{"id":40783,"date":"2020-01-16T01:10:03","date_gmt":"2020-01-16T01:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=40783"},"modified":"2020-01-16T01:10:03","modified_gmt":"2020-01-16T01:10:03","slug":"attention-fellow-vietnam-vets-go-back-to-where-you-served","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=40783","title":{"rendered":"Attention, fellow Vietnam vets: Go back to where you served"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A conversation I had this morning with a fellow member of the McKinney Sunrise Rotary Club brings to mind something I have believed for the past 30 years.<\/p>\n

I believe it is vital for any Vietnam War veteran who is able to return to that country to see what I discovered when I was able to return there in 1989, two decades after I arrived there in service to my country.<\/p>\n

I learned that the war had ended. It was over. The shooting had stopped. The country that had survived all that explosive bludgeoning has become a beautiful land full of generous people.<\/p>\n

My Rotary friend had recalled a question I had asked a fellow who delivered a program at a recent meeting. I asked him if he had been back. He has not returned and the gentleman seemed a bit perplexed by the question.<\/p>\n

I told my friend this morning about my emotional discovery when I returned there 30 years ago. I had gone to Southeast Asia with other editorial writers and editors on a factfinding mission. At the end of the official portion of the trip, I flew from Saigon to Da Nang with two fellow journalists — who also are Vietnam vets — to see the place where I served for a time so many years earlier.<\/p>\n

Our guide, Mai, accompanied us to Da Nang. We took a cab from our downtown hotel to Marble Mountain, where I served for a time as an aircraft mechanic with the Army’s 245th Mohawk Aviation Company.<\/p>\n

We were walking along the sandy soil. Mai told me how the Vietnamese had absorbed all that we had built there and repurposed it for their use. Pierced-steel planking had become fence material; they used lumber to build housing.<\/p>\n

Then it hit me like a runaway freight train. The war was over! That’s when I broke down and sobbed like a child for about three or four minutes. My friends backed away, as did Mai. I cried all by myself.<\/p>\n

Then it was over. I wiped my face dry. Took a deep breath. I extended my arms to my two friends and to Mai. I was cleansed. I had shed the emotional baggage I never realized I was lugging around.<\/p>\n

I did not traipse through the bush. I did not fire my weapon in anger at the enemy. I performed rear-echelon duty. However, returning to that place in November 1989 reminded me that the war was raging when I arrive and it was raging when I left.<\/p>\n

I saw that place in an entirely new context.<\/p>\n

That is why I tell my fellow Vietnam War veterans that they, too, need to see the country is at it is today, not as it was when they left.<\/p>\n