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.