Monday Matters: Vietnam War seen through eyes of Fort Smith veteran

May 28--When Winston Fulmer joined the Army, he probably wasn't expecting to be surrounded by two of the most historically recognized events in the Vietnam War.

Fulmer, who served as the commander of a firing battery in the Americal Division, fought in the Vietnam War from 1967-68 -- two years that had some of the war's most intense fighting. During his time in Vietnam, Fulmer would fight North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops during the Tet Offensive and unknowingly share quarters with an officer who was accused of orchestrating the My Lai massacre.

Though he now lives in Fort Smith, Fulmer grew up in Arkadelphia prior to the war. He said he took an interest in joining the military at an early age.

"I had some relatives who came through World War II and Korea," Fulmer said. "I didn't know exactly how I was going to do it, until I got acquainted with the Reserve Officers Training Corps program in college."

Fulmer completed the ROTC program at Ouachita Baptist University and was assigned to Korea after graduation in 1964. Fulmer would be restationed several times before being stationed near Duc Pho in Vietnam in the summer of 1967.

Fulmer's role as a firing battery commander, he said, involved calculating artillery fire in firefights. One such firefight occurred when his outpost was attacked during the Tet Offensive, in which North Vietnamese and Viet Cong guerilla forces attacked a host of military outposts and cities in South Vietnam on Tet -- the lunar new year -- on Jan. 31, 1968.

"We were shooting artillery fire like you would not believe," Fulmer said of the Tet Offensive.

"You make the assumption your artillery is going to be accurate, and usually, it is. But when people are under fire, they need fire now, and they need it to be accurate," said Tom Waller, an adjunct history professor at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and a U.S. Army veteran and friend of Fulmer's. "He has to call it in, he has to get the right grid coordinates for the target, and he's got to adjust if they're off. He's also got to call in air support."

The moments leading up to when Fulmer's outpost was attacked during the Tet Offensive make for a story he "loves to tell." He said he was playing poker with his comrades around 1 a.m. when the attack began.

"I had the great hand, the winning hand, and there was about $400 or $500 in the pot," he said. "Before we could cash it in, all hell broke loose."

The next few days of combating enemy forces "went well" for Fulmer and his men, he said. He said fighting the enemy was much easier during the Tet Offensive, as enemy troops were out in the open as opposed to the guerilla warfare they often encountered.

Though the Tet Offensive is the acknowledged turning point in the Vietnam War, Fulmer is confident the attacks yielded a U.S. victory.

"We killed them," Fulmer said. "That part of it was never reported in that magnitude in the United States."

Like many others, Fulmer said he did not know about the other significant event in the Vietnam War -- the My Lai massacre -- when it took place. This event, which took place in March 1968, involved officers in a company with the Americal Division killing more than 500 civilians in the village of My Lai -- many of whom were dragged, raped or tortured prior to their death -- after the soldiers could not find the enemy among them.

Fulmer did, however, live in a bunker with Capt. Ernest Medina, who was accused of orchestrating the massacre. He learned about Medina's suspected involvement in the massacre the way many others did -- watching the news in the states after the story broke more than a year later.

The fact that Fulmer had shared a bunker with Medina did not immediately register with him, he said.

"(My wife) said, 'It was kind of funny, because in the middle of the night, you sat up straight in bed and said, 'Ernie Medina. I knew him,"" he said.

Though he said the My Lai villagers were particularly unfriendly to the U.S. military, Fulmer said how the soldiers reacted in their frustration was "really poor."

"It was not in any way how we actually fought that type of war. What we wanted to do was find the bad guys -- the guys that were carrying weapons, the guys that would shoot at us," he said. "When I found out what all had happened down there, I thought that was really sad."

Fulmer would remain in the U.S. Army after he returned to the United States in the fall of 1968. He eventually moved to Fort Smith -- his wife's home -- and joined the insurance business.

Nowadays, Fulmer still shares his stories from Vietnam. Waller said he recently brought Fulmer in as a guest speaker when he covered the Tet Offensive in one of his classes.

"I like to bring in people to talk to the students," he said. "Winston was an obvious choice."

Fulmer also serves as a delegate on the Military Officers Association of America Arkansas chapter with Billy Dooly, a Fort Smith resident and combat helicopter pilot from the Vietnam War. Some of the initiatives under the Officers Association include the expansion of the Fort Smith National Cemetery and the flag education program in public schools in Sebastian and Crawford counties.

"We'll continue to try to help the veterans in any way," Dooly said.

Dooly said he and Fulmer frequently "exchange war stories" from their careers.

Though the justifiability of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam -- which was initiated to curb the spread of communism in southeast Asia -- has been debated over the years, Fulmer said he does not regret fighting in the war. He said he found it honorable to fight for his country in the way in which the U.S. government deemed necessary at the time.

"Every American has a responsibility to serve in one way or another," Fulmer said.

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