From Vietnam to Hollywood: Cpl. Jim Beaver

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Corporal Jim Beaver. Beaver is an actor most widely known for his role as Bobby Singer in the TV series Supernatural, but before his acting career, he served in Vietnam with the Marine Corps as a radio operator.

Cpl. Jim Beaver:
Well, my name is Jim Beaver. I was a corporal E-4 when I got out of the Marines. And I was what was known at the time as a microwave radio relay technician, which was a high-sounding name for a field I really never worked in. But you know that old joke about the recruiters talking together and one of them saying, “Hey, which bakery school do we send nuclear physicists to?”

So yeah, I did not spend much if time doing technical stuff on microwave radio relays. I spent most of my time operating radios, but I also served as a supply chief for a comm company of 1st Marines. And I mainly kept my head down, and I mean that was what I did while I was in Vietnam.

You have to understand, I was sort of the runt of the litter among my friends. Not so much in size or physicality or anything, but I was a year younger than all of my closest friends. So, they were all seniors in high school when I was a junior. And then they all graduated, and I still had one more year to go. And during my senior year, four of my buddies joined the Marines, and they went off and had their adventures. And this was back in the day when people wrote letters if they wanted to communicate. And I got lots of letters from these guys while they were in bootcamp, and then while they were in infantry training. And later when they went to Vietnam, all of which pretty much occurred while I was still in high school. And I remember a certain gung-ho attitude when they first went in, and their letters reflected that for the first couple of letters, and then the realities of bootcamp set in. And I started hearing things like, “Boy, whatever you do, don't join the Marines.” And I heard that a lot. And then, b efore I got out of high school, I was hearing from at least a couple of my buddies who had already gone to Vietnam about their experiences. And it was always in this sort of tone of not just, “Oh, we're sorry we joined,” it was kind of like, “This is way above your capabilities kid.”

And so, naturally, as soon as I got out of high school, I signed up and I thought they're not going to tell me I can't handle the Marine Corps. And I remember I went through the initial physicals I had and have severely flat feet, and I hid that fact, curled up my feet and passed the tests and got in. And within a day or so of getting into marine bootcamp, I was running around to every corpsman I could find saying, “I've got flat feet, I've got flat feet, let me out of here,” but they didn't.

Maybe some elements of that story have given the suggestion that I wasn't the wisest person ever born. I did not have a huge awareness of what was going on in Vietnam or what the politics of the situation were. I was just a 17-year-old kid who thought my buddies are in, they're kind of cool. I should join up and be just as cool as they are. I don't recall having a political bone in my body other than a kind of attraction for what was then the hippie side of things. Which doesn't sound necessarily like the sort of fellow that would be attracted to the Marine Corps, but I don't really … I remember that the Tet Offensive had happened, and it was on the news, but I didn't watch the news that much.

I was a kid, and I didn't go in with any sense of, oh, the country needs to be saved, or we've got to stop them before they take over other countries, or really anything. I thought it would be cool. Which is not my recommendation for how you should decide to join the military or not, but I'm sure it's the motivation for a lot of people.

It was instantaneously fearsome. The Marine DI has a ferocious reputation, and my guys lived up to that. It was terrifying.

But after the first day or so, it became something I thought I can get through this. And I don't know that I was smart enough to see through the drill instructors’ aura of terror, but I've always had a sense that if I behave myself, if I show that I'm not too terrified of whoever's throwing power around, that maybe the focus will go on to somebody who acts a little more scared.

I don't know, I was plenty terrified in bootcamp. I mean, they certainly drilled into us that this was no laughing matter, this was about something really serious, and that we were … I heard a lot of stuff the equivalent of if that belt buckle isn't perfectly shined, you're going to die in Vietnam. And you hear that enough and you start thinking about it. But we're talking 57 years ago, I don't have a strong memory of really thinking about war as a thing that was going to happen to me. I had studied German in high school and was halfway good at it, and I had a knack for languages. And I took the placement tests, the aptitude tests in bootcamp. And I figured, well, I speak German, they're going to put me on embassy duty and send me to Germany. And I had virtually no noticeable mathematic or scientific skills. So, it was a bit of a shock when they sent me to radio technician school. And the whole thing of being a language expert went right out the window. And I was kind of shocked by that. But of course, I didn't find that out until the end of bootcamp when they said 28, 31 – I went 28, 31, what? Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to know numbers.

So, yeah, my recollection is that it was just kind of like I'm going to be doing a job that I probably have no aptitude for, but it's going to be like going to work but wearing a uniform and having a high and tight haircut.

I spent nearly, well, just about a year in electronic school. After bootcamp, as I say I had no aptitude for it at all. I graduated 24th out of a class of 25, and they apparently graded on a curve because nobody flunked. And there were people who were worse than I was. I couldn't change a flashlight battery after a year of electronic school. About the only thing I did know was to always keep one hand in my pocket while I was working on something that was lit up. So, I was a radio relay technician without any of the qualifications.

Well, that was my first year in the Marines. My second year, I was sent to a communications unit at the Marine Base at 29 Palms, California. And they quickly became aware that I didn't know what I was doing. And so, I worked around the comm company shed and cleaned up and swept and dusted, and went on supply runs and things like that. And I was there for six months or so, and then I got transferred to Camp Pendleton. And the same thing happened there. I didn't work as a technician, it was a lot of picking up butts and just making sure the place was ready for inspection all the time. It felt then, it feels now like a wast of education. So, I was there until just before the end of my second year in the Corps.

And I remember in those days I think you had to have 13 months left in service. I had signed up for a three-year contract, and I think you had to have 13 months left in order to be shipped overseas. And I remember sitting with a friend in his mom's house in Long Beach, and someone asking me if I thought I was going to go to Vietnam. And I said, “I don't think so. I've got 13 months and two days, and I haven't heard anything.” And the next day I got orders to Vietnam.

Now, I don't know if I triggered that by guessing wrong, but it was a shock because I had gotten so close to that limit that I thought there's not a chance they're going to send me, because I'll get out before the time is up. And apparently, they had their calculators going and they figured it out almost to the day. So, yeah, I remember I got paper orders, and several of the other guys from my unit at Pendleton got orders at the same time. So yeah, that would've been around … well, it was I think June of ‘70. So, they gave me leave and went home, saw my family for a week or so, and then came back and went to staging battalion also at Pendleton, and got prepped for going to Vietnam.

It was a very interesting trip. They bussed us over to Norton Air Force Base where we got on a commercial airliner. I mentioned my hippie leanings of the sixties. There were awful lot of us who were on that plane, who were … the counterculture was seeping into everything. And it may seem surprising now, I don't know. At the time, it did seem a little unusual to me how many non-conformists, probably left leaning– if they had any politics at all– guys with a real sympathy for the shall we say, the rebellious side of our natures, how many of us were on that plane. And all Marines.

And I remember the movie Woodstock had come out, and I had my little cassette recorder, which was the size of a breadbox. And I had the soundtrack to the movie on it. And I thought it would be really fun to crank it up and play, I think it's Country Joe and The Fish doing Vietnam rag. And which was pretty, I guess, hilarious on a plane full of guys going to Vietnam with these guys singing about “Whoopee, we're all going to die.” And I remember a big staff sergeant coming over and yanking it out of my lap and telling me to turn that shit off.

But we were on a plane. We were a bunch of guys, a lot of whom the only time we'd ever flown was going to bootcamp. And there were a hundred or more of us, and it was rowdy. But when we finally loaded up to take off for Da Nang, that's the first time I remember ever thinking, “Holy shit, I am in it now.” And I remember that they did not give us any kind of preparation for the experience of landing there. So, a lot of us, I think, had the same feeling I had, which is that we were going to be landing during a rocket attack, or that as soon as we stepped out the door, there was a chance we'd be machine gunned by Sappers. And nobody said anything to discourage us from that imaginary scenario. And that was the first time I felt really terrified because as far as I knew, we were landing not only in the middle of a war zone, but in the middle of a firefight. And we got off the plane, and it was quiet.

But the Da Nang Air base, as I came to realize, was in a pretty secure place. This was two years after Tet. It doesn't seem now that there was nearly as much to worry about in that particular location. But they put us in a truck with our gear, and then just drove off into the night, and we couldn't see anything. We didn't know if we were in a town, in a city, if we were out in the country, if we were going to hit a mine, if we were going to get ambushed. And of course, as of yet, we didn't have weapons, so we felt very insecure. And they took us to a barrack somewhere, and took us in and said, “Get some sleep.” And I don't know if any of us slept that night because there wasn't one reassuring thing other than the fact that nobody had shot at us yet. And so, yeah, I was pretty scared.

Then the next morning, sun came up, they loaded us up on trucks again, and took us out to our assorted assignments. But this was the first time we'd seen daylight. And when we saw daylight, we saw, “Oh, this place is pretty calm.” There wasn't any sign of any kind … no one seemed to be scared. The people we saw walking down the roads.

It was Da Nang and the outskirts of Da Nang and people just seemed to be going about their business. And there was a I don't mean to suggest a military laxity, but there was a casualness about the people you saw. And guys were yelling to their friends along the side of the road and drinking sodas. And it just seemed all of a sudden, “Oh, we're in a civilized place.” And a lot of the fear went away. And when I got to my base at 1st Marines, I saw that people were in line at the chow hall. People weren't freaking out. And I started to calm down a little bit.

There was no rumor control. Nobody was saying, “You're going to be fine, this is okay. You're not out in the bush, nobody's coming in here.” And I don't know that they could have made those guarantees, but they didn't.

Nobody said anything to suggest that we weren't all going to be killed any minute now, but you could see from what was around you, that it was a much more casual situation than I think any of us on that plane had expected. So, we all thought we were going to be dropped into a combat episode. And that didn't happen right away.

My base, 1st Marines, was out at a place called Chieu Hoi Pass which was … I think I never got a real good sense of the geography around there, but I think it was northwest of the city. It was essentially out in the country, but not very far. Probably a 15-minute Jeep ride back into the heart of Da Nang. And you pass through a certain amount of open country to get to the 1st Marines base. But we weren't in the city. And yeah, I got a chance to go into town a fair amount eventually, because although I didn't start out that way, I ended up becoming the supply chief for comm company. And so, I had to do a lot of trips into town and over to logistics to pick up supplies and things. And so, it was not a matter of going out of the city or and seeing things. It was a matter of going into the city and seeing things. And so, where I was, it was highly populated by Marines, but it wasn't highly populated, if that makes any sense. You went through a couple of villages to get to the base. But essentially, we were right near the pass that I think went west into places like An Hoa and we were surrounded by hills on the other side of the largest of the hills back toward … Da Nang was 1st Marine Division headquarters.

And so yeah, we were in this kind of bowl sort of surrounded on three sides by hills. And we always had the feeling that if Charlie wanted to send rockets down on us, he's got three really good places to do it from.

But for the most part, it was not … it ended up being, for most of the time, not terribly much different than being at 29 Palms or Camp Pendleton. We were all wearing jungle utilities and we were sweating a lot more. But it was relatively calm most of the time.

I remember one night something was going on because parachute flares were going off everywhere, and we could hear incoming fire, and we were all on mental alert. But as seemed to be a tradition at that time, and probably still is, they weren't explaining a lot to us. They weren't coming around saying, “Okay, here's what's happening right now.” It was just noise and bright lights and shooting in the middle of the night. And I never learned what that particular event was, other than the rumors that ran around that they had seen people trying to come through the wire. But I didn't see anybody, I just saw flares and heard a lot of gunpowder going off. That was while I was with comm company. And I would have to say that there were really only two instances in my entire time there where I heard or saw anything resembling enemy action.

About a month after I got there, I was transferred out to a place called Hill 10 with a unit of 1st Marines. But I was just attached there. We had a little radio outfit that we had our own shack on Hill 10 amongst the mainly infantry and mortar teams, but we weren't really part of them. And nobody there ever talked to us. We didn't talk to anybody except the four of us in this shack. And we ate our meals with the guys from 1st Marines. But as far as I know, we didn't know any of them because our job was to maintain these radios, and that's all we did.

But while I was out there, Hill 10 got hit, and that was my one real combat experience. And once again, nobody told us what was happening because we weren't part of the integral unit that was headquartered there. We were just a group of guys who got stuck in with them, and we didn't have any real chain of command there on Hill 10, all of our chain of command was back at comm company in Da Nang. And so, once again, we didn't know what was happening. We just knew there were green tracers going in, and a lot of orange ones going out. And we just ran out and got in our ditch and tried not to poke our heads too far over the sandbags. And I think there was probably far too much indiscriminate firing because this was both exciting and terrifying. The one thing we knew was the green tracers were not good. We didn't want to see those, and they were coming over. And so, we just kept our heads down and fired into the darkness stupidly and unorganizedly. And then after a bit, it just got quiet. And again, nobody told us anything. We didn't know what had happened, we just knew that the place had erupted in gunfire and that the mortars been going off. The mortars, unfortunately, were principally staged right next to our hooch. And so, the mortars were going off and I don't understand how anybody who worked mortars can hear anything anymore. Because we weren't even working them, and it was deafening.

But the next day around the chow hall, we heard guys talking about the number of bodies they had found in the wire. And there had clearly been some effort to overrun the base, and it wasn't a big base, Hill 10. I mean, it was just a fraction of the size of back at division headquarters bases. I mean, it was a good size. There were a lot of guys there and they were going out on patrols. We'd see them going out in the afternoons. But it was a base that I suppose could have been overrun with enough enemy soldiers.

But that was really my one experience of combat. It's still something of a mystery to me as to what exactly happened that night, because we were the few, the tough and the uninformed. So, yeah, the rest of my time there was pretty sedate, certainly compared to that night.

I was a very timid kid. My friends used to call girls and ask them out for me because I couldn't pull my act together enough to do it. That didn't work, by the way. But I came out of the Marine Corps, I came out of bootcamp I think very much where the Marine Corps wanted me to be, which was filled with a new sense of confidence. I knew that I wasn't a tough guy. I knew a few moves, I knew how to put a choke hold on somebody. But I didn't come out of bootcamp feeling like I was John Wayne, but I felt like I was more of a man than I was before I went in. That I was capable of getting through tough situations. And sometimes, I got through those tough situations by finagling and manipulating, but maybe that's part of it, I don't know. I knew I wasn't going to walk into a bar and beat everybody in it to a pulp, but partly, the uniform, partly, the experience gave me a sense that I can handle whatever's coming my way, that certainly, the exigencies of daily life are not going to conquer me. I'm going to get through my days and nobody's going to walk over me too much.

And a real sense of belonging came out of my military service. They always say, “There’re no ex-Marines, there’re only former Marines.” And the truth is, I'm pushing 75-years-old now, and I still feel like a Marine. I couldn't do the three miles, but I still feel part of that lifestyle in a way. And that sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps is still very strong in me.

I got much more political while I was in the service and became much more questioning or much less likely to take anybody's word about anything in particular without doing some investigating and trying to understand on my own. If that helped me play the Secretary of Defense, it's a very subtle undercurrent of assistance. I look back on a lot of my performances and I have occasionally thought, “What would my acting be like, what would my career be like if I hadn't been a Marine, if I hadn't gone to Vietnam?” And I can't answer that. But my sense is that even at my age, I walk a little taller and I know how to get down a dark street without panicking.

And I still line up my shirt front with my belt buckle and my fly and I don't wear the high and tight hair anymore, but it's something that is a part of me. It's not just something that happened to me. And I had a lot of friends who came back from the Marines, who came back from Vietnam in far worse shape than I did. The only injury I ever got was when an idiot from Corbin, Kentucky stuck me in a hand with his bayonet while he was trying to kill a rat. I got off pretty easy there. But I saw enough to know that it ain't for sissies. And I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. I would not like to relive some of it, and I did my three years active and then fairly soon thereafter, went back on active reserve because there was something I missed about it. I liked the freedom when I got out. I went to college, I liked dropping all of that discipline, and yet there was something I missed. And in some ways, it may sound corny, but it was kind of the formality, the brotherhood, the sense of being part of something bigger than myself, and the sense of common cause.

But yeah, I think if I hadn't gone, you wouldn't be talking to me now. But if you were, you'd be talking to quite a different fella.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Mal Middlesworth.

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