Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
9:45 | His arm was wrecked by a 30 cal round and Bob Hayes began a round of surgeries, first in Japan and then back home. He was sneaking out of the hospital to party with his friends, but the chief surgeon put a stop to that. Once he had recovered, he couldn't avoid getting in trouble one more time before his discharge.
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He was blessed with a foster mother who took care of him, but Bob Hayes was a rebel who dropped out of high school to join the Air Force. That didn't work out, but he did join the Marines, which straightened him right out.
His first assignment in Vietnam was guarding the perimeter of the airport in Da Nang, but Bob Hayes did not get along with his staff sergeant. This led to a threat, which led to a hearing in which he was given a choice, the brig or reassignment to the most dangerous Marine outfit in the country.
When the thing popped out of the ground, Bob Hayes didn't know what it was. It was a Bouncing Betty mine and he was lucky it failed to detonate. The mines in his area were plentiful and deadly, and when one killed a Marine near a village, one of the men took out his frustrations on a civilian.
After Bob Hayes had been in Vietnam for a while, he was sent to the Philippines for jungle survival training. It was difficult but he enjoyed parts of it. Then it was back to the Mekong Delta, where the conditions were tough.
Bob Hayes relates the story of Bernard Fall, an author who was along with a Marine unit near Hue. It did not end well for the writer. Later, during that same operation, he watched his radioman get hit and then it was his turn.
He recovered so well from injuries suffered from a land mine that they sent him back to his unit. Bob Hayes thought he was going home, but he went back to work in the most hard hit unit in the Marines. He did get a ticket home, soon, courtesy of a North Vietnamese machine gunner chained to a tree.
Wounded twice in Vietnam, Bob Hayes was just trying to get on with his life. The protestors where he was attending college were a big obstacle to this, but a chance phone call from another veteran led to a very positive development; reunions with his buddies.
He'd made a pact with his radioman. If either one of them was killed, the other would visit the family. Bob Hayes had the very tough duty of visiting the father of his friend, Walter Weiss. That death was devastating to him, but it's for the innocent civilians caught up in war that he pleads.
