Soldiers, protesters look back on fall of Saigon and official end of Vietnam War

Yahoo

30-04-2025

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – 50 years ago, on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks burst through the gates of the south Vietnamese presidential palace and Vietnam became a single, unified Communist nation.
It was a difficult moment to watch for not only the millions of south Vietnamese who had long dreaded that day, but for millions of Americans who, no matter where they stood in the anti-war debate, had anguished for more than a decade over the war's toll.
California's Central Valley, like most of the country, had thousands of returning veterans, and it had anti-war protestors as well. It also had an untold number of war wounded – fighting men and women whose injuries were both visible and not readily apparent. Lives were forever affected.
Today, those social, cultural and political divisions are largely forgotten. Finally, after a half-century, have we come to understand each other a little better?
About 14,000 men and women from Kern County served in the Vietnam War. Some 178 never came home, but thousands were affected in ways both great and small. Some were ruined. Some achieved great success despite the almost inevitable scarring.
LOUIE VEGA, SCOUT HELICOPTER DOOR GUNNER
One such soldier is semi-retired Superior Court Judge Louie Vega. He went to 'Nam in January 1968 and was assigned to ride shotgun aboard a Loach – an OH-6 scout helicopter, built to fly low and flush out VietCong from the hillsides of the Central Highlands.
About 1,400 of those small lightweight helicopters – all sheet metal and plexiglass – were put into service during the war. 842, more than half, were either shot down or knocked out of the sky due to some mechanical issue. 5,000 U.S. helicopter pilots and crew were killed during the Vietnam War. Nearly 500 of them were aboard those vulnerable three-man Loaches.
Louie Vega was selected to serve aboard a Loach and ride directly behind the pilot because of his size: 5 foot 6 and 125 pounds.
'The platoon leader for the Aero Scouts thought I was the perfect size to sit behind the pilot,' Vegas said. 'So, for the next year, off and on, that's what I did. I rode what you might call shotgun, but in this case, it was an M-60 machine gun hanging from a bungee cord with about 600 rounds of 7.62 ammunition going through my machine gun, along with a M79 grenade launcher. We called it a chunker. We'd use that from time to time. You'd find a position that appeared to be occupied, put a 40 millimeter grenade into one of the foxholes, or whatever the situation was, just to stir things up.'
At 18, Vega thought he was invincible. He learned two things very quickly – vulnerability and humility.
'First time I ever had someone shoot at me,' he said. 'I actually saw who it was. Obviously they were off in the distance, but I could see him taking the sight and shooting. That was the first time I learned what it meant to be paralyzed with fear, because I couldn't believe it was actually happening at that moment. I couldn't do anything, but just – just froze. And it was very humiliating, very humbling. All the guys I grew up with, we considered ourselves kind of tough guys,' Vega said. 'And something like this happens, and you realize you're not as tough as you thought you were…afterwards, after recovering from that moment, it made me a little more sensitive, I guess.'
Vega's copter crashed twice – once from enemy fire, once when the engine quit. He received a Purple Heart for his crash injuries, and he understands all too well how close he came to death.
It really hit home the day his chopper was delivering body bags to Ben Het. They flew over Hill 875 near Dak To, where six months prior the brother of a boot camp classmate was killed. His entire unit had been wiped out.
'You just wanted to be around, make sure that you went home in one piece,' Vegas said.
ED BUDNEY, VISUAL COMBAT TRACKER
Ed Budney, in Nam as a visual combat tracker for the Army, often for the 101st Airborne Division, arrived in Vietnam in January 1970.
He received a Purple Heart for wounds suffered from enemy small arms fire – and friendly fire. He was 20 and had been on the ground for four months when it happened.
'We were tracking, walking down a valley, and I believe we probably walked into a bunker complex,' Budney said. 'They opened up fire. I got wounded, initially in the shoulder and the finger, and the other tracker I was with, he got killed in action. It was instantaneous. About two hours later, being trapped in the middle, I received two more shots in my leg – M16, by our own people. No fault of theirs. The terrain was dense. They couldn't see what was going on…'
He suffered debilitating nerve damage.
'I'd say from a standpoint of pain, not too bad, (but) from the standpoint of long term, more so with my leg, I had a nerve semi severed,' Budnet said. 'Left me with what they call drop foot. It allowed me to get a retirement out of the army for medical reasons.'
He was honorably discharged in October 1970 and went home to upstate New York to something approaching a hero's welcome.
'I had a good reception,' Budney said. 'Put a banner up and everything – 'Welcome Home.' I had, let's just say, some opportunities. I listened to a lot of the old timers when I was in hospitals, but I can say I thought I got treated fairly.'
But there was a lingering stigma.
For decades Budney worked in construction management for Bechtel Corporation. But he did explore other opportunities. He went to a headhunter who helped him market himself. But the employment broker had some odd advice – advice he found disturbing and insulting.
'We were kind of told, 'Like, don't put on your resume that you were in the military,'' Budney said. 'I thought it was a little harsh. I thought it was a little condescending.'
HOMER MARTINEZ, AMMUNITION SUPPLY SHIP
Homer Martinez worked on an ammunition supply ship as an elevator electrician starting in 1971, delivering weapons of war from the U.S. base at Subic Bay, in the Philippines, to U.S. positions in Viet Nam. He was still there in 1975 when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese.
Aboard the ship, 'we had bombs that were 500 pounders, 1000 pounders and 2000 pounders,' he said. 'And we also had missiles that we never saw because they were in cases, but we would write on the bombs – (colorful, R-rated) messages.'
The outcome was almost inevitable, though. An example: Because rubber is an important Vietnamese crop, American soldiers were banned from firing artillery in the direction of rubber trees. So, naturally, Viet Cong hid in those rubber groves. Rubber trees, the American soldiers groused, were more important than soldiers' lives.
'We had our hands tied the whole time,' Martinez said. 'I mean, it's no wonder we didn't do so well. I you know, I don't like to, I don't like to say that we lost but …we did.'
He was there on the last day of the war, April 30, 1975.
'I was over there when Saigon fell,' he said, '… and was part of the evacuation. Although they didn't allow the evacuees on our ship because it's an ammunition ship, I imagine they were concerned about sabotage, but it was quite a spectacle. There were tarps over the guns on the destroyers. It was ironic that they would use the guns that kill people to shelter them.'
Martinez, like many vets, initially had mixed feelings about his service. On one occasion, immediately after returning home, he boarded a bus, sat down and watched a stranger walk up and spit on his buddy's window. They knew where they stood.
'We were mistreated,' he said. 'Now we're getting a lot of regard for being veterans. Because we didn't receive that kind of welcome. Nobody wanted anything to do with us. I just kind of swept my military service under the rug, you know?'
For Martinez, the veteran's experience has drastically changed — for the better.
'I went from sitting at home drinking beer, watching reruns during the day to (having) a calendar that's just exploded with events. It keeps me very busy,' said Martinez.
THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM
What do we take away from the Vietnam experience?
'We learned, but the learning took about 30 years, I think,' Budney said 'And there's a deeper appreciation now, I believe, for the people that experienced those conditions and those calls of duty.'
Vega still gets emotional at times.
'It was sad,' he said. 'It was sad to see what the war had come to, and all the money that we put into it, all the material, all the guys that lost their lives,' he said.'That – that's the tragedy. The loss of lives.'
Nearly 60,000 killed, 304,000 wounded and 1,600 missing in action – a heavy toll that still weighs on the nation.
In addition to the 14,000 young men and women that Kern County sent 8,000 miles from home to do the nation's bidding, untold thousands more took to the streets and the college campus of America to challenge that foreign adventure.
Some of those protesters were our own – homegrown opponents of a war that America as a whole gradually came to oppose.
VERDA VARNER, YOUNG MOTHER
Verda Varner was always dubious about the Vietnam War, dating back to her time as a Bakersfield College student. But things changed for her in a profound way when she transitioned from wife – to wife and mother.
'When my oldest son was born, it really came home, because then it was really personal,' she said. 'This was my child. I felt what other American mothers of the boys that were over there had to have felt. I felt what the Vietnamese these mothers had to have felt, we had to stop it. We can't continue to throw our children into a war and to be killed. It just was personal then. So that's when we started protesting.'
The Bakersfield High School graduate was an innocent, once upon a time. The girl next door, a cheerleader for the BC Renegades, then a state powerhouse in football. It was a great time to be alive, in so many ways. But war loomed over her world.
Mike Walker, her former fiance, a fellow Bakersfield College student, would, upon graduation, become a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He went missing over southeast Asia, and, as far as she knows, is still missing.
'I lost so many friends from the vets club at Bakersfield College,' she said. 'I lost my first fiance. It was our generation, (and we) were cannon fodder for a useless war that we had to stop. So we took to the streets and we stopped it, and we're very proud of that.'
Her then-husband would never have approved, so Verda waited until he went off to work before she hit the streets pushing a baby stroller.
Kind of goes against the standard, prototypical image of a war protester.
'Oh, those hippies, un-American, unpatriotic,' she said, mocking the criticism. 'Well, no, it was the exact opposite. It was the most patriotic thing we could do, was to assemble and to free speech and to stop that war. So he'd go off to work. I take my son, Chad, diaper bag, stroller, Marquis station wagon, and off we'd go. And the last one was the most contentious. The crowd was ugly around us, yelling at us, which was not anything unusual. But then we were very organized. We had permits. We followed the rules. There was no swearing, there was no vandalism.'
EDDY LAINE, WAR PROTESTER
Eddy Laine grew up in Reedley, a valley town 100 miles north of Bakersfield. He attended Reedley College and staged a forum there, about the war, as well as a peace march. 'Peace march is peaceful,' the local paper proclaimed.
In the summer of 1968 he was also an observer at the contentious, violent, history changing Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
'And that's where I saw the massive demonstrations and the cataclysmic divisions of the Democratic Party regarding the war in Vietnam,' Laine said. 'And that's why I went to Grant Park. I saw people, I talked to people who had been involved in the protest.
'I was at the convention. I saw the tension, terrible tension, fight, fighting, some, some physical even in the convention, about the war. And I think what the strongest impression I had when I was in Chicago was watching those tanks roll down the street near going to Grant Park the same time as Russia was invading Czechoslovakia, the tanks were there in Chicago to oppress those who were opposed to the war. It left a really strong vision in my mind. Here it is, how many years later, and I still can remember those things.'
Then it was off to UC Santa Barbara, a campus roiled in dissent over the war. It was at about that time that National Guardsmen shot and killed war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State University in Mississippi.
'I saw the carnage in Vietnam. And, you know, you read about and you can see it on TV every night, the bombing of villages and people dying, the napalm. These are human beings. And why? Why were we busy killing human beings? What were we doing over there, thousands of miles from here? Let me be honest, most of us who were in college, we didn't want to be drafted, so we and our girlfriends, we didn't want us over there, thousands of miles from home, risking our lives for what?
VETERANS AND PROTESTERS
How did that make those who did go feel? If there was animosity, time seems to have healed them, at least somewhat. Vega, a door gunner aboard a Loach scout helicopter for one dangerous year, said one great irony of the war was that, in a very real sense, they fought for protesters' right to protest.
'It became so unpopular, people protesting against the legitimacy of the war and how it was conducted,' he said. 'There are a lot of things that came out of that war policy wise, and things that affect us to this day.'
America saw this war every night on millions of black and white television sets. Not on carefully propagandized news reels that played in theaters prior to Roy Rogers movies. The Vietnam War hit home like nothing before – and in many ways, since.
'That's the first war that was televised,' said Martinez, the ammunition ship petty officer. 'Because everything else was put on a reel and was edited. This was televised live.'
Budney, the Army tracker, said it took a while for America to grasp what was happening.
'We would see the protests, we would see the coverage of the war first-hand, more so than other wars,' he said, 'so the public was more informed and became more vocal as things wore on. I don't think we learned that much at that time, but I think as time has progressed, I think we're looking back at it differently.'
Varner, the cheerleader turned war protester, just wants Vietnam War vets to know one thing about her baby-stroller protests.
'It's important that the guys know that – the guys my age – because we're dying off,' she said. 'And I want them to know we loved them enough to go to the streets to try to stop it. And that's why I did it.'
She wants Vietnam vets to understand that she was protesting the war, not the warrior.
ANOTHER GREAT TOLL: THE WOUNDED
A more nebulous statistic is the number of Vietnam fighters who returned with war wounds. Today Vietnam veterans still deal with the effects of post traumatic stress disorder – shell shock, as it was called prior to Vietnam.
But 50 years ago, we were hearing mainly about physical wounds. 304,000 of them, out of the 2.7 million who served. That's one out of every 10 Americans who entered the war zone. About 153,000 were wounded to the extent that they required a significant hospital stay.
Randa Hunter knew one of them well.
He was her first sweetheart. A grammar school crush who crushed on her right back. A shy, kind boy who lived around the corner from her house on Nelson Street. He moved away before they got to high school and she rarely saw him after that. Upon graduation from high school he enlisted in the Marines and was shipped off to Vietnam.
'As you grow up, you lose contact,' she said. 'And then I left to go to school in (Northern) Arizona, and came home, and there was an article about him being injured. They gave a brief overview of the injuries he suffered.'
THE BOY GREW INTO A SOLDIER
Robert Wayne Boyd, a month shy of his 19th birthday, had been the only soldier in his unit to survive a rocket and mortar attack at an airfield near Dong Ha. Wayne, as he was called, had lost one leg, injured the other, and badly damaged one arm.
'As an elementary school boy, he had injured his finger and lost part of it,' Hunter said. 'He was so ashamed of his missing finger, and I thought, 'Oh, my God. Now he's lost a leg, and mangled an arm.'
Now, Hunter learned, Wayne was in a Naval hospital, Oak Knoll in Oakland. Hunter and her mother Ruth would be visiting San Francisco. They would stop at the hospital to see Wayne.
'How will I find him,' Hunter asked herself as she stepped thought the front doors. 'And this person says, 'Oh, he's at the end of the row. Just go on in there. Just go on in there.' And wow, what an end of the row. It was a rectangle shaped wooden building surrounded by weeds, unkept. And I had to walk down this gauntlet, as I referred to it, and on both sides were crammed soldiers in a bed, no pajamas. They had sheets on them. There was no air conditioning, no music, no television. 'I had to walk and try and find this person in this mass of destroyed bodies. And I got to the end of the row and thought, 'Oh, my god, I can't find him.' And then I heard my name called, and I turned my head and there he was – a skeleton with a deformed arm. One arm, I think, was okay, and the other one was all twisted up, and he had lost some weight.'
Wayne made it back to Bakersfield. His house essentially became a medical facility.
'I did visit him a couple of times,' Hunter said, 'and then he ended up having to go back to the hospital and I went back to school in Arizona.'
Wayne eventually married. He and his wife had three children and many grandchildren. But he was never really able to work much, and in May 2011, just 64 years old, he died following a heart attack. Complications from his war wounds were a contributing cause of death, according to his obituary.
Hunter, who went on to teach history, government and economics at her alma mater, Bakersfield High School, attended the funeral.
'Wayne … never did recover,' she said. 'He had (inhaled) Agent Orange …and it just took a toll on his body. He was such a handsome little kid, nice family, and this just destroyed him and destroyed his family. It was a slow death. It just just broke my heart. And all those other soldiers – missing limbs and mentally changed, changed forever.'
SEVERITY OF WAR WOUNDS
Wayne's was a common story, all too common. Of the 304,000 wounded in Vietnam, at least 75,000 were severely disabled, many with multiple amputations, but they don't receive the recognition of their KIA brethren. A service member must have died in combat, or in supporting combat, within 120 days of returning home in order to be classified as such, and many lived longer than three months. So, in a sense, they are among the forgotten.
A little part of Randa Hunter was embittered by the way veterans, wounded or not, were treated during and after the war.
'I think that the good part that came from learning about Vietnam was to treat your veterans when they come home as human beings, and give them some respect because they went over there, honorably,' she said. 'You have no right to put them in a place and call them baby killers. They are soldiers, and they are trying to survive, and you didn't walk in their shoes.
'It's a hard learned lesson, and I think that has changed. I see more people now. They'll embrace a veteran. They didn't embrace them before.'
Some continue to feel the effects of physical wounds from Vietnam. Many, many others still deal with PTSD, the invisible wounds.
Local veterans who continue to feel the effects meet at 10 a.m. every Wednesday morning at Portrait of a Warrior Gallery in downtown Bakersfield. All are welcome.
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