Celebrating the power of possibility.
There's one thing that we can say about World War II veterans,
they didn't quit.
Welcome to Anything is Possible.
This is Halloran Hilton Hill, and if you're wondering what Anything is Possible is,
well, the show's title is a statement of purpose.
It's to help you see firsthand that Anything is Possible.
And how do we do that?
Telling great stories about great people whose lives prove that Anything is Possible.
Over the years, I've had the opportunity to talk to some of America's greatest veterans
that live right here in this community.
And I think as we celebrate and remember our veterans, we've got a collection
that starts with my dear friend, World War II veteran, Sam Hartman.
It is my honor to have you with us here at our studios today for Anything is Possible.
Welcome.
It's my honor to be here also.
You had a birthday in May.
Last day of May.
How old?
Ninety.
How does that feel to be ninety years old?
I had a gentleman come up and told me, the first time he saw me after that,
he said, Sam, you don't look a bit older than eighty-nine.
But I feel good and I don't have any pains.
I take my medicine like I'm supposed to and so everything's fine.
You know what the one thing that really, as we talked through your story on the radio,
that really got me was your smile.
Well, I've been accused of having one.
You have this wonderfully upbeat, optimistic spirit.
How'd you get that?
I, you know, I think probably some of that came from my mother.
Tell me about her.
All right.
She lived to be ninety-eight years old and she was, you never saw her unless she had a smile.
It didn't make any difference how tough things were.
She always had a smile and I just remember that and she used the baby set for some of the families
and you could see her smile when the kids were and she was so good with small kids
and so it was just something that I remember about her is her smile.
And why do you smile so much?
Good Lord has been good to me.
He's blessed me so much that I just can't ever thank him enough, Hatteron.
Talk to me about why you love this country.
Well, Hatteron, this country has meant so much to me.
When I, when I could see, I got to see North Africa and Italy
and I just knew that when I could get back home that that's where I wanted to be.
There's one thing that we can say about World War II veterans that didn't quit.
We lost the world, we lost the worlds and worlds of them over 400,000 which makes me realize how fortunate I was
and how fortunate I was to be able to still be here and live in this country.
And I made up my mind at that time that I was going to do everything that I could to be a blessing to this country.
I'm going to say one word and you say whatever comes out of you when I say it.
Vietnam.
Hell, for me anyway.
Tell me about your experience in Vietnam.
Well, my experience in Vietnam was I was a combat infantryman and they call us the ground pounders.
Pretty much you're on the ground, you're carrying the M16, pretty much like search and destroy missions.
You're going out seeking to be at Kong. I guess the biggest thing I have about that is that when I transitioned out of Vietnam
it's like I left on Monday, I was back home on Wednesday without no debriefing.
And from that period that's kind of haunted me for a long, long time beyond switches.
They call it PTSD.
Do you have that?
I have PTSD.
How do you manage it and how does it manifest?
I didn't know how to manage it. I didn't know how to manage it.
I come out around about 21 years old, didn't know how to manage it, didn't have no debriefing.
I just started getting help with that 2017, 50 years later.
Wow.
It's stayed suppressed for that long.
Would you have dreams, nightmares?
Dreams, nightmares, you still have those occasionally.
Dreams and nightmares thinking you were still back there.
And how you dealt with just life and family.
You realize now why some of the things you did and said back then was connected with that PTSD.
You were trying to manage that and it's managing you because you didn't have the tools.
No tools.
I guess I didn't even know I had it.
I know what I was going through but I didn't know what it was.
And you would hear about it.
I would say it's old years after some of our rack incident, you heard about PTSD.
But I still didn't connect that to me.
And then went to the VA, got to talking to some people to help.
So in 2017 I started getting some help with that.
It's helping me but it's not going away yet.
But I'm so thankful for the get the help.
You know what's interesting is that is a subtext for your life, right?
21, 50 years later.
If that's kind of bubbling underneath, it makes it even more incredible what God has done in your life.
Because you've built a pretty incredible life and family.
And I guess that's why family means so much to you.
Oh yes, family. Family is God first, family second.
And that's the exact way I like to listen.
Possibility powered by Covenant Health, Home Federal, and the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Coming up.
I was not forced to go into a bathroom and put my uniform off.
I was allowed to wear my home.
Let's talk about your military service first.
Okay.
Where have you served? How have you served?
Well, on the military side, my father was a commercial airline pilot.
And he was also in this Tennessee Air National Guard unit.
And my grandfather on my mother's side, he was a B-17 B-29 pilot.
He actually lost his life flying a mission over the Pacific in 1945, two months before my mother was born.
That's an amazing story. You'll have to indulge me on that.
He flew 50 missions out of North Africa in a B-17, came home, and re-upped to fly the B-29 in the Pacific.
And he was flying a mission where halfway through, they knew they wouldn't be able to make it back.
They wouldn't have enough fuel if they continued the mission.
They decided as a crew to continue because the information they were relaying back was imperative for the follow-on mission,
which was Operation Meeting House, which was the first fire bombing of Tokyo.
They continued, and almost three quarters of the way back to Saipan, they ran out of fuel when he ditched the aircraft.
I've read accounts from three of the people who survived, and it's amazing to go through and hear their discussions and what they were facing at the time.
My grandfather did not make it out alive.
He died and was in the aircraft and went down with the aircraft.
I found out this story about five years ago, and I was on a temporary duty for recurrent simulator training.
I had just made aircraft commander at the time, and I was just thinking of my grandfather and his,
the responsibility that was on his shoulders during that mission and what he carried during the entire war,
and to end by running out of fuel and to realize that I fly air refueling tankers,
so I get to make sure that people's grandfathers get home,
and I get to make sure that the mission is completed and the fathers get to meet their daughters.
My grandfather never got to meet my mother.
So, you know, I often say God has a plan, and so many times we don't know what that plan is, you just have to let it happen.
And so, I'm just truly blessed.
You got a real love for America, Doug.
Oh, I do.
Talk about that.
Well, I'll tell you, I'm proud of two things.
I'm proud of being an Eagle Scout.
That's my biggest accomplishment in my life, and I'm also happy to be a veteran.
And we had one of our local heroes, Ron Canals, die.
He was one of the 13 that didn't get out as we were moving out of Afghanistan.
So, we had a memorial put on our store up in the Gibbs community.
He was from the Gibbs community and went to school there.
And we had veterans come from Florida all over the nation coming in in my sickles for that memorial for this young man that died right before Afghanistan was turned over.
And Mayor Jacobs was one of my speakers, and he had prepared for this speech, and he gave a wonderful speech about how a patriotic speech.
And the veterans were, I went tears, I think, when he finished.
And I'm just proud.
I think we're an exceptional country, and I think being a veteran makes you have a little different attitude about things.
I'll tell you what I love about America.
It is a place of possibility.
That's right.
I flew primarily the F-4 Phantom, several different models of it, and I had one assignment as an instructor in the T-38, which is a fighter type trainer.
How long did it take to learn to fly a fighter plane?
You know, the Air Force, in most of the military flying, it's a pyramid.
You start out, anybody can learn to fly, it's not hard to fly, but flying fighters or any military aircraft, you have to have a pretty good learning curve.
They can't take ten years to train you.
So pilot training last year, and in my day they watched out about a third.
And today I think they have better methods, and they scream better than they used to.
Once you get your wings, then you go into your fighter training, which is one, it takes about a year and a half,
and then you're just basically qualified and you show up at an operational unit,
and really for the next year you learn and get qualified in new missions and roles, weapons systems and whatnot.
And you start off as a wingman and you move to a two-ship lead, then a four-ship lead, and then instructor and evaluator,
and it's like anything else, you've got to earn your way up.
Did you love it?
I loved it every day of it.
Really?
Yeah.
You loved to fly?
I loved to fly, but more than the fly, it was the mission, which you were there to do.
And everybody there was really dedicated to the defense of our country and projecting power to keep a bad thing from happening.
It was during the Cold War of Vietnam it just ended, and went through the rural hollow years in the 70s,
and then the Reagan build-up, and you got this, I think, Sierra Country at its best from the military point of view.
We were well-led, we had great leaders, and it was very fulfilling.
So wait a minute, let me make sure I understand the scene that you're describing.
They're on attack, they've turned one of your weapons on you, your team is calling an artillery,
they're firing on their own position because they are in your perimeter, so you're catching it this way and this way.
You've got a 105 halister, you know, smaller artillery you've got, a 105, you see them pull behind jeeps,
and they have a beehive round you can put in it, and if they shoot the beehive round, it'll nail you to a tree like that, a person.
So they're the NVA, we found them when we did a body search later after the battle, they had hand-drawn maps of us.
They knew where our command bunker was, they knew where our artillery, they knew where our 50 caliber machine guns,
and we were set up in a perimeter on the hillside, so they knew all of that when they hit it.
So you're getting fired on, so what happened?
Well, when they blew up the bunker next to me, the medic who's a brave man, a drug man over Pete, Pete had lost his tricep,
and they drug him and put him in my bunker because the next bunker can't fight.
Sergeant King, who was our sergeant over everything, he got blinded because the debris got in his eye,
so they put a pressure brandage around his head, he can't see, and they put him in one corner of the bunker,
and Pete's back there, they give him morphine, and I said, Pete, are you hurting?
He said, I don't feel any pain, man.
So he's on morphine, he's high as the kite, and then they drag a big old boy named Shears over, he had a hunk of metal sticking out of his side.
You can't get morphine when you've got like a second chest wound or you've got this piece of metal in you.
So they, this late bandage is around him, he's bleeding. They put an IV in his arm, put it on my pistol belt,
and I'm up shooting out the window, and the IV's going in him for the next four hours, and he's laying there,
and he would say, he's strong, he's tougher than me. He said, he called me Mack, he said, Mack, I think I'm dying.
I said, well, squeeze my calf. He was squeezing, I said, oh, that hurt, you're not dying, you're strong.
Last time I saw him, they took him off in a helicopter. I don't know what happened, but he survived the night.
We fought all night. I got out of my bunker and adjusted artillery. I said, you're calling artillery and you're killing us.
Lieutenant said, no, no, no, that's theirs. I said, no, I hear it firing. And I didn't know we were overran.
I didn't know they had to do that. And he said, well, adjust. I said, so many to the left, so many to the right, add and drop.
And they started adjusting, so we started killing the people coming in the perimeter then, and we let the man up there fight
and take back over the artillery and kill the ones inside of our perimeter.
But you have to call it in, but he, you know, killing our own guys. We had a couple of hundred, they had 1500.
That's not good. And so you, you going, it's like if somebody walked up here and did that to you, you're going to come out of that seat.
And I trace all over, whether you may cry or you may think, but you're not going to thank anymore. You're going to defend yourself.
So I didn't do anything anybody else wouldn't have done. You know, everybody was doing it. Nobody got credit for it.
The lieutenant comes home from Vietnam when he's a captain in California. He drives out into a state parks and takes a 357 Magnum and shot himself in the head.
Because I'd say he couldn't get through those memories. He was down in the bunker trying to call the artillery, knowing they were outside the door trying to get to him.
I don't know exactly when it fell in line, you know, is that I go back to my shoot down day and look at what happened to me in just a short period of time.
You know, I was just platinum and happy airborne going to pick up a pilot. Next thing you know, we'll be in shot at.
Next thing you know, the airplane had fallen to the ground and I was able to walk away from a crashed airplane and only to be captured.
And then next thing you know, I'm being severely beaten by the locals, you know, as though I had done something wrong.
And next thing you know, they took me out and had a what I didn't know at that time, turned out to be a mock execution, you know, and.
What do you mean a mock execution?
Well, they took me out and lined me up next to a freshly dug grave with my hands and feet tied together, blindfolded in front of a crowd and somebody read something.
You know, and I said it was kind of like I was reading my charges and then I was found guilty and now I was possibly going to be executed.
So I was thinking my life here on earth was over.
Were you afraid?
I don't know what I was. I guess I was in a certain amount of shock as to, you know, I didn't know prisoners were treated this way or at least I never thought they should be treated this way.
You know, the first B-52 to be shot down that night was a young man on the tail gunner on board named Walter Ferguson.
You know, Walter and I, I looked him up and discovered he and I were at Alters, Oklahoma together, where my first duty assignment.
I never knew him.
But you know, I saw his B-52 flying.
He saw my helicopter doing his thing in the local neighborhood, not having a clue that ten years later, who he'd give his life for the freedoms that I enjoy today.
Wow.
And you know, in our military today is full of Walter Ferguson's and we have a nation of people who do not have a clue nor do they appreciate the sacrifices.
And then, you know, we like to remind the folks out there that these people are not strangers.
They are our sons and daughters.
They are our nation's pride and joy.
And for some reason we don't have what it takes to say thank you to those who serve.
You know, and after the bombing, you know, the Vietnamese rushed back to the table.
They signed an agreement.
And on the 12th of February, we were home with bound.
And I always say, somebody asked me, you know, a friend of mine asked him, could you define freedom?
He said simply doors with inside knobs.
You know, I came home to welcome the belong to many of my brothers who are sitting out there today and sisters who are watching this.
And I'd like to say simply welcome home.
I stole your glory, you might say.
I was not forced to go into a bathroom and pull my uniform off.
I was allowed to wear my own.
And you know, that's my brother's word.
Could you imagine?
A nation so down on its men and women in uniform, they asked them to remove it.
Sad, sad.
May that never happen again.
If I have anything to do with it, I carry a corn that I proudly carry in as part of the Vietnam Veterans of America.
And on the backside of the corn, it simply says, never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.
Yeah, I came home and fanfare everywhere I went, you know, and, you know, and, and as I look back on my 73 years nearly on Earth,
I always say one of the saddest moments to me is when we forgave those who ran before we as a nation stood up and said thank you to those who served.
I look at the things and, and, and I am so grateful that we still have a nation.
We still have young men and women who stand up and say take me.
You know, I have so many family members that were part of World War II that stood up and said take me.
I had cousins that fought in Korea that said take me.
And so, you know, we still have young people out there willing to serve.
And, you know, and I'm so proud of their willingness to give back to the nation that has given them so much.