so hall there and they just put us on buses they told us they told us what the bring his a bring a pair of underwear change into a probably five pair of underwear to change into i was so nervous but a pair of socks on a toothbrush didn't need a hairbrush or anything like that was it then they took us in boston to the boston army base they swore us in and then they said now you got to take orders where you get uniforms and head shaved and we got there about three o'clock in the morning got all that stuff done and like two days later they put us on buses that ok you're going to fort bragg north carolina for basic training that's where you'll be and so the next day or whenever it came we went to down to fort bragg some interesting things at that point because when we went into north carolina i 'd been born raised in belmont i'd never really been out of belmont the go to the cape or to somewhere in new england and we got into north carolina and the st thing i saw was this big billboard them you know i felt for them you could see it was it was visibly bothering them and me too and then from there we had a nice experience we stopped at another place a little town called north carolina where women volunteers from the american legion made us dinner and we had dinner there and i was really the last dinner that we had then when we get out of the especially to me and then and there was a black drill instructor that was the biggest man i ever saw in my life he was just gigantic about some reason he took a liking  i did stay at fort bragg which not all that many did but i did because i had enlisted and so that meant i got to pick the job i wanted long as i was qualified so i decided i want to be a mi military policeman because i could i figured if i didn't go back to college i'd get a chance to work in a police department around belmont or in belmont and fight chance i got to say sent to fort bragg they were opening an extra m p school to feed the numbers they needed for the night and so i went through m p school at fort bragg when i finished m p school i got stationed at fort bragg as an m i made still one of my very best friends today i met then when i he didn't go to vietnam but we stayed in touch ever since one thousand nine hundred and sixty six we've been friends and he was from he went to b c was from connecticut and he was out in prescott in arizona now but we talk once a week anyway on the phone and i go out to visit him once a year not anymore i can't fly anymore  it's terrific so i loved it there and if i could have kept that provost marshal investigators job i would have stayed i would i would have stayed in the army for thirty years i loved that job but from  there i got orders it was the strangest thing i called home one night to talk to my family my mother got on the phone i could tell oh something bothering her and i said what's  trouble and i said no why she says this f b i agents this is me intelligence is all these people coming around they go to the neighbors they go to the high school that they're doing a background check on you i said i don't know anything about it nobody's told me a thing and it's a way out you've got to check and see if you've done something wrong so finally i found out and they wanted to take me into the m e security agency and to take me in you know you have to have a for the top secret clearance you have to have all these things done on your sort of like being in the president's cabinet almost in fact i probably have a high clearance and some of them do but  of january sixty eight i went to vietnam i landed the day had started twelve hours after i arrived and i'll tell you a story when we were flying i flew in  when i left the united states i flew to california then we flew to hawaii and from hawaii we flew to okinawa and then to vietnam and when we were flying from okinawa to vietnam  stewardess said if you look out the right side of the plane that brown piece of land you see down there is vietnam and i'm homeless cry and now it just shook me up so bad to look down at this piece of land that i've been seeing on t v for so long and say that's where i'm going and the war and everything we came in i was sitting next to a guy who was from hole y and were coming in to land and i see all these guys with their shirts off everything laying on top of bunkers getting funding and and i said to you i said george i don't know about you but i'd love to be stationed here look at the guys are all getting tans and every he says yeah it looks like a pretty good face of the station when we came in we landed and as we were taxiing to the get off the plane the stewardesses came down the aisle and they were all crying but they had these on that had medals from each of the companies that are from guys a given the company see thing and they they were crying and they were they were crying because they knew a whole bunch of us were going to go home that were on the plane and they were saying don't worry we'll be here in three hundred and sixty five days to bring you home we'll be here i'll promise you i'll be here to bring you home in three hundred sixty five d you know we knew that wasn't going to happen but it was nice you know it was nice to you know the army or any of the military services can be dehumanizing at times you know for perfectly good reasons but the saying is when you're a young kid a young boy or and then they didn't have young women in the service really much in the service but it was scary it was just so scary i mean i when i was teaching i used to say to kids to give i say you know think about if you had to do something that you were really scared about face what if i pulled an envelope out of my desk and said here i wanted you to deliver this to the th floor a devon shi'ah street be scared to death of a i don't know i didn't know how to get that i said well think how would it be going halfway around the world from your home by yourself on the scariest adventure of your life and nobody to share it with the anything that's joyful about it or anything that's bet you just have nobody to share it with you have to experience it all by yourself and there's so many times you wanted somebody there to put their arm around you shaky hand the i'm i'm as proud as i can be of be in a vietnam veteran i wouldn't change things if they said you can change your life over again other than to bring back a few people that are dead i wouldn't change anything  proud to be a veteran and and so many other people that i met were such good people great people you were saying you work at the v a and i i was in a group at the v a with twenty other guys i was the oldest guy in the group every guy in the group had been either arrested for a crime and done jail time was addicted to drugs was an alcoholic or had done something wrong and there wasn't a bad guy in the bunch they all that done this since they came home from vietnam they were self medicating they were trying to forget things my brother and danny and i have a st cousin committed suicide from the it just took its toll on people and people say oh you look you know they'll say to me you look so good or sigh so you don't know that i have to sleep in the other room because i scream at night with nightmares i had bitten my wife that night if you guys i thought i was being tortured and i needed to get the guy that was torturing me and things like that it just destroyed and i came home 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 buying 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 know i mean you don't like to be nice to people you get in fights they said that's not how we brought you up we didn't bring you up to be like that and i said you have to remember mom have only been home for like three days from a war i can't get used to the noise in the streets and then things so you know i just can't go back to be in paul mcauley that i was in one thousand nine hundred and sixty four too right now it'll happen i hope smally but i can't guarantee it will it's just you don't know if you're going to live you got to do what you were taught of that you got and somewhat you know no i did what i was taught but i didn't i wasn't taught anything really special it's just that i i still was a military policeman but my job became more of a  but you know i did that then a lot of the time i was that i'm guy guard we have to send things from where i was in cam ranh bay up to now training which other vietnam veterans are probably watching th and wow did he get a choice place the station but i was pretty good place to be stationed but i used to be an m guy when we'd go to training i'd go up in the morning ready to kill me because i listed for an extra month i was due to come home in january th and i stayed up there were sixty nine dollars because if i had five months or less left in the service you got out so i said well i'll take a chance to get out of the earlier so i did and my mom and dad were too happy that i had decided to stay an extra month but by then i had made sergeant and so i was a platoon sergeant the only boss i had really was the st sergeant in the the opposite so it wasn't bad it was grow it it turned out pretty good because me having been there was a regular enlisted man asked suspect for i know what all the other guys were going through so like you know when we we were mainly at night i worked almost exclusively from seven at night to seven in the morning  forty six days in a row i worked those hours and that was that was scary because you're out there all by yourself in the pitch black for twelve hours in vietnam you're watching the i can look across cameron bay and see across cameron bay was like looking from habit to habit stadium to harvard square not at all and watch fire fights you watch the tracers fired and hit the rocks and you know go off into the sky and it was just scary and you know you'd be out there and you know there were nights i'd cry i'd be so lonesome you know i just wanted somebody to be there that knew me i wasn't so afraid of dying as i was of death dying alone i didn't want some somebody come out in the morning and find me dead and i wanted somebody to know that i had been killed and not be just found laying there  and i went to boston state and i had to go full time at night for two years before they would let me go days even though i add i learned my lesson when i went to vietnam i did teach me that i wanted to go to school and study and i and i did when i got home but because of a lot of the programs the state was running they wouldn't take me full time until i'd done two years of  guys that i wasn't in vietnam with and i have with the ones that i was in vietnam with we used to have a reunion every year the vietnam guys and i went for probably ten years  it was becoming too much like the military i just wanted to go and have a beer and tell stories and they were getting into the politics you know they wanted people to certain people to run for chaplain things like that and you know i didn't want to i wanted somebody else wanted to do it fine but i didn't want to do it and it was just too much pressure on things so i dropped out of that i keep in touch with some of them i keep you know pretty good in touch with one of the guys from north carolina three of us got parkinson's the disease within three months of each other so that was a little bit because none of there was no history of good in our families and any and they all came down with sort of one time so we kept in touch and one's dead one's very bad and i lucked out you know i have it but mine is mostly balance it's not actually you know it's good that i kept in touch with them the guy in north carolina is a great great real typical southern boy and just a great guy i might add i skipped over when i was talking about  and i was an m p and so one day i was going through smoke bomb hill which is where the green berets i'm going through there and i'm driving the jeep the mpg and ted he walks about fifty yards in front of your crosses the street little dirt road and teddy and he takes off running as fast as he can go and chase him with my jeep down little side streets and everything else finally i catch up i get close enough to tell me it's mcgee you know and look he comes over gives me a big hug and we shook hands and things and i said what do you wrong and he says i saw the m p's i thought they were after me he said because i had thrown a smoke bomb in the day room you know because they will work and i was working and they weren't vietnam before i went to vietnam we knew teddy grew up we lived in the projects in belmont and he lived in i think in the same building we did at least when i was in and i think he moved to another building in the projects but teddy's parents and we all live right there coming today and sincerely thank you for your service my friend oh thank you and thank you for all you are doing and now even though the service time is over a wonderful place they do wonderful things up there if they do where they do