PRESS RELEASE

Press Contacts: Mary Dickson
(801) 581-3263
www.kued.org
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

Last 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. Turning Point, the second gripping segment, built upon dozens of interviews with soldiers, sailors, airmen and medical personnel, is a compelling oral history of the pivotal months in Vietnam during and immediately after the Tet Offensive of 1968.

Turning Point will debut Monday, September 10 at 7:00 p.m. on KUED, featuring interviews with Ogden’s Wynn Covieo, David Magee, Rick Mayes, Terry Schow and Larry Strait, West Point’s Dale Hartog, and Roy’s Rocky Olson.

In 1969, Wynn Covieo was a student at Weber State University. “I'll never forget the day that I was driving a truck, for the Standard Examiner, and I pulled in the parking lot and my mother was sitting there in the parking lot weeping.” She had opened his draft notice. Despite being sent to Vietnam in the Infantry with the 101st Airborne, a division routinely sent into the heaviest fighting, Covieo always felt the he would come back home.

When he got to Vietnam, he witnessed a new military culture, one in which “orders weren't being followed and they were more concerned about survival versus search and destroy.” Newcomers were given the most dangerous jobs so that “old-timers” could remain relatively safe as their time left in-country dwindled down. Drug use was rampant, and Covieo felt on more than one occasion that his safety was threatened as a direct result of soldiers in his unit being under-the-influence. He made it through battles and drugs and a dissident military culture to come “back to the world,” just as he knew he would.

Like his five brothers before him, David Magee enlisted in the military at the age of 17. He was stationed in Okinawa, Japan with the Marine Corps in the early days of military action in Vietnam. From 1962-73, he was in and out of Vietnam with the Marines. On the way to his first big mission, Magee found himself unprepared. “I said, ‘Jerry, I've never fired the M-60 machine gun.’ He turns around while we're running, he says, ‘I'll teach you on the way.’ And he did. ”

By the ‘70s, Magee was a Staff Sargent, sweeping Haiphong Harbor to get rid of mines as part of the Paris Peace Talks. He spent so many years fighting in Vietnam to “stop the domino effect” and ensure freedoms in the United States, a mission he says was lost on the many anti-war protesters in the U.S. at the time. As far as his views on the protesters, “I was just as disgusted with them as they were of me,” Magee explains.

Rick Mayes enlisted in the Air Force while in college, in spite of his World War II veteran father’s objections. He trained in the U.S. and Germany before becoming the courier for photo reconnaissance missions in Vietnam. His job involved scouting targets and the terrain of potential missions, searching for POW locations, and the occasional retrieval of a downed pilot.

A proud veteran, Mayes reflects on his experiences in the military, “From a soldier's viewpoint, we were drafted; we served our country.”

Today, he feels frustration at the involvement of politics in American military efforts. In recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, with many soldiers suffering severe PTSD after returning to the U.S., he considers political influence to be a major source of difficulty for the military and its personnel. “All I can think is, ‘Are you nuts? Go in there; win; stick a flag in it; put a K-Mart up; and call it a day. But let the military win something.’”

After graduating from Ogden High School, Terry Schow volunteered for the infantry’s Special Forces. “I didn't realize it at that time, that I was a three-year volunteer infantryman at a time when folks were going to Canada to avoid that.” He attributes much of his success in life to the military. “They do instill some sense of competency and some sense of worth. It allowed me to buy a home, it allowed me to get an education. I went to school on the GI Bill; it allows me to get health care from the VA.”

Schow has been working in veterans affairs for most of his life since returning from Vietnam. He feels a great satisfaction championing causes for veterans, who he says are humble and won’t advocate for themselves. One project Schow has been campaigning for is the establishment of a vet center in Ogden. “Vet centers, in my view, save lives…the idea that a vet can drop into a place, have a cup of coffee or whatever, talk to [other] combat vets.”

The support and commitment of the military and its veterans inspire him to continue his work in Veterans Affairs. “I cannot believe they pay me to do this job, I almost have to back up to the pay line.”

Larry Strait spent his 17th birthday on the yellow footprints at the Marine Corps Recruitment Depot in San Diego. When he turned 18 – old enough to go in-country – his unit began engaging in sporadic combat with the Viet Cong, but in 1964-65, the conflict was not yet very intense. On an amphibious raid in 1965, “The girls met us on the beach with flowers.” His duties as combat engineer involved creation, detection, and disarmament of booby traps – something he still does today, albeit on a lesser scale. “My squirrels have a hell of a time at my place, 'cause I'll do some black powder and set a little trap for 'em.”

Over the three years, Strait spent in Vietnam with the Marines, he witnessed a change “from the gung-ho to the ‘What…are we doing here?’ to ‘Let's get the heck out.’”

The combat got fiercer, as did the reputation of the Marines. “They used to call us hell dogs…If you shot and killed a Marine and brought him in, you'd win a million piasters…they called us green-faced giants," Strait says.

In the supply and transportation division of the Navy, “Seabees” were not issued weapons. When his base was attacked during the Tet Offensive, Dale Hartog had no choice but to wait it out in his bunker. At first, he didn’t realize it was an attack, because the date coincided with Vietnamese New Year, and locals were shooting guns and lighting firecrackers in celebration. “You just lie there, you just let it pass…until you get blown out of your bunk, and then you run like hell,” he recalls.

Less than a year after returning from his LDS mission, which he spent preaching about God’s love, Rocky Olson became “a paid professional killer” with the infantry in Vietnam. In coping with that contradiction, he reminded himself of a passage in Ecclesiastes: “There is…a time for war and a time for peace.”

Living conditions in the infantry also took some adjustment. Olson puts it frankly, “Life in the jungle was mostly unpleasant. During the monsoon season, I'd lay back in the mud and sleep and the water would be rushing by me and sometimes I even would have to use a belt and tie it around a jungle vine to keep me from being washed down the mountainside.”

Olson was engaged in highly violent combat while in Vietnam. He was the lone survivor in his unit after a battle early in his tour. “That was a tough thing to lose all of my friends, all at that one time, within just an hour.” He was immediately transferred to a different unit, where he spent the rest of his time in-country. The unit arrived at the Battle for Hamburger Hill, one of the biggest battles in the Vietnam War, at its climax. A radio operator on the front lines, Olson attests, “it was just a non-stop 4th of July explosion.”

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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