VIETNAM VETERANS ON BOOMERPDX

My Vietnam Veterans show up on BoomerPdx not as veterans but as guys I’ve met along the way.

Extraordinary guys I’ve been lucky to meet.

What’s my plan to meet anyone?

Get out of the house and walk around and you can’t go wrong.

A man who turned out to be an Air Force fighter pilot was walking around South Portland while his wife was getting checked out at OHSU.

I was doing the same when we crossed paths.

One thing led to another and we were off.

As you travel your path, pay attention to moments of decision. That’s where you decide one way, or the other, or not at all. No decision is also a decision.

A decision in the cockpit of a Phantom is different from a decision on where to sit at a concert. How different?

The sunrise shot is one of my favorites.  We had just come off the tanker and an AC-130 Gunship was screaming for help.  He had been working the “trail”  all night and was running out of ammo, but had a lot of trucks cornered by ones they had destroyed at the front and back of the string.  We were happy to oblige.  

Navy Vietnam Veterans

Some guys never mention their veteran status. Why?

Because it’s part of their life, but not the main part.

Career guys see it differently after their twenty or thirty year run.

Being Vietnam Veterans is just part of who they are.

A man I met was deployed three times and never mentioned it as any more than doing his job.

He is a most understated man.

We first met in Paris as tourists in a group, then in Hawaii a few years later.

He was the same understated man. If he chose to honk his own horn of accomplishments it would break windows.

The part I liked most about the older guys? They were still married to their first wives.

Their family unit thrived during their service years. How does that happen?

Give credit to the wives for believing in their family mission.

Old War Same As The Last War?

I’m what’s considered a Vietnam-Era Veteran because I served six months before the cut-off date, barely.

The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that today there are more than 7 million U.S. Vietnam veterans living in America and abroad, along with 10 million families of those who served during this timeframe. 

We make no distinction between veterans who served in-country, in-theater, or who were stationed elsewhere during the Vietnam War period.  All were called to serve and none could self-determine where they would serve.

I met an active duty Army Captain in the gym who informed me:

“You’re not really a veteran unless you’ve been deployed to a war zone.”

He was the Captain of a motor pool group sent to Iraq to deliver supplies.

I said I was deployed to a war zone, the Revolutionary War, in Philadelphia.

That I was two hundred years late wasn’t my fault.

Frank Rizzo was mayor. I rode the Broad Street subway from Center City south to Oregon Avenue.

Funny place for an Oregon boy to land.

Veteran History

I saw laundry drying on a line on the back porch of a home on Hawaii’s Ford Island.

Bill Little is a history man on a mission.

Like all good history men, including your’s truly, he wants to know more about everything.

He knows Ford Island and Pearl Harbor.

From bullet holes in windows left as a reminder, to bullet divots in cement walls, December 7th is still there in its unvarnished state.

From the USS Arizona, USS Utah, and the Mighty Mo, along with the berths of missing ships marked by white buoys, it’s all there.

But what struck me was the laundry flying on a back porch?

Here’s why:

We all come from somewhere else. 

Even if you never leave your hometown, you experience it at different ages to the point that it becomes new.

People who move around for one reason or another don’t understand how small town people manage their lives.

We look for the new in old places, places so familiar you could find them blind.

What’s worth remembering?

Sam Stone Went Home

Vietnam Veteran John Prine wrote this after he was discharged from the Army.

Sam Stone came home
To his wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas
And the time that he served
Had shattered all his nerves
And left a little shrapnel in his knees
But the morphine eased the pain
And the grass grew round his brain
And gave him all the confidence he lacked
With a purple heart and a monkey on his back

The people who served know what they did, and what others did.

But, some get confused over the years and change their stories.

My guys have been steadfast in who they are.

Call them role models. I do.

What do you call the guys who tell this story:

“The hardest part of commanding troops in combat is writing letters to the parents of those killed in action.”

A man told this to my wife, then showed her his uniform hanging in his closet, his Class A in full decoration.

Being a caring and compassionate women, my wife met his kids and told them they should be proud of their father.

To which they said:

“Our dad has been telling his story for years. All the awards on his uniform? He bought them at at an Army surplus store. That’s not even his uniform. He wasn’t a captain, he was a Spec 4.”

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On the way home:

Wife: Why do men say those things that are not true?

Me: They look for an audience. Notice he didn’t tell me the bullshit.

Wife: Have you ever told that story?

Me: You mean my time in the Vietnam jungle where guys were tough?

These guys were hardcore. This wasn’t run anything at all like the regular army. There was basically only one rule, do whatever you had to do to survive.

Most of the time there was nobody looking over our shoulders, nobody telling us what to do or how to do it, no one giving us any bullshit about uniforms or military procedure. We lived for the mission, and when we lived through that one, we got ready for the next one. It was as a LRRP that I truly learned how to walk the path of the warrior.

The more time I spent in the field, the more time any of us spent in the field, the farther away we got from any type of normal behavior. To survive out there in the jungle, fighting an enemy who understood the environment, we went native.

Wife: I’ve never heard you say that.

Me: Because I’ve never been to Vietnam, never been a LRRP. That’s someone else’s story.

Wife: Why do men lie about their service?

Me: Because being who they are isn’t enough. Besides, who’s going to check on them?

Wife: I’m glad you’re honest.

Me: Honesty isn’t that high a bar for the Army or marriage.

Wife: What’s marriage got to do with it?

Later we learned the stolen valor soldier divorced his wife and married a woman who looked like his wife but twenty years younger.

Me: Remember the guy with the captain’s uniform in his closet?

Wife: I’ll bet he told her all about it.

Me: And why wouldn’t she believe him?