Special section: Those Who Served

Those Who served

A speciAl keepsAke section including the profiles of 50 locAl VietnAm VeterAns feAtured in the pAntAgrAph.

Veterans Day

noVember 11, 2015

2 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

Story index

STEVE SMEDLEY, The Pantagraph

From a Pantagraph story published July 4, 2014, James Burchett holds a faded photograph of himself as a child and his father, U.S. Army Master Sergeant George Elmer Burchett, which was taken in August of 1958. Seven years later, his father would become one the first area casualties of the Vietnam War. He was killed in action on Sept. 18, 1965 in a ground battle in Binh Dinh Province, South Vietnam. His name can be found on Page 19 of this publication, in a list of Central Illinoisans who appear on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.

Those Who Served:

W

Vietnam

com/news/local/vietnam/ elcome to “Those THOSE WHO SERVED those-who-served-storiesWho Served: Vietof-vietnam-veterans/collecnam,� a compilation tion_4b8b9f51-4289-5907of stories about Central Illinois b327-7c10f05b9fc5.html. residents in military service durA list of Central Illinois soling the Vietnam war.

V I E T N A M diers whose names appear on The stories originally were the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall can published in The Pantagraph. They also are be accessed at http://www.pantagraph. part of a temporary display at the McLean com/gallery/news/local/photos-cenCounty Museum of History, 200 N. Main tral-illinois-vietnam-veterans/colSt., Bloomington. lection_f09d5d82-ceae-51a5-96d9The stories and photos can be ac5820c0c621b0.html#0. cessed at http://www.pantagraph.

Aschenbremer, Becky............ Page 19

Orr, Charles ........................................4

Armstrong, Paul............................... 18

Palmer, Ron...................................... 15

Beeler, Roger ................................... 16

Poelstra, James................................14

Bragonier, Ronald.............................14

Provence, Randy................................6

Brook, Jim......................................... 10

Rinkenberger, Michael......................8

Cann, Roger ..................................... 16

Rudsinski, Milton............................. 13

Carstens, Dale ................................... 3

Satterfeal, Ken ..................................9

Carroll, Dennis ................................ 18

Sax, Jerry............................................ 5

Conley, Chuck...................................14

Schieler, Duane..................................8

Crutcher, Bill ................................... 12

Shindel, Lynn ................................... 16

Dennison, John ................................. 7

Simpkins, Gary.................................. 3

Fitzgerald, Mike............................... 12

Spencer, Steven............................... 18

Gates, Jess....................................... 10

Starckovich, Robert........................ 18

Gerth, Tom..........................................4

Steele, Michael ..................................9

Heath, David ......................................8

Tarvin, John...................................... 15

Herrin, Mike...................................... 15

Taylor, Don........................................ 19

Howard, Fred.....................................14

Thompson, Frank...............................4

Huber, Dennis................................... 18

Thorp, Nelson................................... 16

Johnson, David................................ 10

Tolan, Bob...........................................6

Johnston, James ...............................6

Toliver, Mike...................................... 10

Kerber, Mike ...................................... 5

Ulbrich, James................................. 18

Kern, David ...................................... 12

Vance, David..................................... 15

Kerr, Roger ....................................... 18

Vandegraft, Mike............................... 5

Kindred, Garry ...................................4

Warren, William L............................... 3

Kirkpatrick, R. Edward.................... 13

Wiegand, Roy...................................... 3

Koos, Chris....................................... 13

Willmarth, Rich.................................. 7

Leonard, Dick................................... 12

Winterroth, Stan................................ 5

List of fallen .................................... 19

Zimmerman, Bill................................6

Maubach, Edward..............................8

Advertiser index Accuquest................................ Page 20

P.J. Hoerr............................................. 9

Evergreen Memorial Cemetery......13

Realtors............................................. 11

East Lawn Memorial Home...............7

The Vein Specialists...........................7

Meadows at Mercy Creek................. 9

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

‘I remember what kind of man you were’

A

fter seven months of combat, Army medic Roy Wiegand left Vietnam in September 1969 unharmed.

It was a remarkable outcome given Wiegand didn’t carry a weapon “That was by my choice,” says Wiegand, now 67, of Secor. “I did not want to be responsible for taking another person’s lfe.

“I loaded many casualties onto medevac helicopters, and I didn’t get scratch. I could feel angels around me.”

But it was a weapon that brought Wiegand, a farm boy from Woodford County, together with his best friend in Vietnam, Tom Semley, an African-American from the Bronx.

A 1966 graduate of Eureka High School, Wiegand was 19 when he was drafted for military service. He arrived in Vietnam in February 1969, assigned as a platoon medic to the 505th Infantry, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division.

“Our mission was to keep the Viet Cong from infiltrating from Cambodia into Saigon and blowing up buildings,” Wiegand says.

On his second day with the platoon, the troops had to cross a deep stream. Semley could not swim, and his M-16 fell into the water as he clung to a rope tied between the stream banks.

S

Wiegand, who grew up retrieving Coke bottles from the bottom of farm ponds, offered to retrieve it.

“I brought his rifle up on the first dive,” says Wiegand, “and Tom and I became best friends.”

Wiegand was released three months early from his two years of military conRoy scription so he could help Wiegand his father harvest crops. He married, raised four children and farmed north of Secor for 42 years.

“I appreciate every day, because in Vietnam my goal was to survive every day,” Wiegand says.

He and Semley didn’t stay in touch. In 2010 they reconnected after Wiegand looked up his Army pal on the Internet.

After talking on the telephone, they exchanged letters. “It was nicest letter I ever got,” says Wiegand, reading part of the letter aloud. “’I remember what kind of man you were — braver and stronger than any of us could be. ...’”

— Maria Nagle

Sirens started going off, phone started ringing

ome artifacts from Gary Simpkins’ time in Vietnam are sprinkled throughout the large volume of items in his Simpkins Military History Museum on Heyworth’s east side.

They are for public consumption.

Yet, when it comes to Simpkins’ memories of his nearly 13 months in Vietnam, those are his alone.

“Every veteran had a different experience and handles things differently,” Simpkins says. “Visualize a closet and you put things in the closet and lock the door. That’s what I did years ago. I’ve never unlocked the door.”

Simpkins, 68, went to Vietnam as a 20-yearold Army draftee in May 1967 and was 21 when he returned to his native Heyworth in June 1968.

A Specialist 5, he was based mostly at Pleiku in the central highlands, including one notable night in January 1968.

The lunar New Year was being observed and troops were under a cease fire. Shortly after midnight on Jan. 30, some booming sounds could be heard.

“We thought they were shooting off fireworks,” Simpkins says. “Then sirens started going off and the phone started ringing and we were in a major first alert.”

It was the beginning of the Tet offensive,

one of the largest campaigns of the war launched by the North Vietnamese.

Simpkins was a squad leader with the 815th Engineers, a group of construction engineers.

“We built bunkers and buildings and helped work on a large leprosy hospital,” Gary he says. “I saw leprosy just a hand’s reach away.”

Simpkins Simpkins considers himself “one of the fortunate ones,” saying, “I remember the ones who went and came home in a different way than I did.”

Upon returning, Simpkins worked as a carpenter until the economy sagged in the late 1970s. He was hired as a janitor at Illinois State University and worked 26 years until his retirement. He still works part-time with ISU Parking Services.

He and his wife, Carol, started their museum more than 25 years ago. They also hosted five Vietnamese foster children, including three sisters, shortly after the fall of Saigon.

They remain very close to the sisters.

— Randy Kindred

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 3

‘You know what happened to the French’ W illiam L. Warren grew up during the Depression. Jobs and money were scarce, so his family moved. Then it moved again, and again, and ...

Asked where he is from originally, Warren replies, “Everywhere.”

Born in Morton, he eventually graduated from high school in Kankakee. The Depression and his nomadic upbringing made him long for stability.

“That’s one of the things that induced me to go into the service,” he says.

The decision led to a military career in which Warren served his country in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. He joined the Navy in 1944, serving in the Pacific Theater in World War II. Following a brief stint in college, Warren enlisted in the Army as a private and rose to lieutenant colonel by the time he retired from the military in 1969.

Now 88, Warren was in his late 30s when he served in Vietnam from October 1963 to November 1964. He was a senior medical adviser to Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) hospitals and medical units in the northern provinces of South Vietnam.

“My job was to advise the commanders of those units of any problems regarding adminis-

tration and training … and also to keep an eye on the equipment the U.S. Army had given the Vietnamese,” Warren says.

Warren traveled extensively in the region shortly before U.S. troops arrived in Vietnam.

“There were certain areas you didn’t go in without an armed escort,” he says. “I William L. wasn’t fighting people. I Warren wasn’t in combat. But I had to carry a weapon and when I went in a jeep, I was by myself.”

When word spread the U.S. soon would send troops, Warren had a memorable conversation with a Vietnamese doctor.

“He advised me, ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea if you (the U.S.) came in here. You know what happened to the French,’ ” Warren recalls. “That’s what happened.”

Warren moved to Normal in 1969 and worked 20 years at Illinois State University as associate director of Student Health Services.

He is a member of the Bloomington-Normal American Legion Honor Guard.

— Randy Kindred

Our return was ‘like we did not exist’ A

s a 24-year-old stationed in Chu Lai, South Vietnam, in October 1968, Dale Carstens began watching out for his fellow servicemen.

Forty-seven years later, he’s still doing that.

He returned from Vietnam in October 1969 and left the Army with the rank of sergeant six months later. Carstens is a much-decorated member of several veterans organizations, including the VFW, American Legion and Amvets.

“If I run into a veteran who is having a problem, I talk to them about it and try to tell them what to do to get the help they want,” says Carstens, of Pontiac. “You wouldn’t believe how many times it’s worked.”

In Vietnam, Carstens worked on Quad 50s, which consisted of four 50-caliber machine guns mounted together on a turret. They could fire 2,000 rounds per minute at targets as far as a mile away.

Carstens flew out on Chinook and Huey helicopters to keep Quad 50s in working order.

After returning from Vietnam, he found the public’s welcome wagon camouflaged to the point of invisibility. “(It was) like we did not exist and our government is just now starting to recognize just

how much they screwed us up,” he says.

Carstens worked a 23year stint in steel fabrication and a 19-year gig as a salesman. Then the trauma of Vietnam returned.

“It came to roost on me more after I retired,” says Carstens, who has been Dale treated for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Carstens He credits exposure to Agent Orange for giving him heart disease and carries a vertical scar on his chest from surgery.

His real medals, displayed in the hallway of his home, include a Bronze Star for meritorious service in combat.

There was a time when Carstens didn’t talk about the 12 months that “completely changed my life.”

“I didn’t talk about it for years, but then I found out that it’s better if you do,” he says.

Carstens wants “to make the public more aware of what we really did and the sacrifices we made in doing it.”

— Randy Sharer

4 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

‘We could have done more for the people’

A

fter enlisting at age 17, landing in South Vietnam at 18½ and returning from combat in 1971, Charles Orr kept to himself.

In those days, the Army didn’t offer counseling for traumatized veterans.

When he returned to his hometown of Madison, near St. Louis, the only fireworks were the ones kids lit to tease the guy with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It was no real welcome” at all, remembers the 64-year-old pastor of Wayman African Methodist Episcopal Church, 803 W. Olive St., Bloomington.

Among Orr’s challenges was “trying to understand why I came home while so many didn’t.”

As time has passed, he’s seen America become more thankful for the service of Vietnam veterans even as they have faded from the public’s awareness.

“People are surprised when I tell them that I served in Vietnam,” says Orr, who has had PTSD for years and is treated by a psychologist.

Orr grew up on welfare in a single-parent home. He volunteered for the Army hoping to make it a career.

He was a medic and rose to the rank of sergeant. The GI Bill and a state financial aid program helped when he got a business

accounting degree from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

He returned for two tours of active service (1982-85 and 1986-88) with stops in Baumholder, Germany, and Fort Bragg, N.C. He remained in the active Guard Reserve until 1996.

Charles The way the war ended Orr doesn’t sit well with him.

“I think that we could have done more for the people, and the way that we exited the war was not with honor,” he says. “It was a political play to win an election.”

As the U.S. has enters other conflicts, Orr worries each time.

“Will we support the men and women who are putting their lives on the line to protect us?” he asks. “Will we provide them with adequate medical and mental support?”

Telling his story is “an opportunity to let others know that we are still out here and we care.”

— Randy Sharer

‘It was the most scary time of my life’ I

t was late afternoon when the USS General John Pope pulled into port at Da Nang in South Vietnam.

Among 3,000 troops aboard was 22-yearold Marine Garry D. Kindred of Gibson City, who’d grown up a farm boy from Arrowsmith.

As darkness fell, men stood guard on the ship railings looking for Viet Cong mines floating down the Han River. As flares lit the hillsides, Kindred thought, “My God, this is the real deal.”

What that would entail for the now 70year-old retired Bloomington policeman became clear during his rise to the rank of corporal between Aug. 4, 1966, and July 29, 1968.

Kindred’s deal would include attending a Bob Hope USO Show featuring Raquel Welch.

“Boy, was that a big deal,” Kindred, now 70, says tells a visitor to his Hudson home.

The counterpoint was seeing enough combat near the helicopter base at Marble Mountain to earn four Bronze Stars.

“It was the most scary time of my life,” says Kindred, who still gets uneasy at the sound of helicopters and fireworks.

Sound was not the issue with Agent Orange, the defoliant used to rob the enemy of food and jungle hideouts.

Now suffering from a variety of ailments including heart and leg problems, Kindred says, “I am a 100 percent disabled veteran from Agent Orange.”

Kindred got home from Vietnam on a Monday and returned to his job at Noble Bros. Seed Co. in Gibson Garry City a week later.

“The first day back at work, Kindred it was almost like I never left and a lot of things had happened,” he says. “I think taking the extra time off would have been pretty helpful.”

He felt neither animosity nor gratitude from the public about the unpopular war, which he rarely discussed until meeting his wife, Judy, in 1975.

Kindred’s perspective about his service changed on May 23, 1987, when BloomingtonNormal held a Debt of Honor Parade for Vietnam veterans. Fifty thousand patriots formed a tunnel of applause.

“That was the most inspiring thing, to walk along, have people clap and finally get some recognition.”

— Randy Sharer

‘I belonged on a farm.

‘Part of our history I always knew that’ whether we like it or not’ W I hen Frank Thompson’s first try at going to college fell short, his father gave him two options: get a job or join the military.

With little interest in a job, the 18-year-old settled on the Army where he hoped for duty overseas. It was 1960.

Thompson was placed in a training program for radio communications and assigned to an Army base in Okinawa, Japan. The 50 members of the 104th U.S. Army Security Agency Detachment quickly learned that their job revolved around more listening than talking.

“We couldn’t say a thing. It was all very sensitive,” says Thompson.

For Thompson and five others in the unit, the tour of duty took a new turn one afternoon when they were taken to Clark Air Base, Philippines.

“We ended up in a bare barracks. It was almost like a scene from ‘Mission Impossible.’

Very dramatic for 18- and 19-year-old kids.

Then we were put on a plane and went to this place called Vietnam,” says Thompson, of Normal, a retired teacher.

The young soldier’s first impression of the country: “It just smelled wrong to you,” with its mixture of smoke and unknown substances.

A Saigon hotel served as their first post until a

contingent of higher ranking officers forced the unit to move to a former rubber plantation.

“We were doing an early type of intelligence gathering. People would be saying things they shouldn’t in broken English we could understand. We took the material and typed it out as best we Frank could and it was taken back to Thompson Okinawa,” says Thompson.

Thompson and his fellow monitors wore civilian clothes as a way to fit in with local residents. The lack of military attire also helped the U.S. promote its claim that a small number of troops were in Vietnam at the time, says Thompson.

After his departure from the Army in 1963, Specialist 5 Thompson gave college another try, this time finishing at Illinois State University. He has volunteered with the Prairie Aviation Museum for 25 years.

“It’s a misunderstood conflict but it’s part of our history whether we like it or not. You hope that talking about it leaves people with the thought that we were doing the right thing.”

— Edith Brady-Lunny

t’s been 47 years, so forgive Tom Gerth if he doesn’t remember everything about his service in Vietnam. In 1968, he was an Army sergeant with the 4th Battalion 23rd Infantry attached to the 25th Division. He eventually won the Bronze Star and the South Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry for action during an offensive in Tay Ninh Province.

“I have forgotten a lot about my time there, some of it on purpose and some of it just natural brain matter disappearing over time,” he says. “But I do remember it was the worst year for casualties over there. We had 23 killed in action in my unit in just a couple of months and I remember thinking that if it was going to be like this, I’m never going to make it.”

As part of a reconnaissance unit, Gerth, of Chatsworth, was always on call for any type of job.

“We did just about anything that needed to be done,” he says. “We served as reactionary units.

We did search and rescue. We just helped out wherever we were needed. It was a tough year.”

After a year in Vietnam, Gerth was granted a one-month leave and spent it visiting his parents and his fiance, Kay. Last month, the two celebrated their 46th wedding anniversary.

“While I was in Vietnam, I signed a lease on a neighbor’s farm,” he recalls.

“I was born and raised on a farm and that’s been my life.

I went to college for a couple of years, but that really wasn’t for me. I belonged on a farm. I always knew that.”

Following his tour of Tom duty in Vietnam, Gerth was assigned to Fort Carson, Gerth Colo., for five months. He was released one month early so he could begin his career in farming.

Gerth believes the war changed the world for the better.

“It wasn’t a waste of time because, following that, communism went away and I like to think that our part in the war was one reason why.

“There are a lot of things said about the Vietnam War and some of it is true and some of it isn’t,” he says. “You are never going to hear me badmouth the war or anything like that. I was called to serve my country and I am proud that I did.”

— Kevin Barlow

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

Pathfinders were ‘first in and the last out’

S

tan Winterroth can’t forget Thanksgiving Day 1969: Not so much for what he did, but for what he didn’t do.

The Bloomington native was scheduled to report to the Army that day, but with it being a holiday, he just didn’t feel like it.

“I was headed to Chicago to board a plane,” he says. “But instead, I just hung out with my friends for a couple of extra days. But I wasn’t the only one. There were so many of us that didn’t report on Thanksgiving Day. Some of them got in trouble, but I was able to avoid that.”

Winterroth reported on the following Monday. Because he was an Eagle Scout and had jumped out of a few airplanes in college, the Army placed him into a special group of Pathfinders that made up less than 1 percent of the total Army. The specialized soldiers were inserted or dropped into place in order to set up and operate drop zones, pick-up zones and landing sites for airborne operations.

“We were the first in and the last out,” says Winterroth, who spent most of 1970 in Vietnam.

“It was an elite group and we set up communication with planes coming in so that everything would be in place when it was time for the

M

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 5

aircraft to arrive,” he recalls.

As a corporal, Winterroth saw action near the border with Cambodia.

“I was in about a dozen combat assaults,” he says.

“But I led a charmed life.

Nobody ever shot at me personally. But I learned a lot about just keeping my head Stan down and my mouth shut.”

Winterroth When Winterroth returned home, his friends were moving from a State Farm into corporate jobs. He wasn’t ready for that.

“I worked construction and moved around a lot,” he says. “I was in Michigan, Utah, and California. I led an interesting life. I saw a lot of stuff. And then when I was 40, I went into teaching. I taught at Bloomington and Clinton.”

Winterroth is glad for his time in the Army.

“I was going to college, but having too much fun, dropped out and then got drafted. But back then, it was just kind of a no-brainer that you went into the service. It was an honor to do your duty.”

— Kevin Barlow

‘I’m amazed at the technology we had’

ike Vandegraft spent his career amid the electronics revolution, but he still fondly recalls the technology he used on an Army surveillance aircraft during the Vietnam War. In 1968-1969, he flew night reconnaissance missions aboard an OV-1B Mohawk with the 245th Surveillance Airplane Company based at Marble Mountain Air Facility near Da Nang.

The twin-engine turboprop, equipped with side-looking airborne radar, shot film that was developed in flight. He examined the images on a cockpit light table for movement of enemy troops that showed up as “little black dots” and radioed in what he saw.

“These were real-time, hunt-and-destroy missions” tracking enemy supply and troop movements across the DMZ and Laotian border, he says.

Vandegraft graduated from DeVry Institute of Technology before he was drafted. He retired in 2011 as Comcast’s technical operations manager for much of western and central Illinois.

“I’m amazed at the technology we had,” he says. “Flying 10,000 feet above the ground the equipment could pinpoint a man if he had metal equal to a rifle or shovel on him.”

The two-man planes were essentially unarmed, and about one mission in four would run into anti-aircraft missile fire. “It was quite a roller coaster ride” when the pilot took evasive action, he says.

Despite that, “I felt safer flying a mission than on the ground because we got hit Mike so many times,” he says, reVandegraft ferring to rocket and mortar attacks on the base.

Turning over in his hand a 4-inch-long, jagged shard of metal the color of dull copper, he says, “When these things started to hit ... no one could describe the horror you would feel.”

After a year in Vietnam and more than 260 combat mission flight hours, Sgt. Vandegraft was discharged, and his wife, Paula, met his plane in Chicago. A week later, the Hudson native got a job in the then-new field of cable television.

“There was no fanfare, and I didn’t really care,” he says. “I was just glad to be home. I had a job to do, and I did it.”

— Roger Miller

‘I can close my eyes and still see when I asked him’ J

erry Sax still remembers Oct. 26, 1967, the day he traded convoy duty with fellow Spc. Richard Stein, and how that decision indirectly touched hundreds of lives since.

“I can close my eyes and still see when I asked him,” said the 70-year-old social sciences teacher at El Paso-Gridley High School. “It was nonchalant. There was no thought of danger.”

The Army medics staffed ambulances based at the coastal city Qui Nhon and made regular supply convoy runs to Pleiku, a rough, 200mile, 16-hour round trip.

On the day Sax swapped shifts with Stein so he could go swimming in the South China Sea, the ambulance hit a mine and was “obliterated.”

“It’s the guilt,” said Sax, of Gridley. “We were friends but not best friends — it was hard to get close to anyone in Vietnam — but I still ask myself, ‘What if?’”

Sax finished his yearlong tour in March 1968 and ended up teaching at Gridley High School.

About 15 years ago, he started calling Steins in his friend’s hometown of Brookfield, Wis., but he found no relatives.

“I wanted to close the book and forget about it (the war),” Sax said. But in 2002 the advent of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s online

I

database of the war’s casualties changed that.

It allowed the public to post remembrances alongside the names of the dead, but thousands had none. Sax decided to do something about that, offering his students extra credit to post messages.

The kids jumped at the Jerry chance, and in two years Sax they added about 22,000 posts, Sax said.

Then the emails from grateful loves ones started pouring in.

“They absolutely bring tears,” he said.

“People didn’t realize anyone cared. There was so much unbelievable gratitude.”

Coincidentally, two students unknowingly picked a name Sax knew well but never mentioned: Richard Stein.

Senior Ben Jefferies’ post on Nov. 3, 2003, said: “I hope all Americans understand what you have done for them. My dad almost died in the war while stepping on a land mine, and I am thankful that he is here today.”

— Roger Miller

‘As soon as the mortars quit, they took off’

t was a brief but memorable concert for Mike Kerber.

A sergeant in a the 101st Division artillery unit during the Vietnam War, Kerber spent a lot of his time on mountain tops in the Ashau Valley during his service from July 1969 to March 1970.

“During a day that wasn’t very busy, the 101st Airborne band flew out to see us and were playing some music for us,” Kerber recalls. “All of a sudden the enemy started to mortar us.

Mortars started landing very close to the band.

It didn’t take long for them to gather up their instruments and jump into a bunker. As soon as the mortars quit, they took off.”

A Chatsworth native who resides in Normal, Kerber says his unit provided support during the famous battle of Hamburger Hill shortly before he arrived.

“We had three different artillery units get overrun before I got there and after I left,” he says. “I was a lucky guy.”

Kerber’s unit was placed on the top of mountains so “you could fire in any direction instead of being down in a valley. It was not like Colorado. It may have only been 1,000 feet high, but for a farm boy from Illinois that was a mountain.”

The elevated life was challenging, according

to Kerber.

“It was normally very cloudy. A lot of supply helicopters couldn’t bring things to us,” says Kerber. “We might be in the same clothes for a couple weeks. We might be a month between showers.

We ate a lot of cold food from cans. It rained a lot, so we Mike were wet a lot. But we still had it better than the infantry out Kerber walking through the jungle.”

Now 70, Kerber was hired by a small grain company in Decatur after returning to the U.S. and held other positions in the grain business before retiring about five years ago.

Kerber returned to Vietnam in 2013 with the organization Veterans for Peace.

“I met four veterans who live in Vietnam who work with kids with birth defects from Agent Orange,” Kerber says. “I met with vets from what they call the American War. They are unbelievably forgiving considering what we did to that country. It was very healing to go back and see people living somewhat normal lives.”

— Randy Reinhardt

6 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

‘Other guys had no legs, no arms. I felt ...’

A

hard part of the Vietnam War was not knowing friend from foe.

“Without a front line, it was like jungle fighting,” says Bob Tolan, 68, a Colfax native and former Bloomington resident who lives in Clinton.

Tolan joined the U.S. Army after graduating from Octavia High School. He was in Vietnam from late 1966 to late 1967. Much of the time, his artillery battery was attached to the Americal Division.

“We gave direct fire support to the field. We would be stationed on a hillside and we’d set up the artillery guns. When the infantry would run into trouble, they’d call for support and we’d fire in on the enemy.

“We would stay in an area for a month and then we’d move. Some of ’em were easy. Some of ’em were hairy.

“The VC (Viet Cong), or Charlie as we’d call ’em, would try to overrun us at night. The VC would intermix with the villagers and would throw grenades in on us. We didn’t know friend from foe.

“You didn’t want to fire on a civilian. People would snipe at us from a rice paddy. We didn’t know where it came from. You would respond if fired on but only if you knew who fired on you.

“Guys in our unit were killed. Bullets would

B

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

buzz past our ears. After I got home, I started thinking about it and I had a few nightmares.”

Once, when the Viet Cong tried to overrun his battery, Tolan was hit. He called it a minor hand injury but it was bad enough that he was taken to a hospital in Japan.

“When they told me I Bob couldn’t go back (to Vietnam), Tolan I said ‘Why not? We’re shorthanded.’ I felt guilty. I thought my wounds were superficial.

Other guys had no legs, no arms. I felt ...”

Tolan stops speaking to regain his composure.

“That part bothers me.”

After hand surgery and rehabilitation, Tolan completed his service and was honorably discharged in late 1968 with a rank of corporal E4.

He and his brothers own Tolan Excavating.

“Looking back, I’d do it all over again. Seeing how the people had to live, how the Viet Cong treated the villagers. They needed our help and protection.

“I learned to appreciate what we had here in America. And I realized that there is good and bad in everybody.”

— Paul Swiech

‘They did not ask twice.

They sent me over’

ill Zimmerman worked in a factory after graduating from high school in Ottawa.

Then a friend got drafted in the Army and Zimmerman decided to enlist in a “buddy plan” where they could go to basic training together.

When Zimmerman was ultimately picked for officer candidate school after doing well on a test, he found himself surrounded by college graduates.

Zimmerman thought he was too young to lead 40 men into battle so, after 21 weeks with only five weeks left in the program, he dropped out.

“They asked me where I wanted to go, and I volunteered for Vietnam at that point. They did not ask twice. They sent me over,” he says.

What followed was 10 months in which Zimmerman was wounded twice.

Zimmerman went to Vietnam in September 1967 as a 19-year-old sergeant truck commander on an armored cavalry assault vehicle with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. His base was northeast of Saigon.

“The first six months we took fire here and there. There were some interesting days, but they really weren’t so bad,” he says. “There was a lot of road security and we ran convoys and that sort of thing. The last couple months were a doozy for us.”

Zimmerman’s unit was moved near the Cambodian border. He said it was a place where

the North Vietnamese came through Laos and infiltrated.

On May 18, 1968, Zimmerman’s unit was ambushed. He took shrapnel in the face and neck. Four men in his unit were killed.

A month later, Zimmerman was in a column going through the jungle. His vehiBill cle hit a mine and “the next Zimmerman thing you know I’m looking at the sky." Chaos ensued.

Zimmerman suffered two broken ankles and a broken lower back. A week later, he was sent to Japan for surgery.

He was awarded two Purple Hearts and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. Zimmerman spent a couple months in a hospital at Fort Riley, Kan., upon his return before spending his last year in the Army as a training NCO at Fort Hood, Texas.

Zimmerman, 67, who now lives in Bloomington, attended Northern Illinois University on the GI Bill. After graduating, he worked almost 40 years for Country Financial, retiring in January 2013 as advertising director of corporate support services.

— Jim Benson

‘You could get ambushed at any time’ D

uring the Vietnam War, there was no front line.

“We were always moving,” recalls Randy Provence of Dwight, who was a U.S. Navy hospitalman third class.

Provence was assigned to Marine units in South Vietnam, providing medical care to Marines and to Vietnamese civilians from May 1968 to May 1969.

“There was no forward or rear,” Provence recalls. “You could get ambushed at any time.

You never knew if you were going to step into a booby trap or walk into an ambush walking down a trail. We were always on our guard.”

Provence, a Virginia native, graduated from high school in 1966 and joined the Navy. He decided to become a hospital corpsman and went to field medical service technician school and was indoctrinated into the Marine Corps.

In May 1968, he was sent to Vietnam and was assigned to the First Battalion Ninth Marine Delta Company.

“We walked up and down mountains. It was very hot. We carried all our supplies and food. I ended up carrying five canteens. When Marines would pass out from heat exhaustion, I would have water for them.”

J

“I treated a lot of heat exhaustion and there were a couple occasions when we were under fire,” Provence says. He treated shrapnel injuries.

“You did the best you could to get ’em (Marines) stabilized and evacuated.”

After six months, Provence spent five months Randy with a mobile hospital and Provence then was transferred to a combined action group.

The group — consisting of him and five Marines — would go into a village that the Viet Cong (VC) had been harassing and would work with the South Vietnamese Popular Forces to get people to move back into the village.

“For three months, we lived in the village. I took care of the Marines and treated the civilians, mostly for infections. We’d patrol the village. And we kept moving to keep the VC off kilter.”

Now 67, Provence spent many years in health care, retiring in 2013 as administrator of Heritage Health in Dwight.

“My time in Vietnam taught me to not put off things because life is so uncertain.”

— Paul Swiech

‘They had a job that somebody had to do’

ames Johnston arrived at the 3rd Army Field Hospital in Saigon in March 1971 as a specialist E4, assigned to be a pharmacist.

There was only one problem: The war was already starting to wind down and the hospital didn’t need another pharmacist.

But “they had a job that somebody had to do,” Johnston recalls. There were several jobs, in fact.

So Johnston spent his tour in Vietnam from March 1971 to May 1972 working in special services.

His jobs included operating the officers’ club, filling in as a bartender at the enlisted men’s club, taking care of nurses and organizing entertainment for the patients.

“We had movies every night for the patients,” Johnston says. “And if they wanted to stay up all night, I’d take them around to the wards.”

Johnston admits his time in Vietnam was easier than what many servicemen experienced.

“I was very lucky. I was in a hotel,” Johnston says.

But even though his assignment was away from the front line, he says, “I did my year like everyone else.”

His best memories are of the people he served with.

“A lot of the doctors were drafted. All of the

nurses enlisted,” he notes, adding that everyone did their jobs with few complaints.

“I loved downtown Saigon,” Johnston says, but he hasn’t been back to see how it’s changed, including the hospital in which he served that has been turned into a war museum. “I didn’t want to go the first time.”

James Johnston, now 65, had Johnston just finished two years at Prairie State College in the Chicago area when he got his draft notice.

“I was at a crossroad,” he says. Coming from a large family, “my best shot at finishing school was the GI Bill.”

After his service, he came to Illinois State University to finish his education, met his wife “and never left.”

He joined the Bloomington Fire Department in 1980, retiring in 2008 as assistant chief.

“I’m very proud of the 3rd Army Field Hospital,” he says. It was the last U.S. Army hospital remaining in Vietnam, closing in 1973, the year after he left.

— Lenore Sobota

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

‘I was proud to go and proud to serve’

T

here was anxiety all around John Dennison. The ongoing Vietnam War had many of his peers nervous and fearful about having their draft number called.

Dennison eliminated the suspense. He enlisted in the U.S. Army.

Why? “It was because of Vietnam,” Dennison says.

“I just felt like I had to do my duty. I had a couple of uncles who had served. I’m glad I did it. I can stand up straight and say I did my duty.”

Shortly after graduating from McLeanWaynesville High School in 1967, Dennison entered basic training. By 1968 he was in Vietnam as part of the 173rd Airborne Division.

His primary role was to service small weapons.

“I would catch a helicopter and go out into the field and pick up some guns and machine guns – M16s – and bring them back to work on them,” Dennison says.

He served a year, came home for 30 days and then went back to Vietnam for a second tour of six months. Dennison was discharged from the Army in March 1970 as a Sergeant E5, having earned three Bronze Stars for meritorious service.

“I wasn’t a hero or anything like that,” he says.

“I did my duty and I’ve never said too much about

it. It’s more of a private deal to me. About the only time I talk about it is with somebody else who was over there.

“Probably the worst time I had there was unloading bodies (of wounded). I was 19 years old and that’s a different deal.”

Dennison, 67, was based in John three places in South Vietnam Dennison during his tours. There were times his unit was shelled, but he was not injured. “I was lucky,” he says.

Dennison returned home to his family’s farm near McLean and soon purchased “a brand new car and a brand new motorcycle.”

“I wrecked them both within a week’s time,” he says.

Escaping injury, Dennison began working at an auto parts shop in Bloomington. Later, he had 34-year career with McLean County Asphalt and Concrete, driving a Ready Mix truck until his retirement in 2010.

Regarding his time in Vietnam, he says simply, “I was proud to go and proud to serve.”

— Randy Kindred

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 7

‘We came under fire, we were ambushed’ A s the commanding officer of a transportation battalion based in Long Binh, Rich Willmarth was charged with organizing convoys to deliver fuel and supplies to U.S. military bases throughout the southern part of Vietnam.

One of those bases was located in a volatile area along the Cambodian border, ripe for violence.

“Everytime you went out, you just didn’t know, but that was really a touch and go spot sometimes,” Willmarth says.

Then, it finally happened.

“We came under fire, we were ambushed,” Willmarth says. “They hit the rear of the convoy and I was in the rear vehicle in a jeep.”

Willmarth and the convoy escaped the ambush unscathed.

“The road was blowing up everywhere and I don’t know why we didn’t take any injuries or any damage to our equipment,” he says.

“But we got out of there just lickety-split and got back in good shape. I don’t know how we didn’t incur any damage.”

It was the only time during his seven-month tour of duty that Willmarth says he was fired upon. The possibility was always in the back of his mind, however, especially when he organized

convoys that would creep along winding roads through a thick forest into the Vietnamese hill country, destined for a base in Bao Loc. Helping to keep the convoys safe were armed helicopters flying just overhead. Above the choppers were small aircraft surveying the area, requiring Rich planning and coordination for Willmarth each of the missions.

Willmarth was prepared, having earned a transportation degree from the University of Tennessee. While at UT, Willmarth joined the ROTC and was commissioned into the armed forces as an Army second lieutenant.

He was initially assigned to serve in Germany before being sent to Vietnam in August 1971. He earned a Bronze Star medal for his service and left with the rank of captain.

Upon his return to the United States, Willmarth, a native Tennessean, landed a job at Growmark in Bloomington in 1972. He retired from the company nine years ago and still resides in Normal.

— Bruce Yentes

Are VARICOSE VEINS causing tired, achy, heavy, and swollen legs? Restless legs?

Complimentary Vein Screening!

Limited Appointments Daily Call Now!

309-862-4000

Love your legs...again!

Start doing the things you’ve missed doing...today!

Thank You to Our Veterans

Call 309-862-4000 today.

Better Care. Better Results.

BLOOMINGTON (MAIN) 3302 Gerig Dr., Suite 100 Bloomington, IL 61704

East Lawn Memorial Gardens Cemetery and Funeral Home

KATHRYN BOHN, MD | THOMAS NIELSEN, MD RICHARD CASTILLO, MD | JONATHAN BENSON, DO RUEL WRIGHT, MD www.ILveins.com

EUREKA OFFICE 101 S. Major St., Clinic 3 Eureka, IL 61530

PERU OFFICE 3602 Marquette Road Peru, IL 61354

SPRINGFIELD OFFICE 2921 Greenbriar Drive Springfield IL 62704

STREATOR OFFICE 119 S. Sterling St. Streator, IL 61364

Proud Dignity Memorial® provider

1002 Airport Road, Bloomington, IL 61704 309-662-1222 | www.EastLawn Memorial.com Proudly owned and operated by SCI Illinois Services, Inc.

8 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

D

‘Some people still look at you strange’

avid Heath bears two deep scars from his time in Vietnam.

Almost 50 years later, the Dwight resident and Odell native still has malaria and a lingering discomfort about his time as a specialist E5 in the U.S. Army.

“I’m embarrassed to be connected with what happened and the way I was treated by a lot of people when I came home,” he says. “It’s hard to talk about all the negativeness that went along with this.”

He says it’s the first time he’s opened up about his time overseas, and it’s not hard to believe him: he vividly recalls when he served as a medic and infantry between fall 1967 and fall 1968, but the hurt still seems fresh.

“The biggest shock for me was right after we landed, going through the transition area where a lot of young Vietnamese guys yelled at me, ‘Go home, GI.’ I was thinking I was doing something good, and that made me think, ‘Am I, really?’” he says. “We tried to do the right thing, but we get a lot of crap from a lot of people.”

He’s glad to hear his story might comfort and inspire people, and he’s happy to share it, but he insists, “if you say you’re a Vietnam veteran, some people still look at you strange.” He pores

T

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

over photos haltingly, saying he has only a single book left.

“When I came home, I was somewhat distressed, and I burned everything,” he says. “My wife, then my fiancée, took a bunch of pictures from me before I could throw them away.”

Eventually, things got David better: Two weeks after he returned to Central Illinois, he Heath landed a job at R.R. Donnelley, where he retired after 35 years. He’s still married and has three kids and seven grandchildren.

And finally, he remembers a story that makes his eyes lights up.

“Two days after I got back, my dad took me to an American Legion stag in Odell, and I was still not 21, and the bartender would not serve me because I was underage even though I was just returning as a war veteran,” he says. “Helen Black owned Black’s Tavern in Odell, and she used to send me, every two weeks, a care package which was a coffee can full of Beer Nuts and Slim Jims. She said, ‘You can have a beer anytime you want here.’”

— Derek Beigh

‘My proudest moment in the service’ he hardships of war affect everyone from the soldiers, miles away from their loved ones, to the civilians in the middle of war zones.

From 1967 to 1968, Army Spc. Duane Schieler was stationed as a medic in Chu Lai, Vietnam. During his service, he recognized the needs of Vietnam civilians, and knew exactly how to help.

“While working an office job in the battalion aid station, I did reports and vaccinated soldiers,” says Schieler. “Part of my duties included treating the civilians in surrounding villages.”

He and his unit visited the nearby Binh Son Catholic Orphanage. The orphanage housed Vietnam soldiers, parents of soldiers and their children. Schieler noticed many of the children were lacking shoes, proper clothing and general health items. So he wrote home.

“I wrote to my wife, Diane, back in Fairbury,” he says. “She made some calls and was very instrumental in getting people from the community to start donating items to send to me to take to the orphanage.”

Schieler remembers packages and food pouring in to the battalion aid station. He has

images of the donated items being given to the children.

“At one point, I had a tape of a child singing and showing their appreciation,” he says. “Sister Paulina, head of the orphanage, sent my wife a thank-you letter with photos which she shared with members Duane of the community.”

Schieler For his meritorious service with help from his wife and community, Schieler won the Army Commendation Medal.

“That was my proudest moment in the service,” he says. “I feel the most honored by my family, especially when my children send flowers on Veterans Day.” Schieler remembers the emotional moment coming home to his wife, nearly 50 years ago.

“It was incredible, calling her to tell her I was on my way home,” he says. “It was Thanksgiving Day, and our anniversary. All the seats were booked on the plane, so I bought a first-class ticket. But I made it home.”

— Julia Evelsizer

F

‘Your country sent you to do a job’

or many involved in the Vietnam War, their memories are too painful to talk about.

For a long time, Edward Maubach of Forrest couldn’t discuss his involvement, either. The reason? He was sworn to secrecy for about 30 years.

A short time after going into the service out of high school in 1966, Maubach was sent from Great Lakes Naval Base to Memphis for “schooling on planes and metal smith and different topics,” he says. Then Maubach got order that he would be working on a squadron that was kept secret even from him at the time.

After he headed to California for more training, Maubach and another person were flown commercially to Bangkok, Thailand, still uncertain of their mission.

The next morning, they found out.

Maubach, who was an AMS third class E4, was flown into the jungle to work on a Navy squadron that was retrofitting airplanes that would drop listening devices over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Early in 1968, Maubach says, the unit was “having good luck and no problems.” Sometimes, he had to get down in the wings and plug up bullet holes. But the squadron quickly began losing planes that had to fly low and “were like sitting ducks in the air.”

Maubach says it was decided the planes “were too big and slow to do the job.”

The squadron pulled out of Thailand and was sent back to California with orders to not talk of their mission.

Only in 1998, when the squadron was de-commissioned, could they talk. The squadron started having a Edward reunion every two years.

Maubach After leaving Thailand, Maubach prepared planes for another deployment at Moffett Field in California. Three months later, he was sent to the Philippines, then to Okinawa, Japan. Maubach was sent home on Jan. 5, 1971.

Maubach, now 67, worked 38 years at RR Donnelley & Sons in Pontiac before retiring.

Maubach’s main memories of the Vietnam War center around “the people we lost,” but he also has painful memories of his return home.

“They kind of ignored you and sometimes worse than that,” he says. “Your country sent you to do a job, and you went over there and did it. It’s not like we applied for it.”

— Jim Benson

‘We were all finally welcomed home. I cried’ A fter serving nearly two years with the Army in Vietnam, Staff Sgt. Michael Rinkenberger returned home to the family farm in rural Gridley in May 1969.

It would take nearly two decades more for him to find a sense of closure.

“We were not received very well when we returned,” says Rinkenberger of the anti-war protesters and negative press that greeted him and his returning comrades that May. “Some of the things that got back here (in the media) were not true. But I didn’t talk at all about it,” says the 68-year-old El Paso-Gridley area native who still lives on the Rinkenberger family homestead with the high school sweetheart, Sharon Reeves, he married.

Life went on: The couple raised their five daughters while he returned to farming and coped with personal problems stemming from his two years fighting an unpopular war.

Eighteen springs later, in May 1987, a longin-coming healing arrived via the first Central Illinois Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans March, an emotional procession from downtown Bloomington to a ceremony at Illinois State University.

“We were not recognized here until that

time,” he says of the event that lifted his spirits and, through one deeply personal association, left him in tears.

The day in June 1967 when Rinkenberger shipped off to Vietnam, the body of his close high school buddy, Raymond Witzig, killed in action, arrived home in Gridley.

Michael As part of the ceremony, Rinkenberger Witzig’s family was presented with a plaque commemorating his sacrifice, as well as Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars.

“We were all finally welcomed home,” says Rinkenberger. “I cried.”

His voice still breaks when thinking of the moment.

His dreams are still haunted by the 79 combat assaults he was involved in. He still can’t talk about some things to anyone, friend or stranger.

But he does feel the experience “made a man out of me ... made me a better person.”

And he can say it now: “I’m a very fortunate fellow.”

— Dan Craft

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 9

‘People are people ‘Our job was to keep no matter where you go’ the road open’ A D fter training in Fort Gordon, Ga., as a military policeman, Ken Satterfeal boarded a ship to Vietnam with other members of his company without knowing what their assignments would be.

When the ship crossed the International Dateline, their orders were opened. Half of his company went out into the country, the other half – including Satterfeal – was assigned to Saigon.

“I was a very fortunate person,” recalls Satterfeal, a lifelong resident of LeRoy. There was a bad bombing of a hotel in Saigon before he arrived in August 1966, but he had no close calls during his year in Saigon.

“We didn’t have any casualties,” Satterfeal says.

Four months after he left, the Tet Offensive began. “The pictures you see with 716 on their helmets, that was my company,” he says.

Satterfeal was an Army Specialist 4 with the 716th Military Police. His company provided security “anywhere there were GIs,” Satterfeal says, from hotels where they were housed and the 3rd Army Field Hospital to the main PX warehouse and Gen. William Westmoreland’s headquarters.

They guarded against unauthorized entries and thefts as well as attacks, surrounded by

sandbags for protection.

Sometimes infiltrators would plant claymore antipersonnel mines, Satterfeal says, “but they’d usually end up hurting their own people more than us.”

Satterfeal did not participate in the Welcome Home Veterans Parade in Ken Bloomington-Normal in May 1987.

Satterfeal “My welcome home parade was my mom and my dad and my brother who picked me up at O’Hare,” Satterfeal says.

He got married, raised two sons and worked in a fertilizer business for 40 years.

It never bother him that he didn’t receive a bigger welcome when he returned, he says. “I was just happy to be back.”

He would like to return to Vietnam for a visit if he could join an “honor flight” to the former war zone.

“I learned people are people no matter where you go,” Satterfeal says. “The Vietnamese people were wonderful.”

— Lenore Sobota

espite a bullet through the back of his leg and shrapnel in various other limbs, Michael Steele of Sibley considers himself lucky.

“I’ve got all kinds of scars from being in the service, but all the weapons missed the most important parts of me,” says Steele, a Marine corporal.

Steele served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968.

He was stationed in Chu Lai and Phu Bai as a part of security detachment.

“Our technical name was Fleet Marine Force, Pacific,” he said. “While in Chu Lai, we were the security for the RMK, or civilian construction.”

He didn’t experience much combat protecting civilians, but Steele saw his fair share of enemy fire farther north in Phu Bai while serving as convoy security.

“We escorted convoys up and down Highway 1,” he says. “Our job was to keep the road open.”

Steele experienced the Tet Offensive of 1968.

“Tet of ’68 was their New Year,” he says. “It was when they took the embassy down in Saigon. They hit every major military establishment in the north. It was the first time they came out and fought with full units instead of the usual guerrilla action.”

He was slightly wounded by some shrapnel,

was patched up and sent back out. Before that, he was wounded in ambushes.

“I was shot through the back of the leg. In one side, out the other,” he says. “Then, later, an RPG blew up in front of our security truck and I got hit by more shrapnel.”

Steele received the Purple Michael Heart, Combat Action Ribbon, Presidential Unit CitaSteele tion, Naval Unit Citation and a Good Conduct Medal.

After almost two tours, he returned home.

“We heard stories about protests against the soldiers coming home, but I never had to deal with that,” says Steele. “Being from small-town America, no one ever said a bad word to me.”

Steele feels most honored as a veteran when he sees the celebrations for troops returning home today.

“There wasn’t much of that when we came back,” he says. “It makes me proud to see other troops being honored because, really, that could have been for me.”

— Julia Evelsizer

Honoring Our Veterans For more than 92 years, Meadows has been a recognized leader providing quality Christian care to seniors.

—Plus!

Achieve!

10 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

‘This is important.

I need to do this’

T

he Vietnam climate brought a variety of challenges to U.S. troops.

“It’s a subtropical climate and had all the problems that go along with that,” recalls David Johnson of Bloomington, who served with the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam from 1966 to 1967. “There are torrential rains and when it gets dry, you get a red gritty dust.”

With rain came extreme humidity and lots of mud. “It was awfully easy to get stuck,” he says.

That’s why Johnson’s job as a meteorologist was so important to the troops’ effort.

“Everything was dependent on what weather we were getting,” he says. “Air power was an integral part of the ground operation ... we had to deal with visibility for planes. We basically took part in every operation.”

Initially, he was a weather forecaster for the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign in North Vietnam. After six months, he was promoted to captain and was a meteorologist attached to the Studies and Observations Group, a covert operation based in Saigon.

He made sure weather conditions were favorable to float propaganda radios from South Vietnam to North Vietnam.

“We dealt with tides and currents,” he says.

Johnson’s physics degree from Illinois Wesleyan University helped. The Air Force also sent him to graduate school at Texas A&M and to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs.

While in Vietnam, Johnson had an “epiphany” David about his work as a meteoJohnson rologist: “This is important.

I need to do this,” he says.

His wife, Carol, agreed and his career with the Air Force was in place.

The family of six moved 20 times, including to the former Rantoul Air Force Base, where Johnson commanded the weather detachment. After three years, he became an intelligence officer/weather officer. He retired as a lieutenant colonel on Dec. 1, 1991.

Johnson went on to pursue a degree in history and was offered a job as an Illinois State University history professor before finishing his doctoral dissertation. He’s had that position since 2000.

— Mary Ann Ford

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

‘I knew I could act rather than running away’ A s a radioman in Vietnam, Mike Toliver was always close to his commanding officer but, as a rule, not actually involved in shooting.

That is, except for three times — the first of which was about five months after arriving south of Da Nang.

“I was guarding a bridge one time with about nine others,” says Toliver, of Eureka, a member of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine regiment, 1st Marine Division. “The South Vietnam command was near us.”

It was about 2 a.m. and Toliver was sound asleep until about 60 Viet Cong started firing at them with M16s.

“I could see the muzzle flashes,” he recalls.

Toliver only had a pistol but began shooting.

His unit called for mortars “for illumination so we could see.”

As rounds exploded in the sky, Toliver could see the grass.

“I could still hear the frogs in the rice paddies and hear the birds,” he says. “All of my senses were super turned on.”

His friend, Bobby Hall, was firing back at the attack with an M16. Suddenly Hall said, ‘I’m hit.’

A round had hit the bridge, sending wood

splinters into Hall.

The fighting continued until dawn. Everyone in Toliver’s group survived; two Viet Cong were dead.

“I wasn’t scared,” Toliver says. “It was super real; an amazing kind of thing. I could understand ‘combat junkies.’”

Growing up, Toliver says, Mike he always was a “wimp. One Toliver reason I joined (the service) was to prove myself.”

That incident did just that.

“I knew I could act rather than running away,” he says. “I knew I could face whatever.”

After his tour of duty, Toliver went to University of Illinois and earned a doctorate in biology. He landed a job a Eureka College, where he has remained for 34 years.

He didn’t talk about his time in Vietnam until 1983, when he spoke to a Western civilization and culture class. In the 1980s, he was part of a veterans’ discussion group, spearheaded by PBS, and got involved in a website talking to vets and others about the war — something he still does.

— Mary Ann Ford

‘Your story of what you ‘I grew up accepting the have done in life’ world as it is’ B J ehind every military ground unit and air squadron is a highly skilled maintenance crew.

Often the last to be recognized for their contributions, the crews that keep military operations running appreciate a quick, welltrained pair of hands.

Bloomington native Jim Brook developed his mechanical skills after he listed in the Air Force in 1967. Now 67, he has the benefit of a long lens to study what he now considers “a snap decision” made when he was just 19.

When college courses weren’t going well, Brook, like many others in similar situations, turned to the military. High scores on the mechanics section of military placement tests led Brook to an assignment as a fuel systems mechanic on some of the largest cargo planes.

“I just had a knack for mechanics,” says Brook, a licensed ham radio operator since eight grade.

Three years into his four-year stint, Sgt. Brook received orders for his transfer to Vietnam.

The country in southeast Asia held many unknowns. A few short lessons in a high school history class were the basis of what Brook knew.

“They were trying to make us aware of what was going on in Vietnam,” Brook recalls.

He remembers his arrival at Tan Suh Nuht Air Base outside Saigon.

“The heat and humidity took my breath away when they opened the door of the plane,” says Brook, who served with the 460th Field Maintenance Squadron.

Rocket fire that blasted Jim the sprawling commercial air base became routine.

Brook “You would wake up and not know why you woke up. You would get up and see if the base was under alert. The first one was kinda scary, but after that it’s routine.

You get used to everything,” says Brook.

He returned home in 1970, first working as an electrician with Caterpillar and spending the next four decades in industrial technology.

“I grew up accepting the world as it is. I wasn’t afraid to learn new things. Vietnam helped me become more insightful. I’m more receptive to new things and less willing to dismiss them until I find out what it’s all about.”

— Edith Brady-Lunny

ess Gates of Bloomington doesn’t remember much positive about serving in the Vietnam War. But he remembers a lot.

Gates, who served as a sergeant E-5 in the U.S. Army during a June 1968 to June 1969 stint near Saigon, spent more than a year assembling a 2,000-photo, 4-hour slideshow of a place he compared to hell itself.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of that stupid place,” says Gates of Bloomington, a Springfield native and retired air conditioning repairman. “There are some things you want to never forget, and there are some things you wish you could. ... It makes a lot of sense to anybody that’s been through a war.”

Gates was a 21-year-old Illinois State University student when he went to Vietnam, and what he experienced there changed him forever, he says.

“Prior to Vietnam I like to describe myself as ‘the kid.’ ‘The kid’ didn’t come back from Vietnam. The man did,” he says.

Gates was hardened by weather “so hot you couldn’t stand it, punctuated in the monsoon season by torrential rain that felt like ice water, and then back to hot just as fast”; squalid food and living conditions; and a combination of fear and boredom working as part of a motor pool.

“You were bored out of your mind, overworked and up all night because the enemy did its best to kill us or deprive us of sleep,” he says.

“After a couple weeks of being dead tired, you had 20 minutes of terror when the enemy really tried to kill you.”

Gates remembers watchJess ing movies screened on the side of a truck; sending film Gates canisters home to his wife, Linda, to develop; and saving up “every lousy bit of money I could in Vietnam, and immediately after arriving home, I bought a Corvette.”

“It was important to me to get something out of that other than death and destruction,” he says.

Even after going back to ISU, teaching in Atlanta and working “my way up from the lowest employee on the totem pole to owning the business” of a local air conditioning company, Gates thinks what he did as a 21-year-old is what needs to be preserved.

“You write your story of what you have done in life, and hopefully it’s interesting enough that the rest of us want to see it.”

— Derek Beigh

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 11

We Honor our

Veterans Janet Jurich

Kathy O'Brien Boston

Joe Lane Broker, REALTOR® 309-275-0743 joerealtor@cbhoa.com

REALTOR®, BROKER GRI, CNE, SRS Keller Williams Realty 309-825-2078 www.JanetJurich.com

Broker, GRI, SRS 309-261-1428 kobb@cbhoa.com kobbsellshomes.com

Heart of America REALTORS®, LTD

Heart of America REALTORS®, LTD

www.propertiesinbloomington.com

Lisa Lyle

Illinoisnationalbank.com/Bloomington

REALTOR Office Direct/FAX 309.664.3631 Mobile Phone 309.826.1419 Email llyle@cbhoa.com ®

GRI, ABR, SFR

NATHAN GROJEAN (309) 557-0022

(630) 947-2529 www.JennyHillScott.com ScottJenny50@gmail.com

Heart of America REALTORS®, LTD

1603 Tullamore Ave., Ste. A, Bloomington, IL 61704 Member FDIC • NMLS #477621

“Wilson Team”

Illinoisnationalbank.com/Bloomington

(309) 261-0999 carolinebird@hotmail.com www.carolinebird.com

309-319-4008 pwilson@cbhoa.com

Karen Wilson

CURT VANCE (309) 557-0022

309-824-3436 kwilson@cbhoa.com Heart of America REALTORS®, LTD

NMLS #502420

Liliana Taimoorazi

Broker GRI mobile: 309-826-5559 www.lilianacbhoa.com Your Trusted Real Estate Advisor Heart of America REALTORS®, LTD

Belinda Trunell 309.287.6105 belindatrunell@remax.net

www.belindatrunell.remaxagent.com

Each Office Independently Owned and Operated.

Heart of America REALTORS® , LTD

Deb Connor, broker #1 Agent @ The #1 Company

Dena Swigart, Broker

Snyder Real Estate #1 Brickyard Drive, Bloomington, IL 61701 Mobile: 309-825-2194 • Fax 309-663-1380 www.denaswigart.com ©2015 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently owned and operated franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.

NMLS #472914

Caroline Bird

Penny Wilson

GREAT RATES. BETTER SERVICE. 1603 Tullamore Ave., Ste. A, Bloomington, IL 61704 Member FDIC • NMLS #477621

GREAT RATES. BETTER SERVICE.

Jenny Hill Scott

802 S. Eldorado Rd. Bloomington, IL 61704 www.cbhoa.com

(309) 531-1912 Cell (309) 664-3604 Office (309) 663-4707 Fax dconnor@cbhoa.com

Each Office Independently Owned and Operated

See one of theSe Real eState PRofeSSionalS foR all youR Real eState needS!

©2015 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently owned and operated franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.

2015 Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate.

Some offices Independently Owned and Operated.

Each Office Independently Owned and Operated.

12 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

‘The grace of God has been good to me’

D

ick Leonard has a hard time hearing praise for his service as a specialist 4 in the U.S. Army in Vietnam.

“It’s like having a child, and you didn’t want it, so you let it out for adoption, and 20 years later you find out it’s your child and it’s done well. What’s that child going to say to you if you ignore it for 20 years?” he says. “It’s hard to accept that thanks now because it wasn’t there at the time.”

Still, the Cornell native is happy to talk about his experience in machine gun repair, missile repair and gunner service from August 1965 to June 1967.

“We would fly to different areas as troops were manipulated, and depending on the trouble infantry would get into, fly in and help get them out,” Leonard says.

“If we weren’t assigned to a helicopter during the day, we’d do guard at night. ...

There was not a lot of time for messing around.”

It was a big change from working at a canning factory out of high school and a Caterpillar factory in Joliet, but he did get to continue woodworking when “we broke open ammo boxes (and) took the wood and

M

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

nails and built chairs and tables.”

He says working hard kept him focused on going home, because “when the bad things happened, you needed to be positive to keep going.”

“I always had a positive outlook about coming Dick home. I was adamant about Leonard that,” he says. “Even though some of my buddies didn’t come home, I kept a positive attitude.”

Leonard has used that attitude to become owner of Dick’s Custom Cabinets in Cornell; a husband for 47 years to Donna, a former ER nurse, and grandfather of two; and a Sunday school teacher who frequently contributes to mission trips. His son, Kerry, works with him at the shop.

“The determination to do something with my life was very well-established in my heart” after the war, Leonard says. “I’ve always been a good believer. The grace of God has been good to me.”

— Derek Beigh

‘Go Greyhound and leave the flying to us’

ike Fitzgerald’s Army career went to the dogs early on.

Fitzgerald embraces the canine thread woven through his days as a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War with the 240th Assault Helicopter Company Greyhounds from March 1969 to March 1970.

The Bloomington native boarded a bus from San Francisco to Travis Air Force Base near Oakland to begin his service.

“I took a Greyhound bus,” Fitzgerald recalled.

“I was reading in their brochure about the 240th Assault Company. That’s the unit I went to. I still have the brochure.”

Using the call sign Greyhound 26, Fitzgerald piloted UH-1 Hueys (models C, D and H) for 1,266 combat hours during his tour of duty out of Bearcat base 30 miles northeast of Saigon.

“If we took off south of Bearcat, we would be in the delta. And if we took off to the north we would be in the jungle,” Fitzgerald says. “There were three assault helicopter companies at Bearcat, two CH-47 Chinook helicopter companies and the Royal Black Panther Division from Thailand.”

Insertion aircraft called “slicks” used a Greyhound call sign, gunships used the call sign “Maddog” and the company’s maintenance per-

sonnel were known as “Kennel Keepers.”

“Our motto was ‘Go Greyhound and leave the flying to us,’’’ recalls Fitzgerald. “They’ve been great to us. They still support us to this day.”

The Greyhounds even used a logo sent from the bus Mike company on their aircraft until the enemy began using Fitzgerald them as aiming points.

The now 72-year-old Fitzgerald’s mission featured very little time on the ground while either dropping off or picking up soldiers.

“It was touch and go. We were in and out very quickly,” Fitzgerald says. “We knew they liked to shoot at aircraft.”

After leaving Vietnam, Fitzgerald spent two years at Fort Riley, Kan., and then was sent to Fort Sill, Okla., for the Field Artillery Officers Advanced Course.

He also served as head of the ROTC at Illinois State for five years. A native of Baraboo, Wis., Fitzgerald retired as a colonel after 25 years in 1991.

— Randy Reinhardt

‘It felt like the longest walk of my life’ N

ineteen-year-old Bill Crutcher was stationed at Quang Tri combat base in 1969 when his commanding officer asked a difficult question. “‘How well did you know your cousin, Terry?’ he asked me,” says Crutcher, then a sergeant E5. “Terry was stationed as a medic in Vietnam and was killed in action. They asked me to bring his remains home to our family.”

Crutcher was an Army cryptographer, sending coded messages to other bases and to Gen. Creighton Abrams. When his cousin died, he was told to drop everything and hop in a jeep that would take him to the airport.

“We were close,” he says. “He was only a few months older than me and we had been friends.”

Crutcher was given instructions on how to properly care for his cousin’s remains as he accompanied the casket home. The casket was always to be loaded first, with the head toward the front of the plane.

“I was a 19-year-old kid who couldn’t effectively deal with the emotions that came with the task,” he recalls.

It was raining when his plane landed at Peoria around 11 p.m. He loaded the casket onto a cart, pushing it toward the terminal. A single light mounted on the side of the hangar il-

D

luminated Crutcher’s uncle and cousins, waiting behind a chain link fence. A hearse was parked nearby.

“It felt like the longest walk of my life,” says Crutcher.

“When I got to my uncle, Terry’s dad, he hugged me and asked, ‘Bill, are you OK?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m OK.’” Bill Crutcher rode to Bloomington in the hearse. It dropped Crutcher him off outside his home around midnight, where his pregnant wife, Diana, was waiting.

“I was allowed to stay on leave longer since my daughter, Amy, was born one week after the funeral,” he says. “I went home that night and prayed to God asking that none of my children be sent to war.”

His prayer came true. Crutcher teaches his grandchildren the importance of respect for those who’ve served.

“My grandkids both got emotional on a recent trip to Washington, D.C., when we stopped and looked at Terry’s name on the Vietnam memorial. They have a sense of what war means and they understand that importance.”

— Julia Evelsizer

‘There were just a select few of us’

avid Kern’s view of the Vietnam War was different than most who served there.

“I looked at Vietnam from ... 21-, 23,000 feet,” says Kern, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force who now lives in Bloomington. “I was looking down at it the whole time and spending my off-duty time in Thailand.”

For a long time, Kern could not speak to anyone (including his wife, Ruthann, and two children) about what he was doing.

Kern, who reported to active duty in 1956, was assigned to the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam in May 1969.

“There were just a select few of us and it was extremely, extremely highly classified,” he says.

Part of the mission involved flying into thunderstorms and “seeding” the clouds with a silver iodine compound to produce torrential rains. The aircraft was equipped with two specially designed, externally mounted racks capable of dispersing 52 iodine flares each.

“We wanted to turn the Ho Chi Minh Trail into a sea of mud so they (the North Vietnamese) could not come down it because that’s where all their troops and supplies were coming,” he says.

What made the mission top secret?

“The United States, among all the nations in the world, agreed in signature and treaty that we would not mollify the weather — and that’s exactly what we were doing,” says Kern.

The seeding mission was flown during the southwest monsoon season from David March through November.

Kern’s tour came to an end Kern in March 1971 when he was assigned to Travis Air Force Base in California.

“Can I say it worked? Visually, I could say it worked,” he says. “We didn’t have anyone on the ground looking up and saying, ‘My, gosh, it’s really raining down here’ because the bad guys were down there really getting wet, we hoped.”

Only in 1976 did Kern find out his mission had been de-classified two years earlier, after Congressional hearings, and he was free to speak about it.

Kern was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and six air medals (one for every 20 seeding missions flown) for his service in southeast Asia.

— Jim Benson

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 13

‘There was a lot of ‘Our job was to find armament dropped at sea’ enemy supply routes’ C D uring his eight years in the armed services, Milton G. Rudsinski strongly considered making the military his career.

“What politicians did and are still doing made me make up my mind to get out,” says Rudsinski, of Bloomington. “Politicians are messing up the military tremendously. It’s pathetic really.”

Rudsinski was stationed at Cam Ranh Bay in the Khanh Hoa province. He was particularly disenchanted by preparations for a visit from President Lyndon Johnson.

“The commander said, ‘The president is flying in. We’ve got to clean things up,’” recalls Rudsinski. “We were sweeping up sand, making it look neat. But they were flying wounded soldiers into Cam Ranh, and that just stirred up more sand.”

Rudsinski, now 77, served in the Navy from 1956-60 and left as a petty officer second class. His 1964-68 stint with the Air Force included time in Vietnam in 1966-67, departing as a captain and aircraft maintenance officer.

“We kept the aircraft ready as much as we could.

We were dependent on supply and demand,” Rudsinski says. “Sometimes needed parts were not available. If we had a sick airplane missing a part, we would take more parts off it to fix other air-

E

planes. It was cannibalization.”

When aircraft would go on missions out of Cam Ranh, they would have a primary target and a secondary target.

“Probably half the time the south Vietnamese would have them divert from the primary target to the secondMilton ary target,” says Rudsinski.

Rudsinski “These diversions caused them to not be able to do their mission because the secondary target was out of range for them. There was a lot of armament dropped at sea on the way back to base.”

Cam Ranh Bay provided a measure of safety because of its location near the ocean.

“The north Vietnamese never did any Navy attacks, and we were far enough away from the ground forces they never got to us,” Rudsinski says. “We could see bases to our north and south being attacked.”

A native of Lake Zurich who moved to Bloomington in 1947, Rudsinski worked at State Farm from 1968 until his retirement in 1997.

— Randy Reinhardt

hris Koos was living with his parents while attending Illinois State University when he received a call from a high school friend’s mother who served on the McLean County draft board.

“She said, ‘Do you want to go in August or do you want to go now?’” Koos recalls. “I said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’”

Koos, mayor of Normal since 2003, went through Officers Candidate School and arrived in Vietnam in July 1970, serving as a first lieutenant in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division.

“I came to Vietnam right after the last major battle of the war,” Koos says.

That battle at Fire Support Base Ripcord was in Thua Thien province, the same sector in which Koos served. His area was north of Hue, in the far northern part of what was then South Vietnam.

“The thing that bothered me most, because the war was winding down, was the lack of supplies and the lack of manpower,” Koos says.

His platoon had 10 or 11 men when the usual size was 26 to 28.

“Our job was to find enemy supply routes,” Koos says.

Once, they found a battalion-level supply area that had just been abandoned. Koos says his pla-

toon withdrew and returned with a company-size force.

They spent extensive time in the field, once staying out on patrol for 128 days straight — “quite a camping trip,” Koos recalls.

Spending that much time in the field, carrying equipment weighing 80 to 90 pounds, Chris took its toll. The average inKoos fantryman lost 20 percent of his body weight, says Koos, who went from about 170 pounds when he entered the Army to 135 pounds when he came back from Vietnam.

Koos returned to ISU and became involved in the Vitesse cycling shop, which he now owns, in 1978. He was elected to the Normal City Council in 2001.

Koos attends reunions of the 101st Airborne about every three years, reconnecting with people he knew and with whom he formed lifelong bonds.

“Some of them did well and some of them fell by the wayside,” says Koos. “It happens after every war.”

— Lenore Sobota

‘When I came home, I’d learned a lot’

d Kirkpatrick of Saybrook admits the years he spent in Vietnam as an Army staff sergeant had a permanent influence on him.

“Just being around different people and learning different things, times changing …,” he says.

“It was a pretty big time in my life, I guess; I didn’t think it was at the time. It basically changed my whole life.”

Kirkpatrick, who retired from the postal service five years ago after 40 years as a rural mail carrier, fought with the 4th Infantry Division in the central highlands in 1967-68.

“When I left, I was 19 years old and basically a small-town country boy. When I came home, I’d learned a lot,” says Kirkpatrick.

“I mean, I met a lot of great guys but after we all got out, everybody went their own way and we never did get back together. That’s the sad part; I really hate that because I had some great buddies over there.”

Like many other Vietnam veterans, Kirkpatrick remembers feeling unappreciated when he returned.

“It’s really a terrible feeling. Everybody was against the war, but the guys that went … it wasn’t our fault,” says Kirkpatrick, who was among the

about 8,000 veterans who marched in Bloomington’s Welcome Home Veterans Parade on May 23, 1987.

“Everybody spent the whole day in Bloomington and it was a pretty special day for a lot of us,” he says. “It was about 20 years late, I think.”

As it turned out, KirkR. Edward patrick’s time in the service wound up having a strong Kirkpatrick impression on his son, Wade.

“His goal was to join the Army and make a career because of what I did in Vietnam,” says Kirkpatrick. “I thought it was great. Of course, there wasn’t anything (combat-related) going on at the time.”

Wade Kirkpatrick joined the Army after graduating high school in 1988, beginning a 23-year career as a ranger in the 82nd Airborne Division.

“It was his own decision; he wanted to do it, so he went ahead and he did a pretty good job,” says the elder Kirkpatrick. “I tried to tell him everything I had learned from my experience, how things were and what it was going to be like.”

— Joe Deacon

We are proud to honor our heroes, to remember their achievements, their courage, their dedication, and to say Thank You for their sacrifice for our country.

302 E Miller St., Bloomington, IL 61701 309-827-6950 www.evergreenmemorialcemetery.com

14 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

‘I wasn’t meant to die in Vietnam’

M

arine “grunt” Chuck Conley was in Vietnam less than a month when he was in a firefight that earned him a Purple Heart.

His unit was on night patrol in June 1966, about 25 miles south of Da Nang, when Vietcong ambushed them, detonating two mines along the road and opening up with 30 mm machine guns. Conley was pinned down behind a dike.

“All I could hear was thud, thud, thud. We couldn’t even return fire,” he says. “I was praying my heart out. I thought I was going to die.”

The enemy finally pulled out, and Conley ended up with a shrapnel wound to the hand.

The 73-year-old Normal man recalls his year in Vietnam as a time of watching other men die and narrowly escaping death himself. He is grateful to have survived, even as he battles prostate cancer he attributes to Agent Orange, and he worries about what today’s troops face.

“I appreciate everything the Lord has done for me,” says Conley. “I wasn’t meant to die in Vietnam.”

The 1959 Bloomington High School graduate has had a varied career since he left the Marines as a corporal, including stints as a Normal police

officer, bar and restaurant owner, security guard and dog trainer. Despite a lifetime since the war, it’s “pretty fresh in my mind, even today,” he says. “I was pretty tight with these people, taking care of each other.”

He recalls spending a month around Christmas Chuck — monsoon season — at the Conley base of what was nicknamed “The Rockpile.” “When we were evaced, the doctors and nurses thought we looked like we came from Auschwitz,” he says.

He remembers jungle rot, oppressive heat, toxic water, deadly snakes, enemies who would use meat hooks to pull Marines into tunnels — and buddies whose names he copied off The Wall in Washington, D.C. He says headlines today stir those memories.

“I think about these guys (who served in Iraq and Afghanistan) and ISIS. We should be kicking butt, and we’re not doing it right,” he says. “I don’t want it to be another war where everybody dies and it’s a draw.”

— Roger Miller

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

E

‘We were told to kill anything on us’

ven though it’s been 45 years since Ronald Bragonier returned home from Vietnam, he still has memories of the year he served in the war.

“They had rats as big as cats,” he says.

“They’d be in the bunkers with you. I still can’t stand rats.”

Then there were the orders the Bloomington man received while serving as a private first class with Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 17th Artillery, in Bu Prang.

“We were told to kill anything on us,” he says. “Sometimes that bothers me at night,” especially when it involved young boys who had been “brainwashed” and sent in by the enemy.

“The main thing was to protect each other,” he says.

While he tried, he still lost some close friends.

The most intense battle took place in December 1969 at the Bu Prang Special Forces Camp.

“We were taking a lot of incoming,” he says.

The award of valor Bragonier received for his efforts during that event tells just how intense the fight was: “On numerous occasions, rounds exploded in the battery position, covering the entire area with shrapnel.

“Enemy attacks became so intense that it was impossible for his section to fire more than 10 rounds without drawing return fire from enemy guns.”

Bragonier says his battalion had to vacate the site “so we wouldn’t get overrun.”

They went into the junRonald gle. It was night and so dark Bragonier it was virtually impossible to see. Bragonier stepped in a hole, injuring one of his legs. He had to be airlifted to a hospital and was in traction for 30 days.

Once out, he returned to the jungle again.

“I very seldom got any sleep,” he says. The enemy could sneak up “and slice your throat.”

Bragonier, who retired from Eureka Williams after 30 years, “still jumps out of bed sometimes” thinking about that.

He’s been to Washington, D.C., to look at the Vietnam Wall and the names of all those who didn’t make it back.

“I feel guilty about coming back.”

— Mary Ann Ford

‘I had to re-enlist in the ‘I wear that cap almost Army to go to Vietnam’ every day wherever I go’ W F hen James Poelstra returned home to Bloomington in late 1970 after a tour of duty with the Cavalry Division in Vietnam, his life returned to normal but he never forgot his service to the country.

He went back to work as safety manager at Eureka Williams and stayed until the plant closed in 2000.

One day while driving to the job, he saw a man wearing a Vietnam vet ball-cap, walking down the street carrying groceries.

“I stopped and picked him up and took him home,” he says.

When he went back to work, he bought himself a hat with 1st Cavalry Vietnam Veteran embroidered on it.

“I wear that cap almost every day wherever I go,” says Poelstra.

In return, it has brought him the recognition a decorated veteran deserves.

“One day a woman walked by me, turned around and shook my hand,” he says.

Another time, he was at a bank. Someone noticed the cap and pulled him aside and started talking to him about his service.

Poelstra was 26 years old when he went to

Vietnam with the U.S. Army in July 1969. Most of his tour took him to the heat of the war – often near the Cambodian border.

“We’d be out in the jungle 15 days, then go back to the base,” he says.

But one day it was different. His Charlie Company James had only been in the jungle Poelstra one day and got a message to go back to base, he says.

As it turned out, “they wanted us there to protect the base,” he says. That night, the North Vietnamese lobbed the base with mortars.

When dawn finally broke, Poelstra looked over the berm that surrounded the base. A Bungalore torpedo was staring right at him.

“They (the North Vietnamese) were going to blow a hole in the berm,” he says. “It was right where I was sitting.”

Luckily, it hadn’t gone off and Poelstra survived. He also earned an Army commendation.

Only one from his unit had died.

— Mary Ann Ford

red Howard was only 17 when he decided to join the Army to fight in the Vietnam war.

It was a natural choice since his dad had been a “lifer” in the Army, serving 28½ years and ending up at the National Guard Armory in Bloomington.

“I was so young when I went in, they held me over for a month after training,” he says.

But instead of being sent to Vietnam like he wanted, Howard, of Bloomington, was sent to Germany.

“I had to re-enlist in the Army to go to Vietnam,” he says.

He finally got over there in late 1969, serving as a Specialist E-4 with the 111th Engineering Batallion. He was stationed in Phu Bay. “I felt like it was my duty,” he says. “I was young; I felt I could help somebody over there.”

His job was purifying water for the troops, including the 101st Airborne Division. The process involved drawing water from the river, running it through a purification system located in a 2½-ton Army truck and into a 1,000-gallon tank.

The river water was far from clean.

“The (Vietnamese) people were dirt poor,” he says.

“They washed their clothes in the river. A hundred feet up the way, people were going to the bathroom in the river.”

The purified tanks of water would last a couple of days, Howard said, then Fred the process had to start all Howard over again.

“We had to follow the troops; we had to keep the pool full. If it got bugs and dust in it, we had to purify it again,” he says.

“It don’t matter what your job was, everybody was important,” he says.

When his tour in Vietnam was finished, Howard stayed in the Army, serving a total of four years. He was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

Once back in Bloomington, he worked at Eureka Williams and as a roofer before landing a job with Cummins Diesel, a position he held for more than 37 years.

— Mary Ann Ford

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

‘My job was to keep the engines running’

W

hen Mike Herrin and two of his high school classmates enlisted in the Navy in 1965, they had visions of serving on a boat.

Two years later, those plans changed when the three friends were given assignments in Southeast Asia.

“All three of us ended up on the ground in Vietnam — in the Navy,” says Herrin, of Bloomington, a gunner with the Navy’s Helicopter Attack Squadron. The unit was sometimes referred to as “the Brown Navy” because they flew over rivers in the Mekong Delta region.

“My job was to keep the engines running or figure out what was wrong,” says Herrin, who also worked as an aviation structural mechanic.

Like many other young soldiers from Midwest farm country, Herrin didn’t know what to expect when he walked through the gates of the Great Lakes Naval Station for basic training and later when he arrived in Vietnam.

What he saw on the streets of Saigon provided one of many culture shocks.

“Conflict had been such a part of their lives that they just lived with it. You would see

D

them riding their bikes and going on with their everyday lives,” says Herrin.

Between his active duty and years with the reserves, Herrin served a total of 24 years, including three years as a recruiter. He ended his career on the last planes to leave Chicago’s Glenview Mike Naval Air Station in 1995.

Herrin Herrin also logged more than two decades with the Illinois Department of Agriculture as a meat and poultry inspector.

The interests and needs of veterans have remained important to Herrin, who has been active in veterans organizations for 20 years.

He was a recent speaker for an event marking a visit of the traveling Vietnam Memorial Wall in LeRoy. Military service benefits many young men and women, teaching them new skills and developing a sense of discipline, says Herrin.

“I was a shy farm boy. I give the military a lot of credit. I would do it again,” said Herrin.

— Edith Brady-Lunny

‘By the grace of God, I got out alive’

avid Vance grew up in Memphis, Tenn., and entered the Marines as, in his words, “a smart-mouthed white kid from the South.”

One of the positive things he took away from an experience noted for its negativity was an education in “how to get along with other people of different races and creeds.”

It didn’t happen overnight. But today he says he’s a better man for it.

Vance, of rural Secor, recalls becoming bored around his junior year in high school.

To cure that boredom, he dropped out of school at “all of barely 17 ... a young man yearning and fantasizing for adventure.”

At 18, the legal age to see combat, Vance was shipped to Da Nang in the summer of 1969 with the 1st Marine Tank Battalion, then to fire base LZ Baldy, where he was assigned as a tank crewman, eventually attaining the rank of corporal.

Next stop: fire base LZ Ross, “which was where I first started to realize I was in a war with shooting taking place.”

Death was brought up close and personal when two members of Vance’s company were killed by land mines during a tank escort mission. d Christmas was spent at Da Nang, where he

was transferred to the 3rd Marine Tank Battalion, providing front and rear protection on convoys between fire and supply bases, “eating a lot dust” along the way.

Another horrific land mine encounter threw a corpsman riding on the tank’s exterior, followed by David the tank coming down on his legs and crushing them.

Vance Vance received a head concussion, and as a result, a Purple Heart.

Further adventures ensued in his year over there; returning home, he didn’t receive a hero’s welcome and he battled a drug problem; on the upside, he overcame that problem, got married, raised three children and co-founded his own business (Bloomington’s Associated Constructors, where he still works).

“By the grace of God, I got out alive,” he says today. “The experience helped me grow up and become a man. And, most of all, it helped me learn to get along with and accept all people, no matter what their upbringing.”

— Dan Craft

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 15

R

‘I am proud to have served with them’

on Palmer joined the Army in 1966 because he’d quit college, lost his deferment and was not comfortable living at home.

“So I enlisted,” he recalls. “It seemed like a reasonable and patriotic thing to do ... gave some purpose to my life. Besides, I was next in line to be drafted.”

The suburban Chicago native was trained as a medic and operating room technician, then became part of the operating room crew at Fort Hood, Texas.

In the fall of 1967, he was sent to the 55th Medical Group, 67th Evacuation Hospital, in Qui Nhon, northeast of Saigon on the South China Sea coast.

“I was sent to the part of the hospital that did all the sterilizing of surgical instruments and other supplies for the operating room and all the wards of the hospital,” he says.

His entire tour, from that point on, was spent in that role, for which he eventually earned the rank of Specialist 5th Class.

“Being an evacuation hospital, many patients recovered in the wards after treatment, but then were evacuated to sites outside Vietnam,” he says.

Through that experience, the Vietnamese people have left a lasting impression on Palmer.

Despite the crowded conditions and poor living conditions, “they seemed able to cope with their difficult situation and maintained a friendly demeanor, always smiling.

“I admired that about them, and I wished we were able to have done more for them, and it is still difficult Ron to see the images of the many Palmer Vietnamese who wanted to leave the country at the end of the war, but were unable to do so.”

Through his subsequent return to college, Palmer ended up in the Twin Cities, where he got married and “stayed put.”

“I have a lot of mixed feelings about the war itself,” he admits today, wondering if it “would have been better to have let the Vietnamese settle their differences themselves.”

He is, however, unwavering in his certainty on one point: “The Army personnel I worked with at the 67th worked hard and were a credit to our country during an unpopular war. And I am proud to have served with them.”

— Dan Craft

‘I laid in a rice paddy for four days’ A

“semi-retired” owner of a successful Culligan franchise, John Tarvin has enjoyed doing some traveling in recent years. A return trip to Southeast Asia is not on his itinerary.

“I have memories of it and most of them aren’t very good,” says Tarvin, of Bloomington.

As an Army combat infantryman who arrived in Vietnam as a 19-year old draftee in November 1967, Tarvin was among the frontline troops that withstood the Tet Offensive, a massive wave of surprise attacks that were launched by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in the late-night hours of Jan. 30, 1968. Tarvin was serving in the I Corps Tactical Zone, the first target of the attacks.

“We were up there probably a week before we encountered the enemy and we got in a major fire fight that lasted for four days,” Tarvin says, adding much of the enemy fire originated from a village that Army headquarters had deemed as “friendly.”

“I laid in a rice paddy for four days,” Tarvin recalls. “There was so much firepower coming out of that village that we could not get up and move. I had maybe 40 or 50 leeches that had

to be burnt off because we were laying in the water. If we put our head up over a foot, we started taking fire and we couldn’t get our rear forces and upper echelon to give us any support. They said it was a ‘Friendlyville’ and ‘we can’t do that.’”

Help finally arrived in the John form of an airstrike, but the Tarvin conflict was far from over for Tarvin. He spent the remainder of his year-long tour toting a machine gun in a patrol unit, a column of soldiers looking for the enemy.

Tarvin says distinguishing friend from foe wasn’t an easy task because of the “guerrilla” nature of the Viet Cong.

“They looked like regular citizens,” he says.

Along the way he encountered the remnants of a roadside massacre and witnessed other horrors of war.

“I’m happy to say I don’t have any Purple Hearts,” Tarvin says. “I made it out, I’m OK, but I know a lot of people that aren’t.”

— Bruce Yentes

16 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

‘When you’re patriotic, ‘... It was in the water you don’t ask, you just go’ and in our food’ B “I am not a hero,” Roger Beeler says, quietly but firmly, at his business, FrameMart Inc. Frames cover the wall behind him. He opens a business envelope and pulls out pictures of himself as a young U.S. Army infantryman in South Vietnam.

“I came back with no wounds,” says Beeler, 68, of Normal. “The 58,000 people who died there — and the seriously wounded — are the heroes.”

Beeler was a Tremont teenager when he joined the Army in August 1965.

“I came from a poor background. I was a little ornery and thought that maybe a stint in the service might do me some good. It did.”

After basic training and working in vehicle maintenance stateside, Beeler was assigned to a signal company in Vietnam. When he arrived in July 1966, he was switched to an infantry division, which had high casualties.

He reported to base camp in Lai Khe and spent the next year in the field on several combat missions.

“We’d stay in the field for three to four weeks at a time. The jungle was extremely hot and so dense that sometimes we’d lose sight of the person walking in front of us.

“Not counting sniper fire, we were in three

campaigns. Most of the time, as we were firing on the enemy and they were firing on us, we couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see us. I wasn’t scared until afterward when I had time to think.

“My entire battalion had high casualties. We constantly worried about booby traps.

Roger (When people would step on one) I was part of the recovBeeler ery team. It was terrible.”

Beeler spent his third year in the Army in Fort Riley, Kan., and was honorably discharged as a Sergeant E5.

He married Evelyn, his wife of 48 years. They have three adult children and seven grandchildren.

Beeler worked in metal fabrication and automotive repair before buying Frame-Mart in 1994.

“I was not treated disrespectfully by anyone when I came back. People ask me, ‘Was the war justified?’ I tell them ‘I’m not the person to ask. Ask the 58,000 who didn’t come back.’

“I love my country. If Uncle Sam would call me today, I’d go. But is war justified? When you’re patriotic, you don’t ask, you just go.”

— Paul Swiech

orn the son of a soldier who survived the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, patriotism is nearly instinctive for Lynn Shindel.

To honor his father’s bravery, Shindel was 19 when he enlisted in the Navy in December 1967. He served three tours in Vietnam between 1968 and 1971.

As he was completing his first tour in 1969, Shindel learned his childhood friend, David Scott of Carlock, was missing in action.

Shindel changed his job title with the Seabees to heavy equipment operator so he could go on land, and re-enlisted for two more tours.

“I just felt like I might be able to help find him,” he says. Sadly, “he’s still MIA.” For Shindel, Vietnam was life-altering.

“Life was never the same. I’ve been dying ever since, and it’s not a a good death,” he says.

“I am 70 percent disabled from being exposed to Agent Orange.”

The U.S. military used the chemical defoliant to strip the Vietnamese landscape of foliage and expose the Viet Cong’s hiding places.

The defoliant was among supplies that Shindel drove to military outposts, and “it was in the water and in our food,” he says. “It was

sprayed everywhere.”

Shindel and other veterans have been disheartened by their struggle to get coverage for Agent Orange-related illnesses.

“I have heart, kidney and nerve problems; diabetes; and cancer,” says Shindel.

“It took me over 40 years to get my benefits. In 1984, Lynn the year I was found to have Shindel melanoma, a type of cancer, I was denied a medical claim.

In 2010, I re-filed the same claim that I filed in 1984 and I was finally granted benefits.”

“I feel betrayed,” he adds. “They never told us how dangerous this stuff was. They just sprayed us with it. None of the veterans who got Agent Orange got Purple Hearts.”

Even so, his loyalty to his country and its military veterans is resolute.

“I belong to nine different veterans groups,” says Shindel, who is state chairman of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors.

“I am patriotic. That is what I want to be remembered by.”

— Maria Nagle

‘I wanted to be ‘Like walking into in charge of my destiny’ a musty, wet basement’ W T hen Nelson Thorp got off the plane in Da Nang, Vietnam, in September 1970, the first thing that hit him was

the smell.

“It was like walking into a musty, wet basement,” says Thorp, who was serving with the U.S. Army.

But, he says, because he was “there to do a job,” he pressed on.

His first hurdle was getting to Phu Bai. “You’re on your own with no weapon,” he recalls.

He started hitchhiking and traveled about 40 miles before catching a ride with a convoy.

The first night he was at the firebase, it was put on alert.

“I asked where I was supposed to be; what I was supposed to do.”

Someone told him to “keep your head down.”

Thorp’s initial job was in mortars. He later moved to battalion level where he was in forward support, responsible for getting supplies — “everything from TP to ammunition” — to the troops.

“The first priority was mail,” he says.

Lower on the list was taking back the casualties.

“The body bags would be on the heliport but

we had to get the supplies to the men first,” he says. “It was supplies before bodies.”

As a first lieutenant, Thorp also ended up “playing mom” to some of the men under him.

“I remember the ‘Dear John’ letters” that mostly came to the younger men,” he says. “I’d Nelson have to say, ‘She doesn’t know Thorp what’s going on.’”

Thorp, on the other hand, was one of the lucky ones. He married his wife, Linda, before being sent to Vietnam and they wrote each other every day.

When he returned stateside in June 1971, Linda had lined up three job interviews for her husband.

Thorp taught for several years before joining the family business, Thorp Seed, in 1977.

He retired two years ago and now has a variety of jobs including as Wapella’s fire chief.

He burned most of his clothes before leaving Vietnam and got rid of the rest once he was home. That musty smell just wouldn’t go away.

— Mary Ann Ford

here were frequent rocket attacks on the Da Nang, Vietnam, base where Roger Cann was stationed in 1972.

They usually came in groups of four or five.

The Viet Cong weren’t around when their rockets went off. “They would prop rocket launchers up on a fence and set a timer,” Cann says. “That way, we couldn’t retaliate.”

The rockets “weren’t aimed at anything,” but they were a reminder that the enemy still existed.

“You don’t worry about it,” says Cann of Normal, an aviation electrician mate second class with the U.S. Navy. “We would run into shelters when the rockets began to fall.”

Only one fellow serviceman was injured during the attacks, he says, and that was from flying debris.

Cann, who grew up on a farm in Peotone, enlisted after finishing one semester in college.

“I wanted to be in charge of my destiny,” he says. “I always wanted to join the Navy; I wanted to see another part of the world.”

He served in Spain for two years before being transferred to a Rhode Island base where they needed 40 volunteers, including a support electrician, to go to Vietnam.

Cann was one of two who fit that bill. The

other serviceman was married with a family so Cann, who was single, volunteered.

He served as load master and plane captain, making sure the planes were loaded correctly and the electrical components were in working order.

The war was winding down Roger when he was in Vietnam.

Cann “At the time, (the war) seemed kind of senseless, especially going on as long as it had,” he says.

“We hadn’t achieved anything.”

When Cann returned home, he married his longtime schoolmate, Karen, owned Thawville Tap for several years, then was elected Thawville mayor.

The couple moved to Normal in 1987 so Cann could manage the Garcia’s pizza restaurants. He later became manager of Illinois State University’s food services dining center, retiring in 2014.

He has been active in the American Legion for 42 years.

— Mary Ann Ford

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 17

In Honor of All Who Served

18 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

THOSE WHO SERVED

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

U.S. NAVY E3 James F. Ulbrich, Bloomington

V I E T N A M “Those Who Served: Vietnam” was conceived as a 50-day project for its initial publication in The Pantagraph. Many more veterans offered to participate; these five men were among them.

1969-1971; USS Chicago CG 11, Gulf of Tonkin, 7th fleet

U.S. ARMY Capt. Paul ‘Skip’ Armstrong, Wapella 92nd Assault Helicopter Co.

Pfc. Roger D. Kerr, Normal December 1969-February 1971

August 1966July 1971 (Vietnam, April 1969April 1970)

Sp. 5 Steven R. Spencer, Normal Engineers February 1969December 1970

Sgt. E5 Robert D. Starckovich, Bloomington Information operations, intelligence specialist May 1969-April 1971 (Vietnam, June 1970April 1971)

A

‘They were firing from the fishing boats’

s members of the 1st Marine Air Wing went about their business at the main helicopter base known as Marble Mountain, the supposed civilian fishing boats on nearby Vietnamese waters presented a picture of tranquility.

After returning to Marble Mountain one evening from delivering troops and helicopter parts to other bases around the region, Dennis Huber of Bloomington experienced first-hand how looks can be deceiving.

“When we got back one night, just before dark, all hell broke loose,” Huber says. “We came under attack and every copter that was stationed on the base got hit. They hit all the fuel lines, all the supply dumps, all our buildings, everything. It just wiped it out.”

The assault left the troops on the base immobilized in bunkers that had been constructed to weather such an attack.

“When we got hit, we couldn’t get out of the bunkers and we couldn’t find out from where we were getting hit,” he says, adding that some F-15s from the nearby Da Nang air base were sent to the rescue.

“Finally, they spotted them out on the fishing boats,” Huber says. “They were firing from the fishing boats.”

Prior to the attack, the Marines had orders to

peacefully co-exist with what were believed to be civilians earning a living as fishermen.

Afterward, the boats were no longer off limits.

“We had orders to kill anything that moved out there,” he says. “After that, there were no more fishing boats.”

While Huber lost friends Dennis in the attack on the base, anHuber other casualty of the Vietnam conflict struck very close to home. Upon graduation from Bloomington High School in 1966, Huber enlisted in the Marines with Donnie Monkman, his best friend at BHS. Monkman was killed in the conflict.

“I got the memo that he was killed and I was supposed to escort his body home, but by the time they got to me, his body was already on the plane coming home,” Huber says.

Huber served a total of 18 months in two stints in Vietnam, 1967-1969. He was honorably discharged in 1970 and became a union tradesman in Bloomington, helping to build the monument to the Vietnam vets that stands at Miller Park.

— Bruce Yentes

‘Pretty low and we drew fire all of the time’ D uring his Vietnam tour of duty from 1969 to 1970, Army Spec. 4 Dennis Carroll of Bloomington had a bird’seye view of enemy troop movement.

As a flight operations assistant originally based in Vung Tau, Carroll was a technical observer on OV-1 Mohawk aircraft that flew regular surveillance missions.

“The Mohawk did photographic missions up and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” says Carroll, alluding to a network of jungle paths winding from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia and into South Vietnam. The paths were used as a supply route by the North Vietnamese.

“We took pictures and brought them back to Army intelligence,” Carroll says.

The low altitude flown by the surveillance aircraft could lead to some dicey situations.

“If you flew SLAR (Side Looking Airborne Radar), you flew at about 7,500 feet,” Carroll says. “The infrared surveillance was at about 1,500 feet, so you were pretty low and we drew fire all of the time. The plane got hit a couple of times, but we were never shot down. And we never got hit bad enough to where we had to turn around and come back immediately.”

Carroll says the aircraft were the only ones used by the Army that were equipped with ejection seats.

“I was told that when the pilot (signaled), you didn’t ask any questions, you’d just eject,” he says.

“But that never happened.

Dennis I came out of it all right.”

Carroll Carroll joined the Army at 17, right out of Bloomington High School. He requested his tour of Vietnam.

“I pretty much volunteered for it. I was a young kid and wanted to see what it was all about,” he says. “After I got the orders, I kind of had second thoughts about it.”

Carroll served in the 73rd Surveillance Aviation Company. He keeps in touch with the company through a website and said he’d be interested in returning to southeast Asia to witness the change that’s taken place since the hostilities ended.

“I’m glad I went,” he says, “but I wouldn’t want to do it again.”

— Bruce Yentes

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

Wednesday, November 11, 2015 19

‘There were some good ‘When The Wall Hit Home’ things that came out of it’ I W hile stationed at Duc Pho in Vietnam, Don Taylor of Bloomington found a special companion: a pet

beetle.

“I don’t know where I found him, but I put him on a string,” recalls Taylor, then an Army sergeant working in intelligence with the 11th Infantry Brigade in 1968. “Sometimes you could throw him up in the air and he would fly around like a model airplane on the string.

“At night I’d put him outside and tie him to a bush or whatever, so he could, in my mind, eat leaves or whatever beetles eat.”

While at Duc Pho, Taylor sat in on interrogations as an observer. Even though he did not participate in the interrogations, he admits that some of the harsh treatment troubled him.

“At first it surprised me how brutal and, I’ll say, inhumane we could be — we being the American interrogators and other people involved,” he says.

“It was rather indiscriminate; a lot of the people that were interrogated were just detainees and turned out to be completely innocent civilians.”

Taylor says the interrogators he knew “were very good people” who originally never intended to use physical means against detainees.

“It seemed like, in the minds of the inter-

rogators, it was retaliation for something that they had heard had been done to an American,” he says.

After moving on from Duc Pho, Taylor had some rewarding experiences when he worked as an analyst in Phu Bai with the 24th Corps intelligence unit preparing Don briefings.

“I worked with the same Taylor people, in the same van, 1218 hours a day every day,” he says. “But it was a really good experience.”

Upon returning to Bloomington, Taylor earned a degree from Illinois State. After 22 years in banking, he earned a master’s degree in counseling and psychology. He now works as a therapist in private practice and at the Center for Human Services.

He still considers his time in Vietnam as a mostly positive experience.

“There were some good things that came out of it,” he says. “I don’t mean the war itself, but for me personally and the way I look at people.”

— Joe Deacon

t was 96 degrees in my man’s hometown, His brothers were coming from all around.

Veterans and brothers; World War I and II, ‘Nam vets and families, Korean vets, too.

All joined together, together and strong, Mourning their losses, after so long.

My husband stood vigil, proud, straight and tall, As our friends and our brothers arrived at the Wall.

As I was standing and reading the names, I saw my reflection, I felt all the pain.

My husband beside me, I thank God he was spared.

The feeling of helplessness - we all still cared.

I thought of their stories, their stories of old; Those precious stories would never be told.

A small flag, a beer can, unopened and left; For one of too many, for one of the best.

The heat was awful, as I wiped my brow; I wanted to help them, to help them right now.

The sun showed no mercy - typical, true, As ‘Nam showed no mercy in heat or for you.

The sweat and the tears and the blood were there, too.

Just before leaving, in the sun’s glare, I stood there beside him, in a dazed stare, Remembering our brothers, remembering them all; That’s when I saw us melting into the Wall.

Becky Ashenbremer, of Bloomington, wrote the poem on June 26, 1989, after visiting the Traveling Wall in Pontiac. Her poetry also is inscribed on the Vietnam memorial at Miller Park. Her husband, Ron, died in 2013 of cancers related to Agent Orange exposure.

Central Illinoisans on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall nnn McLean County

Gary C. Baize, Richard D. Buckles, William R. Buff, George E. Burchett, Irving S. Chenoweth III, Bernard J. Cook, Terry L. Crutcher, James W. Edwards, William E. Embry, Frank R. Esch, Thomas L. Hoeniges, Thomas C. Jacobs, Omar D. Jones, William W. Little III, Thomas K. Long, Mark E. Madsen, Edward K. Meyer, Donald E. Monkman, Donald W. Olsen Jr., David R. Page, Robert G. Pinkston, David W. Pippin, Larry S. Rainey, William E. Reel, Richard Ridgeway, William R. Schroeder, David L. Scott, Donald C. Taylor, Terry L. Thornton, Timothy L. White, Raymond G. Witzig.

LaSalle County

Joseph R. Ajster, Allen L. Arthur, Kenneth W. Boaz, Donald L. Bute, Cody R. Calkins, Daniel E. Carey, Mar-

tin C. Carr, Herald L. Delaney, William T. Diamond Jr., Mildred H. Dingman, Richard W. Dodd, Michael K. Fultz, David Groene, Patrick L. Haley, Timothy M. Hamilton, Gerald D. Jerde, James A. Jones, David R. Mann, Dennis C. Miller, Greg W. Mills, Richard W. Mindock, Ronald L. Munson, Michael D. Puetz, Randall E. Ramsden, Jon C. Sapp, Charles H. Schaefer, Donald B. Siekierka, Frankie Stanley, Kenneth K. Tower Jr., Norma E. Treest, Michael J. Vangelisti, Paul B. Woolford, Louis C. Zucker.

Livingston County

Richard L. Dixon, Ronald E. Schmidt, Larry E. Sinks

Logan County

Jon D. Baker, James A. Collins, Carson G. Culleton, Raymond L. Gee Jr., Charles E. Halford, David L. Jones, Marshall E. Naffziger, George J. Orr, Andrew G. Richard, Michael T. Scroggin.

Tazewell County

Larry G. Asbridge, Carl R. Barnhart, Jerry W. Bell, Robert D. Beutel, Benjamin H. Binegar Jr., Terry L. Bloomer, Elyvin L. Brown, Calvin F. Butterfield, John W. Clayton, William M. Dean, Alonzo L. Dixon, Bernard C. Mattson, Ramon A. Meeker, Jerry E. Metcalf, John E. Miles, Russell E. Moke, Terry D. Moore, Michael T. Moran, Billy E. Myers, John T. Nelson, John F. Payne, Hershel G. Rogers, Aldo Rossi Jr., Kenneth E.

Schultz, James L. Smith, Stanley B. Smith, John Spurlock, Michael L. Stacy, Everett L. Tabor, William D. Trent, Clifford I. Wright.

Woodford County

Steven D. Belsly, Bernard L. Bucher, Dennis L. Clymer, John D. Herington, Robert D. Janssen, Richard J. Rhodes, Wayne A. Washburn.

nnn

20 Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Pantagraph/ThoseWhoServed

Introducing an INVISIBLE HEARING DEVICE YOU CAN AFFORD.

A virtually invisible personal sound amplifier.

$

ONLY

499 EACH

For mild amplification in special situations.

A FREE HEARING SCREENING will show if youare a candidate for the QLeaf Lite™

Call Today to Schedule Your Appointment ( 888) 305-2103 BLOOMINGTON

( 888) 306-2984 PEORIA

( 888) 306-2366 PONTIAC

( 888) 297-8372 WASHINGTON

2412 E. Washington, Suite 2

303 West Madison

5016 N. University St., Suite 110

100 Hillcrest Drive

www.accuquest.com

PROMO CODE N-PAN-424-FP-C