Minnesota veteran featured in 1969 Vietnam War doc reflects on his service

CBS News

07-05-2025

The year is 1969, the height of the war in Vietnam. The United States has been involved for about four years at this point and the war is growing more and more unpopular by the day.
The Vietnam War was the first American conflict to be shown on TV. It was largely uncensored, raw and real, and it was broadcast directly into our homes.
WCCO reporter Al Austin and photojournalist Gordon Bartouche traveled to the front lines and followed nearly a dozen soldiers from across Minnesota as they battled overseas, thousands of miles away from home.
Their work, called "Grunt's Little War," received several national honors, including the prestigious Peabody Award.
One of the "grunts," or soldiers, who was interviewed was Pfc. John Steele of St. Cloud. WCCO reconnected with him some 55 years later to reflect on his service.
"[Grunt's Little War] just really jogged my memory, and just thinking back at how I went through all of that was just kind of surprising," Steele said. "I was drafted, so I was a soldier that really wasn't wanting to go over to Vietnam, nobody did I think back in the day. So yeah, we were just trying to get through it and survive."
John Steele in 1969, and in 2025
WCCO
In the documentary, Austin describes Steele and his fellow "grunts" as men in their early 20s who have already experienced much trauma.
"He was drafted, or he enlisted for one term. His war is a small patch of jungle spattered with three of his friends. He has killed a man," Austin said.
Steele says that description was just about spot on.
"Actually when I got in country, we call, it the reception center in Bien Hoa, I had just turned 21. It was actually my 21st birthday," Steele said. "Finally legal to go to a bar, and I'm in a reception center in Bien Hoa, Vietnam, starting a full-year tour."
At one point in "Grunt's Little War," Steele says, "I think everybody has grown up a lot. I haven't been in the field that long, but these new guys that come in, you can see that after one or two missions, a lot of them mature quite a bit."
Throughout the documentary, Steele was very candid, painting a grim picture of his experience; trudging through leech-infested waters in the blistering heat; wanting to give up at times amid the low morale.
"You just want to throw everything down and say the hell with it," Steele said in 1969. "But once you sit down and you can get a cool drink of water, maybe eat a can of fruit, smoke a cigarette, then things don't look quite as bad after that."
At one point in the documentary, Steele calls his tour "a bad experience," but then adds, "I figure in a way everybody probably learns something from it."
"I guess I just learned a lot about the world and other people, and I guess frankly how lucky we are," Steele said in 2025.
Austin further describes the grunt's experience as a fight for survival, "for the Vietnamese children and against the specter of communism. He sometimes thinks we are winning, but he can't explain what we will have won."
Steele says today, the true aim of the war is still unclear.
"Well at the time I knew what we were supposed to be fighting for, and at that point quite frankly we were losing," Steele said. "The U.S. Army did not know, this is the first time they had done guerrilla warfare in a jungle-type situation. You're fighting an enemy who you don't, who it really is either. You're in Vietnam, you have Vietnamese citizens, you have the regular army Vietnamese and you didn't know the North Vietnamese from the South, so it was very confusing."
Austin also describes the grunt as "lonely" and "angry," and destined to "come home much older, skinnier and sadder."
Steele was an assistant machine gunner during the war, as well as an aspiring biology teacher. Both pursuits ended when he got back to Minnesota.
"I kind of have to chuckle when I said I wanted to be a biology teacher. I don't think I ever really, I may have said that but I didn't really mean that," he said. "I really did want to forget what was going on, but I guess and I don't, I was not a gung-ho army troop. I just wanted to do my duty, get home and move on with my life, which is what I did. After I got back, I re-enrolled in college, went back to St. Cloud State and got a marketing degree and met my wife and got married, and that was basically it."
This story is part of the WCCO documentary "Vietnam 50 Years Later: Reflection on a War that Changed Minnesota," by reporter Pauleen Le and photojournalist Art Phillips.
Join WCCO on Wednesday, May 7 at 5 p.m. for a special screening at Concordia University in St. Paul — hosted by the Center for Hmong Studies:
Buenger Education Center (BEC)
1282 Concordia Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55104
Attendees are encouraged to park in Lot A, Carroll Street or Syndicate Street
Watch the full documentary below, or on our YouTube channel.