Twenty Years a Soldier — the Veterans History Project interview
On June 27, 2006, Wendy Carmen Trott of the National Association of Native American Studies — an official partner of the Library of Congress Veterans History Project — sat down with Chief Hatcher in Conway and asked him about his twenty years in the Army. The museum has long quoted the memoir he typed for the same collection; this exhibit opens the interview itself, newly transcribed in full — 7,477 words of him talking. Everything below in quotation is his, verbatim as spoken, with elisions marked and the transcript’s occasional mishearing set right in [brackets]. The italics are the museum’s only additions.
“I went in the Army on February 5th, 1968 and got out on March 1st, 1988. So I served 20 years.”
Ninety dollars a month
He was a ninth-grade dropout working for wages that couldn’t feed him, living with his sister in Charlotte, with a brother already in Vietnam.
“I quit school with a ninth grade and worked at a place here called The Charcoal Plant. I earned $2.10 an hour I think it was. Went to live with my sister in Charlotte and was working at Lance Incorporated making $2.60 something cents an hour, didn’t figure I could live on that so I joined the Army to make $90 a month.”
“Well my brother was in Vietnam We were real close when we grew up. I just kind of wanted to do something for the country and see my brother, but at that time all you had to do was live and breathe And the Army would take you … back in those days it was just put a stamp on you and send you to Vietnam”
Asked why the Army and not some other branch:
“Yeah, I was driving by it and saw the sign outside the street and said, I think I’ll join the Army.”
Basic
“There’s something that kind of stuck in my mind was when we went into the basic training they cut everybody’s hair off And that’s the first time I’ve seen a grown man cry when they cut their hair off. It just really amazes me that people were that attached to their hair, but I just thought it was funny.”
“My drill sergeant was a fellow named Lucas. I don’t know his first name. He’s a little teeny man but he was an expert in hand-to-hand combat … He was pretty tough and I was happy to have him there because I knew we were going to Vietnam and I wanted to learn as best I could how to take care of myself So I’ll always remember [Drill] Sergeant Lucas.”
In country
He landed in a combat zone and waited days to be handed a rifle.
“I kind of thought it was really dumb because we were in a combat zone, and we got off the airplane. It was like two or three days before we got our weapon. And I thought that was kind of dumb.”
“At night when you’d be trying to sleep or something the mortars would start coming in … It scared the daylights out of me because you could hear mortars and that kind of stuff coming through the air. That sounded like whoo-whoo-whoo! And no matter where you are you think it’s coming at you”
“First time I believe I ever saw a dead body that was not in the casket was coming down the river, and that was scary too”
His permanent unit was cavalry reconnaissance of the 82nd Airborne — he rode an armored personnel carrier as an M60 machine gunner.
“We got into a lot more than that later on after I got to my permanent unit which was the 82nd Airborne Division even in Vietnam. The B Troop 1st [of the] 17th Cavalry 3rd Brigade of the 82d Airborne Division Some of the meanest people in the world I believe were hardcore people and I think thats probably made me as hard as I am today, which is not really all that good.”
“They beg They cry”
Content note: this section and the next carry the war whole — the dying, and the killing of two allied soldiers at a night checkpoint.
Asked whether his unit took many casualties, he refused the movie version:
“If they look at television and you see an individual get shot and he just falls over … That’s not real combat. Sylvester Stallone with his .45 caliber pistol could shoot a jet plane down and they couldn’t hit him with a mini gun In reality people get shot all around us And they don’t just die They beg They cry things that you never forget. These young men, I was 18 years old in combat and my kid turned 18 and I’d be afraid for him to drive a car half the time.”
“You never knew who your enemy was. In World War I and World War II, you had the lines of battle … In Vietnam that wasn’t the case. You could see a child walking up to you and he could be loaded with explosives”
One night at a defensive position near a crossroads, a Vietnamese truck came up loud and fast in the dark:
“The lieutenant trying to get things calmed down pulled out his .45 caliber pistol and shot it into the air. When he did people just opened up on the truck. They just tore these two men up but it was two South Vietnamese soldiers just trying to get through the check site.”
What he carried for protection was not a charm:
“I played gospel music on my guitar. Now, I’m not a Christian now but it gave me comfort to play gospel music back in those days”
The tunnel
The tribe knows the story from his memoir; here he told it out loud. Three-man teams, pistols and one flashlight, multiple levels down. The lead man was shot on the third level; the man behind him ran.
“I received a Bronze Star … for dragging him out of the tunnel. Of course he was dead when I got him out but I didn’t know that at the time we were in the tunnel … And the guy behind me who was the guy who had the light ran We got fired on over there He just took off and left me with the other guy … It wasn’t like I was trying to be a hero. It was like, I just thought that I wanted him with me. You know? I didn’t want him by myself or something. More for me than him. More selfish but they thought it was some act of [valor] and gave me a Bronze Star”
Eighteen years earlier, typing the same story for the same archive, he had insisted on the same point, in the same plain hand:
“It wasnt that I was trying to save his life, It wasn’t bravery. I don’t know what it was but they gave me a Bronze star for it.” — from his memoir, in his own hand, same collection
Three bullets
He was on night guard in an area designated safe, playing guitar and smoking. He pointed to the places as he talked — the arm, the side, the belly.
“No it was all in one incident I was playing guitar and smoking a cigarette at that time I smoked … And the rounds started coming in … And I started to jump and when I did, I got caught here in the arm. And once here in the side and then once right here just went on the ground.”
“I remember waking up on the helicopter being flown in and I thought that I was on the outside of the … chopper … I woke up with my head hanging like that and seeing trees way down below me and it scared me”
“I never saw anybody from my unit but I did wake up one morning had a lot of medals pinned to my pillow”
Scott Air Force Base
The flight home from Japan stopped in Illinois. He was carried off on a stretcher.
“I remember being unloaded on a stretcher and people standing outside the fence calling us baby killers and stuff like that trying to spit at us. And they … promised us a free steak and a free phone call home. And I had tubes and all that in there couldn’t eat steaks”
“I called my mother and told her that I was supposed to be landing in Fort Gordon Hospital … when I got there she was there.”
“If you’re not white you’re not right”
Content note: the next passage quotes, in his own dismissive retelling, the anti-Indian slur soldiers hung on him.
Asked whether he was ever treated differently for his race, he said the Army was the fairest place he’d been — and then told the truth sideways:
“During the military people used to call me blanket ass because that was their pet term for an Indian but they didn’t despise Indians it was just a joke to them”
“Like the memorial in Washington D.C., about Vietnam Not The Black Wall but the other memorial where most people in Vietnam were people of color But if you go to … this memorial there’s only one person of color there and the rest of them are white. It seems like if you’re not white you’re not right and that’s the way it goes but I think that’s just an attitude … a general attitude in this country that way.”
And the Army’s censors gave him a question he never stopped asking. The one USO show he saw in Vietnam wasn’t allowed to be a striptease; the famous photograph of the burned girl ran with her wounds raw and her body blacked out.
“It was all censored. I just thought that was kind of strange that the Army was looking after our moral values and you wonder what really is immoral? Is it taking a man’s head off or watching a woman naked?”
“They didn’t blacken out the ugly horror of the war by showing the burns and all that. That was all raw. But they blackened out her breast and her genitalia. You wonder what our standards are really?”
“An educated dummy”
His wounds ended his infantry days; he retrained as a mechanic, rose from E-4 through the enlisted ranks, and won a direct appointment to warrant officer. Along the way he built a whole theory of rank, learned the hard way:
“I felt like a second lieutenant was dangerous … not because they’re stupid but because there would be a college kid one day and in charge of a platoon In combat, they are dangerous because they don’t know. They got seasoned E-7s and E-6s out there who’s been in combat before … And some of these guys don’t understand that experience is more important than education. See the Army has always thought that … education makes mark but education doesn’t make mark. You can educate a dummy and you’ve got an educated dummy But the Army never did figure that out, I don’t think.”
He had the proof on his own body:
“When I was shot for example, I couldn’t breathe … And I thought I was going to die from not being able to breathe. That lieutenant was standing there holding my shoulders. Why he was holding my shoulders? I don’t know. He was my platoon leader. And an E-4 came up and sat me up and started making me breathe … I never will forget that either … The guy that was in charge, that should have known what to do didn’t have any idea what to do.”
But the dummy line was never against learning — he was its best argument the other way:
“I went into the military with a ninth grade education but I got out with a degree and I put in a lot of effort after hours to make that happen. And I think that’s the key for folks nowadays is you’ve gotta have something to hang on the wall no matter how smart you are”
Eleven years at Bragg, twenty in all
“I spent 11 years with the 82nd at Fort Bragg but these guys are crazy! … you could go down to the supply room and they’d take a stapler … And they would staple your shirt to your chest. Stuff like that. You couldn’t turn your back on anybody. People were just crazy! I guess they had to be that way … because the 82nd Airborne Division is one of the most elite divisions in the Army … you can be in combat within like a week from being notified.”
There were two tours in Korea — one with air-defense artillery as a maintenance technician, one with the 501st Military Intelligence Group, where his youngest son was born — and a final posting to Aberdeen, Maryland, home of Army Ordnance. By then he had been a CW3 for eight years, in the days before there was anywhere higher to go but a dead man’s slot.
“I made W3 in 12 years and I stayed W3 all the way for eight more years … You had to wait for someone to die or retire or whatever … And so I just couldn’t get promoted and I just got tired of it told the boss I’m going to have to get out of it. Too much politics … You’ve got to hold your mouth just right and point your toes just right. Not the kind of way an 82nd Airborne Division soldier likes to be.”
He could have coasted — “ROAD,” the old Army joke, Retired On Active Duty — but coasting was not in him. He retired a Chief Warrant Officer, CW3, on March 1, 1988. And he left with one promise kept:
“I made a promise to myself though That I would never do anything that I’d regret later And although I saw a lot of people do things that I know they have to regret these days I never did that. I came back with a clear conscience and still to this day”
“I’ll never be right again”
Content note: he speaks here, without cover, about what the war left in him.
“I’ve been going through counseling ever since I came back from Vietnam And I’ve never had counseling really do me any good The only thing that really changes is we talk about 1968 till now … I’ll never be right again. Never, and neither will they.”
The “they” were the young soldiers in Iraq — the interview was recorded in 2006, and he watched the news the way only a combat veteran can:
“I don’t think that you can support a war and a soldier at the same time. If George Bush had to fight the damn war, there wouldn’t be a war.”
“If they ever made a law. A national law or an international law that the leaders of two countries go into war and be the first people to die in the war there’d never be another war”
Asked how the service shaped his life, he gave both edges of the blade:
“One thing if I make up my mind to do something, it’ll get done … That is something the Army’s instilled in me There’s hardly any way they’re going to stop me from doing something I want to do On the other side, I’m a hard individual”
The soldier becomes the chief
Retirement terrified him — half the pay, none of the bills cut — until Conway answered:
“I thought that I would go starve to death when I first retired because when you retire—I think retirement is like the third or fourth most traumatic thing you can do in your life—my military pay would have been cut in half but my bills wouldn’t be cut in half. … I came down here to Conway applied for every job in the paper that I thought I could do. And by the end of the first week, I had so many jobs I couldn’t even take them all.”
And then came the moment the whole tribe descends from. He bought a company and went to register it as minority-owned:
“When I went to register, they told me that I’d have to be a Lumbee from North Carolina because there were no Indians in South Carolina. And I was born and raised in South Carolina … It didn’t make sense for me to become a Lumbee So I sued the state and did paperwork myself Actually, what I did was I filed an old lawsuit. And I copied everything and just changed it to [s]ay what I wanted to say. And I filed it. And the judge signed the thing and made the state recognize my company as a minority-owned company. And that’s one of the reasons that I tried to organize the Waccamaw Indians because I didn’t think every Indian in the state ought to have to fight that battle independently.”
That battle is its own exhibit → The Long Fight.
The veterans’ feather
Asked for the one thought he wanted future generations to carry, he answered as a chief:
“Whenever we do a powwow, we always give out what we call veterans’ feathers because we honor the veteran and they can use this veterans feather as a free pass to every powwow we do and We realize and we know that freedom doesn’t come free. Somebody has to defend it”
“We should always make sure that war is the last resort, not the intermediate resort as it was in this case.”