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Lawrence Korb

Steven Kull

Bobby Muller

MR. MULLER: Okay, my name is Bobby Muller, President of the Vietnam Veterans America Foundation. Served with the Marines in Vietnam from September of 68 until April 29th of '69 when I took a bullet through the chest. At that time, was a first lieutenant and had worked as a Marine platoon commander, and wound up working with the Arvin, South Vietnamese Army, as an advisor on the battalion level. That's it.

MR. BAKER: So you, you signed up and --

MULLER: Oh yeah. You know, a lot people forget that, you know, in 1964, '65, '66, '67, you know, America was very rah rah Vietnam. And, it really wasn't until, really, I think the Tet offensive in '68, that public opinion really turned around. But, for a lot of years, there was a lot of public support, and being a senior in college in '67 with a Marine recruiter on campus, and being 5'8" and a hundred and twenty-five pounds, seeing this 6'2", probably 230 pound guy in dress full uniforms, I said, yeah, that's me. And, signed up.

BAKER: Although it was six inches just for signing up, right? Okay, well, I'm going to start out with the part about your experience in Vietnam and... you told me about that, and then kind of mid-way change directions and look at this Kosovo situation. Okay? Uh, when you went to Vietnam, did you look forward to combat?

MULLER: I graduated honor man in my Marine Corps basic training, and could have any job I wanted basically. And, I chose infantry, and I chose Vietnam as my duty station. And, I was very eager to mix it up and to get into combat. You look back on it now and it sounds crazy but, at the time, you wanted it. You know, when I do a lot of speaking publicly on campuses, I really do tell students, go look at Stanley Kubrick's film, Full Metal Jacket. And, you can really see how basically a bunch of nummies wind up being transformed into the kinds of people that Marines were. I got to tell you that we charge enemy positions. It's remarkable to look at it with the benefit of some age, but it does work.

BAKER: Could you set the scene for me on how you came to take the bullet, how you came to be wounded? What, what was your mission?

MULLER: My mission was, uh, I had a combined force of U.S. and South Vietnamese infantry, and we were a blocking element for a North Vietnamese large size unit that was supposed to be sweeping through the area. We had to get over some hills, and there were basically, I guess, North Vietnamese soldiers dug in as a, basically it was a suicide squad, to block our advance.

And, my job was to take the hill and to set our positions up. And, before we did any ground assault up on that hill, I had an hour and a half or 155 millimeter guns, boom, right on the target. I had four jet strikes come in, drop their payload, boom, right on target. I had eight US gun tanks and two flame tanks, and the gun tanks used half their allowance of ammunition. One of the flame tanks came up and burned the hill. And, with all of that, you know, the tank commanders would still see some of the MBA's popping their heads up, and they were bloody from the concussion of, you know, everything we'd dropped in ordinance on their heads. And, there would be blood from the nose and from the ears. But, you know, it just illustrates, you know, what are the hard lessons you learn in these situations. That, when you have a dug in enemy, the can take one heck of a pounding. And, at the end of the day, you know, with some colonel flying upstairs in a chopper, take the hill, take the hill, I basically wound up leading an actual ground assault up the hill, and that's when I took the bullet through the chest, and that was it.

BAKER: Can you talk about that? I mean, is there, is there any way to describe what it felt like at the moment when you were hit?

MULLER: In any other conflict, I would have died. But, for Vietnam, with the medical evacuation capability that we had, there were some other guys who were casualties, so, before I got hit, I'd called in some Medivac choppers. And, I was Medivac'd literally minutes within getting shot. And, with my luck, the hospital shift, the USS Repose, was right there, right off the coast, that particular afternoon, turning around and go back southbound towards Da Nang. And, they actually put in my records, despite an instant Medivac that, had I arrived a minute later, I would have been dead. Both lungs had collapsed, the bullet went in, went through both lungs. And, it was really the chest injury, and not so much the spinal cord getting severed, that was the critical part of being wounded.

I can't really describe what it felt like other than it's like you're in a big bell and somebody went bong. Or, like the windshield of a car that just shattered into a thousand pieces. It was not painful because it was beyond pain. It's like, you know, you hit your thumb with a hammer and you know that it's going to hurt, but, right then, it's just stunned. And, then, all of a sudden, everything got very mellow and I just started slowly to recede in consciousness. And, I realized I was going to die. And, it was calm, it was you're going, there's nothing you can do to stop it. And, it was an absolute conviction on my part that I was going to die. And, then I went out.

When I woke up on the hospital ship, my reaction was absolute disbelief and also total ecstasy. You know, I don't remember how many tubes I had in there. I had, you know, more tubes than you could probably count, but I made it and I was ecstatic and people don't understand that, if you really think that, you know, you cashed out, if you're given a second chance at life, you know, it doesn't matter if you're missing limbs or you're paralyzed or whatever, you know, you're really grateful to be here. And, that's how I've always felt. I've never been depressed over the disability because I view all of this as a gift, and it's a second chance. And, I don't think you can really understand that or perhaps even believe it until you've gone through it. So, I don't try to tell that story all that much because people think I'm nuts.

BAKER: So, it was a single bullet?

MULLER: One shot, right through the chest. Yep.

BAKER: You must have seen buddies or compatriots that fell before you and not have the fortune of the Medivac.

MULLER:: You know, it's amazing. You see sometimes people with relatively lesser injuries that die. You know, it's weird. And, then you see some guys that get blown to smithereens and they wind up living. It's all a crap shoot. I think twice I had the guys on both sides of me get hit and I didn't. So, it's not something where it's a question of how intelligent you are as to whether your number's going to come up. It's a numbers game.

You know, the thing about being out in the field is, you know, you tend to keep moving to some extent. When you wind up on the other end of the Medivac chain, as I did in intensive care, I don't know how long I was there, but I was there long enough to remember lights never went out and guys were always screaming, always. And, it was guys that were traumatically amputated because, usually, the land mines, changing the dressings, that would scream for their mothers, it was burn cases.

Once you've really been submerged in what the consequence of it is all about, I think it would be much harder to ever get up and get back into a combat environment again. It, you know, when you're out there and you're sort of keeping on moving and so on and so forth, yeah. But, once you really understand the pain and the suffering, I don't think I'd have gone back.

I was in combat in Vietnam. It was one of these things where we were on a ridge line and, before we could call in choppers to get out some casualties, we called in supporting arms fire. And, it's not like the mad moment in training, which is pretty impressive where they show you all this intense coordinated fire power. All of the safety precautions were done away with. And, we called in jet strikes right outside our perimeter. We had heavy, you know, artillery bombardments. And, it's my first day out in the field. And, I'm there. And, I'm going, yeah, team. Wow, I'm getting pumped, you know, wow wee, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was saying this is so bad. The ground is shaking, it's thundering, it's like awesome, right. Boom, smoke clears, we get the choppers in, you know, come in. And, all round our position, where we just pounded these guys for God knows how long, boom, they opened fire. And, I, and the chopper gets hit and the chopper starts to wobble and it crashes in the valley. I said, "whoa, welcome to Vietnam."

But, it was just that first day would prove to be, over and over again, that, when people dig in, they can take an incredible pounding. And, at the end of the day, you've got to engage them. There's just not two ways about it. And, that's what everybody that commented on this war at the front end was saying, you know, you can only go but so far without engaging. And, you know, there's a lot of history behind that.

It was just the one about being, how, once you're on the other end of the Medivac receiving chain, that, it really does change things. You know, when you're on the battle field, and you keep pushing forward, you know, you really do try and get the wounded out, obviously, as fast as you can. But, going back and being in intensive care and, I don't know how many days I was there, but I'll never forget it. It transformed me, it did. The lights never go out. And, honest to God, there's always somebody screaming. You know, the guys that would cry the loudest would be the traumatic amputees, you know, from land mines that had their dressings changed. Or sometimes the burn cases. And, you know, you hear grown guys calling for their mother. It's unbelievable. But, you know, being submerged, so to speak, in that reality, I've got to tell you, even if I could have, I don't think after that I could have gone back on the battlefield, honestly. It's, uh, it's a different reality.

BAKER:So, what happened to you then? How did you go from the Medivac to the ship?

MULLER: I just got transported by helicopter to the Akuska, I think it was, in Japan. You know, went to Da Nang and then got flown to Japan and then Guam. And, spent, I think, a week on Guam coming back. And, then finally got flown back to the States. Spent a year in a hospital, up in New York City. It was a place that, eight of the guys from the spinal cord energy service alone, wound up committing suicide, including my closest personal friend.

Life magazine came in and did a cover story on my ward in May of 1970, which revealed what, at least in some cases, were the deplorable conditions that, at least, some of the veterans from Vietnam had to come back to in terms of veterans hospitals. Some were good, but not all of them. And, mine, frankly, was a medical slump and it triggered Congressional hearings and some degree of outrage in America that its veterans would wind up being dumped in places like this. That's a, that was a whole different story.

BAKER: How did it affect your family?

MULLER: Well, we, everybody went through a lot of changes. I don't want to pick on the Marine Corps, but, you know, I put a lot of faith in the Marine Corps, and the Marine Corps motto was "semper fidelis, always faithful." And, not once in the entire year that I was in that hospital did any representative of the Marine Corps ever come by and say, "hey, how you guys doing? Can we help you out?" despite the fact that it became the focus of a national scandal, essentially. And, I went to a retired Marine officers luncheon, at Sardis restaurant in Manhattan, and pointed out, the commander that came up, a general from headquarters Marine Corps, and, you know, they changed the policy and we started getting some visits. But, during Vietnam, a lot of people didn't want to deal with it, and it was something to just move away from and forget about it. A lot of people couldn't just move away from it and forget about it. They sort of got left holding the bag. And, it took a while, and finally things did turn around, but those were tough years, make no mistake about it.

BAKER:Have you ever been angry or bitter about what happened to you, especially in a war that ultimately lost the support of the American public?

MULLER: I went to college as a jock. I was a phys ed major. So, I always respected authority. And, obviously, as a Marine. There was a day that I crossed the line and became an activist. And, that was the day that President Nixon vetoed the veterans medical care expansion act, along with the vocational rehabilitation act, which was the civil rights bill, essentially, for the disabled in America. And, he vetoed it and he said the funding for the veterans medical care expansion act was fiscally irresponsible and inflationary.

That was the day I went to Times Square, in the heart of Manhattan, in New York City, and, at 4:30 in the afternoon, you know, went right into the middle of traffic and blocked traffic. And, people freaked out and said, "what are you doing?" And, I said, "look, I was a Marine infantry officer. You know, I regularly called in hundreds of thousands of dollars in jet strikes and artillery support, even had the battleship New Jersey firing support. And, you know, I got shot in the process. Now I'm told that it's fiscally irresponsible and inflationary to provide adequate medical care to me and other veterans." I said, "I don't think so." So, that was the day that I crossed the line. And, I never looked back and kept going ever since.

BAKER: Why don't we switch to the present and look at the Kosovo war? First, from the point of view of U.S. troops, I mean, military services still is a sort of self-sacrifice. What impact is there on the mindset or the ethic of troops when they're told that their first mission is no casualties?

MULLER: I can't understand wanting to protect yourself and not be reckless in puttting yourself at risk. But, you know, I've got to say, that's the business of war, to fight, and to fight the enemy, and not the civilian population. You know, in the Marine Corps, in Vietnam, we took 85% casualties. That's true among junior officers. 85% casualties. And, the majority of enlisted guys within all units were casualties. You know, there was no lack of willingness on the part of U.S. forces to fight the fight. The thing that bothered me the most about Vietnam was not engaging the enemy soldiers. I had no problem with that whatsoever. But, through free fire zones and the indiscriminate use of fire power, you know, getting that inevitable 10% that never got the word that it was a free fire zone and having the numbers of civilian casualties that we had.

You know, the whole thing about Kosovo and not taking any casualties is deeply troubling to me. Because there's a fundamental moral equation that I think is necessary to be kept in the process of war. And, that has to do with, if something as a principle or value is important enough that you're going to kill people for it, then you ought to be prepared to die for it. And, this idea of killing with impunity, where you can kill people and really not suffer, that's troubling for me.

And, I think history has a lot of lessons about things being out of balance in that regard, where the moral aspect of the equation really needs to be kept in play. And, I think a lot of the countries around the world look at the United States and our capacity to inflict casualties, and, yet, with no apparent capacity to take casualties and have to be, and understandably to me, you know would be deeply troubled by that set of circumstances. It's an alignment which is off and I think it portends real problems for the future if we go down that kind of a path. Not to say, you know, probably most immediately important is how many thousands of innocent people, you know, had to die while we failed to engage the enemy to protect our own lives. And, again, there's something wrong with that, too.

BAKER: Alright, what do you think specifically, when we, about the decision to forego ground forces in Kosovo?

MULLER: Look, I don't want to make that I'm a military expert but, I was infantry. You know, I was out in the field. And, I know the reality of fire power. You know, I was in enough situations where, you know, I don't care how many jet strikes and how many artillery rounds you can call in, you know, if the enemy's dug in, you're going to have to engage them, it's just as simple as that. You know, people can take an extraordinary pounding.

And, I think what ultimately played out in Kosovo is that, when you finally did get a ground force in operation, the KLA, that all of a sudden, that's when the Serbs took their casualties. That's when they lost their equipment, their tanks, etc. And, the idea that you're going to bring these people to their knees on the basis of simply air power or artillery bombardments, bombardments, regardless of how accurate you may think your munitions are, that just flies in the face of history. And, you know, what we saw in Kosovo proved ultimately to be the same thing. It was the ground force of the KLA that really put the pain on the Serbs that I'm sure was a major factor in their capitulation along with very altered terms of what the agreement for settlement for the war turned out to be.

BAKER:Some people claimed that this is a moral war fought immorally. And, the principle, I think, from just war, principle, non-combatant immunity was turned inside out into combatant immunity. Do you agree with that notion? M

MULLER: I think it's absolutely right that it was. I think, a moral war in that we were going in to stop crimes against humanity and not for a more immediate national interest of oil or something like that. It was to save lives. But, when you fight that war, basically by going after the civilian underbelly, the soft underbelly in Serbia, as opposed to taking the killers that are partaking in the ethnic cleansing, that that's not right.

You know, there were enough reports, front page in the Washington Post, saying unnamed administration sources said the purpose of the campaign was to put enough pressure on the Serbian population that they would ultimately overthrow Milosovic or put enough pressure on him to get him to stop the war. That's targeting the civilian population which, you know, really, I think, a credible argument could be made, you know, is a violation of loss of war. It's certainly not, if it's not technically illegal, you know, there were obvious moral concerns raised by that.

BAKER: In addition, we also dropped... from much higher altitudes than we normally would to protect the pilots. Did that also put some of the people we were trying to protect at risk?

MULLER: Look, the conduct of the war has, I think, shifted a baseline as a precedent, which is very troubling. A few years ago, when we were fighting in Bosnia, the commander of our air forces said we will not use cluster bombs. Because, in areas where you have villages, it's just an inappropriate weapon. And, we changed that policy, and we used cluster bombs obviously, not only in Kosovo, but in Serbia. Matter of fact, you know, we were just recently briefed that we had out cluster bombs dropped at a height of over three times higher than what normally would have done to protect the life of the pilot, but yet wind up with a much wider dispersal pattern on the munitions.

And, the numbers of unexploded cluster bombs will probably be as great or possibly even greater a problem in clean-up and in all the things that happened post-conflict than even the land mines, which are their own problem. The estimates are that we may have well over ten thousand, possibly even 15, 20 thousand unexploded sub munitions that are all over the place in populated areas. The idea of, you know, protecting the pilots at the cost of so many more civilian casualties is an equation that I don't think you can be proud about.

BAKER: Are civilians at greater risk of being casualties of war today than in years past?

MULLER:The basis of our organization's work really is civilian casualties in conflict. In World War I, with the millions of casualties that we had, 95% of the casualties were military. Today, Kosovo is not an aberration. Kosovo is representative of what's been going on in conflict. And, in the last ten, fifteen years, 90% of the casualties are civilians.

The nature of conflict has fundamentally transformed in this century despite the loss of war and the Geneva conventions and everything designed to protect civilian populations. They are now often times purposefully the primary target of violence. And, if you've been out on a battlefield, there is a difference between engaging an enemy soldier and innocent civilians. I think, for a lot of people in this country that have never been on a battlefield and don't really know about war first-hand, it's sort of easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, "ah, that's conflict." No, it's not. Historically, it hasn't been. Currently, it is, but that doesn't make it right. It's wrong. And, we have a law, a substantial body of international law, designed to prevent that. Unfortunately, it hasn't had any real affect.

BAKER:...intentionally targeting civilians or just making the protection of your own troops more important than civilians, it seems to me, I mean how did the way NATO fought the war in Kosovo contribute to this upward trend, towards the 90% putting civilians at greater risk?

MULLER: I think one of the real concerns that you have to have about Kosovo is how it continues to shift the nature of conflict in people's minds. When you have a war that we fight and go after the soft civilian underbelly of the enemy by bombing civilian base areas in what are arguably dual use targets - power systems, water supply systems, basic transport systems - you know, you're putting pain on the civilian population that, at least under international law, has to be, to some degree, proportionate to the value of the military target. How can you argue proportionality if the Army is over there, if the killers are over there, and you don't engage them. And, you're going after these, you know, at best, dual use, and I think in a lot of cases, that's a stretch, you know, targets in a civilian base area.

The acceptance by the American people of a, you know, perceived success in Kosovo that shifted the baseline of engagement towards the civilian base area, the way Kosovo did, I think is troubling. And, is easy to project with antiseptic warfare something we're going to look to do again. And, there are real problems here.

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