by Jenny Watters

The Vietnam War forms a painful chapter in the history of the United States and in the lives of many Walla Walla College alumni. The war interrupted the lives of several WWC students, requiring them to leave family and friends for service in Vietnam. Instead of bearing arms, these men served as medics. They shared a mission to heal wounded men, women, and children in Vietnam.

“We were over there in a healing capacity. That’s vastly different psychologically than being there to kill,” says Richard Harter, the first WWC student to go to Vietnam, recalling his experience as a medic. His view is shared by fellow medic Gary Thietten and Flight Nurse Fred Troutman. Each one carries indelible images of war, the struggle for life, the sadness of death, and the hope of miracles.

As a music major in 1962, Harter began applying his skills early by teaching music at Pendleton Junior Academy. At the time he was “vaguely aware of the military and maybe somewhere I had heard of Vietnam.” He registered for the draft as a 1-A-O and taught through two draft board deferments. The day after graduation he was drafted.

While in Spokane for his physical Richard nearly talked his way out of the military. “I have small hands,” he says “so I curled my fingers up kind of stupid-like. I said, ‘Don’t think I can grip a rifle like that.’ So they said, ‘Get your clothes on and go home.’” He couldn’t live with himself, however. He confessed and was sent to Ft. Sam Houston for basic and medic training. Richard chose not to participate in Project Whitecoats* and instead obtained a permanent station at Ft. Sam Houston teaching anatomy and physiology.

Richard was shocked when one day “they called us into formation and said, ‘Everybody in Whitecoats fall out and stand over there. The rest of you are going to Vietnam.’” At the airport before take-off he managed to see his parents and fiancée (at the time) for a few minutes. The plane he was on to Saigon carried 200 men—about 75 percent were Seventh-day Adventists and the others were conscientious objectors from various religions. “I was real surprised I was the only one on the whole plane that didn’t take a weapon.”

The plane flew into Saigon under anti-aircraft fire the day before Thanksgiving 1965. When they got off the plane “there were bullets flying here and there, and the air was so heavy you couldn’t breathe.” Richard was assigned to the 16th Infantry Airborne Rangers, a “rescue group that would go and get other groups out of trouble.” He frequently carried six to eight 81 mm mortar rounds tied to his body along with his aid bag.

Soon after his arrival in Vietnam, a Sgt. Bryson invited Richard to a jungle barbecue. It wasn’t until after his fourth jungle barbecue invitation that Richard discovered the real reason for the sergeant’s hospitality. Bryson informed him that the previous medic supplied the group with drugs. Richard said he couldn’t do that, and Bryson told Richard that he would never get promoted. Richard didn’t know at the time that he was destined for further run-ins with Bryson.

As a field medic Richard encountered early the harsh realities of war. He recalls caring for two “VC” (Vietcong) who were injured—a young man and a young girl. “You realize real soon that they are no different from you or me. It was sad. We patched these people up and had to turn them over to the Vietnamese. The next day we went through town and there those same two people were hung by their heels. They were scalped. Very dead.”

Richard let his commander know from the beginning about his Sabbath beliefs, and in general his religious convictions were respected. On one occasion, however, he was truly tested.

One of Richard’s jobs was to dig sanitary trenches. Normally, when there was fighting, Richard would dig trenches whether it was Sabbath or not, believing it was necessary work. However, one Sabbath during Tet (Vietnamese New Year) there was no fighting. Richard felt that under the circumstances he would not work on Sabbath and offered instead to work two Sundays for someone. Both Bryson and the captain ordered him to work. Richard refused. They handcuffed him and said he would be court-martialed for treason. It was “an answer to prayer at that moment” when the surgeon intervened on Richard’s behalf and the matter was dropped. Richard realized the seriousness of the situation, but says he felt calm. He acknowledges that while in Vietnam the sense of fear and danger become relative “when you don’t know if tomorrow you’ll get your head blown off. In a way this was just another thing to deal with.”

One morning Richard was standing in a trench eating breakfast when a napalm canister hit some trees. He hit the bottom of the trench. The other guy in the trench “got burned down to his scalp,” but Richard was wearing his helmet. “We were literally running through the jungle tackling guys to get them down and the fire out,” he recalls. “We’d been working on people and I saw a guy who was part of our crew walking back and forth in a fox hole. His nose, lips, cheeks, and ears were burned off. I wanted to do something for him. I grabbed his hands and pulled him up. His outside skin and everything came off in my hands like a set of gloves. I put a respirator tube down him and shot him with morphine. His belt was burning so I popped it off. He knew what was happening and lived about 20 minutes.”

Richard coped with such devastation through prayer and by reading his Bible which he says “literally kept me sane.” Though he was nearly shot once by a VC standing about six feet away, Richard says, “I had a strong belief that I would be taken care of. While I didn’t like any of it and would loved to have not been there, it certainly gave me peace of mind.”

When Richard returned to WWC he discovered that people back home thought he had been killed. The local news had reported his death months before. While in the College Store he heard a girl screaming. “I thought she was just happy to see me, but she thought I was dead.”

He discovered what strong reflexes he had developed in Vietnam when someone from the biology department tranquilized a snowy owl with a dart outside a friend’s apartment. To Richard, on the second floor of Hallmark Apartments, the tranquilizer gun sounded like a rifle shot. In a flash he was over the side of the balcony and on the ground. Throughout his adjustment to returning home Richard says he experienced support and caring from family and friends.

Currently Richard and his wife, Nona (Blankenship), work in the financial services industry. Richard harbors no bitterness about Vietnam and believes that a strong faith will allow you to withstand the trials that come your way. “Obviously I was protected—it was a miracle I made it through.”

While Richard was in Vietnam, Gary Thietten was a freshman industrial arts major at WWC. It was 1966. “We’d sit around in Sittner Hall and watch the Huntly-Brinkley Report and discuss the war,” remembers Gary. When he learned he would likely be drafted he decided to volunteer as a conscientious objector. He was told he wouldn’t go to Vietnam if he had less than six months left to serve. Gary worked post-op orthopedics at an Army hospital outside Boston and met his wife, Judi, at Atlantic Union College.

With only five months left to serve everything changed for Gary one evening. “They called us into formation and announced that our company had gotten orders for Vietnam. Several of us knew we weren’t going because that’s what we’d always been told. We looked on the roster and there were our names. While you felt bad, it turned out to be the best thing I ever did in my life.”

The night before he arrived in Vietnam at least five men were killed in the same barracks where Gary was to sleep. The first couple of nights they slept on top of their bunks in full gear, but after about a week he says “you’re in your skivvies sleeping like a normal person because there’s more to life than worrying about dying.”

Gary helped set up a 400-bed “evac” hospital for GIs and civilians located next to an Air Force base near Can Tho. The surrounding area took mortars frequently. “Of course it would scare you to death,” he recalls. “One night they hit the fuel bunk. A bunch of us ran and set up. We knew the way the flames were going that we’d have all kinds of burns. But even the two guys that guarded the fuel bunk weren’t burned.”

Gary worked in the recovery room and became acquainted with a Vietcong patient who had completed a suicide mission. He had blown off an arm and a leg. Gary says the “VC received good care like anyone else.” Gary gave the man some root beer which he enjoyed, and the man even learned to say “root beer.” During his five months in Vietnam Gary and some buddies adopted an orphanage about four miles away at Can Tho. They visited the kids and took them presents.

It was “shocking” for Gary when he saw an officer in the hospital with a severe head injury who wouldn’t be the same when he went home “That impressed me to write a letter to the editor at home. I wanted people to understand that the war was impacting human lives. I realized the war was wrong. We weren’t really over there to win it and certainly the political and military strategy wasn’t working. We knew that over there.”

Working side by side the nurses in Vietnam convinced Gary to become a nurse. He wrote to Wilma Leazer, dean of the WWC School of Nursing, who sent him a “wonderful letter” and application, which he filled out in Vietnam. Gary went right into the nursing program after his return to the states. He was so involved in his studies that Vietnam wasn’t foremost in his mind and didn’t seem to be a significant issue on campus. “It was ingrained in me—don’t look back, look forward,” he says.

The first time Gary visited the Vietnam War Memorial he looked on the wall for the name of a friend who attended Gem State Academy. “Then this awesome thing hit me that my name could’ve been up there. I tell you what, I didn’t know there were so many tears in the body. I cried there for a half hour, got control of myself and went up the steps to the Lincoln Memorial and cried some more.” Now each time he visits Washington, Gary makes a point of going to the wall.

If it weren’t for Vietnam, Gary observes, he wouldn’t have become a nurse and long-time owner, with his wife, of the largest home health agency in Idaho. “When you have a goal,” he says, “education becomes pretty easy. A lot of people have the IQ, but not the ‘I Will’ yet; Vietnam gave me the ‘I Will.’”

Fred Troutman was also a student at WWC in 1966. He doesn’t recall any activism on campus, but observes, “People felt a responsibility to serve their country. I don’t remember it being a big deal. There was some discussion about being a conscientious objector or going into Whitecoats.”

Fred got a call for his Army physical in 1967 and decided to go into the Air Force as an officer. He served in Vietnam as a flight nurse from December 1968 to December 1969. “It was the most difficult goodbye I’ve ever done—leaving a young wife and child and not being sure what the future would hold,” he recalls. Fred’s son was one year old. “Basically the whole next year a picture was his father,” says Fred.

Fred carries a strong impression of the flight to Vietnam and landing in Cam Rahn Bay. “On the plane people were really apprehensive. The guys were very young and the closer we got the more people smoked. You couldn’t see the front of the plane because it was so smoky. We landed and were hit by this blast of hot air, like opening a furnace door—a slap in the face that we’re here. It was a sense of unreality. The whole year was this surrealistic experience where you did these normal things, but all around you abnormal things were happening. I had no idea whether we were safe or not, and whether you should duck down and run, or if you could walk off the plane. It was very uncertain what to expect.”

“They had just changed the script (they used military script as opposed to American money) and there were all these old Vietnamese women crying and trying to exchange their script with the GIs. It’s a burned-in memory of these anxious people trying to survive. Everything in their lives was disrupted. It was very evident in their faces,” Fred says.

As a flight nurse Fred traveled many places. On each flight they transported 10 to 40 patients from small field hospitals to larger centers. There was rarely a physician on the plane so the nurses had responsibility for a wide variety of patients. They treated Americans, civilians, the Vietcong, and the “ARVN” (Army of the Republic of Vietnam). The plane took off and landed seven to eight times a day. Fred remembers the temperature extremes and always feeling nauseated.

He was in Vietnam only a couple weeks when they had “incoming.” The next morning when everyone went into the cook shack to eat, they all saw blood stains on the floor where the cook had been killed. “A cook is a central person that everyone knows and it affected everyone,” he says.

Morale went up and down. There were even some songs that weren’t played “because they were reminders of unfaithfulness at home, like ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.’”

Fred knew that the Air Force had a low mortality rate. Still, the sense of danger was never far away. He was walking on the campus of the mission compound one day when “a bullet just zinged by my ear—close enough I could hear a ring.” Another time “we flew into a base and you could see tracer bullets.” On one occasion Fred flew on an Army helicopter when no other transportation was available. “Sure enough. They went into a fire zone to pick up someone who was injured and there was active combat going on. You could see it as we landed. That was the most frightening.”

Fred was thrilled to be home for Christmas in 1969, but the adjustment wasn’t easy. “You’ve learned to live on the edge by that time; you’re sensitive to loud noises and things that just don’t seem right that you cue into. You don’t go through an experience like that without it changing you in some respects. It probably strengthens some things and makes you more vulnerable in other ways.”

After 26 years in the Air Force Fred recently retired as a colonel. He is now working on a doctorate in human development. Since 1972 Fred has taught in the WWC School of Nursing. He says Vietnam has had a positive impact on his teaching. “I learned a lot of superb life lessons over there.”

The experiences of Fred Troutman, Gary Thietten, and Richard Harter, are the stories of just three men out of countless others who experienced the Vietnam War. Each of their stories is unique, but they shared a mission of healing that proved to be the source of their strength through the war.

Jenny Watters lives in Portland, Ore. She graduated from WWC in 1985 with majors in journalism and social work.

*Project Whitecoat was a biological warfare research program conducted by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era. Many Seventh-day Adventist men who faced military service entered the program. Denominational leaders negotiated this arrangement as non-combatant service for church members who were drafted into the military.

What was happening on campus during the Vietnam era? Read a related excerpt from Bold Venture: A History of Walla Walla College. This excerpt and other related stories are posted on the new Westwind Web site at www.westwind.wwc.edu.

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