MWSA Interview with Joshua Bowe

Date of interview: 28 February 2020

Joshua Bowe is the son of Vietnam Veteran, Wilbur Bowe. He is the author of “The Ground You Stand Upon: Life of a Skytrooper in Vietnam”, the true story of his dad and the men he served with. Joshua grew up in Cameron, Wisconsin and now lives with his family in Chaska, Minnesota. From 2007 to 2019, he served in the Minnesota National Guard. He continues to work for the National Guard as a civilian.

Website: www.thegroundyoustandupon.org
Amazon Author Page: www.amazon.com/Joshua-E-Bowe/e/B07FBNVVYF
Goodreads Author Page: www.goodreads.com/author/show/18109800.Joshua_Bowe
Facebook: www.facebook.com/thegroundyoustandupon.org
YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCqtTUv5i7WaW2gwnxSQmjKA

MWSA: How did you find out about MWSA?

Joshua Bowe: I heard about MWSA through a fellow who served in my dad’s company in Vietnam, Joe Sanchez. I can’t thank him enough for all the help and encouragement he gave me while working on the book. We had many long conversations about his time in Vietnam and his memories of the friends he made there. He had also written a book of his own, “True Blue: A Tale of the Enemy Within”, that included some of his memories of Vietnam, but was mostly about his experiences as a cop in New York City. He told me about MWSA and suggested that I join. I’m very glad that I took his advice and submitted our book for review. We had received many customer reviews on Amazon and elsewhere, but this was our first “Editorial Review” and I couldn’t have been happier with the results.

MWSA: Why did you write “The Ground You Stand Upon” and what sets it apart?

Joshua Bowe: When I was a kid, we would look at my dad’s photos from Vietnam on our Kodak Carousel slide projector. Clicking through each of them, he would point out which of his buddies got killed and which ones made it, but I never really knew that much about any of them or what they went through. All I could have told you is that they walked around in the jungle and got shot at. A few years ago, I started thinking about how my dad had taken part in something that was a really big deal, so to speak – something that virtually tore our country apart, and he was right there as an infantryman on the front lines. Initially, I just wanted to know more. Then I thought I should write something as a record or memoir that would be of interest to family and friends, perhaps. Before long, I realized that there could be a real story here. Eventually, I just got carried away and decided to publish a book.

I’ve read dozens of Vietnam biographies and found most of them to be very fascinating. I’ve given all of them a “five-star” rating, even if they were just okay. I know how hard it is to actually write a book, and I just can’t bear to give a fellow author anything less. What makes our book special, is that it is primarily written by someone who wasn’t there. It is because of this, out of necessity perhaps, that the story draws upon so many different sources and individuals. On the one hand, it represents a monumental challenge, telling the story of something I never experienced for myself. On the other hand, it actually makes the story better, in that the reader gets to see the war through the eyes of several different young men from within the same company.

What also makes this book unique, is that it features many letters sent home from the war zone. Most are from my dad, but there are also several from two other soldiers within the company. Two of them are written from one soldier to comfort the mother of another soldier, a friend of his who had been killed in action. They are special because they were written in the moment, rather than decades later. They are raw, unfiltered, and not tinted by hindsight. They are about as “first-hand” as you can get. I suppose it’s kind of funny for my dad to think of it, how all these words casually scribbled to his mother back then would someday become part of a book read by thousands of people.

MWSA: How did you research this project?

Joshua Bowe: I started with my dad’s personal memories, which were mostly bits and pieces, fragments, and images that had stuck in his mind over time. He recalled their training at Fort Carson, and how his platoon sergeant was too scared to jump off of the rappel tower. He also remembered how during one night in the jungle, that same platoon sergeant approached my dad while pulling guard duty, asking if he could teach him how to pray. He recalled how his platoon sergeant got shot shortly thereafter, and how their First Sergeant ran through the firefight, dragging him back. He remembered Thanksgiving Day 1966 as their worst day. Seven were killed in the rice paddies and he recalled helping to carry the body of one of their radio operators to the helicopter, and how part of his skull was missing. He remembered his best day, just after Christmas when he and his buddy went to see a Bob Hope show at base camp in An Khe – and how one day a blonde model came to visit them at their outpost, the first time he saw a girl in a miniskirt. There wasn’t a lot of detail to these memories, and exactly when and where they occurred remained a mystery until I did more research.

“The closest I will ever come to time travel” is how I described reading his letters in the book. I knew he had some of these letters, but he’d told me before that they were really quite boring and didn’t say much about their battles or what they were doing. Well, he gave me a cardboard box filled with over a hundred letters. The first was from his in-processing at Fort Leonard Wood, before flying to Fort Carson for basic training. The last was written just after they had made their final patrol in the jungle, on an outpost in the mountains while waiting to be flown out. They didn’t get into much detail regarding their battles, but they did portray who my dad really was during this time – a twenty-year-old kid mostly interested in cars, drinking beer, girls, and having a good time, in pursuit of which he wasn’t afraid to break the rules. In several letters, he talks about the Vietnamese villagers, how well he gets along with them, learning their language and joking around with them. He especially liked the kids, remarking how they were, “just like kids back home.” Many soldiers would have mixed feelings toward Vietnamese civilians, in a war zone where you could never tell friend from foe. And yet, my dad’s letters would always reflect an abiding respect for their humanity.

I searched the National Archives website, and generated a list of names of all of those killed in action from my dad’s company. Along with their date of death, it also provided each soldier’s rank, date of birth, hometown, and region or province where they were killed. The list quickly depicted which days were the worst for Alpha Company. Four killed on October 4th 1966, two on November 1st, five on the 19th, and seven on the 24th, Thanksgiving Day – then four on February 13th 1967, one on March 27th and another on the 31st, another on May 16th, and seven on the 19th. I knew their names, their ages, and the provinces in which they gave their lives, but that was about it. And so, I began looking up each of these names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Wall of Faces at vvmf.org, and this helped to gather background stories of Alpha Company’s killed in action. On this website, many family members, fellow soldiers, and hometown friends have posted their memories of the fallen. Some of them also provided their email address, and I attempted to contact each of them. Many of them provided further information about the friend or family member they had lost. Many were also interested in learning more about what their loved one had experienced in Vietnam. One was the daughter of the very first soldier in the company to be killed in action on October 4th 1966, their first major battle. Another was the niece of a soldier who was killed alongside the other in the same battle.

Eventually, I came into contact with the nephew of that radio operator who my dad recalled carrying to the helicopter on Thanksgiving Day 1966. He had become the “keeper” of sorts for all things related to his time in Vietnam. Among the things he’d kept over the years were all of the letters his uncle sent home from Vietnam. He shared them with me, and they became an important part of this book. Intertwined with my dad’s, his own letters offer another view on all of the things that Alpha Company’s soldiers were going through, from their training at Fort Carson to their first missions in the jungle. He expresses his hopes and ambitions of possibly becoming a helicopter pilot, going back to college, and a girl back home he wants to marry. They also tell of his concern for the poor villagers of rural Vietnam, and how he wants to come back when it’s all over to help them recover from this terrible war. It was particularly sad to read the last letter he sent home before he was killed.

The willingness of these people to share their letters, photos, newspaper clippings, and memories – some of them very personal and heartbreaking – contributed so much to the writing of this book. The most rewarding part was being able to share with them this story about their loved ones and the other young men they served with.

The last part of our research took place at the National Archives near Washington, D.C. where we found the 5/7th Cavalry’s situation reports and daily staff journals for each day of the battalion’s first year in Vietnam.


MWSA: Your Acknowledgements mention nearly twenty soldiers from your dad’s company who contributed to the book. How did you find them all and what was it like to speak to them?

Joshua Bowe: When I started this project, there was only one fellow soldier from my dad’s company that he was still in contact with. Fortunately, he resides close to where I live in Minnesota. We went to visit him one afternoon in June of 2017. They talked about their first patrol through the jungles along Highway 19, one miserable night spent trying to sleep in the middle of a rice paddy, and how they would go for months on end wearing the same fatigues, until they were coming apart at the seams and falling off of their bodies. I also looked up the veterans’ organization for my dad’s old battalion, the 5/7th Cavalry Association. My dad had been getting their newsletters for years, but never got involved. I emailed one of the group’s organizers and he called me back shortly thereafter. His first question for me was why hasn’t my dad been to any of their reunions. Well, he gave me contact information for someone who was in Alpha Company, and that got it started. Each time I talked to someone, they would usually give me the number for someone else in the company that I could talk to. It was a long process, but well worth it in the end – and both my dad and I made some good friends along the way.

Because this was going to be a book about my dad, many of them – at least at first – didn’t think that I’d be interested in their own personal experiences. I had already written a “rough draft” of the book, and so I sent a copy to some of them to get their feedback. Once they were able to see what I was trying to do, to really tell the story of the whole company, that’s when they started to tell me more about their own experiences. As the narrative evolved, it remained focused on my dad’s experience, but with the personal stories of many others interwoven throughout the chapters.

One soldier who contributed a lot of his personal accounts to the book mentioned to me that he had kept a journal of sorts while he was there, and that he had wanted to someday use that journal to write a book about his own time in Vietnam. He was in the Army for almost thirty years, stationed at various bases all over the country, and so he kept a lot of his stuff at his father’s house. Well, one day his dad got sick of storing all of his stuff and threw a bunch of it out, including his Vietnam journal, ending his hopes of ever writing that book. In lieu of that, I think he was happy to see this book published that includes many of his own personal memories along with those of his friends.

Speaking with these men was really amazing. When you endeavor to gather personal war-time accounts, it never goes quite the way you envision it. You start out with a list of questions but usually end up talking about a bunch of other stuff. Open-ended questions tend to be more useful than highly specific ones. This was hard for me to learn at first, because I had a lot of specific questions I was trying to answer. But questions about what exactly happened here on this particular day tend to generate a response of “yeah, I don’t remember anything about that.” I found that just listening to them talk and reminisce with each other is often better than asking questions at all. Even better if alcohol is involved. The conversations will go all over the place. You typically don’t get exactly what you’re looking for, but more often than not, you come away with something even better.

I have been very fortunate that so many of these men have shared their memories with me, someone they had never met before. Some of those memories were very painful, like that of kneeling in a stream to wash the blood from the radio of a friend who had just been killed. Recalling that same day, another fellow spoke of how their special “Thanksgiving Dinner” had arrived by helicopter that night, after the battle where seven of the company’s men had been killed. They were all starving after a long day of fighting, yet he couldn’t eat because his best friend was dead. He choked up a bit when he spoke of this with me on the phone, recalling the friend he lost over fifty years ago.

These men are now mostly in their seventies, some in their eighties. But through reading their letters and learning about their own experiences, I don’t see them as old men. To me, they are still the nineteen and twenty-year-old kids they were when they were sent to war.


MWSA: Was this an emotional experience for you?

Joshua Bowe: Yes, very much so. There were a lot of sad and poignant stories that I was trying to relate through the book, and it was sort of draining at times. It was kind of strange though, this one moment when I had just begun my research. It was the middle of the night in my office, and I had somehow come across a military-type map that depicted the first major battle my dad’s company fought in, at least the first where lives were lost. Amongst the military symbols, I managed to find the one that represented Alpha Company. A little red “explosion” symbol depicted where they had made contact with the enemy. I could see that it was near a village between two rivers that emptied into a lake near the South China Sea. I already knew something of what happened that day, how they were on a mission to rescue a downed helicopter pilot and his gunner. I also knew something of the backgrounds of the two Alpha Company soldiers who were killed in this battle. But there was something about seeing it on the map, the very spot in the world where my dad first watched dead fellow soldiers being flown away on helicopters. Whatever it was, everything just seemed to come out of me, and I just sat there and cried for a while.

MWSA: What was it like to read the documents you found at the Archives and what did you learn from them?

Joshua Bowe: Talk about “time travel”… these were the original documents from the war zone, daily staff journals and situation reports typed up by some military clerk sweating in a hot canvas tent over fifty years ago. Many of the pages held stains of both coffee and reddish-brown Vietnamese dirt. Some of these reports included hand-drawn maps of the battle sites. I had actually put off making the trip to the Archives while writing the book, because it involved a great investment of both time and money with no guarantee of what we would find there. All that we knew before traveling to Washington, was that there were some boxes there with material related to the 5/7th Cavalry. We had no idea what we would actually find in those boxes.

Basically, I learned what the company did, where they went, and how many of its troopers got wounded each day. The situation reports were a summary of each company’s daily actions, and the staff journals served as a “call log” for all the radio communication between the battalion command post and each of its companies during their missions in the jungle. The reports and journals included grid coordinates, which allowed me to plot the company’s movements on the map. The maps I used were topographical U.S. military maps from the era, so I could see the mountains they climbed, how tall and how steep they were, how far they marched on each patrol, and what the surrounding terrain was like. This allowed me to picture in my mind what each scene in the story looked like, then translate that scene into some kind of narrative. The reports also discussed the weather conditions each day. To say the least, it rained a lot.

The staff journals in particular, helped to illustrate which areas were heavily populated with civilians – with plenty of enemy fighters mixed in, of course. Whenever they patrolled in the region known as Bong Son, the journals would be filled with radio transmissions regarding villagers who were wounded or sick, or who were being evacuated, as well as those suspected of being Viet Cong who were being interrogated. They also recorded countless encounters with the enemy during the same time periods. It helped to paint a portrait of what it must have been like – one minute helping evacuate a wounded civilian from a village, the next minute getting shot at from another hut in the same village or being blown up by a hidden land mine. The journals also documented each time a medevac chopper was called in, and it was amazing to see how often they had to evacuate someone for heatstroke. One particular entry noted a soldier with a temperature of 103 who was heaving blood. They also noted several violent encounters with water buffalo and bamboo vipers, unique and inventive booby-traps, accidental weapon discharges, and all sorts of mishaps and misadventures.


MWSA: What did you learn from this experience?

Joshua Bowe: I’ve learned that those who have faced real combat rarely speak of their bravery as they are more likely to tell you about their own comical mishaps and misdeeds. Speaking of their battles and firefights, they are more likely to just tell you how scared they were, rather than speak of their own courage. If anyone I spoke to had been awarded a medal for valor, I would typically only find that out from someone else.

I’ve also learned that everyone is different, not just in what they remember, but how they relate those memories. Some guys are more reserved, careful not to exaggerate or to say anything untoward about their fellow soldiers. Others just lay it all out there and tell you exactly how they feel. In general, it seems that the guys from New York and New Jersey fall into the latter category, while those from the midwest, like my dad, are more reserved. I was talking about this with a co-worker of mine who is a Major in the Army and who grew up in New Jersey. She says, “yeah, if we don’t like you, we’ll just tell you to your face.”

Learning the stories of those who were killed, a couple of whom were good friends with my dad, made me think of how lucky I am to even exist. I realized how death in Vietnam was often random. I started thinking about how if this one thing would have happened a different way, or if this other thing wouldn’t have happened, how easily my dad’s name could have ended up on that big black wall in Washington, D.C.

MWSA: How many books have been distributed and how have the reviews been?

Joshua Bowe: Well over four thousand have been sold including the hardcover, paperback, and Kindle editions since it was published in May of 2018. That’s more than I ever thought possible, being a self-published author. It’s been very popular on Amazon. Every so often, I’ll check their rankings of books in the “Vietnam Biography” category. Most days our book is among the top fifty, and it even made it to #2 for a brief period. Many copies have also been sold in the U.K., Australia, and Europe.

Our book has received nearly two hundred ratings and reviews between Goodreads and Amazon, and they have been overwhelmingly positive. Seventy percent of our Amazon reviews have been “five-stars” and I’ve been very grateful for such a kind public response. We’ve also received three “Editorial” reviews, and I was really jazzed to read each of them. One was from the Military Writers Society of America, and they awarded our book the Silver Medal. Dad and I were especially honored by that. Honestly, I still get excited whenever I see another review posted on Amazon, especially if they mention how the book has touched their heart, or how they learned something about what it was like for a family member of theirs who fought in that war. Many Vietnam Veterans have posted reviews as well. For someone like me who has never been to Vietnam, an endorsement from someone who actually fought in that war is extra special.

MWSA: Did this project help your dad reconnect with any old Army buddies?

Joshua Bowe: Yes, and we’ve even attended a couple of reunions. The first was a 5/7th Cavalry reunion in Pittsburgh in 2018. Men from all four companies of the 5/7th Cav were there. Here we met up with an old friend from my dad’s hometown who served in Delta Company during the same time. They’d actually first met while standing in line to be inducted at the Chippewa Falls Post Office in 1965. During one evening in Pittsburgh, a guy known as “Krazy” Karl, one of the organizers, was speaking to the group as we sat at tables in one of the hotel’s large banquet rooms (I learned that Karl had earned his nickname by stealing the Charlie Company First Sergeant’s car and taking it for a joy ride while at Fort Carson). At one point he mentioned how he had finally met once again, someone he remembered from their training at Fort Carson, a fellow named Wilbur Bowe. I looked over at my dad and he looked nervous. In fact, I could see the tiniest of sweat beads beginning to form on his forehead. Karl asked him to come up on stage, and when he did, Karl gave him a big hug and everyone applauded. Dad returned to our table and said, “Man, I was scared there for a minute.” I asked why and he replied, “I was afraid he was going to ask me to speak!”

We went to another reunion in Albuquerque in 2019, a smaller affair that was just Alpha Company. A few months before this reunion, a good friend from my dad’s platoon, Martin Quinn, called to say he would meet us there. He was from New York City and had never attended one of these reunions before. He and my dad were really close buddies during their time in Vietnam, often sharing a foxhole together. They had kept in touch after the war, and dad visited him once while on vacation in New York in 1993. Since then they had lost touch with each other. At this reunion, they were finally reunited after twenty-seven years. After a few hours of reminiscing, we pulled out a copy of the book. Martin turned to the page that featured a letter he had written to my dad, telling of the deaths of three of their friends on May 19th 1967. My dad had never actually seen this letter until I had found it mixed in with his own letters home. You see, my dad was home for a few weeks on emergency leave when this battle happened, and was already on his way back to Vietnam when Martin sent the letter to my dad’s home address in Wisconsin. Of course, Martin hadn’t seen this letter since he wrote it in 1967. While at the reunion, Martin shared many memories of my dad during their time together. He talked about what a “character” he was, always goofing around and cracking jokes, and how he was more apt to use his helmet for cooking things, rather than for protecting his head. He also told me about what really happened on May 19th 1967, when their friends were killed. Before I met Martin, that day had always been shrouded in mystery for me. Those memories represented what I had felt was really missing from the original book that was published in 2018. And so, those memories have been incorporated into the latest revision, now making the story truly complete.