Father’s Day Is a Painful Reminder of Casualties of War

Harvest Gulevich remembers the day the men from the military came. It was April 3, 1969, and she and her mother had just gotten home from a visit to the doctor. Harvest, then 19, went to her room and hadn’t been there long when she heard first the doorbell and then her mother’s muted conversation with the military men.

She was Harvest Blankenship then, the daughter of Maj. Leroy Blankenship, a career Marine who was serving his second tour of duty in Vietnam. Harvest came into the room that April day and sat behind her mother, put her arm around her. She realized her mother was talking to a chaplain and another officer, but Harvest was unsure what had happened. Afraid to ask, laboring just to breathe normally, Harvest simply waited until the men made reference to “return of the body.”

It was the kind of moment from which there is no retreat, no rewind. Life had been one way before the men came, another way afterward. Jean Blankenship had lost a husband, Harvest and her older brother had lost a father. Maj. Blankenship was 40 when his helicopter was shot down in Quang Tri province. He and his co-pilot drowned after the crash left them unconscious in a bomb crater filled with rainwater.

Harvest Blankenship couldn’t have known that April day how future Father’s Days would affect her. Neither could the thousands of other children of Vietnam casualties. But their losses were, in many respects, different than those suffered by children whose fathers die in other ways.

That’s why this year, for the second consecutive year, Harvest Gulevich, now a Fountain Valley 43-year-old mother of two, is spending Father’s Day in Washington, in the proximity of the Vietnam Memorial. She’ll be surrounded by other grown children of Vietnam-era casualties, men and women from across America who have formed a coalition known as Sons and Daughters in Touch. Several Orange County residents are attending, part of an estimated 1,500 adults across America on the group’s mailing list.

They are linked by more than the shared experience of losing a father early in life, some even before they were born.

Their bond is forged by this country’s intense feelings a generation ago about the Vietnam War and the men who fought it.

While most of us can find consoling friends when parents die, children of Vietnam vets heard their fathers described, Gulevich says, “as baby killers and village burners.” As a result, many servicemen’s sons and daughters repressed feelings about their fathers’ deaths.

In Gulevich’s case, for example, many of her peers were condemning the war when her father was killed. A former boyfriend of hers applauded when he learned her father had died.

“We didn’t know why they had died, our mothers didn’t know why, the country didn’t know why,” Gulevich said when I talked to her by phone from Washington. “There were a lot of years when no one wanted to talk about it. If your father was killed in an accident (as a civilian), the country wasn’t divided about why he died. I was 19 when my father died. It was 1969 and the tide was turning to being anti-war. My friends protested the war, and my friends didn’t want to hear that he was there, that he had died. It was something that couldn’t be discussed. The sentiment of the country was so anti-war at that point that you never knew what reaction you would get, especially from young people my age. I had gotten enough negative reaction that I learned it was better to shut my mouth.”

Because she remembers her father, Harvest is different than many in the organization. Her sense of loss is more real and painful, but she isn’t haunted by uncertainty over who her father was or how much like him she became.

“There’s a definite need (among the children) to know what happened, to want to know the details,” she said. “You don’t have the complete picture. You want to know where they were, what they were doing, something about the circumstances, who they were with. That kind of thing becomes really important.”

In many cases, families didn’t get accurate information from the government. Not until 1984 did the Blankenships get the exact details of Maj. Blankenship’s death--and then only from someone in his helicopter squadron who gave a version that differed from the government’s.

“That’s what being here does,” she said. “You can go back, pick up, talk about the person, feel him again. I can feel him more deeply now. I can feel what it was like to have his arms around me, or see him smile--the things that come back into your memory when you talk about someone.”

Is it painful or comforting being there with the other children, I asked Gulevich. “It’s painfully comforting,” she said. “It’s very very painful, we’ve spent a lot of time with boxes of Kleenexes, we do a lot of crying; but at the same time, when you’re done, you’ve come through a layer and you feel better.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.