Interview with MACVSOG vet Doug Godshall- (FOB1/ CCN - FOB3 - Mai Loc vet) SOA President скачать в хорошем качестве

Interview with MACVSOG vet Doug Godshall- (FOB1/ CCN - FOB3 - Mai Loc vet) SOA President

Godshall, 68, of Granger Township, expects that sharing his military biography will be part of his guest speaker duties. That part of his life started at Christmas in 1965, when he was gifted with Robin Moore's book, "The Green Berets," a fictional account of the Army's Special Forces combatants in Vietnam.Godshall was hooked."I read that and said that's what I wanted to do," he recalled. "School wasn't doing it for me. I was very immature." The Philadelphia native quit school and signed on, mindful of the advice of his father, a wounded Navy vet of World War II, to "stay out of trouble." But after finishing airborne infantry training and jump school, Godshall was pulled out of Special Forces training because he wore eyeglasses. "They told me, 'You're going to be behind enemy lines. What are you going to do about those glasses?'" Godshall recalled. He was crushed. But when he got to Vietnam, apparently glasses weren't as important as getting volunteers to join an elite fighting group, and he accepted an invitation to finish his Special Forces training there. Godshall served in the 5th Special Forces Group of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Studies and Operations Group (MACVSOG). Operating in small teams with two or three Americans leading 5 to 7 indigenous personnel, the unit conducted secret reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines in South and North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. These missions included disrupting and destroying enemy supply routes, assessing opposing troop positions and strength, capturing prisoners, rescuing downed U.S. airmen and "generally disrupting and confounding the enemy," according to Godshall. A Presidential Unit Citation noted that "pursued by human trackers and even bloodhounds, these small teams out-maneuvered, out-fought and out-ran their numerically superior foes . . . compelling the North Vietnamese Army to divert 50,000 soldiers to rear area security duties." At times they operated on the fringes of diplomatic legality. "It was always difficult to figure out what we were allowed to do and what we were not allowed to do, where we were allowed to go and where we were not allowed to go," Godshall said. "It sounds so stupid when you're trying to fight a war, it's a ridiculous way to do things," he added. "But we had the politics to deal with, and you can't ignore that." Sometimes they weren't even told the real purpose of a mission. Godshall remembers returning from the field one time and being exhaustively questioned about the foliage he encountered. He later learned that the Army wanted to know how to disguise listening devices to detect enemy movement in that area. Godshall was wounded by grenade shrapnel in his back shoulder, received another slight wound from friendly fire, and survived his base being overrun by enemy troops on two occasions. But the hardest part of combat was losing your buddies, Godshall said. "There's nothing harder than that. You get over it, but you never forget it." He said training and a sense of duty to your fellow soldiers got him through. "You didn't want to let anybody down. So you take care of your friends at whatever cost," he noted. Godshall ultimately became a first sergeant in charge of a company-sized unit of combatants called a Hatchet Force. Special Forces proved to be everything he hoped it would. "The stuff we did was incredibly interesting, that no one else was doing," he said. here was a "huge" sense of accomplishment that went with their work, according to Godshall. "We were getting intelligence that we thought was informing the Army and Navy where the bad guys were, knocking out their supply lines, finding out where they were so the big guys could go in and get them," he said. "We felt we were accomplishing our mission in spades." But if someone asks if he ever killed anyone, Godshall politely asks that they move on to another subject. "I accomplished my mission. I got my troops down without being killed. I'm a happy guy," he said. He kept that reserved demeanor when he came home from the war and was occasionally confronted with the strident anti-war sentiment of that era. "You develop a little bit of an insulation to the politics of it 'cause you didn't want to get in a fight with anyone," he said. "You sort of learned to deflect the politics." Back home, Godshall decided to become an attorney and was drawn to Cleveland by the reputation of Case Western Reserve University's law school. There's a similarity between being an attorney and a soldier, according to Godshall. https://www.cleveland.com/profiles-of...