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By Al Zdon
Brad Stone was not a hero. Like thousands of other Americans, he trooped through the jungles and hills of Vietnam during the war.
Like many others, he was wounded.
And
like many others, he came home to a country that perhaps didn't appreciate the sacrifice of its military.
"I could tell you a lot of stories about guys getting killed, but what's the good in that? The
helicopters sometimes would just keep coming in, one after another. And there were all those body bags."
"And I could tell you about talking to a guy one second and he's dead the next
second."
Stone sat silent in his chair in his dining room at his rural home, south of Farmington. And then he looked at the reporter again, "But what's the use in that?"
Stone grew up in Fargo,
North Dakota, the son of a World War II veteran who was also commander of the local American Legion Post. Stone went to Fargo Central High School, graduating in 1966.
"I was just playing football with
a bunch of friends one day, and one good friend said he was going to join the Marine Corps. So three of us went down, and we all joined up. We were just 17, and we really didn't know what we were
doing."
Training was in San Diego, and Stone had no problems with the Marine Corps. "I loved it. I had always been a trouble maker anyway."
After training, he was assigned to the Third Marine
Division, Third Battalion, K Company. In January of 1967, he was flown to Camp Hanson on Okinawa. The Third Marines were reorganizing after a stint in Vietnam.
"They were shot up pretty bad and had to
regroup. They just came out of Khe Sanh, up in the hills."
Stone did a little combat training on Okinawa, but said he didn't get much help at that time from the experienced troops. "I was just a kid,
and I didn't know what was going on. And the old guys wouldn't talk about it."
Not long after, he was in a C-141 bound for Dong Ha where the Third Battalion had its base.
"I got off the plane and
it was 120 degrees and the dust was blowing. They told us to dig some foxholes. We didn't dig them very deep until the rockets and artillery started coming in at us. They were plenty deep by the time we
got done."
"That night we heard Hanoi Hannah on the radio come on and say, 'Welcome back, Third Marines.' They seemed to know every move we'd make."
Company K stayed for two days at the base and
then were flown into the Demilitarized Zone between the two Vietnams. "We flew into a hot LZ (a landing zone under enemy fire). That's when I learned about Vietnam and what it was all about. You could
hear the talking on the radios. The North Vietnamese were everywhere. That day we got into our first firefight."
"It was a reality check. I grew up pretty fast."
And the veteran Marines who had
been silent in training, now helped out the new guys. "In the Marines, everybody helps everybody else out. We're all volunteers."
The big difference between the experienced guys and the new guys was
the attitude. "We were all pretty excited, but the guys who had been over there for a while just wanted to go home."
The Marines mainly did search and destroy missions. "We walked and walked and
walked and hoped we didn't get in a firefight. At night we'd set up camp in the hills.
"I can tell you that we never lost a battle when I was there. But we'd take a hill one day and then two weeks
later we'd have to come back and take it again."
The Marines had several base camps in the area: Camp Carol, the Rock Pile, Khe Sanh, Hill 881 and others. "We spent a lot of time at Khe Sanh out on
the perimeter, and I'll tell you what, we'd rather have been out in the bush than to be on the perimeter. By that time in the war, the North Vietnamese had the base zeroed in pretty well. You just hoped
they didn't have your bunker zeroed in.
"I could have had plenty of Purple Hearts from the shells and mortars, you know, scratches and stuff. But we didn't want that kind of Purple Heart. We never
turned them in."
Missions away from the base would sometimes take weeks, living on C-rations. "We'd hope to find a hill full of foxholes at night so we didn't have to do it."
The nights would get a
little scary sometimes, especially with the heavy weapons the U.S. would deliver. "There were B-52s dropping bombs and then there was Puff the Magic Dragon, kind of like Gatling guns from airplanes. It
looked like a piece of lightning. And then there was the napalm."
One tactic the Marines used was to advance until they encountered the North Vietnamese, then to withdraw and call in the air power.
"But I don't think it affected them very much. They had all those underground places to hide."
His personal weapon was a rifle. "We started out with M-14s, but then we switched over to M-16s. The
M-16s had their problems. You'd fire five or six rounds and it would jam. It was a quick rifle, but it just wasn't built for the heat and the humidity."
Besides the rifle, the Marines traveled
lightly. Stone said they had the clothes on their back, their flak jacket, canteen, bed roll, food and ammunition. "We ate C-rations. We made sure we had plenty of food. You learned really fast from the
old guys. This is how you dress. You were lucky to get a new pair of pants before the old ones just wore right off you."
One of Stone's most memorable occurrences in Vietnam happened after an
all-night firefight.
"The smoke was just clearing out and I looked into this open field and there were two deer standing there, a buck and doe. This guy had some big horns on him. I just sat and
stared at them for three or four minutes. Finally, I turned to my buddy and said, 'Hey, look at those deer.' When I looked back, they were gone. To this day, I don't know if it was a visionary thing or
if they were real. I don't even know if they have deer like that in Vietnam."
One other time, his unit was pinned down on a hill for three days. They soon ran out of water, although they could hear a
river rushing below them. "We finally took to lowering the leaves into our mouths for the water on them. It worked, but, of course we all got dysentery.
"Finally one of the guys couldn't take it
anymore. He said, 'Give me all your canteens, I'm going down to the stream.' By God, he made it."
When not out walking, the time back in the base camps was spent catching up with washing clothes,
getting a haircut, relaxing and reading your mail.
There were other opportunities for a break too. There was in-country R&R at places like China Beach or Da Nang, or, after you'd been in Vietnam
for six or seven months, you could get out of country R&R. Stone spent a week in Hawaii.
In the base camps, there was also some time for partying, mainly with warm beer. "I grew a taste for warm
beer. On special days like Christmas and Thanksgiving, we'd get supposedly hot food. Those were our holidays, warm food and warm beer."
Stone was wounded while walking down a path one day as part of a
search and destroy mission.
"It was up in the hills somewhere, I think by Con Thien. The first six guys in front of me weren't very lucky. They were all killed in action. It was an ambush, and they
just opened up on us. There were mortars and bullets and hand grenades. If you haven't been in combat, it's hard to describe. It's pretty chaotic."
Stone was hit by a bullet in the right side of his
chest. "What did I do? I just kept shooting. I couldn't see 'em, but I could see the flashes."
When the firefight was over, Stone was put on a helicopter and taken away for medical treatment. He only
had a couple of weeks left before he was slated to be sent home.
"That's the way it always was. Guys got hit in their first month in Vietnam or in their last."
Stone paid tribute to the life savers
in Vietnam. "If it wasn't for the corpsmen, there would have been a lot more of us killed. They were great. And then there were the helos, the medivacs. They all did their job."
After healing up,
Stone spent the remainder of his Marine time at Annapolis, Maryland, where he served in the honor guard.
When he came back, there was an adjustment period. "Sure, when a car would backfire, I'd be
down on the ground. But you can't let it bother you. I did have some good times and I had some bad times while I was over there."
He said that some of his buddies ran into people who called them "baby
killers" when they got home, but Stone never experienced that. He said he expected neither condemnation nor praise for his service. "What's a hero? The heroes are all in the graveyard."
He said that
one group that did treat the veterans well after their Vietnam service was the World War II guys.
After his service in the Marine Corps, Stone worked for Brockway Glass for many years, then Crown Cork
and Seal for 20 years, and he is now a building chief for Rosemount School District 196. "They're a very good employer. They hire a lot of vets."
He married his wife, Lynda, in 1969, and they have one
son, Ben, who is now 33.
Two years ago, Stone took his wife, Lynda, and his brother in law back to Vietnam. "Why'd I go? Oh, closure I suppose."
They toured many of the base camps. "There's
nothing left, of course. You can talk to the Vietnamese and get their version of how they whipped us.
"But I loved it. The people were very nice. And it's kind of nice to see the country now all lush
and green. By the time we left, it had been pretty much defoliated. When I left, the hills were bare and there was nothing but bomb craters.
"I know at the time there had to be hard feelings,
because we just cleared those villages out. In our area of the DMZ, it was all cleared out. The only thing there were us and the North Vietnamese. Just think of spending your whole life in a village and
suddenly your village is gone.
"But the people of Vietnam have moved on. It's time for us to move on too."
Stone was not very pleased with the VA medical system when he returned. "They kind of
shunned us. They said there was no PTSD. They didn't do anything for us. They were still set up for a different war, a different time."
It took years for the VA to recognize and start to treat such
conditions as the human body's reaction to Agent Orange, the defoliate used in Vietnam.
"Our only boy was born autistic. I blame that on the herbicide."
"Sometimes they would spray right over the
top of us. One day the leaves would be beautiful, and the next day they would be drooping down."
"I fought with the VA, and I had tests taken that were negative. After a while you just give up and get
on with life."
In the end, Stone said Vietnam was a mixed experience. "Did I have a good time over there? Well, sometimes I did. There was the camaraderie. Would I do it again? No. Well, maybe I
can't say that."
"When you go into the Marine Corps during wartime, you know exactly what you're going to get. It was a life experience, you bet it was.
"It was a good bunch of people I was with. I
was sad at the number of lives lost. Yeah, really sad. You lose a lot of friends. You bet it's tough. And it was tough on the other side too. They all had families.
"And when it was over, I kind of
asked myself, for what? I think the government has got to think things through before they get into these wars. Is it really worth it?"
"We're losing kids 18 and 19 years old. They still had a lot of
growing up to do. And then there are the ones that lost arms or legs.
"Am I mad about the war? No. But I'm sad about it."
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