Comrades in Arms : With Their Own Bittersweet Memories Behind Them, Vietnam Vets Welcome Home Troops From the Gulf

The Vietnam veterans in Ventura County received an urgent call-up last week: At all costs, they were to be at the gates of Port Hueneme naval base before dawn on two mornings to wave American flags and homemade signs.

The veterans, men in their 40s with consuming memories of more hostile homecomings, were to line up along Pleasantville Road outside the base and be prepared to cheer and sing for the troops returning from Operation Desert Storm.

They were called up to be there--even though nobody had been there for them.

Men such as Richard Camacho, who spent most of 1967 in Vietnam, still have not forgotten that when they came home from war, America didn’t show up. But Camacho and other veterans say they are not going to impose the bitterness of the Vietnam era on the new veterans. Not now, not during these homecoming weeks.

“Mainly, we don’t want them to go through what we went through,” said Camacho, one of the organizers of the pre-dawn ceremonies outside Port Hueneme last Wednesday and Friday. “Hopefully, with this positive reception they won’t have 110,000 committing suicide the way our guys did after they got back.”

So Camacho and more than a dozen other veterans left their beds in the middle of the night and gathered at the gates to the Seabee base: “There was such excitement, with everybody waiting out there,” Camacho said. “A bunch got together and did the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ right down the middle of the street, and a guy with a trumpet played ‘America’ and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ while we were waiting for the buses with the soldiers in them.

“When the soldiers finally came, hanging out the windows, they looked right at our color guard and screamed out, ‘Thank you!’ I didn’t see a Vietnam vet who didn’t feel good about it.”

But if there is one message from Vietnam veterans about all the fanciful homecomings across America--all the flags, floats and bunting-draped gangways--it is to let the troops of Desert Storm know there is another side to being a veteran once the band stops playing. Sure, the Vietnam veterans harbor resentment that they didn’t receive heroes’ treatment, but more than that they want “these young warriors,” as one veteran called them, to be wary of the government and how it plans for their future.

“The parades and the bunting are all great, and I’m all for that,” said David Cline, a Vietnam vet who now works for a trade union in Bergen, N.J. “But I just want to see how they treat them after.

“Right now (the government is) cutting the Veterans (Administration) budget. Agent Orange victims are being cut from some compensation. I hope they learn to fight for decent benefits, because (President) Bush will still try to nickel-and-dime them, just like he’s doing to us.”

Ed Miles of Washington, an activist for Vietnam veterans, added a further note of caution.

“These guys should be making plans now for how they’ll be taking care of themselves in the future,” Miles said. “Americans are good at waving flags, but they’re not real good at paying their taxes, and that’s what’s going to count.”

Michael Martin, a songwriter from Oklahoma who has penned dozens of ballads and poems about his year as a point man with an infantry troop in Vietnam, said several Vietnam veterans groups hope to appeal to these new vets “to join our ranks.”

A number of groups hope to persuade the Persian Gulf veterans to become involved as advocates for Vietnam soldiers still listed as prisoners of war or missing in action. Other groups are focusing on easing the soldiers’ homecoming: In El Segundo, for example, the veterans’ center is developing counseling services for the men and women returning from the Middle East.

For now, Martin suggested, the Desert Storm troops could probably do with a lot less hullabaloo.

“I’ll bet you anything they would probably prefer to be left alone with their loved ones,” he said.

For many Vietnam vets, the current homecoming is bringing back memories of their own return.

Camacho, for one, got off the plane at El Toro Marine Base in Orange County and was greeted by a low-ranking officer who handed him orders for a South Korea assignment the next day. He had buddies who faced worse--who were spat upon when they walked through U.S. airports wearing their uniforms and who were called drug-crazed baby killers.

Few Vietnam vets were greeted with brass bands and top military brass calling them to order and lavishing pride. President Ronald Reagan once stood at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial--The Wall--in Washington after it was erected and declared that the tragedy of those who died in that war “was that they were asked to fight and die for a cause that their country was unwilling to win.”

Yet it would be wrong to assume that no soldier’s family welcomed him after he got out of Vietnam. A lot of wives, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters were there, waiting in airports and military base lounges, tearful with a mixture of joy and uneasy anticipation.

Cline and Miles both were greeted by their families and tell similar stories about returning wounded, strapped onto stretchers stacked vertically in a cavernous C-141 military plane. Both had been hospitalized in Japan and then shipped home on a 26-hour flight through Anchorage, Alaska. Cline landed at Fort Dix, N.J., Miles at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Washington.

“I have four sisters, and the littlest one was 7 at the time,” Miles recalled. “I’ll never forget her face. She couldn’t comprehend what was going on. She was seeing hundreds of guys that were wounded. I was angry at my parents for bringing her. That was the one emotion I can remember. Besides feeling relief that I was finally home, I was upset.”

Martin said he felt like he had sneaked back into the country when he was flown to Seattle, his first port of entry, on Oct. 15, 1969. The soldiers were told before they left Southeast Asia to go the PX and buy civilian clothes.

“It was the day of the biggest anti-war moratorium all over the country,” he said. “The brass didn’t want us walking around the airport in uniforms.”

But Martin didn’t care what he was wearing.

“I was so happy to be on that plane and headed home,” he said. “I was stunned that I had actually made it. I expected the plane to crash. The stewardesses were so nice--I’ll never forget the sensitivity and understanding and kindness shown.”

While Martin, who won a Silver Star in Vietnam, was prepared for the scorn that the American public had for Vietnam soldiers, he was not prepared for rejection by the military. After a brief leave, Martin went back into the armed forces and was put on KP duty at an American military base.

He was expecting a better assignment. “I was a damn good soldier, but I was treated (badly),” he said. “My veteran status didn’t mean anything to the VFW, it didn’t mean anything to the public, and it didn’t mean anything to the military.”

Meanwhile, Martin and many Vietnam vets emphasize that although they support Persian Gulf soldiers, they did not approve of Operation Desert Storm from start to finish.

“I envisioned thousands and thousands coming back in body bags, the whole mess all over again,” Martin said, reciting this poem, entitled “The Next Wall,” that he wrote with another veteran about their sense of a recurring disaster:

How long until the sound of the sabers stops crashing?

How long will our ears still hear ringing?

How long will the air be choked with the ashes?

How long will the children stop singing?

How long after the dead are all buried will the prisoners of war be free?

And when a monument is done so we’ll always remember, how long will the next Wall be? Martin said he now realizes he was wrong “about a few things about this war, but I’m still looking for what we won. I still think the war itself was wrong.”

Still, when the ground war started last month, Martin and a group of Vietnam veterans who are still fighting for the U.S. government to get POWs out of Vietnam went to Waxahachie, Tex., to a rally demonstrating support for the troops in the Persian Gulf.

Like many far bigger cities, including Los Angeles and New York, this tiny Texas town had thrown the Vietnam vets a rally of their own in the mid-1980s to make up for past grievances, and the vets wanted to return the support.

“When America finally came around to recognizing Vietnam veterans, it meant a lot,” Martin said, “and I think win, lose or draw in the Persian Gulf, America never would have done again to the troops what they did to us. I don’t think that particular mistake would be made again. I think the people of America are ashamed of that treatment.”