WEBVTT

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[sil.]

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[music]

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[music]

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My home. My roots are here.

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My life is here. I went out and explored

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different types of life and…
and when I got that the point

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where I needed help, I had
to come back to my roots

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and this helped me to
survive to where I’m now.

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Here gave me a purpose,

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a reason to stay alive.

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I was about to die.

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Well, that happened because
my mother when she was young,

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her brothers, my uncles
were taken from home, here,

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which is here and placed in schools,
residential schools in Ontario.

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And uh… that’s where my
mother got pregnant,

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and then, days it wasn’t what
you’d call, okay, to have a…

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a child out of wedlock.
That’s when uh… mamma

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and papa here who were already
raising my uncle Bob,

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they decided that, uh… \"Hey, got
one as well have two,\" you know,

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so mamma came and got me when I was, I
think I was six weeks or seven weeks old,

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and my life started over here.
We were poor,

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but we weren’t the only one. Everybody was
poor in then days. It was beautiful because

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it was family life. It… it was strict,

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but it was fair. I would
say we were spoiled

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because in then days I’m talking
about, the late ‘40s or early ‘50s,

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we speak… we spoke three languages at
home, French, English, and Indian.

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In school, speaking Indian was
like using the devil’s language.

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It… it wasn’t tolerated.
They say it in French

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as because they were devout Catholics

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uh… we get whacked for it, if
we spoke Abenaki language.

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I left the reservation because

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I didn’t see no future. It’s funny to say

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but by the end of the ‘50s,
beginning of the ‘60s,

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started seeing TV and it looked like
there was a better life someplace else.

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So when I was 15, going on 16,

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when I went to the States to do site working as
an adult. Construction work was good over there

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and they hired Indians
for work in high rises.

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Being young and with money in
your pocket in a… in a big city,

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I started hanging out with the boys and
drinking and getting into trouble,

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and not major trouble, but teenage stuff.

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And uh… one night, my stepfather
was… or my mother’s husband

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sort of seen me going down the wrong path and he had been
in the military, so he kind of waited till I got a little

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snoozed up a little bit with
beer and he kind of dared me

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to go into Corp. And uh…

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since I had a big ego, I took him
up on the challenge, I was 17.

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[sil.]

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They’d sent you

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to Parris Island, boot camp.

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You’ll be here at the (inaudible) during this time
period you’re gonna receive all of your uniforms,

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all of your shots,

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your service record book will be brought up
today. Everything you need to be processed

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in the Marine Corp. Hurry up, (inaudible), we
don’t have all day. I say get on the car(ph)

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facing the (inaudible).
Do not run, walk swiftly.

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Do not run, walk swiftly.

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Uh… Boot camp is what I’d call

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brainwashing indoctrination,
uh… torture chamber.

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They take your civilian life and they…

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they sort of like break you down.

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Hurry up bro. Hurry up,

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hurry up, everybody is waiting
on you, hurry up. Get up there.

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Get up with fire. Look behind,
you got a whole life behind you.

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Get up there. Come here.

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You quit, you don’t have any guts.

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No sir, I will now give the… Well, why didn’t give back
up there? But I tried to sir. Oh! Yeah, I saw you try.

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I saw it. And then, once
you are broken down,

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they build you back up the way they want you to
be. You’re useless till you do it now. Get up!

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I found out that I wasn’t that tough,

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that they were tougher than me.
Lift your heads and hold up high,

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Lift your heads and hold up high,

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23, 30 years are passing by,

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23, 30 years are passing by.
Saying left and right…

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It is very convincing when they
indoctrinate you into their way of life.

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We’re having up all. We’re having up all.
All the way. All the way.

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[music]

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Low and behold! It didn’t take long,
we were called in the office and said,

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\"Hey! Your orders are in.
You’re shipping over.\"

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Landed up in Vietnam, spent a year,

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eight months and two days in the Frontline
and I guess, I wasn’t ready to go upstairs.

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God didn’t want me yet so
he left me live through it.

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I flew to Okinawa, which is a
transit area for Marine troops,

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used to be known as The Rock
Turn of the Second World War.

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From there you fly to Vietnam
and… I worked for S2

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Intelligence as a scout sniper.
We had to guard the airbase

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at Da Nang airfield. And
we used the guard for

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invasions by the Vietcong
or the North Vietnamese.

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Our life expectancy as a scout
sniper was about 26 seconds.

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[music]

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Don’t ask me how they figure that out but when
going out on a mission if you get attacked

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and your life expectancy is 46 seconds.

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[sil.]

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At first you don’t know, you’re all mixed up, you’re
scared as hell. You don’t have time to think really

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it’s just that uh… you react. It’s
like you’re watching a war stories

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on TV or something like that, right and all
of a sudden you’re in the middle of it,

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and you know that if you get shot (inaudible) that returning
another picture, the next day you’re dead, you know,

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the reality is right in front of you.

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You see your friends go down, half their heads are blown off, their legs
are blown off. You have to carry them out. You put them in body bags

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or… its hell when you see your buddies
die, you know, it’s… it’s not a game.

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[sil.]

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We’re all young men, all of us.

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I seen someone in the
Vietcong that were kids,

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seven, eight, nine, ten years old.
The Congs

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or guerrillas and they would
just hit and run, hit and run.

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A lot of times you’ll run
into a group of Vietcong

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that will stay and fight. And… and when
that happens, is a lot of them are tied up,

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they can’t run. They’re chained to a tree

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or to… to anything. They can’t… they can’t… In other
words, they hit, they know they’re going to die

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because they can’t run no place. They are tied
there. So they had to fight until they die.

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We’ve seen all that.

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It was there and we had to deal
with it to the best of our ability

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and live with it after.

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If you didn’t become numb,

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you would never survive.

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When you kill, to you you’re saving your
buddy’s life and you’re saving your life

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by eliminating the enemy. Sometimes
there’s children, sometimes there’s women

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uh… but they’re trying to kill
you, so you haven’t got a choice.

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It’s not what people think
it’s like, it’s hell.

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That’s why I’m sure to go to heaven.
I did my hell on earth.

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We were used, and then, we came back,
and we felt rejected by the people.

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They looked at us like, you know,
\"Look at these…\" I don’t know,

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these crazy kids are murderers

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or they spit on us and call us all kinds of names. And
inside you, you know, you say to yourself \"Jesus,

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I’m over there fighting
this war, this conflict

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to keep them free in… in a democratic way

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is what we believe, and I come home and…
and they’re treating me like the enemy

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and… and where I’m supposed
to be their savior.\"

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All this rejection, actually doesn’t…
you don’t even want to come home.

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[sil.]

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At this age you feel like
shoo… shooting some of them.

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[music]

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Who says the time when we were
on patrol or on a mission

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in… in the jungle, it’s
almost like walking blind.

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Everybody carried machetes with them
to cut through the different foliage

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over there which was quite uh… thick,

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it served the enemy quite well because it’s
their terrain and they can use it as for cover

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and ambushes and until they started shooting
at us, we would never be able to see them.

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If… when they’re hiding waiting for
you, you show up for the party.

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So we were all

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told that we’d have a better eye view because
they were going to spray some kind of chemical

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that would kill the foliage.

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And we found out years later that
it… it was called Agent Orange.

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And uh… the planes fly over, they drop it,

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and before you know it
the leaves and the big,

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big leaves from palm trees and
stuff they all fall, they all die.

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And… but the thing is they never realized

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that this stuff stays in the air.

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It was killing a lot of us too,

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not right there but in the long
run it was affecting all of us

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who were exposed to it, and fish(ph)…
we used mostly in the south,

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so our lungs, our livers, our hearts,

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our skin, our nervous system

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and, they never warned us about this.

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Once they are done using you,

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you are a dirty rag, get out of the way.

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Me, I’ve done the best I can
with the hand I was dealt to me.

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I don’t regret nothing,

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but there is no money that
can compensate for a life.

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Don’t walk too fast.

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Wait for me, you are nice and
young dog(ph), eh? Uh-huh.

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When we were kids we used to come here.
This was our swimming hole.

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We used to come out here.
There was no trees.

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It s all nice here and… and all hill here.
It was all nice sand.

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We used to jump in it and roll down in
the sand and jump in the river and swim.

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Better than now? Yes, better than now.
We used to hunt here

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all over around here. We’d
go hunting for rabbits

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and partridge, and we used
to fish in the little pond

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that we had on the side over here. Did you go
hunting yet? No. You know how to put the snares?

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What is snare? A snare is… is a little
thing like they make out of wire,

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it’s a collar… Uh-huh. That
has like a slipknot, alright?

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No I am not able to… You’ll find
places where the rabbits travel a lot.

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You find a spot and then you
install it there to catch them.

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Uh-huh. But we used to do it as long
as we were young because we were poor

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so we had to… that was food.

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Good food. Yeah, good food.

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When you’re visiting your grandmother… Uh-huh. Do you talk about when… when she
was young living around here? Sometimes. Yeah, we used to go to school together,

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you know that, your grandmother and me? No.
Yeah we used to go to school together.

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You know what they call
us to (inaudible). No.

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This is a piece of land belongs to the reservation. You
know what that means? Yeah, reservation that goes all

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…it’s like we could go
come here, we could come

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and live here but there is some people that’s
not allowed. It belongs no… as much to you

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as it belongs to me, as
it belongs to Alanis,

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it belongs to the whole… all the people.
Uh-huh. It’s like uh… the holy ground

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if you want. It used to be. I look at
it now and I don’t see it that way

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but that’s the way it used to be here.
Uh-huh. But it’s still a… a nice place.

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I… I like to come and walk through it
sometimes and remember when I was young.

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We used to come and chop Christmas trees
here. We still do it. You still do it?

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There are people that do it, right here. Yeah? Do
you? Did you ever come? Yes, when my mother wants.

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Yeah. Did you get a nice one? Uh-huh. Yeah.
It… it was too big for the house.

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Must’ve been a lot of work
to get out there. Hmm-hmm.

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[sil.]

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You never mention that you were a vet

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because there right away, there was
a stigma on you that you were nuts.

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You had to be crazy to
have served over there,

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you didn’t mention it. We
couldn’t hold a job very long.

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People, they couldn’t put up with us amd…

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and we just assumed, he is
the boss as look at him.

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So getting work wasn’t hard but
keeping it was impossible.

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In… Christ… 99% of us

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that came back from over
there who suffered from

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something called PTSD, didn’t even
know we suffered from it because

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we weren’t re-indoctrinated

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into how to live a normal life.

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We were brought in from a killing zone.
And we had to control our impulses

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of our way of surviving and our way
of surviving was kill the enemy.

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Most of us didn’t know
how to deal with that.

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When we get out of the service, they don’t even
tell you that you’re entitled to unemployment.

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They just give you your walking papers and goodbye. They
don’t want to see or hear from you or see you anymore.

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I was entitled to a pension uh…

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…for injuries suffered in
combat both physically

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and mentally

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but I never found out till 16 years later. It just shows that the
government, they want your help and they give you all kinds of promises

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when you first go in but when they are done and they
don’t need you in a war, they want to forget about you.

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I finally got my (inaudible)
but that’s to me,

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even that is small compensation

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for the way I have to live. You have
flashbacks, you have bad dreams.

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Uh… It… it’s unbelievable, its 38
years ago and I still suffer from it.

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I… I’m on medication for the rest of
my life that… to control my emotions

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and… and 60… over 60,000

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who have committed suicide since they come back
from the war so I think and… and that itself speaks

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a lot that we were left alone to deal with
our problems accumulated from over there.

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[music]

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One morning I… I just… I
just got done working…

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I was working in a bar besides construction and at
about 5.30 or 6 o’clock in the morning in… in June,

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and I had a 357

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because I never walked around naked.
I always was packed.

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And uh… it was either blew my brains out

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or find some way or some
reason to keep on living

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and I thought about my daughter which at
the time was only about two years old,

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and uh… I don’t know something
made me feel guilty

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of taking my life, and I decided then
and there that I come back home,

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that was my last hope. If… if that
didn’t work then, I wouldn’t continue,

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I would have gave up and on the
way and would have done it in.

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And thankfully, I was uh… I
was lucky enough to come back

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to the right spot.

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But I had enough money to take
the bus from Albany to Montreal,

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and then, from Montreal to take a bus
to home. When I got to Montreal,

00:21:05.000 --> 00:21:09.999
the buses were on strike, so I walked from

00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:14.999
the bus station in the city
all the way to Vershire

00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:19.999
in the pouring rain and…
till somebody gave me,

00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:24.999
I was hitchhiking and somebody gave me a ride. And
luckily, they dropped me off uptown at (inaudible)

00:21:25.000 --> 00:21:29.999
next to the reservation.

00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:34.999
When I walked in home, sort of like a…

00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:39.999
a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
I felt peace

00:21:40.000 --> 00:21:44.999
but it didn’t take long.
A lot of it comes back,

00:21:45.000 --> 00:21:49.999
when it comes back you… you kind of realize
that there’s something wrong with me

00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:54.999
and… and I need help.

00:21:55.000 --> 00:21:59.999
Now things are stable because of the
medication but there’s still they…

00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:04.999
they’re never going to go away and I…
but I can deal with them better now.

00:22:05.000 --> 00:22:09.999
[sil.]

00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:14.999
Having a chance to help younger people,

00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:19.999
that’s one of my salvation.

00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:24.999
And maybe down the line talking with me

00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:29.999
and spending time together, uh… I have been
for seven years so I can say something

00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:34.999
that might reflect later and help them in
life. And uh… for me, it’s a good salvation.

00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:39.999
I feel like I am giving
back to my reservation

00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:44.999
something that they had done for me.

00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:53.000
[music]

00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:28.000
[music]