Photo By Sgt. 1st Class Joseph VonNida | Lt. Col. William "Robby" Robinson (right) shakes hands with Gen. Roscoe Robinson Jr....... read more read more
His is a career immersed in loyalty to his country. A career filled with numerous decorations and awards, more than a dozen tactical unit assignments and a personal obligation to serve veterans in his home state of Colorado. A career that will soon come to an end when he exits stage left and moves on to retired life.
William "Robby" Robinson's military career began at the United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., in June 1964. Following in his father's footsteps, college came through a military academy. His dad, Lewis M. Robinson, had visited the Air Force Academy and told Robby not to join the Air Force unless he could become a pilot. Robby's lack of 20/20 vision prevented him from flight, but the Army was his next choice so off he went to get his commission in southern New York.
"The first couple months at West Point you never had a moment of peace except from midnight until four in the morning," Robinson said of the summer of his freshman year at the academy.
In June 1967, after Robinson's junior year of school, his father, a Air Force lieutenant colonel and an A-1 Skyraider pilot, was shot down and killed over Laos.
"I didn't live with my dad growing up. My parents got divorced when I was about three and when I was 14 I moved in with my dad and I lived with him for three years, so I was just starting to get to know him," Robinson said. "Then I went off to West Point and I would go home at Christmas to see him, but I had just begun to mature enough to where I had things in common with him. His death kinda' took the kick out of my senior year — just trying to adjust to the loss."
Two years later, Robinson found himself following in his father's footsteps and volunteered for a tour of duty in Vietnam. As an infantry officer assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade out of Bong Son, Central Vietnam, Robinson, then a first lieutenant, was a platoon leader and quickly adapted to living out of a rucksack for months on end in the jungle.
"The heat is what really killed ya," Robinson recalled, "the heat and the humidity."
Robinson said he was ambushed twice by Viet Cong during his first tour. The second skirmish ended his tour prematurely. Robinson had to be medically evacuated on the outskirts of a village after he was shot through the left arm and filled with shrapnel from a claymore mine that fractured his right lower leg and right arm. He recalled that inauspicious day in his mind with vivid detail:
"I heard several shots being fired and I was like third back in the line. The guy on point fired a few rounds on full automatic and then all of a sudden, boom! I remember smelling the cordite and black smoke and saying, 'What the hell?' In my mind there's this flash and I'm on my back and I say 'How did I get on my back?' The guy up in front of me was down and a couple of the guys in front and a couple in back were still burning a couple rounds, but we weren't receiving anything, so they stopped firing, and that's when I figured out, 'Oh, everything is not alright with me.' I tried to get up and I couldn't 'cause my leg was busted and I got really, really hot. I felt like I was perspiring all over and I started looking at my arms and I said, 'No that's not perspiration, that's blood.'"
Two other Soldiers out of Robinson's 10-man squad were wounded in the ambush and had to be flown out of the bush that day. The claymore mine had detonated one man back from Robinson. When it exploded, it broke all the bones in that Soldier's feet and ankles. The Soldier in front of Robinson was also shot and a piece of shrapnel lodged in his spine, which paralyzed him from the waist down.
Robinson never talked to or heard much about his fallen comrades after that day. All three Soldiers were medevaced to different hospitals and eventually went their separate ways. Robinson doesn't even remember their names. He expressed a sense of sadness and a looming curiosity surrounding the Soldiers' fate that lasts with him to the present day.
Starting in late summer 1969, Robinson spent seven months recuperating from his wounds at Walter Reed Medical Center where he came in contact with amputees and the blind. It was a sanitized environment of fallen war vets completely alien to him. He recalls a particular night when he helped a fellow Soldier pick out a shirt and tie to wear to the officer's club. He looked at the man, who appeared to have nothing wrong with him, and asked why he was there. "Turns out he was blind," Robinson said. "Of all the stuff you could lose, losing your sight would just be devastating. His name was Steve Maguire and he ended up writing a book called 'Jungle in Black.'"
Robinson said his time spent at Walter Reed was fascinating. Initially feeling down after his tour in Vietnam ended abruptly, he quickly changed his attitude upon arrival at the hospital.
"The lesson you learn in the Army hospitals is not to feel sorry for yourself, 'cause all you have to do is look to the right or the left and there is somebody that is much, much worse off than you are, so all of a sudden you're thankful," Robinson said. "I felt sorry for myself when I found out that I was being medevaced from Vietnam. I didn't want to leave."
Months later, he was back.
After his successful rehabilitation and release from the hospital in February 1970, Robinson requested to return to Vietnam and did so in June of that year. He was a captain for his second tour — June 1970 to December 1971 — and worked as a supply officer for three months, then was an air assault company commander for seven months. In this role he'd spend 30 days in the bush out on missions, then come back to a firebase for four days at a time. He spent the remainder of his tour leading a ranger company in which he planned and coordinated missions, and then inserted and extracted the ranger teams by helicopter.
He'd come full-circle in the war — from leading men in combat as a first lieutenant platoon leader, to a captain planning missions on a base in the rear — and now looked to extend for another tour. He summed up his thoughts on staying the course in Vietnam:
"Life expectancy of lieutenants in infantry units in Vietnam was fairly short and when my dad was killed I just thought, 'Oh well, what the hell, if he died over there, I'll go over there.' I didn't go over there to die. I just wanted to stay until the end of the war. I was just 'gonna extend and extend and extend and stay until the war was over. There are limits on that and that's why at the end of my second tour, I had extended and then our unit was sent home. Had there been a place to send me, I would've stayed."
At the time of Robinson's departure, there was only one American Army unit left in Vietnam — a brigade of the 1st Air Cavalry that had reached its quota in captains. His time was over in the war, which, as far as American involvement went, was winding down drastically. The draft was still in effect though, and Robinson expressed pity for the draftees.
"I felt sorry for the guys who didn't want to be in Vietnam. My view was look, if you're a lifer and you went to West Point, this is your career," Robinson said. "There's a war going on — that's why they sent you to school — you're supposed to be out there. I felt sorry for those guys [draftees]."
He spoke of the Soldiers who were sent to war in lieu of jail — men sentenced for drugs (one at Woodstock) or other offenses:
"They were good guys, but when they would get hurt or get killed, I would think, 'It's not fair.' Us guys that volunteered — us lifers — we ought to be taking the brunt of this, so I always felt bad about that. So my view was, for us lifers — guys that are making it a career — stick with it. The war's still on, that's what the Army's all about. As long as there's a war on, I'm in it. I just thought I'd spend the rest of my life over there."
But it wasn't meant to be.
After leaving Vietnam, Robinson's life shifted dramatically. He enrolled at Harvard on the Army's dime and earned his master's degree in political science. The following year, in 1973, he married his wife Cathy, whom he had met at Fort Benning, Ga., six months prior at age 27. Upon graduation he taught political science West Point for the next four years.
"It's an isolated community of perfection," Robinson said of West Point. "It's close to a perfect world. It's a world of immaculately kept lawns and people all in uniform and they're all bright and smart. Duty, honor, country and all that. Sure there's problems up there, but it's a helluva lot closer to an ideal than say Denver is. Why wouldn't it be? You have this captive audience all dedicated to these ideals and all focused on one thing. I mean, talk about utopia."
But aside from West Point's polished, sheltered world, the regular Army was going through some rough times in the '70s.
"Those were low days," Robinson reminisced. "We lost so many NCOs in Vietnam that the officers started doing the noncommissioned officers' jobs. Some of my classmates didn't even want to go into the barracks at night for fear of what they'd find."
Robinson said drug use was rampant among the enlisted soldiers and the Army was constantly experimenting with ways to get people to join in the post-draft era. He said he didn't experience this directly because of his two years at Harvard and his four-year teaching stint at West Point.
Cathy gave birth to a daughter, Meredith, in 1978 while he was teaching at West Point. In 1984, a boy, Will, came along while Robinson was stationed at NATO Headquarters outside of Brussels, Belgium, as an aide de camp to Army Gen. Roscoe Robinson, Jr. The latter Robinson was the U.S. representative to the NATO Military Committee and the first African-American four-star Army general.
Robinson moved 17 times in a military career that saw him as a speechwriter for the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, chief of strategy for USCINCPAC, and finally Fifth Army senior active duty advisor to the Colorado Army National Guard. He said Cathy did well moving around and the kids did OK too because they learned to make friends quick.
"I wanted to end my career in Colorado," Robinson expressed. "It became important to me that my daughter should be able to go to the same high school for four years. When I came back to Colorado as the senior Army advisor, I was not going to move. I would retire before I would move. And so in '95 they [the Army] called me up and said, 'You've been there for three years, it's time to go,' and they gave me the choice of [Washington] D.C. or Africa to be an attache somewhere and there was no question in my mind: I'd retire."
Robinson had two more years to go before he hit his 30-year mark in the military. He didn't want to end up in Washington, D.C., and he certainly didn't want to relocate his family all the way to Africa, so he called it quits. Staying in those last two years would've involved the removal of his daughter from her high school two years shy of her graduation. He had always watched her leave her friends and said that hurt him.
"My kids viewed Colorado as home, in spite of all the places they've been," Robinson said. "Neither of them want to move from Colorado and that's good."
Robinson retired from the Army in 1996 as a colonel and became resource manager and legislative liaison to the Department of Military Affairs. Three years later, he took the post of deputy director for the Colorado Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.
Looking back on his 14-year career in public service, Robinson said the most rewarding aspect of it all had to be transforming the Department of Military Affairs into the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs in 2002.
In the waning days of the last century, he began to attend the meetings of a local veteran's group in order to foster support in the building of a commissary and base exchange at Buckley Air Force Base. He quickly realized that the veterans groups were more influential gaining support for this cause through their congressional connections.
"Working through them, I would argue that we got that commissary and BX built out there at Buckley," Robinson said.
Veterans expressed their desire for their affairs to be handled under the DMA, so the state legislature passed a bill that transferred Veteran's Affairs out of the Department of Human Services and into the DMA said Robinson.
Robinson also touched on the fact that there are more than 430,000 veterans in Colorado, many of whom are married, and the majority of whom probably vote, thus representing a large body of pro-veteran advocates with tons of political clout.
"The things we have been able to do for both the military and veterans' sides have been tremendous," Robinson said. "We were a little department that didn't have much clout in 1999, but politically in terms of getting stuff done, having them [veterans] as part of this department has paid just tremendous dividends both in Washington [D.C.] and in the state."
Robinson described protections against budget turn-downs, bills passed for tuition assistance and for armory construction and the re-writing of laws that didn't deal fairly with Guardsmen, as some of the progress his organization made since combining the two entities.
He has enjoyed his time working for veterans, but feels it's his time to move on.
"I've been here 14 years and the wheel keeps going 'round. The [budget] challenges we face now are repeats of 2003. I'm not getting any younger, and I'm tired of working 45-, 50-hour weeks. To be quite honest, I'm tired of beating my head against the walls downtown and getting it bloody," Robinson said. "This department in my view — a little over a year ago — we were in a position to fix some structural problems on some positions we needed and we had the money and then all of a sudden, the economy goes south and all those dreams — all that work — just vanishes and our budget's going back to where it was in 2002. I'm saying, 'Here we go again.' I no longer have the psychic energy to deal with it."
In addition, the UH-1 "Huey" — the hallmark weapons platform of the Vietnam War — will be retired from the Colorado Army National Guard in September. Robinson figures the old birds are sending him a message and he should leave with them.
Robinson said retirement will consist of catching up on some scrap-booking and other little projects around the house; looking for a part-time job either with the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a disaster-recovery consultant, or as a contractor for the Army; and skiing as much as he can at his favorite resort —Vail.
| Date Taken: | 09.14.2009 |
| Date Posted: | 09.14.2009 16:48 |
| Story ID: | 38758 |
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| Web Views: | 741 |
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This work, Movin' on out: Deputy Director of Military and Veterans Affairs hangs it up after 41 years of service to his country, by SSG Aaron Rognstad, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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