Veterans reflect on Vietnam War and the sacrifices they made after 50 years
Eric Willard was in Vietnam from 1966-1968. At 18, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to work with computers, but two months in, he was sent to battle.
Willard, like other Vietnam veterans, doesn't speak much about the war. Willard said it's because his leaders told them to hide their uniforms and push the memories aside.
Since Vietnam, Willard has worked 22 jobs and kept himself busy, trying his best to forget his time overseas.
'I could hide from all of the things that I felt were failures of my time in Vietnam by burying my head and doing these other things as distractions,' Willard said.
50 years later, Willard said he still feels the effects every day.
'Some days it seems like 100 [years] and some days it seems like yesterday,' Willard said. 'As you get older, you have a sense of guilt, 'Why am I still here? And others aren't?'
Willard said he learned a lot from serving, especially when it came to growing up.
'You have to watch out for yourself,' Willard said. 'That doesn't mean you're greedy or selfish or anything like that, but you realize you help yourself because nobody's out there waiting to help you.'
Local groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter #984 and the LZ Peace Memorial help Willard and other veterans stay connected.
Sgt. Nick Parnello (Army) and Danny Harris (Marine Corp.) both served in Vietnam.
Harris said he remembers the crowd reaction to them returning home.
'We went over and fought for our country and done what we were asked to do,' Harris said. 'People were protesting against us, and we were trying to figure out why.'
Parenllo said he learned to take nothing for granted.
'Freedom is so precious and so dangerous,' Parnello said. 'We can lose it, and boy, if you lose it, it's going to be hard to get it back.'
All three men said that if given the chance to do it all over again, they would
'We honor the ones who didn't make it back, we honor the ones still missing, and we honor the ones who are still broken and in pieces today,' Willard said.
A '50 years since Vietnam' event will be held for community members to attend at Memorial Hall on Saturday, May 3rd, at 12:30 p.m.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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The dark cars smelled of cow shit, and the soldiers were crammed so tightly, they were forced to stand. It took two days to load them. Vonnegut later recounted how, 18 hours after their departure, the unmarked German train was attacked by the Royal Air Force. It was Christmas Eve. Strafed by RAF fighters, bombs dropping all around them, dozens of American prisoners were killed by Allied planes. Against all odds, Vonnegut was still alive. The name Little Boy was chosen by Robert Serber, a Los Alamos physicist who worked on the bomb's design. It seems only fitting for a weapon dropped by children from a plane named after the pilot's mother, Enola Gay. Ten feet long and weighing close to 10,000 pounds, 'the gadget'—as the scientists called it—was a plug-ugly sumbitch, made of riveted steel and wires. Nothing like the sleek, gleaming technology of today. See for yourself: Little Boy was a gun-type bomb, its explosive power triggered by firing a 'bullet' of uranium into a target of uranium. When the projectile and target combined, they formed a supercritical mass capable of sustaining a rapid nuclear chain reaction. That's a fancy scientist way of saying 'massive explosion,' and boy howdy, was it. Fission reactions occur so fast that it's hard to describe them using our human sense of time. Within one-millionth of a second of the uranium bullet hitting its target, a fireball of several million degrees was formed, spawning a shock wave with a blast equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT that pushed the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, and that traveled outward at two miles per second from the hypocenter. The fiery shock wave flattened everything in its path, igniting birds in midair. About a third of the bomb's energy was released as thermal radiation: gamma and infrared rays that flashed through clothing, burning textile patterns into victims' skin and causing severe burns up to a mile away. In the time it takes to say 'boom,' roughly 80,000 people were reduced to ash, and 4.4 square miles of city were obliterated. Wilfred Burchett was the first Western reporter to reach Hiroshima after the bombing. On September 2, sitting on a piece of rubble, he wrote, 'Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.' For clarity, a steamroller was an Industrial Age machine used for compacting dirt and gravel in order to create smooth surfaces upon which vehicles could drive. And so the world ended, if not in fact then in theory. When he arrived in Dresden, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were put to work in a malted-syrup factory, making food for Germans that the POWs were not themselves allowed to eat. The guards were cruel, the work exhausting. Vonnegut was singled out and badly beaten. One night, as air-raid sirens roared, Vonnegut and the other POWs were herded into the basement of a slaughterhouse, huddling among the sides of beef as the city above them was bombed. All told, British and American bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of highly explosive and incendiary bombs on Dresden that night. Vonnegut described it this way in a letter to his family: 'On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F.' The combined forces 'destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me.' Here is a photo of the city before the bombing: And here is what it looked like when the Allies were done with it: To destroy the city of Dresden took hundreds of bombs dropped over multiple hours. To destroy the city of Hiroshima, all it took was one. This, a cynical man might say, is what progress looks like. In his 1967 collection of essays about the Atomic Age, The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian British author and journalist, wrote, 'The crisis of our time can be summed up in a single sentence. From the dawn of consciousness until the middle of our century man had to live with the prospect of his death as an individual; since Hiroshima, mankind as a whole has to live with the prospect of its extinction as a biological species.' Throughout human history, children have adopted a rule of engagement called 'not in the face.' Think of it as the first Geneva Convention. Violating the not-in-the-face rule opens the offender up to serious retribution. It is an act of war. Now I get to hit you in the face, or worse. In fact, maybe I should kick you in the balls to teach you a lesson and restore the balance of power. Maybe I need to make the cost of hitting me in the face so high, you never take another swing. If Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked face punch, then Hiroshima was the kick in the balls to end all future wars. Scientists of the Industrial Age made that kick possible. Vonnegut's relationship with his own children after the war was mixed at best. There would be seven in total, three biological and four of his sister's boys, who had come to live with him and his wife, Jane, in 1958, when Vonnegut's brother-in-law, Jim, died in a train derailment, his commuter train launching itself from the Newark Bay Bridge into Newark Bay. Two days later, Vonnegut's sister, Alice, died of breast cancer. So it goes. It was Alice who had shaken Vonnegut awake on Mother's Day 1944 to tell him their mother was dead. Vonnegut considered Alice his muse, and later wrote in Slapstick: 'I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved.' Suddenly the house was overstuffed with children between the ages of 2 and 14. For the next five years, Vonnegut tried (and mostly failed) to write Cat's Cradle. The stress of supporting that large a family as a writer, while still processing trauma from the war, made him irritable. Never a hands-on dad, he left most of the actual parenting to Jane, and as the chaos of family life filled the house, he would hole up in his study all day, chain-smoking. The slightest noise from the children could propel him from the room, ranting. Vonnegut himself had been raised in a house of math and science. His father was an architect. As a scientist, his brother would pioneer the field of cloud seeding. But Vonnegut had a complicated relationship with the word progress. His experience in the war had soured him on the idea that science was exclusively a force for good. Too often, he believed, scientists and engineers focused on the question Can we do something? rather than Should we? He saw this when he looked at the Manhattan Project. Though scientists at Los Alamos knew that the bomb they were designing was meant to be dropped on people, they rarely thought about the consequences of dropping it. After the war, the physicist Victor Weisskopf, who'd worked on the bomb at Los Alamos, admitted that he was 'ashamed to say that few of us even thought of quitting. It was the attraction of the task. It was impossible to quit at that time.' The task, he said, was 'technically sweet.' J. Robert Oppenheimer himself used this phrase during testimony at his security-clearance hearing after the war. 'It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it.' 'Nice, nice, very nice,' as Bokonon wrote in his '53rd Calypso.' 'So many different people in the same device.' Bokonon was the fictional founder of a religion that Vonnegut invented for Cat's Cradle, a novel as much about the hypocrisy of organized religion as it was about war. Bokonon's first dictum is this: 'All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.' Here's another shameless lie: The atomic bomb was dropped to save lives. This is an ancillary thing that war does; it inverts language. See, the lives that mattered to scientists at Los Alamos were American. So they chose to focus on the lives they would spare—the GIs who would theoretically die in a conventional invasion—instead of the Japanese citizens who would actually die when the bomb was dropped. This made the morality of their actions easier to justify. In this way, they kept things sweet. And yet, to quote a survivor, those scientists who invented the atomic bomb—'what did they think would happen if they dropped it?' Here are some things that happened. Day turned to night. In a flash, the bomb destroyed 60,000 of the 90,000 structures in a 10-mile radius. Of the 2,370 doctors and nurses in Hiroshima, 2,168 were killed or injured too badly to work. This is what the atomic bomb did to survivors: 'They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back,' a survivor told The New York Times in 1981. 'Their skin—not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too—hung down.' In this way they stumbled down the road, going nowhere, 'like walking ghosts.' Only a few of the survivors were children, as most school-age kids near ground zero were killed on impact. This is because at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, they had gathered outside their schools to help create firebreaks to slow the spread of flames in the event of firebomb raids like the ones that had destroyed Tokyo and so many other Japanese cities. Did they hear the distant roar of the B-29, I wonder, flying overhead? An air-raid siren had gone off an hour earlier, but no planes had come, so now, when the Enola Gay approached, many didn't even look up. Picture the children of Hiroshima on that sunny morning, thousands of little haircuts, thousands of gap-toothed smiles. Thousands of children trying to be good citizens, wondering what the morning snack would be. This is whom the child pilots flying overhead dropped the bomb on: schoolchildren and their parents. What else are we to think? The city of Hiroshima had no real military or technological value. It was a population center, chosen to send a message to the emperor. So it goes—or, as the survivors of Hiroshima used to say, ' Shikata ga nai,' which loosely translates to 'It can't be helped.' This sentiment was born from the Japanese practice of Zen Buddhism—an even older made-up religion than Bokononism, Vonnegut might say. And yet, what else can one say about a world in which children drop bombs on other children? In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes of an argument he had with his old Army buddy Bernard's wife, Mary. Vonnegut has gone to their house to drink and trade war stories, and when he tells them he is writing a novel about the war, Mary erupts: 'You were just babies then!' she said. 'What?' I said. 'You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs! … But you're not going to write it that way, are you … You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.' Later, thinking back on Cat's Cradle 's amoral physicist, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, Vonnegut said, 'What I feel about him now is that he was allowed to concentrate on one part of life more than any human being should be. He was overspecialized and became amoral on that account … If a scientist does this, he can inadvertently become a very destructive person.' This overspecialization is a feature, not a bug, of our Information Age. What are our phones and tablets, our social-media platforms, if not technically sweet? They are so sleek and sophisticated technologically, with their invisible code and awesome computing power, that they have become, as Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, indistinguishable from magic. And this may, in the end, prove to be the biggest danger. Because so little thought has been given to the Should we? of the Information Age (what will happen if we give human beings an entertainment device they can fit in their pocket, one that connects them instantly to every truth and every lie ever conceived?), we have, as a society, been caught unprepared. If the atomic bomb, riveted from steel plates and visible wires, was irrefutable proof of the power of science, how is it possible that even more sophisticated modern devices have decreased our faith in science and given rise to the wholesale rejection of expertise? Talk about a shameless lie! And yet how else to explain the fact that misinformation spread through our magic gadgets seems to be undermining people's belief in the very science that powers them? To put it simply, if the bomb was a machine through which we looked into the future, our phones have become a looking glass through which we are pulled back into the past. Shikata ga nai. After the war, Vonnegut wrestled with what he saw as hereditary depression, made worse by his mother's suicide, his sister's death, and the trauma of war. Unable to justify why he had survived when so many around him had died, and unwilling to ascribe his good fortune to God, Vonnegut settled instead on the absurd. I live, you die. So it goes. If it had been cloudy in Hiroshima that morning, the bomb would have fallen somewhere else. If POW Vonnegut had been shoved into a different train car, if he had picked a different foxhole, if the Germans hadn't herded him into the slaughterhouse basement when the sirens sounded—so many ifs that would have ended in death. Instead, somehow, he danced between the raindrops. Because of this, for Vonnegut, survival became a kind of cosmic joke, with death being the setup and life being the punch line. On May 11, 1955, the Hiroshima survivor Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, was featured on the American television program This Is Your Life. He had come to the U.S. to raise money for victims of the atomic bomb known as the Keloid Girls or the Atomic Maidens. Seated on a sofa beside the host, Ralph Edwards, Tanimoto wears a baggy suit and looks stunned. After an introductory segment, the camera cuts to the silhouette of a man behind a screen. He speaks into a microphone. 'Looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima,' he says, 'all I could think of was 'My God, what have we done?' ' The camera cuts back to Edwards and Tanimoto. 'Now, you've never met him,' the host tells the Hiroshima survivor sitting next to him, 'never seen him, but he's here tonight to clasp your hand in friendship. Captain Robert Lewis, United States Air Force, who along with Paul Tibbets piloted the plane from which the first atomic power was dropped over Hiroshima.' The camera pans across the stage as the screen retracts and Captain Lewis emerges from shadow. Tanimoto steps into frame and shakes his hand. Both men appear as if they want to throw up: 'Captain Lewis,' Edwards says, 'come in here close, and would you tell us, sir, of your experience on August 6, 1945?' There is an uncomfortable beat, in which we wonder if Lewis will be able to continue. The camera cuts to a close-up of Lewis. He is unable to make eye contact with Tanimoto. 'Well, Mr. Edwards, when we left Tinian, in the Mariana Islands, at about eight—at 2:45 in the morning on August the 6th, 1945, our destination was Japan. We had three targets. One was Hiroshima. One was Nagasaki. One was Kurkura. 'About an hour before we hit the coastline of Japan, we were notified that Hiroshima was clear. Therefore, Hiroshima became our target.' The camera cuts to Tanimoto, listening, horrified. The social contract of human behavior freezes him in place. 'Just before 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time,' Lewis continues, 'Tom Ferebee, our very able bombardier, carefully aimed at his target, which was the second Imperial Japanese Army Headquarters. At 8:15 promptly, the bomb was dropped. 'We turned fast to get out of the way of the deadly radiation and bomb effects. First was a thick flash that we got, and then the two concussion waves hit the ship. Shortly after, we turned back to see what had happened, and there in front of our eyes, the city of Hiroshima disappeared.' 'And,' Edwards says, 'you entered something in your log at that time?' Lewis's voice breaks and he rubs his temples, trying to compose himself. 'As I said before, Mr. Edwards, I wrote down later: 'My God, what have we done?' ' After retiring from the Air Force, Captain Lewis went to work in the candy business, where he patented various improvements to candy-manufacturing machinery. Sweet treats for kids. Picture them. All those happy kids. Picture them putting quarters in the vending machine. Picture them in store-bought costumes holding out their Halloween sacks. They are no more theoretical than the children of Hiroshima, but unlike them, these children would grow up. They would come of age practicing duck-and-cover drills, diving under their desks at the shriek of a whistle; come of age hiding in the bomb shelters their parents had built, terrified of the theoretical deaths that the A-bomb had made all but inevitable.
