http://www.thenewsenterprise.com/cgi-bin/c2.cgi?053+article+News.Local+20100828152202053053003
08 28 2010
By BOB WHITE
bwhite@thenewsenterprise.com
Hauling ammo to the front lines of war-era Vietnam, former 3rd Marine
Battalion driver Charles Stafford knew very well who his enemies were.
Their sights quite often were set on him and his supply line during
his 1967-68 tour of duty.
"They wanted us bad," Stafford said of the communist North Vietnamese forces.
Stafford wasn't surprised he was a target in Vietnam.
"I knew what I faced there," Stafford said. "But I didn't know who my
enemy was here."
Just before Christmas 1968, while the Frankfort native and a handful
of other soldiers were on their way home from the war zone, a
connector flight dropped them off in Dallas for a six-hour layover.
It was there he received a homecoming he'll never forget.
"They hated us," Stafford said, of people in Dallas he encountered
during his layover. "They spit at us and laughed at us. They looked
at us like we were drug users."
Dallas in 1968, according to Stafford, was a hotbed of anti-war and
anti-soldier sentiment. And he took a heavy dose of it.
He wasn't alone.
Thousands of other soldiers returning from wartime Vietnam received
similar homecomings.
It's partly for that reason that this year's Kentucky Heartland
Festival, and the entire past week between Fort Knox and
Elizabethtown has been dedicated to giving Vietnam vets the warm
welcome they deserved decades ago.
On Saturday, Stafford was among more than 100 Vietnam vets who
attended a very special, albeit late, event at Freeman Lake in
Elizabethtown to give veterans who are now in their late 50s and 60s
the kind of homecoming they should have received when they were in their 20s.
America pulled out of Vietnam, losing a battle between capitalism and
communism.
"We left in disgrace," according to Stafford. But that was politics.
The soldiers, just like those of today working in Afghanistan and
recently returning from Iraq, were doing what they were told to do.
Vietnam-era DJ Adrian Cronauer who gained wide fame after Robin
Williams' movie "Good Morning Vietnam" spoke at Saturday's Camp
Saigon at Freeman Lake Park about misperceptions people had of
soldiers like Stafford who faced ridicule and hate upon their return home.
Cronauer said he "met a lot" of soldiers, sailors and airmen, but
"never met a baby killer," or rapist, or murderer or psychotic man
like that portrayed too often through stateside media during the
Vietnam conflict.
"What I did meet," Cronauer said, with his solid radio voice raising
louder and louder across the many speakers at Freeman Lake, "was good
and honorable men and women doing their duty … as honorably as they could."
The round of applause following Cronauer's statements made it obvious
that, four decades after the war, the former DJ is as much a
patriotic public speaker as he ever was, or is a comedian.
The humor he provided on Saturday merely prepped a crowd for the big
shot of American patriotism that followed.
--
Bob White can be reached at (270) 505-1750.
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