The gentleman was dubious about me being a veteran, saying, “Are you a fake soldier or a real soldier?” I smiled and assured him I was the “real deal.” He might have thought my uniform was a costume or something I bought at an Army-Navy store. Despite dating back to the late ’60s, I have to say the uniform is pristine. It looks like a U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps employee issued the uniform to me yesterday. It turns out he was also is a Vietnam veteran and said, “We should never have gone into Vietnam,” seeing that wasteful misadventure as a big mistake. We both agreed about the mistaken invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d served with the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division in Vietnam beginning in 1969. I said “Aww…you missed out on the Tet Offensive. That’s too bad.” (The offensive began in late January 1968). I told him I was supposed to join the First Cav in July 1967, so my plane (a C-141 U.S. Air Force Starlifter transport plane) landed in Pleiku, the closest airstrip to An Khe, the headquarters basecamp for the division. However, my orders were changed the next day to join the First Infantry Division (the Big Red One), so I had to hop on a C-130 for a flight to Saigon where an army bus took me to the First Infantry Division basecamp at Di An (pron. ZEE Ahn).
This Vietnam vet’s wife noticed the curved Airborne patch above the left-shoulder patch that represented the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. After basic combat training at Fort Benning, Georgia in the summer of 1966, I was assigned to the 13th Psychological Operations (Psyops) Battalion which was part of the warfare center. Since the center had been designated as an Airborne unit, I had to have the Airborne patch as part of my uniform. The woman’s husband assumed I was a paratrooper because of the Airborne patch, but I never jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. I told them, “I was chairborne, not airborne.”
Also before last evening’s Guardians game, a couple from Buffalo stopped to chat with the woman reaching to shake my hand, saying she liked my peace flag. I said, “I wish everyone did. I was in Vietnam for a year. I like peace a lot better than war. “There are two basic elements of war: Fearmongering, war mongering politicians and their war-profiteering bed partners.” Before they left, she again shook my hand, as did her husband.
Standing behind the West Side Market this morning in my vintage U.S. Army dress uniform and holding my peace flag, a woman stopped to say she had said ‘hello’ to me last evening as I stood at East 9th Street and Carnegie Avenue greeting people heading to Progressive Field for the Guardians-Rangers game. I said, “I was promoting peace. We need much more peace, civility, tolerance, mutual respect, compassion, patience and kindness in our society. Those qualities have eroded in recent years.” I then gave her my card promoting the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation which indicates I am a Vietnam veteran and Ohio coordinator for the foundation.
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