Belated Cheers Warm Hearts of Vietnam Vets

For 81 minutes Sunday in Hollywood, Jorge Avila felt as if he had personally won the World Series, swept the Oscars, and banished all evil in the world. Most important, though, he felt as if he had won the Vietnam War.

“The cheering was so loud that it scared me,” said the 43-year-old unemployed veteran from Panorama City. “ ‘Could this be for me?’ I asked myself. But it was. It was for me and all of the Vietnam veterans who marched with me.

“After 23 years, it feels like I did something good. This parade makes my year . . . no, my life!”

Indeed, Avila and the estimated 150 ex-soldiers, marching under the banner of Vietnam Vets of America, were accorded some of the wildest cheering of any unit in the 3.2-mile parade. For many of them, it was the joyous and grateful reception denied them a generation ago.

Some of the marching vets were caught unprepared for the adoration they once only dreamed about.

Avila, a survivor of the 1968 Tet offensive, stoically looked straight ahead, trying to focus on the march cadence. USC business administration Prof. Glenn Payne fought back tears as the chants of “USA! USA! USA!” drowned out the public address announcer near the parade’s reviewing stand.

“I can’t believe this,” murmured Payne, 46. “I can’t.”

But for most, it was a time to bask in the glory. To wave. To salute. To be cheered. To be saluted. And to be thanked.

Jim Wade frequently left the line of march to exchange high fives and hugs with parade onlookers. He jabbed his arms into the air like a heavyweight champion. “Thank you!” he repeatedly shouted to anyone who could hear him. “I love you! We’re No. 1!”

After the parade, Wade, 45, said he was not just thinking of himself. He had seen his share of bodies during a tour near the demilitarized border between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, he said.

“I was thinking about the buddies who didn’t come home--Doc, Sully, Terry,” he said. “I wish they were here.”

The decision to march was gut-wrenching for some.

For 23 years, Ron Bradford, a news producer with Los Angeles radio station KNX, could not touch, let alone put on, his Army uniform. “I still have a lot of deep, deep memories of Vietnam,” Bradford said.

Bradford had dismissed repeated suggestions that he march in Sunday’s parade. “No way,” he said.

But KNX colleague Dave Zorn, an ex-Marine, kept after him, telling him, “Come march with me.”

Bradford finally gave in a few days ago, and reached into his past for the uniform of the 101st Airborne Division. Although he had gained a few pounds over the years, Bradford was not going to apologize for being unable to button the front of the coat.

“I got it on,” he said.

Most of the Vietnam vets, Unit 223 in the official list of parade participants, were hardly as neatly dressed as the recently arrived troops from the Persian Gulf. And they could not march as well.

But they still knew a thing or two about soldiering and were not above letting some raw recruit know about it.

An hour before the parade began, Avila was talking about his 18-year bout with alcoholism when he spied a batch of Navy sailors who had laid their rifles on the ground next to a curb on Van Ness Avenue.

“What is this ?” bellowed the ex-grunt of the Army’s 9th Infantry Division. “You people have no respect! Stack those rifles! You don’t leave them on the ground like that!”

The vets got only one warning from parade officials: Ignore any war protesters along the parade route.

That elicited a chorus of angry howls from the vets: “Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill!”

“Ignore them! (protesters)” the marchers were bluntly told. “We’re not baby-killers. We’re Vietnam veterans. We’re here to show the people that we are decent human beings.”

“Right on,” several of the grizzled vets agreed. “Right on.”

Ramos, a Vietnam veteran, marched with the contingent.