Remembering Vietnam

On the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War

“ When I first got to Vietnam, I thought very little of the enemy. Many of us were that way. We didn’t think they were as well equipped as us, didn’t have our training and so on. But man, when they hit us the way they did on the night of January 21st, 1968, the start of Tet, that’s when I really saw their ability to fight.

Wow. As horrible as it was, afterward, you had to respect the way they fought. They had a lot of drive. They were fighting for a cause in their own country. The hard part for us is that you’d be so miserable on patrol. You’d be loaded down like a mule. You’re in the hot jungle. There’s leeches, mosquitoes, everything there combined to make it just torturous.

All you would do is think of home. That was your diversion. Keep your mind off of how miserable you were. Then all of a sudden, they would ambush you. So you go right from boredom to being scared as hell, and then you would hear screaming and somebody yells “corpsman up”. Now you knew one of your guys was hit.

Then all your emotions turned to anger. You had incredible swings of emotion in a matter of seconds. To me, the people who deserve the most respect were the corpsmen. Boy, when somebody  hollered, “corman up”, I never saw one hesitate. We’d be hugging the earth trying to crawl inside our helmets, but they would grab their bag, bullets would be flying, and they’d go out and try to save somebody’s life. I think every one of them should have gotten some sort of special commendation for what they did in combat. They were just super.  

We did quite a few killer team missions. Those were terrible too. You’d lie there all night in the dark. Mosquitoes eating you alive. Wow. That was really something. 

 I was about halfway through my tour when I really started asking myself, why are we here? We can’t win this war the way we’re doing it. You could just see that it was going nowhere and guys were getting killed and maimed every day. It was a no-win situation. For America, it was fought too politically. The South Vietnamese government was full of corruption and the regular people were poor farmers caught in the middle. We were trying to force our own way of life on them, but all they wanted to do was grow their rice and be left alone.

I got discharged in August of 1969. I didn’t want anything to do with the war once I got home, I got married in 1970, and my wife and I would sit down to supper. The news would come on. If there was anything on there from Vietnam, I’d ask her to turn it off. I knew what those guys were going through. I didn’t have to watch it. I was trying to forget it.  

It was only after I started talking to classes at the local schools that I started realizing that it was okay to open up and talk about what happened. Now, I’m on four or five different Facebook sites talking with other veterans. When I do talk to students, I never, ever glorify war in any way because there is nothing glorious about it. It’s terrible. It’s absolutely terrible. I don’t care how macho or whatever you think you are, if you’ve actually been there, experienced, lived it, it’s not possible to glorify it. It’s just not. 

The one thing I did watch when I came home, and it hurt so much, was the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. To see us leaving that country like that, all I could think of was holding a guy in my arms that was badly wounded. He looked at me in the eye and said, ‘I don’t want to die, Chuck. I don’t want to die.’

 I lied to him, told him he was going to be okay, that a medevac was on the way. I could tell by his breathing that he was fading.  Then his chest stopped rising and his eyes were frozen open. The only thing I could do was to close his eyes and respectfully zip him up. And then to see everybody running to get out of the country, you just sit there and think, what did those guys die for? 

 I was very tight-lipped about Vietnam for a lot of years. I think I was resentful in a certain way that I lost my youth over there. Before I left home I was a happy guy. Lots of friends, liked having a good time with everybody. When I came back from Vietnam, I was different. I had changed. It took me a while to realize it, but I just felt like my old friends were immature. At least that’s how I perceived it. Suddenly, I had a really bad attitude. It gradually went away, but I just had a hard time going from what I had gone through over there to jumping right back into my old life.

That’s what I mean when I say I lost my youth. I would never be that happy-go-lucky kid ever again.”

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