 Richard H. Adkins Jr.
Champaign, Illinois
Champaign Police officer - He joined the Marines right out of high school and went to Vietnam as a military policeman in 1969. He was stationed on Monkey Mountain in Da Nang in the 1st Marine Air Wing unit
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 "I was just a poor black kid from the inner city, Kansas City, never gone anywhere, never been anywhere. I hadn’t seen the country, even the United States, and then all of a sudden you’re sent to the other side of the world. It was a real shock."
"We got off the air-conditioned plane and we hit this 110 degree temperature, with
100 percent humidity. It took my breath away. And then everyone around us had black pajamas on, so I thought we’d landed in Hanoi. I was terrified. The smells and sounds were completely different. The moon was three times the size that it appears here in the Midwest and it was frightening. It was like going to another planet. That’s the only thing I can relate it to. For a kid from the Midwest that had never been away from home, it was just like going to another planet."
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