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.