thedrifter
08-27-07, 08:02 AM
War and Love
By DICK JOHNSON and KRISTIN BUEHNER, Of The Globe Gazette
The Vietnam War was a huge factor in the lives of all men who came of age during the 1960s and early 1970s.
All faced the draft. Of those drafted, most served. Others enlisted because they felt it was their duty or to give themselves some control over how and where they served.
Some who did serve lucked out and were not assigned to Vietnam.
And conscience compelled others not to serve at all. Some of these men were given conscientious objector status and performed alternative service. A few men moved to Canada.
As the Globe Gazette’s Summer of Love series continues, some of these men tell their stories.
Forty years ago, while his peers partied and protested back home, Ken Wheeler was in rough territory.
The Mason City man spent part of 1967, the Summer of Love, aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier off the coast of South Vietnam. Later, he served with a highly-decorated helicopter attack squadron.
Now he has serious health problems, some of which may be related to prolonged exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange.
Wheeler, 66, lost both legs to diabetes, which has been linked to that chemical, a herbicide used to expose enemy soldiers hidden by lush vegetation. Some 20 million gallons of herbicides were used in Vietnam between 1962 and 1971, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Yet he’s not bitter.
“I have no real bad feelings on it, on the Vietnam thing,” he said. “I volunteered to go do it, not so much to fight the war. I went over in hopes of being able to keep some of our troops alive on the ground. That was our specialty.
“If they knew about it and were withholding information, that’s underhanded. But that goes on every day in the government,” he said. “I volunteered to go over there.”
Wheeler earned the Bronze Star, Navy Commendation Medal with silver star and 18 medals for combat flights.
When a chopper broke up in flight, he spent a couple of hours extracting bodies from a pond doused with Agent Orange. The surface looked like an oil slick. Fish were killed.
“I was definitely exposed on quite a few occasions,” he said.
His family has no history of diabetes. But it hit him quickly, and several years ago his legs broke out in a rash.
Wheeler said his feet looked like they’d been in a “deep fat fryer.”
He also has reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD), a chronic neurological syndrome characterized by severe burning pain, pathological changes in bone and skin, excessive sweating, tissue swelling and extreme sensitivity to touch, according to the Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome Association.
He takes morphine daily “just to keep the edge off.”
“I don’t complain,” Wheeler said. “Most people, they only live about two years once this RSD goes full-body. I’m living a good life. I can do just about anything I used to do, except a lot slower.”
The war in Vietnam “changed my life completely,” said Mason City High School graduate RON MULDOON, 58, now of Dallas, Texas.
Drafted into the Army, he served in Vietnam for a year, entering the war six months after graduating in 1968.
He was awarded two Purple Hearts for shrapnel wounds.
He also has cancer of the larynx, which his doctors have attributed to the effects of Agent Orange.
“Being out in the field where they sprayed this stuff, we came in just covered with it,” he said.
“I didn’t really want to go, but I felt I was serving my country — before I got over there and saw what was going on,” Muldoon said of his war experience.
There were areas, especially around villages, called no-fire zones, he said.
“But that’s where the Viet Cong were and that’s where they were launching mortars.”
Drugs such as marijuana, heroin and liquid speed were easy to get in Vietnam, Muldoon said. “It was an escape from reality. It was a release from the tension. You didn’t know if you were going to live or die.
“Guys came back with drug problems,” he said. “You were kind of an outcast. I wouldn’t even talk about the war when I got back. There were so many people that hated the war and hated veterans.”
After Vietnam, “life didn’t seem so fun anymore,” he said. “I saw things most young men never see. It kind of hardened me.”
A former high school athlete, Muldoon said he became somewhat of a loner after Vietnam. “I didn’t like large crowds. I got upset easily. I just changed. I used to be pretty happy-go-lucky.”
JERRY HOFFMAN was preparing for Vietnam during the Summer of Love.
The Lake Mills man graduated from North Iowa Area Community College and worked at a Ford dealership during 1967.
Figuring he’d be drafted and end up in the Marine Corps, he enlisted instead in the Air Force and spent a year in Vietnam and a month in Korea during 1969 and 1970.
“It was a nervous time. It really was,” said Hoffman, 59. “The people back home didn’t realize things as good as they do now (thanks to a more pervasive media). They didn’t really know what kind of trouble we were in.”
He was away from a bomb storage area when it exploded. Some of his friends died.
“I’d say you grew up awful fast,” Hoffman said. “I think guys did grow up faster over there.”
He felt badly upon hearing that his peers were living it up back home.
“You were more lonesome than you were anything else,” Hoffman said. “But you worked seven days a week so you didn’t have a lot of time to think about that.”
While Gulf War veterans and those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are typically honored publicly, those returning from Vietnam quickly ditched their fatigues for civilian clothes.
Hoffman saw protesters at airports. Some spat at the returning vets.
“At that time, there was a lot of protesting and stuff going on,” he said. “Nobody really liked the war.
“It was a different era in our life, I guess.”
“Many young men chose to get married to avoid the draft, but that deferment was eliminated when the services needed to increase the numbers of servicemen,” said BRETT LICHTY, 58, a 1967 graduate of Mason City High School now living in Libertyville, Ill.
“They also eliminated student deferments and established a lottery system for meeting the needs of the military.”
Lichty had friends who died in Vietnam and others who returned from their tours of duty with “horrible” memories. He witnessed the suicide of one such veteran.
After graduating from college, Lichty spent three days at Fort Des Moines taking his physical for the draft.
“If I had passed my physical, my wife and I were prepared to leave this country and live in Canada,” he said. “I thank God and a great senator from Iowa — Harold Hughes — who intervened and persuaded the medical team at the Fort to take a close look at my history. When they did that, I failed the physical. They never did tell me what caused them to fail me and I didn’t really care. I was elated, because my greatest fear for four years had been eliminated.”
Fellow classmate JERRY WETTERLING, 58, still remembers his draft number: 125.
“I was supposed to be the last number picked in 1971,” said Wetterling, who lives today in St. Joseph, Minn.
Wetterling obtained status as a conscientious objector.
“I had to go in front of the Cerro Gordo County draft board,” he said. “My minister from Bethlehem Lutheran Church went with me.”
Wetterling performed alternative service in Washington, D.C.
Mason City native ROSS ANDERSON, 58, who now lives in Oxford Mills, Canada, moved with his wife to Canada in 1971 to avoid the draft.
A 1967 graduate of MCHS who was once part of President Richard Nixon’s so-called “silent majority,” Anderson said his views of the Vietnam War changed 180 degrees as information about the government’s management of the war and its dishonesty with the American public filtered out.
A friend who lived down the street from him was killed in Vietnam. Another friend was fearful of being drafted to the point that he suffered a perforated stomach ulcer. This friend told Anderson he would move to Canada if drafted.
“It never entered my mind that anyone would move away from the USA,” Anderson said.
But it planted a seed in his head that led to his later moving to Canada to take a job as Telecom Services Officer with the federal government of Canada in Ottawa, where he worked for 32 years. He is now retired.
MIKE SHERER, 58, also a 1967 graduate of MCHS, now living in Treynor, said that for him, the summer of 1967 was the summer of fear.
“I remember being afraid, primarily of the draft,” he said. “You did not want to be an unattached male running around at that time.”
“I decided to stay in school.”
Two weeks after graduating from the University of Iowa in 1971, Sherer was in basic training for the Air Force. He was never called upon to go to Vietnam. “I was very lucky,” he said.
JOHN SCHUTT, 58, of Littleton, Colo., another 1967 MCHS graduate, also counts himself lucky.
He voluntarily entered the Marines with two classmates in 1969 after two years at North Iowa Area Community College.
One of his friends made it back from Vietnam. The other, Rick Glaspey, was killed.
After boot camp, Schutt was sent to North Carolina to be a welder, then was sent to Cuba. He was never sent to Vietnam.
“The war messed up a lot of guys big time,” he said. “There were a lot of suicides. I thank God I didn’t have to go over.”
Someone who had a completely different view of the war was SCOTT CRANDALL, 57, also a 1967 graduate of Mason City High School, now of Greenville, S.C.
He proudly entered West Point Military Academy in July of 1967, two months after graduating from high school.
“During my four years at West Point, I was called vile names by tourists, spit on in New York City and entered many debates with some of the least-informed, most narrow-minded people I’ve ever encountered,” he said. “And these were, more often than not, college kids my own age.”
A 2nd lieutenant in 1971, Crandall did not serve in Vietnam but in 1975 was “eight hours from going as part of a divisional reaction force that was supposed to secure the embassy in Saigon. The perimeter collapsed before we could get in the air.”
“Other than reading and conversation with those who were there, I have no battlefield knowledge of the war,” said Crandall. “However, I can tell you that, in my opinion, the war was won on the battlefield and lost in the living rooms and classrooms of America and in conference halls in Paris and the floors of Congress in Washington. In other words, we voluntarily lost that war. We got out relatively unscathed, but it was a bit tougher on our allies.”
Crandall has little good to say about the counterculture movement that started in the summer of 1967.
“Among the hallmarks of ‘tolerance’ and ‘love’ that were ascribed to our generation at that time, it has seemed to me since that tolerance was simply code for shaming everyone else to put up with what appealed to us, while love was a nickname for verbal involvement spread over practical apathy with varied doses of lust and drugs,” he said.
The one good thing that emerged from those times was what Crandall termed “the explosion of liberation” that accompanied the counterculture movement. “It was long overdue, particularly in regard to race,” he said.
“Thank God we got over the Summer of Love,” Crandall said. “That was a holiday, not a sign of coming reality.”
Ellie
By DICK JOHNSON and KRISTIN BUEHNER, Of The Globe Gazette
The Vietnam War was a huge factor in the lives of all men who came of age during the 1960s and early 1970s.
All faced the draft. Of those drafted, most served. Others enlisted because they felt it was their duty or to give themselves some control over how and where they served.
Some who did serve lucked out and were not assigned to Vietnam.
And conscience compelled others not to serve at all. Some of these men were given conscientious objector status and performed alternative service. A few men moved to Canada.
As the Globe Gazette’s Summer of Love series continues, some of these men tell their stories.
Forty years ago, while his peers partied and protested back home, Ken Wheeler was in rough territory.
The Mason City man spent part of 1967, the Summer of Love, aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier off the coast of South Vietnam. Later, he served with a highly-decorated helicopter attack squadron.
Now he has serious health problems, some of which may be related to prolonged exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange.
Wheeler, 66, lost both legs to diabetes, which has been linked to that chemical, a herbicide used to expose enemy soldiers hidden by lush vegetation. Some 20 million gallons of herbicides were used in Vietnam between 1962 and 1971, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Yet he’s not bitter.
“I have no real bad feelings on it, on the Vietnam thing,” he said. “I volunteered to go do it, not so much to fight the war. I went over in hopes of being able to keep some of our troops alive on the ground. That was our specialty.
“If they knew about it and were withholding information, that’s underhanded. But that goes on every day in the government,” he said. “I volunteered to go over there.”
Wheeler earned the Bronze Star, Navy Commendation Medal with silver star and 18 medals for combat flights.
When a chopper broke up in flight, he spent a couple of hours extracting bodies from a pond doused with Agent Orange. The surface looked like an oil slick. Fish were killed.
“I was definitely exposed on quite a few occasions,” he said.
His family has no history of diabetes. But it hit him quickly, and several years ago his legs broke out in a rash.
Wheeler said his feet looked like they’d been in a “deep fat fryer.”
He also has reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD), a chronic neurological syndrome characterized by severe burning pain, pathological changes in bone and skin, excessive sweating, tissue swelling and extreme sensitivity to touch, according to the Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome Association.
He takes morphine daily “just to keep the edge off.”
“I don’t complain,” Wheeler said. “Most people, they only live about two years once this RSD goes full-body. I’m living a good life. I can do just about anything I used to do, except a lot slower.”
The war in Vietnam “changed my life completely,” said Mason City High School graduate RON MULDOON, 58, now of Dallas, Texas.
Drafted into the Army, he served in Vietnam for a year, entering the war six months after graduating in 1968.
He was awarded two Purple Hearts for shrapnel wounds.
He also has cancer of the larynx, which his doctors have attributed to the effects of Agent Orange.
“Being out in the field where they sprayed this stuff, we came in just covered with it,” he said.
“I didn’t really want to go, but I felt I was serving my country — before I got over there and saw what was going on,” Muldoon said of his war experience.
There were areas, especially around villages, called no-fire zones, he said.
“But that’s where the Viet Cong were and that’s where they were launching mortars.”
Drugs such as marijuana, heroin and liquid speed were easy to get in Vietnam, Muldoon said. “It was an escape from reality. It was a release from the tension. You didn’t know if you were going to live or die.
“Guys came back with drug problems,” he said. “You were kind of an outcast. I wouldn’t even talk about the war when I got back. There were so many people that hated the war and hated veterans.”
After Vietnam, “life didn’t seem so fun anymore,” he said. “I saw things most young men never see. It kind of hardened me.”
A former high school athlete, Muldoon said he became somewhat of a loner after Vietnam. “I didn’t like large crowds. I got upset easily. I just changed. I used to be pretty happy-go-lucky.”
JERRY HOFFMAN was preparing for Vietnam during the Summer of Love.
The Lake Mills man graduated from North Iowa Area Community College and worked at a Ford dealership during 1967.
Figuring he’d be drafted and end up in the Marine Corps, he enlisted instead in the Air Force and spent a year in Vietnam and a month in Korea during 1969 and 1970.
“It was a nervous time. It really was,” said Hoffman, 59. “The people back home didn’t realize things as good as they do now (thanks to a more pervasive media). They didn’t really know what kind of trouble we were in.”
He was away from a bomb storage area when it exploded. Some of his friends died.
“I’d say you grew up awful fast,” Hoffman said. “I think guys did grow up faster over there.”
He felt badly upon hearing that his peers were living it up back home.
“You were more lonesome than you were anything else,” Hoffman said. “But you worked seven days a week so you didn’t have a lot of time to think about that.”
While Gulf War veterans and those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are typically honored publicly, those returning from Vietnam quickly ditched their fatigues for civilian clothes.
Hoffman saw protesters at airports. Some spat at the returning vets.
“At that time, there was a lot of protesting and stuff going on,” he said. “Nobody really liked the war.
“It was a different era in our life, I guess.”
“Many young men chose to get married to avoid the draft, but that deferment was eliminated when the services needed to increase the numbers of servicemen,” said BRETT LICHTY, 58, a 1967 graduate of Mason City High School now living in Libertyville, Ill.
“They also eliminated student deferments and established a lottery system for meeting the needs of the military.”
Lichty had friends who died in Vietnam and others who returned from their tours of duty with “horrible” memories. He witnessed the suicide of one such veteran.
After graduating from college, Lichty spent three days at Fort Des Moines taking his physical for the draft.
“If I had passed my physical, my wife and I were prepared to leave this country and live in Canada,” he said. “I thank God and a great senator from Iowa — Harold Hughes — who intervened and persuaded the medical team at the Fort to take a close look at my history. When they did that, I failed the physical. They never did tell me what caused them to fail me and I didn’t really care. I was elated, because my greatest fear for four years had been eliminated.”
Fellow classmate JERRY WETTERLING, 58, still remembers his draft number: 125.
“I was supposed to be the last number picked in 1971,” said Wetterling, who lives today in St. Joseph, Minn.
Wetterling obtained status as a conscientious objector.
“I had to go in front of the Cerro Gordo County draft board,” he said. “My minister from Bethlehem Lutheran Church went with me.”
Wetterling performed alternative service in Washington, D.C.
Mason City native ROSS ANDERSON, 58, who now lives in Oxford Mills, Canada, moved with his wife to Canada in 1971 to avoid the draft.
A 1967 graduate of MCHS who was once part of President Richard Nixon’s so-called “silent majority,” Anderson said his views of the Vietnam War changed 180 degrees as information about the government’s management of the war and its dishonesty with the American public filtered out.
A friend who lived down the street from him was killed in Vietnam. Another friend was fearful of being drafted to the point that he suffered a perforated stomach ulcer. This friend told Anderson he would move to Canada if drafted.
“It never entered my mind that anyone would move away from the USA,” Anderson said.
But it planted a seed in his head that led to his later moving to Canada to take a job as Telecom Services Officer with the federal government of Canada in Ottawa, where he worked for 32 years. He is now retired.
MIKE SHERER, 58, also a 1967 graduate of MCHS, now living in Treynor, said that for him, the summer of 1967 was the summer of fear.
“I remember being afraid, primarily of the draft,” he said. “You did not want to be an unattached male running around at that time.”
“I decided to stay in school.”
Two weeks after graduating from the University of Iowa in 1971, Sherer was in basic training for the Air Force. He was never called upon to go to Vietnam. “I was very lucky,” he said.
JOHN SCHUTT, 58, of Littleton, Colo., another 1967 MCHS graduate, also counts himself lucky.
He voluntarily entered the Marines with two classmates in 1969 after two years at North Iowa Area Community College.
One of his friends made it back from Vietnam. The other, Rick Glaspey, was killed.
After boot camp, Schutt was sent to North Carolina to be a welder, then was sent to Cuba. He was never sent to Vietnam.
“The war messed up a lot of guys big time,” he said. “There were a lot of suicides. I thank God I didn’t have to go over.”
Someone who had a completely different view of the war was SCOTT CRANDALL, 57, also a 1967 graduate of Mason City High School, now of Greenville, S.C.
He proudly entered West Point Military Academy in July of 1967, two months after graduating from high school.
“During my four years at West Point, I was called vile names by tourists, spit on in New York City and entered many debates with some of the least-informed, most narrow-minded people I’ve ever encountered,” he said. “And these were, more often than not, college kids my own age.”
A 2nd lieutenant in 1971, Crandall did not serve in Vietnam but in 1975 was “eight hours from going as part of a divisional reaction force that was supposed to secure the embassy in Saigon. The perimeter collapsed before we could get in the air.”
“Other than reading and conversation with those who were there, I have no battlefield knowledge of the war,” said Crandall. “However, I can tell you that, in my opinion, the war was won on the battlefield and lost in the living rooms and classrooms of America and in conference halls in Paris and the floors of Congress in Washington. In other words, we voluntarily lost that war. We got out relatively unscathed, but it was a bit tougher on our allies.”
Crandall has little good to say about the counterculture movement that started in the summer of 1967.
“Among the hallmarks of ‘tolerance’ and ‘love’ that were ascribed to our generation at that time, it has seemed to me since that tolerance was simply code for shaming everyone else to put up with what appealed to us, while love was a nickname for verbal involvement spread over practical apathy with varied doses of lust and drugs,” he said.
The one good thing that emerged from those times was what Crandall termed “the explosion of liberation” that accompanied the counterculture movement. “It was long overdue, particularly in regard to race,” he said.
“Thank God we got over the Summer of Love,” Crandall said. “That was a holiday, not a sign of coming reality.”
Ellie