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This Sunday, October 4th, the Behring Senior Center and Aging & Disability Resource Center will present A Salute to Vietnam Era Veterans, beginning at 1:30 p.m., at the Monroe High School, with doors opening at Noon. A grant from the Community Foundation of Southern Wisconsin is helping to pay for this very worthy event. In addition to the program, a number of displays will also be available for viewing.

The event will include presentations from Army Photographer, Pete Finnegan. Finnegan’s exhibit is titled Good Soldier/Bad Soldier. Steve Saunders, author; JR Robertson of Monroe, a Vietnam Veteran who has been afflicted with Agent Orange; Clayton Ruegsegger, Green County Veterans Service office, and Kay Krebs will also be presenting. Krebs is the sister of one of the seven Green County men who died in Vietnam.

Tammy Derrickson, Director of the Behring Senior Center, is the driving force behind this major event. For Derrickson this event is very personal and special to her, her father was one of the 58,220 men and women who died in Vietnam.

Army Photographer Pete Finnegan had been in the army hospital being treated for dysentery when he was asked to re-enlist for another hitch, with the promise of being able to choose between being a cook, mechanic or photographer. He picked the photographer and began working in the photo lab, moving on to combat photographer.

During his time as an Army photographer, Finnegan began sending home to his mother some of the photos the Army didn’t use. She put them away, forgotten for 25 years, until Finnegan’s high school aged daughter asked to see her dad’s photos.

That first time viewing in 25 years led to an exhibit of the photos in 1999, at the Civic Center in Madison. After that exhibit, Finnegan’s photos have been exhibited in numerous shows in Wisconsin. His biggest and no doubt most appreciative audience came in 2010 for LZ Lambeau, a Lambeau Field welcome home for Wisconsin’s Vietnam Veterans; 26,000 strong attended this event.

The Vietnam War has no doubt been one of the most fractious wars the United States has ever been involved in. Returning soldiers from Vietnam were often greeted by angry anti-war protesters, who may well have been correct in their dislike of the Vietnam War, but wrongly took out their anger on those who fought the war, and not the politicians who started the war.

In 1964, President Johnson quipped, “Veetnam is a piddling little piss-ant country.” Those few words would become the ultimate undoing of the Johnson presidency. Because of the strong protests at home against the war, Johnson decided not to run for re-election in 1968.

Vietnam tore families apart! Fathers who fought in WWII, who were, in many cases, drafted for the duration of the war, plus six months, often saw their Vietnam Veteran sons as having a much easier time, because they spent “only” 12 months in Vietnam. In-depth studies have shown just the opposite to be true. The typical four-year WWII soldier stationed in the South Pacific saw an average of 40 days of combat over four years.

Vietnam Veterans, in contrast, averaged 240 days in combat in less than 12 months. Re-entry into civilian life was a struggle for many Vietnam Veterans. Bill Hustad, a Purple Heart Vietnam Vet and Commander of the New Glarus VFW, explained why this occurred. “The re-entry into civilian life was made difficult for Vietnam Veterans, because one day they were in combat, and within 24-48 hours they were back home in the United States. They had no time to adjust from battlefield conditions to being back home.” Returning WWII Veterans almost always returned home by military ship, taking many days in passage back home.

This disparity in days in combat occurred because of a new type of warfare, air mobility, which was tried for the first time in Vietnam once Col. John Stockton’s airmobile arrived in Vietnam, followed by the 101st Airborne, wearing the Screaming Eagle shoulder patch that got its founding with Wisconsin Civil War soldiers serving in the Old Abe Regiment.

Air mobility with UH-1 helicopters, more recognizable as the Huey because of the sound it made, allowed troops to quickly be moved from one hotspot to another. Many of the Huey helicopters were piloted by the sons of small-town America who wanted to fly but didn’t have a college degree. The Army was the only branch of the service that allowed pilots without a college degree.

By the end of the war, the UH-1s had logged 7,531,955 hours of air-time doing yeoman duty, moving troops and acting as Dustoffs (air ambulances) which saved many lives that otherwise would have been lost through previous methods of evacuation of the wounded.

Cobra gunships, a scaled down version of the Huey on a diet, loaded with armaments, would often prep the landing zone for the bigger troop carrying Hueys, making troop insertions much safer from enemy fire.

Despite the much better battlefield medicine, many Vietnam Vets came home with problems that often didn’t quickly manifest themselves. PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), which was most commonly blown off as “shell shock” in WWII Veterans, was actually PTSD without a diagnosis for WWII Veterans.

But the bigger health problem was, and still is, exposure to Agent Orange and its many ways of manifesting itself inside the bodies of Vietnam Veterans. Chris Beer of the Green County Veteran’s Service Office, which is funded by Green County and not the VA (Veterans Administration), recently said that Agent Orange is still the single biggest health problem their office helps Vietnam Vets with.

She further said that the guidelines for Agent Orange poisoning have been broadened to include almost all Vietnam Vets. Among the newest health problems to be presumptive of Agent Orange exposure include B-cell Leukemia, ischemic heart disease and Parkinson’s Disease.

Those exempted from probable Agent Orange exposure are the “blue water” sailors, ones that were on ships in the ocean waters near Vietnam. “Brown water” Navy Vets (those, like current Secretary of State, John Kerry, who were running Swift Boats on the rivers in Vietnam) are included in the presumptive category for Agent Orange exposure.

In 2015, 40 years after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, those once young guys now the nearing age 70 and above are now the elder veterans filling the chairs at the VFW and Legion Halls that their fathers and grandfathers once filled.

The Salute to Vietnam Era Veterans will give these men and women who served their country a long-overdue, and much-deserved, thank you.