Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
7:12 | It was a nice reel-to-reel tape recorder. Barry Hirschberg had bartered for it as his unit was scrambling to leave Vietnam. It never made it to the States and it took him a while as well. First they sent him to Schofield Barracks where he did a lot of weed whacking. When he did get home he had to remove his uniform to keep from getting hassled in his own country.
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Barry Hirschberg had dreams of rock and roll stardom so he went on the road with a band but a few years of that wore him down. He got a job at the airport but the letter came one day and the letter said, "Greetings."
They went in one door with long hair and bell bottoms and came out another door with no hair and fatigues. Barry Hirschberg had a good DI who did thing's a little differently. The boots policed themselves so it must have worked. (Caution: strong language)
Selected for NCO Candidate School, Barry Hirschberg headed to Fort Benning where the training was sort of Ranger Lite. Now a sergeant, he was assigned to Fort McClellan where he befriended a Lieutenant with a nice new electric guitar. That friendship delayed his inevitable trip to Vietnam.
It was like a movie. The train pulls away, he looks back, his wife slowly fading back on the platform. It was a hard moment for Barry Hirschberg. When he got to Vietnam, the Shake and Bake NCO was assigned to the Mobile Riverine Force. He would be living on the water down in the delta. (Caution: strong language)
The missions were Search and Destroy. Barry Hirschberg was part of the Mobile Riverine infantry and they would be dropped off by boat for these missions and get picked up a few days later. You were wet all the time and there were leeches to contend with.
C-rations were the usual meal but Barry Hirschberg had hot food brought to the field every now and then. For him the field meant jungle and rice paddies in the Mekong Delta. There were three things that scared him in Vietnam, two of them had to do with the Viet Cong but the third was a insect.
As in other wars, the grunts in Vietnam in some ways viewed their enemies as less than human. There was always a pejorative term and, to be successful in combat, you had to see it as it's either him or me. That's just war. But as Vietnam was beginning to wind down, the brass began to play games with a new statistic, the body count.
Talk about lucky! Not only was the 9th Infantry the first unit scheduled to go home, but the last month of his tour, Barry Hirschberg was made company armorer. That meant he didn't have to go out in the field.
For Barry Hirschberg, Vietnam wasn't a war but an era, part of the vibrant mosaic of the Sixties. A musician himself, it was the music of the Sixties that, in his mind, would always be the best music there is. When he thinks about his days in Vietnam, he has empathy for anyone there who's life he may have affected.
When Barry Hirschberg was asked to lay a wreath at a Veterans Day commemoration, He wondered if he would be asked to speak. Just in case, he wrote a poem.
