Michael “Mike” Mohr will have mixed feelings this Memorial Day as he always does on the last Monday of May.
On the one hand, the Vietnam vet will feel proud: proud that he served his country, proud that he did his duty, proud that he served with the storied 101st Airborne Division.
But also in his emotional mix will be nightmarish memories.
“I try not to think about my time there,” he said, “but if I watch a war movie, especially Vietnam war movies, it triggers something. I wake up in the middle of the night. I’ve been home for over 50 years, but if I see something on TV I actually get sick to my stomach.
“I’m still proud to have served,” he said, “but once I got there, I thought I had made a mistake. I’ll never forget, when 250 of us new recruits got off the big 747 in Saigon, 250 soldiers who had just served there were waiting to board the plane to go home. We could see on their faces that they had just gone through hell, and they could see on our faces that we had no idea of what we were getting into.”
It was 1969, and the conflict that began in 1954 would drag on for six more years. During that war, which the Vietnamese call the American War, 2 million civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers, over 200,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and almost 60,000 members of the U.S. armed forces would die.
Mike explained that he could have gotten a II-S deferment by going to college, and he admitted that it wasn’t a sense of grand purpose that motivated him, like in World War II when soldiers were fighting to defeat Hitler or in the Civil War to preserve the union.
His best friend had been killed in the war in 1967 and his motivation for going was as simple as “I wanted to go there and set foot on the hill where he had died.” Also, he explained, “I just felt that they had the draft and it was part of our duty as a citizen. My grandfather, my father and my uncles had all served, and they passed down that sense of duty to me.”
After basic training he was sent to artillery school and was stationed in fire bases during his tour, firing big howitzers at first and then one millimeter mortars in support of the infantry.
“When we were being attacked, which was mainly at night and which would happen five or six times a month,” he recalled, “I would be called on my phone, which I kept next to my bunk. They would be shelling us and you could hear the rounds coming in. Everyone would be diving for cover. You never knew where they would land.
“I would at times think about dying.”
And Mike was able to visit the hill where his friend had died, right on the DMZ near what would be called Hamburger Hill.
While serving in Vietnam he was not aware of the protests going on back home. It was after he returned that he began to see occasions of people spitting on Vietnam vets and calling them “baby killers.”
As Mike lined up to board the 747 in Saigon to go home, he looked at the new recruits in their new uniforms who had just gotten off the plane and now it was his turn to feel sorry for them, partly because they had no idea what they were getting into.