Herbert Sweat: Never Forget That Freedom Isn’t Free
Herbert Sweat
Meet 75-year-old Herbert Sweat, a Vietnam War veteran whose experiences have driven him to support fellow veterans and honor their sacrifices. In this episode, Herbert reflects on growing up in Brooklyn, serving in the jungles of Vietnam, and facing the challenges of coming home. Through it all, he’s found redemption in helping others navigate the journey.
Hear him talk about:
Growing up in Brooklyn and navigating integration
Serving with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam
Confronting PTSD after returning home
His work mentoring veterans through the court system
Why veterans need your help
Learn more about some of the organizations mentioned in this show:
Black Veterans for Social Justice
National Association for Black Veterans
See all episodes of Wisdom of Age.
Find the book mentioned in the episode: Bringing It All Back Home, an Oral History of New York City's Vietnam Veterans by Philip F. Napoli.
“That’s why I told you it’s a big difference between love and hate. And what causes hate basically is what you see, not what you know.”
Read the Transcript for Episode 6
Wisdom of Age, Episode 6
Herbert Sweat: Never Forget That Freedom Isn’t Free
Stacy (as narrator): Hi, just a quick note before we begin that this episode involves discussions around military combat and violence. It might not be suitable for little ears.
Welcome to Wisdom of Age, where we journey with our elders back in time, learning about life as they lived it and the lessons they learned along the way. I'm Stacy Raine.
75-year-old Vietnam veteran Herbert Sweat is a little younger than the guests I've had on this show so far, but if anyone has life lessons to share, it's him.
Herbert, it seems, is always doing things for other people, most especially veterans. You'll understand by the end of this episode why he's always thinking of ways that he can, as he says, make the higher power give them another chance. Let's start at the beginning of his story.
Herbert: My name is Herbert Jackson Sweat. I was born at Brooklyn, New York City, New York. We call it New York, New York, you see, because we so nice, we what? Named it twice. New York, New York. You see? She is, she is a fantastical place. It's like a magical kingdom.
Stacy (as narrator): This fantastical magical kingdom where he grew up was a melting pot.
Herbert: On my block when I was born, it was, it was very mixed, very mixed.
And it was a scene that one today, one would not believe. There was a mixture so deep that nobody, we didn't even have a problem or a fight with the other boy or something.
Stacy (as narrator): That is, until integration began.
Herbert: When I grew up as a little guy in Bed-Stuyvesant, back in, I think it was 1954 or whenever, 55, my parents made me go to the part of education where out in Flatbush of New York, it was all white.
So, the school bus issue came in. The school bus issue not being, can we get on the bus and ride to a school, it was being integrational.
Stacy (as narrator): Herbert's mom was black, and his dad was Shinnecock Indian. There were kids from all places right there in his neighborhood. They would play in the streets as kids did back then and didn't think at all, he said, about the color of each other's skin.
But that changed for Herbert when integration began.
Herbert: I didn't label nobody, but they labeled me.
Stacy (as narrator): Soon, he was on a school bus being bussed to a white school in a white area, and people were throwing rocks at them.
Herbert: There was four of us that went on that bus from Bed-Stuy, my area. And the four of us would get on the bus and leave in our neighborhood.
It was cool, but you could see and know that we were scared. And as we approached Flatbush and, you know, our stop there was coming up because we had to get off the school bus right there at Utica. An Empire Boulevard in Brooklyn and right there across the street was an ice cream factory and it was White Castle and right down the block was where the school was.
So our people taught us if anything happens, because the whole neighborhood was basically white and if anything go wrong, run into either the White Castle. or where the black men was working at the ice cream factory. So that's how we started fighting back, hollering names at each other back. And that one block, we ran so many times to the school and ran so many times back to the white castle and, and being chased by bigger people because there was another junior high school not too far from there.
Stacy (as narrator): Their parents would go to the school, he said, and “try to straighten out the racial problems that were happening to us kids.” The police got involved. They showed the kids where the police officers would be, but it wasn't enough.
Herbert: I fought a lot. Remember, I was integrated to these schools, and I did fight. Why did I fight? Same reason why you would fight because someone was attacking you or your child. Yeah, so when we went through that integrational school thing from the fifties to the sixties, we had a lot of problems on school, on school property.
Stacy (as narrator): At least at home, things were good.
Herbert: I came, I came up from old school stuff. You must be in the house before dawn. Or you must sit at the dinner table. Sooner or later, it's going to come your turn to say the prayer. You must be in bed with your homework done. This and that. You've got to walk your sister and get her to the high school first.
You've got to do this. You've got to take out the garbage. You got to do the windows of the house. You got to do all of these things.
Stacy (as narrator): They had to go to church, and if you were male, you also joined the service. His dad fought in the Korean War. His uncles had served, his brothers had joined the service. It was a foregone conclusion for him, too, though his mom and his aunt tried to stop him, along with his cousin, who had just returned from Vietnam.
Stacy: So did y'all talk?
Herbert: We sure did. And he laid me out. He laid me out.
Stacy: What do you mean?
Meaning he came home and started cussing at me and telling me that you ain't going in the service. And, woo, woo, woo, all they gonna do is send you to Nam.
Stacy: Did you know I'm gonna end up in Vietnam?
Herbert: Course not.
Stacy: You didn't know that.
Herbert: No, I didn't know that.
Stacy: Okay.
Herbert: What my cousin told me was, that's exactly where they're going to send you. Because that's exactly where they sent him. You see? So he, he knew what, he knew what was going on.
Stacy (as narrator): What was going on was that Herbert planned to sign up as a paratrooper. That was what all the men in the family did.
And by joining an elite infantry unit, it was highly likely they'd send him to where the combat was taking place, the jungles of Vietnam. Plus, he was black. And a disproportionate amount of black men ended up in combat roles where casualties were high.
Herbert: At that time, Uncle Sam was putting us, the airborne guys that were black, into that unit more so than white guys.
Stacy (as narrator): At 17, he joined despite his mom and aunts protests.
Herbert: I love jumping. That's the only thing that I ever wanted to do in the service. I do not want to really go to war because I was too young to even understand war at that time.
Stacy (as narrator): But he joined because that was the path his people took. He reminded me that his dad was Shinnecock. Indigenous Americans, historically, enlist at much higher rates than other groups.
Herbert: And from that 17-year-old mind and ability, I became a soldier and I went to the Vietnam War, which in that time it was called, that year, 67, 68, was called the Tet Offense. And that was the year that America dropped more bombs on South Vietnam and North than they dropped in all the wars that they ever had. So you can imagine how many bombs, 500 pounders, 250 pounders. You can imagine how many bombs was dropped if all the wars that America has had.
And she dropped more at Vietnam and there in North Vietnam. than any other time in any other war.
Stacy (as narrator): The Vietnam War was a major chapter in the larger Cold War. It was a fight between North and South Vietnam over communism. There were the North Vietnamese fighting the South, with the Viet Cong guerrilla insurgents inside South Vietnam fighting with the North.
The U. S. got involved in an advisory role for fear of the spread of communism until the Gulf of Tonkin incident, where it was reported that two U. S. destroyers were fired upon. This led Congress to pass the Tonkin Resolution, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to deploy troops. Herbert Sweat would end up right in the middle of the action.
Herbert: My unit, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, was what General Westmoreland called his strike unit and this strike unit, we lived in the jungle. Strike units are units that are used when they can identify where the enemy is. So if you know where the enemy is, you can quickly make a strike on that area. If Westmoreland wanted to do a light engagement of maybe two battalions, then he would take us on what we call a chopper strike.
And a chopper strike is where we get on a helicopter and there's eight or squeeze 10 of us on there with our equipment and we go and we make a strike in a red zone area.
Stacy (as narrator): Westmoreland was the commander of U. S. forces in Vietnam at the time. His goal was to wear down the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong through bombings, as you heard Herbert talk about, and large-scale ground combat operations.
Herbert: Again, I was only 18 in the war. I was not, you know, abreast to this type of place, Vietnam. Like I said, it was a lot of jungle and monsoon season blew my mind. Where it rained day after day and all night and day after day the next day and it was called monsoon season, but I got used to it. We have to get used to it because again, there was what we call boonie rats and a lot of people don't know what a boonie rat is.
A lot of people don't even know what a rat is. A rat is an outdoor animal. We would call ourselves boonie rats because we lived in the jungle. Every day we would wake up approximately 4. 30, 5 o'clock and we would gear up. And the first thing that we would do is to not eat as much as refill the foxhole that we stood guard at the night.
And there's three or four of us that rotated the being aware of what's going on around us. Listening, we didn't see much, but we listened and that's what rats do too. They listen, they don't see well, but they can hear very good. So that's even like your American rat in the, in the world. Okay. It can only hear good, but it can't see good.
And she lives out in the bush. They don't live in the house. The mice live in the house. So that's the difference between a rat and a mice. And so to make the long story short there, I was a bully rat of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and I only came in out of the field twice. The first time. Was for what we called a three day R& R.
So that means I went to the rear, what they call the rear. And that's where they have buildings that they have built. That's where they have just everything that you would see on a regular military base. Almost. You can take showers. You can go out after 430 at night to the club or whatever. You could eat solid food that is regular food. But in reality, there was one problem. And that one problem was again, the rear part of us that cannot seem to deal with each other because of a racial problem. It's a terrible enemy against life, not just you or I, but against life itself.
Stacy (as narrator): Herbert and I talked a lot about the racism he experienced, first on that bus to school in Flatbush, and then as he made his way down with the other recruits to Fort Benning, Georgia.
On a stop in North Carolina, he got out to use the bathroom, but saw a sign over the door that said, Colored Only. He was shocked. He turned around and got back on the bus. His aunt had warned him before he left.
Herbert: Don't go down south and think you no man. My aunts and stuff used to every time the closer I got to going in, the more they argued with me. So finally the night that they gave me my party, that's when they started really. Telling me the truth about what down south was about. And when you go down there to train, you know, don't be out of line. Meaning don't say nothing, you know, do what those people tell you to do.
Stacy (as narrator): While there was still racism in the North, it was far more overt and institutionalized in the South. Segregation in public places was no longer legal, but enforcement was inconsistent at best. He gets down to advanced individual training in Fort Benning, Georgia, and the drill instructor takes note of his last name, and he thinks probably that he's from the North, and makes him run until he sweats. And when everyone else leaves for lunch, Herbert has to keep running. Finally, a black sergeant comes over and dismisses him.
Herbert: And, and it didn't scare me, scare me, but it made me feel small.
Stacy (as narrator): He felt this racism often, but on the battlefield, in the jungle, it was different. He said in the book, Bringing It All Back Home, an Oral History of New York City's Vietnam Veterans by Philip F. Napoli, that “there wasn't no color problem, there wasn't anything, especially after the firefight when you really see the true tears and the true understanding.”
They saw the sacrifice of death, witnessed the love and grief that goes with the loss of their friends.
It wasn't until Jungle School, once he arrived in Vietnam, that the reality of where he was becomes clear.
Herbert: I forgot whether it was two, maybe three weeks. No more, but whatever it was, they put enough in us to know that we thought we knew that we not probably ain't getting back home.
Stacy (as narrator): He said he was 80 to 90 percent certain he wasn't getting out of there alive. He finishes jungle school and then joins a smaller unit on patrol.
Herbert: They called us cherries up to the third month after the third month, you know, they started sending us on little what they call advanced squad, advanced squads. We go out a little bit. We we set up. different things out there. Trip flares, um, we set up trip wires on explosives. So if Charlie or the VC or whatever was out there and at night they would start coming in closer to where we made our encampment, the trip flare would go off.
Stacy (as narrator): He told me about some of his fellow soldiers in his unit.
There was a guy named Arnold. He used to sing to all of them at night, the Temptations or the Delfonics. One night he was sitting on top of a foxhole and the Viet Cong shot him. They got him out to the hospital. But later found out he died. There was another guy from New Orleans. They called him Old Blue Eyes. Everyone knew he was the guy to go to for good food. Herbert said he even cooked gumbo. Maybe in his helmet. He died too. All of these deaths of their friends and fellow soldiers and this constant feeling that your death was imminent took its toll.
Herbert: You'd be surprised how many how, how many of us did certain things to injure ourselves to get out of that type of situation.
Stacy: Because it was probably fear every day.
Herbert: Every day.
Stacy: Every minute.
Herbert: Simply because, again, the mind is telling us we will get court martialed and we would get, you know, demoted. Or we would be in trouble if we fire. a weapon before they fire at us.
Stacy: But I think they might kill me.
Herbert: They do kill us. A lot of us died in Vietnam. And I'm talking about very young people. That's what I kept was being afraid of. And it's a, it's a pathetic thing for us to die like that. When we were given direct orders, you cannot fire, unless fired upon.
Stacy (as narrator): He would say the Lord's prayer every day, all day, he said.
Herbert: And so many of us, like I said, again, died there for what we were in the jungle constantly. So we would run into different villages and what would happen with where we wasn't supposed to attack. Right. So we didn't attack. Right.
Stacy (as narrator): But the Viet Cong would attack, and then run back to a village. Reconnaissance missions would go out to get intel, and then the orders would come in.
Herbert: So that night, or the next night, or the next day, we would attack that village. Why? Because that's what the man said to do.
Stacy (as narrator): Airstrikes would happen first, then they would attack.
Herbert: But once you get into a war, meaning a true battle, it's called a firefight. Once you get into that, you don't, you don't exactly see a target like you see when you're training. The target is moving and the target is really blind to you. So we take it out on the village. And we know good and well there's some BC in that village. We know it. It's not like you don't know it. The VC, they live there. And they stay there until they get orders to move somewhere where they know we are. And then the, you know, the firing begins. Maybe that night, then we might get into a beef. Maybe the next day. Whatever it is, when we get into that, if any one of us get killed, I don't know. Which, a lot of us get killed or wounded. We take it out on the next village that we come to. Just that simple.
Stacy (as narrator): They would be fired upon from a village, but they didn't know from exactly where or who was civilian and who wasn't. It was guerrilla warfare. Herbert and his unit were trying to live through it. In Napoli's book, he documents how Herbert carried a grenade launcher. They were shot upon by a village, so he launched his grenade after when his company went through the village, he saw that inside the hut where he had hit there was Viet Cong and others who were most certainly civilians, including an elderly man, women and Children. He lives like this for one year, and finally it's time to go home.
Herbert: I did a lot of things to let them, you know, I'm finished with the war now. So I'm walking around the jungle, through the jungle, and over there, when you have less than 14 days, you're supposed to be de-armored. You ain't supposed to have no hand grenades on you.You ain't supposed to have no extra ammo. For the M60 machine gun, or for the M16, you ain't supposed to have nothing on you but your weapon. On your last week, they would put you in the middle. And when we get to our camp, where my countdown went from 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, tomorrow liftoff, I was almost buck naked, you know what I'm saying? They took everything from me.
Stacy (as narrator): He gets out of the jungle, but there seems to be a problem with his records. He thought he was going home, but then was sent to Seattle. There, he was required to be in a formation in his Class A uniform. He didn't have that uniform. He was in his jump gear, fresh out of the jungle. He said if he'd had them, he would have worn them. He got an Article 15 punishment and decided he was done. He called his wife, and she sent him money so he could get home. Long story short, Herbert went AWOL for 472 days.
Herbert: I retired, I retired me. So I had to go in front of court marshals because I went AWOL. I kept going AWOL.
Stacy (as narrator): So how did the court martials eventually end?
Herbert: They give me six months.
Stacy (as narrator): Ultimately, he didn't stay in the military prison that six months, but he felt as if he was experiencing racism yet again in the military. His return home continued to be a troubled one. He suffered from PTSD, though he didn't realize it at first. This wasn't an uncommon experience for Vietnam vets. Up to 30% likely suffered from it, and it was even more common among black Vietnam veterans.
Herbert: I was released from the um, department of Defense in 1970 of October. I didn't know that I was suffering any injuries, but as I reentered into society, I did. Come with a few problems. One was I always wanted to be alone. Second one was I didn't feel comfortable sharing what we did in Vietnam.
Stacy (as narrator): And also it was hard for him to reconcile the things that happened there.
Herbert: We only had men fighting this war, but. Vietnam had men, women, children, they all fought this war. That's one thing that we did not really accept, because as an American and an American soldier, I'm equipped to deal with men. And it was very difficult. For us to, and I say us because the average soldier in America is not about killing no woman, no child. No elderly people, not burning down, even though we have burnt villages down, not only with bombs and I forgot the exact military name of when we sprayed the fire. So these are things that I wasn't comfortable with. So I think psychologically I was affected.
Stacy (as narrator): He said he could never get the war out of his mind. None of them thought they were coming home. He said it was a hard thing to fathom when you had your whole life ahead of you, but you were constantly in battle to keep it. It was always, he said, a fight to the death.
Herbert: It wasn't anything like I could imagine. I didn't go in the service to fight in Vietnam. I didn't even know where Vietnam was.
Stacy (as narrator): He said when he got back, he carried his pistol with him everywhere he went. He never felt safe. This made his wife nervous, maybe driving an even greater wedge between them than the war had already created. They had two young kids at home crawling around on the carpet, he said.
Herbert: You know, the old saying is, If you got a gun, you're going to use it. If you got a knife, you're going to what? Use it. Whatever you carry out in anger, you're going to use it sooner or later.
Stacy (as narrator): And he did. He and another man were playing chess a few years after he got home, and when Sweat won and the other man lost, things went south.
Herbert: And naturally. He had his knife in his hand and I aimed at that left shoulder and it hit that collar bone and went down and punctured the heart. He died.
Stacy: When you shot that man, was Vietnam in your mind?
Herbert: Sure was. Not only was it in my mind, but I felt the guilt to today because I did not have to do it.
Stacy (as narrator): Herbert spent a year in jail until his family could raise the bond money. And eventually he was given five years probation. But he's been carrying out his own sentence in a way ever since.
Stacy: Now, today, I know of your good work. You're doing, you're doing a lot.
Herbert: A lot of good work. And you know why? Now you're, now you're understanding why. Because I took a life. Did I take lives in Vietnam? I sure did. But this, this was a special life. This was back on American soil. The law is none of that. So I live by the law. Like I said, there's nothing, never did I get in any trouble.
Stacy (as narrator): He spent some time in veterans hospitals for his PTSD, had a few different jobs.
Lost his wife at some point along the way. And in 1993, after another breakup, he had no place to live and ended up in a shelter. The Borden Avenue Veterans Residence. While there, a veteran sleeping on a cot next to him was stabbed, and Herbert and another man gave him mouth to mouth for almost an hour trying to save him before the ambulance finally arrived. The man died. Herbert began having flashbacks to Vietnam, and the police took him to the hospital. He eventually ended up in a long-term care facility and stayed for 18 months. He said this was the best thing that ever happened to him, and he's thankful to the Department of Defense for having those resources in place.
Herbert: I went into the hospital, and this hospital was in, uh, Martinsburg, West Virginia. It treated long term illnesses. So anyone listening, I guarantee this hospital is a soldier's hospital. It gave us top line care. And I really feel that it gave me another life.
Stacy (as narrator): What he's chosen to do with this new life is serve others.
Herbert: And the only way that I feel I'm paying back is by doing these activities that I do. For instance, the most prominent thing is the courts. I am a coordinator in the Veterans Treatment Court. And they're all over the United States. About 300 and about 54 of them. Different courts. Supreme Court. Criminal court, felony court, family court.
Stacy (as narrator): In this role, he mentors veterans as they go through the court's rehabilitation program, which helps veterans in the system dealing with service-related challenges, like substance abuse and PTSD.
While in the long-term hospital, he heard about Black Veterans for Social Justice, an organization that provides services to assist veterans transitioning to civilian life. Herbert spent nine years as chairman of the board and started the Veterans Action Group to help assist veterans in need of services. He's also the State Commander for the National Association for Black Veterans and has two non-profits of his own, the United Veterans Mentors Incorporation.
Herbert: Those are the mentors in the courts and in the prisons.
Stacy (as narrator): And Friends of the United States Colored Troops.
Herbert: Those guys are the first men of color. Who fought in the civil war in 1863, they allowed them to come in New York city alone was 4, 000 of them. They trained on a place called Rackers Island. Okay. I get a lot of veterans from Rackers Island, you know, that's where they store them until. Until they figure out what they're going to do with him. Well, that's where I go to see those veterans. Rackers Island. Do all kinds of things.
Stacy (as narrator): Part of his work takes him back to the same shelter he once lived in, so he can take care of the veterans.
Stacy: You're taking care of all your, your veterans, huh?
Herbert: All of these veterans.
Stacy: Is that what you live for? Just making sure you're taking care of them?
Herbert: You got that right. That's what I live for. And to tell my higher power that deep down only he knows that I truly, truly didn't mean it. That was not what I needed to do.
Stacy (as narrator): He works hard to care for his fellow veterans, and he works hard to love his neighbors.
Herbert: Love my neighbor as I love myself.
Stacy (as narrator): Despite it all, he still deeply loves the country he went to serve.
Herbert: America to me is the greatest country in the world.
Stacy (as narrator): Even still you think that?
Herbert: Even still with our problems that we have today, dealing with the same interreaction of racism that we live. It is a country that is still developing.
Stacy (as narrator): He knows it's not a perfect union. He talked about how we can't seem to get past slavery and the racism that still exists.
Herbert: Do you understand, America, that we all have two eyes, 32 or 34 teeth, 10 toes, 10 fingers? By the way, we got a body full of blood, all different kind of blood. And if you need that blood that I got, are you going to refuse it? Over there in the jungles of Vietnam? Of course not. So why do you talk nonsense back here in the United States? Because it's a problem mentally more than anything else. You can't seem to erase the horrors of what happened almost 150, 200 years ago. Very hard for us to forgive. You surely can't forget.
But what I'm talking about is the, is the mind-altering situation of what the eye see, not what the heart knows. And the heart only knows love. That's why I told you it's a big difference between love and hate. And what causes hate basically is what you see, not what you know.
Stacy (as narrator): He says the monuments in Washington, D. C. are a reflection of where America has been and who she is and what she wants to accomplish. He goes every year and takes veterans there too. He said he drags his hand over the Vietnam Memorial from one side to the other, feeling the names of the people who were lost over there.
One even bears his same name, Herbert J. Sweat. He says it's his mirror. He talks about how the Vietnam War was never officially declared a war, only a conflict. It was certainly a war for Herbert Sweat, one he continues to fight even now for his beloved country.
Herbert: I do love God, and I do love everyone. I didn't just go to Vietnam to fight for me. I went to Vietnam to fight for America. You know by living here in America that it's freedom. But you must never forget that freedom is not free.
Stacy (as narrator): Well, let me ask you my final question. After 75 years on this earth, what do you know for sure?
Herbert: I know for sure that there is a living God. And that living God takes care of all the business.
The sun rises. The moon rises, the stars are always the light of the world. God is the most important thing to us. So yes, that's my father. That's my all powerful. That's who I give my prayers and most love and respect for. So my soul will be. will be at rest because he sees what I'm doing. So no matter what goes down, he know he's trying to tell me he's sorry for all that I've done, that wasn't right.
Stacy (as narrator): That was Mr. Herbert Sweat. I hope you learned something from his reflections and the wisdom he shared. Thank you to Mr. Sweat for being on this show. This is the last episode of this season, but before I close, Mr. Sweat wanted to let you know one thing.
Herbert: Every day, a certain amount of veterans take their lives. They have problems. They need a lot of help. But the trick is, you've got to be the helper. So, don't think that they can do it alone. When you see a veteran, thank them for their service. Thank them. Three times. I thank you. I thank you. I thank you for being my night watch.
Stacy (as narrator): Thank you for taking the time to listen to Wisdom of Age. If you want to learn more or just want to share your thoughts, head over to wisdomofagepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this show and want to support the podcast, you can follow Wisdom of Age in your favorite podcast app, leave a rating and review, and please, share it with a friend.
Wisdom of Age is a Raine Media production, produced by me, Stacy Raine, with editing and sound design by Sandra Levy Smith. To discuss how we can help you bring important stories to life through sound, visit rainnmediaco.com.
Thanks for listening.