Swift Boat Vietnam Vet with a "Life Changing" Family Secret

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Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. From the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your stories, send them to OurAmericanStories.com. Our next one is brought to us with permission from the Veterans History Project at the Atlanta History Center. The Veterans History Project provides unedited first-person interviews from men and women who've served our great country. Today we'll be hearing from Oliver Halley, who will share with us a bit about his experiences in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War.

We will also be hearing about the unearthed family secret that would forever change his life. Here's Oliver. I grew up in a small family. My mother and father were only children, so I had no aunts, no uncles, no cousins. I had two brothers.

My older brother, who died in 2009, he was two years older, and my younger brother, who's almost two years younger than I am. He still lives in New York. My father and his family emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1935 or so. And my mother was born in Brooklyn, but her father was born and raised in Germany and came here as a young man, and my mother's mother was born in Brooklyn as well. And we moved to Brooklyn when I was a baby, so I have no memory of where I was born whatsoever.

My first memories begin in Brooklyn, and then we moved to Staten Island when I was seven, and that's where I grew up, too. My father and mother built a legend around our family. Again, I knew that my father and his family had immigrated from Nazi Germany, but they built a legend around that. And the legend had to do with his father, my grandfather, who I didn't know. He was killed in a car accident in 1939. I did know that. And he was a prominent surgeon in New York, and the legend was that they resisted the Third Reich.

My father was in an underground movement, and it was all very romantic, and that was the story that I grew up with. But when I was growing up, everybody went in the military. That was just the way it was. A lot of people don't know that the draft began in June of 1940, and it didn't end until, I think, roughly 1975. So even during the peacetime between the Korean War and Vietnam, people were being drafted. In my high school, people either volunteered or went into the military, and it was acceptable.

Nobody even thought about avoiding it. If they didn't want to join, they were drafted and they didn't complain. That's just the way it was, and I grew up in that environment post-World War II. You see a lot of veterans from World War II. During parades, it was always a big deal, and it's just what you did. It was your turn to step up when it came time, so there was never any doubt in my mind I would go in the service. Growing up in New York and seeing the ships in New York Harbor, I was attracted to the Navy.

It was just there was never any doubt that's where I wanted to go. So my friend Kenny, I don't remember where, but somewhere he heard about Swift boats, and I said, What's a Swift boat? And he described it as best he could, and I said, I'm going to volunteer for that.

I said, Well, you know what? I'll volunteer with you. I know we arrived in Vietnam on September 27, 1969, and when we got off the plane, you see all these sandbags, and we landed in Camron Bay. Camron Bay was one of the Swift boat bases, and it was the headquarters for Coastal Squadron 1. And then from there, we were going to be farmed out to one of five coastal divisions. And I remember seeing the sandbags and seeing, you know, you say, Wow, we were definitely in a war zone when you saw that, and you saw everybody in fatigues. You had the Army there, the Navy, and Air Force, and they said, Whoa, this is the real deal.

So that was my impression. So on Christmas Eve day, December the 24th, I think it was the C-130 flew us down to Cat Low, and the boats were already there, and we were happy. So we get there, and I remember we were sleeping that night in Cat Low in some barracks, and I remember the next morning just, I guess it was before the truce went in, the Christmas truce went in effect, but it was my first introduction to a B-52 bombing somewhere in the area. I don't know exactly where, but, I mean, it was incredible.

I couldn't believe how the ground was shaking, you know, and it's like, Whoa. I mean, you know, I hadn't experienced that in Da Nang. In Da Nang, we worked in Da Nang. The Marines operated out of I-Corps, where we were, and that's it. And we did work some with the U.S. Marines up in I-Corps along the Corday River. This particular day, again, I don't remember why, but we were transporting Korean Marines, these rocks, to Hoi An. I don't remember, you know, what, you know, why. All I know is somebody, you know, we were given an order, you know, pick these rocks up, take them to Hoi An, a few miles up the river. So there was a sergeant and probably, you know, maybe 10 or 12 of these Korean Marines, and we had on board, we had searched a couple of sampans in the river, and I remember, vaguely I remember, that we took several women prisoners because they didn't have paperwork, and they may have had some contraband, no weapons, but they may have had contraband.

I don't remember why, and it's not particularly important. All I remember is we took them on board and handcuffed them because they had done something, and we were going to turn them over to Navy Intelligence in Hoi An. So we had these Korean Marines on board too, and these were young Vietnamese women, and I was in the pilot house where I, that's where I normally stayed.

When we were moving, I'm in the pilot house. And you've been listening to Oliver Halley recount his early days right up to his enlistment and volunteer enlistment in the Vietnam War. He volunteered for swift boat duty in September of 1969, and everything changed. We'll hear more of Oliver's story here on Our American Stories. American Stories And click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give.

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That's KNIX.com. Music And we continue with our American stories and Oliver Halley's story. Let's return where we last left off. So, I'm up in the pilots, one of my, you know, crew members came up to me and said, Mr. Halley, we've got a problem. He said, these Korean Marines, they want to rape these women. I said, what? He said, yeah, they're eyeing them over and they're pointing and they're making motions and all this.

I said, whoa. So, I went back after and I went up to the sergeant. He was the senior petty officer, not petty officer, senior ranking guy, enlisted guy.

There was no officer. I'm trying to speak to him in English. I say, you know, I'm pointing to say, you, women, you're no touch, no touch, you know. And, you know, no English, no English, no, no.

No touch, no touch. And the other guys, the other enlistment, I can see they're getting angry now. They're getting angry and the sergeant is trying to, you know, even though he didn't speak English, he understood what I was trying to say. Now, he's getting confrontational. So, I told my crew members, I said, put the weapons on them.

Put them on them. And it was tense. It was very tense.

They were determined they were going to have their way and I was determined they weren't. And we made it to Hoi An. And I told the sergeant, I said, you know, you touch women. I said, you're a captain. He cock-a-da you. Cock-a-da, you're a captain. He cock-a-da. I kept saying that, you know, cock-a-da you.

And so anyway, we got to Hoi An and as soon as we got there, I reported the sergeant and his troops to our intelligence people and they, you know, reported wherever it went. I have no idea what happened after that, but fortunately these women, you know, were not assaulted. It would have been impossible to let that have happened. It's just some things you just can't do, you know. I mean, that's not our American values. It really isn't. I mean, even at that age, I understood that much. That's not who we are as Americans.

We don't do that. Now to segue into something a little bit amusing, I'm back down again in Coastal Division 11, you know, down there in the Gulf of Thailand and the Pacific Ocean area. And my Commodore, Lieutenant Commander Bill Martin, he called me in. I was out wherever I was. He called me into headquarters immediately. So I go back.

I had no idea what was going on. And he says, he hands me a teletype. And I read this teletype and my heart sank. And as best I recall, I wish I had a copy of it, it said something like this, from Commander in Chief Pacific to, you know, Commander Coastal Squadron 1, Coastal Division 11, boom, boom, subject of presidential interest. I remember those words, of presidential interest.

And I'm paraphrasing here and it goes on to say as follows. Ruth Hallie Gorman, the mother of Lieutenant J.G., Oliver G. Hallie, Staten Island, New York, has written to the President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, that her son is not getting his mail. And the President has ordered an immediate inquiry to determine why he isn't getting his mail. And I was flawed because I had never complained to my mother I wasn't getting my mail. That didn't happen. I never said a word that I wasn't getting my mail. Nothing. I was getting my mail. It wasn't a problem.

So I'm speechless and embarrassed. I mean, this thing went out to the entire Seventh Fleet, this communication of presidential interest. So the Commodore was very sympathetic and he said, well, we have to respond to this immediately. What he suggests, I said, well, Commodore, I'm getting my mail. I mean, I don't know where my mother's coming from.

I can't pick up a phone or call her and ask her what's going on. So I remember we responded that I had been in transit and had been moving around and apparently the mail hadn't kept up, but there was no problem. Be assured that there is no problem, everything's fine, and it's okay. So when I got home, I have a copy somewhere in a box, I know that, of a letter from a general in the Pentagon.

How that works, you know, since I'm in the Navy, but who knows. But anyway, I remember it was a general in the Pentagon who had written my mother that on behalf of the president or something like that, they were looking into why I wasn't getting my mail. Like I say, it was a very embarrassing thing to me. And I asked my mother when I got home almost a year later, I said, why did you do that? I said, I was getting my mail, why did you do that? And all I remember her saying is, you want to get your mail.

Okay. So I do have something that is very critical to who I am. Back in the 1930s, my maternal grandparents had a correspondence with a woman in Australia named Esther Buck. Esther Buck was a teacher in Australia. And she communicated or wrote letters, I should say. They corresponded only by mail, and we're all roughly the same age. You remember back then in the 70s, I'm talking about 60s and 70s, you had that paper, you bought it at the post office. I think they called it fly paper because it was so light. And you would write a letter, and then you would fold it. Remember, you would fold it over and put a stamp on it. But it was so light, and you'd send it by air mail because it was cheap. But back then, if you remember, there were air mail rates versus first class, whereas today there's no distinction.

Okay. So this correspondence, my grandfather, my mother's father, and her mother, they were both educators, as was my mother in New York. And they had this correspondence, they got through the Parker Pen Company.

It was just one of those professional things. And over the years, they got to know each other. Only by mail, they had never spoken. So when my grandfather became too sick, my mother picked up the correspondence.

So we're talking probably about the late 1940s, early 1950s. So my mother wrote to Esther Buck and they corresponded, you know, maybe once a month, once every couple months. And I remember Miss Buck, that's what I called her. She would send us little trinkets for Christmas, that kind of thing.

But again, they never spoke. All of this was by mail all these years. So now I'm in Vietnam, and it was arranged that I would meet Miss Buck on R&R. And I was lucky. I got two R&Rs. First one was in June of 1970. I went to Hong Kong.

And then the second one, the Commodore was really generous about that, went to Sydney. So my mother arranged by mail for me to meet her. So I was pretty excited, too. This was a big deal. And the way it was going to work is I was going to meet her at her home, and then my mother was going to call while I was there. Now, again, we're all the same age.

These young people have no idea. But when you called internationally back then, you had to call the overseas operator. Remember that? Maybe you don't, because if you never made an international call, it wasn't very common. It was expensive. But you called the international operator, and you'd say, I'd like to place this call to Sydney, Australia. And the international operator would tell you that it might be an hour, it might be two, it might be three, depending on the traffic, before they could get a line. So the plan was hopefully it would all fall into place while I was there, my mother would be calling in. The date was September 8, 1970. And I've written a book, but it pertains to this business I have, this speaking business. And I have a chapter in the book called Life-Changing vs. Life-Shaping Experiences. September 8, 1970 changed my life forever.

Forever. And you're listening to Oliver Halley. And again, we want to thank the Veterans History Project at the Atlanta History Center for this story. And we're going to find out what happened on that day.

When we come back, more of Oliver Halley's story here on Our American Stories. High Five Casino. High Five Casino is a social casino with real prizes and big Vegas hits at highfivecasino.com. The hottest games right from Vegas and all winnings go straight to your bank account.

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Forever. I don't know why I'm getting emotional, but I think about it. I told you earlier in this interview, in the beginning, that my mother and father were only children, I had no relatives, and on my father's side in particular, a lot of mysteries that I never knew the answers to. My father had committed suicide on May 9th, 1966. I was 20 years old.

I was a junior in college at the time. And in that book that I wrote, I put in there that he just couldn't outrun the demons that had chased him from the Third Reich. And as I said earlier, he had built up this legend.

He was in this German underground movement and they got into street fights and all of that. Well, it turned out that's all true. That part is all true. What never made sense to me as I got older was why would a wealthy family, because my father came from a wealthy family. He was an only child. His father was a very prominent surgeon. And I didn't know until I sent you the story of the New York Times. I didn't know until this year, until this year, February of this year, that he had actually been a physician for Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas of Russia. I didn't know that until this year. Sue has seen the story of the New York Times, 1939, when he was killed in a car accident.

So anyway, he had committed suicide four years earlier. And I'm sitting with Miss Buck and she had never married. She was a woman probably in her 70s at the time. And she was so excited to see me. I mean, oh, she was just fluttering here, fluttering there. I'm so excited to finally meet somebody from the Halley family after all these years. Oh, so happy. Finally, you know, this is wonderful. And I can't wait for your mother to call.

You know, I'm just so looking forward to that. And then she said as follows. She said, and I don't remember her exact words.

I was too stunned. And so I'm close, but these are not the exact words. I just don't remember what they were.

I wish I did, but I don't. She said something like this. Did your mother ever reconcile with her father for marrying outside the faith? And I looked at Miss Buck and I said, Miss Buck, I don't understand your question. My mother and father, you know, were Protestants.

I don't know what you mean by marrying outside the faith. And she said, no, no, no, no, no. She said, your mother was Jewish. She married your father. But I said, my mother's not Jewish.

She said, of course she is. And my head at that moment exploded. You know how you get shocking news, whatever it is, really shocking news? That's what happened to me.

It was like that. Because I had experienced anti-Semitism growing up. I grew up a Methodist, but I experienced a lot of anti-Semitism. I don't kid anybody, you know, that I don't know. I look Jewish, okay?

I mean, there is a stereotype and I'm one of them. My head exploded. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. So she saw the look on my face and she stopped short. She says, oh my God, I hope I didn't say anything I shouldn't have said. And I said, no. I said, I'm glad you did. But she didn't say another word. Well, my mother called in and we all had a very nice chat, didn't bring any of this up.

And Ms. Buck was so excited to finally talk to my mother. And I left Vietnam, I think September 23rd, so it was a couple of weeks or so later, and got to San Francisco. And I out-processed from active duty to the reserves. It took, I think, five days. I was at Treasure Island, you know, about an hour a day, you know, did administrative stuff and they cut you loose. So at the end of the week, I flew from San Francisco to New York.

A friend of mine picked me up and I went to my mother's house until I could find a place to live a couple of weeks later. And I'm unpacking my C-bag, and this has really been weighing on my mind. And as I'm unpacking my C-bag, I said to my mother, why didn't you tell us we were Jewish? And she said, what?

Where did you get that nonsense from? Those are her words. And I said, Ms. Buck told me. And my mother, very uncharacteristically, she was very polished, very educated, very uncharacteristically, she said, Ms. Buck is a liar. She didn't talk that way.

I said, no. I said, Ms. Buck told the truth. And very uncharacteristically, my mother completely broke down, I mean really broke down crying. And she said, please don't tell your brothers.

And I said, I have to. Well, as the years went by, I would try and talk to my mother about this. She shut it down. She'd act like I wasn't even in the room. If I want to change the subject, she'd look up and talk about it. She wouldn't talk about it. Absolutely refused. So I never learned anything from my mother.

Nothing. And she and my father had destroyed a lot of documents. So over the years, it would take me too long to tell and it doesn't fit in with the Vietnam part of the story, so I'll just kind of synopsize it real quickly.

I learned a lot on my own through reading books and then when the Internet came into being, learned a little bit. And so the bottom line is this. My grandfather on my father's side was Jewish, for sure, 100%. I have the records to support that. He was Jewish and my paternal grandmother was a Lutheran. My father was raised a Lutheran. So in the Jewish faith, the bloodline carries on the mother's side, not the father's side. So even though my father was half Jewish, he wouldn't be recognized as Jewish by Jewish people. So that comment about did your mother ever reconcile with her father, in effect, my mother married outside the faith, even though my father was half Jewish. And you've been listening to Oliver Halley and what a story he's telling. And this is just a side story with these side stories while they inform so much about all of our lives.

September 8th, the day that changed his life forever. And my goodness, why didn't you tell us we were Jewish? What an identity crisis for this young man. Also, he was learning that everything he ever thought was true because he always thought he was Jewish. He looked Jewish.

Where did you get that nonsense? The mom said. And my goodness, she then said, Miss Buck is a liar. And he knew, then he knew for sure that it was true. And then the reality set in. And his mom, well, she just broke down and she just started to cry, revealing her human side, but never came clean, never told the real story. And by the way, we learned that again and again here in our American stories, particularly the World War Two generation. So many of them just wouldn't come clean about what happened. Maybe it was so horrible they couldn't process it. Who knows what the reasons are. When we come back, more of Oliver Halley's story.

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I do not know. My father would write her letters. She lived in Queens when we lived on Staten Island. My father would write her letters and I still see this in my mind's eye. They would come back unopened and there would be a stamp. You know this kind of stamp on the envelope. And it would be of a hand pointing this like this.

And it would say return to sender refused with checkmark refused. And she died in February nineteen fifty nine. But I never met her. And to this day I don't know why they were estranged.

I have no idea. So that day changed my life forever. When you find out you. There's more to your past and it's very different than you were brought up to believe. That has a profound effect. So that's life changing experience life shaping. Without question was my time in the Navy. And certainly in Vietnam I went over to Vietnam. I was twenty three years old as an officer in charge of a swift boat.

I came home. I was twenty four. And to have that kind of responsibility at that young age. If that won't shape you.

Nothing will. After Vietnam I spent a year trying to get into law school. But working this odd job I had when I was in high school just to mark time. I got into law school.

I began in August of nineteen seventy one at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And I went through went through law school knowing that my career plan was to become an FBI agent. There was never any doubt that's what I wanted to do. I had formed that plan years earlier when I knew I wasn't going to be chief of naval operations.

And I figured that out in high school by the way in high school. So my career in the FBI you have two tracks you know the investigative side and then you can choose to go into management. It's not like the military you know it's mandatory promotions here. You know people choose the FBI if they want to go into management.

And I had no interest in it after having the experience that I had in the Navy particularly in Vietnam. I figured nothing could rival that. Nothing. Nothing.

Not even close. And then and I love the FBI. My career I had 28 years it was a free ticket to a show. I loved it.

But to be kind the best leadership I saw was in the Navy. I started late in life with children. I'm married to Molly Johnson Halley. She's from Charleston South Carolina. I met her in New York.

She was an FBI agent as well and she was chief division counsel for the FBI office in Atlanta for most of her career. But we met in New York. And I was just short of 41 when my oldest daughter Caitlin was born. Just short of 42 when my second daughter Victoria was born. They're Irish twins. They're 12 days short of a year apart. And then my son is in his fourth year of medical school at Emory. And this is only a coincidence. It was not planned this way. But my son Tyler is following in the footsteps of his grandfather who was an ear nose throat surgeon. And that's a coincidence. He didn't do it for that reason.

He didn't even really know about it until recently. I'd like to close with this. One of the things that my father did when we lived in Brooklyn and I was a young boy and I remember so vividly. On a lot of weekends he would go into Manhattan and he was volunteer for Church World Service. And Church World Service even to this day I think sponsors immigrants.

And my father went down there and you can picture this. These ships coming in from Europe with thousands of refugees coming to New York. And yet organizations like Church World Service sponsor these people. People who had nowhere to go, no homes, lost families. They had a very profound effect on me. And if you read the words, and I know you have, of Admiral Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty. Your poor, your wretched, your teeming masses, however. And my father and his family, before I was born obviously, coming to New York.

I can only imagine what they thought when they saw the Statue of Liberty. So he volunteered his time to help refugees and one of them came to live with us for several years. Sergei Shohakoff. He was a Russian.

He had been a veterinarian in the Russian Army and the Russian Cavalry. I don't remember whether he was captured or what happened, but either way he ended up in a refugee camp in Europe after the war. He was on one of these ships.

What I remember is as he was coming off the ship and people were being processed. My father, I remember the story saying, you know, he's one of mine. He came with him and he lived with us for several years and then for health reasons he moved to Miami. But we stayed in touch and I last saw him when I was in the Navy.

Our ship was in Fort Lauderdale and I called him and I spent the night with him. A wonderful man. A wonderful man. He loved this country, what it gave him. He lost everything in the war. He lost his family, everything. I think of my father and all of that and you say, how can you not give back?

You know, how can you not do that? This country gave my father and his family a home when they were evicted from this. Was the Vietnam War one of those wars like World War II that, you know, you're fighting to defend your country? I can't say that it was and I won't, but that's not the point. The point was that military service was something that came to be expected and people of my generation, not everybody, obviously we had a lot of people who didn't share my view, but a lot did. You know, we did our time.

We came back from Vietnam. People say, well, you know, do people spit on you or anything? No.

No, I never had that. Nobody cared. When I got back, nobody cared. You were a Vietnam veteran, so what?

In law school, in my class, we probably had 10 or 15 Vietnam veterans. You know, we would talk occasionally. We were probably, you know, we weren't all close friends, but we got along very well.

We could at least, if there's anything about the war that was still going on, we could talk about it. You didn't talk about it with other people. They didn't care. It was irrelevant. It was just, they couldn't relate to it. It was only when Ronald Reagan dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the Vietnam missing, and I watched it on TV live.

Oh my God, that was powerful. And Ronald Reagan made it okay to be a Vietnam veteran. That was the first. It was okay.

Then I could wear a T-shirt, you know, Vietnam veteran. I never did before that, never. I didn't talk about it. I didn't talk about it because, you know, I can't talk about it, I have bad memories, I have PTS. No, nothing to do with that. Nobody cared.

Nobody cared. But yeah, that was it. So I went on with my life, and life was good. My FBI career was fantastic.

It was a free ticket to a show. I traveled all over the world toward the end, you know, with the FBI. And I was very lucky in my life. I really was lucky. Probably, I got a few lucky breaks along the way.

Didn't have to, but I did. And I'm grateful for them, and I've got some plans in my head for what I'm going to do about paying it forward. And we're looking forward to hearing more from Oliver. What a storyteller, what a life lived. And again, a special thanks to the folks at the Veterans History Project at the Atlanta History Center.

And again, we're always looking for stories like this from you, our listeners. And my goodness, what a life well lived after serving in Vietnam, serving in the FBI for 28 years. A free ticket to the show, he said, late in life to children like me. 41 when he had his daughter, Caitlin.

42, Victoria Tyler, who was in medical school carrying on a family tradition. But that story of him greeting refugees, I know that one, because my immigrant grandparents made me do the same thing. I love what he said about Sergei. He was a wonderful man. He loved his country. He had lost everything in the war, everything. He also said, Oliver, the country gave my father and his father a home. So true.

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