University of Virginia Library

12. Ernie Dogwolf Lovato (Apache/Mestizo)

A member of the Apache/Mestizo tribe, Ernie Dogwolf was born August 30, 1947, in Lingo, Wyoming. His parents were migrant workers. He served in the military from 1966 to 1971 (in the U.S. Marine Corps in '68 and '69) in Vietnam, where he worked as a 21/31 artillery mechanic; he also served as Sergeant of the Guard. He remembers being frequently used in small arms repair, field repair, and mortar repairs in the field. Ernie worked with the railroads for twenty years before he began his work with the Vietnam Veterans of America. He has nine grandchildren, and devotes some of his time to visiting schools and educating students about issues connected with Vietnam veterans and the Vietnam War.

Dogwolf Lovato's Vietnam Narrative

Being in Vietnam, you spent a lot of time dreaming of coming home. Wishing. Sitting out there and looking at a hill and imagining that it's your mountain that you're watching. And all you want to do is to go back. I have no bitterness about Vietnam, I just have a lot of sadness. I went because I didn't want my children to go. But unfortunately, war is war, and we're going to continue to have war. How do we stop it? I don't know. Unstoppable. It's like stopping rivers. We've tried that too.

I think that's the difference between Native people and the White man: we understand that we are part of the Earth. Mother Earth is very generous to us. Extremely. It can feed us. It can warm us. Or it can kill us. And it chose to feed us and warm us. We choose to kill it. That is what our young people are taught. The environment is taught in schools but it's not taught like with the Natives. Anglo kids go to school, and they teach them about the environment. But while that young Anglo boy goes home and tells his parents about what he learned about the environment, the Indian young man gets involved in his kiva and practices it. It is his religion—a one-on-one relationship with Mother Earth. He has an intellectual relationship with the Earth.

I related more to the Vietnamese people than to the Americans. The way they lived, the way they ate, and the way they survived with next to nothing. I felt a lot of compassion for the Vietnamese people, and I think a lot of people felt that maybe I was too compassionate. But to me,

is a word that I try not to use in my vocabulary. Our people have been in war since the beginning of time. If you look at the history of all people, and I'm not just talking about native people, if you look at the history of all people, war's not good for anybody. I used that philosophy and tried to turn the worst things into the best possible situation. And I did. I learned a lot from the Vietnamese people and they learned from me. I was with a CAP unit for a little bit, not very long, but it was enough to open up my eyes.

When I was stationed at Hai Phong Pass, my job was to protect the hill, and I couldn't do it because we sat in the opium dens learning what the Vietnamese culture was all about. That was an experience that felt new for me because I had never done drugs before I went to Vietnam. I sat in the opium dens and listened to Papasans and Mamasans, and when I started hallucinating the people around me were actually my Indian people. The den was very much like it was with my people because of how similar their ways were to of some of our religions, especially in the Native American

Church. You had someone that cared for you and somebody that was going to watch over you, so you really depended on that person. People I knew who were in those dens usually went in there to get high. I've learned I used that den to find my inner self. I would say their medicine people taught their elders the same.

I found the children in Vietnam to be really joyful. They were no different than any other children, except for the fact that they were subjected to outside influences, mainly the United States. Their first can of Coke: American food. I think those influences hurt the people more than they helped them. You can't change people through war. I feel that what we were doing in Vietnam was trying to change the people, not the government. The Vietnamese people had been at war with the French, and it was obvious that they were very, very intelligent people. You cannot survive if you're not intelligent enough to get away from B-52 bombers that constantly bomb and bomb and bomb and bomb and bomb. Those kinds of things are still on my mind. Not so much the death and destruction, because I didn't let that bother me, though I didn't really suppress it either. I knew it was fact of war. I think what bothered me the most was the sound of war. The guns constantly going off. The talk of war going on. The talk of people.

It bothered me that people didn't want to know anybody. Soon I got callused to that, because I didn't want to reach in somebody's pocket and get their identification just to know who they were, or have to tell somebody that if something happens please let my girlfriend know that I love her. I didn't want to do any of that. Looking back, I feel really fortunate for what I learned there, but I'm also saddened about the reasons I was sent. I didn't understand. Being eighteen years old, coming from sitting in the back of a Chevy, making out with some chick, six months later you're out there training to kill people. It's like a bad dream, a joke. I really didn't take it seriously until that big jet landed in Da Nang and I got off the plane there. It reality hit me because of the stink, the mist, the smell of diesel, the generator sounds. All of this is still in my mind. Not so much the destruction, but those elements that you had to live with everyday…everyday. The smell of the latrine when you lay in your bunk, and the wind came down that way. The smell of the diesel and the generators that created the electricity for your hooch.

Another thing that was unique in Vietnam was the compassion that the Vietnamese people really had for the Americans, when we gave compassion back.

If you were an asshole, you were going to be assholed. If you were kind to the people, you got that back. Kindness saved my life, simply because I was trusted by them. As other veterans know, we went in there with every will that they were all VC. Maybe that was true, and maybe it wasn't true, but in my experience, I wanted to treat people how I wanted to be treated, even though it was a zone of war. So called word war. I feel very fortunate that I returned. I also feel guilty that I returned. I think this is one of the reasons for what I do here now, and what I have dedicated my life to after railroading. I worked for the railroad for twenty-one years and looked around me and realized I was this $80,000-a-year-man working on the railroads and not being happy. I saw a lot of these guys from either the caboose or from the engine who were homeless, asking me to throw water out there. People in their fatigues asking and begging for water. What a simple commodity.

There are a lot of funny things that happened in Vietnam. I enjoyed

being Sergeant of the Guard, because in that job I had the liberty to go around to the different outposts. That was the time that you could really get into the black market with the guys (the black market was a little local-yokel thing). Someone wants whiskey; a bottle of whiskey buys me two cartons of cigarettes. Two cartons of cigarettes buys me something else. And pretty soon you end up with a jeep that somebody stole from the Navy. You bring the jeep back over to the bay, and you paint it green, and you put numbers on it and you sell it to a Lieutenant for something. It was all there, and everybody played the game. I didn't think anything was wrong with it because I saw the stuff they destroyed. They would take the rear ends of jeeps and use a torch to cut them in half simply because the engine was blown. There was nothing to fix in the four-cylinder engine. When I was working on small arms, rifles were thrown away when people came in to exchange barrels. Instead of exchanging the barrels, I would issue new M-16's. When I went to Vietnam I had an M-14 and liked it, until they changed over to the AR-15, and pretty soon they gave us the M-16.

I enjoyed messing around with the newbies. You had to try to keep your sense of humor. It was a tradition to break somebody in, and it happened to me too. When you were in a perimeter in a secured area, you still had guards. As Sergeant of the Guard, I would go into one specific area where I would stay that night, and a newbie would come by. I would explain to him that he had the first shift, and he would fall asleep. I would have some wire all tied up with a piece of string so that I could rattle the cans. Same old routine. Scared them to death. Told them not to wake me up because sleep was very important, so don't bother me with any off-the-wall stuff. So I'd close my eyes, wait about ten or fifteen minutes, and I'd start rattling the cans. And he'd put his helmet down and say

So he'd wake me up and I'd sit up for a little bit, ten or fifteen minutes. Listen…listen…nothing. I'd say,

So, I'd do the same thing, rattle the cans. And wait a little. I'd rattle the cans and make sure he heard something. He'd say,

So I did this about two or three times and finally about the fourth time I said, I lay down and waited and rattled the cans, and he didn't know whether to wake me up, and I got it louder and louder. He said So I got up and listened again and I was listening and I'll be goddamned if them cans didn't rattle without me pulling the strings. The next thing you know we sent up the flare and stuff. I wasted a water buffalo. water buffalo on the line. I had that one to explain to the First Sergeant and the First Sergeant's Lieutenant. I just got away with it somehow. It cost the government a little bit of money for that water buffalo. Hell, I tried to go get a piece of steak off it. Those Vietnamese were kind of upset at me though, so I didn't bother with the steak.

So, I felt there were some positive aspects of the war. I'm sure that there are other veterans here that view this war as really negative. I view it as positive simply because I'm very fortunate to have a second chance. The Great Spirit gave me an opportunity to work and earn a good living for twenty years with the railroad, but then I knew that I had to do something else, so I began working with the Vietnam Veterans of America. They hired me to do programs, and we've been here nine years, and we're over in funding.

We're about a million, little bit over a million and a half. And it's all for helping veterans, non-vets, and their dependents. There's a lot to do in this country for our poor, for our needy. Not only for our Indian people, but for all. Just the humanities of it. If we don't start taking care of ourselves by taking care of Mother Earth, it's not going to matter. There won't be any wars. There won't be humans. There are a lot of things that are happening now that our forefathers predicted, like the warming of the earth, the melting of the waters. That was said long, long ago by our people. That our children would not be listening. But our people are not known philosophers.

If you really want to see some of the greatest speeches, look at what Geronimo said when he addressed Congress. Look at what the Nez Pearce said. Sitting Bull. If you look at those, there's nothing that touches that. So maybe they could call us primitive, but I would use the word compassionate. There are a lot of stories of Vietnam Veterans being rejected by their culture. We weren't received that way in our own communities. We were well-received, but with minimal honors. We weren't really received, because we never left. We're just welcomed back. We're honored all the time. We're honored in powwows. But powwows are a strange thing to our people, because they are more of a northern plains thing.

The greatest thrill to a young man is to become a warrior and get status within the tribe. That's our ultimate goal. The sad thing about becoming a warrior these days is they're no longer a counting coup. It's got to be a war. So, how do we get our young ones to be warriors without killing them? I don't feel bitter about anybody that didn't go. I'm saddened for those that went to Canada. But I can assure you I don't know of one Native person that went to Canada, except that he lived there anyway. My people are from Canada. I feel strongly that our Indian people have to learn from this war and they have to learn that being a warrior is really not as important as having a son or a daughter, and watching their sons give them children and grandchildren. There are a lot of men out there that will never know their grandchildren. I'm the fortunate one. I've got nine grand babies.

An old, old Apache man told me the story of the Spanish coming into his great-grandfather's community. Being Christianized. A culture has its ways of conducting marriage. They said one man couldn't have all these wives. Pick one wife. And he performed what we call missionary relations. So the Apaches, we figure we have been through four or five hundred different changes, this will be fairly easy. We went along with it for a while. We survived without religion for hundreds of years, thousands. Then all of a sudden somebody comes to save us because our ways of saving ourselves are all wrong, though we had done it for several thousands of years before. Now look at what's happening today, all of a sudden everybody wants to study our religion.

They have the drug mentality instead of the soul mentality. If people were really to take Indian religion to heart, and Indian people would teach their religion to those who are sincere.

The Indian religion is simple; it is real basic, like the penitents. The penitents beat themselves. In a sense, so do we. We suffer with our soul, in our sweats, in our ceremonies, in our runnings, in our bare-feet running. It is a form of humbling ourselves to this Mother Earth. This is how weak we really are. How big are we when that little grain of salt has been here longer than we have? My dust will someday cover that little rock, and eventually the wind will blow my dust away, and that little rock will come up

for the next generation. Look at the mountains. Can we create mountains? No. All we can do is destroy them. Can we destroy the Earth? Yes, we can. We're doing it through pollution, killing the ozone layer. Our people never did that. Our people respected the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the four directions, the winds, the ground. We moved when the ground wasn't fertile. We knew when the Mother Earth had to reseed itself.

We're all fortunate. If you're breathing, you're fortunate. Just understanding that the key to survival of this earth is compassion. And I don't say that we have to agree with everybody, because we all have minds and we all disagree. I don't have to get violent to disagree. It doesn't mean that my opinion is the only opinion and that it should be accepted by everyone. It is for people that give, both spiritually and physically. On the spiritual side I taught the Vietnamese how close they were to our religion, especially in the opium dens. And when I talk about opium dens, don't think that you sat there and sucked up all the opium, and you got yourself silly. They didn't do that. It was a form of meditation to them. It was like a powwow, or after the sweats when they feed you and you get all that you can eat. I shared that kind of thing with them. Teaching one culture to another culture is a very, very difficult task. Even harder than trying to teach it is really trying to understand the other culture and how they feel because of the language barrier. But the mannerisms, the religions in Vietnam were all very, very basic like Native peoples'. They weren't that far apart.

When I worked the yards in Albuquerque, I'd always go talk to these people that were homeless under the bridges. I came to realize that they were cut from the same block I was. They were veterans that couldn't survive back home, simply because of the structure and discipline that the military gave us. When the military released us, there was no structure in release, and you were just thrown back into the environment that you'd left and forgotten. Your loved ones loved you but they still questioned, why did you kill? Why didn't you just come home? Well, that's easy for somebody to say but it was really difficult for an Indian man or any person to say that what they were doing was not right. If my government says it was right, it was right. So I went with it. But having the knowledge that I have now, I know that we were wrong, as a government and as a unit, as people of the United States. And not just as Indian people. I'm talking about people in general.

I feel that Vietnam was a political war, even though I denied it at the time. I read McNamara's book, which people who are interested in this subject should read, and it had a lot of influence on me. After reading that book and reminiscing and looking back about what I've said and watching the homeless off the train, now I believe that they were part of the one hundred thousand men who were drafted simply because a lot of them were illiterate. This wasn't just Indian people that it was happening to; they just chose everybody. The highest rate of people that went to Vietnam were Hispanics.

I don't speak too fondly of the things that I did to hurt people over there. Even though people say

It's still a feeling inside a person that we're not taught to take lives. In our old ways before the white man came, counting coup was a great, great way of becoming a champion. When the white man came in and presented his firearms to our people, not only did we kill the white men, but we also started killing ourselves. The shame of not being able to take coup is still here to this day. The people that were out to really hurt anybody were just taught to protect, and I feel that's the attitude that I took in Vietnam. I felt that I had to protect myself.

I step back and analyze at the age of fifty or fifty-one now; I look back and see how wasted my youth was. They say that it was only two years out of your youth. But the sounds are still there, the smells are still there, the criticisms from other people, negative or positive, are still there. The misunderstanding of the war is still there. Our kids don't even know what a POW/MIA flag is. So I go to schools and speak on that issue, and I'm surprised that I've even had people ask me,

Where were we with all this? What was the benefit of all this? Well, I benefit by it because I've learned, and what I've learned I can pass onto my children. I would venture to say that I am proud to be a citizen of the United States; I am proud to serve my president. I am also proud to serve as a Native. But I'm saddened that my government failed to recognize the humanities, not only for us, but for the Vietnamese. I'm saddened by our government and the compassion that it did not have for our people or for the Vietnamese people.