Interview with my neighbor-David Lee

Even at the age of 57, David Lee is still the grief-stricken man he was back in his youth.  As he still remembers the war that took place for nearly 25 years, David still remembers all of the horrific events that took place.  As I project my questions, he answers each one in vivid detail, and his eyes are as if he was back to the day where he volunteered to fight in the longest campaign America has ever seen.  The only war America has lost, this campaign is the Vietnam War.                  

I was born on August 8, 1946.  Life was poor, since people discriminated my family members and I, for the sole fact that we were Asian.  Although the discrimination wasn’t as bad as what blacks faced, the whole concept of racism bothered me.  Everything about hate bothered me.  Not only was I afraid, I felt great sorrow growing up since my family had huge financial difficulties. To other people this isn’t a big issue at all.  Mainly because they don’t know how it feels to be discriminated.  I understand why your questioning me, since the fact that Asians were discriminated is a new concept.  Please don’t get me wrong though, this may have been a personal problem solely restricted to my family and I.

Both my mother and my father were silent people.  They weren’t even very fluent with English.  My father worked at a factory, I don’t really remember what kind of factory it was.  But life wasn’t glamorous.  My mother was a housewife.  She was a very smart lady.  Sometimes in life, I wonder what she would have been if she hadn’t met my father, but I do not wish to know the answer to that because my parents are very nice people.  Quite frankly, I didn’t care.  I was seven years old when I heard about the war.  I didn’t know what war was.  It was the year 1957, at the age of 11 that I finally realized what this war was about.  Personally, I thought it would be over before a blink of an eye.  Little did I know that this war is the longest conflict that America has ever been in.  I didn’t even know what a draft was.  Well, by the age of around 16 or 15, I finally learned what the draft was all about.  I personally believed that the draft law was an evil thing.  In my opinion, people shouldn’t be slaughtered like dogs for a country that would soon lose.  At this point, people didn’t know what the hell was going on. 

When I heard about the draft, I knew that I was going to be drafted, I just knew.  But it was to my own surprise to find out that I wasn’t drafted.  Strangely, this angered me.  Usually, I would feel beyond exuberant, but the fact that I wasn’t drafted angered me.  I felt as if those pieces of trash that discriminated my family and me were at it again.  I felt that they were thinking that wasn’t good enough to fight in the war.  So I volunteered.  I wanted to show the world that I wasn’t afraid of the war, or the racists of this world.  So I did the unthinkable.  I volunteered for this.  I soon learned that volunteering was the wrong choice.  After I went to basic, I finally got to Vietnam.  We patrolled the areas, and sometimes our platoon was sent for an ambush.  Thankfully, nobody was killed in our platoon.  However, one soldier lost his vision completely because of a grenade.  All of us got 2-3 hours of sleep, and for the rest of the day, we patrolled the area and filled up sandbags.  Our food was horrible; it was mainly beef and potatoes.  But we had a chance to eat at restaurants in a nearby city.  That was not such a good idea.  I remember my friend Adrian getting mugged by 2 guys.  He didn’t lose anything but both of us were really shaken.  I also didn’t understand the fact that these people were trying to hurt us every chance they got when we were here to help.  I constantly wrote letters in Korean to my family explaining that life was horrible, and I wanted to come home.  Most of the time, I filled sandbags and sometimes I got the chance to plant mines.  I also kept watch when we were on ambushes.  Thank god our squad never engaged the enemy in live combat, or we could have been shot.  The other squad had casualties.  It is very hard to say this, but four people were handicapped for life.  Two of the men lost a leg due to a homemade trap made by the Vietnamese.  It was a bamboo pit.  His leg was impaled when he fell, but the infection got so bad, he had to have it amputated.  Another guy lost his vision as I mentioned earlier.  One other soldier lost an ear due to an explosion near an abandoned Vietnamese bunker.  The other two soldiers lost their hearing due to a mine.  I was amazed at how much of a lucky man I was. 

Besides staying awake for ambushes and getting ready to blow the mines, I didn’t have any other responsibilities.  I felt strange.  It was something I never felt before.   I did feel something else as well.  I felt relief.  It could have easily been me that lost a limb, or blinded by an explosion.  The terrible fact was, these soldiers all came from the end of the barrel.  They didn’t have any family, money, maybe even a job as well.  This made me feel great pity on those men.  I was horrified at how brutal war was.  Plus, I didn’t even get the chance to engage in live combat with a Vietnamese soldier.  Every single day, I wonder what those men felt as they were in battle.  Although I volunteered for what is considered to be the longest campaign America has ever been in, I don’t know what it is like to engage in live combat.  However, I am still horrified.

On the negative side, my parents were rather shallow.  They didn’t really care for the soldiers that fought in the war.  They only cared for my well-being.  This bothered me constantly, but, well, I am glad they cared for something.  My lifestyle was not affected, but my personality was altered.  I no longer viewed this world as being civil.  There just has to be one piece of trash to start another wave of violence, or a dictatorship.  I no longer speak and I am very protective of myself.  Sometimes, I am paranoid thinking that figures are following me.  Over the following years I’ve gotten better, but never in my life will I forget what I went through.

I learned to value life.  Life passes by like the wind.  Before you know it, your childhood is over, and then you’re an old man.  Then you’re on your deathbed.  I personally believe life is too much of a valuable thing to be wasted on shooting each other with machine guns.  I’m proud at the fact that I volunteered for this war and I served my country well.  I am also proud to be a survivor.  But if I had a chance to change my past, I would have chosen not to volunteer for this war because this event, although it has made me feel great pride, traumatized me.  No one deserves to go through war.   We highly underestimated the Vietnamese and ended up losing the lives of many American soldiers.  Another factor is the drugs and the terrible influence that was going on at the time.  Another factor is the environment.  The enemy can be hiding anywhere.  I am glad that we came up with the idea of a sniper division.  This division was proven very successful and it probably saved thousands of lives.

Interviewed by William Shim