Interview with Stephen Haisley, Vietnam War
Lance Corporal, H Company, 2/26 Marines, Weapons Platoon, U.S. Marine Corps
Cook Memorial Public Library District
January 9th, 2007

Interviewer: Ellen Bassett
Transcribed by: Connie J. Pfeifer
Proofread by: Ellen Bassett

ELLEN: This interview is taking place on January 9th, 2007 at the Evergreen Interim Library in Vernon Hills, Illinois. My name is Ellen Bassett, and I am interviewing Steve Haisley, a Marine Lance Corporal and a Machine Gunner during the Vietnam War. Steve was born on November 29th, 1948 and currently resides in Vernon Hills, Illinois.

ELLEN: Steve, under what circumstances did you enter the military?

STEVE: I enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1967 in the summertime. I believe it was June of 1967. It was during the time that Vietnam was going on, and it was just something that I felt I needed to do. Back then, I think there was a feeling of patriotism and I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I hadn’t done very well in school. I paid more attention to girls and sports and things like that so that was an option that I took. I really felt it was my obligation, I did.

ELLEN: Was this right after high school graduation?

STEVE: Yes, I graduated in June of 1967 from Wheeling High School and enlisted shortly thereafter.

ELLEN: How did your family feel about that?

STEVE: It was interesting because…as I mentioned to you earlier off the tape….I had enlisted in Indiana and I came back here to Illinois to be back home and when I told my parents, the first thing my dad said was, “You know you’re going to go to Vietnam, don’t you?” And I said, “Yes, but it’s my obligation.” I really felt that way. That was the way that I looked at it. It was my duty to do that.

ELLEN: Why did you pick the Marines?

STEVE: …because it was the toughest in physical training and everything and as I said, I had been a good athlete in high school, and people always said, “Well, you’ll never make it in the Marine Corps. It’s too difficult.” I was always small. I was only….my senior year I wrestled 103 in high school. So I was always very small. It was just kind of a challenge to me both physically and mentally. I’ve always liked to do things like that. Plus, I’ve watched John Wayne for years as well and I loved to dress blue so that was probably one of the predominant reasons.

ELLEN: You enlisted in June. How soon before you were sent off to boot camp?

STEVE: I went into boot camp on October 30th, 1967. I left from Indianapolis, Indiana, which was….actually I was originally from Indiana. I grew up in Indiana until I was almost 11 and then moved here to Illinois. I spent the summers visiting my grandmother, and I enlisted in the Marine Corps during that time after high school. So I left on October 30th, 1967. It was the first time I had ever flown on a commercial airliner. It was quite an exciting trip.

ELLEN: Where did you go for boot camp?

STEVE: San Diego, MCRD, Marine Corps Recruit Depot, in San Diego, which is often referred to as Hollywood Marines. Parris Island is the other option, which is more toward the East Coast. Hollywood Marines are for those going to San Diego.

ELLEN: Once you got there…you said boot camp was how many weeks?

STEVE: Eight weeks at that time.

ELLEN: Eight weeks…andwhat do you remember? Was it as tough as you thought it would be?

STEVE: It was much more than that. I have some very vivid memories about my military service, boot camp being a part of those. I remember landing in San Diego and the drill instructors got on our plane and they said, “Get off the plane and get on to the bus.” Once we got on the bus, we were primarily their’s and they began yelling, and I probably have never heard so many swear words in my life and they basically told us just to shut up and look forward, and they were very humiliating. “I own you, and yada-yada-yada.” I was just scared to death. I was sitting there thinking, “What have I gotten myself into?” Once we arrived from the airport at the base itself….if you’re familiar with the Marine Corps, they have yellow footprints at the receiving barracks. They have you get off of the bus, and the footprints are as if you were standing at attention. They’re almost touching at the heel. The drill instructors are screaming, “You’ve got five seconds to get off my bus and get on to the footprints.” Guys were tripping over each other. It was very scary and I’m thinking, “Boy, I’ve really done it this time.” It got progressively worse as the night went on. I remember one of the guys in our group had a high school jacket on with a letter on it, a high school letter. We were all standing at attention, and the drill instructors just came around and got in your face and yelled and swore and screamed. And he said something about, “You think you’re a tough guy,” to this kid with this jacket and literally just took the letter and ripped it off of the jacket and said, “You’re nothing.” I remember him throwing the letter on the ground. So a lot of that, a lot of humiliating things but I look back in retrospect and it was great because the whole psychology behind it was to break you down both mentally and physically, which they did and then build you back up. And it worked perfectly. Now I’d probably laugh at it if I had to go through it. Those were some of the things. Again, they called us “girls,” they never called us Marines. You weren’t called Marines until you graduated. We were always, again, called “girls.” We marched for the first week holding hands. You never sat with your legs crossed, because only women sit with their legs crossed. Any reference to anything feminine was very quickly removed from your life. They’d say things like, “Don’t worry about your girlfriends back home; they’re dating your best friend.” It’s just all these little psychological seeds that they planted. Now I look back and like I said, it would be humorous, but we all took it to heart. We weren’t allowed to have any candy or pogey bait as they referred to it, during boot camp. A lot of physical…very, very physical, as far as exercising and doing things to the point where guys would drop. Punishment much different today than they…at that time they were allowed to hit people. Fortunately, I only got choked once. We had guys that were hit. There were a lot of things that went on, but like I said, it certainly…I don’t think it harmed me in any way and probably made me a much better and stronger person for it.

ELLEN: Wow! Well! After eight weeks, were you glad to get out of there?

STEVE: Yes. You know, in ______. For me at the age of 18 and 19, it was an adventure. We were just wanting to get on and get to Vietnam, because we knew that where we were all eventually probably going to end up. One of the things that I was talking to one of my friends about the other day….when you arrive at boot camp, you see other recruits in various stages of boot camp. You would see some of them at graduation on the grinder, as we refer to it, getting very close to graduation. You think, “Oh! Am I ever going to make it that far?” MCRD is right next to the airport in San Diego, and the jets were constantly taking off, and I can remember standing out there thinking, “Gosh, I wish I was on that plane going back home.” You know, homesickness….I suppose it was just a mix of anticipation and concern about where we were going, but wanting to do very well and do our best. Like I said, I look back and I don’t regret it at all.

ELLEN: That’s good. Where did you go after you finished your eight weeks of boot camp?

STEVE: After we left San Diego, we went up to Camp Pendleton for ITR, which was Infantry Training Regiment, and we went through some training there. I eventually came home, and I’m trying to remember…I don’t remember exactly, but I believe ITR was four weeks long. I ended up coming home in March of 1968 from my training from there. But again, you learn more military tactics. A lot of boot camp is military history, physical training, obviously you learn to qualify with your weapon, which at that time was an M-14 rifle. ITR was a little less strenuous; obviously, you had achieved the status of Marine. Even though it was demanding, it wasn’t quite as physical and you were treated with a little more respect at that time. Various weapons training and things like that. MOS. When I originally graduated from boot camp, I was assigned to, or my MOS was NI Tank and Explosives, which was a 106 Recoilless Rifle and explosives flame thrower, 3.5 rocket launcher at the time, which was a bazooka, if you’ve ever watched any old war movies. So, that was my MOS, and that was the area of training that we went through so I had to go through that training at ITR, as well, with the flame thrower and the 106 Recoilless Rifle and things of that nature.

ELLEN: Over in Vietnam, you were a machine gunner.

STEVE: Yes. I actually I had gone through all of that training, and the minute that I got in Vietnam and was assigned to a unit, they said, “Have you ever fired a machine gun?” I said, “Well, during training.” They said, “Okay. You’re assigned to a machine gun team.” So I never laid my hands on a 106 Recoilless Rifle. I don’t ever recall using a 3.5 rocket launcher or a bazooka at that time. We had what they called LAAW’s, which was a very short, disposable weapon. They had the M-79 grenade launcher, but I never used all of that training that I had prior to that time.

ELLEN: Okay. After Camp Pendleton, that was March. Where did you go after that?

STEVE: I came home after Camp Pendleton, after that training. At that time, you were all given 30 days leave. I actually extended my leave for 10 days, which we discussed again off tape, that my unit had been to Kaeson. That’s probably what kept me from catching the end of Kaeson. The 26 th Marines had been there during that siege, so I extended my leave just to be with my family a little bit longer. From coming back home, I went back to Camp Pendleton where you went thru staging, which was a basic training that you went through just prior to going to Vietnam. In staging, you learned about booby traps and formations and all kinds of various things just to prepare you for Vietnam. You did ambushes. A lot of the training was the same, day-in and day-out, repetitive, so that you would be able to react when the time came. Then from there, I went to Vietnam.

ELLEN: Do you remember when you left for Vietnam?

STEVE: I don’t remember the exact dates. I arrived in country the first couple of weeks in April. We went from California to Okinawa. We spent….I don’t remember a great deal, but we spent, I think, three or four days in Okinawa…Hawaii, Okinawa, I believe we stopped at Wake Island briefly and then into Vietnam itself, into Da Nang is where we actually landed.

ELLEN: Da Nang? Okay.

STEVE: Yes.

ELLEN: Once you got there, you were then assigned to a unit?

STEVE: Yes.

ELLEN: ….which was the…?

STEVE: The 26 th Marines, Hotel Company 2nd Battalion, 26 th Marine. Again, you have to keep in mind that you’re dealing with a 19-year-old kid. A lot of us were this way. We had never really traveled. It wasn’t common that….today, my daughter went on cruises when she was in high school. We just never did that. We’re now in a foreign country. We don’t speak the language. We have all these strange Vietnamese names that we’re trying to pronounce. It was kind of scary just being on your own. Even though there were certain areas that they…there was a receiving barracks at Da Nang. You had asked me what I thought about boot camp. When I came intoVietnam, when we landed at Da Nang, that was the second time in my military career that I asked myself, “What in the hell have I gotten myself into?” I remember coming around and circling through the clouds. We flew a commercial airliner. I believe it was Eastern that we flew or United into Da Nang from Okinawa. There were commercial flights that were just all military. I remember coming through the clouds and looking down and just seeing all of the bomb craters around Da Nang and everything. And I’m thinking, “Holy Cow! What have I gotten myself into?” We landed, and it’s funny, because I look back on at a lot of things again in retrospect, and I remember seeing the flight attendants and seeing their faces and how sad they looked. It didn’t even dawn on me then, but they were probably thinking, “Some of these kids aren’t going to be coming back next year.” I remember that, and it just seemed like they were so sad. A lot of Vietnam Veterans will tell you they remember walking off the plane because of the tremendous heat and humidity, and that’s one of the things that I remember to this day, just walking off that plane and just being hit. It’s like walking into a blast furnace almost, because of the tremendous heat and humidity. When we got off of the plane at Da Nang, there were a group of soldiers, Marines, I don’t even know who they were, standing and waiting. They were applauding and yelling and screaming. I thought, “Boy, this is great. This is really a nice welcome to Vietnam.” Actually, in essence, what they were going to do, they were going to refuel the plane, turn it around and go back to the world, as we referred to it. All these guys were waiting. They had done their tour. They had done their 12 or 13 months in Vietnam, and they were going to be getting on that plane and going back to the world, again to what we referred to as the United States. That’s why they were so elated that we were getting off. We were on their flight. As I said, again, I was assigned to a unit. I was told….I was by myself…where they were. Again, I had no idea where I was going or anything like that. The unit was up in the Northern ICOR Area which was near Camp Carroll, Cam Lo Village. Again, you’re fumbling through all of this. You just tell people, “Hey, I’ve got to get here. How do I do it?” And they say, “Well, hop on this plane and do this and do that.” I eventually, God knows how I did it, but I eventually hooked up with my unit, which at the time was operating near the Cam Lo Village. That, in essence, was how my tour really kind of began.

ELLEN: Once you hooked up with your unit, how long before you actually saw any combat?

STEVE: Um, bits and pieces fairly quickly. Cam Lo Village was right on the Cam Lo River. Again, this was all up fairly close to the DMZ. We were within a few miles of the DMZ. One side of the Cam Lo River was primarily held by the North Vietnamese. Obviously, the side that we were on was friendly. We would go in to Cam Lo Village and be mortared quite a bit. Actually, we were ambushed in the village. My first real contact was when we’d gone into the village one day, and we were mortared from the other side of the river and I actually got…I just had a little piece of shrapnel in my arm. It just bled a little bit. I never said anything about it. That was probably one of the first times I’d ever seen…there were some children hurt that day. I have letters that I wrote home to my parents about that. It was just so sad. I had younger brothers and sisters at the time. It was just so sad seeing them caught. I remember a little girl crying. She had been wounded fairly badly and the corpsmen were working on her. Camp Carroll was another location that was just up a little further north from Cam Lo, and that was probably one of the first times that we received artillery rounds or mortar rounds. I remember writing home to my parents and telling them I had received my baptism by fire and how cool I thought it was. And we had all run out of our tents that they had up there and jumped into trenches or bunkers, and I thought it was very cool. That very quickly changed after you see the death and devastation that can be caused by that. Again, it was just a 19-year-old kid who was just experiencing all of these neat things, at the time. It’s kind of like a slap in the face. Reality hits you, and you don’t realize that there are all of these thousands of pieces of metal flying through the air that could kill you or mame you or whatever.

ELLEN: You mentioned the kids that were injured or hurt. Did you have any kind of relationship with the people in Vietnam?

STEVE: Often times we did. We would go into the village and we would buy things from them…soda pop or bananas, little Vietnamese…they would sell bananas that were very small, probably half the size of the ones that we purchase today at the grocery store. You had to be very careful because there was always…they would say you have to be very careful when you buy soda pop because they would put ground glass in it or there was always some concern that they might poison the food. Not that we ever saw that. We would go into Cam Lo Village very, very frequently on patrols, because it ran again, along the river. We would set up ambushes just outside the village at night or along the river. People were very nice and friendly. I remember, in particular, there was a girl there who was French…part French, and she was very beautiful. She was probably at that time 16 or 17. I remember the guys talking about her because she had long, dark hair, and she was very, very pretty. And we liked to go into the village for that reason because she was always around. Yes, we would talk, we would often times go into the village and just sit. There would be times when we were supposed to be out on patrol, and you would have coordinates that you would call in. As an example, you would walk a certain distance and call in the coordinates and that would let whoever know where you were. Often times, we would go into a village and we would just sit there and we sat for hours and call in fake coordinates, “Okay, we’re here now. We’re here now,” and spend the day in the village and then come back. We would do that occasionally. We didn’t do that very often, but it did happen occasionally. We also got ambushed in that village one time. I remember going back into the village the next day and just looking at the people and thinking, “How could you do this to us?” Here we are. We’ve been in there everyday, we’ve been friends, we’ve talked to them, we had been buying things from them. We had gone in there the night before and we were on our way to set up an ambush, and we had been ambushed ourselves. There was just that feeling of distrust. It was devastating to us. That was my first real fire fight, the time that we got ambushed in Cam Lo village. All hell breaks loose.

ELLEN: I know you mentioned that you were involved at LZ Margo. How soon was that after you got there?

STEVE: That was September of 1968. Again, I arrived in country the first few weeks in April. I don’t remember the specific date. We spent a lot of time what we refer to as out in the bush just running patrols. Again, we’d go out…we were out initially in an area overlooking the river, overlooking the village. We would leave there during the daytime and go on patrols. At night we would set up ambushes and just spend the days out patrolling looking for contact. They pulled us in briefly to Camp Carroll because of a typhoon. The weather was terrible. It rained. We were miserable. It was windy. I can remember walking and literally leaning into the wind and not falling over because the wind was blowing so strong. We had gone up to Camp Carroll and spent a couple of days just to get out of the weather and to just try to keep dry. Another interesting story, a little spin-off from that was we had gotten there and it was pouring so hard you couldn’t even see. It was windy and miserable. We were cold and soaking wet. We had been out and we came in and people were just scrambling to find a dry place, bunkers or whatever, and a lot of things were flooded and filled with water. We found a tent that was completely empty. We found out that there had been three or four people killed in that tent with a hand grenade and everyone was superstitious and didn’t want to stay in it. I remember still there being blood in the rafters and the framing of the tent. Actually what had transpired was they’d had a grenade, and hand grenades, you could…and not being in the military you may not understand this…but you could unscrew them and there was a blasting cap inside that would, when you pulled the pin and threw it, there was a timer and the blasting cap would go off which would then set the grenade off. One of the things that we used to like to do to new people was you take a grenade, you’d blow the blasting cap on it and so in essence the grenade was inert and it wouldn’t go off but you’d put it back on and when you got new people in, you’d throw it into the bunker and yell, “Grenade!” and they’d all come scrambling out and everything, and you knew it wasn’t going to blow up. Well, apparently these guys in this tent had gotten it mixed up with a live grenade, and they had all been killed. But again, going back to that where nobody would stay in that tent because they were superstitious. We ended up leaving that night and we slept in the mess hall on the floor with the rats.

ELLEN: Can you give me your account of what happened at LZ Margo?

STEVE: LZ Margo was a company. It was in LZ that we had landed on, and I want to say, on the 13 th or 14 th of September. Again, I haven’t looked at the chronology. It was a large operation up near the rock pile. The landing zone…you’ve seen the pictures. There were a lot of trees. They literally bombed a lot of the trees off of the hills so we could land. We landed in helicopters. I believe we took some small arms fire, nothing really significant. LZ Margo was set up as a primary fire base. They kept mortars there. We went out into the hills on patrol for several days, and it was kind of an interesting time. It was hilly. We referred to it as mountainous. I remember climbing and falling. It was very wet, and we’d get to a certain point and guys would slip and fall. There was a lot of yelling and swearing going on. We had picked up a new kid from….one of the things that you always had to combat was heat exhaustion or heat stroke, so you drank a lot of water because of the heat. He had heat stroke. Even though he was young, he had a plate. And he started to swallow that and was choking, and they ended up prying that out of his mouth. I remember going through that, acclimating to the heat…it was just so hot, and learning to carry all of that gear and everything. So there was a lot of climbing, a lot of complaining, a lot of grunting and groaning. We got up to an area…again, it was very hilly, very dense jungle. And we got up into an area and as we got up to where we were going, we found stairs built into the side of the mountain, or this hill, with bamboo stairs with hand railings. As we went up, we found bunkers and things like that, so it was obvious that the North Vietnamese were in the area. One of the guys in my gun team had taken a little walk. Once we had gotten up on this hill and we kind of set up a perimeter and security, had gone for a little walk but he had left his rifle. He came back about 5 or 10 minutes later, and he had this North Vietnamese soldier. All he had was his K-Bar, a knife, and he had this North Vietnamese solider at knifepoint. We were all amazed that he’s got this North Vietnamese soldier. He came back and I really think…this soldier had a weapon with him and everything…and had he wanted to kill this guy on our gun team, he could have. But I think he just really wanted to surrender. I remember a helicopter coming in and taking him out right away for intelligence. This was in the afternoon, I don’t remember exactly, fairly early in the afternoon. I remember them getting back to us later that night after they had interrogated him and said, “You guys are surrounded by a regiment of North Vietnamese soldiers.” Okay. So we set up. It was very dark, raining, cold…couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Again, this was a couple of days before I was wounded. We put out a listening post. We had a couple of guys out on the listening post. If you had a line….if you had guys dug in, in fox holes and trenches, you would put out a listening post perhaps 20 yards, 25 yards out a little bit further than the line. And all they did was listen, so that if somebody was trying to approach your position, they would hear that. They would have a radio. They would call and they would say, you know, “We’ve got North Vietnamese coming up to the perimeter or whatever.” Then they would say, “We’re coming back in,” and they would come back in so you wouldn’t shoot at them. It was very dark and it was freezing and it was raining. I was scared to death. You could actually hear from time to time North Vietnamese walking through the jungle. Every once in a while you’d hear a twig break or something. The area that we were on, the hill that we were on…there was a stream down below it, and it may have actually been part of the stream that ran through LZ Margo. You could hear people walking through it from time to time. I was literally so afraid…scared…that I was having a hard time…we were trying to load the machine gun and I was just trembling. We had the guys out, as I said in the LP and they hit that very quickly, probably 10 seconds, just “pop, pop, pop, pop” and killed one of the guys. They had apparently watched him go out there. They killed one of the guys. The other one got back in, I believe. But that night, they had “Puff.” “Puff” was like a gunship, and I remember it flying around. It was a plane with almost like gatlin guns, a lot of fire power on it. It just circled and fired all night just to keep the North Vietnamese off of us. I was so glad, so glad, to see daylight. They had told us that night because of the machine guns, “If we get hit, don’t open up right away. We don’t want to give away all of our gun placements right away.” I just remember being so scared and shaking. Like I said, you couldn’t see a foot in front of your face it was so dark. And couple that with being cold and miserable….but the kid…interesting side story to that…..the kid that had been killed that night was a kid that I had talked to that day. I didn’t know him, never seen him before. But he and I had chatted about being back home. That was one of things that you asked about, what we did a lot of times. You know, you talked about being back home and wondered what people were doing and things like that. He and I sat, and how we struck up a conversation, I don’t remember. But we talked about how neat it would be to be back home, because it was so hot, to have a root beer float. We talked about this stupid root beer float for probably a half hour. I remember him telling me his nickname was “Swampy.” He was from Louisiana, hence the name I guess, “Swampy.” Anyway, he was the one that was killed that night. That always stuck in my mind, even though I didn’t know him. But that conversation always stuck in my mind. The following day, they came in, they removed his body. The jungle was so dense that they couldn’t land the helicopter. So the helicopter came in, hovered and they lifted his body out. I remembered that. I have since, I have gone back through records and within the last month and a half I went through all of the records of people that were killed in Louisiana, particularly on the 14 th or 15 th. I believe he was killed on the 15 th of September which was the day before we were hit at LZ Margo. I got in contact with his sister and his brother and told them about our conversation. Actually, I came in contact with them through the Virtual Wall. Somebody had left a remembrance for him. Long story short, wrote her and said, “I believe I had talked to your brother on the day that he was killed.” And she told me all about him. I said, “I know it was your brother that I talked to. I know it.” She said, “You know. I can talk to you all day on the computer, but I can’t talk to you on the phone. It’s still too painful. I just can’t talk to you in person.” So we talked back and forth and she said, “My brother would like to talk to you, though.” He has never gotten in touch with me, so I thought I’d just, you know, I wasn’t going to push it. But she told me that after he had been killed, they moved his parents to….his name was Doug….I can’t remember his last name but he had been going to the University of Louisiana or whatever and had dropped out and had enlisted in the Marine Corps. After he was killed, his parents moved out of the house that they had grown up in. They had never celebrated Christmas after that. Again, going back to what we had talked a little bit about before…the pain and sorrow. Here his sister, after all these years, almost 40 years, still couldn’t talk about it. That was leading up to the following date, which was the 16 th, which was when I was wounded. We had gone from the hill from where we had been. We had walked probably a mile and a half perhaps from LZ Margo. We had gone out and again, when we had taken the prisoner, we had gone back to the LZ. Just before we got back to the LZ, they told us that they were going to be arc lighting the area because of all of the NVA in the area. Arc lighting was what they did with B-52’s. They said they were going to be bombing within a mile or so of us, but just to be on the safe side, everybody just get down and let them finish making their bombing runs and then we’ll go back to the LZ, which was what we did. That was probably one of the most unique experiences I had, because you couldn’t see the B-52’s. They were so high that you couldn’t see them, but you could hear the bombs falling and it was almost like…if you’ve ever watched a World War II movie, you hear the whistling when bombs fall. It wasn’t like a whistling. It was almost like a roaring noise…and you could just hear this roaring noise come down and even though the bombs were hitting, like I said, probably a mile away, you could still feel the ground shaking. You’re thinking, “Boy, I wouldn’t want to be really close to this.” Once that was complete, once they had finished making their bombing runs, we went back to the LZ. I believe September 16 th of ‘68 was a Monday. For some reason I thought it was a weekend. But somebody was listening to a football game on Armed Forces Radio. They had a transistor radio or whatever. We were supposed to be digging in and we were screwing around. We had been without water for several days. Guys had gone down to the water hole. Typical young kids, we were just screwing around. The ground was very hard, and I had started to dig and we were trying to put up a lean-to shelter, and it kept falling over, just kind of a half-haphazard attempt at putting it up, and they started mortaring us, actually quite a distance away. The LZ was fairly large. And as I indicated to you, they hit down by the water hole first, because a lot of the guys had gone down there to get water. They had actually had all of those pre-registered, so they hit down there that right away. They hit our mortar pits right away. We took a bunch of casualties. Then they started walking the mortars up towards us. And as you saw from the pictures, it was kind of a hilly area and there were ravines. We were down in a ravine, and they were walking the mortars in those ravines. I said to a guy in our gun team, “We’ve got to get up higher because they’re gonna’ walk these mortars right down these little valleys.” So we ran up and they just kept coming in and you can hear them, they make almost like a…you can hear them drop in the tube, “thoomp.” They make like a thumping noise, and then they make a…it’s not a whirring noise but there’s a distinct sound to a mortar as it comes in. You could hear them coming in, and you knew that they were going to be close. I ran up the slope on one of the hills, and there was a guy who had been digging a foxhole. It was probably six inches deep or so. It wasn’t very deep, and all I remember saying was, “Get over. I’m getting in with you.” I jumped in with him, and everybody was just kind of scurrying. Mortars just kept coming. They would come and then they’d go away and then they’d come back, hitting near us. Guys, at that point were screaming and you can’t imagine the chaos, just blood-curdling screams…guys begging for their mothers, and that was probably the only time in my life that I actually thought I was dead. I just thought, “I’m dead” because the rounds were hitting so close that they were lifting us off the ground. The guys that were within 10 feet of us, they took a direct hit…they were killed. You could hear them coming in. You can hear the mortars coming in, so you could gauge how close they were. I just thought then, “I’ll never see my parents or my sister or brother again.” I had made…I just came to that realization. Then you start, “Dear God, get me out of here. I’ll do anything.” Like I said, guys were just screaming and it was total chaos and then they tried to overrun us. They followed the mortar attack up with a ground attack so now we had small arms fire, and we had the mortars hitting in the center of the LZ. Unfortunately, when they hit us with the ground attack, they hit us on a side where they had set up a number of machine guns on the perimeter. The mortar rounds kept coming in. We kept getting lifted off the ground. You just curled up as tight as you can. And the next thing I remember….the only thing I can equate it to is just being hit with a sledgehammer. It was just like “Bam!” I felt my arm…it was just like somebody had hit it. I went into shock right away, and I just started screaming, “I’m hit! I’m hit! I’m hit!” And the guy that was…I think I started to stand up, and he says, “Get down! Get down! They’re shooting! You’re going to get killed!” I remember sitting there, and I was dazed. Like I said, it was just chaos….people were screaming…mortars going off…small arms fire. I just remember sitting there in a daze and I remember looking down. I literally got hit and it blew my elbow off, my arm was just hanging by a piece of skin that was probably about three inches wide. It had broken my arm…just blood squirting everywhere. It had cut the arteries. I just remember sitting there and looking at it and I’m thinking, “If I keep looking at it, I’m going to pass out.” That’s all I’m thinking so I didn’t look at it. I wasn’t in any real pain at that time. It was funny. I’m sitting there, and he says, “God! We’ve got to get a corpsman to look at you.” He kind of sat me up a little further and he said something to the effect, “Oh, my God! You’ve got a huge hole in your back.” I’m going, “This is great.” I think he said, “You’ve got a hole about the size of a 50-cent piece in your back,” or something like that. I’m just sitting there. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just remember all of the blood squirting out. He actually took his belt off and put it on my arm and did a quick tourniquet. He said, “I’ve got to get a Corpsman. I’ve got to get a Corpsman for you.” It was funny because I wasn’t having trouble breathing. I didn’t think any of my vital organs were hit. It wasn’t like my lungs or anything had been hit. So I’m sitting there and I wasn’t in any pain at that point. I think you just go into shock. Like I said, I just remember the guys screaming. One of the guys from my gun team was across the way, and he kept screaming, “Are you okay?” And I said, “I’m hit.” Guys were just yelling back and forth. You can’t imagine. So they got a Corpsman to me right away. I just remember bits and pieces. They gave me morphine right away. I drank a lot of water. They eventually got me…put me in a bomb crater. The mortars had stopped, but we were getting a lot of small arms fire. So I’m laying there and I was out of it because of the morphine, so I guess I didn’t really care. I was just laying there and this was probably…after about after 45 minutes they called in air support and the jets came. Once the jets came in, the mortars and the small arms fire pretty much subsided long enough for them to get a helicopter in. I was lucky and then I got out on the first Medivac helicopter, and it was full of guys that were wounded and dead or dying. If you read that article, and I’m not sure if it’s in that article that I gave you…but when the helicopter took off, and I wasn’t aware of this, but it was so loaded that when it took off it kind of went down and they thought it was going to crash. Somehow the pilot got it going with all that weight. I don’t remember that. I sat on the side of the helicopter. It was a 46, which was a twin-prop helicopter, it was like the one I showed you in that photograph. There were guys…it was just packed with guys that were wounded…I mean severely wounded and like I said, I was fortunate to get out on that first chopper. Guys just screaming and blood everywhere and I was sitting there. There was a guy at my feet who was just screaming at the top of his lungs and I kind of bent down to hold his hand. I was holding his hand, and he just started screaming, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! Help me!” He just kept screaming. There were two motors on the helicopter, and it was loud. You can’t imagine how loud these helicopters are, because there’s no insulation. It’s not like a commercial flight. I remember sitting there, and I was kind of slouched over because of my arm. I’m holding this kid’s hand, and he’s just screaming. You could hear him above all of the noise on the helicopter, “Help me! Help me! I can’t breathe!” I remember making eye contact with the door gunner on the 46. It had like windows on the side towards the front, and the gunner had heard him…the door gunner or this gunner crew chief had heard him screaming, too. I just remember making eye contact with him, and it was probably just the most helpless feeling I’ve ever had in my life because we both knew what was going to happen, and there was just no way…he just kept screaming, “Help me! Help me! Please, help me!” I thought, literally, I though he was going to break my hand, he was squeezing it so hard and then he died. It was just, like I said, probably the most helpless feeling I’ve ever had in my life. When we eventually landed back at Quang Tri…when the helicopter came in, the 46 has two wheels in the back…it has one in the front and they always come in with the front high. I remember again just bits and pieces. I remember blood just running to the back of the…just streams of blood from the floor running to the back of the helicopter when they put the gate down in the back, or the door. I remember trying to get up and walk off, and I just collapsed. I remember them putting me on a bus. By this time, I was starting to feel some pain and was probably yelling and screaming pretty good, as well. I remember being taken into the trauma center and put on the floor, initially, on a stretcher. That’s what’s so ironic about this experience. I remember bits and pieces. I don’t remember certain things, but I remember bits and pieces. I remember laying there, and I remember two guys standing over me, saying, “I don’t think he’s going to make it.” You’re kind of like laying there, and you’re not talking but you’re thinking to yourself out loud, and I’m thinking, “They can’t be talking about me. I’m not going to die.” One of them said, “He doesn’t look good” or something like that. I’m thinking, “This can’t be me their talking about.” I eventually ended up…they took me in shortly thereafter. They cut all of your clothes off just to check for additional injuries. The last thing that I remember was looking up and they had a large board on the wall in this triage unit that they used felt tip markers to write stuff. I remember just looking up and seeing my name. That was the last thing I really remember for a week. I woke up a week later in Japan at the 106 th Army Hospital. I remember talking to a doctor, and he said, “Son, you’re going home,” or “The war is over for you. You’re going home.” I just thought, “Wow! It’s over.” But I lost a week.

ELLEN: But you didn’t lose your arm.

STEVE: I didn’t lose my arm. Actually, I had a number of operations. Actually, they left my arm open. I have all artificial arteries and there was a lot of nerve damage so I don’t have any feeling in it. I have artificial arteries, and they left that open for about a week and a half. When I was in Japan, I would try to hide, because they would…it was just like I said, it was just all open. This was the only skin (shows arm)…they had like a splint on it, not a cast because they were going to do surgery. They had like a half-cast or splint. When they would take the bandages off, they would stick to the nerves, because everything was exposed and I would just…I was out. So I got to the point where I would try to hide. I’d either go into the head or do something. They caught on to that very quickly. After that, they started wetting the bandages so they wouldn’t stick and then they eventually closed it up. Then I came back to Great Lakes, and had more operations there.

ELLEN: How long were you in Japan before they sent you back to the states?

STEVE: I was in Japan, I think, for (END OF SIDE A)

ELLEN:(BEGINNING OF SIDE B) Okay, we were just saying that you were in Japan for about 2-3 weeks and then….

STEVE: Yes, and then flew back to…found out that I was coming back to Great Lakes, which was great, because I was from Buffalo Grove. That wasn’t that far from where I lived. So we flew from Yokahama to…came in through Alaska and I came back on a Medivac flight. I think it was a C-5 or something. I was on a stretcher. We ended up in Scott Air Force Base, which was in southern Illinois, before coming back to Glenview. It was a Naval Air Station at that time and that’s where they were bringing everybody back through to get them to Great Lakes. I spent the night at Scott Air Force Base and called my mom and dad and told them that I was home. They loaded us on the plane the following morning at Scott Air Force Base and got on that plane. They got half way down the runway, and they had to abort the take-off because of engine problems. I’m laying there and I’m thinking, “Please! I’ve made it home from Vietnam. Don’t let me die in a plane crash.” They taxied back and re-loaded us on to another aircraft. Then came into Glenview and I had worked a lot with my dad, and we used to go by Glenview all of the time. I can just remember looking out the window on the plane and laying there and looking out and thinking, “God! I’m home, I’m home,” as we came in over Willow Road, or however we came in. From there they took us by bus up to Great Lakes…ambulance bus.

ELLEN: So that was a good feeling for you to be home.

STEVE: Oh, it was just a great feeling to see my parents. I think I got to see my parents that night or the following night. My sister actually was getting married the following weekend. Had I not been wounded, I wouldn’t have been home and I had no intention of being at the wedding. I got a special release to go to her wedding. Then I spent probably four months in the hospital out at Great Lakes.

ELLEN: Wow!

STEVE: Best time of my life.

ELLEN: Yes.

STEVE: It was a great time.

ELLEN: Your homecoming then was a little different, obviously since you were wounded, than the average soldier.

STEVE: Yes.

ELLEN: How were you treated by the…?

STEVE: Actually, I was very fortunate. I had a lot of support from my family, a lot of support from my friends. I have a good friend from our unit that was just here visiting that didn’t…that came back through San Francisco and a lot of the flights came in at night to avoid the protestors. When I was injured….when there having protests and they wouldn’t let anybody off the base. I didn’t have to worry about that. I couldn’t go anywhere anyway. But they were having a protest against the war there then. I did have a friend that came back through San Francisco and actually got into a fight with somebody. It was interesting because they just came up and confronted them and asked him how many babies he’d killed and things like that. My friend just said, “I just started hitting him,” and he said, “I had him down and I was just hitting him.” He said a police officer ran up and pulled me off. He said, “Get out of here. I will take care of this.” They got on their connecting flight and came home. But no, I was never subjected to that.

ELLEN: Let’s see…you said you were in the hospital for about four months. Of course, obviously then, you were able to go home?

STEVE: Yes.

ELLEN: Your military career was done.

STEVE: I was actually able to come home quite frequently on leave or liberty, because it was so close to Buffalo Grove. It’s probably 15 or 20 miles, and my mom and dad would come and pick me up or I had visitors or girlfriends and things like that. I actually made my sister’s wedding. I’d lost quite a bit of weight. I’d lost probably almost 40 pounds, so I had wasted away to almost…and I felt terrible at my sister’s wedding, but it was just nice being there and everything. I got discharged from Great Lakes in March of 1969.

ELLEN: And then you were free to…

STEVE: Free to do whatever I wanted. I let my hair grow long and kind of went through the hippie phase. I remember my mom saying…I had the shoulder-length hair and I ran around bare-footed…and I remember my mom saying, “You were in the Marine Corps. You were in Vietnam. What are the neighbor’s going to think?” I remember saying, “Mom! I don’t give a damn what they think.”

ELLEN: You’re entitled.

STEVE: I kind of out grew that very quickly, and then got into law enforcement. I probably did a little more drinking that I should in the interim between.

ELLEN: We call those the college years.

STEVE: Yeah, I guess, it’s a little liquid medication. It’s funny in talking with my friends now. A lot of the things that we did, looking back in retrospect, they were a symptom of something else. We just thought we were young.

ELLEN: Did your decision to enter law enforcement….did that come about, do you think, from your military experience or your decision to do that?

STEVE: No, actually I had no aspirations, and with my arm being disabled, I never even dreamt of being a police officer. I had always wanted to be an architect. I enjoyed drawing. As I said, I hadn’t done well in high school, so I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do when I came back. When I got out of the service, I had a job working for a company in Wheeling as a custodian. I learned very quickly that that wasn’t what my life calling was. I think I lasted for about seven or eight months. I became a volunteer fireman in Buffalo Grove, just on the radio. When we got a fire call, I would go in and answer the radio. Actually, I got started in law enforcement…the Police Chief had overheard me talking on the radio a number of times and said, “You know, you really do well on the radio and so forth and so on. Would you like to be a dispatcher for the police department?” I said, “Sure.” That’s how I got started in my career in law enforcement. I started out as a dispatcher, and 35 or 36 years later, I’m retired..

ELLEN: You’re a retired police officer. Did you need any schooling for that?

STEVE: Not college, no. What’s interesting, a lot of people from Vietnam or a lot of my friends have gone into law enforcement. I have a number of friends who went into law enforcement. I think it was just part of that need to continue to, I don’t know, serve the community. Part of it was the adrenaline rush. It’s hard to come back when people are trying to kill you, and you’re trying to kill them and then come back and just ….I think that was probably one of the most difficult parts, just getting back to normalcy and nobody understood. I never talked to my parents about it…any of my experiences.

ELLEN: I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that nobody could understand.

STEVE: No.

ELLEN: So, in terms of adjustment for you….besides having to adjust to the fact that you were wounded and you were going through rehabilitation….the mental adjustment you had to go through.

STEVE: Yes. It put me to the test, I think. You know, as a 19-year-old kid…or 20-year-old. I was 20 when I got out. I had just turned 20. You look at certain things…and back then, they don’t deal with….they deal with the people that have been wounded much differently than they did back then. It was pretty much back then it was, “Okay. Thank you for your service. So long.” They never said, “Steve, you’re going to be…you’re this 19-20 year old kid, who doesn’t have full use of an arm. You’re going to be self-conscious when you’re on dates.” I mean, there are all kinds of things that people don’t realize. You were just pretty much used and sent off. It’s been difficult at times adjusting and acclimating to it, but I’ve always been very strong. And like I said, I’ve always had a lot of support from people. I just have to try a little bit harder, that’s all.

ELLEN: When we were talking before we turned the tape on, it sounds like you’ve made a really serious effort to keep in touch with a lot of the guys you knew or the families of the friends you had that were killed.

STEVE: More recently than not. I think as you get older, I think you want to…I think you look back. There are certain regrets that I have about not contacting people or staying in touch. I think initially when you get out, you’re just so happy to be out and to be back home, that you want to forget. You want to put it in the past. I had mentioned to you that being at Great Lakes was probably one of the best times of my life. I mean it really was, just the camaraderie. I couldn’t tie my shoes, so I would walk up to somebody that had two good arms and say, “Hey! Would you tie my shoes? I’m going out.” “Oh, sure.” We helped each other, and that was probably just the greatest thing. And nobody was embarrassed. We just helped each other. That was a given. That, without a doubt, was probably one of the best times of my life, just helping one another. I think the one thing that the Marine Corps always taught us was that you never give up and you never quit and I’ve never been a quitter. There have been times when I have wanted to. There have been times where I cried and thought, “Why? Why me? Why do I have to go through all of this?” Feeling sorry for yourself. I have the names of…three rubbings from the guys in my gun team. I have Ray and John and Jesse. I have the rubbings from the Wall framed above my desk in my office and every time I’m having a bad day and I’m starting to feel sorry for myself, I look up. I think to myself, “You know what? They’d give anything today to be in this predicament for five minutes.” If I’m walking and it’s cold, I think, “Gosh, I’m freezing.” Then I think, “They’d give anything to be here…they’d give anything to be here under these circumstances. So, just quit and go on. Quit whining and feeling sorry.”

ELLEN: And those are three good friends of yours that you lost?

STEVE: Yes.

ELLEN: Were they lost during the LZ?

STEVE: No, actually, they were all killed before. Like I said, John was killed on the 31 st of May when we were ambushed. Ray and Jesse were killed on the 24 th of June, 1968 by friendly fire. We were out on patrol. Actually, I told you about cutting patrol short. We had cut our patrol short and our own guns opened up on us. That was probably one of the days I will never forget either, just seeing all that went on and working on Jesse. I actually worked on Jesse with one of the Corpsman for….it seemed like forever, but it couldn’t have been that long, maybe 20 to 25 minutes before the Medivac helicopter came in, but they both were…..he was blown literally in half. I look back, and we kept working on him, and Doc would say, “Damn it! Don’t die on me, Jesse.” I look back now from my experiences in law enforcement and I mean, he was dead from the get-go, but it was just, you know, they never gave up. And Ray was the same way. He was killed instantly. As I said, that one day changed the life of a 19-year-old kid forever. I remember going back and crying that day, and Sergeant Little, one of my other Platoon Sergeants, came and he said, “You did a great job out there, kid.” He said, “You wouldn’t have changed it. You couldn’t have saved him if you wanted to.” It just had a profound impact on my life seeing them go like that. Getting back to what you were talking about…getting in touch...I think as you get older, you become more sentimental. There are a lot of things I wish...people often always ask me, are there things that I wish I would have done differently or would have done differently. I probably would have said, “Probably told him I loved him.” We didn’t….that wasn’t acceptable back then. You know you were tough Marines, and you just didn’t do that. You didn’t show feelings. I talk to my buddies now. I talk to Dan. We always say, “Love you, Buddy.” It’s just something that we do. That’s probably the one regret that I have is not….you’re a stupid 19-year-old kid. You just didn’t share your feelings like that at the time. Back in the 60’s, gosh, you just didn’t do that. You were a Marine. You didn’t show emotions, you didn’t show feelings. That’s the one thing I think I’ve probably learned to deal with over the years…the emotions. It’s very easy now for me to get emotional. I look back and think about the things. My wife doesn’t understand. It’s funny, because I’ve never talked about my experiences in Vietnam with her. We’ll go out occasionally with friends who have been in Vietnam. She’ll just sit there and she’ll say, “How can you talk with them about Vietnam and not me?” It’s just something that Veterans have in common. I can sit and talk all day to somebody else. Even though we talked about this today at length, there’s just really no way of you truly understanding. You can appreciate it, but you just can’t understand it I think. That’s something that…one of the reasons. It’s just kind of unique. I feel a closeness now with the guys. Like I said, we stay in touch, we talk. I talk to a lot of them on a weekly basis or a monthly basis. You know, just a closeness and there’s that bond. The one thing about people who have been in combat, there’s a bond that you’ll just never…you’ll never find it anywhere. I’ve never found it as a Police Officer, because you’re dependant upon each other. You count on each other. It has nothing to do about Mom or the American Flag or apple pie. When you’re in combat, it’s just keeping each other alive. I was dependent upon them, and they were dependent upon me. There’s a bond there that really creates a closeness. I don’t think you can get any closer than that, depending upon somebody else for your life. You know for years, like I said, Lauren, my wife had a really difficult time understanding. I couldn’t remember our kids’ birthdays, but I can remember…I can spit out the days that my friends were killed, the dates they were killed just like that. She’d say, “You can’t remember when Brooke and Steven were born, but you can remember when your friends were killed.” That was something that I’ve had to come to grips with. My life…and I tell kids when I talk to them at school, “My life is divided into two parts, two distinct parts, either before Vietnam and after Vietnam.” Even though I have a lot of good childhood memories, Vietnam was probably the…was the most significant event in my life, without question.

ELLEN: It sounds like it was a turning point.

STEVE: I don’t know how you can go through that…any 19 or 20 year old kid, or 18 year old kid… can go through that and not have it have an impact on your life, and see the things that we saw and do the things that we did. If it didn’t leave some sort of mark on you, I would be concerned. If you thought…if you were just able to shrug all that off, I would think that it would be…there’s something wrong with you.

ELLEN: I’ve spoken with another Vietnam Vet who said the exact same thing you did.

STEVE: Yes.

ELLEN: Exactly.

STEVE: A lot of us feel the same way. It’s amazing.

ELLEN: That’s about all the questions I have. Was there anything else you wanted to add?

STEVE: I think we’ve pretty much covered it.

ELLEN: It sounds like it. You did an incredible job.

STEVE: Like I said, just a defining moment in my life for me. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’d do it again in a heartbeat if I had to. I really would. It was just something that was very, very important for me. I certainly don’t regret it, regardless of what I have been through, regardless of the injury. It’s made me a better person. I often wonder what I would have been, how I would have turned out had I not been wounded or what I would have done or how I would have ended up. I don’t know.

ELLEN: Right. If you would have gone into law enforcement anyway?

STEVE: Yes. It’s definitely made me a stronger person. Like I said, I think as we get older, we become more emotional, and you think about the “What if’s.”…being a parent and looking back now and thinking what my parents went through…I can remember when I came home from Vietnam how terrible my dad looked. He just looked…his face was so thin. It was from worry and having a son who was in the Marine Corps. I can’t even begin to imagine getting up every morning and thinking, “Is my son going to live through the day?” I can’t imagine that as a parent. My mom said my dad always thought…he never told me, he told her…he never though that I would come home from Vietnam, that I would be killed. I just can’t imagine having that kind of weight on my shoulders as a parent.

ELLEN: That’s great.

STEVE: When Lauren…when Steve was in the Marine Corps, our son. And Lauren called me one day when Iraq started up. She was crying, and she said, “Do you think Steve’s going to have to go to Iraq?” And I’m thinking, “Gosh. I hope not.” And I told her, “No. I don’t think so because of his MOS and being a firefighter.” You start thinking about those things as a parent. You start hearing, and you start talking to family members who’ve lost sons and brothers and whoever. It’s just so traumatic, to this very day.

ELLEN: I want to thank you for your service to our country.

STEVE: You’re welcome.

ELLEN: I wish I could do something, do more for all of you guys. You are incredible heroes, every single one of you.

STEVE: I’ve never thought of myself as a hero.

ELLEN: ….and modest, too.

STEVE: You know what?Really. I’ve never thought of myself in that light. Just doing what every…probably hundreds of thousands of other men and women have done before us.

ELLEN: I think what you’ve done is the most important thing that you can do in your entire life…fight for your country and for everybody here. I think that’s the most important thing a human being can do with their life.

STEVE: It’s something I’ll always be proud of. Like I said, I don’t have any regrets.

ELLEN: Well, good. Okay.

1. 2. 3.

1. Official Marine Corps photo of Steve Haisley in combat gear, taken in 1968. 2. Steve Haisley receiving his Purple Heart after being severely wounded at LZ Margo, September 1968. 3. Steve, on the right, aboard the USS Dubuque sitting with friend Emil S.