Terry Overbay did one tour in Vietnam, got a bronze star and was exposed to Agent Orange, the defoliant that has wreaked havoc on thousands of people, both military and civilians, since the end of the war.

Most of what he did during his year in Vietnam, working as a cryptographic equipment repairman, was and still is top secret.

"There's not a whole lot I can talk about from what I did," Overbay said. "Most of the stuff that I was associated with was top secret. I can talk in generalizations, and that's about it. "

The Clayton native and current Los Lunas resident joined the army in the 1960s and was in seven years, getting out in 1974.

He said he volunteered to avoid the draft, and give himself some choice of where he went.

After his stint in the Army came to an end, Overbay worked a variety of jobs. He sold insurance, tended bar and worked for U.S. West, the phone company now known as Qwest, for many years.

He is currently on disability because of exposure to Agent Orange, a chemical known to cause cancer and birth defects.

He said he has had surgery to remove his prostate after it became cancerous. The cancer is now in remission, but he also developed diabetes as a result of the exposure.

"It's one of the things that it can cause," he said. "My family didn't have any history of diabetes."

He said the hardest part of being in Vietnam was being far from his loved ones.

"For me, the hardest thing was being away from family," he said "I was married at the time, and had small children."

Overbay's unit was in charge of communications and operated cryptographic equipment, which disguised radio transmissions from the prying ears of enemy troops.

"My unit was responsible for keeping communication up," he said. "My unit also was responsible for locating and identifying enemy units by their electronic signatures."

Overbay received a bronze star for meritorious action for being resourceful during Operation Parrot's Beak, during which he was the second shift noncommissioned officer in charge.

"That was when they were trying to interdict North Vietnamese Regulars who were coming south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail," he said. "It was called Parrot's Beak because of the way the border between Vietnam and Cambodia looked like a parrot's beak."

The Parrot's Beak was one of the places North Vietnamese Regulars were coming back into Vietnam via Cambodia.

"We were able to scavenge stuff from some place else and keep communications," he said.

His unit's other job was to locate and identify enemy units via radio communications. He explained that most radios will go through a encryption device before being broadcast. Any radio has an electronic signature, like a finger print.

He said he may have not been able to understand an enemy transmission, but the un-encrypted transmission would give away an enemy's position, which could be triangulated within 50 yards.

"If an enemy was stupid enough to key their radio and talk in the open, our people could ID that radio," he said. "If the radio was ever keyed again, we could ID it."

He said sometimes people would lose perspective and do foolish things, such as talk on the radio out in the open.

"That's why it's called the fog of war," he said. "You get people that do things. If they stopped to think about it, they'd know it was stupid. You spend more time reacting than thinking. We would catch these people reacting instead of thinking."

Overbay said if they uncovered an enemy position, the information would be forwarded to reconnaissance or the Air Force, who would bomb the target. He said the enemy troops would usually not know about the presence of bombers until the bombs started detonating. If they were lucky, they may see contrails in the sky.

"The Air Force would do some carpet bombing," he said. "Charlie did not like B-52s."

He said the technology used to determine an enemy's position has advanced in the years since Vietnam.

"It's even more sophisticated nowadays," he said. "You can see predator strikes."

Overbay was affected by some of the information he was privy to during his time in Vietnam. Though he cannot go into detail, he said he has suffered from depression that comes and goes.

"I had some real bad depression for a while," Overbay said. "I saw communications that 90 percent of the soldiers would never see. I saw communications that sometimes only generals saw."

He said doctors have told him that he could have been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, though he has never been diagnosed.

"There were some things that came through that even now I would say 98 percent of American people don't know anything about," he said. "It wasn't what was being told to everybody else."