Dale Cutler
Faces of Five Wars
Story by Karin Orr
Portrait by David J. DeJonge

Historical original interview; not a current biography.
Recovered original Word document: Sergeant Dale Cutler.doc

Sergeant Dale Cutler
U.S. Army
Viet Nam

	Talking to Dale Cutler about Viet Nam is like probing a wound.  He goes where it hurts and examines the soul-deep gashes with unrelenting honesty.  A member of the Army’s elite 127th Wolfhounds, Sergeant Cutler’s assignment was “search and destroy.”
	“I specialized in killing,” Cutler says simply.  But it’s not simple.  The memory of what he did is with him constantly, particularly the first time, during the TET offensive, when he shot a member of the Viet Cong hiding in a well.  “There was this sandal floating there in the cistern, and (he) picked it up as if to protect himself,” Cutler sighs.  “Two hours later there were all these flies on me, all over.  I thought God was punishing me for killing . . . it was a terrible feeling, terrible.”
	Cutler also remembers interrogating, roughly, the chief of a village the Viet Cong had just left.  Crying, the old man said, “‘What difference does it make?’”  Cutler recalls.  “He said, ‘the Viet Cong come at night.  They beat us, rape our women, take our young men.  The Americans come in the morning’-meaning us,” Cutler interjects, still stunned by the realization, “‘What difference does it make?  What am I supposed to do?’”
	The chief’s question made “so much sense” to Cutler that he became angry with all the governments involved.  “I love my country, “ avers Cutler, an American Legion and V.F.W. member who carries the flag every year in Rockford’s Memorial Day Parade.  “I respect my country,” but not what he was asked to do in Viet Nam, and he hates the way the U.S. is offering tax-free loans to former enemies who want to open businesses.
	“I’m a Native American; I don’t get nothing.  I’m trying to start a business,” says Cutler, and Odawa Indian who has a small dry-wall company.  “I’m not asking for a gift.  I’m asking for nothing.  I just want right to be right,” and when the government gives the Vietnamese loans, “it makes it seem like what we did was wrong.”
	Right and wrong bother Cutler a lot.  “I’m not a bad guy,” he says, taking a slow drag on his cigarette.  “I never was a bad guy.  But I kinda think they made me a bad guy.”  When he returned from Viet Nam, there was some trouble.  “I drank and drank and drank and drank,” he admits.  “Three divorces, couple of gun charges . . . But I wasn’t brought up that way.”
	Cutler’s chest full of medals proves his other side, especially the decoration awarded personally by General Westmoreland for rescuing five comrades.  “The medals speak for themselves,” he says curtly, preferring to focus on how he as changed.  Now he abhors violence, “like an alcoholic, that turns straight,” he muses.  “Once you loved it, and now you think it’s the most terrible thing in the world.  But I have to be really honest. . . I did really love killing.  I’m glad I never killed anybody when I came back.
	It was a tough transition, Cutler reveals, being jerked out of intense jungle combat and dumped, three days later, on city sidewalks.  “Just three days,” he says, pounding the table for emphasis.  “There’s no time to adjust and you are forced to fly in uniform” and “get off the plane, and all these people, Americans, are spitting on you, yelling at you, and just three days ago I was fighting for them, killing for them.”
	Mulling over the moral confusion with a deceptively laconic twang, Cutler has the timing of a professional comedian, setting up the joke slowly, then delivering the punch line with machine gun precision.  “I definitely know God was (in Viet Nam),” he drawls.  “He said it would be too easy for Dale to . . . die.  Let him live, and lets push him for another 50 years.”