Lydia Fletcher
Hajera Ahrned
Katie Cardwell
HAJERA AHMED: We are now interviewing the veteran Stephen, also known as Chad,
Fletcher on today, November 5th 2004. Um. The interviewers are Lydia Fletcher, Hajera
Ahmed and Katie Cardwell. Chad Fletcher's birthday was on July 8th 1945. He currently
lives at 18322 Edwards Oaks, San Antonio, 78259.
LYDIA FLETCHER: Alright. Which wars did you serve in?
CHAD FLETCHER: Well I guess the answer to that, uh, a little bit depends on your
definition of "war." But three times I've been involved in combat as an American military
member. I first served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. I participated in the invasion of
Panama in 1989, and I was involved in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990
in Saudi Arabia.
LYDIA FLETCHER: Alright. Where were you living at the time you were drafted?
CHAD FLETCHER: El Paso, Texas.
LYDIA FLETCHER: Were you in school?
CHAD FLETCHER: Uh, I was not at the time. I had been a student at Texas Western
College, which is now called UTEP, the University of Texas at El Paso. I was conducting
what I characterized as a thoroughly uninspired career as a student. I dropped out to party
more. And it was during my uh, time while I was out of college that I got drafted.
LYDIA FLETCHER: Do you recall your first days in service?
CHAD FLETCHER: Sure I do. Vividly. Um, when you're inducted into the service the
frst thing that you do is you go to what's called a reception station. And at the reception
station they conduct a variety of tests, medical tests, just to see that you're physically
healthy. They provide.. . they don't call them intelligence tests, but they're skill tests to
try and figure out who would make a good mechanic, who would make a good foot
soldier, who would make a good cook, who would make, urn.. . so that was going on and
while that's going on they're psychologically preparing you for the next eight weeks
which is basic training, which is quite a rigorous activity.
LYDIA FLETCHER. Can you tell us any anecdotes from your boot camp experience?
Do you remember your instructors?
CHAD FLETCHER: Oh yeah. Sure. The drill sergeant for my group, my platoon was a
wiry, young black soldier by the name of Theodore Sweet, or we called him Teddy
Sweet. And he was quite a character. Had a rhythm about him, had a physicality about
him, a very gregarious sort of a guy. Was demanding of us, physically, that's what boot
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 1
camp is all about. But melded us into a group so that we could work together, accomplish
tasks together. And it was just a rigorous experience. It's twelve weeks of.. . you get up at
four thirty in the morning, you go out and you do what's called physical exercise, you run
and do calisthenics and then you eat breakfast and then you jump into a days training
activities where you do things like marksmanship, learning to shoot the rifles and things
like that. Marching, you did forced marches. You go out and march for six, eight, ten,
twelve miles and so it's just day in, day out. You finally get turned loose to go to sleep
about nine o'clock at night and [snap] your lights go out and four thirty in the morning
they're in there banging on the bunks making you get up and you start it all over again.
LYDIA FLETCHER: Did you get to make the decision to train to be a reconnaissance
observer? Was there any special training you had to do?
CHAD FLETCHER: Oh yeah. Um, based on the tests that were given to me during the
reception station days, the first fkw days in the army, somehow something about the way
I tested suggested to the personnel people that I was a likely candidate for training as an
aerial reconnaissance observer. I don't know what that was but something about those
tests told them that I was a likely candidate. So while I was in basic training I was called
in off the ranges where we were practicing marksmanship and taken into post and into an
ofice in the headquarters building where I was presented an opportunity, a choice. I
could.. . they offered me the opportunity to go through training. They weren't sure what
the training was about, they weren't sure what the job involved. They knew that it
involved something having to do with flying. They new that I would qualify for flight pay.
And they knew that I wouldn't be there for an infantryman, a foot soldier. And that was
about all they could tell me about it, and they asked me if I was interested in pursuing
that. And I thought about it for.. . a couple of nanoseconds and then decided that it
sounded more interesting, more challenging, more fun than just being a foot soldier. So,
um, they sent me back out to the range. At the end of my basic training then I was taken
to an airfield and I was put on an airplane and I was flown from Ft. Bliss, Texas over to
Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. And Ft. Huachuca, Arizona is where they conducted the training
to develop me and thirteen other young men to be reconnaissance observers in an airplane
called a Mohawk. And.. . so yeah. That's how I got there.
LYDIA FLETCHER: When did you find out you were going to Vietnam?
CHAD FLETCHER: Oh, I think from the time that I was drafted I think it was kind of a
forgone conclusion, because in 1967.. . I was drafted on the 6th of March, 1967 and um,
there wasn't much else that was in the news, there wasn't much else that the military was
doing. Although there was ofie.. . one of the members of my class that was stationed in
Italy. The rest of us all went to Vietnam. Maybe one of us went to Korea, but most all of
us went to Vietnam.
LYDIA FLETCHER: How did you feel when you were told that you had to go over there?
CHAD FLETCHER: Oh, I didn't mind. I didn't have any particular angst about it. But I
was.. . it was fine with me.
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 2
LYDIA FLETCHER: Did you do anything special before you lefl the states?
CHAD FLETCHER: [laughter] Yes. Urn As I got out of the training course at Ft.
Huachuca, in July of 1 967, they give you thirty days of leave which is kind of an
automatic thing, and then you have to report to your point of embarkation, which for
people going to Vietnam was in Oakland, California. So I went on leave. Spent time with
the family and just kind of.. . wrapping up and preparing to go to Vietnam, and reported
to Oakland, California. We got to.. . I got to Oakland, California and as I was there
several of the other guys that had been in training with me showed up. And they started.. .
the process of processing for overseas movement. We were in a,. . a compound, a depot
area where there were lots and lots of warehouse buildings. We were actually staying,
temporarily, in warehouses. Just great big, enormous open warehouses with rows and
rows and rows and rows of double bunks, and they'd assign us to a warehouse and we'd
have a particular area and that was just kind of for orientation. And we were there for
several days, and the whole purpose of that was to select or assign people out of this
group and there were probably 15,000 of us there sleeping in these bunks. And they had a
computer that would generate lists of names and those lists of names would be assigned
to an aircrafl that was flying out of California for Vietnam. So, the first day you get there
you just kinda get started or you announce that you're there, and the second day they start
this process of lining you up to get on one of the planes to go overseas. And we knew the
day before we would be leaving the next day at ... 5 o'clock in the morning. So, I took
control of the group of us. I walked up to one of the NCOs, one of the guards we called
them. And I told him that Major Saunders wanted to see us as a group. And using the
name Major Saunders was an authority figure and so this sergeant wasn't going to
countermand the major, so he said, "Okay, well check with me when you come back." So
what we did was we walked around the comer and behind the building and down to the
fence and out of the gate and into a taxi cab and across the bay to San Francisco. And we
spent the afternoon in San Francisco. First we went to a steak house, where we were able
to buy a steak and a beer and whatever. And then we went to the raunchy area in San
Francisco, an area called Columbus and Broadway, which was characterized by strip
joints. Topless joints. And so there were six or seven of us and we sat there and we drank
and we drank and we drank and we just got pie-faced. And they closed down all these
bars at 2 o'clock in the morning, so at 2 o'clock in the morning we made one more stop
which was at a liquor store and each of us bought a bottle of liquor and then we went
back ... got in a cab and had them take us back over to Oakland where we... at about 3
o'clock in the morning come stumbling, stomping, hollering back into this warehouse
that's got 12,000 guys trying to sleep. And they're screaming things like, "Shut the f **
up" and we're hollering back at them. So. That was our departure. That led to ... we were
taken to the airfield to get on the airplane at 5 o'clock. I don't remember getting onto the
airplane. I wasn't conscious. Four of the guys that I was with carried me on. And I
remember watching the bulkhead as I was carried into the plane. And I remember the
stewardess looking down at me and saying, "He doesn't look like he feels any pain." And
they threw me in a seat and I woke up about the time we got to Hawaii.
LYDIA FLETCHER: Where were you stationed in Vietnam?
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 3
CHAD FLETCHER: I was station in a number of places. Initially I was stationed in a
place called Pleiku. And Pleiku is in the central highlands of Vietnam. I was stationed
there with the 4th Infantry Division. I was rnisassigned while I was there. Because the 4th
Infantry Division had no capacity ... no capability to use the skills that I had been given.
And the MOS, the Military Operational Speciality, the job that I had was specific to a
specific kind of unit and the 4th Infantry didn't have of those. So there was a period of
time where I was in Vietnam, I was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division but they didn't
have any way they could effectively use me, so while I was waiting to have my
assignment straitened out I became part of what's called a Civil Affairs Team. And that's
where I got introduced to the montagnards. And we did training and community support
for tribes of montagnards.
LYDIA FLETCHER: Can you tell us real quick what montagnards are?
CHAD FLETCHER: Sure. Montagnards is a French word for ... mountain people.
Montagnards are aboriginal residents of what is the peninsula of Siam, but as you ... the
peninsula itself has a range of mountains that runs down along it. They once were the
original occupants of Southeast Asia. But dating back to the time of Genghis Khan, who
came down out of china and along the coast and actually populated the coastal area of all
of Southeast Asia with yellow-skinned, slanted-eyed Orientals. There is a penchant
between these two cultural groups, and the coastal dwellers along the coast drove the
montagnards up into the less favorable countryside, which was the mountains. The most
favorable country is along the coastal plains, which is where the best agriculture is. The
easiest agriculture. So all of the rice fields and all of the banana plantations, all of the
h i t s they grow down along the coastal areas, and the montagnards had to live up in the
jungles and the mountains.
LYDIA FLETCHER: How did the montagnards react to you Americans being there?
CHAD FLETCHER: Actually they were very fond of us. They were fond of us in the
sense that because of this tension between the two cultural groups of the Oriental
Vietnamese and the montagnards they liked us because they perceived us as being there
to combat the worst of these Orientals, which actually was the North Vietnamese and the
Viet Cong. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were ruthless with the montagnards.
Treated them very badly. We were there ... they perceived us as defenders, not so much
liberators, but protectors, I guess, in a lot of ways. They were, in terms of philosophies,
into spirituality shamanism is I guess the closest way to describe it. Not a particular deity,
not a particular religious philosophy. But just somethmg about the spirituality of nature
and animals, plants, mountains, something like American Indians, I guess.
LYDIA FLETCHER: Did you and your fellow soldiers stay in the montagnard villages?
CHAD FLETCHER: Yeah. Our ... what we did in Civil Affairs Teams ... we would form a
team of Americans that would be assigned a village and we would go out for five to
seven days and live in that village. And during that five to seven days, living in that
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 4
village, we did a number of things. We did construction projects where we built things ...
we called them schools, for the ir... for the children of the village. They were actually
free-standing buildings without walls. We'd set up uprights and on top of that we'd put
trusses, and on top of the trusses we put corrugated tin. And the whole idea was to protect
the kids fiom rain, to give them a place to assemble and to give their village elders a
place to educate them. Provide them with education. So that was part of our activity. The
other part of our activity is we were teaching the village men to provide their own
defense. We provided them with weapons. We actually gave them rifles and shotguns and
grenade launchers. We gave them weapons and these were weapons that were being
taken out of armories here in the United States, they were excess to our needs - they were
older than we were using. But they were perfectly effective weapons. We gave them to
the village men and we taught them to use them. We would go off outside to the edge of
the ... a little away from the village, we'd set up a firing range and we'd teach them to
shoot. And as we got ... as they got better and better with shooting we started teaching
them things like setting up perimeter defenses. Where to station the village members with
these guns to protect themselves if they were attacked in the night or something like that.
So, that's really what our objective was, is to create what we called an Irregular Defense
Force. Irregular in the sense that it wasn't a formal military organization, but the people
had the wherewithal to be able to defend themselves. So that's what we were there for.
LYDIA FLETCHER: Do you have any anecdotes you could share about the montagnards
that would be particularly amusing?
CHAD FLETCHER: [laughing] I have lots of anecdotes. Let's see. One of the things ...
one of my favorite anecdotes about living with the montagnards is one of the things that
we would do while we were living in a village is we had a projector, an old 16mm
projector, we had a generator, a 5kw generator, that ran on gasoline and it was in a little
trailer that we'd pull around behind the jeep that we had with the team. And one of the
evenings during the week that we were there, or sometimes more, we would fire up the
generator and fire up the projector and show these people the first movie that they had
ever seen. And I have to explain that montagnards ... I refer to them as aboriginal ... it is no
exaggeration to say that they were absolutely a stone age culture. Their technology is
stone age. There was nothing technological about these people. The closest they had ever
been to any form of civilization was some of them would go to market in one of the
coastal towns, but they weren't comfortable there, they weren't welcome there. The
Oriental Vietnamese treated them badly. So they were very much stone age people. So,
one of the evenings ... we had these little ceremonial dinners where we would have ... the
womenfolk of the village would cook and prepare food, the menfolk of the villages could
provide beverages ... wines that they made out of different h i t s and rice and quite
effective. And... so we would have these ceremonial dinners and one of the things that we
would do is we'd fire up the generator and fire up the projector and show movies. And it
was not very long before we realized that their favorite movies were Clint Eastwood
movies. We had these big 16mm reels of film for things like "A Fistful of Dollars." "A
Few Dollars More." These were movies where Clint Eastwood never spoke a line. I mean,
he didn't say anything. He didn't need to say anything. Well, these movies that were
shipped over for everybody's use, but for our use became favorites with the montagnards
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 5
because as Clint Eastwood on a movie screen, or actually on a sheet on the side of a
building, would ride up and start shooting Mexicans, the montagnards immediately
associated the tall Anglo cowboy as a G.I. And the Mexicans that were in the movie, or
Italians or whatever they were, were associated as Viet Cong. So that was how they were
translating what they were seeing in this movie. And so as Clint Eastwood would show
up in a movie these people would just get so excited and holler "G.I.! G.I.! G.I.!" And as
the bad guys were getting shot they'd be hollering "V.C.! V.C.!" which was Viet Cong
which was. .. those were no good. So, yeah, we had lots of hn.
KATIE CARDWELL: When did you begin as a reconnaissance observer?
CHAD FLETCHER: When did I begin? Well, I guess technically I began when I entered
the training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. When I...after I got to Vietnam.. . I got there in
August of 1967. They got the paperwork and my assignment straightened out and I was
assigned to a surveillance aircraft company, uh, in December. So I was over there for a
little over three months before the paper work caught up with me before they said "You're
in the wrong place. You need to go to the 73rd surveillance aircraft company. " The 73rd
surveillance aircraft company was stationed in a place called Vung Tau. Vung Tau is, is
on a peninsula that kinda juts out into the, uh, into the Yellow Sea fiom, uh, fiom the
peninsula fiom Vietnam. And so I was assigned there on I think about December the 10th
or 12th 1968. And that's when I started flying on a daily basis and, and doing what I was
actually trained to do over there.
KATIE CARDWELL: What were your duties as a reconnaissane observer?
CHAD FLETCHER: The airplane that, uh, that I flew in was built by a company by the
name of Grurnman Aircraft. It's official designation was an O.B. 1 Mohawk. Mohawk as
just its G.I. name. Mohawk being an Indian and the Army was in the habit at the time of
naming everthing after Indian tribes. Um, the Mohawk was specifically designed for
electronic warfare, or intelligence gathering. It had several different electronic packages
that it could be outfitted with to provide reconnaissance capabilities. One of them was an
infiared scanning system. And the id?ared scanning system gave us the ability to fly out
at across the jungle at night, or in daytime, and see the world in infiared energy. And
that's significance because the jungles, particularly of southeast Asia, were what were
called triple canopy jungles. They were trees that had trees under them and trees under
them and then way down below that was the ground vegetation. And one of the big
problems we had was trying to find the bad guys, where they were and what they were
doing. And there was what was called a trail system that started up in North Vietnam and
came down over into Thailand and through Cambodia and into South Vietnam called the
Ho Chi Minh Trail. And it wasn't really a trail, it was more like a super highway through
the, through the jungle. And it fact, to protect it, the North Vietnamese would get up into
the trees and build lattice works of bamboo, and then on top of that latticework, they
would pile on a daily basis foliage, so that you couldn't see below the umbrella that they
built, and under the umbrella that they built would be convoys of trucks driving south,
driving south. And on those convoys were munitions and supplies and equipment for the
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 6
Viet Gong and the North Vietnamese soldiers that were infiltrating into the south and
becoming our enemies. So it was, it was important that we try and find the Ho Chi Minh
Trail. It was important that we try and find those vehicles because those vehicles carried
the munitions, the explosives, the wherewithal that did damage to American soldiers. So
the infrared system was a way of being able to see down through the canopy of the jungle
and find the heat that was generated by the engine and the exhaust of the vehicles, They,
it would just appear vividly on these monitors in the cockpit. And then the observer that
was in the cockpit observing these heat signatures would call the intelligence back and
call on artillery batteries or airforce bombers to come drop bombs in a particular place,
trying to disrupt the flow of supplies and personnel that were going south. So that was
one, one electronig system There was also a radar system that was called a SLAR, Side
Lookmg Airborne Radar, and the SLAR system had the capacity to identifjr movement.
As we'd fly across the country side, it shot out the fields of energy fiom either side of the
aircraft, and as it came back, it would send out a signal, and then it would send out
another signal, and it would compare those two signals, and if anything along the path of
that signal had moved, it created a, a marker on the panel in the cockpit of the airplane
that would tell us something moved there. And it wasn't just a leaf or it wasn't just an
animal, it was a vehicle. It took a significant mass to activate the radar response. And
then we would know ... and and and, another one of the things the radar energy was doing
was painting a background so we could, we could look at the monitor in the cockpit and
we could see the land, and the land form, we could see the riverbeds, and where we saw
little black dots, something had moved. And that something was usually a vehicle. ANd
so then again, we'd contact and artillery batter or we'd contact a gunnery unit or airforce
bombers or whatever, and they would then attack whatever it was that had moved. And
then the third, and the most, the most glamorous system that we had on the aircraft was a
system of cameras, because the infrared is good and useful and the radar is good and
useful, but the best intelligence is intelligence you can show somebody else. And so there
were, on this aircraft, there could be any of a number of camera systems. There was on
that shot out of the cockpit, out of the nose of the aircraft, and it, it took a picture of
everything in fiont of the aircraft as we flew low across the ground. And then there were
belly aircrafts that would take very high resolution reconnaissance photographs fiom
directly above something. And there were cameras that we could swing out to either side
to take pictures of things as we flew past them And these cameras took photographs on
film that was 9 inches wide, which is a very big piece of film. But it also created a
brillianty clear image of whatever it was that was being photographed. That was
important because we would go out fiom whatever base. And when I say I was assigned
in Vung Tau, the unit that I was in, our aircraft actually moved up and down the
peninsula as, as the war would get hot up in what was called I core, or in the 2nd core, or
down in the 4th core, the aircraft would shift and would go down and support the units
that were down there. And so I had the perception of my job as an observer as being an
extension of the sight and senses of the soldiers that were down in the jungle. When,
when they were down in the jungle, they were, they were, they were, they were limited
by how far they could see. They could on see sometimes just a few feet, maybe a few
yards, maybe a few hundred yards, but not much beyond that. From my perspective
above them, I could see lots of things, and and and and great distances. And so I just saw
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 7
myself as giving those soldiers that were down in the jungle the advantage of being able
to see over the horizon and so that's ...
KATIE CARDWELL: Ok. What was a typical day like for you after you'd been correctly
stationed?
CHAD FLETCHER: We'd get up, we had, we, it depended on on on whether we were
flying daytime or nighttime. When I first got to the unit, I was flying almost exclusively
at night. I'd get up about two o'clock, three o'clock in the afternoon, I'd take a shower,
which was kind of an interesting experience. In our compound area, we had a concrete
wall that was about twenty feet long and out of that concrete wall, on both sides of the
wall, we had water spigots. They were just pipes and there would be ten or twelve on
each side of the wall and you could walk up to one of the water spigots, turn it on, stand
there, and take a shower. Well, a day or say after I got to the unit, I was, I went over to
take a shower one afternoon before I went out and, and flew. And 1 was scrubbing my
head, washing the soap off of my fkce, and I turned around and here's a mama-son
washing clothes, which to her made all the sense in the world. Why waste the water? It
was good water, it was clean water, it was G.I. water. It was a little bit of a shock to my
modesty, but I figured, "Well, if she doesn't care, I don't care." So just went ahead and
went about my business. And, but it was a telling moment for me about them and their
priorities and they didn't care and weren't bashful about looking at G.I.'s and there was no
sense in my being basffil about being there. So, I took a shower and then got some grub,
went to the mess hall and got some, got some hod. And then went down to the flight line
and got a briefing about the mission that night: where we were going, what we could
expect to see, what we should be on the lookout for, what fkquencies we would be using.
We had a book that I carried that was full of radio frequencies for different units to
contact. If I found something or if I saw something, I could contact different units on the
ground by radio and advise them. And then we went down to the aircraft to pre-flight the
aircraft. Before you ever go fly and aircraft, you go through what's called a pre-flight
check. You check the aircraft, you check the systems of the aircraft, the pilot would walk
around and check all the flight services and the engines. I would be checking the
electrical system of the aircraft, the reconnaissance system, where it was an i...infiared or
a SLAR or the cameras. We had pre-flight chekcs that made sure we had film loaded,
power was good, everything was ready. And then we'd put on what we called webbing,
which was a harness system that we had to put on that actually connected us to the
ejection seats that were inside the airplane. So ....
KATIE CARD WELL: Ok.
CHAD FLETCHER: Then we'd take off.
KATIE CARDWELL. How did you feel when you had to go on a mission? Were you
scared, nervous, excited?
CHAD FLETCHER: No. And, a common knowledge to people who have been in war or
in combat it.. . there is an amazing capacity for people to disassociate from the threat.
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 8
Young men have no comer of their mind where they believe that they're mortal. There is
no comer of a young man's mind where he believes he's gonna get killed. So you just,
each day, went out and did a job. And some jobs are much more dangerous that other
jobs, some of them weren't. But you didn't worry about that, you just went out and did it.
And as the days went by and you cheated death on a daily basis, it just reinforced your
presumption that it can't happen to me.
KATIE CARDWELL: So were you ever shot down?
CHAD FLETCHER: Yeah. Shot up more than shot down. But twice while I was there, in
March of 1968, and in November of 1968, were, was in an aircraft that was shotdown and
that I ended up having to eject out of using this ejection seat.
KATIE CARDWELL: Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
CHAD FLETCHER: Yeah. I, after it happened, I had people that were just curious about
the experience. Well let me just back up one step and tell you a little bit about a Mohawk.
The Mohawk had a reputation, a nickname. It was called a "Widowmaker," And it was a
Widowmaker because it was a very high performance, high capacity aircraft as long as
everything was running right. But if things stop running right, things got rapidly very bad.
And the number of people that were, that were in a life-threatening experience in a
Mohawk and lived to tell about it were roughly 18% of the people that got into to trouble.
Of all the people that were in Mohawks that were shot up and about to go down, only
18% got out alive. And it's just because when things start happening, they happen
instantaneously, so fast that you just don't have an opportunity to react. And many many
many people got killed simply because they didn't have enought response time to be able
to react. And I was, I was one of 18% of 18% because I did it twice, and it was a vivid
experience. When the decision is made that you have to eject out of one of these aircrafts,
you set off, you mentally go through a procedure, a checklist procedure, where you
assume a posture that straightens your spine, where you no longer lean forward.
And there's a hoop that extends up above your helmet and it's purpose is to give you
something to grab onto, and you pull it down to your stomach. And when you pull it
down, it pulled out of the seat itself, a canvas covering covers your face, because as you
get that to your stomach, there's an explosion that takes off, that takes place underneath
the seat, and it blasts you, literally blasts you, out of the cockpit of the airplane. And
that's part of the mortality of what happens, but as you pull this thug down and you
blasted out of the cockpit, you go through the roof of the cockpit, and you're not traveling
through the air at whatever speed the airplane was going at, 150, 160-80,200 miles an
hour, and you almost immediately start tumbling back and spinning and the seat itself
recognizes, or was designed for, the instant after the detonation because the designers
understood that whoever was in the seat was not gonna be capable of manually
responding to things for several seconds. So 1.57 seconds after the detonation, the seat
itself starts to deploy a series of parachutes, and those parachutes start to slow you down,
and eventually the main parachute causes the seat itself to fall away from you. And all
this happens automatically. It happens in a little more than a second and a half. And
people ask me what it was like, and I said it is every carnival ride I have ever been on in
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 9
my life all wrapped up into a second and a half. And that's about as good a job as I can
get describing it.
KATIE CARDWELL: Can you relate the story of the little guy in Cambodia?
CHAD FLETCHER: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Another one of my favorite stories. We had a
mission that we flew. It was a photographic mission; we called it Flying the Fence. And
in the morning and in the afternoon, we'd take off fiom our airfield at Vung Tau, and
we'd fly over to the border with Cambodia and we'd fly along the border itself We were
looking for traffic, we were Iooking for signs: signs in the grass, signs in the vegetation,
any kind of sign that a vehicle or a group of people had moved through that area. But as
we'd fly along the fence, there was one place where, just on the Cambodian side of the
border, there was a man, a little man, he was probably 65 years old, lived in a house that
was built out of bamboo up on stilts off the ground 4 or 5 feet, covered with a thatch roof
He'd here the sound of our engines, and he'd get up out of his little hut, he'd walk out of
his, the fiont of his little hut and down 4 or 5 steps to the ground, and then he'd saunter
about 50 yards out to a tree. And this tree had a big branch that stuck out fiom it, and
suspended fiom that branch, at the end of a chain, was a machine gun. So this guy would,
fiom out of his hut, he'd saunter across the open area to this tree, and then he'd stand there
underneath this tree and shoot this machine gun as we flew past. And we were forbidden
by the rules of warfare at the time, fiom shooting into Cambodia, because Cambodia, at
the time, was classified as ....
(TAPE STOPS. CONTINUES ON SIDE B.)
CHAD FLETCHER: So I was relating the story of the little man that lived in the grass
shack in Cambodia, would come out of his hut, and saunter over and take his machine
gun at the end of the chain and just RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT shoot at us. It was a
game because, when he came out and we started seeing the puffs of smoke coming out of
the end of the barrel as he shot in our direction, we would call an artillery battery. And
the artillery battery and their big Howizter cannons knew exactly where the border was.
We knew exactly where the border was. There was nothing to mark it, but we knew fkom
maps that we carried in the cockpit exactly where the border was. The artillery battery
was forbidden fiom shooting into Cambodia, so what we would do is we would give
them coordinates that were 50 yards fiom the border and ask them to fire a target round.
So they'd fire a round out and it would go off out in the grass and we'd say, "Ok. Now,
adjust it downrange 100 yards." And they'd move the barrel of the gun up a little bit and
that'd move the round out a little bit and they would shoot off. So we'd play this little
game. The little guy in the grass hut would shoot his machine gun at us, we'd get the
artillery battery to shoot a round in the grass. We never hurt him. He never hurt us,
although right aRer I left Vietnam, there was another young fellow fkom El Paso, Texas
that was in our unit that was flying on Christmas Day, 1968. He was not an observer. On
holidays, they used to have these informal, unofficial cease fires. We'd stop firing at the
bad guys, they'd stop firing at us. There, on Christmas Day, 1968, that kllow by the name
of Frank ... I don't remember his name of the top of my head, but he got, he wanted to go
out and fly. He wanted to see the countryside. He wanted to see what we did on a daiIy
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 10
basis. And so one of the pilots said, "Yeah, sure. Let's go." They happened to go by this
little old guy in the grass shack. The little guy in the grass shack, that day, came out and
shot his machine gun, that day, hit this young fellow fiom El Paso, came up through the
side of the cockpit, hit him under the ribs. The round went up, traveled up his spine and
into his skull and he was [snap], he was dead. Those things happen.
KATIE CARDWELL: Alright. What was your most memorable experience during the
Vietnam Conflict?
CHAD FLETCHER: Oh man. I'd ... the experiences of getting shot down, the experiences
of ejecting out of airplanes. I talked about the short amount of time that those things
happen. My perception of what happened just before and during the ejection was
recorded in my, in my, in my experience in incredibly slow motion. I can to this day
remember every instant as I pulled the face curtain out, as I started to move away from
the aircraft, as I started to fly off into space, as I tumbled. These things, they just went on
and on and on and it was just a profound experience. I liken it to when people talk about
being on the gallows and seeing their whole life flash before their eyes in the instants
before they die. That has to be what it's like, this incredible slow motion. It is an
incredibly vivid experience. I don't know whether it's fueled by adrenaline ... I don't know
how it happens. It's just an incredible experience. And that's, so that's ...
KATIE CARDWELL: Were you awarded any medals or citations?
CHAD FLETCHER: Yeah. Like all soldiers, I was awarded a variety of medals. I was
awarded the Purple Heart for the injuries that I got the second time I was shot down. I
wasn't awarded the Purple Heart the first time and it's, it's for probably a variety of
reasons. It just, it didn't happen. The criteria for a Purple Heart, that some politicians of
recent history oughta understand, is you have to be injured by an enemy with an injury
that requires medical attention. It isn't actually a commander or a member of your unit
that gives you a Purple Heart or awards a Purple Heart, it's a medical person. The medical
person...you have to be injured in such a way that you require medical attention and then
the medical person certifies a purple heart. And that didn't happen the first time for a
variety of reasons. Some people in the unit I was in believed it was because I was enlisted
and not an officer. The pilot I was with that night died. The shock of the ejection fiom the
cockpit knocked him unconscious. He landed in water. He drowned. So there was, there
were a lot of conflicting sentiments, experiences in the unit going on. Somehow I didn't
get an award that night. So, but in November when I was shot down the second time, I
got a Purple Heart. I was awarded the Air Medal, which is a medal that is given for
service in aerial flight against a non-enemy. I was awarded an Air Medal with what's
called a V Device. A V Device is a Valor Device. It's given, it can be attached to almost
any award as a sign that that soldier has done something valorous. And, so yeah ...
KATIE CARDWELL: Ok. How was life different for you when you returned to the states?
Had your outlook on life or personal philosophy changed?
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 11
CHAD FLETCHER: Whoa. Yeah. I came back in the December of 1968. I came back
and I was in, I came back in San Fransisco. I had a younger brother that was also in
Vietnam. He was in a place called Vung Tau, which was just north of Saigon. And, I
mean Ben Hua. And I used to talk to him from time to time. In fact, he came down to
visit me at Vung Tau once or twice. But when we'd take off from Vung Tau and as we
were flying past Ben Hua to go over to fly along the fence, he worked in, he was Air
Force. He was in the Air Force; he worked in an Avionics shop. Avionics are aviation
electronics. And the avionics shop that he worked in had radios; they worked on the
radios in the jets that the Air Force flew. So that gave him an opportunity to get to a radio
and, of course, I was in a flying radio, and so as we'd fly off on our way to do a mission,
I'd call him up and we'd chit chat for a few minutes and then I'd travel out of range or get
tied up doing something else. But it was an opportunity to talk to him at least, at least
once a week. Not daily, but once a week. I'd, sometime's I'd just call the shop and ask if
he was around and they'd say, "No, he's not here right now." "Ok, well tell him I went
by." So he was coming back from Vietnam 6 days after I did. I extended my stay in
Vietnam by 3 and a half months so I could get out of the army when I came back. Had I
come back at the end of my 12-month tour, I'd have had 5 and a half months left in the
army. I couldn't see anything useful that I'd be doing as a soldier in the United States, and
I felt like I really had developed some skills that were of benefit to some soldiers that
were less fortunate than I was down in the jungle. So I felt like I was better, I had a better
job to do and was more rewarded personally by staying in Vietnam and getting the
opportunity to get out when I came back. So as it turned out, I came back on the 6th of
December. My younger brother came back on the 12th of December. I stayed in San
Fransisco for those 6 days. I found a hotel downtown. An inexpensive place, but a clean
place, kind of in the center of things, and I just kinda walked the streets. I bought some
clothes, I bought myself a corduroy jacket, I bought some jeans. And I just went.. . I did a
tourist thing. And I was just kinda using the time as an opportunity to get away from
Vietnam because I left on the 6th of December, it had been literally 2 weeks before that
that I'd been shot down the 2nd time. So that experience was still real fresh in my nervous
system So I was just using the time to kinda, kinda get away from Vietnam and wait for
my brother to come back. He came back and then we started a trip through California.
We visited some relatives of ours in California. We went down to San Diego, California
to visit a buddy of mine. We went to a movie in Los Angeles and saw the movie 2001: A
Space Odyssey that had just been released in a movie format that was called panorama.
And if you sat on one of the first three rows, the screen literally wrapped around you. So
if you sat in the middle of the third row, is where we sat, the movie just happened in front
of you, and it was just a profound experience to have come from southeast Asia and
having dealt war and warfare and stone age cultures like the Montangards to suddenly sit
there and be presented with this mind-boggling movie about ultra-technology was just a
vivid experience.
KATIE CARDWELL: Why did you decide to join the ROTC and return to the Army as a
career?
CHAD FLETCHER: Well, that was a decision that probably didn't come into focus for
quite some time. One of the reasons that I was willing to allow myself to be drafted, to go
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 12
into the military, to go into Vietnam, was to get access to the G.I. Bill. The G.I. Bill
bought me an education and that was kinda my goal, my priority, that was where I
wanted to go, but I didn't have the wherewithal to do it on my own. The G.I. Bill was a
ticket to college. So when I came back, I was a very different person. I guess I was 23
years old when I came back. I went through a process of deciding where I wanted to go to
school. I didn't want to go back to Texas Western. I thought, well, maybe 1'11 go back to
Texas Tech and I had, because of some of the events in Vietnam, I had to visit a Veterans
Administration Hospital and the nearest examination station for the Veterans
Administration was in Lubbock, so I thought, well I'll use that as an opportunity to see
Lubbock and look at Texas Tech and decide if that's where I want to go to school. So I
drove over to Lubbock. As I approached Lubbock, I started to see that I'm still 12 miles
away fiom Lubbock, and on either side of the highway are aU these liquor stores and it
occured to me that, well OK, that's the way Lubbock feels about liquor, then that's
probably not where I'm g o m be comfortable going to college. And so I blew that off. I
said OK, that's all of that, I guess I'll go to Austin. So that was, I went to Austin. So I got
to Austin in the h11 of 1969. Austin in 1 969 was the Berkley of the South. It was the
hippie capital of the lower United States. And it was a magical place and it was a hotbed
of antiwar sentiment. Austin is a wonderfill town. You have a very excited, energetic
university population and 15 blocks away, you have a very conservative governmental
entity, the State of Texas. And there's a tension between those two because the State, by
its very nature, wants things to be predictable, conservative, limited, defined and then you
have 48,000 students a few blocks up the street that want to tear down all of that. They
don't want any definitions, "Don't hand any labels on me," "If it feels good, do it," "I'm
my own soul." So I came back into that culture at the university and had, as a result of my
experiences in Vietnam, realized that it was a mistake. We shouldn't have been there.
There was nothing I could do about it. There were forces at work that were global forces
that I just happened to be an instrumentality of, but I really believed in my heart that it
was wrong. I, as I was over there and as I flew up and down the countryside and as I saw
what went on, I developed this notion that like people, there are stages of maturity that
cuftures have to go through and the communism that existed in southeast Asia and that
everyone was afraid of was a necessary step, a necessary maturation in those cultures
away from those old feudal cultures. The Chinese have a real problem with the kudal
psychology that permeates their psyche. More, I think, that anybody else on the planet.
But these Oriental cultures and this feudal caste notion that defines people fiom birth to
death, there is little fieedom, little personal fieedom in that culture. And to break away
fiom that was not going to be a gentle experience for a culture. It is not a gentle
experience for a culture. And so I saw the rise of communism as a step in stepping away
fiom that feudal history. I think it's still going on in China today. I think someday the
communist mechanism will collapse, but it has to fkom the inside, not fiom the outside.
And that's what happened in Russia. The communist system structure, the communist
economy collapsed of its own weight of inefficiency. And the same thing'll happen to the
Chinese as they develop more industry, as they, as more and more people leave the rice
fields for the cities and the factories. People will get more disposable income. They'll
realize they can make choices with those, with that income, and they'll start to express
themselves. And there may be still another step that they go through before they get to
some sort of self-expressive democracy, it may be a socialism or I don't know what it'll
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 13
be, but it's just part of a natural process. It's part of a growing up process. That was my
perception as I came back fiom Vietnam. And so as all the students up in Austin were
protesting the war, I was sympathetic to that and lent the weight of my voice to their
efforts. But I had the luxwry of being able to speak fiom an experience. They were
speaking fiom a...an..
LYDIA FLETCHER: Ideological?
CHAD FLETCHER: Yeah. From an innocent, ideological, "We're against war. War is
bad. People get killed." And I had a very different reason for thinking the war was bad
and oughta come to an end, but an appropriate end. And so I lent the weight of my voice
to their efforts. But I got to a point where I bad to decide, as I got through a couple of
years of school, I had to make about, "Alright. What are you going to do when you get
out of school?" And I started thinking about that and I realized that there was something
about the excitement of the experience, there was something about the adventure of the
experience: the travel, the sights, the cultures, the experiences that I had that I really
enjoyed. I am, in my heart of hearts, an adventurer. And 500 years, I'd have been on a
ship some place headed for the unknown And I just enjoy the excitement of that. So I
started thinking, "Well, what am I going to do? I don't have a college degree. I'm
probably not going to sell insurance and live in a little house and raise kids." I wanted to
do something else. And so I started developing this notion that I liked the military
experience and what it gave me as opportunities for adventure. I liked the equipment.
They have some neat equipment. And so, in terms of toys, they don't get any better. And
so I started thinking, "You know, I enjoy flying. It's a magnificent experience. I want to
do that some more." But I also had these philosophical barriers that I would not cross.
One of them was that I never again wanted to involve, be involved in combat as an actual
combatant. And so I started thinking about flying as a non-combatant. Really about the
only role where that, those two things actually fit together is flying MedEvacs, flying
medical evacuation helicopters. So the more I thought about it, the more I thought, "Now
that would be cool" And so I started trying to figure out where I could do that. The Air
Force and the Navy have MedEvacs, but the pilots that fly them are just pilots. They're
not specific to the medical mission. The Army is the only service that has dedicated
MedEvac pilots. So that meant I had to go back into the Army. So I went to the Army,
told them I was interested in going through ROTC, that I, what I really wanted to do was
get into Medical Service Corps and fly MedEvac helicopters. And so I did that. I got into
that and I flew MedEvac helicopters for 5 or 6 years and, a result, I came to a point where .
I realized that what I was doing flying MedEvacs was really an atonement for my
participation in Vietnam. And so, OK. OK
HAJERA AHMED: Ok, so, when did you find out you were going to Saudi
Arabia ..... jumping ahead a few years ...
CHAD FLETCHER: Umrnm.. .urn.. .yeah
LYDIA FLETCHER: ... Jumping ahead a few years
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 14
CHAD FLETCHER: Yeah ...uh... In the summer ...in the summer of 1990 we were...we
were in.. . .we were at fort brad we I was I had given up flying at that point and I was. ..I
was uh what was called a medical logistician supply officer. I was assigned in medical
units and my job was getting the medicines and the surgical supplies that the doctors and
nurses needed for what they did. I had become a part of the very small group of people
that developed software that automated that process and uh we were at Fort Brad North
Carolina. We had gotten to Fort Brag about the 25 of July, 1990, to ... to ...uh train units at
Fort Brag in how to use our software to order medical supplies if they ever went to war.
Well, on the 2nd of August uh of 1990 about a week after we had gotten to Fort Brag,
Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait um the world almost instantly changed at Fort Brag
especially Fort Brag is where the units are that they send first before anything else
happens. We were there conducting training issuing the computers to these units and uh
I was called into a commander's office and uh he said uh 'Fletcher, we're going to war,"
and I said, "oh ...," thinking, well, that's going to interfere with our training, and then he
said, "and you're going with us," and I said "OHH" and uh he says, "and, we leave in
about three days," and I said "OHHHH!." Uh so fiom fort bra g... we were there to
tra in... we end up gett ing.... becoming part of the very fust trips that were sent to Saudi
Arabia. My job as...as I got over there was to set up a supply system To set up
computers and set up a...a communications link that we could sen...we could order
supplies to come in and uh so we established that depot over there ...
HAJERA AHMED: So, where were you stationed there?
CHAD FLETCHER: Uh, primarily in um around Tehran..Tehran Saudi Arabia is uh, on
the Arabian coast about due east of Riyadh about 150 km south of the Kuwaiti border.
It's a major port of Saudi Arabia it's where the ships would come in and they'd offload
supplies.
HAJERA AHMED: Umnt..so...did you ever get to ride a camel there
CHAD FLETCHER: Hah I...ha...I ha...& yeah! Uh but even more than that I got to take
pictures with camels and have my pictures taken with camels and uh I'd sent my daughter,
who at the time I think was about 1 st grade? 2nd grade? Something like that ... a picture of
me and a camel.. .
HAJERA AHMED: Uh, were you awarded any medals or citations?
CHAD FLETCHER: Oh, lots. Yeah, uh I got a bronze star and I got lotsa ... lotsa medals
for being assigned in Saudi Arabia
HAJERA AHMED: Since then have you joined any veteran's associations?
CHAD FLETCHER: I belong and participate as an active member in a group here in San
Antonio that's a part of the military order of the purple heart. And all of the members are
uh are uh former soldiers that have been injured in combat and we share that experience
of having been injured and we do ... we do community support work, we do community
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 15
projects, we, right now, are real active in helping the soldiers that are coming back &om
Afghanistan and Iraq through BAMC ... that are coming back with severe injuries and
burns...yeah.. .
HAJERA AHMED: So what do you think you've gained as far as personal morals or
beliefs as a result of your service?
CHAD FLETCHER: Oh, I think one of the things that I've uh I've ... I've developed is a
very clear sense of patriotism I have a...I have a uh very personal understanding of what
is it to be an American and uh that is contrast to what it is to be anything else I have
traveled in central America, south America, throughout the far east the middle east,
around Europe, I understand what it is to be lots of things, but it makes me appreciate
being an American all the more..
HAJERA AHMED: If you could go back and change your actions during or after the
wars you served in, would you take that chance?
CHAD FLETCHER: I wouldn't change anything
HAJERA AHMED: You wouldn't change anything?
CHAD FLETCHER: I wouldn't change anything. Uh, I..I..I....I believe that I'm a
summation of my experiences, uh, I they haven't always been fim, they haven't always
been pain fie, but they've all been valuable experiences.
HAJERA AHMED: Do you have any advice you'd give people involved in current wars
or any wars in the future?
CHAD FLETCHER: Um..I don't know that I'd be so presumptuous ... I think its
Something ...uh, I have a son who's 15 years old um, he will have to make his own
decisions, I stand before him as a model I've been there, I've done that, I'd be proud if
there was a decision made. He made the decision that he needed or wanted to defend our
country, but I'd be just as supportive if he decided he wanted to play the piano ... I...I
HkTERA AHMED: So, do you believe that the wars you were in were justified
CHAD FLETCHER: In panama I think they were perfectly justified, in Saudi Arabia I
think they were perfectly justified, uh where we were there urn to deal with what I think
was a very specific and uh very evil entity Noriega in panama uh was a terrible tyrant that
was participating in the flow of drugs into this country where he just had to be stopped,
and we went in and decapitated that government. Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussain, I think
it was a mistake not to have dealt with his thoroughly the first time but uh he had to be
stopped. He had to be removed &om Kuwait because his next step after Kuwait would
have been into Saudi Arabia I think the Saudi Arabians understood that, felt that, and we
had to be there to stop him. And part of our responsibility as the only superpower is to
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 16
MS 315. Veterans History Project Fletcher - 17