Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:30 | When Bob Hyatt flew back to the United States after his Vietnam tour, he changed into a Hong Kong suit and threw away his fatigues. He knew what to expect. He had a good transition to civilian life, winding down at Fort Riley and playing golf, then finding a rewarding career. He muses over the difficulty of that war and what our motives might have been.
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Bob Hyatt's friends talked him into joining the National Guard where they played a lot of cards. But when the draft came calling, he enlisted and took the path of Special Forces after his testing indicated high aptitude. He also qualified for Officer Candidate School, so he was in for a lot of training.
Bob Hyatt was in transit to Vietnam when he and his buddies decided to go out on the town in San Francisco. It was going well until a belligerent anti-war protestor accosted them outside a club. He was against the war but he had a gun.
Bob Hyatt recalls when his training unit was introduced to a new commander. Samuel V. Wilson made such an impression on him that he would have fought the war with a stick if he had to.
When Bob Hyatt got to Vietnam with the 5th Special Forces Group, he found many of his friends from training already hard at work. The group was spread throughout the country, with headquarters at Nha Trang. As he awaited assignment, he noted one particular camp that seemed exposed and not very secure where it was located. Wouldn't want to be posted there!
Bob Hyatt was an advisor to a large Vietnamese unit comprised of different, distinct groups who all had competing interests. The camp was between Saigon and the Cambodian border where there were lots of booby traps, but not much heavy combat. The Viet Cong were not eager for a big fight.
It wasn't just the Viet Cong who spread booby traps in Vietnam. Bob Hyatt describes a type of mine that sent out trip wires in multiple directions. It was advanced technology for the time but it was prone to being taken and used by the enemy.
American advisor Bob Hyatt was sharing a cigarette with his one of his Vietnamese soldiers when the man made a startling prediction. He was a North Vietnamese who had come to help the cause of the South. It was a difficult fight because of so many disparate factions, including competing Buddhist sects.
The Special Forces camp was prone to mortar fire directed by Viet Cong sympathizers within the camp. Bob Hyatt points out how that problem mirrored the problems of the South Vietnamese government at large. The French educated Catholics at the top were directing people who had a completely different culture.
American Advisor Bob Hyatt recalls his friends from the Special Forces camp in Vietnam and wonders how that kind of war could have happened in the first place.
