A Floyd Family Soldier's Story
As told to Bianca P. Floyd, interviewer
Originally published online in December 2006
A nineteen-year
old Thomas Floyd entered into the military service in October 1965. Two
years later, in October 1967, he left for a year's tour of duty in Viet
Nam. Like most young men of that generation, he didn't want to go, but
he also recognized the reality of the draft and the escalation American
involvement in a war both undeclared, and left unfinished by the French.
Tommy left his home in Brooklyn, New York to go to Fort Bragg, N.C., the military base where he joined the company he would travel with to the "Nam." He left with a feeling of mixed emotions.
On the one hand, it was exciting because he had never been abroad before, he said, but his other thought was simply coming back home - alive. "It was scary," he said, "because you didn't know what you were going in to.
His company traveled from Fort Bragg to Oakland, California. From there, it took the soldiers a 28-day trip by sea to arrive in Cam Rahn Bay, Viet Nam.
From there, his outfit traveled to a base at Plaku, settling in at a compound called Artillery Hill. "A compound - is fenced in like a base in the United States. It is heavily guarded," said Tommy. On free time, soldiers could go town, but had to come back before night.
"Viet Nam
reminds me of a tropical jungle. Certain parts of the day it just rains,
all the time. It rains hard. Sometimes you go out and that is all it does,"'
he said.
"When I got there, we stayed at Plaku a couple of months. We were assigned to protect a strategic area. We had a range of nine miles that we had to cover," said Tommy. This included providing firepower for the protection of other troops.
"The people were very nice. and they enjoyed Americans because it was a good economic thing for them," said Tommy. "Most of the time we spent out in the fields. We stayed out in the field for months at a time. We would get packages from home and listen to the newest stuff on the radio. Tell stories. Alcohol was cheap so we drank a lot."
Then, he says, the outfit was moved again. Security became tighter because there was always a chance of being over-run. "You had to sleep with your gun with you. You had to wear everything. There were times when we had to go out and do perimeter." Tommy says his outfit was lucky. They didn't have to do hand-to-hand combat.
He did, however, spend much of his time on "perimeter," which he described as like having a fence around your yard and putting people around it to protect your area. "You had people sitting on guard duty with machine guns," he said.
Guard duty would change after so many hours, said Tommy. "That is constantly. This is every night. Twenty-four hours a day. When you're in the hot zone you did your guard duty.
Like so many soldiers that served, the harsh reality of war existed all around him. "Some people liked the action. And for some soldiers, including him, after a certain time he says, you don't care what situation you find yourself in, your body and your mind can adjust.
"One night, we were on duty and it was raining and we were digging fox holes. I didn't ever think I could ever sleep in mud, but I did. You can adjust," he said.
Tommy recorded his experiences on film and photographs. "I took a lot of pictures there," he said. He still has that collection at home and some day, he says he'll gather it all together so other family members can view it.
"Most of my battalion didn't come back. I left before they were run over. A lot of the guys I knew got killed at the end," he said. "At the time that I left, it was getting really bad. My wife's nephew was there while I was there and he had it worse than I had it. It started really getting tight after that. You might hear stuff going on. You might hear bombs. You might see shooting flares. When you were on guard duty you were on pins and needles because you're scared, but after a while you adjust."
"I was in two units when I went to Fort Bragg. My first unit went over to Viet Nam. Most of them got killed because they got overrun, but the unit I went over with - I came back."
What bothers Tommy most is that while men and women were fighting in the Vietnam War, back home students were protesting against it.
Much of the public hostility was directed towards the veterans that served. Unlike previous wars, these soldiers didn't get a Hero's welcome. Instead, they came home to domestic turmoil. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the riots, and campus protests all across the nation.
For Black men, the hostile reception from the public was particularly painful. "People had a bad concept of the reality black men faced at the time of the war, says Tommy. "The reality is that we, as black men that got drafted, could either take one of two stands. Black men could either become a "conscientious objector" as Muhammad All did, and refuse to go, or they simply could go to Viet Nam and serve - which most did. And although a lot of people didn't like Muhammad All, he stood up for what he believed in," said Tommy, "and he was willing to suffer the consequences."
"One of the hardest things that hurts me is that a lot of kid's fathers [mostly white young men] that had money, they went to Canada and they stayed until the war was over. They came back and they were pardoned,"' said Tommy "And they can still do the same things that the guys that had to go. That was tough."
Most brothers, said Tommy, didn't have a choice. They had to go, he said, and people, (primarily those who protested and ridiculed the men that served), shouldn't have gotten upset with the soldiers. These men suffered enough, noted Tommy. "The dangers that you had to look for everyday, and you don't know what you're walking into every day, a lot of men couldn't deal with it," he said. "How can you look at a man that you see everyday, and the next thing he gets blown up? People don't realize how hard that is. You don't get any training period for that. You have to go into it. The military trains soldiers to be soldiers, but there was no training that prepared the Viet Nam war soldiers for the things they saw and experienced," said Tommy. "In Viet Nam, you didn't have any boundaries. Jungle war fare is tough."
Coming home, Tommy's unit took a military flight from Cam Rahn Bay to Fort Lewis in Washington State. They stayed there for two days for debriefing, traveled to San Francisco,, and returned to their home towns from there.
Finally arriving at home in Flushing, New York, Tommy was glad to be there. He had left a girlfriend, parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and other relatives. "I think everyone was happy," he said. "You're glad to be home. When you leave Viet Nam everyone tells you to think about them. You think about the guys you left behind.
Since that time, he's heard from other people, who told him about the guys that came back, about what happened to them, but there are many more that he still doesn't know if they made it back home. "I wish I could find a phone number of all the guys that served together with me," he said.
As many times as Thomas Larry Floyd has visited his family in Washington, D.C., he has never made "the visit" to the Viet Nam veteran's Memorial on the mall.
"When you knew a lot of guys, you don't want to know who got killed. Eventually, I will probably go just to see. You don't want to look up on the Wall and see names of those guys that got killed, especially the ones you didn't know about," he said.
When he finally makes the visit, Tommy says he wants to go with the brothers who have been there. "It was one of the worst life experiences that a human being could have. You can't really understand what happened and then you have to keep going on every day and doing your everyday chores. You sit back and think about all the guys that got killed the day before they got ready to come home."
Author's Note: To my Uncle Tommy - "I'm glad you made it back home. - Your niece - Bianca P. Floyd