Doug Westcott talks about his youth in Southern California, and about playing music and making records with a band called the Esquires. He describes the deep US Marine ties in his family that led, in part, to his enlistment in 1960. He recounts his experiences as a Radio Relay Electronics Technician in the 7th Communication Battalion. He remembers training in jungle warfare techniques in the Phillipines, becoming an expert, and teaching jungle warfare at a guerrilla training school in Okinawa as an enlisted man. He speaks about his awards for Distinguished Rifleman and Expert Pistol, and becoming a 5th Echolon electronics repairman. He decribes coming ashore in Vietnam as part of Operation Starlight in 1965. He recalls being harrassed by people attending an antiwar rally on the day of his return to the United States from the Vietnam War, and his subsequent disillusionment as he realized that public opinion was largely against the war. He remembers his wife’s severe injury to her hip after a fall, breaking his own back during a game of “jungle volleyball” at the barracks, his wife’s heart attack after a plane flight, and giving his children to her parents to raise, since he was paralyzed from the neck down at that time. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and the Museums of Western Colorado.
