Oral History Interview with Tom Daly

BROOKS: Today is November 4th, 2015. This is an interview with Tom Daly who served with the Marine Corps from 1967 to 1969 including a tour in Vietnam. The interview is being conducted at Mr. Daly's home in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The interviewer is Ellen Brooks and the interview is being recorded for the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Oral History Program and Tom is an artist featured in the War:Raw exhibit which is currently at the museum. All right, so if we can start at the beginning. You tell me where and when you were born.

DALY: Well, my birthday is January 13th, 1948. I was born in Chicago. And lived there through the service. Just recently I've moved up here to Wisconsin, about four years ago. We're renting this house here, enjoying our stay. My dad used to own a fishing resort up in northern Wisconsin, up around Butternut on the Turtle 00:01:00Flambeau. We'd been going up there for years, since I could remember two weeks out of the year for a long time and his dream was to own a fishing resort so when it came time for him to retire, he folded his cards and put everything on a big flatbed trailer and had his friends drive it all the way up to the north woods. That was good, that was a good thing for him. It was his dream all his life, was to own a resort up in Wisconsin. I guess the industry isn't doing so good nowadays but at the time it was--it was enough to keep him in fresh clothes and a meal on occasions. He enjoyed it a lot. He passed away in '88, then my two 00:02:00brothers took that lodge over. They've recently sold that. So it's kind of sparse up there. I guess they closed a lot of the lodges and when they sold my dad's lodge they--the stipulation was that because the two brothers were in business together that if they sold it they both had to agree to that sale. Then the new owner he took it, subdivided the land, built some A-frames on it and made it private property. But very familiar with Wisconsin. Loved it, still love it. Don't have to travel so far to go fishing anymore.

BROOKS: Tell me a little bit about growing up in Chicago.

DALY: It was a south suburb, right on the outskirts of Chicago called Oak Lawn. Grew up in that neighborhood in the fifties and sixties, I recall. A good 00:03:00childhood because we had a lot of space to roam around in, there was big fields across the street from our house that was--it was pretty big. It was--could be measured in square miles and we spent most of our days out there in the woods. It was the place where I ended up going to high school down the block, graduating from there and then working for Bethlehem Steel outta high school until I enlisted.

BROOKS: So why did you decide to enlist?

DALY: I don't really know if it was a conscious decision and it wasn't unusual for me to go do things without deciding what I was going to do but I found 00:04:00myself in a recruiter's office one day and the sergeant behind the desk told me that he could only give me a four year enlistment but if I was to come back in two weeks he could get me a two year enlistment. He qualified that with that if I liked the Marine Corps I could sign up for more if I wanted more. I was fortunate enough to take his suggestion and sign up for two, so.

BROOKS: And why the Marines?

DALY: No particular reason. I guess probably the guy a couple doors down the block was a World War II veteran, he was in the Marine Corps. I had an older 00:05:00cousin that was enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was--and not that I even consciously thought about them--it was just coincidence and felt that's probably where my calling should be so I went there.

BROOKS: And at that time did you know that it was likely you'd go over to Vietnam?

DALY: It was a mystery in my decision to go in and it probably wouldn't have made much difference but I wasn't politically motivated, I didn't watch news programs. News programs back then were only on at certain times in the evening and I don't really recall ever hearing about the country of Vietnam and the war. In the sense that I had a cousin that was in the Korean War that was wounded, a 00:06:00Purple Heart recipient and I just wanted to probably--and I don't think I every really completely answered this question--but I probably just wanted to do something else with my life that happened to be there at the time. I quit my job and signing up and telling the parents "I'm going in the Marine Corps." They were all like, "Oh god. Okay." You know.

BROOKS: They weren't excited?

DALY: Well, I don't recall them being too excited over anything I did and they weren't surprised probably by my action. But I followed up on that recruiter's suggestion. I went back in and signed up two year agreement to go into United States Marine Corps.

BROOKS: And then, straight to basic training?

DALY: Basic training in California at Camp Pendleton. MCRD they call it, Marine Corps Recruit Depot. To this day I can't figure out how many weeks it was--eight, ten, twe--I don't know. Just I kinda like put one day together and got through that and then the next day would take care of itself. It was an eye opener, I recall pulling up on the base in a bus from the airport - LAX - and making a comment in my own head that, "Wow, this place looks--the grass is cut, windows are nice and clean, this place is so neat. I wonder who does that?" And it wasn't too long before I found out how this all looks the way it does. We'd 00:08:00have morning working parties but boot camp was primarily for physical rebuilding. They built you from the ground up. They taught you how to tie your shoes, how to dress yourself and what they expected was what they taught you. And any deviation from that was--it wasn't going to happen without some kind of recourse. It was an interesting time of my life. It was probably where the--where an adult--where a kid turns to be an adult, when he has to live under that kind of supervision.

Being in boot camp for about a week or so they changed drill instructors on us. They kept shipping our drill instructors over to Vietnam and replacing them with two new drill instructors and each time that happened like an ordinary platoon 00:09:00would get two drill instructors and a platoon commander and they would facilitate your training but with our platoon--there's four platoons in a series. Our series was 3678, I think, was the number of our platoon but the other three platoons had their two drill instructors and one platoon commander intact for the entire time of their boot camp and ours just kept rotating guys in there. New DIs new--four platoon commanders and eight different drill instructors. It was--it was tough, it was little tougher on us than it was the other guys cause each new drill instructor and platoon commander expected a 00:10:00little more out of you and we thought we were giving a lot to begin with and so it was like a constant feeling that we're just not good enough. We ended up graduating as the honored platoon of the series which is kind of--it was a surprise, I thought we were all a bunch of shit birds and, "We're not going to make it through this, they'll probably just jail us when we're done."

But it was amazing to have that announced to--we didn't know it was coming until we had the graduation ceremony. We were sitting in an auditorium, the facilitator that graduation was a captain and some of the questions he asked and 00:11:00statements he made was, "Who gained more weight?" and so that was kind of pointed out to people. I went in I was 167 pounds from high school and I went--they brought me up to 200 pounds of solid muscle and the guys that were overweight, they brought them down. So we looked like a carbon copy stamp of each other, you know, in uniform. We all looked pretty much the same and they did a good job on making us Marines. They didn't do a good job of letting us know that someday this will be over and you're going to go back to the real world and that's where the problems begin, you know. It's hard to act like a Marine in public when you're not surrounded with your buddies. Yeah, that's just my thought about that.

And then after boot camp we went further training was in to infantry training 00:12:00regiment - ITR. We learned about weapons and tactics and then after ITR we went to Schools Battalion which was an assignment based on your grades in school and their need for particular MOS, which was Military Occupational Specialty. Mine happened to be 2531, that was my number for my trade, which was a Field Radio Operator. That's where I ended up graduating from that school.

BROOKS: How did you end up with that MOS?

DALY: Well I'm thinking that they probably needed a lot of radio operators and--could you pause there?

[break in recording]

BROOKS: So you were talking about how you got the MOS.

DALY: Yeah, I should back up a little bit. We knew--my first inkling that I knew we were going to be going to Vietnam didn't come--it came at the--after graduation and we went back to our area, our billeting area, and that's when our drill instructor sat down with a clipboard and on the clipboard was our platoon - thirty or so guys. Next to each name there was--there's this destination for all this training they put us through and it was indicated with the word WestPac 00:14:00- West Pacific. I recall--I mean it was kind of obvious that they were training us for war all boot camp but still that--the Vietnam thing was just an angle that I heard. I mean, I was aware of it but I didn't realize what was going on over there. Remember sitting in a group on the grass. They call it the grass - it's sand [laughs] but they call it the grass. It's out in front of the billeting huts. I don't know if you ever saw Gomer Pyle, USMC the comedy sitcom. It was kind of the billeting structure was just like that, they called them Quonset huts. But we were all sitting out there and the drill instructor would 00:15:00call names and 2531. I was already assigned the schooling that I was going to be taking and the destination from there, from Camp Pendleton. And he called my name and he said "2531. WestPac." So I'm--"What's 25--?" He says, "Radio operator. That's what that is, shut the hell up over there." Very stern. All right, so now I had some more information to work with. I was going to be a radio operator, trained as a radio operator and I was going to go to war.

So then we went in to Infantry Training Regiment where we learned special tactics and our skills for compass and then in to School's Battalion and we ended up studying our trade which was learning how to run different radios. 00:16:00There's the TRAC-83, there was PRC-47 and there was PRC-25. I ended up learning how to use all three of those different radios and some of them were made for--well, just better, you know, stronger and reach out a little bit further and a little more complicated but I was going to be a field radio operator so I was going to end up carrying a radio on my back and supporting a platoon in--or a squad once we got over there. So I thought. That didn't happen. So I ended up after Schools Battalion--well what happened at Schools Battalion is before we graduated we were going to take the final exam and our teacher said that if you 00:17:00have a certain--I forget what was, ninety-two percentile--going in to the final exam, he said, "You don't even have to take the final exam, you can just sign your name and that's good because we know you know what we've taught you. It's in you."

So that's what thirteen of us did, out of thirty guys. And what happened was that we went in to take the exam, we put the date on the paper, we signed our names, pushed it across the table, got up and left, went outside and started smoking cigarettes or whatever else we decided to do and all these other guys that completed the test, those papers were given to the company commander for review and he's looking at 'em and saw thirteen blank copies of the final exam 00:18:00and he went, "What's this?" And he got pissed and he was going to put us in jail. In fact he had us arrested right on the spot and taken right back to our Quonset hut: "Stay here 'til something's figured out. Find out if you guys are going to jail or not." They did their investigation on it and found out that this teacher that taught us how talk on the radio said that and they found out that that's what happened and I never--none of us ever saw him again, I don't know where he ended up but probably not a good thing.

But we were instructed to take that course again, all over again. The thirteen of us had to take a special 2531 Field Radio Operator course again. That held us 00:19:00back for--and in the meantime we were under house arrest 'til we completed that program so no special privileges, "We're not going anywhere until you've finished this thing, show a passing grade on a final exam." That happened and after that we were allowed to go home. We had leave. We were assigned to leave and go for--I forget what it was--it was like three weeks or something at home and then with an extension of a couple more weeks ended up being closer to a month we were out of the loop and then we went back to--and that's something, it's been so long I can't recall exactly if that leave didn't happen after Infantry Training Regiment in between Schools Battalion or after Schools 00:20:00Battalion but in any case--in any event there was a leave extended to us and then after we returned we were formed up and sent by commercial aircraft over to Vietnam.

Da Nang proper was the air field that we flew into. Being without our guys that we went through boot camp and ITR with they were already--they're gone, you know, they're in the bush, they're doing their thing. Their duty is Vietnam. There was thirteen of us that just kind of showed up late for the game and they're in the fourth quarter already and then we showed up. "Well, here we are." And then they all split up and got their orders, they immediately found the helicopters to get on to be taken to their base--their new base or 00:21:00assignment. I found myself standing there alone and I'm like, "Well, I know all these guys are Marines but I don't know any of them." But I got my orders cut to go to Vietnam and the guy behind the desk--this was right around and just shortly after the Tet Offensive of '68. The guy that cut my orders he said, "I'm sending you to Quang Tri." He had this look on his face like, "Well you must not like tall people. I get that, okay." I grab my orders and jumped on a helicopter and went out to the airstrip and asked around. It was like nobody leading me around I just gotta go do this stuff for myself. I'm asking around and "Oh, it's that helicopter over there, go ask them, I think they're going to Quang Tri." 00:22:00The guy says, "Yeah we're going to Quang Tri eventually we'll get there. Jump on board." I got on there and we kinda got a tour from the air what Vietnam looked like. It was an eye-opener.

Then we ended up in Phu Bai first stop and walked over to the mess hall to get something to eat and they were serving lunch at the time and they had these big, fifty-five gallon drums with heaters in them with water and your mess tray was a steel tray divided up into sections and a piece of wire on it, you were supposed to dip your mess tray inside this hot boiling water but it was all kinda scummy like on a lake when you get that white scum along the bank there. It was all 00:23:00like a big eye opener after eating my first meal I didn't even want to put my lips on the utensils [laughs]. I was kind of scraping the food off with my teeth. It was just--Phu Bai it was just all red clay and it looked like hell, that place that I first landed. After that meal I jumped on the helicopter again and it took us to Quang Tri where I ended up walking over to the radio section telling them, "I'm a 2531. Here I am, reporting for duty." And that's when the sergeant in command walked up to me and started pushing me with his nose cross the tent area, explaining how he is the boss and I'm not it and--it was a weird 00:24:00"How do you do?" to get that kind of feeling from the guy.

That all--that's been a trait all through my life, sometimes my height--I'm six foot six and sometimes that intimidates smaller people and I've learned to live with their reaction to that. I understand that that can be challenging for them--and fearful in some cases I've felt that they were fearful of me because of that and their only response was inappropriate. I know in boot camp the one drill instructor we had, he came up to me. There was--I was one of two people 00:25:00that were unusual in our platoon. I was the tallest, the other guy was the fattest. This DI came in one night before we were hittin' the rack and we were all at attention and he walked up to me and put his Smokey the Bear hat right under my chin and then hit me right in the solar plexus, dropped me, I just almost passed out. I hit the deck. I'm coming to with him yelling, "Get off of my feet, you're at attention, standing." "Okay." I got up there again. He went over to the big guy and he leaned on the racks, the bunk racks, he leaned on there and he kicked him against the bulk head and dropped him. And then his work was done. He did that so he could gain respect and fear of the platoon. That was 00:26:00it; I never had any more troubles with this guy or him with us. It was his way of presenting the truth to you that he wouldn't soon forget, he'd beat up two of the biggest people in the place and then we kinda knew where he stood on that and there was never any argument with that stuff.

Anyways, I ended up in Quang Tri in a little tent up there that we had our little radios in. Eventually from that we did some perimeter watch with the radio on but most of my stay there in Quang Tri was perimeter guard in a fighting hole and stringing concertina wire around the base and just--night watchman, is the way I kinda look at it like--but eventually I did volunteer 00:27:00for--well, I should drop back. That radio unit I was assigned to was about ten or twelve guys. Maybe fifteen guys if you counted the Comm[unications] center next door. Those were the guys that had top secret clearance and the radio traffic that they got they were - because of their clearance - they were able to handle that kind of radio chatter and stuff so. Ours was--we were the field radio operator division of that Comm unit and what I discovered when I first got there that this was an Air[craft] Wing. It was called the 1st Marine Air Wing. It was a MAG, which was a Marine Air Group, helicopter squadron so with that 00:28:00knowledge it involved--knowing that some of the guys would volunteer, I noticed them volunteering for door gunner, helicopter door gunners, and decided that one day, "I think that I wanna do that." So I spoke up and they said "Sure." And then took us out and trained us how to, with a .50 caliber machine gun how to shoot from the air. Aerial combat.

Got on to that, that was a temporary additional deal though, it was thirty days of getting up at three-thirty in the morning, making it down to the air strip, checking out your .50 caliber machine gun, your ammo. I recall my first check out, the armory guy, sergeant, slid a five shot .38 pistol, revolver, on the 00:29:00counter after he handed me the machine gun. He pushed this small .38 across the counter-top. Picked it up and I put it in my pocket. It had six bullets in it and I didn't get any extra ammunition with it, it's just. I kind of knew what that was for and it was kinda obvious this is not really a combat weapon. This is going to have to be for self-defense or suicide. If you were caught, captured, or downed in the bush, your last thing to think about was that pistol zippered up in your flight uniform. But I ended up doing that for thirty days. The first fourteen days of it were light med evacs [medical evacuations]. We did 00:30:00one, two guys, here and there. Resupply. We brought troops in, we brought squads, platoons of Marines that were going to go into the bush and serve as riflemen. That's probably where my trade would have led me eventually but for the fact that I volunteered for being a door gunner, I ended up doing that instead of pounding the bush with a radio on my back.

So I remember writing home to my parents that, "There's nothing go on here, it's kinda boring." It was sixteen, seventeen hour days from pre-dawn to after--to nightfall. Checking you weapon back and next day check it back out, do all that 00:31:00stuff, so. After I wrote that letter home, the next day we were shot down. We had gone into--this was the middle of February of 1969--we ended up going into a landing zone in the A Shau Valley that was overrun the night before, the NVA had overrun the position and just tore the place up. Running around, I guess they had about four different accesses to the top of the mountain and then they met up once they got to the middle of the LZ, and spread out again, and they were busting the artillery. They did manage to disable one artillery piece and they 00:32:00ended up killing a bunch of guys and a lot more wounded. We got the call first thing in the morning to go in there and pick them guys up out of there. It was--that is one of the--one of the bloodiest battles that I had ever saw up to that point. It was all kind of like we're flying back and forth, just doing things that people do every day, going to work and comin' home. But that kind of opened my eyes to exactly what Vietnam was.

So with the Artists for the Humanities, that was one of my drawings that I--it never went away, it was always there and when I got the opportunity to draw 00:33:00that, I did that. It was kind of revealing to me. It was a painting, acrylic painting of two Marines with a poncho, rain gear, with another Marine in there and they were dragging him into my helicopter and set him down right behind me. He was missing a leg. A guy sitting next to me on the gun was another wounded Marine. He was missing a hand and all his clothes, whatever had exploded next to him had stripped off all his clothes and his hand with it. He was bandaged up but all this stuff took place at about--between three o'clock in the morning and 00:34:00seven am and it was over. In four hours they had--maybe three hours of time. We were called in, four helicopters, to pull out the wounded. And we were the first bird to land so they put the most severe injured on our bird and the other three birds I'm not sure, but I'm sure they got their share of casualties loaded onto their helicopter too. But once we were loaded we took these guys over to a place called Charlie Med, they called it up north--

BROOKS: Tom, I'm really sorry, I'm going to pause for a second.

[break in recording]

BROOKS: Okay, so we interrupted you. You were saying you had some pretty heavy casualties on--

DALY: Yeah, we--

BROOKS: --your helicopter?

DALY: We kinda mopped that place up. We got the guys onboard and took them to Charlie Med. The guy they put down behind me waslaying on the deck right behind my gun position and I had seen him and the other two Marines carrying him, come all the way to the back of the bird and then I was back looking at the perimeter to defend our bird. But--and they had set him down behind me and after they walked off the bird is when I turned around to look down to see what his injuries were and he was missing his right leg all the way up to his buttocks, 00:36:00and part of his hip and that was all gone. It wasn't included in the baggage that was laying there that I could see. Another guy that was all naked--what I found out later and actually only recently, I picked up on the internet, I typed in the words LZ Cunningham and it explains the whole battle that happened over a period of a couple of months, that the NVA were working on this hilltop. When it was first constructed they knew that artillery was going to be placed in there so they made a big deal out of--and plans to eliminate it. And so when it was overrun it was done by a bunch of professional soldiers that knew what they were 00:37:00doing and what the article goes on to explain is that they started with mortar fire and the mortar fire landing on the LZ drove the Marines into a defensive posture inside their bunkers and after the mortar fire stopped then the invasion started and the sappers came in up the mountainside. During the mortar invasion--the mortar rounds hitting, and the Marines inside their bunkers, this was what they wanted 'em to do, they knew they would do that. And while that was going on the sappers were cuttin' the wires and making ways to get up on top of the LZ. So they overran the position in that manner. The commander of the LZ he 00:38:00was severely wounded and a lot of guys died.

That's from a point of view of another Marine that was there, that's the story was written by him and the information that he got. It probably did happen that way and it was quite an eye opener, for years and I mean decades, I didn't even know where LZ Cunningham was on the face of the earth. I knew it was in Vietnam, I knew it was just south of the DMZ and this article went on to explain that it happened, the date it happened, and the area that it was in and what that area meant for Marines. It overlooked the Ho Chi Minh trail that came in from the north, north of the DMZ. There was quite a lot of battles fought in that area. 00:39:00Dewey Canyon was another one that the Marines lost a lotta guys in. But that general area they used to call it the A Shau Valley and it's--to me that's just synonymous with death. A lot of guys went in there and met their end.

So, and then the next day or so we probably dropped off probably another couple hundred guys into the bush and I don't know when these incidents happened but seeing as how I was on a temporary additional assignment as a door gunner, that 00:40:00whole episode was within a thirty day window. The first two weeks I recall it was very boring and I wrote that letter home that nothing's happening. But that next two weeks of February 1969 were--that's where the stuff really happened. On a daily basis we were shot and three--I recall three anti-aircraft positions opening up on us from way out there. It was my first time under fire as far as defense of the helicopter and our ship. When I first saw the muzzle flash out in the jungle I thought it was a street light - that's the city kid in me telling 00:41:00me that's a street light. The pilot said, "Shoot." and then another one opened up and then another one opened up so they were really trying to knock us down out of the air. They get big money for that stuff, there was rewards for shooting down helicopters - R&R involved with them and all that so they were on us. I recall knocking all three of those positions out, that got me decorated. The decorations I wear today are from that incident, that took maybe about fifteen seconds. I was awarded seven air medals, three combat strike Air Crew insignia wings and damn near a Purple Heart. It was exciting, it was exciting 00:42:00that. It's still exciting to this day when I think about it, it's like as if, you know, you were right there. I can smell the helicopter, I can smell the gas being burned, the exhaust from it, I can smell the gun powder, I can feel the barrel on the gun, you know, it was hot. And when that happened, that time we took that kind of fire, I returned it, we had a platoon of Marines on board that were going in and they were all standing up looking through the windows at me shooting. When I got done I turned around and looked at 'em like this and they were all just--cause they were just gonna go in so they were pumped and I saw 00:43:00that look on their face like, "Oh yeah!" There was no fear, these guys were trained killers. They wanted that, they wanted to go in there and do that. You'd see one of 'em that was--this is what they signed up for and this is what they did. We would land and the back hatch of the helicopter would go down and they'd go off the bird like one unit. And gone, into the brush. If you blinked you missed them, they're gone. Then occasionally we'd pick 'em up and we'd pick up their wounded, we'd bring supplies and we did a lot of that, so.

Then the next time we were shot down, this is the third time, it was small arms fire. We were kinda close to the ground and it was--well actually the very first 00:44:00time was--there was no reason that we shouldn't have been killed. When we were hit, we were hit with a--as soon as we left an LZ, I don't know what LZ we were on but we'd taken care of business, the helicopter was still revving under RPMs so we could take off, got our work done whatever that was 'cause I was just a gunner so I'm just looking for danger. I'm looking for any kind of action that might be bad for us. And we took off. And as we climbed a .50 caliber anti-air machine gun hit us, hard. It broke the--it almost broke the bird in two, knocked all the guidance system off, the guy couldn't even control--the pilot couldn't even control the helicopter but he did manage to get the nose around and it kind 00:45:00of went down like Frisbee 'cause we still had rotation on the blades and crashed inside the wire which was good for us. If it had gone the other way we'd have been laying out in the jungle and probably have been overrun out there. But he did get that bird around and it did crash inside the wire and jumped out. Our chase bird came, picked us up on the other side of the mountain, we had to run with all this gear, the .50 caliber machine gun, big bag full of four cans of ammo in there, my water, my bullet bouncer -- I used to wear a bullet bouncer like a tortoise shell, just covered you in thick armor front and back - helmet, just your personal gear. It's amazing that a guy could actually hold all that 00:46:00stuff. By the weight of it a gun is about eighty pounds and the ammo's another eighty pounds, you know, 150 pounds of gear suspended by two hands and a shoulder, running at the same time as fast as you can to get across the mountain to get to the helicopter and get out of there. The helicopter we got on, the door gunner in that bird was a field radio operator too that had volunteered to be a door gunner, and he was a real light build guy, kinda short. I remember approaching the bird and he'd yelling out to me, "Tom, are you all right?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But I saw the look on his face and it was like, he thought 00:47:00we were dead. He thought, "Oh man, these guys just got shot down." You know, he could see that happening from his vantage point 'cause he was up in the air and we're taking off and then the next one would supposedly come in.

After all of that crap was over [laughs] then we took some small arms fire was the final time we got shot down. They opened up on us with AK-47s automatic and just sprinkled the bird with holes. We had to set down--they didn't shoot the bird down as much as we had to go put it down and look around say, "What the hell just hit us?" But there must have been about five or six guys just emptying their rifles at us. Didn't see where it was coming from, we just found an area, we landed and we got outside the helicopter, we were looking at all the holes, 00:48:00right underneath the window of my gun there was--it was just chopped up, they were trying to hit the gunners cause they want to get the gunners then they wanted to the get the pilots. That's the area they were shooting for and they were all the bullet holes were right there where my feet would be. So I went back inside the helicopter and grabbed a can of ammo to move it to see if there's any bullets might have come through and how close they were to me, I could identify where I'd be sitting. There's the holes and there's the ammo can and the ammo can wouldn't move so I had to get up and kick it loose. It had gotten welded to the floor by the AK-47 rounds. They'd just welded that canister to the floor. But they were close. That was as close as I probably came to death as far as small arms fire goes.

But some amazing pilots, amazing skills these guys demonstrated under fire was just--and in my instance too, when the pilot got out of that crashed air craft, grab all of his stuff, let's get out of here, we did that and we all did it together and it was amazing that when you're under fire, you know, you don't have time to get confused, you don't have time to get scared, your adrenaline just fills your entire body and I don't care if I had two hundred pounds of stuff to carry back, you'dve picked it up and moved it along, you'd have got it back there.

So then the rest of Vietnam was like a holiday for me. It was--after all of that was behind me, it was regular duty as a perimeter guard in Quang Tri. I did have 00:50:00a small stint with teaching some of the kids in Quang Tri city. A friend of mine there Smitty was his name, his last name must have been Smith because everyone named Smith was called Smitty. Smitty worked for the chaplain and he used to--he had the chaplain's boat, the boat had a little outboard motor on it, he says, "You want to go with me into Quang Tri City." I figured if I lived through all of that shit, nothing's going to happen where I go from here on out so I went with him and we ended up in a school teaching 'em English. It was--they would applaud, we were the stars. We were introduced to the kids and they would applaud, "So glad you're here." They spoke Vietnamese and we spoke English. We didn't have that communications going on but we did help them to where we could. 00:51:00Then we come back on that boat, right by the chaplains. Yeah. It was--there was some good, some good came out of it, in a way.

BROOKS: Was that an assignment for you or was that just free time?

DALY: No, in fact Smitty didn't even have permission to leave the base but he worked for the chaplain and the chaplain wasn't around and there's the chaplain had a boat. It was an aluminum boat, it had an outboard ____[??] seven horsepower, ten horsepower motor on it. He said, "Let's go. Let's go." Really wasn't accounted--I didn't have to account to anybody during the day if I wasn't on perimeter watch or had a radio on doing search and destroy around our base. I 00:52:00mean I could have went anywhere. I could have got on a helicopter and flew down to Da Nang if I wanted to or just--I mean, nobody knew. I mean, the only thing I had to be there for was muster in the morning. "We're going to fall in, in the morning, we're going to take a head count, find out who's doing this, we're going to assign you your daily working party." Whatever it may be, whatever they needed fixed and workin;. You know, you had a daily routine and if you didn't get assigned anything, you were on your own for--'til next morning so, for twenty--almost twenty four hours you were do whatever the hell you want. Leave town, but be back by six am when we had the fall in for that stuff. And then took an R&R, went to Taipei, Taiwan and spent a week there, came back to 00:53:00Vietnam. Then pretty soon the word came down one day that, "Hey, your time's up here, you got thirteen and twenty, you're good." Thirteen months in-country almost, "Hit the road." "Oh." I mean I kind of knew it, I was checking off a calendar, I was gettin' short and I knew I was short but it was still a big surprise and five or six guys--maybe four --maybe four, five guys that I chummed around with there, saw me off.

After I checked out and took all my gear back to the--took my rifle back to the armory, my 782s and my ammunition, gave that to them, had a little talking to by 00:54:00the recruiter that was on the base, "Won't you sign up for a couple more years?" "No, I'm going home." "Well, you know we give you six thousand dollars here, complete your education." "I'm going home." "All right." In fact they wrote that on my DD214 that: "Will possibly not reenlist". But I made it very--it was very clear. "I'm not sticking around here." I often think thank that recruiter I signed up with for letting me know that I could take a two year enlistment instead of four. But my brother was a Marine, he joined after I did, and my cousin was a Marine, that next door neighbor was a Marine. It's an elite force to travel with, to be with, to relate to and when one Marine meets another 00:55:00Marine there's not a lot whole lot said except maybe, "Where'd you go to boot camp at?" At the time there was two bases - there was MCRD in California then there was Paris Island in the Carolinas. I went to MCRD and my brother went to PI. Why from the same family and all, I don't know. But that's just the way it worked out.

BROOKS: When did he join up?

DALY: I'm sorry?

BROOKS: When did he join up?

DALY: Well, let's see, I went in in September of '67, he probably went in October or November--I'm three years older than he is. I was twenty at the time so he was probably seventeen, eighteen. Probably just eighteen. He had gotten in 00:56:00some trouble and was before a judge and my dad was with him in the courtroom at the time for some grabass shit- he was in trouble. But he told the judge that, when he got a chance to speak, he said, "If I can get my son to go in the Marine Corps will you accept that as part of his punishment?" 'Cause they were going to jail him, they were gonna give him a couple of years or something for auto theft or something. But the judge says, "All right, you bring back his enlistment papers and show 'em to me within forty-eight hours and I will dismiss this." That's what they did. That's another miracle that happened - I was sitting in the hooch at Quang Tri one weekend and my brother come walking in the door. He 00:57:00had landed in Da Nang too but instead of checking in like I did, he checked in with the helicopter pilots. Said, "My brother's in Quang Tri and I'm going to go see him." He walked in the door: "Holy crap."

Yeah, there's one element I would probably have to come back down and talk to you about but for now I have to say that--that the area that I was in was called the Golden Triangle. This has to do with drugs that infiltrated the military culture there. And I think a lotta guys were a lot more aware of what was going 00:58:00on back in the States than I was. I didn't hear about the dissenting arguments that people were placing forward onto the country. My vision was clouded by a lot of marijuana use, and whatever else came along. Primarily marijuana. My homecoming was--it was--I don't know, it was the real growing up of Tom Daly. I started listening to news casts and even then the Vietnam stuff kinda went by 00:59:00me. There was some process going on in my brain that was keeping me from looking at what I had done as anything other than being heroic and I thought that maybe when we get home, we might be celebrated. [laughs] But little did I know the whole country was already geared to, "We want you guys out of there." For our own good which was--I later made peace with. My physiological appearance had changed. I grew long hair. I played a guitar and I played the hippy guy to melt in with the segment of society that did that. So I had this contradiction going on in my brain the whole time which was -- and even to this day - which was: I'm 01:00:00proud of what I did. I'm not real proud of what my government did but I was working for them at the time and I did what I was told to do.

Coming home, seeing the country in the state it was and trying to avoid it by masking - long hair, avoidance, not developing any kind of relationships on any level that superficial and pouring drugs and alcohol onto that for my program of recovery was--it came to a point where that stuff didn't work anymore. I ended up just alone and sick. Knew I needed help, I ran into a guy on the job--when I 01:01:00got home I ended up being a tradesman. I'm a retired roofer now, I worked for Local 11 in Chicago and got a good pension and couple of pensions from that organization and my social security now. After that was--that part of my life of drinking was coming to an end, I was around forty-five years old at the time and ended up meeting this guy that had nine years of sobriety. Was a good AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] member, decided he wanted to stay sober some more time himself so he was going to help me. I was like forever grateful for that man. He 01:02:00got me into--he got me oriented to life through twelve steps. Today, I'm twenty three years sober. Haven't touched another drop or drug and it's made my life an interesting journey. Here I am today, I belong to a VFW and it's good. It's a good life. [Pause] We help a lot of people and try to run a tight ship over there. Welcome home the combat warriors. When you sat down today, I took that 01:03:00call--excuse me I have to--

BROOKS: Sure.

[break in recording]

DALY: When you called today, that was a call for Friday. I have to go to a funeral of a Marine at Ryan Funeral Home at eleven o'clock in the morning. So that's what we do. So today I live life on life's terms. I remember what that 01:04:00guy did for me. I know that I have to do that for them, for others and I do that. I have several sponsees in AA right now that are sober people. Two of them I would have put on a list of people that would have never gotten this far, never sobered up in their life. Now they're faithful and productive members of society. One of 'em's a co-worker, the other guy's drinking partner that I used to drink with, so. But they're sober today, through the grace of god and the fellowship of the AA. This thing called Vietnam, it's alive, you know, it's just--it's going to be alive until the last veteran says, "That's it." But right 01:05:00now in the VFW we're facing a shortage of membership. The World War II vets are in their nineties, they're dying off fast. Pretty soon the Korean guys and then there'll just be the Vietnam guys. Maybe that's when all that ends. Just crazy, crazy to have a war. I don't know.

So I belong to Artists for the Humanities and I paint pictures. Some are deemed worthy enough to hang in museums [laughs]. It's kind of weird to me that 01:06:00somebody would say, "Hey I want to hang that up, show people." I guess my--that one painting of the two Marines pulling that guy out was--it's kind of sparse, there's only the two Marines and the one wounded Marine in the poncho and the helicopter on the horizon. That's actually all I really saw that day, was that. I was focused on that, with all the carnage going on around it and the helicopter just jammed full of guys that were wounded, that I picked that one incident to paint. I hope it hangs some place even more prominent than the art 01:07:00museum and I hope that people that see it can respond appropriately to its content. I didn't mean to offend anybody by doing that--the poncho that this man was laying in, the hood of the poncho was dangling from that litter that these two guys were carrying. And the hood was just draining his life away, his blood, it looked like a drain. As they walked it just kept spilling on the ground. When they got him on the bird the whole deck was covered in blood and when we off 01:08:00loaded him at Charlie Med, it took a garden hose and started wiping and--[walks away from recorder]

BROOKS: I've got tissues here too if you--

DALY: [blows nose] Started hosing down the bird to get cleaned out of coagulated blood and flesh and bandages that had fallen off because they were soaked with blood. It was--I didn't draw it for shock value, I drew it for the sacrifice 01:09:00that it took - the wounded guy made and the other two for helping him out of the situation. I don't know if that guy ever died, I don't know if he ever made it. I don't think so. It just looked too, too much. Nobody did come back from Vietnam with feeling good about themselves, I'm pretty sure. It was a rough one. It can get rough today. Today I belong to VFW, Artists for the Humanities, the Vets Center. I go to probably about eight to ten meetings a month at the Vets Center and I'm under counsel of another vet that understands what Vietnam 01:10:00veterans are going through. He himself is a Purple Heart recipient. He says I'm doing better. I'm not sure what that means but he sees something in me that I have yet to discover myself. He asked me that, "If I had a magic button to push, take away all your pain, but also knowing that it would also take all your memories of what happened there, would you do it?" I said, "No. No." I'm proud 01:11:00to be a Marine, proud to have done what I did and we just keep living one day at a time. So Ellen, I don't have much more to add to that unless you have some questions.

BROOKS: I have a few. So how did you get involved with Artists for the Humanities?

DALY: You will find in the next subsequent interview on that. I was referred to by someone I love very much and it's worked out on another level. I didn't realize that that kind of help was available to me. So with that first step of 01:12:00going in there and seeing what they had to offer I ended up staying. I enjoy bringing this stuff up. This interview's a little different from the ones I give at Artists for the Humanities. That's more of a subjective--I mean the work is subjective. It's just offered and I can explain to--because of the limitations on time and others that have work to be displayed, I can be quick about it and get through it. This interview is a little more soul searching that I was prepared for. You know, I was praying for you the whole time, that you were on your way up here, that you wouldn't be late. That you would show and that this 01:13:00would come out. Historically I don't know if it'll have any [inaudible]; there's people have stories a lot greater than mine. But if that guy with one leg lived he'd probably have one himself. The story of that Landing Zone being overrun was portrayed by a man, a veteran, a Marine that was there and wrote that story from inside a cell block of a prison. He's locked up and I don't know what for but his address is Leavenworth, Kansas. He's serving long time. Whatever he did was 01:14:00frowned upon and they put him away but he had that story and man is it good. So anyone that would like more of description - and I don't know why they would - but if they would Google "fire support base Cunningham" and see what led to this invasion of their landing zone, they're welcome.

BROOKS: What do you think compelled you to look into it and Google it?

DALY: It was always a mystery. It was the only thing I heard when I got off of that plane that--the helicopter got back to base, from the Comm center. I heard somebody over talking that that was--they called it LZ Cunningham which--it is 01:15:00an LZ, a landing zone, but it's actually a fire support base, so FSB Cunningham and I wasn't prepared for what I was about to read when I Googled that. It's extensive research on what happened there over months of how the NVA had enlisted the services to plan this operation. They had regiments of sappers--in fact I forget the number of their regiment, the 5--say for arguments sake the 519 Sapper Regiment and the 518--you know there was hundreds of these guys, trained to go give their lives for the country. When they overran that position 01:16:00that night they were throwing--after they got all the Marines covered because of the mortar fire and the mortar fire stopped and they started coming on board and throwing grenades and satchel charges and Willy Pete [White Phosphorus] down the barrels of artillery, killing and hacking and running, screaming and yelling and people cross firing at one another. You know, they're already through the wire, they're on the base. How--you shoot at them you're shooting at your own guys, they're on the other side. It was just mayhem. Shooting and explosions and smoke and fire and running and sh--a lot of shooting and more shooting and another 01:17:00explosion and this went on for a couple of hours, then it was over. I think only five of their sappers got killed. It was--when you read the story it's amazing what was going on in that part of the world at that time and that was all February of 1969.

It was two year enlistment, thirteen months in-country. When I left Vietnam and got back to the States, it was a Friday afternoon. I landed in Travers Air Force Base which is in San Francisco. Friday afternoon about three or four o'clock I walked down to base and walked up to the duty desk and there was a corporal 01:18:00sitting there and I says, "I'm just coming back from Vietnam." He says, "Well it's Friday. Everybody's on liberty, there's nobody here." And he threw me a liberty card. He said, "Well, see ya Monday morning." I'm just out of the bush, twenty four hours ago I was shooting at somebody and now I'm back in San Francisco in the streets, "Oh man, oh man." You show up drug addicted in San Francisco during the Haight-Ashbury days and go see Jefferson Airplane live. I mean it was just--"Wait a minute, this is surreal. This isn't happening to me." Not as it was happening, years later "What the hell happened there?"

And that name Cunningham came to mind and with the onset of the internet I just 01:19:00never did think at the time to ever Google it and when I did I wasn't prepared for what was there. It was amazing, what was involved in that whole story of my life and my small part in it. I can only say about what happened at LZ Cunningham from the point of view of a medevac helicopter gunner. We landed, we took 'em on and we left. The place was smoking, it was leveled. But beyond that any kind of information that somebody might want was better justified to read that article itself and study those things for themselves. To me I believed that it was written. I didn't see any embellishments in it. It wasn't written by just 01:20:00one author, his information came from the people that he served with in that battle. He was held through the fire to tell the truth because of others people's point of view. That guy's sitting over there by that piece of artillery looking, he has a side of the story and so does this guy that's trapped in a bunker and so does this guy that got wounded. Well, a vantage point of what actually happened there and once you read that bigger, larger picture is exposed. They said that that particular LZ could see a thousand NVA tucks rolling down the Ho Chi Minh trail a day, one day, one thousand trucks. And this 01:21:00was after, this was during and after Tet, it's like the highway. We'd fly over it and there's be craters from B52s bombing the trails and we'd go there again the next day and the road would be bulldozed and paved right around all the artill--the craters, the bomb craters which were the size of this house. Big 2000 pound bomb probably the size of this property and within a twenty four hour period, they have moved all that jungle out of there and made sure that trail was always open and supplies went all the way to the south, all the way to Saigon that reached. It's just amazing.

And so when that LZ Cunningham was built, when it was erected for that purpose, to support fire, the Marines that were going into the jungle and finding caches of weapons buried. The article explains that they had stumbled across a brick and mortar hospital, NVA hospital, with Russian surgical implements in it for x-ray, for brain opera--you know. Anything that a hospital would use, to treat their wounded. Five strands of Comm wire were run out. One strand of Comm wire 01:23:00would facilitate a base, they had five strand Comm wire around it that they found. That was for communications network for the entire North Vietnam, it was amazing to find out what was found there. That's the point of view of the Marines that were on the ground, support this base, to protect the fire support base and when they came across this stuff they would call in artillery, Cunningham would get the coordinates and tear it up. But it's a good read and it's not terribly long. It's probably three, four type written pages of what actually happened there. Dewey Canyon operation, they're aligned; all of that 01:24:00stuff is aligned in the A Shau Valley.

BROOKS: And one of the pieces we have of your work in the exhibit is the--it had to do with the helmet that you found? Can we talk a little bit about that?

DALY: I was on a trail one day at the MAG - the Marine Air Group -- and we went out in the bush, it was three of us and we were pretty much sightseeing 'cause we were pretty--we were still inside the wire but we were in a rural area of the base. There was an NVA helmet laying on the ground and I almost stepped on it. I picked it up and turned it over and it was pretty messed up. It had been hit by shrapnel on the rim and tore up pretty good. I think that's why it was 01:25:00discarded. It was either discarded by an NVA soldier or maybe another Marine. I have no idea of its--where it came from. If it was thrown out by an NVA soldier, I don't know. But what I did find out about the helmet that the last person to wear it was dead too. There was four, five names scratched inside the helmet liner. Each name consecutively was scratched off by the next person--the next guy that wore the helmet. There was four names and all four names were scratched out so the fifth guy that was wearing the helmet didn't write his name in it but 01:26:00he did draw - or one of those people drew - a couple of mountains, scratched a couple of mountains in there with some palm trees and birds. The helmet was all stained and red from those shrapnel wounds to the side of the helmet. All dried blood from the last guy that wore it and now that I think about it I think there was--that guy that owned it that picture was one of four people that had owned that helmet. The last guy's name wasn't scratched off, his name was there but 01:27:00the three or four other guys their names were scratched off by subsequent ownership and the last guy that had it--whoever had it afterwards, I'm pretty sure on one of those lineages of ownership of that helmet, something had happened, very serious to somebody that wore that helmet cause it was clipped on both sides as if somebody took a sharp blade and dented it which is an indication of shrapnel, something flying through the air, not necessarily a bullet. It didn't look like bullet holes although possible. But the dried blood on the inside looked like lacquer. And the star was missing. There's a communist 01:28:00star that they would wear on their helmets that was missing and I think maybe possibly that another service member, US service member, might have found the helmet and thought it too unserviceable, took the star and threw the helmet down, you know, I'm thinking something like that happened.

I really don't know but I found that helmet laying there with the drawing. I tried to recreate the drawing with--I think I entitled that piece "Helmet of Tears" but it was--it was my attempt, the painting doesn't look like a helmet but it looks like--what it would represent to me would be that helmet and names 01:29:00crossed out from trying to make do with--in the US Army or Marine Corps you would just go to supply, get another helmet, you just wouldn't try to make do with that. You wouldn't scratch out somebody else's name and wear their helmet. You would want your own helmet and I don't know how well supplied that the North Vietnamese were but I'm pretty sure a thousand trucks a day had box or two of helmets someplace on board there. They were hauling everything - the medical supplies, they found in there, in the A Shau valley, and the caches of arms and ammo and rice. I mean there was boots, there was clothing, you know, whatever it takes to run an army, that stuff's available. So, I call that the "Helmet of 01:30:00Tears" and--did Tim indicate that he had sent that picture up over there?

Brook: Mm-hm.

DALY: Oh, okay. I didn't know that. I didn't know that was going to make the cut. [laughs]

BROOKS: Yeah, it made it. Do you remember why you drew that?

DALY: Well actually I drew that because that helmet came back to the United States with me, I brought it back. When I landed at O'Hare airport I walked outside with my ditty bag, my uniform on, and I flagged a cab and he pulled right up and it was black cab driver in a yellow cab, weighed about 350 pounds this man. Told him where I was going and he drove out of the parking lot, got on 01:31:00[I-]94, started heading for Chicago, "Well, I see you're in the military." "Yeah I'm just coming home from Vietnam." "Oh yeah, what's that you got?" I said, "That's an NVA helmet." "Can I see it?" I said, "Sure." I passed it up front to him, he took it, looking at it. He put it on. Then he didn't say another word. Drove for another half hour. Just small talk. "Yeah, we're going to Oak Lawn, near my dad's home." Driving along with that NVA helmet on, he wore it all the way home, right into the driveway of my house, we lived in an area similar to this in Chicago, in Oak Lawn. Pulled in the driveway, the old man saw and he 01:32:00comes out. My mom is there crying, so happy to see me. Then the cab driver's crying. He gives me the helmet back. The old man reached in his pocket, "How much do I owe you?" "It's twenty bucks." The old man gave him a hundred. "Here, keep the change." Then he really started crying. He was like--it's just one of those images that I just think about it from time to time. It was so real and probably the only time--and I did have one other relative, a young girl, a young cousin who just thought I was the war hero. She was just grateful and thankful, 01:33:00a show of respect from her, she was just amazing. But I kind of avoided all that stuff, I knew what happened over there. I knew what happened. I did what I had to do. Then sorry to offend anybody that didn't really want it that way but it was the whole change of a nation, the whole thing was coming unglued at that time, it's too bad for that.

BROOKS: What do you get out of doing the art?

DALY: Well it's kind of a resurrection of--see I would've never discovered where 01:34:00I was at that time in history 'cause I didn't know what Cunningham was. Although I via the internet is where I discovered that stuff. Artists for the Humanities got me to--because of the nature of the program which is to draw, reflect and explain your work, of which--if you could draw a stick figure, you're in, for this group. If you know what the difference between a crayon and a pencil is, you're in, come on in. And you draw your work, it draws you back to a time that you saw or that you lived and it puts a stamp of reality on it instead of maybe 01:35:00some fantastic story that you might have dreamed of in your own head, thinking that maybe it was possibly the wrong thing to do at that time.

We had one gentleman at our Artists for the Humanities that - by rights - concerned about the issue of killing and combat and he wondered how his higher power would accept him in life as being one of those that participated in the death of another. It was a struggle for him to understand that but not so much afterwards, after he became one of our artists at the Artists for the Humanities. [beeping in background] and has since reconciled with himself and 01:36:00his ideas about that, he's moved away unfortunately, he's a good member, but he's raising a family elsewhere someplace, duty calls, so he's outta here. But I remember thinking on those lines myself and I don't think anybody that's been in combat probably has done the same thing - trying to make sense of it. And to reconcile that stuff often doesn't get done because it's so painful that the amount of time you want to invest in it is short. It's short circuited because of the pain and the artwork is another way of laying it down, one layer at a 01:37:00time in a fashion that brings you more closer to what it probably really is or what it was than what you may have thought, it might have been.

Because the attention span is always short circuited by an interruption, a pain and physiological elevation of the blood pressure, confusion in the brain and the time it takes you to even sort that out and calm down and get out the other side without thinking about it all the way through and to make some kind of reality out of it, sense. But the drawings, they allow you to--at the end of the 01:38:00day you have to--you don't have to but you can hold your drawing up and you explain yourself. When you're explaining yourself to other people, of what your work represents, your mind is released. It's released from--it's like the pictures that I draw too - I don't want 'em back. When I heard you guys were going to keep 'em, I said, "Great. You can have them. Go ahead, do whatever the heck you want to do with them." I've already used them for what I have to use them for. Its lead me to--by doing that it lead me to--'cause that's one of the paintings that I did, it led me to, "Where in the hell is LZ Cunningham? How 01:39:00would I ever find out what--would it be on the internet? I don't know, type it in, find out. There it is. Wow. Little more to it th--." I played this little miniscule part right there, that's the part I played. I didn't know that, that all of this was what it really was. It was amazing to find out that "Woah, there was a lot of people involved in this and it was a big deal to the NVA."

But in the interim of calling the enemy gooks and zipperheads and dinks and, you know, those terms have left me only because of the leadership of the group Artists for the Humanities, Tim Mayer has sternly reminded me that whenever I do 01:40:00call somebody out of their names, it dehumanizes them and keeps me sicker. So today I want to recover, today I want to be kept well. I don't want or need to be calling--well I need to be calling people by what they're called, by their own, by their own people. That's North Vietnamese Regular or Viet Cong. That's the enemy. It's helped a lot on different levels. The learning goes on and I do that once a month, we go down there the third Thursday of the month and talk for a little bit, break out the paint and see what comes out of your mind on the 01:41:00paper. There's benefits in that.

BROOKS: Are you working on anything right now?

DALY: Yes I am. I have to tone down a photograph of--not exactly a photo--a painting that I'm developing now is an ammo dump that was hit by NVA artillery on a night that I was out on the perimeter watch in a fighting hole with a friend of mine. And you could look to the north and you could see the glow, it's like a--almost like a sunrise or a sunset. Pitch black out but you could see this glowing horizon where the ammo dump had exploded and because of the amount 01:42:00and the kinds of ordinance they had there at that ammo dump there was casualties, US casualties because of the nature of the armament. There was a lot of artillery shells in there that were--when they go off close to people, they don't have to hit them, the concussion from it is enough to crush their organs, I mean just the shock value from it is--in a bunker where you think you're safe and then the ammo dump goes off and it was pretty horrific. That can be accessed by the internet also.

But I will say that there's different versions of that story on the internet and 01:43:00one that you can absolutely believe in is that it was artillery fire from the NVA shot about fifteen miles away and it was a good, lucky hit for them. But there's other subsequent reports of a pop flare being accidentally landed in ammo dump. That's not true. I think there's two other ones. But I know what happened there to a point because of the Comm center right there next to where the radio men hang and they said, "Yeah, that's what happened, they got hit by artillery." But that's a painting I'm working on right now. Subsequent plans for other stuff. So, they'll be revealed as time permits and allows for me to do 01:44:00that stuff. It's--you never know what's gonna happen. I went two, three, probably three months without working on one painting and nothing as intricate, it's not that I try to make it so it's beautiful it's just that I just fool round with until something starts popping off the page at me and then sometimes even in the middle of that stuff, "This is what I need to being doing there." Done yet?

BROOKS: Yeah, just about. Well one thing I like to ask people when we're wrapping up the interview is kind of why you agreed to do the interview with me. Kind of what you were expecting to get out of it, maybe.

DALY: Hm. Well, you asked and I said, "Yes." I didn't want to read too much into it. I know Henrietta she's a little excited. I mean not--it's just--I don't know where's she at. You'd have to ask her about that, maybe you can calm her down a little bit. She's a little worked up about it. I really didn't know what's going to happen here but I think I did the right thing when I said "Yes" to Artists for the Humanities. I think I did the right thing when I joined the VFW. I think 01:46:00I'm doing the right thing by letting you guys have my art to do with as you please. Whatever, you can tear it up if you want, it's already done for me, what it's going to do for me. There's no more I can squeeze out of it than what I've given you today. Like I said, if there is anything I can think of that can help you out later on, I'll be down in Madison soon, and I'll call you, we'll talk. I think you got a good--you got enough. I have to charge you.

BROOKS: Oh, is that so? [laughs] That's how this work?

DALY: I'm glad you guys asked and I hope this goes well for you.

BROOKS: Great, well I appreciate you taking the time and sharing everything with 01:47:00me, I know it's not easy so.

DALY: My honor. My honor to do it. And Ellen, you're a Capricorn. Capricorns got to take care of each other.

BROOKS: Both from Chicago, both Capricorns [laughs]. Great, well I'll turn the recorders off now if that's okay.

DALY: Yep.

BROOKS: Okay, great.

[end of interview]