Oral history interview of Michael H. Adkinson

Atlanta History Center Veterans History Project March 11, 2014 ATLANTA HISTORY CENTER VETERANS HISTORY PROJECT MICHAEL HAROLD ADKINSON Interview Date: October 20, 2011 Transcribed by: Sue Shaddeau ROGER SOISET: This is October 20th, 2011. My name is Roger Soiset. I'm here with Tony Hilliard at the Atlanta History Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where we are volunteers. With us is Mr. Mike Adkinson, a veteran of Vietnam, who has agreed to share his experiences with us during his tours of duty in the U. S. Army. This interview is being recorded for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, through the efforts of the Atlanta Vietnam Veterans Business Association. Mr. Adkinson, would you give us your full name and address please. MICHAEL ADKINSON: Yes. Michael Harold is my middle name, Adkinson, and my address is Old Stonewall Drive here in Atlanta, Georgia. (RS) And would you give us your date of birth and a little bit about your life growing up. (MA) Sure. I was born on the 18th of August, 1944. My parents were Harold Atkinson and Carolyn Baker Atkinson. I was born in Troy, Alabama. The hospital is still there, and I think it is Edge Hospital is the name of it. My father was not present because he was in England at the time. Because I was born in August, 1944 and he was actually in England with a unit getting ready for the D Day Invasion, and he was participating in that. Or he did participate in that, and it wasn't a good day for him. But my Mother was there in Troy, Alabama, and it was a great day, because it was the day that I joined the ranks of people from Alabama. (RS) So you grew up in a military family? (MA) No, my father, that was his only military experience. Just World War II and the D Day invasion. He was, he had one brother, but he was not military, so he was the only military experience in the family, other than a couple of uncles. But it wouldn't be true to say that we were long vintage military family. (RS) So what brought you into the ranks? (MA) Well, growing up in South Alabama, and I've got to tell you that I've had a unique experience in a little agricultural community population 600 people, and I have several times told others, and my kids, how lucky I was in growing up, from age...up until sixteen, I could actually walk out of our house, across our vegetable garden, into one grandparents' back yard, or go the other direction and cross over to the other grandparents' backyard. And I distinguished grandparents, differentiated them by the food they had left over from lunch. They were both good cooks, and I was a good consumer of good cooking. So I enjoyed that relationship and having them handy. Growing up in that environment, the easiest thing to do was stay there. That's what most people did, but there were a few people around who also kept encouraging me to look, or for me to be aware that there was a world outside of that little agricultural community. And I think the most influencing person in that life was my grandfather, my grandfather Baker. And I still count him as probably the most important person I ever met in my life, or the most important to me. Not to the world, but to me. He was very influential to me, and the lessons that he taught are still with me today, and hopefully will always be. But he wanted me to just keep seeking a higher level in whatever I did. He was an educator. Where I went to school grades one through twelve were all in one building, yet we still managed to be very competitive at the state level for basketball and baseball, and to do things that brought attention to us in sports. When I was in the tenth grade, the next town kind of recruited, or enticed, my family to come down, to move there, because they had a bigger sports program. So when I did that, I became under the influence or in association with people who had higher vision. Who wanted to do greater things. In the little town I was in, I don't think I ever knew anyone who aspired even to go to college, but when I moved to the larger town, that was something a lot of them were talking about. They were going to go to college. So that moved me, and I ended up getting some financial assistance for sports at Troy University, and I went there for one year, and learned pretty quickly that I wasn't ready for, really for the academics, and I really wasn't quite ready for the sports side of it, and there was some flaws in their program. And in 1963 there was just tremendous pressure on the draft. If you hadn't been in the military, you were going to have to pay that bill before any company was going to give you a very good job. So, I decided, along with a couple of others, to go volunteer for the draft. Go in the army. And that was the best thing that I could have done. It was a good move. I ended up being trained as an air traffic controller, and being assigned to an airfield out at Ft. Riley, Kansas, and sitting there on night duty for several nights, I was tremendously influenced by a captain who was on night duty and his name was Claude Ivey, and Claude Ivey later went on to become, he retired as a lieutenant general. But when he was a captain, he really was one of the first ones to convince me that I had potential. That I could do whatever I wanted to do. That I could be what I wanted to be. You know, maybe I had seen those words on a poster somewhere, but other than my grandfather, who I thought was a bit biased, no one had ever really sat me down, and looked me straight in the face, and said that. And all of a sudden he really had me thinking, "Well, doggone it, I can go do something." And I had ended up going to Infantry OCS (Officers Candidate School), and when I graduated from Infantry OCS in March of 1963, I think I was the only one in my class who also volunteered, or requested to go attend Airborne School and become a paratrooper, and then go into Ranger School and be qualified as a Ranger, and when I finished that, or when I was finishing that school, actually is when President Johnson came on television one day at noon, and I was having lunch with a couple of other guys, and I remember yet him saying, making the statement that we're going to deploy troops into Southeast Asia. I walked straight to the phone and called Personnel, and said, "Okay. Put me on that list. I'll go." And they said, "No, you're on a priority assignment to be a training officer." They needed, they were really ramping up the basic training camps, and so that was considered a priority assignment. So I headed off to, well, off to Missouri. What was the name of that little Fort? (TW) Leonard Wood. (MA) Um hum. Ft. Leonard Wood, and I was a training officer and I did that for about six or eight months, I guess, and I was bored to tears, so I went back. I went in one evening and I applied for Special Forces, because the only thing they had in Vietnam at the time was the 2nd Infantry Division in Special Forces. So, it was too late to join that division, so I applied for Special Forces, and about a week later I got a phone call saying, Okay, it's from Personnel. They came out and got me on the range. Come back in and call Personnel, they want to talk to you. So I called them, and they said, "We've got your application, and you've been approved. Go ahead and tell your commander and you can start packing, because we want you to report in two weeks." I said, "Great. I'll be at Ft. Bragg in two weeks." They said, "No, not Ft. Bragg." I said, "Well, you may have called the wrong desk then, or called the wrong lieutenant because I applied for Special Forces." And they said, "Yeah, but you have 20/20 vision, and the Army needs helicopter pilots. I said, "No, Sir! You have definitely called the wrong number." And they said, you know, "Are your heels together?" I said, "No, sir! They said, "Listen, you are going to be a helicopter pilot, and report in to Mineral Wells, Texas in two weeks." Well, I didn't think they could do that, but welcome to the army, they could. They told me I was going to be a helicopter pilot, so I decided I'd better be one. I went to Ft. Walters, Texas, and standing in line that hot March afternoon, to process for a room in the BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters), I met a fella named Frank Burganty. He was, what I called then, being from Alabama, I called him a damn Yankee. And he was quite sure I was the most Southern person he had ever met. That was forty-six years ago. You know that guy and I are still best friends? In fact, he called me on the way over here this afternoon. He lives down in Florida now, but I was the first Southern person he had ever met, and he was certainly the first Yankee that I had ever been caught talking to, and we were absolutely amused by our differences, and that was a good turn for me because he was a great guy, and we've known each other ever since. We went through flight school, and four months in Texas and four months at Ft. Rucker, Alabama. We were roommates through both of those places, and when we finished flight school...and flight school was a great experience for me because I was back home in South Alabama. As you know, Ft. Rucker is right down in South Alabama. And that's where I grew up. So I was like twelve miles from my grandfather's house, and where we lived when I was going to flight school, I could walk to my Mother's house. So, I was back home for the four months of flight school. And that's what it was. It was like being back home, and my Mother I think tried to feed everyone in my class (chuckles) at one time or another. She was trying to convert them all to butterbeans and okra. Some it worked and some it didn't take. But we had a good time. What happened there as a result of, that's relative to this, is when I finished flight school, when we all finished flight school, it was in November. That was the graduation month. Every pilot in my class was on orders to Vietnam. No exceptions. That where they were going. That's why they were there. And it was one of those things we just didn't talk much about. We just did it. And so when class was over, when graduation was over, everybody was given thirty day's vacation to go back home to be with their family before going to Vietnam. Well, I'd already been home for four months, so I just said, "Oh, yeah. I'll go ahead and go cut a trail for us." So I went down and did the very memorable moment of buying a ticket, one way, to San Francisco. Now, there's one thing about knowing, you know you're going to war, you know the war is located in Vietnam, you know you're going to travel by air, you don't mind flying airplanes. Heck, by that time we could even drive them. But there's something about buying a one-way ticket that just caused me a lot of grief. I just worried about that too much. About, dammit, I want a round-trip ticket, but the Army would only fund a one-way ticket. So I bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco, and I got there. A couple of days later I arrived in the famous town of Saigon. And right out at the end of that airfield was what we all knew as Camp Alpha. Camp Alpha was a tent village, and it was an in-processing point for Army. I don't know if Marines and others came in there or not, but it was an in-processing station for Army. And I got in there early evening, and Personnel tent was already closed down, but I went over there anyway to find some of the people who worked there. The troop talk on the plane going over said "Well, you don't want to get here, you want to get here, and don't get here, this place is bad, and this place is good." Well, I gave thought to what is bad and what is good in my definition. And I thought, well, first of all, I didn't want to fly helicopters. I wanted to be somewhere where something was going on. If I'm going to be involved, I want to make a difference. So I don't want to end up getting over there flying somebody around. Don't put me into a VIP flight attachment. I'll end up in jail. So give me some assignment that's meaningful. So when I got there, I walked over to that Personnel tent and there were a couple of sergeants sitting in there playing cards. It was hot! They were sitting there in their tee shirts, with their dog-tags dangling, smoking their cigarettes and drinking that beer. And I went in with my, I pulled my jacket off outside so that I went in with just my tee shirt on too, and I sat down and was able to have some conversation with them. One of the things I learned, I finally got enough friendship with the one of them, and I said, "Where's the best place for a pilot to go?" And he said, "The best place is down and fly along the beach. Duty where the pilots fly up and down the beach looking for boats that are capsized or people who are stranded.” And I said, "Okay. What's next?" (Laughs) He said, "Well, I know the unit that you want to stay out of is the 11th Aviation Battalion." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because they have…they go through pilots like you would not believe. They're constantly requisitioning new pilots." I said, "Okay." So the next day I put my jacket on and went back and got in line, and I walked up and the guy was surprised to see me standing there as a lieutenant with flight wings and all that, and he said, "Do you have an assignment request?" And I said, "Yeah. I want to go to the 11th Aviation Battalion." He just started shaking his head. (RS) Mike, when was this? (MA) That was December of 1966. And so I got to the, I got on a, they had courier aircraft, and I got on the courier aircraft and went to Binh Hua. Binh Hua. That's where the 11th Aviation Battalion headquarters were located, and I did essentially the same thing there. I got there after hours, and I went and found the Personnel sergeant, and asked how many companies are in this unit, and where are they, and what's going on with them. And the guy said, "You know, we've got a unit here and a unit here and a unit here." He said, "But the one over at Cu Chi, they're in deep stuff every day." I said, "What's going on at Cu Chi?" He said, "They're over with the 25th Division, and they just inserted them about a month ago," and he said, "Charlie, the VC, really didn't want them there, so they raise hell with them every day." And he said, they're just always in the deep stuff". And I said, "Fine." "So the next day I go back, stand in front of his desk, and I said, "I want to go to the 116th over at Cu Chi." He said, "Well, you're crazy." But he stamped and said, "You're on!" I was in Cu Chi two hours later, and sure enough, that day, they were in trouble. They lost a gunship, they had an aircraft hit. It didn't happen for them every day, but every once in a while they'd have a black cloud over them, and it was one of those days. That night, or that afternoon, I was assigned a cot and a bunk, and told how many sandbags I needed to fill, because they were building bunkers and everybody had to fill fifty sandbags. I think it was that evening. And I decided to go over and talk to the commander, because I wanted to be in gunships. If you're going to be in a helicopter, there's really two kinds of aircraft. There's the lift ships. They haul people and supplies. And then there are the gunships. They shoot rockets and machine guns. And that's what I wanted to do. So, I went over and when I talked to the people in operations about that, they said, "Come back to us in six months." They said no one can go into guns till they've been on the ground here or been in the unit for at least six months, because you have to have a lot of experience to go into guns. Well, I lay there and I thought about that, All right. I should be able to come up with some way to justify getting in there a little bit early, so I decided that evening to go talk to the commander. I had heard about him. His name was Patterson. He, when he retired, he was a major general. At that time he was just a major, and he later became the mayor, I think it was Sanibell Island, down in Florida. But I went in and knocked on the little half door at his tent, and he beckoned me to come in, and there was so much cigar smoke in that tent I could hardly see. But he was very depressed because they'd had a really bad day. Two aircraft had gotten shot up real bad, and one pilot killed. So he was...and he was writing letters. Letters to the families, and that's not a fun job. I was interrupting that. I told him that I had come by to tell him that, one, I was moving, I was in the unit and I was glad to be there, and two, that I wanted to be in gunships. And he said, "I thought you said you just got here." I said, "I did." And he said, "Unless this is your second tour you're not going into gunships." And I made my case, because I noticed that he had a Ranger patch on the jacket that was hanging on the door. And it turned out we were the only two Rangers in that unit, and he gave me a lot of credit for that. And I said, "You just lost a good man today. You need another good one to replace him, and I'm up to that task." He decided, there in that tent, to give me a chance. So he assigned me to go ride with another pilot that he trusted, the next day. And I did, and I did well on that ride. So I was assigned to the gunships immediately on arrival in country, and I never knew of anyone who had that good luck before, or since. Because most units you had to have a lot of experience to get in. Well, that turned out to be the starting point of a whole new career for me. I liked flying guns. I felt I was good at flying guns. And I did a lot of things to change and create new tactics for how gunships were being flown. When I got there, gunships didn't go below a thousand feet, unless they had target approved. Then they could break a thousand feet and go down and go in and engage the target. I soon learned, I quickly learned, from you know, growing up in Alabama, we did a lot of hunting of small animals. If you're going to see and hit a small animal hunting, you've got to get as close to him as you possibly can, to get it with the first shot. And that same logic prevailed for me in flying gunships. I cannot see well enough from a thousand feet to have my first shot be effective, but if I can get down on the top of the trees and go slow, my first shot can be real effective. So I started doing that, and that made a difference in our effectiveness with the troops that we were supporting and the aircraft that we were protecting as they came in and landed to unload the troops. Now, one of the little bits that I've got to tell you, to loop back around and pick up again on my friend Frank McGantey. You know, he was from Connecticut and I was from Alabama, but when I left there, when I left the States, I told him that I would write him and let him know where I was, and the benefit of any intel, of anything I learned, I'd pass along to him. So after I had been in Cu Chi for a couple of days and was sure that was the right place, I sat down and wrote him a letter. I knew what would appeal to him. I told him that there was this place called Cu Chi, and didn't know how I had managed to get there, but we were surrounded by palm trees, and there was two different ways you could walk from there to get down to the beach, which was a desirable place to be, because all the little seafood huts were right down by the beach. And I said, luckily, this is also the Red Cross training center, so all the Red Cross people coming into the country come through here. All the best bars and all the good seafood. This is the place to be, so when you get to Camp Alpha, tell them you want the 11th Battalion. When you get to Bien Hua, tell the people at 11th Battalion you want to go to Cu Chi. Hopefully you won't have a problem. Well, I thought he would write back and challenge that, or turn around and ask other veterans who had been over to Vietnam, or maybe he would just look at a map to see that Cu Chi was not on the coast. I didn't hear back from him, but I was busy and I didn't worry about it. But a few…and over time, I thought well, he just probably threw that in the trashcan. Well, I came in from a mission about a month later, and I walked through Operations as you were supposed to back from a mission, to give them your little incident count for the day, what you did, what they did, and hours flown and stuff like that. And as I did that and finished up and started to walk out, the Op Sergeant said, "Wait a minute, Lieutenant. A courier aircraft came in today and they brought in a new pilot, and one's here, and he's pissed, and he wants to talk to you." (Laughter) Guess what? Frank McGantey had just taken the bait hook, line and sinker and there he was. And I went over and found him in his assigned hooch and he was sitting there, and when I walked in the door he turned red in the face, but he was so upset and happy, because we were good friends, and he just wanted to know why. He just wanted an explanation. And I said, "Because if we're going to be here, we're going to make a difference. We're not here just to log time, and he bought into that a 100 percent. From that point on, even to this day, we laugh about it and tell that story, but there was never a moment and some people would say, well, he should've pulled out a gun and shot me right then, and any good jury would have let him off, but that didn't happen. He flew slicks. He was in the first platoon, um, the second platoon. He flew slicks. He was Hornet One Two was his call sign and my call sign was Stinger Nine Six. (RS) Would you explain the difference between guns and slicks. (MA) Yeah, okay. The slick was at that time a Hughey, UH1 D model, which later became H models, built by Bell Helicopter, and their role was to, they were built with a big cargo area, so they would haul people, haul troops and haul cargo. They had a door gunner, an M60 machine gun on each side, but that was purely a self-defense gunnery system. The difference in what I flew was a B Model and then a C Model in later Hugheys, I mean Gobers (?), but we were built not to haul anyone. We didn't have a place for a passenger to sit. All of our cargo compartment was taken up by drums of machine gun bullets and rockets. So we had rocket pods hanging out the side, we had 40 millimeter frog units on the front sometimes, and we had quad M60 machine guns on each side, plus we had door guns. So we had a lot of firepower. In fact, we had so much firepower and we put on so many rounds in those aircraft that when you're taught to fly a helicopter, what you're taught, the only way to do it is, or so we thought, was to pick it straight up. You're supposed to come to a three foot hover, then you can nose it over and move on out until you get into transitional lift, and then you fly. With our gunships, and in that density altitude, we'd put on so many rockets and so many machine guns, because we wanted all the ammunition we could possibly get, it would not pick up. The aircraft would not clear the ground. So we would slide it forward. We would just slide it until it would get going fast enough that it would start to bounce, and after about the second bounce, you'd hit translational lift, and we were "phew, we made it!" Now lo and behold, you didn't want to have an engine failure then, because you could not rotate because it was too heavy, but all we cared about was getting up in the air. So we would bounce that thing into the air and get off. Now Frank was flying slicks, so he would be in the flight hauling out the troops to put them in, and a typical mission would be the night before we get a briefing of what unit we're going to be supporting the next day, where they were going and why. So it was just every day it was, they called them combat assaults, and that was a good name for them because they were loaded up sometimes if it were going into what was thought to be a truly hostile area, they might put in air strikes and artillery, prep the area before we'd do the combat assault. But at least half the time, or more, they were depending on stealth. They wanted to go in, put the troops in, without telegraphing in advance where they were going or why. And that was responding to intelligence missions, through whatever means they had discovered that there may be a cache of weapons or ammunition or supplies. (RS) What units did you support? (MA) Primarily the ones of the 25th Division, the 2nd and 27th Wolf Hounds, Second and 14th, but all the different…I think all three brigades of the 25th. At least two of the brigades of the 25th Division were there at Cu Chi. That's right, two of them were. One of them was up at Tan Nien. So at each brigade had three or four battalions. So we supported their infantry battalions. And every once in a while we would get called to go off and do other missions. We'd go down to support the Seals out of Nha Be from time to time.Then we'd go to support the Aussies on submissions. Every once in a while, at Junction City and big real big operations where they were going to mass and insert a division, we might go up to 2Corps, 4Corps, We went down to Black Easter down at Long Binh. We went down, we'd go off on big operations, but day in and day out, we would do combat assaults for the 25th Division. Okay. So, what we would do is go in for a briefing at night, and they would tell us here's where we are going and why. They'd give us the coordinates, and generally they would have picked out from map reconnaissance a field they were going into, or a particular tree line they were going in to be inserted on. So everybody was to stay out of that area, of course at night, you wanted to. The next morning, the command and control ship would go, but it would orbit up at altitude where, if you were on the ground, you wouldn't know they were there, probably, but even if you did see them, you had no idea what they were looking at. Until I got there. The gunships would come in, and we would go in specifically to find that spot on the ground. That intersection of the tree line. That place where the canal crossed the pasture. Whatever that landmark was. And we would go in at fifty feet above the ground, identify that spot and then I would give direction and look around. Is there anybody in the trees? What's there? Who's there? Is there trouble? Or just people out farming, or are there little people running around in their black pajamas scurrying to pick up their ammo belt. And we found some variants. Sometimes we found kids playing. Sometimes we would find people scurrying around picking up their ammo belts. And we had different, you know, if they were if the fighters were there, we flipped and went hot, and we were doing our work. But a goodly number of the time it was just, it was friendly, or it looked friendly. Or it was nothing at all. That was the only thing you had to be careful about. If there was nothing at all, you don't know who's in the hole or what's going to happen next. So I would give direction to the lift shift. They would fly the directions that we would assign to them, and we would land them in to the wind, if we could. But we would pop a smoke to mark where the lead ship touches down, and then they would begin their approach and they'd come in in lead ships, flight of ten aircraft, ten slicks would land for that smoke. And ideally, they would touch down at about the same time. All the troops get off. So they provided security for each other by having numbers. And then all aircraft depart at one time. Nine times out of ten, that worked just like you would want it to work in a textbook. Boy, that tenth time, or one time out of ten, was going to be trouble. And that was when something bad would go wrong. Well, back to my friend Frank. When something goes wrong, there's usually some clean-up to do. And clean up can be going back in to pick up a crew who has lost their aircraft because the engine got shot, it's going back in to pick up some wounded soldiers, who got hurt getting off the aircraft because they got shot. It's going back in and taking maybe a special weapon system that they didn't take because they didn't think they needed it. Some mangaloid torpedoes, and stuff like that. Special ammunition. Well, guess who almost always took that assignment? That was my friend Frank, because he had more confidence, I think, well, he knew that he could do the job, and he knew that he was going to be covered, and I knew I was going to cover him, and the boss knew we worked together, and so they almost always designated him to go back in there to do those kinds of assignments. And we became a really good team doing those kinds of jobs, and those kinds of tasks. So I stayed doing that. Flew most days. Because I became, I was promoted from first, just an aircraft commander, then I became a team leader, then I became the platoon commander, and I was a lieutenant and it was a major's command assignment, but I ended up in that job because it was a good fit for me. Everybody, almost every pilot in the unit at that time was a warrant officer, except me. And I became the platoon commander. And we just had a really good team. And I've got, would love to show you, well here's the photo of that group. But that was a great group of guys. They have influenced me for the rest of my days since then, because of their dedication. You know, that's where you learn, or where I learned, about honesty and integrity, commitment, loyalty, dependability. If somebody said, if one of those guys said, I'll meet you at the rearming point with that part you need, you didn't spend one minute wondering will they really be there? You didn't spend any time at all doubting whether or not they'd show up with what they promised. You know, they made a pact. And they may have run into a lot of problems. It wasn't always easy, but they always performed, and it was just one of the, it kinda…now I was age, I got there at age 22, so I guess when I finished that career, that tour, I was 23 and should have been coming back home. But here's what happened. I got near the end of that year. We had one of the infantry units and it was one of the Wolf Hound battalions. They got into really deep stuff out there one day. They made really hard contact. What they were doing is crossing a creek or small river. And they got about half the unit on the other side, and that's when they got hit by the ambush. Charlie had anticipated that's what they were going to do, and they were being hit really hard. Well, we were there, and we came in and looked at the...and they were popping smoke on both sides. I said, "Which side of the river are you on?" They said we'll pop smoke, and they popped smoke on both sides. We knew then they were straddled the waterway. So we got down there and tried to come in conventionally, like we normally do, and look for them and then turn around and engage the rockets, but because Charlie was right in the middle of them, we couldn't do that. We couldn't use our weapon systems very effectively, because those rockets were just not that accurate. I mean, they were an area weapon system, not a man to man weapon system. And so I couldn't use the rockets, yet they were taking fire from within their circle. So I got in there, and took the helicopter and went over that little river right where they were, and I just sat there until one of them reported fire, and then we could see where it was coming from. And I hovered over it, and we started dropping Hand grenades down in the valley. We had about a case of hand grenades, in the gunship, and my chief gunner just started dropping frags in there. Well, we took them out. That's what we had to do. That was the way we got them out that day. Well, that's not conventional gunship tactics to drop hand grenades, and that unit knew when they got there and when we got there, and they saw, we helped them realize they had the bad guy surrounded but just couldn't see it. They knew they were in a bad situation, and they didn't know, nobody knew for sure because of the train. Nobody knew for sure how we were going to get out of that, but dropping the hand grenades saved the day. Well, that made they very delighted, very happy with us, I'm getting right near the end of my tour. That was in late November, and I was supposed to rotate out of there by the second week of December. And that unit was back at Cu Chi a few days later, and they gave them a few days to rest and recuperate, because they taken a lot of casualties. So they were giving them a couple of days to wash everything out and get some replacements. A jeep came down to our unit and picked us up, picked me up, and said that unit, Bravo Company, 2nd 17th Wolfhounds, I think, wanted to see me. Wanted Stinger 96 to come down there, and they wanted to give me something. Well, I went down there, and they had some parts of that weapon that were blown out and they were giving me the parts, and what they were really doing was saying thank you. And the commander introduced me and said a little bit about me, and it was all nice, and I stayed about an hour and had a beer and a piece of pizza with them, and I was about to leave, when one of the soldiers came over, and he pulled out his wallet, and he showed me a picture of a very attractive lady holding a baby. And he said, "I've never seen that baby, but because of you, I'm going to see the baby, if you stay here and help me. Oh, the commander had said Stinger 9-6 is leaving to go back to the world in a couple of weeks. And that trooper came over and said, "Don't go back. You've got to stay here and help me." I could not sleep that night. I stayed up all night long, just thinking about that. The next day, I went down and extended, and I stayed six more months. And at the end of that, I stayed six more months. I was committed to, and saw then that my role and my purpose was to serve those soldiers, and that's what I was going to stay there and do. So that was what that beer and the pizza that afternoon with that infantry unit, I've thought about that many times thereafter, that was the most expensive, in some ways, although I didn't have to pay for it, but Spec. 4 Garcia, who was the fella who showed me his family, and he kinda hooked my heart and my willingness to stay and help. And when I extended that time, and the deal was, if you extended, and agreed to stay six more months, because the Army needed people. I mean, they needed soldiers and they needed pilots. They had a lot of jobs, so if a pilot, or anyone else, I think, agreed to voluntarily stay six more months, then their deal was you could have six months, I mean thirty days vacation, or leave, and a round-trip ticket anywhere in the free world you wanted to go. So I said, Okay, I'll do that. I'll go to Sydney, Australia. And then it wasn't an R & R center, so I was ahead of the pack. That was in '64. So I went to Sydney, Australia and the day I got there, I met a guy named Ted Mackarowitz, who was a captain, and I was a captain by then, and he was a captain in the Air Force, and he and I were both there for thirty days, and we stayed in the Coudgee Bay Hotel down on Coudgee Beach in Sydney, Australia, and December is their summer, so we had a fantastic thirty days of great relaxation. And the Australian people liked, loved Americans, and we loved Australians, so it couldn't have been any better in terms of just enjoying ourselves and being away from combat for a month. Now my Mother would not have described it that way, because, one, she certainly did not agree with me extending (laughs). And she absolutely had trouble with the fact that I had chosen to go to Australia rather than come back to the butter beans and the okra. But I did. I went back then to the unit and served another six months. And by this time, I had learned more. I hate to say I was smarter. I was more the place was becoming real familiar to me. If I went out in the morning then, every morning I went out, I knew if something had been moved. It was like my back yard. I understood if there were two new boats on the river, parked under the trees, somebody was there. I was really good at gathering intelligence and noticing change, because change is what signaled something happened. Something happened last night. (RS) And if the new guy came in to take your place, these things wouldn't be noticed. (AD) Those little nuances would be gone. Well, the units appreciated that, my bosses appreciated that, and I was truly complimented I guess for that, and as a result I was in the thick of it an awful lot of the time, so I ended up with an awful lot of missions flown. An awful lot of medals. I have, I don't remember how many. I think Air Medals, I have 72 clusters on my Air Medal and that's 25 combat hours for each of those clusters. I have silver stars and lots of distinguished flying crosses and all that kind of stuff, and that was because almost every day I was getting out and getting in the middle of it. Well, at the end of that six months, I knew how much I was needed, so I didn't have to have an emotional experience to extend, I just said yes, I'll stay another time, but I'm going home this time. So I took thirty days and came back to South Alabama to get the butter beans and the okra, and to be with family, which I needed and wanted to do, but there was something different about it. When I came home, my friends and I would go out, and we would go out and socialize and I noticed that I would be introduced to somebody I didn't know, "This is..." and they called me Mickey, my nickname growing up in that little town growing up was Mickey. They'd introduce me, here's Mickey, he's back from Vietnam, or he's on his way back to Vietnam. Something like that. Vietnam would be in the sentence. And the reaction from the people I was being introduced to was just almost like I had some kind of disease. They didn't want to touch me. They didn't want to have anything to do with me. They didn't like me. They didn't like me. They would say things negative. My friends overlooked the Vietnam stuff because they knew me. They liked me. I was their friend. I was their buddy. I was their cousin. I was their former football roommate or teammate, but meeting other people, they couldn't let go of the fact that if you're connected with Vietnam, you've got to be bad. And that was just a real shock to me. I was disappointed in that. I was surprised at that. And then I started watching the news every night, and I better understood why they were upset because the news people were putting it down. And I would sit there and watch the news and knew that they were not telling the truth. They were grossly exaggerating reality that was going on over there. I put up with that for about three weeks. I was supposed to stay home for thirty days, but after about three weeks I told my family that I needed to go back. And I just packed up my bags and went down and caught a flight and went back and I think that may have been a first to get back early, but I took good advantage of that. As soon as I got back my boss said that he needed to fill a quota for somebody to go to the Survival School, Escape and Evasion Pilot Air Force course over in the Philippines. He threw my name on the list and the next ten days I was chasing around in the jungles of the Philippines, trying to keep from being caught by the people they had hired to try to catch you while you escaped and evaded, and ate snakes and rice. But that was okay. (Laughter) I went back and it was back in the role, they put me in the operation officer position, and I did all the things that I needed to be doing, and I have a lot of experience, and I was, I had just the experience of working with people that you knew, that you trusted, and you had confidence in, was probably the still to this day turns out to be the most satisfying things I did. Was it dangerous? Yeah! Did you think much about that? No. What you did was, you just enjoyed being part of a team, a unit, that was getting something done. You figured out what you were doing, and you took pride in how well you did it. Now, I look back on that, and say, "I wish I could have seen more of that in my roles and environments since then." And it was like a study of leadership, because I worked for, I had five different commanders during the years that I was in Vietnam, and they were, two, four of them were among the best commanders that I've ever known, and leaders. They were just really good leaders. A couple of the ones I worked for in my Army career after Vietnam, were Gary Luck, who retired as a four-star general, and he was my boss a couple of times, and I was the Operations Officer for Colin Powell, when Colin Powell was the Commander of the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. And that was a great experience. They were good leaders. I learned a lot from them, and from my military career of twenty years, I think that the best thing that came from it, among the greatest things that came from it, that I wish other young men could have that same opportunity, was the training and the exposure to leadership. They just don't get that in any other environment that I'm aware of. There are a few corporations in this great country who do have a little bit of a good reputation for providing training, but I've seen those corporations up close, and they do not have the same reputation for leadership that the military has. So, I'm not sitting here making a recruiting tape, I'm sitting here telling you of my real experiences, but if any young man who is about 18 or 19 or 20 ever does look at this and says, "Wonder what I ought to do with my life." I'd say give the military a shot. Look, because it's the best training and the best leadership that's available anywhere. And that's, if there are good points and bad points about Mike Adkinson, and I'll bet there are, I'd say that most of the good points, were developed, honed, and put into pretty good shape by either my grandfather Baker, or leaders in the army. Because they are the instructive forces, in terms of physical people, that I have known in my life. So, I've enjoyed that, and that's been good. Now, what else would be relevant? The Army said, okay, you're back from Vietnam what are we going to do with you. They gave me credit for three tours. They didn't want to send me back into Vietnam any more, and we were getting on the back side of that bubble anyway, so they started sending me to schools. I went to (?) School. I went to Ball Dancing school. I went to Career Course. They sent me back. Ahey told me I could go back to college on their nickel. I'd chosen and went to Auburn University and got a degree there. Later, years later, they sent me for special education courses at Columbia University in New York. So, the Army gave me a lot of educational opportunity. I went to Commander General Staff College. So, lots of school. Lot of opportunity for me to learn skills and it the military was a good experience. The relationships developed there were probably the most meaningful that I have known. It's a part of why I'm still coming around and eating a noodle salad with the Atlanta Vietnam Veterans Business Association. It's not because I've had a lifetime relationship with those particular people, it's just sort of like when I'm there, I know they know what I know. (Chuckles.) I know that they too had similar to what I did in their own world, and there's just a bit of camaraderie that kind of feels good to belong to. So, that's been my military career. I got...I exited, I retired the Army was being really good to me. They gave me an early promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, and were encouraging me to keep moving. I was selected to be a Battalion Commander at Ft. Hood, Texas, and I don't know where the end of the track would have been. The guys I was sort of peer-pared with during those years went on to accomplish great things. But I was here in Atlanta, when I hit my twenty year mark, at Ft. Pherson. I had two daughters and they were running along three and five or four and six, and to pull them up and move again was, I thought, a little bit of a negative. I hated to keep moving them around. Plus, the Army wasn't, there was nobody to fight then. If you remember back in 198 we had the cold war going, and there was you couldn't pull the pin out of a hand grenade anywhere, and I'm thinking, Okay, the Army isn't necessarily the best place, not the most adventurous place to be when there is no war going on. So I thought, and at the time, I really couldn't see where another war was going to come from. I listened to the intel people, and there was no, we really didn't think the Russians were ever going to show up on the East Coast and try to march across the country. So I didn't know where in the world. So I went ahead and retired. So I went ahead and retired, and there wasn't any military any more. There was nobody to fight. It wasn't many years after that that they did find reason to get in a little skirmish, and no they're overloaded with things to do. But during those years, there weren't. It was getting quiet, and we spent all our time training, and we really didn't have a good scenario for who we were going to need to fight again, so it was getting a little bit boring, so I left. (RS) What year did you retire? (MA) '83. March of '83. And if you'll go back and look at the number of combat assaults run in 1983, I think the number is zero. So it was quiet times in the army, and I needed something a little more exciting. So, I just came downtown, pulled off the uniform, went down and bought a suit and a white shirt, and until I figured out what to do, I started just calling myself a leader. Consultant. And that worked fine. I got in some really neat places, and once I got in I learned a lot about business, and I enjoyed the learning and enjoyed being a part of those things here in this community and others, ever since. And now this is what I call home, Atlanta, Georgia. And I'm starting to redefine that to say it's becoming Blairsville, Georgia, because I'm really enjoying starting to slow down and be up there in the North Georgia mountains, and every once in a while catching a nice fish out on Lake (?) Put that on the brick and getting them kind of cheap, riding around. This has been, you know, as I'm sitting here now started to get to a, okay, I wanted to tell my "Vietnam story,” and there's probably lots more little nuances and incidences there that I could go back and bore you to tears with, but there's enough here to give you a feel for at least the view that I had when I was going through it. And where I am now. And where I am now. I'm getting toward the last chapter. I think I'm 67, years old. I tell people I'm 84 consistently, so that's why I'm a little… why I have to stop and think about how old I am really. I adopted the age 84 about five years ago, and it works really good for me. (Laughter) Because when age comes... (RS) They tell you how young you look. (MA "That's right. "That's right. I did that accidently several years ago at a sales meeting. A lady, a young lady, she was maybe 24 years old, she said something that could have been derogatory, about sick people in their fifties and sixties. I said, "People in their fifties and sixties like that product." She said, "Oh, no. They just don't get it." And then she said, "Oh my goodness! I've offended you." And I said, "Heavens no! I'm 84 years old and I agree with you. When I was fifty or sixty I wouldn't have gotten it either, but at 84 I can get it now." And she said, "Okay." (All laugh) "And she said you are absolutely the best looking 84 year old man I've ever seen." And I became 84 that day. (Laughter.) I use it consistently, and I get the same results. "Well you sure do look good." Now if I told them the truth, if I told them I was 67, they would just say, “Well, all right. But 84, Really!” So at age 84 I'm looking back over my life saying I'm real proud of the opportunity I had to grow up in Mr. Richard Baker's adjoining back yard and to be his grandson. And the years in the Army. It was service to the country, but I was really serving the guys that I was working with. I was in the cockpit with and the foxhole with. And that's how, back, remember that story I didn't want to go to flight school, so I had to make that adjustment, I convinced myself that what the helicopter was, was a mobile foxhole. And if I treated it and thought of it as a mobile foxhole, then that's okay. I could go back and just get in my mobile foxhole every day. And go to where the war was. Go out to where the combat was. That's what I wanted to do and that worked for me. But I learned a lot, I experienced a lot, I've been a lot of places. I have been to a lots of places in the world and that wouldn't have been available to me had I stayed in South Alabama. And I have nothing against South Alabama. It's just that I didn't need to stay there. I needed to get out and go do other things. And the military became my way to do it. It provided me and avenue and an opportunity and exposure to leaders, to good people, who took good care of me. And I love this country, and I love the opportunities that I've had, and I appreciate you guys for giving me this opportunity to come sit and tell you. about it. (RS) Well, I was going to try to ask you for your final thoughts, but I guess we just got them! (Laughter) Okay, sir. Was there anything you wanted to say in closing? (MA) No. I don't know, uh, I'm not thinking of anything and oh, boy I thought we'd get onto that one. I could talk about kids and grandkids, and fishing, but I think what I was wanting to talk about was me and my experiences and I'm comfortable that I've done that. (RS) Well, thank you very much. This has been a real pleasure hearing your story. (TW) Thank you for your service. Welcome home! (MA) Thanks.