Why I Love the Vietnam Vet

I have the utmost respect, admiration and gratitude for all veterans of all our armed services.  But I've always had a special affinity for the Vietnam-era veteran.  And not just because I'm the proud son of the one pictured above.  I feel a special duty to try to make up for the honor and recognition they deserve but were denied for so long, to make sure as many Vietnam vets as possible know they are appreciated.

Vietnam-era veterans, following the example of their fathers and grandfathers, stepped up when their nation called, and wrote a blank check for an amount up to and including their very lives.  They fought with every bit as much determination, valor and love for their brothers as did their fathers in the Greatest Generation, even as they were maligned and mistreated by a nation that lost its way.  Don't believe me?  Read the citations of Medals of Honor awarded for gallantry in Vietnam.

While so many others their age at home turned to chemically fueled self-indulgence, exhibitionism and apathy, our Vietnam warriors looked outward in dedication and sacrifice.  While many of the ones who were fortunate enough to return came home broken in body and spirit, and were spit on and abused, in years to come a conscience-stricken nation vowed to never again let its warriors be so mistreated.  Our current fighters reap the benefit of this and of the example of honor set by their fathers and grandfathers of the Vietnam generation.  And unlike their tormentors, Vietnam veterans can now walk with their heads held high, knowing that whatever was lost by the press and politicians, they won their war, outfighting a skilled and determined enemy, and did so with consummate skill, courage and honor. 

Thank you, Vietnam veterans.

The Measure of Devotion

            On Sunday, May 1, 2011, the Wounded Heroes Fund Kern County Chapter held their 3rd annual Salute to Local Heroes at the CSUB Outdoor Amphitheater in celebration and support of local veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

            Two local veterans honored were Casey Schaubschlager and Wesley Leon-Barrientos.

            In the savage fighting in Ramadi and Fallujah during the darkest days of the Iraqi insurgency, Cpl. Casey Schaubschlager and his brother Marines were so continually battered by daily combat that Schaubschlager can’t even say how many times he was wounded.

            “We got mortared three times a day like clockwork. Morning, noon and night.”

            It was a buried, remotely triggered artillery shell that finally sent him home for good, with 40-60 percent hearing loss and traumatic brain injury.

            Schaubschlager still contends with the invisible wounds of survivor guilt and post-traumatic stress and likely always will, has had to fight for medical care for combat injuries and still hasn’t received his Purple Heart.  But for Schaubschlager, who considered himself a career Marine, the premature end to his Marine Corps career may have been the bitterest loss of all.

            “If it wasn’t for them retiring me out, I would still be in for my 20 years. I was what they called a ‘lifer.’”

            Schaubschlager is open about his difficulties in coping with that loss and readjusting to civilian life.  He’s gradually healing from his seen and unseen wounds with the support of a loving wife and the same determination that saw him through his three combat tours of Iraq.  And he credits the Wounded Heroes Fund with helping with everything from groceries to finding jobs. 

            “They actually approached me.  They just felt like they wanted to help me, so they did.  They were ‘forcefully helpful,’ in a good way, though,” he laughed.

            His work at the Kern County Veterans Center, volunteering with the Wounded Heroes Fund and pursuing a degree in psychology with an eye toward helping other vets have given Schaubschlager a renewed sense of purpose in a post-Marines life that, until recently, he’d never even imagined.  His advice to other vets?

            “Keep the faith, keep the hope, don't let your head hang low.  At first I let my pride get in the way.  Don't let your pride get in the way of getting the help you need.”

            For U.S. Army Cpl. Wesley Leon-Barrientos and his fellow 101st Airborne Division “Screaming Eagles,” death and injury were a daily reality in Iraq’s infamous “Sunni Triangle,” as were enormous mental stresses and ironic twists of fate.  He once flipped a coin with a close friend to determine which one would have to take up the dreaded rear position in a convoy escort.

            “I lost, and he got to go in the front truck.  The front truck got hit and he died right there.”

            That was the first of many incidents over the course of three combat tours that might have shattered a less resilient man, but not Leon-Barrientos, who earned five Army Commendation Medals and three Purple Hearts.  The third was for an IED attack that cost him a broken jaw, two crushed vertebrae - and both of his legs.  But he believes there are reasons for everything - even for that.  He gestures to his two year old pixie of a daughter, who was born during the time he’d still have been in Iraq had he not been wounded:

            “I see a lot of reasons.  I see one right now.  She wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t lost my legs,” said Leon-Barrientos.  “I wouldn’t change a thing.” 

            Leon-Barrientos’ friendliness and upbeat attitude are remarkable in light of all he’s experienced.  He is lavish and effusive in his praise of the way the people of Kern County support their veterans, especially through the efforts of the Wounded Heroes Fund, which protected his mother’s home from foreclosure while she remained with him during his year-long sojourn at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., and helped build his family a home of their own.

            “If you've never had anything that you're thrilled about, proud about, and honored to do in your life, there's nothing better than volunteering with and donating to the Wounded Heroes Fund.”

            Please join the Wounded Heroes Fund in thanking and supporting these remarkable young men and their families and many others like them for their service and sacrifices.  For more information, or to learn more about Casey Schaubschlager and Wesley Leon-Barrientos and their fellow vets, call 661-324-7453 or visit www.thewoundedheroesfund.org.

Why The Wall

In August, 1969, my 23-year-old mother drove west with her husband and their month-old son in their ’68 Volkswagen from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky.  Back home to Kern County, after my dad’s year in Vietnam and honorable discharge from the Army, to make a home with her new family.

In the coming decades, my mom made that home, helped raise two sons and weathered the ups and downs, joys and sorrows of a typical American life.  She welcomed two brides into the family as daughters, cared for other people’s children and settled into a well-deserved retirement with my dad.  She’s the happy grandmother of four grandkids.  She’s lived most of her life, a lifetime, since 1969.

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In the month Mom was coming home on Route 66 to begin the next phase in her young life, a happy-go-lucky neighbor and Wasco High classmate two years her junior was beginning his tour of duty as a combat medic with the U.S. Army 5^th Special Forces Group, Vietnam.

 

Had he survived his tour, his story from that point wouldn’t have been the same as my mother’s, but probably wouldn’t have been all that different.  I don’t know if he would have gone to medical school, or Bakersfield College, or to work as a Pontiac salesman.  Maybe he would have married and had children and grandchildren.  Maybe, having seen and done more than most people twice his age, he would have left his hometown behind and burned brightly across the firmament.  Or perhaps simply made a quiet, honorable life in small-town Kern County.  Maybe he’d have found a cure for cancer or maybe just vanquished the crabgrass.  But no matter what twists and turns his life would have taken, he should have had a life, should have lived, like my mom, a lifetime beyond the year 1969.

After all, he was just 20 years old then, barely a grown man.  Not old enough to vote or even take a legal sip of beer.  But on December 1 of that crazy, climactic year, as my parents got ready for their baby’s first Christmas, at a time when this young man’s life with all its unrealized promise and possibility had just barely begun, it ended in an mortar attack in the Quang Duc Province of the Republic of Vietnam.  And instead of Who’s Who in American Business or the minutes of school board meetings or the Family Practitioner section of the Yellow Pages, the name Stephen Leon Ragsdale is etched in Panel 15W, Line 014 of a long, black granite wall.

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There are at least 1,006 other names that will join Sgt. Ragsdale’s on Kern County’s own Wall.  Each one represents a life full of limitless potential that should have been lived to the fullest but instead was cruelly abbreviated.  Each is a story never finished and never told.  Like my mother, each should have experienced his share of successes and failures, love and loss, satisfaction and regrets.  Each should have been entitled to graying hair, growing waistlines and the other unwelcome trophies of middle age.  Each should have been remembered not only in faded photographs and eight millimeter home movie film and the failing memories of elderly parents and middle-aged siblings and high school friends, but in adult accomplishments and ceremonies and good times and milestones, and in the hearts of children and grandchildren.  Although they achieved much, their lives were too short for any of their names to be engraved on a Lifetime Achievement Award.  So let us, the people of Kern County, engrave them on something meaningful and lasting and worthy of their sacrifice, where we and our children can come and reflect on the meaning of service, the importance of gratitude and the fragility and brevity of life, and where we can let them know they are still not forgotten.  Let’s all give what we can to finish the Kern Veterans Memorial Wall of Valor.

Kern Veterans Memorial Foundation

(661) 201-3987

e-mail: info@kernvets.org

www.kernvets.org

Book Review: Brothers in Arms, The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII’s Forgotten Heroes

Book Review: Brothers in Arms, The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII’s Forgotten Heroes

In the flush of outrage and patriotism in the days and months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans by the hundreds of thousands volunteered to serve in our nation's armed forces. It was no different for black Americans, who were ready to fight for their country, even one that still treated them as decidedly second-class citizens.  Eager to maintain the support of black citizens for the war effort, the government attempted to placate them by accepting blacks into the still racially segregated armed services in support roles such as cooks, mechanics, quartermasters (supply troops) and the like, while never actually intending to let them fight.  This is well-known, but to this day, a myth persists that no blacks fought in combat during World War Two, except perhaps in isolated instances such as the famed Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group.  But in fact, driven by the urgent need for combat replacements in the last year of the war, tens of thousands of black soldiers fought and were killed and wounded in front line combat, mostly in all-black units.  The 761st Tank Battalion was just such a unit.

With Brothers in Arms, The Epic Story of the 761stTank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes, NBA Hall of Famer and historian Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Author of On the Shoulder of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, and co-author Anthony Walton, finally do justice to the remarkable but almost completely unknown story of the 761st Tank Battalion, whose motto was "Come Out Fighting!"

Highly trained, but manning poorly-designed Sherman tanks that were in many ways mobile death traps and were in all ways under-armored and outgunned by the vaunted German Panzers, the 761st fought their way over 2,000 combat miles from the hedgerows of Normandy to the concentration camps of Mauthausen.  You could say they had to fight a two-front war - not only against the best Nazi Germany could throw at them, but also the worst to which some of their own countrymen could subject them. Both in stateside training and European combat, they fought to overcome indifference, stereotypes, outright racism and even violence.  They struggled against mistrust, disrespect, disdain, ignorance, doubting leaders, poor leadership and tactics, neglect and exhaustion.  They dealt with the ambiguous and contradictory feelings toward them personified in their erstwhile commander General George S. Patton, who had made it plain in past writings that he thought blacks couldn't think quickly enough for armored warfare, yet was willing enough to have their support in critical battles.  They fought for weeks and months without more than a day's break from combat, adequate winter clothing or even a change of uniform. To drag a wounded comrade to safety under fire or to scout ahead or attack German positions on foot was nearly an everyday occurence.  Rather than being part of a self-contained armored division staffed with infantry trained to support tank operations, the 761st Battalion was a detached unit (known to themselves and the rest of the Army as a "bastard" battalion) that was shuffled around different armored or infantry units according to need or the whim of commanders.  They would be placed alongside an all-white unit whose reactions to them ranged from caution to outright contempt, and win most of them over with their courage, skill, dedication and humanity, demolishing stereotypes that blacks weren't brave or intelligent enough fight or lead.  Then they would be abruptly bounced to another unfamiliar unit and have to start again from scratch, suffering the crushing indignity of going from heroes and life-savers one day to "n----r tankers" the next.

Through it all, they fought with unheralded but unexcelled valor and determination, and often with conspicuous gallantry.  And when they returned home, sure that their bravery and sacrifices in blood and lives would open America's eyes to their worth as men and finally gain them full participation in American life, they found a country mostly eager and determined to go on as if they had never even set foot overseas.  Their status as an unattached unit hampered record keeping, as did "lost" commendations and paperwork and old stereotypes, to the extent that even other black Americans refused to believe that they had fought at all, let alone from inside the iconic Sherman tank. Their skill in maneuvering thirty-two ton tanks through difficult terrain and demolishing German fortifications and machine gun teams with 75mm armor-piercing shells did little to prepare them for the postwar workforce and the reluctance of white managers to hire them, even after some obtained college degrees.

It would have been little wonder had they given up and retreated into bitterness and disillusionment.  But instead, we see in almost all of them a determination to start families and make new lives for themselves.  (We also see that men whose courage had been forged in bitter fighting against elite German armored units and SS troops were not easily intimidated by jeering crowds and phalanxes of police with nightsticks, dogs and fire hoses).  What is surprising is that so many people had to work so long and hard for them to receive the recognition that should have been theirs from the beginning.

While not without minor flaws, such as the need for more maps, the thoroughly researched and well-written "Brothers in Arms" illuminates an important part of black history and American history (including the history-shaping involvement of one John Roosevelt Robinson with the unit).  The experience of the black serviceman in World War II is an important prelude to the Civil Rights struggles of the '50s and '60s.  It's hard to read this account knowing that what they went through was part of a fight that would stretch on for another two decades. It's hard, knowing they thought they had won peace for their children, but their children would have to continue the struggle.

"Brothers in Arms" also retells an important part of military history.  The flawed and bloody campaign for the Saar, a low point in Patton's career, has been almost completely overshadowed by the Battle of the Bulge and the final drive through Germany (in both of which the 761st also fought) and receives deserved attention here.

But I recommend "Brothers in Arms" simply because the men of the 761st Tank Battalion, as well as all black WWII veterans, deserve for their story to be told.



Book Review: Descent into Darkness Pearl Harbor, 1941 (The True Story of a Navy Diver)

August 21, 2010

The standard narrative of World War II in the Pacific long engraved on the American psyche moves from the devastation at Pearl Harbor to the dark days of Bataan and first good news of the Doolittle raid.  From there, the tactical defeat but strategic victory at the Coral Sea, the stunning turning point of Midway, the Marines' savage struggle for Guadalcanal, fighting in the jungles of New Guinea, and the bloody island-hopping campaign.

But while all this was happening, Pearl Harbor was a beehive of activity, and not just with the comings and goings of Navy ships and in-transit personnel.  Every day, civilian and Navy "hardhat" divers like Edward Raymer donned almost 100lb of bulky diving gear and descended into the blackness of the oil-covered waters of Pearl to undertake the important and hazardous task of salvaging what they could of the once-proud battleships sunk and damaged in the attack and refloating as many of them as possible so they could be repaired and sent to the fight that had been over for them almost as soon as it had begun.  In Descent into Darkness Pearl Harbor, 1941 (The True Story of a Navy Diver), retired US Navy Commander Edward C. Raymer (formerly an enlisted sailor and the first person to dive on the sunken U.S.S. Arizona) weaves a fascinating tale of a relatively unknown but important part of the war in the Pacific – the attempt to undo as much as possible the damage from the Japanese sneak attack on the Pacific Fleet.  In so doing, he brings to life a motley cast of ordinary but brave, dedicated and hardworking sailors who are a microcosm of the Greatest Generation who triumphed in World War II, and who, like the combat sailors, sometimes gave their lives in doing so.

The nature of the divers' work dictated that it be done alone and unsupervised.  The kind of officers that would normally try to micromanage things were only too happy to leave the terrifying work up to the enlisted divers once they experienced it themselves.  This work involved painstakingly moving through fully fueled and armed battleships that were ripped apart and strewn with wreckage and debris.  It was up to the individual divers to overcome countless problems and hazards that had never been encountered in peacetime salvage diving, whether it was jagged steel, the removal of 2,000lb high explosive shells from magazines or the deadly buildup of explosive gases.  And because the work was inside sunken ships in water covered and saturated in fuel oil and debris, it was all done in pitch darkness and had to be accomplished with the help of radioed directions from ship's plans and done completely by feel – a feel that was finely honed in the months and years they toiled in the inky blackness.  The cadre of divers were true pioneers who invented solutions and procedures that became adopted as standard later on.  And from the Publisher's Weekly review, "Raymer's memoir is useful above all as a case study of the hands-on, un-bureaucratized approach to problem-solving that the U.S. brought to WWII from the beginning."

Raymer hilariously relates off-duty antics as the divers ingeniously circumvented prohibition (of liquor) in order outmaneuver an entire island of soldiers, sailors and Marines to secure female companionship for a series of covert beach parties.  But he also sensitively treats the difficult subject of encountering the bodies of sailors still entombed in the ships.  Phobias – fears of the dark, confinement, drowning and being buried alive all came into play as every day brought new challenges to be overcome.  (Even arachnophobia was a problem in an incident that will either terrify or amuse, depending on one's feelings towards spiders).

Raymer and a fellow diver spent a hardly peaceful interlude in the jungles of Guadalcanal and the waters of "The Slot" between the Solomon Islands.  Dodging the nightly "Tokyo Express" of marauding Japanese cruisers and destroyers, the sailors worked to repair ships and resupply the Marines on the island, for whom they gained a profound respect after observing and sharing in some of their hardships.  A high point was doing underwater repair work in crystal clear sunlit waters – something they had not yet experienced in the war.  The low point was the torpedoing and sinking of their home away from home, the repair ship U.S.S. Seminole.

After a 30-day survivors leave in San Francisco, Raymer returned to his brother divers and continued the work at Pearl Harbor on the USS Arizona, Utah, West Virginia, California and Oklahoma. He served as a liaison to news reporters and even a tour guide of the Oklahoma to none other than First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.  Some of the battlewagons were beyond saving – the Utah was scuttled and the Arizona remained at the bottom of the harbor, becoming a sacred monument and a tomb for more than a thousand sailors.  Others lived to fight again, like the lightly damaged Tennessee and the West Virginia, which was present at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, where the long, costly and bloody war was finally brought to a close.

If you're interested in history, curious about the "rest of" the Pearl Harbor story, love the salty vocabulary and tales of the Navy, are curious about working diving in canvas suits, weighted shoes and copper helmets in the days before SCUBA, wonder what it was like when important work wasn't weighed down with a web of nonsensical rules and regulations, or just want a good read, Descent Into Darkness is highly recommended.