When You Put Your Name on the Dotted Line

“You asked me [when I spoke to your class at Penn State Beaver], ‘Should we have been there in Vietnam and why were we there?’

And I forget what I said, but when you put that name on the dotted line and your ass belongs to Uncle Sam, you go where they tell you to go and you do what they tell you to do. And that’s what we did.

I just got an email from of mine who was in my company in 1966 that our platoon commander just passed away. He’s one of the reasons I’m here today. He kept us alive and he kept us out of harms way. He did a helluva job.

[John then discussed the “What’s in it for You, G.I.?” flier the North Vietnamese dropped during the war to discourage U.S. service members].

One of the leaflets the North Vietnamese used to throw on the ground and it would tell us to throw our weapons down, don’t listen to your company commanders, just walk away. We’d pick them up and read them and just kind of chuckle. I’ve always wanted to keep one, just to remember what they did, and my friend recently sent me this.”

[John Barber is a Vietnam veteran who shared his story at a recent Veterans Breakfast Club event in Beaver. VBC works in partnership with Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh Oral History Initiative to capture, preserve, and share veterans’ stories for future generations, and raise public awareness about the veteran experience].

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