This story is part of a series called "Faces of the Vietnam War." KQED recently asked our audience to submit their stories about the Vietnam War. We heard from refugees, military veterans, journalists, activists and more. This story comes from Sacramento resident Angela Shortt, 59, whose father served in the U.S. Air Force during the war.

As an Air Force Base brat whose parents served during the Korean War and whose father served during the Vietnam War, my views of war, life and death were formed by what I experienced as a child. My family, which was my mother, father, sister, brother and I, were stationed at Clark Air Force Base, Luzon, the Philippines, from 1966-1968.

During the Vietnam War, I was the oldest daughter of Master Sgt. Richard Shortt, who was a loadmaster flying missions over Vietnam. His job was to load ammunition, food and personnel, and usually they were dropping into active firefights. They had to drop live ammunition, because the guys on the ground didn't have enough time to be opening up boxes and loading things.

Master Sgt. Richard Shortt receiving a medal for valor. (Courtesy Angela Shortt)

My dad did get shot once as they were dropping the ammunition — a bullet grazed his head. He didn't even feel it. It went right past his temple and caught his hair on fire, but he kept working. The flight engineer -- or navigator -- jumped down with a towel and was patting his hair. My father said he cussed him out: “What are you doing? I got to do my job!” And the flight engineer replied: "Shortt! Your hair is on fire!" My dad didn't tell us he was injured. We didn't know something had happened to him until he got a Bronze Medal.

As a loadmaster on the C-131s, my dad brought food and supplies in, and the wounded and dead out. We saw the latter whenever we went to pick him up from the flight line, which was located very close to the Military Airlift Command (MAC) headquarters. I will never forget that.

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The wounded were always placed in cots inside the big, dark-blue buses with the large red and white crosses painted on top. They had to keep putting them into cots that were stacked up -- it looked like all the way to the top.

I would look over there and I used to think, "They look like they're dead,” because they never moved. My siblings and I never saw the soldiers twitch, move or give any other indication that they were still alive.

[audio src="https://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/tcrmag/2017/09/2017-09-22c-tcrmag.mp3" Image="https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/RS26907_20170912_VietnamStories_AngelaShortt_Credit_BertJohnson-1-2-qut.jpg" Title="'More Than Hell': A Military Brat's Vietnam" program="The California Report"]

I used to pray that all of them would live, because we also saw the crew members tossing out what looked like large black garbage bags from the back of the C-131s and the C-141s, and my sister and I came to the nearly simultaneous conclusion that the bags contained dead bodies. We used to involuntarily shiver as we watched the airmen do their jobs, despite the stifling humidity of a typical day in the Philippines.

We didn’t dare ask our mother about what was going on because she always seemed so tense when we were parked outside of dad's squadron HQ. I was 8 years old when I saw the crew tossing the body bags off the back of the planes. For me, there was this revelation that war is more than hell, because it doesn't stop when the people die. There's people who are left behind.

Believe it or not, that wasn't the worst. The worst was going to the hospital because we went to the same hospital as the guys who were injured. They all had that eerie deadman's stare that sent an involuntary shudder through my entire body whenever I saw them sitting in the wheelchairs that lined the hospital's hallways. They never blinked.

A lot of them were missing body parts. They had tubes going up their arms and bandages all over. I don't know why they would have these guys out in the hallways in wheelchairs, but they would. Maybe the rooms were too crowded.

I don't even remember talking about this stuff with other kids at all. And maybe things are different now, but back then you tried to live a life that was kind of normal. I used to think about my father not coming back, but I would push it away because if I dwelt on it, it would eat me up.

Angela Shortt's mother, Mary, and father, Richard, at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. (Courtesy of Angela Shortt)

But I also learned much from these experiences -- primarily, war is not a game, nor is it as simple as "killing the bad guys." Bullets and bombs aren't movie set pieces. They rend bodies into ghoulish, almost unrecognizable pieces of their former selves, and twist the minds of young men and women in ways that are difficult for people who never served in the armed forces or grew up on military bases to understand.

I was shocked to find out that the reason why I saw so many people wounded and in body bags was because our government had to stop Communism. We didn't stop it. So many lives were lost, and for what? It wasn't about Communism versus capitalism, in my opinion. It was about resources. And people died as a result.

You know, it hurts to lose people, it hurts to be wounded. I've seen that it does things, not just to the body, but to the mind and to the soul. That's why horror movies don't scare me. I've seen real horror and it doesn't compare.

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KQED's Bert Johnson, Bianca Taylor and Peter Arcuni produced this report. Shortt's essay has been edited for clarity, and material from her interview with KQED has been added to provide greater detail.

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