Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 : Editorial

1963, the United States’ involvement in the Second Indochina War was all but underway. Years before the US imposed the draft many people associate with the Vietnam war today, a 17 year-old farm kid, Henry Gutierrez, signed up voluntarily for the United States Navy to be part of the Vietnam War effort.

His military path started in my hometown, San Diego, where he attended boot camp in what is now Liberty Station in Point Loma, a community housing project just west of our airport. Upon completing boot camp, Texas-born Gutierrez left San Diego, and was stationed on various military bases abroad, including the Philippians, Australia, and Vietnam.

By 1966, the Navy had approximately 250 PBR’s patrolling the Mekong Delta, the Rung Sat Special Zone, and the Saigon River. The PBR combatants’ role was to disrupt weapons shipments. Henry was assigned to a PBR Mark II, the second revision of the PBR, outfitted with a twin .50 caliber machine gun turret on the forward. These fast moving, agile watercraft were a force to be reckoned with, and they proved it. One of the duties of the PBR was to man the turret during watch.

“I remember, one night on watch, I’m sitting up there in the guns and I hear *tink* on the side of the boat. ‘Hey you hear that?’, I said to one of the guys, *tink* – it happened again. They were taking pop shots at us from the shoreline… Boy, lemme tell ya, when you open up on an area with two fifties?…Shoot, there’d be nothin’ left.”

Henry served nearly three tours in Vietnam, in the third, he was wounded in a conflict, awarding him passage home and a Purple Heart. With a sea bag in hand and a fist full of metals, he was plopped back on US soil in northern California.

“Yea… I got shot, they put me up in this hospital next to some other guy I never met, and one day Ann-Margaret came to visit us, I thought that was pretty cool. That guy and I got into a lot of trouble with the nurses, one night we planned a mission to steal one of the TV’s so we could watch Vietnamese television, not that we could understand it anyway.”

Nearly everyone he went to boot camp with did not return home alive, nearly everyone he served with died. He came home to a nation in turmoil and protest about the US involvement in Vietnam. War protesters were at their strongest, and the “peace” movement was in full swing. Through it all, one story sticks out in my memory over all the others:

“I sat down in the airport, had all my stuff waiting to get shuffled on to the next place, and protesters were all over… I was just minding my own business, and this little old lady walked up to me and thanked me. That’s the kind of person I did my service for.”

He returned from Vietnam awarded with metals for his actions. He returned with the weight of those actions on his mind and heart. His memories of the smell of napalm, his friends and fellow soldiers being killed, witnessing villages be decimated were to forever haunt him, as it does many others to this day. He’s my father and has been my hero for 30 years. He always will be.

Happy Veterans Day, dad.

[photos to be posted soon]