For Veterans, Life--Like War--Calls for Courage

My nephew did not know what to make of the dirty, blond man who approached us in the restaurant parking lot with a spray bottle in one hand and a soiled rag in the other.

The stranger appeared to be my age, in his mid-40s, and his embarrassment was obvious when he asked if he could clean the windshield.

Speaking with a soft Southern drawl, he struggled to explain that he had not always been homeless. He said his name was Brian.

“Mister, I’m not a bum,” he said with emotion in his eyes. “I’m just a guy who lost his job and whose life fell apart. I used to be nobody special, just a veteran.”

“Just a veteran.” The remark moved me with both sorrow and pride.

He said he served as a combat infantryman with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam and now had been kicked in the teeth by the economy. This evening he was trying to earn money by cleaning car windows in the parking lot of a popular Orange restaurant.

Judging by the indifference shown to him by people going in and out of the place, he was still nobody special, just an anonymous, homeless veteran.

Today is Veterans Day, and I want you to know about two other Vietnam veterans who are every bit as unknown as Brian but unforgettable to me. Frank Doezema Jr. of Shelbyville, Mich., and Walt Meeley, a Philadelphia attorney, served with me as members of Advisory Team 3, in Thua Thien Province in 1967 and 1968.

Both enlisted in the Army when they were 18.

Borrowing the title of a powerful book about the Vietnam War, the three of us were soldiers once, and young. But Vietnam killed one of my friends and is still killing the other. Vietnam is not just a place from our past, but a place inside our soul as well.

Frank died a hero on Jan. 31, 1968, at the beginning of the Tet Offensive, the most vicious enemy campaign of the war. On the night before he died, he killed about 25 North Vietnamese Army soldiers when the enemy attacked the Army advisers’ compound in Hue. Alone in a bunker, he repulsed repeated assaults on his position before he was mortally wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade.

The quiet 19-year-old farm boy bled to death before he could be evacuated to a field hospital. You will find Frank’s name on panel 36E, line 6 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

The war ended for Walt a few weeks earlier, on Dec. 18, 1967, but Vietnam has been killing him slowly in the 26 years since. His youth vanished on that December afternoon in a bright crimson flow that stained the earth in an area with the rueful name of Street Without Joy.

An AK-47 round slammed into Walt’s face, shattering his cheekbone and ripping his nose. Another round tore through his canteen, web belt and flak jacket before slicing into his stomach, where it is still entombed--no longer a pristine, pointed, shiny, copper-jacketed piece of death, but a lumpy lead wad that triggers metal detectors.

This was not Walt’s first tragic experience in the Street Without Joy, an area northeast of Hue, near the coast and lined by sand dunes and salt flats. About two months earlier he had been wounded in a mine explosion. Then, I was only a few yards away from him and was able to help him when he went into shock.

But on Dec. 18, 1967, I may as well have been a million miles away. All I could do was listen to a medic’s desperate cry for help over a field radio as he struggled frantically to save Walt’s life, and curse the feeling of powerlessness that has gnawed at me ever since.

Like the war itself, our job as military advisers was an impossible task. We were assigned to individual units of three or five American soldiers whose mission was to lead about 100 Vietnamese ragtag militia, called Popular Forces, who were dispirited and tired of war.

On occasion, we also led provincial strike teams called Regional Forces, which could be mobilized throughout the province.

We served with these indigenous soldiers in isolated outposts that were often in areas solidly aligned with the Viet Cong. In the district where I served with an Australian and three other American advisers, the South Vietnamese government’s influence did not extend beyond our camp’s defensive perimeter.

Walt was assigned to Phu Thu, east of Hue, near the South China Sea. However, on the day he was wounded, he was one of three Americans attached to a regional force company.

Frank and I were assigned to Quang Dien and Phong Dien respectively, north of Hue and a few miles south of the Demilitarized Zone. Both outposts were old French forts, built before the first Indochina War.

It was dangerous duty. We assumed that some of our Vietnamese troops were Viet Cong sympathizers. It was an uncomfortable assumption, to say the least. In effect, we did not trust the very people we soldiered with and were fighting and dying for.

When the Tet Offensive began, we discovered that five of the Vietnamese troops assigned to our outpost at Phong Dien were missing. A few nights later, we killed three of them when we ambushed a Viet Cong platoon.

Frank lived his brief life as a contradiction. He was gentle, kind--and a warrior.

It is a testament to his humanity that 25 years after his death, a Vietnamese refugee befriended as a young boy by Frank in 1967 tracked down Frank’s family to express condolences.

Like Frank, Walt was tall and lanky, but the similarities ended there. Where Frank revered the dairy farm his family owned in rural Michigan, Walt was a street-wise Irish kid from a tough Philadelphia working-class neighborhood. But he was religious and clung to his Catholic faith.

After Vietnam, Walt underwent lengthy and painful rehabilitation, which included reconstructive surgery on his face. While he was in a military hospital recovering from his wounds, he wrote a letter to Gen. William Westmoreland, begging for permission to return to his unit in Vietnam.

But Walt never returned to Vietnam. After his enlistment ended, he married and went to Temple University and earned a law degree, despite never having finished high school. Eventually, he joined a Philadelphia law firm.

Things were going splendidly for him until 1981, when he began exhibiting symptoms of Agent Orange poisoning. Walt began having seizures, which some doctors attributed to Agent Orange, a dioxin used as a defoliant by the U.S. military throughout Southeast Asia. He has been hospitalized 50 times since 1981, and has been given the last rites at least seven times.

Today, he is able to work only three days a week because of the seizures, which occur more frequently now. He receives a small pension from Veterans Affairs and Social Security disability payments.

Over the years, the seizures have led to numerous falls, resulting in fractures in both legs, ankles and hands. Although he uses leg braces to help him walk, Walt spends much of his time in a wheelchair, a nearly incapacitated 46-year-old ex-warrior who was once weighed on the scale and found not to be wanting.

He is understandably bitter at the U.S. government. The VA fought him at every turn when he tried to get the government to recognize that he was a victim of Agent Orange. After years of making his life miserable, the VA finally conceded that Walt has “a disease related to dioxin poisoning” and awarded him $1,024.

Not $1,024 per month, but a grand total of $1,024.

Walt has never expressed any regrets about Vietnam, not even about his final mission, for which he volunteered.

The only time I have ever heard any dismay from him is when he talks about how Vietnam veterans have been treated by the nation, regardless of the arguments over the legitimacy or morality of the war.

Vietnam veterans are the ghosts that continue to haunt the nation’s conscience. Forever the outsiders, we are men and women who never seem to fit in your social circle. We make you uncomfortable and embarrass you by our presence.

“We weren’t the fortunate sons,” Walt said in a recent telephone conversation. “Everyone knows the war was fought by Hispanics, blacks and poor whites. Most people think we’re all SOBs anyway.”

In Vietnam, there were times when we would go on combat operations for days or weeks at a time without seeing the enemy. We used to call this experience “taking a walk in the sun.” However, the cheery phrase mocked the constant terror that one felt from not knowing if the enemy was dug in in the next tree line, waiting to cut you down as you walked across an open field, or if you were going to make contact with an invisible-but-superior enemy force.

Frank and Walt took walks in the sun that lasted longer than the combined duration of our adventures in Grenada and Panama, and the conflict with Iraq. It is important that the American people know this.

Gen. Westmoreland said that “war is fear cloaked in courage.” Frank and Walt never denied the one and had no shortage of the other.