In 1966, as the Vietnam war was escalating, Bob Adams and a buddy decided they should enlist in the navy together, thinking the two would learn a trade. “I was a year out of high school, and I really wasn’t going anywhere and had no plans to get an education,” says Adams, who grew up in Scottsdale, on the far southwest side. “I had no money and not a lot of skills. I had an uncle who had been a corpsman and came home from World War II. He had served aboard an aircraft carrier and became a successful optometrist in Chicago. So I thought I would be following his footsteps. I thought joining the navy would mean that the worst that would happen is that I’d be offshore, aboard a ship.”
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After 17 months of training as a corpsman, or medic, Adams landed near the North Vietnamese border. He started seeing casualties almost immediately. “My job was to be the first person on the scene when someone was hurt or wounded, to administer first aid to ease the trauma and get that person back to medical help that could actually save their lives,” he says. The only way to deal with the carnage was to become numb. “One minute someone’s here and the next minute they’re gone,” he says. “That’s traumatic enough. But when you can’t stop to do anything about it but have to keep going–that adds to it.”
After a year in Vietnam, Adams was sent back to the U.S. and completed his tour at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. He moved back in with his parents and enrolled at Lewis University in Romeoville. But like many veterans, he started drinking and doing drugs to deal with his experience, which no one wanted to hear about. “I think people were confusing the war with the warrior,” he says. “I would talk for a few minutes and get an uneasy reaction from people, so I just stopped talking.”
Though Adams was able to write about his experience, Jeff Still performs his words onstage. One incident described in the play occurred near the end of his year in Vietnam, while he was working at a clinic that provided medical aid for civilians. “Two teenage girls were stealing bandages,” probably to sell to the VC, Adams says. “I snapped and pulled out my .45 and made them get on their knees and plead that I wouldn’t kill them. There was another corpsman there who helped calm me down. I don’t know whether I would have or not. I was pretty angry by that time, and pretty nuts.
