so i always wanted to go into the army i would have preferred after high school in june of sixty seven to go into the military my parents were somewhat dead set against it they enrolled me in bentley i actually never took a i never fill out the application the bentley i never took an interview my parents basically said you're going there and i showed them why i dropped out and went home one day and told them on a list of in the army and i actually didn't drop out of school until i made sure that the army would take me thinking that i might not be suitable physically i was commission does an officer of spent my entire military services an officer going from second lieutenant to bri about will make a man out of you and everything and i kept that in on it but it worked it worked it kind of got me away from mom and dad and motherhood apple pie and you're close to a little life and realize that you have to start to be an adult and grow up and be on your own and be able to function as an individual so that's how we ended up in the service and so after the vietnam war many of the mainline denominations like lutherans and methodists and presbyterians they stopped providing chaplains for the military because they didn't like the military and so several decades of that meant that there was just a shortage and the goal is to have a diverse chaplaincy to provide for the religious needs of soldiers so the church was looking for people that were young i was and took my basic training down in miami beach this was during a korean war in one nine hundred fifty one to fifty five i was in the service in the air force i enlisted in the navy and when i went into boot camp they told me i was chosen to go into the c b division of the united states navy i was with the united states air force should teach you care command i was in the navy and because i had been injured hand in the meantime i searched around to join so i joined the force i have been involved in both operation iraqi freedom in operation enduring freedom during the global war on terrorism as well as operation noble eagle it was an office is basic training course at fort sill oklahoma i was trained in guarded missiles and  graduating from the class of sixty seven we were right in the in the height of the vietnam war and i think most of us realized that eventually we were going to have to fill our military so well i worked for a year and then my dad had been world war two in the navy and i decided i would kind of follow in his footsteps and decided to join the navy in one thousand sixty eight well i surf a twenty year so i served all over and coral snakes and i served in the army the branch army and within the army i was two things i was an air defense officer so shoot down planes and shoot down missiles missile defense airplane defen i was also what they call a foreign area officer or a specialist in the region of the world in my region was the soviet union warsaw pact countries which are now russia and eastern europe if you're going to go soundly you want to be with the best one of the reasons i'm still here all lawyer bog so i volunteered for the navy and they always said you always have a clean bed and good food and that's true the marine corps made me they were a little tough you know but maybe it wasn't a bad deal to go in the navy i volunteer d however i went to and during a period of time in one nine hundred sixty six when conscription the draft was a reality for young men of my age and  university and i wanted to try and become more independent not rely on my family quite so much to pay my way so i thought the army would be a good stepping stone so i decided to enlist and i wanted to try to become an officer and use that to pay for college but then once i graduated basic training and by my job training and i got out i thought maybe college isn't for me so i just withdrew and i just decided to focus more on the just being a soldier rather than you know being an officer or anything it was a day of chaos personally because nobody knew what was going on and they pretty much had you in the dock and i think as i just kept you so busy that you finally were just so fatigued when you finally get to where you were going which was four decks for me that's right good basic training and by the time you got the air in you got yeah fatigue and whatever else it was probably four o'clock in the morning and they let you go to bed and then pretty much got you up at eight o'clock the next morning round two and then you still had no idea what's going on so that was like a day and i can remember turning in all of all my belongings and you know of course the back happens next i guess i just remember it's like wow this is going to be a long day and it was a long day and when i was a little boy in the sandbox with one toy because it was a depression back then and i wish i was that guy flying that plane boy he's like he is very lucky and i stay with that dream i never told him because i thought that laugh at me here i am in a sandbox and i want to fly a plane so but i kept at that dream my first day when you go to paris island it is an island with a long causeway and they bring you in there at two o'clock to three o'clock in the morning and we've flown to buf it and then we get on the school bus and we drive up to the main gate and as we're going through the main gate the bus driver says you'll be sorry and then the next words out of his mouth was when we pull up in front of receiving barracks make sure you get off the spots quickly and as we pull up in front of receiving barracks the bus stops and this huge black drill instructor who filled the front of the bus said welcome to paris silane get off the sp and he used some colorful language so i opened the window hopped out the window because he was drawing people off out the front door the funny story though with my father really was very traditional five sons two daughters he thought it was great the boys wanted to go to west point he had served in the army himself but he wasn't so keen on his daughter going in he really wanted me to pursue fashion merchandising or something and  just kind of defied the odds and said to my father i want to do this and once i got through it and kept getting promoted and doing while he was very supportive but being a traditional father he really he felt it was a woman's role to be at home and not be in the service so when we went into north carolina i'd been born raised in belmont i've never really been out of belmont the go to the cape or to somewhere in new england and we got into north america welcome you to fayetteville north carolina and that you know really hit home that this isn't something you just see on t v it's it's real and that was sort of scary you know i  felt for a lot of african american guys that were with me even though i hardly knew them you know i felt for them you could see it was it was this is of the bothering them and me too you realize that they were acting  their best interest to the process and most services to marines in the army specifically as they break it down they basically break you down you go into conformity you basically you know there was no no room for independent thought somebody said to do something what have you what it taught me is how to get up in the morning and be there on time every place i go that will stay with me until i die that i and i think it's important understand what they do at officer candidate school or boot camp is was a five mile track and two and a half miles you'd be doing ten miles you know five miles of the morning five miles in the afternoon then you did and you had to run everywhere so there we get year in you know when you're thrown in with thirty people you don't know from around the country all with different backgrounds there were a handful of women predominantly men you and you really get to know each other  and you're you know you're doing your physical fitness and you're running in your you have a need to push up thing you're going to do all this stuff and they're testing you physically mentally and emotionally in basic training i remember when the bus pulled in that took the train from boston to trenton and then we went from trenton to fort dix and to scare you in shape you up when the bus pulled in the fort dix there were the army sergeants and they literally to scare you to get you in that they literally t you off the bus you were getting off the buses i remember and i had my stuff with me and i grabbed the stuff and mike out of my hand through the stuff way he grabbed me and pushed me late they gave everybody thought of manhandle to try to scare you and soften you up you know as far as for discipline i asked them when we were going to get our parachute training and they said well we don't give parachute training to our flight students anymore and they said well gee that means the first time i'm  going to be in a pair of shoes if somebody shoots me down or my plane flames out and they said it was a gun the sergeant a marine gunnery sergeant was in charge of our p t and he said yes sir mr williams and so i said well i'm not going to do this  because they can't make you fly and so i dropped on request and they reviewed my commission and they said if you quit doing this you'll quit everything that you ever tried to do and i said well you won't give the training and they said what makes you think you're worthy of being unable officer and i said i am unable officer i was commissioned by the president six months ago when i graduated so then they said well what do you want to do and i said like to be on a destroyer and because when you're in rajiv they teach you how to navigate and ships operate so i went on a destroyer for a year and a half it was deployed in the western pacific and  then i volunteered to go to be because the captain had been a political warfare officer in vietnam and i thought i was a history graduate of political science and i thought that would be a good a good thing for me to do so i volunteered to go and i went as a political warfare advisor i served in southern california and seattle in houston in hawaii in rhode island in d c north carolina up here in boston was here for nine eleven in boston that was a big event in our career and then i was down in my last assignment with as commander of the coast guard district so i was responsible for a twenty six state region there that included the mississippi the missouri the ohio and the tennessee reverse the river system and then i had the panhandle of florida over to the texas mexico border and all of the activities in the offshore oil and gas industry so i was the district commander during the  doing here i should be all my mothers just the world leaders of the civil fishes for christmas eve but anyway we get to camp good in georgia four o'clock in the morning in the middle of a ra to believe that it only rained down south all the time so we walked a mile to the barracks syria and we passed out there walk us up for christmas dinner and some of them were too tired to even go to dinner exhausted from all the traveling but anyway we started the next day we started vance them from tree training you know and i noticed that i was a little bit older than some of the guys that were in so many guys coming in and were all eighteen years old or something i was twenty twenty one and i not as old you know at the time but i notice that they were just somewhat really apprehensive you know kind of scared what was going on probably my most significant interaction with that is doing death notifications and so when a soldier dies for whatever reason around two thousand seventy thousand eighty thousand nine lot of it was war but it also could be suicide or accidental deaths but a lot of war death notification so you find the person sometimes they get help with the police and the police in that town to locate a person maybe that dress wasn't good or they're not home maybe the town somebody in the town knows where they might be and so i would knock on the door there's a chaplain and there's a notifier who says the words and there's this person that you've never met before you don't know and you're bringing them the worst news that anybody could receive and that had been in the back of their mind as a worry to begin with because their loved one was going off to war so the toughest part of the job i had was number one to i had to go a couple times and tell a parent and a spouse that their son or husband had died in vietnam i only had to do that twice thank god it was a terrible terrible experience but i did play in a lot of military funerals because once they were told of the casualty then you had to go in and plan and arrange for the body to come in and everything else of this this was the toughest part of what i did when i was stationed there so i was in a tank maintenance are fit and we had to go back to the beach and pick up these monstrous metal things that they had there attached to the tank show you act like a plow and plow through they were fairly good but not really great and of course when we did the german planes the spy planes would be seen the torch on so we hear a plane and we shut the torch off sometimes a plane coming over and we twelve on twelve off one day off in between and it was just it was amazing the ordinance that was loaded on a daily basis to see those b fifty two is take off and they sorties and then come back empty and then just load them back up again little bit of b fifty two a b fifty two carries one hundred twenty eight five hundred pound bombs and ninety six seven hundred fifty pound bombs and then they have rocket pods on them and was just day in day out i mean i just couldn't figure out when they the lighting of the skies it's amazing to me we had a field exercise and we had him for teens then and we're on the exercise members us yes we're still being yelled at by various folks automatic weapon and at one point the extractor in the bolt had jammed and it wouldn't get to the right of the spent round casing and out of the out of the rifle back to the barracks rifle inspection in ten minutes and i had this bold the result part because the spring of gun somewhere out there clean the rifle real quick and there's the whole platoon there at attention and this side the staff where we encountered most of that stuff was we were responsible protecting diplomats so the few times that we got attacked we had a very distinct mission you went through all the motions and all the stuff and for the most part the medical i just got to sit there and wait for somebody to scream for help so that my first year in vietnam i was a helicopter pilot second year in vietnam i was a bird got a pilot or a small fixed wing aircraft reconnaissance and the first year was probably a little more interesting where's we did a lot of combat a sauce bringing troops and troops into landing zones and come back later and pick them up and i'm not sure what you want me to tell you it is a lot of shooting and you know there's seven my friends were were killed the city gave shot because they know that if they started shooting at us we would destroy the city like i don't know if you have a sub pictures of munich after the war it was in a building left standing i mean total destruction you keep him visualize this because you'd have to see to believe it but anyway we will a little town just east of as rock we were supposed to meet up with the russian army when the war when there was a little town called was and then she was we found prisoner of war camp that the germans will use and there was stocked with all russian people who are working in the shop that was built inside of a mountain so it was just unbelievable this was a big if you will there and that was one they took they took a picture of me in a measure smith to sixty two first jet plane stockade you smile right up and i was up in the d m z which is the line of demarcation between north and south korea i was on the western side of career in  what was called a grenade screen and we had what are called navy periscopes but they were see solitary riders on horseback going across the horizon from one point to another depending upon the time of the year wintertime  it averaged twenty below so i've been out in forty below i've never been so cold i haven't recovered since primary mission was a military working dogs so we were sponsible for keeping them healthy and our secondary mission was to run regular vet clinics on bases where you know people who live there that were service members could bring their pets for vaccinations  and checks and that kind of stuff draw instructor who was giving out the assignments you know he was just passing amano didn't know what it was and turned out i was assigned to the second marine division in camp lejeune north carolina in a turned out they made me an accountant i was curious so i just want to the first sergeant one day and i said i want to add here i want to go to vietnam well within seventy two hours i was out in north carolina heading out pendleton for some more advanced training and going on over there you know but when i got over there i said all this is going to be an easy gig well when i got over okinawa  don't need any accountants over here a full cold miserable ready to go to hell it was wicked i mean it was muck all over  you know always know where you read either the germans tried very hard but one thing that was against the weather was bad so the planes couldn't come over and help us then finally the weather did clear up then planes came over and they helped us a lot were able knock a lot of the german tanks out but they couldn't go on and we didn't have gasoline and they couldn't get it they had no way of getting supplies of gasoline to their tanks so they had to s speak so we were lucky in that respect i've you know the only time i've seen casualties i have as is as during the vietnam war i would i would be on aircraft that were taking bodies from vietnam to well robbing the united states and taking them on the united states was kind of is a sobering experience to be sitting there on a plane is the whole plane was full of caskets so it was difficult when i came home my parents had had a big party and everything for me but i i came in the house i've been out with my best friend by and some civilian clothes and i came in and my sister and my mother were in the living room and they were just sitting there  both were crying and i said what's the matter and they said it's you and i said me what did i do and they said you're not the same boy anymore you mean you don't like the piece nice to people you get in fights and i said that's not how we brought you up we didn't bring you up to be like and i said we have to remember mom i've only been home for like three days from a war i can't get used to the noise in the streets and will it's just you're you don't know if you're going to live beyond the next hour sometimes the next minute you know i didn't mind seeing billy's being killed but it really b me when i saw the american kids being killed after a while you get pretty well hardened to it you know it's not a you have to accept it or you go crazy  and you can't be worried about your safety if you're worried about you see if you can do you know you know i don't know what to tell you about war  absolute last last thing we should be get involved also risks of suicide boats either striking us or the carrier and that whole region there's a lot of under sky underwater mines that have been left over from the iran iraq conflict i was with the task force from massachusetts that went down after hurricane katrina in louisiana in two thousand and five and then two thousand and three two thousand and four i was part of a joint task force that task force and troops that were going into iraq or coming back from iraq so what i did for the first the first six years i was a seventy four delt reacting to industrial accidents chemical attacks back in the early ninety's i was just touching on it when saddam hussein was using nerve agent against you know the kurds that's when we really had a big focus on protecting our soldiers against chemical chemical agents i think similarly right now in syria chemical weapons are being used against the local population so we are function within the military is to protect our combat assets so they can go in and do their job without having to worry about you know chemical agents that sort of thing that's our primary duty that's what i did and now i recently changed jobs i'm an intelligence analyst now i was over there during a very explodes of time during the vietnam war called the tet offensive i just got over there the end of january which was the beginning of their new year the tenet year over there is their new year in vietnam and i was stationed out of denying that's the northern part of south vietnam which now it's all one one country but  i was sent over there like many other navy people and my particular group was called naval support activity so naval support activity is a group of  they were use in this this particular group for supporting the troops in the field and vietnam most of them gone through the tet offensive in one nine hundred sixty eight which is the equivalent of that would be a belmont policeman being in belmont center and all of a sudden there's an uprising the shooting i mean you greatly outgunned a lot of m p s were killed a lot of non m p s were killed but but i was an m p i was overseas i went up to the d m z twice the demilitarized zone which is very much in the news now and i was an m p i had control of the patrol area between outside of west of seoul east eventually and a little bit north of there and we had bars so i was my only combat i saw was nightly i would go into bars fifteen bars i would go in and i'd break up bar fights arrest people i fought but not on the front lines by fought i fought the war of sinchon village of like us just just becomes just a saying that people just make sense to feel good saying it's a feel good say i never asked for any applause and a pat on the back nothing but i just sensed that there was like but people just got to like not looking to figure out how to get back into the society in so people didn't get help and i'm not even sure that anybody knew what to do you know because if you take if you take a twenty three year old and you put them in a war zone in people are trying to kill them and then they're trying to kill other people which i meant i mentioned before that you know we i was angry with the vietnamese and yet their government was doing to them what our government was doing to us and in my view the governments failed and then they put their eighteen year olds gave each side a rifle and then you're supposed to shoot to shoot at each other so that's kind of the  irrationality of war once it gets there but it's hard to come down from that in the civil war what they did was they gave that turns farms and then people you know they farm for the rest of their career but in our case they they didn't do that to me it was a job it was just another drop that you did you know you did your three through four years and you know when i got out i got out and it was funny i  but it was because of the circumstances we were from total different walks of life just thrown together for a period of time that we became as close as brothers be yet we also know what that same time is that we were going to be breaking up and probably never going to see each other again i've made a lot of friends i'm still friends with a lot of the guys that worked for me or you know this i guess they they were pretty cool with that because they were still in touch so it's a great feeling when somebody reaches out to you you know now with social media and all that you know people can find it really easy so my military experience for me was was very important as i mentioned i learned as supplies and i learned a lot of negotiating skills you were responsible for all of the couldn't find a truck could find it by the way so we went down and we stole a truck from one of the other units we changed all the numbers on it we put it on our unit for the inspection and then you know they came in they stole it back i mean but it was it was like it was it was a lot of  excess of shortages so it was it was it was and you always had to be on your toes a lot of the do that was it was interesting it was fun i think of all of the men and women that are in the service today that i think we have to look at them in a different  light and to really be appreciative of what they're doing they have left their families they're putting their lives in danger and so i think we need to look at them in a in a different light and really more thankful and appreciative of what they if you're not in that situation people should be thoughtful and not impulsive when they join the military they should i tell them before they want to basic training to start running a lot but t but it's what you do when you go in the military and i tell this to kids in court i've been a magistrate for thirty one years is you know you have to be careful when you put yourself your life in the hands of other people as other people control your fate ok that you have no free will you can you can go a wall you want to enjoy your free will if you if you want to but there are certain positions you get life in the military outside where you  control of your physical wall being in your life to others i learned that there's always a different side to every sort of story i learned that cultures and nasa and nationalities should be respected you know that since i you know since i retired and you know i look at the various expeditions and campaigns united states has has mounted in iraq and afghanistan you always ask the question are we doing the right thing with the number of troops in the council these we've got and so you're more you know you more thinking about this than than ever before and when you're in the military you just react to orders you know you do what you're told to do there's not much thinking about it when you're out you thinking about what happens to the young men and women who go off now and taking your place i feel very strongly that when we got away from the commitment to having to serve as a result of the draft you had to make a decision was i going to get drafted and go away for two years was  three years or four years that i think the experience of being in the military even though i was only in for six months especially of active duty  very developmental and i think every person in that country should be required to serve in some way after high school because it's a very very maturing process you learn a lot about yourself you learn a lot about other people you a little i love a lot about other cultures you know i had grown up in belmont and you know back then kids from bellmore were literally privileged life as a middle class with fairly privileged life and you know when you're in the service you meet people from the south you meet people from get a very very  for the veterans that are currently serving i understand that they do what they're told and if the government sends them somewhere they'll go in they'll do the best mission they can and unfortunately  think the united states in general looks at our soldiers in a negative way when the government sends them to do stuff that that general public doesn't agree with and  unfortunately the the soldier sailor sailors and marines and navy guys they all pay the price for that and it's unfortunate but indeed in regards directly to what you asked me i i don't think i'm as supportive to combat missions and putting our guys in harm's way now as i was back then but i do know that that our our military our u s military is the greatest force on earth and they are completely ready and willing and motivated to do whatever is called upon him and i think it's a shame if our government orders them to do things that you know we all don't really support they're the ones that usually pay the price for that like vietnam veterans  are still very hurt about the treatment they got when they returned from vietnam but they were just doing what they were told because they're good soldiers good soldiers do what they're told and so it's the same kind of thing it's  sad that they are the ones that pay the price but the american people it's it's in the old days to lose you know and you will jim but i lost i think five thousand people in the battle but nobody ever saw it on television no people come home and you see people coming home and caskets and i think it drives it home that you shouldn't you shouldn't waste waters having been in it i understand that there's  lot more to to it than than just the idea of combat and the stuff we see in movies and on that i personally have seen and dealt with a lot of local nationals are destroyed  by dictatorships and then destroyed by years of combat operations around them and our attempt to stabilize we as a nation should being such a powerful nation with so many resources  world view about us and our allies we have no choice we have a responsibility to our fellow man and unfortunately bargaining doesn't always work right now there is always going to be somebody willing to commit violence against us or somebody else in order to get what they want so the unfortunate assess it is that we have people willing to stand up and defend those people we could avoid wars but then at this particular time in our time now it's something  that you know it's not a it's not a political war but it could turn into a political war that we have you know some people say it is some people say it's not but the impact to me is that you know we're always going to have them in in the situation that the