Vietnam Vet Readies for Emotional Mission

On the day set aside to celebrate the birth of a nation, Ed Bastiani will contemplate the death of a friend.

The Simi Valley resident will be preparing mentally and emotionally for July 5, when he will speak for the first time with family members of a fellow serviceman who was killed 35 years ago in Vietnam.

Bastiani was there the day his friend, Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Gerald McCall, was killed by an explosion. The then 24-year-old Bastiani, a Navy medic assigned to McCall’s unit, was standing 25 yards away when a booby trap exploded, sending a single piece of shrapnel into McCall’s chest. Bastiani ran to his friend, but it was too late.

On July 5, he will tell McCall’s family that the husband and father loved his wife and four children, that their brother was brave in the face of danger and that their son did not suffer when he died on July 14, 1968. McCall’s relatives will be on one end of the phone, gathered for a family reunion in New Jersey, and Bastiani will be on the other.

Bastiani and one of McCall’s younger brothers, Darryl Bradley, found each other through the Virtual Wall on the Internet. Bastiani happened upon the Vietnam Veterans Memorial site one day as he was surfing the Web. He typed in McCall’s name and up it popped, with his date of birth, rank and date and place of death.

Bastiani left a written remembrance of his friend: “I had the honor of serving with SSgt. McCall as one of his platoon Corpsmen when I first arrived in RVN. I was senior Corpsman for Hotel 2/7 and present at the time of his passing. I only regret that I didn’t get to thank him for all that he taught me.”

A few days later, Bastiani received an e-mail from Bradley thanking him for the message. That response led to an exchange of e-mails, a telephone chat and eventual plans for the July 5 “meeting” with McCall’s family.

Bradley said Bastiani’s revelation opened up old wounds for him and McCall’s six other siblings, but they are grateful to finally know the truth.

“After 30 years, we had gotten over the pain, and now it almost feels like the day he died,” Bradley said last week from his home in Iowa. “For 30 years, all we knew was my brother was gone. We often wondered what happened to him and who he was with when he died. Now we know.”

Sitting in an examination room at his Thousands Oaks optometry office, Bastiani said: “I would have hoped that someone would have done the same thing for my wife had it happened to me.”

He struggled to explain what led him to connect with McCall’s family after all these years. For three decades, he pushed thoughts about Vietnam out of his mind. He was not ready, he said. But the combination of time, 9/11 and the war in Iraq forced him to confront what he had long brushed aside, he said.

“Up until the last five years, there would have been no way,” Bastiani said, his pale blue eyes rimmed with tears.

As pictures of young men and women fighting in Iraq flashed on television around the clock, Bastiani finally thought about Vietnam. It is a path many men and women who served in that war find themselves taking, especially those who returned relatively unscathed to lead lives centered on family and career, said Alan Greilsamer, spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which sponsors the Web site.

“A lot of Vietnam veterans returned and put the war behind them,” Greilsamer said. “But years later, they come to grips with their service, and they find this great Web site where they have connected with their past.”

Greilsamer said he hears of dozens of such reunion stories a year, but is sure there are hundreds more he never learns of, stories in which widows, siblings, sons and daughters make contact with a Vietnam veteran who shares precious details about their loved ones.

Although Bastiani and McCall knew each other only four months and were not close friends, Bastiani said he could not get the slim, muscular platoon sergeant out of his mind.

For all the death and dismemberment Bastiani witnessed in his seven months in Vietnam, he wondered why McCall’s memory still haunted him. Now he thinks he knows: McCall, one of the first Marines he met upon his arrival in Vietnam, was a true leader who respected and loved his men, and the feeling was mutual.

“I didn’t get to thank him for what he had done for me and how he had treated me,” Bastiani said.

Technically, McCall was not Bastiani’s superior because the latter was in the Navy. But McCall served as his de facto boss in the field.

McCall’s platoon was scouring a minefield on July 14, 1968, searching for the enemy in the tropics of Thua Thien Hue province in South Vietnam. When their assignment was completed, McCall called to his men, “Let’s get going!” Bastiani said. They were heading back to camp when McCall’s radioman triggered a booby trap hiding a 155-millimeter howitzer round. Bastiani heard the explosion and ran to McCall, who was hit by shrapnel in the small “V” of his chest unprotected by his flak jacket.

“I wish there was more I could have done,” Bastiani said.

The radioman, Steven Scott, was critically injured and flown by helicopter to a military clinic. He died a few days later.

About three weeks after Bastiani posted his message on the Virtual Wall, Scott’s brother saw it and e-mailed Bastiani for details of Scott’s death. Scott was a Canadian citizen who had enlisted in the U.S. Marines. His name appears on a memorial wall in Ottawa honoring Canadian Vietnam War veterans, Scott’s brother told Bastiani.

When he returned home in December 1968, Bastiani resumed his studies at Los Angeles College of Optometry, near USC. Over the years, the veteran helped raise three children and two stepchildren and managed a flourishing practice. The Vietnam memories were relegated to the distant background.

“You hide it, you sublimate it,” Bastiani said. “But finally, one day, it pops up and bites you in the ankle.”

Until he made contact with Bradley in May, Bastiani said, he had never cried over the war. Now he gets weepy whenever he thinks about it. The 59-year-old optometrist believes he is experiencing a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. His slow but sure coming to grips with his past led him to attend a reunion of his former Navy battalion, H Company, last month in Las Vegas.

The stocky optometrist with close-cropped hair said he only wishes he had connected with the family before McCall’s mother died a couple years ago. He is sure the mother of eight would have wanted to know more about the final moments of her first-born child.

“When I talked to Darryl Bradley, I told him what his brother had died of, when he had died,” Bastiani said. “That he had died in shock and not in a lot of pain, he wasn’t maimed, he wasn’t disfigured. They need to know their brother and father was a good man who was respected by the Marines and the men he touched.”