Celebrating A Band Of Brothers

They met in the fall of 1965 - a handful of Army officers, non-coms and nearly 800 draftees stepping from buses at Fort Carson, Colorado. The draftees knew little about the Army except that they were in it. They began their basic training as members of the 1st Battalion (Mechanized) 11th Infantry. But the First Cavalry Division (Airmobile) had deployed to Vietnam with eight maneuver battalions instead of the standard nine. The Cav was authorized another battalion. In April 1966, the draftees at Fort Carson became the 5th Battalion of the 7th Cavalry.

They trained together until the summer of 1966. Initially bound for Germany when they first came to Fort Carson, they left for Vietnam in July as a unit. They had lived and worked together for nine months, forging a bond that would prove to be a double-edged sword - they knew each other's strengths and capabilities, they knew what to expect of one another; but many would suffer and die in the combat that awaited them. Friendship and familiarity removed anonymity. They would have no emotional anesthetic to dull the pain of loss.

Twenty-four years after they came home and went their separate ways, one of their officers, Bernie Grady, who lived in Pennsylvania, put a Locator ad in The VVA Veteran. Unbeknownst to him, another 5/7 trooper - Jasper Catanzaro - had done the same thing in the same edition of the paper.

Catanzaro lived in Detroit, where he was an official with the United Auto Workers union. He had thought about trying to contact members of the 5/7 in previous years and knew a number of them lived in the Detroit area. He saw some of them at a wedding in 1969, two years after he came home from Vietnam. He remembered three of them had lost legs in the war.

After the ads ran, Catanzaro got a call from one of the 5/7's NCOs, George Porod, who lived in northern Michigan. The sergeant called Grady, too.

"That was the spark," Catanzaro said.

Not long after the phone calls, Catanzaro traveled to Washington for a Labor Day union parade. He made a side trip to visit Grady in Pennsylvania. (Grady died last year.) Grady, who in 1994 published a book about the 5/7 in Vietnam - "On the Tiger's Back" - said he would track down the officers; Catanzaro would try to find enlisted men.

"Then we just started looking up people," Catanzaro said.

He went to the library to check out-of-town phone books. He read his old letters written when he was Vietnam. A self-described "pack rat," he had kept them all - 270 letters to his girlfriend and 140 letters to his parents. Some spoke of feeling alone. He wrote that his friends had been wounded and killed. He didn't think he was going to make it home alive.

Another contained an eerily prescient note. In 1966, he wrote to his mother: "This war is going to end the same way the Korean War did - 50,000 dead and we don't gain anything."

Every time he stopped moving in Vietnam, he pulled out a pad and wrote, creating a virtual diary of his time in the war. In some of the letters, he included sets of orders, which now contained exactly what he was looking for - names.

"From the orders, I started building a list of people in the battalion," he said. "As we heard from the other guys, they started sending in orders with lists of names. Bill Purdy from Ohio is with the steelworkers union and he moves around the country the way I move around the country. Bill was finding all kinds of guys, too. Pretty soon we started compiling a database." Today the database stands at around 4,000 names with approximately 1,400 active names and addresses.

They decided to hold a reunion in Detroit in 1992. Catanzaro and Purdy signed the $7,500 hotel contract with some trepidation. They didn't have a clue about how many people would show up. "We had about 120 guys come from around the country," Catanzaro, now the association's treasurer, said. "It was the 25th anniversary of the original group. Most of us came back in ' 67 some time. Severely wounded guys might have come home in ' 66. So 120 guys came, including the battalion commander, Col. Swett."

The contract wasn't the only source of nerves for Catanzaro. He had worked for months to make the reunion a reality, but as it drew closer, he wondered what might happen when he saw so many faces from the distant past.

"I guess I was nervous to see these guys after all the years," he said. "I don't really know what it was but a few days before I really didn't think I would go. But as soon as the guys started coming in, it was a fantastic feeling. We had gone to Vietnam as a battalion, came home, and we had a great reunion. From that we decided to include all members of the 5th Battalion 7th Cavalry in future reunions. We opened it up to those who were our replacements during our time there and those who came after us."

The unit was deactivated in 1971. In the years it served in Vietnam, 302 men were killed in action; five were listed as MIA. Four 5/7 troopers won the Medal of Honor, three posthumously. Seven members of its officer corps went on to become Army generals; around 30 of its non-commissioned officers retired as Command Sergeant Majors.

In the introduction to Bernie Grady's book about the 5/7, former battalion commander Col. Trevor (Ted) Swett wrote: "I had the privilege of getting to know these fine young citizen soldiers, many of them draftees, practically from the moment they entered the service. I was fortunate to be designated the first commander of the 5/7 Cav."

At their first reunion, he found his good fortune still holding.

"None of us had an idea of what would happen," he said. "And what happened was a tremendous bonding. Like me, the troopers who attended it probably had some misgivings. Will there be bitterness somehow? Soldiers weren't very much appreciated when they got home from Vietnam. There were a lot of questions going into the reunion, but from the minute we got there, those questions evaporated."

They built the reunion around families. They didn't want it to be a bunch of guys drinking beer and swapping war stories. They didn't want guys just coming to the reunion alone. They wanted something of value to everyone, something that would last and that families could take home when they left. Swett said they found it.

"It became apparent to me and virtually everyone there that this reunion had become a major healing project," he said. "There were a lot of people who had kept it all inside and much of that 'all' was bitterness, a refusal to talk about it with their families. After that reunion, I got several letters from wives saying 'I think you may have saved my marriage by getting this thing organized because he talks about it now and I understand.' "

Jasper Catanzaro received letters, too.

"I got some that made me cry," he said. "Wives would write me letters that thanked us and said they finally understood what all of us had gone through in Vietnam. I swear to God, some of those letters moved me to tears. Over the years, I'll bet I've gotten 20 letters like that. I've had probably 50 wives come up to me during reunions and tell me the same thing."

The first reunion lasted four days. They held a banquet and barbecue; they had company meetings and battalion meetings. They decided to form an association and named former commander Ted Swett its first president; the former C Company First Sergeant, Command Sergeant Major Haskell (Wes) Westmoreland was named vice president.

Westmoreland left his native West Virginia at 17 to join the Army. His career spanned 23 years and when the draftees met him in 1965, he was not the most popular man in the outfit. He drove them hard, knowing anything less would compromise their survival.

"He was a pain in the ass and we all hated him and he saved our lives," Karl Haartz said.

Westmoreland served three tours of duty in Vietnam, two of them with the 5/7. He said that since he retired in 1977, he hadn't gone near an Army post or anything else connected to the military. He joked about his reunion qualms.

"I got up to that reunion and I didn't know whether I was gonna get whipped or they was going to shake my hand," he said. "All the guys treated me real good. I saw one guy I didn't recognize, and I was standing over by the bar, and he was looking at me, and I was looking at him, and at my age (64) you can tell when somebody's thinking about kicking your butt. I walked over, and I said, 'Do I know you or do you know me?' He said, 'Well, how in the hell could anybody ever forget you?' "

Having made the decision to form an association, they set about the business of finding people to belong to it. For six years they worked primarily through the telephone - find a name, call information, make cold calls until they tracked someone down. When the Internet blossomed, tracking became easier. E-mail and search engines helped to turn up 4,000 names.

When the 1991 edition of The VVA Veteran arrived in Karl Haartz's New Hampshire home, he followed his habit of reading the Locator ads first. When he saw the 5/7 Cav ad, he sat down to make a list.

"I wrote down 15 to 18 names and hometowns that I had just from memory," he said. "I had them in my head."

Serendipity played a hand in finding people, too. Haartz knew a guy who lived in Crystal Lake, Illinois, but he couldn't get a phone number or address for him. So he wrote a letter with only the man's name and the town on the envelope.

"It turned out he worked in the post office," Haartz said. "They were getting ready to return the letter to me because it didn't have an address and one of the guys in the post office said to him, 'Hey, we got a letter addressed to you from a guy in New Hampshire. You know anybody in New Hampshire?' He said he did. That's how we found him."

But not everyone wanted to be found, and in at least one case, family members thought it best that someone be protected. Haartz had located a 5/7 veteran who lived only 35 miles from his home. Haartz called. A relative of the 5/7 vet said the man had died. Last January, Haartz received an e-mail from the "dead" veteran.

"On the tailgate of my pickup, in 4-inch letters, I've got - "5th Battalion 7th Cav, Vietnam 1966-71" - and our website - www.cav57.org, Haartz said. "He'd seen it at the mall, went to our website and found the e-mail address of a guy in Hawaii he was RTO (Radio Telephone Operator) for in Vietnam. He gave him my e-mail address and now we e-mail back and forth."

Another Haartz friend remains steadfast in his refusal to have anything to do with the association.

"He won't go near it," Haartz said. "He doesn't want to talk about it. He was in the 5/7 and I see him once every six months. He lives 12 miles away and he just doesn't want to loosen up. He's still got it wrapped up inside of him. We haven't found the trigger yet to get him to crack. He doesn't want to remember a thing about 'Nam and I think it bothers him a lot."

Wes Westmoreland tells of the other side of the coin, a moment when the group provided a release for what had been bottled up for so long.

"We had one squad leader who got shot on Thanksgiving Day," Westmoreland said. "Well, when he got out of the Army, he was about the same as me. He didn't go to anything that had anything to do with the military. It took him two and a half days to drive to our first reunion and when he got there and started talking to all these people he knew, it just relieved him of all those bad feelings about what happened in Vietnam. These guys stick together good. They went through a tough time, a very tough time. But we were blessed with good people, good troops, good young Americans from all walks of life."

They hold a reunion every two years. The next will be in July in St. Louis. They still look for more men to come. "Every time I get together with these guys, I feel better about where I've been and what I've done," Karl Haartz said. "We went through basic training together, infantry training, unit training. We'd been together for 18 months. The camaraderie developed through being an infantry soldier and watching each other's back is a lifelong thing. You don't forget these guys."

Their former commander, Ted Swett, said he didn't want to overstate the matter, but used the word "family" nonetheless.

"It's sort of like of having a family kind of relationship," he said. "The main value is that there is a healing to those who need it most. It's the value of getting together and realizing they have something in common and something they can be proud of. It's tinged with sadness because some of them didn't come home, but there is a feeling that we have something special and it comes across in what they say when we're together, not only to me, but to each other."

A Veterans Day Reunion

On Veterans Day, Jerry Barfield walked up to Tom Corey in a Washington hotel and introduced himself. Corey didn’t recognize him. Barfield had seen Corey’s name on an e-mail list some time before and was shocked at the sight of it. When he heard Corey would be at the Veterans Day dinner, he made inquiries.

When Barfield introduced himself, he told Corey he was one of the guys who put him on the chopper. They laughed when Barfield said, "You look a lot better now than you did then." He thought Corey was dead that day 34 years ago. Everybody did. Even Corey himself.

They hugged. They cried. Each says he gets emotional about these kinds of things now. Each says every moment means so much more now. "All kinds of things were running through my mind," Corey said.

On Jan. 31, 1968, in Quang Tri Province, 22-year-old Tom Corey was a squad leader with a First Cav unit. Jerry Barfield was a lieutenant’s RTO. A call came in to saddle up for a ride into a hot LZ. Corey had a bad feeling about it, a premonition he couldn’t shake. He didn’t want to go.

"I was trying to get my guys organized and not show them I had any bad feelings about where we were going," he said. "I had a responsibility, especially to the new guys."

On the flight to the LZ, Corey sat on the floor at the helicopter’s door with his feet on the skid. He liked to stay close to the door "in case those things fall from the sky." The helicopter didn’t touch down at the LZ, but hovered a few feet off the ground. Corey and his squad jumped, the bad feeling hanging with him all the way. He couldn’t rid himself of it.

They headed for dikes near the village. They called in artillery and air strikes. When the barrage ended, Corey stuck his head up over the dike’s edge to see the best way to approach the village and to locate other men. He saw a flash come from the tree line. It was the last thing he would remember clearly for a long time.

The bullet hit his neck on the left side, severed the main artery and the jugular vein, went through his back, hit his spinal cord, and exited his right shoulder.

That day, and for years afterward in hospital after hospital, people asked, Why is he alive? The artery, the vein. How could he live? He wondered himself. He thought he was dying, if not dead already.

"I remember saying words to myself, 'God forgive me,’ ’’ he said. "It’s like when you go to confession in the Catholic Church. I felt I needed to be forgiven for anything I might have done in my life, because I thought that was it. I was on my way out. I thought I had died."

Then came the hospitals - Japan, California, Colorado, Tennessee. Critical care wards. Burned men. Disfigured men. A triple amputee who screamed incessantly because there wasn’t enough medication to bring relief from the pain. Brief moments of consciousness lapsed into long periods of darkness. Someone told him he was paralyzed. He didn’t understand what it meant.

"I don’t remember who told me," Corey said. "It didn’t come across that I was paralyzed permanently. I tried to move and nothing on my body moved."

Tom Corey is the president of Vietnam Veterans of America now and one of the architects of the Veterans Initiative, an endeavor meant to bring healing to people on both sides of the war. He said it never occurred to him over the years that he would be in a position to give back in a meaningful way to so many people.

On Veterans Day, he sat at Jerry Barfield’s table in the hotel banquet room, talking about the war, looking at photo albums filled with Barfield’s Vietnam memories.

"I told him how much I admired him for what he was doing," Barfield said. "Most people in his condition would just give up on life and you couldn’t blame them in a sense. I admire him for what he’s done for Vietnam veterans. If I would have been in Tom’s position, I probably would have just given up on life."

Corey said such thoughts were not unfamiliar to him, that "giving up" was a companion for many years. The thoughts come to him even now. He knew men who had chosen to quit.

"I thought about it a lot," Corey said. "I thought about it in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. I lost several friends to suicide when I was in therapy in Memphis. I go through it every once in a while. Then I think about the things I do have, the things God has blessed me with, the family and friends and people who are so important to me. So I hang in some more."

Jerry Barfield said he spent 21 years in the Army and laughs at the thought. Old friends said he hated the Army so much they couldn’t begin to imagine that he’d make a career out of it. He said he gets "real emotional now when I talk about my guys."

"It’s hard to put into words what I felt when I saw Tom," he said. "When I was in the Army, I was never like this. It’s different now, but I don’t know why."

Corey said the moments Barfield described carry significant weight.

"Vietnam changed the lives of those who served," he said. "There is only one group of people who understand that change. It’s important that we talk about it, about the sacrifices that were made. No one else wants to talk about those things. No one understands. The guys on The Wall, the guys who have left us since then - thousands have left us so early, dying of things related to what happened to them in Vietnam. There are so many people. It’s all around us. It’s important to make that connection. It’s important to touch those people we served with."

A Death in the Desert: The Legacy of Lori Piestewa

More than three months after Pfc. Lori Piestewa's death March 23 in an Iraqi ambush near Nasiryah, the telephone calls still come every day to the Hopi tribal offices in Kykotsmovi, Arizona. The callers are American veterans who want to memorialize her, remember her sacrifice, make donations for the care of her children; the callers are Australians and Austrians and Kuwaitis and other people from around the world; many of the calls come from Muslim countries. Lori Piestewa, a young Native American Private First Class in the U.S. Army, touched something universal in the human spirit.

``I don't know what it was, but she touched everybody,'' Hopi spokesperson Vanessa Charles said.

Piestewa (pronounced py-ESS-tuh-wah) was the 23-year-old mother of two children--a 4-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter. She was assigned to the 507th Maintenance Company and died with 11 other soldiers in an ambush when the convoy, slowed by heavy equipment and having taken a wrong turn, came under heavy enemy fire.

Piestewa is believed to have been the first Native American woman to die in combat in a foreign war.

``Her death came as such a strong, debilitating blow to all of us,'' Charles said in a telephone interview from her tribal office. ``When we first heard about it, we knew only that it could be one of our own, but we didn't know who it was, much less that it was a woman. When we found out who it was, it really struck a chord and it has continued to hit people hard. She was so young and she was a mother. It struck everyone on a lot of different levels.''

Charles said that while she understood the impact of a young woman's death, and especially that of a young mother, Piestewa's gender was not the strongest shock that rippled through the tribe.

``It didn't make any difference to us,'' she said. ``She was just one of the tribe. Of course, this is a matrilineal society and matriarchal at that. But the fact that she was a member of this tribe is what struck a chord. Naturally, anywhere in this country or in the world, if a woman dies in the course of a war, it does have more of an impact. But I think what weighs more heavily with people here is the fact that somebody from the tribe died.''

About 12,000 people live on the Hopi reservation. Hopi officials said 56 currently serve in the armed forces and that in early April all but eight were in Iraq. Charles said that many Hopi enlisted in order to escape the difficult economic conditions found on the reservation.

``On many Indian reservations, in a practical sense there isn't much to do,'' she said. ``Just trying to support your family is difficult. The military is a good avenue for people to do that. Apart from that, we are Americans, too. When the call comes out to defend the freedom we have, like everyone else who is American, the Hopi will answer.''

Charles pointed out in an April article in the El Paso Times that answering the call
doesn't come without a unique set of internal conflicts.

``There's no warring tradition in Hopi,'' she told the newspaper. ``Hopis are considered peaceful, and they are considered the caretakers of the Earth. That's where the conflict comes in.''

In the weeks following her death, Piestewa was honored at the urging of Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano when Squaw Peak, in near-north central Phoenix, was renamed Piestewa Peak, a move that came with its own controversy. Richard Pinkerton, a member of the state Geographic and Historic Names Board, citing concerns that the governor had pressured the board into changing the name, resigned. He was replaced by a Native American woman.

While the name change has been approved on the state level, questions remain when the change will appear on maps. The state board waived its five-year waiting period, but it could still take that long for federal geographic naming authorities to consider the change and reprint official maps. A name change had been under consideration in Arizona for several years, as Native American groups had long objected to ``Squaw Peak,'' saying the name was demeaning to Indians. Until Piestewa's death, an appropriate replacement name had not been found. Arizona officials now argue that there is no need for the federal government to drag out the final name-change process.

Hopi spokesperson Charles said that while the tribe was happy the mountain was no longer called Squaw Peak, the naming of the mountain after a single tribal member conflicted with yet another fundamental cultural value of the Hopi people.

``The Hopi are intensely private,'' she said. ``Anything that draws attention to the individual can be difficult. We try to shy away from anything that draws attention to one person because it is not humble to draw attention to yourself. Everyone is happy it's no longer Squaw Peak--and not just among the Hopi but in the whole state. There are 22 tribes in the state. Nobody really wanted that name there. I know the governor talked to the family about it, though, and they were in agreement with the name change. But everything happened so fast.''

In addition to renaming the mountain, in early May the Squaw Peak Freeway (Arizona 51) became the Lori Piestewa Freeway.

Her name is now mentioned nationally in the same breath with the famed Navajo Code Talkers of World War II as an example of the contributions and sacrifices made by Native Americans to the defense of the United States.

And the telephone calls keep coming into Vanessa Charles' tribal office.

``We understand the significance of her death in the country and the world,'' Charles said. ``God bless all of the people who have felt compelled to call and have wanted to do something. They are concerned about the future of her children. It's wonderful and it's a testament to the fact that there is still humanity among us, regardless of how we might be divided politically or culturally. We're still humans, and we still have compassion for one another. She touched all of us.''

A Candle In The Darkness: The Ongoing Legacy of Sharon Ann Lane

I am thankful for this day. I am thankful for good health. Today, I will go through the day inwardly relaxed and outwardly alert. I will pay more attention to the things outside of me and less attention to the things inside of me. I believe I will be given the strength to meet whatever problems come to me. I will do my tasks one at a time and not try to cross all my bridges at once. --Favorite saying of Sharon Ann Lane

Sharon Ann Lane had been in Vietnam about seven weeks when a Soviet-made 122mm rocket detonated in the Quonset hut complex that was the 312th Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai. Rocket and mortar attacks were not infrequent, but this rocket came by itself, a lone missile in the early morning darkness. It was around five o'clock, June 8, 1969.

The next shift of nurses already was up and getting dressed for the day. Sharon Lane worked in Vietnamese Ward 4, a volunteer who chose to tend to patients most others avoided. The patients included ARVN and civilians and children the nurses loved; but the Vietnamese ward also included NVA and VC prisoners. Medical personnel rotated quickly through the ward. Most didn't care to stay long. Lane chose differently. She saw only patients who needed her.

Her former head nurse, Jane Carson, who now splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and her native South Carolina, said: "She just liked people. She was color blind. She loved the children. We all did. But a lot of nurses resented having to work on the ward that had POWs, people who injured our guys. But Sharon liked the Vietnamese people, and she wanted to remain there.''

The rocket hit almost dead center in the Quonset hut complex. It injured many patients. It killed Sharon Lane, the only woman in the American armed forces killed by enemy fire in the Vietnam War. She was a month shy of her 26th birthday.

"It was devastating for the hospital,'' Carson said. "Everyone was in a stupor for a while. But we didn't talk about it. We didn't grieve. We went back to work. Part of my difficulty was that I was always afraid I wouldn't have the skills for the next patient, the knowledge, the courage to do it. After a while, you forgot about any concern for your safety, and it was more being able to measure up when the time came. You went on automatic pilot. You just didn't want to lose one of those guys or one of those women or one of those children. It was a defeat each time. Death was our enemy every day.''

Like so many other Vietnam veterans, Carson took the war deep inside herself. It stayed there for a long time.

"It took me literally years, 17 or 18, to even start thinking about it again,'' Carson said. "I met Sharon's mom at the dedication of the Vietnam Women's Memorial in 1993. That was the starting point for me to come to grips with some of this stuff.''

In November of that year, Kathleen Fennell, another nurse and Vietnam veteran, flew across the Pacific on the long voyage back to Vietnam. She, too, had not spoken of it for years. Then Fennell got involved in Operation Smile, a volunteer surgical mission that traveled to the developing countries of the world to repair cleft lip and palate deformities. In 1993, she found herself headed to a place filled with memories.

She asked her husband, with whom she served in Vietnam during the war, to accompany her. A medical technician during the war and now a physician, her husband at first declined. He said he didn't want to go. Later, he relented. They have been back many times since.

"If the guys became invisible after the war, the women became more invisible,'' Fennell said. "We simply put everything aside as best we could and went on with our lives. You just didn't deal with it.''

Someone gave her a book to read on the long flight--Hostile Fire: The Life & Death of First Lieutenant Sharon Lane, by Philip Bigler. Fennell didn't know Sharon Lane. But the story of her life and death in Vietnam stayed with Fennell. The following year, when she returned to Vietnam on another medical mission, an idea germinated.

In 1999, she contacted Sharon's mother, Kay Lane, in Canton, Ohio, and asked permission to name a clinic in Vietnam in Sharon's honor. Mrs. Lane gave her blessing.

Construction began in 2000. The Sharon Ann Lane Foundation www.sharonannlanefoundation.org was established in 2001. In the spring of 2002, the clinic was dedicated.

"We decided to locate the clinic in Chu Lai, where Sharon served,'' Fennell said. "Donations came mostly from veterans. The clinic is now open and serving the population about two kilometers from where Sharon was killed. Patients are being treated in obstetrics, gynecology, and pediatrics. They want us to develop a public health program that would take medical staff into rural areas to deliver care on infectious diseases and for elderly people who can't come into the clinic."

In May 2003, having been honored by numerous civic, military, and medical organizations, Sharon Lane was posthumously awarded the Ohio Medal of Valor and inducted into the Ohio Military Hall of Fame.

Pat Powell, president of VVA Chapter 199, The Sharon Ann Lane Chapter, traveled to Vietnam in 2001 to see the beginnings of the clinic.

"She was such a kind, caring, compassionate person,'' Powell said. "She was a true nurse. She didn't look at the face or color of the patient. She looked at the wound and the person who needed to be healed. When I went to Vietnam, the clinic was just beginning to be built. I was just happy that it was actually being put up. For the Vietnamese to allow us to construct a clinic, there was a miracle in itself.''

Kathleen Fennell sees the clinic as the closing of a circle, a continuation of the spirit Sharon Ann Lane infused into the care of her patients.

"It was apparent this woman was like a candle in the darkness,'' she said. "Her presence and example reminded us all that it didn't make a difference which uniform a man or woman might wear. They were all patients. She was there for a purpose, I believe. She did something really positive, and we feel she can be remembered best by a clinic that continues the care she gave to people. She recognized the Vietnamese as human beings, and she was regarded by her patients with a great deal of love and affection. You can't make that happen. Patients, regardless of what country they come from, either feel that way about their nurses or they don't. She was unique.''

One particular visit to the clinic stands out in Fennell's memory. She quietly played with two children, one suffering a physical deformity, the other developmentally disabled. Two Vietnamese teenagers came to join them. There was no interpreter to bridge the language barrier, but none was needed. Fennell said she had never felt closer to human beings.

She thought it "weird'' being in Vietnam, the country in which Sharon died, the country in which a medical clinic had now been named after her. Vietnamese kids drew maps of the United States; they played games and sang "Happy Birthday'' in English.

"It was a sad war and cost so damn much in human suffering, but here's this clinic and what continues is Sharon's love. We're just the instruments of it,'' she said. "This building wouldn't be here were it not for the regard in which veterans held this woman. A lot of guys, regardless of the severity of their injuries, have said Sharon has become the nurse they can thank, a kind of universal nurse.''

As she reflected on the continuation of Sharon Ann Lane's work and the Vietnamese children played and sang their songs, Fennell looked over her right shoulder. She saw nothing but a wall.

"I had this distinct sense of a presence,'' she said. "But it was just a wall. It was nothing. There was no one there. I didn't see anybody. There was no weird Twilight Zone stuff or anything like that. But I thought, you know, she's here. She really is here. Whenever you step out of yourself and do something for the other guy, you have a sense of this. It doesn't have to be governments. It can be one person--Sharon Ann Lane. She accomplished this.''



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One Belly-Dancing Marine: VVA's Mike Zimmerman

It's hard to predict how a guy might become a belly dancer. Maybe even reinvent the whole genre. Or at least expand its, uh, horizons. Belly dancing isn't the kind of thing that floats into a guy's mind while he's waiting for halftime to end or driving home from work or sitting in a barber shop with a Sports Illustrated in his hands. It probably helps if you're open to new experiences.

"I've been known to do just about anything," Mike Zimmerman says.

So one day the phone rings at his house and a guy Mike has never met or even heard ofa total strangersays, "You don't know me, but I've heard you'll do anything."

Mike asks him what he means.

The caller says, "My wife gave me a belly dancer for my 40th birthday, and I was so damn embarrassed, I was wondering if you'd be a belly dancer for my wife's 40th birthday."

Mike tells the guy to hang on a second and hollers upstairs to his wife : "Do you think you could come up with some kind of costume for a belly dancer?"

Yes, she says, she canand a career is born.

"That's how it started," Mike says.

He is 6 feet tall; he weighs 320 pounds. He's been belly dancing for 14 years.

"I lost about 30 pounds, and I did a show last week, and a woman said, 'What happened to you? There's only about half of you there.' "

While mysteries might abound in the matter of 320-pound male belly dancers, it is not a mystery at all about how the caller 14 years ago thought to ring up Mike Zimmerman. His name, as the phrase would have it, is "out there."

A former Marine with two years in Vietnam, Mike joined VVA about 20 years ago. He has been president of Chapter 613 in Muskegon, Mich., for about 10 years. He also has been involved with other veterans' organizations in Muskegon since the day he was discharged. He is active in numerous civic organizations.

He said it is no surprise to him that he is comfortable with veterans' groups. His military service was the logical extension of a long family history. An uncle was on the Bataan Death March, another at Pearl Harbor; his father was a Navy veteran. Zimmerman says being active in veterans' affairs is "in my blood."

"I guess I just love being around people," he said. "I love life. When I was in Vietnam, my whole theory was that we were there to help the people. I had good Vietnamese friends when I was there, and I have them here."

He speaks frequently at local schools.

"The first thing they all ask is, 'Did you kill anybody,' " he said. "I tell them most veterans don't like talking about it. It's the worst thing that can happen to you. Then I move on to another subject. I'm not sure how to measure the interest level of the kids. A lot of them will come up to me afterwards and say their grandfather is a Vietnam veteran. You get the sense that Grandpa hasn't talked much about it. At least after hearing me, the kids will have some idea of what Grandpa did. It might even help when the kids go home and tell Grandpa that a Vietnam veteran came to school and gave a talk."

He is concerned about the dwindling membership in his chapter.

"We have trouble keeping members," he said. "I argue that membership is great for
camaraderie and that one day you're going to need that camaraderie. We used to be much more active than we are now. I don't know why we've slowed down. Maybe we're getting older."

He is 58, active in civic and veterans affairs, president of a VVA chapter, and a belly dancer a part-time career that might have more to do with genes than anything. He comes from a vaudeville family. His mother sang, danced, and performed acrobatics; his father was a self-taught piano and guitar player. They were veterans of the vaudeville circuit, and now the son is news in Muskegon.

The Muskegon Chronicle once put his belly-dancing picture on the front page. He said it was like a free $15,000 ad.

"I do girls' bachelorette parties, and they stick money in my underwear," he said. "I can make more money on a weekend than I do during the week at work. I averaged it out once, and it came to about $200 an hour.''

He once asked a guy if he wanted to join him in the belly-dancing work. He was getting too many requests for appearances and needed help.

"He laughed and said, 'I would never do something like that,' " Mike said. "I said, 'Yeah, I know. I only do it because I make about 200 bucks an hour.' "

The guy asked Mike if he gave lessons.

Talkin' 'Bout Their Generation VVA's Three-War Veterans

We called them "lifers," and many of us set them apart. They were the ones who had chosen to make the military their career: the hollow-eyed sergeant, the grey-bearded cook, the corps of senior NCOs and officers who cut their combat teeth on the beaches of Normandy, or along a string of islands in the South Pacific, or at Chosin, Inchon, or Pusan.

They were of a different generation. They were not children who came of age in the turbulent 1960s. Many had grown up in poverty during the Depression and fought the good fight in the Second World War. Others too young for that war went off to the frigid stalemate in Korea. They were old enough to be our fathers. Some, in fact, were.

Many chose to remain in uniform. According to the U. S. Census, of the eight million Vietnam-era veterans alive in 2000, more than 160,000 also had been in the armed forces in World War II and in Korea.

With the nation about to dedicate a national World War II Memorial, it seemed appropriate to seek out VVA members whose time in service spanned three decades and three wars.

Charlie Green

Charles Welby Green was drafted when he turned 18. It was 1944. The same week Green received his draft notice, he recalled, "My folks got a telegram from the War Department that my older brother, Marion, was missing in action. He'd been on a bombing mission over Hungary. A month later, they were notified that he was a prisoner of war."

The uncertain status of one son and the conscription of another was a "double shock to my parents,'' Charlie Green said. Years later, just before she died, his mother got another shock when she learned that Charlie had been badly wounded in Vietnam.

Charlie Green was in basic training when American casualties from the Battle of the Bulge led the Army to curtail training and ship raw recruits to twin fronts on two oceans. While in a repo depot in France, "fifty of us were pulled out and sent to a field artillery battalion,'' he said. "We became cannoneers. When our forces bottled up the Germans in a pocket between the Rhine and the Ruhr, we were firing 200-pound high-explosive shells into surrounding cities until they surrendered." It was the last gasp of Hitler's Germany.

With the fighting ended and victory secured, Charlie Green and his mates were sent to Cologne. Their assignment: round up displaced persons. His battery had responsibility for 5,000 Russians who had been in German slave-labor camps. "Most of them did not want to go back to Mother Russia,'' Green said.

Charlie Green, like most troops, wanted more than anything to go back home. A year later, he was demobilized and returned to Indianapolis, where his family had moved from Webster County in western Kentucky when he was 15. His war was over. The rest of his military career had yet to begin.

In 1949, he re-upped. He saw extensive action in Korea with the 27th Infantry Regiment. From the Pusan Perimeter, he recounted, the Wolfhounds pushed to a few miles from the Yalu River before the Chinese "came out and chased us down.''

After spending several years as an agent for the Criminal Investigation Division, Charlie Green was sent to Vietnam in October 1966. Linking up with his old Wolfhound outfit, he was acting first sergeant and then field first sergeant. He saw his share of combat.

"I made the mistake of coming back at the end of 1967,'' Green said. "This time, it damn near killed me.'' A day after his 43rd birthday, working a security detail with a company of ARVNs in a village west of Cu Chi, "Sergeant Rock,'' as Green was nicknamed, was sprayed by shrapnel from an old Chicom hand grenade during a night encounter with the VC.

"That grenade came within inches of my left foot,'' he said. "It only got me in the leg, the buttock, and the elbow, though.'' He nearly bled to death waiting for a dustoff.

It was only later that he learned a medic named John Taggart, a conscientious objector whose religious beliefs prohibited him from bearing arms, had saved lives--with a rifle. "The VC reconned, then hit my command post. Seven of the eight of us who crowded into that CP were wounded within minutes,'' Green said.

"As Doc Taggart was working on one of our wounded, two VC came around the side of the bunker. Doc saw them. He picked up a weapon and blasted away at both of them. I can only imagine how traumatic an experience that was for him, killing another human being. But he knew he had to do what he did. He's partly the reason I'm still here today.''

After he recuperated, Charlie Green talked himself into a desk job. He was assigned, he said, "to a spook outfit that monitored antiwar activity.'' He retired from the Army in 1972 and went to work as a field deputy for the Marion County coroner in Indianapolis.

Charlie Green is 77. "I feel lucky to still be around,'' he said: "I've lived through the most fantastic era in the history of the world.''

For too many years, Green said, he had put his experiences in Vietnam "in the closet and left them there. It's only in the last few years that I finally got around to joining.'' He has been a member of the Sammy Davis VVA Chapter 295 at Fort Harrison, Indiana, for five years.

Charlie Green first visited The Wall in 1999. He had avoided making the journey because he didn't know how he'd be affected. It was, he said, "emotionally overpowering.''

This Memorial Day, when he journeys again to Washington to be at The Wall, Charlie will also visit a belated memorial to his earlier war.

Despite the anticipated pomp and ceremony, he is sobered by the "superficial post-9/11 patriotism" of too many Americans. "You can't expect people to understand what they haven't experienced,'' Green said. "But you would hope they can appreciate what somebody else does for them.''

David Jordan

Illinois-born and Missouri-bred David Jordan entered the service when World War II was well under way, joining the Navy in 1943. "I just had it in my head to follow my brother, who had enlisted in 1940,'' he said. Jordan spent 25 months aboard the destroyer USS Stephen Potter (BD538). "We saw a lot," he said in an understatement. When all the bloodletting ended, the crew of the Stephen Potter received 12 battle stars for their exploits.

Plying the waters of the Pacific, encountering and engaging a determined enemy, "there was no such thing as easy,'' Jordan said. What was his hardest day? "Hell, there were so many of them,'' he said. "When the aircraft carrier USS Franklin was hit, we had to get people out of the water who were dead, who were mutilated. That was the worst of it."

David Jordan was on the gun crew. One time they shot down a Japanese Kamikaze. They were elated. "Only our commanding officer got the Silver Star,'' he said, "but everybody shared equal in the danger.''

After the war, he mustered out. Jordan's life as a civilian, though, was short-lived. He went to school and bummed around before reenlisting in 1949, switching from the Navy to the Army. As a sergeant E-6, spent most of his tour in Vietnam with an artillery battery operating near Cu Chi. Comparing this tour with his time in the Navy, he said, "the food was a little betternot good, just betterand the mail came a little quicker. But this time, we didn't win anything."

When he left the Army, Jordan found that there was little demand for an ex-military man. He worked ten years on a riverboat, plying the Mississippi. He put three children through college. He is a charter member of VVA Chapter 859 in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, not far from his home in Doniphan.

David Jordan won't be journeying to Washington this month. He may follow the ceremonies, he said, but he will be participating in his own waywith barbeque and a beer or two.

Carmelo LaSpada

Carmelo LaSpada, a son of Newark, New Jersey, enlisted in the Marine Corps on the first day of July 1942. He spent the next 30 years and nine months in uniform.

After boot camp, LaSpada was sent to the Marine base at Cherry Point. Although he was supposed to go to Florida for advanced training with an aviation unit, his superiors found out that he had been a baker in civilian life and asked if he would help set up a bakery on the base. They promised he would be sent for aviation training later on. That "later on'' turned out to be never. Because "the needs of the Corps come first,'' LaSpada said he was told, his training was cancelled and he "got stuck'' in Cherry Point through 1943. Eventually, though, he received orders to deploy overseas. He fought at Bougainville. He saw a lot of death. "We tossed the bodies of dead Japanese into trenches we had dug, sprinkled them with lime, and covered them with dirt.'' Sometimes, though, the bodies would be burned in a pyre.

"Once you get past the shock of seeing your first dead enemy, it doesn't bother you'' any more, he said.

Carmelo LaSpada learned to take one day at a time, because, he said, "every day was just a matter of survival.'' A lesson that he learned, one that he would preach to his men a quarter of a century later during two tours in Vietnam, was that "you can't worry about your girlfriend or what she's doing back in the States. Worry about what you're doing. And worry about your buddies.''

LaSpada was well past his 40th birthday when he first was sent to Southeast Asia; he was almost 50 the second time around. What disturbed him about this new war was the stark realization that he never knew who was a friendly and who was an enemy.

"We had this 12-year-old who did some cleaning up for us,'' he said from his room at the Durham, North Carolina, VAMC extended care facility. "One night we came under attack. The next morning, we found him, all tangled in the concertina, with a dozen hand grenades on him.''

LaSpada was also struck by the fact that in this war, although there was a rear, there were no front lines. "We fought over that bloomin' Khe Sanh five times, and then we abandoned it,'' he said. "But me being a professional Marine, it was not for me to question.''

In his 1968-69 tour, LaSpada's unit built a big orphanage in Quang Tri City. His daughter, Linda Routten, said that he "always talked to us about birds and monkeys and the children, all the displaced children.'' Her father also talked about all the body bags.

After he left the Corps, Carmelo LaSpada went to college, earned an associate degree in business administration, and worked as an instructor in Carteret County Community College. He retired at 65. Almost a quarter of a century later, despite the infirmities of age, he maintains his Marine trim. "I can still wear the uniform I retired in,'' he said. Now 83, he is a member of VVA Chapter 749 in Morehead City, North Carolina.

Of the new memorial he said: "It's about time. But to try to memorialize something that happened 60 years ago'' is not very timely.

P. Evangeline Jamison

Worry and care have always been part of P. Evangeline Jamison's job. Jamie, as she prefers to be called, trained as a nurse. Knowing that her newly acquired skills would be put to good use, Jamison, who lived in Seymour, Iowa, enlisted in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In January 1943, she shipped out. Her eventual duty station was "a very primitive hospital built by Army engineers in New Guinea. They had left it only half-done,'' she said. "We all had to hammer in nails to get it finished.''

The hospital, designated the 13th General, was hard duty. Although surrounded by the Japanese, "they didn't ever attack,'' Jamison said. The death of a chief nurse, who had wandered off into the jungle and committed suicide, spooked everyone. Jamison's hardest time, though, was monitoring newly released prisoners of war. "They were so starved, we had to watch that they didn't overeat,'' she said. "But it was hard to deny them food.''

After the war, Jamie Jamison left the service, only to return following a short stint nursing at the VA hospital in Topeka, Kansas. Fast-forward to Vietnam. By then a lieutenant colonel, Jamison was assigned to the 93rd Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh as chief nurse. "I was in the jungle in World War II and I was in the jungle again in Vietnam,'' she said. Before she went overseas, "people said to me when I got my orders, 'You're not going to accept them, are you?' '' she said.

"I told them, ' Of course I am. I'm an officer.' ''

Jamison experienced the near round-the-clock blood and gore that was the lot of many nurses in Vietnam. "It was so hard to see young people shot in so many places,'' she said. "One young boy was shot in the face, and I remember thinking, 'Oh my God, how is he going to look?' ''

Perhaps Jamie's most difficult day was when she had to tell one of her nurses that her boyfriend, a medevac pilot, had been shot down. "She wanted to go with him to Japan, but I had to tell her no. I didn't think he was going to make it.''

In 1968, shortly after her tour of duty ended, Jamison left the service. She embarked on a second career, inspecting nursing homes and hospitals for the state of California to check if they were in compliance with state and federal laws and regulations.

Jamison, who lives in Walnut Creek, California, joined VVA Chapter 400 in Oakland "just as soon as I heard it was being organized.'' She is "just so proud,'' she said, of a former Senator Bob Dole, who was severely wounded in World War II and whose name and political clout were instrumental in transforming the idea for the World War II memorial into reality.

Although her golden years "aren't so golden; sometimes they're kind of achy,'' Jamison is buoyed by her memories. "I never saw a puppy or a baby or a soldier I didn't love,'' she said.

Maynard Campbell

Maynard Campbell, the son of a traveling evangelist from Richmond, Texas, was already an old salt when the Second World War began. He had enlisted in the 69th Coastal Artillery, based in Galveston, in February 1937, right after he turned 18. Two years later, he transferred to the Army Air Corps.

He soldiered through the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. He was wounded one night when his unit came under attack and he ran into barbed wire in the pitch blackness.

Discharged in 1945 in Denver, his last duty station, Campbell spent eight years working as a carpenter. He then joined the Colorado Air National Guard, making rank over the next 18 years. He was a senior master sergeant when his unit, the 525th Fighter-Bomber Squadron, was activated during the Berlin Crisis. The 525th was one of the few National Guard units deployed to Vietnam.

Maynard's ammunition maintenance squadron was assigned to Phan Rang Air Base. He quickly became its leader after the chief master sergeant shipped home. The base was rocketed nearly every night. His scariest encounter, though, took place one night when he "met up with a big ol' black panther. He ran one way,'' Campbell said, "and I ran the other.''

It wasn't Vietnam that Maynard Campbell celebrated his 50th birthday. He and Clarinda, his wife of 63 years, make their home now in Lufkin, Texas.

Jack Potter

Jack Potter was already in the Army when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Drafted in March 1941, he was in Colorado on a three-day pass when "everyone was called back'' because the nation was now at war. Opting to become an officer, Jack had OCS at Fort Benning. As a newly minted second lieutenant, he was sent to Hawaii, where he joined the 198th Regimental Combat Team as a platoon leader.

Jack Potter would soon see places he'd never even heard of before: New Hebrides, Guadalcanal, Bougainville. He came down with malaria twice. "That wasn't fun,'' he said. One day, on one island, out of water, obsessed by thirst, he drank from a puddle where wild pigs had lolled. He ingested all sorts of bugs along with the water.

Although "the lot of the grunt'' had such difficulties, he said, the life of an officer in the Army had its rewards. While not inclined to a military life, Potter nevertheless decided to make the Army his career.

He was a full colonel in 1966 when he was "kidnapped by the exchange service'' and sent to Vietnamanother place he had never heard of beforefirst to investigate and then to take command of the troubled Vietnam Regional Exchange. Theft was rife in the PX system, feeding a voracious black market. Potter managed to cut losses by 50 percent and increase sales to $400 million a year. His was not a cushy job, however. "We had 220 different locations where we had people,'' he said. "I was in lots of places I shouldn't have been.''

Jack Potter still harbors resentment toward many senior officers who chose to stay in the relatively safe haven of the rear, living well rather than being with the troops out in the boonies.

In 1974, after 33 years of service, he retired from the Army. After working as an administrator for the San Francisco Unified School District, he joined the Executive Service Corps. A self-described joiner, he is a member of VVA Chapter 547. He also serves on the Marin County United Veterans Council and the Military Retirees Benefits Foundation.

Jack Potter, who has donated to the World War II Memorial fund, expects to travel to Washington to attend its unveiling.

Arthur Sebesta

Arthur Sebesta, who grew up on a farm north of Wilson, Kansas, graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. His war began in 1943. A specialist in communications, he was assigned to a signal information and monitoring company. "We had platoons that went out with corps and divisions and sent back information'' to Army commanders, he said.

The military, Sebesta always figured, would be his career. It was. He served in a variety of communications and counterintelligence assignments before retiring in 1964 "because they would not send me to Vietnam.'' A member of VVA Chapter 802, he lives with his wife, Mary, in Haworth, New Jersey.

Sebesta doesn't expect to visit the World War II memorial for its dedication. He points out that veterans of his generation are dying at a rate of more than a thousand every day. How many will be able to view the memorial, he wonders.

Peace and Friendship Among Nations

On September 12, in Hanoi, the VVA Veterans Initiative Task Force was awarded the prestigious Medal for Peace and Friendship Among Nations in recognition of the continuing contributions VVA has made in the exchange of information about fallen Vietnamese during the war.

At a subsequent meeting, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), Detachment 2, in Hanoi briefed VVA’s VITF team (Robert Maras, Bob Johnston, Gary Jones, Bill Duker, Grant Coates, and Mokie Porter) on operations in Vietnam. There were several requests from JPAC for the team to present to the Vietnamese officials throughout the trip; in particular, access to specific excavation sites.

At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the VITF delegation met with Ambassador Le Van Bang—Vietnam’s first Ambassador in Washington—at the Vietnam Office of Seeking Missing Personnel to discuss the need to reestablish Joint Field Activities in the Central Highlands. Access has been limited in the Highlands due to unrest over land and religious issues. Le Bang noted that although the situation in the Central Highlands remains sensitive, there is improvement. JPAC and VNOSMP have conducted some interviews and investigations; however, no excavations are scheduled.

At a meeting with the Veterans Association of Vietnam, General Dang Quan Thuy, the Association’s president, reaffirmed his organization’s commitment to working with VVA: “The Vietnamese government has always considered the MIA issue as humanitarian, so the two organizations would continue to cooperate to overcome the damage left by the war.”

General Thuy presented each member of the delegation with a copy of the diaries of Dr. Dang Thuy Trau, a 27-year-old North Vietnamese Army surgeon who was killed in a battle near Duc Pho in 1970. Her diaries were saved by an American soldier in 1970. The soldier, who later became an FBI agent, kept the diaries for over thirty years and eventually succeeded in locating the doctor’s 82-year-old mother in Hanoi and sharing them with her. Published in July 2005, the diaries have sold over 350,000 copies in Vietnam. They have been translated into English and can be found at www.texastech.edu/tramdiaries

The meeting between VVA’s VITF and the Veterans Association of Vietnam was attended by many from the Hanoi press corps, including Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Press, Vietnam News, TV 1 (Vietnam Television), TV 4 (Vietnam television for international community), Nhan Dan, Peoples Army Newspapers, Saigon Times, the Labor Daily, the Yomiuri Shimbum.

As they traveled south, the VITF delegation met with the People’s Committee and Veterans Associations in Thua Thien-Hue Province, Quang Tri Province, Quang Nam Province, Danang City, Ho Chi Minh City, and Ben Tre Province.

During the visit to Hue, the VITF delegation met a delegation of Australian veterans and the two delegations shared information about the missing from both sides. More than 500 Australians died in Vietnam. Four Australian Army soldiers and two RAAF airmen remain missing.

In Quang Nam Province, the Veterans Association of Vietnam represents 30,000 veterans and their families, of which 5,000 veterans are believed to have A/O-related illnesses and 500 children have birth defects. Unexploded ordnance is an ongoing problem for the province. The veterans of Quang Nam Province and the VITF have worked together for more than 11 years; their hard-earned relationship has led to the recovery of both American and NVA war dead from the battlefield of Ngok Tavak.

Veterans there face a new challenge: The battlefield of Kham Duc, 75 kilometers west of Tam Ky in northernmost I Corps, has been designated an “Enterprise Zone” and is slated for a strip mining project. In August 2005, a Joint Field Activity successfully recovered the remains of some American and Vietnamese soldiers, but, because of finances, the recovery mission was not completed. A second field activity, scheduled for spring 2006, should complete the mission.

In Hanoi, JPAC had expressed concerns that the strip mining project might supersede the recovery efforts. The vice chairman of the People’s Committee of Quang Nam Province in Tam Ky gave her word that the excavation of the battle site would take priority and the mining project would be delayed until the excavation was complete. The veterans of Quang Nam Province have vowed they would allow no development until the recovery of American and Vietnamese soldiers is complete.

Also in Quang Nam Province, at the urging of JPAC, the VITF asked for information about an American servicemember who remains unaccounted for. The team received detailed information in response to their inquiry, and this information has been turned over to JPAC for evaluation. In keeping with our commitment of confidentiality to the families of those who remain unaccounted for, it will be up to the family to decide to share this information.

While in the North, VITF members compared war memories with a Vietnamese veteran who had been an instructor in a military school under the Air Force and Anti-Aircraft Command of the Peoples’ Army of Vietnam. While in Bien Hoa, Grant Coates and Bob Johnston were invited to visit with friends of the veteran’s family. When they spoke about their mission in Vietnam, the conversation turned to a discussion about American remains that had been buried nearby and, to the best of their knowledge, hadn’t been removed. This information was immediately relayed to JPAC, which followed up with an interview.

VVA was consistent in its message that by working veteran to veteran, Vietnamese and American veterans can achieve extraordinary results. At each meeting, the VITF delegation provided recently received information about three mass burial sites in three provinces that reportedly contained over 90 Vietnamese KIA. During the course of its existence, the VITF has provided documents and information from American veterans concerning over 9,000 Vietnamese KIA in various locations. The Vietnamese have informed the VITF that the information provided by American veterans has enabled them to locate the remains of over 900 Vietnamese veterans. The news of VVA’s new leadership and the reaffirmation of the membership of VVA’s commitment to the Veterans Initiative was greeted with great enthusiasm, as was the hope that VVA’s president, John Rowan, would come to Vietnam.

VVA’s VITF continues to ask American veterans to provide documents, maps, photographs, diaries, and other information that might assist the Vietnamese in learning the fate of some of their many missing who never returned from the war. We know that missing Americans remain unaccounted for. American veterans still continue to come forward with information, and VVA’s VITF continues to work with JPAC and the Veterans Association of Vietnam. Working veteran-to-veteran, the VITF allows information and communication about the missing to be shared. Even with the solid accomplishment of Ngok Tavak behind it after many years of persistence and joint effort, the VITF knows that its work is not done.

The Medal for Peace and Friendship Among Nations

The medal for Peace and Friendship Among Nations honors individuals and organizations who are making great contributions to the promotion and enhancement of mutual understanding, peace, and friendship between the Vietnamese people and the people of the world. The medal, initiated in 2000, is awarded by the Vietnam Union of Friendship organizations, the umbrella organization for more than 50 bilateral friendship organizations of Vietnamese people with people of other countries. Of the 878 medals that have been awarded to date, only two have been awarded to organizations: VVA's Veterans Initiative Task Force and Clear Path International
share this honor.

Pictured on the cloisonne medal is the logo of the Vietnam Union of Friendship. Circling the logo in red on the gold background are the words, "Vi Hoa Binh Huu Nghi Giua Cac Dan Toc," translated from Vietnamese, "Medal of Peace and Friendship Among Nations." The Veterans Initiative Task Force was awarded the medal on September 12 in Hanoi. The citation recognized VVA's "valuable assistance and contribution to the process of the fullest possible accounting for the personnel missing in action on both sides and the establishment of friendship relations and cooperation between veterans and the people of Vietnam and the U.S."

Chef Jim Shott: In Search of Pastry Precision

Almost by definition, the path from U.S. Marine to French pastry chef cannot be a simple straight line. Not only poles apart, each environment comes with a long list of disparate expectations and demands. Nothing about such a path suggests an easy journey. Nonetheless, Jim Shott took it.

He started down the path about five years ago. After retiring from the Marine Corps in 1992, he continued to work in the addiction-counseling field at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Then, after the department moved to Andrews Air Force Base, Shott started having flashbacks to his Vietnam combat experiences.

“One of my patients talked about places that I had forgotten about, then one day the sound of a diesel engine and the rotor blade of a chopper set me into an immobilizing depression.” He entered into a VA treatment program and began weekly visits to the Silver Spring, Maryland, Vet Center.

“In the process, it was about two years before I could even consider doing any kind of work,” he said. “I had to resign from my government job.”

As he began to regain his footing, he read an article about a new industry, the personal chef service, in which an entrepreneur might serve as the personal chef for clients who wanted quality food but who lacked time to prepare it. He had always wanted to get into the food service business and even had some experience as a cook.

“I always loved to cook,” Shott said. “My Boy Scout cooking badge came about because my Irish mother taught me how to make a meal. After I got back from Vietnam, I was working at an Officers Club for a while doing short-order cooking on the barbecue. I always loved to do it.”

He investigated a web site offering training in the personal chef association and decided to try it. After signing up with the association, Shott started a company called Dinner’s Ready in 1999.

“It started slow, but then I got clients through word of mouth,” he said. “I didn’t have any money for advertising. Starting a business from scratch is tough. There was a desire to be my own person, though, to be independent, to take risks that were calculated risks. There was a lot of motivation there.”

Wanting to raise the bar, Shott began looking at the art and science of fine pastries. “It’s always intrigued me how those pastry chefs could make such wonderful desserts,” he said.

He decided to enroll in the nine-month Pastry Arts program at L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, Maryland. Shott soon realized he would have to devote all his time to the school; then circumstances forced a setback.

“I injured my right elbow while working,” he said. “Then I started losing clients because I wasn’t able to do the work.”

After several months of physical therapy, Shott’s elbow improved, and he re-enrolled at the pastry school. But another setback awaited him, forcing him to drop out in late 2002. “I needed surgery,” he said. “I couldn’t use my right arm effectively.”

About a year later, Shott enrolled again. It had been a long time since he was in a school setting. He found the challenges formidable. “At age 57, I found the pace was very fast for me,” Shott said. “It was long days on my feet. The main challenge came from the standpoint that I had to learn to be a student all over again.”

His PTSD added another level of difficulty.

“I have trouble remembering things on a short-term basis,” he said. “I do it a few times and I get it down okay, but studying for exams was difficult. I knew the material, but translating it to taking a test was a real problem. I did well with the practical experience, and I got very good grades on projects and presentations. My senior instructor understood and encouraged me.”

The teaching method of the school’s founder made it even more difficult. He wanted his students to learn the way he had learned, and his way included no handouts of recipes and no textbooks in the routine. He dictated the recipes to students. They wrote them down, in effect, creating a technical manual in their own words.

“Writing down the recipes was tough,” Shott said. “We had a three-ring binder we had to turn in every five weeks for a grade on the material and the techniques and descriptions. It became our own textbook, if you will. It was our own way of note keeping so it made sense to us. That’s how the founder learned in France. You wrote the recipe, you wrote the technique, you wrote the little side notes on why you do certain things and why you do it at a certain pace.”

Before he began, when he had wondered about how pastry chefs created desserts, he had not known about the most basic differences in the creation of food that often did double-duty as art.

“What I like about the pastry field is the exactness,” he said. “The ingredients are all weighed on a baker’s scale. Commonly, textbooks call for half a cup of this and one teaspoon of that. When we do recipes, it’s ten ounces of flour, two ounces of water. Everything is measured precisely.”

Jim Shott has graduated now and has a three-tiered goal. He wants to open a commercial kitchen; he wants to concentrate on pastries; and he hopes to offer services to local businesses for meetings and special events. The third element will fulfill a sense of giving back.

“I want the commercial kitchen to be a teaching kitchen in which I can offer classes,” he said. “The prospect of the future with this business is exciting for me. I would like to have a site where veterans could come to learn.”

Shott is developing a corporate catering element called Creative Cuisine. He’s working in Gaithersburg, Maryland, as a pastry chef for the Classic German Bakery.

Nashville and Beyond

Get ready for the VVA National Leadership Conference in Nashville. The PTSD/SA Committee is sponsoring a seminar on Friday, August 7, that should be of interest to all veterans. It is entitled "Exposure to Combat, PTSD and Future Medical Problems: The Health Impact of Military Service for Vietnam Veterans." The presenter, Dr. Joe Boscarino, is one of the country’s leading PTSD researchers. He is a Vietnam veteran and epidemiologist at the New York Academy of Medicine, he has conducted hundreds of studies over the past 30 years, including 20 involving veterans’ health outcomes. It promises to be a great presentation.

The newly revised PTSD tri-fold brochure is being distributed with the assistance of VVA’s Conference of State Council Presidents and Veterans Service Officers. Additional copies of the brochure will be available at the Leadership Conference. In addition, the PTSD/SA Committee is reviewing a proposed update of the on-line "Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Guide’’ that can be found under the Benefits News and Resources section on VVA’s website. The committee is also developing its own web page with assistance from the Communications Department for inclusion on the VVA web site.

As you may have heard, VA Secretary Principi recently announced his decisions to reconfigure the VA’s facilities and health care services. The PTSD/SA Committee remains very concerned about the impact of the reconfiguration on the VA’s PTSD and related mental health programs.

VVA President Tom Corey said, ``We remain particularly concerned by the lack of beds and staff to treat the psychiatric and neuropsychological wounds of war. VVA will continue to press hard until the VA performs a proper needs assessment to make VA a true veterans’ health care system that can deal with wounds, illnesses, and toxic exposures that exist on the modern battlefield.’’

Indeed, we need to monitor any and all changes to existing VA PTSD programs and services. Our lives and the lives of the veterans who follow depend on it.

PTSD/Substance Abuse Committee

The PTSD/SA Committee has been hard at work during the past 12 months. What follows is a partial list of the committee's accomplishments and initiatives.

The committee's "Policy and Procedures" document was approved unanimously at the April VVA Board of Directors meeting.

The committee sponsored a nationwide PTSD poster contest in which 13 people submitted entries. The winning entry will be selected by the end of October.

Since February, 55,000 copies of the PTSD tri-fold brochure have been printed. More than 50,000 have been distributed around the country with the help of VVA's Council of State Council Presidents, VVA Service Officers, and the national VVA office staff. The most innovative distribution effort was initiated by Mokie Porter, national office Committee Liaison, who gave a box of the brochures to airline attendants staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Nashville during the VVA National Leadership Conference in August. She asked the flight attendants to distribute the brochures to our returning Iraq and Afghan troops.

The committee sponsored a presentation at the Leadership Conference. More than a hundred conference participants attended Dr. Joe Boscarino's presentation, "Exposure to Combat, PTSD, & Future Medical Problems: The Health Impact of Military Service for Vietnam Veterans." In addition to giving a great seminar, Boscarino was honored with a VVA life membership in recognition of his 20-year history of groundbreaking health care research focusing on Vietnam veterans.

With the assistance of national office staff member Carol Engle, the committee's web page is now up and running as part of the VVA web site at www.vva.org The web page contains minutes and reports from PTSD/SA Committee meetings; links to important articles such as the study reported in the July 1 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine about PTSD and our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; announcements of events; the committee's "mission statement"; and links to other organizations and agencies that specialize in PTSD, mental-health, and substance-abuse issues. In addition, VVA's "Self-help Guide on PTSD" and the "You're Not Crazy" tri-fold brochure can now be downloaded directly from the web page.

The committee also continued its efforts to build partnerships with other organizations to identify the priority mental-health and substance-abuse issues affecting America's veterans. For example, the chair participated in a panel discussion at the 25th Anniversary Conference of the National Association on Mental Illness in early September where he addressed the decline in VA funding for these issues. In July, the chair presented a program, "Domestic Violence and PTSD," to counselors attending the Vet Centers' annual Region 3A Counselors Training session in Atlanta.

The chair also was recently appointed to serve as the veterans' representative to the VA's Substance Use Disorder Group of the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative Executive Committee, which provides input on VA substance-abuse programs directly to Secretary Principi and his deputies. In addition, the committee is investigating funding opportunities and collaborative research projects with several other agencies and individuals on suicide prevention, crisis management, and other mental health- related programs that incorporate the concept of training veterans to care for veterans.

These accomplishments are due to the commitment, support, and teamwork of committee members. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of them for their dedication and hard work.

Chair: Tom Berger. Members: Dottie Barickman, Liz Cannon, Tony Catapano, Bob
Corsa, Marsha Four, Larry Goucher, Bob Maras, Sandy Miller, Johnny Pancrazio, Fr. Phil Salois, Jim Shott, and Dave Whaley. Special Advisers: Dee Hagge, Mary Miller, Anne Pancrazio, and Nancy Switzer. Staff Liaison: Mokie Porter.

2005: Focus On PTSD

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times in August, the VA health-care system, with 7.5 million veterans enrolled, has struggled to keep up for decades. At any one time, more than 3,000 veterans are waiting for a first visit to see a doctor. Those whose injuries from battle qualify them for disability compensation often wait six months to two years.

Although the VA has taken steps to cut the wait for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, newly discharged soldiers have waited 54 days on average to get their first veteran disability compensation checks. In addition, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have now become terrorist counterinsurgencies that have put American troops into sustained close-quarter combat on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War.

Many mental health professionals say that kind of fighting—spooky urban settings with unlimited hiding places; the impossibility of telling friend from foe; the knowledge that every stretch of road may conceal an explosive device—is tailored to leave lasting psychological scars. And not since World War II have so many troops faced such uncertainty about how long they will be deployed. More importantly in this regard, the Government Accounting Office published a report in September that noted the VA lacked a count of the total number of veterans currently receiving PTSD treatment, not to mention the information needed to determine whether it could meet an expected increased demand for mental-health services as a result of the Afghan and Iraq wars.

That’s why we have titled this column to reflect the PTSD/SA Committee’s commitment for 2005: “Focus on PTSD.” Our efforts during the year will focus on three goals: (1) raising PTSD awareness; (2) assisting our fellow veterans (especially Afghan and Iraq veterans) and their families in obtaining timely access to meaningful PTSD- and substance-abuse diagnoses and treatment programs; and (3) strongly advocating for a significant increase in appropriations for the VA health care system, particularly in the areas of mental health, PTSD, and substance abuse.

What can you do? Borrowing from a recent VVA Communications release, “What you can do is visit the district offices of your Senators and Members of Congress. Don’t ask them about funding of veterans health care—ask them how they plan to do their part to appropriate more money to meet the needs of the veterans who use the VA health-care system today. Remind them of the thousands of critically wounded casualties who will need the expertise of VA doctors.” By doing so, I believe we will be living VVA’s founding principle: “Never Again Will One Generation of Veterans Abandon Another.”

Contest Winner
I would like to thank everyone who submitted designs or ideas for the VVA/PTSD Awareness poster contest. The winner was John Monaghan of Wilmington, Delaware. A VVA life member, he claimed $225 worth of VVA merchandise. Congratulations, John.

WHAT IS PTSD?

Diagnostic Features

The essential feature of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one's physical integrity; or witnessing an event that involves death, injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of another person, or learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury experienced by a family member or other close associate (Criterion A1). The person's response to the event must involve intense fear, helplessness, or horror (or in children, the response must involve disorganized or agitated behavior) (Criterion A2). The characteristic symptoms resulting from the exposure to the extreme trauma include persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event (Criterion B), persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness (Criterion C), and persistent symptoms of increased arousal (Criterion D). The full symptom picture must be present for more than 1 month (Criterion E), and the disturbance must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (Criterion F).

Traumatic events that are experienced directly include, but are not limited to, military combat, violent personal assault (sexual assault, physical attack, robbery, mugging), being kidnapped, being taken hostage, terrorist attack, torture, incarceration as a prisoner of war or in a concentration camp, natural or manmade disasters, severe automobile accidents, or being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. For children, sexually traumatic events may include developmentally inappropriate sexual experiences without threatened or actual violence or injury. Witnessed events include, but are not limited to, observing the serious injury or unnatural death of another person due to violent assault, accident, war, or disaster or unexpectedly witnessing a dead body or body parts. Events experienced by others that are learned about include, but are not limited to, violent personal assault, serious accident, or serious injury experienced by a family member or a close friend; learning that one's child has a life-threatening disease. The disorder may be especially severe or long lasting when the stressor is of human design (e.g., torture, rape). The likelihood of developing this disorder may increase as the intensity of and physical proximity to the stressor increase.

The traumatic event can be reexperienced in various ways. Commonly, the person has recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event (Criterion B1) or recurrent distressing dreams during which the event is replayed (Criterion B2). In rare instances, the person experiences dissociative states that last from few seconds to several hours, or even days, during which components of the event are relived and the person behaves as though experiencing the event at that moment (Criterion B3). Intense psychological distress (Criterion B4) or physiological reactivity (Criterion B5) often occurs when the person is exposed to triggering events that resemble or symbolize an aspect of the traumatic event (e.g., anniversaries of the traumatic event; cold snowy weather or uniformed guards for survivors of death camps in cold climates; hot, humid weather for combat veterans of the South Pacific; entering any elevator for a woman who was raped in an elevator).

Stimuli associated with the trauma are persistently avoided. The person commonly makes deliberate efforts to avoid thoughts, feeling, or conversations about the traumatic event (Criterion C1) and to avoid activities, situations, or people who arouse recollections of it (Criterion C2). This avoidance of reminders may include amnesia for an important aspect of the traumatic event (Criterion C3). Diminished responsiveness to the external world, referred to as "psychic numbing" or "emotional anesthesia," usually begins soon after the traumatic event. The individual may complain of having markedly diminished interest or participation in previously enjoyed activities (Criterion C4), of feeling detached or estranged from other people (Criterion C5), or of having markedly reduced ability to feel emotions (especially those associated with intimacy, tenderness, and sexuality) (Criterion C6). The individual may have a sense of foreshortened future (e.g., not expecting to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span) (Criterion C7).

The individual has persistent symptoms of anxiety or increased arousal that were not present before the trauma. These symptoms may include difficulty falling or staying asleep that may be due to recurrent nightmares during which the traumatic event is relived (Criterion D1), hyper-vigilance (Criterion D4), and exaggerated startle response (Criterion D5). Some individuals report irritability or outbursts or anger (Criterion D2) or difficulty concentrating or completing tasks (Criterion D3).