CENTERVILLE—In 1966 the Vietnam War had just started escalating during Richard Bingham’s freshman year at Brigham Young University. Like every young man, the Bountiful native had to register for the draft. 

“My birthday is Dec. 30 so that put me kind of at the front of the list,” he said. “So my draft number was 18. They put you in according to your birth date and in the county in which you reside. I was in Davis County.” 

Bingham said during his freshman year military recruiters and speakers came on campus to talk about the war and so forth. “I got a little concerned. I’m not realizing the significance of my draft number. So my last semester as a freshman I joined the Air Force ROTC on campus in hopes that it would give me some kind of deferment if I had to go into the service and I would have to wait until I completed my college degree.”

It wasn’t until later that Bingham said he found out he had to be in for a whole year or at least two semesters to be qualified for that deferment. “So I took my last final on a Friday and I walked up to my dorm and into our cafeteria area where the mailboxes were for each student. As I walked in there the floor was littered with these #10 manila envelopes.”

Bingham said he wondered what this was. “Then I glanced off to my right. There’s kind of a lounge area and I saw all of these girls sitting on their boyfriend’s laps crying. I thought ‘what’s going on?’ I opened my mailbox and I had a manila envelope addressed to me.”

It was from the Department of the Army, he said. “I opened it and it said ‘you are hereby ordered to report for an induction physical at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City.’ I immediately called home. My family was living in Seattle, Washington at the time. So I called my dad and I told him I had received this draft notice.”

He said he’d be down, said Bingham. “He flew down the very next day. I explained to him that this was not in my plans. He said change happens all the time so we might make plans but it’s always good to have a plan B or a plan C.”

Each county in the state had a quota to fill, said Bingham. “Davis County had 238. I was number 18 so there would be no deferment for me. That was it. After I had the physical I had two weeks in which I could join another branch of the military service rather than go into the Army.”

A family friend in the military suggested Bingham consider enlisting in another branch which required him to serve for four years or go ahead with the two year draft. “But if I did that he said it’s probably pretty certain that I would go to Vietnam.”

After much thought, Bingham decided he’d be better off joining the Air Force for four years. After four weeks of basic training in Texas, Bingham got his first assignment as quality control and evaluation at Mather AFB, in California. 

“I was assigned to an office out on the flight line,” he said. “I would help do reports on maintenance and any failures in equipment and I would send them out to all the other bomb wings that the Air Force had so that they would know and learn from any problems. It was a big deal.”

Bingham said he would ride a shuttle bus out to his duty assignment. “One day I was reading our base newspaper and it said that the Air Force had an urgent need for broadcast specialists.” He applied and got accepted to the program.

 “After I graduated from that I went back to my home base Mather AFB and awaited my orders,” he said. “I got orders to Vietnam. So I was preparing to go then I got notification that my orders had been canceled and that I was now to report to Thailand which was a part of the Vietnam War at that time. Those orders got canceled.”

Then Bingham got orders to the Philippines. That got canceled and then South Korea that also got canceled. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “It was crazy. Finally I got orders to Japan. Those orders were held. It was a super experience for me. What we did was provide information and entertainment to the military people in the Far East network.”

Every afternoon Bingham would do a radio program. “It was a music program and we would play contemporary rock and roll and every kind of music,” he said. “At night we would do news broadcasts at 6, 8 and 10 every day.”

Bingham was there for about a year and a half. “I was ordered back to the United States to Shepard Air Force Base in Texas. They had a production facility for Air Force training films. I became a producer and director of the Air Force training films.”

He completed his four years of service and got out of the Air Force in May of 1970. “I guess I had a bit of a tainted attitude about the military at that time of my life because the Vietnam War was not a popular war,” said Bingham. “There were protests going on all over the country.”

Bingham said when he was at Mather AFB he had a friend that had moved from Utah to California and he invited him to come down and visit. “As I walked through San Francisco I had people actually spit on me.”

Richard Bingham and his wife Vickie. Courtesy photo

 As time has passed, Bingham has seen veterans of the Vietnam War get more recognition for their service. “I think it’s a positive thing,” he said. “A very small percentage of people actually serve in the military so few people venture out of our country. I just feel like a lot of Americans do not fully appreciate the freedoms that we enjoy and the very principles upon which our nation was founded. I’ve recognized more and more how blessed I am to be an American.”