Dad, What Did You Do In Vietnam

A Veteran Shares His Heart... Because “You Never Asked” By John Shivers

Tom Randle just needed to get it out of his system. The war in Vietnam, that is, the nationally divisive military action that polarized this country before it was a done deal fortyfive years ago. He’d arrived in Southeast Asia on his 19th birthday, February 14, 1969, and left one year later as a 20-year-old certified U.S. Army combat veteran. For this vet, however, it was still all-toovividly real the older he got.

His return wasn’t exactly what he’d anticipated. The folks back home, the people he’d risked his life for, didn’t quite see everything the same way. This was to be the seed that took almost fifty years to finally germinate in the pages of Tom’s book, Dad, What Did You

Do In Vietnam?

He had no forum, he discovered once he was home, that would allow him to share his frustration without also sharing his experiences as well. This was a time when returning troops were the object of scorn and ridicule, if not outright hatred. They were taunted, spit on, ostracized and ignored. No one wanted to hear all he’d seen and done. No one asked, questions, not even his wife. And when they did ask questions, such as “You didn’t kill anybody over there, did you?” Tom found himself disgusted. It was just easier to keep everything to himself, even though he wanted to tell someone. Anyone.

Tom had returned home believing he’d matured physically, mentally, and with marketable skills. After all, he and his fellow soldiers had cleared a good bit of the country to make fighting the Vietcong easier and safer for the ground troops. Yet he was denied a job doing precisely what he’d done and done well so far from home, all because hiring criteria decreed that anyone under age 25 wasn’t qualified. The specialized skills he’d mastered well during his year away from the land of the free and the home of the brave came with a

high financial price tag, all compliments of the United States’ taxpayers. However, some of those same taxpayers didn’t seem to want a return on their investment, and Tom found himself in a professional banking career instead, where he stayed until 2009. Then the country’s financial collapse closed another door for him. But you can’t keep a good man down, and Tom found a way to repurpose all his skills into a consulting / motivational career. About the same time, those long unshared memories of that year he feared death every day, began to work on him, and he sought professional help to learn how to harness the unforgettable in positive fashion. Since he’d already penned two books dealing with banking and business, it wasn’t a huge leap for him to put memories to paper again. In addition to finally opening the door to closure, his words allowed him to pay homage to all the men who served in a land clearing unit during that war.

He says in his dedication to those individuals, “You were the nastiest, most undisciplined, unwashed, hardest working, bravest, beer-drinking, farting, belching, cussing phenomenon’s, loyal battle buddies, and hard-nosed sumbitches that ever lived.” You meet some of them in the book.

When Dad, What Did You Do In Vietnam? was published, family and friends confessed they hadn’t asked because they didn’t think he wanted them to. And now they don’t have to. Tom and his wife, Mary, live full time in Clayton. They have a daughter and a son, and two granddaughters. The book is available both in hard copy and as an electronic download from Amazon: https://www. amazon.com/Dad-What-Did-You-Vietnam/dp/ B08KFWM6N6/.