History in the Raw: Veteran's Primary Source Accounts from WWII and Vietnam
Teach with Impact: Veterans’ Day 2021
SPI’s Veterans’ Collection contains the personal narratives of veterans who served at Los Alamos, Iwo Jima, and in Vietnam (1964 - 1968). The stories are uploaded to its 4-12 Learning Lab site and are appropriate for students grades 7-12. They are deeply moving and, in ways that history books cannot, they illuminate the sacrifices made and the inner core strength of those who served - and currently serve - in the US Armed Forces.
Victor Kumin (1921 - 2016) - U.S. Army Soldier / Scientist, Los Alamos
Victor Kumin graduated from Harvard in January of 1943 with a degree in Chemistry. A year and a half later, in June 1944, he was drafted. Three months after becoming a soldier, he was in the final phase of basic training when he was called out and brought before a civilian and a military officer who quizzed him about physical chemistry.
At the end of the oral exam, Kumin returned to the mud but within a few days, he got another call. This time he was told to pack his bags and be ready to leave the next morning. Along with a train ticket to Santa Fe, N.M., he was given orders in a manila envelope with instructions not to open it.
From his SPI recording:
“I was told that I wasn’t to open the orders, I wasn’t to ask any further questions, I wasn’t to discuss it with anybody, I wasn’t to tell anybody where I was going, or where I had been.
When I got to Santa Fe I was told to go to something called 108 or 110 East Palace Street in Santa Fe, which is on the main square. It was a little storefront, a USO type of facility run by what’s known as the AWVS, the American Women’s Volunteer Service. The instructions were that there was a public telephone booth outside, and I was to go to that telephone and call this number. When I called the number, a male voice answered the telephone—“Sergeant Dabney”—and I said, “What the hell is this all about?” Then he said, “Soldier, keep your mouth shut and go inside and have a cup of coffee and wait there, and we will send a car to pick you up.”
Later, he relates:
“Oppenheimer explained in colloquiums, which I was permitted to attend, that they were about to arrange for the test at Alamogordo. He recalls Oppenheimer’s words, ‘There are many of us here that hope and pray that his project will prove to be impossible. However, if this test fails, we will come back and work twice as hard to make it work the next time.’ “
John Robinson - U.S. Marine Corp. Sound Ranging Unit, Iwo Jima
After a near lifetime of “trying to forget,” 98-year-old WWII Marine Corps veteran John Robinson agreed to share with SPI his personal remembrances of the Battle of Iwo Jima and his presence in Japan during the US post-war occupation.
Mr. Robinson relates: Initially, Iwo Jima had been bombed and strafed and burned for a month ahead of the invasion. It was assumed there was no enemy remaining there. What the US didn’t take into account was that on a volcanic island there are underground “tunnels.” In the case of Iwo Jima, these tunnels housed somewhere in upwards of 20,000 Japanese troops. When US troops landed, the 20,000 came out and attacked.
What was supposed to be a simple operation turned out to be a more than month-long “catastrophe” for the US before successfully taking the island. “Every time I took a breath, someone was killed.”
Michael Heaney - U.S. Army, Surviving Operation Crazy Horse, Vietnam, 1966
Near 60 years ago, Michael Heaney, a former platoon leader, witnessed the men under his command gunned down in an ambush by North Vietnamese soldiers. It was a firefight so fierce that it has been chronicled in military history books.
From Michael’s SPI recording:
“Then came a very fateful day: May 16, 1966. We had just gotten another new company commander. He wanted to take the company out on sort of a shakedown cruise—an operation that wasn’t regarded as too dangerous, too dicey, where he could learn all of our names, something about each platoon, each platoon leader. So the operation we drew was to go out to a nearby hillside—it was about ten miles from the division base camp, above a valley that had been getting some mortar fire every night on this little village. Our intelligence said, well, there’s probably a VC insurgent unit with a mortar, setting up every night and just lobbing mortars down on this village. We want you, Captain Coleman, and your company to march up—land below the ridge, we’ll helicopter you in to a landing zone—and you can march up to the top of the ridge and scare them away. So he said fine. And that’s all the intelligence we got.
What intelligence missed, and we had no idea of, [was that] there were several regiments of North Vietnamese regular-army soldiers on their own form of kind of R&R, up in this mountainous region—remote, uninhabited, steep-sided hills.” Listen to an excerpt from Michael’s recording here.
Doug Anderson - Combat Medic, U.S. Marine Corps., Vietnam, 1967
Post-Vietnam, Doug is an American poet, fiction writer, and memoirist. At the time of this recording, he was the poet-in-residence at the Robert Francis House, Amherst, MA. Doug has written about his experiences in Vietnam in both poetry and non-fiction. His poetry collection The Moon Reflected Fire (1994) won the 1995 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2000 he published the memoir Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties and a Journey of Self-Discovery.
In this excerpt, Doug talks about his first day in Vietnam:
“Before I knew it, I was landing in Da Nang, getting off the plane, and I was still having magical thinking, right at that point that, you know, that I was going to get a hospital ship, or was going to get a job in the rear in the hospital, and stuff like that. This guy comes out of the admin building with a clipboard, and he starts calling off names and assigning them to units. Every single one of us, except one, got assigned to an Infantry unit. The guy who didn’t had been a mortician, so he was assigned a graves registration. I was put in a truck and sent down through the area which is now called China Beach, into a sandy and scrub pine area, to 3rd Battalion, First Marines. That evening, I was on my first patrol. I got shot at my first evening.
I remember it was starting to get dark, but it was still really hot. We were going up this sandy hill, and we got ambushed. There were riflemen on the flank and a machine gunner up front, in the classical L-shaped ambush, but I didn’t know any of this. I was totally confused. I could hear the rounds coming through the air at us, but I couldn’t distinguish direction. So I hear somebody call “corpsman up” at the front of the column. I got up and started running but I was running in the wrong direction. A Marine grabbed me by the collar and turned me around and sent me up the hill. The point man had been shot in the back.”
With funding provided by the National Geographic Society, SPI is in final stage development of material designed to guide students through the creation of their own community-based oral history project.
The SPI Oral History Field Guide, SPI’s Guide to Thinking Like an Ethnographer, and The SPI PhotoVoice Guide will be uploaded to the 4-12 Learning Lab soon!
Story Preservation Initiative makes its work available to all, free of charge. We are a small non-profit whose mission is to positively impact the lives of young people through the sharing of ideas, the transformative power of story, and the development of educational materials that engage the hearts as well as the minds of children of all ages.
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All SPI veteran’s audio stories can be found on the 4-12 Learning Lab site. Go to: www.storypreservation.org / Humanities / American History