The Life and Death of Dennis Magnusen

A note from the project director

First Learning about Vietnam

I remember when it was senior year in high school. Time Magazine came out with a big article about Vietnam. I looked at that. I knew that meant something to me. I didn't know what, and I knew I did not want to be a soldier running through the jungles, killing people. When I was younger before I got into high school, I got into a lot of fights. That's because I was just an unhappy kid from my household stuff, but it wasn't until surfing that I stopped fighting. I just didn't want to fight anymore . . .

I just didn't want to kill people.

Then Came the Draft Notice...

Emotionally, I was shaking. I did not want to do this. It just didn't feel right to me. I didn't understand the full ramifications of the war. I didn't understand what Ken Burns was going to tell us years later. I didn't understand any of that stuff. I just knew that I did not want to be involved in that— that was not me. I was just a surfer kid. . . . 

Higgins: Did you ever consider resisting the draft?

Magnusen: No. . . . my grandparents have done it, my grandfather has done it. Both of my grandparents have done it. My dad has done it. It's my time. It's my duty. I'm going to go over. I went over feeling like it was my duty.

It wasn't until I got there, that things changed in my mind.

Introduction to Cannabis at Fort Hood

I got to Texas, and I was there for 13 months, and eventually I got orders.... That's when I had some friends there who had already come back from Vietnam, and said, 'Dennis, you're going to need to know how to smoke cannabis.' Right before I left Fort Hood, Texas, they indoctrinated me into the art of smoking cannabis.

It's been a life saver ever since. It even got me off of the opiates—that's another story that the VA had me on. . . .

In Vietnam, there was only a few ways that I could see that people got through Vietnam. Number 1: getting drunk every night. Number 2: there was a Bible group. . . . Then there was us—quite a few anti-war people smoked cannabis.

Smoking every night and being able to relax with my guitar, and I'll tell you about that it's a different story. It took me away from the war, even though it was right outside my door, knocking as hard as it could.

....I have a dear friend, along with myself, we're both members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He's been there since '68, and he tells me that when somebody says to him, ‘thank you for your service,’ his reply is—‘if you only knew what I did, you wouldn't be thanking me.’

Bringing a Guitar to Vietnam

Bob Dylan opened my eyes. I started off just as a basic guitar guy and then Dylan opened my eyes to the social scene. When I was in Texas, I used to start tapping my foot to the country music as well. But Dylan was where my heart was....

The first day in Vietnam, the first night, I was stuck at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The next day, they put us on a truck and they drove us into town to a personnel office where a guy would assign us to a different unit. We were supposed to sleep there in that building that night, and tomorrow, the next day, we'd be shipped off to the units.

The guy looked at me with my guitar and says, 'Damn. Do you want to stay at my place tonight? We can play guitar together?' He happened to be a folk guitar guy from Boston. Incredible guy. I say, 'I'm with you, brother.' 

...I'm there that night in his place with the war going on because it's in the middle of the Tet Offensive, 'boom, boom, boom.' He turns me on to this new record that he just got from a friend in the mainland, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding company.

The Street Execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner

The first week was rather eventful. . . . they drove me back into town, me and a few other guys in a Deuce and a Half [two and a half ton truck]. I was the last guy sitting in the Deuce and a Half, which means I had a clear view of whatever was going on outside. . . . 

I look across, and I see this guy being assassinated right in the street. He was a military police, Vietnamese, had a 45, stuck it up to the guy's head, and pulled the trigger and blew him away. I looked around, no one else saw it. I’m thinking, damn, did I just see what I saw? I couldn't believe it.
 

Turning Against the War

One important thing happened at the Econ Compound, and it was my conversion point.

Right outside the compound was the Vietnamese hospital, a tents hospital. Every day they would line up casualties in stretchers dying, the dead, the wounded, that deal. There would be like 15 or 20 of them. Every time I would see them. Every time I would leave the compound and come back in—it finally got to the point where I couldn't just walk past them.

I was walking into the compound, and I just stopped. I walked over towards them. I didn't care if they were Vietnamese or whatever. I sat down with each one of them, offered them a cigarette if they wanted, offering them just at least my eyeballs to know that I cared about them. I could not pass by this moment, but I could not just pass them by any longer, I had to recognize them....

Higgins: By recognizing the humanity of these wounded Vietnamese people, how did that start to change how you understood your role in the war or even America's role in the war?

Magnusen: I became very much against it, and I started to act out against it.... A lot of people bought those peace symbols and they were wearing them all around the place. I would wear them. The girls would come to work every day, they'd give me flowers. I'd tape them onto my uniform. I would wear sea shell necklaces. I had rose-colored glasses. In fact, on my last month there, I was hitch-hiking. Some general picks me up, looks at me very casually and goes, 'what unit are you in, son?' He wanted to court martial me for being out of uniform.

The Difficulties of the War

Higgins: Was there anything that was particularly difficult about your time in Vietnam that you care to talk about?

Magnusen: Seeing dead people. Watching people struggle.

Just watching the war in general. It's just like in the movies where you see all these explosions and fires and rockets and shit. It's just like that. But watching what war does to the people, and since I knew about the Vietnamese on a personal basis, I knew what the war has done to their families. I know it from the military standpoint, but also from the local Vietnamese standpoint.

I know that you said that you were wearing peace signs on your uniform and things like that. But at what point did you realize that you were against the war?

Back at Eastern Compound when I saw all those guys lined up in stretchers. I knew this is not what I wanted. I knew I could not support this. I knew I had to do whatever I could at whatever junction to stick up with this. I just flashed on my guitar for a second. People knew at Eastern Compound that I played guitar. This one guy who had been there for a while had drums in his place, and so he invited me down one night. He was hitting on the drums, and he plugged me into his electric guitar and we're making all this noise and jamming and stuff. Then we stop and take a break, and hear all those boom, boom, boom outside. We look outside, and right outside was a bunker, and all the guys who should have been sitting inside the bunker were sitting outside the bunker on sandbags listening to us play music while the war was going on.

But as far as being against the war, the seed was already there. It just germinated when I saw all those dead guys in stretchers. How do you pass that by?

Higgins: It sounds like more of like a gut reaction that death and the senselessness of that pushed you away from it. At what point did your anti war become more intellectual? I know that you mentioned, like you believed in the Domino theory, but did you start to understand the war from the Vietnamese perspectives at all?

I threw the Domino theory out shortly after getting there. I said that that was bullshit just like reading the Stars and Stripes newspaper, you read about the war, but then you're in the war, and it's not that way. You totally different. You realize that there's propaganda going on. There's a lot of bull shit going on and nobody's being told the truth.