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Welcome to episode 450 of Behind the Shield Podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show Major James Capers.
Major Capers is one of the earliest members of Marine Recon in the Vietnam era, the early
Vietnam era, but also was one of the very first African Americans in that division and
the first at multiple ranks that he held.
What makes this conversation so powerful is here is a man who is now 84 years old that
as a child entered the Marines, entered combat and volunteered for combat in Vietnam, saw
horrific things, had to do horrific things and to this day he carries that with him.
So I urge you not only listen to the full conversation, but make it to the very end
where you will hear one of the most powerful closing thoughts I have ever had in 450 episodes.
Before it gets to that conversation, as I say every single week, please just take a
moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, hit subscribe, leave feedback.
I love reading your thoughts on the podcast and leave a rating.
Every five star rating this podcast gets elevates it, make it more and more visible for others
to find.
And this is a free library, as I mentioned, 450 episodes.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to everyone else who I know needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Major James Capers.
Enjoy.
Well Major Capers, I just want to start by saying thank you so much for inviting me to
your home here in North Carolina and taking the time to talk to me today and come on the
Behind the Shield podcast.
James, thanks for coming.
Really appreciate it.
Especially with a name like James, you've got to be okay.
Absolutely.
So obviously this is an audio recording for people that are listening where on planet
earth are we sitting right now?
I live at Jacksonville, North Carolina, about 20 minutes outside of Camp Lejeune.
I've been in this home for going on 43 years now.
And my wife and my son, who have since passed on, so I live here with the assistance of
some stepchildren like Bill and Carmen, they helped me out quite a bit.
But all is well.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to start chronologically at the beginning because I know your early life obviously
has a lot of depth to it and obviously there's things in your early life that definitely
carry over later in life.
So tell me where you were born and then tell me about your family dynamic, what your parents
did and how many siblings.
Yeah, I was born in Bishopville, South Carolina in 1937 or so they tell me.
I don't have a birth certificate.
So a lot of my early childhood is what the family told me, aunts and uncles, and they're
all gone now.
I have no biological family anymore.
And so most of my memory is what I was told about South Carolina.
My folks were sharecroppers.
In other words, we shared the crops with the folks who had the money, which means that
being African Americans, we weren't called African Americans back in those days.
We worked for the white landowners and we picked the cotton, cropped the tobacco and
worked the farm.
And at the end of the year, you're supposed to share the profits with the owner.
Didn't happen very much.
We didn't get very much.
And by the time you bought seed and got ready for the next season, you didn't have anything.
So you had to kind of improvise.
And it wasn't just us.
A lot of the African American families back in those days in the rural South, you know,
I'm about four or five generations away from slavery.
You know, I don't know how old I am.
I have no birth certificate and there is no pictures of me as a child.
So a lot of what I will tell you is what I was told growing up.
And in the South, of course, you can read many books these days that talks about, you
know, the difficult times in the South, no respect and you didn't own the property and
it didn't have a lot going for you.
But a lot of times there were people there who were benevolent, who went out of their
way to help you.
It didn't matter if they were black or white.
As the story goes, when I was sick, I was given to a white family who took me in.
And I don't I can't confirm any of these stories, but these are the stories that I was told
growing up.
And after we moved to Baltimore, you know, my father did a little time in the chain gang.
Very brutal system of justice or lack of justice back in those days for something that he was
innocent for as well.
And it's for something he was falsely accused of.
And he moved on to Baltimore and eventually as I was cured by this family, I don't have
no names.
I have no idea who they were.
But these are stories that was handed down to me.
So I was lucky in a way that I survived.
And early on, the first James Capers Jr. passed away.
I was the last James Capers Jr. and I have no birth certificate, as I said.
So the family members passed away in early childhood.
Back in those days, you didn't have access to doctors or hospitals, those type of things.
And so as I was told, I was given to this family and obviously they must have gotten
me back to health.
And we moved on to Baltimore, was left to the family and joined up with my father.
And I went to school there and I didn't go to what they would call kindergarten or first
grade.
I have no memories of going to any schooling in South Carolina.
But when I got to Baltimore, they put me in a class that they thought I could handle.
So I went to school there and I went to middle school and went to church and met friends
and was amazed at what I saw there.
A little different than cotton fields and tobacco fields and corn fields, row houses
and there was lights and stores on the corners.
I made friends and in 1956 I graduated high school.
And back in those days, when you turned 17, 18, you expected to rest before the draft,
which meant you were probably going to go in the Army.
So my buddy and I, he's gone now.
We both decided to join the Marine Corps and off we went to Paris Island and the adventure
started.
And that was Pitt, your friend?
Yes.
Now, just to go back for a second, because I was not was curious.
One thing that just literally astounds me is you grew up when World War II finished,
which is also an interesting thing because your instructors in the military were vets
as well.
So through your lens now with this whole career that you've had, one thing that I don't understand
is how we went to war with the Germans and the Japanese and all colors and creeds fought
side by side, even though when I explore it a little more deeply, some of those units
were segregated.
They all laid their lives on the line for the greater good.
And then fast forward to the 50s right after World War II and people are being hung from
black people are being hung from trees again.
So how you know, what was it?
What was broken that we went through a world war that was based on race hate and genocide
and all these things?
And yet when that war finished, that that was still allowed to thrive in the US.
That always baffled me.
Well, because that was the law of the land, even though the Civil War was many years over.
But then you had the Knight Riders and the KKK and basic segregation never went away.
You can watch the news from yesterday.
You know, it's still an issue that we have to deal with.
Everyone is not bad, but this is a systemic problem that we've had with that kind of problem.
And for us, say us as a people in the slavery years and just during those years, the African
American slave was not allowed to be educated, could own property, could marry or you couldn't
buy your freedom.
Every civilized nation in the world, those things were even in Roman days, you could
buy your freedom.
You could be educated, but not the African American slave.
All those things was denied.
And so we're still quite a few generations away from freedom is accepted because of your
valor and your sacrifice you've made for this country.
You know, I taught for many years in the military.
I was director of a military school.
And a lot of the youngsters who come into the Marine Corps or the services didn't know
about the history because at times it moved on.
And a lot of the history of what we as a people went through was systematically taken out
of the history books.
It didn't talk about a lot of the heartaches and the 15 million Africans who died on the
way to this country.
So there are a lot of heartaches and things that's hard to talk about, even to understand
how could human beings do this to other people.
I went through that.
But then on the other end of the spectrum, I was taken in by a white family who fed me,
clothed me.
Someone must have held me, laid me down and stood watch over me while I slept.
So I didn't come away from the South with any anger or bitterness because I didn't see
that.
The families obviously protected me and fed me, but then handed me off to a family that
didn't look like me.
But they had a good heart to take in a black child.
So looking at that scenario, this is probably during World War II because I have two birth
dates.
I don't have a birth certificate, so I guess they rolled a dice and gave me a birth.
So there are a lot of things that occurred with my family history.
And there are some things I know to be true.
And there are some things I'm just rolling a dice and thinking that this is what must
have happened.
But with respect to how young Americans went overseas and came home and still couldn't
ride a bus or eat in a restaurant.
It's amazing how the ones who had the power to make those decisions were just not willing
to accept those who risked their lives and laid down their lives as equals.
I'm sure you know a lot about my career and how I had to struggle and finally get to the
point where I was considered the best of the best.
Yes, sir.
Well, and you see, that's what confuses me because if you look at the history of slavery
and I'm in Charleston staying tonight and we went last time we were there, there's the
Slavery Museum and what it screams to me is the root of so many problems, whether it's
the health problem we have at the moment, the mental health, the addiction, all these
things is the foundation.
I mean the addiction problem we have, the foundation is racism.
Harry Anselinger back in the 30s.
With slavery, only a few people would have really gained from that.
The people selling, the African people in Africa itself, the British making the trades,
the Americans buying, but it was only the plantation owners and some few out there.
So that's what is crazy is this issue that we have now, if you reverse engineer it, it's
still down to power and greed of a very few people.
The blacksmith in Iowa had no idea probably that there was a slave trade going on.
But now, here we are and in some areas this racism has become so cancerous when it came
from just a few people wanting human beings, regardless of what colour they were, to work
for free so they could be rich.
That's fundamentally what it was and that's just the most disgusting notion.
Well, the Romans had slaves, but the difference was they could buy their freedom, they could
marry, they could be educated, but the black slave was denied all of those benefits.
We didn't have that.
They took a civil war with hundreds of thousands dead Americans to get beyond those years and
we still, even after that, we still had the KKK and the Knight Riders and the greedy plantation
owners.
Then when you look at the Walmart guy, old Sam Walton in Arkansas, he made a lot of his
money and I guess this is pretty accurate, selling stuff to black folks on the plantations.
Oh really?
I didn't know that.
Yeah, there's a lot of history behind old Sam Walton and how he made a lot of his money.
He probably wasn't the only one.
When I left the Marine Corps, I joined an organization as Vice President and they sent
me to Harvard Business School.
I had been educated, but not to that level and I learned a lot of things about the Hershey
guy and the Walton guy and a lot of the ones that had the money.
It's amazing how we look at these organizations now and they made b's and dollars on the backs
of poor farmers, not just black farmers, but white farmers also.
And nowadays that goes on and most of this stuff is... I lectured it for many, many
years about what I saw and what I lived, not only in combat, but just coming home and being
denied the things that I thought I was fighting for.
But I was strong enough to realize that I'll make this work best where I can.
And I had some hard times, obviously.
In the military you have rank and those types of things.
And my rank didn't come as easily as I thought it was going to, but I survived and in spite
of that and just reading about... Dr. John Hope Franklin, he wrote a book, From Slavery
to Freedom.
And that was my Bible that told me so much.
Dr. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom.
He's passed away now, but the book is a very good source of understanding the history of
this country and how we evolved where we are today and how it still lingers on.
And not just with the corrupt placement or this or that, but there's so much that we
can learn from that particular book.
And when I was lecturing at the military school there, I used that as my Bible to talk about
how this country evolved, the right things and wrong things.
And I would give my perspective on racism, because we went through a period of time in
the military that we had some real issues there.
A lot of the youngsters were not getting promoted and things were going wrong.
And so the leaders didn't get it.
And so they were middle level guys like me who picked up the books and was, here's what
happened.
You can read it for yourself.
So there's a lot of things that I read and talked about and to those young military people
or civilians that were willing to accept the reality.
Here's how it got to this point.
Yeah.
I think it's important for people to understand why.
Same with the Native American story.
If you look at the Thanksgiving story, it doesn't seem to be as accurate as what actually
happened.
Well, I want to get to something we talked about before we started recording, because
I think it's important as well.
One of the issues that I've seen with my generation is they were raised on basically like a Hollywood
facade of what a man is.
It's two dimensional Rambo type and I think it's very dangerous as you progress into later
years, especially in our professions, if you buy into that.
The beautiful part of your story is me and Dottie.
So tell me about that.
You're in school and how that romance evolved, because obviously that's going to be a through
line through your whole life here.
Did you get it?
She denied it.
When I was walking by one day and I saw this beautiful young lady there and I stopped.
It just got my attention.
And through the years, I always told her that she winked at me and we always laughed about
that.
But 15 years old, 16, love of my life, my only real love.
And we married 50 years and there was funny things that occurred in my class.
My old buddy, Pitt, we were in the same class.
And we were sort of the romantic couple in the high school there.
And my teacher, they all sort of caught on to it and they would send Dottie down to my
class.
The boys were in one class and the girls in another class.
There was no coed classes back in those days.
So her teacher would send her down to my classroom extensively to tell the teacher there something.
And when she walked in the door, all the guys would say, Jim, there she is, there she is.
And it was sort of a romantic thing there.
And as we were married and had a life together and a child, when she was dying of, she was
a stage four cancer, she died of cancer of the liver and she died in the hospice program.
And I moved into the room there with her.
I lost my son by that time.
And so we would sit there a lot at night and we'd talk about those early days and she had
a version of it and I had my version of it.
But it was a wonderful relationship and that I felt love first time in my life that I knew
that she loved me.
I felt it.
And then she went on to college and she got a scholarship and I went on to the Marines
and did three years of hard infantry time and deployed most of that time.
Killed my first man, bailed out of my teens in Lebanon in 1958.
Scary thing, but we were trained to do certain things to hold this post and I was given this
post to hold.
And I held it, but some other folks wanted it.
I went through these type of things in my first three years in the Marine Corps and
I stayed in touch with what we wrote.
Didn't have computers and all those things back in those days.
When I came home on leave, I'd go see her and we'd go to movies and all those type of things.
Didn't have much money back in those days, but it was something that keeps me going today.
Those wonderful memories.
We'd go to the movie and go do different things.
And finally, my three years was up.
I'd made Marriott to a sergeant and I guess I learned quick life.
I was a good student and they told me I could get out or my contract was up or I could stay
in the Marine Corps.
I never had a real job and I talked to Dottie about it and I told her that my time is up
now and I could get out of the Marine Corps or come home or I could stay in.
And she said, well, what will you do?
Where will you go?
And I told her I'd never been to California.
I asked her would she like to go with me?
She didn't bother asking to marry me or anything like that yet.
But she said yeah, right away.
It was one of those things that meant to be.
So she did wink at you then?
She always denied that.
But she was funny.
She had a great sense of humor.
Great sense of humor.
We had a wonderful time.
That day on the 28th of June at 2 31 the afternoon she closed her eyes and I told her I'd see
her again.
And for me the clock is ticking.
I'm 84 this year and I went to visit her.
I said earlier I went to visit her all into the National Cemetery a few weeks ago and
I put some flowers on her graves and I gave my son a teddy bear.
Made my report to her.
I said you know, babe, there's going to be a young man named James coming to talk to
me about our lives.
So I better get this together.
But yeah, she passed away and I crashed and burned.
Couldn't handle it.
I lost my child.
Lost her.
So I went away to California.
Lived in a hotel.
Got an apartment.
Went to therapy.
Every Tuesday at 1 o'clock I went to therapy.
But I was able to, I did the documentary when I was living out there and I wrote the book.
Made some friends.
I'm going back next weekend for another mission I guess with the Ghost Star Widows.
But Dottie was special.
She was an artist.
She took care of the house, the baby.
And I don't know that I could have had a better life with anybody else.
She sounds amazing.
We'll get into it as we talk about deeper in your career.
But I think one of the big, the lesser discussed areas is the partner.
Where we're out in the military and in fire and police, whatever it is, they're everything.
Especially if they have a child.
And you had a special needs child.
So that's an even higher level of care.
But even when you transitioned out, and we'll get to that, but your struggles when you first
came back to the US.
So many relationships fall apart.
And I know you guys had some struggles.
But to meet your childhood sweetheart and then stand by you through that whole thing
and then pass away in your arms.
Makes this tragic story and this story of bravery that we'll get to is this beautiful
love story.
I think it's important for people to hear that.
Just because you're a soldier or a Marine or a firefighter or a police officer doesn't
mean your marriage is doomed.
It doesn't mean that you have to be promiscuous or anything else.
That soft side, you can be a romantic and still be a Marine recon warrior as well.
That's why I'm going to California next week.
I want to tell those young ladies who lost sons or husbands about my life with my wife
and she's gone now.
And I've had to do a lot of praying.
I've always believed in God, still believe in God, but it was kind of tough.
I lost everything I cared for and loved and it's all gone now.
All gone.
I lost my mother, my father, lost my sister, my brothers all in.
They're all gone now.
So I had those memories of her because she was an anchor.
She kept the family going.
When I came home from Vietnam, they said I would never walk again.
And she said, you will walk again.
And I believed her.
She'd be there every day sitting at the hospital holding my hand while I went through some
painful procedure.
But she believed in me and I was able to walk again and do the normal things.
And there was always Dottie.
She was always there to hold my hand and now I miss her.
Sit around here some afternoons and this is what we retired to.
First home we've ever owned.
We didn't own a home in the military.
We lived on the basin.
And now I wish she could be here today to see what we've done with the property.
It's beautiful.
The fruit trees and the fish pond and the palm trees and the banana trees.
She would have loved all of this.
But God has called her home.
I guess when I'm at the end of the line now, so they tell me.
But that's up to God and I don't worry about those kind of things anymore.
We all think you're going to live to be 150 years old.
But I've had 50 years of marriage.
A week before she passed away, we decided to renew our vows.
Oh really?
And we called a pastor in and we did it all over again.
And she passed away the next week.
Yeah, by that time our sonnet was gone and the pastor came in and then our friends came
in and watched us renew our vows.
And so 50 years we made it from young teenagers who sneaked in another classroom to get a
glimpse.
But we went to prom together.
We were a quintessential couple and she had this good heart.
She would take in some of the younger families and not physically take them in, but they
needed money.
I was drawing jump pay at that time.
So she'd always go in her little person, help another family.
She was so kind, had that great heart.
And she was always that way.
I mean that's what I love so much about her.
She was always willing to take somebody in, which is one reason.
In August I'm going to have a family lunch here for the homeless in my backyard.
I'm going to bring them over and I'm going to feed them and have some of the family members
help out.
And the city is going to help out.
This is what I do now.
We're at the Donnie and Gary Capers Foundation.
And so we did a barbecue a few weeks ago, donated all the money to the Human Resource
Center and I've done well financially.
Every dime from my book goes to charity.
So I've been lucky.
After I left the military, I used my old basic military skills.
I bought a radio station and construction company and did some business things.
Took advantage of this great economy in this country.
Made a lot of money, but it doesn't do me any good now.
They're all gone now.
So I donate monies to wherever I can.
Now we're going to concentrate on the homeless.
So that's what I do now.
And I still have the memories of kind Dottie and my son who was blind, special needs.
He played the piano, the flute, the melodic, the organ.
Amazing.
Yeah.
He was an amazing, amazing child.
And he died in my arms of appendicitis.
So I still have those wonderful memories.
That's my personal life.
But as far as my military life, we were together.
They kept the home fires going when I was overseas doing what I needed to do, doing
what I thought was right.
Back in those days, you were a patriot.
World War II was over.
Korea was, they were just digging out of Korea.
And so I think that you expected a Serb country.
And I did.
I mean, I couldn't wait.
I couldn't wait.
And there were some days I wished I hadn't.
I wanted to ask you just to interject for a second.
So one thing that really jumped out at me from your early years was you seemed to become
an absolute student of your craft, even at the beginning.
When some guys were going out and drinking everything you were studying and working on
your tools.
Yeah.
Where did that come from?
And then how did that kind of pay off later in your career?
Well, I was in high school.
I was a reader.
I was a late bloomer.
I didn't go on dates and things like that.
You know, I didn't have a car and folks didn't have a lot of money.
And I didn't get to go to college until many years later in the Marine Corps.
I went to the University of Maryland.
And when I was a captain, I went to the University of Chaminade University in Hawaii.
But I never got a degree.
I got enough stuff.
I should have gotten something, but I just...
They're overrated.
I have one.
I have a bunch.
It gave me a lot of debt.
Yeah.
Well, I think that just looking back on it and what did you...
Oh, I'm sorry.
It was about you being a student of the craft in the Marines.
I used to go to the Enot Pratt Free Library.
It was a library that was built for slaves after the Civil War.
And I used to go there in the evening after I got off work, got out of school, and I'd
read all kinds of stuff.
I was a student of the generals, I guess it was, because they were the ones getting the
press.
And I kind of enjoyed reading about the Romans and everybody else who was out there.
I started a program called Social Studies back in those days, and you learn so much.
My world was open by reading those books.
And I finally got to the Greek Acropolis.
And when I was a young man, I think I was 57, I guess it was.
So I studied hard before I got into Marine Corps, and then after I joined, of course,
boot camp, you learn the basics.
But I was a quick study, I guess it was.
And I was the great young guy that had this high IQ, and I was a high school graduate.
We didn't have many high school graduates back in those days.
And so I learned from guys that were Moffat Point Marines.
They were the first African Americans who were allowed to come into the Marine Corps
in 1942.
Up until that time, blacks could not join the Marine Corps.
You could join the Army, Navy, didn't have much of an Air Force those days.
So they let 20,000 African Americans join the Marine Corps in 1942 to 1949, and they
fought all over the Pacific, but they didn't really get to fight long enough, say that
famed First Marine Division that went in Guadalcanal and Ujama, places like that.
So they were mostly support personnel.
They were drivers of Cook's Tobacos.
They were loyal and good Marines.
But even when the war was over, a lot of them were not allowed to stay in.
They were put out of the Marine Corps.
So in 1947, I think it was Truman who integrated the services.
And African American Marines were allowed to join the regular Marine Force and go to
a place called Parris Island to be integrated.
And Moffat Point, where the basic black Marines were going at that time, till 1949, that was
close.
So I think that it was hard to define why it was that the Marine Corps didn't want
African Americans.
Maybe they thought we weren't smart enough for this or that.
Just like when I joined, after my time in infantry, did three years of infantry, and
I decided I wanted to go into, we had something called the Pathfinders and Triple Threat.
We did it all, jumping, swimming, and diving and all that.
And I was a young man, and I joined that organization, spent three years there.
And I got to go to jump school and did all of the fun things.
But it was hard to get into those organizations because they too didn't want African Americans
in it.
So I had to go through all of the, it was a tough program to get into.
You had to be okay to pass all of the tests.
Of course, I was a young guy, I could run all day long and do all those things.
I went to jump school in Fort Benning, Georgia, where I had 101st Airborne there.
So I did that.
And then I went to all the other training, jungle warfare and mountain leadership and
a lot of misery.
But once you passed the program, I was sent to the Pathfinder platoon.
And you jump in ahead of the advanced force and take out the bad guys so the good guys
could land.
So I did that for three years.
And that was my first time in reconnaissance.
I went on to train troops for a while.
And then I got into not the spy business, but I went to work for the National Security
Agency.
Did that for two years.
Then I went to Vietnam, 65, 66, 67.
I spent 68 in the hospital.
And I think went back to the Marine Barracks for what made that's where my family was.
And they sent me to Europe to do some more interesting work.
We still had the Russians, they were creating all kinds of problems.
And so I got to do a little bit of that work, working with some of the emissaries, American
emissaries.
But all that is pretty much well documented by now.
And there's so many things that I could tell you, you're gonna ask me about some things
I can't even remember anymore.
I don't want to remember maybe.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing.
The book is very beautifully written.
There's so many accounts.
There's obviously some that were officially written, especially in the Medal of Honor
review.
So I don't want to drag you through all these memories.
Oh, I don't mind.
But there's a couple obviously I'd like to talk about.
But before we do that, one thing that again popped out a couple of times was martial arts.
So how did you get into that?
When in boot camp, they give you a basic martial arts, bayonet training and those types of
things.
That was the basics, throw each other around and all that.
But then a few years later, I got into karate, sabate, kito, judo, because I was in pretty
good shape and it was interesting to me.
So I found a guy that was an army guy stationed at Fort Meade.
And he'd always come over to the barracks there and he helped me with my katas and all
kinds of stuff there.
And I learned quite a bit from him.
And I got to the point where I got the third degree black belt.
And then I started my own teaching program.
But it was this guy, he was a big guy and he had this big, huge belly.
I've seen those kind of instructors before.
But he had good balance.
Oh, he could do real good.
So I learned from him and I took it on.
And I would teach from the army special services.
I'd go and teach every Thursday night to all the guys who wanted to learn martial arts.
And I became a martial arts instructor for the recon guys.
And I don't know, I guess in order to be in reconnaissance you had to have this exceptional
PT and be able to do all those things, make night jumps and warm my body out.
Now in my 80s I have trouble getting up these days.
Both my legs were broken, both my arms were broken.
I'm carrying like seven pieces of metal.
And I think the 20 some years I spent doing that line of work, we had to take the PFT
test every quarter and make some of these jumps every quarter and swims and dives.
And I made three combat dives in Vietnam.
I did a ship bottom search on the USS Boxer.
It was almost a thousand feet long.
And we went on there looking for explosives and whatever it was.
Didn't find anything.
And we did so much water work.
We went amphibious.
And so we did a lot of diving and brought up ammunition and it was stored in rivers
and places.
I was a dive master and a jump master and a demo master because I'd been doing this
stuff so many years.
And I was a staff sergeant then and a young officer that we had.
He was not very good.
He was physically fit but he wasn't able to understand the basics of special operations.
And I'd been in 10 years.
And I was a martial arts guy and I was a platoon sergeant.
Then when I got commissioned, I kept doing the same thing.
I kept doing the martial arts and all that, jump master.
We made one parachute jump in Vietnam though.
Made a lot in other Okinawa, Philippines, different places.
But we had a couple jump schedules when we were going to get these POWs out of this POW
camp.
We didn't get them when we got there and killed the guards but they had moved the POWs at
that time.
So I got my first Purple Heart on that mission.
I know that wasn't any fun.
You said you saw part of the documentary.
No, I haven't seen the documentary yet actually because we were waiting for it to come out
on Amazon but I read the book.
But with the POW story, what I thought was interesting is, and I'd love to hear it in
a little bit more detail, but you went there at that point the POWs had been moved at some
point and so there was always that feeling that you wondered what happened to them.
It really reminded me of what most firefighters do when they go into a house.
Very rarely do we find a person but we all take that same risk when we go in.
To me it was like, there's no guarantee that you're going to be able to make that rescue
but the fact that you and your men risk their lives to go and facilitate that save, the
result was almost, not irrelevant, but you took the same risk whether you made the rescue
or whether you didn't.
Well there was 12 of us went in.
I had the intel guy in, I had a young Vietnamese called Lap and he had been in the POW camp,
knew where it was, so CIA brought him to us.
I took him with me on the rescue.
He led us right to the POW camp but it was empty.
We killed the guards and blew up everything else.
Then the problem was getting out of there.
That was kind of hard because the chopper couldn't land and so we had to hoist up.
I was the last man on the ground and I got hit going up.
It wasn't that bad but it scared the hell out of me because it hit me in the head there.
So they gave us all ron stars and they gave the young officer who led the mission, gave
him a silver star.
He didn't deserve it.
But we did a lot of good missions.
That Rambo movie, ours wasn't as flamboyant as that thing but we were there.
We got into the fire fights and did all of that.
Our unit ran something like 55 missions and we took it to them.
There's a lot of things, you probably read a lot of it anyway, but it was a hard tour
for us.
We only had 40 men and then we lost a good bit of those on the way.
We got some new guys in as replacements and most of those guys are gone now.
My team was called team Broadminded and there's only three of us left now.
We did good, ran some good missions.
We spent time up in a place called Quezon which was a nasty place.
If you have time, I'll have Bill set up the documentary so you can see it's an hour and
a half.
That would be great.
Thank you.
I have to get someone who can show it to you because I don't know how to do this stuff anymore.
Computers and all that.
I think these days as well, there's a code so you can watch it anywhere and you just
punch it in.
I have to see what kind of copy they've got.
I've been waiting for it to come out for everyone listening.
It should be coming out soon on Amazon I believe.
We've been working on this thing now but unfortunately, ran into a problem with the music.
We didn't own the music.
The copyright problem?
Yeah, so we're working on that now.
As a matter of fact, I'll call Hollywood later on today and see.
I'm going to meet with them next week when I go out to LA or San Diego.
It's a good documentary.
My old platoon sergeant, he lives about 20 minutes from here.
Oh really?
Sergeant Yermont, he started off as a young land's corporal and a good man.
He's got some serious issues, PTSD.
He lived as a hermit for 15 years after the war.
A lot of the guys such as me, that's an air freshener.
Yeah I know, it's funny, it sounds like a cat getting throttled.
Yeah, but we ran a lot of good missions and I remember some of it and some of it.
I think that year in the hospital, they tried to get me to forget some of this stuff there.
But lately, I'm doing much better.
I take medication.
I take medication for PTSD, for grieving, for pain, for sleeping.
A lot of stuff they give me because the pain I go through, I'm dealing with it.
I don't know that the medication helps me that much, but at least I can sleep a little
bit better.
Yeah, a lot of the things that you would probably want to ask, I have to think about it and
see whether I even know the answer to it anymore.
One thing I did want to talk about, because I think that it's very rare that we hear mental
health discuss, especially in the Vietnam generation.
It's funny, you've got Karl Malanta's book on your side there, I've got the same one
speaking of that.
When I was reading, it seemed like the first time that you really felt the weight of that
was when you lost Corporal Michael Scanlon.
If you're okay recounting that, tell me about his heroism, another Medal of Honor-worthy
moment and then why that one particular one was like that, that critical mass for you.
Well, he was like a son to me.
He was a young guy from Boston, Springfield Mass.
Once I came home, I went to see his mother, told her how sorry I was.
I thought for sure I'd get him home and work that way.
There's some thought that one of the grenades that came in, I wasn't with him on that mission,
but he apparently had pulled it under him because when they looked at his body at great
restoration his sternum was crushed.
So I flew down to denying I was in Quezon at the time.
He was our first Kensley at the Quezon.
Red-headed kid, freckled face, smile all the time.
He's like a son to me.
When I got the word that he was killed, it hurt.
I went to denying to the hospital because one of the other men, Sergeant Ernst, he's
gone too.
I went to see him to see if he could tell me what the hell happened out there.
I was on the POW mission.
That was a hard one for me, I think, because when I went in, it was raining outside, I
caught the chopper from Quezon down to denying, which was only about 30 miles away.
When I got a jeep and I walked it in the hospital, as I was walking down the aisle, I heard this
baby cry, a little girl cry.
I stopped and I couldn't believe it.
She was blind and was tied, tethered to the bed there.
She had one leg and one arm.
It was so sad.
She was crying.
I stopped and I went over.
I heard babies crying in war zones, but I picked her up and she tried to hold on to
me.
I knew I had to go down to see Sergeant Ernst because I needed to get back to Quezon because
they would be coming in.
The 324B division was hitting us pretty hard on 120 rockets.
I picked the child up, rocked her, and she stopped crying.
I looked at my watch and I said, oh man, I've got to get out of here.
I couldn't put her down.
She wouldn't let me, wouldn't turn me loose.
At any rate, I laid the child down and went down to where Ernst was.
He had that big old city grin on his face.
I was a lieutenant at that time.
This was January.
I was standing talking to Ernst.
He had been hit both arms.
I think he was trying to throw a grenade.
The thing was a dud.
He got shot in one arm and eventually got hit in both arms.
He was counting the story.
We were going to send him home.
When I was talking to him, I heard this Marine crying.
He gave me water.
I need some water.
Somebody help me please.
I turned around and I said, Ernst, what's going on?
He says, Lieutenant, he's dying and they can't give him any water.
Well, if he's dying, why?
He was crying.
I went over to the corpsman and I said, Doc, can't you do something with this kid?
He said, no sir, I can't do anything.
He's dying.
He had a big old stomach wound and a mess.
You could smell it all over the place there.
I said, Doc, you got to do something.
You can't let this kid.
He said something I didn't like at night.
Probably said something else to him.
The next thing I know, Ernst was saying, Lieutenant, let him go.
By that time, I had seen so much death and destruction that it just broke my heart.
The little girl up there and Ernst here and the Marine dying and couldn't give him any
water.
A nurse came over and said, Lieutenant, can I talk to you?
I said, yes, ma'am.
She said, why don't you come with me for a minute?
I said, okay.
The Uerman is still alive.
Ernst is gone now.
Ernst said, Lieutenant, behave yourself.
I said, all right.
She took me back in the office there.
I had soft music playing and she said, Lieutenant, sit down for a minute.
She said, who the hell are you?
I said, I'm Lieutenant Jim Capress.
I come from Kaysan.
Look out for one of my Marines.
I said, oh, Sergeant Yermont.
I said, Yermont what?
Ernst is buried up in Arlington and she said, you look pretty bad.
When was the last time you ate?
I said, nurse, I don't remember.
She said, the doctor's not going to let you out of here.
I got wounded down in Fulau.
She said, why don't you stay here?
We'll send a message to your command because you need to be hospitalized.
She said, how long have you been here?
I said, I joined the unit in November 1965.
She said, Lieutenant, this is February 1967.
I said, yeah, but I've been a staff sergeant and I'm filling in for some of the officers
till we get some supplies, get some replacements in.
She says, I think you're done.
I think you need to see the doctor and have them do something with you because you obviously
got blood all over you, got mud all over you and don't know if you've eaten anything.
I said, well, I'll eat when my troops eat.
She said, let me give you something else.
I said, no, I won't eat now.
You feed Sergeant Ernst.
But I can't eat now.
I got to get back to Kaysan because we're going to be expecting an attack tonight.
She said, how do you know that?
Because that's what they always do.
So I got to get back.
She said, well, you need to eat something.
I said, no, I can't eat till my troops eat.
That's just something, you know, officers never eat until they've been eaten.
How am I going to sit down there with music playing and a plate of food?
No, you know, can't do that.
That's not where it goes.
In a way, I was taught, you know, coming up in a line of work I was in.
So the doctor came in and he said that I heard that you were here and I want to come in and
tell you that it's no shame in us keeping you here.
We think that you had, you got combat fatigue and we want to keep you here.
And I said, Doc, I can't stay.
He said, well, we also know you got to get away from the sun back home.
And so I was supposed to go home in April and this was February.
I said, Doc, you know, let me talk to my sergeant and I got to get out of here.
He said, you know, I could have the MPAs keep you.
I said, Doc, you and I both know you don't have enough men in here to keep me.
He said, no, I don't.
Let's don't get carried away with this thing now.
So I got up.
Actually, he left.
He said, I got to go see another patient.
I want to say go take care of that boy who's dying out there.
And he said, why don't you sit here and I can smell the nurses perfume.
And I had to smell perfume and I don't know when.
And I said, that pretty white smock on, pretty girl, young.
I thought too young to be in a war zone like this, but a lot of young ladies, they volunteered.
I mean, they were really heroes.
They were just so, so brave when the hospital got hit.
They grabbed those M16s, they go out there and they'd get their helmets and jump on the
lines.
Amazing young women who did those kind of things.
I admired them so much, the nurses.
And she sat down there with me.
She said, Lieutenant, take your boots off.
Take your boots off and relax for a minute.
And I said, I'll sit down for a minute, but I need to get back to K-San.
She said, you know, if you go back to K-San, you're probably going to die.
I said, nurse, been a story of my life.
And she said, why don't you sit down for a minute.
I sat down for a minute and I dosed off.
I was just tired.
Body was worn out.
I weighed 125 pounds when I come home.
I weighed 206 pounds now.
Most of that's fat right now.
But I said, no, I need to get back.
So I went out and I said hello to, goodbye to Sergeant Ernst.
And he died of brain cancer from ancient orange.
And I was going back up to get my Jeep and I heard the little girl crying.
My mind was fried.
I can't do this anymore.
Just couldn't do it.
I couldn't, I wanted to go over and grab a hugger.
My heart was broken.
I didn't know whether Ernst was going to live or die.
Well there's the rain over there, the bad stomach wounds.
Now I've got this child I could hear.
I could hear, but I couldn't do it anymore.
So the nurse come behind me and she said, Lieutenant, your Jeep is out there.
And it was raining and the Jeep pulled up and she had this beautiful white smock on.
And she come out to the Jeep where I was and grabbed me by the arm.
She said, Lieutenant, don't go to K-Son.
You won't make it out of there.
You need to be in the hospital.
I said, nurse, I appreciate it, but I told you, my men are up there.
As long as they're up there, I'll be there.
If I got to die, I'd die with the only friends I ever had.
And she was saying something to me and she tripped and stumbled in the mud.
And damn it, she said, Lieutenant, come on with me.
And I got in the Jeep and didn't say goodbye.
The Jeep drove off.
I got me a helicopter and drove back to K-Son.
And that night they came.
You hear the whistles blowing and hop up on opium and morphine and hear the whistles blowing.
And they'd come through the lines.
They had something called sappers.
They'd blow themselves up and blow a hole in the barbed wire and they'd come running
in.
It was like suicide bombers.
But there were wonderful young troops there.
They picked up entrenching tools.
I wasn't able to do anything that night.
You could hear them yell, come on.
Then we had this setup run by a lady named Hanoi Hannah.
And she would be broadcasting these Yankees, something like the old Japanese thing there.
Yankee, go home.
You die.
And they'd be broadcast over there.
But they came, blowing those buoys.
And they didn't take K-Son.
But when I think of those nights, I needed to rest.
I was tired mentally.
Plus I never healed from that POW thing when I got hit.
And I called my corpsman.
I was lieutenant at that time, packing K-Son.
And I called my corpsman.
I said, Doc, come with me now.
Come with me because I'm going to need you.
Doc says, you okay, Lieutenant?
I said, yeah, Doc, I'm okay.
This might be a haunted force.
And he followed me around a little burn.
And that's when the flares were coming down and everything was going on there.
I said, Doc, stay with me now because they'll be coming soon.
It was dark.
You see the flares dropping down.
And the corpsman said, Lieutenant, he said, you know, I don't feel well.
I'm just a little tired.
Can I rest for a moment?
I said, yeah, Doc, we've got a little time.
He sat down next to me.
My right foot, he leaned against my right foot and he died right there.
He never got up.
I had to hold his chest.
I never knew the boy had been hit.
He followed me.
He said, I'm just a little tired.
Let me rest for a minute.
He didn't complain.
He died in his post.
And so I think that's when the demons come home.
I didn't even know his name.
When I looked at him, he had a big hole in his chest.
I never said a word.
I said, let me rest for a minute.
And you know, I think when I go back into those days, those dark days, you know, you
wonder who was this boy?
Where did he come from?
How did he know that he was supposed to stay on his post?
Where did he come from?
Where do we get these young men from?
I never knew him before.
I don't remember.
I knew he was a corpsman, so I must have known him from somewhere, but I was gone for a little
while and the boy died right there.
So it's at night.
Things are going on.
People are yelling and screaming.
And I thought maybe I lost it just for a little bit.
I put down my rifle and I looked up in the sky and I said, God, I need you tonight.
I need you.
I need you to help me.
I said, hit me with a bolt of lightning and do something.
And God didn't answer, didn't say anything, nothing I could recognize, no bolt of lightning.
So I wondered if God was listening.
So much chaos.
But I got up, picked up my rifle and I went back to the war.
And they pulled us out and sent me back to Fubi.
And I wanted so badly to hear God say, it's going to be okay.
I didn't hear anything, nothing I could recognize.
So eventually we got out of there and moved on back down south.
And it started all over again.
God Almighty.
I didn't hit twice at K-San, but I only had one purple heart from the POW thing.
If you had three purple hearts, they would send you home.
And I never said nothing to anybody.
You didn't want to leave your men?
No, couldn't do that.
Old Don was gone, Spain I was gone, Kettison was gone, Barnes was gone.
And I'm a staff sergeant.
I'm running this thing now, staff sergeant.
They turned me down in 1964.
In 1965, I applied for officers training.
They said consider it, but not select it.
But then again, that day in 66, my colonel called me in and put some lieutenant Barnes
on me.
No officers training.
I went there a few weeks ago, Quantico.
Finally let me see it.
This is what you missed.
But we lost so many men at that K-San.
The 324th B Division hit us hard.
They they could fight.
They'd been there since Dien Bien Phu when they fought against the French.
But they never took K-San from us.
No, when they never took it, they'd come pretty close because some of that West Moline came
at it one time.
He flew in and looked around and left.
And he was the commanding chief at that time.
But we got out of there and flew south and then it got worse.
So in between we went on special missions and I can't remember all of the missions,
but if you can tie all this together.
No, I mean, it flows the way it's supposed to.
But one thing I wanted to ask you, and I always ask every member of the military this that's
been deployed, the scene combat, because there is no worse example of how abandoned our men
and women in the military were than the Vietnam era.
And even to this day, I think that the civilians of the world, or at least in the US and maybe
the UK, get given a very polarizing view.
These days now, you could think of it as a pro-war view, like kill them all, let God
sort them out and then you have the baby killer side.
So what I always ask people so that people listening can get a view of what it's like
to be a member of the military wearing a uniform standing in that combat zone.
When you got there, let's say Vietnam specifically, regardless of politics that sent you there,
because often there's people on this show that were in a war they didn't agree with.
What were some of the things you started seeing done by the VC and the MVA to the Vietnamese
people that made you realize, regardless of politics, there are some horrible people that
we need to take care of?
Well, I think earlier on, we knew that they were the North Vietnamese, because we came
in on the side of the South Vietnamese, because they divided the North and South at the end
of the Dien Bien Vũ thing.
And the North Ho Chi Minh, I think he's running that.
Forget the President of South Vietnam, but we were on the side of the South Vietnamese.
We came in, the army came in with big divisions, and my unit, we were in 40 men, whole train,
top of the line, you know, Team Broadmontet.
We had a 12-man group, but we had other train commandos also.
But Team Broadmontet, which was my team, were very good, dangerous, I would say.
Whole young men, trained by the sergeant here and led by the lieutenant.
But the Vietnamese, we had something called a National Liberation Front, and these were
some of the Viet Cong.
And the Viet Cong would go into some of the villages and rape the women, recruit the young
men, take all of the rice.
And if they had a chief, they would take the chief and hang him up, rip his stomach out,
let the hogs eat his entrails.
They'd burn what was left.
And my job was to go and find them.
And I did.
We hunted them down.
And we killed one of them.
But didn't they come back again?
So we hunt them down to their villages, to their hideouts in the mountains.
They'd drop us in by helicopters.
We spent five or six days out there and found out they're cooking pots.
And we track them down at night.
We had artillery, a wonderful battery called Yankee Battery.
And they were 105s.
And they could move pretty much close to us.
They were the 175s.
Then we had the 175s at Kaysan.
But the artillery were guys that would back us up because we didn't have enough men to
fight them toe to toe.
So we had the gunships that we'd give them the coordinates and they were scared of us.
They needed to be.
We had what we call free fire zones.
And anything in that zone there, I could hunt down and kill.
Killing and I hear these noises here.
You're in the zone and all of a sudden the air freshener goes off again.
I don't plan that stuff, but that's where it is.
But we were good at that and we'd hunt them down.
Sometimes we were not to get a prisoner.
And sometimes we didn't bring them back for a lot of reasons.
But they were so violent.
They were so violent.
I was a little older at the time.
I was a little older.
A lot of the guys were barely out of their teens, but they were young and strong and
they volunteered and I needed them.
When I was up at Arlington a few weeks ago, my point man was there.
Sergeant Dorosky, point man, an interesting person.
Lord knows interesting person.
And the one mission that he didn't go on was the one that we battled a Fulock.
I lost my war dog and all of us got pretty much banged up.
But we accomplished the mission.
We needed to blow the leeward side of the mountain range.
And we called in phantoms and artillery because that's where they were based in the hit Way
City.
We didn't stop them going into Way City, but we slowed them down a lot.
I had 10 men in my war dog, Cango, had been with me a long time.
He was killed right in front of me.
Probably saved my life, but we brought his body out.
I tried to talk about that as best I could, but so many missions we ran, it's hard to
remember them all or certain degree of accuracy.
But you asked me about the cruelness of the enemy soldiers and why it was so important
for us to make sure they knew if they come into this area, we're going to find them.
Because you had Green Berets protecting areas too, didn't you?
So I think that's an important thing is that in these combat zones, people forget that
American, British, Australian, wherever, the Allied forces are protecting the native people
of that country, whether it's Iraqis, whether it's Afghanis.
I think, again, the distortion of what these often drafted men and women were asked to
do in Vietnam, the worst case scenarios are reported.
The massacres that did happen at the hands of the Americans, which were an anomaly versus
all the good that you guys were doing amidst this battle zone.
So it's so important that we civilians, myself included, get to hear these firsthand accounts
of where Americans were dying, protecting South Vietnamese.
We had the Australians there.
We had the two divisions from South Korea.
We had the Korean White Horse Division and the Korean First Division, First Marine Division.
And they were good fighters.
And I didn't fight with them, but I was with Australians.
And they had some British there.
I don't remember running into too many of them there.
But always our best allies.
And I worked with them in my early years when I was on the Med Cruises.
And we would see the British in the Middle East with the French Foreign Legion in places
like Italy.
The Legion was there and the British was there.
It was the NATO forces.
And as a young guy, I saw this happening and I was soaking it all up.
But I found out that the British and the Legion, they were older guys.
My guys were 19, 20 years old.
Some of these guys, you know, in World War II, you know.
I never really saw too many of the Foreign Legion in a combat environment.
And I don't remember seeing it in Vietnam, because they had this shot at it when they
lost Dien Bien Phu.
With the French.
But the British, they had to be there.
I don't remember war.
We fought the British.
We might have been in the SAS.
They were probably hiding in all the shadows.
Well, I know that one of the reasons behind the documentary, the reason that I came across
your story in the first place, and it's one of so many that people should be hearing,
was the Medal of Honor component.
Now, you know, I mean, when people read your book, there are so many acts of valor in those
stories with you and your men.
It's incredible.
But so let's kind of transition to that point now.
Tell me about April 3, 1967.
And then I think that that part is important, but also the events following and finding
yourself back in American soil and not receiving the hero's welcome that our World War II vets
did.
Yeah, coming out of a caisson, we went into a place called Phu Bai.
Then we launched a mission into Phu Loc, you know, to hopefully stop them from going into
Hue City, because that was already planned.
It wasn't no big surprise to anybody.
But the South Vietnamese, they fought relatively good.
But I got nominated for the Medal of Honor in 2006, years after the war, because I got
nominated by both my battalion commanders for the Medal of Honor.
They gave me the Silver Star.
And the Navy gave me the Commando Medal of Honor.
And you know, I got a lot of stuff around here.
If you see over there, the governor gave me awards and the North and South Carolina governors,
recent years they gave me these governor's awards.
And they did the documentary and I wrote the book, but I never got the Medal of Honor.
There are some who didn't think I did enough.
In our line of work, we didn't stand up and fight against tanks and whatever.
We would drop behind enemy lines and do what we were trained to do.
We had to slow them down a little bit.
And we fought pretty good battles up in Khe Sanh, Phu Bai, Phu Loc, and we made four infamous
landings up near the DMZ.
We fought against the divisions up near the DMZ.
And that was a, we had 1st Battalion 26 Marines and I was attached to it to provide reconnaissance
for those guys.
And we lost 37 men killed, over 200 wounded.
I only had a couple wounded.
I didn't have any KIAs on that one.
So, we were violent up near the DMZ.
My team rescued a bunch of Marines that had been surrounded and they brought us in by
chopper and I flanked them, the enemy soldiers, and got as many as I could.
Then we brought them out.
We were operating from ships, I mean, four amphibious landings from ships and Amtrak's.
We'd go in and do what we needed to do against the enemy.
Then we had the Australians and the 173rd Airborne Battle Group.
Australians came in from the west and the Airborne came in, they were our anchors.
We came in from the sea and the Australians over here and the Army was coming in, putting
an anvil right there.
Unfortunately, we came in, the Army had a little bit of a gap.
They jumped off a little bit late so we didn't kill as many as we would have if they'd had
that anvil there.
Because the Australians, they did good.
They did good.
We killed 990-something on two missions and went back and killed another 200-something.
But the battalion wasn't just us recon guys.
We left them until we thought the bad guys were rescued, a few guys, and did the best
we could.
But on to the Medal of Honor, right now my senators have recommended that I be awarded
the Medal of Honor.
Marine Corps is kind of hard on awards.
They turned me down, said, no, you didn't do enough.
But back in those days, we've never had any history of the whole Marine Corps dating back
to 1775, because we didn't have black officers back in those days.
We've never had a black officer receive the Medal of Honor or be nominated in the history
of the Marine Corps.
I was the first one ever to be nominated.
I got nominated, didn't get it, they dropped it down to the Silver Star.
And they gave me some other stuff, but I never got the Medal of Honor.
Now Congress is picking it up now, and I met with some of the senators, congressmen, who
said, hey, this is BS.
This guy should have got the Medal of Honor.
Given what we did and all of the missions we ran, but they will only give you the Medal
of Honor for one mission.
And I ran 50, 60 missions over there, and diving missions, and special ops missions,
and POW missions, and it was my team that found that aircraft, B57, came there and it
was crashed in the mountains and we located it.
And it was outfitted to carry a nuclear weapon.
But then they left us out there.
We had to walk home.
Walk home is not half a mile down the road.
You were there for what, five days or something?
Yeah.
And you wrote a book?
Yes, sir.
Like I said, it was a great read.
Yeah, thank you.
It's not the book that I wanted to write, but I had to hire a ghostwriter.
Paid him 10 grand to help me with the spelling and all of that.
And a lot of the things that I wrote didn't make the cut.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
He said people won't read any more than 300 pages.
So he could have let his stuff out.
That was pretty good stuff.
Maybe you can release a second portion of all the bits that were cut out.
I'm thinking about that.
An addendum.
Yeah.
And we, a group of young men, I'm telling you, they were really good, hard guys.
And of course at that time, you know, I'd been handpicked to do whatever it was we did.
And I think when I got hit the last time, they sent me to the Nang, and they shipped
us off to Japan.
And from Japan, they sent us to Alaska.
It was 10 degrees below zero and snow all over the ground.
Snow was falling and they took us off the aircraft and refueled it to go to Virginia.
And you were, you had shrapnel on your abdomen, your leg was broken.
So you were in a bad way.
Bleeding out.
Yeah.
That was a tough, took us five days to get home.
Yeah.
I think the sadness of it, when I was in Japan, Air Force Base there, there was a young Marine,
I mean I was the only officer that was going to Alaska.
And the young Marine who was in the wreck next to me, he lost his right leg and lost
his right leg.
And he was a lieutenant.
I said, yeah, what do you got?
He said, you want to have my milk?
I'm not going to drink my milk.
You didn't get much milk in the country, you know, them things there.
But I said, no, no, no, you will need your strength.
He said, you know, I'm going to marry a girl named Mary Lou.
And she's waiting for me.
But I don't know now.
He said, you think she's still going to love me now I lost my leg?
I said, don't worry about it.
She's going, long as you're home, she can't wait to have you home.
And don't worry about it.
Mary Lou is going to be there.
I never knew if Mary Lou was there or not because the boy died and they didn't make
it.
So that's the kind of sadness.
You wonder why didn't he make it?
Why did I get home?
You know, I had a wife and a son waiting for me, but the boy didn't make it.
And we lost four on the way home.
And I think, you know, when I got off the aircraft, son of a bitch, pardon my language
there.
Oh, please.
He pissed on me.
So because I heard you talk about that in the other.
So so you were basically on a stretcher on on the airport ground in the tarmac.
Who, who the hell was that?
Good question.
So so you're lying there near mortally wounded and someone peed on you.
Cruelty.
You know, we didn't get the bands.
Nobody reached down and say, hey, welcome home.
Thanks for doing a good job.
Can I help you?
Can I give you a drink of water or whatever?
No, then get that.
Nobody say hello.
People walk by.
You're bleeding on the sidewalk.
And on the way to the hospital that put me in the ambulance, I had all this urine on me.
And that was my welcome home.
One.
You know, it hurt.
But then I figured, you know.
I remember this guy in my mind, God, please let me remember this person.
But God didn't work that way.
No, no, you've had enough.
No more.
So I went on to the hospital and they call my.
Oh, they sent a they used to have telegrams.
They send telegrams.
Somebody was wounded or killed or whatever.
Or they would try to send an officer out to like they sent an officer out to my wife's
apartment where she lived in Baltimore.
And she didn't want to open the door because she didn't want to.
She saw the car.
She looked out the window because she had this feeling all day long.
And she called her mother and say, I think something wrong.
And I got this feeling.
And then she saw the car pull up out there.
She said, oh, boy, he's gone.
And then two officers come up to the door, knock on the door.
And they try to they try to tell her that I was OK.
And she was hearing I was dead and she wouldn't open the door for him.
So they finally convinced him he's alive.
He's alive.
And then then she was able to come to the hospital, but she couldn't find me because
they told her they didn't have any black Marine officers.
I was a little commission over there.
They gave me a new dog tags, new ID card.
They changed my social security number.
You know, I went over the staff, so I can come back as a lieutenant.
Well, all new stuff.
Staff Sergeant Capers didn't didn't exist anymore.
The ultimate spy, really.
Yeah.
So we got home and she come to see me.
But I'm not sure so sure how I felt.
I felt the shame because I wrote to her, you know, all those letters and.
You know, when I get home, you know, we're going to go to lunch and dinner.
We're going to go dancing.
We're going to go to dinner.
I left in sixty five.
Now this is.
April sixty seven.
And and.
All that time had gone by.
She brought the baby with her.
He remembers that.
But when she brought in there, he would hold her hand.
But some kind of way.
He got away from her and come into my room and put his hand on my on my bed and says,
hi, daddy.
And the question was, how did he know what room I was in?
Because he said he was blind.
Yeah.
Amazing.
There's so many moments in your stories as well where there's that kind of divine intervention
moment now, obviously, with one of them.
Well.
So when I was telling you when I was a case on and I'm pleading for God to help me out
here.
And I see no bolt of lightning.
God didn't say anything to me.
But on the way home, the battle of Fulock.
Got hit real bad and.
Chopper landed.
I got my all my troops on there and.
Yes, we could and.
Got my dog's body on, then we couldn't get off the ground.
It was one of them little small eights, thirty fours.
But everybody got on board bleeding and guys were kind of a mess.
And I was in pretty bad shape.
And when the choppers took off.
I didn't think it was gonna make it.
It took off and it started.
The second or third time it started going down.
Then all of a sudden, like the hand of God reached up and took it up and send it home
toward the hospital.
And years later, when I thought about what happened at Kason, when I was pleading for
God to help me, that's when God said, you know, I heard you.
I wasn't asleep.
I heard you the first time.
I am God.
I can fly this helicopter.
I don't need any gas.
I don't need a pilot.
I'll get you home.
And the next time it crashed, it crashed in the hospital yard.
I could see the red cross there and it crashed there and got all my guys off.
Everybody survived except the dog.
And we're still fighting that same old battle.
Now what was really powerful to me about that moment is you try to take off the first two
times and the weight was too much.
You were hanging on to the landing gear and not one moment was there the thought to remove
the dog because you saw the dog as another Marine.
I mean, for me, I've actually have a German shepherd myself as well, but I thought that
was very powerful.
You know, and then the way that, you know, when you landed, the dog was still continued
after you made sure, continued to be treated as a Marine.
So I think that was, you know, a very, very powerful part.
That third time, like you said, that that thrust was found through, you know, divine
intervention and the craft got you guys back.
Through the years when my son was dying and I was holding on to him and he stopped breathing
and I got on my knees again.
I said, God, you know, I am again.
But he died my arms and demons come home.
I got angry again.
And God works in mysterious ways, but I always worried about my son being blind and special
needs.
What would happen to him when mom and dad is gone?
Would he ever be cold?
Would he be hungry?
Would he be abused?
Who would care for him?
We wanted those things.
We discussed it.
But then God said, I heard you.
He's with God now and he's with his mother.
He'll never be cold.
He'll never be hungry.
He'll never be abused because he's in heaven with God.
God has assured me of that and I believe I'll see them again.
But God never does things when you want them done.
But he answered my prayer.
So he's no longer blind.
No longer blind now.
So I have to take these things with me.
I wish I had him here because God gave me a gift because he was gifted.
He was gifted.
And he was such a wonderful, wonderful child.
And he was so much part of my life in the days when I thought that I would make it,
he gave me that inspiration.
I'm going home to give him sight.
He will be able to hold on to me.
But if I fail now, who will carry my child?
I was holding him when he closed his eyes.
It was hard on me.
The demons come by again.
And it seemed like the next day Dottie passed away of liver cancer.
But now on the positive side, she doesn't have cancer anymore.
She didn't have cancer anymore.
She's healed.
God has healed her.
These are things that I have had to hold on to.
And I believe today and I believe that I will see them again.
Definitely.
I know for me the clock is ticking.
I know that.
And I've fought some good battles.
It depends on which side the coin you're on.
I always like to think I did what was right for my country.
Even though the places I went to, there were signs up, no Negroes allowed.
Even in Hawaii you experienced prejudice, didn't you?
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
I mean, that's the way our country has evolved.
We're getting better.
It's sad that we have so many young people killing, being killed on both sides.
But I wonder sometimes when I start to write the book, my wife and I start to write it
together.
Then when I got to California, I was in a hotel and I finally got an apartment.
And it's kind of hard because everything I ever wanted and cared about was gone now.
This house didn't exist anymore.
Only in my mind.
And I went from hotel to hotels and then I would try to call my wife.
I take my cell phone out and I try to call her and tell her that I'm in LA now.
But she wasn't able to hear those calls.
She was in Arlington.
But in my mind, I was in denial.
I went to tell her I'm okay.
Okay.
But I told her a couple weeks ago when I was up in Arlington, I told her I'll see you soon.
We'll be all right.
God has promised us that.
She was a very deeply religious woman.
And she told me before she closed her eyes, I'll see you again.
But this time she didn't wink at me.
She will when you get up there.
Yeah.
Hopefully, hopefully I'll make it because the life I live, you know, I did what I thought
was right.
Killed a lot of people.
A lot of people along the way.
I'm not sure if I'm proud of that.
But at the time, it didn't make much difference to me.
I was trained and I got good at my craft.
I was very good at it.
Yeah, they run up on Team Broadminded, they had a hard time.
We'd go out and it wasn't unusual for us to kill 20, 30, 40.
And we would do that with small arms.
I would usually open up.
And then my M79 man would open up.
My M60 would open up and then we would smoke the area.
And in a matter of minutes, there'd be smoke and death all over the place.
And I don't know how you're proud of that, but they didn't harm any innocent farmers.
And then we'd back off, then call in artillery, burn the whole area, then the choppers would
come in and then we would get on the chopper to go back to our base and nobody would speak.
We were just staring.
And you could, as the chopper turned around, you could see nothing but a burn drop zone,
fire all over the place.
Because Team Broadminded had been there.
And if you're not careful, we're coming back again and again and again until they feared
us.
They feared us.
And then some of my guys, unfortunately, I worried about them because that's what they
wanted to do.
They want to kill people.
I had to say, okay, it's not what we're here for.
We kill what is necessary.
And you saw that slowly grow from that what was an innocent, blank canvas mind, new marine
to that point.
See, again, we hear some of these stories where that's gone too far.
And it wasn't like you arrived in that place with that mindset.
And I think that's what we've got to remember as well, especially in drafts, that we picked
these kids from this one country and we dropped it in this other one, children.
And we told them to go kill.
And then what's disgusting is then when they come back, they're pissed on and spit on and
call baby killers and all this.
And then we wonder why that generation now is taking their lives at an astounding rate
because we abandoned them.
We forced them to go out there.
We forced them to kill.
And then when they came back, we left them out to dry.
So I mean, it's it's an absolute embarrassment, I think, what we did to that generation.
Yeah.
The other day, I got a.
This there was Tuesday, I got a call from a very successful businessman.
He asked me if I'd come to this very prestigious golf course.
And he said they want to hear my stories of Vietnam.
And these are folks who got plenty of money and they go play golf.
And they read about me somewhere along the line and they contacted me and said, say,
would you come and tell us what it was like?
At first, I said no, I don't know if I want to go down this road again, you know.
Let's take it enough for me to go to.
San Diego next week and talk to the Gold Star Widows.
But I said, yeah, I'll come.
And these guys never wore the uniform.
Very successful.
But they want to hear how I suffered and my generation suffered.
You know, nobody gave me anything when I come home.
You know, I mean, you know, it was kind of hard.
But when I look at the totality of kindness, when I got home from Alaska to Virginia, to
the hospital before my wife come in, and I was a mess.
I'd been in five days getting home.
I'd been four days in combat.
You know, I was bloody and dirty.
And this young nurse came in and I was, you know, my wounds was open and draining.
And I was in serious pain.
And she sat down next to me and she left the room for a minute and then come back with
a pail of water, scented water.
And she took my hands and rubbed my hands in this water and the dirt and blood came
off my hands.
And she massaged my hands.
And that's the first time I had a human touch in I don't know how long.
And she said, Lieutenant, they tell me your wife is coming tomorrow.
She's coming tomorrow.
And you know, but the little touch, little touch of kindness that I'd had flesh and whatever
all over me, hadn't shaved and hadn't bathed.
You know, but there she was sitting there.
I must have smelled awful.
You know, she sat there with that pretty little white outfit on, washing my hands and couldn't
get the blood off my hands.
Flesh under my fingernails.
My eyes were sunken back in my head.
I must have looked terrible.
But she rubbed my hands and says, your wife is coming tomorrow.
She's coming tomorrow.
And those little things, they help in the healing process.
So you begin to heal by somebody doing something, some little kindness to you.
And you take that with you.
They don't remember the person who pissed on me.
But it's those kind things of kindness.
A blind child finds his way into a hospital room.
He says, hello, daddy.
How's that happen?
The doctor said he didn't know it, he must have felt it.
He could have known I was in that room.
But you know, there are things that we don't quite understand yet.
But I knew it was my son.
I felt it.
He didn't cry.
I was a mess.
And those long nights, all these wounds were draining and the pain I was going through.
And sometimes I would take my clock.
They would give me a shot of morphine every four hours.
I had a clock over my bed.
I had turned my clock up and I called my nurse.
The nurse, you forgot to give me my medicine.
Come look at my clock there.
I was a junkie.
I was so used to that morphine.
That's what kept me alive, that morphine.
I just wanted to say, come get me my morphine.
Look at this clock.
You forgot.
She didn't forget.
Just that that's what I wanted.
I can know how a drug addict feels.
And all those long nights I laid there in that bed, hearing those cries and trying to get
through the night, the dreams I had and things that occurred to me in that time there.
You don't know what's real or what's imagination.
You're trying to put it out of your mind, but you can't.
You can't.
And so many things occurred in that hospital.
When I had the near death experience, when at 6.31 that morning, a nurse and a doctor
came into my room and they looked at me and said, we have some news for you, Lieutenant.
We have some news for you.
And we're here to tell you that you've been killed in action and you're going home to
see God.
This is in my mind.
I'm going through this and they were standing at my bed and they said, if you look to your
right, you're going to see God.
And I looked to my right and I saw this big ball of light.
I heard this loud explosion.
The next thing I knew, I was on the floor.
Didn't know how I got there.
And the psychologist come down and told me it was a near death experience and that I'm
here for a while longer.
I didn't go see God.
Apparently God didn't want me.
Yet.
But these are things that occurred when you're there.
There were occasions when the little candy stripers would come there and bring me a book
or something.
The chaplain would come by and pray for me.
But up until that time, I was isolated.
You couldn't come in my room except for family.
So I had to go through all that and they skin grass.
It was 10 months you were in hospital for?
I don't really remember.
They let me out for a while.
And I remember I got out of the hospital on March 12th, 1968.
Yeah, that's pretty much a year since when you got blown up.
Now what about, this will be the last thing and I want to wrap this up because we've been
talking for over two hours and I want to be mindful of your time.
But a big part is the abandonment of these Vietnam era warriors.
You talked about the opium.
I mean, excuse me, the, why am I forgetting the name now?
The morphine.
Thank you.
Now we see so many of our veterans that are stuck in addiction, that are homeless.
And again, that era seems to be a large portion of that.
You, I know that you said you had the demons, you went to some dark places, your marriage
was strained for a while, Doughty stood by you.
So just going to walk me through where the lowest part that you found yourself and then
what were the tools that you personally used to get yourself back out of that?
When I looked out the window one morning and I said, you know, all this pain I'm going
through, I can open up this window.
Dark places.
But God kept it shut.
It didn't open.
Window of a tall building you're talking about.
Yeah.
I was on the 14th floor.
And so you're right, we could talk for weeks about how I got to this place here without
my wife and my child.
You're so kind to come all the way up from Florida to talk to an old guy.
Talk to a fascinating old guy.
The hell of a story.
Well, if they give me the Medal of Honor, maybe somebody will hear your story and say,
yeah, give it to the guy.
Well, I mean, like I said, it's listened to a lot now and there's a large community that
does listen.
So I hope it helps.
I hope it's part of the push.
But you said about the window not opening, what were some of the things you used that
helped you heal, helped you grow, helped you get over that survivor's guilt and the inability
to save and all these things that a lot of this audience are familiar with?
Well, I keep saying it's God.
Not everybody believes in God.
I believe in God because I can't explain my being here.
It makes no sense.
My wife and my child are up in Arlington and I feel guilty because I felt like I should
be there.
They were the innocent ones.
When I stood at their graves, I made my report to my wife and my son, told him I'll see them
soon but I'm not going to get used to this thing one of these days.
It's always at the most poignant moments as well, the air freshener goes off.
How do you get through something like this that I've been through?
I hadn't put all that together yet.
I went all the way to California after I left my wife and son up in Arlington and a lot
of other friends up there and on the Vietnam Memorial.
It's a process, I think.
I don't know if I can point to one thing that helped me get through the violence, the war.
I killed my first person when I was not quite 20 years old yet.
That was many, many years ago and about a month ago, some young people took me out to
a firing range and put some targets up and said, Major, why don't you go ahead and take
a few shots?
The first time I fired a weapon in years, but I never lost it.
It was a dead shot.
I didn't see anything in the target.
I wasn't even any person, just a regular silhouette target, but I could always shoot.
I'm alive today because I was that good of a shot, but it's not something that I would
want to do anymore.
A friend of mine sent me a 9mm from Czechoslovakia and that's the weapon that I use, but it was
awkward for me.
I'm no longer a violent man.
We're going to bring some homeless people over here and going to feed them.
We just did a barbecue for single mothers.
That's where I want to be.
I don't want to be remembered as Major Capers, kill more people in the law of the loud.
I don't know that I'm happy with that.
My tombstone is already there.
My name is on it with my wife and my son.
I don't want people to see that with such a wonderful woman and a wonderful child and
with a guy like me.
A lot of these things I did because I wanted to do.
Wasn't by accident.
I hunted them down and I would track them.
I'm talking about the enemy soldiers who created so much violence on farmers that they were
leaving those areas.
I would track them and they would find their stool and I'd pick it up in my hands and
I'd test it to see if it was hard or soft that I knew how far they were gone.
Then I tracked them and I killed every one of them.
My son Bill who was here a little bit ago, he said, you shouldn't talk about that.
That's the world I lived in.
You'll need to hear that, the rawness of those stories.
How do you pick up stool and if it's hard, they've been gone for a while.
If it's soft, I got them.
I got you.
You're like an animal.
You sleep on the ground.
You eat one meal a day and everything you have is ammunition and grenades but you keep
going and you think you're doing the right thing.
But there are things in my line of work when they drop you behind the lines.
So we'll pick you up in four or five days and you come back and tell us how many you
killed, how many was wounded, how many prisoners you come back.
Then you write it down on the board and then you go back out in two days and you come back
and you write more names on that board.
They give you two beers when you come back.
After all the hell you've gone through, they give you two beers.
What a great job you've done.
Now you drink these two beers as our reward for you killing so many human beings.
But that's what we did.
And some of the guys got drunk and they were so happy.
Hey, we killed 15 today.
We killed 20 today.
We dropped in 175, 155's artillery.
Our choppers came in and you could see parts of bodies lying around.
And you sort of get addicted to that lifestyle.
And then you're too sick to eat.
When you wash your hands, you got a human being stool in your hands and you get flyers
all around.
How do you measure that?
And you come back and you write a letter to your loved ones and today I killed 25 enemy
soldiers and I blew his head off.
Ha ha ha.
I'll be home soon and we're going to go to the movies.
The Dichotomy of the Human Brain.
Yeah, I'll be 84 in a few months.
And the doctor told me a few weeks ago that for me the clock is ticking.
You have you like an old car.
The parts are falling off now.
But if you can equate your heart to an engine, it's still ticking.
He said, I'm not God, but you're an amazing human being.
He was a new doctor in the hospital.
I don't think I've seen anything quite like you.
I don't know what to say.
I look at all your scars and I read your history and whatever the battles you fought.
That's amazing you're still here.
But he also said that he wasn't God so he could tell me.
He couldn't tell me that time went a place.
But he said, even though the clock is ticking, I look forward to seeing you for a long time.
I'm not only your doctor, I'm your friend.
And if you need me, you call me.
I'll be here and we'll go down the road together.
We're on the road together.
Said, thanks doc.
See you next time.
Then he transferred him.
That's a horrible ending to that story.
I was just about to say you found an amazing doctor.
He transferred him.
Wait a minute, what happened?
But anyway son, I'm going to figure out a time to show you the documentary.
Beautiful.
And a lot of what we just talked about is in the documentary, it's not half long.
Hollywood produced it, won four awards so far.
It hadn't been on the market as of yet.
And I'm supposed to get a percentage of this for my foundation.
So let's talk about that first.
Tell everyone about the foundation and where they can donate, where they can support it.
Well, the foundation, I started when my son passed away.
And again, the demons come home.
When I lost my son, I had some pretty bad thoughts.
My wife was not at the hospital.
I had to call her and tell her that she had been diagnosed with cancer.
When I called her to come to the hospital, we'd lost our only child.
Bill is my godson.
I became angry.
And the chaplain come in in the hospital room out there and try to pray with me, but I told
him to stand back.
It's not the time.
And I want everybody to walk easy now.
Nobody talks now.
Nobody talks.
Then my wife come over and held me by the hand, said, let's go home now.
We left our child there at the hospital.
Then we buried him.
It didn't seem like the next day we buried her.
And the demons kept sitting on my shoulder saying, you know, all those people who killed
your wife and your son, let's go do that.
And I thought, well, I got nowhere to go now.
Everything I had is gone.
So I don't make them pay.
But my wife took all my weapons and I'd been given a collection of weapons, different people.
I don't have any more, but I see she took them and locked them all up.
She says, I know that look.
And I gave them away.
I got one pistol now that a friend of mine said, check those Avakian non-millimeter.
But I was angry.
I wasn't angry at God, but I was angry because how could this happen to my family?
So I want somebody to feel the pain that I'm feeling.
Then God stepped in again.
No, no, no.
And I went to California, went to therapy every Tuesday at one o'clock.
Finally got an apartment and lived in hotels and ate in some little dive somewhere.
Trying to get it all together.
But God stepped in and brought me home.
And young God Sunday, he picked me up at the airport and brought me home.
Where I am now.
So the time for me, you never know.
You might come back when I'm 105 years old.
My grandmother's about to turn 104.
So that's a possibility.
So I'll show you the documentary.
And what's the documentary called for people listening?
The Legend of Major Jim Capress.
Beautiful.
And the book is entitled Faith Through the Storm.
I've written other pieces.
The book I wrote a little piece about, Devil's Mountain.
You probably read that.
Yes, sir.
So, you know, as I try to come up with different things, I had another young man that was a
cranky vet and he had PTSD, PTSD, real serious.
So he would come to visit me here at the house before my wife passed.
And after my wife passed, I moved him to California with me.
He lived in my apartment with me.
Another nice young man from his name was Rooster Dixon.
Rooster.
Wonderful young man.
He went home to Georgia to see his folks and he got shot and killed.
And the police had surrounded his house.
He called me on the phone and told me Major, they got me surrounded.
I said, stand down, I'll come get you.
Next time I knew the phone went dead, they'd kill him.
So I went to his funeral in Georgia, met his mother and father and his sister.
I delivered the eulogy at Rooster's funeral.
Wonderful young man.
He went to California to help me out.
We both had PTSD.
We were holding on together.
It seemed like there was always so much tragedy.
So much tragedy, you know?
And I try to catch my breath.
I get these emails from somebody that I served with years ago to remind me that someone that
I knew years ago just passed away.
And yesterday I talked to a young man named, his name is Mark American Horse.
And he'd called me a few weeks ago and he and his girlfriend of 30 years was going to
get married.
And he asked me, could he get married at my home?
He wanted me to give away the bride and he wanted me to have my pastor conduct the services.
He called me two days ago, this Tuesday, and he said he has stage four cancer.
Oh God.
And he had to cancel the wedding.
He didn't think he'd make it.
And I talked to his, Sarah's fiance.
I told her I didn't know what to say.
He wanted to be married at his commanding officer's house.
And we were just getting our backyard ready for that wedding.
He was going to bring members of his tribe with him.
Good horse, good man.
He's caper's train.
And now we had to cancel the wedding.
So you know, he's still alive though.
And I gave him a direct order.
You'll be here for this wedding and I'll be here.
And I talked to Sarah, his wife.
It's a wonderful love story.
But it seemed like sometimes I can't catch my breath.
They give me 16 pills a day for PTSD, for sleeping, for breathing, for breathing, and
for pain, and God knows whatever else.
And I didn't know you were coming today.
Bill called me and said, guess who's coming today?
This was coming to dinner today.
I had forgotten.
Carmen had told me.
But I really had forgotten.
Well, there was a few.
I think we arranged it a few weeks ago.
And then I only asked her if we could do it in person.
I think it was only a couple of weeks ago.
So there's plenty of room to forget because that's why I even called this morning to make
sure because I know it had been a while and I forget.
My mind's like a colander.
So I'm glad you came.
It's been good for me.
And I'm a little apprehensive going out and talk to these young widows and mothers in
San Diego, the ghost law mothers.
And what do you say?
What do you say?
But I'll be there with them.
I'll go to dinner with them.
And they'll want to know how did I get over losing my wife and my child.
I don't know.
I don't have the answers.
I wish I knew.
How did I get through all of the hardships?
I lost my mother, my father, my sister, aunts, uncles, everybody I knew.
They're all gone now.
So I pretty much live by myself.
Carmen comes in and helps out.
Bill lives next door.
They all looking to take care of me.
Then you show up and bring back all these memories.
I hope what we've talked about that you remember these homeless veterans, the ones who got
PTSD.
I'll leave you with this.
Then I'm through talking.
During the Civil War, there was a song, Johnny Comes Marching Home.
When I was a child, I used to sing this song, Johnny Comes Marching Home.
Well during the Vietnam War, we had a lot of young Johnnys that grew up wanting to serve
their country.
They joined the Army, Navy, the Air Force, Marines.
They went to Vietnam.
Did the best they could.
But when Johnny come home, nobody gave a damn about Johnny anymore.
He spilled his guts on battlefields, Hamburger Hill, Kaysan.
Now he's home.
He can't find a job.
Nobody wants him anymore.
But Johnny is home now.
Who cares for Johnny now?
What does Johnny do?
He can't find a job because he went to Vietnam.
He has memories of all of the friends he lost over there.
And they tell him, well, you can go to Washington and see a monument.
Look at their names.
That's what Johnny gets, a piece of marble.
But Johnny is home now.
What are we going to do with Johnny?
He signed the contract.
He did what he was supposed to do.
He went overseas and served his country now, but Johnny's home.
What do we do with Johnny now?
Well, since nobody had the answers, Johnny couldn't find a job.
He tried his hand at marriage.
That didn't work out for him.
So Johnny says, you know, I gave everything I had to this country and then some, but nobody
want to give me anything now.
Nothing.
So Johnny goes out on the street and begs for a few dollars and he goes and gets a hotel.
He goes in that room and locks the door and shoots himself.
Johnny is home now, but you don't have to worry about Johnny anymore because Johnny's
gone.
Johnny's come marching home, but nobody gave a damn.
Let's go buy some hamburgers.
Who cares about Johnny?
What's on TV tonight?
But there's a young man named James who come on away from Florida to hear that story.
I hope you won't forget it.
I have a lot of Johnny's that come home.
We can't afford to forget those Johnny's, those veterans that 22 commit suicide every
day.
Yeah.