The Interview | "Echoes of Vietnam"
The not-yet-a-New-York-Times-best-selling-author interview you've been waiting for.
HENDERSON COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA | November 9, 2024 — Tucker Carlson had to jet off to Russia, and Face the Nation booked Nikki Haley instead. So, we decided to interview today’s Indie Author on the RGK Publishing platform.
Looks like we’re all here, so let’s get started.
RGK Publishing: For readers unfamiliar with you, share a bit about yourself.
Ron Kays: Sure. My life began in 1957 in a small town in eastern Ohio. I have two older brothers and an older and younger sister, a big family by today’s standards.
My father worked as an engineer for B.F. Goodrich. The company transferred Dad to Southern California when I was about a year old, so our tribe moved to the northwest corner of Orange County in the golden era of post-war America.
Ours was a pretty normal childhood—playing with the many other kids in the neighborhood, birthday parties and sleepovers, little league games, and visits to the beach. Stuff like that. We had a stay-at-home mom, so we were pretty well “managed.”
There were no cell phones, schoolyards were wide open, the Dodgers had Vin Scully, and gasoline was cheap.
So, paradise.
RGKP: Tell us a bit about your education.
RK: OK. In sequence, we all attended Macy Elementary School just up the street from our house. Then we entered Starbuck Junior High—current-day Whittier Christian High School, where my younger sister eventually attended. The rest of us moved on through La Habra High School, and by 1976, all of us had graduated and headed out the door to college.
I enrolled at Cypress Junior College for three semesters but dropped out and went to work in a furniture warehouse for a while. Hard physical labor, four bucks an hour. At some point on a hot August day, after stacking china hutches by myself in the warehouse basement, I sat down on a packing crate, dripping sweat, and had an epiphany:
“If you don’t go back to college, you’re gonna die in this warehouse!”
So, in September 1978, I jump-started book-learnin’ again at California State University, Fullerton, as an Art Major.
RGKP: Did you graduate this time?
RK: (Smiling) Yes. I managed to cram four years into five and, in 1983, received a B.A. in Graphic Design. Ironically, shortly after I traded my cap-and-gown for an entry-level artist position at Hughes Aircraft Company, Apple Computer unveiled the Macintosh Plus—a real game-changer.
Because of Apple and, later, Microsoft, in 1986, I began translating school-taught manual production skills to their digital equivalent to keep my nose above the rising tide of technology.
I bought a Mac Plus in 1986 for $2,500. A nine-inch diagonal black-and-white screen, half a megabyte of RAM, floppy disc, and no internal hard drive. Clock speed was nine megahertz, I think. I quickly added a 40-megabyte external SCSI hard drive—for 800 bucks.
RGKP: Excuse me—$800 for a 40-megabyte hard drive?
RK: Right? I was broke in those days, so feel my pain!
RGKP: Sounds exciting.
RK: It was. Some of the company’s established senior designers—The Talent—viewed the dawning digital technology revolution with amusement. Between their indifference and our lowly status, the early days were pretty wild west for me and my fellow design plebes.
But, it was time well spent. Five years later, I was recruited by an ex-Hughes colleague to a new project team at The Automobile Club of Southern California (AAA) to advance the Desktop Publishing initiative within the I.T. Department.
Our project goal was to convince the executives to spend a quarter-million dollars on Apple computers for the corporate magazine publishing group, Westways. And we did!
RGKP: Impressive!
RK: It was. When I started at The Auto Club in 1990, there wasn’t a single Apple computer in the building aside from our test machine. The entire shop was Big Blue (IBM). Getting the C-Suite on board with that Apple acquisition was a notable accomplishment for someone in their first 18 months with The Club.
I had learned enough in my role at Hughes to interview very well for that opportunity at AAA. And it paid off for me and the company. Westways magazine group initially saved something north of $250K—in 1991 dollars—by transferring manual processes to digital tools. So—yes, BIG.
RGKP: Tell us about Echoes of Vietnam. Why did you write the book?
RK: Great. Echoes is the story of my older brother’s Vietnam deployment in 1971. It’s also a memoir of my perspective of the times and events as the 12-year-old “little brother” left behind to wonder what it all meant for him and my family.
I wanted to capture my brother’s memories of that time—after five decades—before he died, and the story was lost forever. I wanted to preserve his thoughts and experiences for our family and anyone who wanted to know what that time in American history was like—particularly those without a military background.
Echoes of Vietnam is a story of the “boots on the ground” and his kid brother back home—an epic played out countless times over the ages.
Presenting two perspectives in Echoes—his and mine—broadened the reader base. It’s not just a book for soldiers. It’s for civilians, too. Mostly—I would say—to give civilians a peek into the violent, bloody, scary world of soldiering. We tend to avert our gaze. But, sometimes, we need to see the horrors of war. It’s cliche, but life is not all roses and rainbows. There’s a dark side and a butcher’s bill to pay.
RGKP: Can you elaborate?
RK: (Pauses) We find ourselves in a time—and I touch upon this in the book—we appear to be caught in a revolving door of military “conflict” resulting from questionable decision-making and sometimes spurious information provided by sources with a vested interest in the profitable nature of armed conflict.
Freedom is both fragile and expensive. To endure, it must be defended—and some would leverage that reality to their advantage.
RGKP: The so-called Military Industrial Complex?
RK: Exactly. But it’s more nuanced than just a generic brand. Look—America has been “at war”—and I count “conflict,” “engagement,” and use of “special operation forces,” as the same thing. America has been at war during most of my six-plus decades. Korea, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Cold War, Grenada, Columbia, Somalia, the Baltic States, Iraq parts one and two, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Seriously?
And those are the ones I know about.
RGKP: The story you tell in Echoes morphed a bit over time. You published a couple of book extensions. Why?
RK: Writing Echoes was the first thing of consequence I did after refocusing and relocating to North Carolina. There was an urgency on my part to get the basic storyline out there. So, version one was a mini-book, if you will. Maybe 51 pages. An easy trip-to-the-john read . . . if you know what I mean.
RGKP: (Laughs).
RK: But, then, the astonishingly ill-conceived and executed—is that the right way to say it? The sophomorically executed withdrawal from Afghanistan happened in the Summer of 2021. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The United States of America cut and ran, leaving behind billions of dollars worth of functioning military equipment and technology and abandoning U.S. citizens and loyal Afghan interpreters, their families, and support personnel to the Taliban.
All because a grand-standing politician and his administration wanted us out of Afghanistan on the symbolic 20th anniversary of the original 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Looking back on those bloody closing days—the 13 military personnel killed in the bombing at Kabul airport—while helicopters darted through smokey skies, desperately seeking to extract a few lucky souls from the swirling mass on the ground . . . I couldn’t help but think back to the fall of Saigon in 1975.
I asked my brother in the book to comment on those similarities.
Both of us were shocked that our country’s civilian and military leadership appeared not to have learned a damn thing since Vietnam. The current administration and military Branch Secretaries are even more culpable—they tried to deny the obvious problems of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Sadly, the media were complicit in the administration’s global gaslighting effort. But the cameras were rolling through it all. So, all of them were revealed as inept and morally bankrupt.
In mid-2023, I wrote and published a 3,500-word extension of Echoes to address events in both Afghanistan and Ukraine relative to the original storyline. The parallels between bad decisions and dubious justifications in all eras were too stark to ignore.
RGKP: For instance?
RK: Without too deep a dive, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident paved the way for President Johnson to use conventional military forces in Vietnam without a Congressional declaration of war.
After Osama Bin Laden fled Afghanistan for Pakistan, President Bush’s prolonged and failed nation-building effort in Afghanistan.
The alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction used by President Bush to justify the second Gulf War—while we were already engaged in Afghanistan.
And now, President Biden has poured over $130B into Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Ukraine to fund what very much looks like a proxy war with Russia.
There are more details, but there’s also a discernable pattern that seems to lead to U.S. involvement in war consistently.
RGKP: I can tell you’re pretty fired up about it.
RK: Absolutely. Because, if we don’t say anything—if we don’t raise a voice or a fist or something . . . it will happen again. And again. Whatever the justification and sober consideration of necessity, one thing is sure—a lot of people die horribly in war.
My family was blessed. My brother—a Purple Heart recipient—came home intact. Not everyone is as fortunate. To suffer the loss of a loved one in an effort with dubious beginnings and questionable motivations is untenable. Where national security or the interests of strategic allies demand action, then, yes—military involvement is warranted. Perhaps unavoidable.
Look—war should be the last option for conflict resolution. But its planning and execution, including a supportable exit strategy, should be priority one. Until we have a civilian commander-in-chief and military Branch Secretaries more interested in national security than critical theory and intersectionality, the next Vietnam is just around the corner.
Or, perhaps, in Ukraine.
RGKP: How would you answer those who say that your assessment sounds like that of a Putin puppet?
RK: (Long pause) Seriously?
RGKP: What would you say to young people caught up in supporting or protesting particular movements? Hamas comes to mind.
RK: I think—you’ve put your finger on a hot-button issue. Young people, by nature, are impressionable and quickly recruited to popular movements or charismatic personas. Taylor Swift comes to mind (smiling).
Kidding aside, I would share with young people what I wish I could have spoken to a much younger version of myself:
Take the time to hear more than one pitch;
Learn to think critically for yourself;
Find your voice and be prepared to use it;
Be prudent in adopting positions or uttering words with dire consequences.
And pray.
RGKP: Thank you for your time.
RK: My pleasure.
Echoes at gift time—or any time
You can find Echoes of Vietnam | A Soldier’s Voice is Heard at your favorite digital bookstore.