By the Grace of God: Chapter 3

We survived the jungles of Vietnam only to have the attitudes and war protests back home break us

How did you deal with the negative public attitude towards Vietnam War veterans as a career Marine?

Lieutenant Walters shook his head, the corners of his mouth curving upwards. He raised his twinkling eyes to mine and nodded.

Living on base insulated me from the worst of the anti-military attitudes, but we still saw it. The media made sure of that.

The veterans who went home to civilian life were the true heroes, they dealt with it every day of their lives.

When my tour ended in 1971, our uneventful flight home landed at Camp Pendleton in California. Like Chuck’s did. After a delicious home-cooked meal, new uniforms, and a good night’s sleep, we were ready to head home. We boarded a bus the next morning and headed off base to civilian airports so we could catch commercial flights home.

Every veteran on the bus saluted the guards at the gate as we left, cheering to be on our way home to our families. Then we got a crash course in the ugly side of the protesters and their protests. Not twenty feet from the gates to the base stood a loud group of obnoxious civilians. They held placards and signs high and proud. There were offensive messages on them directed at us, the protesters hurling profanity and insults at the bus as we passed them. There were identical pockets of protesters all along the route to the civilian airports local to bases all over the country. Protesters who delighted in tormenting veterans returning from hell on Earth.

Words escaped us as we stared in stunned silence at them. I remember saying to one guy with me ‘I didn’t think coming home would be just as bad as being in the country’.

Vietnam, one of the most hostile war zones in US history, where we were protecting them, and they had the audacity to tell us we should have died over there. There are no words to describe how we felt facing those protesters. No one can understand how their words were like sucker punches to the gut. They tore us up. We spent months, sometimes years, of our lives away from our families and in constant danger fighting for them and they threw it all back in our faces. It was nasty and disheartening.

Loo’s words reminded me of the question I wanted to ask him.

There is one other thing, Lieutenant. If I consider what you experienced in Vietnam, I have to ask how you could send boys over there to fight in good faith?

With a sharp intake of breath and a shake of his head, Lieutenant Walters chuckled.

Well, now, you aren’t one to pull any punches, are you?

I have never seen the point in that, Loo. I play it straight. No point in anything else, is there?

No, no there isn’t, Sarah. Your question isn’t an easy one to answer, but I’ll do my best.

After my tours of duty ended in seventy-one, I was part of strategic planning for the rest of the war. My greatest honour was in welcoming the returning veterans home. It was a duty I not only looked forward to, I cherished it, whether those veterans came home under their own steam or in a box.

The hardest part of my job, both during my tours and after, was watching those young, gung-ho guys enlist hoping to make a difference. When I was in-country, it was my job to keep them alive, which wasn’t always easy, but I did what I could.

After I got stateside, I worked in Basic getting new recruits ready to go to war. It tore me up when boys I trained came home in a box, not that I ever admitted that to anyone else.

I was part of the team training them up in Basic Training, it was my job, but I wish I could have refused it. I hated sending those new recruits overseas. It broke my heart knowing how many of them would come home with a flag blanket. I never let them see that, though. I put on my big boy pants and did my job, making sure they were as prepared as they could be. 3

Early in the war, there were boys who enlisted out of a sense of duty or obligation to their country and others who wanted the excitement of going to war. Both opinions were valid, both groups of boys a source of pride. Then we began sending them home inboxes. It looked as if we sent a box home every hour, at first, then it escalated. On average, if you looked at the total number of US casualties over the 20 years of the Vietnam War, eight boys came home with flag blankets every day. Every damn day. Those statistics disheartened those in the country and angered those at home, but they pointed their anger in the wrong direction. Those at home ranted and raved against those who fought in Vietnam, but it should have been the US government and military in their crosshairs, not the soldiers. The soldiers had enough hardship without their fellow Americans berating them for serving their country.

The media put a negative spin on those deaths when they reported them as unnecessary or what they deserved for being in Vietnam. Those reports added fuel to the fires lit by the protests around the country.

Lieutenant Walters’ eyes flashed with anger. He was angry with the country he served and the military he loved. Angry that they treated their young men the way they did. He spoke through gritted teeth as he remembered popular opinions from back in the day.

Americans saw returning veterans through muddied lenses. They saw them as the media and the government told them to, only their families seeing them for the heroes they were. Still, there were families who didn’t agree with their boys enlisting. They sided with the media, only crying foul when their boys got killed in action. They blamed the government and protested harder when their boys died, not understanding the government welcomed their protests.

Those demonstrations fuelled the propaganda machines the government feigned ignorance of.

The fake news outlets established and funded by that same government fuelled those demonstrations.

It was a vicious cycle, and one the bureaucrats never wanted to bring to an end.

There were gung-ho guys who did whatever their COs asked of them, and there were COs who loved that ass-kissing, but I wasn’t one of them. If you kissed your CO’s ass to get things done, you weren’t good at your job and then you were no good to any of us.

Ass-kissers got the full weight of my ire heaped upon them. I wanted, and needed, to weed out the ones who maybe weren’t compatible with the Corps. I had to find the ones who should have been pissant GI Joes in the Army, so I worked at breaking them, and I succeeded more than I failed. Breaking their spirits might be mean and unnecessary, but it often made them better Marines and better men.

Loo chuckled, nodding at whatever story he was hearing in his head.

Attersley, he was a diamond in the rough if I ever met one. Corporal Ralph Attersley was an expert ass-kisser. He was great. Ha His CO before me, Major Harrison, loved ass-kissers, thrived on surrounding himself with them, and everyone knew it.

Attersley’s nickname was Puck, short for Pucker Up, named by the other guys in his unit because he was that good of a kiss-ass. Puck knew why they called him that, but he didn’t care.

He got off on the game of manipulating the Major. It didn’t matter what Puck wanted, if he stroked Harrison’s ego, he got it.

I got to witness him in action when I was visiting his unit one day.

Puck walked up to the group of COs Major Harrison stood with and interrupted the strategic discussion they were having. Captain Reynolds dressed him down for interrupting his superiors, but it was too late. Puck damaged Harrison’s reputation with the way he spoke to him, one step from full disrespect. The puck was smarmy and supercilious. I didn’t like him much when I met him. I called him on his manipulative ass-kissing when he got to my unit. He didn’t like me much, either.

Walters stared at the floor, focusing on something beyond my sight, something distasteful to him. He blinked and refocused his eyes on me with a smile, a wink, and a nod.

Harrison’s unit got involved in a stand-off on Hill 527, up in the A Shau Valley. They got trapped by three units of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). It was a brutal firefight. Puck and Windy, Corporal Windermere, were the only survivors.

Major Harrison, for his faults, was a good leader. Instead of sending his men into battle, he fought alongside them. Harrison watched the NVA pick off his men one by one until he was one of the last men standing. Puck and Windy walked away, not unscathed, and after watching their entire unit get killed first.

After the gooks slaughtered Major Harrison and the rest of their unit, Puck and Windy transferred to my unit. They got a rude awakening when they arrived in camp. They were used to getting their own way, and we didn’t roll that way. Puck was a kiss-ass and Windy was full of hot air, lying his way to whatever it was he wanted.

I got the impression they were expecting things to go smoother than they did for them in our unit. It might have if their reputations hadn’t preceded them. We tolerated neither of those behaviors amongst our guys.

Puck and Windy took two days to get their bearings, then they started back to their old tricks. Day three after they got to Camp WhoopAss — what we called our base camp — Windy took on Jeepers, our resident repair guy. Jeepers could repair anything he took apart, it was amazing what he could do with next to no supplies.

Windy met Jeepers on his first day in camp. Jeepers was a short, thin wisp of a man with dainty hands and glasses that amplified his already huge eyes. Windy, as did everyone else, though he was a few sandwiches short of a picnic when he first met Jeepers. Everyone assumed Jeepers, whose real name was Crowley, was a submissive, simple man when they first met him. He got his nickname because no one could look past his glasses to the man behind the lenses. Jeepers was a throwback to the line ‘Jeepers Creepers, where d’ya get those peepers’ from an old Louis Armstrong song. He was a good sport and laughed it off, but he was not simple or submissive.

Windy spent his time wandering around camp looking for stuff to pilfer. Jeepers was always fiddling with something he found lying around camp. One day Windy found him with an old TA-57 field phone he was trying to restore to working order. A Russian piece of equipment Jeepers found in the jungle, the TA-57 was in high demand on the black market. Windy saw it and dollar signs appeared in his eyes. He sat with Jeepers, feigning interest, and struck up a conversation.

He told Jeepers it was a knockoff, not a real TA-57, so not worth as much. Jeepers kept working on it, nodding in agreement. When it was back together and Jeepers was polishing it up, Windy picked it up and cradled it in his arms.

“I’ll give ya a fiver for it, it’s not worth much more than that. Here.” He tossed a five-dollar bill at Jeepers and started walking away with his phone. Jeepers jumped in front of him, grabbed it back and told him to take a hike. They ended up in a scuffle over it until Jeepers popped him one in the face and gave him a piece of his mind.

“Boy, you must think I’m some kind of stupid if you think I will fall for that claptrap. This here TA-57 is worth at least fifteen bucks on the black market. And thanks for the fiver.” He stormed back to his tent, Windy’s money in his fist, and called over his shoulder “You should lower that opinion you have of yourself, too. The rest of us have.”

Jeepers was full of personality. I was sorry to see him head home a few weeks later, at the end of his tour. Even sorrier when I found out he’d offed himself a year after that. Goddamn Vietnam War was no bloody good for any of us.

Continue reading with By the Grace of God: Chapter 4 here:

To read from the beginning, check out By the Grace of God: Chapter 1 here: