My Father's Vietnam (2015)

[bunniefuu]

[helicopters whirring]

My name is Soren

Peter Sorensen ll,

and this is my namesake

Soren Peter Sorensen I.

He was born over a century

before me in Denmark in 1871,

and he's pictured here at 17

in his Danish m*llitary uniform.

Here's his son, my great

grandfather Ralph Sorensen,

holding me at two months old as my

father and grandfather look on.

When I look at this photograph

I wonder if any of these men

ever thought my life would

even remotely resemble theirs.

There's a stranger

lying in my bed

A slate-eyed asleep

assassin in my head

I keep on dying until

I finally fall dead

Every day has a way through

There's an ether hanging

at my door

A cross-eyed crucifier

keeping score

I keep on smiling until

I can't smile no more

Every day fades to blue

We go Waltzing past

the grave

We go Waltzing

past the grave

And we go Waltzing

past the grave

For one more day

[Soren] The first time my father took me to

Washington DC, I was around 1 O years old,

too young to really get it.

DC was one of a number of uniquely

American destinations we used to visit,

places like Annapolis

and Gettysburg,

where all I ever really learned from the monu-

ments, memorials, re-enactments and powwows

was that I loved the junk food that always

seemed to accompanied each day's outing.

When we visited

the Vietnam memorial,

I was hardly old enough to comprehend the

Smithsonian or the air and space museum,

let alone Maya Lin's

granite masterpiece

honoring the more than 58,000 Americans

who were k*lled during the Vietnam w*r.

The experience always stayed with me

because my dad made pencil rubbings

of two of the names that day: Loring M.

Bailey Jr. and Glenn D. Rickert.

I remember standing as far away as

I could from my teary-eyed father

as he made the rubbings and took

pictures of each of the names.

Who were these people, I wondered

to myself, these dead soldiers?

He had never

mentioned them before.

I can probably count on one

hand the number of times

I've seen my father's eyes well up with

tears, and I'm not sure he's ever cried.

But it wasn't a good

feeling as a child

seeing that vulnerable, human side

of a guy I imagined was invincible.

This little effort to distance myself

physically from my father in DC

continued emotionally

throughout my adolescence,

manifesting itself as a fear of

upsetting or disappointing him,

as I intentionally grew

into what I considered to be

a much different person

than he once was.

This distance between us,

real or imagined on my part,

caused me to wait until I was over 30

to ask him how he ended up in Vietnam.

[Peter]

"Not by choice, by chance."

Or is it "By chance, by choice"?

There was a recruiting

slogan that had to do with...

Yeah, "By choice, but not by

chance," or something like that.

You pick your branch and all that

good stuff and you get a career path,

go to college and become

a PhD machine gunner.

I backed into it. I knew that this was

probably the biggest news story of my life.

I knew that I wanted to be a journalist,

or thought I wanted to be a journalist.

I was a political science major.

There have been family males

involved in the Civil w*r,

the Spanish American w*r, World w*r I

and II, Korea, and this was just my w*r.

There's a tradition of, if you're a male

and there's a w*r on, that's your job.

That's what you do.

It's just bad luck, or good luck

if you're into that sort of thing.

So I was balancing not wanting

to miss this news story,

a dyed-in-the-wool

Ernest Hemingway fan.

On the other side of the coin, I knew that

this was a bogus w*r, it was a civil w*r,

the politicians were steering us astray, and I

sure as hell didn't want to die over there.

But you balance one against the other, and

then depending upon where you want to go

with the discussions, you can play this

out right until the day I got over there.

It's avoidance tempered with,

this is something I should

be doing, or want to be doing.

[Soren] In 1968 a lot of

high school and college seniors

were in the same

situation as my father.

And the perception of Vietnam as a working

class w*r fought only by America's poorest

and least-educated

citizens was changing.

In March, President Lyndon Johnson announced

that he would not seek reelection.

In April, Martin Luther King

was assassinated.

In June,

it was Robert F. Kennedy.

In November, Richard Nixon

was elected president.

[Peter] Nixon had a plan.

I remember distinctly sitting in Fort Dix

cleaning an M14 and listening to speeches,

and Nixon had a plan

to get us out of Vietnam.

I was thinking to myself, if he can do that

in two months, I'm going to vote for him.

[Soren] Another Connecticut resident

who probably voted for Nixon in '68

is Loring Bailey, then an employee

of Groton-based Electric Boat,

the largest manufacturer of submarines

for the United States Navy.

Bailey's only son Loring Jr., or "Ring"

to his close friends and family,

enlisted in the United States Army

around the same time as my father,

and for similar reasons.

When the kids came out of, or

graduated from school, from college,

when they ended home

here in Connecticut...

Well, all over the country,

there lying in the pile of mail

was the card for

registration for the draft.

Every senior faced that.

A lot of people said, "My God, if I'm

going to be drafted I'll enlist."

"I'll go before they call me."

[Soren] It surprised me to hear that

so many young people in the late '60s,

including my father and Ring

Bailey, were still enlisting.

Members of my generation, the sons

and daughters of these baby boomers,

seemed to treat the topic of Vietnam

either with overt criticism,

including comparisons to Iraq and

Afghanistan, or eye rolls and apathy.

I've honestly never spoken to very many people

my age or any other come to think of it,

willing to defend the American

government's motivations

for expanding our m*llitary's

involvement in Vietnam.

But the reasons people enlisted were

not as simple as I once imagined.

Because the United States

m*llitary is now all-volunteer,

I always figured anyone who made

a conscious decision to enlist,

rather than waiting for the draft

or avoiding the w*r altogether,

must have been enthusiastically anti-communist,

that or too willing to please their fathers,

members of Tom Brokaw's

"greatest generation."

I think it's partly doing

what is expected.

So I think he was reared in the

tradition of being responsible,

"doing the right thing,"

however you define that,

and not disappointing

your family.

And he had not just a father, but a

grandfather whom he loved, and aunts,

and a family tradition that would

be a big deal to just walk out on.

The National Guard wasn't available unless

you knew somebody, or your name was Bush

or you had some way of getting

in to the National Guard.

The National Guard was closed out,

the reserves were closed out,

'cause they were

really popular, obviously.

You weren't going to see action.

I looked into the Army.

The Army had a program-

And I was about to be

drafted as far as I knew...

If you sign up for officer candidate

school, and at any point wash out,

you get the time you spent in training

subtracted from a two-year draft.

So my mind is cranking away

and I'm thinking to myself,

it takes a couple months for Basic, a couple

months for Advanced Individual Training,

however long I could

play out OCS,

and then if you, again,

throw in the towel-

If I played it right, I would

have either less than a year...

And at that point if you had less than

a year, they weren't shipping you out-

So I would come

pretty close to a year.

If I had done something other than go, my

father probably would have been disappointed.

But in terms of my family, I received

no input either to go or not to go,

whether it's a good idea

or bad idea.

I think he cared about his father's

impression of him, but I'm not sure...

but I also think he resented it.

[Peter] It would have been

an embarrassment probably,

because there was

a stigma attached.

Again, if you go back to

that era, in a neighborhood,

if somebody was evading, if somebody went to

Canada or something, the neighbors talked.

[Soren] Perhaps America's hindsight

perception of '60s counterculture, hippies,

and the sexual revolution

produces the illusion

of a greater protest

movement than actually existed.

As much as I can't imagine enlisting in

the m*llitary during the Vietnam era,

for my father and Ring Bailey,

evading, avoiding, dodging the draft,

or going to Canada

weren't really options.

When I contacted Ring Bailey's

widow Maris to request

an interview she respectfully

declined, stating,

"The years since Ring's

death have done little to soften

my heartache

and anger over his loss."

Maris put me in touch

with her brother Rik,

who invited me to his home

in Burlington, Vermont.

Rik's deaf in his left ear, so he received a

4F designation, meaning unfit for service,

upon completing his physical.

He told me the outcome of the physical

didn't matter. He wasn't going to Vietnam.

Does it look like me?

I would have gone to jail.

They sent draft resisters to a

Allenwood prison farm in Pennsylvania.

It's minimum security.

There's no barbed wire.

Ring became

my sister's boyfriend.

Ring was two years older than me

and he became a mentor.

He went to Trinity

College in Hartford.

He was really smart.

And I really liked him,

and here he was with my sister,

and we hung out together.

So that's how I met him, and he

eventually married my sister.

You know, that's Ring.

And by gosh, the telephone

call that I received

the night that he went

down to Fort Dix was,

"Hey, Dad, I'm in the infantry!"

Well, you take Rings glasses off and

he couldn't see a hundred yards,

and make out anything without

glasses, in a hundred yards.

But here he was in the infantry.

Well, okay. So, you'll

learn how to march.

Ring liked automobiles. He was

a real automobile enthusiast.

His father was

an automobile enthusiast.

His father had

a XK140 Jaguar coupe.

Most of them are roadsters, this

one was a coupe. It was swooping.

And I learned the appreciation

of these automobiles from Ring.

He drew cars, he knew race cars, he

had little die-cast miniature cars.

He collected them and now I do.

He had a Bugeye Sprite.

Before he went to Vietnam, he bought a Bugeye

Sprite, and I bought a 1600 Fiat roadster.

And in his time off before

he went to Vietnam,

we worked on these

two cars and we drove around.

Fun.

With a cloud over your head fun.

[Soren] My father met

Ring Bailey in 1969 at OCS,

Officer Candidate School,

in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

They were both aspiring writers, Hemingway

fans from small Southern New England towns.

And the seemingly insignificant common ground

they shared led to an alliance that almost

spared them both from service

outside the United States.

[Peter] He was gonna be a journalist.

He wanted to go into writing.

And he found a colonel who was looking

for people to write training manuals.

And the colonel said, "I need a

half-dozen or I need four writers."

And he got the job, and he said,

go down there, and he said, "We'll spend

the next year outside of Washington."

He was married,

I was about to get married.

He said, we'll spend...

either a year or a year-plus

writing training manuals

at Fort Belvoir

which is a suburb of

Washington DC with our spouses.

What could be better?

In any case I went down,

interviewed, got the job,

and in both cases our orders

for Vietnam got cut

before the orders

for the writing job.

[Soren] My father and Ring both

decided against finishing OCS

and were sent

to different bases.

They weren't gung ho by

any stretch of the imagination.

Neither were countless other Americans

who found themselves in Vietnam.

Selective service and self-preservation

were not as contradictory

then as they seem to be today.

When my father received word that he

would be shipping out in October of '69,

my parents had to move their wedding

up from September to August.

People in my mother's hometown, Wheeling, West

Virginia, were convinced she was pregnant.

The day that he left for Vietnam, my

parents didn't feel comfortable having me

drive him to the airport

because I was gonna be upset.

And so they arranged a bus trip

or a limo trip for him,

so the thing came

around the circle.

I remember vividly

saying goodbye to him

and opening that door and having

him walk and get in that car.

[Peter] It could have

been Air America,

but it was a commercial flight

with stewards and stewardesses,

although we were

wearing jungle fatigues.

We landed in Hawaii

and Guam for refueling,

but essentially other

than the fatigues...

I don't recall

an in-flight movie,

but we had meals and it was

like nothing was happening.

And on the way down, everybody was sort

of hanging onto their seat and concerned,

because we're in this commercial setting...

it was just a regular airplane flight,

and the next thing we knew, we were

at a 45-degree angle coming down.

When we landed, I asked one of the

stewardesses what the story was

and she said when we get to

Vietnam, we do m*llitary landings

to lessen the exposure

to enemy fire.

And on the way down, it was like we were looking

at each other like we're not gonna make it.

We're not even gonna land this plane, or

there's been a mechanical difficulty.

We saw the South China Sea, we saw

Vietnam, and the next thing we knew,

we were just...

seemingly crash-landing.

We hit the deck,

they open the door,

and once it was open it was like a blast

furnace, it went from an air conditioned cabin,

originating flight from

Fort Louis, Washington,

and the heat and humidity

was unbearable.

It was just very difficult

to communicate.

Within two hours I was on the perimeter of

Cam Ranh Bay stringing Concertina wire,

and I figured I wasn't

gonna make it 24 hours.

I figured the environment or the

temperature was going to do me in.

I wasn't going to make it

because of the weather.

[Elizabeth] I was scared that

something might happen.

I knew he wasn't going to be in the

jungle, that would have freaked me out.

I guess I didn't constantly fear the way I

would if he had been in combat or a Marine.

And then at night, I remember there was

some kind of either an arc: light,

which is a B-52 drop,

or there was a firefight, something

going on in the mountains.

And I remember looking, coming out of the

hoooh and looking toward the mountains,

and it was like there

was a large thunderstorm.

You'd see a flash and then

there'd be a four-minute delay

and then you'd feel

the concussion.

It brought home that

you know where you are,

and then tomorrow or the next

day, the day after that,

you're going to be closer

to what's going on there.

Loring was assigned to an infantry

brigade, an infantry battalion.

I was assigned to an

engineer company,

and essentially he went off and did his

thing and I went off and did my thing.

His first letter

indicated that he had,

on the day of his arrival, that

night, they went out on a snake.

That was a case of where

you blackened your faces,

you're heavily armored,

and he was with

a group of machine gunners,

and they set up

a blocking force.

And he said, the blocking force,

we were there,

but nothing occurred.

[Peter] From Cam Ranh

Bay orders to Chu Lai,

which is the m*llitary

headquarters company

or headquarters

for the Americal Division,

and it was there, they have what

they call the Combat Center,

which is like graduate school,

and for a week you were there to acclimatize

yourself and also go through a quick k*ll course,

where you had a BB g*n and had

to sh**t at pop-up targets,

booby traps and mines

and try not to set them off.

Everybody set off something,

which is kind of debilitating...

Warning lectures on dr*gs.

All the hooches had

essentially plywood walls,

screens, and then

corrugated tin roofs.

And then attached,

or very close by,

there were culverts or half

shells covered with sandbags

which were for rocket

att*cks or incoming...

The defensive

positions essentially.

The first night I was there,

we had incoming rockets.

There was an expl*si*n.

We were green. We were looking

at each other, what was that?

And finally somebody came

running through the hooch

and said, "Everybody in the shelter,"

and we all got in the shelter.

There were three or four more

rockets that came in that night.

So the first night that I was in Chu

Lai, we received rocket att*cks,

probably B-1 Os

or Soviet-made rockets.

They were just set up with bamboo

stakes out in the hinterlands

and they were launched

towards the American base.

I don't think there were

any casualties or anything,

but that was my

introduction to incoming.

From there, we got orders

to Duc Pho, which is about

on the coast,

it's in Quang Ni Province.

I was assigned to the

engineers, from the engineers

I was shipped out to LZ Liz,

or Landing Zone Liz,

which was a forward

fire support base.

And there were three mountains, one

large lump where the LZ was located.

There were a couple of howitzers there, and I

stayed there for four months or so, five months,

doing mine sweeps

and construction.

[Soren] For soldiers of the

Vietnam era and their loved ones,

letter writing was the most

useful method of communication.

As much as pictures tell us what the

w*r was like for these young men,

their letters home are as remarkable,

not only for what was written,

but also for what was left out.

[Rik] He wrote to us

to protect us.

He wrote to us and tried

to look at the light side.

He wrote a letter about a duckling

that he took with him for three days,

a little duckling that he carried on heli-

copter rides and finally let go somewhere.

There was Pete the puppy clog who followed

them around. He wrote about micro frogs.

[Loring Sr.] Oh, he was upbeat.

It was an upbeat deal.

He made it that way. I could tell you

one letter that he sent to his wife,

three or four paragraphs of

disassembling and assembling...

a machine g*n,

a 50-caliber machine g*n.

I don't think he copied it out of the

manual, but it was very, very close.

And he wrote this...

"Also, saw an enormous

python the other day."

Those exciting animal names grow

a bit meaningless or prosaic

when we think of them as automobile

models or can opener trademarks.

"But a real python opens your eyes and gives

new meaning and respect to the name."

He was in a God awful

environment...

just hideous.

[Peter] He was carrying 70 pounds of pack,

and then going from place to place,

and at night

setting up ambushes.

If it was the monsoon season,

you were wet to the bone,

48 hours, three days,

four or five days at a time.

Elizabeth, I wrote once a day. If I

missed a day I used to write two.

I probably got back

an equal amount.

It wasn't like World w*r ll where everybody

wrote, and everybody sent cookies,

and everybody did this. It was fairly confined

to the closest relatives and closest friends.

So you didn't get groundswells of mail, but the

ones I counted on obviously were Elizabeth's,

and friends.

I wrote him a letter

every day and did that.

But when he was gone,

he left in September

and at Christmas, which was a big family

gathering around the Christmas table

with my parents and Aunt Susie and Uncle

Atwood and all of the cousins and everybody.

And here I was having

been married one month.

And he left in September

and it was Christmas.

The entire Christmas clay and

through the entire Christmas dinner

not one person mentioned him,

he was not toasted.

He was not... it just

wasn't in their conscious.

Part of our job was

to get up, very punctual,

so that the enemy knew

we were coming.

But there was at least

eight of us,

this parade of people

going down the road.

We did the sweep, and then

at the end of the sweep,

what would happen was a five-ton dump

truck would be filled up with sand.

It was called pressure testing,

and it would back down the road,

so anything that we missed electronically,

theoretically the clump truck would set off.

We did this one day,

got onto the truck,

because the pressure testing had been done,

and they would drive us back up to LZ Liz.

And on this particular day, we were working

on bunkers and then all of a sudden

we heard an expl*si*n

down toward the road.

It was after the monsoon,

so they were repairing the road.

Anyway, we got down there and

the medevac was just leaving.

The dump truck driver...

The mine went off right under

the cab and it blew his eye out.

He had other injuries, but we had to

do another mine sweep of the road.

So this is the second mine sweep

within four hours, five hours,

and they did another

pressure test.

Got back on the dump truck to LZ Liz

and started working on the bunkers,

and we heard another expl*si*n.

Another truck bringing

a load of dirt blew up.

Again the medevac was there.

But there were those two

in one morning.

The next day they

had sniffer dogs.

They accompanied us

for the next week,

and we never found

anything else.

But we lost two dump

trucks and two guys.

This is a Corgi die-cast miniature car.

I don't know the scale.

It's a De Tomaso Mangusta

that I sent to him as a Christmas

present, and we liked our cars.

And he wrote to me, he said,

"In the dark watches of the night, I roll

the De Tomaso Mangusta Corgi toy car"

that Rik sent me back

and forth very quietly.

I sit squishing the suspension up

and down for minutes at a time,

looking at it at eye-level,

digging its amber headlights.

But that's another form

of devotion entirely.

Huddled under my poncho, trying to

preserve the condition of my stationary,

all thought of quality gone,

writing away while monitoring

my trusty two-way radio,

looking out at the little

plastic Christmas tree

that one of our machine

gunners received in the mail

and planted before

his draped poncho.

Put the little metal car, the De Tomaso

Mangusta that I carry in my pocket,

beneath the plastic

tree and lo and behold,

we'll have toys under the tree

come tomorrow morning.

All the amenities are not lost.

One little Tupperware container

of mother's best cookies, too.

No, all is certainly not

lost at Christmastime.

Next Christmas Eve,

I'll perhaps remember

my rainy night

squatting beside my radio

on my plastic covered map to keep

my bottom unsuccessfully dry,

watching the bushes move, and every so often

munching on mixed nuts without peanuts.

"Maybe this was the Christmas Eve and

Christmas to make the rest worthwhile."

[John] For about

two-thirds of the time,

it was as a platoon leader.

I went in as

a second lieutenant.

March, April, somewhere in there, I

was promoted to first lieutenant,

and so I had a platoon of men.

We never had a full

compliment of people.

I believe a full compliment

would be 40 some people,

and we had generally running

close to about 30 at the max.

We would go out

on patrol during the day,

and we'd set up

ambushes at night.

Most of what we were looking

for were resupply issues.

The area we were in had been defoliated,

bulldozed, b*rned, and was a free-fire zone.

So anybody out there

theoretically was a target.

That made it difficult when you

actually wanted to eliminate a target,

you were told that you could possibly

impact some poor innocent civilian

who wasn't supposed

to be there in the first place.

So I was involved in planning,

deploying the troops, making sure

everybody knew what their mission was,

making sure the resupply came in, whether

it was weapons, food, whatever it was.

[Loring Sr.] Ring volunteered

to go out and carry the radio.

I wrote back to him saying,

"You get rid of the radio

as fast as you possibly can.

That is

a highly visible target."

He had already been in this unit, my

first unit that I was assigned to.

So when I first met

Loring he was spec 4,

I believe was his

rank at the time,

and he was my radio guy.

And so he was responsible for any

communication out of our field unit

to anything or anybody else

we needed.

Actually, when I saw

the picture, I...

realized, I hadn't remembered

a whole lot

from the picture you sent me.

I remember dark hair.

I always had the impression

he was a lot taller than I was,

but I'm not sure

if he was or not.

And the glasses.

He seemed like a, this sounds terrible, not

that the other people weren't civilized people,

but he seemed more civilized,

educated, reasonable, intelligent

than many other

people I ran into.

I'm the guy that when he went fishing

as a kid I threw the fish back in.

I had never hunted,

I had never been around weapons.

I didn't come from a family

that was into the outdoors.

We were tennis players

and swimmers.

So this gung ho, try to keep

yourself from being k*lled,

carrying a hundred

pounds of supplies

and being armed and sh**t

to k*ll, very strange.

The minute I was in country

and the night we were rocketed,

I knew I didn't want to be

a combat engineer,

and I knew that I wanted to get as

far from the ugliness as I could.

And I went to the division headquarters

and I got a unit transfer application,

dutifully filled it out the second day

or third day that I was in country

or in Chu Lai and then did not

hear anything for four months.

During that period, we were

in Mo Duc building a bridge,

and I took pictures and wrote

a story about the project,

and I submitted it to the 31

st public information office,

and that was that, and about three

weeks later or two weeks later,

the squad leader over the radio received a call

from the captain in charge of the engineers,

"Have Sorensen on the LZ at a certain

hour with all his equipment,"

and the squad leader, of course,

looked a little askance at me,

"Where are you going,

and how'd you do it?"

So anyway, I got on the LZ

and the next thing I know,

the captain's personal helicopter

was there, picked me up,

and then flew me back

to Bronco, all of five miles,

and the captain was in his jeep

waiting to pick me up,

and he looked at me and said,

something to the effect that,

"You look a little scruffy to be someone

who's working in the rear now."

He explained that I had been reassigned

to the public information office.

The story that I had written

appeared in either "The Army Times"

and or "Stars and Stripes"

and so someone said,

"Take this guy out of the engineers and put

him in the public information office."

There happened to be an opening.

So that was the transition,

it was abrupt.

There were four people assigned

to the public information office

and two of them were officers,

two were enlisted.

So I was in a position where

I could come and go as I pleased

as long as I maintained a certain flow of

stories and pictures out of that office,

they didn't care if I showed up.

They didn't care what I did.

Sort of to further add to the confusion

and to the elation on my part,

the division thought the brigade was in

charge of the public information office,

the brigade thought the division was

in charge, so nobody was in charge.

[Peter] One of the things I did was fly

with either the combat as*ault unit

or they had a light observation

helicopter unit that did scouting work,

or drew fire, or visual

reconnaissance flights.

And there was a pilot named Rickert

and I typically flew with him.

Glenn Rickert was a captain,

very accessible, very friendly.

When I had to take pictures, when

we needed aerial photographs

or reconnaissance photographs,

I would go out,

or if I needed to take pictures

of a body or something like

that, he would fly me out there.

[Soren] This is Glen Aurelius.

He flew Light Observation Helicopters

with Glenn Rickert in Vietnam in 1970.

For him the Vietnam w*r represented an

opportunity to pursue his love of flying.

He works as a pilot to this clay.

[Glenn] I looked up to

him, maybe a role model,

I believe that

would be the case.

He had a commanding

presence, soft-spoken.

I Wasn't the only one

who would say this to him,

but probably the first and I'd say

it many times because we were close.

The job we were doing was

very dangerous, very risky.

Every day you never knew

what was going to happen.

And I said, I told him

a couple of times that

I could do all of those trips

and he wouldn't have to do any,

because he had a wife

and a child now,

there was more to lose there

if something happened to him.

I remember

the conversations with him,

and he said "No," he said, "Thank you,

but I really like flying these flights."

[Soren] Like my father and Ring Bailey, Glenn

Rickert had only been married a short time

before shipping out. His son Glenn Jr.

Was only an infant at the time.

He and his mother Margie still live in Pennsylvania,

not far from where Glenn Sr. Grew up.

[Rickert] I think it was a little bit

after the parade for Bucks County,

Vietnam Memorial. I finally

started realizing my heritage,

so I finally wanted to get it

all put together, the letters,

the uniforms, things like that,

so it was a lot of information

so I figured I'd just kind of start throwing

it all together in some type of format

just so I could show people.

Because a lot of people

were asking after that time.

And then, in school I did

a project about his life,

that helped out a lot, too,

with being able to share that.

[Margie] He wanted to go,

he wanted to do his part,

and he really believed

in what he was doing.

It wasn't that he didn't

feel that we should be there.

I mean, of course everybody

has mixed feelings about w*r,

nobody likes w*r, but if you believe

in what the purpose of it is,

tying to liberate

an oppressed people basically,

that's what it comes down

to and he believed in that.

He was a very moral person.

He was a Christian, so he valued life,

every life, regardless of their politics.

In Vietnam, there was a time when

I was so wrapped up in the w*r

and what I was doing over there, that

I didn't really write regularly.

I believe it was Glenn that told me one time

that my parents were trying to get a hold of me

or that the Red Cross had contacted him

to tell me that I needed to write home.

Because I hadn't written or contacted

them for maybe a couple of months,

and when you think about it,

that's pretty sad

with all that was going on

on TV every day of the week,

every hour there were pictures

of helicopters being sh*t down

and people getting

k*lled by the thousands.

So I thought it was very selfish of me

to be that way and not communicate.

I just isolated

myself over there.

I just really detached myself from there

rest of the world, it just didn't exist.

No newspapers,

I didn't see any TV.

It was really what was going on

right there and then.

But then when the Red Cross

contacted me

through Glenn Rickert, then I realized

there that I really needed to communicate,

and that they cared and they wanted to

hear from me, so it was a wake-up call.

[Margie] Because of his

morality and his beliefs,

I believe that's why on weekends

he would go to the orphanage.

That was an outlet for him that he felt probably

counteracted all the death and destruction,

through the week whenever

he could go to the orphanage

and do something in a more positive vein,

I think that was an outlet for him.

[Glenn] He was really a very humane guy.

He really cared about,

he wasn't prejudiced, he didn't

look at the Vietnamese as being-

whereas some pilots you know, looked at

the Vietnamese as being maybe inhuman,

not like them.

But really we were all the same,

and Glenn looked at

the Vietnamese,

both the enemy and not

the enemy, as being people.

And there was an

orphanage in Quang Ni.

He wanted me to do a favor for him. He

had adopted an infant Vietnamese girl.

She was probably

six months, four months old.

Anyway he asked as a favor,

"Would you mind taking pictures of the

baby so I can send them home to my wife."

It was kind of strange because

she was a part of his life,

but of course to me

it was just a picture.

But I knew I'd be able

to love her like he did.

He flew me up there

and we got out.

I met the baby and took pictures and

printed up some pictures for him.

I had it in our kitchen. I don't...

Well, Glenn was so little.

I also had a bank where I was saving

money towards our R&R in Hawaii,

so it was like Ian and the

bank were right there.

It was just, that was

what we were, you know,

that was our goal to get

to R&R and then to adopt Ian.

[Soren] Glenn Rickert sh*t this 8mm footage

while piloting his light observation helicopter

over Vietnam in 1970.

Margie told me that Glenn had always wanted

to fly helicopters and that, in a way,

he was very much in his

element during the w*r.

For Ring Bailey, unfortunately,

things were not going quite as well.

So I think it was at least on two

occasions, once before and once after,

I was in the public

information office,

his unit...

I crossed paths with his

unit and he was there.

And he was...

I got insights.

He had no axe to grind,

and he was an honest person...

or candid with me. I had no reason

to believe he'd color the facts...

or would say anything

that was inaccurate.

But the first time he was seemingly

pretty down in terms of spirits.

The unit was involved

with a company

either practicing or calling in

air-strikes on farmers,

clearly not m*llitary targets,

and they were either just for the

hell of it or they were practicing.

There were situations like that, or just

the day-to-day grind was getting him down,

the lack of sleep,

the physical work,

the sn*pers, the ambushes that

were set up night after night,

He was not in a good place

mentally, let's put it that way.

He wasn't depressed, but

he was exhausted, I think.

I had a cat named Miranda.

And I had her bred

and she had kittens,

and I had written him about the kittens,

and here he was in the jungle and he said,

"You know how I'd react, but its

really hard for me to understand"

the joy of being

a cat with kittens

"when I'm out here

in the jungle."

The second time I saw him, we were about to get

an opening in the public information office

and I said, and in fact

I had mentioned it last time,

if I can put your name in or would you

mind if I put your name in for a position

writing and taking photographs,

and of course he jumped on it.

And it was about the time that

the vacancy became available

that I found out

that he was k*lled.

It's just another day

going out on patrol.

We were getting toward evening.

We were setting up a night defensive

perimeter for the platoon.

And so I had both Robert and

Loring with me up on the knoll...

giving out instructions, "Okay,

we want our grenade launchers"

to cover those gullies

over there.

"We want the M60's along this straight

area, this flat area that's open."

Normal things you would do

to set up for a perimeter.

I can't recall exactly how

long we were up there,

but we were up there shuffling around

this area for quite some time.

Then I said, "Okay, let's get

that set up" then I walked away,

and that's when

the expl*si*n went off.

And to my knowledge, there wasn't

anything left of either Loring or Robert.

I was blown through the air... what

seemed like quite a long distance,

but I really don't have any way

of objectively measuring that.

I know one individual about an

arm's length in front of me...

had a big piece of shrapnel

sticking out through his shoulder.

He survived but had significant nerve

damage on his right arm, his shoulder.

It would have to have gone within

inches or a foot of me to hit him,

just with the line of sight.

And I remember lying there,

not knowing what

the heck had happened.

Ears are ringing and I remember

saying, "My legs, my legs!"

And another lieutenant

came along,

and I can still

picture him. He said-

It seems funny

but in this tragic situation...

He said, "There's nothing wrong

with your legs, Wilson, get up!"

And so I got up... The

rest of it's pretty hazy.

Every night somebody had

to go in at 12:00 at our office,

the information office, and then go

over to the tactical operations center

where all of the communications from

the fields was filtered into one room,

a sort of action room,

or w*r room,

where the colonel could come and see the area

of operation and see where various units are,

what m*llitary intelligence was

telling us, where people were.

And then there was a list on a corner of

enemy and friendly missing in action,

k*lled in action,

wounded in action.

That particular day, I was on duty, and so I

had to go over and I went over at noontime- ...

Or not noontime, at midnight.

On the board it said

two KIA, 1st and the 20th.

Before I went back

to wire it in, I went down

to graves registrations,

where the bodies went.

And anyway I asked

the enlisted in charge

the names of the people

who were k*lled.

One was a sergeant and the

other was Loring Bailey.

And I said "How'd he die?"

And he said...

The euphemisms for a booby

trap, a mine or booby trap,

was traumatic amputation.

So he d*ed of

traumatic amputations.

Then he sort of sarcastically said, "Do you

want to see the body?" and I declined.

I didn't think I could take it.

Anyway, I dutifully went back to the

detachment and called the division,

called the numbers in and Loring became a

number. He went from a person to a number.

The device that k*lled

both Loring and Robert

was either an a*tillery

round or a mortar round,

and we suspect that it was either

a 155mm round or a 175mm round,

and that was triggered,

we think,

by a battery and

a couple of metal plates.

And when the contact was made,

completed the circuit, and up it went.

The officer...

that came and

announced Ring's death...

I was at work and I was putting

my coat and hat on the rack

and I heard someone say, "He just

came up on the elevator." And then...

another man that worked

with me came down and said,

"Look, they want you in the

conference room right away."

So he and I walked up to the

office and he opened the door,

and I stepped in thinking he would come in

right behind me, but he closed the door.

And here I was face to face

with a service officer, a major,

and a sergeant major.

And he was on one

side of the board table

and I was facing him

across the table

and the sergeant

was on his right.

And he introduced himself as Major So-and-So,

I can't think of his name right now.

But his daughter worked at

SUPSHIP across the street,

so we had a little chat about the

fact that I knew his daughter.

Then he said, "I have some..."

Well, I looked at him,

and it was perfectly reasonable.

I saw that he had

a bronze oak leaf,

and the device

on his lapel indicated

that he was

of the engineer corps,

corps of engineers.

That seemed to be perfectly normal

to me, so, what's this all about?

It never dawned on me

until he said, "I have some

very bad news for you."

And even then,

until he went to work and said,

"Your son was k*lled

on the 15th, Monday the 15th."

And this was Wednesday,

just two days later.

March 17th darling, March 17th.

And that was a...

that was a tough thing.

[Rik] My mother called me

and told me that he was gone.

I mean, she just said,

"He's gone."

And I walked out the back door

and I went home,

and I went home and you

know, you see it in movies

the olive green sedan,

with the dress uniforms,

that drives up to the house.

And there was the olive green sedan

in front of my mother's house,

and my sister was there...

[signing]

- I'm sorry.

- It's okay.

And the Army men were there,

and their shoes were

so, so f*cking shiny.

At the time that we were

informed of his death,

the officer that was responsible

went to the apartment,

the address that Ring had.

That was his abode at the time that he

went into the service was Hartford.

So that officer went to

the Hartford apartment

and he received a very

unpleasant greeting

from a member of Marie's family.

When they were leaving,

I said to him

in my anger, I said,

"It's too bad he was

fighting on the wrong side."

The young brother,

Marie's young brother

was sort of a wild

kid in college,

and I don't know what the name

of the association was,

but he represented

the ultra extreme

student opposition to the w*r.

[Rik] I was involved

in antiwar activity.

I had a choice

when I went to college.

Some of my friends went further to the left, went

to what they called the Weather Underground.

I was involved with a group called Students

for a Democratic Society, it was SDS.

And I went with what was

called the moratorium.

The moratorium was

symbolized by the dove,

and it was the peace movement.

And it wasn't just kids like us with

long hair. It was grandmothers.

It was real people who really wanted to end

this w*r and make the world a better place.

So I talked with

the older brother,

and I gave him a little

bit of a warning, I said,

"As a result of

Rik's involvement..."

I think you should be aware

that I've been informed

that there's a possibility

"that students may go

to work and demonstrate."

They were concerned

about me at the funeral.

They were concerned that I'd do

things that, I don't know...

All I did was cry.

I couldn't drive my car.

I've never known

that amount of grief ever.

[Soren] Loring M Bailey Jr. was k*lled on March

15, 1970 in an expl*si*n that also k*lled

19-year-old Staff Sergeant Robert A.

Wood of Savannah, Georgia.

In a letter to my mother dated

March 17th my father wrote,

"I just learned yesterday that a good

friend of mine was k*lled by a booby trap."

I'm sure you remember me speaking

of a Loring Bailey after OCS

and a few months ago

when I met him on LZ Liz.

It is such a damn waste.

I tried ever since I got a job in the rear to

get him into the office and out of the field.

"Now I feel like

I didn't try hard enough."

A little over two months later on May 20,

the helicopter Glenn Rickert was piloting

received enemy fire,

and he was k*lled.

It's hard to recollect because I wasn't

there, but from the information that I got,

which was sparse,

and the Way I envision it

in my mind

is that he was on

a combat as*ault,

combat recon.

He had cover, aerial cover,

with maybe some other types of

gunships or maybe another LOH.

More than likely other gunships

and he was...

doing low-level

reconnaissance, I believe.

When I say that, we're talking

about five feet above the ground,

hovering around low and slow

blowing the bushes away,

looking behind rocks

and looking for tunnels.

I believe it was on

the side of a mountain,

maybe 150 feet or 200

feet above the valley.

It wasn't unusual

to uncover hiding places,

and have people get up and start

moving and running and sh**ting.

From what I was told

that's what happened.

He uncovered the enemy

or somebody was there

and maybe from behind

a rock they sh*t him down.

The b*llet that k*lled him actually came

in through his back, through his shoulder,

and hit his heart,

so it was instant.

So somehow, even though

he had protective armor on,

it came in at a side angle, but

still directly hit his heart.

I was thankful it

wasn't a painful death.

For us it was very decisive

and we knew that it was quick.

I mean, that's small

comfort, but...

I don't remember too much about

Vietnam after that day actually.

I'm not sure of the day, whether it was

close to the end of my tour, I don't know,

but I don't really have

much of a recollection

of Vietnam or what

happened after that sad day.

[Soren] Before Glenn Rickert's body was shipped

home, there was a short memorial service

held to honor

the popular captain.

When my father was given the assignment to

sh**t these pictures he initially refused,

so saddened was he by the

loss of his colleague.

When threatened with an Article

15 letter of reprimand,

he reluctantly

documented the ceremony.

We had been living up in

Sellersville, Glenn Jr. and myself.

And that Saturday there was

a Memorial Day parade

and of course it came right down

past our house, and we were outside.

And then it came down

to the little town square

and they had a little ceremony, and I'll

always remember at that time I prayed

and was thinking about

all the women who were widows

or had lost loved ones, or

mothers who had lost loved ones.

I said a prayer for them, just in remembrance

because this was a Memorial Day parade

and the next clay was Sunday.

I had gone with Glenn's parents and then we came

home to Glenn's parents' home in Souderton.

We came in the back door,

and as we came in the back door,

the doorbell was

ringing at the front.

And I walked through the living room

and saw the uniform and you just know.

So I opened the door, and the poor guy

there, I said, "Just tell me he's not dead."

And of course,

what could he say?

Just, "I regret to inform you."

And then Glenn's morn came in the room

behind me and she just started crying,

because she just knew.

I mean, that's a day

I'll always remember.

I'm feeling emotions right now because it's

just something you don't ever want to hear,

but the minute you see

the uniform,

you know they're not coming

to tell you he's fine.

You know that it's bad news.

So that's how we found out.

We were together.

And After Glenn had been k*lled,

the proceedings just stopped.

I had received one phone call the

week I found out Glenn was k*lled.

They said, "We're sorry,"

and they hung up,

and if I had wanted to go on,

I had no connections,

because Glenn was handling

everything over there.

And it's been a source of guilt,

like, whatever happened to Ian?

I pray that maybe someone else adopted her,

or that she was able to come here to America.

But I often wonder

what happened to her.

Every once in a while I wonder if

in fact this child got over here.

The follow up, again, the psychology

or my psychology was such,

and I think the psychology of a lot of

the people that served over there was,

you serve your time,

you get back

and then you get back into

the world and you do your thing,

which is essentially what I did.

[inaudible conversation]

[Rik] Where Ring's death fell

in terms of my activity,

I can't really recall now.

After he was k*lled,

we defaced a billboard.

The billboard said, "To an unemployed

veteran... peace is hell."

And so we changed it with spray paint,

"To a dead veteran... w*r is hell."

And for the first time in the history

of the Hartford Times newspaper,

they printed a picture

on the editorial page.

We wrote this letter about it

called "Yours and uncertainty."

We called ourselves "the

Children of American Blood."

But we were young,

and we were immature.

When President Nixon mined

Haiphong Harbor,

a group of us, maybe 20

of us, got together.

We got 40-gallon steel drums

and we made mines out of them.

We painted "Kaboom" on them and tied

them with ropes and cinder blocks,

and in the middle of the night,

drove over the Connecticut River

and dropped these drums off into the

river and drove to the other side.

When it was all secure, people

called all the media and said,

"We mined the Connecticut

River," in a protest.

I used to say "Nixon,"

now I say "President Nixon."

I hate the man, but there's

a respect that's important.

And then we held a press conference

in front of city hall in Hartford

and turned ourselves in.

This is what we did

and this is why we did it.

But that put the people onto us,

whoever they were...

the FBI, or army intelligence,

whoever they were

and they were parked outside

our apartment so...

So we moved, I was the last one

to leave and I came to Vermont...

The safety of Vermont.

We were no more liberating that

country than we're liberating Iraq.

We weren't even invading.

We were trying to prop up

a puppet state to our own ends,

either for economic reasons

or to "stop communism."

Stop the domino from falling.

[Elizabeth] He changed.

He was always pretty serious,

but I think this experience would

be life-changing for anyone,

and I think it was

life changing for him.

In the immediate return,

his startle response was high.

We were driving home from

a trip right after he got back,

and a helicopter flew over and

he almost dove out of the car.

He was just much more...

and that would be typical.

And I also think it made him more

grave, and a little bit darker.

[Peter] I feel guilt

about surviving.

That doesn't go away. Collateral damage extends

not only to the individual who survives,

or is in fact k*lled,

but there's a ripple effect.

It effects the family in

physical and psychological ways.

Elizabeth essentially

has had to contend

with a different person than

she married after one year.

The person you had or my offspring

experienced a different person than I was

before I went in the m*llitary,

and those things don't go away.

Those things are perpetuated.

It's like the ringing in my ears

from the concussion.

It's there all the time and

it's very close to the surface

and I can hear it all the time.

Sometimes it's louder, sometimes

it's softer, but it's always there.

That's self-serving because I also know that

it affects my son, my daughter, my wife.

It's not that I feel guilty

for surviving. I just-

I just...

Why do these things happen?

It's hard. I'm trying

to find the right words.

I'm not guilty for surviving...

but I guess you wonder, well...

what made me walk away at the moment?

Where was I going?

Was I truly done there? Did somebody

call me away to do something else?

Why wasn't I there?

I went years and years dealing

with the symptoms,

and then we figured out, "Oh, of

course, it's post traumatic."

So one of the options here is to take

some anti-depressants or whatever,

which didn't seem to do the job.

But it's still there. It's not necessarily

going to k*ll you, but it's there.

You can't rationalize it. You can identify

it, but you can't make it go away.

I would like to be able to remember

everyone's face that I lost in my unit.

I would like to know the names.

I would like to be able to, in

some way, go back through those...

Even though they

were horrible things...

Because I just feel like

I'm not doing justice to them

to not be able to remember who

the heck they were when...

they d*ed there right in front of me doing

things we were all supposed to be doing.

I have a very low

startle threshold.

If I was napping or if you came

up behind me in the garage

and tapped me on the shoulders,

my reaction is to spin around or put up my

hands, or somehow go into a defensive position.

I'm telegraphing to,

whether it's Elizabeth or you or my

daughter that the world is hostile.

If you want to survive,

this is how you have to be,

and it's an unspoken

message, it's telegraphed.

I remember him overreacting

to certain things,

but the thing is that

that's sort of, that's Dad.

So he will overreact to things,

but then it'll be fine.

And his overreaction wasn't

a big deal to me, ever.

Ever. It was just the way it was

and it's sort of like,

I knew it wasn't something

that he could control.

My daughter, my son, my wife have experienced

somebody who, since coming back,

often times does not take

that step of thinking,

but reacts as if in the jungle.

He's definitely been

affected by Vietnam.

I mean, he probably was a

different person before Vietnam,

but he's not a bad person now.

He's a great person now.

Living with guilt is awful, and I think

that guilt and regret and remorse

and all those things

are real wastes of emotion,

because you can do

something about them.

So if you feel guilty about something

what can you choose to do?

[Peter] I always had this interest in terms

of finding where Loring Bailey was buried.

I checked a couple

graves registrations

and went on the Internet

when the Internet was available,

and found nothing

in the immediate area.

And of course 20 years later, it was our

first Memorial Day weekend here in Mystic.

Elizabeth said,

"You're not going to believe,"

or, "Take a look at the

front page of the paper."

And the front page of the paper had that picture

I showed you of Loring Bailey, the son,

in Vietnam, and the story that accompanied

it had to do with Memorial Day

and the mother and father living in

Stonington which is four miles away,

three miles away, and the fact

Loring is buried

less than two miles

from where I'm living right now.

In any case, I read the article and was

incredulous that after all these years,

and my failure to find where he was

buried, the front page of the newspaper,

sort of rubbed my nose in it saying,

"Here they are, here's the family."

So I picked up the telephone,

introduced myself,

"I apologize in advance

if this is a painful subject,

but I just wanted to let you know I knew

your son, and he was a wonderful person."

Your father said...

"You don't know who I am,

but I was with your son

in Vietnam and I

was with him at OCS."

And I said, "Oh, where are you?"

"Well," he said,

"I'm in Old Mystic."

The thought that I had was, "Well, he must

have picked up Rings name from the stone",

the monument down in Old Mystic.

And I hesitate to call you because I

didn't want to bring back bad memories,

"and I hope you don't mind."

He said, "I don't mind at all."

I said, "I'll stop by sometime," and he

said, "What are you doing in 10 minutes?"

"We would like

very much to see you."

And he said, "Well I'd be glad to come over, and

I'll come over as soon as I change my clothes."

And I said, "Well that's

fine." I hung up.

I turned to Dot and I said,

"I have no idea where he is, he's

going in to change his clothes.

He couldn't have been

at the monument in Old Mystic."

It never dawned on me that

he was living in the area.

So he came up to the front door and

that's how we met, at the front door.

It was quite interesting.

[Peter] We've been visiting

each other ever since.

And, as I told them,

I was, for 20 years, 30 years,

more interested in where he was

buried than where they were living,

which is probably a regret or

probably a monumental oversight,

but that's the way

it played out.

And I think he felt like he helped them to

really get to understand what their son's...

Some of the times that he spent

in the last year of his life,

because when your son

is in training or OCS.

So just the stories

he could tell,

a little bit about what his last

months might have been like,

or what it was like in Vietnam.

I know he thinks he performed a service

and really was helpful to them.

Dorothy obviously feels a loss, and

is still very, very sensitive.

Not to say he isn't,

but he's in m*llitary history

and that kind of thing and follows the

history of his son's involvement.

And then when we talk we talk about,

typically I'm talking to the father.

I think about him now

and it's just sadness,

that a man would lose

his son at the age of 24.

That the whole lifetime

would be taken away.

And now here I am, I'm 60 years

old and my son is a Marine.

And who'd of thought that my son

[chuckles] would be a Marine?

Now I fly an American flag

in front of my house,

and I wouldn't have

thought of it then,

or I would have flown it upside

down or something like that.

[Elizabeth] I think it's fascinating,

that at least you've told me,

a number of people you've been in touch

with about this process of making this,

working on this film, where they have said, "I

never thought I'd talk to anybody about this."

I've never talked

about this before."

So remember that Dad,

and many people,

they don't talk about themselves

unless they're asked.

I'll talk about myself

whether you ask or not.

Dad's introverted, so if you

look at type he's an introvert.

He generally needs

to be drawn out.

And so when people say, "How was the

w*r?" They want you to say "Fine."

And they might say, you know, "What was

the best thing that happened to you"

or the worst thing

that happened?"

But if you sit down and say, "I want to

know what was the hardest thing about it?"

or "What was the best thing

about it?" or "What elated you?"

Those, I believe are the things

that he's willing to talk about.

But you need to feel the interest

when you're somebody that has

his particular type, and I would think

that'd be true of almost anybody.

It's not a conversation I ever have.

No one's interested.

You're interested.

Would you be interested if your father had

not had a similar type of experience?

Would you be asking these questions

and things? Maybe you would...

but this starts out with you wanting

to know more about your father,

and what his experience was,

and what was going on at the time,

and how did he deal with all this.

Was that the thing

that started you?

I mean, if you hadn't had that connection would

it just have been something that happened

in history, and you

wouldn't be here today?

I'm really glad you're here and I'm

really glad I have a chance...

to talk about Ring. I'm just

thrilled that I have a chance to...

let this out.

I'm talking to you today because

of the way you presented yourself

as someone who's got a serious interest in

putting together a little piece of history,

some people that

are intertwined somehow,

and if there was something I could

say that would add to that,

I'd be happy to do that,

although I've never had a conversation

like this with anybody else before.

When David graduated from Paris

Island, and he was a young recruit,

Paris Island, eyes like

deer in headlights.

We brought him home,

and we passed through airports,

and it was obvious that we were

parents and he was a Marine.

And people came out of the crowd to

shake his hand, to pat him on the back.

The respect was overwhelming,

and as a parent it just

made us immensely proud.

And I'm sure that that's

what Mr. Bailey felt.

But the pride and the respect

for my son is wonderful.

Is wonderful, you know,

and I see it and

I hear it all the time.

People say, "How's your

boy doing? Where is he now?"

And I always say,

"Thanks for asking.

Thanks for asking because

we're very proud of him, too."

I have to say

it's been interesting.

I have run into some

people in the last few years,

and not just when you go in

and see a doctor at the VA,

because they're all primed to say,

"Thank you for your service."

That's kind of part of

their mantra down there.

But I have run into other people

and it's caught me quite off guard

when somehow they've found out...

And I'm not sure, I can't point

to a specific conversation...

But when they find out that I was in

Vietnam and I was in the infantry,

and very sincerely

they say, "Thank you,"

and... it catches me off guard.

Just saying it now has kind of...

because nobody ever said that.

And I didn't realize anybody

really thought about it.

It's kind of unnerving because I don't

think I did anything to be thanked for.

It could have been anybody.

It could have been anybody going, anybody

being k*lled, anybody surviving.

The difference between somebody wounded,

being k*lled, not being hurt...

A couple of inches,

a few seconds in time.

When my son is in harm's way...

Barbara and I live

with a level of fear.

Every car that comes clown the street, I

look to see if it has government plates.

That's hard.

[Soren] Because you know

what that looks like?

- I do.

- Those shoes.

Oh, shiny. Shiny, shiny shoes.

How do they get them so shiny?

Three or four months into the

tour, I was noticing the ringing,

and the inability to understand

people when they're talking.

And I went to Chu Lai and

they tested my ears and said,

"You've got a hearing

loss in the mid range."

The nerves are destroyed.

It's not temporary.

The middle range is where

the consonants are formed,

which means you're going to have trouble

understanding people when they talk.

Here are some earplugs,

"so if you're gonna be in a situation where

there is loud noise, wear your ear plugs."

[Soren] My father took this

picture in Vietnam in 1970.

Seconds later he took this one.

When he first showed me these prints, he

asked me if I could tell the difference.

I pointed out the obvious, or what had become

obvious to me during the making of this film

after pouring through

hundreds of others like it.

The barrel of the 155mm Howitzer

is recoiled in the second picture,

and you can see the dust

rising from the ground

under the weight of the

g*n's thunderous discharge.

He asked me if I noticed anything else

and I couldn't think of anything.

So he pointed to the people

in the second sh*t and said,

"They're all holding their ears.

I was holding a camera."

[Elizabeth] You know, you think back on your life

and what are the things you wouldn't change?

I think this is one of the

things that he wouldn't change.

It was phenomenal for him in the

best way and the worst way.

[Soren] My father has often asked

me why I'm making this film.

As different as we are,

we share this story,

this presence like

the ringing in his ears.

My wife Carrie and I even

named our firstborn son Loring,

after both Loring Baileys, junior and

senior, who meant so much to my father.

And I suppose the journalistic process of making

a documentary has brought me closer to him.

But in this picture, he still looks about

as far away from me as my namesake,

Soren Peter Sorenson I, born over a

century before me in Denmark in 1871,

pictured here at 17 in his

Danish m*llitary uniform.

On the train from

Jackson to Chicago

Providence is yet

to be revealed

Standing on the platform

by my window

Soon you will be

swallowed by the fields

A sudden blur of trees

A sudden blur of trees

Rushing through

the delta veins

On the train from

Jackson to Chicago

Licking all the wounds

that never healed

Turn around Turn around

Now you're at

the end of the line

Don't look down

Don't look down

You're standing

on the shoulders

You're standing on

the shoulders of giants

Every day the shadow

of my father

Is painted on the walls

and on the floors

It stretches out across

the open water

And crashes on

the sandy eastern shores

Searching in the dark

Searching in the dark

Looking for a clue

to what's been lost

Now I see the shadow

of my father

On the shoulders

of the one that came before

Turn around Turn around

Now you're at

the end of the line

Don't look down

Don't look down

You're standing on

the shoulders

Standing on

the shoulders of giants

A clear run A blue sky

Downhill A free ride

A stone's throw

A straight line from here

Turn around Turn around

Now you're at

the end of the line

Don't look down

Don't look down

You're standing

on the shoulders

Standing on the shoulders

Turn around Turn around

Now you're at

the end of the line

Don't look down

Don't look down

You're standing

on the shoulders

You're standing

on the shoulders of giants