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TI: And while you're doing this work at Wells Fargo, I'm looking at kind of the dates. So now we're going, sort of in the mid- to late-'60s. So at this point, I'm curious, you're a veteran and served overseas in Korea, trained at Fort Benning in this air assault. At this point, Vietnam is just going full blast.

RK: Yeah, it was.

TI: And with that, a lot of protest, I mean, you're in the Bay Area, and so a lot of protests here. What were you thinking when you saw all this happening?

RK: I'm glad I didn't stay in.

TI: [Laughs] I remember watching TV, and they always had the body count, and I was wondering, what was going through your mind as you saw that?

RK: It was hard to watch that because I could imagine guys in my own company. It could have been one of those guys, it could have been my good buddy down in Benning, used to call him Snake, that was his nickname. So it could have been him. I could have lost a lot of good friends, I might have. Because that's all infantry unit, that's what I would have been.

TI: Did you ever stay in touch with any of your old infantry buddies in terms of what happened to them?

RK: I actually saw one guy from Benning. He came over to the house, I forgot where he lived. I know he lived across the Golden Gate Bridge, someplace on that side.

TI: So you were on East Bay, you lived in East Bay? Oh, I'm sorry, Golden Gate, so you were more Marin.

RK: Golden Gate, going up north. So he was on leave, so we went out and had a couple of beers because I had to go to work that night. It was just have a couple of beers and said our goodbyes. I never did see him after that.

TI: Did you talk about what it was like?

RK: Oh, he didn't want to talk about it, so I wasn't going to push him.

TI: So you saw that in terms of the war, how about your views about the protests, protesters, and they were protesting, which made it hard for people like your buddy and other people that fought in the military.

RK: Yeah, because we're over there getting our heads blown off. True, it's not our war, but we're over there. Somebody needed our help, whether it be South Vietnam or North Vietnam, the North Vietnamese, because later, as the war got closer and closer to the end, we find out they were actually fighting with the wrong guys. We were actually fighting the wrong people. So it's like... and especially some of these guys that are draft dodgers. It was like, you could be over there helping these guys instead of sitting here protesting the war. True, it wasn't our war, but our guys were over there.

TI: Well, it was such a divisive time in the United States at that time. I remember just the protests, the military, and just the verve of that, it just was really, really difficult.

RK: I don't think any of our guys wound up to be there, but you're a soldier, you go where you're told to go. There's nothing you could do about it. If you don't want to go, what do you want to do, desert? If they find you, you're going to find yourself in jail.

TI: Yeah, it was such a difficult time.

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