Editor’s Note: Students from Elizabethton High School recently worked on a project in which they had to write profile pieces on local veterans in the community. The Elizabethton Star will be publishing one piece a day, highlighting both the work these veterans have put into their communities and the students who have spent time and energy telling their stories.

Taylor Thompson

EHS Student

Talking to people is something that comes naturally to me, it is not something I get nervous about. Except interviewing someone about a time period of their life is causing me to feel slightly anxious. I have known Jim DuBose for years, but I have never sat down with him and asked him about his experiences overseas in Vietnam. I put my nerves aside and head to Golf Course Acres to their two-story brick home. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon, and as I walk into their house I see pictures and paintings hanging in their living room of Mr. DuBose in his uniform and of his plane he flew in Vietnam. His wife, Carol DuBose, is coming to the door to give me a big bear hug and a glass of water. He leads me into their dining room to sit at their table. On the table, he has stacks of Polaroid pictures laid out by each of the many stories he was preparing himself to share with me. After seeing those stacks of pictures, I felt a sense of relief; there is no need for me to be nervous. He is prepared to talk about his life in the war and I am eager to absorb the stories that I get the privilege of saving and sharing.

DuBose was the son of an active member of the Air Force, and throughout his childhood he knew that his future rested in the arms of the Air Force. He tells me, “I was raised in the military and it was a way of life that I liked and enjoyed. I set my own goal that I wanted to go into the military.” He grew up traveling around the world, following his father wherever he was placed. His mother was a military dependent and stayed at home with Jim and his sister while his father was away serving his country. Jim admired this and sought the Air Force to be his life as soon as he was old enough to enlist.

As a part of Dubose’s upbringing in a military family, his education was untraditional. He found himself in a grammar school in a province of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in Nijmegen, Holland. That is one of the many experiences, as being a part of a military family, that DuBose got the opportunity to live. He was the only American in the whole entire school, so he learned to fluently speak Dutch, along with other languages throughout his childhood. His most vivid memory from his three years in Nijmegen was — his demeanor is very relaxed and humorous as he tells me — “I got in the most trouble in grammar school when I found a bomb at our playground, which was an old bombed out building. I strapped it to the back of my bicycle and took it down to the sheriff’s office and dropped it on the desk. They cleared the whole building.” DuBose leaned across the table, eyes wide, offering me the stories of a lifetime with an open heart.

One of the first concentration camps in Germany was in Dachau, and when DuBose was in the first and second grade he got to walk the grounds of the camp. He still imagines the bins of ashes of all of the Jews that had been burned and cremated. DuBose’s childhood did not mirror any elementary school student’s that I have ever met — typical first graders worry about how long recess will last and who is going to be sitting beside of them on their bus ride home. After all he witnessed growing up, it molded him into the type of person that was strong and resilient — which was exactly why the military was the right place for him. He went from living in Germany to attending Brooklyn Casey High School in South Carolina for his freshman year. After that, he moved to Karachi, Pakistan to become a student at Karachi American High School for his sophomore and junior years, transferring back to the states to attend his senior year at Albany High School in Albany, Georgia. Following his graduation, he proceeded to spend the next year at the University of South Carolina studying mechanical engineering — influenced by his interest in planes and the Air Force. Jim was going to complete his years in college, but he received a draft notice. He says, “I got a draft notice because Vietnam was going pretty strong and I didn’t wanna be an infantry or even a bush beater so I enlisted in the Air Force because I knew what it was and that is what my father was in at the time.” He wanted to go into the Air Force, it was something that he was sure of. There was no doubt in his mind that he was going to serve his country to the best of his ability, and he did just that. DuBose was enlisted in Vietnam at the same time as his father, but because of the regulation that two family members could not be on tour at the same time, his father got removed and Jim went to Vietnam. At the time of his enlistment in 1965 he was 20 years old.

Prior to his time serving overseas, DuBose attended basic training in San Antonio, Texas for three months. The way that he is explaining training he is making it seem like it was extremely easy for him, he had already done regular physical training and went to classes that taught him about military life. After he completed his basic training in Texas, he went to technical school at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. He speaks of the beauty of Mississippi and its beaches, yet he tells me with solemn laughter, “There were some beautiful beaches, but we didn’t get to see a whole lot of ’em.” The time spent in Mississippi was consumed with DuBose training and preparing for the war. He then graduated and proceeded to the next step in his career serving his country.

After DuBose graduated from Keesler Air Force Base, he went onto his first duty assignment in Florida at the Eglin Air Force Base. Jim was an enlisted man in the Air Force for four years as an Avionics Repairman. He spent those four years of his enlistment working on radios, radars, and encryption. DuBose joined a 42d Air Force Base Quadrant, which was the testing unit that received inventory of the new aircrafts and aircraft equipment. His calm voice alters tone while he is characterizing the importance of his quadrant because they got to be the testing unit that got to evaluate the fastest flying airplane ever made. It flew as fast as 3,000 miles per hour, he speaks in a way that demonstrates the pride he had in his work on aircrafts.

DuBose then left Florida and went to Vietnam for two years as flight status in a radio repair shop. He flew in combat zones to analyze the issues with the fighter planes; if there was a problem, then he was the one to repair it. Daily life in the Air Force resembled the daily life around America. He would get up, take a shower, go to the shop, receive his daily assignment, eat dinner, then relax and watch TV. He tells me about how mind boggling it is that there was only one television station and one radio station — they had no choice of what they watched or listened to. When asked if he knew about the media and political disputes surrounding the Vietnam War in America, DuBose tells me about how disappointed he was with the people at home he was fighting to defend. With disgust in his eyes, he tells me “We expected support from the States and we were the ones who paid the price, not the people in the states calling us ‘baby killers.’” To DuBose and his friends, the media was a bunch of communists and they “would have liked to clean house on those idiots.” He explains — with desperation in his light blue eyes — how sickening it was to hear that your own country, the one he was willing to die for, caused them to lose the Vietnam War.

Overseas, living life in danger was an expectation. DuBose explains to me how in the middle of the night his hooch would get attacked at times. At times he found himself hiding in the bunker in the middle of the night and wake up without a clue of how or when he got there the next morning. One time, while asleep in his hooch, the whole opposite end was blown up with rockets and mortars. DuBose expresses to me how lucky he was not to lose his life that night. Although, according to DuBose, that is exactly what he expected to do while he was serving time in Vietnam. He casually expresses to me that there was no expectation in his mind of him ever returning home to the States, so he did what he wanted and lived carelessly.

His main regret overseas was not the casualties he witnessed or the missions that resulted in injuries, but instead it was the drinking. He and his buddies drank alcohol on a regular basis because, “Why not?” Except now, DuBose tells me he wishes that would not have been his mentality towards the alcohol.

DuBose ended up leaving the Air Force and going into the Army. In the Army, he applied for flight school and officer flight training. He ended up becoming a helicopter pilot and went back to Vietnam for another year. He flew a scout plane and hand-painted a skull on the side, along with his identification number. He was a member of the hunter-killer team, and they were the ones who were sent out to find the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong while in the air. “Open your hand,” he instructs me, “and put it in front of your face and try to look at me. It’s hard to focus on me right?” This is how they trained other men to go into air and keep an eye out for the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong. He shows me pictures taken from the air and shows me how hard it is to see the Vietnamese through the bamboo, but it was something that became a natural mechanism to DuBose, since it was part of his everyday life.

In the army, the Americans had a mutual relationship with some Vietnamese. There was a Vietcong hooch near his and they worked out a deal that the Vietnamese would warn his hooch of any rocket or mortar attacks if DuBose’s hooch would keep theirs supplied with food. He calls it “the old, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Surprisingly, he tells me that none of them ever spoke to those specific Vietnamese in person, they only left each other notes. There were exceptions. DuBose says, “The Vietnamese could be your friend during the daytime and your enemy at nighttime.” The only people they could trust were the people they knew and had been serving with for years. He thinks as he tells me that they did not intermingle much with the Vietnamese, except when you need something like a haircut. DuBose shocks me when he tells me, “We were around picking up bodies whenever you pick up a body and you look at it and you recognize him because it was the barber that was shaving the back of your neck with a straight razor a couple days before that, so you never knew about the Vietnamese.” It was nearly impossible for them to differentiate between the genuine citizens and the Viet Cong because they all wore the same “black pajamas.” Life in Vietnam was lived day by day with no expectation of what would happen next but that is the way DuBose got used to.

DuBose had flown 35 consecutive days and that meant that he had the next day off. His platoon leader got a notification in the middle of the night for a mission and did not want to fly it, so he gave the order to DuBose. DuBose’s best friend overseas was his regular crew chief that flew with him every single mission, and he says, “As long as me and my regular crew chief flew together, neither one of us ever got hurt.” That one mission that he was ordered to fly in the middle of the night, his best friend was on leave for rest and recuperation for two weeks. During those weeks, DuBose flew with other guys, and just before his best friend got back, he was shot down, which resulted in his right ankle and part of his leg being blown off. He was then medivaced out of Vietnam into the Charleston Navy Recuperation Base and had to learn how to walk again over the span of six months. DuBose’ passion has always been flying, so he took a physical so that he could get back on flight status.

After retiring his time spent serving the country in May of 1987, DuBose spent his life up until he turned 60, flying for Airborne Express in the United States. Inside his home, on the walls, there are paintings of his planes that he has flown because he takes pride in the service he has given to this country, along with being a pilot in the states. Coming back to America after traveling and living around the world, he met the love of his life, Carol DuBose, and they live in a brick home in Elizabethton, Tennessee.

DuBose shows me his life story through dusty Polaroid pictures that his friends overseas mailed him while he was recovering in the hospital in Charleston. After he was shot down all of his own pictures he had taken had been misplaced and the majority never made their way back to him. DuBose took an hour out of his Monday morning to eagerly share with me a series of stories about himself. He handed me a piece of his life story that I now get the opportunity to share throughout my lifetime.