I'm Going! (Page 3/4)
maryjane OCT 03, 10:48 PM
Out of the airport, onto the sidewalk and our Austin 'guardians are checking off each name, onto three charted bus and right away one of the guardians on a microphone starts pointing out the buildings and different things as we pass by. I, am on the Alpha bus. "Don, you're on the Alpha bus, this is the Bravo bus. The Apha bus is over there" Our driver, is fearless. In and out of traffic like he's running a grand prix and every lane his lane and he just don't care wo else may want to occupy it.

The Marriot. I don't remember which one but it's actually in Virginia. Nice digs but we don't go to our rooms yet. It's right into a big dining facility, throw our blue bags against a wall and find a seat at any of many big tables all set with bluetable clothes, several forks, tall glasses of water with a big plate of salad in front of each chair and waiters everywhere dressed with their starched white shirts and black jackets. All us Texas vets are all way under dressed for the dinner we are about to eat.. It's here, that we learn each of us will have a personal military escort (guardian) with us every waking moment until we board the plane back to Texas. I sat at a table and a young Army soldier from Ft Belvoir comes, sits down, and he looks about 16 and IMO, needs a haircut but Myles is supposed to stick to me like glue. (yeah, good luck with that) He's an E3, medical type.
I picked at my salad, then passed on the entraa and I ate the dessert, strawberry shortcake I think it was.

On other side, a very young Marine Sgt sits down, waiting for his vet to come sit down. Our name tags on the thing that hangs from our neck has our branch of service emblem, mine being an EGA and Sgt asks what my mos was and it happens to be the same as his. 6077, so I ask him what squadron he's with and he's from HMX just over at Quantico. Quantico is where Headquarters Marine Corps is but they have White Side and Greenside. Green=HQMC Whiteside is HMX. So, I know immediately what this Sgt does and why he's already got 2 rows of ribbons. They are the squadron that tranports the President around when he's not flying on AirForce one. So, He and I are both CH53 guys but his is a lot fancier than the ones I flew on. He has to go to another table as that's where his vet sat down.

Back when my primary guardian first called, she told me we were each going to get an opportunity to speak at this dinner, so be thinking about what I wanted to say regarding my year in Vietnam, in other words, .we were going to get to tell our stories, from RVN. No audio recording, no video, just between us boots on the ground guys (there was 1 female there too)
I had stayed up most of Wed night trying to compose what I wanted to say..

At the meet & greet the previous Saturday, much was said by the non Vietnam war primary speaker (ceo of honor flight Austin) about the non-army branches of service and it didn't sit well with some of us. I suppose it went over ok but it came off as the same kind of disrespect we all often got when we came back over 50 years ago. I wanted to set the record straight... 'Army this, Army that' may have worked ok out in the wide expanses of the mid east desert, where maneuver warfare was possible but in Vietnam it was all small units. A full battalion would be an unusually big operation. Most of the fighting took place with company sized units operating out of LZs and fire support bases.
I hauled too many Americal and 101st wounded and dead around to believe any of his bullshit.

Friday night about a dozen of us spoke. I spoke nearly 50% of it, of my experience with relying on USAF aircraft and Navy air power and fire support from US Navy vessels to allow us in Marine helos to be able to get into hot LZs. I simply wouldn't be here today without them. Door gunners are patched in thru a helmet headset/microphone to the pilot and cockpit comm. We cold hear everything the pilots say and everything said to them When you're trying to resupply an LZ up just south of the DMZ and just north of the Cua Viet River, and the command post waves you off several times because they don't want you shot down in their tiny outpost, killing 1/2 his troops and plugging up the LZ so nobody else can get in or out and you move off to the south a little ways and to a higher altitude, and you hear the FAC calling for fixed air support...bad things are fixing to happen. A pair of F4 Phantoms from Danang air base come in screaming, dropping napalm on the treeline where the fire and mortars are coming from, then 2-3 Navy A6s from a carrier on Yankee Station drop HE just outside the perimeter all the way past the jungle edge and an A-6 might be subsonic but they can carry a crapload of HE. A new voice comes up, and it's 1st ANGLICO telling you to move a little farther away and the whole area around the LZ starts exploding because a destroyer or cruiser is lobbing shell after shell of 5" or 8" and all of a sudden what's left of the jungle is quiet and we can get in and drop off what and who we are carrying. I saw that play out time and time again, especially over in Laos in Lam Son 719 where fixed wing from as far away as Guam dropped bomb load after bomb load for over a month straight as the ARVN on the ground were getting shot to pieces because the NVA knew ahead of time what the plan of attack was and threw 2 full divisions at them to demoralize all of the South Vietnam military. It worked too.

Then, I spoke at length thru teary eyes about the friends I lost, how hard it was when they didn't return from their missions into Laos and what it was like to have to go thru and 'sanitize' all their belongings so their mothers and wives back home wouldn't see something their fallen sons or husbands wouldn't have wanted them to... It was very hard, but hopefully vanquished some of my own demons and the dreams that my wife never understood will stop and I don't ever ever ever want her to. That's why we fight in far away places, so our friends and loved ones back here never have to know and see the real horrors of war.
Sep 22, 2025
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I never heard anyone say we weren't allowed to go anywhere, so after the dinner, I stepped out to a bench right out in front to enjoy the cool temps and gentle breeze. In about 10 minutes, here comes my local guardian, 'oh, oh there you are...we're all looking for you and a few seconds later 3-4 more little Army guys and gals are out there.. making sure I came back inside like a good little boy. I coulda been down 3 blocks at the 'Gentleman's Club' our bus passed on the way from the airport to hotel.

It was time to get our room keys and they realized I was gone when they couldn't check me off their always present checklist but they didn't see the other vet that was around the corner hiding to smoke a cigarette.
My room mate was an old sailor that was kinda disappointed he didn't have a room to himself but we both set our phones to wake us up at 5 but I was up at 4:30 and downstairs drinking coffee.

Next morning was a big serve yourself breakfast at 6am and it was much much better than the dinner the night before.
Grab all our bags, and on the buses. We're still in Va but soon are in DC and our primary guardian has done this a lot, pointing out buildings of interest. I marveled at the height and length of the Dept of Agriculture building and thought of all of you.
I have tons of pictures I took but they're nothing you haven't or can't see anywhere on the web for the most part.
Arlington Cemetery was impressive and sad at the same time. We first stopped at WW2 Memorial, which was immense. Walked all the way around and thru it. All those 4000+gold stars behind the fountains, each representing 100 fallen. It took some time to walk around it I came to regret that but I didn't bring the strong magnet that's needed to reset them and it's a really good thing I took my cane. They tried several times to put me in a wheelchair but I declined.

The places we actually stopped at were the memorials of interest to Veterans. ww2, Vietnam/Korean war Memorials, Into the gate of Arlingon Cemetery, where we stayed nearly an hour and saw the changing of the guard and 2 of our members got to assist in changing out the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown, with the guard's help and direction. It wasa chilling thing to watch. Spent a good bit of time there. We walked around part of the cemetery a bit and someone pointed out Col John Glenn's grave.
Later..........
maryjane OCT 04, 12:42 AM
My little speech ended with a poem that one of my squadron mates had written for a memorial service we had at Marble Mountain Air Facility south of Danang, after we stood down from that gawd awful Lam Son 719. I remember him reading it in that little chapel that March 1971 evening but none of us got a copy of it. It was just one of many difficult days over there. When the squadron departed Vietnam a couple of months later, I had orders to Millington Nav Base Tn for instructor and maintenance duty, & not with the squadron in Hawaii. They had been in Vietnam continously since 1967. I didn't know it, but there was a cruise book made up for that '70-'71 time frame. I must have been flying the day they took the pictures for it.. Fast forward to around 1984, my father was in a yard sale or flea market in Conroe Texas and saw a book laying there and recognized my old squadron emblem on the front..a Pegasus. He gave a couple of bucks for it and gave it to me next visit. The last page of that cruise book had a photo of that poem that my friend had written. When all my kids came for a visit in 2011, I spread most of my old Vietnam USMC stuff out and decided to let them divide it up then. One of the few things I kept, was the last page from that cruise book and it's hung on my wall behind glass ever since. Faded now, and very fragile. I read it the night of the honor flight dinner, but it was hard to get thru it. Kobe got it right.




The Wall.
I had been to the scaled down traveling Vietnam wall a couple of times. Once with my father in '84 and again around 2003 in San Angelo Tx with Jane. But, the one in DC was different. It's a lot taller, longer and in the shadow of Arlington cemetery. I again touched my friends' names. The emmesity of it and all those names along with the size of the cemetery is hard to digest.

But, that's not the only wall there. There is a wall on the North side of the WW2 memorial, with over 4000 gold stars on it, each representing 100 KIAs. There are 56 granite columns surrounding it, one for each state and territory in WW2 eras.
I saw them all in one of my hobbling along walks.

The Korean War Memorial. Growing up, I hauled hay and worked calves for a friend of my father. He hadserved in Korea in the 1st Marine Division at Chosin Reservoir and lost some toes to frostbite. As I stood next to that memorial to the so called 'forgotten war' I looked at the faces of the members of that returning patrol, with their cold weather/rain gear on, and even tho it was over 80 deg that day in DC, I could feel the cold and thought of my friend that I had spent so much time with. Forgotten? No, not in my life. There are over 36,000 names on their wall.

[This message has been edited by maryjane (edited 10-04-2025).]

maryjane OCT 04, 01:07 AM
But Myles.. my 'guardian' in DC from Ft Belvoir. I didn't know it until I was on the flight back to Austin,... but this was Myles first gig as a HF guardian. God bless him he tried, he really did but Myles had 2 flaws... One of them was he couldn't resist a pretty face. He was supposed to be making sure I got off the bus ok!!!...



The other, he couldn't stay awake. I took this 2 minutes after we got back on the bus to go to another memorial. He musta had a long hard night after he left me at my room Friday night and I already knew he was excused from all other duties on base...

The DC guardians rode with us from the last memorial, then stayed with us thru airport security and stayed at the gate area until we boarded for return flight to Texas. The last time I saw Myles, he was chatting up a different young girl by the bar in the gate area.....

US Marine Iwo Jima memorial, where we were fed box lunches..bbq, mac n cheese and peach cobbler. (choice of chicken or pork...I got chicken and it was a bun sandwich and it was awful. Piled high with chicken but still awful) Leave Texas, fly all day and eat 'bbq' in Washington DC??? What were hey thinking? Of course, I got my picture in front of the Iwo Jima Memorial. All us Marines together in the photo, and there were just a handful of The few, The Proud. I think there were only 6 of us, along with our Austin Honorflight guardians. (I may have posted this already) Top row, far right. This was our next to last stop before the airport and I was hurtin pretty bad by this time. On the bus, off the bus, on the bus, off the bus, walk some more, on the bus, off the bus, walk walk walk... 'Donald, you're on the Alpha bus'..




We couldn't go to the USAF memorial because they had an infestation of bodylice-crabs Oh, I'm mistaken, it was lantern moths they were spraying for but we did stop at US Navy Memorial which is kinda in between some large govt office looking buildings right next to the original FDR memorial. We were running a little behind schedule so they asked only the Navy folks or if you had a relative USN kia to get off. I stayed aboard the Alpha bus.

[This message has been edited by maryjane (edited 10-04-2025).]

maryjane OCT 04, 02:40 AM


US Navy memorial
blackrams OCT 04, 07:48 AM

quote
Originally posted by maryjane:






Twice I visited the Wall, I couldn't manage to actually touch the wall, found several names I knew. Other monuments there spark pride in seeing them, that wall brings tears.

All gave some, some gave all. My sincerest gratitude to all those who served.

Rams
olejoedad OCT 04, 04:25 PM
Thank you for your posting about your trip to D.C.
I don't have words to describe how I felt when reading it.
I shed more than one tear....
maryjane OCT 04, 07:04 PM
hang loose, some of the best is yet to come! (Twas for me anyway)
blackrams OCT 05, 02:05 PM

quote
Originally posted by maryjane:

hang loose, some of the best is yet to come! (Twas for me anyway)



Don, thanks for posting the story of your adventure and I'm looking forward to what you have coming.

Rams
Newbfiero OCT 05, 06:55 PM
Thanks for posting 👍 love reading about it .. 🙂
82-T/A [At Work] OCT 07, 01:15 PM
Thanks for posting this MJ. I was wondering what it was going to be like, not just for everyone in general, but also how you might deal with it. I'm sure (as I read), it brings up a lot of pain as well... but also some level of comradery. Sorry that the Navy guy didn't get his own room... he's probably frustrated by having to sleep next to so many people in those little bunks over the years that he was jaded.

I appreciated the experience you had at the Korean War memorial too... it's the same as I'd always felt too. From the moment they built the memorial (it wasn't there when I was a little kid living in DC), I always appreciated the fact that... while sad, the "haunting" look on the faces of the soldier statues really helps to try to convey what they felt. I'd never known it was so bitterly cold there until you told me about your dad's friend that you worked with, but I always got that impression when I'd visited it that... even though it might be in the middle of summer, it felt "chilling" over there.


Anyway, thanks for writing all that, I really appreciated the opportunity to read it.