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- [Announcer] The following program is a production
of Pioneer Public Television.
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- Welcome to another special episode
of Compass, as we celebrate the Great American Read
in cooperation with PBS, I'm Les Heen.
As part of an eight part series from PBS,
we at Pioneer are celebrating the contributions
of local authors, local authors who bring
to our viewing area special stories and viewpoints.
Writers and wordsmiths in our communities
who live and work around us daily,
and then they retreat to their special places
in order to write the next great American novel,
or give us a historical perspective
on life in rural America.
Pioneer proudly presents these authors
as our way of celebrating the Great American Read.
In this episode, we interview two authors
who examine very different times in our nation's history.
We'll talk about a special K-9 unit that was assigned
to an Air Force Security Police Squadron
in Vietnam in the 1970s.
Royal Hettling from Minneota, Minnesota,
will share some first hand
heroism stories of this special K-9 unit,
as he describes in his book, Ten: Five Five.
In our second interview, we'll visit
with author Dean Urdahl, who writes
about the Dakota Conflict of 1862.
His four installment set of books describe fact based
and historical information
about this period in Minnesota's history.
He combines fictional characters with historical figures,
to weave an interesting telling of these tumultuous times.
Here now, first, is the little known
but very important story of the Vietnam War,
told by a local veteran about his time of service,
where the police dog who saved his master's life.
Welcome to the Compass Literature Corner.
This week, a soldier's story that includes something
rarely told, the service of K-9 units
during the Vietnam War.
Royal Hettling is a Vietnam veteran
from Minneota, Minnesota, and he's the author
of Ten: Five Five, chronicles
of the 483rd Security Police Squadron's K-9 Unit,
and Royal is here now, Royal Hettling,
thanks for joining us on the Compass.
- Well, thank you, Les, I'm happy to be here today.
- So, I wanna start with the title of the book,
Ten: Five Five, what does Ten: Five Five mean?
- Ten: Five Five was based upon a radio code
we would use on our, we carried small two way
portable radios with us, and Ten: Five Five
simply means K-9 alert.
- And so, when the K-9 alert,
and you said there's really three kinds of reasons
why you were using K-9 units.
There were sentries, and there were trackers,
and there were scouts, right?
Three different sort of functions?
- Yes.
The sentry dog which we handled mainly serves
as security for a camp perimeters,
landing strips, we secured bomb dumps,
fuel dumps, munition dumps.
The scout dogs were mainly used to lead infantry patrols
and they would look for booby traps, ambushes and snipers.
The trackers, which were primarily Labrador retrievers,
because of their keen sense of smell,
would be used after contact was made.
They would tract the enemy ambushers down
to whether they ran to a village or into a tunnel.
And they would find their hiding places.
And now we use primarily German Shepherds
and Labrador Retrievers,
mainly because the Retrievers for their keen sense of smell,
the German Shepherds for the sentrying skill,
because of their adaptability,
and their intelligence.
- I know you had said in your book
that growing up in Southwestern Minnesota,
growing up near Minneota,
growing up on farms, you had dogs around
and then when you went into the service,
there was a series of different trainings
and you ended up in security and then dog patrols
as part of the Air Force
and so when you got to Vietnam, though,
as you said, you told me off-camera,
it's surprising how few dogs there really were in Vietnam,
about 4,000.
- Yes, sir.
There were 4,000 dogs altogether that was used in Vietnam
and that included all three categories,
and they only had about 10,000 handlers altogether.
That was combined in the Army,
the Navy and Marine Corps combined and the Air Force.
- Now when we hear about people handling dogs,
we often think of a dog turns on someone's handler.
That may be it for the dog, but in your case,
you had some pretty rough times early on,
you know, working with dogs.
- Yes.
The first dog they assigned me to, Pepper,
which was a German Shepherd/Black Lab mix.
Yeah, him and I didn't exactly get along too good.
He turned on me and he bit me in his kennel run one day.
I wasn't gonna take him out,
and so I was just playing with him in his kennel run,
giving him some dog treats,
and then I was in the far end of his kennel round that day
and I heard a faint growl
and I knew right away I wasn't gonna get out
of that kennel unscathed and by the time I got to the gate,
he had a hole in me.
So, yeah, he gnawed on my arm pretty good.
- So Pepper was out of the picture,
but the next dog you worked with, Thunder,
I know you said in your book,
which wasn't much, but it was a terrific experience
and life-saving.
- Oh yes.
Thunder, he was a real winner to me.
We bonded right away
and we meshed instantly from day one
and, in fact, a lot of people don't realize,
in fact, maybe they do,
that dogs have personalities just like people.
They're no different,
and either you mesh with them or they don't,
and Pepper and I just didn't get along, hit it off,
where Thunder and I, we did right away from day one,
and so that's how worked so good together.
We just immediately understood one another
and dogs are like people.
- I know when we were talking off-camera,
sharing these stories, these unusual stories
of you working with dogs and having this experience
in Vietnam.
It took a while for you to get to the point
where you were willing to share the stories
and to write them,
and it took encouragement from other writers,
as well as support from other veterans, right?
- Yes, it did.
In fact, it wasn't until I read an article
in a veteran's magazine once,
that they said that we should be writing down some
of our stories to preserve them for other people,
for those that come after us, and I thought about that
and I just though, you know,
the Vietnam veteran is not living near as long
as what our Korean and World War II counterparts are,
and I just thought when I'm gone,
my son's going to be asking his mother,
what did dad do in 'Nam?
And his mother's gonna say, I really don't know,
he never talked about it,
and when we went to their reunions,
none of those guys ever talked about it.
They just talked about current things
and so I just thought maybe I should start writing some
of these things down,
and then as I started writing some
of my own experiences down, I just thought,
what are my contacts of the guys I was with?
Let's just make it a little bit more about unit history,
so I just went on from there
and contacted some of the guys I was with,
so it got to be our stories, and it just evolved from there.
- And I know some of the stories
that you share in the book is about, of course,
there were many life-changing experiences,
but some of their experiences at night,
led them down the road to becoming pastors.
- Yeah, two of the stories in there are very intense.
In fact, for us, we always used a story,
The Hundred Yard Stare, meaning simply
if an intruder was 100 yards from us,
we were very concerned about him,
and our sappers, as we called them,
our enemy was always up close and personal.
We could always see them,
and a lot of times we could see the expression on his faces,
and two of the accounts in the book
are written by friends of mine who had those experiences
where the enemy was up close and personal,
and as a result of those experiences that night,
their experiences led them to the ministry,
and those stories are explained in very graphic detail,
and very concise detail on how it affected their lives.
- And of course, with Ken Burns' Vietnam airing recently,
there's been a lot more attention paid
to the ideas that these stories,
as you have shared, need to be told,
and there's a lot more telling now
and, as you've done, with your friends,
getting these stories together is even more important.
- Yes, it is.
And in fact one of the stories in my book there
when I was watching the Ken Burns Documentary,
I call it the eye-opening experience there.
We were there about 4-6 weeks at the time
and I was sitting in the hooch with some
of the guys we came with,
and we were talking about our observations at that point
and we begin to realize this may be a no-win situation
for the United States, and we noticed there was
an elderly Vietnamese maid listening to our conversation,
so we asked her to join us,
and so we asked her what her take
on the United States being there.
And she just asked us why were we there?
And so we gave her the normal answer,
that we're trying to stop the spread of communism,
and she just looked at us and said, what's communism?
So we did our best to try to explain
to her what communism was and what it stood for,
which I simply think went way over her head.
Then she said, follow me, so she took us outside
to behind our hooch and it was about the time of the day
where all the maids were leaving for the day
to the pick-up point, and she said you talk a lot about VC.
Can you tell me what VC look like?
So we looked around and said -
oh, she asked us had we seen any VC there, and we said, no.
We didn't think we had seen any VC there,
and she said, well, I'll tell you this,
as we stand here, they're all around you,
and with that, we just stood there kind of speechless
for a few moments and finally one person said,
well, what should we do?
And she just looked at us and said, go back to America
and just leave us alone.
- As I think about it, off-camera, you'd said that
as you did go back to America, that you thought
about all the people that were there of course,
but also the dogs you worked with
and how many were left behind.
- Out of the 4,000 dogs that served,
approximately 350 were actually killed in combat,
and probably another 700-1,000 died of disease,
and the rest, they only brought 200 of them,
240 of them to be exactly, home.
The rest were either ordered to be destroyed
in our hurry to get out,
or they were turned over to South Vietnamese military,
which was considered to be a travesty,
because they did not know how to handle dogs,
or did not appreciate what the dog could do.
- Royal, I wish we had more time, we're out of time,
but I wanna thank you for your service,
and thank you for joining us today on Compass.
- Well, thank you, Wes.
I'm happy to be here.
- Royal Hatling, and the book is Ten: Five Five,
The Chronicles of 483rd Security Police Squadron's K-9 Unit,
and Royal, to get your book?
- They can go to Amazon.com and just type in my name
or Ten: Five Five, it's spelled out numerically.
Or you can just contact me, Royal Hatling,
at my home address, 3011 North Grant Street, Minneota.
I can send you a copy, $25.
- Great, Royal.
Thanks again for being with us.
You will find Royal Hatling's book, Ten: Five Five,
at the Vietnam Memorial and History Center
on Highway 68 in Minneota,
or you can go to Amazon.com.
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While the nation lived through the awful years
of the Civil War, in Minnesota,
we also experienced a conflict within our own boundaries.
The book Uprising is in the form of a novel,
and it tells the story of the Dakota Conflict of 1862.
Some time ago, I sat down with author Dean Urdahl
to talk about his book.
Welcome to the Compass Literature Corner.
This week, an author whose experiences as a history teacher
and his family roots in rural Minnesota,
have led to a fascinating life
as the author of several books.
He's also a member of the Minnesota
House of Representatives.
Welcome to Representative Dean Urdahl of Grove City.
Dean, thanks for joining us on Compass.
- Good to be here, thank you.
- It's such a treat to be able to talk about this,
because one of your books that we've talked about off air
is Uprising, and this is actually the third,
or it's one of three books in a series that you've written
about Minnesota and that time in our history.
- Well, actually, there are four books.
Uprising is the story of the US Dakota War of 1862,
kind of from the beginning to the end,
then Retribution, the next book,
talks about the captives, the trials, the executions,
the hangings at Mankato in the aftermath of the war,
and then in 1863, Generals Sibley and Sully went after
the Dakota Indians who had left Minnesota
under Little Crow and got into the Dakota territory,
so my third book, Pursuit, talks about that,
and then in 1864, there were still Dakota
that hadn't been subdued, so to speak,
and so Conspiracy tells the story
of General Alfred Sully going into the Dakota territory,
going up to what is now near Dickinson,
and defeating, actually Sitting Bull,
at Killdeer Mountain, and then we transition
from that end of the US Dakota War in Conspiracy
into a connection that Minnesota has
to Abraham Lincoln's assassination,
so I get into that a little bit, too.
- As you work through these books,
and one of the things that you have done
is you have taken individuals who were actually documented
part of these conflicts, such as Solomon Foot
in the Wilmore area and also characters that
are fictional and you've got all these voices
pulled together as a way to tell the story.
- Yeah, I write historical fiction,
but the events that I describe are well-researched
and as closed to the way they really happened
as I can put them,
and most of the people in my books are also real people
and I use their real words wherever I can,
but obviously I couldn't have been there for everything,
so the fiction in my historical fiction mainly
is in the form of dialogue, and the main character,
one of the main characters in my book Uprising,
is fictional whereas the other two, Solomon Foot
and Emily West are not, but Nathan Thomas,
the confederate officer who is sent to Minnesota
to start the Indian War might have existed,
maybe, certainly not the name Nathan Thomas,
but he may have existed or he may not.
I ran across this possibility through my research
when I read that a confederate officer had been seen
in Little Crow's camp before the uprising started,
and so that gave me the thought that that would be
an interesting concept to develop,
and it became more interesting later on
when I received a communication from someone in Virginia,
saying was I aware that a confederate officer
was in charge of covert operations for the confederacy
in charge of starting Indian wars on the frontier,
and that was General Elbert Pike,
so it could have happened.
Makes some sense in what it would do
is first of all keep soldiers on the frontier
so they wouldn't be off fighting in the Civil War,
and secondly cause soldiers fighting in the Civil War
to be sent back to Minnesota.
- Dean, one of the other things that I found fascinating
is you've had the opportunity to meet some
of the descendants of the people you write about,
and also some of your ancestors were around at this time,
and actually had a very important role
in experiencing what this time was.
- That is one of the fascinating things about writing
about history and about this particular time and place
that there are relatives, there are descendants who
are still around and Solomon Foot's family lives
in the Wilmer area.
I've met the great-great-granddaughter of Little Crow.
I was speaking to a city council one time
in the Twin Cities and I look on the desk there,
and the name Galbraith is there
and I said, are you related to the Indian agent from 1862,
and he said, yes, he's the great-great-grandson
of Thomas Galbraith, and I myself,
my interest in history came from my family background.
My mother was a Ness, and the Nesses came to Meeker County
in 1856 and were some of the original settlers of the county
and my great-great-grandfather Uley Halverson Ness
was enacted on August 17th, 1862,
and helped to bury the first five who were killed
by four Indian braves who had come
upon the settlement of Echt.
- And, so over the years growing up,
you obviously knew about this, and so that passion
for history started for you very, very early.
- Yeah, I guess I credit my mother.
I went to Ness Lutheran Church,
just southwest of Litchfield, an old country church,
one of the first congregations,
actually Lutheran congregations,
west of the Mississippi River,
and the large monument to the five who were killed
is in the cemetery there,
and I can remember coming out of the church
with my mother asking about that monument
and she telling me about it
and giving me the family history,
which she had a way of repeating to me many times
in my youth.
- I know people who talk about some of their fascination
with history, and for them the oral history tradition
that's often about having relatives,
not tell the story not just once, but many times,
and that that repetition is a very important part
of those oral history traditions.
- Yeah, I think so.
I, again, heard a lot about it from my mother.
She'd repeat the story and I became a history teacher,
and I, again, think I credit a lot of my early interest
in history to my mother.
- And I know when I've heard you talk to groups
about your experiences and how you wanna make history
come alive for people, that was critically important
for you to keep those seventh graders interested,
wasn't it?
- Oh, that's right.
That's what I taught.
For about 34 of my 35 years,
I had seventh graders in my classroom,
and, you know, history can be kind of dry,
even boring to some people,
but I tried to do the best I could
to make history come alive to my students
and use all kind of different techniques to do so.
To me, history is a story and I'm telling the story
of history to my students and I think it worked fairly well.
- Well, you've also said that as look at these stories,
these stories are still very much with us
as you've worked on them.
- Well, they are.
I have also had a couple of commissions
that I'm involved with.
I chair the Bicentennial Commission
of Abraham Lincoln's birth,
I've chaired the Susque Centennial
of the American Civil War commission
and through that, you recognize that history is still alive
even, oh, 150-200 years ago.
When I gave a speech in the Minnesota Capitol
about Abraham Lincoln, I get folks up
in the upper levels calling down murderer, executioner
every time I use the name Abraham Lincoln,
but I'm speaking on his 200th birthday,
and I've talked to them
and tried to understand why they felt that way
about Abraham Lincoln.
These were Dakota people who were shouting down at me.
One of the things that I discovered through my research
was that the Indian Removal Act of 1863,
the one that Abraham Lincoln signed,
the one that took the Dakota people
who were remaining in Minnesota after the war,
and sent them to Croquete in the Dakota Territory,
that that law is still on the books,
the Indian Removal Act of 1863, and technically,
the Dakota people are not welcome in Minnesota.
Now obviously that's not enforced,
they can come and go as they wish.
They can live here obviously,
but I think it's very egregious to have something
on the books as a law in our federal government
that is discriminatory toward a whole group of people,
and so in the Minnesota House,
we did a resolution asking that Congress repeal that law.
It passed the House, passed the Senate
and Governor Pawlenty signed it
and it's still sitting in Washington.
Frankly, the Dakota people, well,
it gets complicated as to why.
I don't think I'll go into all that,
but unfortunately the law is still on the books.
Now, we've done some things.
On the 150th anniversary of the war,
when we had that recognition here in Minnesota,
we went to the border in Pipestone,
Secretary of State Richie and I,
and did a symbolic welcoming back of Dakota people
to Minnesota, those who were at the Flandreau reservation,
and then we also, the next day, had an observance
at Ness church where it all started just a few miles
from there and we had a ceremony of healing,
a wiping of the tears at Ness Church.
- Dean, we're running out of time,
but I just want to make sure I let our viewers know
if they wanted to find a way to get a copy of Uprising
or the other books that you've mentioned about this period,
what's the best way for them to find that?
- Well, you can go to bookstores.
Ask for them, if they don't have them,
they can get them for you,
but Amazon.com is probably the easiest way.
If you simply Google in Dean Urdahl Amazon.com,
the nine published books come up.
- Okay, and the most recent one again is Uprising, a novel,
and Representative Urdahl,
thank you for joining us on Compass.
- Well, thank you, but actually Uprising is the first.
The last two are on the Civil War,
the first two years of the Civil War in the west,
which is Tennessee and Kenntucky,
it's called Three Paths to Glory,
and then the second two years of the Civil War in the west,
The Remains of Glory are my two newest books.
- Alright, great.
Well, thank you very much for joining us on Compass.
- Thank you!
- Dean Urdahl's book Uprising may be found
in your local library, or you can go to Amazon.com.
The other books in his series are Retribution,
1863 Pursuit and Conspiracy.
Thank you for joining us during
this Great American Read episode,
brought by Pioneer and PBS.
As we've said before, now is the perfect time
to pick up a book of your choosing.
Lead the way for your children and their friends.
Check out your local library,
or your neighborhood bookstore,
or go on the Internet and visit some interesting sites
and find great options of great literature for you
and your family.
Pioneer is proud to join PBS
in celebrating the Great American Read.
As always, thank you for watching Pioneer Public Television.
- [Meredith] The list is out and the voting has begun.
It's time to select America's favorite book
in the Great American Read.
Come to the website and see our collection
of America's 100 Best Loved Novels.
Is your favorite on the list?
Vote for your book, then share your choice,
so your friends and family can join in.
The voting is open now.
I'm Meredith Veira.
Help us choose America's favorite book
on the Great American Read.
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