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Oral History with Charles Watkins
April 28, 2011
Interviewer: Judkin Browning
Judkin Browning: It is Thursday, April 28 [2011]. My name is Judkin Browning and I am here
at Appalachian State University interviewing Charles Watkins, a professor in the History
Department here at Applachian State University, and the interview will begin now. Chuck, if I
may?
Charles Watkins: You may.
Browning: First of all, when and where were you born?
Watkins: I was born a poor, black sharecropper’s… oh, no wait [Dr. Watkins, who is white, was
joking, mimicking a line from the movie, “The Jerk.”] I’m sorry. I was born on February 4,
1946 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Browning: And when you joined the military, what branch of the service did you join?
Watkins: I joined the army under duress.
Browning: Ok. So please enlighten us on how you entered the army, obviously not voluntarily.
Watkins: Well, my family had moved to Delaware when I was a young kid and my father had
opened up a clothing business in the early 1950s, and in the mid-60s, he started having a series of
heart attacks while I was away at college. So I was having a very good time at college. I was in
the middle of my second senior year, and he had another heart attack, so I dropped out and went
home to basically run the business. And, as such, I had had a series of deferments, being in
college. I think I had actually had every deferment known to mankind. And, when I left school I
was able to get a hardship deferment because I was working for my father. And my dad died in
late December 1968, and technically my deferment, of course, died with him, and so then I began
to battle the draft board, which increasingly wanted me to make reports, in particularly business
reports. It so happened that one of my father’s rivals was on the draft board, and I figured if I
turned over my business records to the draft board I would be out of business the next day. So, I
thought that I could stand down the draft board, which proved to be an idiotic concept on my
part, because they finally had enough. And so they not only sent me a draft notice, they gave me
a week to report, and so I did what every good business man would do, I ran to my senator in
D.C., whose name was Caleb Boggs, and I moaned to him about the problem, about how unfair it
was and so on, and of course he said to me, “Gee, if you had just come before you were drafted I
could have helped you, but I can’t do anything after you are drafted.” So he sent me to the
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�Pentagon. So I had a nice chat with the people at the Pentagon, who basically said (laughing)
“That’s going to leave a mark.” So anyway, what I did was I found that I could enlist and get a
120-day delay, and it was my goal to try and sell the business in that period of time… I worked
on that and lo and behold the time came and off I went to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina.
Browning: What year was this when you eventually reported?
Watkins: I guess it was 1969, I don’t remember the date. I remember it was hotter than hell in
Fort Bragg. If you’ve ever been to Fort Bragg, you know they have these wonderful ants, and in
summer it’s hot as blazes and no matter where you sit down, the ants climb up your boot, and
start rolling up your pants leg there.
Browning: Let me ask you a question about how, for those who are uninitiated, how does the
draft process work? When you were a young man in college, how did you know that you had
been drafted? How did you get a deferment? What were the mechanics of that?
Watkins: You would be automatically deferred if you were actively enrolled in a college, or in
certain types of graduate school, like Divinity School would give you a deferment. You made
application for deferment, and you were given a classification. I think 2-S was a student
classification and 1-A was… you were ready to roll, as it were, you were unprotected. And you
got a draft card and it had your number on it. So colleges would report to the draft boards when
students graduated or unenrolled any longer, so it was an interesting system of “Gotcha,” if you
will. [Browning starts to speak]. I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but I think that I was drafted in
the last draft before the lottery was introduced, and I had a wildly high lottery number as I recall,
so I never would have been drafted. And I was reasonably old at that time for a draftee.
Browning: The lottery was in ’69.
Watkins: I was 22 or 23 years old. So I was… they caught me at the very end.
Browning: I believe the lottery was in December of ’69. So prior to the lottery, there was just an
understanding that if you were 18, you would be issued a number?
Watkins: You had to register with selective service just as I guess you do now. So you did that
and you requested a deferment.
Browning: So when you eventually enlisted, it was 1969. The Vietnam War had been in the
news for quite a while, especially with the Tet Offensive in ’68.
Watkins: Yeah.
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�Browning: What were your thoughts on, or did you have any thoughts about what was going on
in the Vietnam War during your college years, during your deferments?
Watkins: You know, I went to a Southern school, good ole Mars Hill College, favorite college
of the South. I like to brag that Mars Hill College is the only degree-granting reform school in
America at the time. (pause) When I left college in 1968, unless you were going to Yale or one
of the Ivy Leagues, or really any of the northern schools, people’s idea of the ‘60s really hadn’t
hit. So most of my classmates—my class was 1967, even though I didn’t graduate with it—most
of those guys, if they thought they were going to get drafted, they went ahead and enlisted, and it
was just one of those things that you did, you got out of the way. Now when I went back to Mars
Hill in the early ‘70s for a summer to get my degree, the place was plastered with anti-war stuff,
you know. The teachers had stuff on their doors, and all this kind of stuff, but that was really an
early ‘70s phenomenon for most places.
Browning: So did you, I mean, just following the news, did you have any thoughts on what was
going on overseas, or “when my time ends, I may end up there?” Or was it all so far away?
Watkins: It was all very, very, very far away. And it was not something that I thought that I
would be a part of. Because if you think about it, the draft system was a kind of social classifier,
in the sense that if you were not college bound or college trained, you might well go. Otherwise,
you could very easily escape it and avoid it.
Browning: So, back to your service—you entered in 1969, wound up in Fort Bragg in apparently
the summertime, and your boot camp experience was there? Any memories that you have?
What was boot camp like for you?
Watkins: well, the army is a wonderful place to be if you’ve been under a lot of pressure,
because you don’t have to make any decisions. You don’t have to pick out a tie in the morning.
You don’t have to figure out what you’re going to have for breakfast or when you’re going to
have breakfast, or if you’re going to have breakfast (laughing). The army takes care of all the
major decisions. Do you need to have a crap? Well, you have ten minutes here to do it in. It’s
now or never. So it’s very (pause) a simple life, shall we say? I had a great drill sergeant, whose
name was Churchill Graham. Churchill Graham was a great guy. He said, “Don’t ask, don’t ask
about my feelings about the war. I’m a professional soldier and I go where they tell me to go.”
And he didn’t want to hear any crap from anybody. He was an equal opportunity taskmaster. He
was black, but he didn’t care if you were black or white or green or yellow, as long you could get
down and give him 25 pushups when he needed it. He was a good role model, a good role
model.
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�Browning: Did you find the physical challenge of boot camp to be difficult for yourself?
Watkins: At first, because I had been out of school—I’d played soccer in college, and I had
been away from that for awhile—so I was out of shape. But I managed to quit smoking before I
went in, so that was a help. But the army knows how to get you into shape very quickly. They
are very effective at doing that.
Browning: So when you finished your time at boot camp, where were you—what was your
specialty, and where did you find yourself next?
Watkins: well, I, because of I guess the needs of the army at the time that I enlisted, I ended up
signing up to become a clerk. So they sent me to clerk school at Fort Jackson [Browning: in
South Carolina?] in South Carolina. And they ran three schools there, as I recall. They ran the
clerk school, and then they ran what they called spoon school, and that was to teach you how to
do mass cooking for the military, and they also had pole-climbers school, which you trained you
to climb up poles and fix communications lines. We all sort of trained together. I was… I didn’t
realize it at the time, but they were going to save my life, because they taught me how to type.
Basically, they taught me how to type by having a sergeant stand behind me and every time I
made a mistake, he hit me in the back of the head. And so I got damn good and accurate and
fast, real quick. So it was intensely boring.
Browning: How did that save your life? I’m just curious.
Watkins: Well, I’ll tell you a long story, Judkin, if I may. I got bored, and so I volunteered for
flight school. I thought that I was going to be sent down to learn how to fly Hueys. So off I
went to Fort Walters, Texas, where flight training took place. What I discovered was, (laughing)
we weren’t going to learn how to fly Hueys. What we were going to learn how to do was to fly a
little two-man bird called the Hughes—had a big, bubble top and a little boom on the back. And
what you basically did was you, if you were a pilot, you flew real low and real slow with a guy
who had a rifle, and you looked for people in foxholes. As romantic as the opportunity was, I
thought, you know, I’m not going to do this, because that gave me a four-year commitment, and
the deal at the time was—well, this is great. You go in, you graduate as a warrant officer, you do
12 months in Vietnam, and then they promote you to Lieutenant. Then you come back and you
spend a year out, and then you go back and you do another year in Vietnam, and then you come
back, if you come back, and you’re a Captain. I thought, well, you know, I’m not going to make
this a career, I don’t care if I’m a Captain or fraptain. They tell you at that time, when you’re
headed off to flight school—they say “look, you’re going to Vietnam, one way or the other.
You’re going to fly in Vietnam or you’re not going to fly in Vietnam, but either way, you’re
going to Vietnam.” So I thought, well, okay, you know, the hell with this, I’ll take my poison up
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�front. So I dropped out, and of course I got orders to Vietnam as I knew I would. I expected that
they would make me a door-gunner…
Browning: on a helicopter?
Watkins: On a helicopter, or I would be assigned to an Av Company in some regard. But, lo
and behold, I stayed in Cam Ranh…
Browning: That’s Cam Ranh Bay.
Watkins: Cam Ranh Bay. What I discovered was—I did not know it—but I possessed at the
time the most valuable skill that the army needed. I could type. Who knew? And so I ended up
being a clerk with a Headquarters company there.
Browning: Did you find yourself thanking that sergeant who beat you in the back of the head at
Fort Jackson?
Watkins: Yeah, it was good, you know, because quite frankly—you might want to turn the tape
off—but you know, as far I knew, they could have sent me to Fire Base Fuck You in a heartbeat
(laughter). But it was better to be at Cam Ranh.
Browning: So when you were sent to Vietnam, do you remember when it was that you arrived in
country?
Watkins: It was sometime around Thanksgiving.
Browning: of ’69?
Watkins: Yeah.
Browning: Did you serve twelve months?
Watkins: Yeah. See, that’s a funny way to fight a war because, you know as soon as you get
there, you are given a date—it’s called the DEROS date: Date Eligible to Return to the States I
think is how the acronym works out. So let’s say you go on December the 25th, well you know
on Dec. 24 the following year, you’re going to be out of there. So it doesn’t encourage you to
take risks, I don’t think. Because, now we were housed next to a bunch of troops from the
Republic of Korea, known colloquially as ROKs. They were very, very difficult people, and one
of the reasons why they were thought to be very difficult people was because they were there
until the war was won. Which means that every night the ROKs pounded the shit out of
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�somebody all night long with artillery fire, and you know, I never had any bad experiences that
would give me flashbacks, but when I came back I found that it took me months to go to sleep at
night with quiet, because I was used to artillery fire all night long, and that took some time to go
away.
Browning: What were your duties primarily while you were at Cam Ranh Bay?
Watkins: I filled out forms.
Browning: You weren’t actually loading and unloading so much?
Watkins: No, although I was with an outfit called the 124th Transportation Command, and if
you’ve ever seen these big SEALAND vessels were container ships basically, sailing container
ships, and we’d unload them primarily using local labor. The material would be divided up and
we would send truck convoys all over the place in the central part of Vietnam, so you’d go to
Pleiku and Buon Ma Thuot, and Nha Trang, all kinds of interesting places and we would send
those things out with what were known as hard trucks. They were supposed to be armored
vehicles, but we made them armored by putting sandbags in the bottom of the truck and screw a
couple of M-60s on the side, and that’s your protection.
Browning: As part of your time in Vietnam, did you ever visit other parts of the countryside?
Did you ever make your way to Saigon, for instance, or any other places besides Cam Ranh?
Watkins: (pause) I never actually went to Saigon proper. I went a couple of times to Tan Son
Nhut Air base, to the international terminal, where… because I took a leave back in the states,
and you end up back there on your way out. Never saw Saigon. I went on… we used to call
these things Civic Action Missions, where you go out and theoretically help the populace, and so
I did some of those and I realized that my captain wasn’t reading the intelligence reports before
we left, and at one point we had a MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] advisor who
showed up and said basically, “what in the hell are you people doing out here?”
Browning: This is a hot zone?
Watkins: Yeah, I mean, you know, here we are wandering around in a convoy of jeeps.
Browning: Now did you ever experience any combat or engage in a firefight, or witness one
taking place?
Watkins: No, no. I have no war stories. The only problems that we had really involved
rockets. I don’t like rockets. And Charley would try to hit the SEALAND ships by setting up
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�these rockets and try to nail the ships. The only problem was they didn’t have a guidance
system, and so sometimes the rockets would end up in odd places, like my company compound,
for example. I thought for God’s sake, you know, we’re the most industrialized country in the
world, can’t we give these people a guidance system so they wouldn’t kill us accidentally. And
every now and then sappers would come in and they’d blow the place up. But other than that.
Browning: It makes me think, Cam Ranh Bay makes me think of the scene in “Forrest Gump”
when he first arrives in Vietnam. Have you seen that movie?
Watkins: You know, I did see Forrest Gump.
Browning: and he first arrives in Vietnam, and they’re playing the Credence Clearwater Revival
song, “Fortunate Son,” and Forrest Gump’s narration says when I first got to Vietnam the thing
that I was surprised about was, something to the effect of the amount of beer, because they’re
having a big barbecue when they first arrive in country. I didn’t know if that movie or any
Vietnam war movie that you’ve seen if you thought that these people are getting it wrong, or
that’s somewhat similar to what I remember over there.
Watkins: You know, except for “Forrest Gump,” which I don’t think is really Vietnam.
Browning: No, it just has a scene.
Watkins: I have deliberately never watched Vietnam films. I think I’ve seen snippets from two.
I remember seeing the river scene from… what was that film taken from Heart of Darkness?
Browning: “Apocalypse Now.”
Watkins: “Apocalypse Now.” Some very dark and weird scene.
Browning: So you’ve never seen the Robert Duvall Air Cav scene?
Watkins: No.
Browning: The classic scene of that movie.
Watkins: No. But the other scene I saw was, I think it was “Platoon,” and I came upon this
accidentally. But whoever the main characters were, I think there were three of them. You and I
may have had this discussion before—but they’re all standing around having a chat while
somebody is burning shit in the background. And, I’m a guy of fastidious manners, and I like
privacy, and there is no privacy, certainly in the war. And so you discovered that if you needed
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�to have a bowel movement, there was a place to do that, a small building euphemistically called
“the shitter.” And it consisted of about a board with maybe 8 holes in it, and underneath the
holes were half of 50-gallong oil drums and that’s where the waste material went, and every
morning, a Papa-san, an older Vietnamese gentleman would come by and put a handkerchief
around his face, like he was holding up a grocery store, and he would take gasoline and he would
pull out all those drums with a stick and he’d pour gasoline in those drums and then he’d light
them all on fire. And, you can imagine the worst thing that you’ve ever smelled in your life and
multiply that by a factor of 100 and you’re not even close to what that stuff smells like. You
don’t want to be anywhere close to that. and the fact that these three guys are standing there
talking in the middle of this is so absurd. When Papa-san or anybody else would go on holiday
for Tet, that meant somebody else had to do that. and the person that had to do it was the last
guy who’d shown up in the company, and we used to outfit that guy, whoever it was, in what
amounted to a 1969 HAZMAT suit, you know with a gas mask on and everything else, and
they’d still be half dead. It was just a very unpleasant experience. I don’t like to watch Vietnam
movies, but that one fascinated me just to watch that scene, because who’s the director of that?
Browning: Oliver Stone.
Watkins: Oliver Stone. He’s supposed to be a big Vietnam vet.
Browning: He had served a tour over there.
Watkins: So he says. Well, I don’t know how anybody who ever served a tour in Vietnam
(laughing) would have been able to do that scene. Because anybody who’s ever been near that
would understand how absurd that is.
Browning: Now I remember that you mentioned to me before that—I had asked you earlier, off
the record—about the climate in Vietnam. I wonder if you could remark on that again. What
you encountered when you got off the plane, and a lot of people are “Oh my god!”
Watkins: Well, it was hot, it was real hot. But the climate to me was just like Delaware. It just
had a more garbage-y smell than Delaware. The funny thing is, speaking of movies, because you
land at Cam Ranh on a jet, at the time I was there they flew Flying Tigers, and so they didn’t
want the jet to be on the tarmac for very long because you start to attract mortar fire, so you go
off the plane and another group of guys gets on the plane. It’s a very surreal experience, because
you’re getting off and you’re in your jungle togs, and they’re just fresh from the factory,
everything’s clean. And the guys who are getting on the airplane. They looked like they’d been
through hell, I mean, their clothers are all ripped and all that. and there was a guy in front of me,
getting off the plane—and the lines pass, you know, you can talk to each other—and he looks
over at this guy getting on the plane, and he’s obviously very nervous and he said, “how was it,
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�man?” (laughing) and the guy looks at him and he says—I’ll never forget this—he said, “It was
the worst movie I was ever in,” (laughter) and he kept on going. And I thought, well, there you
go. And that really kind of describes the situation. You know, it’s why everybody talks about
“when I go back to the world,” or “when I get back in the real world,” and at first that doesn’t
make any sense, but after a while it does.
Browning: and did you find that while you were in country in Vietnam—obviously Vietnam is
much talked about in the years following the war and in the years of the war—did you when you
were in country, did you find you and your comrades discussing the war in any way, greater
mission, why are we here? Or were you just counting down the days until you.
Watkins: No.
Browning: Not many philosophers in the organization?
Watkins: No. Not too many people want to (pause) discuss the philosophical aspects of things.
You know what your day is, and you want to be around for that day. That’s the only thing.
Browning: So your day came around Thanksgiving of 1970?
Watkins: Yeah. As I recall, and this may be incorrect, but I remember having Thanksgiving
dinner twice that year, because we were flying back. But I couldn’t get on the first flight, and I
remember I was standing there, and I had given away all my other sets of jungle fatigues that I
had. I had only had one pair of boots for about 4 months. They wouldn’t give you any more,
and one of mine had fallen apart. I’m standing there and it’s raining like hell, and I missed the
flight, couldn’t get on it, gotta wait for the next one. “What’s that God-awful smell? Did
somebody dump their garbage or something?” And then I realized it was me. I was out there
and I just smelled like an old wet dog. And I wanted to keep that set of fatigues, you know, as a
souvenir and the boots, and finally I threw them in a trash barrel, and I put on a pair of Class A
khakis that I had. You know, it’s hard to stay clean, and it does accumulate.
Browning: When you returned to the States, what consisted of your remaining service once you
got back?
Watkins: Well, I had orders to go to an MP company in Fort Belvoir outside of Washington.
But clerks and Spec 4s, they always know what’s going on in the army, and it became known
that good duty could be had in what were called AFES stations, these were induction stations. If
you could get assigned to an induction station, you weren’t on a military base, and you lived
basically a civilian life, except for the time that you spent at the station. They get you an
apartment and this sort of thing, and I was getting married anyway, and so I had orders to AFES
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�station in Charlotte, NC. So I had somewhere around a year left, so I gave mental tests to people
who didn’t always want to take them.
Browning: Did you also have to judge the tests, or judge the results?
Watkins: Yeah, we would score the tests. And it was really great training because you learn
how to add up really long columns of numbers in your head to save time. You score these things
real quickly. At the time it was the AFQT, the Armed Forces Qualification Test, and then
another test called the AQB, Army Qualification Battery, I think, and so you’d be done at 12 or 1
or 2 o’clock in the afternoon and you could go off and do whatever you wanted to do.
Browning: So you said you were getting married anyway, were you engaged while you were in
Vietnam?
Watkins: Yeah, I was.
Browning: Communication was almost exclusively letters?
Watkins: Yeah, entirely letters. The idea of making a phone call was—you were in another
world.
Browning: How often did you have correspondence with your future wife?
Watkins: I did not have correspondence with that woman, my wife [Dr. Watkins is again joking]
Browning: (laughing) I’m sorry I should have phrased it differently.
Watkins: I don’t really remember. We’d get mail once or twice a week maybe. Sometimes
there’d be a letter, sometimes there wouldn’t. Just depended. Sometimes you get a bunch of
them at one time.
Browning: When were you officially decommissioned, if you will, from the army?
Watkins: I got an early out, to go back to school, sometime in ’73, I guess. I don’t remember
actually.
Browning: Was it a four year commitment that you had?
Watkins: It was three year commitment. So I went in last ’69…
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�Browning: Somewhere in late ’72 or early ’73?
Watkins: Yeah, something like that.
Browning: And so you said you went back to Mars Hill College?
Watkins: I did, I went back to Mars Hill.
Browning: And finished your Bachelor’s [degree]?
Watkins: Yeah.
Browning: And from there?
Watkins: I came to Appalachian for about nine months, because at the time I was interested in
going to law school, and no law school would take me. I was being turned down by night law
schools that largely took cops, you know, that wanted to get out of “copdom.” A friend of mine
said… and secondly, although I am usually—I probably shouldn’t admit this—I am usually
amazingly adept at taking standardized tests. I am really good at it. Well, I couldn’t score high
on the LSAT to save my life. All the answers looked right. (Laughter) And having given mental
tests, you know I was very adept at testing strategy. So I knew how to maximize the score by,
essentially by manipulating how I answered the questions. Well, it was absolutely not helpful
whatsoever, and I thought, well, you know, I don’t think I’m stupid, but I need 200 more points
on this thing. So a friend of mine said look, you need to go to Appalachian, said they’ll take
anybody, and then you know you can use that transcript for grades. And amazingly, while I was
here I took a course in constitutional law from a guy in Political Science who had both a Law
degree and a Ph.D., and that’s how I learned how case law was built, and I realized how you
actually made the determination on the LSAT, but I was interested in museum work also, and I
had a chance to go to Delaware, so away I went. That was the end of law school.
Browning: So you acquired your Ph.D. at Delaware?
Watkins: Yeah.
Browning: What year was that?
Watkins: ’82.
Browning: And then soon after that you wound up back here.
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�Watkins: Well, yeah, I mean I had worked for a couple of years. When I left Delaware, I got a
job as a museum director in Pennsylvania. I had the dissertation completed, researched, and
everything written but two chapters, so I left in 1980. And it took me two years to write those
last two chapters, because the work was pretty intense. So that worked out well.
Browning: Obviously, you’re at Appalachian now. What year were you formally hired here?
What year did you join?
Watkins: I came in 1984.
Browning: And been here ever since?
Watkins: Yep.
Browning: I guess the final question I should ask you, being an oral history interview for a
military veteran, is: when you look back on your military experience, do you see any… what
value do you see? Life lessons or anything that it taught you? What of intrinsic value would you
say your service gave to you?
Watkins: Well, Judkin, I can honestly say to you that I hated every goddamn day that I served in
the U.S. Army. I got up every morning and I said, “I hate this fucking army.” I’m insuring that
you will never be able to play this tape.
Browning: You are not insuring that.
Watkins: But the army… I was a snotty, superior kid. And being a private in the army was the
greatest experience that I could have, because it threw me in with people I never would have
been involved with. And it taught me that except for a very few number of morons at the
bottom, and a few Mensa people at the top, the difference in intelligence between our smart
people and our dumb people—it ain’t that much. So, when I think of William Buckley’s great
quote, that he’d rather be governed by the first 20 or 50 or 100 people in the Boston telephone
directory than the Harvard faculty… I don’t know if he understood exactly what he meant, but I
understood what he meant, and that is, if you have to rely on the average intelligence of the
American public, you’re going to be okay. Because there’s not much difference between
whether they got a high school diploma or a doctorate—they’re about the same. And that was a
real good experience for me to have. You learn how to get along with people who sometimes,
you know, don’t want to get along.
Then the army ruins you in a certain other way. If you need sympathy, or you need
coddling, or you need psychological assistance, the army would not be the place to look for that.
The army doesn’t care if you don’t feel well today. They don’t care if your knee hurts. They
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�don’t care if your nose is running. They don’t care if somebody has just shot at you with an M60. They just want to know a simple question: did you accomplish the mission or didn’t you?
And so that becomes the deal. They teach you to get the job done. No moaning, just get it done.
Nobody wants to hear the grisly details. And so that’s good to know, and frankly, I probably
would never have gone back to college without the GI Bill. It enabled me to have time to do
what I wanted to do without the need to get a job right away. So I got a lot out of that as a result.
So it’s a good thing.
Sometimes…. I remember one night…. I’ll tell you a war story here, but anyway. We
seemed to be being blown up, and I was dropped on a hill with an M-60 machine gun, a tripod,
and a box of ammo. And it was pitch black out. And I was gonna defend the hill. Hoorah. It
was just one problem. I had never fired an M-60 machine gun, and I had never loaded an M-60
machine gun, and so after about half an hour of trying to figure out how to put a belt in the damn
thing, I just sat there next to the gun and waited to see what would happen. But you know they
give you a lot of leeway for experimenting. You done?
Browning: Well, Chuck, I thank you very much for the time you took to tape this interview.
It’s been very enlightening, informative, and entertaining. Thank you very much.
Watkins: I do my best.
THE END
13
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Appalachian State University American Military History Course Veterans Oral History Project
Description
An account of the resource
Each semester, the students of the American Military History Course at Appalachian State University conduct interviews with military veterans and record their military experiences in order to create an archive of oral history interviews that are publicly accessible to researchers. The oral histories are permanently available in the Appalachian State University Special Collections. The project is supervised by Dr. Judkin Browning, Associate Professor of History at Appalachian State University and all interviews are transcribed by the student interviewers.
Copyright Notice:
Copyright for the Veterans Oral History Project’s audio and transcripts is held by Appalachian State University. These materials are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Veterans Oral History Project, University Archives and Records, Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC).
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed.
Watkins, Charles
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview.
Browning, Judkin
Interview Date
4/28/2011
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
0:42:34
File name
2013_063_Watkins_Charles_interview
2013_063_Watkins_Charles_transcript
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Charles Watkins, 28 April 2011
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Browning, Judkin
Watkins, Charles
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a title="UA.5018. American Military History Course Records" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/167" target="_blank">UA.5018. American Military History Course Records</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright for the Veterans Oral History Project's audio and transcripts is held by Appalachian State University. These materials are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used.
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
13 pages
Language
A language of the resource
English
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Subject
The topic of the resource
Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Veterans
Watkins, Charles
United States
Interviews
Personal narratives, American
Description
An account of the resource
Charles Watkins talks about his service as a typist in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. He spent a year overseas, and finished his 3-year service contract conducting mental health tests in the US.
1969
AFQT
Appalachian
Cam Ranh Bay
Charles Watkins
Churchill Graham
deferment
Fort Bragg
Fort Jackson
Mars Hill
private
typist
Vietnam