17 February 2014 - It was 1968, the worst year of the Vietnam War, and Sgt. Chuck Hagel didn’t know from one day to the next whether he would live or die.
"We lost something like 16,000 dead Americans in that year, 1968," Hagel says.
His life was in the hands of Lt. Jerome Johnson, his platoon commander.
"Steady, careful, never excitable -- and in combat, that's who you want leading," Hagel says of Johnson.
Now secretary of defense, Hagel keeps a photo of one of their battles together on his office wall.
While the Viet Cong was trying to kill them, racial tensions, especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April, were threatening to tear the unit apart.
"It was a terribly difficult racial year in the Army in Vietnam, as well, where African Americans and whites were not getting along," Hagel says.
Johnson, now retired and living in Chicago, told his men it had to stop.
"Our fight was not with each other," he says. "Our fight, our whole purpose in being there together was to protect each other so that we would all come home safely." read more>>>
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