Mountain Resource Center's Executive Director Karen Verdier is go-getter and powerhouse helping those in need in the Conifer area. On Saturday, Karen was at Conifer High School throwing bowls for the Empty Bowls Project in November. Karen's a novice at throwing bowls, but her beautiful hands say there's plenty of creativity to spare.

Veteran fought to save his humanity

After he returned from the Vietnam War, Russell Gates gave away his Bronze Star.

“I did it because I didn’t think it was a war we should be fighting, and I wasn’t proud of my service,” Gates said.

Gates, 61, a Dumont resident who works for EON Office in Denver, enlisted in the Army infantry in 1969 at age 19 and rose to the rank of specialist E4. His memories of that Southeast Asian nation center on the monsoon rains, the leeches, the endless patrols — and a loss of humanity.

During one patrol, 15 members of Gates’ unit came upon a bunker complex, and machine-gun fire broke out. Sixty seconds passed, and the shooting was over. When Gates stood up, he saw a Viet Cong fighter fall after having fled the bunker.

“By the time I got there, they had pulled this guy up, and he was still alive — but not for long,” Gates said.

The man had been shot in the groin and was bleeding profusely, just moments from death. Gates said some of his fellow soldiers tortured him.

“He was almost dead anyway, and that was unhealthy thinking (to do that),” he said.

Humanity amid horror

One day, Gates and his company came across a Viet Cong camp, and during the ensuing firefight a woman was shot. She was terrified and cradling a small child.

“I felt for her; I knew she was scared,” he said. “I’m trying to console this person with no (common) language.”

Gates said he carried the woman and her child, along with his 60-pound pack, up a hill to a waiting chopper. Gates said he used a gentle voice and told her she and her child would be OK. He said he could see in her eyes that she believed him.

“That’s what I should have gotten a medal for … I should have gotten a compassion medal,” he said.

Gates said military medals were devalued in Vietnam because so many were given out. Gates said he didn’t know what he got the Bronze Star for.

“I didn’t deserve it, but if I did, then everyone deserved one,” he said.

A history of service

Gates’ father was a World War II veteran, and his family believed in service to the country.

“There was a mind-set that said when you’re called, you serve,” Gates said. “I get that.”

He believes the war began in March 1965 when the first boatload of Marines landed in Vietnam, the “Normandy landing” for his generation. He said that around 1967, people in America became skeptical of the war 8,000 miles away. He said Americans were told that losing the war in Vietnam would mean Communism would consume Asia.

“History has proved that was a war we should not have been in,” he said.

In 1968, he left college to enlist.

“I just thought that was wrong, that war,” he said. “But, yes, I enlisted.”

While in Vietnam, Gates applied for admission to the University of Kansas and sent the application off in a mailbag loaded onto an ammunition supply helicopter. He wondered about the people who opened that application and saw the crinkled, once-soaked application. He was accepted to KU, and three weeks after his discharge he began classes.

In 1968, he was a religion major with plans to study religion abroad. Today, he embraces his faith at St. Laurence’s Episcopal Church in Conifer.

“I’ve become very serious about my faith,” he said.

Before he left for that long-ago war, his aunt gave him a crucifix, and though he’s not a Catholic, he treasured the small icon of faith that he carried through the endless rains, sucking mud and daily horror.

“I carried it with me all the time,” he said. “I didn’t think it was about protection — it was from someone that cared about me.”

Grunting and hunting

Gates said his job in the Army was to hump through the jungles, looking to engage the enemy. Wearing thick-soled boots that would wear out after three months, Gates said it was a dangerous and miserable place to be.

“Nobody ever thinks about what it’s like to be in the jungles in the monsoons,” he said.

“Do you get all wrinkled up when you’re doing dishes? That’s how your skin is all the time — you get cuts, scratches and infections.”

He said it was common during breaks on patrol for the GIs to take off their shirts and find huge pus pockets from cellulitis.

“In the jungles, you wear the baggy pants and a shirt and combat boots, you would take your pants, and fold this tight against your leg and put your boots and tie your laces up to the knee to guard against the leeches,” Gates said.

He said one precious possession was leech medicine. Sleeping on the jungle floor, he said, everyone would wake up and find leeches on their chins, armpits or legs.

“You wouldn’t know this unless you were a grunt,” he said. “Nobody knows the leech stories.”

If the leeches and rain weren’t bad enough, walking all day and sleeping under a soggy rain jacket made it worse. Often they were cold, hungry, sleep-deprived, and the snakes and lizards were constant visitors.

“I’m sitting there next to a typical jungle tree, and a really large snake slithered by,” he said. “My head would have been right there where that snake was.”

Once his unit couldn’t get re-supplied, and they ran out of food, though they had plenty of ammunition. They foraged for potato-like vegetables, fished and hunted to stay alive. Gates said he also ran out of cigarettes and decided to smoke a small corner of his blanket instead.

Two armies, one fight

Gates described his emotions during his time in Vietnams as nervous and anxious, not knowing who was friend or foe, if local children were booby-trapped or if racial tensions within the unit would explode in violence.

“Ninety percent of the kids in Vietnam were drafted, and it was not a very effective army because most were drafted as opposed to enlisted,” he said.

Gates was in the 23rd Infantry Division, the same division as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the same division involved in the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, a year before he enlisted.

“They took three brigades and brought them together, and the division was probably too big, at tens of thousands of men,” he said.

Gates was discharged on July 31, 1971, and he said he was offered no support or transition from jungle warfare back to life in the American Midwest.

“Some people dealt with it better than others,” he said.

Gates dealt with it well, mostly because he felt he never lost his own humanity.

This story ran in the October 27, 2010 edition of the High Timber Times and the Clear Creek Courant.

Blog post for October 27, 2010

Scratching post: Helping the Humane Society

http://www.hightimbertimes.com/content/scratching-post-helping-humane-society

Thanks for looking!

A new website? Nah!

Our new websites at Evergreen Newspapers have spot for blogs, and this is my first attempt for the High Timber Times website. Take a look.

My blog for October 20, 2010

http://www.hightimbertimes.com/content/new-website-nah

A sailor’s letter home: Conifer resident wrote his friends amid frightening battles, numbing boredom during Vietnam War

“… We’re going in … all ahead flank, 23 knots … I am now crouched behind the vents … we’re 13 miles out … we are now in range of the coastal batteries …”

Twenty-year-old Noel Lane III scribbled these words in a 10-page handwritten letter during a confrontation off the North Vietnamese coast on Jan. 10, 1973. Lane, a Conifer resident, recently came across the letter, which chronicles both the mundane aspects of life aboard ship and the numbness from spent adrenaline.

“It’s a letter to friends of mine, and in the middle of the letter, I would write down what was happening,” Lane said. “We were getting hit with 200 rounds. … They shot the hell out of us.”

Lane was a torpedoman’s mate second class on the USS Turner Joy, a ship that was involved in the first confrontations of the Vietnam War and also fired the last shot before the cease-fire was declared on Jan. 27, 1973. On that day, the ship’s schedule read as follows: “0800: Commence Cease Fire, Commence Holiday Routine.”

Most of Lane’s January 1973 letter covers a mission near North Vietnam’s main port, Hai Phong, just a few days before the cease-fire.

“… 25,000 yards and closing … speed still 23 knots … they have us on radar now …”

Lane’s job was to foil the enemy radar by launching “stack chaff” that created false targets away from the ship. Lane’s most memorable flirtation with the chaff was when it misfired and landed on his own ship, covering him with the aluminum-laced debris.

“Now I was the target,” he said, laughing now at what scared him to death then.

Lane said he was often frightened but did his job. Still, he and his buddies made plans for escape should the ship be sunk — most kept a ditty bag ready to go in case they had only moments to abandon ship.

According to Lane, the mission outlined in his letter was called Linebacker II and was designed to pound the North Vietnamese into agreeing to a peace accord, which was signed a few days later.

But before peace, there was still war.

“… Changed course to 280 degrees true … still going in at about 30 degree angle to the beach … slowed to all ahead full …”

Lane said the North Vietnamese were firing 8-inch projectiles at the Turner Joy, and he was stationed on the top deck.
“If they hit the ship, there would have been big damage,” Lane said.

The ship had a crew of 250, and Lane has “yearbooks” from his stints in the Navy, one from boot camp and a couple from other tours. Fresh-faced kids smile out from the faded black-and-white pages, and though the books don’t document actual battles, they show the daily routine, the fun and the laughter, when war was far away.

“… 6 miles, 14 knots … were the first time we came under fire … we’re firing now … all 3 guns … what a noise …
… Boy, are we putting out a lot of rounds …”

During that encounter, the ship fired 193 rounds, and in the letter Lane keeps score like a baseball game, complete with innings and hits. A short time later, Lane rambles on in precise handwriting about his mind-set during his 19th hour on duty. He wrote about going 15 days without a cigarette but finding other means to get through the endless shifts.

In a non-combat moment, Lane reflects on the experience of fighting in a war:

“I’ve really become introspective in trying to understand more fully my own self. I’ve been having a lot of feelings inside me that I really don’t understand. This is really a strange experience and it is giving me such a fantastic insight into myself.”

“… 290 degrees true, 16 knots, all ahead …”

Being on deck and under fire required Lane to wear a 20-pound flak jacket, and at times the ship would take fire from starboard and port. Though it kept him safe, the jacket was heavy and cumbersome.

“I have nowhere to go, and I’m outside while all this stuff is blowing up around me,” Lane said.

“… This damn flak jacket is putting my arm to sleep …”

“They (the crew) could feel the rounds as their shock waves bounced off the hull in sonar, and I could feel the shimmy or vibration or whatever. I’m sitting here again on the floor behind the vents.”

“… Real close round shook ship … they have a better average this round …”

Lane said one round hit the vent behind him, just 2 inches from his head.

“Hey you guys, save this letter for me, I’d like to read it again at a later date to see if I can understand or re-capture the feeling of these moments.”

Today’s thoughts on yesterday
Lane, who today owns Lane III Group, Inc., a development and business/management consultation company, said that, for him, whether Vietnam was a just war was not the question when he joined the Navy in the middle of his senior year of high school in 1969.

There were bad times he wishes he could forget, but he still remembers them vividly. Lane said that as he gets older, he tends to remember “only the adventure and the excitement of being a young man on a tremendous adventure.”

He said the only significant part of remembering is when he shares his experiences with a fellow veteran. No one else can truly understand what it was like.

The Turner Joy was commissioned on Aug. 3, 1959, and named in honor of Adm. S. Turner Joy. The ship was decommissioned on Nov. 22, 1982, and is now a floating museum anchored in Bremerton, Wash.

“I was proud to be in the Navy and proud to serve my country,” Lane said.

This story ran in the October 13, 2010 edition of the High Timber Times, Canyon Courier and was part of a special section to commemorate Veteran's Day, 2010.