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“What was the biggest change about you from Vietnam?”
Hannah Campbell interviews her father, Tom Geerdes, about coming home from war.
Recorded in Murray, KY
Credits
Produced by Michael Garofalo.
Facilitated by Rani Shankar.
Transcript
Click here to read the transcript for this story.
Interview transcript
HC: What was the biggest change about you from Vietnam?
TG: I was not really worried anymore about being socially acceptable. From the day I got out I didn't shave or cut my hair for probably a year, and people that I knew from before I left, even some of my cousins, didn't think too much of me after I got back. So, I took a long bicycle trip.
HC: Went off and got by yourself.
TG: Yea, I rode straight North up through Minnesota, cut across and rode all the way to the West coast. Took me about six weeks.
HC: Do you think that you sorta healed from Vietnam on that trip?
TG: It helped a lot but ah, really, I actually didn't heal from Vietnam until quite a number of years later. I had a Janitorial business and I was doing floors at Sears, and ah, they had a Vietnam movie on there and something just broke, and I cried, I sobbed like a baby for a couple of hours while I finished those floors. Just sobbed like a baby. Cause it was several good friends I lost. It was just too much devastation that I saw over there. Just too much hurt, and I really didn't really plan on coming back.
HC: I'm glad you came back.
TG: Yea, me too. Me too.