Scott City veteran looks back on time in Vietnam

Larry Corn, a resident of Scott City and a Vietnam veteran, would be the first to say his wartime experiences aren't anything to brag about.

"There were men over there who did a lot more than I did," said Corn, 66.

Corn, a Sikeston, Mo., native who served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969 while in the U.S. Army, wasn't a Special Forces hero who came home with rows of medals on his chest. He didn't serve as an infantryman with plenty of stories to tell about intense combat situations. Instead, Corn served in military intelligence as an interrogation specialist, and while he downplays his service as uneventful compared to the thousands of men who bravely fought in Vietnam, he does have a story to tell.

"I had a fairly usual childhood growing up in Sikeston," he said. "I worked part-time at a grocery store, and my father, B.G. Corn, was a Baptist minister. I was a typical preacher's kid, I guess. You try to be good but you fall out of Grace every now and then."

Corn graduated from Sikeston High School in 1965 and enrolled at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. With the military draft in effect at the time, Corn thought he would be safe from the draft while an undergraduate, but the Army had other ideas.

Larry Corn during his time in the Army. (Submitted photo)

"After a couple of semesters, I got a notice that I was going to be drafted" he said. "It took me by surprise. I took the notice to the Army recruiter in Sikeston, and he was able to find me a noncombat role in intelligence. So I went ahead and enlisted for three years."

Corn enlisted in the Army in January 1967. After he completed basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., he was sent to Fort Holabird in Baltimore, Md., for training as an intelligence analyst and interrogation specialist.

"We were all green out of basic training and pushed into the different world of intelligence," he said. "For several weeks we learned about military structure and also the structure of the South Vietnamese Army. We also learned interrogation techniques."

The training was fairly simple, according to Corn. A two-man interrogation team would be in a room with a soldier who acted as a North Vietnamese or Viet Cong prisoner, and the team would practice their techniques on him.

"There was a nice guy and a bad guy," he said. "Our instructors watched us and they saw where we fit in during the process. My personality and characteristics came out to be the nice guy. The bad guy would go in and ruffle his feathers, and then I would come with a cup of coffee and talk to him. 'Do you miss your family?' and 'Do you miss home?' I would play on their emotions. I wasn't any good at being bad."

Learning Vietnamese

Corn finished his training at Fort Holabird in July 1967, and he was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, for 47 weeks of learning to speak and read the Vietnamese language.

"We were taught eight hours a day, five days a week," he said. "We learned to speak Vietnamese so that we could communicate with prisoners and learned to read it so that we could translate documents. Most of us butchered the language something awful."

Corn arrived in Vietnam in August 1968. His first set of orders was for Cam Ranh Bay, what he called the "Hilton Hotel" of Vietnam.

"It had swimming pools and good food," he said. "But I guess someone realized that with my training I wouldn't fit in doing nothing all day, so I was moved up north close to the DMZ [the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam]."

When Corn was sent near the DMZ, it was as a member of the 191st Military Intelligence Detachment assigned to 1st Air Cavalry Division. He was also able to put his "good guy" interrogation skills to the test with North Vietnamese or Viet Cong prisoners.

"Some people might call what we had a POW camp," he said, "but it was more like a detention place because they would later be processed to other areas. What we did was more like an interview, really, because they had already been interrogated in the field by combat soldiers and then brought to us. We'd talk to them for a while and occasionally we'd get a good bit of information. We had guys who screamed and yelled at them, but our unit had specific rules on how we treated our prisoners. It didn't do any good to beat them up or anything like that, anyway."

Corn said that he could remember prisoners who had been captured while carrying maps and other information that could possibly be deemed important.

"They were big into carrying documents like diaries and letters from home. The majority of stuff we'd find was poems and songs. We'd try to look at them in that respect, but while we translated them we'd also try to see if there were any hidden messages, things like dates, times and places. We'd also see if any names in there might be military names we got from other detainees. We'd try to match the names up, but most of the time nothing came from it."

Under fire

Corn said he felt safe within the Air Cavalry base except when it was hit by enemy rockets and mortars. Part of his duties also required him to occasionally travel by chopper to pick up detainees or take part in a field interrogation, and once he emerged unharmed from a chopper crash. But there also was plenty of downtime at the base, which afforded Corn and other unit members time to translate more documents and to also forge unlikely friendships.

"There was a young boy from North Vietnam who had been captured and had been trained to work with us," Corn said. "A good little fella. The worst story I remember about him was when we were talking as friends. I asked him what he'd do when the war was over, and he said that he didn't know. He said that he wouldn't be able to go back to his family in North Vietnam because they wouldn't accept him. He said that he would probably die or get lost somewhere. I really wonder what happened to him because I lost track of him shortly after I left Vietnam."

Corn left Vietnam in 1969 and was discharged as a Specialist Fifth Class later that year. He said he was a frustrated soldier when he returned home.

"I felt like we were losing the war," he said. "The South Vietnamese were tired of us being there. Some of the attitude was, 'Why don't you just go home? Give me my pig and chicken and 1-acre plot and leave me alone.' It didn't matter to them whether they lived under communism or democracy. And I got to come home and have a family when so many soldiers lost their lives."

Corn enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University, majoring in art and minoring in sociology, but he was really interested in law enforcement.

"They didn't have a criminal justice major or the Law Enforcement Academy at the time," he said. "The lady I was married to then, her family had a lumber business in Chaffee [Mo.], so I worked there. But law enforcement still interested me, and I applied to the FBI."

Next: FBI

In 1972, Corn was approved to become a fingerprint analyst by the FBI, and he and his family relocated to Arlington, Va. He said he wasn't on the fast track to become a bona fide FBI agent.

"You had to be either a lawyer or an accountant to become an agent," he said. "I was more or less a clerk looking at fingerprints sent from all over the country."

After serving one year with the FBI, Corn and his family returned to Chaffee where he resumed life in the lumber business for the next 17 years. But he couldn't shake wanting to be in law enforcement, so he enrolled at the Law Enforcement Academy at Southeast, which had been established in 1987.

"After I completed the academy course," he said, "I joined the Scott County Sheriff's office as a deputy. It was about that time that they needed a bailiff, so I became the bailiff for Judge [David] Dolan. I was also a jailer, but I spent most of my time in the courtroom.

Corn spent seven years with the Scott County Sheriff's Department and he also served as the Chaffee chief of police from 2003 to 2004. Now retired and living in Scott City with his second wife, Donna, health issues have taken their toll on Corn in recent years.

"I'm a disabled veteran because of Agent Orange," he said. "I had prostate cancer discovered in 2007 and also heart disease connected to it. I also have peripheral neuropathy in my leg. But all that is minor compared to what other people face. Some days when you get down on yourself, you see someone else in much worse condition."

Agent Orange was a defoliate used during the Vietnam War that has been linked to health problems experienced by military personnel who were exposed to the chemical.

Interrogation methods

When it comes to waterboarding and other forms of interrogation methods that have been used on members of al-Qaida or their associates, Corn said that he personally disagrees with those methods.

"You can beat a fellow to death, but you might not get the information you want from him," he said. "My nature, my personality, my upbringing said 'no,' you still treat them like humans. I guess dealing with al-Qaida is more severe than us dealing with the Vietnamese. I guess they felt that they had to use extreme interrogation techniques to get information. But I wasn't there, so I don't know what it took to break the personality of someone with al-Qaida."

When asked if he would ever return to Vietnam for a visit, Corn said that he would have to think about it.

"I might do it if it would help relieve memory stress," he said, "but right now, I won't even buy a shirt or a pair of shoes made in Vietnam. The memories are too strong. It's a personal thing, but maybe someday it might start to break down."

klewis@semissourian.com

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