Honoring Veterans, Remembering Vietnam

My wife's small hometown on the southwestern border of Georgia is on fire for veterans.

The Blakely Methodist Church has staged a November Sunday worship service dedicated to veterans for 30 years-plus. The town of about 5,000 was recently designated as a U.S. "Purple Heart City" honoring those wounded in action. Its American Legion Post is thriving. Rotary also honors vets.

The Blakely Methodists go all-out for vets with a wall display of dozens of photos of the county's military veterans. The local paper publishes all of them, too. I'm proud to have my photo included, taken while standing aboard a Huey helicopter pad in 1969 at Moc Hoa, South Vietnam, about 40 miles northwest of Saigon on the Cambodian border.

I had spent a year in Key West where my unit retrieved test torpedoes fired by submarines, and where we caught a ton of mahi mahi while doing it. The Navy in mid-1968 directed me to Naval Support Activity-Saigon. The smell of the North Vietnamese's Tet Offensive on the South Vietnam capital's Cholon suburb lingered as our plane carrying 600 service people landed in-country.

(There's a well-worn story about how our TWA airliner pilots, about an hour out of Saigon, announced: "When we land, please get the hell off this plane as quickly as possible. Your pilots and stewardesses will help you with your bags. We want to get back in the air as soon as possible because we don't like being shot at.")

I became a clerk. Somebody had to do it. Paperwork is important. They gave us two guns each, an M-16 rifle and a .45 pistol, and dressed us in battle fatigues, but I was not a combat soldier, nor was I assigned to the Navy's "Brown Water" fleet operating on most rivers in the country.

Top Admiral Elmo Zumwalt's headquarters for Naval Forces-Vietnam was near our compound in downtown Saigon. That made it easy to nightly tour the French-inspired sights of Tu'do Street in the city known as the "Paris of the Orient," where we often cavorted with Australian troops.

Mostly, we handled correspondence, mail, some investigative work and courier duties. A small Navy "riverine" special-forces group was stationed at Moc Hoa and we often took them supplies and their paychecks to send home. Navy guys rode aboard Army helicopters to reach Moc Hoa. Army helo pilots loved having sailors aboard as we skirted small rivers at 100 knots.

In my Vietnam experience, I felt unsafe only a few nights during that year. They were all at Moc Hoa, once when the base was mortared from Cambodia. I was thankful for my assignment.

I admire and love all the people who are honored on The Wall in Washington representing the estimated 58,225 Americans who gave their lives in Vietnam. I'm no hero. Those 58,000-plus men and women, and those wounded, are the heroes. They "gave their today for our tomorrow" (as stated on my friend Marine Cpl. Mike McKenney's grave in Hollywood Cemetery in McComb; the State Golden Gloves boxing champion died in battle in Vietnam).

Incidentally, my homestate's people continue to sign up in record numbers for military duty. The Mississippi Air National Guard leads the nation in signing up new recruits, according to Biloxi WLOX television station.

So, Veterans Day is always special to me. Certainly, those who died in combat deserve to be remembered. Folks from America's wars who came home to live out their lives also deserve notice. Veterans appreciate all who served, particularly those who died on the battlefield or were wounded in action.