Oral HISTORY
Scott Camil
The Activist
PHOTO BY EDWARD GRAY
A Marine Corps veteran who earned two Purple Hearts during the Vietnam War, Scott Camil returned to Florida after two tours of duty and became a leading activist in Veterans Against the Vietnam War. This is an edited excerpt from an interview the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program conducted with Camil in 2005. To learn more about the project and access its thousands of interviews, go to oral.history.ufl.edu.
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rowing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was taught by my parents that I lived in the best country in the world and it was the duty of all males to serve their country. I signed up for the Marine Corps in high school and about three days after graduation I was getting off a bus in front of Parris Island.
I graduated boot camp in September of 1965, requested orders for Vietnam and arrived in Vietnam on March 20, 1966. I remember a teacher in [high school] said, “There is a war in Vietnam and many of you are going to end up there and some are not going to come home alive. So it is important to know about it.” But in high school, all I was thinking about was how can I earn enough money to get some booze and what day are we going
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to skip school and go to the beach. My basic understanding was that South Vietnam was our ally. It had been attacked by North Vietnam. They are communists, and our job was to stop them before they came here. When I got to Vietnam, I befriended a guy named Maines because we were both from Florida. My first duty was nighttime guard duty. In my third week, I was on guard duty and [the enemy] came through and destroyed our camp. They had explosives strapped on their bodies and they jumped into the bunkers and blew themselves up. [Others] had machine guns and mortars and rockets and they kicked our asses. It changed who I was. The day before I was a boy with Marine training and the day after I was a man. A man in the sense of how men were looked at then. Now I am not quite sure. We covered up the dead Marines with ponchos. I pulled the ponchos off each one and one was Maines. I was 19, and I thought, “This is real. There are people whose job it is to kill me. There is
