we had three of the. victims in the right key that there were expiring rapidly we pulled them out of the car and we started doing it for a state i called a corpsman the corpsman came and got the three bodies and took them back to the battalion surgeon corpsman came back dump the bodies on the side of the road and went over to the corpsman. what do you do and how can you bring him back you need to get him out of your you need to get him back to an area where they can see a surgeon and corpsman there's nothing we can do for him so we're going to leave you know you can leave the bodies on the side of the road and i said yeah well you want to do stuff. so i want to have compatible up

so they dump them on the side of the road and. move the guys brother you come running over to him and he just said they're holding them while they roll around on the on the asphalt on a highway. they're rolling around in pain they didn't even give many morphine. the guy's brother. he kept running around and he had his hands in his in this and his face. he was crying and sobbing and he's saying why did you kill my brother . we didn't do anything to you we're not terrorists.

remember i remember i just want to i wanted to close my years i didn't want to hear just sat there and he's time that he said it. it was like it was permanently being . burned into my brain. and. i lost that's the last i've ever gotten a good night's sleep the night before that. and i'm the. next morning lieutenant you walked up to me and he said.

are you all right you seem a little distressed a little agitated. no cirrhosis not all right. so i'm pretty pissed off what we're what we're doing over here. he said it will give me your interpretation of what we're doing over here. and. for what we're trying to accomplish over here. i just looked at him and said it well said honestly feel that we're committing genocide and. he didn't like my answer and he stormed off towards the. c.e.o.'s vehicle. and i knew at that point that my career was done across the line and i knew i had to watch my back and grow eyes. so after that night i pretty much slept with my no

i millimeter underneath my poncho liner within easy reach. me in the dark the dark days. when i first came back from vietnam and i turned sixty six i saw protestors out speak in. i don't want to hear it i did believe it to get away from it i put in a ten forty nine to go back to vietnam because i was what a tar and we'll wired up and i don't think it would have taken a much for me to take one of the protesters out failed had asked stayed here i would have ended up killing some people and i could do it legally in vietnam so i put in a ten forty nine to go back i think i was looking at just the full cation of doing

what i'll be doing of killing. it was all a do on my second tour when i began to realize that something was wrong when i came back to the states i want to washington d.c. to the white house or i talk to someone a the next in the us say that i would not go back to vietnam. when i arrived back stateside i was ordered to report into the mental health clinic in twenty nine palms. the. psychologist looked at me and she said. why don't deal with conscientious objectors and. just about last. for them to label me as a conscientious objector that's the ultimate slap in the face you're called be

a conscience objector i just killed thirty plus individuals for you and you calling me a conscience objector no. stood up and us the ma'am if you want to label me as a conscientious objector for not wanting to kill innocent civilians then i'll see you court. i went down and hired an attorney. a man by the name of mr gary myers. and. mr mars was represented during the may lie trials. and. mr myers in the marine corps came to a. very discreet mutual understanding i was on or billy discharged december thirty first of two thousand and three and here i am.

when i came back i think that that sense of a long term planning was gone. i went through a divorce some things i did reckless way probably in the back of my mind i would not have minded dying homo. but my. i went through a period when. t.c.p. cocaine are on. and about it and try to mange. a long period of severe drug abuse. i finally got to the point of raw i had no warning and. i had no more car. i had long since moved out of my house and could not come back home exactly where do you go

from here. and it was when the national guard needed someone in my my experience and teaching people how to fly the armed helicopters the cobras and i was asked to come in and help train some of those folks and the money was. you know fifteen twenty thousand dollars a year for part time work and it carried a retirement with even though i had and a change of heart about wars i needed the money you first come home and you meet lee forget about everything. and you go to mcdonald's you go to all your favorite restaurants and you do all your favorite things and you're having a great time and you know and then all of

a sudden you wake up one day and you're like wait a minute i'm not having a good time anymore. starting with think about this i'm starting to think about that because all the newness has worn off your home i'm a lawyer i got my arm i got my legs i'm alive. but then the mind and the mind starts catching up. with everything else. i found myself going through my gear prepping like i'm getting ready to go to combat i mean i even look for suicide bombers you know anything out of the anything out of the ordinary. once you reach that level of your senses being that heightened it's hard to turn it off it's like being in a cage tiger. and

soon after. i got back in december of forty four there is nobody you can talk to you know there was nobody who had been in combat around. i can remember still seeing that glow red glow on the tip of a christ. and my god i was home. one day you're killing somebody they're trying to kill you and the next day you're sitting in a bar in new york city it's it's crazy. i took so normal nobody knows that your hand at work nobody you know if you got a you got a headache or you got a hole in your head you can't see. when i wrote home that i was wounded i had been in france from middle of august to i was it dad said to the newspaper

reporter who interviewed him he was only there for a few days that was to me the only was a at that time not now was a real rejection of who i was as a man he didn't last he didn't make it he got hit. and i think i didn't even understand it then but that started a defining our relationship which spiraled downward downward downward. so you don't talk about it a little you sit on it. and say i was lucky why didn't i kill why didn't i both somebody you know guys do that or why did no poor me why

didn't i do this. i was trying i got on a stool and. i remember i was living in the y. in new york city totally alone i don't just to put my bathroom sasheer rock hung it sort of share. and why i got down was because. my friends. i had made after the war who had been through the same thing i had and i felt if i did that to myself i would betray. the bond we had.

coochie vietnam federer for tain't nineteen sixty six by eighty they call it hell's half acre because of the american boy. that would been still there tonto do well and be a kong snipers have done most of the damage today was no exception. on the. twenty seventh and for a tree the framed wolfhounds moved out to attack the snipers open up from such perfectly camouflaged positions the most of the a complicated want the whole day with a c. and one of the enemy a sergeant was hit in the shoulder and leg as he rolled over a third shot ripped to his by. a medic broke form of and rushed to his as he dropped to his knees to begin given

a bullet smashed into the stomach. both the sergeant and the medic. and artillery both watch was laid down to screen a squad gone after the wall and it especially was forced won't it in the help cross the deadly fifty yards with all the fallen to us he was hit again and this was an old you were there yes it's hard it could bring back to minimum. i don't. know christmas certainly we're building up to go into iraq i thought think obama grandson. they were. where. if they had to draft

they would be drafted so i start thinking of what i could do to protect them to keep them from will. join the military but a same reason that the young people join now because it is the poor people out of people on the lower end of the economic scale all that want to fight these wars. even go rob a magnet america came out years later and say that vietnam was a mistake it did not take the brain from me. nor did it take the guilt that i carried for killing people when i went to vietnam i was a car courts rule and i believed what i was going there was the right thing and i was a good soldier but now i'm a soldier on the other side and i think i'm just as good.

i sold my soul a long time ago i'm just here trying to recount. and have. been a hero for all and i do for. people as we want to you're free to go to prison i mean you're saying you're a war criminal brother i'm already in prison this is veterans for peace chapter zero nine nine western north carolina hoping that this moment registers in everyone's mind that this is one of the total cost of war.

sick food soon who is a great war political war one wrote a line war was a scene who stopped our clocks though we met him grim and gay and i know people who got their clock stopped so badly they never got beyond it drugs booze women suicide whatever you want to call it and that happened to me and i think my clock was stopped for close to forty years before i got over that i was ashamed i was ashamed that i had been wounded i was ashamed that i hadn't been a hero. i never understood that my problems with my parents my problems with my wife my ex-wife were buried in the fact that i had gotten blown up i never i never understood it repressed it totally and

then i began to go to a coffee shop and i would hear the big bands of the night hundred forty five and i would weep like a baby in public i had no idea that what i was doing i could weep right now was going back and try to find that the little boy of night and what happened. the fall of eighty four i was driven to go back to fly to look for birds to spend the night there to rent a car and file and find the place where i was wounded on september seventh one thousand and forty four. and then suddenly. i found the bridge that we crossed it had been blown when i'd been shot. i discovered to the hour at the moment where i had been wounded forty years before

and i cannot explain it but that discovery began my healing. my generation really repressed with the war was about we didn't want to talk about it we weren't allowed to talk about it and then slowly in the one nine hundred eighty s. and one nine hundred ninety s. this whole thing of the greatest generation occurred it was wonderful you know the greatest generation what a nice thing to call us and we forgot what we had done we forgot that we had been animals for a while. war is about one thing it's about killing you either learn to kill somebody else or you get killed or wounded yourself and that's why i have become to solo the idea of war and i think that's all the purple.

vietnam assault on us cost don't what may i think of it every day. to fire back from that to memorise still go to counseling for. and. it's is now worth it but what i did do was to manage to find some good in that war . vietnam a me a better person and made me people more. made me understand that we are all one one people. there's a certain amount of guilt i think you learn to live with you compartmentalize it or unite you rationalize you see and i call that excuses i mean i really don't have to make excuses even. so there are things i wish i had not done. but there's no way to change. the.

last. laugh. when you come to the point that you're not sure you're actually much but there's more snow on the way to sad. and disagreement. and kind of like the poster you can have your war and i. loathe luxury. i.

laugh. at.

so.

i'm not. saying. this in the. least but one of. the most.

live. just.

discovery.

nature can give you. all artsy tonight moscow prepares to ratify the new strategic arms reduction treaty with washington already approved by the u.s. senate the deals praised by both sides as proof of a new level of trust. peace on the edge north korea says it's ready to unleash a sacred war on the south and use its nuclear deterrent angered by souls massive military drills right across the border. living with leprosy russians in a remote village feel the battle is no longer with the good with the stigma which society imposes on them.

hello this is our team in our top story at ten pm from moscow the kremlin is praising the u.s. approval of the atomic arms cuts to you saying it's a big step not just for both countries security but there's a key move towards a nuclear free world russia's lawmakers now say they're poised to say yes as soon as they study washington's ratification in detail the president's preventive and a bomb are expected to discuss the treaty by phone later on thursday following the story on both sides of the atlantic with vanity should count in washington and i have a bennett who has the developments in moscow. we could see russia's ratification of this new treaty as soon as tomorrow actually because both chambers of parliament the state duma the lower chamber and the other chamber the federal council very keen to start the.