| Summary: | (8:00) Mr. White tells about his time in the military between his second and third tour to Vietnam.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Euell White
June 22, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 7
Rhonda Haygood: What kind of contact did you have with your family during this time? Did they know—?
Euell White: I wrote my wife, during this second tour I wrote my wife every day and I, I kept a journal and I mailed that with my letter. That’s the basis of a lot of—that and then on my last tour I didn’t keep a journal, but I wrote to her every day and she kept the letters so it was like a journal, you know, because I told her what was happening. So that was what the basis of, that and my memory, you know, the basis of the book.
Clint Alley: Did you get a lot of mail from her while you were there?
EW: Yeah. You know, it was pretty, it was pretty regular.
CA: Yeah. Well, so that was your second tour. Did that last a year? Is that right?
EW: Yeah.
CA: Okay.
EW: Um-hm.
CA: Okay.
EW: And then I made Major while I was on that tour.
CA: Okay.
EW: Right, right before I came home and then, my assignment then was Advisor to the 20th Special Forces Group, Airborne, Alabama National Guard. I was assigned initially to a subordinate unit in Huntsville and then later my boss in Birmingham who was Advisor to the Group Headquarters in Birmingham, guy name of Ola Mize, he was, he was a Medal of Honor winner in Worl—for the Korean War in Gadsden, Alabama and he went back to Vietnam and he—he and I had gone to Special Forces school together but I didn’t get to know him then, but anyway he went back to Vietnam and he fixed it because of his influence with being a Medal of Honor winner so nobody would replace him so he could come back there when he came back. So I got that as my additional duty for the, for the time. But, ah, how, that assignment really surprised me because while I was on my second tour in Vietnam, one day when I was engaged, our battalion was engaged in a battle, you know, and I needed to be there, I got a call from division and the, the people at division didn’t, didn’t, they just didn’t have no idea what was going on, I get a call from division that—emergency. I needed to come to division immediately, it was an emergency. And I’m thinking something’s happened to my wife, something’s happened to my daughter and I’m shook up and I’m zooming in there and there’s a personnel clerk with a form, what they call an assignment preference sheet and most of the officers called it a dream sheet, you know, where you’re suppose to say where you, tell what your preferences are for your next assignments. And I mean, they called me out of a battle to do this, you know. And they had all these things, you know, your 1st, 2nd, 3rd choice for this, 1st, 2nd, 3rd choice for that and I just went through them all and I wrote, “See remarks.” “See remarks.” “See remarks.” And in the remarks I said, “I want an assignment where I can commute from my home of record, Rt. 1, Rogersville, Alabama to my duty station.” And that was it. Well, I was on a, I had a sixty days TDY to Malaysia. Liaison to a Navy detachment; I don’t want to get in any detail about that. And ah, I got back from there just in time to come home from Vietnam. Well, in November, and from Malaysia I called and I got—and I called personnel, you know, to see what my assignment was gonna be. And he said, “Your gonna be assigned—”, he didn’t take, I didn’t know exactly what it was gonna be, see I just knew it was gonna be, said I was gonna be assigned to the Advisor to the Alabama National Guard in Huntsville, Alabama. That’s all they told me. And I thought, “They must have, they must have really done what I said.” I couldn’t believe it, you know. And then he said, “By the way, you’re gonna be promoted to Major on the 17th of November,” and that was a couple of days away. But I, that was, I never did believe those sheets ever got you what you wanted, but it did that time. It could have been coincidence.
CA: Yeah. My goodness. So you got to, you got to come home and you lived in Rogersville, you said.
EW: Yeah. Then I did.
CA: And, and commuted to Huntsville.
EW: I owned a little place out there.
CA: Okay.
EW: That’s where I grew up. When I say grew up, that’s when I started growing up anyway.
Grew up in the Army.
CA: Yeah. Well how, how long did you, were you in the, with the Airborne unit in Huntsville?
EW: Ah, I, I joined them in, well I really joined them in January of ’69, you know, and I think April of ’70 I gue—I don’t know how long they would have left me there, but I got so bored. Course my retirement was set for 31 May 1972; I knew I was gonna retire then. And it was really statutory. And so I called up and said, “Are you guys gonna send me to the Advanced Course, Infantry Officers Advance Course?” And they said, “You want to go?” And I said, “Yeah.” So I guess in a sense I volunteered for another term, which was another term in Vietnam when I did that. So I went to the Advance Course and my counterpart Captain, now Major, Hoang Kim Ninh who had, I had recommended to go to that school on his evaluation was my classmate there.
CA: Oh, yeah.
EW: So I was his sponsor for that nine months in school there and then I went back to Vietnam. And the reasoning of personnel, you know, again they came down about midway through the course, course you know being it was Infantry Center, so the Infantry Personnel people came down about midway through the course, got all of us together, I mean there’s about two hundred in each class, about five classes going so it’s probably about 1,000, about 1,000 of us, you know, Captains and Majors mainly and give us an overall briefing, you know, they were getting ready, this is in 1970. Already figured out how to lose a war, you know, and so they was giving us a briefing on what was happening and everything and I just, the picture I got was another tour in Vietnam. They was talking about the critical, critical need for Majors in Vietnam and so I went home and told my wife, you know, that’s what’s coming. “No, no, no. They wouldn’t do that. That’s not fair. You’ve been there twice. You’ve been wounded twice.” And I said—course she knew this, she’d been around it, but you know, I’m, I’m thinking with the head and she’s thinking with the—and she said, “But, it—.” I said, you know, “Fair doesn’t have anything to do with it. You know, the needs of the service.” She just wouldn’t have it, you know and I kept trying to prepare her, so when they came back then they give us our actual alert, not the orders but telling us what our orders were gonna be. This was a scheduled event, you know. So I kept telling her the day before, “I know what it’s gonna be.” “No, no, no. They wouldn’t, they wouldn’t do that; they wouldn’t do that.” And they did. And it really, really, really upset her, you know, she just, you know, really—she’d always been real cool, but I mean, you know, she’s, she just knew I wouldn’t make it if I went back.
CA: Um-hm.
EW: Well I did something I’d never done before to try to get out of something, you know, and just a few weeks later, there was another Major that was in my class named Black, and he was black and he’d gotten alert, you know, same thing and he’d, he hadn’t been, he was a young guy, he hadn’t been to Vietnam, you know, yet and he, and he wanted to go. So I said, “Well, we’re both Infantry Majors maybe we’d just swap.” So we got on the phone to personnel, you know, we put both of us on the extensions and we told them about it and they said, “No, we can’t do that.” I said, “Why?” They said because the requisitions for me was for 3 prefix which means Special Forces qualified.
CA: Um.
EW: But see I knew that Special Forces were phasing out and I tried to tell them that. “Well we have to go by what we have.” You know, this is bureaucracy, you know. It says this; it’s got to be that.
CA: Um-hm.
EW: So I went knowing I wasn’t going to get a Special Forces assignment, you know, and I didn’t, you know.
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