On September 1, 1965, draft laws were changed to prohibit anyone under eighteen from going to war. Darold Baum turned eighteen that August and entered the Vietnam War. During his first tour he was a Private First Class in Charlie-11 of the Charlie Company Battalion. He sustained two injuries and earned two Purple Hearts. During the first instance, he and his platoon were doing patrols outside of Danang when he was hit by a booby trap (this is detailed later), and medevac-ed to a medical center in Chu Lai and then to Japan and Guam. Upon returning he sustained a second injury, which was minor enough to let him finish his thirteen-month first tour and rotate out of Vietnam in September of 1966. Darold earned his third Purple Heart in 1970: He and his platoon were north of Phu Bai near the Dematerialized Zone. The North Vietnamese were on patrols and Darold’s forces sprung an ambush on them, during which he was wounded. He ended his second tour by being medevac-ed to Chicago.

During Darold’s time as a PFC in 1965 and 1966, his platoon commander was Philip Caputo, who has since written several war books. One of his works, A Rumor of War, details his time as Darold’s commander, and Darold is quoted in it. It is available at the Canton, Avon, and Simsbury Public Libraries. For more information, visit:

www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/11/interviews/caputo/

and www.keywestliteraryseminar.org/anovel/caputo.htm

For further research Darold Baum recommends “Full Metal Jacket,” a movie. He says, “It’s a very good example of what the Marines had to do.” The video is available at the Bristol Public Library (Manross Branch), the Farmington Library (Barney Branch), and the Rocky Hill Cora J. Belden Library (also on DVD in Rocky Hill). For more information about this film, see:

www.kubrick-web.co.uk/fmj.htm and http://home.ins.de/~fmj/

Below is an extended transcript of my interview with Darold Baum. It includes segments of various lengths which give a more detailed picture of his experiences during the Vietnam War.

In preparation for his first tour in Vietnam, Darold first spent twelve weeks training at boot camp in San Diego. He then trained for about two months at infantry training school on Okinawa.

Darold Baum on Training and Boot Camp:

…Question: And, did you, did you make friends there, or was it just, uh, a

strictly business atmosphere?

Darold Baum: No you made friends, yeah, you made friends. It’s not um, it’s not like prison. You, you had fun, you could do things, but it’s, it’s a very controlled environment; and uh, there’s not a lot of uh, going out and there’s not a lot of, uh, drinking beer and doing that kind of thing. It’s umm, pretty controlled. You’re still, you’re still under the control of um, uh, platoon sergeants, until you get out of, uh, training, and once you get out of training then you’re assigned to a, um, regular company, a regular platoon, then things relaxed a little bit.

… on Friends and Relationships:

Darold Baum: You were friendly, but you didn’t get real close…You were friends. Um, you know, you really didn’t get to know people too well, because you didn’t know what uh, what was going to happen, so uh, you didn’t get really attached to anybody. Um, if somebody were to uh, get shot or uh, killed, it was devastating but you didn’t get attached to them, ‘cause it could happen to anybody- anytime…You wanted to come out of there alive so you relied on everybody. You had, you had to rely on each other, and uh, um, as a PFC I didn’t really see it that way as, as much as I did as a sergeant. And um, you want to make sure that the right person is doing the right job. A lot of people, a lot of lives depend on that.”

… on Being Under Attack:

Question: Was it like what you expected or were you caught off guard, or…

Darold Baum: No because you trained for it. When you train you train with war games and you have, you’re constantly having the bad guys come on after you- you’re the good guy they’re the bad guys,- and then you do that; it’s , it’s the same thing. But over there it was with real bullets and training was with blanks. So you, you train for that, and you prepare yourself for that. So it’s not, it’s not a shock, so you know exactly what to do if something were to happen. If somebody starts shooting at you, you know exactly what to do.

Question: What were you trained to do?

Darold Baum: Just shoot back. It’s infantry- that’s what you do.

Question: Were there any techniques for knowing like where the fire was

coming from?

Darold Baum: First of all you, you watch where it comes from. If somebody can pinpoint where that shot came from if you see the muzzle flash. Um, and then you had different things that you were designed to do depending on what your position was in the firing team squad where you shot; you had your certain area of responsibility that you have to shoot into, and then they overlapped each other, so if, if the uh, firing got real hot and heavy, you just don’t shoot all over the place like they do in cowboy movies. You have, this is my area, you put a stick in the ground here and a stick in the ground here, and then I’m sitting in my bunker and I know I can’t shoot past that stick, and I can’t shoot past this stick because somebody over here, he’s got his two sticks in the ground and his shooting overlaps my shooting… If we were on top of a mountain or on top of a hill, we’d always have that on the high ground, so you’d go around this hill and all sides of the hill are covered by areas of responsibility; each person is responsible for a certain area of the hill…maybe a two, maybe a two by four hole.

… on Specific Military Campaigns:

Darold Baum: Oh yeah, operation Hastings, operation Starlight… there were, there were hundreds of them; every time they, they wanted to do something, they’d have an operation for it. Um, some of them were to feed the people, some of them were to take different parts of the country, take control of it… Those two [military operations] stick out in my mind… Operation Starlight’s when I first got in country, so that was, that was scary, but here again you just do what you’re told… I’m a PFC, Private First Class, and, I’m in a platoon and I’m told to go here, I’m told to go there, I’m told to carry this, I’m told to do that, and that’s what you do. You just do it. You don’t question, you just do it. And hopefully the person that’s telling you what to do knows what he’s doing because you rely on him to keep you alive.

…Question: Did you have many casualties?

Darold Baum: Yeah, we had a few, we had a few.

[Darold generally fought against Vietnamese Guerrillas. He did not come across any North Vietnamese soldiers until his second tour in 1970.]

Following his first tour in 1965/1966, Darold Baum rotated out, re-enlisted, and went to Camp Le Jeune and Viecas in the Caribbean. He was stationed in Boston for a couple of years and became a sergeant there. In 1970 he was sent back to Vietnam in a seven-member combined action platoon. The platoon had a unit outside of Hue City near Phu Bai and lived with Vietnamese citizens in their villages:

… on his time with the Combined Action Platoon:

Darold Baum: When you go into the village, you just, you’re there to help the people, you help them build schools, you help them build their houses, and that kind of thing, and plus, you protect them. You work with the um, uh, the ARVNs, which are the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, and the ARVNs are stationed all over. Some of them are farmers, and at night they uh, they go down on their farms and they come back and they help you stand guard, and they run patrols and that kind of thing. The combined action was the idea, of um, winning the hearts and minds of the people.

… on Why he Stayed in the Marines:

Question: why did you stay in?

Darold Baum: I enjoyed it, I really did, I enjoyed it, being in the military.

… on What Soldiers Knew about the War:

Question: What were you told about the war, like by superiors, like the progress of the war?

Darold Baum: Well, God, you know what, I never even gave that any thought. Well we were always told about body counts and all that- that’s that was a big thing- body count.* Always had to have, always had to have a body count… And you weren’t allowed to take any, uh, you weren’t allowed to shoot, unless you could actually, uh, show a body, but they didn’t really pay any attention to that… Now that I think about it I don’t remember being told anything, um. The war is progressing, we’re winning, uh, we’re always winning… and it always looked like we were- at, at our level, at the bottom level. At the uh, grassroots level it did look like we were winning, and then uh, little did we know that, that we weren’t.

*The problem with body count was that the Vietnamese Guerrillas always took their dead with them so they could not easily be counted by Americans. Darold Baum: …The chances of getting the bodies were real slim- unless you had them all… Usually if you spring an ambush you can get ‘em all…

... on Procedures for Taking Care of the Wounded or Killed:

Question: What do you do when someone gets killed?

Darold Baum: You pick up his gear, you pick him up, and you take him to the rear…once the fighting stops. You try to um, if they get shot, of course you administer first aid.

Question: Does the medic only do that?

Darold Baum: No, we all do. We work with the [navy]corpsman… the corpsman would come and, uh, they’re the ones that would do the actual, what we, what we trained to do is just stop the bleeding ‘til the medic can get there, ‘til the corpsman can get there… then the corpsman will uh, administer first aid, give ‘em morphine if necessary, and we call medevacs and get a medevac in so the helicopters can take ya out. And even if you’re killed you still get a medevac, they come in and take you out… they take you to a secure location um, and then [another] helicopter takes you to a medical center.

Question: What were you trained to do like, to stop the bleeding?

Darold Baum: Everybody has a um, a combat dressing- it’s little bandage, so, it’s a big pad actually, and depending on where it’s at, you just, uh, put the, put the combat dressing on and tie it up real tight. If you have to apply a tourniquet you do. If you have a chest wound, a sucking chest wound, um, you have to stop that, because that, uh, if somebody gets shot in the chest then the um, their air gets sucked through uh, through the hole and their lung could collapse. So they, what we, what we were trained to do is take um, cigarette cellophane and put that over the chest wound and then wrap, wrap it up with that, to keep, make an airtight seal. So it depended on, on that. The head wounds, you wrap them up tight. Keep people secure, keep ‘em quiet.

… on Daily Conditions:

Darold Baum: It was hot, very humid, always. You’re always sweaty, uh, you’re dirty, you never, very seldom can shower. You bathed whenever possible… [in] rivers, streams, wells.

… on Guerrilla Tactics:

Darold Baum: Thy used, they used um, they had spider holes, they had tunnels- they had lots of tunnels

…Question: What are spider holes?

Darold Baum: It uh, You dig a hole in the ground and they would put a top on it. And, then they’d camouflage the top with leaves and what have you, and then when you get close to them they open it up and they can shoot out of the hole, and then they can put it right down again, and you could walk right by them and not see them.

Question: What kind of top is it?

Darold Baum: It’s made out of whatever’s on the ground. Brush, they’d weave it together and put leaves on it… they’d stay in these things for hours and just put it up enough to shoot out of and then they’d put it down again…The tunnels would run for miles and miles. They [the Vietnamese Guerrillas] would just, they would disappear and you would never find them. And you sent people down inside the tunnels, they would blow the tunnels up, and you would hopefully stop them, but they’re back there again the next day. They’d clean ‘em all up and use ‘em all over again… [the tunnels were] all the way under ground. They had cities underground, medical centers…

Question: Did you ever see any?

Darold Baum: Oh yeah, I was too tall- thank God- that I didn’t have to be a uh, a tunnel rat. The little guys, you’d use them in the tunnels.

Question: How tall would they be?

Darold Baum: Well anybody that’s uh, five foot four, or five foot five, somewhere in that area. Anybody that’s short in your platoon would turn out to be a tunnel rat. And um, their purpose is to go into a tunnel and blow it up.

Question: And what would they use for that?

C-4- that’s explosives.

… on American Fighting Strategy:

Darold Baum: You always moved towards them- we never retreated.”

… on Daily Life:

“…We were close to the uh, uh, China, uh, China Beach, right, real close to the water. And sometimes we, we had occasions where we could go swimming in the ocean. Set up perimeter and keep everybody secure and go swimming in the ocean.

… on Setting Up Perimeter:

Question: What was um, involved in setting up perimeter?

Darold Baum: Just um, here it was again, set up where, where you’re going to shoot. This is where you’re going to be sitting, dig a hole here. Dig a hole on the other side, just everybody make a big circle basically. A circle of wagons, that’s what we did- a circle.

… on the Realities of War:

Darold Baum: …War’s not just all this shooting and and, um patrols, and things like that. There’s, there’s a lot of stuff that did go on that, uh, that wasn’t that bad. When I first got there, when I first got to Danang before the war really got started, we were about to go on liberty in Danang, and ate, at in uh, in a Vietnamese-Italian restaurant, with spaghetti and meatballs, over, over the Danang river. So that’s before the war really got escalated. But it was ok. And of course it got worse, and heavier fighting, and heavier, you couldn’t do those things, but it wasn’t always all fighting. It was a lot, a lot of patrols, a lot of humping, a lot of standing guard, a lot of sleepless nights.

… on what Soldiers Carried:

Question: What did you carry?

Darold Baum: Everything you owned. You had, uh, a change of clothes, everything, whatever you owned. You carried boots, socks, um, when we first went in we had to carry everything, we even had to carry our khakis, our dress uniforms. ..just huge packs that must’ve weighted a hundred pounds. And uh, we carried all kinds of extra ammo, and hand grenades. Depending on what position you were in a platoon you carry mortars, you carry a radio for communication…I carried an [stone] elephant [four or five inches in diameter] for a while. Then it got heavy and I threw it away. A lot of guys did stupid things: they would make little notes on their helmets, um, like an ace of spades, they would paint it on their helmet, or a bull’s eye… with a magic marker on the cloth part of the helmet…After the village was destroyed, it [the elephant] was actually laying on the ground… it was, it was difficult working with the people of these villages, because as far as you were concerned, everybody was the enemy, whether they were or they weren’t… because they were Vietnamese. They could have been the nicest people in the world but to you they were the enemy. So the relationship between you and them was uh, was rather uh, strenuous I guess, so you didn’t deal with them very much.

on Racism within the Platoon:

Question: Was there um, was there racism or discrimination within the

platoons?

Darold Baum: Um, Not too much, uh, it was ’65, yeah maybe a little bit. The uh, the blacks had just uh, they’d just won the right to vote. Um well maybe a little bit, but not that much. Everybody, everybody realized you know, you had a cause, everybody had the same purpose, and that was to get out alive.

Question: Were you aware of the civil rights movement?

Darold Baum: No.

Question: So there was no news from…

Darold Baum: No I’m sure there was some. We would get the Newspaper Stars and Stripes, but I didn’t care. I was a kid. What did I care? Seventeen, eighteen years old, you know, you don’t think about those kinds of things.

Question: Were most of the people just seventeen or eighteen?

Darold Baum: Yeah, no, all kids. The oldest guy we had in our platoon was uh, 25, and we used to call him pappy…”

Question: Did you keep track of time, first of all?

Darold Baum: Yeah, but it didn’t matter… the only time it started to make any difference is when you got down to time to rotate, time to got home. Then you start worrying about it. When you first get there you’re real scared, because you just got in country, you’re scared. The you get so you realize what’s going on, um, you’re going to be there for thirteen months, so probably the first thirty days you’re scared. Then after that you don’t care. So you make eight, nine, ten months and you don’t care, then you start getting, now it comes down you got thirty days to go home. Now, now you’re getting scared again. Because now you start worrying about going home. So you, so you start keeping track of the days, and you start counting the days and everybody has these calendars… if they’re good to you, they’ll bring you to the rear and you can stay in the rear until you rotate out.

… on Holidays:

Darold Baum: I remember during thanksgiving of ‘66 we were on patrol outside of, I don’t even remember where we were at, but they wanted us to go back to the rear, to uh, to eat thanksgiving dinner. And uh, a lot of us didn’t want to go back because it was always just go back to the tent and they have uh, cold turkey, and cold mashed potatoes, and it wasn’t worth the hump in to have it so. But they made us go anyway. So they tried to, they tried to um, keep some, some order, some sort of um, awareness of uh, of the holidays and that type of thing. Christmas, there was a cease-fire for Christmas of sixty- Christmas of ‘65 they had a cease-fire… on both sides…but the Vietnamese tried to get us to break the cease-fire. They would do things, I remember in Charlie Rear [battalion headquarters], and we were on top of a hill overlooking uh, a valley. What they would do is, we had our positions set up and we weren’t allowed to shoot, period. No shooting at all. Um, what the Vietnamese were doing, what the Viet Cong were doing, is they would sneak up real close to us and uh, make mud balls about the size of a golf ball and throw ‘em at us…they would hit the ground just like a hand grenade hitting the ground…actually what it was was mud, and what they wanted us to do was break the cease-fire because if we broke the cease- fire it would justify them shooting back… we had to tough it out – it was like torture.

Question: How long was it?

Darold Baum: All night. All night Christmas night… it was uh, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

… on Tricks the Soldiers would Play on Each Other:

There were, uh, there were some good times… You take a hand grenade and if you unscrew the top of a hand grenade… if you unscrew the top it has a primer inside of it, a plastic cap. You take the top off and you pull the pin on that, on that part of it, and drop it in water and it’ll blow up, but then it wouldn’t hurt anything. You put the top back on the hand grenade again, put the pin back in, now you have what looks like a real grenade. So what these guys would do, they would be sitting in a tent or something, or sitting in a group of people, and uh, they, they would be messing with their stuff- and you’re always messing with your stuff- and he would take his hand grenade and mistakenly pull the pin out of it. So now you got the hand grenade out and the pin’s out. Now as long as you’re holding the spoon on the hand grenade, it’s ok, it’s safe. It s when you let go of it, the spoon flies off and you hear a ‘ping,’ and the spoon flies off and you know it’s primed and about three seconds later it’s gonna explode. So what they would do is they would blow these things up, put the pin back on, then they would play with them. The pin would come out and they would mess with it trying to get the pin back in and it would fall off, it would fall out of their hands and the spoon would fly and everybody’s thinkin’ there’s live grenade on the floor. And they would, I mean I’ve seen people run through screen walls, they’d just disappear. And then, it got old, but when it first happened it was funny.

… on Vietnamese Booby Traps:

Mostly hand grenades. A lot of them would take explosives and wrap them with bamboo and when they exploded you got a lot of bamboo. And so the idea was not to kill you, the idea was to demoralize you and to wound you so they could, because they understood that if Americans were wounded we would take care of our own and make sure they were medevac-ed out. The idea was to wound somebody: they knew that you would be wounded, they knew you would call for medevac, and then when the choppers came in to medevac you out, then they would shoot the chopper because they wanted the bigger fish.

…Question: How could you set off one of the booby traps?

Darold Baum: Step on it, trip a wire. The one that I, the one that got me was electrically detonated, which meant that someone was sitting in the bushes with a battery and two pieces of wire, and touched them together, and that’s, that’s what got me.

Question: Um, on that note, did they have the same type of um, military

supplies?

Darold Baum: No… they, uh, they were using, uh, mostly uh, Chinese or Russian, uh, weapons, ammunition, and whatever they could steal from us. Most of it was Russian- a lot of AK-47s… they were using Chi-Com grenades, Chinese Communist grenades.

… on his Reflections on Vietnam:

Question: Reflecting on your experiences, um, how do you feel about

Vietnam? Like, are you proud that you served?

Darold Baum: Yes, absolutely, yes. If you look at my car I have a sticker on it that I’m a member of the Vietnam Veterans’ Association. I’m a life member of the Purple Heart Association, of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, life member of the DAV.

… on Common Misconceptions of War:

Question: And what do you think is like the most common misconception of war, like

that you would like people to understand that it’s not that way?

Darold Baum: …That you’re constantly killing people, because um, when you think about war you think about, it’s not, you’re not always shooting at somebody or somebody’s not always shooting at you. It happens in spurts. I mean, it’s not a constant battle. Don’t get me wrong, there are some people that did have that. The Tet Offensive of ’68 there were days and days of combat… Then another misconception about the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese War, is that people came back, um, you know, crazed killers and that’s not true. There are a lot of Vietnam Veterans that are holding public office or that, uh, work at jobs, are probably teachers at your school, are people like me.