Larry Johnson, 69, didn’t want to be a soldier, he wanted to be a Marine.
As the U.S. was plunged into Vietnam, he and hundreds of thousands of other young men faced the draft, but rather than waiting to be picked for service, he signed up.
“Me and my cousin were talking, we were building houses, and we knew they were going to draft us. And when you’re drafted, you go into the Army,” he said. “That didn’t appeal to us at all, so we decided we were going to go join the Marine Corps.”
After training in the states, Johnson was shipped to Vietnam to serve in a rural village outside Da Nang as part of a Combined Action Program (CAP) unit, strategically situated to work with locals and serve as a barrier from Vietcong fighters.
The rifle squad manned bunkers and trenches, running lines of wire in the forest and conducting patrols on the lookout for the enemy. While there, they also helped the villagers in their areas of operation.