KURTZ: My name is Jim Kurtz and I'm interviewing Roger Boeker. Is that the right pronunciation?

BOEKER: Baker. Yeah.

KURTZ: On October 4th, 2005, at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. Roger, Where and when were you born? [XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]. And where did you grow up?

BOEKER: West Washington Avenue. The 500 block during World War Two. That part of World War Two that I was alive and the 400 block 430 was Washington until I finished high school and went to college.

KURTZ: And did you go to Central, Madison Central or?

BOEKER: I went to Washington, which is now the Board of Education and then to Madison Central for… Well, I always say high school was the best six years of my life. But it's central at a junior high as well.

KURTZ: And so what year did you graduate?

BOEKER: 1960.

KURTZ: Okay. And in 1960, what did you do after you graduated from high school?

BOEKER: Well, oddly that summer I was a counselor at a YMCA camp in Phantom Lake, Wisconsin. And then I entered the university.

KURTZ: Okay. And university here in Madison? Yes. Okay. And did you… did you graduate from the University of Wisconsin?

BOEKER: I did. Five years later.

KURTZ: Okay. So that would have. And you graduate in 65, then?

BOEKER: Yes, June of 65.

KURTZ: And what what was your major?

BOEKER: Political science was the degree. The emphasis or stream or would have been Soviet government.

KURTZ: And were you in ROTC when you were in University of Wisconsin of Madison?

BOEKER: For three years.

KURTZ: Okay. So, you didn't complete it?

BOEKER: I did not complete ROTC.

KURTZ: Is there any particular reason why you didn't?

BOEKER: I broke a broken leg at summer camp, and they said I had to come back a year later, and I was already done with school.

KURTZ: Okay.

BOEKER: And so I said, I've got to get this done with. I can't get a job. And the tenor of the times was you could not get a job without having completed your military obligation. So I went down, enlisted in the Marine Corps.

KURTZ: Okay. So is there any particular reason why you enlisted in the Marine Corps?

BOEKER: Because they wouldn't let me fly. And they were going to take 4 or 5 years either way.

KURTZ: So, okay, so in other words, basically you couldn't fly. You knew that you had to go into military service and you chose to go in the Marine Corps. And that's unusual that they would take a two year enlistment, too, isn't it?

BOEKER: I met one other man, and all the time I was a Marine Corps that was in for two years, actually enlistments. The rules of enlistment, at least at that time, were standard throughout the services. And the Marine Corps just never accepted the two year people unless they got desperate. 6 or 8 months after I joined, I think they drafted for about six months. It was a terrible, terrible experiment. And I don't think they drafted for more than half or two thirds of a year. But that was a pig in the python as far as being bad people to be Marines. You want volunteers. You just don't want people off the street that have no interest in being a Marine. They were they were bad, the units. They were they were hard to manage. The one thing the Marine Corps could always say, you asked for us, we didn't ask for you. There's a lot of hardship. Institutional hardship. Traditional hardship that is justified by the fact that you wanted to wear the uniform. You're going to pay the price. And I guess, you know, people who didn't want to wear that uniform should not have to pay that price.

KURTZ: Yeah. What they did, because I've interviewed several people that have been drafted into the Marine Corps, they counted off.

BOEKER: You know, One, two, three, four years in the Marine Corps.

KURTZ: Yeah. Every third person or, you know, depending on how many and whatever they needed. Being a political science graduate, did you have any views about Vietnam before you went into the military?

BOEKER: Well, yeah, I had kind of a world view. I did believe in the domino theory. I did believe in the communist threat from two sources. Lots of things I didn't know or that I suspected. But as I as I went through the Marine Corps, my views changed a little bit. Mostly it was that our government was trying to run the war on the cheap. The principal offender was a fellow named Robert McNamara who took the hook eyes off Marine boots. They were different than Army boots, for instance, and Air Force Boots. And the hook eyes were there because if you make an amphibious landing, you step in a hole with 75 to 100 pounds on your back, you're going to go down. Well, we have quick release carrying gear. It's called 782 gear, but there's only one snap. Your pack's gone. You untie your boots and your boots fall off. These are critical. But McNamara decided to save money and standardize the equipment issue without understanding the needs of the service. I understand he also tried to put a hook on an A7 and or one of the fighter planes and make it an all service fighter plane. And of course, it did not work very well for the Navy trying to land it on carriers. So I felt that, you know, America was probably going to be in a lot of trouble if they refused to commit, and they never did commit to that war. At the same time, my education said this is not the war we want to fight. We don't want to fight the Communist's proxies forever. However, it was my view that we were proving our willingness to oppose communism, that if we didn't oppose it there, we'd be opposing it in the Fulda Gap in Germany. If we didn't oppose it there, we could be opposing it on Taiwan and perhaps even Iwakuni in Japan and again in Korea. So this was a test of our metal. It was a test of our belief in our own systems, and yet we tried to do it on the cheap. In fact, we tried to buy off the attention of the American public with social programs. So we had Johnson on the other side running The Guns and Butter Administration. As a political scientist in uniform, that's kind of the way I felt.

KURTZ: Where did you go to boot camp?

BOEKER: San Diego.

KURTZ: And what… Were there many college graduates in your boot camp?

BOEKER: There was one in my platoon, but he was smart enough not to put, uh, list his level of education. Actually, at a master's degree from USC in communication. He was an employee of Southern California Bell, and a six-month reserve. [Michael Coin??] was his name. There were probably… I met four enlisted college graduates in the third Marine Division in Vietnam. One fellow had a degree from Hamlin and a degree from the University of Minnesota. Both.

KURTZ: Did… Did they respect college grad–? College degree in the Marine Corps?

BOEKER: Confused people. You know, they didn't know what to do with you. When I got to Vietnam, they noticed my education level and they said, what the hell do we do with you? What are you? Well, I wasn't anything. I had just graduated from college and held the professional job. I said, I guess I'm a teacher. They said, okay, run education for the third Marine Division. We don't have any officers to spare for that.

KURTZ: Okay, so there's anything that stands out in your boot camp training?

BOEKER: Ah, the fact that my junior drill instructor became a movie star.

KURTZ: Who would that be?

BOEKER: Lee Ermey.

KURTZ: Okay. The man from Mail Call.

BOEKER: The man from Mail Call, from Full Metal Jacket, and about 60 other movies and several TV shows.

KURTZ: Did you have any relationship with him?

BOEKER: Yeah, he slapped me around. I was the first recruit he ever met or touched, because I happened to be the platoon guide when he came to our platoon from drill school. He was interesting in as much as I knew something about teaching from various education courses, and we liked him best because he let us smoke more than the other drill instructors who hardly ever let us smoke. Ermey would take us out and go through a training session. Then he would stop, give us parade rest, light them up if you got them, and we'd smoke, and he'd go off and turn his back to us and pull out his notepad and check to see what he was supposed to do next because he was so new. Meanwhile, we're getting extra cigarettes so that we don't think it's okay for him to stand at ease and study his notes.

KURTZ: Have you had any contact with him subsequent to boot camp?

BOEKER: I met him a year and a half later in Okinawa. We were both coming back from the hospital, going back to Vietnam. I met him in an NCO club, and kind of surprised me, because, you know, Marine Corps was pretty big with 100,000 Marines in Vietnam. And because his tour should have been 2 or 3 years. He shouldn't have been in Okinawa. Well, they cut short that tour and sent him to Vietnam. I suspect that he didn't work out that well as a drill instructor because he did have a shortened tour and there were a huge ocean of troops coming through at that time. They needed drill instructors. I met him again 20 years after that, almost to the day on the grand opening of Full Metal Jacket. Stanley Kubrick's movie about the Marine Corps in Vietnam. I lived in Los Angeles for several years. I went to the opening of the show because I recognized his voice in the ads. I mean, he was not a star. He was just amongst the cast. But I knew his voice, and I could hear it on the radio. I called Warner Brothers, which produced that movie, and I said, I want the agent for the Army. They gave him to me. You know how to do these things if you live in L.A. because everybody has friends that are in the industry. Call the agent. I said, I'm going to write Ermey a letter and send it to you. Please forward it to him. He said, very good. We will. Why? I said I was his very first recruit. I am the authenticity which you tried to portray. So about three months later, he had been filming a movie in Spain, and he called me on a Sunday, and we talked for a couple of hours, and I had bought the beer on Okinawa. I don't know why, but he said, come on down to Beverly Hills tomorrow and we'll have lunch. Be at the Monte Carlo room at about 10:00 at the Beverly Hill. I came down there and this PR gal from Warner Brothers came up with an armful of press kits, gave me one, and she said, “Oh, you must be Mr. Boeker.” I went in the back of the room. Everything was going on up front. Had about a hundred people there. Dragged me right up to the front, introduced me to Lee Ermey, whom I hadn't seen since Okinawa, and shook hands, and I was introduced as his first recruit. So, then they went out with the … what was a press conference. Warner Brothers was campaigning him for an Oscar as best actor or best supporting actor or whatever it was. And this was the International Film Press that was gathering to talk to him. So, after they resumed the press conference, having introduced me, I'm sitting over there thinking, I'm going to have to sit here and look Marine-ish until they get done asking him questions. The first fellow was a [operation?] film reporter who said, “Monsieur Ermey, I thought the movie was fairly good in the second half,” which was after Ermey was dead, shot by a boot camp attendee, one of his platoon members. He said, “But the first half was over drawn; I felt.” And Ermey said, “Well, we tried to make it as authentic as we could.” And then the little French guy looks at me and he said, “Is that true, Mr. Boeker?” And I said, “Under drawn, if anything.” And from then on, America's culture be what it is. Every question they asked Ermey, they asked me to verify, which I don't think is the way Warner Brothers really wanted it. But then we went out and had a couple of adult beverages that retail in very Marine fashion, if you will. So that's the last time I saw him until… He has been the spokesman for the VFW Foundation known as Unmet Needs. So I've seen him at the national convention the last couple of years.

KURTZ: Okay. Well, that's a great story. Is there anything else about boot camp that we haven't covered?

BOEKER: I think the thing that amazed me, I met a cook or a dietician from boot camp who had supervised those missiles. They fed us something like 5700 calories a day. And I lost 47 pounds in boot camp eating 5000 calories. So, you know, when I think about being heavy, I think about, yeah, all it takes is a great deal of work to lose weight.

KURTZ: When you completed boot camp, what happened?

BOEKER: I got… They tried to get me to go to OCS. And…

KURTZ: And they wanted more time too, didn't they?

BOEKER: Yeah, well, of course they wanted four years. And finally, they just cut a set of orders for Quantico and I refused them, which I was not obligated to do. While I was out in that administrative hold, I was an assignment clerk. I shipped men to Vietnam. I filled two 707's a day. 175 seats. The government does not like to send empty seats from Los Angeles to Da Nang. So, it was my job to see that they were full. The administrative processing of recruits overseas had something like 30 pieces of documentation from a Geneva Convention card, to a shot card, to a dental record, to a health record, to a base record, to a personal history, to a servicemen's group life insurance, etc., You know, to an inventory of the equipment that he was to have on hand for an inspection before he went, etc.. So, I was preparing these people. Most unusual thing and I ran across in the course of that work was a serial number. Marines were serialized since sometime before World War One. I was Marine number 2,161,677. And I could tell pretty much that if a guy was a 2,200,000, he went in after me and it was a 2,010,000. He went in before me. I ran across a private, an E1 private, who had 1,300,000. That was 800,000 ahead of me. That was a World War two serial number. I said, there's got to be something wrong. Intuitively, I know that this man has a beard. In fact, he should be on a cane or in a wheelchair. So I grabbed his stuff up. Something was wrong. He was the wrong rank, or he was the wrong age, or something was really out of whack. I went over to the barracks; found the kid. He was 18 years old. He was from nowhere, Idaho. And the recruiter for that region had been issued a block of numbers in World War Two and had yet to use them up in 1965. So it was a legitimate number, but it just destroyed this seniority system of the Marine Corps. And the Marine Corps is very, very, very seniority conscious. You'll never see two Marines in uniform walking down the street out of step, and the senior one will be on the right and they will be in step. Somebody is in charge. And that's that's just something that you get in into your gut. And at the end of boot camp graduation, whatever they do after boot camp, we got a half a day off. Base celebrity meant that you couldn't leave what was a very small base. And we wound up on the opposite side of the grinder. The grinder was the drill field. It was one mile and one eighth, 1 in 5 eighths of a mile wide, one flat long piece of blacktop. Literally a hundred platoons could drill out there in comfort, and nobody was allowed on that grinder unless they were drilling. Nobody. So here we were with the choice. We've no choices except to having wandered off to the what's called the pogey bait shop, candy store, if you will, and this free liberty. We were at the middle of this grinder and our housing was straight across the grinder five eighth of a mile, which meant we would have to walk five eighth of a mile to one end, five eighth of a mile across and five eighth of a mile back to get to work. There were about six of us there. As the PFC, the senior man there, I formed them up and we marched across and saved ourselves a mile and eighth of extra walking. And we marched very smartly. So, I forgot what the question was.

KURTZ: Okay. Did you have advanced infantry training after boot camp then?

BOEKER: Yes.

KURTZ: And where was that?

BOEKER: It's called Infantry Training Regiment. It was at Camp Pendleton, in the mountains, up in the hills. A lot of physical conditioning, a lot of lectures on Vietnam, because just about 84 men in my boot camp platoon, 80 of us went to Vietnam.

KURTZ: Did you get trained in the M16 there?

BOEKER: No, we had M14s. M16s were just starting into distribution in 67 in the Marine Corps. The Air Force needed them much worse, I'm sure. Because they probably had [inaudible].

KURTZ: Yeah, I know. I know. And the M16 actually started out being an Air Force weapon. Yeah. And it's too bad they didn't keep them. That's another story.

BOEKER: But we had problems with them as well. We had test weapons and test squads, and we determined, my memory serves, that there was bad ammo. There was a bad chamber, and gosh, there was one other thing.

KURTZ: No cleaning equipment. It was.

BOEKER: Oh, Really.

KURTZ: Yeah. It's pretty important to clean those things.

BOEKER: You know, we had firing pits at the wire. If you were going on a sweep, an ambush, a roadblock, you would have to fire a whole clip into the pit without a jam, and then you could take it. If you couldn't, you turned it in, got another one, and you refired. Well, sometimes it took so long, people just take the rifles, break them over a sandbag and try and get an M14 to replace them. We were sold on the M14, which is nothing more than a 20-round M1, you know, with a flash suppressor. But it's a beautiful weapon. Heavy.

KURTZ: Yeah. Is there anything that stands out about your experience at Camp Pendleton?

BOEKER: Just the fact that one night, you know, I used to work 12-hour days, and as I said, I had total responsibility for shipping out 350 men a day to two 707 loads, plus about once every other week a ship load of 900 Marines. I guess there were two things that stood out. One was they came and got me at two in the morning. One morning. They had me turn out an extra plane load. And the only thing I could deduce was that we had fought a battle and lost a lot of people and had a lot of casualties. And as it turned out, 3 or 4 weeks later, that was the case. But the order also came down that there would be no more 17-year-olds going to Vietnam. Apparently, 3 or 4 of them were killed when being overrun. Now, if you can imagine 17-year-olds after going through three months of boot camp, a couple of months of ITR, that's five months. Those kids were coming in on their 17th birthday to get there, or they lied and came in at 16 and didn't get caught until they were dead. So, I had the problem of this huge pool of men, 350 today, in a month, I'm sending out 10,000 men. Half a division. Marine division. We have these oversized divisions, but we have this huge pool of men, and amongst them there are going to be 30 or 40 or 50, seventeen-year-olds. And so, I would take those 17-year-olds, and I put half of them on mess duty, and half of them on guard duty. And at the end of their… When they turned 18, the day they turned 18, actually ten days before, and I had to keep charts of it, I'd send them home on overseas leave. And they came back on their 18th birthday, I sent them to Vietnam. We were desperate for people. The T-O-N-E for Camp Pendleton, it was a division, and there were 3000 permanent personnel [inaudible]. Even though there were 40,000 people, bodies running around, only 3000 were assigned there. The rest were just training there. So that impressed me a lot.

KURTZ: Did you have any particular feeling sending people to Vietnam?

BOEKER: I felt bad about treating kids so bad, those 17-year-olds so badly, you know. Guard duty and mess duty or not very fun. And that's all they do. I sent them there, and they work their dogs and their tails off, and then send them on leave, and then send them to Vietnam. I thought happy damn birthday. What kind of guy was I?

KURTZ: What kind of supervision did you have doing this?

BOEKER: Not much. I mean, there were officers responsible. Nobody checked my work. I was presumed to be both competent and committed. And I was.

KURTZ: How long did you have that duty?

BOEKER: Until I declined my orders through Quantico. Either… until July. And I wrote my own orders to go to Vietnam. And consequently, I went on a Northwest Orient 707. I did not take a ship.

KURTZ: Well, that's very smart, from what I've understood. So, did you get to go on leave before you went to Vietnam?

BOEKER: I had ten days. It happened to be during an airline strike. And so, I spent four days getting home. That was an adventure in itself. On military hops, I went from coast to coast and finally wound up at Chanute Field, took a train to Chicago, and then to Madison.

KURTZ: How were you received when you came back to Madison knowing you were going to Vietnam?

BOEKER: Well, it was 66, and basically the city was… and the country and the culture, supported the president in 66.

KURTZ: Okay. So, there was… Did they have any specific reaction, I mean, or feel sorry for you, encourage you…?

BOEKER: Well, I remember in six. Well, six months prior. And to begin, you know, January of 66, I had a girlfriend going to the University of Minnesota, and I had to fly out of Minneapolis. So, I went out and saw her and I had broken my arm on a toboggan taking my brother on a Boy Scout camp out. So here I was, a Marine with no badges, and I had a cast on my arm. I couldn't get in my blouse. I didn't have any other clothes that fit. So, my blouse is pulled over the sling on my arm, and I looked like, you know, some war hero, and I'm just out of boot camp. And I was terribly embarrassed, but she takes me into a restaurant in Minneapolis and a piano player plays the Halls of Montezuma, and everybody buy me a drink. I don't think I spend a nickel in Minneapolis. So, there was support from the middle class. That is the class that was out eating and dining, and dining and drinking in the evening. There was positive recognition. In Madison, I spent all my time with my family, so I didn't know. And actually, when I was… When I was home, on the second or third day, I was home, one of the kids in my Boy Scout troop was a Marine, was killed at Con Thien and then was brought home and buried. So, the day before I left, I was at his funeral.

KURTZ: How did you…? I've got to turn the tape off… We were talking about attending the funeral of an acquaintance of yours before you went to Vietnam. Could you explain how you felt about that?

BOEKER: Well, first of all, he was a Marine, but he was three years younger than me. And he was a really nice kid from my Boy Scout troop. And I had been his squad leader at one time in the Boy Scout troop. And so I really felt bad because I knew him personally. I felt bad because he was a fellow Marine and it scared the living doodle out of me, because I didn't know that many people that had gone to Vietnam. So, uh?

KURTZ: So, so. Okay, so what…? How did you get to Vietnam? You said you went Northwest Airlines. What route did you take?

BOEKER: There used to be a Marine air base called El Toro at Santa Ana, 20 miles north of Camp Pendleton. And the commercial airliners would land there, pick up 175 Marines, and take off. We left there, went to Elmendorf, which I think is outside Anchorage or Fairbanks, and my uncle was air operations, no a radar station commander somewhere 100 miles out in the boonies. So, I got, I didn't know anything about Alaska first time and the only time I've ever been there. And so I asked the guy at the operations desk, an airman. I said, I want to call Major Slawson. Do you have him on your roster? Yeah, he's right here. It's one in the morning. I'm not calling any Major at one in the morning. I said, it's my uncle. He says, okay but you dial. So, I called him, and I said, “Hi, this is Roger. Your nephew, Roger. I'm on my way to Vietnam. I'm at Elmendorf.” To this day, he does not remember that call except that I mentioned it to him, you know, from time to time. We flew from there, headed for Okinawa. We landed because of radio problems in Tokyo. The only interesting thing about that was they kept us on the plane, had to repair the radio. It's July in Tokyo. Hot, humid and the engines are off. So, there's no air conditioning. And we're parked way the hell down on one end of a runway, so there's no auxiliary power unit, no APU. We're sitting there sweating pretty bad for five hours. It's probably 110. It was good acclimation for Vietnam, really. Finally, they pulled in another 707 upside us, figuring they couldn't fix the radio. They put up a canopy from that plane from the door down to the tarmac across the space between the planes and up to ours. And then we were ordered to run from one plane to the other. Double time, down, cross, and up into the other Northwest 707. Ran up the engines and off we went. As we were taxiing down to the end of the runway, the pilot explained his apologies for being late or for making us sit there. He said, “But if you'll notice, off to the right, you'll see an airplane that looks a little like…” [inaudible] There weren't anymore 747s… “A little like a 707. A big airplane. Said, “Look at the tail number.” It was. C. C. C. P. 1. British naff was speaking at the airport in Tokyo to every communist in Japan, and they didn't want 175 of our Marines wandering through the Tokyo airport. [Canada??] I guess. So, we understood why we had to stay in the plane. We took off; went to Okinawa.

KURTZ: And how long were you in Okinawa?

BOEKER: 60 hours.

KURTZ: What happened there? You get just…

BOEKER: We were supposed to be there two weeks for acclimation. Weather. climate. I had to get comfortable with the climate, and they needed Marines badly enough. We were there for 60 hours. Not much happened there. We just…

KURTZ: Okay. And what… Were you told what to expect in Vietnam?

BOEKER: Well, I thought they gave way too much emphasis to snakes. I never saw a snake in Vietnam. But maybe that's because we were in I Corps up in the north. I don't know.

KURTZ: We had a lot of snakes where I was.

BOEKER: Well, they should have given you some of our [lessons??].

KURTZ: I got none. So where did you land in Vietnam?

BOEKER: Da Nang

KURTZ: And what was your first impression of…

BOEKER: This place is really hot, really humid, and it stinks.

KURTZ: That's the same answer I get for almost everybody. So did you get assigned to a unit right away when you…?

BOEKER: I was sent to the third Marine Division headquarters and they were trying to figure out what to do with a PFC College graduate. And they put me in charge of the Education Department.

KURTZ: So what was the duties there?

BOEKER: There were none.

KURTZ: Okay.

BOEKER: Education is… The Education Department is responsible for monitoring, initiating, and facilitating service schools or correspondence, college education, doing any testing that may need to be done like G.E.D. testing and so forth. But when the Marine division is committed to combat that just kind of goes away. However, the IG never goes away. So some IG with some assistant comes through a unit, and he wants to know where the hell the Education Department is. Well, all I had to do was make monthly reports of not doing anything. And that is not exactly the way I was taught to, brought up, either in the Marine Corps, in my own home, or in the in the places that I was educated. And as a result, what I did was I made an office south of Da Nang, a little suburb called Dogpatch, near Hill 327, which the army, when they took over the name named Freedom Hill and put up a strip mall of soft ice cream, pizza, haircuts, and massage. It was unbelievable, you know, two target stores and the Sears. I mean, it was an open hill when I was there. We secured it. But the point… The point of that was that I had an office where anybody could come and take a G.E.D. test. Nobody was coming to take a G.E.D test. So I went to the field. I went to my colonel and I said, “Colonel, this is ridiculous. I have 25 tests. I have score sheets. I have an office in Madison, Wisconsin, where I can send these to be graded. These guys can be getting some stuff done. You want me here because you think I'm a teacher? Let me go do something.” So I just went out to units in the field. I go to the commanding officer, which took a little hutzpah from a PFC, but I go to the CEO and I say, “Sir, you're not on a sweep right now. You're not committed. Could I have the men that aren't real busy that aren't high school graduates, and we'll throw the G.E.D. at them and they'll have something to go home with from this place.” And almost all of them agreed they would give me the none high school graduates. Now understand, that the Marine Corps was less than half high school graduates at the enlisted ranks. So I knew that there was a need and I knew that I could fulfill it. And I had to sell my commanders or the commanders of these other units on having them do it. I did get [turnover??]. Actually, I used to barter with other services like the Air Force on airstrips near our Marine bases. I used their mess halls because they had nice mess halls and we, you know, [inaudible] on the trolley. I do his people if he let me use his facility to do Marines, and that worked pretty good. Seabees were good. Air Force people were good about that. And we got a lot of people tested. I guess there's a couple of things. So I traveled a lot. I was on planes, and you know, I didn't have any security clearance, and I didn't know where the units were. And I had no reason to know. Military reason to know. So it was always a constant struggle to find out where people were and what they were doing. And the best thing I could do was go down to the Red Cross in Da Nang, which was kind of a crossroads, a transition point. And I'd meet up with Marines and I'd say, “Hi, I'm Boeker. Where are you from? What outfit are you with? Where are they located?” And, you know, gathering intelligence wasn't that hard. One of the things that I did was make up one of these bright green overlays. I knew what constituted the third Marine Division in units. And so I made this overlay with grease pencil and I put their location, their strength, and I had this all in my office. And my colonel walked in one day and went ash white from a very dark brown tan. And he said, “Jesus Christ, we got we got women around here, Vietnamese women that are cleaning and stuff. And here's the intelligence for the whole [division??].” And he said, “Where did you get that?” And I said, “I listen.” He said, “Get that out of here!” Well, I took all the centerfolds from my Playboys and pinned them over the information, and those girls wouldn't go near those centerfolds. Number ten. Number ten. They couldn't even look at them. So that was one of the things. The other thing was my enlisted superiors, my staff and CEOs really hated me, because I really kind of had open orders like, go and go. Go and come as I like, which is not a very Marine thing. And they couldn't assign me to mess duty and guard duty. So what they did was they grabbed me, and they put me on propaganda leaflet distribution, which meant flying in a little Cessna 172 up over North Vietnam, finding where we suspected a unit was, and throwing paper out the window. Or actually there was a [funnel??] that went out the side of the plane.

KURTZ: How come could they assigned you to that duty? I mean, those other duties weren't very good. I understand that. But how could they assign to do this duty?

BOEKER: Because they, you know, they liked rosters and schedules, and this was on the schedules. Hey, there's nobody here to go run the propaganda plane. So it was…

KURTZ: So how many missions did you fly doing that?

BOEKER: Oh, just a few. Two or three or five or something. It was exciting.

KURTZ: Anybody ever shoot at you when you were doing it?

BOEKER: I never knew that anybody shoot, I almost shot at the pilot because he did a couple of stupid things, but or at least I threatened him. He was an Air Force pilot. He was not a sober guy. He wanted to fly jets, and he winds up in this little dinky plane. He used to let me fly it so he could snooze. Straight and level a mile out over the ocean going north. I can handle that. Anybody can keep the wings level and heading. But we did find a hole in the plane one time after we got down. I didn't hear it or see it or anything, but, you know, if they fired at us in North Vietnam, they proved that our intelligence was correct, and they were very well-disciplined soldiers. And fire discipline was one of the things you had to admire about those people.

KURTZ: Uh, did…? Did you have any other duties other than these educational duties when you were in Vietnam?

BOEKER: Not regular duties.

KURTZ: Okay. Are there any areas that made any particular impressions on you in I Corps?

BOEKER: Dong Ha.

KURTZ: What struck you there?

BOEKER: Well, the Vietnamese army could hit us from the other side of the DMZ with the 122 rocket, and did regularly. You know, they could. They can shoot with impunity and we could not. So that impressed me. What also impressed me was we had some ARVN troops on the mesa that we occupied, which had like five fingers sticking out, and the ARVN troops would be between Marine units, never left them on a flank, and then we'd have a blocking force behind them. So at least if they had to go, we knew they were gone. One night we were watching a movie. I think it was a three-year-old or a four-year-old Dodger game and run by a generator. We're sitting there watching this really dull movie, or sports event, and all of a sudden grazing fire came across our camp. We're all scrambling. Cut the generator. This, that and the other. We all hit the line out to the bunkers. And here the ARVN firing at a wild chicken on the side of our our finger of land sticking out there. And they're not very good shots. And so they're firing through us, you know. And it occurred to me that these are not real sophisticated people. They don't even know the bullets go farther than what you aim at. You know, there's basic ballistics, intuitive ballistics, that they didn't understand or they didn't care. We were very angry with them. We were not happy that people would fire through our camp when they were nominally on our side. Now, we can attribute that to a lack of training, a lack of sophistication. These are medieval people with 20th century weapons. That's pretty scary.

KURTZ: Do you have any other views about them, about what kind of fighters they were or anything?

BOEKER: Well, that was the close up experience. The Koreans were just [coffered nails??]. We had a battalion of Koreans that made a lot of kimchi, as far as I could tell, because they had the… you know. They were upwind of us. We were down wind of them. We could smell the kimchi. I don't even like sauerkraut, and I'm a German. So fermented sauerkraut is not my favorite thing. But these guys were committed, extremely well-trained, extremely disciplined. They were also less, in my opinion, more vicious than we were. And by that, I mean, they were much more willing to ignore civil rights, I guess.

KURTZ: Uh, did you have any views about the Vietnamese civilians?

BOEKER: I had a couple of them work for me. I would say, you know, we had a… We had a Vietnamese that repaired our radios. The ones that were commercial, the ones that came from commercial services were not government issued. They were commercial. Well, there's no parts, so the parts have to be manufactured. And we get a lot of these. And let him fix them. You know, bullet holes he could he could handle, or he could cannibalize and make something work again. He had a little shop in Hue. And because we sent so much stuff to him, he tried to be grateful and he invited us over for dinner. And I said, “Well, you must be Chinese,” because he was bright, accomplished a lot, you know, used a lot of positive values, and I assumed that he couldn't be Vietnamese, which told me, and he was Vietnamese. It told me that I had a great deal of prejudice, probably from a lack of experience with an interface with the people, and we were largely segregated from the indigenous population. So, you know, exposing my own prejudice to me is what that little event did. And I think the funny thing was they had something like a… I was the senior Marine in that group by then. I was, of course, you know. There were three of us, I guess that went to dinner. And it was something, you know. The first course, it was like a cup of French onion soup, a whole duckling in it. You know. It had been cracked out of the egg and nobody ate anything. And I'm sipping out of on the side. I don't want to eat the [inaudible] duck. And finally, the host said, “It is our honor if you would eat your duck first.” And I said, “I can't, I'm Lutheran.” And he said, “Okay, I'm sorry. We didn't mean to offend.” And so being Lutheran is served me well. More than once.

KURTZ: Yes. That's good. Is there any other experiences that we haven't discussed that stand out from your Vietnam tour?

BOEKER: Going to Hawaii on R&R. My uncle was an aviation officer in the Marine Corps on Kaneohe, and he picked me up at Fort DeRoussy in the middle of the night. We watched the sun come up on the top of [Napali??] and then went to, uh, staff NCO housing. He had just been promoted from staff NCO but refused to leave staff NCO housing, because it was much better than junior officers housing. And we pulled up to the house, and I walked up to the door, and my aunt came out. She said, “Stand right there and take off all your clothes.” And she went away and got me some of Arden's clothes and made me take off this freshly pressed uniform. And how, I mean, despite all the plane ride and everything, it was the cleanest clothes I'd had on in six months. And she took them all and washed them. I never quite understood that. When I went back eight days later to Vietnam and smelled the smell, I realized that it was the monsoons. It was January. I'm up in Phu Bai somewhere, and the washer people came on to our camp and did our laundry and, you know, stuff around these little soft bags, tents. And here it is, raining 24 hours a day and it's about 50 degrees. They can't dry the clothes after they wash them. Well, they wash them to start with in what amounts to rendered fish scales. And then they drive them in a tent and they build a wood fire. So you smell like a smoked fish. And that's what my aunt could smell, I think, from [Napali??] to Kaneohe. And I couldn't. I didn't smell it because when I got there, I was acclimated. By the time I left, there was acclimated to Hawaii. I went back and I could smell that smoked fish smell. And I was really embarrassed, even though I was several thousand miles from my aunt. When I…. Toward the end of our tour in Vietnam, we started hearing rumors about the fact that the Hells Angels were having to escort Marines home from their bases, that the population was that hostile. We started planning ways to smuggle guns home with us, because we couldn't imagine not being armed in a country so hostile as that. We were really, I think, afraid of going home for several reasons. One, we didn't think we… our country wanted us. Secondly, we didn't know if we could survive in that new world, you know, because it was… We were totally estranged from American society. American society had changed and we had changed. So there was a double change. We had become something else. Warriors, if you will. America had become something else. Resistors, if you will. And we were very, very unsure of how we could reintegrate to society. And I left Vietnam on a Monday, maybe, and I was home on a Thursday. That included stops in Okinawa and California in Santa Ana. And I went to work at Oscar Meyer the following Monday. And I was no more ready to deal with work or society or even my parents. And it took a long time.

KURTZ: How did you get the information in Vietnam about these changes? From new troops were coming in… or in newspapers or…

BOEKER: People would send me newspapers. One of the newspapers they sent me had Mrs. Boardman raises one million dollars was the headline. Madison, Wisconsin. Mrs. Boardman, you remember her?

KURTZ: Sure.

BOEKER: And shipped medical supplies to Haifa. I couldn't imagine going home to that.

KURTZ: How were you received? I mean, I want to pursue your feelings about that. But how were you received when you came home? I mean.

BOEKER: I didn't get spat on. Couple of sailors were on a bus with me going to L.A.X. Well, wait, no. Not sailors. Former sailors. World War two guys. And they both…both of them individually had families. And we were pretty drunk. I mean, we were seriously drunk and happy. We were not mean drunks. But we got on that bus from Santa Ana to L.A.X., and the people, as people are in our culture, evenly distributed across the bus. And being the most sober person there, I said to the man who had a family. I said, “You know, we just got out of the service and we're all drunk. We're not nice people, and you might be happier in the front of the bus.” He said, “I understand.” Took his family up front. We sat in the back. Drank some more. He came back and said, “I know. It's the best welcome of home.”

KURTZ: Yeah. Now, in Madison, how did they react to you?

BOEKER: Didn't interface in Madison.

KURTZ: So in other words, it's like nobody cared.

BOEKER: Everybody ignored it, including my family. I mean, I wasn't treated badly. I just wasn't treated.

KURTZ: Isn't that sometimes harder than being abused?

BOEKER: Yeah.

KURTZ: You said it took a long time to get over this feeling. What process did you use to do that, Roger?

BOEKER: I drank a lot.

KURTZ: Did you…?

BOEKER: I moved to Detroit. I mean, Oscar Meyer sent me there. And, within a couple three months. And I didn't know anybody there. And I was okay. And I wasn't very social. And I did drink. So, you know, at some point, you learn to [inaudible].

KURTZ: So when… Obviously you've become verbal and converse and talking about this now. What, what allowed you to be able to discuss these issues?

BOEKER: Well, finally getting involved in Veterans Affairs.

KURTZ: So you've been a member of veteran's organizations for how long?

BOEKER: 15 years.

KURTZ: 15 years? That's fairly typical for getting out. So you spent about 25 years not being in that organization.

BOEKER: Yeah. I never concealed the fact that I was in the military or in Vietnam. But it was a point of… It was more like… So what are you going to do about it? You know, it was a challenge rather than a revelation. And then I tended to group myself with other people who were not active in veteran's organizations but were veterans. You know, it's pretty much disdainful of people who weren't, or if not disdainful at least, I presume, no commonality.

KURTZ: Is that because the society you lived in was so uncaring? I mean [inaudible].

BOEKER: And Madison has this pride and perversion. Okay. And lots of people, lots of communities have something that it's a point of differentiation. That's Madison's point of differentiation. I don't have to agree with it. But, you know, ultimately it is my city, too, and nobody's going to take my franchise away. As a native. I gave it away once and now I'm home. I left for 30 years. Now I'm back. How do I feel about…? I think most of the people that are in the traditional left wing of Madison are pretty silly. And as much as that they don't understand, Madison is not reality and cannot be reality. It's not them that's causing the unreality. But this is a town that is totally artificial. It is government and it is education, which is a subset of government. And that it doesn't go through the economic rise and fall. It doesn't go through the boom and bust cycle that the rest of the world does. And there's these islands that don't. And you cannot make pronouncements about the real world from an unreal climate.

KURTZ: How do you feel that your Vietnam experience affected your life?

BOEKER: Well, it made me very goal oriented. It made me very focused. When I work, I want to work hard. You know, certainly I have every, every element of an A-type personality, and that was accelerated.

KURTZ: Do you feel the military accelerated your [inaudible].

BOEKER: Yeah.

KURTZ: Okay. Did you feel on a whole it was a plus or a minus?

BOEKER: Oh, absolutely a plus. Self [inaudible]. I can will myself to do a lot of things that I couldn't will myself do before. I think that it also gave me some basic understanding of people's motivations and responses. Some insights into what leadership is. Leadership without a legitimate authority, meaning authority granted by superiors. You know, it gave me the understanding, the military, of all places, gives you the understanding that authority is granted by the followers, not the leaders.

KURTZ: I want to ask you about that after the tape. It's nothing to do about Vietnam. Is there anything we haven't covered that we should have, Roger?

BOEKER: Not in regard to the military. I don't think. I mean, there's lots of little individual stories that don't have great meaning in the context of what people want to hear about Vietnam. I think. I think Vietnam was only tragic in that we didn't have our desired outcomes. You know, maybe we rode a bad horse. I have to think that there was some way we could have reached an accommodation with Ho Chi Minh, except that he was the ultimate player, political player. He was playing off China, Russia, and the US. The U.S. as an adversary and Russia and China as adversaries to each other. And, you know, if we aren't the kind of dealmakers that can say, hey, these guys can't give you half of what we give you, you know, we can make this good for all of us. And I think Vietnam had the essential resources in cultural terms and in resource terms, natural resource terms, to be an outstanding asset to itself and to us. Why would we make war on it? Why would we make business on it? That's my long view as a businessman. Short view is that we did not lose the war. I don't think anybody can ever convince me that we did. We did give up. And yes, I do hate Jane Fonda.

KURTZ: I have not talked too many people who like her in this.

BOEKER: Have you ever done Steve Petroski's interview, by chance?

KURTZ: No. This is the other side. One of my one of the people I really admire.

KURTZ: Steve has he's the guy that works for Senator Coleman.

BOEKER: Right?.

KURTZ: He's. He does. He does. He did a very long one. And I don't know whether he would regard my style as useful or not. You know, I just don't know. You know, I've talked to him about it and he said yeah he'd do it and maybe I ought to. I don't know.

BOEKER: Well, I'll tell you. Steve is a guy that he and I and Colonel Ridgely, Tom Ridgely, I think it is. He's the corrections guy from DOC, have done panels here at the V.A., and out at the university on our histories in Vietnam, because we did three different things at three different times, which gives the view. But we just randomly sat down the first time, and Tom was in the middle. I was on the right. Steve was on the left. From the second discussion forward through about five of them, Steve Petroski would always say we are not randomly seated. You will note that I am on the left arm, and Tom is in the middle, and Roger's on the right.

KURTZ: Okay. Who's this? Well, I'll ask you that again off line. Why do you think that the war is still so divisive with the American people, given, like the last election?

BOEKER: Are you talking about the Vietnam War?

KURTZ: Yes.

BOEKER: Well, what specific divide are you referring to? Kerry and his service?

KURTZ: Like Kerry and Bush. I mean, they kind of split out there. I mean, most of the people that don't like George Bush ran at war. You know, John Kerry is another phenomena. You know, for whatever reason. It seems to be the same divide that we had in the 60s.

BOEKER: Well. Well, I you know, I was going to give you a political opinion.

KURTZ: Okay. Give me that. Yeah. Your opinion.

BOEKER: That's not what you want.

KURTZ: Yes, it is.

BOEKER: Okay. Well, you know, the reason John Kerry offended veterans was… He's a weasel. I mean, he took an early out on questionable wounds. I've had… One of my best friends. My best friend, I'll call him that, ran a riverboat, and he just can't understand how anybody could have been hit three times. Especially when… Well, any new people in the Navy that that didn't like John Kerry. Why a guy who embraces the anti-war group would then brag about his military record, I don't know; would advertise his military record. I mean this is not a man who's smart enough to be president for sure.

KURTZ: Well, let me ask you another political question, because I understand what you just said there. Why would a Vietnam veteran value a guy who arguably didn't fulfill his political, I mean, his military obligation? I mean, we spent $1 million training him to a fly an airplane and he quit. I mean that's the… Kerry was there. The other guy wasn't, but yet, do you think the feeling of…

BOEKER: So was Al Gore.

KURTZ: Yeah.

BOEKER: He was a chaplain's assistant, an E-4, who signed up to go to seminary.

KURTZ: Yeah.

BOEKER: And went for four months after he got an early out. Same [inaudible]. We're going to [target??] people who take and early out.

KURTZ: Okay.

BOEKER: You know early hours are much worse than never having been assigned.

KURTZ: Okay. That's important to understand.

BOEKER: You know, the American Legion is one of those groups that say you didn't get a choice about whether or not you went to war. You know, you look at the leadership characteristics of Gore and Kerry, and, for that matter, John Kennedy. And these are not people, at least in their military careers, that demonstrated any kind of… any of the kind of leadership that that I would like to see in the White House.

KURTZ: Okay. Well, that's enough politics I think. Is there anything else you'd like to say before I turn the machine off?

BOEKER: You know only that I was really proud to have served in the Marine Corps. I was really pleased with what it did for me. And I can't imagine what I would be like had I been in the Army. I mean, as a person, how would I be different? The truth of the matter is, my great to the eighth and ninth grandfathers, served in the army in the revolution. And everybody in my family up to my generation was in the Army. And myself and two cousins both went in the Marine Corps. Now, I don't know why it was happenstance or ego or whatever it was. I just have no idea why that happened.

KURTZ: Yeah.

BOEKER: My dad was a soldier, and an honorable soldier, and had three Purple Hearts. I guess the most interesting thing was I broke my legs again in Vietnam and I called home from Clark Air Base where I was first medevac. And they said to my dad, I said, “Look, you're going to get a telegram in the morning. I don't want you to be scared.” I said, “I broke my legs. I broke, cracked one and crushed another.” And I said, “I have no pain. I'm out of Vietnam. I'm in [Hue??] and I'm just fine.” And my dad, a P.O.W., escapee in Germany, three Purple Hearts said, “Did you get your Purple Heart yet, son?” I said, “No, Dad. I don't take Purple Hearts for that kind of injury. Well, they know. So, you know, there is that tradition of service. And I think, you know, in a way, I was glad to be in the Marine Corps because if I didn't suffer in the war like my dad did, I sure as hell suffered in the peace in the military like my Dad didn't.

KURTZ: Yes. Yes.

BOEKER: It's not a comfortable place, but it's something you can be proud of. I once… The one thing I guess I'd say was we were in Dong ha in the middle of the monsoon. It's 55 degrees, 50 degrees. And you know the stuff that made you adapt to the heat?

KURTZ: Yeah.

BOEKER: Well, we were freezing.

KURTZ: Yes.

BOEKER:I mean, our hands were blue and wrinkled. The coldest I've ever been in my life was in Vietnam in the foothills. Well, anyway, I'm sitting in a bunker with about eight other guys during a shelling, and the thought occurred to me and I said, you know, I'm in the Marine Corps. Would I rather be in boot camp or here? I asked 8 guys 9 to nothing. I'd rather be in Vietnam, being shot at, not getting chow, cold, hungry, scared. Nothing as bad as boot camp. And you know, that kind of an experience. Survival school was pretty easy next to boot camp. So, you get kind of proud of that experience.

KURTZ: Well, I think that's a good note to leave off on there, Roger. Thank you very much.