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thedrifter
07-20-07, 07:30 AM
Published July 19, 2007 11:56 pm - Combat has become a bond between former Marine Tom McLaughlin and his son, current Marine Michael McLaughlin.

Father views son's service from perspective of Vietnam
Tom McLaughlin lauds generation of volunteer warriors

By Mark Fischenich
Free Press Staff Writer

MANKATO —

Tom McLaughlin isn’t one for telling war stories.

The little bit of detail he provides about that day in Vietnam — Feb. 3, 1968 — is preceded by the words “This isn’t for the paper ... ”

People who know what happened that day, however, describe a young Marine squad leader who took on multiple enemy soldiers at close range in an effort to protect his men, knowing fully that it was going to end badly for him.

“You can never explain what it’s like being in combat,” McLaughlin said. “You can try to explain what it’s like to family, you can try to explain to friends. And as eloquent as you are, you can never get them to fully understand the experience of being in combat, incidents where things happen, where people die.

“People who were never in that situation will ask, ‘How could you ever manage to put up with that situation? How could you survive?’”

So when Michael McLaughlin returned from his first seven-month tour of duty in Iraq, his father didn’t need to ask questions like that. Tom McLaughlin knew his job wasn’t to ask any questions at all.

“After the first tour when my son came home, I met him in Hawaii,” McLaughlin said. “We sat in the balcony over Waikiki Beach, and I let him talk for two hours and I just listened. As someone who experienced the same thing, he knew I could understand.”

“I still remember ...”

When his son was deployed, McLaughlin worried like other parents of sons and daughters serving in Iraq. And then he worried like most other parents can’t.

“Basically, him being in the same situation as I was, I worried about everything,” McLaughlin said. “Because what he described to me, I could feel.”

McLaughlin was gravely wounded that day in Vietnam and lost his leg. But that wasn’t the most trying moment of the war for McLaughlin.

“I still remember every friend that I lost, just as they were 40 years ago,” he said. “You forget all the bad things about them and remember all the positive things about them.”

When the memory of one of his buddies comes back, even decades later, the remembrance always ends the same way — with the last moment he saw them as they were carried away.

“Some were alive and some weren’t and some died right there with me.”

In Michael McLaughlin’s second seven-month tour in Iraq — at 22 years of age — he saw some of his fellow Marines fall.

“He could talk to me in a way that he couldn’t talk to his mother because I’d been through the same thing — had lost friends,” said McLaughlin, who is confident his son is managing his war experience with maturity and strength. “He’s the same person. He’s just experienced a lot more than other people his age have — or ever will.”


“Totally in awe ...”

While McLaughlin’s focus is, naturally, on his son, he worries about all the young men and women serving in the war.

“I’ve met so many of them through my son,” he said. “... I’m just totally in awe of the fact that we have young people who are willing to serve under the conditions they serve. It says something about this generation that I think a lot of people are overlooking.”

The Americans of World War II have been called “The Greatest Generation” in a best-selling book, but McLaughlin thinks today’s group of soldiers — all of whom voluntarily signed up — need to stand second to no other.

“Every one of those young people over there now have enlisted and made that personal decision to serve this country,” he said. “They’re probably one of the most selfless generations.”

He met another of the young soldiers in 2004 when he heard that a soldier from the area had lost a leg and met up with the man at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis.

“His attitude reminded me so much of the guys 40 years ago, just positive, positive, positive.”

They talked prosthetics, particularly about the new C-Leg — a computerized leg that’s a fairly recent development and that McLaughlin is now using.

“You have to plug it in at night, just like a cell phone,” he said.

They didn’t tell war stories, other than the briefest possible discussion of how a 60-year-old Vietnam vet and a much younger Iraq war vet came to be sitting together in the same hospital with the same wound.

“He said ‘RPG’,” McLaughlin said. “I said ‘AK-47.’”

Ellie