The following is an interview with Timothy Healy conducted by Omar Ayub. The interview took place at Canton Public Library on March 29th, 2002. Tim Healy served in Vietnam as an infantryman and a company clerk. The interview was used as the basis of a vignette. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from the interview, so I walked into it anticipating anything. I found Mr. Healy to be a very friendly person who made the interview very enjoyable.
Omar Ayub: What types of missions did you go out on?
Tim Healy: Well, most of them were either combat patrols or sometimes your would do that for two weeks then you would come and spend a couple of days on fire support base then you’d go out again for a couple of weeks then you’d come back and do the fire base then after a month or a month and a half of that they’d send you back to the sea coast just to relax, if that was possible. At least you would have a different venue.
TH: Hmm, yeah….
TH: Well, the most memorable one is in that…that little book, it’s gotta be here someplace, but that was the last mission when we thought we were being attacked when in fact it was a monkey, that was approaching the perimeter. Yeah, it’s…the whole thing was incredible…but any particular mission? (Pauses) I was thinking about that on the way here, and uh…hmm. There was a time when we went to a place called Happy Valley, it was ironically so named, as it was a rather nasty place to be, no place you would take a family or go on vacation. We found this one area, a weapons cache, and we decided to blow it up. So we put the C4 and all the…uh…the blasting cap and about a minuet and a half worth of fuse on it. What you do after you set a charge like that is you walk away, you don’t run away because if you run away you’ll fall and knock yourself out then, well too bad, or if you fall and break a leg no one is going to stop to help you, well they will, but they won’t let you forget it. So we walked away, got to a safe place, and we listened and waited and…nothing happened. Now one of the things you don’t want to have to do is find out why something didn’t blow up because it could blow up while your trying to find out, and it did blow up. We were all just sitting there and it became clearer and clearer that that was what we were going to have to do, and no one was really happy about it. Then the lieutenant said, “…How long was that fu…” and that was as far as he got and the thing blew up and we all felt a sense of relief
TH: Well, typically you carried an M16, carried 24 magazines
of uh, well they could hold 20 rounds a piece but no one put 20 rounds in
because then the weapon would jam, so you put 15 rounds in, so maybe you had
about 300 rounds of M16 ammo. Now everybody carried two belts of M60 machine
gun ammunition, a couple of grenades if you wanted them, some smoke grenades
for the helicopters. We had to carry a claymore and a couple of trip flares, so
you wanted to sleep at night. And…what else…you carry water, your
own food, Sometimes you’d, well I liked to carry an M72 it was
a…was it an M72 or an M79, I forget, but it was an anti-tank weapon. Now
there were no tanks for us to worry about, but the reason I liked it was
because it made one hell of a loud noise, so what you didn’t kill
you’d frighten away. So if you wanted to, you’d carry that. Those
were the typical things you would carry.
OA: Did you make any new friends in Vietnam?
Tim Healy: Oh, Sure.
OA: Did you keep any of these friends after the war?
TH: Wait, Vietnamese friends or other types of friends?
OA: Oh, I meant enlisted fellows.
TH: Sure
OA: You made Vietnamese friends as well?
TH: Yeah. Well, that portion of time I was a company clerk they, uh, there were Vietnamese people and they would clean up the area for you. So we’d get them in and the they would teach us Vietnamese words and we’d share they’re food and they’d share our food and we would laugh and try to tell jokes and so on.
OA: Did you remain friends with them afterwards?
TH: No, there’s no way to get in touch with them.
OA: What about you’re enlisted friends?
TH: Yeah, for many years we used to get together and at this point in time we pretty much went our separate ways. I suppose I could look them up and it would be like yesterday. Uh, I have a lot of old but not really from that neck of woods, not from that juncture in time anymore.
OA: Did you have any friends that suffered from instances
of discrimination?
TH: Uh…Yeah actually there is a really interesting story I’ll tell you about. There was a black guy, uh Joe Adams was his name and he felt about the war pretty much as I did. There was some good that you can do here, there were things to do but there was large number of other people who felt it was a white man’s war and why were we here and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and uh, they actually discriminated against him. He came into our orely room one day and he was actually in fear of his life at that point in time. So we told him to stay with us, not that we could have done anything but, if they really wanted to get him but we would keep him as safe as we would keep ourselves.
OA: What exactly is an Orely Room?
TH: That’s a, uh….what’s it like? It’s uh, just a small building with bedrooms in the back, well, bedroom in the back and a storage area and the orely room itself is just a desk and two typewriters. It is just a place to sit down and speak.
TH: No, it’s an actual building with sand bags around them and so on.
TH: Well, a lot of the things you think are important really aren’t. When you’ve been at deaths door, literally, you put a lot of things in perspective. Well, its like the…uh… what is it…the Taoists or the Buddhists have this Ying-Yang with the black and the white and just within the circle of totality there’s good and evil and within the good there is evil and within the evil that’s in the good there is evil and so on at infinitum. But…uh… I think I came out of there a wiser person, a more loving person. That sounds strange, that certainly didn’t happen to other people but it certainly rearranged my priorities. It helped me figure out what was important in life.
TH: Yeah, well, just that overall sense of disappointment that the whole thing was so poorly organized. The one thing you really can’t do is deceive other people or yourself about things that really matter. The worst form of deception is self-deception, to say, “We’re wining. We’re wining. We’re wining. We’re wining” when in fact what we mean is that we haven’t that faintest clue in what we’re doing. It’s just a wrong thing to do, its morally wrong. Did it change my view of the government prior to the war? Yeah, there was just a sense of over all disappointment. Ya know, you have the right to send me someplace and put me in harm’s way, but you shouldn’t do that frivolously…I mean what’s all this about. I’m willing to do that, to fight for people’s freedoms, including my own. And to send us someplace where the mission is unclear and the goals are not well stated, and the will to win is really not there…no that’s not right… it’s a waste of life. It’s just a stupid thing to do.