Daniel Allison, Oral History

Recorded: May 4, 2015
Interviewed by Lae'l Hughes-Watkins
Transcribed by Amanda Faehnel

[Interviewer]: This is Lae'l Hughes-Watkins speaking on May 4, 2015 at Kent State University Special Collections and Archives as part of the May 4 Oral History Project. I will be talking with Daniel Allison. I would like to begin with a few biographical questions. First, where were you born?

[Daniel Allison]: Columbus, Ohio, 1949.

[Interviewer]: And where did you grow up?

[Daniel Allison]: Columbus, Ohio.

[Interviewer]: Okay, didn't change. (laughs)

[Daniel Allison]: Didn't change very much.

[Interviewer]: Then I would like to ask, how did you come to join the military and what branch did you serve?

[Daniel Allison]: During that period of time, after I graduated in 1967 from Eastmoor High School, the prospects for a person of my economic background was very slim and, in fact, I realized that I only had two choices: it was either go in the military or get drafted. The interesting piece was that this played out in spades as I went into the military, I wanted to take the path of least resistance. So I went and interviewed in all the different branches of the military and the one branch that said that I would definitely never go to Vietnam was the Air Force. So, again I signed the contract and you know, lo and behold, two years later--or three years later--I was in country. But the odd piece to this is is that when I arrived in basic training in Texas, when I got off the bus, the training instructor, the TI, called my name out and said, "You know you're AWOL."

And I said, "What?" I mean, I just joined.

He goes, "Yeah, you had a draft notice from the Marines and you didn't appear for that date."

So here I am, I'm in the military, I'm in the Air Force at the time in San Antonio, and having to face the prospect of now am I going to go into the Marines or am I going to go stay in the Air Force? And in a split second, the decision was made to keep me in the Air Force. But it turned out that my draft notice had showed up at my home and my mother had thrown it in the trash and ignored it. So, for whatever motivation that was, I have no idea. And this will become clear as we go through this, because the whole issue around Vietnam broke my relationship with my family as well. But those were no choices for us when we were kids, when we were that age.

Of the 360 some students at Eastmoor High School in 1967, over 75 percent of the males went to, in some shape or form, got drafted or went to Vietnam. It was my understanding that we had some of the highest killed ratios of students in Ohio at that time. Most of my friends who went to Vietnam, most of my friends who went into the military never came back.

[Interviewer]: What percentage did you say that was?

[Daniel Allison]: Approximately, I would say probably sixty percent. You know, I have no basis to back that but I can assure you that when I go back to a school reunions for '67, it's very sparse. Very, very sparse.

[Interviewer]: And you said you weren't sure how the decision was made that you would end up staying in the Air Force versus going to the Marines?

[Daniel Allison]: Well, the decision was made on the spot by this TI because one way or the other, I wasn't going to get out of there. As Jim Morrison would say, no one gets out of here alive. That was the moment that I realized that my destiny was locked. And I know this will shock you but the Air Force said, Oh, you'll never go to Vietnam. (laughs) So it was an interesting time nonetheless.

[Interviewer]: Can you share some of your training experience that you--

[Daniel Allison]: When I got to basic training, I was in basic training for approximately three days and during the basic training process, my TI, my training instructor, came up and as they always do, tried to toughen you up, started making comments about my family and those kinds of things and to--what they want to do is size you up. You know, growing up on the streets in Columbus, Ohio as a kid, I was kind of a scrappy guy, you know, and he made a comment about my family and I instantly--let's just say I put him to the ground, I hit him. So off to jail I went. (laughs)

So they sent me off to a place called correctional custody and I was in correctional custody for approximately ten days. During that period of time, and I really don't want to belabor the whole definition of that, but during that period of time, they--they being the Air Force--asked us to one day get in line and stand at attention and they brought a gentleman up to the barracks where we were incarcerated and I had never seen an individual that looked like this before. I mean, he was impeccably dressed, he had jug boots on, he had his wool pants tucked in, he had medals all over him, he had this maroon beret, he had Jump Wings on, and they were looking for volunteers for what they called Pararescue. And interestingly enough as volunteers go, they--they being the Air Force and the people that were in that unit--stood us all in line and they introduced this gentleman and they said, We're looking for volunteers to go into this specific training to be a parajumper, Pararescue guy. And of course, as they walked up and down the line, they said, We're taking you, you, you, and you. And uh-oh! (laughs) I was one selected.

So, you know, anyone who has been in the military they know that when people ask for volunteers, it's really kind of not a volunteer. So they pulled me out of the correctional custody and put me into intensive training that I went through which consisted of jump training and invasion school and what we used to call kill school and all of these specialized training that they had at the time for Air Force personnel that were doing that specific job.

Compared to today, if you look at the training that Pararescue guys, the PJs, have now compared to what we were, it's not even the same. We were just, in hindsight I look back, and it was just nothing but they just needed people to fulfill this obligation and it was a high kill ratio. Our chances of living through that were going to be fairly slim. But you know when you're nineteen years old, eighteen years old, you don't think anybody's going to break you. But that's how I got selected to do what I did.

[Interviewer]: So when you say, you're the guy that's jumping out of--

[Daniel Allison]: Jumping out of helicopters primarily, right, and going down and picking up downed airmen, downed pilots, those kinds of things, which was kind of interesting within the military, in the Air Force especially, because the Air Force was primarily known as well, marines used to call us bus drivers. You know, we were known as we had air conditioning, we worked on airplanes, we did this, we did that, and our segment of the business was while we had those skills, our segment of the business was primarily saving lives. So kind of an interesting thing.

[Interviewer]: So you said--I just want to get the date--so when did you exactly end up going to Vietnam?

[Daniel Allison]: February 1, 1970. Rotated over from 1967 until 1970. My first duty station, I know this will shock you, is Las Vegas, Nevada. So as a kid growing up in Columbus, Ohio with all this training, and then being shipped over to Las Vegas, quite frankly, I didn't know what to do. I had way too much excitement on my hands. Plus all this training and the machismo that went around and all that, all of the camaraderie with my brothers that went through the training with me, when they didn't have a slot for us immediately in Vietnam, they would just take us and put us in places that were normal duty stations. So it set up this dichotomy so to speak of the folks that were just normal Air Force versus the folks who went through specialized training and were doing these odd, weird, bizarre things outside the envelope, so to speak. But February 1, 1970 was my date into the country.

I was certainly not prepared for what I saw that day. You have to remember that, you know, we were just kids. At that time, I was twenty years old. If I can share this with you, they flew us over on Flying Tiger Airlines, and if you keep in mind, it's February 1, 1970, and all the flight attendants that were on board the aircraft had those little weird '70s,'60s hats, you know, that were like a beehive, you know, (laughs) and mini-skirts, white boots. They were all cheerleaders, you know, quote unquote, and as we flew into the country, I came into Cam Ranh Bay, and having not experienced any combat in my life, or not experienced any type of trauma, so to speak, I mean, I'd seen fights and stuff like that, but as we rotated in and we're starting to go into Cam Ranh Bay, I remember looking outside the window and seeing little puffs of smoke, and I'm wondering, Wow, is this fireworks or what?

And lo and behold, the captain came onboard and said, "We're under attack. We're out of fuel. We're going to have to land."

So as we came in and landed and hit the ground, they rotated, they taxied the aircraft over, and all this time we're getting rocket attacks and mortar fire. And here's the comedic part of this: these flight attendants--I don't know how many there is, probably ten or twelve on this airplane--they opened up the door, and the first thing I remember was the smell. And then they would come through and grab each one of us and throw us out the door. Literally, throw us out the door to get us out of there so they could get refueled and get out.

So here's this airplane full of kids laying on the ground with these rockets and mortars coming at them and here's these little five foot two flight attendants grabbing these two hundred pound guys (laughs) and throwing them out the door one by one, and it was like, welcome to hell. No ceremony, no marching bands, no nothing. Just, welcome to hell.

The interesting piece to this is as I'm laying on the ground on this aluminum matting they used to have as far as where they put the airplanes, and thinking, Oh, this is great. Nowhere, I mean, I can't run anywhere. I can't go anywhere. You know, if I run over to here, what if they shoot over there? So having that initial gut reaction, that sense of helplessness, not having a weapon, not having a gun, not having anything, really makes you politically savvy in an instant and you know then that you're in for the ride of your life.

The interesting piece that I remember about this in particular was that being twenty years old and not having any political affiliations or not knowing anything about, you know, other than, okay, this is my big adventure, that all of a sudden within an instant, I became very politicized. I became very scared. I became very frightened, very worried. But that image of these poor five foot two, five foot women, you know, in their go-go boots and their short skirts throwing these guys out the door, it's incredible. Just an amazing image that's still stuck.

Obviously, you know, none of us got hurt, and the airplane refueled and left and there we were. The next instinct that I remember, or the next thing I remember is, like I said before, the smell. And the smell was like--it's something that's hard to describe. It's fear, sweat, death, pain, anger, angst, it's not anything that you've ever experienced or smelled before. And once it gets into your psyche, it never goes. It's always there. I think the closest that I could actually describe it would be--and I want to make sure that I keep this as cool as possible--but if you've ever come across, if you've over-burned steak, that's pretty close to what that smelled like, that nasty, disgusting smell. And then keep in mind, we had to keep that in our psyche for a year. In my case, it was actually nine months.

[Interviewer]: So, as a member of the military, I know you're not encouraged to express your political opinions outwardly. You said that you became politicized once you got there, so even though you couldn't express them outwardly, how were you starting to feel?

[Daniel Allison]: Actually, and this is something that a lot of Vietnam vets struggle with, and obviously I can't speak for every Vietnam veteran who ever served. I can only speak for myself. But it was a slow, grinding motion. It was a sudden realization of denial. The denial of everything that you learned in your life, everything that you tasted in your life, every sense that you've had. Now, I'd just been married, not even--it was June, so maybe six months prior, but that was to my first wife. Then there was a second, all part of Vietnam, by the way.

The sense of organization, the sense of religion, the sense of God, the sense of being, the sense of faith, all of these things came into question during that period of time in Vietnam. Now, how much can a twenty year old kid who's never experienced this really have those senses? So as you're in Vietnam and as you were there doing what you had to do, and facing what you had to face, you had to reinvent all of these things and you began to reinvent them to fit the circumstances so you could move on from one day to the next. It's okay to kill another human being because they're going to kill you. It's okay to drink. It's okay to drug. It's okay to do this, it's okay to--anything to mask the pain, anything to mask the hatred. All of the things that were involved in that, in that episode. You know, I never, as a kid--I was exposed to alcohol, most of my family unfortunately were, they liked to drink a lot--but I never really liked to drink. And then in Vietnam, I began to drink. And then there was other little enticements that I found that the more you would use them, the easier it was to get across the barrier to do what you had to do to survive. It was easier to cross the barrier to do what you had to do to make sure your brother survived. And when I refer to my brother I mean my guys that were with me. The fact that there was no female companionship at all, other than the obvious party girls, you know, we'll just keep it at that.

But from February first, at least through my particular scenario, until the events leading up to May fifth, really struggled with these whole things about self and being and religion and God and marriage and family and you know, am I going to live through this? And in fact, there were many times when I would write back to my wife or my family, I would say to them, Well, this is happening, this is happening, and obviously, and they would filter, they would go through our mail. But I would get responses back that were, Well, that's not true. That's not happening. And in fact, Vietnam was the tear from my family, between myself and my mother and father.

I was sent into Cambodia on May the second, and I wrote a letter back to my father and my mother saying, I can't tell you where I'm at, but if you look on a map between Thailand and Vietnam, that's where I'm at. And the next response letter I got back was, I never want to talk to you again because you're lying to me. And Nixon would not lie to us. Our great President Nixon would never lie to us. And I actually still have that letter. Our Governor Rhodes would never lie to us. I mean, he supports Nixon in the war effort. We're going to win. You're just not doing your job right.

And at that moment that was (noise), that was the severing of it all. Now I share that with you because I want whoever views this to understand that what you're being told here in this country and what we were being told in that country was nothing the same. And then having the experience of actually living it, walking it, talking it, smelling it, feeling it. No one here knew what that was about. No one knew what any of that felt like. The only thing I can equate that to would be I've seen a lot of documentaries in my life from the time of when I spent in Vietnam until now, and one of the things that's a recurring theme with most of the people that were in the States was, and especially in my generation, maybe a little younger than I: we'd sit around at the dinner table and we'd watch the dead, we'd watch the bodies come back, we'd hear about the body count, we were winning by body count. I'm here to tell you that's not the truth. We got to a point, I mean these facts and figures have all been confirmed, that we would falsify body count. We would lie just to keep alive because if we became too aggressive, then our leadership in Vietnam would want us to become more aggressive. If we gave them the basic numbers on a day to day basis, then they wouldn't want us to press on. It was satisfactory now. It was good for headquarters. It was good for the president. It was good for the media. I don't want to lay any blame on the media because I believe that in some cases they did try to tell the truth. I mean, they were embedded with us a couple times. You know, they tried to get the message out. But it was the politicizing of the war effort during the Nixon years that made everything so false, that made everything so fake. But yet, the population in America was so bought into the Nixon doctrine at that time that they had nowhere else to go.

So they had two people to blame. There are two groups of people. They had the warriors to blame, and I'll talk to you about that a little later, and they had those hippies to blame, the ones who were out trying to stop that war. And in the meantime, we were stuck in the middle. We had no place to go. It became our position at that time just to save ourselves. Don't kill any more than you had to kill. Protect your brother. Make sure that you make it back to the world. That was all we ever talked about was going to the world. Being able to buy a '69 Challenger, you know? (laughs) Being able to go back and get a decent job. Being able to come back and just forget all this. You know, I mean after all, my dad was in World War II. He was on a destroyer in the South Pacific, and I learned later he was a kamikaze. Wanting to get back and be honored and respected for what we did. And then finally coming back and realizing none of that was ever going to happen.

[Interviewer]: I did want to go back to--you said that there was a rift in the family. So if you could just expound a little bit more on how your family and friends felt when they found out you were going to Vietnam and that you had volunteered for the military, and did they even tell you, as you were writing back, all the protests that were taking place? Did your family hear about the protests that started to take place at Kent pertaining to the Vietnam War?

[Daniel Allison]: Yes, all of the above. You know, when I was in high school, and I need to put this in a frame of reference for you. When, you know, you have that infinite moment, I think it's in the fifth or sixth grade, when you get marched into the guidance counselor's office with your family and the guidance counselor's going to tell your family what you're going to be the rest of your life. And I remember very distinctly that the guidance counselor sat my father and mother down and told them that I would be nothing more than a garbage man. So, taking that in reference, you know, for them, having me go in the military was probably a godsend. There was no college in my future, there was no higher education in my future. I mean I just barely eked out of high school. So for them, I truly do believe it was a godsend that I went. Maybe this is where Dan will get some skills. Maybe this is where Dan will get some experience for continuing his life.

As my wife and her family, they were more into raising of children, they were a big Catholic family, so they were raising of children, so you know, just sending someone over and, by the way, my wife's family never sent anyone to the military or Vietnam--they all skated by pretty good. But they never really had anything to really say about it. But when it came to the protesting and the anti-war movement in the country, that became an issue between myself and both my wife at the time and my parents.

I remember, for example, after Kent State happened, when I came back, there was a big lively discussion around the family table over Thanksgiving about how they should have killed them all. And my reaction was to stand up and never go back. I never went back to my family again after that. This whole image of the population of America blaming the loss of the war on the demonstrators or the veterans, when in fact it should have been looked upon themselves, because they lost the war. They lost the war in the sense that they believed in this leadership that lied to them on a continual basis. So in full circle to your question, there was never any of this political thought. It was more like a shotgun effect. Well, they did this. Oh, they're down on Ohio State campus now. Oh, they burned this. Oh, they burned that. There was never any questioning about why are these people doing this. Why are they killing people at these campuses? Why are they killing people down South? There was never any of that. It was just simply statements. There was never any question as to what was behind the statements.

[Interviewer]: So how did you get word that you were going to be a part of the invasion to Vietnam?

[Daniel Allison]:Well, you never really got the word. You were just told, Hey, get your stuff. Get onboard the airplane, and you're going to fly over to these coordinates. Keep in mind that during 1970, there was a clear message sent out to the American public that they were going to wind down. And I believe Nixon made a--and I don't recall the dates--but at some point right after he got elected, he made a state of the union address that led the American people to believe that we're going to pull a hundred and some thousand troops out by next Fall. Which clearly sent a message to the American public that the war was going to wind down. But on the ground, from our perspective, that was not happening. They were pouring more people in, they were pouring more resources, more aircraft, more supplies, more fuel, everything. They were pouring it in like crazy.

So, when they would come to us and say, Hey, you're going to go here or there or the other, we never questioned that. We just figured, Ah, okay. Another party, you know? Another place to go. I've been sent to Thailand, I've been sent to Cambodia, I've been sent to Laos. All up and down to South Vietnam, almost to (unintelligible), all those places, and it was just another day at the job, it would be just like you coming in to work.

The only difference on May second was the fact that as we crossed the border--I mean, obviously, there's no distinct line like you have when you're entering South Dakota to North Dakota, there were no signs now. But the distinct line was, as you looked outside the helicopter, you could see the brown death dirt, where the bombing was, where the craters were, in South Vietnam. And all of a sudden as we came across, it was lush, green, beautiful jungle. And my first thought was, Well, they just haven't bombed the hell out of this place yet. And quite frankly, we didn't even know we were there. We just knew we were doing a mission, that was to go in, retrieve, do whatever we needed to do, whatever the mission requirement was. And quite frankly, even when we were told, we never questioned it. We were just there to do what we were told to do, what our job was. We had no knowledge that our leadership in Washington had even made this decision, and in fact, came as quite a surprise to learn that this insurgence into Cambodia was something that was planned. We just had no idea.

In my little small part, I don't really believe we did anything. We really didn't. You know, we were there, we did our jobs, we did what we were supposed to do. All we did was sit around--we'd do what we were supposed to do during the day, and at night we'd go in some hooch somewhere or some bunker and sit there and just smoke and joke and drink and think about what we were going to do when we got out of there. So that political moment was not something that we even thought about. We were just there.

Then, May fourth. I remember distinctly, you know, it was the world's first rock and roll war, man. Every one of us had a radio or some kind of--I look at iPods and stuff now and think, My God, if we'd just had those. (laughs) But we always had radios, big radios and stuff. And I'll never forget the moment--it was early in the morning when Armed Forces Radio came on, and for them to even say anything about what happened here at Kent State was quite a shock. Any time they would talk about demonstrations and stuff, they would politicize them as being those communists, those dirty people, those rich kids in college, that kind of a take, that kind of a push. But to have them say what they said, and that was that these students were killed at Kent State, and the somberness of it, that was kind of a shock to all of us.

And in fact, with all of the smoking and joking we'd been doing since February first, up until that period of time, even though taking mortars and getting shot at and all those things that go with that job, it was like a switch went off. It was like you would turn a light switch off. Everyone just stopped. Literally stopped. And I remember looking at my group that I was with and we all said, What are we doing here? We're dying for nothing. But yet, there are people in this country who were dying for us. That's when we said no more. From that moment, at least for us, I can't speak for every Vietnam veteran, but from that moment on, it's like, if we were going to get in a fire fight, we were going to just do what we had to do. We weren't going to do any more. We weren't going to give them the body counts anymore. We were going to falsify them. We were going to go out and lie in order to stay alive. I mean, who really wants to die for that? And who really wanted to lay their life down for a country that was killing their own? So this politics of it all at the time, as I said before, was a light switch going off. This is not the thing to do here. From that moment on, the rift began. The rift began between us and the military. The rift began between us and our families that lasted forever.

The last time I even spoke to my parents were probably fifteen or twenty years ago because of Vietnam. Because of the choices that we made that day to no longer believe in what we were being told. No longer believe in the ilk that was being fed us. No longer believe in religion, in God. In fact, from that moment on, I just turned into a--I started to study Buddhism and while I'm still not religious and I certainly don't wear orange robes, but I knew that, at least for me personally, it was a personal choice now, a personal belief system that I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life. And with that said, I've noticed over my years, just me, but other Vietnam vets that I've come in contact with, we set perimeters. That's when we formed our perimeters and we would not let anybody in or we would never let ourselves go back.

So the cathartic moment, and the reason that I am doing this today, is I wanted to share with the world that Kent State was not just the killing of students; it was the killing of a generation. It was the killing of a spirit. You know, fifty-eight thousand American lives were lost for nothing. Okay. And the sad part, is it still continues.

I suffer from post traumatic stress and during my last session, my therapist down at the VA [Veterans Affairs] did me some statistics. Of three million Vietnam veterans who were actually in country, in 2005, there were only one hundred seventy-seven thousand of us left. I do not know what the statistics are now. I would say that probably by, I don't know, I have no idea--maybe another fifty thousand.

So, how does this all play together? How does Kent State play together? How does those statistics, how does the homeless rate among Vietnam veterans--it all interfaces together. It all plays very well together if you look at it in a grand scale. So, going back to your original question, and I'm sorry I went off on that, but the central fact that our parents, our loved ones, the ones we wanted to support us did not support us and in fact denied the truth and denied the honesty of what was really going on during this period of time.

[Interviewer]: So when did you return to the United States?

[Daniel Allison]: Returned on September 15, 1970. Another horrible story. It took me seven days to get back from Vietnam. I got to Hawaii and we were told that there was no airplanes going back, so we'd actually have to pay our own way back. I had to buy a ticket on United Airlines to come back. And when we came back, they had to sneak us through San Francisco in the dead of night because--and I don't throw any fault at these people because of the protestings going on. And this hatred that we felt--remember I spoke about this being in between? I'm sure you heard the stories, the baby-killer stories, and the spitting, and it happened. It happened. I don't know to everybody, but it happened. And you know, I don't hold anyone at fault for that, I just think that it was the times, it was the way that things happened, but we were actually snuck back into the country that night. You know, like a bunch of thieves, like a bunch of less than honorable people.

I got on an airplane--I spent the night in San Francisco and we couldn't get a hotel. We literally had to sleep at the Y, the YMCA. Next morning, I got up, I still had my uniform on, I still had my greenies, you know, my jungle fatigues and jungle boots and still had mud and blood and everything else on me. The next morning, I couldn't even get a uniform. Got on an airplane to go back to Columbus, Ohio. So, I got back to Columbus, and I'll never forget, it was around maybe one or two o'clock in the afternoon. My wife was working in Columbus for an insurance company--I think Nationwide or something like that--and I called her up and I said, "Katherine, can you come pick me up at the airport?" She didn't even know I was coming back, no one knew when I was coming back, it was that quick.

And when I first asked my parents, they said, Well, just get a cab and get home. Now, I want you to think about what had happened the last two days of my life, where I had to buy my own ticket, where I had to pay to go home, where I didn't have any clothes. I still smelled, I mean, I hadn't had a bath or a shower for probably a week, of course, we never used bathtubs. We thought we were smelling pretty good in a week, you know. (laughs) But my parents wouldn't even come pick me up. So finally, after much discussion, and you know, back then, it was pretty hard to do. You had to put a quarter, or a nickel, in the phone and call somebody up. So I finally got ahold of Katherine. She finally said, "I'll pick you up."

So I stood at Port Columbus, the old terminal building was like a T. You get off the gate, you go up to the T and then there was a bunch of gates where you buy the tickets. I stood there at the T and I waited and I waited and I waited and finally Katherine showed up. She showed up at the front door of the airport. She actually walked past me three times. Didn't even know who I was. I had changed that much. So I finally reached out and called her name and she turned around and looked at me and just walked by. I mean, I had changed that much. So I finally had to grab her and tell her who I was and you could see in her face the shock of, Oh my God. What have they done to you? To me, it just looked like a good, healthy kid, you know, (laughs) but to her, it was a whole different person, a whole different persona, a whole different deal.

I remember the ride home, and I never even went to my own family. I went to her family's house. She dropped me off at the house, in front of the house. I went into the house, no one's there. No one to greet me, no one to say hi, and she went back to work. She came back at around five o'clock, her dad came from work around that time, her mom came from the church or something, the kids came home from school, and I was expected to just pick up from where I left off nine months before and there was no way that was going to ever happen. It was just this expectation, this false expectation of what they wanted me to be versus what I had become. There was no discussion about what happened. There was no discussion about what they could do to help, whether they want to listen, none of that. It was all a discussion about their lives and what had happened while I was gone with their lives, what was going on with the school, what was going on at work, this kind of thing. There was never, never any gateway or gate open to any discussion of what I went through or what I was going through.

So, interestingly enough, that evening, I decided that, okay, I'm just going to resort back to my normal behavior that I learned so well in Vietnam and decided to go out partying, which that didn't work out too well that night. Ended up in a major fight, ended up busting up a couple people. Matter of fact, bartender down at this bar in Columbus told me he said, "Hey man, I'm buying your drinks, dude. I've never seen anybody kick anybody's rear end like you did." (laughs) Put me in a cab, sent me home.

Went to bed. Next morning, about ten o'clock in the morning, her mom came up and woke me up and I came out of bed and I put my hands around her throat. Almost killed her. So I was told to leave. So, I left and went back to the air base in Columbus, Ohio--Lockbourne Air Force Base--and hung out there for probably five, six days and begged them to send me back. I didn't want to be in the world anymore. I wanted to be back where I knew I could survive and even they wouldn't do that for me. They wouldn't even give me the courtesy of sending me back there. So instead, they sent me to Louisiana, by far the most racist, horrible, disgusting place I've ever seen in my life. So now, we've got Vietnam, we've got the anti-war movement. Now they send you to Louisiana where this terrible racism is going on and I want you to just kind of think about all that and think about what's going on and how that forms judgments and thoughts.

So after that, you know, I did another four years in the military and ended up joining an outlaw bike group, you know, the camaraderie thing, the brotherhood and all that. But going back full circle with this, the anti-war movement and things, the politicizing of my life began on May fourth and was set in concrete by Jackson State later that month. And to this day, I still, you know, I'll probably go to my grave with this: I still believe that the people who were anti-war, the people who were against this war actually were there to save our lives. We just didn't know it. We weren't allowed to know it. We were so deep in the hell of it all, trying to survive, trying to keep it alive so to speak, that we had no time to figure any of that out. It was only in hindsight, in retrospect, that we were able to figure that out.

As I got in my last years in the military, I became very, very politically against the war while in the military so there's an oxymoron for you. (laughs) And in fact, I went to Washington D.C. with John Kerry and that group, Winter Soldier organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and threw my medals back on the--so I share that with you to give you some kind of a benchmark as to the time you go in, you're just a kid, the things that happened, and then the offshoot of what happened in the end and where we are now. One of the reasons I agreed to come here was I have no family, I have no kids. I have family, obviously now, but no one was there when I was there so I wanted to somehow be able to share this and let people know that we were just victims too. That we were just pawns of somebody's sick obsession with this political power and this whole thing about what's right and what's wrong and the fact that the rights were all wrong and the wrongs were all right and how we should take any of this and look at what is going on in our current events today and think about all of these guys that have done four or five tours. It's not good. So, anyhow.

[Interviewer]: I know you said after you had been back in the States after some time, I don't know how long you had been back in the States, but you ran into Governor Rhodes?

[Daniel Allison]: Yes, interestingly enough, I got out of the military in 1974, after doing a four year stint in Germany, which was kind of like the Renaissance of my life--that was the greatest time I ever had--outside of the military, obviously. My first instinct was to go to college. I wanted to go to school. The prospects were not good. I was homeless for probably six months. I actually lived inside my van up on campus at Ohio State University. Every night I'd pull off to a different curb and shut the doors and go live in my van. And finally, you know, I won't go into the circumstances, because they're not good, but finally I got the VA to give me my Veteran's benefits to go to school.

So I moved into this little apartment over on 12th and 4th in Columbus, Ohio and fell in love with this girl next door. Because my first marriage had deteriorated, was gone and there was no more. Her father was the vice president of sales for Chevrolet, General Motors Chevrolet division so she was affluent. We'll just call it that. Keep in mind by the that time I'm entering, my hair was down my waist, I had the beard, I wanted to fit in with the cool people, you know, the group. I was very anti-war still, at that point in time there was an anti-war movement going on but very, very slim, not a big political movement at all.

And she came over one time and said, "Dan, my dad is going to--he's coming into town from Michigan and he wants to know, do you want to go to dinner with us?" And I'm thinking, sure, why not? Free dinner, heck. That's cool. But I didn't realize who he was going to bring to dinner with us.

So at the appointed time, I look out and here's this black limo sitting out in front of the house. Now, having a big black limo sitting down in Columbus, Ohio, in a big campus, that kind of raises some eyebrows, what's going on here? Her name was Allison. Allison came over and she got me and walked down to the car and opened up the door of the car and her dad got out. And her dad looks at me like I was the worst piece of scum on the face of the earth. Just one of those up and down looks, you know.

And Allison said, "Well, he said to bring a friend so I'm bringing Dan. He and I have been kind of going out together," which that didn't go good with him. So, he said, "Okay, well fine. We don't have time to argue this thing out." So he opens the door of the limo and inside the back was Woody Hayes, Mayor [Tom] Moody, and Governor Rhodes.

I took one step inside the limo and from the moment I walked in there until I walked out was nothing but verbal abuse. And in fact, Rhodes actually said to me that if I'd gotten a haircut and if I'd ever done any military that I would have a whole different perspective on being a human being. And I remember looking at him saying, "You bastard. You have no idea." And I wouldn't even give him the courtesy to even explain to him or to anyone else in that car that I knew more about life than they would ever be able to know about.

So I reminded him that I did a tour in Vietnam, which he immediately said, "You're lying." Because of my appearance, obviously. And I just walked out and went back in the apartment and never came back out again for about two weeks. And obviously it caused a big split with Allison and her family, and that caused a split between the two.

But I thought it was interesting, you know, in hindsight, I think it's quite interesting that here we are, being a citizen of, growing up in Ohio, always hearing about Governor Rhodes, always hearing about Woody Hayes, all of this stuff that was brought into my household all the time through my father and mother who were ardent Republicans. And then going to war, going through that, Kent State, Jackson State, all of the demonstrations, having to come back into the country, sneaking back into the country so to speak--really, that's what it was. I had to sneak back in. And then here we are four years after Vietnam and literally probably a year after being out of the military, having it all come back one more time. That was pretty strong stuff, for me. I mean I can't speak for everyone else, but I can certainly speak about that. And having one more time Vietnam and all of these things that happened in 1970 come to roost one more time and affect another family, and affect another life, and affect another person and another soul. It's kind of like the gift that keeps on giving, you know? (laughs) It just never goes away.

I've had situations as, even up to two, three years ago about Vietnam vets and us being losers and those kinds of things. The fact that the VA wouldn't respond to our needs until probably three years ago, three or four years ago, they finally started to come to us and say, Hey, we really screwed up here and we need to make amends and we need to fix this. But it's the whole mix of everything that occurred, the whole mix of everything that happened, the sacrifices, the death. The death in Vietnam, the death on campus, the death in the streets during the riots, it should never be forgotten. It should never be forgotten.

You know, coming from a family, from the great generation, you know, I almost understand their reluctance to deal. And now with age and that generation going away quickly, and I look at the Korean generation that are going away quickly now and every day I drive back and forth to work between where I live and where I work and there's a national cemetery that resides just outside of Sturgis [South Dakota] and I see every day another row of crosses. I'm just glad that we have the opportunity to make the statements we need to make and share what we need to share and do what we need to do.

And I mean at this stage, I haven't even touched on Agent Orange and the poison they sprayed on us and the disaster that's created. Interestingly enough, my second wife's father was a head chemist for Dow Chemical, so (laughs) I'm sure you can imagine the discussions we had around the dinner table about that.

So all of these legacies for all of this mix, for all of these things that happened in 1970, and all of this mix of all of these agendas, the horror, the body counts, the falsification of body counts, I don't know that it's ever going to be fully told. I don't know that it's ever fully going to be discovered. I don't think it's ever going to be really opened up like it should be.

I look back, if I may, I look back at the times, the Nixon years, and I look at what's going on now, and while I'm not going to comment on my political background or my political beliefs, I would say if I had a message to send to anyone now: be very, very careful at what people are saying to you. This whole rhetoric that I hear on the ultra-right scares me to death. I think if you take the McCarthy years, the Nixon years, and you take the McCain years, all of the people who are running the government and you put them over the top, I believe they'd match perfectly. I think the message is not a good one. And I am concerned about that. I am concerned about our youth and not getting them into something else. We've already got them sucked into the longest war we've ever been in. How are we going to pay that debt? We haven't even written a check for that yet. I mean, we haven't even written a check for Vietnam vets, for that matter. So how are we going to write the check for these guys? These women, these men that have done this time now.

So, looking back and going back to the purpose of being here, is that the four people who died here really did give their lives for the right thing. That could be debated by history forever, but from one viewpoint, I respect it.

[Interviewer]: Well, at this time I would like to conclude the interview and thank you so much, Mr. Allison, for sharing your story with us today.

[Daniel Allison]: No problem. Good to be here.

[Interviewer]: Thank you.

[Daniel Allison]: Thank you.

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