We Were All in This Together
Profilers: Margee Mahoney, Jojo Ibalio, Amani Yohanes, Kathy Thach, Steven Shi
Childhood and The First Impression about The War
Sue: My name is Sue Grousd. My maiden name was Sue Van Hove… I grew up in Waukegan, Illinois. I grew up in a very middle, middle-class family. My father ran a small factory, my mother didn’t work most of the time I was growing up. I have one brother, Bob, and it was just the four of us, and we lived a very, very, middle-class life growing up.
Bobby Bride was a year and a half older than I, grew up in exactly the same kind of family. I think my father… I think our parents first became friends through a softball league that my dad played in and Bobby’s dad played in. We became very close friends as families, and we kinda grew up together. Papa, my cousin Doug, grew up in Williamsburg, Iowa, the town where my mother came from. My mom grew up there too. His dad, Doug, stayed there, and lived there and they raised their family there. It’s a tiny, tiny, little town, kind of a farming community, near Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
My uncle had small businesses in the town, shops and things like that. And I grew up in the same kind of family as I did. His mom didn’t work. He had two older sisters or two.. One older sister, one younger sister. And he went to college and didn’t go into the service, into the war, until after he had graduated from college.
Papa grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He was the son of an attorney who worked for the government. And he grew up in the city all of his life, went to college. And when he was a junior in those days, you didn’t have to get an undergrad degree to be accepted into medical school. So when he was a junior in college, he applied and was accepted and went in then to his training at the University of Illinois. When he was drafted, he was at Emory University in his surgical training program in Atlanta. So he was living in Atlanta then finishing up. I want to say he was like midway through his surgical program in Atlanta.
Us: Could you tell me about what your childhood was like initially before you knew anything about the draft or how it would affect you?
Sue: So I lived a pretty ordinary childhood. My dad had fought in World War II. So he had been a soldier and had been injured in Germany. And then he was sent to Japan as part of the occupational forces after the war ended with Japan. So there was not a lot of talk about war when I was growing up. My dad didn’t like to talk about it at all because it was so traumatic for him. But I lived in a middle class community and it was very common for people to go into the military because there was something called the GI Bill. And if a person served, then they were entitled to money for college education afterward. And where I grew up, a lot of us did go to college, but many, many people couldn’t because their parents couldn’t afford it. So it was common for people to go into the military when they got out of high school. Or when they finished college.
Us: How was the war first presented to you? Did you experience any misconceptions or propaganda at first?
Sue: I don’t think at first anybody was aware that propaganda was being given out. I think in the beginning, there was a sense it was during the Cold War. And so there was a lot of fear here and in democratic countries about communism spreading throughout the world. And it was a generalized feeling, I think, among the populace that communism was not something… we had a democracy. We didn’t want to live with communism. So there was fear about communism being spread throughout the world.
And that was part of the beginning of the Vietnam thing was it was touted to the American population that this was to stop communism from spreading in Southeast Asia because North Vietnam was a communist area and it all began there as a civil war. So we were drawn in under that premise.
Us: Yeah, yeah. That makes perfect sense. Did you believe in Eisenhower’s Domino Theory? Where, if Vietnam— or did you even know about it when the war first began?
Sue: Oh yeah. I think I was aware, yes, certainly of that Domino Theory. And it was a fairly well-accepted concept, I think. at that time, Eisenhower was a highly trusted individual. He was a war hero from the Second World War. And he was very, people really trusted him. And he was very well-respected in this country. So I think a lot of people just assumed that that was the case.
Us: What were your thoughts and sentiments about the war and the draft when it first came onto your plate? What was your understanding of why it existed and why it came to be?
Sue: Well, there hadn’t been an active draft in my lifetime until then. And once it was decided that troops were going to be sent over there.. At first, it wasn’t that we’re sending a ton of troops. It’s that we’re sending expeditionary forces. We’re sending support personnel, that sort of thing. But then the draft started up. And I was a teenager. And it started. And then I knew people were getting drafted.
What they did was a lottery campaign. And every single person’s birthday and guys, not women, every single male over 17 had to register for the draft. Their birthdays were put into a lottery and then you know, they’d go from one end of the spectrum to the other and start drafting people. So when that started, then there were people who didn’t go to college. For a while, you were deferred if you were in college and you weren’t taken if you were already in school. But if you were out of high school and not in college, then people started getting drafted. That was upsetting and frightening because it was my firsthand experience with people I knew having to go to war.
So you know, it was unsettling. And then as time went on, they were drafting higher and higher amounts of guys. So more and more people you knew were going. Then I started knowing guys, you know, who I had grown up with, like Bobby Bride, who was one of my earliest best little buddies. We were— our families were very close and we vacationed together. And Bobby was a year older than I and, and he got drafted and he was over there for about a year. And then he was killed in around Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.
That was a big blow to me, losing Bobby. It was incredibly sad. When it gets close to you— then you start getting even more concerned and more anxious because it looks, you’re looking right in the face of it now. And that’s how I felt. My cousin Doug was in college, so he deferred until he graduated from college.
So around 1968, when he got out of college, he was drafted. That was again, really terrifying because Bobby Bright had already died. Doug was a really close friend, male cousins. So when he went, that was horrifying.
And he would write me letters. We wrote letters back and forth. And all of the letters had to go through a censor because they didn’t want certain kinds of information getting out to the public. There were certain things that they didn’t want people to know about. So he would write me letters and it was clear that he was living a hellish life.
He was fighting in the middle of the jungle. American troops were trained in conventional warfare, and this was a guerilla war. And my cousin told me in a letter that they were given amphetamines by the officers to keep them awake because they were living in the jungle and they were sleeping in hammocks suspended from trees and things. And they would go for days and days and days.
They couldn’t just go somewhere. There wasn’t a barracks or somewhere to sleep. You had to sleep in the jungle. He also told me that the North Vietnamese troops were infiltrating the South Vietnamese. And it wasn’t like you could tell the difference. They were all Vietnamese people. And he said they were afraid to sleep at night because they were afraid that there would be North Vietnamese soldiers in their group and they might be killed at night.
As time went along and more and more people were sent over there, the sentiment for the war in favor or supporting the war really dissipated. People were dying. Families were losing their children, their brothers, their, you know, some sisters—there were women over there. and we weren’t winning either. And that was a huge thing. We were not winning the war. And, you know, there’s this sense that America always wins the war, the wars they’re in. That was a really novel, different thing. And so support for the effort really started to fail.
Sue: I think in the beginning,our society.. Was such that it, and it still is, to a large degree, very patriotic to serve your country. So the concept of serving your country was really, you now, that was strong. It still is strong. You know, it’s a well-respected thing to do with your life. It was warped a bit by the war. For a while, nobody wanted to go into the service. It really jaded people’s opinions of the armed services, I think, and the government for a very long time.
Experience during The Draft Time
Us: How was Papa or Doug’s experience with the draft? What were his initial feelings and reactions?
Sue: He was in medical school, and he was in his surgery training program. So, he was not touched by the draft for quite a long time until they needed more and more medical people in the service. Then he received a draft notice and had to go in for his physical because they needed doctors. So he did his physical, and then he was called up to service. The director of his surgical training program. I think there were something like six or eight people in his program and all of them were being drafted. So the director of his surgery training program went to somebody he knew in the military who oversaw the draft or had some role in it and said to this person, “If you take all of my people, my program dies.” There will be no oral surgery training program for me and this university. So they relented and said, “O ,kay, we won’t take these people.” And so that’s why he didn’t end up having to go over there. But it was only because someone intervened in the system.
Us: Yeah. Wow. Did he believe in the war at the time, and do you think he felt relief, guilt, or mixed emotions about not having to serve?
Sue: I don’t think he, at that point, that was fairly late in the war. I don’t think he support, I know he didn’t support the war. He would’ve gone, of course, if he had been called, he would certainly have not avoided it. He was prepared to go. It was just that somebody intervened for the entire of the surgical students. He would’ve gone. He wouldn’t have wanted to go. He would’ve wanted to go help. He was trained to help people, and so he would’ve definitely would’ve gone, but it wasn’t something he wanted to do or something that he felt supportive of in terms of the war effort,
Us: I feel like that’s a really interesting view into American consciousness about not even feeling that obligation towards the moral of the war, but feeling that obligation towards fellow soldiers…
Sue: One another.
Us: Yeah,
Sue: Yeah. Supporting one another, doing what you can to help one another no matter what. We’re all in this together. We may not agree on a lot of things about all kinds of things, but in the end, we’re a society and we’re all in this together.
Us: Yeah. I’m going to ask some questions about Bobby’s experience now, if that’s all right.
Sue: Okay.
Us: So how was Bobby’s experience with the draft? What were his initial feelings and reactions, and of course, just answer these questions…
Sue: I think he was ready to go. I mean, I think he felt like it was something. This was 1967. I think 1966 or 1967.
Us: Okay.
Sue: 66, I think, and he was ready to go. He felt it was his obligation. His dad had also been a soldier during World War II, so their family was supportive of the military, the concept of being in the military, I think he was scared. Everyone who went there was very frightened. This was a really… all wars are terrible. All wars are terrible. This war was really frightening because everyone knew it wasn’t going as well as the government or anyone hoped. You weren’t heading into some noble, you were heading into real trouble, and everybody knew it.
Us: It’s a very different experience from the organization almost of World War II, where there’s the Vietcong who are incredibly powerful and not trained in a recognizable way to the US armed forces.
Sue: Yeah. No, it was apples and oranges in terms of the war effort. It was apples and oranges. We had big tanks. We had guns, we had ships, we had bombs. We had all that conventional warfare, and we were as skilled as anyone in the world. But we were not trained. Our military was never trained for gorilla war.
Us: How was Doug’s experience with the draft, and what were his initial feelings and reactions?
Sue: Well, I think by that time, he was pretty certain that he’d be drafted once he was out of school. He didn’t have a deferment anymore. There wasn’t any reason (he wasn’t a critical worker ) that was necessary to stay here in the States and not be drafted, so I think he pretty much knew that that was what was going to happen to him. I think he was accepting of it. He wasn’t the kind of person who ran away. He still is not.He never was the kind of person who ran away from responsibility. He was a very, very responsible person and still is, and that was sort of the hallmark of my mom’s family. They were solid people who always tried to do what was expected of them and what was right. They were really good people, so I think he just thought, this is what’s going to happen, and this is what I’m going to do. I’m sure he was worried. We were all worried for him. He also was very much like his dad. He was kind of not a tough guy, but a serious kind of person who just, he was serious. He went about his business in a serious and straightforward way. So, I think he just knew he was going to go and accepted it.
Us: Wow. That’s a really impressive trait for a family to all be raised with, to have that sense of pride and responsibility in yourselves.
Sue: That was very strong throughout my entire mother’s side of the family. That’s how they were raised, and that’s how they all were.
Us: That’s wonderful. Do you know if at the time that he went, I think you said around 1968, did he believe in the war then?
Sue: I don’t think I ever had that conversation with him. I don’t think it was even a question. I think it was that it was his responsibility and he was going, but I don’t think we ever had a conversation about supporting the war.
Us: Do you remember anything specifically about the day he got drafted or the time around when you and your family found out that he was going? Is there anything significant about the experience?
Sue: Not that I can remember. I think it was, I think everybody suspected it and dreaded it a little bit, but expected it, so I don’t think it came as any shock, and it was just, oh, boy. Okay.
Us: Yeah, get ready. Can you say about the specific type of service he was going into?
Sue: So he was a corporal, and as far as I know, I don’t know. He wasn’t trained, I think in any specific special way. I think he was just in the general ranks of the army soldiers who were there. I think I do know this. He led a platoon. He was a platoon leader, which is a smaller group within a, I don’t know enough about the army to know what all the definitions are of this and that, but he did lead a platoon and I want to say that would probably be like eight to 10 people.
Experience during the War
Us: So I’m going to start again with Bobby. Where in Vietnam was he? Do you know?
Sue Grousd: So when he died, he was in Ho Chi Minh City. He died right around there. That’s where they were trying to defeat North Vietnam, so that South Vietnam, all of Vietnam would become, I don’t think it would become a democracy just so that it wasn’t communist. I mean, it’s now a communist country. It became one.
Us: Where in Vietnam was Doug? Do you know?
Sue Grousd: So Doug, was he out fighting in Vietnam? He was part of forces that were moved into Cambodia. Around 1970, we started sending forces into Cambodia, which is a neighboring country of Vietnam. At the time, according to the government, we had no soldiers in Cambodia. There were no soldiers fighting in Cambodia, but they were, and Doug was one of them. And so that also was highly censored where exactly he was. I mean, I didn’t really know how fully he was fighting in Cambodia until he came home because the government told us that we didn’t have any troops in Cambodia, and it was untrue.
Us: How did it change his demeanor in your eyes?
Sue: Oh my Gosh. This may make me cry
Sue: Okay. Doug was one of the most fun loving people I’ve ever known. When we were kids and we were all together, often it would always be at somebody’s one of our parents’ house and there’d be scads of kids, and my mom was one of six children, so there were a lot of us, and we often spent summer vacations, we’d have big reunions and things like that and holidays, and Doug was just such a positive person. He was up for lots of fun. We used to do just crazy pranks and things like that all the time. And Doug was always right in the middle of it, pretty carefree, wonderful, great fun, a great fun person to be around.
After he came home from Vietnam, he was a broken person and he was broken for a long time. He was so psychologically scarred and he barely smiled anymore. He was very serious. And when they came back, they were shunned. People by then hated the war, and they blamed the soldiers when they came back here. So when he first came back and he was in the airport, he was still in uniform and he was spat upon, and that was stunning for him. He didn’t expect that. And as I said, when he came back, he just felt like he didn’t belong here anymore in this country. And he joined the circus, and it sounds like a novel, and it kind of is. It could be when I think, but he joined the circus then He was part of an aerial act. He was catching people flying in the air and things like that for a couple of years because he needed to be in a community where he felt accepted and safe.
And during the time he was in the circus, he was raised in the Methodist church, and it wasn’t like his family wasn’t super religious, but they were definitely raised in church. But when he came back and he joined the circus, he became an evangelical Christian. And I think that the circus is like a family. They travel together, they’re together every day, all day. They travel, they go everywhere together, and I think that there was a high percentage of evangelical Christians in that circus then, and he became an evangelical Christian, and he stayed that, and he is very religious. He married a woman who was evangelical as well, and he never had children. He didn’t want to have children, and that was not the person I grew up with. I saw Douglas as being married with a bunch of really rambunctious kids. He was just full of life, and he’s a kind good person. He’s a landscape contractor in California near you, but he’s a very, very serious person.
Us: Do you think that going to war had something to do with not-
Sue: I think it had everything to do with it. It was about the war because he went in one person and came back another.
Us: Did hearing of their time in Vietnam and seeing the people who were there change your view of war in the military?
Sue Grousd: Yes. Yes. And it may happen in every generation that goes through a war, you have one feeling about what war is and what it means until you go through it, and then you have a different feeling about what war is and what it means. The Vietnam War was not clear cut at all. We couldn’t figure out what we really were fighting for. It became apparent as the war went along, I think, to lots of people that it really wasn’t about the danger of communism. It was about getting into something for one reason and staying in it for another, and that was disillusioning.
It was demoralizing in every single way, and people were just coming back and they were just such a mess and the society, and we were so disillusioned. That for me was the moment where I realized that you can’t believe everything. You have to think for yourself, and you have to think for yourself, and you have to do research, and you have to stand on your own tenets on the things you believe.
Us: It sounds like going through such a hard experience made you really passionate about individualism and critical.
Sue: I think it probably was the first time I was, and it was a time in my life when maybe that would’ve been inevitably what happened. I was still growing and maturing. I was still a girl at that time. But I do think that’s true. I think it led me to realize that you have to think for yourself, and you have to stand up for what you believe in. You can’t just accept things as they’re told to you or handed to you. You have a responsibility.
Experience after The war
Us: How did Doug originally feel coming back from the war?
Sue: Broken, demoralized, broken. It took a long, long time before he could sleep peacefully. He was very traumatized.
US: You said he was spat on when he came back and flew back to the States.
Sue: I think he could have started to heal faster if he’d been received as someone who had done good instead of someone who had performed criminal acts, and that’s how the soldiers coming back were viewed by very, very many people. Yeah.
Us: So how do you think he was emotionally and psychologically affected by the war?
Sue: He killed people. People are not meant to kill other people. It’s not in the ethos of, I mean, obviously there are people who are pathological and psychologically very, very sick, but Doug wasn’t one of those people , and he feared that he’d be killed every day and he killed other people, and I don’t think you can do that and not have permanent damage. Human psyches are not set up for that kind of trauma.
Us: I completely agree. What do you think his opinions of war are now?
Sue: He was very anti-war when he came back. Very, very anti-war. I don’t think he had any position pro or anti-war going in. Again, we had not grown up in a war before, but he was very anti-war when he came back.
Us: What do you think he would say if he could say something about war or violence or his experience?
Sue: I can’t speak for him certainly, but I don’t think he would want to talk about it after he first came back. I mean, we’ve never had another conversation about it since then. I think he had his hands full, just trying to be healed enough to be able to be a functioning human being again.
Us: How did you and your community process Bobby’s loss?
Sue: Well, it was terribly sad. Bobby was only one of, he’s the one who was closest in my life, but there were many, many young men who didn’t come home from my town, my town, Waukegan It’s not a big town, it’s a relatively small town, but there were a lot of people who went to war from there, and there were a lot of them who didn’t come home. So it was a very sad thing. And there were memorials that happened, physical monument, memorials, things like that. There was a great deal of sadness and grief that followed that. I remember going, uncle Bob and I went, uncle Bob was living in Washington DC or just outside, and I came to visit and we went to the Vietnam memorial that had been constructed, and it has the name of every single person who was lost, and it’s this long, windy granite monument.
The only thing that Uncle Bob wanted to do was take a rubbing of Bobby’s name from that wall. And so it was just, it’s a sea of names, and we went along until we found him. And when I saw his name etched on that wall, I just kind of fell to my knees. It was so powerful and so final and it just broke my heart. And both he and I mean, he took a rubbing to take back to Bobby’s mom, and we both just sat there for a long time crying, and I remember just, I didn’t want to take my hand off Bobby’s name because it felt like I was kind of connected to him again. It was terrible. The grief and sadness lasted a very, very long time.
Sue: It’s important, those kind of losses. Any kind of huge loss is difficult to carry unless you can find a way to closure. I think that’s just the nature of that for humans.
Us: How did you feel when you saw Doug for the first time after the war?
Us: Did he seem like a changed man? Did it make you appreciate, reflect on anything specifically?
Sue: You know what? It made me appreciate the time I had with him before when we were kids, when we were carefree, when we were horsing around and pretending crazy things to scare our parents at family get-togethers and doing goofy things, riding around on bicycles and hitting golf balls at the golf course together and things like that. It made me grateful that I had that time with him when he was still that person. It also made me really miss that part of him.
Us: Of course. How did the experience change the way you view war now?
Sue: Well, it changed how I view war. It changed how I view government. It ended a lot of naivete for me. Certainly made me less trusting in institutions, and it definitely made me, I can’t say that there isn’t a war with fighting, that’s not the case. But it would have to be something really, really clear to me. For me to cast my lot in favor of it.
Sue: Sadly, people don’t learn. People learn because history repeats itself. Sadly, I wish we could just learned from the lessons of history, but people tend to learn only from their own experience.
Us: That’s the end of my questions, but I want to leave this space open to make sure you have the opportunity to speak on anything that you think is important or is on your mind.
Sue: Well, I do think that it’s really important. I think what this course that you’re taking this semester, courses like that are vitally important because they’re not just about the actual war. They’re about morals and ethics. They’re about true deep examination of events, so it doesn’t gloss over things. It forces you to stand in the middle of it, and that’s really important for people to do that, to stand in the center of something uncomfortable and just look around.
Sue: I’m honored that you asked me to participate. I’m happy to share my own experiences, the secondhand experiences I have through the people I care about, and I haven’t thought about these things in a very, very long time. It’s not something I think about very often, and again, I think it’s good for people to stand in things that are uncomfortable. I think it’s good for people. It helps us stay human, and it helps us be more sensitive.