<Begin Segment 30>

TI: We only have, like ten more minutes in this session before I have to give this studio up. I wanted to bring you back to stateside, and first, at one point did you tell your wife what you just went through? When did she hear what, not only this one, but the other things that you had gone through? I know you've told me other stories about that one time early on where I think you got ambushed, and they now have a monument there.

HY: To the Viet Cong.

TI: Right. And so you have gone through horrendous, sort of, fighting situations. At what point did your wife find out what you did?

HY: Not.

TI: Still to this day she doesn't know?

HY: Well, you know, now that I'm writing this book and she's starting to hear about that. In 2016, I was in a company conference in Vietnam, and I did go back and visit the battlefield. And I told my wife some of this.

TI: And was she there traveling with you?

HY: No, she didn't travel with me. But I've never really talked to her about a lot of things that happened.

TI: And is it because she, you think she doesn't want to know? Or why wouldn't you tell her this? Because it's such a, I don't know, just such a deep part of your life.

HY: Yeah, I guess I don't want to bother her with that. Another story of why I left the Marine Corps, because I could have had a career in the Marine Corps. But one day, after I came back I was a duty officer at the camp, we were at Camp Pulgas, and a telegram came in saying a Marine was seriously wounded, and his wife was still living in the area, wife was a nineteen-year-old or eighteen-year-old, and so I needed to go out and notify her. But the chaplain wasn't around, so I decided I'd ask my wife to come with me. So she agreed and she came with me and we visited this young girl. And, of course, she was, even though the husband had survived, he was seriously wounded and she was devastated. My wife was wonderful, she was helping me comfort her. It's not like I would say, "Your husband's been seriously wounded," but my wife consoled her and I just saw what she was doing. And I understood then what wives were going through. Because it's not like today with the internet and everything, they didn't know what was happening. And so as I saw that, I said, you know, if I go back to Vietnam, I'm going to put my wife through this same ordeal again. Because she was, my wife was also living alone there and not knowing what was happening to me day by day. So at that point in time, I decided I'm going to leave the Marine Corps and not put my wife through any more of this. So that's, I think, what changed my mind, because I had wanted to be a Marine officer and make a career of it, but I decided then that it's not worth putting my wife through this again.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.