Vet organizing homecoming event for Vietnam veterans

DAYTON, Ohio – When Mike Jackson returned from the Vietnam War in 1972, he was met by anti-war protesters like many colleagues and was given the cold shoulder in his hometown.

Thirty years after the war ended, Jackson is helping organize one of two major events this year to welcome Vietnam veterans home.

“You’ve got a whole segment of the population that went through the same thing I did,” said Jackson, author of a Vietnam War memoir “Naked in Da Nang.”

“I just want somebody to say thank you, somebody to say welcome home. It would mean a lot.”

Jackson, former executive director of the National Aviation Hall of Fame, is chairman of Operation Welcome Home, a four-day event to be held in Las Vegas on Veterans Day weekend November. A similar event – Operation Homecoming USA – will be held in Branson, Mo., in June.

A 1985 homecoming parade in New York City drew about 25,000 Vietnam veterans, but there have been few similar events over the years for the 7.9 million living veterans from the war.

J. Michael Wenger, a Raleigh, N.C.-based military historian and Vietnam War author, can recall no official homecoming parades during or shortly after the war.

“The military was just ready to have it done with,” Wenger said. “It would have been a publicity nightmare. It would have attracted protesters like a magnet.”

Jackson, 57, flew 210 combat missions in Vietnam and calls his June 25, 1972, return to the United States a day of infamy. He said anti-war protesters were at the airport in San Francisco to harass soldiers as they caught flights home.

“We walked a gantlet through these guys on either side of us, putting signs in front of your face and screaming at you,” Jackson recalled. “This was our welcome home.”

When he returned to Tipp City, just north of Dayton, there were no parades or any official welcome-home events. Townspeople were pleasant, he said, but no one ever asked him about his Vietnam experience.

“Nobody wanted to hear it,” he said.

Steven Herman, a clinical psychologist at the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis, said many veterans feel that their entire tour of duty in Vietnam was made meaningless because of the way they were received when they got home. He said this year’s homecoming events could be therapeutic.

“At the very least, it would provide some validation,” he said.

Gene McMahon is a Vietnam veteran and director of Vets Journey Home, a a program designed to allow veterans to vent traumatic wartime experiences.

The program has simulated homecomings for small groups of Vietnam veterans. McMahon said that can be critical to helping them heal.

“They have a missing piece,” he said.

McMahon said he appreciates the organizers putting on this year’s homecomings, but he questioned whether the events will be able to heal the severe psychological wounds suffered by some veterans and predicted that many won’t bother to go.

“It will be too little too late,” he said. “It’s deeper work than that.”

Jackson calls the Las Vegas event a start.

“The time is right in the American psyche to do this,” he said. “I think that there is a little bit of guilt in the American public on what did we do to these guys.”

The event, to be funded by private contributions, will feature a parade, concerts and a contest for the best photo that positively portrays the U.S. soldiers’ experiences in Vietnam.

Organizers of the Branson event hope to raise $12 million through corporate sponsorships and registration fees. So far, they have $3.5 million.

They are expecting at least 150,000 Vietnam veterans to attend the homecoming, which will feature concerts, military displays and demonstrations, a memorial service and a parade.

Organizer Gary Linderer, a Vietnam veteran from Festus, Mo., said the homecomings are late, but are better than doing nothing.

“There are a lot of vets that are bitter and angry to this day,” he said. “How do you apologize for what happened 30 years ago. This doesn’t make up for it.”