Learning to Love You More #59

Interview someone who has experienced war.

"James Ruffer, father and fighter pilot of the Vietnam War"

me: Why did you decide to join the service?

James Ruffer: We had a war, Vietnam. I had been in college when the war started, the fighting started and I was patriotic and wanted to help the cause. I believed that if we didn’t stop communism in Vietnam and south East Asia that it’d spread to the Philippines and other places in that area just like we had the problem in Eastern Europe and with North Vietnam invading South Vietnam, so on. Pretty much believed that communism was out to do just what it said it was going to do and that was “bury us” and so that’s why I signed up.

me: Can you tell me a brief timeline of your years in the military?

James Ruffer: Well, I was born in the military. My dad was in the military, we were in a war when I was born. I lived through the rest of the Second World War and then the Korean War and then the Vietnam War started and so I joined up in 66’ and except for medical school I was back in the service again by 79’ and stayed in until I retired in 95’. So it’s like a 30 year period of military service with the exception of medical school but I don’t think I ever really left the military at any time in my life. I was fighting the Japanese and the Germans as a little boy and the North Koreans and there’s always a great alarm in America. There’s always great alarm, concern for the world and for the sake of freedom.

me: What was one experience you remember from war?

James Ruffer: Well, I remember leaving my wife and three little girls. I was looking forward to going over, flying Marine Corps fighter bombers, supporting the troops, close air support and interdiction and whatever else we were asked to do. So training was exciting and we were all military men and there was no conflict of interest, we were simply all in it together.

Didn’t really know much about… didn’t pay to much attention to what was going on in society, so I missed that era of the hippies and the anti-war on college campuses but when I left in August of 69’ my best friend had just preceded me over and he was an Aviator also and before I even left he had been killed. And so when I left my wife and 3 little girls I was aware of the fact that some people weren’t going to come home, you know. And that was, that was tugging on me pretty heavily in kind of a hidden part of my awareness or in my heart, maybe in the pit of my stomach sort of a, kind of a sadness that this could be it.

On the other hand I was motivated to go and do what I was trained to do. I wanted to be a veteran of combat too, that was something I think that meant a lot to all of us was to have actually been there and done it. We were willing to take the chance that we would not come back just so that we could get into it, not to mention the patriotic and the fact that the cause was a just American cause and so that was my first sad or hard experience was leaving my family and all the time it took me to get from home to Vietnam it weighed heavy on me, you know, but I was going to miss them and possibly wouldn’t be able to get back to see them and loosing my good friend, my best friend also, you know.

Once I started flying missions, it was exciting and there wasn’t a lot of fear. It was being part of the team and doing my job and doing it as well as I could seemed to take the place of outright fear or endless worries about what if, what if.

I had a sad experience flying a mission out of, as we said, out of country in I think Laos one day, dropping on a bridge and I missed the bridge. The air craft controller who was an individual up there in another aircraft spotting the target and I had just done it poorly, even to my own standards and to his. I could tell he was frustrated with me because he was risking his life to try to get me to do something important in terms of the mission and it really hurt a lot. I realized that he was performing the same mission that my best friend had been performing when he died. I related the two that, you know, Ronald "Ron" Hamilton had died doing this kind of mission, could it have been because of somebody working with him that had done a poor job like I had just done. That he had risked himself for nothing so, that has always bothered me, it uh, it wasn’t uh near death experience, it wasn’t being, you know, blown up, it was just disappointing myself and somebody else in a situation where lives were at risk, sort of like I didn’t show up, you know, or I didn’t show up ready to fight and so that was, sadness.