicate things that looked less than good?

Michael: Yes. That was the, especially as a junior officer, I had to be more mindful of that. And I learned that lesson at Fort Bragg. We had, in addition to Major Jones, who was the I.O., and myself, there was also a civilian information specialist. We were having a discussion about reporting things because there was antiwar activity in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at the time. And I said something, "Well, do we report "on what's going on?" And he said, "No." He said, "Think of it this way. "You work for General Motors. "Are you gonna, on a news release, "'Our Cadillacs are crap'?" He said, "So everything we put out "has to be positive." But in 'Nam especially, now, the Saigon Support Command really didn't have a lot of the war news. That was handled by the US Army command and also we had a superior command 54:00in Saigon known as MACV, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. At that time, General Abrams was the commanding officer. So his people were putting out everything that had to do with the war news. Mine was, you know, it could have been very minor, troop movements or shipments, because at that time, when I got in Vietnam, now this was September of '70, we had already started retrograde operations, meaning we began shipping things back to the States because Richard Nixon had decreed that we would start Vietnamization. So I may have had reports on that. My guys were doing stories about, we ran a lot of convoys. So we would do a report on convoy out to Chu Loy or we had units in the delta 55:00around Can Tho and Binh Thuy. In fact, one of the things we also looked at, and I got a lot of the reports, was AWOL. Surprisingly, there were 1,000s of AWOLs and desertions in Vietnam. Now, this was not generally reported. So I could not report that. But it was internal communications of, how can we reduce AWOL rate? And someone at the staff meeting had said, "Well, this colonel who runs one of our units in the delta, "he has the lowest AWOL rate in the command." So the colonel called me and he said, "Fly down there and find out what he's doing. "We can use it throughout the command." So I took one of my photographers, we went out to Bien Hoa Airbase, got on a plane, flew down to the delta, got out to the command and met with the colonel, and he said, "What brings you here?" I said, "Well, we were looking at AWOL rates "and you have one of the lowest in the command. "And the head shed wants to know, what are you doing "that your troops aren't 56:00deserting "or you're not having those problem?" And he looked at me, and then he looked at my photographer and he said to my photographer, "Leave the room." And he said, "Close the door on your way out." Now, I'm, I didn't think we'd asked anything that was out of line. So that was done and I'm sitting there. He said, "Lieutenant, you cannot tell this story." Well, now I'm really, "What is going on?" And he said, "The reason I have the lowest AWOL rate," he said, "Did you see the fourth barracks in there "with all the fancy things?" I said, "Yeah, I sort of did." He said, "I run a brothel." He said, "I have the happiest troops in 'Nam." 'Cause he had the medical guys taking care of everyone. He said, "That's why my AWOL rate is low. "But you cannot tell anyone." These are just some of the things you face as an information officer. You can't report that. So these are some of the fun things that I got to do.

John: Some people listening to your account of this, you're a lieutenant in the Army, you are an information officer, you are in Saigon in 1970, '71. There's so much happening around you. Also, though, you're in Southeast Asia in a large urban area. Did you have time to go and play, as it were, to see what Saigon is like, bars, restaurants, to have, you know, sort of freedom to do what you would when you're not on duty?

Michael: There was some of that. I had a split tour. I was at Long Binh for about five months. And then I was in a position that was 58:00originally slotted for lieutenant colonel. But since there weren't a lot of other officers available, being a lieutenant, and by now I was a first lieutenant, I was slotted. But a senior officer came in who had the same MOS as mine, Military Occupational Specialty. So he was given the job. So I went down to Saigon to AFVN, America Forces Vietnam Network, the radio and TV station, and I asked if there were openings for news officers. And there were. So they told me, "Just put in your," I gave 'em my background again and they said, "Sure, we can probably bring you down here." I put in my transfer. By then we had a new commanding general. And my new boss said, obviously he looked 59:00at my background and said, "Hell, take that job." So he endorsed me, the commanding officer did, and in, like, about a week, I was down in Saigon with AFVN as a news officer. And then my duties were somewhat different. I was responsible for the content of radio and TV newscasts. Part of that responsibility also meant covering the daily press briefing that was held at five o'clock. And it was derisively referred to by the media as the Five O'clock Follies. It is where the representative from the US government, mainly the ambassador, would give a briefing and then the Vietnamese government would give a briefing about what was going on. Then the US military and then the Vietnamese military. And I sort of joked that it's where the ambassador lies, the Vietnamese government lies, the US military and the Vietnamese military all lie about what's going on. And most of those sessions got very heated because by then, the media had known that 60:00there was a lot of lying going on about body counts, about everything else. There was a, I don't remember the exact location of where this engagement occurred. But they were reporting, the US military, that 1,200 Viet Cong and NVA had been killed. And one of the reporters, and I do remember him to this day, he was from the New York Daily News, his name was Joe Freed, and he began asking questions about, "Well, where are these bodies? "Where was it? What happened?" And it went from bad to worse because the Vietnamese military spokesman said, "We won't tell you." And by now the whole room is, like, you know, going at it and saying, "Well, what is this? "What kind of a briefing is this?" So it was very contentious. I had also met by then other reporters and news producers from the other networks, and I met a contact 61:00with the Group W Broadcasting, which is Westinghouse at the time, and guys from ABC. There were other things going on in the states. But it was something happening in Vietnam involving a lieutenant, Rusty Calley, who was charged with murder because of the My Lai incident. And all of this was coming to a head. Some of the producers and reporters from those other news outlets who got to know me, they said, "What do you think?" And I said, "Well, I think the junior officer corps "is being railroaded," because there were other senior officers who were just as involved but they were all acquitted. And I think there was one E7 or E8 who might have also been convicted in that whole incident. So it really dampened down the enthusiasm because you felt as a junior officer, well, you're here for one reason. Shoulder the blame.

John: I'd like to move on now. I mean, you'd said that it didn't quite work out that you were gonna just serve your two years. How long did you serve and when were you discharged?

Michael: I ended up doing three years because as enlisted, I was responsible and required to serve 24 months. However, upon finishing officer school and receiving a commission, I was discharged from active duty and then I was re-enrolled active duty for a period of 24 months, additional 24 months. When that happened, I was already in the military, by the time I'd got my commission, 14 months. I only had 10 months on my obligation, if I had refused the commission. But by that time, I was so into it and I wanted to get that gold bar. It just 63:00meant something and it showed as some kind of accomplishment. Not that I was a great war hero. I never pretended to be. But it was just something that I wanted to accomplish and I wanted to do. That's why I had the extra 24 months. So I ended up almost 34, 35 months total til I was discharged. That's another thing that went sort of bad. At that time in the Army, if you were time in grade, meant if you were second lieutenant time in grade one year, 12 months, you're promoted to first lieutenant. At the end of the next 12 months, you were promoted to captain. 60 days before I was gonna have my two-year anniversary, they changed the regulations and I didn't get my captaincy. And then I thought, "Well, now I'll just go back to the States, "I'll be discharged and that'll be it." But if they had offered me the captaincy, I probably would have taken it for another year. Or well, actually, you couldn't just say a year because in order to get it, you 64:00would have had to sign what they call volunteer indefinite, which means you serve at the pleasure of the Army. And it could have been a year or could have been less. You just didn't know. But by that time, I really wanted to make captain. It was just something, it was, like, right there. Even though I was not extremely military-minded and had never, other than doing public affairs, I had never been in a signal company, I never organized signal communications. But I liked what I was doing.

John: But instead you were discharged.

Michael: Yes.

John: Did you end up back in Pennsylvania?

Michael: I did initially, yes. I came back. And I spent about a year, maybe a little bit more, working in marketing advertising. And then I 65:00went down to Maryland and I was with a research organization. And that would have been about '73, '74 by that time. It was a weird time because, if you think about what was going on, Watergate had broken, I think it had happened in June of '72. And then the press kept digging. And by now I'm down in the D.C. area and it was a very hot topic down there. But at the same time on the economy, things were getting very, very bumpy. I seem to recall that inflation was, it was starting to rear its ugly head and things were slowing down. So now we're into '74. Nixon is really in the hot seat. And the economy is not getting any better. And the company I was with decided they were 66:00going to outsource a lot of what they were doing, even though they were research company. I was in sales promotion. It was with one of the media rating companies who did television ratings and radio station ratings. And we did a lot of promotion to the industry. But they decided they could save a lot of money just contracting that. So I was sort of kicked out of a job. This was in late '74. And I decided that, after working in the economy for three years, I didn't need that. So I decided I was gonna go back to graduate school. So I applied at Penn State and started a program in public administration. My specialty, I was interested in health administration. So I started that program in '75 and finished in '76.

John: Did the military help you with your tuition?

Michael: Well, I had VA benefits, such as they were. It wasn't as good as what the guys had in World War II and it's nowhere near what is available today. We received a monthly stipend, if I remember correctly. I don't, (sighs) I can't remember if I was getting, like, $7 or 800 a month, from which I had to pay my tuition as well as living expenses. I went to Penn State in Harrisburg because they had the upper division in the graduate school and the program I was looking for. So I completed that in late '76 and I immediately got a job in New Jersey with a new federal health planning program. And I spent little over five years in Jersey. Along the way, I met other vets and met some folks who were in the Army Reserve. They asked me why I never went in. And I said, "Well, I just didn't see "that I was gonna get 68:00anything," because every time I'd speak to the reserve, I'd say, "Well, if you made me captain, I'll join." "Well, we can't guarantee that." And I wasn't gonna spend any more time as a first lieutenant.

John: As you look back to that time in 1968, the year right when you were actually drafted, and you understood that you had three choices, to follow the draft, to go to Canada, or to take your chances, as you put it, staying in the states but not replying. Did you make the right choice?

Michael: Yes. Yes, because I think what happens, and I said this many times, you get to a point where, when a person has nothing to lose, 69:00they're the most dangerous person on the planet. And I decided that, "I'll go. "I'll see what it's like. "I might learn something." Well, as it turns out, I was very, very fortunate in that I went in at just the right time, I had a background that was able to get me to officer school. And if you're gonna be in the military, better have a little bit of collar brass. You don't live like a king, but it's a heck of a lot better than living with lower rank. You have a few more opportunities. And I really liked the people I was meeting. It was wonderful. I got an opportunity to do things that may never have done. So from that standpoint, it may sound hypocritical, where I didn't really support the war, I ended up having an unbelievable tour of duty with the assignments, as information officer, stateside, Vietnam, being in 70:00broadcasting, which I had done when I was in college. So it really worked out. And then it also set the stage because of the VA benefits, however good or bad they were, for me to get to graduate school. Because I had planned on going to graduate school earlier. I was still in Vietnam, and I wrote off to Penn State. I was gonna go there initially for a Master's in journalism. And I'm preparing to do the GRE and everything else, and I get a letter from someone that says, "I'm your advisor," I think that was the title. And he said, "Welcome to the class of" whatever, and, you know, "just report here "September, August," something or other. And I'm thinking, "Oh my God. "I'll be back in the States four days "and have to head out to a campus? "I can't do this." It was just, was just too much. So I delayed it three years 71:00and then eventually went to grad school. But no, I think it gave me a lot of opportunities to do things that I ordinarily would not have done. I think the training was phenomenal, when you think about it. It taught me how to organize things, how to get things done. I had opportunities I otherwise would not have had. And I think in the long run, it's maybe terrible to say on a war, but I had a very interesting and exciting tour of duty.

John: (mumbles), do you have any other questions?

Man: Yeah, it kinda (mumbles) on what you were saying, gonna voice out an all that. But I was wondering maybe, and you kind of touched upon it, maybe you already said what you wanna say about it. But you know, the Vietnam War, maybe with the exception of the Civil War, but the Vietnam War has had kind of this continual reassessment of the Vietnam War and a reevaluation of the controversies surrounding the Vietnam 72:00War. I'm just wondering if, looking back on that, you'd speak to your personal experience. I wonder if that, how that helps you or how that impacts your views of current wars. I mean, like, the Iraq War was another very controversial war that goes in with, at best, faulty intelligence, at worst, outright lies. Very much at the Gulf of Tonkin it was suggesting or (mumbles) you discussed. So I just wondered if, you know, how current conflicts may be helping you reevaluate, or is there any relationship between these two?

Michael: I think there's a lot of relationship. For example, as I said, I've always been interested in history. I can't remember dates and things that sometimes get focused upon. But I like to read about the incidents around it and what's going on in society. As I said, my first exposure to Vietnam was that article in the Philadelphia Enquirer when I was about 11 or 12 and the whole thing of Indochina. At that time I know that John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State. And I know that was not long after the McCarthy red scare, which I sorta 73:00remember and I don't. But I think from reading that and understanding these geopolitical forces, now I couldn't spell geopolitical when I was that age. I didn't know exactly what it meant. But I think in looking back and doing more reading about that, I see that we're repeating a pattern. In fact, I just finished a book on John Foster and his brother, Alan, who ran the CIA. And you find out that they have this totally Calvinistic missionary attitude toward foreign policy, which caused them to view everyone as either with us or against us. And if you're against us, you're a communist and you're fair game. I had also read in the book that Ho Chi Minh had visited the US back in the '30s and was quite impressed by our Constitution and also the Declaration of Independence. Then you learn that in the 1940s, Ho Chi Minh 74:00was our ally in fighting the Japanese, and he had been promised by the Allied Forces that after the defeat of the Japanese, that he would be allowed to declare the Republic of Vietnam as an independent nation and no longer a French colony. Well, when you're a kid, you don't know what went on, how he ended up being double crossed. And later you find out that it was only at the behest of De Gaulle, and I think the Dulles brothers and some others who kept saying, "Oh, the French were so humiliated. "You know, the Germans ran over the Maginot Line "and they were humiliated. "Let them regain their colony." Apparently what I read is that Ho was still not convinced that they were gonna let them back in. But they did, so at that point he said, "Well, then we're gonna start an insurgency." So all this was going on. And the 75:00more you learned, the more you felt, "Wait a minute. "This whole war is started on a lie, "on double crossing. "And now we're asking young men and some women "to die once again for interests "in which they don't understand, "and really, there's nothing to gain for them. "It's strictly a geopolitical balancing act "between the forces of good and the forces of evil," which at that time were defined as the Soviet Union and, as they called it, Communist Red China. And as you get a little older and read more, you see that you're really used as pawns. And then it becomes very aggravating. And then when you get these other wars, you start to examine, "Well, what's really going into it?" And I think, Afghanistan I don't believe that people have a situation where they think that was totally wrong, because we were attacked. 76:00Those were the people were located. And you go get them. I have no problem with projecting military force if it will ensure our security or if it's to redress something that happened. Iraq we now see that all the intelligence that was collected, I think given by Ahmed Chalabi, the guy he found, I think they called him Curveball, had lied about all the WMD, the weapons of mass destruction. We were sold a bill of goods. Colin Powell was, I think, used to deliver that erroneous information and we went into a situation that has deteriorated. We also learned that Paul Bremer, the ambassador, disbanded the Iraqi army, sent them home, 400,000 men with weapons. They're Sunnis. They are now 77:00in a situation where the Shia are dominating and no wonder they formed ISIS. So when you start putting these pieces together, you have to start questioning everything about our foreign policy and what we're told. We don't know if it's ever true because we're not privy to some of that information. But the general information is that we just don't have the full story. And I saw that in Vietnam. At the same time, when Nixon was talking about the Vietnamization, there really was no plan. It was essentially, "We're just gonna pull out our units "and we're gonna ship this stuff back "and we'll see what the heck happens after that." It was only through a horrific bombing campaign that I think Nixon unleashed in December of '72--

John: Christmas bombing.

Michael: Christmas bombing, that Le Duc Tho and Kissinger worked up the final agreement which enabled us to get our POWs back in '73. And I 78:00think it was six months after that, or so, six or eight months, that we had removed the remaining combat units from South Vietnam. So I think it's, the best thing is, always be alert, be cautious, try to make sure we get as much information as possible when we're talking about these serious foreign entanglements.

Man: Thank you very much.

Michael: Oh, right, oh this is, hey, this is my pleasure. If I can help in any way, you know, very happy to. I think what you're doing is great. Hope I don't frighten people. I just, I don't wanna shock anyone.

Man: No, you're very articulate and wonderful material, I think.

John: Absolutely.

Michael: Well.

John: You have such recall. Your ability with the names and the different nomenclature. You know, I just, unit orientation--

Michael: I'm exhibiting early Alzheimer's. I can't remember yesterday, but I can tell ya 38 year ago, 'cause I'm with my, with Mimi, we're 79:00watching a ball game or something and I'll say, "Yeah, don't you remember back in '55, "Pee Wee Reese was," I said, "Don't remember in 1960, "Rocky Bridges hit the ball to Tony Coo back, "it hit the infield, bounced up in his adam's apple, "he got knocked down." (laughs) "And then Bridges hit the three-run home run "that tied the game at nine-nine, "going into the ninth inning "and Maseroski whacked the home run."

John: (chuckles) It's crazy what we--

Michael: Oh yeah. And then other things I'll remember. "How do you know that I said I watch baseball?" There's no explanation. (man laughs)