Radicalized by Vietnam

an interview with Ron Citkowski

GROWING UP IN a working-class Polish neighborhood on Detroit’s west side, Ron Citkowski assumed he would go into the army as his father and uncles had. He registered for the draft there when he turned 18. But by the time he was drafted in May 1968, he was attending graduate school on a science fellowship at the University of Michigan — and against the Vietnam war.

Although the head of the draft board had promised to support his deferment, the quota assigned to the neighborhood was too high to spare him. Reporting for duty at Fort Knox, Kentucky, with others from the Midwest, he was determined not to use a weapon and was hoping to become a medic.

Dianne Feeley for ATC: During basic training, how did the war in Vietnam come up in conversations?

Ron Citkowski: The brainwashing took the form of songs we were to sing, like

When I get to Vietnam,
I’m going to kill some Vietcong.
If I die in a battlefield
box me up and send me home.

Some must have taken it seriously, but most of us didn’t. It got actually kind of campy, you know.

It was pretty, pretty heavy-duty stuff, but later on when, you get to know the people in your unit, you have some friends, you hang out and you say “this war is crap,” and “what are you going to do?” But they kept you exhausted so not a lot of deep thinking. When we got to the advanced training, in Fort Monmouth, NJ it was a little different. Many of the people were against the war. Nobody was championing it that I had heard.

It was a specialized school for people in the Signal Corps and a stone’s throw from New York City. New York was a easy place to get to on a bus.

ATC: Did you see signs of an antiwar movement or go to any demonstrations?

RC: We usually hung out in the Village area so yes, we made some noise and joined in a bit. There were newspapers and materials specifically aimed at GIs with a lot of antiwar information. They were very easy to come by; you’d get a handful of them.

ATC: When you went back to Fort Monmouth, did you and others come back with this material, exchange it, talk about it?

RC: Yes, we did. People had a lot of time to think and talk. We were in night school so we had very odd hours and a lot of time off in the day.

ATC: Did you know that you were going to Vietnam?

RC: We figured we would all be going to Vietnam, but as it was, the class that graduated just before us all went to Europe, staffing embassies. Because we were specialists we were scattered all over.

A number of us were sent to a medium-sized communication base in Vietnam, not too far from Saigon. We were near to some big bases that people may have heard of, like Long Binh. A half a dozen of us trained in what I was doing and there we were part of a bigger signal group of a couple hundred. We were not really out in the rough, but kind of off to the corner.

We worked at the communication center in our base, while others went out into the field to work at a small communication center on top of a mountain. We rotated to different places.

ATC: Were you able to maintain an antiwar group there?

RC: When I first got to Vietnam, I would make the peace sign as if to say, “Give peace a chance, war is bad.” After a little while I’d just ball my hand into a fist — we all did that. A number of us knew each another from New Jersey so we were a pretty tight group. We were all in the same boat.

When I arrived at the base in Vietnam, the captain was a career military, and a military brat. He was very arrogant. Morale had gotten very bad, but I didn’t have much to do with any incidents that may have happened. But after I’d been there about a month or so, they booted him out and sent him somewhere else.

Another one of our sergeants was a bossy blowhard. He’d have a drink with you and then use what you said against you. There was another fellow, one rank below this sergeant, who was thinking of becoming a career military. He hung out with us and this sergeant didn’t like it. The fact that this other up and comer was hanging around with riffraff resulted in his being given a hard time. We didn’t like it.

The tension built up and one night some of us were standing around talking. I just happened to be holding a teargas grenade. I got a couple other guys and said, “Let’s go get this guy.”

I pulled the pin and rolled the grenade under the sergeant’s bed while he was sound asleep. We stood waiting outside his hooch. Of course the grenade went off as his room filled with gas. He came running out, choking, vomiting and completely in a panic.

We’re standing there looking at him, just giving him a good hard look. I can’t remember whether it was me or somebody in the group who said, “Next time in the frag, motherfucker.” (The frag is a grenade that blows up and kills you.)

Of course there was a big crowd out there. We’re standing in the crowd saying, “Oh yeah, whatever happened?” and just blended away.

Next morning they pulled what they call a shakedown inspection. That’s when they get you just before you get out of bed, roust you outside, open your lockers and look at what you got. And of course, they found a whole lot of people had grenades of all sorts stashed in there.

No surprise they found drugs, which they didn’t much care about, but when they found those grenades and seeing what happened, they got a little nervous.

The next day that sergeant disappeared. They sent him off to a different site up on the top of some secluded mountains somewhere. Just got him out of there. They brought us in a completely different captain, a Black guy. He was very good at working with us. He knew when to back off, when to leave things alone. He kept things moving a lot more smoothly.

For a couple of months I was attached to the Australian army, maybe 50-60 miles away. A small group of Americans maintained some of their communications equipment. The Aussies were a little more mixed about the war.

I remember talking to one Aussie from the Outback. He was a long time Australian soldier, drank a lot, was a little bit of a goof, and had been knocked down in rank three, four times.

His rank was no more than the rest of us, which was nothing. And he had been in the army for about 15 years. One night I asked, “Why are you fighting here? You’re an Aussie.” He replied, “I’m fighting for me Queen.”

A memo was finally issued to the Aussie commanders to stop them from hanging around with us. They were told not to hang out with us. It didn’t matter. They did.

ATC: Was that the only trip to the field that you were on?

RC: I would sometimes go out to places for a few days. One time I got put on a helicopter late at night to deliver equipment out to a broken communication center that was at a Thai army base. I took a night flight on a little helicopter, not the great big one that carries the VIPs.

I’m riding usually where the captain rides. A crew of two flew me out with bullets flying under us and landed out there to drop the equipment off. They set me down and I said, okay, “I’m going to drop this box off and get it installed. Where will I meet you?” They said, “We’re leaving. Our mission was to bring the box here, not you.” I was stuck out there for days.

ATC: Did going out in the field give you a feel for what those doing the fighting were thinking?

RC: Their attitude was “Fuck the war.”

ATC: What was their attitude towards the officers?

RC: Well, the Aussies took them more seriously, but you know, they’re the boss, like the boss in the factory: some were worthy of your respect, others were absolute jerks.

ATC: Given soldiers’ attitudes, what did you think was going to happen?

RC: We were hoping we would all get out of it alive. None of us were interested in shooting any enemies. When we were there we could see the war was ending. This was 1970. The Vietnamese people were not on our side. Even those who worked on our base did not like the South Vietnamese government. It didn’t represent them. Some of those working on the base were caught spying.

It was very clear that we were losing this war; we did not have the hearts and souls of the people. That was very, very clear. And we all knew it. Aside from some of the officers who were pro-war, no one was for the war. You know we’re soldiers. We have a job to do. We’ll get our job done. We’ll do as little harm as we can, but really the gung-ho sort, no, they weren’t there because it was clear this was a losing war; they were trying to wind down. Then of course, Nixon came up with his Cambodian invasion, which was a big show.

ATC: What did soldiers in the field think when the Cambodia incident happened? [When Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown and replaced by pro-U.S. General Lon Nol, the United States decided they would take the opportunity to clean out the VC from the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. The invasion took place before it was announced on April 29; the operation was completed July 22, 1970. The announcement of the invasion set off huge U.S. demonstrations. It also led to the National Guard shooting and killing students at Kent State and the police killings at Jackson State. —ed.]

RC: I was involved. We were kind of like the roadies running the sound gear for the rock stars, that is the infantry. It was over fast. Not too much came from it that we saw, but it was kind of frightening.

ATC: Frightening because?

RC: We were pushing into this country with the jumping off point a small city in Vietnam right on the border. The VC were hitting it hard. They blew up a big movie theater. In fact, a famous photo journalist, Sean Flynn — the only son of Errol Flynn — was killed on Highway One. We saw him. He was talking, kind of holding court, and everyone was in awe of him. But two days later he got blown away on the road. [The bodies of Flynn and a second journalist, Dana Stone, have never been recovered. —ed.]

ATC: Did people see the Cambodian adventure as a desperate last-minute attempt?

RC: I don’t know if anyone analyzed it that deeply, but it was clear that this was a big push made by Nixon with a lot of theatrics. I don’t think anybody had any hope of this ending the war. It’s just “Well, this is where they sent us. Okay. We’ll set up the systems and then it’d be out in a couple of weeks.” We didn’t know it, but then we were out in a couple of weeks.

ATC: Were there racial tensions that you could feel in Vietnam?

RC: Our group was very, very mixed. We had a lot of Latinos from New York. We did hang together and things went pretty smoothly.

ATC: You mentioned you saw a lot of contractors in Vietnam. What were they doing there?

RC: The biggest contractor was Pacific Architects and Engineers. They were building roads, bunkers and forts, driving these heavy bulldozers through the jungle. They were earning very good money. We could see that the money was going to places like that.

It was our lives on the line — and to some degree theirs too, but not so much. We were giving our time, our lives and our abilities and they seemed to be getting all the money. So people were pretty much opposed to that. That’s where I would say I began to take a different view. At that point we realized the power of big money and what it was doing.

ATC: Was that a topic of conversation?

RC: Sure was. People talked about that. Pacific Architects and Engineers, they’re getting all the money. We’re doing all of this stuff. So, yeah, it was eye opening for a lot of people. It definitely moved me further to the left and others too, when you see this in action.

ATC: What were the class differences? Were the officers’ lives on the line?

RC: It depended. A lot of the young officers were very, very similar to us. Not the career ones, the big shots, they’re generally more upper-class people. I’m talking about colonels not second lieutenants.

Our second lieutenant was a guy, my age, who had graduated from college the same time I did. But he went the ROTC route and became an officer. One night we were leaving the communication center for our shifts; we’re just chit-chatting as we are walking along by ourselves. He told me he thought it would be better to go in as an officer but said I had the better deal because I had more freedom.

He said, “I have to hang around with the officers at their club. I don’t like being there, but I can’t hang with anybody else.”

Just then, they were taking the flag down, as they did every night. They play a bugle and you’re supposed to all stop and turn toward the flag. No matter where you are, you are to stand and give a salute. He looked at me and he said, “Nah, we don’t do it, huh?” I agreed. So the two of us ignored it. That was kind of eye-opening to get his view.

Socially we didn’t mix. We had a place where you could go get a beer at night and they had theirs. We did not cross those lines. Could not cross those lines. And they ate separately from us. It was a very distinct class.

We also had our own hangout, a movie theatre in a tent with canvas seats. It was open to anyone who wanted to go see movies in the evening. They ran some fairly new movies.

Everybody was there smoking dope and stuff like that. And talking, talking politics, talking against the war, hanging out. They always started the movies with the national anthem. People stood up and you had to salute it. Gradually we took the place over.

One night, instead of the national anthem, one of our guys put on Jimi Hendrix playing the Woodstock version. A bunch of us stood up and gave a clenched fist salute. The lifers who were there for the movie looked really scared. They didn’t come back after that. They just did not hang there anymore. This was not territory for them.

The new captain that ran the base pretty well acknowledged that this place was for us, the more radical bunch, for as long as we did our job and came back for duty in the morning.

It was a kind of a no man’s land. We had some Aussies come and visit us because they had heard about it. They said, “We want to see this theater of yours.” It got to be well known.

We were a bit of an odd bunch. The Signal Corps had a lot of free thinkers. We had to pass tests so a lot of us were college grads, but not conformists. Others hadn’t finished high school like a good friend of mine, a South Carolina boy, married at 17. Another friend of mine, a Puerto Rican guy from New York, was a subway mechanic. His skills were very, very good. None of us was typical.

There was a sense of camaraderie, but also an undercurrent of rebellion against the rigid structures of military life. Our little enclave, surrounded by the dust and noise of the base, offered a kind of refuge — a place where the rules were blurred and new ones quietly written by consensus.

We were mostly young, disillusioned, and wary of authority, yet determined to carve out a space we could call our own. In that space, boundaries softened and identities shifted, united less by rank than by shared skepticism and a yearning for some semblance of autonomy.

Outside our tented theatre and makeshift world, however, the machinery of the army ground on. We were still watched, expected to show up and do the job. But the undercurrent of dissent ran deep; it was an open secret that many of us questioned the war and the orders we received.

The gap between official policy and lived reality widened with every passing week, and, for some, insubordination became not an act of defiance but a simple assertion of self.

It was said that in the army, the highest number of disciplinary actions were young troops in the infantry. But the second highest was with the Signal Corps. We didn’t much follow the plan.

ATC: As you were prepared to leave Vietnam, what was in your mind?

RC: What’s it going to be like to go home now? What’s going on? In the States, you couldn’t quite fit back to where you were. I didn’t want to go back studying to be a chemist for big pharma. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

You’re very much off the track. Then you go back to the world; you’ve got to catch up again.

ATC: What was different?

RC: When I got back, my friends were pretty much scattered. Some were off in the army, some were off here, some were off there.

I floated around a bit, picked up a few odd jobs. Eventually I found work that was interesting and a life partner. That made a big difference.

ATC: When did you hook up with Vietnam Vets Against the War (VVAW)?

RC: Shortly after I got back, I found a number of antiwar groups. I’d heard of the Winter Soldier investigation VVAW organized in Detroit [January 31-February 2, 1971 —ed.]. I was a little too inert to actually go down there, but I read about it and then I got more and more fired up.

Then I saw there was a VVAW group in Detroit. I hooked up with them and went to a lot of meetings. That’s how I met Neil Chacker [who wrote the Kampfer column in ATC until his death —ed.] and worked with them for quite a bit.

We were very much opposed to the war, pretty far left and strong willed in our demonstrations. It suited me. I felt I was doing something good.

ATC: What did you do beside demonstrate?

RC: We had regular weekly meetings. We worked with other antiwar groups and with the Black Panthers, who also had many Vietnam vets. We went to a lot of demonstrations, wearing our raggedy uniforms. We organized a camp at the Michigan State Fair for a few years running. We would have fake patrols going through the fairgrounds, carrying toy guns and signs and chanting slogans.

We slept out there overnight too. It was kind of a big party, with a lot of the circus people hanging out with us. Our tent became a center of interest because we were the soldiers who had been there and survived. Young people were very interested in what we were doing and thinking.

People were quite receptive to our antiwar message, except for the few who would make up an argument with you. That didn’t go too far usually. They were kind of arrogant.

ATC: When I first became against the war, we were just a small group. We started out as a minority — and became the majority. You came along a bit later and there was already a sense of being the majority!

RC: I would say so. By 1970 you didn’t see too many people who were supporting the war.

ATC: When you look back on your experiences what lesson might you offer to young people today?

RC: Don’t be afraid to stand up and get something done. You can find other people who think your way and do it. Don’t be afraid.

November-December 2025, ATC 239