Bruce D. Jolly ’65 

Dartmouth College Oral History Program

The Dartmouth Vietnam Project

May 28, 2015

Transcribed by Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft

[HANNAH]

CHUNG ’16:                My name is Hannah Chung, and I am interviewing Mr. Bruce Jolly on May 28th, 2015, and I am currently in Jones Media Center, Room 266, and Mr. Bruce Jolly is currently in his home in West Virginia. Is it correct?

JOLLY: Virginia.

CHUNG: Virginia, yes. Sorry. Awesome. Right. Mr. Jolly, thank you so much for taking your time to have this interview with me. Right.

                                    So the first question that I have for you is I would like to hear kind of where you’re coming from, so we would like to start all the way from, like, where your parents are coming from and where you were born and what was your childhood like.

JOLLY:                       Okay. I was born in West Virginia. You used the location before, and that’s where—I am a West Virginian, a native. My parents were both from southeastern Ohio.

                                    I was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. My family—my dad was involved in coal mining, and we moved to the southern part of West Virginia when I was five years old.

                                    Lived in a what was called a coal mining camp, a town by the name of Dehue [pronounced DEE-hue], that is no longer there. Was near the larger town called Logan in southern West Virginia. A fairly rugged environment but a good place to grow up. Lived there until I was 18. Sort of almost by accident found Dartmouth College. My family—my father was a coal miner, but he was a well-read coal miner and liked to travel and had always wanted to see New England, so we were—I had an older brother, who had already left home by that time.

                                    My father, mother and I were touring New England and were looking for a place to stay, and it seemed like we couldn’t get a hotel or a motor inn. We were sent forward to a place called the Chieftain [Motor Inn]. I don’t know if the Chieftain is still there, but in Hanover, and went out that evening, and I discovered Dartmouth College for the first time. Thought it was an absolutely beautiful place with those gleaming white walls and didn’t think much about it until—I think I was a sophomore in high school then—until my senior year, and two of my best friends were football players, who also got good grades, and [Robert L.] “Bob” Blackman, who was the coach at the time, tried to recruit my two good friends. And I said, “Well, I’ve seen Dartmouth. It was a beautiful place, and I’ve read about it,” and so all three of us were going to go. But it turned out that I was the one admitted, and by that time I knew enough about Dartmouth, and I decided it was a place for me.

CHUNG:                     Right. Great. Yeah. So before we get into kind of how you started your college years at Dartmouth, I actually would like to hear just a little bit more about your childhood. And, you know, you said it was a, you know, rough terrain but it was a good place to grow up, so I just wanted to hear a little bit more about, you know, what you liked to do as a child, if you had any sibling[s]. Like, maybe talk a little bit about your elementary and middle school experience as well?

JOLLY:                       I could wander around and spend a lot of time on that.

                                    As I said, it was sort of a melding pot that we had. My father was of Welch ancestry and had been involved in coal mining, his family, for generations. They came to the United States because they knew about coal mining. But then the other people in the town were from Russia, Poland, Italy, Spain—many, many countries—all living in one town of about 1,000 people.

                                    It was a self-contained community in that we had the store and the theater, and, you know, all the occupations to run an enterprise were there. A big part of that was I was a Boy Scout, and the town very strongly supported the Boy Scout troop, and several of us, including myself, became Eagle Scouts. I went to Boy Scout Jamborees and to Philmont Scout Ranch and spent a lot of time in the summers at Scout camp.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Go on.

JOLLY:                       Well, high school was seven or eight miles away. It was a fairly large high school, about, I would say, 1,300 students or so, in three grades. I sort of left my little town then and joined the larger community and become involved in all sorts of high school activities. Got grades or Dartmouth wouldn’t have welcomed me. Good grades.

                                    And had several leadership positions in the high school. Active in the church locally and that sort of thing, and the youth groups. It was a just a good place to grow up, I think. If you were to see it now, you wouldn’t think it was that good, but there were always eyes watching us and helping us to grow up the right way, I think.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Great. Now, I find it really fascinating that you were a part of Boy Scout[s] and Eagle Scout[s] during your childhood because I know a lot of things kind of [that] they do is very much of an outdoor activity, and it also in a way kind of prepares for you, like, kind of to be out there, and I guess even, like, in times of, like, emergencies and war, kind of, you know, you really get those trainings to prepare yourself for that, so it would be great if I can hear a little bit more about, you know, your Boy Scout and Eagle Scout experience.

JOLLY:                       Well, actually, the Boy Scouts were great training for the military, which came later, in that you were part of a group. You were aware from your parents when you were 11 or 12 years old. You had to learn to function in this group. You had adult supervision, but it was pretty much a group of kids sorting things out for themselves. You learned about nature. You learned about, you know, First Aid, citizenship, all kinds of good, healthy things. Electricity. I had an aviation merit badge that—I’ve never flown a plane, but if I ever had an emergency, I would try to think back to what my aviation merit badge taught me about landing. I would never take off, but I’m able to land.

                                    Yeah. And it was—I got to go other places. The Jamboree was in Valley Forge, near Philadelphia. The Scout ranch I mentioned was in New Mexico. So I think I was 14 at the time, so that was a major event as a group of about 20 of us left West Virginia and went to the large ranch in New Mexico.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Great. Right. Great. Awesome.

                                    So I guess kind of moving into your experience in Dartmouth, so it’s real interesting how you choose to come to Dartmouth, and I just wanted to hear a little bit about your first kind of impression of kind of stepping onto, like, Hanover as a first-year student at Dartmouth and kind of what was your first experience at Dartmouth was like.

JOLLY: Probably the first week, I was frightened because I had always been on top. Now, I was first in my high school class. I was—always got good grades. I just thought I was pretty sharp. But the people that I met were equally sharp, that—they were from different places, knew different things. Particularly, some seemed much more sophisticated than I was. If you’re from Connecticut and you go into a prep school, you’re a little bit ahead of, in some ways, a high school graduate out of West Virginia.

                                    And so I spent the first week or maybe the first months being a little frightened at times. But then I managed at least to stay in school and made some good friendships, and so I got over the early shock that came in arriving in Hanover.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Great. And what did you study in Dartmouth, and what are some different activities and organizations that you were involved in [at] Dartmouth?

JOLLY:                       I started out, like probably many people at the time—things were going on in society when I was in the ninth grade, tenth grade. There was the Cold War, and there was Sputnik, and there was space exploration, and so we were all to be engineers. And so I began as an engineering student and took the necessary courses, actually through my first three years at Dartmouth, or two and two-thirds years, something like that. Took a lot of math courses, physics, German, and the normal distributive requirement sorts of courses. I ended up, though—the first part of engineering, I understood and it was good, but at some point I went into a class one day and there was a board full of equations, none of which I could relate to any practical thing. And at that time my engineering grades started to go down, and I fled from it into—about the only way I could get enough credits to graduate was to combine economics and mathematics, so it was an economics major modified math, because I had already taken a lot of math courses that would count to the combined major.

                                    Had a little bit of trouble there because coming out of engineering, you are taught that there is an answer and a precise answer to that is correct. I had to learn that in economics you need to fill up a blue book and you can have a lot of different theories and words that—in economics,—a one-sentence answer doesn’t really usually work.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right.

                                    And what are some activities or organizations that you were involved in [at] Dartmouth?

JOLLY:                       I assume most everyone still at Dartmouth is involved with the [Dartmouth] Outing Club, if for no other reason than to get good rates at the [Dartmouth] Skiway. I wasn’t a—I was a member—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —but not a major participant. For a while, I was in what was called the Dartmouth Society of Engineers, besides ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps], which was a major user, my activity was to be in a fraternity. I was in Phi Kappa Psi, which is no longer an actual fraternity on the Dartmouth campus. [It is now Panarchy.] But we were strong at the time.

                                    And so there were a lot of activities there, and not only parties but athletic events and just good friendships that developed over the time in the fraternity.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see.  And, yeah, as you’ve just briefly mentioned, that it seems like ROTC has been a big part of your Dartmouth experience, and [I] just kind of want to hear about, like, what motivated you to join ROTC and what was your experience like there?

JOLLY:                       I think I—you know, coming from—West Virginia is a state that’s, for one reason or another, known for being involved in the military. I think it probably still has one of the highest per capita participation rates in the military of the country, so growing up in that environment and seeing veterans coming back—and I can remember World War II veterans when I was quite small and seeing Korean War veterans, and it just seemed natural. And my brother had been in the Army, so it seemed natural that the military would be there somehow. You didn’t question. Sort of if called, you would go.

                                    I hadn’t thought about it a whole lot, but my brother had been in ROTC and had gone to summer camp and worn a uniform and had been in the [U.S.] Army, so when I got to Dartmouth, I went to some kind of an activity night and spoke to the officers from Army ROTC, and I remember somebody saying, “Well, gee, in advanced ROTC you get $27 a month for cigarette money,” and that seemed like a good idea.

                                    It didn’t take into account the fact that I didn’t smoke [chuckles], but if was if I ever started, it would be nice to make a great amount of money like that that I could buy cigarettes with. I think I had just started to smoke, but the $27 didn’t cover it.

                                    I joined ROTC. I think I wore a uniform for the first time outside of the Boy Scouts.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. Yeah. I just find it really interesting that, you know, from a very young age, you were exposed to, you know, seeing many veterans coming from their big wars, so I’m just, like, wondering if you had I guess interaction with any of these veterans and, like, any kind of—I guess kind of childhood memories that you have about these veterans.

JOLLY:                       Not any specific—you know, I just remembered they had gone to war, and once in a while would tell a story or something, but it wasn’t that, you know, I had a strong, vivid experience or anything with that. I had a great uncle that I can recall who was wounded in World War I, in France, and it greatly affected him. It would be what we now call PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. I think that he was a dashing young man, from the pictures before his time in World War I, and he was sort of a broken person after that. He had been wounded. And so I didn’t understand all that; I just knew he had been a soldier. So, again, no—I can’t recall many things. It was just men in town had been in the military. I knew that and not much more than that.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. And it’s also interesting that—because it seems like you just have a lot of exposure to, like, military and ROTC in general, even prior to kind of joining one yourself, so I also would like to hear a little bit about—more in detail about kind of the impressions that you had from seeing your brother in ROTC and in [the] Army.

JOLLY:                       Just my brother and I were ten years apart, and, you know, so we were never close growing up or anything, but it was a little bit of I respected him, and I wouldn’t call it worship, but he introduced me to many things that perhaps my parents didn’t. And he would tell me things about the military. He was in the Reserves at the same time, so he went to a Reserve camp. And he knew the names of weapons and various military vehicles that he could pass on to me, and it was just a way of learning, I guess.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. And did your brother go to any of those big wars, maybe—

JOLLY:                       No.

CHUNG:                     —Vietnam War or Korean War?

JOLLY:                       He was—

CHUNG:                     Okay.  And so—

JOLLY:                       —on active duty right after the Korean War, so it would have been in the, oh, I think ’55 through ’57 period that he was on active duty. Never left—

CHUNG:                     Oh, okay.

JOLLY:                       —the United States.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Right. And what was his position and role in [the] Army?

JOLLY:                       It was strange. He had been in ROTC when he was going to college and was in the Reserves at the same time.

                                    But when the Korean War was over, they cut back on the number of people in ROTC, and he was eliminated from ROTC, for some reason, and he was drafted. And in that time, he had spent three years in ROTC and had gone to ROTC camp and had also been in the Reserves and had gone to Reserve camp. But he went in as an absolute private in the Army, being drafted. But he was a very skilled one, so he rose quickly and was sent—he was a college—well, he wasn’t a college graduate yet; he was close to it, but he was sent to clerk-typist school and set all sorts of records typing. I wish I had that ability.

                                    And became—because he knew so much about—he had had military exposure before and was a college-type guy who could type very well. Became a clerk for the battalion and higher organizations and eventually was a brigade clerk to the commanding officer. So he had a pretty good time and was in the right place. Was at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, which is probably a nice post.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Great. And would you say what your brother did in [the] Army and, like, his position and his duty kind of in a way influenced your decision in making—in your decision of—I guess your role and what you want[ed] to do in [the] Army?

JOLLY: Probably not. It may have had a little bit of influence and made me be interested in the Army or—you know,—I’ll get off on another subject here in a little bit, but it was just something that looked like the natural course for me. It wasn’t like, Gee, I want to be just like him. There was an earlier point where I thought about going to [the U.S. Military Academy at] West Point or the brand-new [U.S.] Air Force Academy. And—

                                    Until I saw a movie of—I forget which movie star, but he was fighting in the Korean War and was in an airplane and got shot down, and I said, Gee, you could get shot down in these airplanes. Maybe I don’t want to go to the Air Force Academy. So I don’t know if that was a deep thought, but when I was about 12 or 13 years old, that was a direction I seriously considered.

CHUNG:                     I see. Mm-hm. So, yeah, I guess kind of talking now more in details about your Army ROTC experience, it would be great if you can tell me a little bit about, like, kind of how often you were trained and what kind of training that you received and maybe your typical daily routine as an Army ROTC.

JOLLY:                       It varied over the years. There were different programs. But generally every Wednesday you had what was called “drill,” and that was usually on Chase Field, if you know where that is. Down beyond where the [Rupert C.] Thompson Arena is, is where we would drill. We would form up behind Alumni Gym[nasium] and march down there, and in your early years, you just drilled and learned all the—you know, how to turn right and left and “about face” and what to do with your M-1 [Garand] rifle, which is the rifle that we had. And so that was pretty much the first year. But you also had a class going on, and you’d get a grade in military science, but it was—the class was an hour or I think two hour classes a week or so, and the first year, it was just introduction to military. It was what the ranks are and how to recognize them and how to address an officer and go to military courtesy as much as anything else, I think. And you later picked up, you know, the military alphabet, how to say those, and you started into radio telephone communication, and gradually it increased over the four years, and you would get more—there was also—I wasn’t in it; my two roommates were—there was a mountain and winter warfare detachment at Dartmouth.

                                    That took a little more time. They would go out, climb cliffs and go up and down Bartlett Tower, and they would ski, and that would take, oh, three hours or so more, I think, each week than we just [unintelligible] mountain and winter warfare cadets were.

                              Dartmouth was a pretty good—our military science professor was Col. [Joseph W.A.] Whitehorne [III], who was a liberally educated Rutgers [University] professor—or not a Rutgers professor but a graduate, who had been in World War II. And he did thinks that weren’t part of a normal program in that he had movies for us to go see. We saw All Quiet on the Western Front. We saw The Red Badge of Courage. And some of the movies were basically antiwar movies, to open our minds, that we weren’t just narrow military, that we saw the other aspects of it.

                                    Junior year, we started doing things like going out into the field, and we would actually fight against aggressors. They were just other cadets from another class or something, but you would learn tactics and that sort of thing. And the big thing was six weeks in the summer of your junior year. We went to ROTC camp with cadets from maybe 20 or 30 other colleges. Ours was at Fort Devens, Massachusetts.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Great.

                                    And I guess maybe kind of linking back to your experience in Boy Scout and Eagle Scout, would you say there it was, like—was ROTC training a big surprise for you, or what were some aspects that were different from your prior—from this Boy Scout experience that you experienced in ROTC?

JOLLY:                       The biggest difference is boys versus men. You know, we were now men and what we were about was serious, because there were in 1961, ’62 there was the Cold War, and there was Cuban Missile Crisis, and that made it seem a little serious. But it was—coming back from summer camp, on the radio I heard about something called “the Gulf of Tonkin.” And Vietnam was just a small thing that was in ’63, ’64 starting up, you might say. But this was a grown-up world versus the boys’ world, but there were certainly similarities. You had uniforms. You were outside. You had to get along in the trees.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Great.

                                    So also I guess a little bit about your military science class. Did you guys also kind of learn about, like, how the weapons work and really I guess the science behind, like, lots of—like, different wars, like, the military strategies as well?

JOLLY:                       We had—I forgot to mention also, I believe our junior year, a military history course, and it was taught by the history department at Dartmouth. I forget the name of the gentleman—[Louis C.] “Lou” Morton; it seems like Morton was his name, anyway. Was a professor who taught the class.

JOLLY:                       And we had a lot of reading and lectures about various battles and strategy and tactics. You know, he went clear back to the Romans and the Carthaginians and up through the American Civil War and World War II, and so this was a regular Dartmouth course, but it was mandatory for the military science students.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. And anything that you kind of learned outside the military science courses, like math or engineering or economics? Like, were they kind of relevant to what you’ve learned inside military science courses in any manner, or no?

JOLLY:                       As it turned out, you know, the job I ended up in Vietnam certainly—I was working with computers, and so the math background when you’re out on a pile of rocks with the computer was helpful. But more than anything, just the liberal education at Dartmouth was helpful because you had to deal with diverse people from all walks of life, with different motivations, and to have seen the broader world that Dartmouth introduced you to made you a better officer, I think.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. And you told me that you went to ROTC summer camp in your junior summer. Is that correct?

JOLLY:                       Yes.

CHUNG:                     Yeah. So would it be possible for you to tell me a little bit about what that experience was like, now that you are mingling with cadets from, like, other schools, like, and now you’re no longer in, like, Dartmouth setting but in a different place?

JOLLY:                       I think Dartmouth had a reputation among all the schools that were there of being good. We had—our lead non-commissioned officer attached to the Dartmouth ROTC unit was Sgt. Major William [R. “Sarge”] Brown. And Sgt. Brown was a veteran of both the World War II and going up the boot of Italy against the Germans, but he also was on the Yalu [River] when the Chinese came across the Yalu. As I remember the story, he became a battalion commander, which is roughly 1,000 men. He was the highest-ranking officer. He wasn’t an officer; he was a sergeant, but he was the highest-ranking person left alive. So he had all kinds of experiences, and had a great reputation. He was really a good guy, but he wouldn’t let you know it, so just his image made us have a good image also. So—

                                    And we generally did well with things when we were at Fort Devens. I have a trophy downstairs. People—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. And what—

JOLLY:                       Are you there?

CHUNG: [Chuckles.] Yeah. What is the trophy about?

JOLLY:                       The trophy—it’s for map reading, that there were 1,600 guys in this camp,—

CHUNG:                     Ohh!

JOLLY:                       —ROTC students and one of my friends from Dartmouth and I got the only perfect scores on the map reading test, and I have to hear about this whenever I get lost. I’ve got a trophy.

CHUNG: [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       But I sort of took pride in it, because I never beat 1,600 people before in anything, so—

CHUNG:                     Right!

JOLLY:                       That’s just—you know, that’s the kind of thing—we also learned that in classes at Dartmouth, in the military science classes of how to read a map. And I still don’t need GPS [Global Positioning System]. I’m fairly good at the old-fashioned way.

CHUNG:                     Right. So other than that reading which you did really well, apparently, I could tell, what were some other trainings that you received during the ROTC camp, ROTC summer camp, and were they really different from the previous training you received at Dartmouth?

JOLLY:                       No, not so much. It was just more of it on a bigger scale. It’s interesting that we were still taught to fight in Korea. [Chuckles.] The whole—the tactics we learned at Dartmouth—

CHUNG: [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       —were you were—we had a battle line. And you had the forward edge. It was called the FEBA, the forward edge of the battle area. And you had the I think IP [initial point] or something when you cross that in an attack. And everything was geared to what the military knew. It wasn’t geared to the next war; it was geared to where they had experience, so we were pretty much trained to fight in Korea. You just did things on a larger scale. There were now tanks.

                                    You would hear something clunking, and it was an enemy tank coming at you. But you just—you know, we went out for three days or so on a bivouac and let our beards grow and all that kind of stuff and came back in at three in the morning.

                                    But it was just a larger-scale training and more of it. It was a much more intense period. It wasn’t once a week; it was every day for six weeks.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. Right. Ooh, that sounds very intense. Right.

JOLLY:                       And you got different weapons. You practiced the old-fashioned bayonet and machine guns, and you fired rocket launchers. We were exposed to military aviation, even branches because we had to choose our branches by our senior year, and so each branch of the Army would have an orientation program and tell them what their branch did.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. So, yeah, I guess talking a little bit about your ROTC experience in your senior year, so now you have to make [a] decision on which branch you want to join and I guess kind of where you want to take away with your—on ROTC experience at Dartmouth. So it would be great if you can tell me a little bit about that.

JOLLY:                       Okay. You had to—I’m trying to think what—you had to choose one combat branch. Combat is infantry, artillery, engineers—I think that—and maybe [U.S. Army] Signal Corps, but infantry, artillery—armor and engineers. You had to select one of those, and your top three choices, and if you selected—there was something you selected, you had to choose a fourth. And my first choice was armor because I had taken German, and I thought we had a lot of troops in Germany and, Well, if I’m in the armory, they’ll send me to Germany because, you know, that’s where armor goes. So that was my first choice.

                                    Usually you don’t get your first choice. And I had I think Signal Corps and Engineering. I think it was Engineering. You had to pick another, fourth choice. And I couldn’t think of anything for a fourth choice, and one of the captains, Regular Army captains, was in the office when I was trying to choose. I said, “What should I  choose?” And he said, “Ordnance Corps. It’s a good place to be.” I didn’t know what that was, but I wrote it down. And I got my fourth choice.

                                    I think if you chose a combat branch, you’d get that, but in Ordnance Corps—now deals in many things. It deals in weapons and ammunition, but it also deals in supply and in service and it’s sort of a changed branch. But I ended up with that as my branch of the Army.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. Yeah, so you said your first choice was armor because you wanted to go to Germany, and is there any particular reason why you wanted to go to Germany?

JOLLY:                       Yeah, well, Elvis [A.] Presley was there, and why not join Elvis? I just had taken German and wanted to see Germany, and I thought I would like to see Europe, and it wasn’t a great—it was an inspiration in the hallway: If I’m going somewhere, I might as well go to Germany. And I would get to speak a little of the German I had learned at Dartmouth.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Mmm. I see. It’s just sort of really interesting because I guess kind of your impression of Germany would have been formed from your previous knowledge of, like, World War II and all that, so I just kind of find it interesting how that you were kind of attracted to that language and that country, specifically when, you know, the U.S. has been fighting Germany for such a long period—well, not too long, but, like, a considerable number of years.

JOLLY:                       I don’t know, I think I was attracted to German more because it was at the time we were all to be engineers, and German was a good engineering language. Russian seemed to be too foreign to me. It was also a good engineering language. So that was more the attraction than any sort of a World War II or having much knowledge of Germany. I had to pick German, French or Spanish, and I tried German.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. Great. Yeah. So now you I guess—you have decided your branch, the branch that you would be joining, so it would be great now if I could hear a little bit about kind of the graduation ceremony and your military career shortly after graduation.

JOLLY:                       Okay. It was also in this time, I should mention—when I started Dartmouth in 1961, as I mentioned, Vietnam was just a—you know, you’d heard that there was something going on there, but I was a different generation than those who came to Dartmouth in 1966. Things changed abruptly. You know, we just—I don’t know. A good many of us were in either Army, Navy or Air Force ROTC. We didn’t think about resisting anything, and the change took place. But also, as the war escalated, everyone—there was a great movement to go to graduate school.

                                    I’m going to get a cough drop here.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY: [Coughs.] So I sort of joined the crowd. I was commissioned. We were commissioned in the BEMA [Big Empty Meeting Area] I think the day after graduation. There was a ceremony and speaker, and maybe 25 of us became second lieutenants.                       

                                    And then I applied for and got a two-year deferral to go to graduate business school that I went straight to the University of Virginia to business school. I think I had a summer—no, I went—I had a summer job, I believe, but then I went into the University of Virginia for two years. In the meantime, I still had the obligation ahead of me that I would have to spend two years as an officer but that I was back to being a student again. The time was deferred until I graduated from the University of Virginia. Then the Army gave me my orders for when I should go on active duty. And it happened that the Army deferred me for another, like, eight or nine months, so I took a job with IBM [International Business Machines Corporation] as a computer systems engineer and worked in Richmond, Virginia, or in San Francisco for eight or nine months until it was time to go on active duty in January of ’68.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Great. Yeah, just I guess kind of talking a little bit more about the atmosphere, like, the general atmosphere at the time of your commencement. I just find it interesting that—you just mentioned that people kind of tend to go to graduate school as the war escalated, so it would be—I was just wondering if I can hear a little bit more in details about kind of what were some words that people were saying about the war and especially kind of within I guess the cadets, like, your peers that you met in ROTC. What was kind of the general sentiment and reception about the war?

JOLLY:                       I think those in ROTC,—you know, while we were not wild about the war or anything, we were of maybe a different time, and it was our obligation to go. And I didn’t—while my two roommates that I mentioned were both in ROTC, they were both—they also went to graduate school, but as soon as that was over, they went off to the military. They were both married. I’m sure they hated to leave their wives, but that’s what they had to do.

                                    They did not resist in any way, because that concept came a year or two later, and so—even we’d have an Armed Forces Day at Dartmouth where we would—you know, all three branches of ROTC would form on the [Dartmouth] Green, and there would be a speaker and a band that came from some post in New England each year and would lead the parade up the main street of Hanover. And there were some protesters, but it was, like, 15 or 20 protesters, not a large crowd. The crowd of supporters was much larger than the crowd of protesters in 1964.

                                    I’m going to kind of backtrack—

CHUNG:                     Okay, so even—

JOLLY:                       I think I was almost ready to go on active duty.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Okay. So even up until, like, ’64 and ’65, like, I guess kind of the students’ attitude or a reception of war wasn’t really I guess negative or, you know, it wasn’t really an avoiding atmosphere per se. Is that correct?

JOLLY:                       Yeah, it was more of an awareness of it, but it wasn’t a heated kind of thing. At least in Hanover, New Hampshire, it wasn’t. There may have been—if you could go to [University of California,] Berkeley or a more active campus at the time, it might have grown sooner. But it hadn’t really hit Hanover in a big way.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. And so was it just the common thing for a lot of students to go straight into graduate school after their undergrad programs?

JOLLY:                       It seemed, at least at the time, to be a big thing. You know, the fact that “this war will soon be over,” and while I said we weren’t protesting in our group, it was, Well, I might as well get a graduate degree here, and then I’ll go on to my military service. It was just a more of a common sense decision, not an angry decision.

CHUNG:                     Right. Okay. Okay, now I think I understand that better. Great. So while you’re in business school in University of Virginia, did you get any kind of a military training or did you continue to have exposure to, like, ROTC and Army training in any sense?

JOLLY:                       No way. It was—you know, you would have to report that you were in good status or something and you were still in school and you would—the deferral wasn’t for the full two years; you had to update the military on it. But as long as you were still in school, you could continue to be in school. You couldn’t continue forever. It was only for two years. After law school, you—

CHUNG:                     And I—okay. And I bet, like, you know, the overall atmosphere and the environment and everything kind of was very different from your experience in Dartmouth while you were in University of Virginia, so what were some kind of transitions or changes that you experienced?

JOLLY:                       Well, there started to be—yeah, there was music I didn’t understand. You know, when I was in grad school, I was very busy. I didn’t have the fraternity house or anything, but people like Bob Dylan were appearing. You know, “What is that music? It sounds foreign, strange.” And hair was growing a little longer. Even at the University of Virginia, which is known as a very formal school, and you wore coats and ties and—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —you’re a Southern gentlemen, and it was starting to appear here. There was a different movement underway, a more—a little more hostile, and it was—you know, San Francisco was having Haight-Ashbury. [Transcriber’s note: He refers to the hippie counterculture movement there in the ‘60s, and, in 1967, the Summer of Love.] The climate was changing. But I was in business school, and I was working until 11 o’clock every night, and I almost didn’t notice that the change was going on because I was so involved with my work in business school.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. And so what was it like to kind of, you know, now go into business and actually have a career after your business school?

JOLLY:                       Well, there was a little—you know, I knew it was only—I forget the time, but I went into the Army in January of ’68, and I finished Virginia in May—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —of ’67, so it was that short period that I worked for IBM. Part of that was in school in San Francisco, IBM school. I mentioned Haight-Ashbury. I now could see Haight-Ashbury. That was in its nice period. Not too bad yet. The “flower [children]” period.

                                    Then I came back to Richmond and went to work for IBM. It was a little bit like business school. I just worked long hours, and would have Saturday evenings off, but other than that, I was just working hard, so not too much exposure to the military or what was going on in society.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Mm-hm. I see. So I guess you—were you still kind of able to kind of sense I guess the transition in [the] public’s, like, general sentiment towards the Vietnam War, though?

JOLLY:                       Could I sense it? Yes, because the Vietnam War was building. It was on the news, when I got home on time to watch the news, but it was on the news regularly. You know, I knew friends who were now going. The mood in the society was, you know, going from “Let’s support our boys” to “Gee, what’s going on here?” kind of thing.

                                    It hadn’t reached quite the boiling point yet in January of ’68,  but it was definitely—I knew something was happening, you know.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. Great. So I guess the atmosphere was definitely different from the time that you were just kind of graduating from Dartmouth.

JOLLY:                       Yeah, I would say so. It had escalated in that period. But, again, I was in a little bit of a cocoon, working long hours and somewhat oblivious to what was going on around me. You know, I just had to get the work assignment done. I knew I was going into the Army, but I still had the immediate objective in front of me.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. I see. Okay. So you entered active duty in January 1968, so I’m just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your military career prior to going to Vietnam.

JOLLY:                       Okay. As you said, I had been designated to the Ordnance Corps, so the first thing I had to do was show up at the Ordnance Officers [sic; Officer] Basic Course at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, which was the home of the Ordnance Corps.

                                    And I was probably—I don’t know the size of our class, but 50 or 60 similar people. And it was surprising how many of them had graduate degrees. We had lawyers and MBAs, and how many people had gotten their undergraduate degrees and their commissions but had deferred, and now we were all on—we were a rather well-educated group. Most of us had graduate degrees.

                                    On active duty. It, again, was—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —ordnance officers’ basic class, you were going to go on to additional training. It was almost like advanced ROTC summer camp. It was a lot of the same things all over again. You had to—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —learn military procedures and how to give a platoon leader’s order or a patrol leader’s order, practiced the various formations and weapons, and, you know, you would fire for qualifying for whatever skill you had as a marksman. Many things all over again. You were reduced to—you weren’t commanding troops now, you were just a trainee once again.

JOLLY:                       And it was cold in Aberdeen, Maryland.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see.

JOLLY: Hanover is a very cold place, but it’s also cold right off the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland when the wind’s blowing, and it was January, and we were outside a lot.

CHUNG:                     Okay. Mm-hm. That must have been tough.

JOLLY:                       None of which prepared us for Vietnam.

CHUNG:                     Right. [Chuckles.] Right. It must have been really different.

                                    Yeah, I guess—I actually have a few questions about your occupational specialties, so I’ve learned that your first MOS [military occupational specialty] was 2402 and ADP operations officer, so I was just wondering if you can tell us a little bit about your MOS.

JOLLY:                       That’s where I ended up. I had all kinds of MOS’s along the way. I think almost all of us had a secondary MOS of infantry platoon leader. That’s where all this training—we could have led an infantry unit, but I’m trying to think of what other—I’ll get back to the MOS because that’s where I ended up. That probably is the end of the story of how I got that MOS. Out of Aberdeen.

CHUNG:                     Okay.

JOLLY:                       Well, I think we can have an interview, if I get talking here, that could last three days, but it was at Aberdeen—

CHUNG: [Laughs.]

JOLLY:                       —when I first ran into personal war resistance, I guess, because I said we were all graduate students and we had had jobs or had been lawyers before we went on active duty, and I went to a college mixer, hoping—well, I’m unmarried, and I don’t know anyone around here, and we’ll go to the college mixer.

                                    And it was the first time I was called “baby killer.” And three weeks before, I had worked for IBM, and I hadn’t killed a single baby that I was aware of, but I was called “baby killer.” Because you can tell by our haircuts that we were military.  And it was the first time I had been exposed to bad comments on a campus just because of that I was military. And it was also the period when I was at Aberdeen that [the Rev.] Martin Luther King [Jr.] was killed, and we were confined to the post, and you could see the burning fires from Baltimore on the horizon.  The sky was glowing red from the fires that were ignited by Martin Luther King’s assassination, so it was sort of a tough period in our country’s history. And we were in the Army.

CHUNG:                     Mmm. I see. Uh-huh. Right. That is actually a very compelling experience, have to say.

JOLLY:                       I also—

CHUNG:                     You told me a little bit about—

JOLLY:                       —met a—

CHUNG:                     —the—

JOLLY:                       I met a young lady in Baltimore that was going to Goucher College, and maybe it was the time—I didn’t know where I was going, and I was lonely, but I fell very much in love, but we had different views on the military.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       And we got along well, but that was a contributing factor, I think, in our breakup, that—different views. So it was now affecting me personally.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. So that’s—so were there any kind of any other incidents that you kind of felt that antiwar sentiment directly hitting you, and were there any kind of—more of, like, new stories or things that you’re reading on newspapers that is telling about the rising antiwar sentiment during the year?

JOLLY:                       Well, out of Aberdeen, I was sent to supply and service school in Fort Lee, Virginia, which was almost back to where I lived in Richmond.

                                    But after that, I was sent to the [U.S. Army] Electronics Support Command in Philadelphia. It’s right in sort of the heart of Philadelphia, on Rittenhouse Square, or was there, in a very large building that I think is a Sheraton Hotel [Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown Hotel] now. But Rittenhouse Square was also the place of major antiwar rallies, and so we had to walk across it in uniform, and so people would fall in behind you and say, “Hip, hip, whoop, whoop,” and, you know, it would be five people following you as you tried to walk across the square.

                                    And it was—the day I got my orders for Vietnam, I was the duty officer in this building, and being the duty officer, I was the only one there at night with a uniform on. There was a major antiwar rally, and the crowd was chanting, you know, “Hell no, we won’t go,” and they were burning their draft cards. And I’m the one—I was the bad guy inside, and I was the only one going anywhere. It just seemed like an ironic kind of situation, that I was a bad guy—

CHUNG:                     Right.

JOLLY:                       —going to Vietnam. They probably weren’t going anywhere.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. Yeah, it seems like—

JOLLY:                       There was a lot of experiences walking the streets of Philadelphia that you would hear comments.

CHUNG:                     Right. Mm-hm. And was there any kind of special events or anything that struck you or anything that you still remember till nowadays during your time at the supply and service school at Fort Lee, Virginia?

JOLLY:                       Not—the most unusual thing that happened there is I had a—my roommate, who had been my roommate at Aberdeen, another lieutenant, came back to our bachelor officers quarters one night and said that he had learned that if we knew a way to get housing off post, we could move off post and have it paid for because there was a great housing shortage, and so I called my landlord from when I was a civilian and moved into the small units that they had, and so we could move off post. That’s not a great experience, but it was an unusual situation, and I almost was getting extra pay to do that, and I wasn’t making as much as I did with IBM but was making more than lieutenants usually do. The pay then was $330 a month for a second lieutenant.

CHUNG:                     Mmm. I see. That’s really interesting. And anything—so what were your duties at supply and service or what were trainings that you received at supply and service school? Was it very kind of different from the courses that you took at the ordnance officers—

JOLLY:                       It was different in that it covered just about any kind of supply and service thing that you could think of: graves registration, how to mark bodies and put them in bags, and how to run a cemetery. We had two days of that. We went to a model cemetery. Any kind of maintenance units on vehicles. Just as the name “supply and service,” it was anything to keep the troops—that if you were in Europe or in Korea, the troops that were on the front line, you kept them going. It was the [U.S. Army] Quartermaster Corps sent people here. They did things like laundry or food or clothing or any kind of supplies. That’s the sort of training that you received at Fort Lee. It was under what was called the Quartermaster branch of the Army.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. And just before we move on, can we just kind of clarify on the timeline here? So it would be great if you can tell me, like, when you started your Ordnance Officers [sic; Officer] Basic Courses [sic; Course] and then when you moved to supply [and] service, and then when you finally arrived at the Army Electronics Command.

JOLLY:                       I know that I started in January of ’68, went on active duty at Aberdeen, Aberdeen Proving Ground. I’m thinking that was about a nine-week course, and then I went to Fort Lee, to the supply and service school, for nine more weeks, I think. So that’s 18 weeks. Does that put us in June or something?

CHUNG: Umm—

JOLLY:                       Close to it, anyway.

CHUNG:                     That puts—May or June, yeah.

JOLLY:                       And then that’s when I went to Philadelphia.

CHUNG:                     I see. Okay.

                                    So now could I hear a little bit more about I guess kind of your, like, military career-wise—like, your duties, and kind of if there was training that you received at the Army Electronics Command?

JOLLY:                       No, that was unusual. It was an installation of about 3,000 Department of the Army civilians and maybe 20, 25 military. The commander, who was the colonel, who was military—and then you had lieutenants and captains there. I don’t think there were any enlisted. Basically, I would have to say I did nothing. I had a job name, but you would go in, and you would talk about who won last night’s baseball game or just no one else was doing much of anything. You know, a building of 3,000 people and perhaps 300 actively doing things, so they should have gotten medals or bonuses or—you know, they were doing serious things. But the rest were counting up their sick leave. It was just sort of shocking to see how little work was being done and knowing that there was a war going on, that people were dying, and they needed batteries and radios and electronic gear that worked, and they needed it delivered in time, and it wasn’t happening at all. What was happening was the 300 people who deserved rewards and not the other 2,700, but basically none of us—we would come to work at 8:30 or 9 in the morning and leave at 11:30 for lunch and play cards. Like, five or six lieutenants would play hearts until 1:30 and go back to work and leave at 4:30.

                                    A pretty boring existence. But we were a small community of lieutenants and family. We had two apartments. There were about ten of us. So we would socialize together, and I enjoyed meeting my roommates there. They were good friends.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. Mm-hm. Right. So it sounds a little bit—it sounds like your military experience since your active service—like, since you began your active service—it sounds a little bit different from the experience that you had back in ROTC at Dartmouth, so just kind of wanted to ask you, like, kind of—was there any kind of changes and thoughts about military career since you started your active duty? Like, what were your feelings? Was there anything kind of that surprised you, or were there any things that were kind of similar to what you have expected from your ROTC experience at Dartmouth?

JOLLY:                       Well, there was just—there was a war, and you had this—even though I was very bored in my job of not doing anything, you knew it was coming. You knew you were going to go, so you didn’t know—it was a great unknown. What would it be like? What were you going to end up doing, you know? Where would you be? You know, could you do your job? And it was hanging over your head. I mentioned I had a girlfriend. We were together but not together, and some pressure there. So, you know, it was in some sense a relief the day I came in. I have a desk in an office, and it was mostly civilians in the office, and I came back from one of our long breaks, and this was empty. Where did everybody go? And I went to my desk, and here was this stack of orders saying, “You’re going to Vietnam.”

                                    So they wanted not to be hanging around talking. They knew if somebody came in—that’s why they cleared out, and then they came back later. I found out I was going to Vietnam. That was the day I was the duty officer that night of the protest.

CHUNG:                     Right. Mm-hm. Right. And I guess it’s totally fine if you would not like to discuss a little bit further about this, but—and not to be too, I don’t know, kind of infringing upon your private life, but I just find it interesting that, you know, the sentiment towards war and, like, different opinion towards war was kind of the factor that even influenced your kind of relationship and role in romantic life. So just kind of wanted to ask you, like, what were some I guess disputes and kind of the conflicts that you had with your girlfriend about the war? Like, what were some, like, words that you guys exchanged or the opinions that you guys shared that kind of, you know, always kind of conflicted one another?

JOLLY:                       I don’t think—well, it turns out that the girl’s parents had met during World War II. So she wasn’t totally anti-military. Her mother was a nurse in the military, and her father was a major in the Army, so she couldn’t totally be against lieutenants. But she was three years younger and a college senior, and more things were happening then in college than when I was a college senior three years before. We never reached the point of yelling at each other or—but it was a factor there, that we had some different political views, and I don’t know that’s what broke us up, but it was an element of it, I think. You know, we never had shouting matches over the war because I think she knew that I wasn’t looking forward to war, you know.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       But I would explain, “My concept is if there are American troops there and I’m an American, and I’m a pretty good officer, I think, it’s sort of my job to go be there for it.” She thought, “Well, it’s not good, and you should take a stand.” So we had that difference.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. I see. I see. Okay. And I guess kind of also was it very different experience for you? Because it seems like at the Army Electronics Comment Command, you’re mostly with the civilians rather than I guess soldiers or military officers, and you did tell me a little bit about how that dynamic was like, but I just would like to hear a little bit more about how their—like, if there was any difference, how their opinions kind of differed from yours about the Vietnam War in general.

JOLLY:                       They seemed to, you know, not—because they had jobs that depended on the military, they didn’t talk against it. They didn’t—I didn’t have many conversations with them, and if they had been against the war, they probably didn’t want to talk to an Army officer as though they were against the war when their job depended on it. But I didn’t run into any—you know, we young lieutenants got along well with the young ladies who worked there, so, you know, that was—didn’t find any problem there. So—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       But the civilian workers—I don’t think we had any problem, and they seemed to show some respect for us.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see.

JOLLY:                       And our—

CHUNG:                     And what were some kind of the—mm-hm. Yeah.

JOLLY:                       We were—

CHUNG:                     Yeah, go ahead.

JOLLY:                       As I’ve mentioned, the group of officers, all eight or twelve of us—we hung together. We were our only—we didn’t know anyone else. We had two apartments, and all the parties had the same twelve guys, and so—and we’d go to the [New] Jersey shore with three or four. So we were sort of confined to ourselves. We weren’t great chick magnets at the time, because it seemed like if you were headed to Vietnam, that wasn’t somebody that a young lady should consider of high potential.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. Right. So what were some I guess words or opinions that were kind of circulated or that the different officers are exchanging about the war?

JOLLY:                       You didn’t talk about it that much, because you were in the Army. You were an officer in the Army. I don’t want to fall back on World War II and “orders are orders,” but, you know, it doesn’t make much difference to—you just got to do your job. So I don’t think we—we talked more about how the Philadelphia Eagles were doing in football than what happened in [the] Tet [Offensive], you know. We were, of course, very interested but didn’t exchange opinions about it.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. I see. Okay. Great.

                                    So, yeah, I guess now kind of talking about your time in Vietnam, so it would be great if you can tell me a little bit about what your trip to Vietnam was like and maybe, like, [the] first few days when you were just settling in your new base.

JOLLY:                       This is where you can start to talk—you know, I sometimes in the local newspapers here will see someone, an obituary where they have a picture of them as a 20-year-old person with their uniform on, and you read and you think, Well, a 20-year-old died. No, he’s 84. But it’s such a period of your life that you can remember more things in 24 hours than you can remember in a year that happened ten years ago. You want the humor as well [chuckles] as the—funny things happened along the way, too. I guess you can have funny things in history.

CHUNG:                     Yeah, definitely.

                                    But flew from—being a West Virginian, my parents drove me to [Washington] Dulles [International] Airport, which was, oh, a three- or four-hour trip, but I couldn’t get a good connection out of West Virginia, so I flew—Dulles was a brand-new airport then. I flew from there to Seattle, and I was leaving from McChord Air Force Base, which is part of Fort Lewis—that’s where many of the flights left from. But I flew, in my green uniform, my dress uniform, to Seattle-Tacoma [International] Airport. (I think that’s what it’s called.) And had to change into my khaki uniform to wear to Vietnam.

                                    And I had this big duffel bag with all my clothing and everything I was taking to Vietnam I was carrying. Now, this is the risqué humor, I guess. I took that—put the whole thing in a locker and went to a men’s room at the far end of the airport, because now I have to change clothes, and I don’t want to change clothes in a busy place. So I go to this far-away place. I put my uniform on, and the zipper’s broken. And you can’t go to war with a broken zipper.

CHUNG: [Laughs.]

JOLLY:                       So I had to go all the way back and get my second uniform, the one I was going to wear home. (I was confident.) And exchanged that. You know, it was a big mess because I had to get a bus to go to the Air Force base. Coming out of the restroom, I had my uniform on, and an old guy came up and said, “Excuse me, son, are you going to Vietnam?” And I said, “Yes, I’m on my way.” And he said, “Well, think of the advantages.” I said, “Sir, I can’t think of many advantages.” And he said, “Well, you’ll be eligible to join the VFW, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, when you come home.” And I said, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. Okay, that puts me in a good mood.”

                                    So that was one of the funny things that happened on the way. But then we went to the Air Force base, and it was both enlisted and officers were all waiting for the planes. I happened to run into a high school friend, who was a year behind me in high school, who had gone to the [U.S.] Air Force Academy and was—he was on his way to Taiwan. He flew C-130s [Lockheed C-130 Hercules]. He was a pilot. And so I spent the night with four Air Force Academy graduates, who were also going somewhere in that direction.

                                    But then it came time for our plane, and we had two lines that went by each other: the returning veterans and what we would call newbies, the new people going out. We all had clean uniforms on, and they came back with bedraggled, worn-out, patched uniforms with their bleached hair, and the two lines had to walk by each other, and no words were said, but you walked by the veterans returning and the new guys going out. It was a moment to remember, a pretty touching moment. But then was, you well know, a long airplane ride.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Yeah. I bet.

JOLLY:                       We flew from Seattle to Tokyo and then Tokyo on into Cam Ranh Bay, is where I entered the country. Now you have to wait for your assignment. And you had no idea where you were going. But at Cam Ranh Bay that night, there were flares across—I think there were jagged mountains and this white sand, and it’s an absolutely beautiful place. And I said, Well, this war isn’t too bad. It’s sort of beautiful here. But it was maybe 14 hours later when somebody came by and said, “Are you Lt. Jolly?” And they told me where I was going. I had to go from Cam Ranh Bay—I had to go to the airport and take a C-130, which is a cargo plane, to Bien Hoa Air Force Base, near Saigon.

                                    And I was the ranking officer, so on this plane there were all kinds of people: Vietnamese, Americans, Montagnard tribesmen, people with chickens. I don’t know where everybody was going, but I was the ranking officer, so I had to lead them down the air strip and get on the plane. And we flew off to Bien Hoa Air Force Base. And there, I was just in a temporary housing for a night, and I went to a replacement depot the next day.

                                    You know, my training—as I said, I could have been many, many things. I could have been an ammunition depot officer. I could have been explosive or ordnance training. I could have been graves registration. In fact, there was a warrant officer. He said, “Okay, we’re gonna find something for you to do.” And he said, “How about graves registration?” I said, “Can you get anybody else for that? Can you find somebody else?” And he said, “Do you know anything about computers?” And I said, “Well, I worked for IBM before I went on active duty.” It had nothing to do with much of military training, but he said, “Okay, we got a computer job for you.”

                                    And I went off to Long Binh depot, which was the largest depot in country, at the edge of Long Binh post. And my title was that of Chief of Computer Operations. And we processed supplies. The depot was about five miles by four miles or so, a very large place with all kinds of stuff, and so I—that was my job. There were about, oh, 30 Vietnamese and 10 American military in our area.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. And you arrived in Vietnam in January 1969. Is that correct? Or early—

JOLLY:                       I believe it was, yes.

CHUNG:                     —1969?

JOLLY: Early—

CHUNG:                     Uh-huh. Okay.

JOLLY:                       —’69.

CHUNG:                     Early ’69. Right. Early ’69. Right. Sorry. So it must have been—the war has escalated quite a bit by this point, so what was—

JOLLY:                       That was a real live war then.

CHUNG:                     —the general atmosphere when you—

JOLLY:                       Tet had already occurred. Tet’s the previous year.

CHUNG:                     Yeah, exactly. Right. Tet occurred the previous year. So what has been, like—what was the general atmosphere when you arrived in Vietnam? Like, what was the vibe that you were getting from the officers club, there for several months already, and, you know, I guess kind of the general—kind of the vibe that you got from the country when you landed in?

JOLLY:                       It was—no question, everyone was on a war status. You know, you saw four flares going up in the sky everywhere. You would hear artillery. You know, still—like, the first week I was there, we were in—it was a temporary—because the build-up had taken so long, they didn’t have quarters for officers, and we were in what was an old barracks, and it was called the Bay of Pigs, because it wasn’t a very good place to be. And if you remember the Cuban crisis and the Cuban invasion that failed and they landed at the Bay of Pigs,—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —so that’s where this name came from.

CHUNG:                     Right.

JOLLY:                       But it was about—sometime my first week I was there, I heard someone yell, “Incoming!” And “incoming” to me was something I’d heard in movies, and I heard somebody else yell, “Hit the dirt!” “Hit the dirt” is what [movie actor] John Wayne would yell. And then all of a sudden—wham! wham!—rockets started hitting. You know, I learned it was real, and I sort of stood there as—This is like a war. You know, I didn’t stand very long, but—

                                    So we were [in] what you would normally consider a relatively safe place. We weren’t out looking for trouble. But there were no truly safe places.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. I see. Yeah. I guess I’m a little bit curious about your role at the Long Binh depot—like, what exactly you were doing. And—so you said it’s about the computer—like, ammunition and the supply, so what exactly would be some things that or some informations that you’d be processing there?

JOLLY:                       What we were doing? We had—at first, I was sort of running something called the document control and analysis section and that’s where the—we had Vietnamese keypunch operators. They were there in the day, ladies who were—

                                    Do you know a keypunch machine is? Back when—and you used to have cards that—you didn’t enter data directly into a computer; you would put it into an 80-column card and would punch holes, and that’s what the computer then read. And these ladies would punch orders, and they would sit at the machine, much like a typing machine, and these things—they would produce cards for supplies, to order the supplies, to distribute the supplies. And they were tremendous. They were very good workers. And at night the section were GIs [government issue, or general issue] that had extended a year to get out of infantry units.

                                    Said, “I want out of this infantry unit, and I will spend another year in the Army if you can transfer me to a better job, a better place,” and so they would say, “How about a computer job?” They tried to turn them into keypunch operators, and these guys typed—[Chuckles.] But they were just—they were glad to be there, but the Vietnamese were much better workers to do this.

JOLLY:                       You know, we had—I like—these guys—we had to take out—we had miscellaneous duties. I had to take out patrols once every—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —week or so. And when you took out the patrol, it was nice to have people with infantry experience behind you in the patrol.They were good at this. Even though they transferred to get away from it, they had experience. Later on, I became the night shift officer in charge of the data processing installation.

                                    And I would show up for work about 5 o’clock and leave at 8 in the morning, and ran the whole thing. And I was also, as a first lieutenant, the ranking officer in the whole depot, which covered this five-mile or so area, so I got, you know, decisions that went beyond the scope of the immediate chief of data processing or whatever my title was, or computer operations.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Great. Yeah, just I find it really interesting that—though, like, you did have to do the patrol and were in charge of, like, more things, just like beyond your kind of information processing duty, it’s just really interesting that you actually got to kind of interact and work with the officers who had more of, like, a combat and were, like, infantry combat experience.

JOLLY:                       They were the enlisted men who would transfer out of infantry units.

CHUNG:                     It just sounds like—Right. Yeah, it seems like just—it sounds like you guys would have had, like, very kind of different background coming into this, so I just want to hear a little bit about what your interaction was like with them.

JOLLY:                       Oh. You know, it was—if you ever want to learn how to lead a group of people, you get this group of people behind you that are of different races, nationalities, persuasions, desires, objectives and give them all loaded weapons and then walk in front of them [Chuckles.] You got to learn how to deal with a lot of different people and a lot of different situations. They don’t have—you know, they weren’t all Dartmouth students. They are from the hills of Tennessee and ghettoes of the city. They’re Latino, they’re—but you got to get the job done, and the best way to do it is to be the best officer you can possibly be, and they’ll recognize that and they’ll follow you.

                                    So I went from—the first time I had to take a patrol out, I was—I had never been very good at ROTC camp in giving what is called a patrol leader’s order, all the things you’re supposed to say before about, you know, where you fall back to if there’s a problem and what the password is and checking everybody’s ammunition and, the first time I did it in Vietnam, though, it went from being a klutz at Dartmouth to being—I could have made the training film because it was now serious.

                                    And the same way on the radio—we had on these patrols sometimes—you would have to radio back in from checkpoints, onto radio, and that was really good, and I hadn’t been that good when I was in training. But when it gets serious, you do a better job.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. Great.  Yeah, and what were your kind of patrol experiences like? Yeah. So you said you had to lead patrol about once every three weeks. Is that correct?

JOLLY:                       Yeah, something like that. Oh, the first time we went out, we were supposed to—one of our objectives was to check a gate. We were beyond the perimeter of Long Binh, and we were supposed to check a gate that was supposed to be locked, and so you had to go up to this gate, and we had three gun Jeeps, and they were Jeeps with 50 caliber machine guns mounted on them and four guys in each Jeep. And so we were going up, and as we walked up toward the gate, you could hear there was a little faint light, and you could hear a murmur of voices.

                                    So everybody—you know, the hair on the back of your neck goes up, and What is this? And so you’re sneaking up, and, you know, I’m giving my best signals, and everybody is spreading out, and so we’ve got 12 guys coming up together, and all of a sudden, what the faint noise was—they were propelled—155 millimeter Howitzers, American, that had a fire mission. We didn’t know they were there, and they didn’t know we were there, sneaking up behind. And they let loose with firing their artillery. And all we saw was just a flash of light. You know, I hit the dirt, and I think I may have muttered some foul word, but we got up and walked away. It was quite a startling experience. And it could have been dangerous because we could have walked up on top of them, and not knowing what—

CHUNG:                     Right. Mm-hm, mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       But it was good to get—

CHUNG:                     So was it because of—right. Yeah. I bet. Was it because of a miscommunication or lack of communication between troops? Because it sounds—

JOLLY:                       I’m sure it was.

CHUNG:                     Right. It sounds like it was, like it could have—

JOLLY:                       Two commands didn’t talk to each other.

CHUNG:                     Right. Uh-huh.

JOLLY:                       That it shouldn't have happened that way. We shouldn’t be sneaking up behind them, not knowing they’re there.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. Exactly. Yeah, that sounds like it could have been, like, a really, really dangerous situation, so just wanted to ask you that.

JOLLY:                       Oh, I’ve got another Dartmouth story. Can I tell—

CHUNG:                     Yeah. Any other memories about—

JOLLY:                       —you a Dartmouth story?

CHUNG:                     Yeah, I would like to hear that.

JOLLY:                       My roommate at Dartmouth, Wayne [A.] Wight [Class of 1965], was in the [U.S. Army] Transportation Corps, and I found out after I had been at the Long Binh area for a month or two months, through his wife and my parents—found out we were a mile or so apart. And where we lived. And so I went to see him one night, and his company was away doing something, and he and just a few of the men were there, and I brought a six-pack of beer. And so he said—there was a red alert, meaning there was some kind of activity either going on or potentially going on. They said, “Well, let’s go to the bunker and take our radios and drink a beer.” And so we went—he had a command bunker that he had built, and we went into the bunker and were drinking the beer, and it came over the Armed Forces Vietnam radio [sic; Armed Forces Vietnam Network]—they were bringing the news, and some of the big news that evening was that Dartmouth College had abandoned ROTC, that ROTC no longer had a place on campus. And Wayne and I looked at each other with the shared thought of: “Can we go home?” You know, we thought maybe this would let us out. But it didn’t. That was a Dartmouth story from a bunker.

CHUNG:                     Right. That’s, yeah. That’s really actually really interesting how that roommate was stationed very close to where you were in Vietnam.

JOLLY:                       Yes. And my other roommate was in Vietnam—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. So were you able to—

JOLLY:                       —but I never got together with—

CHUNG:                     Oh.

JOLLY:                       —him. He was farther away.

CHUNG:                     Okay. I see. Did you have any—like, after this encounter, did you have any other chances to meet this roommate at the Transportation Corps after, or no?

JOLLY:                       Did I see him after this time?

CHUNG:                     Yeah.

JOLLY:                       The one that was in the Transportation Corps? Not regularly, because, you know, we went different ways, and he went home before I did. But I would see him.

CHUNG:                     Okay.

JOLLY:                       There was an officers club, and I would occasionally see him at the officers club. I saw him there. The officers club is nothing that would impress you. If you take the worst Dartmouth fraternity house and downgrade it about three steps—

CHUNG: [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       —it would equal an officers club in Vietnam. But we did have bands and music, but I would occasionally run into him there. You would go and have a beer.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. I see.

JOLLY:                       It was a particular kind of beer.

CHUNG:                     Right.

JOLLY:                       I now go into restaurants here, and there are 400 different kinds of beers, and there, you took whatever beer—

CHUNG:                     That’s true.

JOLLY:                       —they had.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       It could be San Miguel from the Philippines or just any kind of beer. You would—you just drank the beer. And it was warm. So you learned to live with that.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. I see. Right.

                                    And also I guess kind of going back a little bit more to your, like, military duty in Vietnam, I just find it really interesting that you had quite a bit of chance to directly interact and work with the local Vietnamese—

JOLLY:                       Yes.

CHUNG:                     —in your office, so I just wanted to hear a little bit more about that as well.

JOLLY:                       Oh. You know, there were about 30 or 40 Vietnamese that worked at our units during the day, but, as I said, I went to the night, so I didn’t have a great an interaction with them after going to the night.

                                    But I just—and the cleaning ladies or people working around the post were Vietnamese, so I learned to really like the Vietnamese. I didn’t care for the North Vietnamese, but I liked the South Vietnamese a lot.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. And did they speak—like, do you guys interact in English or—

JOLLY:                       I learned perhaps a hundred words of Vietnamese. I still go to a Vietnamese barber, and I can tell him, you know, that my hair looks like a monkey’s tail or something, but I learned about a hundred words of Vietnamese, so I could communicate a little bit. But the GIs and the Vietnamese had a total pidgin language between them.

                                    You’d say something like, “Boo-koo work, ti-ki money,” which I think combines three languages. Ti-ki I think is Vietnamese for “little.” And there were these words that were just pidgin words. And some of them were words out of—you know, the American troops had been in Japan or in Korea, that—you know, mama-san. Baby-san. Those were GI words. Most of the GIs thought mama-san was a Vietnamese word. It’s just a pidgin word.

                                    [Pause] But there was—

CHUNG:                     Right. That’s really interesting.

JOLLY:                       Yeah, that’s almost a separate language, of how the Vietnamese and the GIs communicated.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Okay. And also just kind of wondering: What were the kind of the background that these Vietnamese employers or the officers are coming from? Like, their maybe education or, like, their kind of political belief? Like, kind of their socioeconomic status? Like, if you are able to kind of, you know, notice any of that in any sense.

JOLLY:                       Of the Vietnamese that we worked with?

CHUNG:                     Yeah.

JOLLY:                       Some of them were—the males had been—I can think of one who was an officer in the Vietnamese army and was wounded, so he was disabled. So he came to work for the Americans at the depot. More women than men were working there because the mean were off in their army. They were just very good workers and very pleasant, and they sort of—they believed in America. They didn’t want to come to America. Said, “Well, don’t you want to move to California?” They said, “No, I’m Vietnamese.” But they thought America was a good place.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see.

JOLLY:                       They generally—

CHUNG:                     That’s real interesting.

JOLLY:                       You could—you saw bad things.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       You know, the Vietnamese—some Americans called them names, you know.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       But I would say at least 75, 80 percent, they got along fine and they kidded a lot.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       So relatively good relationships.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Interesting. Yeah. Do you just remember any kind of conversations that you had with them that kind of—that was telling about where they were coming from or their thoughts?

JOLLY:                       Um—

CHUNG:                     Or any episode or anecdotes?

JOLLY: Nothing other than that kind of short conversation and that I mentioned: “Wouldn’t you like to live in the United States someday?” And “No, because I’m Vietnamese.” Many now live here. But that wasn’t their intent, anyway. I don’t remember having deep, serious conversations with them.

CHUNG:                     Okay. I see. So that’s real interesting that after the war, did a lot of people who worked in your office end up living in the United States?

JOLLY:                       I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to the people that I worked with. I have never seen any mention—it’s hard to find them, anyway. A third of the people in the country are named Nguyen, and so [chuckles] they all have the same name. [Chuckles.] But it’s like Lees in Korea. There are a lot of them. Or Smiths in the United States. But I have had no contact. I’m sure some of them, like the gentleman that I spoke of that was in the South Vietnamese army—I’m sure he was reeducated in some way, and he worked for the Americans, so—

                                    That reminds me. I had taken Latin in high school and didn’t see any practical use for Latin, but here was this old man who worked in the depot—

                                    I’m getting a little echo on my phone. Do you hear any—am I coming through okay for you?

CHUNG:                     Yeah, you’re coming through just fine.

JOLLY:                       But he couldn’t speak any English, not a word of English, and he was sort of a lonely man. I learned from one of the other Vietnamese that he had lost five sons in the war. He had come from North Vietnam in 1954, but he had a very low job, but I heard him humming “Adeste Fideles,” the Christmas carol, around Christmas one year. And I had learned to sing that in high school Latin class, so I started singing it, and he started singing it in Latin. He had been trained by the church. He had gone to church schools. So from then on—he was much better in Latin than I was, but I could say, “All of Gaul is divided into three parts” and “I’m a farmer,” and I knew enough Latin that he and I communicated in Latin, the only use I really had for direct Latin is with him. He lit up when he could speak to an American.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. That’s really interesting. That’s really cool. Right.

                                    And so you said you were not really able to keep up with any of the officers, like, the Vietnamese officers that you worked with in Long Binh depot, but are you keeping in touch with any of the American officers that you worked with in Long Binh depot?

JOLLY:                       No, none that I worked with. I haven’t seen—it seemed like I had either officers or enlisted. I’ve had no contact with any of those. My two college roommates—the one who was in the Transportation Corps and—the one I see regularly, because he lives not too far away, the one who was in the Transportation Corps I see at Dartmouth reunions. Saw him last fall when we were in Hanover together.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Oh. I see. Okay.

                                    So I guess now I kind of would like to hear a little bit—now coming back to your military duty—would like to hear a little bit about what it was like to kind of work for the night shift.

JOLLY:                       Okay.

CHUNG:                     It sounds like it’s a really tough job because you’re a one-horse thing overnight at the place, so, yeah, please go ahead.

JOLLY:                       Well, I liked the job because it was quieter at night. You didn’t have colonels around. You could just do a job, and it was you and the GIs, and the GIs that we got for the computer job were mostly college dropouts. I can think of one guy who went to the University of Minnesota for three years. We had one who went to University of South Carolina, [University of] Louisville. They decided that they were having too good a time in school or school wasn’t for them, and they got drafted. But these guys were smart enough to a computer job. But they still wore their uniforms, and they went out on patrols.  But they didn’t like where they were. They didn’t like some of the things they had to do. But they did their job.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see.

JOLLY:                       One guy who came to our unit—there were always people who still would try to buck the military. He had gone to—the Army had sent him to Russian language school to learn Russian, somewhere in California. It seems like—not Pasadena but Monterey, I think. And he had completed the school, but at the graduation ceremony, whoever was giving the talk said that “you should be proud to die for your country,” and he stood up and said, “Well, I would die for my friends, I would die for my family, but I would never die for anything like my country.” And so they washed him out of the school—

CHUNG: [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       —out of that school and put him in an infantry unit.

CHUNG:                     Wow.

JOLLY:                       And—

CHUNG: [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       —he should have just kept his mouth shut, but he still went to the infantry unit, so he exchanged and came to us for extending a year, and then I would try to counsel him, and they were on him for not wearing a hat. In uniform, you’re supposed to wear a hat.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Oof!

JOLLY:                       When you’re outside. And he wouldn’t do it. And the lifers, those who were making a career, were just on him all the time. And I would say, “Just put the hat on your head,” you know. And he ended up—when I was leaving, there were charges against him for disobeying orders for that kind of stuff.

                                    I was also on a lot of court-martials [sic; courts-martial]. You know, troops—we were called, and I would be on the court-martials [sic]. And there were usually not—they weren’t for major offenses; they were for marijuana or disobeying an order or that kind of thing. And they would take up your time.  You know, you’d had, like, a five-person in effect jury of the court that would rule what the punishment should be.

                                    There were just all kinds of extra duties. I had to pay the Vietnamese in the depot. So I learned to count pretty well in Vietnamese.

                                    Oh, and you had, it was the reactionary force, and all you did was go out to this barren area with about ten enlisted me, and you were the lieutenant, and you slept out there in this old wooden building. It’s just that anybody on the buffer line saw North Vietnamese coming through, you were the reactionary force that—you were deployed to go out and to help them, wherever they were. Usually you just slept out there all night, but—I don’t know, special duties that lieutenants were always getting.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. I see. I just find it interesting that you were also kind of in charge of court-martials [sic] as well, so just wondering if there are any kind of court cases or—what were some kind of the trend that you saw in these court cases? Like, what were the most frequent reasons an infantryman or officer would be brought to court in Vietnam?

JOLLY:                       Never saw an officer brought in. It was only enlisted men.

CHUNG:                     Okay.

JOLLY:                       And it was usually for usually really, really dumb things. Yeah. For instance, going to an area where you weren’t supposed to go. You know, there were off-limits areas. You’re not supposed to be on Tu Do Street in Saigon, which is where the young ladies ply their trade, you know. You’re not supposed to be there, and we had guys go there and get picked up by the MPs [military police]. I was never on that kind of a situation, but most of mine were marijuana. I had one where a guy fired his weapon through the roof of a building for—you know, he got angry with somebody, and—

CHUNG: [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       I forget what the charges were. I never saw a situation where anyone was innocent, because this was a low level of court-martial.They were always truly guilty. Now, like marijuana violations. They were caught with marijuana.

                                    And then the battle became on the court because you would have probably a colonel, two majors and a captain and a lieutenant. And the captain and the lieutenant—we would say, “Okay, they broke the law. They should be punished.” The punishment could be one month or six months, and we would vote the lightest. And the senior officers or the lifers would usually vote the heavier sentence. We were closer to the troops than the guys who were of a different generation.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. I see. That’s really interesting.

                                    And—right. I guess another duty that you talked about as a night shift officer was the reactionary force. Was there any—because it sounds like—though you said that you, you know, just pretty much went out there and slept, for the most part.

JOLLY: [Chuckles.]

CHUNG:                     It sounds like it also can kind of be a very, I don’t know, nerve-wracking and anxious job because you’re kind of out there in the—outside in the fields at night, where you can’t really see anything. Like, you can’t really tell as well, like, as you would during [the] day when someone’s approaching, so was there any kind of, like, memorable experience that you had during your—

JOLLY:                       No, I never encountered—

CHUNG:                     —shift?

JOLLY:                       —a combat situation, particularly on the patrols. Never ran into anybody. Some patrols were lost because during Tet, I understand, the previous year—you know, you’re out there with three Jeeps. You’re more likely to be found than you are to find someone else. But you make a lot of noise in dying. [Chuckles.] That there are 12 of you with three machine guns, and the fact that you fight back alerts the good guys that “there’s something going on out here.” And they can react to you. So you’re out there and you stumble into something—you’re a sacrificial lamb, is what you are. But I was never the lamb that was sacrificed.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Okay. Okay. Right. Did you have any, I guess—so any kind of urgent or any kind of patrol or, like, on-field experience that you remember till nowadays?

JOLLY:                       What kind of experience?

CHUNG:                     So any kind of, like, experience that you had during, like, patrol or during your night shift duty that was—that kind of sticks to you till nowadays.

JOLLY:                       You know, there are probably a thousand of them, but the people, the situation, the hours. I never, ever worked so hard on any job in my life. I would work, in effect, seven days a week and work at a 13-hour shift. And it was partially because I wanted to do it for the guys wearing the green uniforms, but it was also because I didn’t have anything else to do. I had to pour myself into those duties that I learned where things were in the depot. You know, I can tell stories of a supply sergeant we had. He was—

CHUNG:                     Right.

JOLLY:                       He was really, really good. And he was a great trader that—this was on the night shift. He came in one night and said, “Lt. Jolly, can I borrow the deuce-and-a-half [2-1/2-ton cargo truck] and a couple of men for a while?” They were going to have—and he had the twinkle in his eye. I knew something was up. And I said, “Sure, Ben. You know, go ahead.” And so they were gone, and they came back, and what they had was—a deuce-and-a-half was a large Army truck. You’ve probably seen them on the roads in—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       It’s not a dump truck but a little bit like it. And they filled the whole vehicle with Visqueen. Visqueen is [polyethylene] plastic sheeting, and there are rolls of it, and they had maybe 200 rolls of this that they brought back in a truck. And we had a building near us that they unpacked it in. The next morning, I was still there, and he called on the field phone to an engineering unit, and he said, “You know, what you guys say is right, it’s almost impossible to find this Visqueen. And I’m looking at him. He got a truck load of it. And it was maybe, I don’t know, 200 rolls or something. And he said, “Come by tomorrow morning. I think I found a way to get a couple of rolls for you.”

                                    And these guys were—this engineering unit was building underground secure areas—bunkers and things—and they needed to line the inside with this Visqueen to prevent water from coming in when it rained hard. And for the next three months or so, they came back, and some days he would say, “I haven’t been able to get any more of it.” And always before they came back, he’d send somebody out to the shed and bring another roll in. Some days it was one roll; some days it was three. And he kept this up.

                                    And we got a paved volleyball court. We got sidewalks surrounding it that these engineers built for us in turn for the Visqueen he was trading to them. He traded with aircraft carriers off the shore. He would trade for steaks with aircraft carriers with things that they needed, and I aided him because I knew the computer system at the depot extremely well, because I had nothing else to do, and I knew the computers. I could find things for him. And he would, you know, make all these elaborate trades with people and never was—it screwed up our supply system, but it didn’t—it provided people with things they needed. You know, we might trade boots for a steak. But the people needed the boots, and we thought we needed the steak, so he was one of my most memorable people. He had been a professional football player in the National Football League straight out of high school, so he was big and strong.

                                    Oh, and another memorable—

CHUNG:                     I see.

JOLLY:                       —event that I thought of last night. There was a program on PBS about Neil [A.] Armstrong, and I went to the Bob Hope show. You know who Bob Hope is or was?

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Mmm, no.

JOLLY:                       An American comedian that was famous for entertaining troops all over the world. And there were about—this was at Christmas—25,000 GIs there, and they were climbing light poles, and you can still see it on YouTube if you look up Bob Hope at Long Binh.

                                    And there were entertainers there, and, you know, nice-looking girls, and bands, and Bob Hope made jokes, and—but at the end of the show—it was almost over; we thought it was nearing the end—he said, “Oh, I’ve got a special guest today that has come to see you guys.” And we had all missed—I had grown up loving the space program, and I loved learning about rockets and built model airplanes, and so I felt very gypped that I had to take a patrol out on the night the Americans landed on the moon. I missed it.

                                    And we walked out on the stage was—you know, Bob Hope said, “I’d like you to meet Neil Armstrong.” Just waves of applause, because we had all missed him landing on the moon. And he came to see us. Nobody else cared much about us. You know, we would read in TIME magazine or there were reports of the major antiwar demonstrations, and we would talk about, “What if they don’t bring us home, they just leave us here?”

                                    “You know, what’s gonna happen?” You know, so we didn’t feel very welcomed. And any entertainment we saw came from the Philippines or from South Korea. I can talk to you about South Korean troops. They’re the meanest, best troops you could ever come across.

                                    But Armstrong came that day, and he cared about us, and he came to see us. So there were a lot of tears.

CHUNG:                     Mmm. Yeah! That must have been really touching.

JOLLY:                       And I told one of the Vietnamese—lower—we called her a peasant. The Vietnamese had a story about Hang Nga, and Hang Nga was a beautiful virgin who lived on the moon, and at least two cleaning ladies were looking at a magazine that had pictures of the Americans in it. “What is this?” And I told them, “Hoa ki di” [roughly: Americans go]—whatever “moon” is, and convinced them that the Americans had gone to the moon, and they got very angry. They started yapping and—you know—had to get the other Vietnamese to explain to them that—this was a month after the Americans had gone there, and they hadn’t gotten the word.

CHUNG:                     Uh-huh. That’s very interesting. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you have any just memorable experiences or memories that you have, whether during your duty or, you know, while you’re taking time off in Vietnam, like while you’re off your duty, like, you know, just really tell me anything. I would love to hear anything that you would like to share with us.

JOLLY:                       Well, it could go on for days, I think, that the experiences and—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       You know, it—and coming home was an experience, because you couldn’t talk about it. That it was like, “Where have you been?” You know, and—and you’d go to work, and you didn’t know whether these people were anti-war, pro-war, so you just didn’t tell the stories—like I’m telling now. There was no one to talk to.

                                    But my mother didn’t really understand the situations.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       So it’s really nice even 50 years later or something to be able to find somebody that actually wants to listen and that you don’t bore. So it’s kind of—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —now—

CHUNG:                     Yeah.

JOLLY:                       —it’s more than the returning World War II veterans, who could talk about it. And, you know, the situation I have described is I was not—people had it far, far worse than I did in Vietnam in that I had lucked into—but it still wasn’t a pleasant situation. I could have spent a year somewhere else that was nicer, but all in all, it was an experience I’ll never forget, and I guess I’m glad I did it.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Yeah. Yeah, I guess kind of just going back I guess to your time in Vietnam, so you were in Vietnam from early 1969 to 1970. Is that correct?

JOLLY:                       Yes, pretty much most of ’69 I was there.

CHUNG:                     Uh-huh. Okay. So were you at the same station the whole entire year?

JOLLY:                       Yes. I did move around a little bit. I went on one trip back to Cam Ranh Bay to take some items there. But mostly I was the whole time on the edge of Long Binh post, although I did—

CHUNG:                     And—right.

JOLLY:                       I went on both a leave and R&R. I guess R&R is rest and relaxation [sic; recuperation]. I went to Singapore for five days and five or six days in Sydney. And the Vietnamese experience, as well as Singapore and Sydney, infected me with a travel bug, I guess, and I’ve now probably been in 80 countries or something, because, you know, it’s like if you eat a potato chip, you can’t just eat one potato chip.

CHUNG: [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       If you’ve been to three or four countries,—

CHUNG:                     That’s true.

JOLLY:                       —you’ve got to go to more countries because they’re all different and the cultures are different—and learn from all of them. So I haven’t been to North Korea yet. I’m not sure I want to go, but it’s still—

CHUNG:                     Right.

JOLLY:                       Have you?

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Oh, no, I haven’t. I personally haven’t. [Chuckles.] Right.

JOLLY:                       But it’s something that the experience gave to me.

CHUNG:                     Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I guess actually would like—kind I hear a little bit about your R&R experience in Singapore and Sydney? Like, it must have been, like, very different from, you know, being in Vietnam at your station.

JOLLY:                       Oh, yeah, because you still—even though I said—well, I didn’t, you know, have the worse the job, you didn’t know when a rocket or a mortar would come in on your head at night, and in Sydney I was safe.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Exactly.

JOLLY:                       In Singapore I was safe. And I went to Singapore with three GIs from our unit, enlisted men, and that usually doesn’t happen, that an officer—but they were all three-year college dropouts. One was a college graduate, was a salesman for Pfizer’s chemical company, and his Reserve unit was called up, so that’s how he ended up there. So it was a more mature group that I was with, that they could go along with an officer, and we’d had no problem. But it still—even then, out socially in Singapore, because I was the lieutenant, I got to sit in the right seat of the taxi, and I got to—you know, “What restaurant are we gonna go to?” I got to decide because I was a lieutenant. It just worked that way.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Right. And do you remember exactly, like, when you went on this R&R? Was it, like, maybe in the midpoint during the year or towards the end?

JOLLY:                       I really don’t remember. It was when—I had been there six months or so before the first one, anyway. I had been there quite a while. I think you build up some sort of seniority to go, that you couldn’t go your first week, that it took a little bit of time before you could go on the places.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. Mm-hm. Okay. Yeah, and I guess kind of talking a little bit about kind of your position as a lieutenant, you said that during your service in Vietnam there were just some things, some of the duties that you had to take upon kind of just processing the information because you were one of the very few rank officers around the region, so could you tell me a little bit more about that?

JOLLY:                       Of the miscellaneous duties that you had? Court-martials—

CHUNG:                     Yeah.

JOLLY:                       I was the—you had to teach—there were education classes that you would bring guys together, and you were under a tent or something, but every once in a while, the lieutenant—I remember I had to give a lecture on Educational Opportunities in the Army After Vietnam, for those who were staying in—everybody had to take it, but it was with—the University of Maryland had classes that they gave I guess around the world in Army posts, and so I had to talk all about those classes.

                                    You had to go—you had to do training. We had—we trained in gas masks, and, you know, gas hasn’t been used in—well, I guess there has been in Syria or someplace, but since World War I the Americans haven’t been exposed to gas, but we were trained with our gas mask, and we had to go out for that for a few days.

                                    I was somehow the training coordinator for that. I made a list once of all the—I was the piaster [monetary unit] conversion officer for our company, which meant, you know, I paid the Vietnamese, but I also—the Americans who were going to go to Saigon or something who wanted to change their military payment certificates—we didn’t get paid in cash; we got paid in military payment certificates. I had direct deposit into a bank. But you would also—you could go to a bank and cash a check for military payment certificates, and they were only to be used by Americans. But you could convert those into the Vietnamese money if you were going out on the economy.

                                    So that was one of my duties. That was because I could count so well in Vietnamese by that time. And those are the—I must have had other duties, but I don’t recall them right now.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Okay. Right. So, yeah. I know—well, if you would like to, we can go for days and days, honestly, with the interview because I can always come back to you at any time, as long as you’re available. So, yeah, just I really kind of liked that little bit of these anecdote and episodes that you had kind of in terms of, like, your interaction—like, you know, just stories about the supply sergeant or Bob Hope, so if you have anything kind of like that—you know, kind of on your, like, day-to-day ba- —kind of daily routine or maybe special occasions that you had that you would like to share with us, that would be great.

JOLLY:                       Well, I have, you know—I had a birthday party. The Vietnamese—even though I was on the night shift, the ladies that worked there decided to have a birthday party for me. And I still have—they were very concerned—because I was—let’s see, I’m a Dartmouth ’65. I would have been 21 then. So by ’68 would have been 27, 28 or something like that. At the party, one of the gifts was bride. They gave me a Vietnamese doll, which I have downstairs here, of a Vietnam outfit, because they were very concerned because I was so old and I didn’t have a wife yet, and so they thought this would work like a wife.

CHUNG: [Laughs.]

JOLLY:                       And I have notes and letters—

                                    The last day, I should have gone back and told them goodbye, but I couldn’t because I loved these ladies so much, I couldn’t face them. But I have one or two letters I got after I came back that they—they had my address. They sent it, gave me a hard time for not coming back to say goodbye. That was difficult.

CHUNG:                     Right. I guess—right. I guess you really built a rapport with kind of local Vietnamese officers and people who worked in your office.

JOLLY:                       Yeah. I ended up probably liking the Vietnamese as much or more than many of the Americans I saw. Not the American troops. I loved the American troops. But some of the civilians that were there. You saw some “ugly Americans” occasionally that I didn’t like that much, and I tended to bond with some of the Vietnamese. I still—I went back with my son to Vietnam when he was 16, and it was interesting to—you know, he sort of—it became a little real as I started remembering my hundred words of Vietnamese and I could talk to people, and there was still a divide between the north and south, even if you go to Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City. You can tell the northerners and the southerners are different. And the southerners would occasionally come up to you. They were the lower workers in the hotels, and they would say, like, “The Americans weren’t so bad after all.” They said, “Americans can be pretty good. We’ve been taught that they’re not, but my mother said they liked Americans.”

                                    And my son would see this when he was 16, and it sort of made the whole thing a little more real to him, of my background. We had a good—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right! Yeah, I bet. Mm-hm. Yeah. Right. And is there—so did you also spend your Christmas in Vietnam as well, Christmas of ’69, I suppose?

JOLLY:                       Yes. Uh-huh, Christmas and New Year’s.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. How was that like?

JOLLY:                       Mừng Chúa Giáng Sinh—Merry Christmas in Vietnamese. Pardon?

CHUNG:                     Ah. Yeah, I’m just wondering how that was like.

JOLLY:                       It was a touching moment. I’ve been asked, “What’s your best Christmas?” It was that, because, you know, my family doesn’t like to hear that, but it was when—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —the other GIs came up to you and they said, “Merry Christmas,” they meant it. I remember seeing—there used to be signs in the newspapers, like, “14 shopping days left till Christmas,” and then “13 days left till Christmas.” And I saw a Jeep with a sign on it that say, you know, “382 days left to Christmas,” because they weren’t observing Christmas.

                                    Then we had a little bit of a cold snap for Vietnam, and there was talk of a white Christmas. We didn’t get it, but we probably got down to 70 or so.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Mm-hm. Right. And, yeah, I guess kind of hearing about, like, what’s going on in Christmas, and you did briefly mention about reading the magazines about what’s going on in the United States, so I was just wondering how you kept in touch with your family and what’s going on in the United States during your time in Vietnam.

JOLLY:                       Well, the several areas that I think I could address. One, I have right behind me about ten tapes that—my father bought a tape recorder at—he bought one for himself and my mother, and one for me, and I took the one. We exchanged tapes for a while. And I put the tapes away when I got back, and I still haven’t listened to them, although they’re three feet away from me right now, because it’s my dad speaking to me. Me, speaking as a young lieutenant in Vietnam. I remember one. I was describing what it looks like and how it’s not that different from West Virginia, and my dad’s just telling me what’s going on around there, and I don’t know if I could listen to that now without breaking up, but that’s one way I communicated with my parents.

                                    And then you could—mail was free, so it was—you wrote letters. And we also had—it was called I think MARS [Military Auxiliary Radio System] with ham radio operators in the United States. You could call a number at night—it was an Army number. But they could link up to a ham radio operator, who could patch you into a home phone. I think I did that once, but some of the—I remember one of the guys in our unit at night did that. He got his wife on the phone, and she started crying. And you had to say “Over” because it was on a radio transmission. One of you had to say “Over,” and you’d say, “Well, dear, we’re clear,” and she’d—and you’d say “Over,” and you’d hear—you know, “Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo,” as she cried. And you’d say, “Well, say ‘Over.’” She never—the whole call, all she did was cry. But that was another way you could talk back and forth.

JOLLY:                       It’s not like the troops in—

CHUNG:                     Right.

JOLLY:                       And troops now are texting or sending e-mails back and forth. We didn’t have that. A letter would take quite a while. But there was no postage. You could write, “FREE” on it.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. And so also, you know, the antiwar sentiment and, you know, general public’s reception of war also changed during all your time in Vietnam, and were you able to kind of get that as well along with I guess kind of messages from, you know, your family and your friends? Like, were you able to kind of—

JOLLY:                       Not so much—

CHUNG:                     —also kind of learn—

JOLLY:                       —from—

CHUNG:                     —about the general—

JOLLY:                       You got it a little bit from new replacements coming in  would tell you what was happening.

CHUNG:                     Right. Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       When I left IBM, IBM gave me a gift subscription for a year to any magazine, or for two years, I guess, when I went into military service, so I got TIME magazine, and so we’d around—my TIME magazine was passed around. And so we’d see, you know, signs of the major war demonstrations and antiwar demonstrations, and so we really didn’t know—you know, as I had feared going to Vietnam, the unknown, there was the fear of returning to the United States. And a little bit—I got back to—I got out of the Army at Oakland Army Terminal [Oakland Army Base] in California, and this lieutenant and I went across the street to a bar. We had some extra time before we were processed out. And there were some ladies in the bar arguing about the length of skirts.

                                    And we looked at each other. “We don’t understand that. What are they—what’s a mini and a maxi?” Those were the popular lengths at the time, I guess. And we were used to people saying, “We got hit last night” or “We don’t have socks for the troops” or, you know, “Somebody is sick” or, you know, those simple, basic issues of life, not length of skirts.

                                    It was something. And then we had to cope with street lights. You know, when do you cross the street? We hadn’t done that for a year. But San Francisco was—the only thing I had to wear a month was my dress uniform, and so I called my IBM roommate, who lived in San Francisco, and he picked me up—went into the [InterContinental] Mark Hopkins—I don’t know if you know San Francisco, but it’s an old elite hotel. And I said, “I want a room.”

                                    The guy looked at me, the desk clerk, and he said, “Do you know how much our rooms cost?” And I said, “I don’t care how much it costs. I want a room,” because I had, I think, $5,000 in my bank account, and I was—discharge pay and stored-up leave. But it was because I had a uniform on, he thought I couldn’t afford a room there.

                                    And then the former roommate picked me up, and we stopped at a coffee house to pick up his sister, who was there, and I walked in, and it was like every head in the coffee house turned toward me. It was like I was the Gestapo coming in to arrest them or something. But I was just looking for his sister.

                                    But if it was a town that I had loved as a civilian, it was now not too friendly toward me.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. Yeah, that’s quite a transition.

JOLLY:                       I flew home to West Virginia, and when I landed at Dulles, it was 6 degrees with snow on the ground. And after a year in South Vietnam, that was hard to take.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Right. Yeah. Actually, that kind of—that makes me curious how you felt about the general—like, the environment and climate of Vietnam, because that must have been really different from, you know, anything that you experienced in Hanover or in Maryland or—I’m not actually quite familiar with what West Virginia is like, but I’m assuming it was also a little bit different from there as well?

JOLLY:                       Yeah. The human body is very adaptable, but it takes some time. I remember when I first arrived in Hanover in January, coming back after the Christmas break, the start of winter term, I’d stepped off of an airplane in Lebanon and thought, I’ll never be this cold again. And for the first month in Hanover I wore, you know, three jackets and—but then—you know, at the end of that month, I could walk out on the Green in a sweatshirt, and my body had adjusted over temperature. And Vietnam was the same thing. When I arrived there, I was—it was this oppressive heat. You couldn’t get away from it. It was awful. And then 30 days later, it was just perfectly fine. My body had become adjusted enough. It didn’t bother me. But it certainly took some time.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Mm-hm. I see. Yeah, that must have been really different. And was there any other—the Vietnamese officers and workers that you really were able to build a strong rapport with? Was there any American soldiers or officers that you also interacted pretty well or you clicked well with?

JOLLY:                       No. I had people that I knew and that I liked, but they were sort of coworkers, and you never knew—people were coming in, and people were going out, and you—I didn’t build lasting relationships that continued. You know, there were—I mentioned Ben Richardson—Sgt.—“General Ben.” I will remember forever and truly respect and admire the guy. I don’t know what happened to him. I hope it was good.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Right. And, yeah, is there any kind of I guess kind of going to back to episodes and anecdotes—you know, just kind of—before talking about your post-Vietnam War experience, if there was anything else that you really would like to share, and really don’t worry about the time. You know, we will set a time if we need more time, so just please feel free to share any of the, yeah, your memories and stories, because we really would like to hear as much as possible.

JOLLY:                       I probably have—you know, they just don’t pop into mind. A lot of them have. You know, I even started making some notes several years ago and writing them down. And the problem is it never ends. I’m going to have an 800-page document out of a few short months of life. You never are as intense—you know, I’ve heard it compared to childbirth, and I can’t experience that, but as far as the experience, but wars last longer than childbirth, I think.

CHUNG:                     Right. Definitely. Mm-hm, mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       But I could probably look through those notes and come up with, you know, many other funny or interesting—I remember a time I almost shot a doctor, that—one of the guys in our unit—was walking through the unit, and I saw him. You know, he was in bed, and he had two blankets on top of him, and he was shivering. This is Vietnam, and I just described the weather.

                                    His name was Hill. “Hill, what are you doing?” He said, “I’m cold, and I’m freezing, and something’s wrong with me.” And he described everything, and I said, “It sounds like you’ve got malaria,” you know. And I said, “Do you take your malaria pills?” We were to take a malaria pill once a week, anti-malaria pill. He said, “No, haven’t taken them ever since I got here. I don’t like them.” And so I talked to other guys around, and it looked like malaria. So I said, “Come on,” and with one of the sergeants we went down to where the doctors lived that worked in the medical facility, and I knocked on the trailer door, and a doctor came to the door, and I said, “I’ve got a man here who I think has malaria.” And he said, “I’m off duty at 5 o’clock. You try to come by in the morning.” And I said, “He’s got malaria, and I’m not going coming by in the morning. I want somebody to look at him now.” And he said, “Well, I can’t. I’m off duty.”

                                    And I happened to have my rifle with me. I used foul words, and I said—I clicked it and moved it around and said, “Get over there and look at him.” It was the first time I almost shot a captain.

                                    But he went over, and he looked at him in this nearby building, and I heard him say, “This man has all the symptoms of malaria.” And then I almost shot the doctor again. But then they did admit him to the hospital. And it turned out it was some kind of a viral infection, but—he did not have malaria. But it closely resembled it. It was not anything you want him to spend an extra night suffering through. That’s the closest I’ve come to shooting a doctor, although a few times, when I’ve been in a waiting room—

CHUNG: [Chuckles.] Mmm! Right. I feel ya. [Laughter.] But, yeah, I mean, was there any kind of troublesome or kind of I guess problematic situation that you ran into during your time in Vietnam?

JOLLY:                       Oh, well, race was a problem in Vietnam, that—you learned things like—one of the other duties was to be the bunker line inspector, and, you know, when you went out on that bunker line at night, you had to do it; it was your job to go around and see that everything was okay and that everybody was awake, and, you know, usually it would be the smell of marijuana, but there were—you know, the blacks stuck together, and you had to be gentle with—you know, occasionally you’d give the Black Power salute, and you got along fine, but you had to know how to do that.

                                    You know, a few years at Dartmouth, you can get along with anybody, so—but race was an issue. The people that were in the computers were all Caucasian, and so we—oh, no, they weren’t. We had one—two sergeants, both of whom were Japanese.

                                    But Caucasians. We had two Japanese sergeants, where I really learned to love rice. We would eat it at night. But we moved one of the black infantrymen into the job, and he was a really good guy, but he didn’t do well at the job, and there were almost fights that broke out. And some of them were—race was involved a bit in that, I think. But it was always there. It was in the atmosphere.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. And I guess kind of just one of the questions that I just had—came to my mind is it seems like there were a lot of Vietnamese, local people working in your office, a lot of civilians. Did you have any interaction with, like, ARVN [pronounced AR-vin; Army of the Republic of Vietnam] troops or, like, ARVN military officers?

JOLLY:                       I didn’t have that much interaction with the ARVNs. I remember—you know, they were there, and you would see them. But I didn’t have that much interaction, although there was one unit that came in, what they called a “stand-down,” I think, and they were just there for a while. And they started playing basketball, and I went over and watched them play basketball.

                                    You know, I played for the Dartmouth fraternity team, and I played for various pickup teams and for the business school team, but I didn’t play high school basketball or anything. I’m not that good. But I’m about 6’-1” or 6’-2”. That makes me taller than many of the Vietnamese. And so I asked if I could play. It was my finest day in a basketball game because with that American experience, I was much better than any of the Vietnamese. I could block shots, and so I spent about an hour playing basketball with the ARVNs.

                                    My other Dartmouth roommate [unintelligible] was an ARVN—a MACV adviser, which is a [U.S.] Military Assistance Command, Vietnam]. So he spent a year with the ARVNs.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Oh. Okay. Interesting.

                                    And you said that you have a little bit of story to tell me about the Korean troops that you met in Vietnam, and I definitely would like to hear that.

JOLLY: Particularly when I first arrived in Cam Ranh,—I was talking about the Bay and across the jagged mountains, and I forget the name of it, it was, like, the White Horse Division (9th Infantry Division, Republic of Korea Army].

CHUNG:                     Yeah, it was probably White Horse.

JOLLY:                       But they never got attacked by the North Vietnamese, because the North Vietnamese were afraid of them. It was the story, anyway. And they were—but they did spend some time near us, and they knew all the angles. There were PXs [post exchanges] in Long Binh post, and supplies would come in. Like, one month or, you know, one time there might be a truckload of little refrigerators or a truckload with little televisions. And the rocks always had somebody stationed near the PX to broadcast back to all the other Korean troops, so they would come rushing in. They were united, and how do you get the supplies out of the American PX? So they were so well organized.

                                    But they were—they also were at our mess hall. I would watch them. They would put a lot of sugar in their drinks, more sugar than any American. You know, a cup of coffee and they’d, what, half fill it up with sugar, you know. I don’t know if that’s a Korean trait.

CHUNG: [Chuckles, then laughs.] Right.

JOLLY:                       The guys on our night shift found a box of—do you know what C-rations are? They’re the canned food that you eat in the field, or used to be, anyway.

                                    They had weathered. They found this old box stacked somewhere, and we thought it was going to be a big treat, or they did. They thought it would be, you know, ham and beans and whatever is in C-rations that—some of it was pretty good. They opened it, and they were all excited, and they had their can openers, their little P-38 can openers, and they opened it, and a strange smell came out.

                                    Some kimchi [a traditional fermented Korean side dish made of vegetables and seasonings]. It was all canned kimchi, which the Americans—

CHUNG: [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       Their enthusiasm went down a little bit.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. That’s funny. That’s really funny.

JOLLY:                       You probably don’t have kimchi in Thayer Hall?

CHUNG:                     I can get—because, actually, I really connect to that because sometimes my Korean friends would have kimchi in their refrigerator, and if you don’t store them right or if you keep them for too long, it definitely smells—it does not smell good to me, either. Just like—yeah. So—

JOLLY:                       The Vietnamese equivalent is nuoc mam, and nuoc is—they put it on everything, and, as I understand, it’s the juice of rotten fish, that the fish ferment somehow, and it’s a smell you don’t forget. If you go into a room where there’s a group of Vietnamese eating, it is there.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Wow. Oooch. Yeah. I mean, that doesn’t sound too pleasant in such hot weather, because it sounds like it’s going to go bad really fast.

JOLLY:                       Well, they like it, though, so—it’s a sauce they put on things.

CHUNG:                     Okay.

JOLLY:                       I’ve never really tried it.

CHUNG:                     Uh-huh. Oh, okay, so it’s a little bit different. Mm-hm. Right.

                                    So, yeah, was there—I think—you talked about the moment, actually, when you’re with your Dartmouth roommate in the bunker and the bomb was dropping. Right. And do you—have you—were you ever able to figure out, like, where these bombs were coming from and what exactly was happening during the time?

JOLLY:                       I don’t know that there were any bombs falling. It was just an alert that someone has been spotted nearby; there’s been some kind of military activity approaching our perimeter, and so they called a red alert so everybody would be—

CHUNG:                     Okay.

JOLLY:                       But there could be—the mortars and rockets that came in were most psychological weapons that if you have 20,000 people in this area and you send in three rockets, they’re all going to write home, and that kind of thing sort of—you know, the letters back home say, “Well, our sons are having rockets fall on their head. What is this war for?”

                                    We didn’t like the rockets, but it was more of a psychological weapon than the damage it did. They would kill people, but they were random. It wasn’t like there was a definite target. They would just carry them in and fire them, and most of the time they missed everything, but they did alarm people and got them upset in the middle of the night. I developed a habit that I still have that’s not good: Before I would go to bed in Vietnam—this is when I was not on the night shift, when I was on the day shift—

                                    I would drink three cans of beer. And three cans of beer would make me so that I could go to sleep. I would just pass out, but not so much that if something happened I couldn’t get up, but my greatest fear or time of being bothered was when nothing was happening, because I worried then. I couldn’t go to sleep. I’d think, Could a mortar come through the roof?

                                    When something was happening, I knew what—you know, that was okay, and you knew what to do when you were getting shot at. So it was the worrying when nothing was happening.

CHUNG:                     I see. Mm-hm. I see. And were there any other times where kind of around your depot your troop or your office sensed military activity that you guys had to be alerted?

JOLLY:                       Oh, I’m trying to think. There were alerts off and on. I remember one night I was the duty officer for what was called the Saigon Support Command [sic; U.S. Army Support Command, Saigon]. And I don’t even know what it was, but it was—there were, like, 20 units attached to it. And—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       I forget the story I started to tell. You were asking if there were ever other alerts? Oh, I know what I was going to tell.

                                    I got a message that there was a top secret message waiting for me at the tactical operations center, so I had to get the driver, and we had to go to this place at 2 in the morning. And I went in, and the message that had come down from Intelligence was that—“Expect an enemy attack.” And I said, “Okay,” and my directions in the book that I was supposed to following were that I should awaken the colonel and tell him that or, you know, I should immediately contact colonel with any Intelligence messages.

                                    So I went and knocked on his door, and he seemed sort of in a gruff mood, and he said, “Lieutenant, ever since Tet, they have been issuing this alert once a week. There aren’t any attacks. They just issue it so as to not be wrong if it comes this time. They were wrong in Tet, which they didn’t anticipate, so now they’re calling for a major attack once a week.” And he said, “I’m tired of lieutenants waking me up in the middle of the night.”

                                    There was another time on this that I was—the same duty—that I went in, and there were two different books of procedures you were to follow, and there were two different commands, and if it was an alert called, you were supposed to send units out to different places, and I got the wrong book, and I sent all these units out, and then I realized I was in the wrong book. And so I moved over to the right book, and when it was all over and the alert was on, I called back the people in the right book, but I left two companies sitting on a pile of dirt [chuckles] all night long.

CHUNG:                     Oh! Oh, no!

JOLLY:                       That morning, I went to the depot and was eating, and I heard these two captains talk about, you know, “Some idiot lieutenant sent us out there, and it wasn’t even an alert, and he didn’t call us back.” And I just, you know, quietly ate my breakfast and left. I was the idiot lieutenant.

CHUNG: [Chuckles, then laughs.] I see. Wow.

                                    And I guess kind of being really kind of being in the position of processing all this information about the military supply and all that, were you kind of able to—like, kind of through the information that you were processing, were you kind of able to sense kind of the overall sentiment or kind of direction of the war—like, in terms of, like, how the U.S. kind of now is I guess taking the war, if there is any transition or change in the way the U.S. government, the military is thinking about the war? I guess in terms of, like, what kind of supply are they sending more or what kind of—like, you know, things that the troops are requesting more? Like, were you able to kind of get a sense of that?

JOLLY:                       No, there were a lot of things—when the war first started, the U.S. just pumped supplies. They sent shipload after shipload of supplies, many of which were still there in unmarked crates when we arrived, because they had so much, they didn’t know where they were going, and they couldn’t handle them, and they stacked them up in the far reaches of the depot, in a very military fashion. So if you flew over, it looked like all the crates were lined up neatly, but nobody knew what was in any of those crates because they’d been out in the weather for years, five years or so, and all the identification had washed off of them.

                                    And so you could sense that there is this huge buildup of supplies that went over, and then we went through periods when [President Richard M.] Nixon started the Vietnamization (I’ve never been able to say it) of—we had a truck that was picked to go to the ARVNs, and so we lost our beloved truck. And this truck wasn’t perfect. Like, the passenger door was held on with rope, and you had to climb in and out of the window to get in it, but I was used to that. But we hated to see our truck go because now we’re down to one truck. And they came back to us. They turned it down. It wasn’t good enough for the Vietnamese, so we got our beloved truck back.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Right. That’s such a really interesting point. Were you able to—because this is around the time when—now, war kind of has peaked, and we’ve passed the time of Tet Offensive, so—and with the increasing kind of antiwar sentiment amongst the U.S. public and, you know, some kind of conflicts and the sense within the government and within the U.S. military now, there are just—kind of the U.S. is slowly pulling out of Vietnam. And were you kind of able to sense that while you were—during your time in Vietnam?

JOLLY:                       Yeah, toward the end of my time, we’d started—I mentioned the word “Vietnamization,”—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —that troops were—the number of troops went down in my last months. Units were being pulled out, and so it had really just started, and we didn’t know what it meant or how rapidly it was going to go or any of that, but it had begun, anyway.

CHUNG:                     Oh, okay.

JOLLY:                       We probably—

CHUNG:                     So do you remem- —Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       I think the general sentiment was probably the ARVNs wouldn’t be able to handle it because I think by that time, there were very few VCs [Viet Congs] left. It was all the North Vietnamese Regulars. But they were well supplied and kept coming.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. And I guess—and in terms of, like, what kind of supplies you guys are receiving or supplies that the American troops were requesting in Vietnam, was there also kind of—were you also able to kind of see the Vietnamization of Nixon kind of taking into place?

JOLLY:                       None, other than some of our equipment was being—as I mentioned, our favorite truck was being turned over. I didn’t see anything any different in the supplies coming in or going out.

                                    Oh, we did—remember the millennium and Y2K, the Year 2000 [bug]?

CHUNG:                     Right.

JOLLY: Everybody thought the world would end? Well, the world briefly ended—

CHUNG:                     Uh-huh.

JOLLY:                       —in 1969 going into 1970, that all our computers quit issuing supplies because the Army used a four-digit date to determine—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —time, and if today would be—today would be 5—whatever the number, the Julian date is, let’s say 5 100,—

CHUNG:                     Uh-huh.

JOLLY:                       —that falls apart when you hit zero, when you start to subtract one day from the other, and so for about ten days—

CHUNG:                     Right.

JOLLY:                       —the computers in Vietnam no longer issued supplies. We had to just cope without them, which maybe we were a little better off. But they had to fly teams of people in from—and we had sat around at night, saying, “Well, how are they going to handle that, when we know we’re now 9/3/64 [sic], and what happens when we go over and we have the zero and the arithmetic no longer works? And which supplies, which requests are the oldest?” So it just didn’t work for about ten days, but nobody mentioned that in the news media, that for ten days we couldn’t issue supplies. But it was a preliminary of what was supposed to happen at Y2K.

CHUNG:                     Oh, so what happened in Y2K?

JOLLY:                       Well, nothing, because everybody was out changing computers, and so everybody was adding—you know, when it went from, you know 1999 to 2000, now the arithmetic didn’t work, and so it was expected that all the computers would blow up and everything. You know, I went to a New Year’s Eve party, and I thought life would be over, but the party went right on.

CHUNG: [Laughs.] Right. So during the ten days of suspension of kind of supplying, you know, military supplies, was there—I guess that created a big chaos and kind of halt in a lot of maybe operations or plans or the projects that different troops throughout South Vietnam—the different American troops throughout the South Vietnam were carrying out.

JOLLY:                       I don’t think anybody let it do that. The practical soldiers and people—if somebody needed something, we’re still going to give it to them, you know. We were running the system, but we weren’t going to let the system get in our way, so nobody went hungry or without ammunition or anything like that. It’s just we screwed up the system, so it didn’t work for the next year because supplies were issues without paperwork, but nobody was going to lose a war because they didn’t have the right piece of paper.

CHUNG:                     I see. Okay. And do you remember, like, preparing supplies for any specific operations or projects during the year 1969 that kind of was a major thing for the American troops in South Vietnam?

JOLLY:                       No, not that I can think of that we were dedicated, you know—no Normandy invasion or just major operations within South Vietnam. I don’t recall that the depot acted any differently. We just—we plugged away every day and shipped out whatever somebody needed.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Oh, okay. I see. Right. Yeah.

                                    So we’re now about to talk a little bit about your post-Vietnam War experience, but before going on to that, if you remember anything that you would like to share, you know, please go ahead, please.

JOLLY:                       I think I’ve run out of things, although probably as soon as we break the phone call, I will run to my wife and say, “These are seven stories I should have told Hannah,” you know, but—

CHUNG: [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       —I can’t think of them right now.

CHUNG: [Laughs.] Okay. No, that’s totally fine. I

JOLLY:                       I’ll call you in the middle of the night—

CHUNG:                     I mean, if you think of it,—

JOLLY:                       — to tell you to turn the recorder back on.

CHUNG:                     Uh-huh. Ah. Well, unfortunately, the Rauner Library will have their laptop in their office and will be locked, so that—

JOLLY: [Laughs.]

CHUNG:                     —will be hard. [Laughs.]

JOLLY:                       I was gonna say, unfortunately or fortunately.

CHUNG:                     Right. No, yeah, please let—unfortunately, or fortunately maybe. Who knows? [Laughs.] Right. Yeah, but really, please let me know if you have any, like, specific memories or experiences that you remember that you would like to share. Just shoot me an e-mail. And if you have quite a bit of that, you know, we can definitely come back to it and talk a little bit more about it.

JOLLY:                       If something pops into my head.

CHUNG:                     Yeah.

JOLLY:                       If—we had a computer repairman—this how things, you know, appear in the mind, but he was a guy in our unit, but he really didn’t work with us; he went out in the field and worked on little computers that were out in smaller units issuing supplies and doing maintenance, and he was a repairman.

                                    He came to me one night and said, “Lt. Jolly, my brother is coming into the country and he’s going through the replacement depot, and I haven’t seen him in two years. Could I go down to Saigon tonight and spend the evening with him, or the night?” And I said, “Well, you’re not supposed to. You’re not allowed to do this, but if you don’t tell me, it’s fine with me.” And so that was my quiet consent to do it. And so he went, and next day he was back, and the next day after that, he found out his brother was killed the first day he was in a unit. So I was awfully glad I said, “Go ahead and spend the night with your brother.” So there were such things like that.

CHUNG:                     Right. Yeah. I guess it’s kind of—it’s real interesting how the questions pop up in my mind as well, because talking about the computer maintenance, it just kind of made me wonder how the whole, like, computer system and, like, the devices and electronics and equipment worked at your office because as far as I understand, there was—you know, the Vietnam, itself, was not really producing any kind of those electronic devices. You know, there were no factories or manufacturing plants in Vietnam, so was it always like that—you know, American troops would be shipping things from the U.S. and installing there? And, you know, usually electronic devices don’t do too well with humidity and heat, so how did the maintenance of these devices work?

JOLLY:                       Those are very good questions. All of our equipment, our major equipment was produced by IBM. We had something called an IBM 7010, which is probably—your cell phone has twice the computer power in it or a hundred times more computer power than our machine that took up a whole room.

                                    The closest IBM employee lived in Saigon, and he would drive up if we had major problems. We had some Department of Army civilians that were supposed to be skilled. They were totally worthless. They knew nothing. We did have a company that I think still exists, Computer Sciences Corporation, which had built the supply system.

                                    They designed it for all of Vietnam. It was called 3SVN [Standard Supply System Vietnam]. I don’t know—Supply something Vietnam. But Computer Sciences had written that. They were good. They were the ones that eventually fixed—they should have been aware of the date problem, but they fixed it.

                             Computers in those days—the operators would record the codes for what they were doing. They could be testing programs, they could be running production, they could be doing maintenance, and we had one called [unintelligible].

                                    I don’t know who would be silly enough to stay in the room and write this code down when somebody was throwing grenades at them, but the theory was, we would write that.

                                    We had a few problems, you know, that smoke came out of the computer at night, and we were down for a day or two and tried to run the disc units with Jeep batteries, and that didn’t work very well. My commanding officer at that time taught electrical engineering at West Point, so he had this theory about the Jeep batteries, so I don’t have much faith in West Point’s engineering—technical engineering department.

                                    Oh, my [unintelligible] name. I should tell you who I was in Vietnam. Before I was going to Vietnam, I had a car wreck and had a tooth knocked out. And I had a plate or something, a false tooth that I would fit in, and it was uncomfortable, and I said, I don’t care what I look like in Vietnam, so I had the tooth missing. And the Vietnamese called me “Hượng úy không răng.” And Hượng úy is “first lieutenant.” And không răng is “toothless,” like a baby. You could be toothless like an old man or you can be toothless like a baby.

                                    They called me Hượng úy không rang, first lieutenant, toothless like a baby. But after a while, they shortened it to không, which is “toothless.” It was the nickname, as I was toothless.

                              Everybody in the whole depot knew who I was: Hượng úy không răng. It was a name. And they couldn’t say the “l’s” in Jolly, because Jolly would come across more as Jow-rie. Apparently the l’s aren’t in the Vietnamese language. So Hượng úy không răng was a lot easier to say.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. That’s really interesting. Right. Awesome!

                                    Yeah, so I guess now to talk a little bit about the time right after you come back from Vietnam to the United States. So I assume that you arrived in the United States in the early 1970s, so if you can tell me a little bit about that, that would be great.

JOLLY:                       Well, I told you it was cold when I got back. That was rough to take. But then, like, I had all these stories to tell, and, again, I wasn’t suffering from post-traumatic [stress disorder (PTSD)]. I hadn’t been out in the boonies and had a terrible experience, but it was an experience, anyway, and I wanted to tell people about what I had been through, and it seemed that other than maybe my parents, no one—and even my parents had trouble understanding the things and the feelings—but no one much to talk to because, you know, it wouldn’t help you in your job, and there were hard feelings that had mellowed over time. You know, at one point I thought, Well, why would I hire anyone who had not been in the military? It was a great experience. Which I still believe. But now you can’t find anyone who’s been in the military. There are very few. The college graduate type people.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. Right. And what did you do, like, in terms of I guess, like, how did you spend your time right after you got back to the United States? Like, did you go back to school or did you get a job?

JOLLY:                       Got a job. Well, the first thing I did was the $5,000 I was talking about after I paid for the Hotel Mark Hopkins—I went to Europe for 30 or 40 days and had a Eurail pass, and, as I mentioned, I now had been exposed to foreign cultures and travel, and so I thought I would get Europe out of my system and all travel out of my system if I went there for 30 or 40 days before I came home. I had interviewed for a job in Illinois, and they said, “We want to hire you, but we won’t be ready for about 40 days,” and that was just what I wanted to hear. And so I went to Europe and wandered around and rode the rails of Europe for 30 or 40 days before I came back to that job.

                                    But coming—

CHUNG:                     What are some countries that—mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       Go ahead.

CHUNG:                     Yeah. Yeah, what are some countries that you visited while you were in Europe?

JOLLY: Started in Spain. Went to Italy then to I suppose Germany, Switzerland, sort of made the circle in through Belgium and Amsterdam [the Netherlands], and then to England. I think that was it. I may have hit another country or two along the way, but that trip—that was the route I took.

CHUNG:                     Right. Ah, you covered quite an extensive area. And, like, things that you’ve experienced and saw while you were traveling those countries must have come to your, like, really differently now that you had that experience in Vietnam. Like, as compared to if you had gone straight to Europe, like from—without having gone to Vietnam, just right from the United States. I mean, I guess it’s kind of hard to—

JOLLY:                       Once you’ve walked down the streets of Saigon in the middle of a war-torn economy London doesn’t seem so unusual. You know, that you can always find food, and you understand where somebody lives. They live in a house; they don’t live in a culvert somewhere. Once you’ve been exposed to that war-torn place, anything—you can almost handle anything. It doesn’t shock you that much.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. [Chuckles.] And I guess—yeah, after your travel in Europe, now you came back to the United States, and did you start working right away, then?

JOLLY:                       Yes, I did. I think, you know, two or three days after I came back. Went to Illinois, which was a new place for me, to Peoria, Illinois. Still had my—you could still tell I was military. I had short hair on the sides, and I had a moustache that was proper military, because it wasn’t supposed to go down beyond the mouth. So I still looked like I was just out of Vietnam, I think.

                                    But I quickly changed. I went out and got the outfits that were in style, because the wardrobe I had in 1967 didn’t work in 1970. People, you know, wore bell-bottom pants and short hair wasn’t the style, and you didn’t want to stand out that much.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. Right. Uh-huh. And I assumed Illinois must have been a very different setting for you as well, compared to any other places that you have been.

JOLLY:                       It’s a little different, but not actually too dif- —West Virginia is a little Southern and a little Midwestern, so it isn’t too different from places that I’ve been. A little flatter, I think, but people are not so dissimilar. Many of them had never heard of Dartmouth, which makes them terrible, but other than that,—

CHUNG: [Chuckles.] Right. And what was your job like? So what did you do? What was your job about in Illinois, more in detail?

JOLLY:                       Well, it was I think tied not so much to my military experience but to my IBM experience. I was the—

CHUNG:                     Right.

JOLLY:                       —corporate headquarters of a steel company. I started as sort of the IT liaison. I did whatever they needed with computers, the corporate financial staff and planning staff and the accountants, the president’s office. I built—you know, actually Dartmouth helped, too. We built models with—[what was] called [the] Dartmouth Time-Sharing [System].

                                    I wrote BASIC [Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code] programs that I had learned to do at Dartmouth, so it actually worked in the real world. And I linked with the company’s IBM mainframe. But then I gradually—some of the staff members in the finance department left, and I was an MBA, so they said, “Well, why don’t you do these financials?” I was doing the modeling and things, so that shifted me toward the financial world, and somebody thought I looked like a comptroller, and then I became a CFO [chief financial officer].

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. I see. Right.

JOLLY: Through all that I didn’t talk about Vietnam. I just had to work. You had to—

CHUNG:                     Okay. But you did visit—you—right. But you said you did travel to Vietnam once again with your son, so—

JOLLY:                       Yes.

CHUNG:                     —I know you briefly mentioned about that, but I just would like to—can I hear more about that? Because that’s really interesting, that you actually, you know, went back there after, you know, your experience of war service in Vietnam.

JOLLY: Because I loved the Vietnamese people, and there’s something about—you know, I thought we would stay in one of the old hotels, but we stayed I think at an Omni [Hotel] or something, and my son said, “Well, this is the fanciest hotel I’ve ever been in.” And I went: That wasn’t the Saigon I wanted to show him. But when I went up on the rooftop, I took a deep breath, and I still do it with Saigon because it smells like Saigon. You can call it Ho Chi Minh [City], but it still smells like Saigon.

                                    What I really miss there, that it was just a bad thing and strange—I said I love the people of South Vietnam. I also loved the American Army. When I went to the Bob Hope show and I saw 25,000 guys in these green uniforms that probably weren’t loved back in the United States—at least they were not being applauded, but they were doing their jobs as best they could, and they were trying, and I loved the American troops.

                                    They had some of the best-trained, best-meaning troops. For the most part, they meant well. And what I missed when I went back—I would drive around Saigon, and Where are the boys wearing the green? You know, the troops aren’t here anymore that I was part of—and that—I loved those guys. They were my team. But it was an empty feeling. The—part of my Vietnam memories are of the American troops, so—I miss them.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. And you said you visited Vietnam with your son. Is that correct?

JOLLY:                       I went to Vietnam, yes. with my son, yes, who was 16 at the time.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. So, yeah, right. Just kind of curious to hear a little bit more in detail about his reaction and his responses to things that he’s seeing and, you know, stories that he’s hearing from you.

JOLLY:                       Well, he has read my—well, I call it my story or something that I have written. He’s read it all, and there are parts of it that I wouldn’t even want to expose—you know, I may have had a girlfriend or two in Vietnam, and so my son—that’s part of war, too. My wife said, “Why’d you put that in?” Well, I was a soldier, a young soldier, and if you have such encounters, tell it like it is, as they say. But he didn’t—you know, he didn’t come out and say, “good” or “bad” or anything else, but I think he now knows his father a little better. And when he was 16 he liked the—you know, we were at Angkor Wat in Cambodia when he was 16, and he was not speaking to me because he wanted to be with his friends in Indiana. You know, I had to say, “We’re the only two people for 30 miles that speak English, and you’re not speaking to me now, so why don’t you start talking?” It was his birthday, and he didn’t want to be with his dad in a strange country. But about six or seven years ago, I heard him—overheard him talking to a friend at a football game, and they were talking about what they did for their 16th birthday, and he had a smile and said, “I want to Angkor Wat, Cambodia.” And nobody else could top that. And so—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm.

JOLLY:                       —his views have changed, and he also has now become a pretty good traveler. He’s been to a lot of places and continues to do that.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. I see. Great. What are some other places that you’ve traveled, other than Europe and Vietnam?

JOLLY:                       Well, let me see, Africa. My wife and I are going on a cruise to west Africa, down the coast from Ghana to Cape Town this fall. We’re about ready to go on a trip to Madagascar and Mauritius and the Seychelles. Been to Fiji and Taiwan, all the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand. Name a country. I think I’ve been to most of them.

CHUNG:                     Wow.

JOLLY:                       I’ve been to most of them that are safe to, anyway.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Yeah, you did travel really extensively. And I actually forgot to ask you: What year did you travel back to Vietnam? When was that?

JOLLY:                       He was born in ’78, and even though I told you I was a partial math major—’78 and he was 16. That makes ’94.

CHUNG:                     Yeah, okay. That’s actually the year I was born.

JOLLY:                       We went to Laos and Cambodia and Thailand on the same trip.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Ah. Interesting. Okay. Great.

                                    Yeah, I guess kind of going back to your career and your life in the United States, so you began your career in Illinois, and it sounds like you stayed there for a while, and just kind of it would be great if you could tell me a little bit more about the things that led up to now, where you are.

JOLLY:                       I, you know, somehow got in the Midwest. I somehow—[there] was a friend from the University of Virginia who had started to work at the same company in Illinois and had said, “Why don’t you come on out and join us?” So I did that.

                                    And then I joined a company in Iowa, HON Industries [sic; The HON Company], which made office furniture, and I was the comptroller and became the secretary and treasurer, then joined a smaller company in Iowa. I had sort of jumped over the things a secretary and treasurer or CFO needs to know in some cases, and in a smaller company I could do everything, and I did that for three or four years. And then the company hit hard times, and I started back this direction and went to Indiana and was with two companies in Columbus, Indiana.

                                    Was going through a divorce in ’96, I guess, or so, and said, Well, the reason I went to graduate school in Virginia is I think Virginia is a nice state. It might be a good place to live. And I saw an ad in The Wall Street Journal for a CFO job in Virginia and took that job, and the company was sold in 2002, and I joined a company of interim CFOs, financial officers, that I would go in and work a place for nine months that was going through a transition, maybe. Six months or nine months or a year, and be the CFO, and—maybe the CFO had left or the company had been acquired or—so it was a position of change. And that’s still what I do.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm, mm-hm. Ah. I see. Great. Awesome! Right.

JOLLY:                       I decided to—my first loyalty—I bleed green first, to Dartmouth, but I have a second love, and that’s the University of Virginia that I like, and I like my two years here, and so we had a chance to move to this town, and it is warmer than Hanover, and so we like living in a university town, which Charlottesville is.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. Great. Awesome.

                                    Yes, those are the questions I have for you, and thank you so much for your sharing your life story with us. And, you know, before we end our interview, if there’s anything else that you really would like to kind of add and talk a little bit about, you know, please feel free to do so—

JOLLY:                       Oh, maybe one thought—

CHUNG:                     —you know, any kind of opinion, your thoughts, your feelings.

JOLLY:                       —that pops into my mind since—I talked of Dartmouth and ROTC. I may have mentioned to you on our earlier phone call that some of the best officers I ever ran into were Dartmouth graduates—that it was a combination of—you don’t go to Dartmouth unless you’re interested in the outdoors, in most cases. You like trees and you like nature and being out there, but also a liberal education you receive—it just all combines to make—if you’ve got to have military officers, if you just have to have them and if you have to have wars, I can’t think of any place that produces better officers than Dartmouth College.

                                    And so I would maybe like to see a little greater support and opportunity for those good, great potential people coming out of Dartmouth to become officers, because our country probably will continue to need good, liberally educated military officers. So that’s my little—

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Okay.

JOLLY:                       —soapbox and make a speech.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Right. Great.

JOLLY:                       Part of a great heritage.

CHUNG: [Chuckles.] Right. Great. Thank you so much.

JOLLY:                       Well, I have absolutely enjoyed it, and next time you’re in Virginia or I’m in Hanover when you’re there, I’ll tell you 14 more stories, and you can tell me what you’ve heard from others.

CHUNG:                     Mm-hm. Yeah, sounds exciting. Sounds like a plan. [Chuckles.]

JOLLY:                       Okay.

CHUNG:                     Right. Uh-huh. Thank you so much. I will just turn off the recorder right now.

[End of interview.]