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Stevan Duke Vietnam
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Stevan Duke c. 2011
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In March, KUED aired the first episode of Utah Vietnam War Stories, a powerful documentary tribute to the men and women of Utah who served during the Vietnam Conflict. The second gripping segment, built upon dozens of interviews with soldiers, sailors, airmen and medical personnel, Turning Point is a compelling oral history of the pivotal months in Vietnam during and immediately after the Tet Offensive of 1968. Turning Point will debut September 10th at 7:00pm, and will feature an interview with St. George’s Steven Duke and Cedar City’s Steve Cantonwine, who passed away recently, Cheryl German-Chung and Bryant Jake.

“I got married in 1969, and when I got home from my wedding, I had my draft notice in the mail saying that I was to report within the next five days,” recalls Steven Duke. After a 120-day delay, he was in training and on his way to becoming a specialist E-5 door gunner. In 1970, he was sent to Vietnam with the 307th Aviation Division of the U.S. Army. As a door gunner on a helicopter gunship, there were rules that Duke had to follow about shooting: permission had to be given before shooting was initiated, and even before returning fire in self-defense. “That's a little bit strange that if somebody's shootin' and tryin' to kill you, you're not allowed to shoot back until you get permission.” Duke had a variety of adventures under orders, from accompanying officers to restaurants to traumatic fire fights. One fight, for which he won a medal for bravery above and beyond the call of duty, his brain has blocked out. “There's not a lot of it that I really can put a finger on. I'll have nightmares about it, but a lot of the nightmares never make any sense.”

To this day, the man can recognize the sound of the bolt closing on an M-16, a sound that, in Vietnam, meant an ambush; he went to see Apocalypse Now in theaters, where he nearly clocked his wife, who, startled by a sudden ambush in the movie, grabbed his arm. Old habits die hard, but heightened vigilance is not the only thing Duke took out of his experience in Vietnam. “I look at the way the soldiers are coming back today, and it just makes me as proud as I can be,” says the veteran.

Steve Cantonwine enlisted in the Marines after high school, eager to go to Vietnam. “As crazy as this might sound, most of us that enlisted in the Marines were hoping to go to combat,” he explains. “That's why you enlist in the Marines.” He landed in-country on Christmas Eve of 1967 and became part of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines – more commonly known as, “Rent-A-Battalion,” because they typically got sent all over the area. They would patrol the jungle for days on end, often unprotected as Agent Orange fell from the sky. “It was just like a light rain that smelled bad… We'd been told it wasn't gonna hurt us.” Between patrols, he and his buddies managed to get up to some mischief, like on one occasion when they stole rations from the supply depot with the rationale, “What were they gonna do, send us to Vietnam?”

On his first tour in Vietnam, Cantonwine had made a point of learning some Vietnamese. Thanks to his knowledge of the language, he was stationed in a small village. “I was basically a policeman in a Vietnamese village, and I couldn't do my job, I couldn't help protect the villagers if I didn't have their trust, if I didn't have their faith. And the only way to get that was to learn their language and their customs.” He believes that it was this experience that pushed him in the direction of law enforcement, where he made his post-military career. [While he was passionate about his job, it took him a long time to come to grips with his PTSD as a civilian. “I have a lot more good memories of Vietnam than I do bad ones. It's just that the bad ones are real bad.”]

Full of grandiose ideas about the military portrayed in the movies, Cheryl German-Chung joined the Army as a nurse during her first year of nursing school. She spent the year of 1969 in Vietnam, where she worked 12-hour shifts six days per week. “You just didn't have time to sit and wail and gnash your teeth about what was happening,” she recalls. “You worked to save them and that was it.” In Vietnam, German-Chung encountered all manner of injuries, wounds, infections, and illnesses, but says that in the hospital in which she was stationed, patients who made it to the hospital alive had a 98 percent chance of survival. She attributes much of her success to the incredible corpsmen she worked with.

“There were sad times, there were terrifying times, but there were times when we laughed,” attests German-Chung, remembering how a patient who was unable to speak overheard her and another nurse discussing sex one night. “I said, ‘Did you hear us?’ And he got this grin around the endotracheal tube and he shook his head yes.” At the time, she was mortified, but looking back, she was glad she was able to distract him from what he was going through. She feels that a nurse’s duty was not only to provide medical care for patients, but to act as mother, wife or girlfriend to the soldiers she treated, and to ease the pain of their often comfortless surroundings.

Born and raised in Cedar City, Bryant Jake was drafted fresh out of high school in 1967. He went to Vietnam later that year, an active sergeant. His leadership abilities surprised him, but he earned the respect of his men, who would volunteer to go out on patrol with him – something all the more impressive in the military climate of the Vietnam War, where insubordination was increasingly common. He used to tell his men, “You've gotta be crazy if you wanna stay alive.” He did a lot of things he now calls crazy in Vietnam – like going out on ambushes alone – but he brought his boys back. Although Jake didn’t believe in it when he first when out on tour, his family gave him prayers and protection in the Native American tradition, and, looking back, he feels it really did protect him while he was there.

Survivor’s guilt began to plague him when three men on his squad were killed. When the combat and guilt were too much and he couldn’t bear to go back out in the field, he put a loaded gun to his head, too tired to go on, but one of his friends came to talk to him. “Don't do that, Sergeant Jake. We want you to live and take care of us,” he said. Jake found strength in prayer and in the commitment to his men. “I had to do what I promised my squad – I would take care of 'em; and I did.”

The second episode of a projected three-part documentary series, Utah Vietnam War Stories: Turning Point provides a sense of the wide scope of human experience that took place during the Vietnam War. Additional episodes of Utah Vietnam War Stories will debut in early 2013.

Utah Vietnam War Stories is made possible by The Katherine W. Dumke and Ezekiel R. Dumke, Jr. Foundation, The George S. and Delores Doré Eccles Foundation and the contributing members of KUED.

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