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Yahoo
19 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Behind the veteran designating Winnebago County's Highway 21 as Purple Heart Memorial Highway
OSHKOSH, Wis. (WFRV) – Winnebago County Marine veteran Roy Rogers' time in the military came to an end with a 15-month hospital stay at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Waukegan, IL. Before arriving there, a landmine detonated in front of him in Chu Lai, South Vietnam, blowing apart a piece of his left hand and foot, littering that side of his body with shrapnel. 'It hit my rifle and disintegrated my rifle and part of me,' Rogers said. 'I was lucky.' After requiring nine operations during that hospital stay, no one would have blamed him for wanting to forget those days, leaving them behind to never be thought of again. He has not. In fact, Rogers has spent nearly six decades working for and with veterans in Winnebago County and throughout the state. 'I may have stepped on a landmine, but I'm still here and I'm still fighting for everything,' he said. Still fighting for fellow veterans, Rogers has spent the better part of the past year working to make Highway 21 in Winnebago County a Purple Heart Memorial Highway. 'I worked for about 10 months asking the Winnebago County executive and our state governor if they'd approve making that a state highway designation, and it came to pass and I'm so happy,' Rogers said. While the county board and state review and approve of the motion to make the designation, it takes citizen action to organize it, and at least one veteran from the county to lose life or limb for it. 'There was probably 60 people in Winnebago County that were probably killed in Vietnam,' Rogers said. The effort that Rogers spent on getting the designation is not lost on Winnebago County executive Gordon Hintz, who spoke at the ceremony Saturday along with Rogers at the intersection of Highway 21 and Oakwood Rd. 'It's important to recognize that we have people who have served, given life and limb, from Winnebago County,' Hintz said. 'But it really took a citizen, a veteran himself, Roy Rogers, to push this forward, and the county was really happy to build off his work and make today happen.' 'I'm thrilled that what I started actually came to pass,' Rogers said. He is hopeful that people driving on Highway 21 remember not the effort it took to get the designation passed, but rather the sacrifices women and men in the military made and continue to make. 'Hopefully everyone that drives on Highway 21 in Winnebago County realizes that a person had to be combat wounded in order to put that sign there,' he said. Wisconsin has allowed highways to be designated as Purple Heart Memorial Highways since 1994. The Purple Heart was first instituted in 1782, by then-General George Washington. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
27-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
Vietnam Made Him a Writer. His Anger Still Burns on the Page.
At a time when a serial draft dodger has made it his mission to reinvigorate American jingoism, it might be instructive to remember an American draftee who actually went to war. Not just any veteran or any war, but Sgt. Tim O'Brien of the Fifth Battalion, 46th Light Infantry Regiment, who was a 22-year-old private from small-town Minnesota when he landed in the murderous Chu Lai district of South Vietnam in February 1969. His was a harrowing tour, detailed in Alex Vernon's exhaustive new biography. As his unit's radiotelephone operator, O'Brien was positioned near the front of the column whenever his company ventured from base on reconnaissance patrols or ambush missions against the Vietcong. It was a position that required extraordinary poise. He was in charge of calling in the coordinates for an artillery or airstrike while under fire, and radioing for helicopter 'dust-offs,' or evacuations, for the unit's dead and wounded. During his 13 months in Chu Lai, there were too many dust-offs to count, and death rarely looked how it was depicted in movies: O'Brien saw his comrades cut in half on booby-trapped pathways, crushed beneath armored vehicles in flooded rice paddies, killed by the friendly fire of panic-stricken newbies. He also saw his comrades routinely abuse and burn down the homes of those they were ostensibly there to protect. From his experiences, O'Brien, now 78, emerged as one of the foremost chroniclers of the Vietnam War. His first novel, the astonishing 'Going After Cacciato,' won the National Book Award in 1979 and drew comparisons to 'Catch-22' and 'Slaughterhouse-Five.' He is best known for his semi-autobiographical collection of short stories, 'The Things They Carried' (1990), which has become required reading for war reporters, politicos and literary writers alike. O'Brien's writings have derived much of their influence not from the stories themselves — as searing and raw as they often are — but from the pitiless emotional honesty that undergirds them. His work, which also includes novels about domestic strains and lifelong regrets, lays bare a tortured and angry soul, a conscience that won't allow absolution for either himself or society. Although O'Brien was adamantly opposed to American involvement in Vietnam, he dutifully showed up when his draft number was called because he 'lacked the courage' to do otherwise. Once in Vietnam, he felt guilt for the barbarity taking place around him, for not reporting the officer who made a souvenir of the severed ear of a Vietnamese man he'd killed, for the ease with which he could put to one side the deaths of friends. His guilt is simultaneously that of the witness, survivor and perpetrator, and it never lets up. As his semi-fictive alter ego in 'The Things They Carried' says in remembrance, '20 years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.' In composing his biography, the wonderfully titled 'Peace Is a Shy Thing,' Vernon appears to have tracked down most every individual who crossed paths with O'Brien and had an interesting anecdote to tell. A seasoned critic and scholar who has published studies of Hemingway and war literature, Vernon also sleuthed through a veritable mountain of reference material; his list of archives and libraries consulted alone runs to well over two dozen. In the process, though, Vernon sometimes makes the mistake of letting the research drive his narrative, and this is especially noticeable in the chapters devoted to O'Brien's time in Vietnam, the formative period of his writing career. As with almost all frontline soldiers, the spells of horror and combat O'Brien endured were interspersed with long periods of boredom or uneventful slogs through the countryside, and by relying so heavily on the Fifth Battalion's logs and official records, Vernon occasionally replicates that tedium. The reward for his thoroughness has been to find a number of personalities who speak with both perspicacity and candor about his subject. None is more invaluable than O'Brien's lifelong friend, Erik Hansen. After going through basic training together, the two young grunts served in different corners of Vietnam, but throughout their tours and for many years afterward, they maintained a wise — and at times agonized — correspondence. Their exchanges are some of the most powerful and revealing moments of the book. Although he acknowledges that he too is friends with O'Brien, Vernon avoids the classic biographer's curse of falling in love with his subject. In his telling, 'O'Brien is affable, warm, loyal and funny,' but he 'can be prickly to the point of being a prick.' Vernon also understands that his subject's 'good humor stands on a foundation of anxiety and rage,' a lasting fury 'toward the magnanimous nation and the polite hometown that sent him to a repugnant war. Toward himself for letting them send him, the great moral failure of his life.' His biographer does not try to redeem him. It's hard to imagine that O'Brien, the most unsparingly honest and self-flagellating of writers, would accept anything less.
