Don Hodges was in the middle of his college career, working to become a pharmacist, at Samford University in Birmingham when he enlisted in the United States Army.
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Until that point he had been deferred from the draft, but because he could not afford to attend school full time his deferment ran out. “I was afraid that if I was drafted, because of my pharmacy background, that they might make me a medic. That, of course, was a very high risk job in Vietnam, so I went ahead an enlisted so I could pick my choice of school,” he said. “I certainly was not chomping at the bits to go to Vietnam, but the main thing is I knew so many had served before me in all the wars, but especially World War II because that was the greatest generation. A lot of people don’t even know about them now, but if we had lost World War 2 we would certainly be living differently today,” Hodges said. “I just thought about all those that had gone before me and knew it was my duty to go too.”
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Don was 23 years old when he enlisted, several years older than most people he served with. “I really wish I had gone sooner and gotten it over with,” he said. He began his basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. in 1967. After basic, he went to Advanced Individual Training where he became a Microwave Radio Specialist. “I had always been interested in electronics,” he said, “yet, I only ended up doing that maybe less than a month in Vietnam and then I became a company clerk and I ended up driving truck.”
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By the age of 25 he was in I Corps, where he would spend eight months, next to North Vietnam.“The main thing about my story,” he said, “is I was just scared to death.” “I’d never been in a war before. The main thing that scared me was there were people I didn’t know, and they didn’t know me and they were trying to kill me. I never had a narrow escape episode or anything but when I was up north I had some that were too close for comfort.”
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He was stationed in a place called Phu Bai, where he says there were many attacks, mainly at nightThough he was scared, he said he was lucky in many ways. “I was always back at established base at night. I never had to spend a night out at what we referred to as the boonies. I ended up seeing more action than I wanted to, but the main thing is I didn’t have to stay out at night,” he said.
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The last six months of his tour, Hodges spent at a battalion headquarters near Cam Ranh Bay. “There wasn’t much action there and that’s where I started driving a truck. It was called a ration truck and I’d go get food and supplies.” he said. “This place was not one of the main sights for people coming in to the country, but it was a sight where people go home. It’s also the sight of a big mortuary. Most people went home with their bags. Some went home in a bag,” he said. “But, compared to I Corps, where I was stationed at first, we had very, very few attacks. It was a pretty secure area.”
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Hodges had gotten married before he was sent to Vietnam. “We missed each other a lot. There certainly were a whole lot of letters,” he said. “We also had tape recorders that had a reel on them and we would make tapes and send them back and forth. When she would visit my mother, my wife could let her listen to my tapes and she’d make me one. The mail was everything. It’d probably take five days, maybe seven, for mail to travel between home and Vietnam, but when you got it, it was current,” he said.
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He was also able to make a few precious phone calls back to the states while he was away. “I can’t remember if it was the Red Cross or the USO, but if you were ever close enough to where you could get to a place they had, of course the line would always be long, you could call home. I’d call home in the middle of the day there and it’d be the middle of the night here. I made several calls to my wife and mother and that was real neat because that was the farthest from home I’ve ever been.”
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Hodges says he doesn’t like to talk in too much depth about his war stories. “It was pretty rough. And, I don’t like to talk about it much either because it was such an unpopular war,” he said. “When I was in I Corps I had to run down to Da Nang and do a courier run. There was a CBS news crew there that interviewed me, and I don’t know if it ever got on TV or not, but the main thing they asked me is ‘What do you think about all the protests going on in America now, especially by people your own age?’ My reply was ‘Well I wish they were over here and I was home.’ I didn’t want to get into politics or anything like that, but that’s just what I told them.” he said.
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It wasn’t until ten years ago, on a hike in the Smoky Mountains, that some one thanked Don for his service. “That was the first time that had ever happened. It’s happened a lot since. It’s not that I’m looking for thanks, it’s just that I remember when I came home. I flew in to Huntsville. I had on my uniform and when I got off the plane there were some people who shot me the bird and called me a baby killer.”
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Hodges was born in Scottsboro to L.C. “Mess” and Elizabeth Hodges and though he only spent his first 18 years in Scottsboro, it is still the place he calls home. He is a member of VFW Post 6073 and even comes back most years to help at the county fair.
When Hodges returned from Vietnam in 1970 he got to go back to school in Birmingham, where he has lived ever since. He is now a retired pharmacist.
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