Overview 

For this project I interviewed my grandfather about his experience in the Vietnam war. Some of the topics covered in this interview will be how he joined the air force, his experience within the air force, experiences flying, what his family life was like during the war, and about life returning home. The Vietnam War was a conflict that lasted from 1954 to 1976. It started as a war within Vietnam between North Vietnam and South Vietnam over the type of government that the entire nation should have and if it should be communist or not. It was not until 1965 that America joined the war supporting the south. They joined due to the domino theory. This was a theory that if a country fell to communism, then the surrounding countries would do the same. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the President at the time, and he believed in the domino theory. He then sent US troops into Vietnam in 1954.

This was a war that was surrounded by controversy, lots of people back home were not in support of the involvement of the United States. This was also one of the first wars that had very high media coverage. There were lots of journalists across the country writing and bringing stories back to the United States. This helped keep people informed, but it also led to a growth of negative opinions from the general public. When Vietnam soldiers returned home at the end of war, the expected to have a similar welcoming to those in WWII. However, this was not the case; they were met with a negative response that is also discussed in this interview. By the end of the war, there were around 58,000 American deaths.

Biography: Quick fought in the Vietnam war and was in the air force. He joined in September of 1962 and left September of 1971. He flew 1142 combat missions with 1080 combat hours. During the war he was married and had a child in 1970. Before the war he was a journalist for The Washington Post. 

Research

Daddis, Gregory A. “The Vietnam War and American Military Strategy, 1965–1973.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2 Mar. 2015, Vietnam War and American Military Strategy, 1965–1973 | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

Peer reviewed.

Given that the interview is done with someone in the air force finding an article that has to do with military strategy was beneficial. The article does a great job going over the military strategies for this war and how it progresses throughout. This was posted in 2015, which is not very current. However, the Vietnam war was over by 1973 so this article is not outdated. This is connected with Oxford which is held in very high regard. All the information in this article is correct, I did some lateral research to confirm certain things, and it was all right. In the about section of this page, it is mentioned that everything within this Encyclopedia is peer reviewed that is continuously updated by the world’s leading scholars and researchers.

Hawkins, Kari. “Story of Vietnam Shared through Lives of Wives.” Story of Vietnam Shared Through Lives Of Wives | Article | The United States Army

“The Vietnam War (Article) | 1960s America.” Khan Academy, Khan Academy, The Vietnam War (article) | 1960s America | Khan Academy        Peer reviewed.

The featured image is from the Smithsonian. Vietnam | Smithsonian Institution (si.edu)   

Transcription: 

Jonas Kerlin  0:17   

How’s it going? 

  Quick  0:18   

Good, how are you? 

Jonas Kerlin  0:21   

I’m good. I just had dinner. It was very yummy. 

Quick  0:25   

Good. Yeah, we just had pizza. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  0:29   

Well, cool. Before we start, do you have any? Any questions? 

  

Quick  0:34   

Don’t think so.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  0:39   

Okay, so based off what I’ve heard in the past, before you joined the air force you were a sportswriter. How did you feel leaving that job?  

  

Quick  0:48   

I felt good leaving the job. 

  

Um, so the full story is, I graduated with a journalism degree, and I worked for the Washington Post. So, I went on the air force as an Information Officer, which is a journalist pipe job 

  And my roommate and I decided to apply for pilot training. And, surprisingly, we were both accepted, very rigorous process. So, at that point, I thought I was gonna go fly airplanes for a while, stay in the Air Force, come back as an information officer with a credibility of being a pilot with a lot of metals and stuff. But then I decided I would rather have people do things that people write about, than write about things that people do. So that was the end of my journalism career. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  2:04   

Gotcha. So, in terms of joining the Air Force, you were not drafted you ugh, you like volunteered to join?  

  

Quick  2:11   

Yeah, I didn’t really have a choice, much choice. When I graduated from college, I either needed to volunteer for one of the three services or I would have been drafted.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  2:26   

I see. 

  

Quick  2:27   

Like, I would have passed the physical and I wasn’t married, I don’t have children. And so, and I was looking for an adventure. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  2:39   

Yeah, that’s cool. 

  

So-  

  

Quick  2:43   

Go ahead.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  2:45   

Sorry.  

  

Quick  2:47   

No, you go ahead. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  2:50   

Next question is, before the war, would you describe, like the society sort of on edge about the possibility of a war in Vietnam? Or where people not seeming very concerned, or they’re not super concerned? 

  

Quick  3:04   

I think people were upset. Because at your age, Jonas, if you had not been in college, you would have been drafted, would have had to go, you would have had to go to Vietnam. You wouldn’t have, you would have had to be enlisted, you wouldn’t have been an officer because you didn’t have a college degree. And people were getting killed over there. And they didn’t want to go. And it got there were a whole lot of antiwar protests going on. And what people didn’t do that, because they were unable to separate the war from the warrior. I mean, probably more than half of the people in Vietnam had been drafted. And probably almost the other half volunteered, because it was a better way to go than being drafted. Almost nobody, very few people were over there because they wanted to be.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  4:12   

Mhm  

  

Quick  4:12   

And so, the population was pretty upset, you know, their, their kids, their friends or grandchildren were all getting killed in Vietnam. And nobody was really sure why. Just the way some people were reacting against the war. In Ukraine, it’s pretty obvious to me that the Russians will just keep picking off the adjacent countries if they aren’t stopped, but probably 40% of the US population thinks we shouldn’t be there and it’s a waste of money and we should just With the Russians habits it’s kind of the same way. Yes. We shouldn’t be there. And so, so when I came home from the war, people were pretty nasty to me. They’re kind of holding us responsible for the war, which of course, we had nothing to do with. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  5:36   

Okay, um, yeah, I was reading that there was a very negative response from a lot of society in terms of the war. And like you said, with the separating warrior from the war, moving back to the Air Force specifically. Was there a reason that you chose that specifically, besides just wanting to like, fly or anything along those lines? 

  

Quick  6:01   

I had a childhood dream of being a pilot.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  6:05   

That’s cool.  

  

Quick  6:07   

My two childhood dreams for being a sports writer and being a pilot, and I got to love both of them out.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  6:13   

That’s wonderful.  

  

Quick  6:14   

Yes. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  6:16   

You mentioned that there were lots of lives being lost. And talking to you, (in the past outside of the recording) you have mentioned that there were times that some of your friends had been, had like passed away during the war, and stuff along those lines. How did that impact morale and relationships with your fellow pilots? 

  

Quick  6:38   

We believe we were invincible. So like, you probably believe death is something that happens to other people, but it’s never gonna happen to you. So surprisingly, it didn’t really, I didn’t wake up in the morning thinking, oh my God, I’m gonna die today. And one of the ways we handled it is whenever somebody we knew did get killed, mostly flying people, we would sit around and talk about what a stupid mistake they made. And I’d never make that mistake. It was just a way to rationalize it. So, I don’t think anyone stayed up late at night worrying about dying. We just didn’t think it was going to happen to us. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  7:36   

Interesting.  

  

Quick  7:38   

There’s a poem, I think by Byron called on youth belief and immortality. That’s kind of what was going on there. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  7:50   

Interesting. Oh, can you tell me about the Tet Offensive? [The Tet offensive was an offensive across Vietnam on Tet. Tet is a national holiday in Vietnam, it is a very large celebration. Because of that, no one expected attacks on that day.] And how and like your personal experience with that? 

  

Quick  8:08   

Yeah, I this is almost toward the end of my two years. And so, we heard the shelling of the base school, we lived off base in Saigon. There wasn’t enough room on the base for housing. So, we were housed in various seedy [bad or negative] places. And the place we were staying at that time had a roof. You could go up on the roof. And we could see the shells hitting the base. And so, they got us out of there pretty fast. And when we came back to our quarters the guard was dead, we figured he’d run for it, but he didn’t. He was a mercenary, and obviously the bad guys had been there, but none of us were there at the time. So, it was very exciting. 

Flying is, you know if you’re going to fly airplanes in the Air Force, you want to be in a war. That sounds weird, but it’s true. Because that’s where the good flying is. Right now, Pilots are lucky to get- it’s so expensive. They’re lucky to get 10 or 15 hours of actual flying a month. And the rest of it is usually in the simulator. We’re flying 100 120 hours a month. I got more flying time while I was in the Air Force in like seven years of flying, then most people got a 40 year career in flying is motor skills so we got better through repetition. And we were all pretty good. By the time war was over, and it’s fun, flying, it sounds weird to say people are shooting at you and it’s fun. But a lot of the rules went out the window, we got to do a lot of things that we would not have been allowed to do in peacetime and got to use their own judgment a lot. And so, Ellen [his partner] thinks it’s bizarre. If I were to say, I actually enjoyed the war. But I enjoyed the flying part of the war.  

Jonas Kerlin  10:52   

Yeah, I’m sure the adrenaline rush part was significant. 

  Quick  10:59   

Yeah, that’s good. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  11:02   

What kind of flying did you do specifically? 

  

Quick  11:04   

So, I flew in Vietnam, I flew a C 130, which is a four engine turbo prop, which means that jet engines are powering or turning a shaft that turns a propeller. It’s the most powerful cargo plane ever built. The first one came off the assembly line in 1954. And they’re still building them.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  11:38   

Yeah, I was in Arkansas recently. And I saw some while there. 

  

Quick  11:43   

Yeah, and they’re still today, their airplanes rolling off the assembly line. And the airframe is pretty much identical, the engines have changed, the propellers have changed, and the instrumentation and the electronics have changed, but the basic airplanes same. It was a way for an airplane to fly, overpowered so you could take off from short deals. But all that power and the control surfaces you could apply slowly meant that when you were flying fast, it flew like a fighter plane. You could do you could do aerobatics in it and never let me down. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  12:32   

So, it was mostly it was like mostly transport or like combat kind of stuff. 

  

Quick  12:37   

Well, we had the ability to land and really improvised airfields so we can land on a really short is 2200 feet. And the runways you see commercial airliners on are 10 to 14,000 feet to give you an idea. 

So, the airplane could get into places most airplanes couldn’t get out of them. Our priority mission was aeromedical evacuation. We could carry 40 or 50 litter [a litter is an apparatus used for moving patients from one location to another] patients in the airplane and we always had the equipment on the loader stanchions were on the airplane. 

  

just right up against the forward bulkhead and about 10 minutes. If the airplane was empty, we could reconfigure it for arrow back. And then they would just bring the patients on board on litters. And the litter clamped into these litter stanchions, which are vertical. And we’d stack three or four high litters and back of the airplane versus 9 feet 3 inches high. So, we get a lot of people on there in a hurry. And then we could fly at 350 knots with 50 patients, whereas a helicopter could only fly at 120 knots, with two or three patients so we can get them there much, much faster.   

And even take off from an improvised field in Vietnam. And if we had some people that they couldn’t accommodate at the hospitals in Vietnam, we could fly to the Philippines which was only about two and a half hours away. Usually burn patients. So that was our primary mission. And that was the most satisfying thing we did. But we also hold cargo and passengers when we weren’t doing air-evacs we call, them and the airplane could hold 35,000 pounds of cargo, half its weight and different configurations for passengers. Sometimes in combat, they would just sit on the floor, so we could get more people in there. So, we’d have them lined up sitting on the floor with their legs around the kind of the waist of the guy in front of them. And every 10 feet, there was a cargo strap that somebody could hold on to. And we could get more than 120 guys on there even bigger, even more if they were Asian – smaller 

so, it was definitely combat, I would say half of it was people shooting at us. Yeah, the other half was semi routine stuff. Like hauling passengers or cargo between secure base. But the fun part was, was into the little dirt strips and I flew 1142 combat missions.  

Jonas Kerlin  16:18   

Wow.  

Quick  16:19   

In two years, 1080 combat hours. And again, most people, most pilots would not get that degree of experience. 

Jonas Kerlin  16:35   

Interesting. Okay, I just have a couple more things I want to ask you. Were you married to Nana (grandma) at the time? 

  

Quick  16:47   

Yes. To Karen.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  16:48   

Okay, how was- what was that relationship like during the war, like seeing her and stuff along those lines? 

  

Quick  16:57   

Okay so we had- the we all the- there were 150 C 130s, in Vietnam, when I was there, but none of them are actually permanently stationed in Vietnam. They were either permanently based in either the Philippines as I said two and a half hours away, or Taiwan, which was also about the same distance away. And we had, we had our families there. And so, we would go for 15 days in Vietnam, and then we’d come home for three, and then we turn around and go back for 15 more days. So, in the two years, I was probably home for maybe a couple of months total. And they told us, don’t tell your wives what’s really happening.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  17:58   

Yeah 

  

Quick  17:58   

Just tell them “Everything is okay. It’s very safe. We never do anything dangerous”. And because if you don’t, they will, they will freak out. And then you’ll have to deal with that in addition to all the other stuff you have to deal with. In retrospect, I don’t know that was a good idea or not. But we follow that. You should ask Kaaren she’s probably still not totally aware of what we went through. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  18:31   

I was talking to her, and she was saying that’s what the people would tell their wives and stuff. 

  

Quick  18:40   

Yeah, that’s what we were told to do. And didn’t know any better. And again, I’m still not sure that that wasn’t the right thing to do, because there was enough pressure as it was. And so at least when you got home for maybe three or four days a month you didn’t have to deal with their wife being freaked out. You can have like, a little respite for maybe three days. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  19:12   

That’s interesting to think about. Yeah, um, one of my last questions. Can you tell me about your time leaving the Air Force? 

  

Quick  19:25   

About my time leaving? Why did I leave maybe?  

  Jonas Kerlin  19:29   

Yeah, something along those lines and like how when it was relation to the end of the war. 

  

Quick  19:35   

Oh well the end of the war so I came back to from the Philippines and Vietnam. I was back at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, flying a bigger airplane but also had tactical abilities like the 130 but it was two and a half times bigger and a pure jet. And so, I was still flying back and forth to Vietnam two or three times a month, we’d fly to Alaska, maybe Okinawa, in and out of Vietnam and back to Alaska and back to New Jersey. And so, I was still two or three days a month in Vietnam, even while I was stationed in New Jersey. And my job there was to teach combat tactics and techniques to pilots that hadn’t been in the war. But I might end up doing that in a big airplane, bigger airplane than and I was flying C 141. That’s we wore them out there. Unlike the C 130, which they’re still making, the 141 were completely trashed by the amount of flying we did. And then they 

 

retired them and replaced them with the C 17, which is even bigger than the 141. So, I never left the war completely behind those last three years, I was in the Air Force. And at that point, one of the main reasons I got out was Mark [his son, my dad]. He was born in 1970. I could see, I was gone, like 80% of the time. And I would, I didn’t want to miss his childhood, and I basically would have. So, I got out September of 71 [1971] He was about a year and a half old. And, um, I’m glad I did that. And I felt like I’d done that too. You know, I often say that life is too short to keep doing the same things over and over again. And so, I had my journalism career, and I had my flying career. And then I decided it’s time for a business career and make some money. I had no idea what I was going to do. I had no clue. I got out I used to say to each other as we were leaving, you know, well, there’s like 150 million civilians out there making a living so there’s gotta be a way we can do this. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  22:36   

Yeah, if you served in Vietnam, you know, I’m sure you can figure something out. 

  

Quick  22:40   

And I definitely, I definitely flailed around for three or four years before I figured out what I was good at. Other than flying airplanes. I’ll tell you; this probably won’t go on the report. But when I got out, I had an exit interview with a general who was still trying to talk me into staying in and I told him “I feel like the Tomcat that just finished having intercourse with a skunk it’s been great but I’ve enjoyed about as much of it as I can stand” and he said ?can I use that when I retire?” So, he got it. 

  

Jonas Kerlin  23:29   

Good. Well, cool. Um, do you have anything else that you want to add or feels important to say before we hang up 

  

Quick  23:45   

I don’t think so. I mean, the bad side of all of this is the friends that I lost. I still think I still think on them early often my best friend in pilot training 

  

there’s a newspaper called Stars and Stripes it’s been it’s a military newspaper has been published since World War one, I think. And but it’s run by the military, and they have to causality list in it every day and everybody when they got paper in Vietnam, the first thing they do is look at the list and see if their friends are on. And that’s how I found out that John, the four guys that I was closest to in pilot training two of them, the way I found out they were dead I saw their name on the causality list in Stars and Stripes. About half of my pilot training class ended up, we had four last and training for were killed in pilot training, which is not unusual. And but another 10 or 15 in Vietnam out of it started out with 38 

I think about 27 or 28 graduated and about half of them were killed. 

Jonas Kerlin  25:07   

Do you still keep in contact with any of them? Or know if they’re alive? 

  Quick  25:10   

No, no, I actually don’t, you know, sometimes I regret that. But there was no- it was hard to do. There was no Facebook, there was no Twitter. The only way you could do it was by letter. And once I got out of pilot training, I kind of lost a way to even send a Christmas card or something to them. So, I’m not in touch with anyone from those years, and I wish I was there were a couple of people I really liked and was close to 

  

Jonas Kerlin  25:47   

Yeah well cool, I really appreciate you giving your time and sharing your experiences with me. 

  

Quick  25:58   

It’s always good to talk about stuff you’re not talking about very much.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  26:04   

Dad was mentioning that they might want to ask some stuff as well. They were giving me some ideas for questions. 

  

Quick  26:17   

Yeah, well share it with him and any questions he has. I’m always happy to answer because that’s gonna die with me before long.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  26:31   

Okay, well, I hope you have a good rest of your night and I love you. 

  

Quick  26:35   

Okay, thank you. I love you. Happy to help.  

  

Jonas Kerlin  26:39   

Bye Bye.  

  

Quick  26:41   

Okay, bye