A plastic card opens the electronic latch, but getting through the door doesn’t get you in the fraternity.

The building is plain red brick, and all but two of the 20 cars in the parking lot are American brands. It’s dim around the rectangular bar, and smoke rises from several ashtrays. A dozen or so people, men and women, are tending drinks at the bar by Friday at 4 o’clock. Small tables topped with white, plastic doilies are spread throughout the room.

The initiation rite is war. Mike McClure and Carl Reece are members, part of the color guard. They represent this VFW post by wearing their fading uniforms at special events. They’ll be there July 4, providing the formal side to the burger, music and beer gathering that will take place at an open-air shelter outside. They do it out of patriotism, out of old-fashioned love of country. This year alone, the color guard has been a dignified presence at the funerals of about 50 men who fought in this country’s wars, from World War II to the Persian Gulf conflict.

Like thousands of Vietnam veterans, these men still struggle to understand the war fought against them when they returned from the fighting in Southeast Asia. They gathered around those tables last week at the Post to talk about July 4, patriotism, war and country.

“I remember getting off the plane in Ft. Lewis, Washington,” recalls Mike McClure, who was posted for 365 days in the tense demilitarized zone (DMZ). “They threw eggs and shit at us, called us baby killers.”

Reece, a dark-haired man who looks deep into the eyes of whomever he’s talking, says everywhere he went he heard people dissing vets as “dope smokers.” People back home thought all vets did it, he said. Reece served two years in Nam, infantry.

“I came back and couldn’t get a decent job. So I enrolled at Haywood Technical Institute,” Reece said. “When I wanted to use my awards and military achievements to get a job, I remember what the teacher said. She said, ‘Carl, don’t use that, people look down on it.’”

He shakes his head, still confused, still disbelieving: Uncle Sam plucked him from his mountain home in the draft, ordered him to kill, and then his fellow citizens made him ashamed of it, encouraging him to hide his past like a crazed criminal guilty of some heinous crime.

“That got me down because I thought what I had accomplished in the military was the best think I’d ever done,” he said.

Ronnie Glavich was career military. He was drafted, did his time in Vietnam, and came back to the hills and listened as people railed against the war and those who followed orders. Suddenly an outcast in his own hometown, he re-enlisted, preferring the company of like-minded men and women who would fight for their country. He stayed long enough to retire.

The misconceptions about Vietnam are still staggering, he says. The movies have been wrong, he said, glorifying the negative, wild side.

“I was still active when ‘Platoon’ came out, and we blackballed it. Every bad scene they could imagine they put in,” he said. “It just wasn’t like that.”

Reece remembered the scene where the soldiers killed villagers, nearly starting a massacre.

“We didn’t all kill the mama sans and the papa sans. It happened, but we didn’t all do it,” he said.

McClure was an artillery soldier, lobbing shells from big guns at unseen targets miles away. Orders would come down to destroy villages suspected of harboring the Viet Cong. He never saw the victims.

“We would shell all night long, put around 600 rounds into the village.”

They recalled tiptoeing through the jungle, going two weeks just walking through a particular area. Then, a sudden few minutes of life-and-death firefighting, many targets unseen. They contrasted that to the war fought by men like Hub Tate. Hub is old, probably in his 80s, was wounded three times in WWII, uses a cane, and strains to listen as the younger men tell their war stories. As all eyes turn to him, he talks slowly.

“I was in the fourth round of troops coming into Normandy. When we came in, we were walking on blood and dead men, that deep.” He stops talking and lifts a sleeveless arm, one hand karate chop style to the inside of other elbow, eighteen inches of sacrificial death. “We just kept going until we were out of it.”

Hub came home to parades and hero worship. McClure, Glavich, Reece, and countless others, were met on the tarmac by tossed eggs full of scorn and confusion.

McClure is a big man, and he points to my recorder and motions to turn it off. They speak, a little more quietly, about a man they looked up to as kids, a man who was drafted, finished boot camp, and then fled to Canada. He’s been there since. Around this table there is a general condemnation. They talk about rich kids who got Reserve and National Guard status, of people who stayed in college to avoid fighting. Again, there is obvious resentment. I ask point blank if those kinds of feelings have softened over the years, and they answer just as bluntly: No, not knowing what they know, not going through what they went through.

They were drafted and fulfilled the call knowing they would be on a military transport to Vietnam in a matter of weeks. They served as they were told, fighting unseen enemies in steamy jungles, survived and came home. No running. No dodging. It’s what you do.

Perhaps today’s young Americans don’t understand, don’t appreciate what veterans have done and what Independence Day stands for. Perhaps, but Glavich isn’t so sure. Maybe, he says, in the last few years, there’s been a change. As the turbulence of that era fades to history, appreciation may be replacing the divisiveness. Some time in the future, he says, that kind of social chaos mixed with war will repeat itself. He likes to think there are young people around today who will answer the call in the midst of the confusion. Such thoughts are reassuring as we prepare to celebrate July 4.

His own son, in his early 20s, was sitting with Glavich at the bar only minutes earlier. He was gone now, had left the Post, but Glavich smiled as he thought of him.

“He was raised a military brat. He doesn’t want to go in, but if it came down to it and he was needed, I think he’d be one of the first ones.”

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)

 

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