[Interview Begins]

SPRAGUE: Today is June 27th, 2023. This is an interview with William R Lancaster, who served in the United States Navy. In January 19th 63 to 1966 and with the Navy Reserves to 1968. This interviewing interview is being conducted by Luke Sprague at the Penney Library in Madison, Wisconsin, for the Wisconsin Veteran's Museum Oral History Program. No one else is present in the room. Okay, Bill. Hi. Hi. How are you today? Good. Good. Good. Good to hear. Where did you grow up? 

LANCASTER: Okay. I grew up in Southern California, in Burbank. My family had long history in California. My mother's family. My father's family was from Oregon. They met during my mother and father. Met during World War Two. He was stationed in somewhere in Southern California. She worked as a Rosie the Riveter in airplane factory. So the family was very much involved in the World War two greatest generation type situation. They married He was in the Super Bowl in the Navy at that time. He served on a number of different ships. He had one ship that was sunk under him and was in the ocean for a period of time and went through a lot of traumatic experiences. I was born when he was. At sea. He came back shortly after I was born. There's a little article about that and whatever. His name was William Ralph Lancaster Jr. And I'm William Ralph Lancaster, the third. So there is somewhat of a tradition there. He served in the US Navy in World War Two. I just came across these documents. I didn't realize I had them. 

SPRAGUE: I need to learn a little here. Okay? Yep. 

LANCASTER: And I also in the Army up until 1949. So he was greatly involved in the military. He had tattoos on both arms. All of my uncles at that time. My mother has had five sisters and they most of them were married to World War two vets. So I was constantly surrounded by men who had had served on, fortunately in my father's case. The trauma of war got to him. He became an alcoholic, very despondent at times, suicide attempts. He was in and out of rehab for most of my childhood, very dysfunctional. There were vets who were his sponsors and tried to help him overcome his problems. They would take us to visit him at the VA hospital and various things, but basically to no avail. He never really recovered from whatever his issues were. I was young, so I don't know exactly what the details were, but eventually he and my mother were in very difficult circumstances. We were a very poor. He would spend the money on the booze. And anyway, by the time I was about eight years old, he left. They separated. He left. He moved to Oklahoma and never saw him again. So that episode of My Life has kind of mixed memories. There's some pride in his military service, but also a lot of regrets that his life was changed in such a negative way. I did went on Ancestry.com and did recently did the research, and they showed there they showed his gravesite and he had a military marker with this rank and stuff from the military. So evidently he carried that pride in his service through to the end of. But a lot of unanswered questions about that situation. 

SPRAGUE: And what was your mother's name? 

LANCASTER: My mother's name was Norma Reams Lancaster. And she and all her sisters worked at Lockheed and other companies during World War Two. The whole family was very patriotic, very devout. My grandparents, for example, my grandmother, grandparents, had a picture of FDR on the wall in their living room. This was in the early 50s. Values were pretty conservative, you know, religion and loyalty to the country without much question. I grew up in very conservative times, you know, when there was certainly no criticism of what the government was doing or involvement in fighting communism, which was the big thing. Of course, as I was growing up as a child, I experienced the atomic. Raid practices at school. You know, he ducked and went under the desk and whatever as if that was going to save you in some way or other. But, you know, that Cold War mentality was certainly very prominent as I as I grew up. My mother remarried, unfortunately to different times, and my stepfathers were not very notable people. So I pretty much consider myself a person who grew up with a single family. We had not many material resources. But I think my mother instilled good moral values in me, and I certainly realized they didn't want to be like my father's in any particular way. By the time I was in high school, I was very much a very much admired President Kennedy, and I had photos of him on the wall in my bedroom. And I was, you know, very, very proud of what our country was, was doing. 

SPRAGUE: On what high school was that? Sorry. I'm sorry. What high school? 

LANCASTER: I went to high school in numbers of them, but one was the last one I went to was in Tunga, California. Okay. But all of them were in Southern California. Okay, so we moved. Many, many, many times. And so that that experience, school experience was pretty sporadic. Although by the time I was in high school, I became a pretty, pretty good student and did well. I even won an American Legion essay contest about what it means to be an American or something was the concept and won $10, which was a lot of money in those days. Unfortunately, my mother had a chronic heart disease and she died when I was 16, so I finished the last year of high school. I went to live with an aunt and uncle in San Jose, California, and I graduated from high school there. It was not the best transition. The experience was not the best transition. When I graduated from high school, I was very young. I was still I was 17 and so I was kind of caught in a limbo situation where I was. Not a true adult at that time. It was difficult to find any kind of employment in California at that time because of unions. You had to be 18 and unions were very powerful at that time. So I was in a situation where I had no resources of any sort. I didn't have any encouragement of any sort. So what my future would be, I had taken the SAT tests and and was eligible to go to college. But again, I had no funds or transportation or anything to do that. So by January of 1963, I graduated in 19 and June of 1962, in January of 1963, I went into the Navy. I remember visiting the recruiter. He encouraged me. I wanted to go to Italy. That's where I was going to head on a magnificent ship of some sort. That was my vision. I was very naive about such things. 

SPRAGUE: Why did you choose the Navy? 

LANCASTER: I chose the Navy because of my father's connection. 

SPRAGUE: Okay? 

LANCASTER: He was the only one of the uncles, whatever that was in the Navy. And all the pictures, photographs of them when they were in the happy times, he was in his uniform, etc.. And so I think I chose because of that, that tradition also, they told me, the Navy recruiter, that they took more capable people rather than the army. I know that sounds very prejudiced, but you know, any promise me I get all kinds of educational opportunities and travel and see the world and all that stuff. So, you know, promise me everything. I went in on what they were called a minority enlistment because I was under 18. My aunt had to sign a guardian had to sign for me. And it was was what was called the Kitty Cruise, where I was supposed to get out the day before my 21st birthday. That was the the arrangement. So I would have served a little over three, three years if that had come to pass. There's a little more to that, that story. 

SPRAGUE: And they called it euphemistically the kitty. 

LANCASTER: Kitty Cruise. Yes, the Kitty Cruise. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so I wanted to be home for Christmas. And so I went in in the end of of January, which I went to boot camp. We talked My experience was horrendous going into boot camp at that time. It was very strict, I would say cruel in the way they treated people. When I went from San Jose to San Francisco and went through the physical of the mass, the big room of all naked guys, and you had to bend over and you had to do the hernia test with whatever, whatever cough with all these hundreds of people around. So which was very embarrassing to a 17 year old kid, you know. 

SPRAGUE: And that was the induction center. 

LANCASTER: That Cisco in San Francisco. Yeah. 

SPRAGUE: Do you remember the name of that base? 

LANCASTER: I don't know what it would be called. They took us by bus from San Jose to there during the daytime. We went through we took various tests, so procedures. But I certainly remember that physical bit and the. Very awkward situation, something I had not thought I would ever experience. And then we took the oath of office. I remember doing that like it was probably late afternoon. I was very proud. Yeah, I felt really good about doing that and what I was going to be looking. I was looking forward. I didn't, you know, I had not. Thing to look back on in the past that was very pleasant. And so I'll look good. I was able to take my first plane ride from San Francisco down to San Diego. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. Quick question before we finish up with San Francisco. Who were the people who were being inducted? Yeah. Were they where were they from? Where they were. 

LANCASTER: From? The Bay Area. You know, San Francisco, Oakland, whatever. Bay Area by. I would say all of them were pretty much young people like me. You know, I know this was before the draft, whatever. But, you know, there were probably way over a hundred people that I recall in that naked room and in that swearing in room, there were quite a number. 

SPRAGUE: And I assume the unit was racially integrated or not. 

LANCASTER: I don't recall that being true. 

SPRAGUE: Oh, okay. 

LANCASTER: No, not at all. I don't recall that being true. Oh, okay. There weren't many. As I grew up and as my experience in San Jose, there were not very many black people and not many Hispanics whatever at that time. Okay. I had had very little racial cross-racial experience. My family was even though there was quite prejudice in their language, whatever. But I had very little contact with people from other races at all. I was kind of a poor white kid, you know. And so I was more conscious of class, you know, being what class you were in. I think I had. Some inferiority feelings because of the situation we were in, because we basically grew up supported by welfare system or whatever, which was kind of a derogatory thing in those days. My mother being divorced, there were a lot of a lot of prejudice against divorced women in those days. So I think the married women felt nervous about them. But it was a negative connotation. And coming from a so-called broken home, you know, there was a lot of cloud hanging over all that at that time. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. So before I interrupted you, you're you're getting on the plane from San. 

LANCASTER: Francisco, right? 

SPRAGUE: Pick it up there. 

LANCASTER: Yeah, Pacific Southwest Airlines. So I think the whole plane was filled with recruits, whatever. So that was thrilling, of course. And then we got to San Diego, traveled by bus. And so it was very late, like midnight or later than that. And we got off the bus at the depot. And the drill sergeants, they weren't sergeants, they were Navy personnel, but they were screaming at us, call us maggots, you know, and told us to get in line and line up and all this stuff, you know, whatever, you know, not a not a kind and gentle welcome by any means. Had no sleep. And they were march. They marched us around like all night long, you know, wearing civilian shoes that were horrible, you know, to try to walk in. And then we went through the, you know, getting the clothing and all that kind of stuff, going to the barracks. And, you know, it was all pretty, very strict, whatever, lot of yelling. My experience was that they, you know, they hit you, they slap you, they hit you, They've called you names all the time. They punished all the time. Give me ten. Give me, you know, jumping jacks with the rifle, you know, always, you know, just physical punishment. Either if you did something wrong or somebody else did something wrong, it was a very bad experience. One thing that was very unusual, the Navy emphasized cleanliness. So at that time, we had to wash our own clothes by hand. Yeah, this was a big deal. You had to wash your clothes by hand. You had to go out and scrub and whatever, and then you hung them up on clotheslines, you know, regimented way or whatever, and very meticulous about this stuff. Well, in the middle of the night that the drill personnel came, they woke us all up. They made us all go outside, noon in the middle of the night. This is you know, it's still chilly in California in January, February, we had to go outside and wash our clothes, whatever, while they're kind of mocking us and making fun of us. The other these are some sickos. Looking back, I didn't know anything about. That's things that that time in my life. But there was something wrong with these people. Whatever. So that was one experience that especially struck with me. And then partly as a consequence of that and getting no sleep or whatever, you know, because you had to get up and you had to do what they want you to do, you had to do all this stuff. I got pneumonia. And so I went to the U.S. Naval Hospital, Balboa Hospital in San Diego and was treated for pneumonia for a number of weeks and then was kind of rehabbing. And then I got called again. So I was there a number of different times. So my boot camp experience was interrupted, if you want to say that. Eventually I was sent back. Luckily, I got a better company, a group, a better officer, and it was not as dramatic of a situation and made it through that experience. 

SPRAGUE: Was there any sexual harassment there? 

LANCASTER: I would say I would just ask. There was a lot of like commenting about your body, like I was tall and thin and pretty good looking, you know. So they they call me pretty boy. And, you know, it was very perverted. You know, looking back on it and frightening. And it would go on forever. And like, you would wash the clothes, wash the clothes, and they tell you to do it again. And whatever their game was, that they were playing with this thing. And I didn't experience any of that that second time when I came back. It was much more sensible and. 

SPRAGUE: I would have been sorry. Early 63. 

LANCASTER: Early 63. 

SPRAGUE: Maybe. 

LANCASTER: I have a chronology. 

SPRAGUE: Just trying to get to June. 

LANCASTER: By June 1963, I had finished boot camp. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: We also were quarantined for meningitis during this time period, which was a fairly frightening thing. They made us stay in the barracks and whatever. So illness was a big, big thing. 

SPRAGUE: Do you remember by chance, do you happen to remember your your boot camp unit name? 

LANCASTER: Yeah, I think I have a picture here. We know what it was, but it's called. Well, I don't know. They went by a number. Company commander. 

SPRAGUE: Och, Company. 

LANCASTER: Commander of C.O. Weaver. BMC. I don't know. 

SPRAGUE: Okay, I'm gonna zoom in on that here for a second. 

LANCASTER: I don't know what that means. I don't recall any kind of special name for it. I know we were one of many units that were trained at the time. 

SPRAGUE: Okay, that's good. 

LANCASTER: And excuse me. I know. I remember these were pictures. My aunt and uncle and family came and that's what I looked like at that time. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. Let me zoom in on that real quick. Boot camp and you had mentioned your aunt and uncle. They came for. 

LANCASTER: Me. They came for the graduation ceremonies. Cool. Yeah. You know, they were fine in that way, but they were not. As long as you didn't live with them, they were fine. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: That would prove to be true throughout their whole life. 

SPRAGUE: Okay, we've got that. Okay. 

LANCASTER: Then. This was a company commander, this Weaver, who was really pretty kind. He liked me because I. Followed orders and whatever. 

SPRAGUE: He looks like he's a petty officer. 

LANCASTER: Yeah, they had these men. So he had the men that were so cruel. Must have had a similar kind of rank, I would think. But I don't. I really don't recall. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: What that was all about. I know it's a really small picture, but, you know, we went through the graduation ceremony where you had to march and review and whatever, and it was very nice. Yeah. So I was very proud. We had drilled and drilled and practiced and whatever to, you know, be able to do all those formations and all that kind of thing. 

SPRAGUE: Okay, we got that one. 

LANCASTER: Okay. So I went from this is I forgot. So this is what I looked like when I went in. 

SPRAGUE: Let me zoom in on that. 

LANCASTER: Those are the clothes. That was the day I left. That was, of course, the clothes I wore. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: And then by the time I came out, I looked and especially proud of the blue uniform. I never really liked the lights too much, but all that. And my family was proud. They were proud of me. So that that ended that particular phase. 

SPRAGUE: So that's that that was boot camp 1960. 

LANCASTER: I don't think I have any more. I really want to say about that, except I hope to have better experience now that it had back then. I'd be interested to listen to somebody going through today. 

SPRAGUE: Tell me about next year, your training. 

LANCASTER: Going to. Okay, I went to Balboa Hospital. There's a beautiful facility, a Spanish style building on the top of a hill overlooks San Diego. It was a huge hospital, was a place I had been treated when I was there for pneumonia, So I was familiar with it at first. Went to hospital core school. That's basic medical training I forgot to mention at that time, because of my mother's death, I had a goal of becoming a doctor. That's what I wanted to do. And so that's why I was interested in the medical training and wanted to pursue that. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: What was my goal at that time? 

SPRAGUE: I was wondering why that was. 

LANCASTER: So at that time I went to hospital core School from July 3rd to October 24th of 1963. I just found all those dates. The nurses, there were nurses that were in charge of the stiff white uniforms. They were strict but very kind and very professional. I have nothing but good memories of that training. 

SPRAGUE: Okay, we've got that one. 

LANCASTER: Okay. We went through, you know, we had to learn how to draw blood. You know, we used oranges for some reason. We had on the negative side, we had to learn how to do bad bass. And so we each we each had to give another member of our class a bad bath, which was interesting phenomenon also. But and then we went to the wards and whatever. And you learned about, you know, giving up medications and but also on the negative side, bedpans and all that kind of stuff, you know, came with it with the territory. But they taught us to be very proud. They talked about the history of corpsman in the military, especially during World War Two. I don't know if you heard this statistic, but early in World War one and World War Two, the the Carmen, the medics would wear crosses on their helmets because they were supposed to be noncombatants. And that was the consideration for even me going to Vietnam was I was a non combat and I was only supposed to fire a weapon, defend myself or or my patient. And so they wore these helmets, whatever. Well, of course, they learned in war by World War Two. They learned that this made them targets. And they figured that every corpsman that died would take along with them. 200 people, 200 soldiers that they would have saved. Wow. Okay. So the stress, this kind of thing and they talked about Medal of Honor winners and, you know, all the you know, the really impressive history because I had never heard of corpsman that term. Our hospital corps was very foreign to me. I heard probably medic, you know, I saw grew up with World War two movies and all that kind of stuff, but I didn't really know that tradition. But I mean, it was a very good experience. I was I really excelled. I did extremely well. I got a lot of recognition within that school. And so I was able to go on to operating room, tech technician, school, surgical tech school, which was more an advanced degree. And that was from November 18th, 1963 to May 15th, 1964. And, you know, here's the diploma from the Hospital Core School. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: And. Use one from the surgical technician school. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: And we had done a project, you know, with selling sutures and whatever, you know, bulletin board educational thing and got recognition in the local in the newspaper about that. 

SPRAGUE: Do you happen to remember the name of the local newspaper by chance? It's okay if you don't. Hmm. That's okay. 

LANCASTER: Doesn't say on here. I don't know. Something. Either through the hospital or. 

SPRAGUE: It could have been. 

LANCASTER: Whatever. I don't. I don't. I'm not really sure of that. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. No problem. 

LANCASTER: You know, I've got a fancy diploma that must have been left over from World War Two. They were nicer. Okay. Quality in those days. And anyway, in surgical, I love being an operating room technician. We had you trained. You learned by doing. And it was hard. Some of the doctors were very demanding. And basically what we did was assist in surgery, have the instruments to the doctor, etc. That was our primary role. And so I saw all kinds of surgeries of all different sorts and really took a lot of pride in that. I have one interesting story. During this time period, I forgot to mention that at one point in my I think I was in the hospital called training. We were called to assemble at a base. I forget what base or what location it was, but we assemble and President Kennedy was there and he walked. I was in the front row of the unit I was in, and he walked by like right in front of me. I never seen anyone with such a glorious tan, you know, That was what struck me because, of course, that was highly valued at that time, especially in California. Young people as to have a great tan. And he that's all I remember, you know, just seconds of him walking by. So that was, of course, thrilling for me, having had so much admiration for him and, of course, his family as well. During the time I was in operating to take that technician school, the day that we were learning how to put gloves on to get ready for surgery was the day that we heard about Kennedy's assassination. 

SPRAGUE: Wow. And what was that like? That, of. 

LANCASTER: Course, everybody was appalled, first of all, and also very frightened. You know, nobody knew what was going to happen next. And it was interesting that my I had an aunt and uncle, another aunt and uncle who lived in Burbank and LA area. And so I was scheduled to go see them on that weekend. And I went to the bus station and there were armed guards, soldiers with weapons there at the bus station. And they were interrogating everybody about where they were going, what they were doing, whatever. And because, you know, they thought the Cubans were behind it or they didn't know if there was going to be a more militant or action of some sort or other. So it was really a panic kind of a mode as well as a great sadness. And I was at my aunt's house to be able to watch Kennedy's funeral on TV while I was at my aunt's house. And that, of course, you know, everybody watched. It was very moving on the black and white TV and. Very, very memorable. Anybody from my generation, they remember where they were when when Kennedy was was killed. When I finished my operating room training, I thought I we we were able to put in for orders, you know, And so I put in of course, I wanted to be on a ship and I was in the Mediterranean. All right. We got our you know, and I was hope that thinking because I had done everything right, I'd done everything, you know, and then everything else, I was it was expected that I would probably get what I wanted. And unfortunately, that did not happen. I was instead aside, assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps and had to go to Camp Pendleton to what they called field medical service training. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. Before we go there. Yeah, looking at it retrospectively, how do you think your training as an operation. 

LANCASTER: Operating track that tech. 

SPRAGUE: How do you think later, looking back after your Vietnam service, how do you think that prepared you for that? 

LANCASTER: I think it didn't prepare me for what I ended up doing. I did not end up in like a Mash unit. Where they did surgery all the time. I ended up ended up in a battalion aid station, which was like more like an emergency room types and clinic. So I was not able to use much of my training. Okay. Unfortunately. I was able I think we were very poorly prepared for. I was going to talk about that in the next section, but we still had this field medical training. We went to Camp Pendleton and we basically went through a marine boot camp. A lot of it was physical training. Running along the beach and lifting and training were all that physical kind of stuff. 

SPRAGUE: And what is this called at Camp Pendleton? 

LANCASTER: It was called the Field Medical Service training. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: Thank you. Field Medical School. And so we were given marine uniforms. Lived in the barracks there. We had some medical training, you know, medical training. But also we were trained with weapons, with guns, with rifles, whatever. I had I had very superficial training with that kind of thing in the boot camp. Very little. I was horrible marksmen. I had no experience with guns prior to that. I was still really bad. But we learned how to to take. They issued us, General. They issued us 40 fives. And holsters. And so we had to learn how to take those apart, putting back together all this kind of stuff. Even though it wasn't our primary interest to be doing that kind of stuff. So unfortunately, most of the training was more toward getting us to integrate with the Marines and not a whole lot about how to treat wounds or injuries or anything of that sort at all. You know, and I think that was a big mistake. But again, this was peacetime. Yeah. Yeah. 

SPRAGUE: What was that like coming from the Navy and going into the Marines? 

LANCASTER: Okay. I had a lot of resentment because I had never planned, you know, I did not want to do this. That was not my goal, was to be in the Marines and wear a marine uniform. That was not my goal. Under any circumstances, yeah, I really wanted to work in a, you know, either on a ship or in a hospital setting or somewhere, you know, where I could use the training that I had. And I didn't see this really doing much for me in that way. Eventually we graduate from there is a photo of India, just like the old Marines. You know all the gear. 

SPRAGUE: And did your did your your nametag or nameplate say actually Marines or did it say. 

LANCASTER: Oh, we had a symbol. We had the producers of the Medical Corps symbol. We had badges that went on the uniforms. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. Got it. 

LANCASTER: Okay. We had the rank was the same like in the in the Marine. Designations. But we stood out and it was obviously that we were were in the Navy. Yeah. You know, because of that. Oh, yes. Or somewhere else. So here I am in the marine uniform. 

SPRAGUE: Of a zoo. 

LANCASTER: So unfortunately, I had to carry two c bags full of clothes around with me all over the place because I had both Navy and Marine. 

SPRAGUE: And where do you think picture was taken? 

LANCASTER: This was taken at the base Camp Pendleton. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: Yeah. 

SPRAGUE: Wow. Okay. Thank you. Got it. 

LANCASTER: Yeah. So it was an abrupt transition. It was not what I had really thought was going to happen. At all. 

SPRAGUE: I would imagine you'd be quite upset. Or I. 

LANCASTER: Was. Yeah, we. We all were. We pretty negative about the whole deal. You know, they tried all this stuff with being gung ho like the Marines and Semper Fi, and we really weren't part of them. You know, we're. There's always a separateness to the hospital corpsman. We're just a small minority group of our own. Very different than the Marines in our experience. I hate to say it, but we felt a bit superior to the Marines. You know, we call them Jarhead. You know, they call themselves the Reds, but at times we call them maggots. That was the term we used for them. It was a sad thing, but, I mean, we looking back on it, but we would just casual conversation refer to them that way or call them the animals because many of them were very poorly educated on educated. Some could not read or write. They put an X, you know, to mark the spot. There were a lot of very poor white Southern people, white people with heavy accents and whatever. So it was easy to kind of put a little prejudice on them, you know, whatever. And then mainly inner city blacks. My first real exposure came with the Marines and with black soldiers. I would say it was basically, you know, you drill together, eat together, whatever, but you didn't socialize. There was basically a de facto segregation. You didn't socialize with black soldiers at all. Later on, when we were in in in Okinawa and Japan, there were black bars and white bars, you know, switched their separate way. There was kind of a peaceful coexistence. I think the the officers, not the officers, but the ANC over the sergeants and whatever were pretty unkind to the black soldiers and made them do the worst kind of jobs, which had a long tradition, of course, in the in the military. So even though this was we had a lot of progress had been made, we didn't I didn't really see it. We were a little bit different in that. All right. Later on, like by the time I when we come back to I won't get back to the Vietnam, if that's all right. Yeah, that's okay. Anyway, what happened? I finished that training. Whatever, with the Marines, whatever, in limbo and was assigned to the third Battalion, ninth Marine Division. 

SPRAGUE: Now, just for clarification. Ninth Marines. 

LANCASTER: Italian, ninth Marine Division. They had had evidently a glorious history during World War Two. This book I found, I did not absolutely even know I had it, but it became a pretty valuable resource as I was putting this together. It's like a high school yearbook for all the, you know, pictures and pictures of all the people, whatever, including myself in there. And I did not realize this was being put together, but this documented that that year, that time period. 

SPRAGUE: Hmm. 

LANCASTER: All right. We loaded onto a ship in Camp Pendleton, San Diego, somewhere. 

SPRAGUE: So you were assigned in California to third Battalion. Ninth Trains. 

LANCASTER: Division? Yeah. 

SPRAGUE: What company were you in? 

LANCASTER: We they were. I looked in here and it just called H and M Country Company. It's like a support company. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. That's what I thought. 

LANCASTER: Support company. And we're listed separately, you know, as on a separate page as this is from later after we get. Vietnam, but battalion aid station is on a separate page. 

SPRAGUE: Right. 

LANCASTER: I mean, I honestly don't recall even having that picture or anything about it. 

SPRAGUE: So you were a battalion level ass? 

LANCASTER: Yeah, They call it a battalion aid station. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: So that would be below way below like a mash, you know, where they did surgeries and all that kind of stuff. Okay. The. We traveled by ship to Okinawa Camp. Hansen. There I worked in a battalion aid station primarily. So it was like a clinic. And we treated, you know, people for illnesses and whatever. Lot of drunken. Dealt with a lot of drunken Marines. And so I was sobering them up and whatever. When they come back from the village from the outside. There the group of of. The training, there was some jungle training. So we did go out and we had some jungle training. I want to mention that we were always very much respected by the the Marines. They called us doc, whatever. Are they biased drinks? If we were out socializing, they realize that they would be dependent on us in a dangerous situation. So there always was a level of respect and we didn't have to generally didn't have to do the Scott work. You know, we generally didn't have to be involved in clean up stuff and whatever. So a little bit of a privileged status. And the officers always kept us fairly close by to, you know, they kind of looked out for us and, you know, whatever. So I think that improved my experience over maybe what the average Marine would have experienced. From Okinawa. There was a they called the float. You went through the series of trainings. 

SPRAGUE: So how well do you think the training in Okinawa prepared you for what you'd find later. 

LANCASTER: And more would come later? In the Philippines? Okay, I'll talk about that in a few minutes. But Okinawa is kind of, you know, fine. They had a nice base. You know, they had nice. We went to the village and whatever. For me, it was Party City first. Yeah, I was only 18 and of course there was no drinking restrictions or anything in those days. You could drink at the, the, the bars on base and whatever. And we went to the villages and the the girls were there and we had a good time, you know, stuff that I was not I hadn't been exposed to before. And so we had lived it up, that's for sure. We went to Japan and there was cloud counting, climbing Mount Fuji all the time. Mount Fuji, of course, that very famous symmetrical volcanic mountain we climbed, that was all volcanic ash. It was very difficult to walk in. It was cold during the time that we were there. And we used various military exercises of different sorts. And we had, you know, stayed overnight and whatever the camp was a tent, kind of a tent city kind of camp with the, you know, the barracks, the wood stove. I think it was probably oil power, not wood power, but, you know, very kind of primitive, whatever. But we were able to go on leave. And so they organized bus trips. And so we went to Tokyo and we went to various places. At that time, the 1964 Olympics were being held. So I didn't go to any events, but it was very exciting to be there. The Japanese people were very kind because I was so tall. I was six for the little. The school girls all wanted pictures with me or whatever, which kind of surprised me. After World War Two, it wasn't that far off from World War Two, but I had a very good experience there and touring and and seeing that a different culture and whatever, that was very enjoyable. The yeah, the training was, was hard, but I was young enough that I was able to accomplish it from there. At some point we went to Hong Kong and that was wonderful. I'm not sure if we went on the same ship every time we went from place to place or different ships. I don't recall that, but we went to Hong Kong. Was wonderful at that time. James Bond was the big thing. We all read the James Bond books, so everybody bought a Rolex watch. So I still have that 1964 Rolex, which is pretty valuable today by the custom made suit. Because you were there for like three days and they would make the suit with it. And we had money that we had not been able to spend on anything before that. We party with Australian soldiers, so we had a really good time. It was a lot of fun and the Beatles songs were just coming out at that time. So I remember, you know, being in bars and Beatles songs, playing and meeting the Aussie soldiers, and they really could drink very much beyond what the Americans and my experienced since then is they still any of them know how to drink that great deal. But that was a really fun, fun experience. And I got some very good. You know, I took unfortunately, I put together an album of what my experiences were and I should have taken more pictures of of. You know, being in the military, whatever, whatever. But I took a lot. I had a lot of postcards, you know, from years about Fuji and Japan scenes. This was very exciting to a 17 year old, 18 year old to think that I would be in such places. So I unfortunately collected more postcards than I did, actually, photographs of of what was going on. That it was difficult to get, you know, film developed and whatever, You know, in those days it was a different kind of technology. But that was a great kind of experience. Then we went to the Philippines, a very hot, extremely hot, and that's where we had the real jungle training where they talked about bungee cords. You know, the cats that are supposedly the enemy would dig to trap the soldiers and those spraying driven things like you see in the Indiana Jones movies that whatever, you know, really got. They never I never did I hear of Vietnam. I did not know there was such a place. They were not preparing for going there or anything. Like we were just doing the training, the tropical weather training and all the generations of people, you know, decades of people had done since World War Two. 

SPRAGUE: So this was just a standard training. 

LANCASTER: Yes, it was a train. Nobody had any. There was never that. We're training for something specific. Never. Wow. Never. In fact, you know, it was considered a peacetime peacetime because when I grew up, you know, there was the Vietnam War. But as that time was called, the Vietnam conflict. When I was in high school, there was very seldom even talk, even mentioned as an afterthought, if anything, that we knew the communists were bad, you know, but. Never a clue that we were actually going to any kind of a combat situation. Nobody that was not in our mind at all. That that would be something that we would be experiencing. 

SPRAGUE: This is all late. 64. 

LANCASTER: This is late 64. 

SPRAGUE: Yeah. Yeah. And then you were you're still with that same company? 

LANCASTER: Still the same group. Yeah. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. I'm trying to quickly find a picture. I don't want to take too much time. 

SPRAGUE: No worries. 

LANCASTER: Anyway. 

SPRAGUE: No. 

LANCASTER: Anyway, we were trained about the bungee pit's about people being put in cages and. But I think it was more from World War Two kind of situation, you know? More than anything else, I think maybe they had just done that training forever. There was never any real specifics about you got you're actually going to deal with this at all. Nothing. Okay. Philippines hot, really hot. Difficult. A lot of snakes and bugs and awful things. We went back to the base. We piloted some more in the Philippines. It was interesting. We were given a warning about what we would take today, called transsexuals. But we were warned that there were men that dress like women in the bars and you couldn't tell them apart and whatever, and so you had to watch out for them. They had a specific name for them, but I can't remember what it was anyway. It was something for somebody my age. I didn't know what such a thing was. There were such things, whatever. But I remember it was a specific kind of warning that went out. I have to say here as part of my hospital corps training. Of course, one of the main things we were taught about was at that time what was called V, the venereal diseases, you know, And we they had horrible training movies of these people rotting away from syphilis and whatever, you know, And we have we would a part of our job was to train guys you know show these movies warn them about the dangers of getting V, D and or whatever, whatever. And so. As a result of that, I was often I was extremely cautious about any kind of experience because sexual experience because I didn't want to come close to getting anything like that. The Marines themselves were not that cautious. And so we had a lot of EDI, a lot of a lot of it, especially among the black soldiers, unfortunately. 

SPRAGUE: Or whatever it that I can only imagine. What was that like treating that? 

LANCASTER: Okay. So we discussed it, first of all. Okay. The when we were on the ship. Okay. After we would have leave, well, floor leave, whatever. And periodically at times they would we would have to go out in the middle of the night. It's a little embarrassing to talk about, but they call them pecker checks. You had to wake up the guy, go and raid the barracks, get the guys up out of bed, and they had to squeeze their penis to see if there was any discharge that would come out. And so here we are with a flashlight, you know, a flashlight walking up and down the rows in this barracks with these guys in this situation, whatever. And so it was to catch people who had VD. Well, we used to have to give this speech because we were the educators that you are government property and you can be punished for damaging government property. So it was kind of a script that we had to go through whatever. And so it was embarrassing. Yeah, difficult, embarrassing. But I mean, it was matter of fact, this is what you did. And so if you would catch, people would come in with the idea of different swords. You know, they had some types that we were not aware of. But one thing I really remember, you know, you treated with antibiotics, of course, and they would they would be somewhat punished by their and that was by their officers. I don't know how, but maybe they were restricted from leave or something. I don't I don't know what happened administratively, but we would have guys come to the clinic and they would have to soak their penis in a medical solution. So you had this whole room, you know, this room of guys sitting around with their penis in a basin full of this kind of eyeliner, kind of like stuff that we had to mix up, whatever. And so it was an awkward situation, but a necessary situation. And that's how they treat those days. And it was something you'd never think about as part of your job to do something of that sort. But that came with the territory. And it was it was very was very common. And they did not distribute condoms. They didn't do anything in particular other than tell them not to do anything, you know, whatever. So it was ineffective. Whatever they were doing was not very effective at all. When we left the Philippines, we got on the ship and we were supposed to be heading to South Korea for cold water training. Cold weather, I'm sorry, cold weather training. So that would have been the freezing frigid stuff that the Korean veterans were going through. So I remember on the ship being issued, the big parka, furry parka, gloves, all this kind of stuff being issued, all the stuff is sweltering. But we're given all this being given all this stuff on the ship. I was in the sick bay. There was a doctor there. And so I went and worked in the sick bay. Much of the time. It was like a clinic type area, whatever we had. One surgery was very interesting. They had to transport another ship, had no no surgeon on board. And so they had to transport the patient across the ropes, across the ocean, between the two, between the two ships and whatever. So that was very exciting. Had an appendectomy. And so I had to I got to use my surgical tech training. And the doctor performed that surgery. We did a couple of other minor surgery type things. And so, yeah, it was a hilarious experience. Unfortunately, when when we weren't. When I was busy that we they had to we had to go up on deck during the day. We were at night, we were in the, the sleeping quarters which was racks on racks, on racks of bunks, very close together, hundreds and hundreds of people. Very hot, very awful situation. You just lay on our bare canvas bed rack. We literally rack during the day. All the Marines, all anybody else who didn't have a job had to go up on deck in the horribly hot conditions because we were in the Pacific Ocean somewhere very crowded. Very unpleasant. And this float, you know, we were supposed to be transport, you know, just going from one place to another. But this float lasted for over 70 days. 

SPRAGUE: Wow. What was that like? It being? 

LANCASTER: It was awful. I mean, we didn't know anything. We didn't nobody told us anything. We didn't know what was going on. It was so uncomfortable, horribly uncomfortable. There were no showers of any sort. You wash your face and hands, and that was about it. Nothing to do. You know the name of the ship? I do not know. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: Now I should curious now. And maybe I could find it if I had to, but I don't remember it at this point. It was not a huge ship, you know. Not the most. I can take one. And it was from World War Two, I'm sure. 

SPRAGUE: Was it a type of landing ship or. 

LANCASTER: No, It was a it carried landing craft. It had landing craft on it. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: Okay. But it was not there. And there were other ships along with us. So it was like a flotilla of other ships along with us. But again, we knew nothing about what was going on. We. We knew something was wrong, that we weren't getting anywhere. We were going someplace. They did a couple of times. They would let us go swimming off the side of the ship. They would set up this kind of makeshift boundary and you could get off the ship and swim in the water or whatever. I remember doing that. That was and that was like the only break in this whole time period. It was very. Very, very, very difficult. 

SPRAGUE: Did you end up playing cards or doing some play? 

LANCASTER: You know, you play cards. You just, you know, sit around and talk, you know. You know, of course, there were no there were no movies. There were no nothing. You know, nothing. There was a boredom, just complete boredom all the time. I was fortunate, at least some of the time I had something to do working in the in the sick bay. But the Marines didn't have anything to do. I'm sure they took the rifles apart 500 times or whatever, but. Very, very, very difficult situation. Okay. I'm going to take a drink of water before we get to Vietnam. 

SPRAGUE: No problem. 

LANCASTER: March 8th, 1965. We get we're off the coast of you could see land all over. And this is what it looks like. 

SPRAGUE: They catch up to here. And this is off of maybe off of. 

LANCASTER: Top of Danang somewhere along there, I don't know. 

SPRAGUE: And I've heard various reports. What was that like that day in the day before at sea? 

LANCASTER: Okay. We were just kind of told, you know, get ready who are going to be landing? Whatever. All of our image was this was going to be like Iwo Jima. So this was going to be something like World War Two movies, Audie Murphy and whatever. That's what everybody was expecting. And. But we did not know where we were or who or anything about what was going on. Nothing. Okay. The Marines went off the side of the ship on the ropes. All day long they were going down was very rough. And so the ropes go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth and up and down and up and down. So we had a couple of people that fell and broke their legs. So I was still in the sickbay clinic. And so we were treating people who were injured because this is a pretty difficult situation and nobody had ever practiced that, of course. And so they were unloading them into these landing craft and they took off. I didn't know where they were going or what was going on with that. And we were there until it was dark by the time it was dark. And so we had to climb down the nets. I remember that. And they took the patients that, you know, we had some people that were limping and, you know, had casts and various things, and they took them. Somehow they got them, lowered them or something down into this landing craft. I don't I didn't really see what was done. Okay. So we were on the landing craft and it was very dark. It was again, we're expecting that you have to rush ashore or something, wade through the water. That's all I expect. Very noisy. And we we we go in and we actually came up to a wharf, to a dock, which amazed me. And there were all these lights on us, whatever. And they offloaded us and there were cameras there. People were photographing it, whatever. So somewhere and somebody is archived somewhere. Is this event going on? I watched the Ken Burns Know Vietnam series, the segment that deals with arms. It's called the River Styx. I got it somewhere anyway. I just watched it last night. Refresh my memory. Well, evidently the Marines had landed, had done the beach landing, and they had to eventually March 30th miles to get to the burning air base. It's recorded in this book. We did not. We got on. You know, we had patients with us and whatever. So we were the last off the ship. We landed at a shore. According to the documentaries, the Marines there, they were greeted by young girls that had flowers. They had banners welcoming the Americans to to Vietnam. 

SPRAGUE: So you'd get off at maybe at the pier? 

LANCASTER: Yeah. 

SPRAGUE: And on late March 8th or maybe even early March. Right. Very late in the evening. Right. Do you remember the time. 

LANCASTER: Or it would be in the middle of the night. Middle of the night? It was very late. 

SPRAGUE: Do you remember the ship that you launched from? 

LANCASTER: No, I don't. Okay. I don't remember that. Anyway, it was very. That's confusing. No. And of course, at night. And then we had to attend to other people. You know, it wasn't like just doing our own thing. And we had to attend to other other people in this process. And so it was interesting to me that the Marines experienced that even though they kind of came ashore like a gung ho, you know, World War Two. They were greeted with banners that said long live U.S. friendship. But for. And the the. The episode is episode three of the Vietnam War. Our series called The River Styx that runs from January 1964 to December 1965. So I really learned something just by watching that myself. We did not know any of the background political background, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, any of the politics that I don't know if you want me to go into any of that. I've learned about it since. 

SPRAGUE: No, that's okay. 

LANCASTER: I've learned about it since. But we do not know anything about any of that. 

SPRAGUE: When you got off the ship that evening, that night, were there people there greeting you with flowers? 

LANCASTER: No. 

SPRAGUE: And what. 

LANCASTER: What I recall any body being there just offloading and getting on to shrubs. 

SPRAGUE: Or. 

LANCASTER: You know, some kind of vehicle tracks and not a vehicle like a truck, you know, not a deuce. 

SPRAGUE: And a half. 

LANCASTER: Yeah, whatever. And probably one of those ones with benches and whatever. Anyway. And then we went to the outside of the air base of Danang. And we eventually learned we were in Danang, Vietnam. Vaguely in school. You know, it was called Indochina, you know, And during the colonial period of the French, whatever you suddenly call of Berlin know what Vietnam was, didn't know there was the North and the South didn't know. And just we were told, you know, the the enemies, you know, where the where the communists. And they used the term Luke, the gook look, the dirt gook was the you hear your name, unfortunately, was the enemy, you know, kind of generic name for the enemy. And we heard Uncle Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Uncle Ho and his people, whatever, as the the enemy, whatever, later on. But. It was interesting to be so ignorant about what where, where you were and what you were doing and whatever. It was very frustrating. And always this level of confusion during my Vietnam experience that nobody really knew what was going on. Like there was not a plan. Everything was kind of done on an after thought kind of thing. And so you kind of came to. Not accept it, but. Resented, you know, more than anything. Resent that. Nobody's in charge here, you know, and, you know, talked about the lack of discipline and whatever. And it really was true. You know, people didn't have any understanding of a mission of and very inconsistent discipline, whatever. You kind of on your own a lot of time figuring out things that you had to accomplish within your own, you know, work situation. 

SPRAGUE: Do you think that was widespread, that sentiment? 

LANCASTER: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Very, very widespread. And the longer you we were there and the less. We saw that being accomplished. And I can't even say accomplished because we we didn't know what we were really. The goal was what we were doing. Let me find my notes. 

SPRAGUE: So tell me about the training airbase and then your your movement. You talked about this in the pre-interview. Yeah. 

LANCASTER: Okay. We set up a battalion aid station in a goat shed. Here you can see it in the background of this. This fellow here, that's me. But it was a goat shed. Had a cement floor, had a couple. 

SPRAGUE: There you go. 

LANCASTER: Couple of windows in it. 

SPRAGUE: So it was an existing building. 

LANCASTER: It was existing building on the edge of the airbase. We were I think we were a fair distance away from the airbase. 

SPRAGUE: Now, were you down by the airbase or were you up on one of the hills? 

LANCASTER: We were between the air base in the hills because you could see the hills in the background. And the biggest hill they called Monkey Hill for some reason. And that was one we would visit occasionally. I'll tell you about that. 

SPRAGUE: Let me ask you a question here real quick. And I'm not sure if this is going to help or if it's going to be confusion, but I'm going to ask you anyway, sir, and we'll go from there. I had a friend who hand you a map of the Danang area in the spring of 1965. And I have. Where are the textbooks? Tell me. Third Marine. The third. Third of the ninth Marine. Where? On two hills here. 268 and 327. And you're saying you're somewhere in between that back down towards the airbase so we can disappear here real quick. And here are the two hills. Here's two. Six, eight. Here's three, two, seven. And then here's the airstrip. And then based on what. 

LANCASTER: I would say, we're right over here. Right where that 319 is. Somewhere over in that. I don't know which of these mountains would be this Monkey Island. 

SPRAGUE: I think that here's here's Monkey Mountain. So we do. 

LANCASTER: Think back, hey, maybe that was the biggest one in the distance that these smaller ones were the ones that we were involved with. 

SPRAGUE: Correct. So in order to see Monkey Mountain in one of your shots here, if this is it, you're looking back to the northeast. 

LANCASTER: Yeah. Yeah. 

SPRAGUE: And then we'd have to turn around. 

LANCASTER: These would be the smaller ones, probably. 

SPRAGUE: Yeah, that would be these two. Yeah. 

LANCASTER: But see, there's like dirt roads. He was like. And there were some building outbuildings and things I never really saw, like the runways or any of that kind of thing. I never really saw that. 

SPRAGUE: At least a couple of miles to the east of that. 

LANCASTER: Yeah, I never saw that at all. 

SPRAGUE: Okay, so let's I just want to get this for the record so we have it. 

LANCASTER: And see, I, I would have had no knowledge of that. I didn't realize we were that close to the ocean, to be honest. 

SPRAGUE: Right. So we didn't. So what he's indicated is that where 39 is marked on this map is roughly about where the aid station was not on the hills, but down in between the hills and the air base itself. You get that out of the way. 

LANCASTER: It was like a dusty, very dusty, open field. And. There were we took the shed was, of course, just filthy. Everything was filthy. And so we took sheets and lined the inside of the facility with sheets and we set up some bunks. Who would be the poor patients We took, made some tables, put some tables together and drape those with sheets and then put our medical equipment on top, you know, the forceps and bandages and all that kind of stuff to set up kind of a clinic. You know, basically it was more like a clinic than it was anything else. We slept in in pup tents, basically. I remember there were huge rats all around. 

SPRAGUE: Big just outside of that. 

LANCASTER: Yeah, just outside the goat shed right next to it. 

SPRAGUE: How did you prevent yourself? Were there roads or was there a chance of you getting run over by a vehicle? 

LANCASTER: No, we were off the track and there's photos that were off the track of these dirt roads that were going by. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: You know, there's our bags next to us. That dirt path, basically. 

SPRAGUE: If you could help me up. 

LANCASTER: The links to a dirt path. 

SPRAGUE: And then get them. Oh, there's your bags. Yep, I got it. Okay. 

LANCASTER: And then here you can see the shed, and we're sitting outside of it. 

SPRAGUE: Was this something that you. You purchased or. They just took over and said, we're going to go chat now. 

LANCASTER: You know, they're loaded, made out of the ammo boxes. So somebody constructed them. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: I didn't do it. But somebody there I mean, you know, the old ammo boxes, whatever. Anyway, we tried to make it as sanitary as we could and original. And as we were there, things gradually improved. We had to we went from being in the small pup tents and eating C. C rations, you know? 

SPRAGUE: How was that? A couple of weeks I've heard was scuttlebutt on that. 

LANCASTER: It was very. 

SPRAGUE: Just initially, I guess. 

LANCASTER: Like now what? Oh, it's kind of that. Okay, here we are. But now what? You know what? What do we do now? And then eventually we learned that we were supposed to be guarding this air base. That was our main goal. And our primary goal was defensive. You know, just stay there, build a perimeter, whatever, and protect the air base. That was primarily what we were supposed to do because this was the, you know, the first incursion of troops into Vietnam. Um, that was done before that. There were they call advisors. There were thousands of them, but they were called advisers and they weren't considered, you know, to be really an armed force that had been had landed. I forget what the numbers were. I wrote it down from the, you know, the tens of thousands of people of men who were coming in at that time. 

SPRAGUE: What was a typical day like? 

LANCASTER: At a typical day? Again, we had no we had no running water. We had no whatever we got, there was water was brought to us and we had to use those tablets to sanitize it, whatever. Again, once again, no showers, no nothing of that sort. Nothing of that sort. We our primary work was getting the aid station tidied up and put together and we, of course, would be seeing patients, you know, during this time time period, there were two doctors, Dr. King and Dr.. And from what I found in the in this year was about 60 hospital corpsman. So it was a pretty small, small group. 

SPRAGUE: Now where the two officers, were they in command of the unit or. 

LANCASTER: Was their medical doctors. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: The medical doctors. So they're not in charge. They're in charge of us, but not. And they were Navy and they were Navy, but not. 

SPRAGUE: And then did you have a platoon leader or. 

LANCASTER: We had a chief petty officer. Okay. That was kind of in charge of us until I see. Yeah. There were a couple of leftover old vets from like must've been in the Korean War that didn't do a whole lot of anything. So bosses around. And. We also had to. We had to dig trenches and fortifications. And up on one of the hills, probably one of the ones you were referring to. There was an aid station up there, like just a tent that was meant to receive casualties, whatever. 

SPRAGUE: Which was that tent there. 

LANCASTER: And we had to go up to this mountain and dig. Fill sandbags. Endless quantities. 

SPRAGUE: Yeah. Till this way. Nope. You plenty far up. Just. There you go. 

LANCASTER: Analysts, Quantities of sandbags. I mean, endless, endless sandbags and endless trenches. And, of course, we weren't really prepared for that kind of work. That was not what we were accustomed to. So it was very hard. 

SPRAGUE: Okay, I got it. 

LANCASTER: It was very hot and very difficult. And again, we thought, well, you know, are we going to be bombed all the time or shelled all the time or whatever? And nothing, nothing of that sort happened most of the time. 

SPRAGUE: What did your experience in the Philippines? How are you climatically to be in Vietnam or not? 

LANCASTER: No. That was more hot and wet, you know, tropical what we think of as tropical. Whereas Vietnam, it's subject to the monsoons. So the wet season and the dry season. So the dry season, like when we're digging here, it's just dust. Just dust, dirt dust hot. But still, it is humid, but it's very hot. And then the monsoons would come and this horrendous rain, tremendous rain for days and days and days, you know, just a real force of nature that if you've never experienced that. And for us, it was just a relief because it would cool things down. And one of my fondest memories is that we would when the monsoon rains would come because we had limited even at the best, we had limited shower ability, whatever, because everybody would just strip down and go out in the open field and lather up with soap and in the monsoons. And it was a neat, neat kind of experience to be able to do because it would rain for hours, you know, so you could stay, you know, you'd be clean for a change. And it was kind of fun, you know, to do that, whatever. But that was very periodically it wasn't, you know, was only a short period of time. 

SPRAGUE: That's how you got your showers? 

LANCASTER: Yes, that's how we got our showers at first. Eventually, I was going to tell you, things did get better eventually. We had a larger a larger tent that had rows of bunks that we were in, but still right next to the aid station because we were all kind of on call, you know, whatever. When somebody would come in, whatever somebody had to excuse me, had to, you know, attend to the people. 

SPRAGUE: How were the mosquitoes and other skeeters? 

LANCASTER: Were it really bad that firstly, right after the monsoon season, there were these huge flying insects of different sorts? Everybody lost a lot of weight because the food was so bad. It was the sea rations and the ready to eat meals. They call them today. But, you know, I remember, you know, when you had various choices, like there was beef stew and there was chicken noodles and whatever. But then for some reason, they had something called ham and Lima beans. And it was the worst of the worst thing because you'd have bits of ham and alive. Just grease grease, you know, kind of stuff. And you could warm it up. We had Sterno type thing and you could warm it up, but still it was just like this lump of grease. And I hated it. It was always awful. And what would happen is the higher up petty officers, they would take the beef stew and all the good stuff, and then they would give us the crappy stuff, including the ham and liver beans. And so we were always disgusted at that. I remember one time this, in fact, one of these guys, they gave me the ham and was that I got that. Oh, I hate that metal. I actually threw the can back at them without thinking, you know, because he was higher rank that man, whatever. But through that, whatever. So I'm not eating that stuff. And so that became kind of one of my big episodes of Rebellion at that time because I was just sick and tired of all of that. But what. 

SPRAGUE: Did you do in your downtime. 

LANCASTER: In the downtime? You did play cards. You sat around, just talked, smoked. Everybody smoked. Of course, the Cigarets were in the C rations. Eventually they set up. Eventually we had a nicer tent, a bigger tent. Eventually we had like a mess hall type thing, outdoor kitchen, you know, with people cooking and whatever. And that improved the situation a great deal. Eventually we had outhouse type thing instead of little trains, whatever that outhouse, you know, actually a screened in type of facility. The Seabees built these structures. Eventually they had like a shower house kind of thing with hot water that you had. Unfortunately, we had to walk to it. It was a distance away, like maybe a mile away down there. We walked down the dirt road. You go in and you could take a hot shower and you got dressed and you had to walk back on the hot, dusty road. So it didn't do a whole lot of good. But the thought of it, yeah, the thought of it was better. It was a better situation. 

SPRAGUE: How about. Mail service from home. 

LANCASTER: We did get mail sporadically. I didn't get a whole lot because I didn't really communicate too much with with my family. In fact, I got in trouble. I got called in by the officer once for. My aunt that I had had gone to after my mother died. She had put in a notice through the Red Cross, wondering where I was and what I was doing. So I got called in by the officer and chewed out for not writing my ad, And so he made me sit down and write a letter to her and whatever some of it was, we really had nothing to say, you know, here we are. And, you know, I think there was okay, you know, yeah, I know that we're all, you know, that was, you know, our small little group. Those were our friends. Those were the people we hung out with. I mean, we didn't. The rest of the world seems so remote, so far away. We really didn't know for the longest time how long we would even be there. We could. We thought maybe we'd be there. Definitely. You know, whatever. It was not something that we could relate to. So your only source of information, you can see a person reading the paper was Stars and Stripes newspaper, which was the official kind of government newspaper. And it was supposed to be have all these articles and whatever, but it was a propaganda device, you know, it rah, rah, everything, you know, USA, everything is going well. Whatever. Begin to see some cut from articles about the Vietnam conflict and who the enemy was. And we were always winning, of course, great victories all the time. Was the the message. 

SPRAGUE: Did you have to move a rat? Well, you were at an end. Did you have to move around at all or. 

LANCASTER: Yeah, I was going to discuss that. We went to that. I mentioned we had to go to periodically to this hilltop aid station and dig the, you know, fill sandbags. And we were supposed to be there to receive leave any wounded, whatever with them. We had to. We had people come in to the aid station. We had, you know, injured soldiers just from, you know, accidental guns, shot wounds, whatever, you know, just accidents happening. We had people who were ill, you know, with infections. Whenever the place was horrible as far as any kind of wounds where they get infected and whatever. We did a lot of inoculations for very, you know, the tremendous number of shots that you would get for being in this environment. One of the most notorious they show in this picture here, this kid getting a shot was rear end, but it was glamor globulin shots that were for supposedly to prevent meningitis. And they were ten cc's of this real thick, thick liquid. It was hard for us to even draw it out. And you had ten cc's in each cheek. So we had lines of Marines. They would come lay down on the cots, wham, wham, whatever, for hours and hours and hours of doing this, whatever. And it hurt. We had to have this. 

SPRAGUE: Hurt. 

LANCASTER: We had to have on to. Yeah. And so that was, you know, the big job to do do that many common wounds of all different sorts. Most of our casualties. We did have a couple of casualties. Most of them at this time were friendly fire where somebody got trigger happy along the perimeter because we would hear firing at night and see the tracing. Tracy, Bullets, whatever. Nothing. During the daytime tracer bullets, we would occasionally see and hear things that the distance, you know, mortars or some kind of device going off in the distance, but not in the daytime, but at night. And so we did get I think there are at least four people that would be on the Vietnam Wall that were killed by friendly fire. I don't know if they ever told their families that was the case, but that was what would happen. 

SPRAGUE: But how about the rules of engagement for you? 

LANCASTER: Okay. For us, We we weren't told any rules about anything, whatever. But again, we were we only had we had the 45 got weapon. And so, again, it was supposed to be according to the Geneva Convention. We were again, noncombatants still, and we were not supposed to be shooting anybody. We're just supposed to defend ourselves and our patients, whatever. I remember one episode we had, you know, we had a pretty lax situation as far as military was concerned. You know, we didn't we got by not saluting people and, you know, officers and various things just because of the nature of what we did. And so one time we had for some reason, they decided we had to have an inspection or whatever, and we had to present our our 45 revolvers, whatever. Yeah, we had to present a. 

SPRAGUE: Present. 

LANCASTER: Arms, hold them up kind of thing. I don't know what that was. We didn't know what to even do and we hardly knew how to march or any of that stuff, you know? And so I did my. Everybody brought theirs up and whatever. Well, mine. That clip fell right in front of the officer, whoever was inspecting, and they kind of rolled their eyes, you know, whatever. Well, there's a corpsman, you know, they wanna know about any of this stuff, but you. 

SPRAGUE: Present arms with your 45. 

LANCASTER: Yeah, right. It was some kind of ritual. They told us they had to do this, to this, to this. And we never seen that before and never done any of us anything like that before. And we never did anything after that. It was like that as well, because I remember a couple of times we had they had a formation and we we had to kind of March 1st from one place to another. We were probably the saddest lot of people marching that they'd ever seen out there. And they again, they kind of considered the source, whatever the next thing that we did that. As part of the the the goal was to win hearts and minds was we had to go out to the villages and treat the the natives supposedly or whatever. That was part of what we had to do. And so there are some pictures here, you know, of us. With the native people, I can show you some art. 

SPRAGUE: Okay, that's good. Now, was this rotating or were you rolling out from your base? 

LANCASTER: From the base? Periodically, they tell us we're going to the village or going to the village. 

SPRAGUE: Yeah, whatever. 

LANCASTER: And so they troop us out. We had armed soldiers around us, whatever. And they troops to the wherever this village was. And we were supposed to be treating them. This, you know, was part of trying to be make friends with the the people. And we were very ineffective. I mean, they had horrible tropical diseases. They had leprosy. They had, you know, things you'd never, never seen a scene before, you know, children with horrible birth defects and whatever. And they would come to us and, you know, they buy they flocked to us, flock all around us. We were the great saviors. And for the most part, all we did was put bandages on on things and whatever and give them an aspirin or, you know, it was very superficial. And then we would not go back, period, you know, on a regular basis. So there was like you wouldn't follow up with somebody to see how they did whatever. So again, it was what I later learned, pretty much just the propaganda move, you know, to try to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. Going through all my documents, I found something that was very unusual. I don't know how I got this or why I got this, but this is a letter that was submitted to someone. From Jerome King, who's the battalion's surgeon. He was a very aristocratic person. He and his man or I don't know his name was Jerome Stovall. King And very he had a tent by himself. And he wore like riding boots, like high riding boots and had a riding crop thing. 

SPRAGUE: And he was a battalion surgeon, Italian surgeon. 

LANCASTER: Well, he thought he was like MacArthur or somebody, you know, in his manner, very aloof, did not like to treat the average soldier Marine at all. We were delegated. I went to mention that responsibilities way beyond our capabilities. You know, 90% of the people that came to us, we really treated and we learned through experience. Obviously, the recognize, you know, an infection or, you know, various basic things. And we did suturing and we did, you know, which we weren't really trained to do. We just learned it on our own or whatever. And so we we learned a lot more skills because we had to because the doctor wasn't really attending to this stuff himself. He liked to hang around with the officers and have his picture taken and whatever when they do little photo op type stuff, but very aloof kind of person. Anyway, this document, it says experience of the medical department of the third Battalion, ninth Marine Regiment while stationed in Danang, Vietnam. From March 8th, 1965 to June 17th, 1965. And he details supply. So I'll just read through some of this stuff. The battalion landing support group. I don't know who what that references to. On many occasions was unable to supply us with basic basic items such as Band-Aids, ace bandages and normal sailing. We received the bulk of our medical supplies from the Army Field Hospital, Danang and the Air Force dispensary. Supplies, which are imperative for our operation, were composition, injectable morphine and bismuth, diarrhea tablets, salt tablets, Oxford oxy tetracycline and corresponding oleic i solution for infections. Camel globulin was not supplied until we'd been dining area for two months. Yet we have only seen one case of hepatitis or hepatitis C rather than meningitis. Okay. There was a 60 bed hospital and clearing company at demand. They say the attitude of the general medical officers at the collecting and clearing company left something to be desired. But the surgical staff were quite helpful. They were able to perform laboratory tests such as him adequate and school stool cultures. The Navy hospital smaller, not equipped to perform any sophisticated laboratory tests. So very critical of this report that he was scared. 

SPRAGUE: This was written by that witness. 

LANCASTER: By the doctor? Yeah. Medical cases were evacuated straight to Clark Hospital in the Philippines Parkway Hospital in Okinawa. We found the recommended route of evacuation too cumbersome to get from the battalion aid station to collecting and clearing company and eventually to Clark Air Force Base. Prominent medical problem. Sanitation. All water in the area, including that from Springs, is contaminated. Flies. The mosquitoes are legion and no screening is available for the heads. The toilets are the mess halls. So for washing mask here was often unobtainable. No showers available for the troops. Gastrointestinal disorders. This is the main disease group of significance, both viral and bacillus dysentery. We're seeing no laboratory tests. The symptoms were abdominal cramps, followed by vomiting and diarrhea. They didn't have injectable Compazine and morphine to treat the diarrhea. I do remember that as a big issue. Heat and exhaustion. We saw these because the men were carrying too much equipment, example flak jackets and because salt pills and water were not being taken in sufficient quantities, the corpsman and company commanders were reminded that while walking in 100 degree, 110 degree Fahrenheit heat, a man loses one and one half canteens of water per hour and requires 6 to 8 salt tablets per day of venereal disease. There is no national attempt to control this group of diseases. Mostly are prevalent. Talks about the drug regime that there was a lot of gonorrhea but had not seen syphilis. A lot of ear infections oc treating the indigenous personnel, the natives, the villagers. We found it most profitable to direct our efforts toward bacterial infections of the skin. For this point, it was both satisfactory. We had the cure. The aura of acupuncture. So what we would do is try to pretend to give them a shot. And quite little of the content from it was a one thing deal instead of a daily schedule of pills. There are no hospitals in the den area to refer the people from the village to whatever is submitted by the sponsor. I don't know why in the world I have. That was very interesting. 

SPRAGUE: How do you think What do you think of his reflections? 

LANCASTER: I think I don't. I remember some of it. You know, it helps me to recall a lot of it. I remember, you know, a lot of people having the runs because of the food and the water and worrying about the water, you know, which is that something that's real commonplace, you know, commonplace kind of situation. I remember a lot of our supplies were outdated. There were World War two era supplies. A lot of stuff in the climate were not would not, could not be preserved very well. And because of the rise of the dust and whatever, you know, was really hard to maintain for our standards, any kind of cleanliness or anything of that sort. Uh, and so I think we're not we were not as effective as we could have been because of, of these situations. I remember one case I had to go for about a week. There was an officer who was ill, and I went to this hospital that they described that was in the main, and it was very small and it was all native, all Vietnamese doctors that were in there. And I couldn't speak their language and they couldn't speak English. Anyway, I was to attend to this sick officer. And so I was there for about a week and I, you know, gave him the he had a medication regime and whatever that I could. And I slept like right next to his bed or whatever during that whole time period. And I remember that he was quite, you know, unconscious, not doing well. I don't recall exactly what his problem was. Anyway, eventually he was evacuated. They were going to take him to Saigon. And for a while there was the assumption that I was going to go with him. But I thought, well, this is cool. I would like to do that. And unfortunately, once I got to the helicopter, he took me by helicopter. They they took over and left me. I didn't get to go to the Saigon at all, but it was something that I. I was near and yet so far, too. So there were, you know, some fairly serious situations that we developed it to also. 

SPRAGUE: Are you getting any news from back from the States at all? 

LANCASTER: No. My family was pretty clinical. I didn't get too many letters. I told you they would not have mentioned anything that was going on at home. I had no idea that there were protests. I had no idea that we were basically losing in whatever we were doing. I had no idea. I didn't know of other conflicts and battles and things that were going on. Again, this was very early on in the conflict, and so the battles were few and far between. And, you know, large numbers of troops were being sent elsewhere that I didn't see. 

SPRAGUE: And did you stay in that dining area and. 

LANCASTER: Stayed there the whole time period? We did go on patrol. We had to go out in the daytime, you know, just with soldiers when they were out on patrol. Most of it was, you know, none nothing great. You know, just walk for a number of miles and come back to the base. We had to go out at night. And that really terrified me because we could see the tracer bullets and hear the booms and whatever. And I was really afraid of having to do that. 

SPRAGUE: Was there any particular you were in that battalion aid station, but were you ever particularly associated with a particular company within third Battalion that you went out with regularly? 

LANCASTER: I know we went out with these I don't know the I don't know their title. Okay. They were small group, you know, very small platoons probably fall numbers like ten people. 

SPRAGUE: Oh, okay. 

LANCASTER: Something like that. 

SPRAGUE: Like squads. 

LANCASTER: And they always went first. And I was always at the end toward the end. And I always was hoping that nothing was going to, you know, the daytime didn't bother me too much because, again, we didn't hear firing and stuff during the daytime. But that. Night. It made me really nervous, you know, And I was not real comfortable doing that. One thing that did go on is that the Marines were all kept as a unit. You know, they they traveled as a unit, whatever. They had a great identity as a unit. We did not. And we had corpsman that would come and go individually. You know, their time would be up there, 13 months would be up and they would go, whatever. So what happened was, I forget, I could not tell you exactly when it was, but this whole group of Marines, they all left and we were left behind. So in this area where we were, they all took off. And we were this group of 20 of us there. We were for like 3 or 4 days just sitting there on on our own. And that was so disheartening because we, you know, we knew some of these people, you know, associated with them, whatever had been with them all this time. And they left us there for whatever reason. I don't know how it was. Figure it out, whatever. Then eventually a new group came in, you know, and occupied their places and whatever. And then we were told we left again one by one by one. And so there were about five of us. We were told that to be ready the next day. All abrupt, you know, Very abrupt. Be ready now. The next day you're leaving. Whatever. And that night, the person in charge decided that I would go out on patrol by last night. What? My last night in Vietnam, that I would go. So there were again, and this example of this kind of sick humor or sick mentality or whatever. And that was the time I was the most frightened. I was really scared. And we went somewhere down by the coast. There were boats around whatever. And there really was some action of some sort going on. And they were I was running they were the soldiers were running. I was running after them. We were dodging tracer bullets. You know, it was really like fire, open fire going on, which I had never experienced before. And so that was a really terrifying kind of experience. But eventually they did come. They took us by truck to the airbase, I guess. 

SPRAGUE: So that would have been late. That was when when you were on your last patrol? 

LANCASTER: That was. Yeah, that would have been. 

SPRAGUE: Was that about. 

LANCASTER: I'm trying to look at that. 

SPRAGUE: The. 

LANCASTER: 66. It would have been early 60s. Early 66. Yeah. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: Because according to my service record, I served one year, two months and ten days in the combat zone. Okay. However, they did find that. Whatever. 

SPRAGUE: And then less than your last night in theater took you out on a patrol? 

LANCASTER: Absolutely. And it was purposely done. Maybe it was that sergeant I threw that that ham alive of beans out, but it was purposely done to make me miserable. 

SPRAGUE: So was that. Let's see, 66? Was that. When was that? In 66, if you. 

LANCASTER: That would have been if it's a year later. So March, two months, April, May, May of 66. 

SPRAGUE: May have 66. Yeah. And you said you thought it was there were boats. It was along the coast. Kind of vaguely. Remember? 

LANCASTER: Yeah. Yeah, we were definitely. There were boats, like, there were boats nearby. And you can see the reflection off the water, whatever, which I had not seen before. So I don't know where exactly we were. Mm hmm. And as we were there longer, there was more activity at night. But I think, again, mainly defense that we weren't really going out looking for trouble. Plus, there weren't at that time there weren't too many North Vietnamese. From what I know from history, there weren't too many in that area. Right. They would tend to come in more later. 

SPRAGUE: Later on. Did you have any experiences with Arvin or not? 

LANCASTER: Yes, I we we did interact with them very little. Really? They were always very polite. We couldn't communicate with them. Of course, we thought they were very odd. There was a lot of racial prejudice, you know, again. Underlying that, they were inferior people. The little brown people, the gooks, you know that they were not like us. We. One thing that was ever so small and they were very affectionate towards us, they would hold hands. For example, the soldiers would hold hands. And we thought that was very strange. Of course, very, very strange that that would would happen. The the people, the women and children were very attractive, very cute. The women were beautiful in their old eyes. The Vietnamese dress were very pretty. They aged very rapidly. And then we had the old people that were after had black teeth from chewing betel nuts and they were looked like they were hundreds of years old, whatever. But the young people were very attractive. And we had we did treat some of our soldiers more that were wounded than our own people. They were brought to us. Again, It was very difficult because we couldn't communicate with them at all and they were with us for a very short amount of time. If they had a wound, a bullet wound, we just kind of wrap, patch it up and send them off to somebody else because we didn't really do surgery there at all. 

SPRAGUE: And these would be enemy. 

LANCASTER: Soldiers I did no contact with then. And we saw all this violence with the South Korean. Sorry, South Vietnamese. 

SPRAGUE: Okay, my bad. 

LANCASTER: I had no I never saw what would be considered an enemy. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. 

LANCASTER: At all during my time there. 

SPRAGUE: Yeah. Did you have much time to go into the thing? 

LANCASTER: Yes, we went into the NG. Danang was lovely. It was had been a French colonial city, so there were some very beautiful structures there. There wasn't much. There was. You know, there were. European style churches. This is the only part I ever saw and probably would be considered Old Town, Danang. And it was very pretty on there. A lot of street vendors, lot of of course, by this time a lot of bars. Their beer was called 33 beer. It was like a rock kind of beer, but it was the only beer that was available for a long, long time. Eventually, some would come in through the military, but, you know. Much less developed than what we saw in Okinawa or the Philippines, whatever. We were taught. We were told that any one could be an enemy about them with carrying hand grenades or whatever. And so we were very wary of having contact with them, with the people on the street or whatever. We would go to the various bars. Of course, the girls were all there and whatever, but that was very different kind of situation. But out on the street we were very wary. Did you travel in groups? It didn't happen very often. We traveled in groups. We always were with other of people. Usually the people we knew we did go. I have a couple of pictures. There was a museum or some sort of that we went to. But we didn't go very often. I mean, we didn't go to the town or whatever you want to call it, very often. So I don't know if it was restricted or we just. That's not very not real common place to do that at all. 

SPRAGUE: So I would guess not many. Not many contacts are for working with the Vietnamese. No. 

LANCASTER: Well, no, not directly. No. Never. 

SPRAGUE: Yeah. 

LANCASTER: The contact we did have, you know, they would cut our hair. You know, we'd go on the street vendors, they would cut our hair and, you know, we'd get by a little odds and ends of stuff from them until they established the path where we could get, you know, soap and toothpaste and all that kind of stuff. There were restaurants for them. Oh, we were real adventuresome about all we would eat is fried rice. That's all we trusted to was fried rice because we didn't know what else was in their in their food, whatever the villages were. The the struck by, you know, just the poverty, you know, just by our standards, tremendous poverty. One memory I have is when we had the mess halls, you know, you'd have you pick up your food, whatever, and then you take your, your, your, your plate's yours and you put in the hot water, you know, got the garbage, wash the plates in hot water, and then you take it with you. Anyway, the old ladies were there and they'd be going through the all the food, the old food and picking out, meeting, you know, the what was the good, the goodies that were left that were not consumed and picking them up and taking home what was there. And we used to, you know, look down upon them. But now I feel bad about that. I should have been sharing more of what I what I had with them. But we were, you know, with so much illness and them, you know, that they were they were not like us. And we. 

SPRAGUE: They were new. 

LANCASTER: Really. There was not any. Idea that we were partners in this, you know, partners in this goal of fighting off the Communists or North Vietnamese or whatever. There was never any real feeling of that way. There was never any integration of the forces. You get the language barrier. You know, you do a few signs here and there once in a while, and that was about it. And we. We dealt with them because, you know, like we could buy Cokes from them. They probably I don't know if they were legitimate Cokes, but they sold Coca Cola. And so we buy bottles of Coca Cola from them whenever we had some Vietnamese currency. We also had script two, or you could use that that the p the packs, it was like phony money. It was into, you know, American money that you could use for, you know, very little buying of anything. I save a tremendous amount of money. I saved over $10,000 while I was in the service because there was nothing to buy. There was no place to spend money. That was a lot of money in those days, a tremendous amount of money, which I used later on for my college experience. 

SPRAGUE: Did your battalion aid station, did it have a did you have a pet or a mascot by chance? 

LANCASTER: An animal? 

SPRAGUE: An animal? Some sometimes units do, no. Okay. Any particular did you guys ever, in addition to playing cards, play any sports outside or. 

LANCASTER: Not too much? I think there were volleyball thing that I don't remember participating in that. I think there were baseball games and stuff. Not much. We didn't again, we didn't hang out with the Marines very much. And they probably had more organized kind of things than we did. There was just a lot of sitting around, you know, it's the old military things hurry up and wait, you know, a lot of sitting around doing nothing, you know, try and just boredom, tedium. And I had you know, there are 2 or 3 guys that I really liked that I, you know, spent most of my time with, if I could that some dislike tremendously within our even our small group. We were a little bit I went to the really unusual we had a couple of of blacks guys that were hospital corpsman I think so all of that. And. Yeah there's one picture this one we're seeing a table anyway we associate with each other. We were really good friends, you know, whatever. There was no no prejudice or anything, you know, between us, which was a little bit unusual. 

SPRAGUE: So you on the road. 

LANCASTER: That I mean. Right. You know, Yeah, a little bit. 

SPRAGUE: Unusual. It's like you're eating outside. 

LANCASTER: Yeah, we're eating outside. 

SPRAGUE: Yeah. Next to the. 

LANCASTER: Gotcha. Gotcha. A little unusual. What was the other little interesting. Little. Little bit. Was that. We were getting some draftees or people who were trying to avoid the draft, and they were college educated people. And so they had a lot of influence on me as far as because they were reading books that were a little higher caliber than I was reading. And I would pick those up, you know, and whatever. I did a lot of reading when I could get a hold of books that had always been part of my life and. So anyway. 

SPRAGUE: You have a unit library. But, you. 

LANCASTER: Know, there have, as far as I recall, you. I know the ship had all had books. So I know you purchased them. Okay. And I don't know how through work process, maybe there was some kind of distribution system, you know, that, as you say, there probably was some kind of distribution system system. But most of the time we read. Yeah, we read James. I talked about James Bond's bag and, you know, those kind of novels, whatever. But, you know, from the college students, I started reading things that were more like would be in a college curriculum of some sort. And they kind of introduced me to some of that, that type of of reading, you know, certainly that was my goal, was to go to college and whatever. And they also influenced me and, you know, they. Most of them came the white guys. People came from a better, you know, higher class of society than I grew up in. And so I learned of, you know, different ways of thinking from them maybe, And what I had experienced before. I don't know what really wasn't even looking for right now anyway. So, you know, I think that made a difference to me in my experience. I always tell throughout my life, I always hung out with people who were older than me. And so I learned some of the values and things from them. That made me a bit more ambitious, perhaps an experience. And again, I was still going to be the right doctor at this point in my life. So. 

SPRAGUE: So your, your your tour, you go out on your last patrol the next day, your next flight out. Yeah. 

LANCASTER: So it was very abrupt. Yeah, very abrupt. So we went back to Okinawa or took back went back to Okinawa for a couple of weeks and. Then we each where we went, we went on a plane to Okinawa. Like a transport cargo plane. There were like six of us, maybe 6 or 7. And we went to Okinawa. And then we each our travel arranged with a roommate, and we all left one by one. So we had to say bye bye, farewell, goodbye to all these people. And we did exchange information, but not to a great extent. So I never saw any of those people again or had contact with any of them again after that 13 months of such close contact. It was a sad thing looking back on it now, but that's just the way it was. I when I left, I was put on a commercial plane. I because I was called. This is very interesting here. I coming from Vietnam, these conditions again to Okinawa. I was because I was corpsman that an officer assigned me to accompany a woman and her children back to the United States. They were dependents up bearing. She was had been married to Al was married to officers. I had 2 or 3 kids and I was supposed to help her with their kids on the way home from Vietnam on this plane. 

SPRAGUE: And so why was that called? 

LANCASTER: I don't know. It just was trying to be nice, I guess, whatever. And I was having none of it I didn't want. And I was I did a very poor job of it. I was kind of well, I myself. And she asked me to help her a couple of times. I did what I had to do and I didn't get into it at all because I was certainly just not for it. We stopped in Hawaii. I think we stopped to Guam and then Hawaii and then San Francisco. Okay. So, you know, within, you know, whatever hours of travel that would be would be a lot of hours of travel, whatever, we get to San Francisco and somehow I don't know where I was transported to. Anyway, there are lots of other soldiers there, lots of soldiers left, the lady and her kids behind, lots of other soldiers with all their gear and whatever. And it was early in the morning by the time we got there, and they took us through a screening mechanism of some sort or other. And then they kept us until two in the morning because there were protests outside of this facility, wherever this facility was the first time I ever knew face to face that this was going on. They said it was not safe for us to leave. We had civilian clothes. And so they told us wear our civilian clothes not to identify ourselves as military. And then they kind of by dark of night, took us out for me because I was only traveling from San Francisco, Rosales, 50 miles, whatever. I went to the bus station and I had to sit in the bus station all night long, whatever. Then I called my aunt who, you know, I was going to my aunt's house and told her I was back, whatever. I remember crying on the phone, choking up on the phone, hearing the voice of this after I didn't get along with school, but just the the other I was really home, you know, really had gotten back to the United States all in one piece, whatever. And so I took the bus from San Francisco. I didn't want to come and get me. So I took the bus from San Francisco to San Jose, and they picked me up and I went to their house. And it was so overwhelming. Cultural shock just. Unbelievable. You know, almost to the point, I just felt like, yeah, I was chatting with them and whatever, you know, and they're telling me about the relatives and whatever it was like, this is not my world either, you know? It was so disorienting. And then to have a bad, you know, like we had a double bed and I like to go in a double bed or whatever and to have a refrigerator and, you know, just the function of what we call routine American living was so unbelievable to me. You know, riding in a car or going to a store, things had changed. One thing I noticed, plastic bags had come into use and I had never seen plastic grocery bags or, you know, McDonald's. You know, I was not familiar with that. There was a McDonald's or whatever, you know, fast food. And just so different from what I recall, you know, for fear of having been gone just that relatively short period of time. 

SPRAGUE: This would have been May 66th or would have been. 

LANCASTER: When. 

SPRAGUE: You came back here. Now, roughly. 

LANCASTER: Listen to that. Yeah, it would have been And you know they may have 66. Yeah, something like that. Sure. 

SPRAGUE: Any experiences in terms of first of all, how when you realized when they said to you, take off your uniform, get into your civvies, how did that affect you? 

LANCASTER: Okay. I thought, well, you know, first of all, was, you know, certainly a slap in the face and not really knowing that this was going on, this whole movement was going on, not having an understanding. I'd never seen any television coverage. You know, there was no TV. And in Vietnam, there was no newsreels. There were no nothing of that sort. I may have seen a Time magazine or two, you know, somewhere along the line, but I don't recall reading about that at all. Nobody I knew ever discussed it at all. You know, they had not heard it from their families or anything. But, you know, the message was that this, you know, just keep it to yourself, you know. And I found two in my family, like my uncle had been in the Army. And he asked a couple of questions, but they really glad to hear about it at all. Yeah. And then, of course, the war was being fought on TV. But, you know, you could see it every night at 6 p.m. You could see what was going on in the war. And over time, of course, the worse and worse coverage of it, whatever I learned from the documentary, that they did not restrict the press like they did in World War Two and Korea. They could shoot whatever they wanted to a video and they could report whatever they wanted to, which was changed everything, you know, of course, from that time period. 

SPRAGUE: Can you speak to the a little bit more to you had mis mentioned the disorientation, right? 

LANCASTER: Yeah. It just. It was like, first of all, from us, just even the physicality of the comfort level, you know, what comfort level you are, what you're eating, where you were sleeping, the heat, you know, whatever. Then to, you know, so-called modern us, you know. Much faster pace. Of course, even though I was on leave at that time, but very I met with various relatives and they took me there. You know, I went various places and, you know, kind of went to the movies. I went to the beach and, you know, did various things and whatever. And just getting into that routine that you have to having choices, that was something, you know, having a choice in what you were doing or could do was something that was a little bit confusing as well. I didn't I don't know if I really had any I don't think I had the orders to know what I was going to do next. Yeah. So I don't think I did know what I was going to do next. 

SPRAGUE: Mm hmm. 

LANCASTER: And so eventually, I was told to report to Camp Pendleton again. So I went back to Camp Pendleton there and went to another aid station on the. That's a huge base. But I was on an aid station there. Again, kind of routine care. And I was, you know, going traveling to see relatives and things on the weekends, whatever. It was a pretty routine kind of living. One event that happened there that was really unusual was they they brought in an officer who had hung himself. And so they brought this dead guy into this aid station. I was there by myself. Well, I had to stay with the body for like till they came and got it, which was a lot of different hours. And that was the first time I had experience that in Vietnam I'd never been with a dead body before. And the guy had, of course, the rope burns on his neck and all this that was really grisly and whatever, but that was of all the odd things that happened. That was the only thing I remember from that time I was at that base. But ever. The then I eventually got I had requested to go to Moffett Naval Air Station, which is located near San Jose. 

SPRAGUE: Back up north. 

LANCASTER: Back up north in California, because I had planned to I was going to get out soon, forced to get out in February 21st of 1966, I was supposed to get out. And so. I. Just a few months left, supposedly. All right. So I did get assigned to Moffitt Naval Air Station. I went there. I live with my aunt and uncle, commuted to the air station again. It was a clinic. Nothing. Nothing too great. Whatever. Nothing too involved. I had to stay there on some weekends, but it was a more like like a regular kind of a job. And it was a short period of time. I went I reported I was told to report like in February as I was supposed to get out the day before my 21st birthday. And so, like the week before, I went to the office, whatever. And they told me I was being involuntarily extended for four months. I think I might have written longer my first note, four months. The reason for that was they were short of hospital corpsman because the war was increase. The increase increasing. I don't know how they decided for months where that came from, whatever any of that. I was. Of course, another once again, very resentful, very resentful about that because I was ready to be out of there. And so I did that time and eventually was discharged on June 21st, 1966. I had to report to the Reserves. I had the year wrong until January 29th, 1969. I reported to a station once a month, one Saturday a month. For many a number of years. We sat around and did nothing all day long, so I resented that. So by this time what had been. A source of pride, you know, thinking about going back, going to Luke through boot camp and the hospital. Of course, I was. I was really in good shape all the way through all of that. I was really in an accepting of the situation in Vietnam that this was just the way it was. And with help from my friends and whatever, we got through it, whatever. I knew it was at least a limited period of time. But then these experiences at the end, the extension, voluntary extension, the getting more and more word that the war was unpopular, that we were losing, becoming more politically aware as I am exposed to more information having to do the reserve training, I was just totally fed up with the whole thing. I was not real happy with what I had done, proud of it. I never discussed it with anyone. At that time or later never discussed it with anyone. Nobody wanted to hear about it. I went to college on the GI Bill. That's when I had joined the service for and the GI Bill was a savior. I went to college. I went to a junior college, first in Los Altos Hills, California, and then I went to San Jose State University for five years. I got my teaching certificate along the line. First couple of years, I had to take biology classes and math, and I was I could not keep up with that. I think a couple of factors. I was not good at it, chemistry, that kind of stuff. But some of it was my background when I was a child. Move Moving around a lot had this disconnected education, but I think those three years I lost, you know, I had no exposure to any of that kind of skill. And so I realized that I was going to, if I wanted to go to medical school or something, I was going to have a very tough time, you know? Yeah, I did all right. I got like a B, okay. You know, by going extra and whatever, I got a B, But I knew I wasn't going to be very proficient in that area. And math was completely difficult for me, whatever. And so I became very discouraged that I could not be a doctor or be too long of a hall. I felt I really did feel I kind of had wasted three years of my life at that point because I was older than most than the other college students, you know. So there was a little bit of a gap there. But I had experienced, you know, they were more like high school kids to me. What I had experienced was so different. This negativism toward the military and toward the war was very prominent in the Bay Area, very prominent. Berkeley was where a lot of the demonstrations began, very San Jose State, huge demonstrations all the time, protests, whatever were going on. I kept to myself. I just kept my mouth shut. And I didn't volunteer that I was in the service or anything to anybody. You know, I grew my hair out and whatever and fit in with the look of that, that time period. I never went to the point of joining any war group or anything of that sort. I just kind of my, my, I just got on with my life. I eventually decided I was going to go into education. It was a very long process because you had to do student teaching and all this stuff. I worked all the time that I went to school, and so I got a job because of my surgical training. I got a job at a local hospital as a surgical technician. And so I worked at least three nights a week, went to school. I worked all summer, went to school all summer. I was very busy, very overextended a lot of the time and just got on with my life as best I could. It was very interesting that I worked the evening shift at the hospital because once the day surgeries were done, you only had to deal with the emergency. So I had time to study at that at. This place. And there were two other guys, both of whom were veterans. They had served stateside, so they didn't have any Vietnam experience. And so they were doing the same thing. So we had this kind of community, again, another little community of people who were in the same on the same track. One of them was said he wanted to be an airline pilot and one of them wanted to be a social worker. Airline pilot didn't work out for him either, because was a similar situation that I. I ran that, too. Interesting that on that evening shift, I met my wife, Carol. We met in the operating room. She had grown up in Wisconsin, had moved to California, but the dream of moving to California, we lived the same hospital. We worked at, the same hospital, worked at shift and whatever. And eventually, after three years, we got married. I still had one year of college left to do. And so with her help and my help, we pool our resources. And I, I got through college. I enjoyed the experience a great deal as far as the classes. I liked all that part of it. But the community I commuted all the time. I didn't really have what you call a typical college experience. You know, I didn't join frats or I didn't go to football games. I didn't do any of that kind of stuff. You know, it was, you know, huge school, huge population of students. There were no veterans organizations. There was no outreach. Nobody ever contacted me. Did anything, anything, any. 

SPRAGUE: Need to or any interest in being involved in those. 

LANCASTER: Veterans? No, never. So I always say the Vietnam vets are not joiners. I think some of it is kind of an anti-authoritarian point of view. Some of it is the prior to the 60s that even though we conformed by going in the military, whatever. I think we still have that kind of anti authority. We were tricked. We were betrayed in various ways. And so you watch out for the man. You don't hear Careful. You're cautious about anybody in a in positions of authority telling you what to do. Know, the veterans groups, they always appealed to me, always wanting me to join. Let me let me finish my slog here a little bit. Okay. Eventually, I get graduated from high college with a degree. I did very well in college. I graduated with honors, whatever. Despite all the things that I had to do to get there. And fortunately, I managed to stay in the Bay Area, were very well established with friends there, etc.. And there were no teaching jobs. Absolutely not. Part of it was affirmative action. It come into play. So unless you were Latino or black, you wouldn't get an even an interview. And so, you know, I hear of hear the story and I don't think it destroyed my life in any way. But I just wanted to mention that, you know, you hear about black servicemen coming back from World War Two, coming back from Vietnam and not being appreciated, not having opportunities for them, for advancement, you know, to improve their lives that, you know, even though they had served, they didn't get a lot of the benefits from doing that service. There were others that had problems as well. And so that was a reflection of it. That was just the way the world was at that at that time. And San Jose State had a big Chicano studies at that time, what we call Latin, what, you know, whatever, you know, big movement toward people of Mexican-American heritage, whatever, getting their rights and whatever. So that really impacted what was going on in that area. So after looking for a job for a couple of years and continue to work at the hospital during that time, we had our first child, a son, David, in 1972. And so things were kind of at a dead end. I was sick of working at the hospital and she was ready for a change. So and I had really little family connection. She had a family in Wisconsin where we decided to move to Wisconsin. And so her family was stationed in Watertown. And we went there. I sent resumes to the larger dots on the map in southern Wisconsin. At that time, they had a teacher placement office in Madison, and the woman who worked there really took a shine to me from my experiences in whatever. And so she set me up with an interview in Monroe, Wisconsin. I was hired during this summer visit. And we went to California, packed up and moved back out here. Eventually, I spent 30 years teaching at Monroe High School. High School social studies. I taught us government of all things, the US government. I taught history both American and world history, psychology courses in international relations, 20th century history. So I was able to learn what I didn't know. When I was in Vietnam, I learned about the background as to why we were there, what we did, what we didn't do, what went right, what went wrong. And so I taught that too. By the time I finished two generations of students, I had over 10,000 students in 30 years. And so I think I have an influence that my experience was relayed not in a bitter way, but in a matter of fact, way to two students. I was always one thing that caught my attention. The recruiters were always around, you know, always around trying to get kids to sign up and whatever. And, you know, I had was related, you know, close enough to some students that they would ask me, Do you think I should join? Should I not join or whatever? And I said, Well, I can do a great deal for you. You can allow you to grow up to create. You know, what you did for me? I grew up I built my own life about my own confidence in being able to run my own lot. But they own, you know what? You're in the military. You sign that contract. You are, as they used to say in the old days, government property, and they can do with you what they please. If they and they don't believe their promises, you're not necessarily going to get, you know, whatever school that they tell you you're going to get and whatever. And I it was funny because I, I do the recruiters, I do them by name and whatever. They'd always kind of butter us up, you know, and give us book covers and stuff and whatever. And I always joked with them, I look what happened to me when I signed on the dotted line. So it was a friendly kind of interchange with them as well. I retired in 2003. We eventually moved to Madison after my wife retired from her job nursing job, and we've been here ever since. We've been here about six years in Madison. I have my oldest son, unfortunately passed away from a sudden heart attack at age 46. My youngest son lives in Ireland. We have two grandchildren, Henry, who's eight, and Gracie, who is five. So I was over 70 before I had grandchildren. I was in my 25 when I got married, which is a little old for my generation. My son was 40 when he got married, and so I pushed the years back. But we are we are involved with our a little bitty family. We don't have many people and we have a pretty good life. I have health issues of different sorts. In fact, eventually Vietnam, I have losing a lot of my mobility and I am starting to investigate whether I was exposed to Agent Orange. I recently have not been happy with the services I've received through local hospitals and clinics involved with the VA, so I end up with them and in the process of getting accepted for treatment and review and whatever within that facility and they so far they've been very helpful. So I'm hoping I find some answers as to why I am. I, I've got some degenerative spine disease, but I'm also have kind of nervous disorders that I have. No, nobody has an explanation for it. So I'm looking into that and seeing if they can at least provide me with some answers. I wanted to say that I now I'm back, back track, back into being very proud of what I did and the role I played and the experiences that I had and. I have a great deal of patriotism for our country. I'm very sympathetic toward veterans, and those who came out are not as fortunate. This idea is that with physical illnesses or psychological problems or whatever, I always comment to people when they think about Vietnam vets and their ideas that that they're all druggies and alcoholics and whatever. One thing that was interesting is a lot of those people, they were that when they came into the service, because there was a policy we found among especially among black soldiers, you go to jail or you go in the army, you don't go to jail or join the service. And so a lot of them people brought very bad habits with them into the service, into Vietnam. And when they arrived in Vietnam with the drugs that things were readily available. They were in heaven on earth. They were more than happy to be there. I never was involved in the drug culture at all. Was that something I was interested in? But there were people who were very much involved, a lot of alcoholism, a lot of people drinking way too much all the time. And people I saw in the service. 

SPRAGUE: Would talk during the pre-interview a little bit about hate the war, not the war. Right. Can you expand on that? 

LANCASTER: Yeah. I really learned a lot in my classes. I showed a film that was about the the background to the Vietnam Wall, Vietnam Memorial, and I showed that for decades as I was teaching. And it was a chance for me to. That was when I would intersperse my experiences, whatever. I didn't dwell tremendously by I did mention that. But in that film, they that was one of the messages of that film, was that. The country had to go through this transition, you know, where Vietnam vets were, the baby killers. You know, that was the idea of what we were baby killers and burning down the villages and napalm and people and, you know, all this horrible cruelty all the time, whatever. And to try to make people understand that we were just doing what we tolerate or we're doing what we were told to do, what we were expected to do, what the country wanted us to do at that time. Unfortunately, without being able to question what it what it was, we didn't know enough. There were so many secrets kept, so many lies that were told about the Vietnam War that we were winning all the time and whatever. Whatever. Absolutely. The. Misconceptions that were presented to the American public and to the world about what our role was there, what we were doing and what we were accomplishing and not accomplishing, and our treatment of the Vietnamese people. We certainly suffered all those names on that Vietnam Wall. Nothing compared to what the Vietnamese people went through and there was the country devastated, etc.. So I have anyway, that film kind of taught me that line. And I think you hear it enough in the public now, you know, with 4th of July coming up and Memorial Day having been passed, I think the society has evolved of that. Now, we had the Gulf War veterans and Afghanistan veterans and whatever. I mean, they were in the same kind of situation that they were doing what they thought was for the best for our country and protecting it, and that we have to be able to separate the politics from the individuals who have to carry out these various missions. I wish our country learn more the lessons of the past. As a history teacher, I wish we could learn the lessons of the past. I'm very upset with the state of our country at this point, with the political divisions and deception and the horribly horrible kind of quality of our politicians and our leadership in this country. I wanted to tell one one kind of last story that we were going to go on a pleasure trip. In fact, it was the last trip I starting to lose my mobility. So the last place we had traveled a great deal once I retired. So I went to go back to Italy. And so we happened to live in Madison. And so through their call to travel, they were arranging a group that was just Madison people going on this trip to Italy. And we had just moved to Madison and thought, well, maybe this is a chance to get to know some people, you know, local, local people, because we left our our long term friends behind in in Monroe. And so we went on this trip. Very lovely. The trip itself was beautiful. Whatever. Well, we were in one. Restaurant. And too much wine. Too much wine was flowing and whatever. And these people, all of whom were about my age, you know, in 70s or whatever. So talking about the Vietnam War, well, all of them had been UW students during the war. Many of them were protesters, whatever. And they were talking about the old days. You know, for them, that's their glory days. You know, when they were because Wisconsin was such a leader in those those protests, that, in fact, it in those protests and whatever they talked about, the bombing that took place and all that kind of stuff in kind of positive terms, whatever. And they said, you know, and some of these people know each other, you know. So, you know, and I we were, of course, the strangers. And so what were you doing? And I said, well, I was in Vietnam. And then they look at me and too much again. They had too much wine. And I said, why were you there? And I said, Well, you drafted. And I said, No, I joined. Well, they immediately got all over me, you know, All over me. How could you do that? Whatever. Whatever. Didn't give me a moment to explain my circumstances or not. Yeah. They probably didn't want to hear it anyway. But that war lives on. It lives on in that generation. You know, the just as my parents who are coming full circle, my parents, you know, World War Two was the highlight of their lives. You know, I think everything else was framed around that. You know, those were kind of the glory years for them. Those who worked with the war effort, who survived the war, who beat out the evil enemy and all that kind of stuff, I think, you know, that greatest generation, they look back upon that with tremendous pride. And what they led the country out of the country evolved after that. Well, these people are still stuck in that mentality, too. Living in Madison is that, you know, it's still an us and them. It's such a strong was such a strong moment in their lives and their emotional development, their their life that what they look upon as their achievement. You know, I could say I have the achievement of being a Vietnam vet and whatever, and they can say their achievement is protesting in a UW marathon. So it's still going on and there's still that kind of mentality. And it was a very unfortunate situation that colored that whole trip. I never made friends with any of those people, never wanted to see any of them again. And what really got me is that there was no interest in what I had to say. Still, there was no interest in what I had to say about the whole situation. You know, they had their mind made up about the way things were and and that was that. So it was unusual circumstance that went on. Mm hmm. 

SPRAGUE: What do you think your life would have been like if you hadn't joined the military? 

LANCASTER: Oh, for me. I think it would have been very difficult for me to have gone to college. But I was one of the few people who graduate, even graduate from high school, from my family. Most people, you know, still were getting married right out of high school. I think maybe that might have been where I would have gone. My family, they they had connections within Lockheed aircraft. Maybe I would have gotten a job there. Other people in my family did. I was not really attuned to the kind of work that they would do, which would be factory type work. I was more always kind of more scholarly, you know, in some ways. I don't know what. If I would have gotten so dissatisfied that I would because I was always dissatisfied throughout my life with what my circumstances were. So I think I would have found something different. But I have no way of saying what it was. Unfortunately for me, I was thinking back, I don't know exactly what the different circumstances were in the 1960s, but I wonder if there would have been Social Security or some kind of assistance for me as an orphan because I was basically an orphan by that time. But there would have been some kind of assistance where I could have gone to college. I don't know. And nobody ever pursued it for me. Nobody. Now, though. Or anybody ever. My family certainly didn't. I don't know if I could have found a way on my own to to do it, but I'd like to think that I would have of found a lifestyle that I would have been happy with. 

SPRAGUE: Mm hmm. 

LANCASTER: Now what? But the GI Bill certainly opened the doors for my future. 

SPRAGUE: Mm hmm. What motivated you to do this interview? 

LANCASTER: I. I thought. I thought these stories need to be told. You know, I, as a historian myself, I. I love hearing other people's history, whatever it might be. I'm in the process of. I've done a little genealogy type stuff. I've. I always have been interested in. Historic sites, people's experiences. My wife's family has been with many generations back in Wisconsin, and they had people who fought in the Civil War and whatever. And we inherited all their stuff, all their the family pictures and all that kind of stuff. Let me talk about that a little bit after this. But. Just kind of get into that kind of thing. And I really feel I know about like the Holocaust survivors doing the interviews. I know about how, you know, the World War two vets faded away and time on their flights. I went to one of their events up on the lists for the honor flight. I've been to all those sites before, but I on the list case, when it's ten years wait or something like that. Well, we'll see whether I make it long enough to be able to go. But you. No, I'm just really interested. I been to the veterans visit a number of times. I want to come again. I want to take my grandson there and my son and I you know, we've been to Washington so many times and whatever. I just. Feel that we still have lessons we can learn if we're willing to listen. And I think life is changing so fast, you know, so rapidly that each generation is. Being forgotten. Maybe, you know, the generations are being forgotten because the future is everything is forward. What's next? What's tomorrow? It's more the mentality. And I've always tried I always put things in a historical concept, what was and what wasn't. Even with my grandchildren. I know they get tired, they're young, but they get tired of Grandpa's stories. Everything's got a story connected to it, you know? So I show them something and say, This is what this is. This is what it was for. This is what took place when I was a kid story, you know? And you know, they'll listen politely for a second and then they move. Yeah, it's that really hopefully more will be sticking with them. Then I tend to think, well. 

SPRAGUE: Did we miss anything you'd like to cover? 

LANCASTER: I don't think. Let me just a second I to review if I came up with some words of wisdom here, but I've gone through this. I think I was prepared well enough. 

SPRAGUE: You are? Oh. 

LANCASTER: I think I think it's pretty much what I want to say. I. I just hope that. Every generation doesn't have to have its own war. And that I'm very concerned about the people in Ukraine. What's going on there. Very sympathetic. Have donated money. Very much concerned about what they're going through. I had my war. They're having their war. The people, anybody in this country could not support them. And what they're trying to do, it's impossible for me to recognize, frustrating for me to recognize when people, you know, politically use that to say that we should not be involved, that Ukraine's not the 51st state. We shouldn't care about what they're doing and we should be supporting Russia. I cannot imagine that it's very destructive and disappointing that that kind of attitude exists in this country at this time. I think we really have lost our way as to what our values are and what's worth fighting for. 

SPRAGUE: Okay. And that's going to conclude the interview. 

LANCASTER: Right. Thank you for a wonderful experience. 

SPRAGUE: Likewise. 

[Interview Ends]