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Vietnam DiariesWyatt EarpBy Ken Anderberg
William Poole's office on West Paces Ferry Road looks about as you would expect of an international lawyer who might spend one week in Mexico and the next in the United Kingdom. Stacks of file folders half as high as the computer monitor cover most of his desk, table tops and credenza.
Mementos from around the world decorate the bookshelves on one wall. Among a hodgepodge of framed wall hangings is a certificate signed and presented by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. Two photos of Vietnam grace another wall, facing visitors in the two chairs in front of his desk.
What is perhaps missing from this Cheyenne, Wy., native's office cornucopia is a photograph of Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman of the Old West who never suffered a scratch doing his duty, while those around him were constantly being wounded or killed. After all, when Poole first arrived at his assignment in the town of Ben Tre in Kien Hoa province in the Mekong Delta, the soldier sitting next to him on the helicopter was killed. It was a pattern that would repeat itself throughout Poole's Vietnam tour of duty in 1968 and 1969.
Today, Poole, a partner in the Atlanta law firm of Cofer, Beauchamp, Stradley & Hicks LLP, is one of the city's best known and most knowledgeable international attorneys. He has represented companies from more than 40 countries doing business in the United States, as well as companies doing business in more than 30 other countries.
West Point grad Poole is pervasive in the Atlanta international business scene. He is a founding member of the World Trade Center Atlanta, former chairman of the Atlanta District Export Council, member of the Global Commerce Committee of the Metro Atlanta Chamber, and seemingly in attendance at or moderating nearly every international function held locally. Thirty years ago, however, such a future was not clear, or assured.
"I saw action all the time," he says. "The district I was in was written up by the Wall Street Journal as the town that had to destroy itself during the Tet offensive in order to save itself. My district was totally Viet Cong controlled when I arrived. When they landed me at the helicopter pad to bring me into my district, the guy sitting next to me in the helicopter got killed. They had to mount an operation to go to the helicopter pad to get me into the district."
Harrowing experience
"We were crossing an open rice field and there was a jungle off to the side. We found out later they had infiltrated our command staff somehow and found out where we were going that day and they ambushed us. He and I were out in the middle of the rice paddy. I was trying to call in some fire support and I was down beneath the rice paddy dike, which was about this high (spreading his hands about a foot apart) and he was standing on top of the damn rice paddy dike. I was grabbing him, trying to pull him down. He was trying to get his troops to disperse and I said 'get your ass down here' and I looked up and he took a .50-caliber machine gun round right through his neck. Cut his head off. That got my attention.
"Basically, the South Vietnamese troops deserted us," Poole continues of the action that first brought home the reality of war. "We were left out in the middle of the rice paddy. The Viet Cong fired five-round bursts from machine guns. I knew that was how they fired it. So we swam through this rice paddy to the next dike and the damn rounds were hitting on the dike right above our heads. My radio operator and my medic froze. They wouldn't go. I said, 'Look, they fire five-round bursts. Go over after the five-round bursts. But they wouldn't go. So I said, 'I'm not going to stay out here and die you son-of-a-bitches. If you're not going to go, I'm going. And I went over the dike and they followed me.
"I went back to the district town, got some more troops, went back out, fought the war, came back and on TV they were playing Combat and I was so burned out from being deserted out there, I lost it. I felt like turning in my bars and going home. But from that point forward I knew I was in a real war. I thought if I make it through this I'm going to be lucky. That was when it really hit home, what war was all about."
Turning in his captain's bars, however, would not have been a realistic expectation from a man whose West Point classmates include Gen. Wesley Clark, commander of the NATO forces in the Yugoslavia conflict. An Airborne Ranger, Poole was trained for the war, attending special warfare school and Vietnamese language school, before being assigned to Military Assistance Command Vietnam in June 1968.
"One of the differences I have in perspective (about U.S. involvement in Vietnam) was that I was really well trained," he says. "I was one of the better trained people there.
"I lost 100 of my classmates from West Point in Vietnam," he adds. "I lost my best man, my roommate in college, many of my best friends. And I think it was worth it. I think Vietnam stopped communism, and if we had not been there, it wouldn't have stopped. We needed to do it and I'm glad I was there."
Back in the world
"We were married in 1966 and had an eight-month-old kid when I went to Vietnam," he recalls. "The first year after I came back was a little rough. We had another kid and I went to law school."
Poole's parents moved to Lithonia when he was 7, after his father left the Air Force. Except for his stint in Vietnam and a tour of duty in Berlin, Germany, he has remained an Atlanta resident. A member of the first graduating class of St. Pius X, he was captain and an all-state performer on the football team, as well as a five-sport letterman. He earned his law degree from the University of Georgia in 1973.
Since then, he's been with half a dozen law firms, including two of his own. During those past 26 years, he has carefully honed the international skills that he first took a shine to while in Berlin.
"The real catalyst for getting me into international law was when I was a general's aide in Berlin," Poole says. "The U.S. commander in Berlin was a general and the State Department person was below him in rank and was supposed to report to the general every day as to world affairs. I had a top secret clearance. My general was an infantryman and wasn't that interested in world affairs, so he had me go meet every morning with the minister, who was the equivalent of an ambassador.
"The minister and I would have tea every morning and he would give me a top secret briefing and then I would go back and give it to the general. He tried to convince me to go into the foreign service. At the same time, the commanding officer of the JAG corps there was a colonel who later became the commanding general of the entire JAG corps. He said I ought to be a lawyer. At one point, when I went to law school, my goal was to be a legal adviser to the Department of State."
In fact, Poole's first year at the University of Georgia was also Secretary of State Dean Rusk's first year there as a professor. "He was one of the main reasons I went to Georgia," he says, adding that he interviewed Rusk about Vietnam on public television in 1970.
Poole is not one who thinks Vietnam shaped his personality and his career. "My personality was already shaped when I went to Vietnam," he says. "It did influence me somewhat but my character was already built. When I first came back, however, and I still feel this way, ordinary day-to-day existence is pretty dull and mundane. I'm an adrenaline junkie. I'm looking for thrills. I don't find them in day-to-day life.
"Most of us who were there, who were volunteers, were risk takers and aggressive entrepreneurial sorts," he adds. "We might be more inclined to be entrepreneurs."
Directness also is not a problem for the gregarious Poole. "I don't know if this is because of Vietnam of not, but I am definitely a no bull shit kind a guy," he says colorfully. "I don't enjoy game playing, I don't enjoy political maneuverings. If somebody isn't straightforward with me, whether they're a client or a senior partner in a law firm or whatever, I tell them exactly what I think of them. As I told a client last week, if you don't want to do business with me on a straightforward, honest basis, if you can't trust me and I can't trust you, I don' want to represent you.
"I don't know whether that came from Vietnam or not. Maybe it did. Maybe I wouldn't feel that strongly if I hadn't been there. I do think there is something in the people I know who were in Vietnam, or just in war in general, that playing silly Mickey Mouse games, there is no time for it, not any point in it, not worth doing. I'm more of a no-nonsense, no bull shit type of a guy as a result of my experience in Vietnam.
No stereotypes
"I'm sure there are people who had a terrible experience in Vietnam, didn't accomplish any good and spent most of their time smoking pot and killing babies. That's also part of Vietnam. There's no one person who is a Vietnam vet, just as there's no one experience that's a Vietnam experience. We all had different experiences, we're all different people. It's just not fair to grossly over-generalize the population of Vietnam vets and say we're all crazy or we're all entrepreneurs. I don't think we're all anything.
"I haven't seen any crazy Vietnam vets," he adds. "There may be some people like that who had bad experiences, but it certainly is a minority. Most of us are just like everyone else. The one thing I found out when I went to war is that anybody can be a killer, anybody can be a hero and anybody can be a coward, and it just depends on the day. And I've been a hero and I've been a coward."
Like most Vietnam veterans, Poole admits to feeling chills whenever he hears the sound of helicopter rotors slicing the air above him ("Every time I hear a helicopter there are flashbacks," he says. "The gun ships saved my ass a number of times."), and he admits to some disappointment when he returned from the war.
During his first year back, he served as an ROTC instructor at Georgia Military Institute in Milledgeville, and often made speeches to various civic and business groups in the area. "I came back thinking that everyone was going to want to hear about what was going on in Vietnam," he says, "how we were doing good things. I couldn't understand why they weren't more positive and more supportive. When I came back through California, they told us not to wear our uniforms because we would be defiled or something. I wore mine in spite of it. I told them, 'The hell with them. If they don't like it they could try to kick my ass. I was disappointed with the lack of support."
Today, he says, "There's more of a tendency to appreciate people in general who served there than there was years ago. I also think there are more people who now realize that what we were doing in Vietnam was of some good and some value."
William Poole - Personal File
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