After a career as a high-level official for the Navajo Area Indian Health Service, Ron Wood wanted to leave a legacy for his children and grandchildren who were constantly asking him, “What did you do in the war?”
So he sat down at his computer and wrote about the 18 months he served as an Army radio operator in Vietnam. Three years later, the book, “Vietnam: Remembrances of a Native American Soldier” is now on sale via Amazon.com and at barnesandnoble.com.
For Wood, 65, Vietnam – or more properly the Army – was a necessary step towards adulthood.
As the war spread in the mid-1960s, he was attending Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University but he admits that he was “a party animal.”
He says he was about to get his draft notice when he woke up in jail one day and decided it was time to change his life.
And he changed it by enlisting.
“My military career helped me grow up and learn to take responsibility,” said Wood, who is Kinyaa’aanii (Towering House Clan), born for the Tiger Clan of the Seminole.
In his book, he talks about everything from the danger of being a soldier to finding food in the field to his unique experiences as a Native American coping with the war.
He has a chapter on food.
“We ate what the Vietnamese ate,” which meant no beef but a lot of vegetables, he said in an interview Tuesday.
While Wood talks about the dangers of war, many of his recollections involve GI humor.
He devotes a section to life as a soldier at Camp An Phu near the Cambodian border from late 1966 to early 1968.
One story deals with two spider monkeys kept in camp by the soldiers, one a loving pet that liked to play with the soldiers and the camp’s dogs. The other one was so ill-tempered that the two had to be chained so their territories overlapped by only about a foot.
The dogs in the camp soon learned to stay away from the bad monkey because he would strangle one of them anytime he got the opportunity.
One evening, someone decided to switch the two monkeys, with the result being…well, you’ll just have to read the book.
He also told of a decision by members of his outfit to pool their money and buy a mascot, which turned out to be a beautiful jungle cat that had black spots on a tan coat.
But after a few weeks, the cat’s spots began to fade and it became obvious that the “sergeant had paid good money to purchase a Saigon domestic alley cat that had been daubed with black shoe dye.”
Wood writes about his relationship with the Vietnamese people, who loved movies involving Indians and the cavalry.
The Vietnamese he knew saw the cavalry as the U.S. Army and the Indians as Viet Cong, he writes.
“Since the Indians generally got beat by the cavalry, they liked the idea that the Viet Cong was also being beat by the U.S. Army and the Vietnamese military,” Woods wrote.
While none of Wood’s team members were injured or killed during the war, he said he witnessed a lot of death and talks about being in combat and dealing with snipers and other enemy combatants.
It led to a serious-minded return to education after he finished his tour of duty. He majored in aeronautics. But another change was in store because when he got out of school, the aeronautics industry was in a slump and jobs were scarce.
So Wood went back to school a third time and eventually joined the Indian Health Service, rising to an executive position under the area director. After 18 years with the agency, he retired in 2006 and now works part-time as a consultant and writer.
He and his wife, Genevieve Jackson, live in Tse Bonito, N.M.
Wood said he worked on his Vietnam memoirs off and on for about two years after his retirement, and spent a year finishing it and then self-publishing it.
The book is available on the Internet and through Woods (e-mail him at rwood44@gmail.com) for $12.95. It is also available through Kindle.
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