"[ Helicopters whirring ]" "My name is Soren Peter Sensor ll, and this is my namesake Soren Peter Sorensen I." "He was born over a century before me in Denmark in 1871, and he's pictured here at 17 in his Danish military uniform." "Here's his son, my great grandfather Ralph Sorensen, holding me at two months old as my father and grandfather look on." "When I look at this photograph I wonder if any of these men ever thought my life would even remotely resemble theirs." "♪ There's a stranger lying in my bed. ♪" "♪ A slate-eyed asleep assassin in my head. ♪" "♪ I keep on dying until I finally fall dead. ♪" "♪ Every day has a way through. ♪" "♪ There's an ether hanging at my door. ♪" "♪ A cross-eyed Sorensen keeping score. ♪" "♪ I keep on smiling until I can't smile no more. ♪" "♪ Every day fades to blue. ♪" "♪ We go Waltzing past the grave. ♪" "♪ We go Waltzing past the grave. ♪" "♪ And we go Waltzing past the grave. ♪" "♪♪ For one more day. ♪♪" "[ Soren ] The first time my father took me to Washington DC, I was around 10 years old, too young to really get it." "DC was one of a number of uniquely American destinations we used to visit, places like Annapolis and Gettysburg, where all I ever really learned from the monuments, memorials, re-enactments and powwows was that I loved the junk food that always seemed to accompanied each day's outing." "When we visited the Vietnam memorial," "I was hardly old enough to comprehend the Smithsonian or the air and space museum, let alone Maya Lin's granite masterpiece honoring the more than 58,000 Americans who were killed during the Vietnam War." "The experience always stayed with me because my dad made pencil rubbings of two of the names that day:" "Loring M. Bailey Jr. and Glenn D. Rickert." "I remember standing as far away as I could from my teary-eyed father as he made the rubbings and took pictures of each of the names." "Who were these people, I wondered to myself, these dead soldiers?" "He had never mentioned them before." "I can probably count on one hand the number of times" "I've seen my father's eyes well up with tears, and I'm not sure he's ever cried." "But it wasn't a good feeling as a child seeing that vulnerable, human side of a guy I imagined was invincible." "This little effort to distance myself physically from my father in DC continued emotionally throughout my adolescence, manifesting itself as a fear of upsetting or disappointing him, as I intentionally grew into what I considered to be a much different person than he once was." "This distance between us, real or imagined on my part, caused me to wait until I was over 30 to ask him how he ended up in Vietnam." "[ Peter ] "Not by choice, by chance."" "Or is it "By chance, by choice"?" "There was a recruiting slogan that had to do with..." "Yeah, "By choice, but not by chance," or something like that." "You pick your branch and all that good stuff and you get a career path, go to college and become a PhD machine gunner." "I backed into it." "I knew that this was probably the biggest news story of my life." "I knew that I wanted to be a journalist, or thought I wanted to be a journalist." "I was a political science major." "There have been family males involved in the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War ll, Korea, and this was just my war." "There's a tradition of, if you're a male and there's a war on, that's your job." "That's what you do." "It's just bad luck, or good luck if you're into that sort of thing." "So I was balancing not wanting to miss this news story, a dyed-in-the-wool Ernest Hemingway fan." "On the other side of the coin, I knew that this was a bogus war, it was a civil war, the politicians were steering us astray, and I sure as hell didn't want to die over there." "But you balance one against the other, and then depending upon where you want to go with the discussions, you can play this out right until the day I got over there." "It's avoidance tempered with, this is something I should be doing, or want to be doing." "[ Soren ] In 1968 a lot of high school and college seniors were in the same situation as my father." "And the perception of Vietnam as a working class war fought only by America's poorest and least-educated citizens was changing." "In March, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection." "In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated." "In June, it was Robert F. Kennedy." "In November, Richard Nixon was elected president." "[ Peter ] Nixon had a plan." "I remember distinctly sitting in Fort Dix cleaning an M14 and listening to speeches, and Nixon had a plan to get us out of Vietnam." "I was thinking to myself, if he can do that in two months, I'm going to vote for him." "[ Soren ] Another Connecticut resident who probably voted for Nixon in '68 is Loring Bailey, then an employee of Groton-based Electric Boat, the largest manufacturer of submarines for the United States Navy." "Bailey's only son Loring .Jr., or "Ring" to his close friends and family, enlisted in the United States Army around the same time as my father, and for similar reasons." "When the kids came out of, or graduated from school, from college, when they ended home here in Connecticut..." "Well, all over the country, there lying in the pile of mail was the card for registration for the draft." "Every senior faced that." "A lot of people said, "My God, if I'm going to be drafted I'll enlist."" ""I'll go before they call me."" "[ Soren ] It surprised me to hear that so many young people in the late '60s, including my father and Ring Bailey, were still enlisting." "Members of my generation, the sons and daughters of these baby boomers, seemed to treat the topic of Vietnam either with overt criticism, including comparisons to Iraq and Afghanistan, or eye rolls and apathy." "I've honestly never spoken to very many people my age or any other some to think of it, willing to defend the American government's motivations for expanding our military's involvement in Vietnam." "But the reasons people enlisted were not as simple as I once imagined." "Because the United States military is now all-volunteer," "I always figured anyone who made a conscious decision to enlist, rather than waiting for the draft or avoiding the war altogether, must have been enthusiastically anti-communist, that or too willing to please their fathers, members of Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation."" "I think it's partly doing what is expected." "So I think he was reared in the tradition of being responsible," ""doing the right thing," however you define that, and not disappointing your family." "And he had not just a father, but a grandfather whom he loved, and aunts, and a family tradition that would be a big deal to just walk out on." "The National Guard wasn't available unless you knew somebody, or your name was Bush or you had some way of getting in to the National Guard." "The National Guard was closed out, the reserves were closed out, 'cause they were really popular, obviously." "You weren't going to see action." "I looked into the Army." "The Army had a program..." "And I was about to be drafted as far as I knew..." "If you sign up for officer candidate school, and at any point wash out, you get the time you spent in training subtracted from a two-year draft." "So my mind is cranking away and I'm thinking to myself, it takes a couple months for Basic, a couple months for Advanced Individual Training, however long I could play out OCS," "and then if you, again, throw in the towel..." "If I played it right, I would have either less than a year" "And at that point if you had less than a year, they weren't shipping you out" "So I would come pretty close to a year." "If I had done something other than go, my father probably would have been disappointed." "But in terms of my family, I received no input either to go or not to go, whether it's a good idea or bad idea." "I think he cared about his father's impression of him, but I'm not sure... but I also think he resented it." "[ Peter ] It would have been an embarrassment probably, because there was a stigma attached." "Again, if you go back to that era, in a neighborhood, if somebody was evading, if somebody went to Canada or something, the neighbors talked." "[ Soren ] Perhaps America's hindsight perception of '60s counterculture, hippies, and the sexual revolution produces the illusion of a greater protest movement than actually existed." "As much as I can't imagine enlisting in the military during the Vietnam era, for my father and Ring Bailey, evading, avoiding, dodging the draft, or going to Canada weren't really options." "When I contacted Ring Bailey's widow Maris to request an interview she respectfully declined, stating," ""The years since Ring's death have done little to soften my heartache and anger over his loss."" "Maris put me in touch with her brother Rik, who invited me to his home in Burlington, Vermont." "Rik's deaf in his left ear, so he received a 4F designation, meaning unfit for service, upon completing his physical." "He told me the outcome of the physical didn't matter." "He wasn't going to Vietnam." "Does it look like me?" "I would have gone to jail." "They sent draft resisters to a Allenwood prison farm in Pennsylvania." "It's minimum security." "There's no barbed wire." "Ring became my sister's boyfriend." "Ring was two years older than me and he became a mentor." "He went to Trinity College in Hartford." "He was really smart." "And I really liked him, and here he was with my sister, and we hung out together." "So that's how I met him, and he eventually married my sister." "You know, that's Ring." "And by gosh, the telephone call that I received the night that he went down to Fort Dix was," ""Hey, Dad, I'm in the infantry!"" "Well, you take Rings glasses off and he couldn't see a hundred yards, and make out anything without glasses, in a hundred yards." "But here he was in the infantry." "Well, okay." "So, you'll learn how to march." "Ring liked automobiles." "He was a real automobile enthusiast." "His father was an automobile enthusiast." "His father had a XK140 Jaguar coupe." "Most of them are roadsters, this one was a coupe." "It was swooping." "And I learned the appreciation of these automobiles from Ring." "He drew cars, he knew race cars, he had little die-cast miniature cars." "He collected them and now I do." "He had a Bugeye Sprite." "Before he went to Vietnam, he bought a Bugeye Sprite, and I bought a 1600 Fiat roadster." "And in his time off before he went to Vietnam, we worked on these two cars and we drove around." "Fun." "With a cloud over your head fun." "[ Soren ] My father met Ring Bailey in 1969 at OCS," "Officer Candidate School, in Fort Belvoir, Virginia." "They were both aspiring writers, Ernest Hemingway fans from small Southern New England towns." "And the seemingly insignificant common ground they shared led to an alliance that almost spared them both from service outside the United States." "[ Peter ] He was gonna be a journalist." "He wanted to go into writing." "And he found a colonel who was looking for people to write training manuals." "And the colonel said, "I need a half-dozen or I need four writers."" "And he got the job, and he said, go down there, and he said, "We'll spend the next year outside of Washington."" "He was married, I was about to get married." "He said, we'll spend..." "Either a year or a year-plus writing training manuals at Fort Belvoir which is a suburb of Washington DC with our spouses." "What could be better?" "In any case I went down, interviewed, got the job, and in both cases our orders for Vietnam got cut before the orders for the writing job." "[ Soren ] My father and Ring both decided against finishing OCS and were sent to different bases." "They weren't gung ho by any stretch of the imagination." "Neither were countless other Americans who found themselves in Vietnam." "Selective service and self-preservation were not as contradictory then as they seem to be today." "When my father received word that he would be shipping out in October of '69, my parents had to move their wedding up from September to August." "People in my mother's hometown, Wheeling, West Virginia, were convinced she was pregnant." "The clay that he left for Vietnam, my parents didn't feel comfortable having me drive him to the airport because I was gonna be upset." "And so they arranged a bus trip or a limo trip for him, so the thing came around the circle." "I remember vividly saying goodbye to him and opening that door and having him walk and get in that car." "[ Peter ] It could have been Air America, but it was a commercial flight with stewards and stewardesses, although we were wearing jungle fatigues." "We landed in Hawaii and Guam for refueling, but essentially other than the fatigues..." "I don't recall an in-flight movie, but we had meals and it was like nothing was happening." "And on the way down, everybody was sort of hanging onto their seat and concerned, because we're in this commercial setting..." "it was just a regular airplane flight, and the next thing we knew, we were at a 45-degree angle coming down." "When we landed, I asked one of the stewardesses what the story was and she said when we get to Vietnam, we do military landings to lessen the exposure to enemy fire." "And on the way clown, it was like we were looking at each other like we're not gonna make it." "We're not even gonna land this plane, or there's been a mechanical difficulty." "We saw the South China Sea, we saw Vietnam, and the next thing we knew, we were just..." "seemingly crash-landing." "We hit the deck, they open the door, and once it was open it was like a blast furnace, it went from an air conditioned cabin, originating flight from Fort Louis, Washington, and the heat and humidity was unbearable." "It was just very difficult to communicate." "Within two hours I was on the perimeter of Cam Ranh Bay stringing concertina wire, and I figured I wasn't gonna make it 24 hours." "I figured the environment or the temperature was going to do me in." "I wasn't going to make it because of the weather." "[ Elizabeth ] I was scared that something might happen." "I knew he wasn't going to be in the jungle, that would have freaked me out." "I guess I didn't constantly fear the way I would if he had been in combat or a Marine." "And then at night, I remember there was some kind of either an are light, which is a B-52 drop, or there was a firefight, something going on in the mountains." "And I remember looking, coming out of the hooch and looking toward the mountains, and it was like there was a large thunderstorm." "You'd see a flash and then there'd be a four-minute delay and then you'd feel the concussion." "It brought home that you know where you are, and then tomorrow or the next day, the day after that, you're going to be closer to what's going on there." "Loring was assigned to an infantry brigade, an infantry battalion." "I was assigned to an engineer company, and essentially he went off and did his thing and I went off and did my thing." "His first letter indicated that he had, on the day of his arrival, that night, they went out on a snake." "That was a case of where you blackened your faces, you're heavily armored, and he was with a group of machine gunners, and they set up a blocking force." "And he said, the blocking force, we were there, but nothing occurred." "[ Peter ] From Cam Ranh Bay orders to Chu Lai, which is the military headquarters company or headquarters for the Americal Division, and it was there, they have what they call the Combat Center, which is like graduate school," "and for a week you were there to acclimatize yourself and also go through a quick kill course, where you had a BB gun and had to shoot at pop-up targets, booby traps and mines and try not to set them off." "Everybody set off something, which is kind of debilitating..." "Warning lectures on drugs." "All the hooches had essentially plywood walls, screens, and then corrugated tin roofs." "And then attached, or very close by, there were culverts or half shells covered with sandbags which were for rocket attacks or incoming..." "The defensive positions essentially." "The first night I was there, We had incoming rockets." "There was an explosion." "We were green." "We were looking at each other, what was that?" "And finally somebody came running through the hooch and said, "Everybody in the shelter," and we all got in the shelter." "There were three or four more rockets that came in that night." "So the first night that I was in Chu Lai, we received rocket attacks, probably B-1 Os or Soviet-made rockets." "They were just set up with bamboo stakes out in the hinterlands and they were launched towards the American base." "I don't think there were any casualties or anything, but that was my introduction to incoming." "From there, we got orders to Duc Pho, which is about on the coast, it's in Quang Ni Province." "I was assigned to the engineers, from the engineers" "I was shipped out to LZ Liz, or Landing Zone Liz, which was a forward fire support base." "And there were three mountains, one large lump where the LZ was located." "There were a couple of howitzers there, and I stayed there for four months or so, five months, doing mine sweeps and construction." "[ Soren ] For soldiers of the Vietnam era and their loved ones, letter writing was the most useful method of communication." "As much as pictures tell us what the war was like for these young men, their letters home are as remarkable, not only for what was written, but also for what was left out." "[ Rik ] He wrote to us to protect us." "He wrote to us and tried to look at the light side." "He wrote a letter about a duckling that he took with him for three days, a little duckling that he carried on helicopter rides and finally let go somewhere." "There was Pete the puppy dog who followed them around." "He wrote about micro frogs." "[ Loring Sr. ] Oh, he was upbeat." "It was an upbeat deal." "He made it that way." "I could tell you one letter that he sent to his wife, three or four paragraphs of disassembling and assembling... a machine gun, a 50-caliber machine gun." "I don't think he copied it out of the manual, but it was very, very close." "And he wrote this..." ""Also, saw an enormous python the other day."" ""Those exciting animal names grow a bit meaningless or prosaic"" ""when we think of them as automobile models or can opener trademarks."" ""But a real python opens your eyes and gives new meaning and respect to the name."" "He was in a God awful environment..." "Just hideous." "[ Peter ] He was carrying 70 pounds of pack, and then going from place to place, and at night setting up ambushes." "If it was the monsoon season, you were wet to the bone, 48 hours, three days, four or five days at a time." "Elizabeth, I wrote once a day." "If I missed a day I used to write two." "I probably got back an equal amount." "It wasn't like World War ll where everybody wrote, and everybody sent cookies, and everybody did this." "It was fairly confined to the closest relatives and closest friends." "So you didn't get groundswells of mail, but the ones I counted on obviously were Elizabeth's, and friends." "I wrote him a letter every day and did that." "But when he was gone, he left in September and at Christmas, which was a big family gathering around the Christmas table with my parents and Aunt Susie and Uncle Atwood and all of the cousins and everybody." "And here I was having been married one month." "And he left in September and it was Christmas." "The entire Christmas day and through the entire Christmas dinner not one person mentioned him, he was not toasted." "He was not-it just wasn't in their conscious." "Part of our job was to get up, very punctual, so that the enemy knew we were coming." "But there was at least eight of us, this parade of people going down the road." "We did the sweep, and then at the end of the sweep, what would happen was a five-ton dump truck would be filled up with sand." "It was called pressure testing, and it would back down the road, so anything that we missed electronically, theoretically the dump truck would set off." "We did this one day, got onto the truck, because the pressure testing had been done, and they would drive us back up to LZ Liz." "And on this particular clay, we were working on bunkers and then all of a sudden we heard an explosion down toward the road." "It was after the monsoon, so they were repairing the road." "Anyway, we got down there and the It was just leaving." "The dump truck driver..." "The mine went off right under the cab and it blew his eye out." "He had other injuries, but we had to do another mine sweep of the road." "So this is the second mine sweep within four hours, five hours, and they did another pressure test." "Got back on the dump truck to LZ Liz and started working on the bunkers, and we heard another explosion." "Another truck bringing a load of dirt blew up." "Again the It was there." "But there were those two in one morning." "The next day they had sniffer dogs." "They accompanied us for the next Week, and we never found anything else." "But we lost two dump trucks and two guys." "This is a Corgi die-cast miniature car." "I don't know the scale." "It's a De Tomaso Mangusta that I sent to him as a Christmas present, and we liked our cars." "And he wrote to me, he said," ""In the dark watches of the night, I roll the De Tomaso Mangusta Corgi toy car"" ""that Rik sent me back and forth very quietly."" ""L sit squishing the suspension up and down for minutes at a time,"" ""looking at it at eye-level, digging its amber headlights."" ""But that's another form of devotion entirely."" "'"Huddled under my poncho, trying to preserve the condition of my stationary,"" ""all thought of quality gone,"" ""writing away while monitoring my trusty two-way radio,"" ""looking out at the little plastic Christmas tree"" ""that one of our machine gunners received in the mail"" ""and planted before his draped poncho."" ""Put the little metal car, the De Tomaso Mangusta that I carry in my pocket,"" ""beneath the plastic tree and lo and behold,"" ""we'll have toys under the tree come tomorrow morning."" ""All the amenities are not lost."" ""One little Tupperware container of mother's best cookies, too."" ""No, all is certainly not lost at Christmastime."" ""Next Christmas Eve, I'll perhaps remember"" ""my rainy night squatting beside my radio"" ""on my plastic covered map to keep my bottom unsuccessfully dry,"" ""watching the bushes move, and every so often munching on mixed nuts without peanuts."" ""Maybe this was the Christmas Eve and Christmas to make the rest worthwhile."" "[ John ] For about two-thirds of the time, it was as a platoon leader." "I went in as a second lieutenant." "March, April, somewhere in there, I was promoted to first lieutenant, and so I had a platoon of men." "We never had a full compliment of people." "I believe a full compliment would be 40 some people, and we had generally running close to about 30 at the max." "We would go out on patrol during the day, and we'd set up ambushes at night." "Most of what We were looking for were resupply issues." "The area we were in had been defoliated, bulldozed, burned, and was a free-fire zone." "So anybody out there theoretically was a target." "That made it difficult when you actually wanted to eliminate a target, you were told that you could possibly impact some poor innocent civilian who wasn't supposed to be there in the first place." "So I was involved in planning, deploying the troops, making sure everybody knew what their mission was, making sure the resupply came in, whether it was weapons, food, whatever it was." "[ Loring Sr. ] Ring volunteered to go out and carry the radio." "I wrote back to him saying," ""You get rid of the radio as fast as you possibly can."" ""That is a highly visible target."" "He had already been in this unit, my first unit that I was assigned to." "So when I first met Loring he was spec 4," "I believe was his rank at the time, and he was my radio guy." "And so he was responsible for any communication out of our field unit to anything or anybody else we needed." "Actually, when I saw the picture, I... realized, I hadn't remembered a whole lot from the picture you sent me." "I remember dark hair." "I always had the impression he was a lot taller than I was, but I'm not sure if he was or not." "And the glasses." "He seemed like a, this sounds terrible, not that the other people weren't civilized people, but he seemed more civilized, educated, reasonable, intelligent than many other people I ran into." "I'm the guy that when he went fishing as a kid I threw the fish back in." "I had never hunted, I had never been around weapons." "I didn't come from a family that was into the outdoors." "We were tennis players and swimmers." "So this gung ho, try to keep yourself from being killed, carrying a hundred pounds of supplies and being armed and shoot to kill, very strange." "The minute I was in country and the night we were rocketed," "I knew I didn't want to be a combat engineer, and I knew that I wanted to get as far from the ugliness as I could." "And I went to the division headquarters and I got a unit transfer application, dutifully filled it out the second day or third day that I was in country or in Chu Lai and then did not hear anything for four months." "During that period, we were in Mo Duc building a bridge, and I took pictures and wrote a story about the project, and I submitted it to the 31 st public information office, and that was that, and about three weeks later or two weeks later," "the squad leader over the radio received a call from the captain in charge of the engineers," ""Have Sorensen on the LZ at a certain hour with all his equipment,"" "and the squad leader, of course, looked a little askance at me," ""Where are you going, and how'd you do it?"" "So anyway, I got on the LZ and the next thing I know, the captain's personal helicopter was there, picked me up, and then flew me back to Bronco, all of five miles, and the captain was in his jeep waiting to pick me up," "and he looked at me and said, something to the effect that," ""You look a little scruffy to be someone who's working in the rear now."" "He explained that I had been reassigned to the public information office." "The story that I had written appeared in either "The Army Times"" "and or "Stars and Stripes" and so someone said," ""Take this guy out of the engineers and put him in the public information office."" "There happened to be an opening." "So that was the transition, it was abrupt." "There were four people assigned to the public information office and two of them were officers, two were enlisted." "So I was in a position where I could come and go as I pleased as long as I maintained a certain flow of stories and pictures out of that office, they didn't care if I showed up." "They didn't care what I did." "Sort of to further add to the confusion and to the elation on my part, the division thought the brigade was in charge of the public information office, the brigade thought the division was in charge, so nobody was in charge." "[ Peter ] One of the things I did was fly with either the combat assault unit or they had a light observation helicopter unit that did scouting work, or drew fire, or visual reconnaissance flights." "And there was a pilot named Rickert and I typically flew with him." "Glenn Rickert was a captain, very accessible, very friendly." "When I had to take pictures, when we needed aerial photographs or reconnaissance photographs, I would go out, or if I needed to take pictures of a body or something like that, he would fly me out there." "[ Soren ] This is Glen Aurelius." "He flew Light Observation Helicopters with Glenn Rickert in Vietnam in 1970." "For him the Vietnam War represented an opportunity to pursue his love of flying." "He works as a pilot to this day." "[ Glenn ] I looked up to him, maybe a role model," "I believe that would be the case." "He had a commanding presence, soft-spoken." "I wasn't the only one who would say this to him, but probably the first and I'd say it many times because we were close." "The job we were doing was very dangerous, very risky." "Every day you never knew what was going to happen." "And I said, I told him a couple of times that" "I could do all of those trips and he wouldn't have to do any, because he had a wife and a child now, there was more to lose there if something happened to him." "I remember the conversations with him, and he said "No," he said, "Thank you, but I really like flying these flights."" "[ Soren ] Like my father and Ring Bailey, Glenn Rickert had only been married a short time before shipping out." "His son Glenn Jr." "Was only an infant at the time." "He and his mother Margie still live in Pennsylvania, not far from where Glenn Sr. grew up." "[ Rickert ] I think it was a little bit after the parade for Bucks County," "Vietnam Memorial." "I finally started realizing my heritage, so I finally wanted to get it all put together, the letters, the uniforms, things like that, so it was a lot of information so I figured I'd just kind of start throwing it all together in some type of format" "just so I could show people." "Because a lot of people were asking after that time." "And then, in school I did a project about his life, that helped out a lot, too, with being able to share that." "[ Margie ] He wanted to go, he wanted to do his part, and he really believed in what he was doing." "It wasn't that he didn't feel that we should be there." "I mean, of course everybody has mixed feelings about war, nobody likes war, but if you believe in what the purpose of it is, tying to liberate an oppressed people basically, that's what it comes down to and he believed in that." "He was a very moral person." "He was a Christian, so he valued life, every life, regardless of their politics." "In Vietnam, there was a time when I was so wrapped up in the war and what I was doing over there, that I didn't really write regularly." "I believe it was Glenn that told me one time that my parents were trying to get a hold of me or that the Red Cross had contacted him to tell me that I needed to write home." "Because I hadn't written or contacted them for maybe a couple of months, and when you think about it, that's pretty sad with all that was going on on TV every day of the week, every hour there were pictures of helicopters being shot down" "and people getting killed by the thousands." "So I thought it was very selfish of me to be that way and not communicate." "I just isolated myself over there." "I just really detached myself from there rest of the world, it just didn't exist." "No newspapers, I didn't see any TV." "It was really what was going on right there and then." "But then when the Red Cross contacted me through Glenn Rickert, then I realized there that I really needed to communicate, and that they cared and they wanted to hear from me, so it was a wake-up call." "[ Margie ] Because of his morality and his beliefs," "I believe that's why on weekends he would go to the orphanage." "That was an outlet for him that he felt probably counteracted all the death and destruction, through the Week whenever he could go to the orphanage and do something in a more positive vein, I think that was an outlet for him." "[ Glenn ] He was really a very humane guy." "He really cared about, he wasn't prejudiced, he didn't look at the Vietnamese as being..." "Whereas some pilots you know, looked at the Vietnamese as being maybe inhuman, not like them." "But really we were all the same, and Glenn looked at the Vietnamese, both the enemy and not the enemy, as being people." "And there was an orphanage in Quang Ni." "He wanted me to do a favor for him." "He had adopted an infant Vietnamese girl." "She was probably six months, four months old." "Anyway he asked as a favor," ""Would you mind taking pictures of the baby so I can send them home to my wife."" "It was kind of strange because she was a part of his life, but of course to me it was just a picture." "But I knew I'd be able to love her like he did." "He flew me up there and we got out." "I met the baby and took pictures and printed up some pictures for him." "I had it in our kitchen." "I don't- Well, Glenn was so little." "I also had a bank where I was saving money towards our RR in Hawaii, so it was like Lan and the bank were right there." "It was just, that was what we were, you know, that was our goal to get to RR and then to adopt Lan." "[ Soren ] Glenn Rickert shot this 8mm footage while piloting his light observation helicopter over Vietnam in '1970." "Margie told me that Glenn had always wanted to fly helicopters and that, in a way, he was very much in his element during the war." "For Ring Bailey, unfortunately, things were not going quite as well." "So I think it was at least on two occasions, once before and once after," "I was in the public information office, his unit..." "I crossed paths with his unit and he was there." "And he was..." "I got insights." "He had no 1970 to grind, and he was an honest person... or candid with me." "I had no reason to believe he'd color the facts... or would say anything that was inaccurate." "But the first time he was seemingly pretty down in terms of spirits." "The unit was involved with a company either practicing or calling in air-strikes on farmers, clearly not military targets, and they were either just for the hell of it or they were practicing." "There were situations like that, or just the day-to-day grind was getting him down, the lack of sleep, the physical work, the snipers, the ambushes that were set up night after night," "He was not in a good place mentally, let's put it that way." "He wasn't depressed, but he was exhausted, I think." "I had a cat named Miranda." "And I had her bred and she had kittens, and I had written him about the kittens, and here he was in the jungle and he said," ""You know how I'd react, but its really hard for me to understand"" ""the joy of being a cat with kittens"" ""when I'm out here in the jungle."" "The second time I saw him, we were about to get an opening in the public information office and I said, and in fact I had mentioned it last time, if I can put your name in or would you mind if I put your name in for a position" "writing and taking photographs, and of course he jumped on it." "And it was about the time that the vacancy became available that I found out that he was killed." "It's just another day going out on patrol." "We were getting toward evening." "We were setting up a night defensive perimeter for the platoon." "And so I had both Robert and Loring with me up on the knoll... giving out instructions, "Okay, we want our grenade launchers"" "to cover those gullies over there." ""We want the 1970 along this straight area, this flat area that's open."" "Normal things you would do to set up for a perimeter." "I can't recall exactly how long we were up there, but we were up there shuffling around this area for quite some time." "Then I said, "Okay, let's get that set up" then I walked away, and that's when the explosion went off." "And to my knowledge, there wasn't anything left of either Loring or Robert." "I was blown through the air... what seemed like quite a long distance, but I really don't have any way of objectively measuring that." "I know one individual about an arm's length in front of me... had a big piece of shrapnel sticking out through his shoulder." "He survived but had significant nerve damage on his right arm, his shoulder." "It would have to have gone within inches or a foot of me to hit him, just with the line of sight." "And I remember lying there, not knowing what the heck had happened." "Ears are ringing and I remember saying, "My legs, my legs!"" "And another lieutenant came along, and I can still picture him." "He said..." "It seems funny but in this tragic situation..." "He said, "There's nothing wrong with your legs, Wilson, get up!"" "And so I got up..." "The rest of it's pretty hazy." "Every night somebody had to go in at 12:00 at our office, the information office, and then go over to the tactical operations center where all of the communications from the fields was filtered into one room," "a sort of action room, or war room, where the colonel could come and see the area of operation and see where various units are, what military intelligence was telling us, where people were." "And then there was a list on a corner of enemy and friendly missing in action, killed in action, wounded in action." "That particular day, I was on duty, and so I had to go over and I went over at noontime- or not noontime, at midnight." "On the board it said two KIA, 1st and the 20th." "Before I went back to Wire it in, I went down to graves registrations, where the bodies went." "And anyway I asked the enlisted in charge the names of the people who were killed." "One was a sergeant and the other was Loring Bailey." "And I said "How'd he die?" And he said..." "The euphemisms for a booby trap, a mine or booby trap, was traumatic amputation." "So he died of traumatic amputations." "Then he sort of sarcastically said, "Do you want to see the body?" and I declined." "I didn't think I could take it." "Anyway, I dutifully went back to the detachment and called the division, called the numbers in and Loring became a number." "He went from a person to a number." "The device that killed both Loring and Robert was either an artillery round or a mortar round, and we suspect that it was either a 155mm round or a 175mm round, and that was triggered, We think," "by a battery and a couple of metal plates." "And when the contact was made, completed the circuit, and up it went." "The officer... that came and announced Ring's death..." "I was at work and I was putting my coat and hat on the rack and I heard someone say, "He just came up on the elevator." And then... another man that worked with me came down and said," ""Look, they want you in the conference room right away."" "So he and I walked up to the office and he opened the door, and I stepped in thinking he would come in right behind me, but he closed the door." "And here I was face to face with a service officer, a major, and a sergeant major." "And he was on one side of the board table and I was facing him across the table and the sergeant was on his right." "And he introduced himself as Major So-and-So, I can't think of his name right now." "But his daughter worked at SUPSHIP across the street, so we had a little chat about the fact that I knew his daughter." "Then he said, "I have some..." Well, I looked at him, and it was perfectly reasonable." "I saw that he had a bronze oak leaf, and the device on his lapel indicated that he was of the engineer corps, corps of engineers." "That seemed to be perfectly normal to me, so, what's this all about?" "It never dawned on me until he said, "I have some very bad news for you."" "And even then, until he went to work and said," ""Your son was killed on the 15th, Monday the 15th."" "And this was Wednesday, just two days later." "March 17th darling, March 17th." "And that was a... that was a tough thing." "[ Rik ] My mother called me and told me that he was gone." "I mean, she just said, "He's gone."" "And I walked out the back door and I went home, and I went home and you know, you see it in movies the olive green sedan, with the dress uniforms, that drives up to the house." "And there was the olive green sedan in front of my mother's house, and my sister was there... [ sighing ]" " I'm sorry." " It's okay." "And the Army men were there, and their shoes were so, so fucking shiny." "At the time that we were informed of his death, the officer that was responsible went to the apartment, the address that Ring had." "That was his abode at the time that he went into the service was Hartford." "So that officer went to the Hartford apartment and he received a very unpleasant greeting from a member of Maris's family." "When they were leaving," "I said to him in my anger, I said," ""It's too bad he was fighting on the wrong side."" "The young brother, Maris's young brother was sort of a wild kid in college, and I don't know what the name of the association was, but he represented the ultra extreme student opposition to the war." "[ Rik ] I was involved in antiwar activity." "I had a choice when I went to college." "Some of my friends went further to the left, went to what they called the Weather Underground." "I was involved with a group called Students for a Democratic Society, it was SDS." "And I went with what was called the moratorium." "The moratorium was symbolized by the dove, and it was the peace movement." "And it wasn't just kids like us with long hair." "It was grandmothers." "It was real people who really wanted to end this war and make the world a better place." "So I talked with the older brother, and I gave him a little bit of a warning, I said," ""As a result of Rik's involvement..."" ""I think you should be aware that I've been informed"" ""that there's a possibility"" ""that students may go to work and demonstrate."" "They were concerned about me at the funeral." "They were concerned that I'd do things that, I don't know..." "All I did was cry." "I couldn't drive my car." "I've never known that amount of grief ever." "[ Soren ] Loring M Bailey Jr. was killed on March 15, 1970 in an explosion that also killed 19-year-old Staff Sergeant Robert A. Wood of Savannah, Georgia." "In a letter to my mother dated March 17th my father wrote," ""I just learned yesterday that a good friend of mine was killed by a booby trap."" ""I'm sure you remember me speaking of a Loring Bailey after OCS"" ""and a few months ago when I met him on LZ Liz."" ""It is such a damn waste."" ""L tried ever since I got a job in the rear to get him into the office and out of the field."" ""Now I feel like I didn't try hard enough."" "A little over two months later on May 20, the helicopter Glenn Rickert was piloting received enemy fire, and he was killed." "It's hard to recollect because I wasn't there, but from the information that I got, which was sparse, and the Way I envision it in my mind is that he was on a combat assault," "combat recon." "He had cover, aerial cover, with maybe some other types of gunships or maybe another LOH." "More than likely other gunships and he was... doing low-level reconnaissance, I believe." "When I say that, we're talking about five feet above the ground, hovering around low and slow blowing the bushes away, looking behind rocks and looking for tunnels." "I believe it was on the side of a mountain, maybe 150 feet or 200 feet above the valley." "It wasn't unusual to uncover hiding places, and have people get up and start moving and running and shooting." "From what I was told that's what happened." "He uncovered the enemy or somebody was there and maybe from behind a rock they shot him down." "The bullet that killed him actually came in through his back, through his shoulder, and hit his heart, so it was instant." "So somehow, even though he had protective armor on, it came in at a side angle, but still directly hit his heart." "I was thankful it wasn't a painful death." "For us it was very decisive and We knew that it was quick." "I mean, that's small comfort, but..." "I don't remember too much about Vietnam after that day actually." "I'm not sure of the day, whether it was close to the end of my tour, I don't know, but I don't really have much of a recollection of Vietnam or what happened after that sad day." "[ Soren ] Before Glenn Rickert's body was shipped home, there was a short memorial service held to honor the popular captain." "When my father was given the assignment to shoot these pictures he initially refused, so saddened was he by the loss of his colleague." "When threatened with an Article 15 letter of reprimand, he reluctantly documented the ceremony." "We had been living up in Sellersville, Glenn Jr. and myself." "And that Saturday there was a Memorial Day parade and of course it came right down past our house, and we were outside." "And then it came down to the little town square and they had a little ceremony, and I'll always remember at that time I prayed and was thinking about all the women who were Widows or had lost loved ones, or mothers who had lost loved ones." "I said a prayer for them, just in remembrance because this was a Memorial Day parade and the next day was Sunday." "I had gone with Glenn's parents and then we came home to Glenn's parents' home in Souderton." "We came in the back door, and as we came in the back door, the doorbell was ringing at the front." "And I walked through the living room and saw the uniform and you just know." "So I opened the door, and the poor guy there, I said, "Just tell me he's not dead."" "And of course, what could he say?" "Just, "I regret to inform you."" "And then Glenn's morn came in the room behind me and she just started crying, because she just knew." "I mean, that's a day I'll always remember." "I'm feeling emotions right now because it's just something you don't ever want to hear, but the minute you see the uniform, you know they're not coming to tell you he's fine." "You know that it's bad news." "So that's how we found out." "We were together." "And After Glenn had been killed, the proceedings just stopped." "I had received one phone call the week I found out Glenn was killed." "They said, "We're sorry," and they hung up, and if I had wanted to go on, I had no connections, because Glenn was handling everything over there." "And it's been a source of guilt, like, whatever happened to Lan?" "I pray that maybe someone else adopted her, or that she was able to come here to America." "But I often wonder what happened to her." "Every once in a while I wonder if in fact this child got over here." "The follow up, again, the psychology or my psychology was such, and I think the psychology of a lot of the people that served over there was, you serve your time, you get back and then you get back into the world and you do your thing," "which is essentially what I did." "[ Inaudible conversation ]" "[ Rik ] Where Ring's death fell in terms of my activity," "I can't really recall now." "After he was killed, we defaced a billboard." "The billboard said, "To an unemployed veteran... peace is hell."" "And so we changed it with spray paint, "To a dead veteran... war is hell."" "And for the first time in the history of the Hartford Times newspaper, they printed a picture on the editorial page." "We wrote this letter about it called "Yours and uncertainty."" "We called ourselves "the Children of American Blood."" "But we were young, and We were immature." "When President Nixon mined Haiphong Harbor, a group of us, maybe 20 of us, got together." "We got 40-gallon steel drums and we made mines out of them." "We painted "Kaboom" on them and tied them with ropes and cinder blocks, and in the middle of the night, drove over the Connecticut River and dropped these drums off into the river and drove to the other side." "When it was all secure, people called all the media and said," ""We mined the Connecticut River," in a protest." "I used to say "Nixon," now I say "President Nixon."" "I hate the man, but there's a respect that's important." "And then we held a press conference in front of city hall in Hartford and turned ourselves in." "This is what we did and this is why we did it." "But that put the people onto us, whoever they were... the FBI, or army intelligence, whoever they were and they were parked outside our apartment so..." "So we moved, I was the last one to leave and I came to Vermont..." "The safety of Vermont." "We were no more liberating that country than we're liberating Iraq." "We weren't even invading." "We were trying to prop up a puppet state to our own ends, either for economic reasons or to "stop communism."" "Stop the domino from falling." "[ Elizabeth ] He changed." "He was always pretty serious, but I think this experience would be life-changing for anyone, and I think it was life changing for him." "In the immediate return, his startle response was high." "We were driving home from a trip right after he got back, and a helicopter flew over and he almost dove out of the car." "He was just much more..." "and that would be typical." "And I also think it made him more grave, and a little bit darker." "[ Peter ] I feel guilt about surviving." "That doesn't go away." "Collateral damage extends not only to the individual who survives, or is in fact killed, but there's a ripple effect." "It effects the family in physical and psychological ways." "Elizabeth essentially has had to contend with a different person than she married after one year." "The person you had or my offspring experienced a different person than I was before I went in the military, and those things don't go away." "Those things are perpetuated." "It's like the ringing in my ears from the concussion." "It's there all the time and it's very close to the surface and I can hear it all the time." "Sometimes it's louder, sometimes it's softer, but it's always there." "That's self-serving because I also know that it affects my son, my daughter, my wife." "It's not that I feel guilty for surviving." "I just..." "I just..." "Why do these things happen?" "It's hard." "I'm trying to find the right words." "I'm not guilty for surviving... but I guess you wonder, well... what made me walk away at the moment?" "Where was I going?" "Was I truly done there?" "Did somebody call me away to do something else?" "Why wasn't I there?" "I went years and years dealing with the symptoms, and then we figured out, "Oh, of course, it's post traumatic."" "So one of the options here is to take some anti-depressants or whatever, which didn't seem to do the job." "But it's still there." "It's not necessarily going to kill you, but it's there." "You can't rationalize it." "You can identify it, but you can't make it go away." "I would like to be able to remember everyone's face that I lost in my unit." "I would like to know the names." "I would like to be able to, in some way, go back through those..." "Even though they were horrible things..." "Because I just feel like I'm not doing justice to them to not be able to remember who the heck they were when... they died there right in front of me doing things we were all supposed to be doing." "I have a very low startle threshold." "If I was napping or if you came up behind me in the garage and tapped me on the shoulders, my reaction is to spin around or put up my hands, or somehow go into a defensive position." "I'm telegraphing to, whether it's Elizabeth or you or my daughter that the world is hostile." "If you want to survive, this is how you have to be, and it's an unspoken message, it's telegraphed." "I remember him overreacting to certain things, but the thing is that that's sort of, that's Dad." "So he will overreact to things, but then it'll be fine." "And his overreaction wasn't a big deal to me, ever." "Ever." "It was just the Way it was and it's sort of like," "I knew it wasn't something that he could control." "My daughter, my son, my wife have experienced somebody who, since coming back, often times does not take that step of thinking, but reacts as if in the jungle." "He's definitely been affected by Vietnam." "I mean, he probably was a different person before Vietnam, but he's not a bad person now." "He's a great person now." "Living with guilt is awful, and I think that guilt and regret and remorse and all those things are real wastes of emotion, because you can do something about them." "So if you feel guilty about something what can you choose to do?" "[ Peter ] I always had this interest in terms of finding where Loring Bailey was buried." "I checked a couple graves registrations and went on the Internet when the Internet was available, and found nothing in the immediate area." "And of course 20 years later, it was our first Memorial Day weekend here in Mystic." "Elizabeth said, "You're not going to believe,"" "or, "Take a look at the front page of the paper."" "And the front page of the paper had that picture I showed you of Loring Bailey, the son, in Vietnam, and the story that accompanied it had to do with Memorial Day and the mother and father living in Stonington which is four miles away," "three miles away, and the fact Loring is buried less than two miles from where I'm living right now." "In any case, I read the article and was incredulous that after all these years, and my failure to find where he was buried, the front page of the newspaper, sort of rubbed my nose in it saying, "Here they are, here's the family."" "So I picked up the telephone, introduced myself," ""I apologize in advance if this is a painful subject,"" ""but I just wanted to let you know I knew your son, and he was a wonderful person."" "Your father said..." ""You don't know who I am, but I was with your son"" ""in Vietnam and I was with him at OCS."" "And I said, "Oh, where are you?"" ""Well," he said, "I'm in Old Mystic."" "The thought that I had was, "Well, he must have picked up Ring's name from the stone", the monument down in Old Mystic."" ""And I hesitate to call you because I didn't want to bring back bad memories, and I hope you don't mind."" "He said, "I don't mind at all."" "I said, "I'll stop by sometime," and he said, "What are you doing in 10 minutes?"" ""We would like very much to see you."" "And he said, "Well I'd be glad to come over, and I'll come over as soon as I change my clothes."" "And I said, "Well that's fine." I hung up." "I turned to Dot and I said," ""I have no idea where he is, he's going in to change his clothes." "He couldn't have been at the monument in Old Mystic."" "It never dawned on me that he was living in the area." "So he came up to the front door and that's how we met, at the front door." "It was quite interesting." "[ Peter ] We've been visiting each other ever since." "And, as I told them, I was, for 20 years, 30 years, more interested in where he was buried than where they were living, which is probably a regret or probably a monumental oversight," "but that's the way it played out." "And I think he felt like he helped them to really get to understand what their son's..." "Some of the times that he spent in the last year of his life, because when your son is in training or OCS." "So just the stories he could tell, a little bit about what his last months might have been like, or what it was like in Vietnam." "I know he thinks he performed a service and really was helpful to them." "Dorothy obviously feels a loss, and is still very, very sensitive." "Not to say he isn't, but he's in military history and that kind of thing and follows the history of his son's involvement." "And then when we talk we talk about, typically I'm talking to the father." "I think about him now and it's just sadness, that a man would lose his son at the age of 24." "That the whole lifetime would be taken away." "And now here I am, I'm 60 years old and my son is a Marine." "And who'd of thought that my son [ chuckles ] would be a Marine?" "Now I fly an American flag in front of my house, and I wouldn't have thought of it then, or I would have flown it upside down or something like that." "[ Elizabeth ] I think it's fascinating, that at least you've told me, a number of people you've been in touch with about this process of making this, working on this film, where they have said, "I never thought I'd talk to anybody about this."" "I've never talked about this before."" "So remember that Dad, and many people, they don't talk about themselves unless they're asked." "I'll talk about myself whether you ask or not." "Dad's introverted, so if you look at type he's an introvert." "He generally needs to be drawn out." "And so when people say, "How was the war?" They want you to say "Fine."" "And they might say, you know, "What was the best thing that happened to you"" "or the worst thing that happened?"" "But if you sit down and say, "I want to know what was the hardest thing about it?"" "or "What was the best thing about it?" or "What elated you?"" "Those, I believe are the things that he's willing to talk about." "But you need to feel the interest when you're somebody that has his particular type, and I would think that'd be true of almost anybody." "It's not a conversation I ever have." "No one's interested." "You're interested." "Would you be interested if your father had not had a similar type of experience?" "Would you be asking these questions and things?" "Maybe you would... but this starts out with you wanting to know more about your father, and what his experience was, and what was going on at the time, and how did he deal with all this." "Was that the thing that started you?" "I mean, if you hadn't had that connection would it just have been something that happened in history, and you wouldn't be here today?" "I'm really glad you're here and I'm really glad I have a chance... to talk about Ring." "I'm just thrilled that I have a chance to... let this out." "I'm talking to you today because of the way you presented yourself as someone who's got a serious interest in putting together a little piece of history, some people that are intertwined somehow, and if there was something I could say that would add to that," "I'd be happy to do that, although I've never had a conversation like this with anybody else before." "When David graduated from Paris Island, and he was a young recruit," "Paris Island, eyes like deer in headlights." "We brought him home, and we passed through airports, and it was obvious that we were parents and he was a Marine." "And people came out of the crowd to shake his hand, to pat him on the back." "The respect was overwhelming, and as a parent it just made us immensely proud." "And I'm sure that that's what Mr. Bailey felt." "But the pride and the respect for my son is wonderful." "Is wonderful, you know, and I see it and I hear it all the time." "People say, "How's your boy doing?" "Where is he now?"" "And I always say, "Thanks for asking."" ""Thanks for asking because we're very proud of him, too."" "I have to say it's been interesting." "I have run into some people in the last few years, and not just when you go in and see a doctor at the VA, because they're all primed to say, "Thank you for your service."" "That's kind of part of their mantra down there." "But I have run into other people and it's caught me quite off guard when somehow they've found out" "And I'm not sure, I can't point to a specific conversation..." "But when they find out that I was in Vietnam and I was in the infantry, and very sincerely they say, "Thank you,"" "and... it catches me off guard." "Just saying it now has kind of..." "because nobody ever said that." "And I didn't realize anybody really thought about it." "It's kind of unnerving because I don't think I did anything to be thanked for." "It could have been anybody." "It could have been anybody going, anybody being killed, anybody surviving." "The difference between somebody wounded, somebody being killed, somebody not being hurt- a couple of inches, a few seconds in time." "When my son is in harm's way..." "Barbara and I live with a level of fear." "Every car that comes down the street, I look to see if it has government plates." "That's hard." "[ Soren ] Because you know what that looks like?" " I do." " Those shoes." "Oh, shiny." "Shiny, shiny shoes." "How do they get them so shiny?" "Three or four months into the tour, I was noticing the ringing, and the inability to understand people when they're talking." "And I went to Chu Lai and they tested my ears and said," ""You've got a hearing loss in the mid range."" ""The nerves are destroyed." "It's not temporary."" ""The middle range is where the consonants are formed,"" ""which means you're going to have trouble understanding people when they talk."" ""Here are some earplugs,"" ""so if you're gonna be in a situation where there is loud noise, wear your ear plugs."" "[ Soren ] My father took this picture in Vietnam in 1970." "Seconds later he took this one." "When he first showed me these prints, he asked me if I could tell the difference." "I pointed out the obvious, or what had become obvious to me during the making of this film after pouring through hundreds of others like it." "The barrel of the 155mm Howitzer is recoiled in the second picture, and you can see the dust rising from the ground under the weight of the gun's thunderous discharge." "He asked me if I noticed anything else and I couldn't think of anything." "So he pointed to the people in the second shot and said," ""They're all holding their ears." "I was holding a camera."" "[ Elizabeth ] You know, you think back on your life and what are the things you wouldn't change?" "I think this is one of the things that he wouldn't change." "It was phenomenal for him in the best way and the worst way." "[ Soren ] My father has often asked me why I'm making this film." "As different as we are, we share this story, this presence like the ringing in his ears." "My wife Carrie and I even named our firstborn son Loring, after both Loring Baileys, junior and senior, who meant so much to my father." "And I suppose the journalistic process of making a documentary has brought me closer to him." "But in this picture, he still looks about as far away from me as my namesake," "Soren Peter Sorenson I, born over a century before me in Denmark in 1871, pictured here at 17 in his Danish military uniform." "♪ On the train from Jackson to Chicago. ♪" "♪ Providence is yet to be revealed. ♪" "♪ Standing on the platform by my window. ♪" "♪ Soon you will be swallowed by the fields. ♪" "♪ A sudden blur of trees A sudden blur of trees. ♪" "♪ Rushing through the delta veins. ♪" "♪ On the train from Jackson to Chicago. ♪" "♪ Licking all the wounds that never healed. ♪" "♪ Turn around Turn around. ♪" "♪ Now you're at the end of the line. ♪" "♪ Don't look down Don't look down. ♪" "♪ You're standing on the shoulders. ♪" "♪ You're standing on the shoulders of giants. ♪" "♪ Every day the shadow of my father. ♪" "♪ Is painted on the walls and on the floors. ♪" "♪ It stretches out across the open water. ♪" "♪ And crashes on the sandy eastern shores. ♪" "♪ Searching in the dark Searching in the dark. ♪" "♪ Looking for a clue to what's been lost. ♪" "♪ Now I see the shadow of my father. ♪" "♪ On the shoulders of the one that came before. ♪" "♪ Turn around Turn around. ♪" "♪ Now you're at the end of the line. ♪" "♪ Don't look down Don't look down. ♪" "♪ You're standing on the shoulders. ♪" "♪ Standing on the shoulders of giants. ♪" "♪ A clear run A blue sky. ♪" "♪ Downhill A free ride. ♪" "♪ A stone's throw A straight line from here. ♪" "♪ Turn around Turn around. ♪" "♪ Now you're at the end of the line. ♪" "♪ Don't look down Don't look down. ♪" "♪ You're standing on the shoulders. ♪" "♪ Standing on the shoulders. ♪" "♪ Turn around Turn around. ♪" "♪ Now you're at the end of the line. ♪" "♪ Don't look down Don't look down. ♪" "♪ You're standing on the shoulders. ♪" "♪♪ You're standing on the shoulders of giants. ♪♪"