OUR WELCOME HOME

After a year of surviving in the jungles of Viet Nam, living with the rats the size of possums, leaches sticking on you and the constant use of malaria pills and salt pills to survive trying to keep from being one more sent home in a body bag and becoming another target for "charlie", I was getting ready to go back to the world. I got all my stuff ready to DEROS, done all the out-processing, de-brefings, got all paperwork and my new orders for home. I just had one final most important thing to do, I had to go say good-by to Bitch. One of the hardest things I have ever done. I finally got through it and started the long journey home. First to Hue then a C-130 to Cam Rahn Bay for three days, then the freedom bird for the world. We had a pretty good flight home and finally landed in Seattle-Tacoma Washington. I dont know how the pilot landed the plane with all the cheering and yelling. We got off the pland and on a bus for Ft Lewis for our in-processing so we could get home. What a rude awakening on the bus ride to the Ft. Some hippies were lined up just outside the fence and we thought they were welcoming us home, but we had a rude awakening, they started yelling baby killers, spitting toward the bus, giving us the middle finger. Our spirits just sort of dropped. We went on into the Ft for our processing and a big steak, our first in a year. Then for our lecture from one of the in-processing personnel. Troops for your own safety and the Military's, we are advising you to not wear your Military Uniform in public as you are now back in a different world than you left. What the hell did this mean, we just spent a year, some more, living everday facing death and destruction and now we are not welcome back in the country we had just fought for. Some of us thought he was just blowing it out of what it really was. So some of us wore our uniforms, we were proud, it didn't take long for reality to hit us like an incomming mortar. We weren't welcome home. And it wasn't just the hippies. The American public rejected us as some kinda monsters. The people didnt really know how to treat us MONSTERS. So most didn't even try. It took years for the American public to finally start accepting us as anything but damaged. But the truth is we were all damaged by the War and our WELCOME HOME. It took years for some of us to sober up and become good citizens. Never again do I wish our government to send our troops in combat and then turn their back on them when they return. Some of us are scared for life. Some have already died not ever feeling WELCOME HOME. Some are so messed up even today they cannot bring themselves to ask for help. It has been 40 years for me and I still have very vivid memories. For those that have never been there in any kind of combat it is very scary but it is also something that gets the adrenlien pumping so high you just do things you never thought you could do or would do. You will never get that kind of feeling anywhere else but on the battlefield, or while under an attack. To all those Viet Nam Veterans that read this I say from my inner soul. WELCOME HOME AND MAY GOD BLESS