Privileged to hear from two Vietnam Veterans who are comrades and brothers chuck hagel and tom haeckel both volunteered to go to the war and fought in the same Army Infantry unit. From Middle America to the vietnam war and then home again. As we observed we are privileged to hear from the two eyewitnesses. Retiring as a Lieutenant General commanded troops both in afghanistan and iraq earning a five star medals in combat action badge as a contributing editor for the magazine and the author of eight other books. He currently teaches history at North Carolina state university. He was the secretary of defense from 2013 to 2015 and beforend that, a u. S. Senator from his home state ofeb nebraska. During the vietnam war, he served in combat as the army and earned two purple hearts in the combat infantry badge and vietnamese gallantry. After graduating from the university of nebraska at omaha he worked as a staff assistant, cofounded vanguard cellular and served as the head of the administration and became president and chief executive officer of the uss zero. He was the author of america the next chapter. Tom haeckel was born and raised in nebraska. He earned three purple hearts, bronze star and the combat infantry badge. He graduated from the university of nebraska at omaha as the school of law and after working as a public defender to nebraska she taught at Temple University and then joined retiring as a full professor. In addition to his professorship role he served as head judge for the Municipal Court in beta and ohio. Hes the author of two books and numerous articles on the subject. [applause] november 7, where were you . We were in california and i was getting ready to leave to go to new jersey because they had orders to go to germany. We were in the advanced infantry training and i was about four weeks for six weeks behind you in basic training and infantry training. Everybody is happy. There are orders to germany. Of course the vietnam war was also goingn. N. On so did you evo to germany . No, i got to new jersey in late november and when they were getting ready to pick up, we were the first class in our arsenal designed to bring them up from the soviet union through the passive germany. I decided if i was going to be in the army and served my country at a time then i want to go to vietnam. Tom will tell his story, but he did the same thing. I said i want to volunteer to go to vietnam and i recalled vividly in the orderly room there was aut startling silence. They put me in the back of the room and said come back here and they brought in a chaplain and a Security Officer because immediately they thought something was suspicious i was running away from a crime or some didng was wrong. I stayed and got new orders and went back home for a few days and went to california to process for the vietnam. Then about four weeks later, i ended up in the fort dix new jersey and remembered the two and a half Ton Army Truck and remember driving by i saw this poor guy he had a little trail with a rifle which im sure was empty, Walking Around with this outdoor light glaring on him and i felt i cant do that and im supposed to go to germany as well and i have this thing about cold weather to begin with. I just couldnt do that because of our group was told we would spend about six months living out the maneuvers in the snow in germany and then go to vietnam which turned out i ran into a couple of i my friends who did o over and i turned to them and vietnam. They were just getting over there so i went and volunteered to go. They didnt call any security people, they were happy to do that and keep in mind im 18yearsold or Something Like that and it got in my head. I remember seeing a movie about brothers, they can only have one there and the rest can go to a noncombat unit. I thought i will go over and they said no problem, just get a hold of the red cross when you get there. So i went over and went to the assignment center. You probably all knownd about this. Obviously it didnt work. To follow up on that, both of them were drafted, but in each of your cases it wasnt the standard draft. What action did you take . I had been to three colleges. Not an academic career to be emulated. They said we will give you six months to come back and then we have to take it. I said i think it is a waste of time a for any respectable institution to go back. I am not getting anything out of it. I will volunteer for the draft, but i want to go right now. They looked at each other and said theres actually a bus leaving in two weeks. So i got there and that was it. You were still in high school. I took my physical and i got the same letter. They said i wasnt going to sit around all summer with his opinion over my head so i said i will just go now. I was in the army i think five days after high school. I mentio mentioned that becau always hear people say the army today is a long journey also true that here you have the Vietnam Veterans who were basically volunteering even though officially but records show there was one other opportunity if you want to comment on what happened when the potential was recognized. I wasnt particularly interested in it because. I wasnt sure i wanted to take another year and the other thing that kept going through my mind was the fact that our dad was in world war ii and they spent quite a bitbe of time. He was enlisted and came out of technical. I dont know maybe there was some romanticism. I didnt know how that was all going to work. Im 18yearsold, not too bright, sitting there thinking i learned very quickly they have a better life to lead. Its a 52 week program, so i am thinking by the way, both of us havean to ghad to go through add infantry training to be able to then go to the officers. So no matter how it shook down we were going to be trained as infantry which is fine. Basic training lasts so long and have them lasts so long. I thought this isnt a bad deal, so i went along with it until i finished in entry training and goty the group together to kick off f. Keep in mind the 52 week cspan doesnt count against the first two years. So, two brothers both volunteered for the army and volunteered again for the infantry. I think at one point they didnt want to put in the infantry. After the initial screening they recommended you for another specialty. Ive seen the records. If you saw my record, you would understand why. One of the jobs was pizza maker, cook, things like that and when i refused to go he didnt know what to do because my orders were already cut. And they cut new orders for germany i would still keep about 20 going at a time. Your comment about work, they were raised in nebraska which was the Geographical Center of the continental United States and in a very rural area. Both the works from a very young age as i recall. He was mine and i was seven when we got our first child together at a s Grocery Store sacking potatoes and ice. All of this is manual by the way. You know how the Social Security system works. I was looking at mine the other day and i started paying into Social Security when i was 8yearsold. And i remember the job it was at aa drivein, i was a car hop and i wasnt tall enough to get off thehe window and stand on box to take the order. I look back as to why they would have taken the Social Security up because i probably only made enough money to buy a hot dog and that was it. So we worked all of our lives at every job i think they had. Dot work ethic would help you during your military service certainly. So both of these gentlemen arrived at the vietnam. Chuck got there in decembe deced tom got there in january. Initially coming you were both in theis same division of the ninth Infantry Division but its a big division, mike 20,000 troops, but not the same unit. U the large as any offensive war broke out the tet offensive and both of you gentlemen were involved in that. Yeah i got there december 4, 1967 the end of january and bad as you said was a defining time for that war for the optics of it and those who have had an opportunity to look at ken burns and give some historical reflection on what really happened about that its still being debated and so on. That really did define our service, and it defined everything. Absolutely and it defined the war. The turning point in america politically in every way. And for the rest of your time in publicc service it kept the picture from that time. What was that picture . Well tom knows about this. Tom was not with me at the time that this happened but when i was in the senate and i think you have met him, tom i got a letter one day from a retired armyet colonel in wisconsin whoi remembered his name. I couldnt put it allt together but a very nice letter and he said senator i dont know if you remember this or remember me but we ended up in the same company and we were in the qunais unit of Army Personnel carriers. He said i took a picture with my little camera and i was behind your tracks of the ammo dump which was the largest in the world blowing up and he said id like to come by when im in town. Nd give it to you so we set up the time he came by when i was in the senate and had a long conversation and he gave me an 8 x 10 picture of his little brownie schematic picture. Look like an atomic bomb going off. It just was astounding and he autographed it for me and i have kept it on my wall the rest of my time in the senate and the habit at my office at gallup as well so its a reminder and tom and i have discussed many times again the significance. And the scale of the destruction. For chuck hagels unit at the time they were in and around the city of saigon the end the largest city in South Vietnam in the capital of South Vietnam. People still living there call at saigon. I was in a replacement unit and they came and instead how many of you have an infantry in the west and put us on the perimeter so we were involved in it and trying to keep them out out the base. It was a huge base and after a couple ofin days thats when i t orders to go to the calvary and up there it was just as crazy. Most people if you bought the ken burns special or you are familiar with serving in vietnam or new people who did the north is the area that was right next to the socalled Demilitarized Zone so all the north Vietnamese Regular troops filtered down through that area. The marines have a lot of courses up there as well. It was a tank unit. Major fighting at that time was occurring where tom pagels movement was then places like caisson. That whole area was all under attack. You both sent in a request to serve together. Whatever happened with the red cross idea that you could get a country to send chuck on. Me. Hey never got back to this is one thing where it helps when you are in author and decades later you can dig up the actual paperwork so heres what i found. There is not only regulation within the department of defense that the former secretary of defense hagel would know about but its also a United States law passed after world war ii. Some of you may have seen the movie the fighting sullivans are of heard of the five Sullivan Brothers from iowa. Theyll enlisted in the navy and served u together on the light cruiser uss juneau. The uss juneau was torpedoed by the japanese off of the island of guadalcanal and many crews were lost including all five of the Sullivan Brothers. It wasan sewed devastating for e Sullivan Family and by the way her are navy in world war ii named theo destroyer the sullivan. Theres an destroyer today called the sullivans so they have been memorialized throughout our countrysut histy history. Lawmakers after the war said we cant let this happen again so they passed a law that became known as the sullivan rule and this law said that two close family members cannot serve together in a combat zone involuntarily. That last part is the key part. Both hagel brothers have asked to serve with each other guess what the sergeants and officers said when ii got there . Does the sullivan rule apply . No. Set that aside. I didnt know that. Because you volunteer to do it and i might add ladies and gentlemen what was really unusual about chuck and tom they didnt just serve together in a 20 thousand person out there, they were in the same rifle unit with 30 or 40 soldiers altogether at the same time so they really serve closely together. When your brother showed up what did you think . I was concerned on the search and destroy mission for four days and they pulled me back in the base camp. I asked whats going on my first thought wasas tom. I remember explicitly the captain saying sun if we wanted you to know and that was kind of the order of the day. I said okay, so i waited in my tent in a a few hours went by in the next thing i know i look up and tom walks in and the rest is history. Exactly right and the First Sergeant sergeant said if your brother ever did decide they would put him right eye your site in a platoon. What are they tell mother about that . I always signed toms name. I think mom felt that we were going to be over there in that war if those of us wanted it this way they had better be there together. I think thats fair to say. Chuck already mentioned this it was a mechanized unit which means to say they had small things that look like a tank. They had tracks of the soldiers were in the back being carried around and they have machine guns on top and that unit was basically a response to a reaction force. Anything that was really a hot situation had to go very quickly. They had a siren and play for everybody to mount up and go but many of the operations and all the roads around saigon were of course boobytrapped and ambushed and their outfit had the responsibility to clear them and clear the area around h the. So it was tom a fateful day for you two gentlemen on the 28th of march when he rolled out on. Osition what happened . Well we were on a search and destroy mission and tom and i like we often did walk point. Ladies and gentlemen when he says what point that means a long column of men and the first two dies are the hagel brothers. Mom didnt know about that. I think tom and i just felt and i think our platoon leaders and Company Commanders felt we could do a pretty good job of matt and we could do it better than anybody else. Tom was the best i truly ever saw. He saved me, he saved the company many times. I could read ad map pretty well and a compass. Today when you ask somebody about a compasseb talk about shooting in that were you talking or what did youh. Mean . You relied on your compass. Its not that way anymore. Anyway we made a pretty good team and on this particular day we had been up one point most of the day and if you are on point you are shopping a lot especially the point guy which would be normally tom and id the right there behind him with a compass and a map that but you are usually with a machete because you are walking the roads all the time. The Company Commander wrote me out of the point position to give us a break and it put another few guys up in front of us. We were crossing a street and we tried to always stay off theec road because the booby traps were everywhere. The point guys which tom and i had just been hit a tripwire in the water and there were claymore mines in the trees, mines that are filled withth pellets with high explosives that can do some pretty rough damage. They hit all those bright guys and they hit tom and me. Thats what happened on that day day. I always look for his name on the wall, Robert Summers the point guy who was killed and then they had to get the severely wounded out and the helicopters had the common drop the basket down to the jungle and the jungle is very dense. You dont know if the snipers wouldpe open up. You could be trapped with a helicopter and. We eventually got the severely wounded out and then we had to get out. You are both woundedd now. It was getting to be nighttime and as the old saying goes the night belongs to vietnam. You didnt ever want to be in the jungle at night. Without protection and so on. We had to get out of there. The Company Commander asked tom and i to get us out so we started to move again after the wounded were taken out and the one kia taken out and so on. We got a few steps into it and tom stopped and coughed and sob grenade hanging in a tree. I didnt see it but he saw it and we were able to get around and we finally got out. Even in the middle of the afternoon its dark. The triplen canopy. Both brothers earned a purple heart and the only way he can earn it is the hard way that day and to this day tom when you go through the tsa at the airport airport. Tom has a little shrapnel in him. I have a couple pieces of my w chest. We went into the Field Hospital and they dug stuff out and unfortunately it was significant but that not that significant significant. So they got the stuff out of me but ive still got it couple of pellets still in my chest. When i take in mra have to tell them because those things show up. But it has never given me any trouble. Mine got out to. It just took a while. It worked its way out. 50 years later. Even though wounded both of these soldiers went back to their unit. The thing i might also mention is chuck and tom were young men at this time. They are not experience with 10 years of experience but the role they describe, that point role is normally in todays army would be done by a relatively experienced sergeant. They became sergeants but they became sergeants in combat and really had to take charge of the other young men who were with them because if you are willing to do it and you have the skills. They went back and a month later what happened when he went into the village on the tracks . I think they got intelligence we were sent out to sweep the village to find out and we swept the pillaging came back and the traps and apcs and the personnel carriers and since we were at the first tracks out we were the last track in and of course s