Male Speaker:   [ unintelligible ]
after we talk -- Diane Kresh: I'm Diane Kresh.
I'm Director of the Veterans History Project and delighted
to be the host of this evening's event.
For those of you who don't know, the Veterans History Project was created
in the fall of 2000 by the Congress to collect the stories of men
and women who served in combat or civilians
who served on the home front.
We cover all wars, we have stories back to World War I, although,
clearly, there are not as many as some of the more recent conflicts.
But, currently, we have close to 40,000 stories,
which makes us the largest oral history project
in the United States.
And secondly, it's done really all by volunteers.
We don't have paid professionals conducting oral interviews.
It's people who feel the calling to get in touch with veterans who live
in their neighborhoods or the their retirement communities or who are
in some way affiliated with their schools.
And we encourage active participation on the part
of all Americans because the veterans' stories really become our
stories as Americans and gives us an opportunity both
to honor what they did and thank them for their selfless service.
So, again, thank you for being here this evening.
We are delighted to be sharing the stage in partnership
with the District of Columbia Library Association
and the Military Librarians Group of the D.C. Chapter
of the Special Libraries Association.
I would have said that fast.   But I would have stumbled.
The idea for this evening's program was conceived
by the aforementioned groups,
and we appreciate being given the opportunity to host it
and to share this opportunity with them.
As many of you know, this Veterans Day is approaching,
and we typically have a series of events honoring veterans
and their service, and this is, I think, the first of a series
of events we're going to be having over the next couple of weeks.
Before we begin, I'd like to note that this event will be recorded
and may be broadcast on the World Wide Web and other outlets
on the library's home page, so if you don't wish
to be recorded, you have to leave.   [ laughter ]
[ Laughs ]   . That was a joke.
I'd now like to introduce the master of ceremonies, Diane Schnurrpusch,
who is Chair of the Military Librarians Group,
of the D.C. chapter of SLA, and she will present some of the background
and then turn it over to our panelists.
And, again, thank you.
I think this will be a really interesting program.
And, again, thank you for your continuing support
of the Veterans History Project.   Diane.
[ applause ]
Diane Schnurrpusch: Thank you, Diane.
It's my pleasure to be the facilitator for the meeting tonight.
And as a good facilitator, I have to mention the obligatory
"check your cell phone" before we begin.
Tonight we've asked people if they served in a hostile area
as a librarian, if they would fill out an orange card.
So if you didn't hear about that, and you want to be recognized,
please raise your hand now, and my assistant,
Elaine Cline will hand you a card and something to write with.
Okay, thank you.
I also want to thank quite on number of people.
It takes a lot of people to put something on like this.
From DCSLA and DCLA, D.C. Library Association, we have Kathryn Ray.
And if you would stand, please,
or if you would raise your hand, at least.
Kathryn Ray is President of the D.C. Library Association.
Elaine Cline is President-elect of the D.C. Library Association.
Shirley Loo is President of the D.C. Special Libraries Association.
Sharon Lenius, on our panel, is both the Director
of the D.C. Library Association and part
of the Military Librarians Group steering committee of SLA.
We also had help at the table from Maria Vagianos, Ebony Henry
[ spelled phonetically ]   , April King
[ spelled phonetically ]   , Tracy Myers
[ spelled phonetically ]   , Sarah Striner, and Erin Clakerty
[ spelled phonetically ]   . All helped in some way, too.
Now, from the Library of Congress we need to thank Mr. Peter Bartis,
who's the Senior Program Officer for the Veterans History Project.
Mr. Tom Wiener, he's the Veterans History Project historian.
Nancy Mitchell, Anneliesa Behrend, and of course, the technology staff
of the Library of Congress.
You probably saw a display outside of books that are currently provided
for our soldiers overseas, and that was provided by the Army Community
and Family Support Center.
Carla Pomager, take a good look at her.
She also has tickets for the Soldier Show coming up on November 12,
and she'll be at the table afterwards if you'd like tickets.
And Nancy Murphy   [ spelled phonetically ]
. Is she still here?   Okay. Thank you to both of them.
And, also, I was told that the books that are on the table are giveaways,
so it's first-come-first-serve.   Nobody get up and leave yet.
[ Laughs ]   .
[ laughter ]
And, of course, we need to thank Factiva
[ spelled phonetically ]   for providing the desserts tonight.
And Mr. Bill Donovan   [ spelled phonetically ]
is in the audience.
He is the premier vender-sponsor, as Sharon says.
[ applause ]   Thank you.
And now, I want to remind you
that our interviewers will be Sharon Lenius and Tom Wiener.
And then I'm going to tell you a bit about our two interviewees.
Bill Sittig hails from Mount Vernon, New York.
He received a B.A. from Williams College in 1963.
By 1966, he had acquired a Master's of Library Science
from the now-closed Columbia University School
of Library Service.
That same year he joined the Army where he took his basic
and advanced infantry training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
In 1997, he served as a clerk -- that's not right -- '67 --
[ laughter ]
-- 1967 -- he served as a clerk in the USARV headquarters
in the Republic of Vietnam.
From there he transferred to the U.S. Army libraries in Saigon
where he served until 1968.
By the end of '68, Mr. Sittig started his career at the Library
of Congress where he was in the Special Recruit Program.
In 1969 he assumed the position of Law and Government Bibliographer
in the Legislative Reference Service,
now known as the Congressional Research Service.
From 1972 to 1985, Bill was a Collections Development Officer.
In 1985 he moved to the Collections Policy Office as Director,
and since 1996, he has been the Science, Technology
and Business Division Chief.
Mr. Sitting's professional affiliations include both the
American Library Association and the Special Libraries Association.
And he is the President
of the Washington International School's PTA.
Francis Buckley, Fran Buckley attended the North Carolina State
College for two years and went on to obtain his B.A. and M.L.S.
at the University of Michigan,
where he also received a Distinguished Alumnus award
from the School of Library Science.
After serving in the Army as a librarian in Vietnam,
Mr. Buckley held positions in libraries in the Midwest.
After three years as Director of the Shaker Heights Public Library
in the Cleveland area, he spent nearly 30 years
with the Detroit Public Library.
His positions included Reference Librarian,
Government Document Specialist, Collection Development Coordinator,
Assistant Director for Technical Services,
and Associate Director for Public Services.
He then spent five years at the Government Printing Office
where he was the Superintendent of Documents until retirement.
Well, the first retirement anyway.   He came out of retirement,
and is now currently Interim Library Director of the District
of Columbia Public Library.
Fran is active in numerous professional organizations.
He is currently on the council of the American Library Association,
the board of trustees of the Freedom to Read Foundation,
and the board of directors of the District
of Columbia Library Association.
He has also been elected to serve on the executive board
of ALA starting in June 2005.
Among his other activities, he has been on the board of trustees
of OCLC, the board of directors of the Detroit Literacy Coalition,
and President of the Michigan Library Association.
It's my pleasure to turn the podium over now
to the speakers to begin the interview.
Tom Wiener: I think I'll begin the interview, because I'm going
to ask some of the kind of general questions
about their military service, and Sharon's going to chime
in at a certain point and talk about the more specialized aspects --
Sharon Lenius: That's right.   Tom Wiener: --
[ unintelligible ]   the military.
So, I'm going to ask both of the gentlemen the same question,
and they can respond in turn.
Probably Bill first because I think he's a little senior to Fran.
Francis Buckley:   [ Laughs ]
. Just a little bit.   [ laughter ]
Older. Older   [ Laughs ]
. Tom Wiener: What we usually ask veterans
when we're interviewing them for the project is:
How did you get into the military?   Were you drafted, or did you enlist?
Bill? Bill Sittig: I was drafted.
As you heard, I come from Mount Vernon,
N.Y. You probably don't know much about it,
but my draft board was notorious in the New York area.
I was in graduate school.
Actually, when I was an undergraduate,
I was called to be drafted.   And they did let me off.
I had to prove, and go down to my draft board, that I was actually
in school, and she let me off.
The second time, I was in graduate school, and I had to go down again.
And the person ahead of me was --
I could hear a lot of loud voices in the room.
The man ahead of me, I think,
was in graduate school in Moscow studying art.
And the lady said, "I don't believe that."
Or, "You're a commie."   Tom Wiener:
[ Laughs ]   .
[ laughter ]
Bill Sittig: Anyway, he came out all flushed.
But he got out of it, and she let me off too.
And then I went to library school, and the day I stepped
out of library school I was drafted.
My draft board was in the news a couple of months later
because she had let a man who was blind go
down to the recruitment center.
And when he got down to Brooklyn, they said, "How did you get here?"
Tom Wiener:   [ Laughs ]
. Bill Sittig: Anyway, I was drafted --
[ laughter ]
Tom Wiener: Now, Bill, did you ever think that there were some people --
during the Vietnam war era, we're familiar with stories of people who,
in the face of getting drafted, decided to enlist
because they could get a better deal in terms of being
in officer situation and maybe away from combat.
Did they ever occur to you?
Bill Sittig: No, it didn't occur to me.
I wanted to serve as short a time as possible.
It turns out during my service -- I'm jumping ahead a little --
when I was at USARV headquarters in Vietnam with a few
of the officers I'd worked with suggested that I go
to Officers Candidate School and an application was actually put in.
I received the word two days before I was discharged that I could go
to Indiana and apply and go
into Officers Candidate School, and I said no.
Tom Wiener:   [ Laughs ]
.   [ laughter ]
Fran, what was your situation?   You were drafted?
Francis Buckley: I was drafted also.
I had actually finished library school,
had gotten married while I was in library school, and was working
at the Detroit Public Library where I worked
about a year before a draft notice came on my birthday.
Tom Wiener: What birthday was that?
Francis Buckley: I was 20 -- was I 24 or 25?
Twenty-five.
My draft board was in Hendersonville, N.C.,
and I'd left Hendersonville.   That's where I went to high school.
So I'd registered there and moved up to Detroit after college.
And so when I went down to report for the draft there,
I went home to see my mother,
because I was sure my life had ended when I was drafted.
And so I went in with the other people who were being drafted
from that draft board, and I discovered that a number
of them were not only married, they had children.
And, you know, they weren't supposed to be drafting people
with children and so forth.
But I discovered that the people that they were drafting
out of the hills of North Carolina -- this was a pretty rural area --
most of them would wash out during the introductory physical.
They'd never seen a doctor or a dentist,
and so a lot of these people had health problems
that caused them to wash out.
So my draft board was having problems meeting their quota
of people to get to enter, so they --
and here I was, a person up in Detroit.
They didn't care about me anymore.   You know, "Draft him."
Tom Wiener: And did you have any second thoughts about enlisting?
Francis Buckley: Oh, well, I'll jump ahead a little bit,
too, in my tenure.
I ended up in this country as a clerk
in the basic training unit that I started out as.
Tom Wiener: Mm-hmm.
Francis Buckley: And so every cycle of recruits that would come through,
the recruiting people would come through following them to see
who they could get to go to OCS.
And they would go through the cards listing every person in the company,
and they'd be in the office with the captain saying,
"Oh, look at this guy.   He's got a master's degree."
You know, "Why can't we get him to go to OCS?"
And the captain would say, "You can try that.
He's out behind the typewriter right there."
And, like Bill, I didn't want to stay in one day longer
than I had to, so I kept turning them down.
Tom Wiener: Now, your adjustment to military life, just very briefly.
I mean, what was it like for you in basic training
and the barracks and so forth?
Did you have a lot of problems adjusting
to life without any privacy?
Was the basic training routine very difficult
for you physically or mentally?   Bill Sittig: It was interesting.
It was very different for me.
I was -- probably like Fran -- I was also right out of graduate school,
and most of the people I was in basic
and advanced infantry training were younger than I was.
Most of them were just out of high school.
And so I was, I'm trying to think, about 25 or 26,
and most of them were either teenagers or in their low 20s.
So I was a little more mature.
There were people from many different geographic areas.
I found it interesting to meet people from Alabama and Pennsylvania
and other places that I had hadn't really met too many people
from those areas and different economic and social strata
that I hadn't really mixed with too much.
And I found that interesting.
Physically, I was never terribly interested
in the sports or physical activity.
I was so-so, and I was surprised that I could do most everything
[ laughs ]
and pass. Since I did have a college degree, I was pulled out often
to do clerical types of things.
The companies often needed somebody to work as a clerk,
and I often did those things so I would often miss some
of the more strenuous activities because of that.
So it wasn't quite as -- Tom Wiener: Yeah.
Bill Sittig: -- rigorous as I really feared.
[ Laughs ]
. Tom Wiener: Were you expecting to be assigned to a combat unit?
What was your -- Bill Sittig: No, I wasn't, actually.
At the time I was drafted was the time
of the really big buildup of Vietnam.
Tom Wiener: What year is this?   Sixty-six?
Bill Sittig: Sixty-six.   Tom Wiener: Okay.
Bill Sittig: August '66 is when I started the training.
And it was really unfortunate.
There were a number of people in my unit who had enlisted,
and they said they were going to be -- they were given a choice of,
they could either go to a place that they'd choose, like "I want to go
to Germany," or what do they call it?
An MO? Sharon Lenius: OS.   Tom Wiener: OS.
Bill Sittig: MOS.
You know, "I want to be a clerk-typist."
Or "I want to be" -- Tom Wiener: Sure.
Bill Sittig: -- you know, a nurse or something.
And most people were being sent to Vietnam
after their Advanced Training.
Even though they said they wanted to go to Paris.
[ Laughs ]   . Tom Wiener:
[ Laughs ]   .
[ laughter ]   Bill Sittig: Or wherever.
Almost all of us in our training, it's a few people did not go,
but almost everybody did go to Vietnam.
No matter.
So the handwriting was on the wall, I think, for almost everybody.
Tom Wiener: What about you, Fran?
What was your situation in adjusting to the military?
Francis Buckley: Well, I was perhaps even less athletic than Bill.
So I did have physical problems in basic training.
In fact, I developed stress fractures of the bones in both feet
of my heels, within a month and a half of going
in from all the walking and the marching and so forth.
And the military is not kind in basic training to people
who have some physical problems like that.
They would send you back, you know, you would go on report for,
you know, the health problem.
They'd, you know, give you an aspirin
or something and say, "Go back."
So that happened to me several times.
And Christmas intervened.   I went home.
I didn't get any better after several weeks off, came back and,
again, finally, got to a doctor instead of the medic
at the health clinic, and he said, "Oh,
I'm afraid you've got broken bones in both feet,
and we'll have to put you on profile."
"Profile" meaning no walking, running, stooping, jumping,
long standing, et cetera for several months to let these get better.
So I went back to my company headquarters to report
that I had this profile, and I had an old-line Mexican-American First
sergeant who, you know, made you knock on the door,
and it never was loud enough.   You had to do, you know, 20 pushups,
and then they'd knock again before he'd let you in.
And so he took one look at this profile of no walking, running,
stooping, jumping, et cetera, and said, "What are you?
A vegetable?"   Tom Wiener:
[ Laughs ]   .
[ laughter ]
Francis Buckley: And so he had to figure out what he could do with me.
And so I ended up painting every fence pole in the company area
with orders to walk to each pole, sit down, and paint it sitting down.
And then get up and walk to the next fence post and paint that.
Tom Wiener: How long did it take you?
Francis Buckley: Well, there weren't a lot fence posts.
Tom Wiener:   [ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: It only was about two or three days.
And then he had to figure out what he could do.
And so, like Bill, he ended up, once he knew I was a college graduate,
so forth, that I made charts for his orderly room.
I did typing and various clerical work.
And, actually, then was -- if I could just go on a minute.
Tom Wiener: Mmm-hmm Francis Buckley: This was a wily old First sergeant.
So I was a better typist than his Army-trained typist.
And so he said, "You know?
I could get you recycled in this unit for basic training,
and we could make arrangements so you, you know,
rode for some of the marches and things like that,
and then I could get you stationed here for on-the-job training
as a clerk, and then you'd have a clerical MOS if
and when you went to Vietnam."
And so that sounded better to me than going on because most
of the people going through basic were immediately being slammed
into the infantry and so forth.   So we did that.
He did that.   I was recycled.
I finally got through.
I then was a clerk for, I don't know, four or five months,
six months or so, before I got orders to go to Vietnam.
Tom Wiener: Okay.
Sharon Lenius: This was at Fort Bragg?
Is that right?   Francis Buckley: At Fort Bragg.
Mm-hmm. Tom Wiener: And Bill, where was your base of training?
Bill Sittig: At Fort Jackson in South Carolina.
Tom Wiener: Okay.   Now, going to Vietnam.
When did you ship out to Vietnam,
and what was your specialty at that point?
What were you expected to have to do when you went over there?
Bill Sittig: I shipped out January 1 -- nice New Years present --
1967, and I had gone to Advanced Infantry Training
at Fort Jackson also.
And the unit I went with were all expected to go
to the 25th Infantry Division.
Once they all got to Vietnam, almost everybody went to Cu Chi,
which is the home base of the 25th Infantry Division at that time.
Tom Wiener: Mm-hmm.   That was a real hot spot.
Bill Sittig: It really was.
Tom Wiener: So what happened when you got there?
Bill Sittig: Well -- Tom Wiener: To you personally?
Bill Sittig: Well, when we got there, there were two entry points
into Vietnam at that time.
Everybody processed in at either Ben Hua
[ spelled phonetically ]
, which was a station right outside Saigon, or at Ad Nang
[ spelled phonetically ]
. We all went to Ben Hua right outside of Saigon,
and we were all assigned to these large of tents in this dusty area.
Tom Wiener: What were you experiencing getting off the plane?
A lot of Vietnam vets talk about that.
Do you remember that?   Bill Sittig: It was hot.
Dusty. Tom Wiener: Was there any arms fire going on at that point?
Bill Sittig: You could hear in the distance fire going on.
And it was surreal.   And we were very tired, too.
It's a long flight out there.
And you're not quite sure what was going on.
But everything is --
almost immediately it's a different situation.
Things are not like back in training
where everything is very military, you know?
"Hop, two."   You know? All this going on.
Everybody is much more relaxed, you know, because you're
in a real theater of war.
But when we got to Ben Ho, you go to this tent area,
and you're not really sure what was going on, you know.
They say, "Go over there," you know,
"put your stuff down and take a cot."
And there'd be these formations about six times a day.
You'd get out in this field, you know?
Masses of men.
And they'd start calling out, "Cu Chi," you know,
and they'd call these names, and you'd go over there.
And they'd start calling names of people I came over with.
And I'd be listening, and my name wasn't called.
And then somebody next to me poked me, and they said, "Sittig,
they just called your name."   I said, "What?"
because they'd called, "Saigon."   And I wasn't expecting that.
Tom Wiener: What did that mean to you?
Bill Sittig: Well, I went over there, and I found --
I didn't know what it all meant.
And so I hopped on this truck, and I went off and I --
they took us to Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base.
And what I finally found out what had happened was that the head
of the Army library program in Saigon had made arrangements
with a clerk at the Ben Ho entry point to look out for people with,
for soldiers, with a library degree --
[ laughter ]
-- because they needed librarians, and --
this was the time of the big buildup,
and they didn't have enough support services,
and there wasn't enough time to get civilians to come and work
in the library program, and so they wanted GIs if they could find them.
Bill Sittig: And I just happened to arrive at that time,
and this clerk saw that I had a library degree,
and so they pulled me aside.   They sent me down there.
I was at USARV headquarters at the Tan Son Nut Air Force Base
until they could decide what to do with me.
And I worked as a clerk at general Westmoreland's headquarters
for a month until they decided they could use me in Saigon.
And I was transferred there a month later.
I really lucked out.
Tom Wiener: Fran, what was your situation in arriving at Vietnam?
Your first impression?   When did you go?
When did you ship out?
Francis Buckley: Actually, I guess it was March or April,
and -- Tom Wiener: Of '67.
Francis Buckley: Sixty- Sharon Lenius: Six.
Francis Buckley: Six.   Tom Wiener: Six.
Bill Sittig: Right.   Francis Buckley: Or, no.
No. It had to be later.   It was near -- it was October.
October. Because I was in Vietnam 364 days.
And I came home in October.
But I was quite mad about the process that they used.
Because they told you you were going to go to Vietnam,
and they gave you orders with a specific destination,
a specific assignment of what company you were going to go to,
where it was located, and so you spent time with your family
because you were given a 30-day leave.
You went home, you looked at the map, you found where you would be --
[ laughter ]
-- you told your family, "I'm going to be right there.
Here's the address.   You can write to me."
And then, of course, when you got to Vietnam, and I got to Ben Hua,
they put you in this large holding company
and immediately change your orders.
And you're going wherever they send you, wherever they needed the body.
Tom Wiener: Mm-hmm.
Francis Buckley: Now, I was very fortunate because I ended
up being -- because I had a MOS as a clerk, I was assigned
to an inventory-control company on Long Binh as their company clerk.
I could have just as easily been assigned to be the company clerk
for an infantry unit that made everyone go out on patrol.
And, of course, I'd never had Advanced Infantry Training,
because I'd done this -- Tom Wiener: Sure.
Francis Buckley: -- on-the-job training as a clerk.
So I could just -- when I was there
for the three days before they assigned me somewhere,
all I could think of was, "I'm going to get assigned to one of those,"
you know, "infantry units.   I'm going to refuse a direct order.
I'm going to be court-marshaled -- Bill Sittig:
[ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: -- I'm going to be in jail."
Bill Sittig:   [ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: -- you know,
because I'm going to refuse to do this.
Fortunately, I then ended up on Long Binh and my first week there,
we were all taken -- there were four or five new people assigned
to the company -- we were all taken into Saigon
to have our records processed at a finance unit there.
And we were given the afternoon off,
a couple of hours off, to see the sights.
The other guys immediately wanted to go to the bars
and see the Saigon bar girls.
And I left asking the MP, "Which way is the library?"
[ laughter ]   Bill Sittig:
[ Laughs ]   . Sharon Lenius:
[ Laughs ]   . That's a good story, Fran.
[ laughter ]
Francis Buckley: So -- Tom Wiener: That was your idea
of R & R. Francis Buckley: Yes.
I knew there had to be a Special Services library.
[ laughter ]
So the MP, of course, did not know where this was --
[ laughter ]
-- and he said, "Oh, just ask one of these taxi drivers."
Well, here I am in Saigon.
Everything looks strange and scary and everything else.
So he waves over one of these little, tiny taxis,
and I say to the taxi driver, "Library?"
No comprehension.   "Bibliothque?"
No comprehension.
Finally the MP suggests, "Well, ask for the USO."
So, sure enough, they knew where the USO was, and when I got there,
they could give me directions to walk three
or four blocks to the library.
And when I went into the library, here was Bill Sittig -- Bill Sittig:
[ Laughs ]   .
[ laughter ]
Francis Buckley: -- working in the library.
Bill Sittig:   [ Laughs ]
.   [ laughter ]
Francis Buckley: And I -- Tom Wiener:
[ Unintelligible ]   haven't seen each other since.
Francis Buckley: Yes.   Sharon Lenius:
[ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: -- I sidled right up to him and said,
"How did you get this duty?"   [ laughter ]
Since I'd asked when I was first drafted,
you know, "Use me as a librarian."
I'd already been working as a librarian for a year.
And they said, "Oh, no.
We don't use librarians here in the States," you know?
[ Inaudible ]   . "-- military personnel.
We hire civilians."
But, as Bill said, they couldn't get enough civilian librarians
in country, and so he introduced me to the head librarian who --
I can continue the story if you want -- Tom Wiener: Go ahead, because,
I think, leading up to the point where you do become a librarian,
and then, I think, Sharon will -- Sharon Lenius: Yeah.
Tom Wiener: -- have some questions about your
[ unintelligible ]
. Francis Buckley: Well, I went to see Eleanor Driscoll
[ spelled phonetically ]   , who was then the acting head
of the library program there, and she said, "Well!"
You know, she'd be glad to have me come and join them,
and she would talk to general So-and-so,
the head of Special Services for Vietnam, and make the arrangements,
and could I call back in a couple of weeks?
Well, because I was the company clerk, I had access to a telephone.
So I could call and see what was going on.
And after two weeks she said, "It's all arranged.
You just put in your transfer request."
Well, because I was the company clerk,
I had access to the typewriter and the forms, and I could type
out my transfer request, and I gave them to the company commander
who said, "They'll never approve this.
You've just come to country.
You have to," you know, "re-up to stay in country more
than your one year before they'll give you good duty
in Saigon," you know.
But, you know, I told him I could serve my country best
if I used my profession.   And so he signed.
And, you know, couple days later,
just a couple days later, my orders came back.
And because I was the company clerk I opened the mail, you know?
Put them on his desk, and he came in, you know, in the morning
and it was just like the M*A*S*H scene, you know?
"Good morning, sir," as he goes by.
And, you know, then this bellow comes out of the office.
[ laughter ]   "Buckley, what is this?"
And I go in and say, "My orders, sir?"
[ laughter ]   And he said, "Who do you know?
Who do you know up there?"
I said, "Well, general So-and-so was going to try
to make arrangements," you know, et cetera.
He said, "Well, you really don't want to do this."
He said, "You know" -- he was expecting an IG in a couple
of months, and he was, really,
he had been without a company clerk for several months.
He really wanted someone to put those records in order.
And he said, "You know, if you get transferred to Special Services
and then put on detached duty to work in the library," he said.
"If Special Services gets the ability to promote anybody,
they'll never promote you, because you're not a regular person
in their company, and so you should stay here
because you might get promoted from a Spec 4 to a Spec 5.
[ laughter ]   I said, "Thank you very much, sir,
but this is not my career objective."
[ laughter ]   Sharon Lenius:
[ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: And so I was very fortunate.
I then was transferred, put on detached duty, living in a hotel
in Saigon, and working in the library.
Sharon Lenius: That was tough duty there, wasn't it?
Francis Buckley:   [ Laughs ]
. Sharon Lenius: Bill, can you tell me about the library in Saigon?
What was the physical plant like?
Bill Sittig: Well, I think the building
that we worked in had been a hospital.
[ Laughs ]
. Sharon Lenius: A French hospital or --
Bill Sittig: A French hospital.
And it was in a nice part of Saigon, in downtown Saigon near a park.
And it served double duty.
It was the main U.S. Army Library in Saigon that served the troops
and the allied troops and U.S. civilian
and military personnel in Saigon.   So it was a pretty good library.
The collection compared well
with a medium-size U.S. public library, city library.
But it also was a central service center for all of the libraries
in Vietnam, so it was a central cataloging, distribution center.
Fran will probably tell you a little more.
In back of this library was the distribution center
where kits were prepared of books and serials and that were sent
out to troops in the field as well
as to branch libraries throughout Vietnam.
The main building had two floors.
It was not really built as a library,
but it was a fairly nice facility.
Sharon Lenius: They converted it so it worked as a library.
Bill Sittig: It worked as a library.
Sharon Lenius: Can you tell me how many staff members were available
and what kind of hours they did?
Bill Sittig: I can't remember exactly.
At its maximum I think we had about, in the library part of the library,
there were maybe five or six librarians and a staff of, maybe,
six or seven Vietnamese workers who worked in the library.
That's the library part of the library.
The service center, I'm not sure how many were back there.
Fran could probably --
Sharon Lenius: What kind of hours did you keep?
Bill Sittig: They were regular working hours.
Sharon Lenius: Nine to 5:00 or 9:00 to 9:00?
Bill Sittig: A little earlier, maybe 8:00 to 5:00, 8:00 to 5:30.
I think that's what it was.
Francis Buckley: I think even a little later.
Bill Sittig: A little later.   6:00. Francis Buckley: Something.
Yeah. Bill Sittig: Yeah.
Francis Buckley: Because I remember working evenings and the women,
Vietnamese women, would go around -- I didn't discover this right away --
they would go around to all of the patrons in the library
and say, "We are very sorry.   We are closing early tonight.
Would you please leave?"   Then they would come to me and say,
"There's nobody left in the library!"
Bill Sittig:   [ Laughs ]
.   [ laughter ]
Francis Buckley: So -- Bill Sittig: There were some night out.
I think it was -- Francis Buckley: There were some nights.
I don't remember how many.   But we were open six, seven days?
I think seven days -- Bill Sittig: Seven days.
Francis Buckley: I think seven days a week.
Sharon Lenius: Were you serving on the reference desk, Bill?
Bill Sittig: I served in a variety of capacities,
especially in those early days
when there weren't too many other professional librarians.
I served on the reference desk as well as a number of other --
I was a cataloger sometimes and did a number of different duties.
I was mainly an acquisitions librarian for quite awhile also.
Sharon Lenius:   [ Unintelligible ]
like an interesting experience into library science.
Bill Sittig: Coming right out of library school, it was, really,
my first professional job, and I was glad I had the opportunity --
Sharon Lenius: At a variety -- Bill Sittig: -- at a variety of things,
which I probably wouldn't have had if I had come to the Library
of Congress right away or another library.
Sharon Lenius: That's good.   Fran, what about your service there?
So you came in, and there you saw Bill, and you got it all worked out.
Francis Buckley:   [ Laughs ]
. Right. Sharon Lenius: And what else happened then?
Francis Buckley: Well, for a little while I worked
in the library itself also on the desk, and so supervising some
of the clerical staff and so forth.
But, actually, most of my tour there I was in charge of one
of the back-office operations putting together the kits of books
and paperback books and magazines to send out to units in the field.
They'd already established that program,
and we had a separate outlying building in the back of the property
that was used for this purpose.
So I had about 15 Vietnamese men and a couple of other soldiers
who worked on this project.
And for a librarian who's only been out of school for a year,
what was wonderful was that I had this enormous budget
to buy paperback books and magazines --
paperback books, the magazines were all purchased centrally.
But I could order the books for this program,
and at the time I think I had, like, $20,000 a quarter to spend on this.
Now, this was when paperback books were 75 cents.
And when you bought them at discount, you know,
they were about half price, and the publishers would send me covers
to use to see what was coming out and so forth.
So I'd make decisions like, "I'll take 500 of these and 700 of those,"
and you know, buy them in fairly --
Sharon Lenius: Did you have a formula or something
that you bought seven Westerns and two mysteries?
Francis Buckley: No, no.
I did try to diversify, you know, mysteries and Westerns and,
you know, the various things that would be of interest.
But, sort of, just personally trying to extrapolate
into the interests of the soldiers.
But this operation actually handled about 60 tons
of mail every month, manually.
The -- Sharon Lenius: Forklifts, I hope.
[ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: No, no, no, no, no.
Sharon Lenius: No?   No, no. Francis Buckley: No, no.
We had some of those rolling things to use to push things along,
but you'd set up them as needed.
But the phrase "when your ship comes in" had a lot of meaning for me,
because the mail would get to San Francisco, and we're talking,
you know, 12,000 copies -- well, this came out of Tokyo.
Time magazine, twelve thousand copies every week.
And, you know, the U.S. publications, too,
would come into San Francisco, and we'd be getting 8,000 copies
of Playboy every month and, you know, Sports Illustrated
and the whole variety of 20-some magazines.
And they'd load up these, you know, truck containers.
And so when our ship came in, we would get two, maybe three,
containers of magazine and books.   Sharon Lenius: Conex containers?
Francis Buckley: Conex containers.
They are not light, and we had to unload them in 24 hours,
because the ship had to go back.
And so they would pull into our yard, and we would just,
when it wasn't the monsoon season,
just pull all this stuff off and dump it.
Because it was all in mailbags.
We would just try to get it off the containers
so they could turn around.
Monsoon season, we had to put it inside
[ laughs ]   and that was more work.
But it was physical work -- for everybody.
Sharon Lenius: Hmm.
You once mentioned the monsoons came a little early,
and what was your solution to that?
Francis Buckley: Well, you know, even when it rained it was so warm.
I mean, you had lightweight uniforms and so forth, so if you got wet,
you'd be dry in half an hour or an hour later.
So it wasn't that you tried to get out of the rain,
but it was just we had to protect the books and so forth when we were
in the process of unloading and so forth.
If I could tell one more little story...
Sharon Lenius: Of course.
Francis Buckley: Beyond the property there was a swimming pool.
And when I looked at the swimming pool, I said,
"Got to get this empty and with water in it."
And what was in it were boxes of books that had been saved
from libraries that had been closed in Germany and previous bases.
And they'd sent these to be used in Vietnam, but, of course,
there was so much money being pumped
into the Special Services library operation
that they could buy new books.
And, in fact, we had a McNaughton Plan in the library,
a portion itself for new books.
So this pile of books filling up this swimming pool had been there
for a couple of years and covered with tarps so they hadn't gotten wet
in the monsoon season, particularly, but of course,
the humidity goes way up.
And so I climbed down into the pool so see what condition these were in.
And as I lifted the tarp -- uh!   --
[ laughter ]   Sharon Lenius: Uh.
[ laughter ]   Francis Buckley: -- the smell.
The bugs that were infesting these --
[ laughter ]
-- the boxes disintegrating and so forth.
I said, "Well, we're obviously never going to use these."
So I went through the process of filling out the paperwork to arrange
to have them taken to Long Binh to a disposal point
to have them buried, or burned.
And I had to bribe the Vietnamese men who worked for me
to help unload this, to pick these up.
I mean, you didn't want to touch these boxes,
falling apart and slimy and so forth.
So I got a truck from the motor pool.
With enough beer and so forth, we got this pool emptied
and all the boxes loaded, and you know, the truck is just piled high,
and these boxes are, of course, breaking open,
and you can see the books and so forth.
But we sent them off, closed the gates, and said, "Good riddance."
And that night we got a call
from the motor pool asking about, "Where is our truck?
Where's our driver?"   "I don't know.
We sent them off at noontime to go out to Long Binh."
The next day we got another call from the motor pool.
"Where's our truck?   Where's our driver?"
"I don't know.   We sent them off."
You know? The third day the driver made his way back to the motor pool,
and on the way out to Long Binh,
where there often was sniper fire along the highway,
and they would stop all the traffic and bring in the infantry to clear
out things, there'd been some sniper fire.
So the truck had stopped, and behind the truck there'd been a jeep
with a general in it.
And the general was looking up ahead -- Sharon Lenius: Oh, ho!
Francis Buckley: -- seeing all these books and sent his driver up to see,
"Where are they taking all of those?"
Well, the driver came back and said, "They're going to burn them."
And the general said, "Oh, no.
My men could use those books," commandeered the truck
and the books, took them about 200 miles up-country to his base camp,
and I don't know what the men did with those books --
[ laughter ]   -- but it came back empty.
That was all I cared.
The sad part of the story is, after I got all this empty,
and I went to Miss Durbin, Ramona Durbin
[ spelled phonetically ]
, who was then the Chief of the Library, and I said, "You know,
Miss Durbin, I got the pool empty," you know.
"I'd be glad to pay for the," you know, "pumping equipment
to fill this," and what have you.
And when she checked they wouldn't let us do it
because we could not sanitize the water sufficiently
to be pure enough to swim in.
I mean, the water from the river and so forth was --
Sharon Lenius: So all for naught.   Francis Buckley: All for naught.
Sharon Lenius: All for naught.
Francis Buckley: All for naught, my dreams.
[ Laughs ]   .
[ laughter ]   Sharon Lenius: Your dreams.
Tell me about the hotels.
Were these former French hotels or where they -- what kind of --
Bill Sittig: I think they were because the hotel that I lived
in still had posters and was kind of eerie in a way.
There'd be posters, "Come visit beautiful Vietnam."
"Come shoot tigers up north."
And they were still on, like, the lobby of the hotels.
The room I was in had, maybe, eight beds in the room.
It was a room, obviously, meant for no more than one or two people.
But, you know, it was relatively a nice facility.
Sharon Lenius: Wasn't a tent out in -- Bill Sittig: That's right.
Sharon Lenius: -- on some firebase.
Bill Sittig: Not a tent in the jungle.
I was pleased to be in a facility like that.
Francis Buckley: My hotel had less population.
I was in a different building where, generally, there were rooms
with two bunk beds, but, essentially, three people to a room.
We had three people and a bathroom with natural heated water.
That is, if you came home from work while the sun had been out,
it had heated the water in the cistern up on the roof.
And if you took a shower right away, you had warm water.
If you took a shower in the morning, you had cold water.
[ Laughs ]   . But we roughed it, you know.
We had a maid to do the laundry -- Sharon Lenius:
[ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: -- to do the cleaning and so forth and, you know,
little refrigerators in every room with, you know,
your snacks -- Sharon Lenius: Beer.
Francis Buckley: And your beer, snacks from home.
Which was all very handy when the Tet Offensive occurred,
because we were then kept in our hotels while the fight was going on.
And so we survived for three or four days
on all the food we had in our rooms.   [ Laughs ]
. Sharon Lenius: You didn't have a mess hall that you had to go to
or assigned to a mess hall?
Francis Buckley: Our hotel had no eating facilities in it.
We ate on the economy, or we could go to an EM club a little ways away,
but we didn't have any real mess halls.
Bill Sittig: The same with me.
My friends and I often ate just in local restaurants.
They were fairly inexpensive, about the same price
as eating in a mess hall.
To add about the hotels, though, something interesting where I was.
In fact, the room, or in several rooms, in my hotel were used also
by GIs who came in from the field.
Saigon was a place that was for R & R for troops
that were out in the field.
And my room in particular was a haven for Green Berets
who had come in for a couple of days.
And those guys were something else.
And you can't blame them, but they would come in and they were wild.
Sharon Lenius: They'd party, huh?   Bill Sittig: Party.
They'd be drinking all night.
They would hear a noise in the alley,
they'd take out guns and start to shoot.
I was really afraid.   [ Laughs ]
. But, you know, they were letting off steam.
They described some very difficult and hairy situations.
They'd been up north.
I saw some of the same people time and again.
And there were two guys in particular.
When they came I would try
to find accommodations elsewhere while they were there.
But it was an interesting situation.
Francis Buckley: One of the things that I felt very sorry
about because I was stationed first in a basic training unit where,
initially, I, like Bill, was older than the people going
through basic training, but then as someone on the staff,
and seeing the young folks coming in and the philosophy of sort
of breaking down their hesitations and, indeed, perhaps their values,
so that they would react in a situation to shoot, to kill.
And then they were sent to Vietnam
where they were told they were bigger, badder, you know, et cetera,
than these people who were less than people,
who were gooks, and given a gun.
And, you know, their attitude in terms of treatment
of the Vietnamese people was often very, very poor.
Very sad situation.
And, you know, I felt bad because we did that.
The military was doing that deliberately
so they would react in a combat situation.
But it carried over into their behavior with civilians.
Tom Wiener: You mentioned the Tet Offensive before,
which is January of '68.   And you were both there for that.
Would you describe it?
In turn? Bill Sittig: Well, I had been there all of 1967,
and when I was -- at that time the Army had a policy, you know,
if you were in Vietnam at least one year, and when you came home,
if you had less than three months to serve, you could be discharged.
So since I had it fairly easy -- I mean, I was not out in the field.
I was working in the library in the profession that I liked.
I said, "Well, I'll re-up until May when I'll have less
than three months to go."
So I did. One week after I re-upped, Tet Offensive.
And it changed life entirely.
I walked from my hotel to work that day.
I remember it so clearly even to this day.
There was nobody on the streets,
and usually the streets were teeming with people.
And I thought, "Well, it's like a holiday in the United States.
People are sleeping in."   They weren't.
They were -- Tom Wiener: They were --
Sharon Lenius: They were hunkered down because they knew.
Bill Sittig: They knew what was going on.
And you could hear popping around the area.
I got to the library, and there was some sergeants met me at the door
and said, "What are you doing out on the streets?"
And immediately took me to a nearby hotel
that housed American -- mainly civilians.
And I was there for the next -- I don't know how long it was.
About a week the library was closed.   Nobody went to work.
And I took guard duty for a week or so until things calmed down.
But the important thing is
after that occurred life was very different in Saigon.
Before then you could go out at night.
Life was fairly free.   After that, there were curfews.
You couldn't go anywhere non-escorted,
and it really changed the whole atmosphere.
People were much more on guard.
Life was much more dangerous even though I was, really, myself,
never in a very dangerous situation.
Right about the time of Tet, you could hear firing going on.
And if you went to, like, the roof of tall buildings,
you could see a lot of action.
Especially at night you would see flares off in the distance.
But, fortunately, nothing was ever terribly close to where I was.
Tom Wiener: Mm-hmm.   How about you, Fran?
Francis Buckley: Well, my hotel was right in front
of a small Buddhist temple.
And so at night, the night of Tet -- the day before Tet --
you know, there's a lot of banging and cymbals
and all this, gongs, going off.
And people had decorated their houses with streams of firecrackers.
You know, there was a lot of decoration on houses in the area.
And so at night, we went to bed with firecrackers going and, you know,
cymbals and gongs and what have you and got up the next morning,
and there was still firecrackers.
So I got dressed just like Bill and went downstairs to go to work,
and the MP at the door for our building said,
"You can't go out there."   You know, "They're having a war."
Tom Wiener:   [ Laughs ]
. Sharon Lenius:   [ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: So we were then all confined in our building.
Fortunately, there was an MP out front.
But as Bill said, the attitudes and way
in which people were living prior to the Tet
and after changed dramatically.
Before Tet, partly because a lot of the guys had used their weapons
to shoot up bars, there had been a directive,
"Don't carry your weapons.   Leave your weapons in your office.
Don't carry your weapons around town," your rifles.
And so when Tet occurred, there were three rifles and about 20 rounds
of ammunition in our whole hotel.
Because everyone's weapons were at their offices.
And so we took turns.
I had charge of quarters one night with one, you know, rifle.
And all of a sudden, I'm sitting at a desk in the lobby,
the guard is out front, and a shot comes whizzing into the lobby.
And I go like "Uh!"   Tom Wiener:
[ Laughs ]   . Sharon Lenius:
[ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: What am I going to do?
I have one rifle, you know?   And I can't see a thing.
It's lit inside, and it's black outside, and you know,
so I call out to the MP, "Oh,
someone going by just shot in," but it was nothing.
We aren't being attacked or anything.
But after Tet, then we all were instructed
to carry our weapons, you know, all of that.
It changed life considerably.
But, also though, prior to and after Tet,
the Viet Cong were mortaring the city.
I mean, mortars would land wherever they landed.
They were not aimed at something particular you know.
They would just lob the mortars in, and so it had to be very fatalistic
about life there, even before Tet.
You're walking the streets, the streets are teeming with people,
you're riding on these little cycolo   [ spelled phonetically ]
things where you're the front bumper in a bicycle thing, and you know,
snipers could be anywhere.
You know, there weren't a lot of Claymore mines,
but there were some occasionally.
And so just had to be a little fatalistic
about continuing your life and what you were doing.
One night, I'm sleeping away in my lower bunk, and I feel something.
And I look up; I can't see a thing, and then there's this hand coming
up from below tapping me on the shoulder saying,
"Those mortars are getting awfully close.
Don't you want to get under the bed?"
[ laughter ]   You know? And I said, "No!"
and rolled over --   [ laughter ]
-- and continued sleeping.
I was on the bottom bunk so that may have protected me.
But one time, actually, a mortar landed on a building
that was right next to the building that we used as the Service Center.
A building that was, sort of, four or five stories tall.
It hit on the top of that building and knocked bricks
and so forth off that, that plummeted down through the tile roof
of the Service Center and, you know, knocked boxes and bags of stuff all
around and so forth and blew out the windows.
I mean, fortunately this happened at night when no one was there.
But I came into work the next morning, and as I was walking
across the courtyard, I'm seeing glass and so forth.
And I said, "I'm going to have to get the maid
out here to clean this up."   And then I looked at my building,
and it had no windows -- Bill Sittig:
[ Laughs ]   . Francis Buckley: -- and so forth.
And I said, "Oops!"
Sharon Lenius: The Library Service changed a little bit after Tet.
What about attendance in the library itself?
Did that go down a bit or --
Bill Sittig: I think it did go down somewhat, you know,
right after Tet -- Sharon Lenius: Mm-hmm.
Bill Sittig: -- and then it gradually came back
to the pre-Tet levels.
Sharon Lenius: What about your experience, Fran?
Do you still have the book kits coming -- Francis Buckley: Oh, yes.
Yes. Yes. And, in fact, you know, that whole program, as people know,
was really so well appreciated by units that were out in the field.
We got wonderful letters from people who were at radar stations --
Sharon Lenius: Firebases.
Francis Buckley: Little firebases and so forth who had no access
to any of the Special Services functions.
And, you know, they were really out in the boonies and depending
on what they got from home in their mail and these book kits.
That was their connection with American civilization.
Bill Sittig: That was one of the most gratifying things to be
in the library when troops would come into Saigon say,
"I read some of the books you sent us"
or "listened to some of the tapes."
We didn't mention, but we had a very active music program.
In fact, I worked on that a number of months.
We taped music all the way from popular music, country music,
to opera and sent these tapes out into the field.
And that was greatly appreciated.
As I said, we served the allied troops that included --
we had many ROKS, Korean soldiers.   They came in.
And they loved listening to the music, especially country music.
[ laughter ]
And they loved listening to that music.
And they were so appreciative of what we did in that area.
Tom Wiener: When you say you made "tapes," were they reel-to-reels?
Bill Sittig: Reel-to-reel tapes.
Tom Wiener: This was before cassettes, right?
Bill Sittig: That's right.   Tom Wiener: Okay.
Sharon Lenius: Sounds like you had a varied experience
for a person just beginning -- Bill Sittig: Yes.
Sharon Lenius: -- in library.
And for you, adding to your experience
in text services, then, wasn't it?   Francis Buckley: Right.
As I said, it was very nice to have a budget of $20,000 a quarter.
At the end of the physical year, Miss Durbin came out to say, "Well,"
she really "had more money."   And could I "spend another $20,000?"
And when I got back to the Detroit Public Library
and told my department head --   [ laughter ]
-- that I'd been spending all of this money.
And here I was a new rookie librarian, you know,
only a year out of library school and in a traditional library
where I barely got to order one book, you know?
And here I'd been spending all this money, more than he had
in his whole book budget.   He was a little chagrined.
[ Laughs ]   . Sharon Lenius:
[ Unintelligible ]   . What about after Vietnam?
So went home in October?
Is that -- and you went home in May, right?
Bill? Bill Sittig: Yeah.   In May of 1968.
Tom Wiener: I'm curious about your reentry to America because there's
so many stories that Vietnam vets have told us
in the Veterans History Project about what happened
when they stepped off that plane in San Francisco or some
of the other cities that they were reentering the United States to.
What was your experience like?
Bill Sittig: My experience wasn't too bad.
I arrived back in San Francisco, and it turns out my brother,
who was also in the service -- he was an officer.
He had wanted to go to Vietnam.
I didn't. And they didn't send him because I was there.
[ laughter ]
He was living with a bunch of other guys in the service
in the San Francisco Bay area, and I used it as the opportunity
to visit him and stayed with him for about a week.
And the other people he was with had not been to Vietnam
so were very curious about my experiences.
And they were just eager to learn.
Some of them actually, eventually, did go to Vietnam,
so they were just very curious.
But I didn't have much opportunity to speak with civilians
about my experience, and I didn't go out of my way to tell them.
So since I was in a situation in Vietnam where I worked
with so many civilians, I didn't have a hard time readjusting.
I had not been in a battle situation with a lot of people
who had been fighting, so it was not a very difficult reentry situation
for me.
Tom Wiener: You didn't encounter any outright hostility
if you just casually said to someone, "I served in Vietnam"?
Bill Sittig: I really didn't, no.   Tom Wiener: Yeah.
How about you, Fran?
Francis Buckley: Well, I also didn't, you know,
have any hostile kind of reactions or anything.
I do remember earlier when I had R & R,
and I went to Hawaii to meet my wife.
I can distinctly remember getting off the plane and smelling flowers
and not the odorous smell of Saigon.   [ Laughs ]
. And then, you know, that situation was more or less repeated
when I came back to the States.
But I really didn't have negative reactions from the library staff
when I went back to work.
By that time there were more people being drafted out of the library.
I did join the Veterans Against the War and actually participated
in a couple of marches and so forth.
I'd gone in rather, I'll say, naive about the situation
and had not studied a lot.   Sort of was just over there.
But, actually, being there and seeing the life of the people,
meeting some of the Vietnamese who were there who were in college
who could speak English, and I had an interpreter and so forth,
and realized that there were just thousands of people
without any social service system to support them.
I mean, they were living on the streets with nothing
but the clothes on their back.
There was no public education system for the country.
There was no, you know, social service or support programs.
It was quite obvious that a socialist form
of government would be much better for the majority of these people.
And many of them were much more interested in a nationalist form
of government as opposed to the Tuen Ky
[ spelled phonetically ]
dictatorship that we were supporting.
So, you know, I couldn't see that there was overwhelming support for,
you know, our involvement and our participation there.
I, you know, developed more concern over our participation
and what I saw we were doing in the country and so forth.
It just really bothered me.
So I actually spoke at several big rallies in Detroit opposing the war.
Sharon Lenius: Had you ever gotten out to the countryside ever?
Bill? Fran?
Bill Sittig: I only got to the countryside once.
I went by chopper out to Cu Chi where many of the people I had gone
over there with, and it was
such a very different situation from Saigon.
I was glad I had seen it if only briefly.
And to tell you the truth, I was glad I was not out there.
It was very difficult, and even while I was visiting there only
for a couple of days, it was, you know,
rockets were being fired all over the place.
You could see patrols going out and people coming in with, you know,
wounds and it was just horrific.   It was war.
It was really war, right in the heart of war.
On the helicopter that we took back to Saigon,
we were fired upon several times.
The helicopter had to veer, and it was a war situation.
That's the only time I really ever got out of Saigon.
Francis Buckley: I really didn't get around the countryside other
than a couple trips back to Long Binh and so forth there.
Yes, the airplanes leaving the air bases would take off and go
up at the greatest angle as they could
so that they wouldn't get shot at and so forth.
I did have one of my roommates in my room in Saigon.
I was very fortunate.
In my room I was a draftee who'd ended up working
in the library in my profession.
Another roommate had also been drafted,
and he'd gotten a law degree before he was drafted,
so he'd ended up somehow being assigned
to the Judge Advocate General's Corps office in Saigon.
A third roommate was a fellow who, threatened with the draft,
had joined the Navy for four years, and he had a journalism degree.
And so he had signed up so that he could work in the press offices.
And so they taught him to operate a Teletype machine,
and he was assigned to be a clerk sending stories back
but not writing them, which was what he wanted to do.
So he was kind of irritated that his other two roommates were doing they
wanted to do and he wasn't able to do what he liked.
So he was always angling to try and write a story.
So he finally got someone who agreed he could go with a small flotilla
of ships that was going to resupply a naval outpost in the Delta,
and they were going to ride up some rivers to do this.
Unfortunately, I don't know, three or four ships,
sort of motor-boaty kind of ships I guess -- they were ambushed.
And Viet Cong on the shore just machine-gunned
across these people standing up there.
So he ended up being shot along with some of the other people.
And so he survived, and he was helicoptered back to Saigon,
and he was out at Tan Son Nhut, at one of the hospitals there.
And when I went to see him -- he survived the whole experience --
but a very grim and frightening kind of scene.
The hospital was same type of building they also built
for barracks: long frame building, two stories,
with slat walls and screening.
But the sidewalls were open slats so that air
and breeze could flow through.
And just long, open room with bed after bed after bed.
And because of the heat, they would not dress the wounds thoroughly
because they would have to come in every couple of hours and swab them
with antiseptic and so forth.
So they would lay bandages sort of across,
but not necessarily completely covering the wounds.
And it was just awful walking down this long row seeing, you know,
wounds, wounds, wounds of everybody.   But they were operated on.
They recovered.   And they were sent right back.
They weren't sent home or anything else.
I suppose many people were if they were injured sufficiently,
but most of these people were going to go right back into the fray.
Sharon Lenius: What an experience in Vietnam, huh?
What an experience.
Tom, do you have any further questions?
Tom Wiener: I think we can close with the obvious question: what,
in retrospect, did your military service mean
to your life in general?   Bill Sittig: Big question.
I think it was a growing experience for me.
It was certainly nothing I would have chosen
to do even though I also, like Fran,
was against the war even before I went in.
I was more so after I went, and I think it was important
that I did something for my country.
I think helping to support the troops even
if I did not agree what we were all doing,
I think that was an important service
to my country, and I was glad I did it.
And I think it was a broadening experience.
I was very, very fortunate in doing something
that was something I was able to contribute
because it was in my profession.   I met a wide range of people.
People that I made very good friends with.
People that I know I did not like, a type of person
that I did not like at all.
People that I thought were just wonderful human beings.
It was a very broadening experience I would not have had just leading my
regular life here.
Tom Wiener: You say you met some people
that you became good friends with.
Are there people from your Vietnam days that you've kept up with
over the years just because of that experience?
Bill Sittig: Fran is certainly the prime example.
Francis Buckley:   [ Laughs ]
. Bill Sittig: I don't think there are any others that I can think of.
Tom Wiener: You don't go to any reunions or anything?
Bill Sittig: No.   Tom Wiener: Fran?
Francis Buckley: Well, I'll just follow up on that,
because it made me think of something
when you said, "go to reunions."
For years and years and years I've deliberately not read the books,
not watched the movies, you know, not wanted to really revisit,
mentally, what might have happened to me.
Just going to the wall, to see the Vietnam wall a few years ago,
was a very emotional thing.
You know, you try to distance yourself,
or compartmentalize yourself in that situation and go forward
with what you have to do, but you know, when you think
about what might have been .
. . My wife and I were in New York a couple of years after that,
and we ended up going to see a play
that involved some violence and so forth.
I was almost under the seat, you know?
Tom Wiener: You don't feel that way about Vietnam
[ unintelligible ]
-- Francis Buckley: Not directly, no.
No. But, you know, I didn't realize that I had, you know,
this had affected me as much as it had mentally,
because I could do my normal things day-to-day and so forth.
But I also felt that I matured a lot in the situation, learned a lot.
I appreciated really getting to know much more
about the culture of the people there.
Their life and the way they lived and so forth.
As well as, I have to admit, the food was wonderful.
Tom Wiener:   [ Laughs ]
. Sharon Lenius:   [ Laughs ]
.   [ laughter ]
Francis Buckley:   [ Laughs ]
. Oh! We ate at, you know, French restaurants and Chinese restaurants
that were absolutely incredible.
They were considered to be the prized cuisine.
The Vietnamese cuisine was served, if you call it "cuisine."
It was the food served at neighborhood restaurants,
their neighborhood culture.   Sharon Lenius: Noodle stands and --
Francis Buckley: And noodle stands, yes.
Oh, I used to sometimes order Bai Yu   [ spelled phonetically ]
, the maid, to go to get me some soup or something,
and Ramona Durbin would say, "You're not going to eat
that off the street are you?"   [ Laughs ]
. You know?
But it was an interesting experience,
and in a sense I'm glad, you know, I survived.
I have some pictures that were brought back by a distant relative
who went to Spain to evade the draft of the Civil War.
It just didn't occur to me to try and go somewhere to evade the draft.
You know, it was sort of, like,
"Go because that's what your country has asked of you."
But I also felt that I had an obligation after that,
based upon my knowledge and experience
and personal observations, to express my political opinion
about what we were doing there, what we're doing now.
[ Laughs ]
. So I wouldn't have chosen to go, but, you know, you learn a lot.
Sharon Lenius: Well, we thank you very much for participating in this,
and -- Tom Wiener: Take some questions.
Sharon Lenius: -- Diane's going to come up and ask
if we want to take few questions.   Anybody have some questions?
I see a hand.
Female Speaker: Names of the hotel you stayed in.
Female Speaker: Yes.   [ laughter ]
Female Speaker: And would you repeat the question?
Tom Wiener: The lady wanted to know the names
of the hotels that they stayed in.   Do you remember?
Sharon Lenius: Or what street, or what -- Female Speaker:
[ Unintelligible ]
. Bill Sittig: I don't remember the name of the one I was in.
Francis Buckley: Mine was either the Plaza
or the Phoenix or something like that.
Female Speaker:   [ Inaudible ]
. Francis Buckley: Maybe the Plaza.
Yes. Tom Wiener: Assuming they're still both there.
Bill Sittig: Mine was a small one on a back street,
and I really don't -- Female Speaker:
[ Inaudible ]
. Bill Sittig: It's not one you'd want to go stay in I don't think.
[ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: What was the big one?
The Colonial or the Caravelle   [ spelled phonetically ]
or something.
Female Speaker: Continental -- Francis Buckley: Continental --
Bill Sittig: Continental.   Francis Buckley: -- yes.
Where all the newspaper people stayed and so forth.
[ Laughs ]
. Sharon Lenius: We have some more questions in the back?
Tom Wiener: Sir?   Sharon Lenius: Sir?
Bill Sittig: Yes?   Male Speaker:
[ Unintelligible ]
I had a feeling that you had a broad range of books
and viewpoints in your selection   [ unintelligible ]
in the field -- Sharon Lenius: Did you buy anything you wanted
to buy in your selection?
Bill Sittig: When I was involved with the program to send books
to the field, it was mainly recreational reading.
Light reading, you know.   Mysteries.
Westerns. I don't remember too much nonfiction at the time
that I was preparing the kits of paperback books.
We included, and I think Fran was more involved with the magazines,
that were magazines like Time and Newsweek that, certainly,
had articles that had different points of view in them.
Francis Buckley: Yes.
Bill Sittig: But the kits of paperbacks that went
out to the field were primarily recreational reading
that weren't heavy, you know, political reading or social science.
Francis Buckley: That's right in terms of the kits.
We did have in the library some books that were
on various aspects of the situation.
There's also a USIA library in Saigon that was supported
for Vietnamese who could read English.
And I went to visit there several times to talk to the librarian.
And they had had no restrictions on the books
that they had regarding the political situation et cetera.
But during my time there, for some reason, someone decided
that they had to censor what was available.
And so she had to send in all of the books that she had that dealt
with the situation in the country, and she got back
about six sanitized books that USIA would allow them to display.
Bill Sittig: But in the library used by the military
or by U.S. civilians, all points of view were in the library,
and they purposely wanted all points of view.
The command libraries, especially, wanted a wide range of opinion.
Sharon Lenius: Any other questions?   Yes, Pinai
[ spelled phonetically ]   ? Female Speaker:
[ Inaudible ]   . Tom Wiener: Any desire to go back?
Sharon Lenius: Or visit the area of Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City?
Would you go back if you had a chance?
Bill Sittig: Yes, I would.   I would go back as a tourist.
I would also like to see some of the places in Saigon where I was.
I don't know; I haven't kept up with many of the people.
As Fran said, I did make a number of friends
of the Vietnamese while I was there,
but I haven't really kept up those contacts.
I'm not sure I'd be able
to re-establish them this many years later, but I would want to go back.
Francis Buckley: I have had thoughts about the possibility of going back.
However, my wife has indicated very definitely that they took a year
out of her life -- Bill Sittig:   [ Laughs ]
. Francis Buckley: -- out of her life for a year,
and she wasn't going back -- Sharon Lenius:
[ Laughs ]   . Francis Buckley: -- there.
But I wouldn't mind going back.
It's a beautiful country, and the people were very,
very nice on an individual basis, you know.
Sharon Lenius: I think we have time for one more question.
Is there anybody else?
No? Then I'll turn it over Diane Schnurrpusch, and she can talk
about the rest of our program.   Diane Schnurrpusch: Thank you.
I'm going to recognize those librarians
that served in hostile areas.
And I'm going to start with the most recent.
And if these people would stand, at least for a few seconds
so we could all see them, I'd appreciate it.
First of all, Carla Pomager served in Bosnia
for several weeks in December of 2000.
And she was an Army librarian at the time.
Eileen Roark   [ spelled phonetically ]
was a volunteer librarian.
She was not in the Civilian Army service.
She was there at the National and University Library
of Sarajevo in the spring of 1998.
Pat Alderman was an MWR specialist --
MWR means Morale, Welfare and Recreation,
and they normally run libraries -- in Hungary, Bosnia, 1997.
Louise Latondra   [ spelled phonetically ]
. Louise was in several places in Vietnam.
She was, from 1972 to '73, she was in the command --
Sharon Lenius: The command librarian.
Diane Schnurrpusch: -- command librarian, I'm sorry.
[ Laughs ]   . Command librarian at Long Binh.
And from '73 to '75, she was with the Defense Attach's Office.
Thank you.   Female Speaker: Saigon.
Diane Schnurrpusch: In Saigon.   Thank you.
Ann Kelsey?
Ann was a Department of Army Civilian
with the Army Special Services libraries
in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970.   Sharon Lenius: In Saigon?
Female Speaker: Saigon,   [ unintelligible ]
-- Diane Schnurrpusch: My gosh.   Sharon Lenius: Hmm.
Diane Schnurrpusch: Thank you.   Sharon Lenius: Tour of the country.
Female Speaker:   [ Unintelligible ]
. Diane Schnurrpusch: And, finally,
you've heard this lady's name several times.
Ramona Durbin?
Ramona? Male Speaker: Where's Ramona?
[ laughter ]   Diane Schnurrpusch:
[ Laughs ]   . Ramona was in --
[ Laughs ]   .
[ applause ]
Ramona was in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968.
Prior to that, she was in Korea from 1958 to 1967.
She was in Germany and France in 1953 to 1958.
And she was with the Army Special Services.
So I'd like you to all give a round of applause
to all these people who served.   [ Laughs ]
.   [ applause ]
And to finish up, I would like to, again, mention Sharon Lenius.
I introduced her as one of the volunteers,
but she really was the person with the vision to do this.
And when Sharon gets a vision and starts running with it --
[ laughter ]   -- you all know what happens.
And it usually turns out very well.
And I also want to thank both of our veterans
and Mr. Wiener for their words tonight.
And I think they'll probably be available afterwards
for any other questions.   Thank you.
And let's give them a round of applause.
[ applause ]   [ end of transcript ]