From the mid-1970s until very recently, David Hunter of Warren spent most every Sunday morning, from 8 to 9 a.m., talking on the phone to his old friend, Doug Green, who lived in New Jersey.

“We talked about life, kids,” Hunter said, “the government, how bad it is.”

Green would make regular visits to Warren,for the Warren County Fair and to hunt.

The pair began their strong and long friendship when they served in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Green died on April 30.

Green’s illness also began in Vietnam, when he was exposed to Agent Orange at Fort Radcliff at An Khe, Vietnam.

Hunter’s memories are sharp.

A Warren native, Hunter was 21 when he got his draft notice in the spring of 1964.

He remembers his first night in the Army, at Polk, La., listening to some of the men in the barracks whimpering in their beds.

“I thought, what the hell have I gotten myself into?”

Moved to the 4th Division at Ft. Lewis, the new soldiers – including Hunter and his new comrades-in-arms, Doug Green and Dave Kiser – were support for ROTC, Hunter remembered. The students in Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (a college-based program for training commissioned officers in the armed forces) went to the base each summer for military training.

“My job was mowing the lawn around where they’d camp,” Hunter said.

Other enlisted men had more fun.

“Doug and Kiser, they acted like the enemy,” Hunter said, laughing, “shooting blanks and harassing the” ROTC boys.

Besides mowing, Hunter practiced loading LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) in Puget Sound for quick movement of the division.

In December 1964, Hunter and Doug Green went with the 29th Artillery to a frozen Mount Rainier. Skills they learned for cold weather and mountain warfare included walking on skis while pulling a sled loaded with equipment, Hunter said.

“But too many guys were getting hurt,” he said, smiling. They were using the sleds for toboggans. “One guy hit a tent rope and it took out his front teeth. That was the end of the playing.”

Everyone in Hunter’s unit got Christmas leave that year, and he spent a week on the family farm in Warren before returning to training, but this time to “Polar Strike” at the Air Force Base at Fairbanks, Alaska.

“They made us run,” Hunter remembered, “it was 30 below zero.”

“The coldest it got was 60 below,” he said, while they were in Alaska.

Of the 15 days Hunter spent in the cold, he and his unit, seven men of the 29th Artillery, spent 10 of them outside in the bitter cold practicing setting up and breaking down camp and moving to different locations.

“We would clear the snow … We could get the tent set up and heat in it in 15 minutes.”

By June 1965, Hunter and Green were moved to the 18th Artillery, a self-propelled (mobile) unit.

He and Green were trained as “wire men,” Hunter shared. “Phone lines is what we did.”

Finally, in September, they got a week of leave to go home to say goodbye to their families again.

They had received their orders for ‘Nam.

Hunter was flown to San Francisco, and they boarded the USNS Gordon.

By the time they sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge, a few short miles, Hunter was vomiting over the side of the ship.

“I was sick for three days.”

He wasn’t the only one.

“The whole side of the ship was yellow” from so many soldiers being seasick alongside.

His section chief, Sgt. King, said, “I’ll fix you up,” Hunter remembered, “and he put me on KP. Once I was moving around, I was alright.”

They had been on the Gordon 17 days when they landed in White Beach, Okinawa, for a 12-hour layover.

“We dropped our bags and went down a rope into a landing craft,” Hunter said. Excited to be on solid ground, “half the ship went AWOL.”

“Our ship spent five days and nights in Qui Nohn bay waiting to be offloaded,” Hunter explained, and that first day after landing there was record-breaking heat.

It was then Hunter knew he was in a different world.

“The stink. The heat,” he said. “There were Jeeps with their windshields shot out.”

They were stationed in An Khe, a small village located in the highlands about 250 miles north of Saigon and 75 miles east of Qui Nhon. The base had a 200-yard perimeter.

Their first day there, they dug fox holes, set up their M60 guns and hunkered down for their first night.

Hunter and Sgt. Turner were assigned an M60 machine gun.

“They gave us one box of ammo,” Hunter said, “and we shot half of that the first night … There’s someone out there, there’s someone out there,” he said. When they woke up in the morning, they discovered the “someone” was a stump.

“It was two weeks before the eight-inch guns came in.”

Helicopters dumped rolls of heavy barbed wire for fences designed by engineers.

“We were the first ones there,” Hunter explained. C Battery, 18th Artillery.

Camp Radcliff, An Khe, Vietnam, became home base for Hunter and Green.

They strung communication lines and set up a switchboard.

The area in which they set up camp in An Khe had been defoliated with Agent Orange, and the South Vietnamese people were clearing the trees.

“They wanted that wood to burn,” Hunter said.

“My dad asked me how long the war would last,” Hunter remembered, “and I said maybe a year, two at the most.”

It wasn’t until nine years later that the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam.

“The generals, the officers ran WWII,” Hunter said. “But once the government is involved, it’s a mess. They wouldn’t bomb those ships. They knew they were there. That would have shortened things a lot … Walter Cronkite said ‘this war is lost.’ That made me mad.”

At An Khe, the South Vietnamese people were friendly. Children at An Khe visited the soldiers daily, selling Coca Cola and popsicles, offering to wash their clothes in the river for money.

“My watch went bad,” Hunter said, so he bought one from one of the children. “It lasted two weeks,” he said, laughing. “They’d have made good car salesmen.”

Despite the heat, Camp Radcliff was not the horrible hell generally thought of in times of war. Hunter kept a pet parrot for a bit. An Khe had cooks, so soldiers didn’t have to rely on MREs.

“We had good cooks, Hunter said. “They made the best fried chicken,” Hunter said. “Outdid Kentucky Fried!”

As a line man, Hunter knew the phone lines, and in the small hours of the night he would try to call home.

“They said if you could get connected to Saigon you could call home,” he said. But his attempts never got him as far as the Saigon operator.

At An Khe, there was something going on all the time, Hunter remembered.

“We were constantly on patrol,” Hunter said.

Until camp was established well, they ate MREs (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) and from cans they opened with P38s (can openers) that Hunter found out were made in Warren by G.G. Green Enterprises.

During Hunter’s two years in the U.S. Army, he was allowed to keep a Bell & Howell 8mm camera with him (and he still has the camera) and regularly sent film home to be preserved by his family. Today on VHS, the film is jumpy and in some places unclear now – more than 50 years after it was shot – but the impact is solid:

South Vietnamese children peddling pop.

South Vietnamese adults gathering wood.

Shirtless soldiers putting together a gun.

Lines of helicopters coming in. Going out.

Smiling soldiers with their arms around one another in an ageless fraternal bond.

South Vietnamese women picking nits from one another’s hair.

Hunter was only shot at once, toward the end of his tour. The bullet zipped over the hood of the Jeep he stood near.

And, one night, their unit was mortared in a terrifying attack.

“When they are shooting at you, you can get down,” Hunter said, “but when they come out of the sky, that’s a different story.”

“Have you ever been so scared your butt vibrates?” Hunter asked. “That’s how scared I was.”

At one point his unit traveled up Happy Valley … soldiers in personnel carriers, trucks pulling ammunition for eight-inch guns through ditches and waterways.

“They were too heavy for the bridges,” Hunter said. “We had helicopter support all the way up and all the way back.”

“We were out there for a week I think, and it rained every day,” Hunter said. “Everything was moldy.”

Soldiers complained about their wet feet.

“I changed my socks, kept my feet dry,” Hunter said. But it was difficult, the wet.

They put sticks in the bottom of their foxhole where there was standing water.

The eight-inch guns could shoot up to seven miles, Hunter said, depending on how many packs of gun powder were loaded into them.

One day, as he walked by, he asked shooters on the perimeter what they were shooting at, and they said, “an elephant,” Hunter remembered, smiling.

The Viet Cong had stolen a 105 mm Howitzer, and they were using an elephant to pull it. The shooters dispatched the elephant.

Hunter never saw hand-to-hand combat, but his unit “did a lot of time on target,” he said, with the eight-inch guns.

“They would pick a location on the trail” and bombard it, he said, where the North Vietnamese traveled at night.

“Very seldom would we find anybody,” he said. “If there was a casualty, they’d cart them off.”

Sadly, an infantryman guarding the perimeter of camp was killed when troops with a 105 “shot short,” Hunter said.

Once, when a soldiers was wounded in the head, Hunter drove the 70-mile trip to Qui Nhon in one day. They packed their bag to stay at Whi Nhon but had to turn around and head back to An Khe as soon as they deposited the soldier at the military hospital there.

They were at An Khe about six months.

Green was discharged in February 1966, and Hunter soon followed, in April 1966, complete with a Good Conduct Medal and an honorable discharge.

Hunter didn’t experience any derogatory treatment suffered by many veterans of the Vietnam War.

“We didn’t have anything to be ashamed of,” Hunter said. “They appreciated us being there.”

But, he didn’t wear his uniform home.

“I changed into civilian clothes when my plane landed in Pittsburgh,” he said.

Hunter, now 72, spends his days working his family farm on Fifth Avenue in Warren, a 141-acre farm his mom’s family – the Wentz family – purchased in 1874. They came from Alsace-Lorraine, between France and Germany in Europe.

“My great-great-grandfather was a tobacco farmer,” Hunter said. The family planned its voyage to the U.S., sewing gold coins into their clothes, but one of the daughters became ill right before the passenger ship was to leave, so they missed it. When they finally completed passage – on a cattle ship – they discovered the passenger ship on which they originally planned to travel never completed its voyage. It sunk in the Atlantic Ocean.

Today, Hunter – who technically could have been deferred (II-C) for working on his family farm – grows hay, oats and corn for silage. They have about 30 cows for breeding, and they sell cows and beef.

He and his wife, Sally, were married in 1967 and had four daughters, one of whom they lost at 20 months. Jean, Jessie and Jill all live nearby.

“They’re good kids,” Hunter said.

The couple has six grandchildren.

Besides farming, the Hunters enjoy watching NASCAR.