Candice Griffith
Robert Buckley
Group 2
Interview Transcri~t
Griffith: Hello, my name is Candice Griffith and I am with the University of Texas at
San Antonio. In participating in the Library of Congress Veterans History Project
I will be interviewing Mr. John Kuborn. The interview is taking place at his house.
Griffith: So, Mr. Kubom, what did you do before you joined the service?
Kuborn: I was a cook in a restaurant.
Griffith: And, where were you living at the time?
Kubom: I was living in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Griffith: And, why did you enlist when you did?
Kuborn: I have always wanted to be in the Military, and the restaurant I was working
in, there was a change in ownership, and it worked out just right for me to join the
service at that time.
Griffith: And, why did you choose to join the Air Force?
Kuborn: I had been in the civil air patrol, and had spent three or four years in the civil
air patrol, and I was very air force orientated.
Griffith: And, what was your boot campltraining like?
Kuborn: It was six weeks at Lackland in the hottest time of the year. I was there in
August. We had a lot of, what they called, red flag days, where it was just too
bloody hot to do anything. The TI was an Alcoholic, which made life interesting.
He was also a chef in Germany, and had gotten into trouble and was transferred to
Lackland. And he found out that I cooked, we had a couple of get-togethers at
various chow halls on base, so it worked out quite well, it was a good experience
all the way around.
Griffith: Where are some of the places that you have served?
Kuborn: I've done, okay, as far as where I've served it's been primarily in the
southwest area; New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Texas. As far as bases I have been
to, I was in what was called a rotational outfit, and I have probably been to just
about every base in the free world, at one time or another. We traveled, the first
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four years I made three and a half trips, time around the world. So it was an
interesting career to say the least.
Griffith: And, on to Vietnam, what did you do during Vietnam, what were some of
your job assignments?
Kuborn: Ok, I had three tours to Vietnam. I went over there, I always tell people I
went over there in 1962 to start the war, I went back in '67 to make sure it was
going well, and then went back in '72 to end it. So, but for the purpose for this
interview, probably the most important one was the middle one, 1967, and that's
when I was stationed at Bien Hoa Vietnam. And I was an aircraft mechanic, and a
crew chief, on F 100s at Bien Hoa.
Griffith: And, what was Vietnam like when you first arrived?
Kuborn: In '67 when I got there it was relatively calm. We, right after I got there we
started getting more and more attacks were occurring. They blew up the ammo
dump one time. They blew up the fuel dump one time. And then, I was trying to
think, I think it was around June, they mortared and rocketed the base. And we
took quite a few casualties and lost a couple of aircraft as a result of that. But
tensions, the Viet Cong activity were steadily increasing, and then I left in July,
before TET, so, but you could see the building of the action.
Griffith: Did you personally, or your base, work closely with people from other
branches of service?
Kuborn: Where we were, no it was primarily Air Force, and Vietnamese, we had
Ranch Hands, which was the defoliant unit, was stationed next to us, and right
down the ramp from us was Vietnamese AlE unit. SO, we had, that was the
biggest variance. And then we had our unit of F100s and then there was a small
detachment of F102s.
Griffith: Did you personally ever see combat?
Kuborn: Other than the fact when the base got the heck blown out of it, that was, that
was it. From where we were we could watch the B52s and Puff the Magrc Dragon,
the AC47 gun ships, and the helicopter gun ships. We could see them working
over the area. But, other than the night that we took the main attack, that was my
closest to combat.
Griffith: In the war were any of your close comrades seriously injured, killed?
Kuborn: No, we had, several people I knew were injured, one of them initially was
serious, and he was air lifed back to the states. But, most of the people I knew
were real lucky. I had a pilot come back one time, with, the side of his face was
all cut up. He had gotten goulld fire, it blew out the side of the canopy, the
MS 315. Veterans History Project Kuborn - 2
windsheld, but, I'll tell you, tell you that story, tell you a war story. Captain
Holland was his name, and he was coming back from a mission, and a forward air
patrol, FAC, pilot asked if there was anybody in the area that still had any
ordinance on board, and he had 20 Mike-Mike, 20 millimeter, guns on the aircraft,
he still had some rounds, and the FAC asked him if he wanted to go duck hunting.
'Cause they had found a lake, and what Charlie would do is cut the wings on the
ducks, and then they would swim around in the lake, whenever they needed food
they could go get the ducks off the lake 'cause they couldn't fly away, so it was a
food source for the Viet Cong. So, the FAC wanted to know if Holland wanted to
do some duck hunting. SO, he did, and he came down with an F100, with four
cannons on it, shooting ducks on the lake. Well, what neither one of them realized
was that Charlie had placed a gun to protect the ducks, and Holland kept making
the pass the same way. Flying over and coming down, flying over and coming
down. On the third pass the anti-aircraft opened up and caught the side of the
aircraft and caught the windscreen on the left hand side, and that's what exploded.
Cut him with shrapnel, from the glass, but he was able to bring the aircraft home
with out any problems. Of course I chewed him out for ruining my airplane just
for shooting ducks, but, he was a good guy.
GriEth: Do you have any other memorable experiences, during the war?
Kuborn: It was, it was quite an experience. The people that I met there and worked
with, in fact one of the people we were just on the cruise with was a guy that I had
met in Vietnam when we were stationed together when we came back from
Vietnam. So it was a good experience in that sense. The Vietnamese people are
very interesting people, very easy to get along with, type of thing. The country
itself, its beautiful, hot, humid, rainy season of course, lots of crawly creatures.
But, other than the fact that it was a war, it would not have been a bad assignment.
Griffith: What lund of special training, if any, did you receive in Vietnam?
Kuborn: Other than just the aircraft maintenance of which I had received prior to that,
we didn't get any special training for it.
Griffith: What was your opinion on the herbicide spraying operations? Did they
affect you in any way?
Kuborn: The Ranch Hands, like I said, were right next door to us; I knew a lot of
them. The good that they did as far as the American troops were concerned - and
the Vietnamese troops - far outweighed any problems that we're now receiving as
a result of the herbicides and so on and so forth. It.. . you have to imagine that the
jungle is so h c k that you can't see your hand in front of you and the Vietcong
would lie in wait and could ambush and so on and so forth, so, in retrospect, the
number of lives that were saved by the Ranch Hands and the work that they did
more than outweighed the number of people that are coming down with cancers
and so on and so forth. So, Unfortunately, in this country, we have a tendency
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with our very liberal press to only look at one side of the picture, and the good
that the Ranch Hands have done has never been brought out, and having been
right next door, and working with them, I can contest that they were constantly
being honored and receiving all kinds of weapons and stuff from various troops in
the field because they were able to go in and clean up and do their job much better
after the Ranch Hands had done theirs.
Grifith: Were you involved in any way in the Air Force's civic actions, such as
delivering relief supplies to the Vietnam communities?
Kuborn: In Vietnam, no. In Thailand, I worked with several organizations, including,
I helped with the leper colony that was there. In Vietnam, things were, we were
working twelve-hour shifts, and we were working anywhere from 22 to 26 days
on before we got a day off, which they'd call the RDO, which is the Regular Day
Off', whch would be like a 24 and 1 shift, so there was very little time as far as
that was concerned to do things that [inaudible].
Grifith: What medals or citations did you receive, and how did you earn them?
Kuborn: I've got the Vietnam Battle Ribbon with three or four Battle Stars on it,
constituted timeframes in the Vietnam War where the Air Force was actively
involved in doing that. I got the Vietnam Medal for Gallantry. What else is there?
I think there's a couple more in there. Nothing fantastic, just doing my job.
Gnfith: Tell me a little about the food and provisions where you were. Was it -
Kuborn: Absolutely horrible! That was one thing that the Air Force had, in those
days, made a major, major mistake. Here we are in a combat zone, and they
decided to pay separate rations so that you could buy your food on the economy.
Of course, there was no economy to buy your food on. So they had an NCO Club
that tried to fulfill the bill as a chow hall for the senior NCOs, and they did a
lousy job at it, and the chow halls themselves were so overcrowded that there was
no way they could feed the NCOs. So the majority of the time we scrounged, care
packages from home, bought what we could on the economy and then did a lot of
trading with the Army for C-rations. I would say my primary diet was C-rations.
And they're the individual containers. And what we would do on the flight line,
we'd have these big bread trucks - UPS trucks - and you would take the C-ration
cans and put 'em on the manifold of the truck, and then you'd drive around. And
I'd work primarily the night shft, and you'd drive around, around, at two o'clock
in the morning, then open up the hood and get a hot meal off the manifold. Of
course if you forgot 'em and left them on there, then the day shift, they'd explode
on them. Then they were not happy that the night shift left the beans on the
burner, so to speak. But the Vietnamese themselves had very good food, very
reasonable price. The problem, of course, is anytime you went downtown, you
were opening up an opportunity to get shot at, blown up, and everything else, so
you always had to keep that in mind. But small lobsters - small rock lobster tails;
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the most famous thing in the Vietnamese food is a sauce called Nuoc Bong sauce,
and Nuoc Bong sauce is made from fermented fish parts, along with lots of chilis
and extremely hot; you could smell Nuoc Bong from a block away, and by the
time you left there, you were putting Nuoc Bong sauce on everything, from your
eggs to your steak, and it didn't make any difference; you had oatmeal in the
morning, you put Nuoc Bong sauce on it.
Grifith: What were your living conditions like?
Kuborn: We lived in a, basically in an open barracks, but what we did was divided up
using the lockers, individual bunks with metal lockers to put your food in, or put
your clothes and stuff in. And then we had foot lockers that you could put it in
there. And by setting the lockers up and then using bamboo, you could divide it
into basically little two-man cubicles, which gave you a bit of a privacy. There
was communal showers outside. In fact, the night we got ht, that was one of the
things they hit, was the shower, so we had to walk like a block and a half down to
use another shower until they fixed that. And of course they hit the, there were
outside latrines, and that got hit also, so you got to walk through the chunks as
you were going to the shower, which made for interesting times until they got
everything repaired. They were two-story buildings; I was on the first floor,
which made it nice. After that, we got h t several more times, and it was very
easy to roll out of the bunk, with your mattress on top, you know, to stay right
there in the barracks, rather than trying, in the dark, to work your way to the bomb
shelter.
Griffith: Did you, for the most part, have sufficient supplies?
Kuborn: Yeah, that was not a problem. The aircraft maintenance, parts for the
aircraft, munitions, all of those things, we had more than enough, and in being
enterprising G.I.s, we would scrounge plywood from the Army. We had a very
marketable commodity in that we had disposable drop tanks on the aircraft, which
didn't work, and we had lots and lots of it. And we would trade those to the
Army to use as showers, and they would paint them black, put them up on posts,
fill them with water, the sun would heat it, then they could come in the field and
have hot, hot shower. So they were very amenable to trade for what we want, so
if we wanted jungle boots and, like I said, C-rations, these kind of things, we'd
swap out a pair of drop tanks for a couple of cases of each.
Griffith: How did you stay in touch with family and friends back home?
Kuborn: In those days, we had the little, three inch, tape recorders, was the primary
way. And a lot of organizations, in fact one in particular was a Jewish
organization, sent us a gigantic box - it had to have been five feet high, about
three foot square - and there must've been two thousand of these three inch reels.
And, very similar to the cassette player that we have today, except you'd set the
two reels on it, and you'd record, and then you'd put that in the mail, and you'd
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send it back. We also had a MARS station - a Military Automatic Radio System,
or something like that - and you could call on the MARS station to a base station
in the States, and then they would make the telephone call from the base station to
wherever you were calling. One of the greatest places, when they were up, or
when the atmospheric conditions were right, was the Goldwater department store
in Phoenix, Arizona. Barry Goldwater made the telephone available free of
charge, so we would go by radio from Vietnam to Phoenix and then they'd put
you through on a telephone, and 'course it was labor intensive; you had to have
someone on the Vietnam side, you had to have somebody manning the radios on
the Arizona side, and after you finished talking you always had to say 'Over' so
the person knew to throw the switch from talk to receive, and of course you had a
minimum of about six people listening to your conversation, so there was no
privacy in the conversation. And then, the other bad thing about it was you got
ten thousand G.I. s trying to use these two little phone booths, and they're about a
hundred and ten degrees in the phone booth, so you did the best that you can to
get a line, and you didn't care what time of the day or night it was in the States,
because you tried to get it the best that you could - like for me, the best time for
me to get a line was like four o'clock in the morning. So I would go over there at
four o'clock in the morning, and sometimes I'd wait an hour, sometimes two or
three hours, and I'd finally get, everything was lined up the way it should be, and
I would get through - well, it might be ten o'clock at night in the States, my wife
was in Wisconsin at the time; it could be ten o'clock at night, it could be two
o'clock in the morning, you never knew, when I would get a line, what time it
would be there. So it made for some interesting conversations. And then, of
course, you had letters, and everything that you send.
Griffith: How did people pass the time and entertain themselves?
Kuborn: We had, played a lot of poker, a lot of card games going on. We had, played
a lot of football and baseball as far as physical activities during the day, trying to
stay busy. Over to the club, cheap booze, you could always drink at the club or
drink in the barracks. Entertainment from the states and from Australia. We had
a lot of Australian entertainers. Plus there was a lot of Vietnamese entertainers.
They sang all of the popular songs of the day and all that other stuff.
Gnffith: Did you listen to many songs that were drectly related to Vietnam?
Kuborn: Everything that was, there was nothing restricted or anything. We got all of
the protest songs and all of that. I enjoy singing and I have a base voice, so I sang
with a lot of groups. To us, it was hn, poking h n at the anti-war people. So, if
the music was good, we'd play it, if it wasn't, we didn't care about whether it was,
you know, anti-government, or what have you.
Griffith: Did any of the songs affect your opinions on the war?
Kuborn: No.
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Griffith: Did you see a change in the music at any point in the war? Did it become
more for the war, more against the war?
Kuborn: Didn't pay any attention to it. What I looked for was good melody and a
good beat and somethng that could be performed with a group.
Griffith: What did you do when on leave?
Kuborn: I didn't take any leave when I was up. We were offered the "R&R, but
because I had, this was my second tour over there, we could combine tours and
everythng else, so I was going to get a three-month curtailment, so rather than
trying to take leave and the fact I was going to be home in three months, I didn't
take any leave.
Griffith: How did you celebrate the holidays?
Kuborn: A lot of booze. [laughter] In Vietnam itself, a lot of fireworks, a lot of
shooting stuff off. In Thailand, the first tour over in Thailand, the commander
brought in a ton & a half state truck full of iced beer. God, there must have been
300 cases. We tried to drink it dry, we didn't. But that was probably the biggest
thing. If we got time off, then you could ah, see the problem with drinlung was
you always had to get up and go to work the next day. So you never wanted to
hnk to where you would have a bad hang-over, because it's miserable working
on a flight line with the noise and the heat and the smell and then being hung over
from the night before. So, you would have two or three drinks, but if you were
going to work the next day, you kinda played it a little bit cool. But then if you
got a day off or a holiday or something came up, then you could just let it go,
'cause you were going to sleep the next day. Sleep was probably the biggest
thng that we did when we had the opportunity.
Griffith: What skills or lessons did you learn?
Kuborn: Oh, how to shoot an M16, open a door and throw a grenade in, No, I didn't
do any of that. I would say the shlls that I learned over there, were probably, how
to handle tense situations. Not to get really upset about things, because in the big
scheme of things they probably don't mean a whole lot. Had a, had a guy who
over there was a Sky Cop, security police, and the night before he was to rotate,
he was standing up on the water tower and got hit by a bolt of lightning, and
killed. THis guy had just gone 365 days, had been mortared, and shot at, and had
survived it all, and God struck him with a bolt of lightning. And I thought well,
that kind of puts everything in perspective. Where you goin' from there. SO,
that's probably the biggest lesson.
Griffith: What did you think of your officers and fellow soldiers?
MS 315. Veterans History Project Kuborn - 7
Kuborn: A great bunch, all the way around. We didn't, the things that you see in the
movies, depicting all that kind of stuff, never saw it. These are people that I had
trained with for a dozen years before going over. Some were new, some were old.
Friends, ah, old, ya know, people that I knew, and there wasn't a whole, I guess
that was the bottom line, is there wasn't a whole lot of difference in what we were
doing on a day to day basis, weather you did it in Ben Hoa, Vietnam, or Cannon
Air Force Base, New Mexico. We trained the way we fought; we fought the way
we trained. And it was poor working conditions, you got shot at, you know there
was other things involved. But the basic day to day, go to work, check out the
aircraft, load the munitions send it off, retrieve it, fix it, turn it, send it back off
again, was pretty much what we had all been trained to do. So, for the Air Force
side that was, that was the standard.
Griffith: Where in Vietnam did you spend time, mostly northern, southern, any major
cities?
Kuborn: Ben Hoa, outside of Saigon. And then I went on to Camaron Bay. WE
deployed up there, and I didn't go off base there 'cause, Carnaron had, was a nice
facility right where it was at. And right before I left, my unit transferred up to
FUCAT. And I didn't have enough time to go with them. Almost extended over
there like a dummy. That's the kind of camaraderie that you get. I mean here I
have a wife and children back in the states, and my unit is deploying to another
base, and I only had 60 days and you had to have a minimum of 90 days to deploy,
and I'm sitting there thinking, well I can extend for six months, and go up there
with them. But at the last minute, sanity won out, and I didn't deploy with them.
Griflith: What was your response to the news of the TET offensive?
Kuborn: The very first response was, my buddies that were over there, how they were.
And I was at a base at the time where I was able to get a message off and find out
that all of them had made it without any problem. Second response was, I knew it
was coming. NO matter what Westmorland and everybody was telling the news
media, or how the news media was reading it, Charlie needed to make a splash,
and he actually won, which is kind of ridiculous, because we knocked the crap out
of them. After TET the Viet Cong was never a serious organization again. The
never were able to, the things that I was experiencing when I was there, the
mortar attacks, the bombing of the fuel dump, the bombing of the supply dump,
all of these things, the were never able to accomplish that again after the TET
offensive. The were so, thoroughly beaten that they never became a viable
organization after that, however from the news media's side, ths was a great
victory, and so on, and so forth. Part of that problem was Westmorland.
Westmorland was probably the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time,
for that area. But, don't get me into the politics of it. [Laughter]
Gnffith: Do you recall the final days of your tours?
MS 315. Veterans History Project Kuborn - 8
Kubom: Oh, vividly. I spent most of it sitting in the bunker. Cause we were getting
hit just about every night, we were getting some kind of attack. Weather it was at
the perimeter, or a stray rocket, or a couple of mortar rounds coming in, and the
shorter I would get, the more nervous I was getting. So, finally, I think the last
three nights, I slept on top of the bunker. It was cool, it was comfortable, and it
was, it wasn't the rainy season. So I just laid out on the bunker so I could jump in
if I needed it. [Laughter] You get very, very nervous towards the end. Especially
like I say, I had seen the sky cop that I know get killed the night before he was to
rotate, and we had also lulled a couple of Viet Cong that were working on base,
the barber that I went to, turned out to be a Viet Cong, and was killed at the end of
the base. And a couple of people that worked at the Base Exchange were Cong,
and they got killed on one of the attacks. And, you got so the last days that you
were looking cross-eyed at everybody. You didn't want to go down town, you
didn't want to go to the BX, you didn't want to go to the post office, you just
wanted to sit close by with your helmet and get under cover if you needed it.
Grifith: What were some of your overall views about the war; before, during and
after your tours, or even now? Did you agree with how the US used their airpower?
Kubom: Ok, well, let's start with that. The use of airpower was ludicrous, it was
totally wrong. It was improper use of airpower from the get-go. Graduated
response with this kind of action does not work. You either go in to win, or you
stay out. So, and it went right down the line with Kennedy, and then LBJ, and
then even Nixon. They kept playing around with what you could and couldn't do.
There's no such thmg as a humanitarian war. A war, is a war, you either fight the
war, or your not gonna fight the war. We were trying to do it in such a way, and it
just wasn't working out. The second major problem there, and they solved a little
bit of it in the Gulf war, is the news media. You have to imbed the news media in
with the units so they have a feel for what's going on. IN my war, the news media
sat in Saigon. And they went out when something was happening, so they had a
totally disorientated perspective of what they were seeing. The classic is the,
police chief that is shooting the Viet cong, picture, that is whenever they talk
about the Vietnam war they always show that, and he's standing there with the
gun and he pulls the trigger and the UPS, or the photographer snapped the picture,
and that went around the world about the cruelty, and all the other stuff. The guy
he just shot, just blew up the police headquarters, killed the police chiefs brother
and his family, there were taking refuge in there, they caught him in the act of
doing it. There was no doubt of his guilt; there was no doubt of what went on. But,
none of that was ever published in the thing, and its that kind of news coverage
that was both morally wrong and did much to hurt the war. And then the third
thing from the Vietnam war was Hanoi Jane, and liberals who were against the
war, but in their protest to the war, gave aid and comfort to the enemy, and that
should have been prosecuted. There is nothing wrong with [inaudible], I have no
problem with anybody burning their daft card, and I don't have any trouble with
going to Canada cause you don't want to participate in the war, or those people
who become presidents who go to England that don't wanna, you know,
MS 315. Veterans History Project Kuborn - 9
participate, I don't have any problem with that, but when Jane Fonda goes and
photographs sitting with an anti-aircraft weapon, she went to one of the POW
camps, the POWs passed her notes to smuggle back to the country, she turned the
over to the commandant, and they were beaten as a result of it. These kind of
actions, when you are fighting a war with an enemy that is totally committed, are
unconscionable. Because that is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. SO those,
those three areas would probably be the main thing. I was not a big believer in the
domino efffet. IYma professor in history, and Ho Chi Min actually wrote the
constitution of North Vietnam on our constitution. He was assisting the
beginnings of the CIA, the OSI at the time. There were, lots of opportunities we
could have reached out to North Vietnam. Kennedy decided on a particular way
that we went, and I was in the military, so I followed my Commander in Chief,
and all of that. Would I do it again, sure, if I was I in the military and that was my
job that's what I would do.
Griffith: Do you recall the day you left service?
Kuborn: The day I left ser.. . , yeah, yeah. I had, after Vietnam, I guess I had about
five years left to go in the service, and I cross-trained into another career program.
And I had eleven months to go in the service, and they sent me for my fourth
remote, to Turkey. And, when I came back I was bitter, oh, oh, was I bitter. And I
took my retirement, and vowed that I would never have anything to do with the
military again. I was just, I was bumed out, I was bitter, my entire career it had
seemed like I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Three years later I
was offered a job as an Air Force historian, and I took it and I loved it ever since.
SO, strange the way thngs work out.
Grifith: Did you make any close friendships wile in the service, and do you still
continue those fnendships today?
Kubom: Yes, yeah, we have several, several fnends that we deal with almost on at
least a weekly basis. And we have friends that we see once a year, we still have,
exchange Christmas cards with dozens of people that we knew in the service. That
kind of stuff, is, its part of the camaraderie wither you were in Vietnam or not, its
just when two GIs meet, the first thing they look at is, "do I know you", and
"were we ever stationed together". And then you, you start talking about different
bases that you were on, until you narrow it down, and nine time out of ten if you
don't know the person at least you have been stationed in the same places. So it
gives you a, a starting point to develop a friendship right from the get-go.
Grifith: How did your personal experiences contribute to your thinlung about war
and military service in general?
Kuborn: Initially it was very bad, very, like I say, I was very frustrated; I was very
down on the military after I took my retirement. But then, as I got my degrees at
the university, and got to thinking about what had occurred and the experiences
MS 315. Veterans History Project Kuborn - 10
that I had had, and then was able to put them to what was happening in the world,
much of that changed. My personal treatment to the military probably, I am still
frustrated about that. Well to give you an example. The military came out with a
reenlistment bonus. You could get four times your base salary, you know, really
quickly. And, I was due to reenlist in August, and this thng came out the first of
September. So, I went to the personnel office, and said look, can I extend, and
then reenlist, and then get the bo.., oh no, if you extend you cant reenlist. So I
listened to em. And I didn't extend, all my buddies extended, and of course I said,
"ha ha ha" your not gonna get it. Well, I reenlisted I didn't get the bonus. They
extended for 90 days, they all got the big bonus. And it had been that way, now
eleven months left in service and you get another remote assignment, that is not
usual. [Laughter] So, I was, I was very frustrated and still am in that respect. But
the people I've met, the training I got, the officers I served under by and large, the
places that I went to, I could not duplicate that experience in any way, shape or
form. It was that good.
Griffith: Are you a member of any veterans' or other organizations related to your
service?
Kuborn: Yeah, I am a veteran, the VFW. That's the primary one right now. I'm also,
you know, a member of the Air Force museum association, the Air Force society,
all of these things. But as far as a basic veterans group, the VFW.
Griffith: Do you attend reunions through them?
Kuborn: No, I haven't. I was the historian for the 27" wing, a while. And then I
attended their reunion, as the historian. But, there's been a couple of them I've
seen, but I never attended.
Griffith: Ok, and as a final question, many of the veterans that I have ever come in
contact with are very hesitant about share their stories, and how are, or why, why
is it that you agreed to participate in this?
Kuborn: Dee beat me up and said I would, and if I didn't do it, oh no I'm joking.
Because, number one, as 1 said, I've been an air force historian, a civil service
historian for 20 years, it has been my job to tell he air force story. So, an
opportunity to tell my involvement in that air force story, just was something very
natural. My experiences over there were not the post war syndrome type, the
traumatic type, I bury my self in a bottle, or wake up with nightmares, stuff like
that. So, by and large, other than getting shot at, they were rather enjoyable,
[Laughter]. SO, when you asked, I thought sure, I don't have any problem with
that. It's ok.
Griffith: Well thank you very much.
Kuborn: Uh-huh, I'm glad to, glad to do it.
MS 315. Veterans History Project Kuborn - 11