Original air date: May 4, 2023
KATIE WHITE: This is Bringing War Home, the show that connects listeners with the history of war through sharing wartime objects and the personal stories that surround them.
This collaborative project is led by Utah State University professors Susan Grayzel and Molly Cannon at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
I’m Katie White, producer of the series.
Named after the Vietnamese holiday celebrating lunar new year, the Tet Offensive completely reshaped the Vietnam war. Instead of the informal holiday truce that had occurred in previous years, North Vietnamese forces launched several simultaneous coordinated attacks on cities, towns, government buildings, and military targets — resulting in tens of thousands of casualties for both sides. Although South Vietnamese and US forces were able to repel many of these attacks, the Tet Offensive demonstrated that victory in Vietnam was far from imminent.
Army reserve veteran Jerald Jacobs was deployed during the Tet Offensive in 1968. He survived numerous attacks during the year he served in Vietnam and carried home a piece of shrapnel and a rocket nozzle. Very few people were allowed to keep such items. While these pieces of shrapnel may seem insignificant, keeping it for another lifetime helps preserve the memory of what it was like for Jacobs to be in country, in Vietnam.
JERALD JACOBS: Hue was just totally destroyed. The first couple of weeks that I was there, we were riding in the back of a deuce-and-a-half. And I was just so intrigued by everything, by the country and - You know I wasn't that interested in history at the time, but just - just being there and seeing everything that was going on.
I'd been in the reserve for a long time. And we'd go to meetings once a week and one Saturday a month, we would spend all day at the armory, maintaining vehicles and cleaning our weapons and just training. But there we were actually over there doing what we had been trained to do.
And I remember riding in the back of that truck with some other guys and I remember thinking, "Oh, a year isn't going to be long enough. I'm going to be wanting to be over here longer than a year. Of course, by the time six months or so was up - even less than that - we were ready to get out of there.
In Vietnam, there was no front battle lines. We weren't out shooting our rifles every day, but we were in danger all the time. We just never knew. The people in our combat base - the Vietnamese - they'd come in in the morning and cut people's hair, work in the mess hall, do laundry and all that kind of work. And then after work, they would go out of the combat base and become the enemy that night. You just never knew. It was just nebulous in that respect.
We had rocket attacks and mortar attacks every two or three nights - maybe, maybe every night for a long time. The shrapnel - just a little insignificant piece - they were laying all over. The rocket nozzle was from a 122 millimeter rocket course I don't know what date or anything or where I even picked it up, but that was in Phu Bai when that happened. I don't even remember the circumstance.
I just - I would never have been able to bring that rocket nozzle back home if I hadn't have been a staff sergeant. So I had some privileges and we were allowed to bring, as I remember it was a footlocker full of stuff that wasn't inspected. So I just threw that in there. And I was out of the military three days after I got back from Vietnam.
KATIE WHITE: Support for Bringing War Home comes from Utah State University, the National Endowment for the Humanities Dialogues on the Experience of War, and Utah Humanities. Introduction written by Annika Shinn. More resources available at upr.org.
