Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
4:08 | He was happy that he could get a hamburger at the American Compound, but the real happiness for ARVN advisor Brad Snyder came from helping the nuns and children at the orphanage near the compound. He got the Seabees to dig a well for them which meant they no longer had to carry water with baskets and poles.
Brad Snyder went from the Citadel into basic training, which was cut short by the Cuban Missile Crisis. The next stop was the 8th Armored Cavalry which had the only nuclear weapon in the Army's arsenal. Thankfully, that was never deployed during the first ever division versus division war games.
The first thing that got his attention when he arrived in Vietnam was the smell, followed by the temperature, the humidity and the motor scooters. Assigned to advise a South Vietnamese armored unit, he was humbled when his counterpart was older, more experienced and had been to more armor schools in the states than he had. As for the Vietnamese people, he loved them and was proud to be helping.
The ARVN unit he advised was a reactionary force, usually sent on short operations to chase away encroaching enemy forces. During one of these firefights, he was helping a wounded man when his beret was knocked off. The advisors wore the hats of their host units for unit cohesion, but he realized he was crazy for being in a firefight without a helmet. As soon as he put it on, a guy with an AK-47 stood up and did a John Wayne.
Brad Snyder tells the story of the chaplain who came to his bedside at a MASH hospital in South Vietnam and scared the hell out of him by giving him the last rites, "just in case." That chaplain eventually became Cardinal John O'Connor, the Archbishop of New York, but not before Snyder tracked him down and gave him some grief.
He lost an eye to a VC bullet but the good news was that he was going to live. The bad news was that his military career was over. Serving in that war was a life changing event for him as it was for so many, and he reckons that the best day of his deployment was the day he managed to get a well dug for an orphanage.
Even though Brad Snyder was booed and spit on when he returned from Vietnam, the full meaning of the public's anger at this war was lost on him until he was invited to speak at Harvard. His contact advised him to not wear his uniform. What? He goes on to describe his thoughts on the war's legacy, the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial and the all volunteer military.
