Al Krause

Question 3:Were you drafted or did you volunteer?

I was drafted

Question 4: What was your response when you were drafted/why did you volunteer?

I… have you ever heard the term "oh shit", well that was the origin of that term when those draft notices went out. By the time I was drafted, 60% of the country was against the war. Usually in my presentation I show a Gallup Poll of people who were against the war. Every night the lead story on the news was American soldiers getting killed on the news, so when you got your draft notices you thought you were going to be that soldier on the news who was killed. And of course at that time there were a lot of antiwar protests and things like that. And it was a lot different when the war first started in '64

Question 5: What were you doing before you went to Vietnam?

Well, when I graduated I was a Psychology major and when you graduate with a bachelor degree in Psychology you are qualified to do nothing really but clean up rat droppings. It means nothing, you need to go on and get a doctorate. So my plan when I graduated from college was to go to graduate school on the West coast. And I was accepted to go to a few schools in California. But your student deferment was only good for four years so once you graduated from a 4 year college you can be drafted. They handed you your diploma and your drafted notice. Then they notified you that they had informed your local draft board that you were eligible for the draft. So it's kind of like your life stops, there was no point in me moving to Chicago, to California and then only staying a quarter and then being drafted. So that ended my academic career.

Follow up question, how long was the difference between when you graduated and were drafted?

Well, see that's a long story. I graduated in April, I got drafted in June, I had my physical in July, and I got married in August. Then I got a government job in Maryland in September, because that's where my wife lived. The assumption was that while I was deployed, she would stay with her parents in Maryland. Well, the way the draft system worked was that my local draft board was in Forest Park, and so the way the draft system worked is that they didn't make you go back to where you were drafted so you could go to your local draft board in Maryland to report. But they had to send the paper from Forest Park, to Springfield and then to Annapolis and then to the draft board in Bethesda, Maryland. So my papers got lost. It’s a long story with a short question. It turned out it was two years between when I got my original draft notice and when I went to the Army. And so originally, of course, I came home each day expecting to find my draft notice, but after a year two years you start to forget about it. That’s why it was such a shock when it came.

Question 6: What was your job in the army and how long were you deployed?

I was a combat infantryman assigned to a recon platoon, and a recon platoon was a small group of soldiers. It was about 24 guys and later on we were broken up into two smaller groups of eight man squads. We were up along the Cambodian border. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, was the infiltration. Our job was to go along and look for the infantry route and where that infiltration route went into South Vietnam, where they were passing supplies and men and things like that. We patrolled that unit. Because we were a small unit, our job was to see and not be seen because we didn’t really have the firepower to engage the enemy. I spent 80% of my time actually in the jungle. Sleeping in the jungle, I think you saw the C-rations. We patrolled up and down the border of Vietnam and Cambodia and that's basically what we did in a very broad sense. The only method of keeping touch was to write letters since we wrote letters. You can mail them every day. We could mail the letters when we got back to the fire base and our shortest mission was a 3 day mission and our longest mission was 21 days. Because we were a very small unit they wouldn’t resupply us in the jungle, because the helicopter comes to a clearing in the jungle to resupply us with water and food and think it also is a sign to the enemy that American troops are right here. When you have such a small unit, an 8 man unit can’t be resupplied. They just drop you in with a helicopter and patrol for 3 days then they pull you out. You could mail your letters every 3-18 days, then it would take 7 days for a letter to get to my wife and 7 days for her response for her to get back to me. Then you have to add in the time when you were able to pick up your mail and mail it. It might be 14 to 20 day in between. I said, ``How are you doing and she said fine."

Question 7: Did you get along with your fellow soldiers and did you stay in touch later?

You know there was only one guy who lived in Texas, who I stayed in touch with the whole time for the last 50 years. I was in the 5th battalion of the 7th cavalry division and they have an association of guys who fought in that unit. Tom and I were able to find other people who we served with. So in 2011 we met up in Las Vegas with 5 other guys who we hadn’t seen in 40 years, since we had served in Vietnam. Now the guys and their wives meet for an annual reunion. Now we’ve gone from a group of men who shared a common experience 50 years ago to a group of men and women who have become close friends. All of the guys are from different places. Our first agreement was to not discuss any politics

Question 8: Were you excited when you heard you were going home?

When you are in the Army the standard time for a draftee but your tour in Vietnam, is one year or 365 days, so everybody had calendars usually some kind of cartoon character that was divided up into 365 lines. The favorite was the poster with Uncle Sam "I want you for the US Army," but it was changed to say "F___ the army." There are 365 boxes and each day and each day you cross one off and everyday you blocked out one box until you got to the tip of the finger and that was our way of keeping a calendar. Once you got to the 99th day that is called the 'two-digit midget.' That's when you really got heavily paranoid about becoming a casualty.

Question 9: What was it like when you came home and did you feel supported?

Everybody hated Vietnam soldiers back home, no matter where you were or what you did you were accused of being a baby killer, a rapist, and murderer. Because everybody was associated with the My Lai Massacre. I was processed in Fort Ord and the airlines at that time would give you a discount if you wore your military uniform and would let you fly for free. I was at the San Francisco airport and I was just sitting there in the waiting area and this couple came up to me and they said "that it's too bad that you didn’t lose an arm or a leg for the terrible things you did over there" and they kept on walking. That was my official welcome home. Everyone knew you were in Vietnam because everyone else had a beard and shoulder length hair. But as a soldier I had a buzz cut so everyone could tell I was a soldier in Vietnam. And baseball caps weren’t popular then. You kind of just hide out and wait for your hair to grow out. The Vietnam veterans are the only veterans in the history of the United States that were not welcome home.

Question 10: What’s one way your life was changed by the war that you wouldn’t have thought of.

It makes me a lot more sensitive to the plight of people because, at that time we didn’t have an all volunteer military so you were drafted so you were amongst people of all races and religions all over the country and you learn to intermingle and relate to all the sub cultures of the USA. Otherwise you would just relate to your own little sub group of America like here in Oak Park. I remember when I was on basic training, I was with this guy Frank Jones from Mississippi and he asked me to write a letter to his girlfriend because Frank said "well I can write but you write better because you went to college" and I was thinking to myself this is like a story from a WWII movie, like if I told this someone they wouldn't believe that I was sitting next to someone in the Army that probably couldn't read or write. He gave me a brotherly sense of people in the United States that I wouldn't otherwise have met.

Question 11: Have you ever gone back?

One of my guys, Lloyd, he’s gone back there all of the time just to vacation. He’s actually financially adopted a couple Vietnamese girls and paid for their education all the way through college. I said Lloyd that’s really impressive, and he said not really a year of college in Vietnam cost 120 bucks. He loves Vietnam, and he's been there so many times and the same people pick him up at the airport and ride through the countryside on their scooter. Nobody else has gone back or wants to go back. I have no desire to go back.