By Julie Sullivan, The Oregonian
January 30, 2010, 1:56AM
Somewhere, in the silence after death on the Mekong Delta, he saw the medals.
Stamped in gold, one showed a Viet Cong soldier attacking a U.S. tank and the words "Heroes Who Destroy Mechanized Equipment."
The Green Beret's hand closed around the medals in the stilled soldier's rucksack. He put the medals in his pocket.
He carried them home.
Forty years later, his brother e-mailed: Want to go back to Vietnam?
His brother reported that Jan Scruggs, the combat vet behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial -- the Wall -- was leading a delegation of veterans back in January. Among them: a former U.S. drug czar, a Naval War College professor and the owner of the San Antonio Spurs.
The brothers conferred. Both had fought in Vietnam. Both figured someday they'd return. They could take their dad, one of the last Americans to leave in 1975 after working as a tax adviser to the South Vietnamese. Dad was turning 90. The Green Beret hung up the phone and walked through his Lake Oswego home, past his Bronze Star for Valor and framed commendations, to another box, another soldier's medals.
He was in.
For 20 years, there was almost no going back to the battleground where more than 3 million Americans served and more than 58,000 died, along with 3 million Vietnamese and 1.5 million Cambodians and Laotians. Diplomatic relations between the countries had been severed, but the psychic wound of the unpopular war created its own gap. One Marine, paralyzed during the fighting, who managed to visit Vietnam in the early 1980s came home to death threats. Still, veterans persisted.
"It was U.S. servicemen who went back in small numbers that led to the whole movement of reconciliation, not the politicians, not the statesmen, but the men who fought the war," journalist and author David Lamb said last week.
After President Bill Clinton lifted the trade embargo in 1994 and restored relations a year later, Americans began returning. Among them was Scruggs, the man responsible for the most searing and healing edifice of the war -- the Wall.
As a soldier, Scruggs had lost 12 friends in a single explosion in Vietnam and lived with the image of them dying. But as the years passed, and after he earned a master's degree in counseling, he found he couldn't remember their names. He became convinced that veterans, and the nation, needed a way to remember in order to heal.
Scruggs sold some land he inherited for $2,800 and began raising private money for a memorial. Eight million dollars and three years later, the Wall was dedicated in 1982.
Today, the black granite panels are the most visited monument in Washington, D.C., and Scruggs' Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is raising money for Part II -- an underground education center between the Lincoln Memorial and the Wall. The center will house the 100,000 artifacts left at the monument and photographs of each American killed.
On a return trip to Vietnam in 1999, Scruggs said he realized healing was needed there, too. He launched a program to disarm the 350,000 tons of unexploded landmines and other ordinance that remain. Project Renew funded a bomb squad, education programs and micro-loans for victims in the most heavily mined province. In December, Congress approved a $1 million federal grant to help.
To deliver news of the unprecedented award, Scruggs assembled 14 combat veterans, their families and Gold Star families who'd lost a husband or brother in Vietnam. Among them were Spurs owner Peter Holt, retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, and the Whitehouses, including Tom Whitehouse, the former Green Beret who lives in Lake Oswego.
Tom's dad, George Washington Whitehouse, was an Internal Revenue Service agent assigned to advise the Republic of Vietnam, accompanied by his late wife, Doris. At 89, the senior Whitehouse still files 300 tax returns a year for the poor and elderly near his home in Emmaus, Pa.
Tom's older brother George Whitehouse, 62, was the founder and senior vice president of a payroll company in Kensington, Md., and a longtime supporter of the Wall. George served as an artilleryman with the unit that fired the last U.S. combat round on Aug 10, 1972.
The Whitehouses had gone to the Wall as a family the first time in the 1980s, and regularly returned. They'd seen the letters, candles and flowers. They'd stood in silence, they'd thought about the stories.
That's where Tom Whitehouse, 61, began to think the medals he carried home weren't trophies.
They told a soldier's story. A story that didn't belong to him.
Tom, the younger Whitehouse, reached Vietnam first. Not pro-war, not anti-war, just a second son, a "classic underachiever," he called himself, drifting through his freshman year at Penn State. When he dropped out and faced the inevitable draft, he volunteered for the Army's Special Forces, the Green Berets.
He landed with the 5th Special Forces Group around New Year's Day 1970 at an outpost on the Cambodian border near the vast wetland known as the Plain of Reeds. There, his 12-man team recruited, trained, armed and led Cambodian irregulars in a running battle with the North Vietnamese. Working in pairs, or often alone, the Green Berets fought as the Cambodian guerrillas they led did, without helmets or flak jackets, conducting long-range patrols and ambushes to stop and kill enemies crossing the border. On his first reconnaissance flight, anti-aircraft fire blasted the M-16 between his feet in half. On his first patrol, he was the lone American. At 21, he was almost always the senior person on the ground.
Calm by nature, Whitehouse was able to compartmentalize much of what happened, a response that served him in the year ahead. News accounts and Army documents show that beginning in February, the tiny force faced an unprecedented push by the North Vietnamese into the Mekong Delta. On Feb. 7, his radio operator and his sergeant were wounded in a heavy firefight. According to the Army's account:
"Lt. Whitehouse repeatedly exposed himself to the heavy enemy fire to reassure his troops, to guide their maneuvers and direct effective counter-fire. He constantly moved through open areas to aid the wounded and led assaults on enemy positions. During one action he personally destroyed three fighting positions and killed the soldiers who occupied them. Despite the tremendous fire, Lt. Whitehouse remained cool and his sound tactical decisions allowed the friendly units to defeat a larger NVA unit."
After four days of heavy fighting, Whitehouse's forces helped disrupt the push toward Saigon, leaving more than 200 enemy troops dead.
On March 6, Willie Stephens and Walter Foote, died, too. Robert Henderson, and Whitehouse's favorite interpreter Lat, died June 15. In all, two thirds of those in Whitehouse's unit were killed or wounded during their yearlong tour. Whitehouse identified bodies and prepared them for transport. He stayed with the interpreter's body and his widow, all night. He wrote letters to families. During his last week in Vietnam, he was ordered to lead a convoy into Cambodia, where he became convinced he would die as well.
He did not. He left Vietnam at 22, a captain in the Green Berets. He volunteered to go back, but there were too many West Point graduates in line. So he went to survival school, where he withstood water torture and other training to prepare him for being taken prisoner of war. He became an expert on Pakistan. But as the Army began to downsize, he realized he could not advance without a college diploma and completed his service.
He went back to the life he envisioned before the war. Married the girl next door. Finished his degree at Penn State. He earned a law degree at the University of Miami. Then his attempt at normalcy unraveled.
He divorced and drifted west to a friend's couch in Portland in 1978. He started driving as a dispatch messenger at The Oregonian. He married Marilyn Pacheco in advertising. In 1991, he was named director of human resources. The couple raised their daughter, Dawn, in Lake Oswego. They became grandparents of two boys. He took up golf.
Few knew that Whitehouse had ever served as a Green Beret or that his dearest friend at the paper also served in Special Forces -- for South Vietnam. Decades after the war, Whitehouse's beloved godchildren were Vietnamese.
But a return to Vietnam offered a chance to further reconcile what had happened.
The timing was terrible: Newspapers are in an unprecedented economic decline, and The Oregonian is in a transition. Whitehouse's three closest colleagues -- the publisher, the president of the company and the editor -- had just retired. The newspaper faces a reorganization and layoffs. Whitehouse said he could not abandon the staff at such a time, even for 10 days. He hadn't slept decently in months.
But Scruggs' delegation was meeting with North Vietnamese veterans. Whitehouse could finally return what he had taken. Medals were an important morale booster for enemy soldiers a long way from home. Medal expert Edward Emering said the Vietnamese even had a slogan: "Born in the North to die in the South." And it had been standard practice to rifle through pockets of the enemy or take insignia for intelligence.
Whitehouse hadn't kept a single picture of himself from Vietnam. But he kept the medals. He moved them across the country, protected in a cloth-lined box. He never spoke of the February day he took them, the day he earned the Bronze Star for Valor, the day his sergeant, shot through the sciatic nerve, lay screaming and the radio operator bleeding, and the dry grass exploding like the devil's prairie fire across the Plain of Reeds.
The Whitehouse men landed with the delegation in Hanoi Jan. 11. It was "surreal" and deeply unsettling, they said later, to enter the enemy capital, see the red flag with its yellow star and walk through the "Hanoi Hilton," now a museum. The French had used the infamous prison to torture Vietnamese prisoners before the North Vietnamese used it to torture the American prisoners of war. "You got the idea they learned all that from the French," George Whitehouse recalled thinking. The delegates saw propaganda posters of U.S. soldiers playing ping pong and John McCain's flight suit, under glass.
They saw the lake where McCain's plane crashed, met with the U.S. military team still working to account for missing Americans and toured Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. Finally, late on the second day, the American veterans reached the meeting with North Vietnamese military officers -- to have tea, Scruggs said, with the very men they'd faced over loaded rifles.
Until that morning, Whitehouse had no idea whether he would speak, jotting down a few words at breakfast. As the event ended, he spoke.
"I served in combat with the U.S. Army and when I returned to the U.S., I took some medals with me. As a young man I thought of these as trophies. As an older and hopefully much wiser man, I know they represent a person, they represent a soldier, one who performed with valor as many in this room did also. As such they should be returned with the appropriate honor and respect. This is not about governments. This is not about politics. It is about the mutual respect of soldiers. As a new friend wisely told me, 'to heal you must first forgive.' In that spirit, may we veterans lead the way to a new era of cooperation and peace."
Whitehouse then presented his small case holding the two decorations to Lt. Gen. Tran Hanh.
"The room was spellbound," delegate Judy Campbell wrote afterward.
"When it sunk it what Tom had said, the general removed a handkerchief from his pocket to dry his tears."
Journalist David Lamb, who wrote a book on returning to Vietnam, said the experience is "absolutely cathartic. You could throw away half the medication at the VA hospitals if the soldiers and Marines would go back. There is absolutely nobody who is not changed by it."
Dr. Jim Sardo, a Portland Veterans Affairs psychologist, said that the desire to return to Vietnam is both common and unusual, in therapeutic terms.
"It's often more a spiritual wound, or existential piece that goes beyond psychotherapy," Sardo says. "Most veterans left before the war was over, so for them, the war is ongoing. When they get to Vietnam, they can see the war is over. It's clearly over."
The country the Whitehouses returned to is still communist, but also friendly, stable and rapidly modernizing, with schools of scooters jamming the streets. The airfield where George had spent three days firing howitzers in 1972 is now a driving school. The R & R stretch at China Beach is a five-star hotel with $2 million vacation villas next door. George could see a casino and a Greg Norman golf course under construction. The mountaintop where he used his math skills to aim artillery is covered with green.
But remnants of war remain. Days before the delegates arrived, a farmer in Quang Tri Province near the Demilitarized Zone found a grenade and two cluster bombs near his home. The delegation had a ceremony in which they detonated the bombs with the help of Project Renews disposal team. Delegates also dedicated a school built by U.S. veterans. Vets have also built a library, community center and a baseball field there.
Sardo, the psychologist, said such steps are a powerful path to health.
"If the Vietnam Wall is a lens that focuses veterans on losses and grieving, then the country of Vietnam is about connecting with the place in a positive, creative way, in building or healing," Sardo said.
When the official tour ended, the delegates scattered to their own pasts. George Whitehouse traveled to where four fellow soldiers died and a dozen were wounded in an artillery accident on July 7, 1972, just weeks before the troops withdrew. George Washington Whitehouse journeyed to the site of his old tax office. A Gold Star sister found the ground where her brother was killed.
Tom Whitehouse, whose own base was too remote, went alone to a hotel terrace overlooking Saigon. A busload of German tourists blasted through, downing cans of beer and departing in a few short minutes. He found himself in the silence afterward, and felt a sense of peace.
"All Americans have a huge connection to Vietnam," he said later. "Not Vietnam the war, or Vietnam the country, but Vietnam the syndrome that has impacted all of us in the U.S., through personal loss, and in what it has done to our country.
"The problem has been when we try to sublimate it or forget it. We have to deal with it. If the people who fought the war, who faced each other across the jungle or in combat, can get beyond that, then everyone else certainly can."
-- Julie Sullivan
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Oregonian rarely covers staff members in its news pages. This story is an exception, in order to bring readers news of an international delegation to Vietnam earlier this month. Tom Whitehouse is the newspaper's director of human resources and a Vietnam War veteran. He is the only Oregon resident to accompany the 2010 Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund on its historic January trip.
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