Talkin' 'Bout Their Generation VVA's Three-War Veterans
We called them "lifers," and many of us set them apart. They were the ones who had chosen to make the military their career: the hollow-eyed sergeant, the grey-bearded cook, the corps of senior NCOs and officers who cut their combat teeth on the beaches of Normandy, or along a string of islands in the South Pacific, or at Chosin, Inchon, or Pusan.They were of a different generation. They were not children who came of age in the turbulent 1960s. Many had grown up in poverty during the Depression and fought the good fight in the Second World War. Others too young for that war went off to the frigid stalemate in Korea. They were old enough to be our fathers. Some, in fact, were.Many chose to remain in uniform. According to the U. S. Census, of the eight million Vietnam-era veterans alive in 2000, more than 160,000 also had been in the armed forces in World War II and in Korea.With the nation about to dedicate a national World War II Memorial, it seemed appropriate to seek out VVA members whose time in service spanned three decades and three wars.Charlie GreenCharles Welby Green was drafted when he turned 18. It was 1944. The same week Green received his draft notice, he recalled, "My folks got a telegram from the War Department that my older brother, Marion, was missing in action. He'd been on a bombing mission over Hungary. A month later, they were notified that he was a prisoner of war."The uncertain status of one son and the conscription of another was a "double shock to my parents,'' Charlie Green said. Years later, just before she died, his mother got another shock when she learned that Charlie had been badly wounded in Vietnam.Charlie Green was in basic training when American casualties from the Battle of the Bulge led the Army to curtail training and ship raw recruits to twin fronts on two oceans. While in a repo depot in France, "fifty of us were pulled out and sent to a field artillery battalion,'' he said. "We became cannoneers. When our forces bottled up the Germans in a pocket between the Rhine and the Ruhr, we were firing 200-pound high-explosive shells into surrounding cities until they surrendered." It was the last gasp of Hitler's Germany.With the fighting ended and victory secured, Charlie Green and his mates were sent to Cologne. Their assignment: round up displaced persons. His battery had responsibility for 5,000 Russians who had been in German slave-labor camps. "Most of them did not want to go back to Mother Russia,'' Green said.Charlie Green, like most troops, wanted more than anything to go back home. A year later, he was demobilized and returned to Indianapolis, where his family had moved from Webster County in western Kentucky when he was 15. His war was over. The rest of his military career had yet to begin.In 1949, he re-upped. He saw extensive action in Korea with the 27th Infantry Regiment. From the Pusan Perimeter, he recounted, the Wolfhounds pushed to a few miles from the Yalu River before the Chinese "came out and chased us down.''After spending several years as an agent for the Criminal Investigation Division, Charlie Green was sent to Vietnam in October 1966. Linking up with his old Wolfhound outfit, he was acting first sergeant and then field first sergeant. He saw his share of combat."I made the mistake of coming back at the end of 1967,'' Green said. "This time, it damn near killed me.'' A day after his 43rd birthday, working a security detail with a company of ARVNs in a village west of Cu Chi, "Sergeant Rock,'' as Green was nicknamed, was sprayed by shrapnel from an old Chicom hand grenade during a night encounter with the VC."That grenade came within inches of my left foot,'' he said. "It only got me in the leg, the buttock, and the elbow, though.'' He nearly bled to death waiting for a dustoff.It was only later that he learned a medic named John Taggart, a conscientious objector whose religious beliefs prohibited him from bearing arms, had saved lives--with a rifle. "The VC reconned, then hit my command post. Seven of the eight of us who crowded into that CP were wounded within minutes,'' Green said."As Doc Taggart was working on one of our wounded, two VC came around the side of the bunker. Doc saw them. He picked up a weapon and blasted away at both of them. I can only imagine how traumatic an experience that was for him, killing another human being. But he knew he had to do what he did. He's partly the reason I'm still here today.''After he recuperated, Charlie Green talked himself into a desk job. He was assigned, he said, "to a spook outfit that monitored antiwar activity.'' He retired from the Army in 1972 and went to work as a field deputy for the Marion County coroner in Indianapolis.Charlie Green is 77. "I feel lucky to still be around,'' he said: "I've lived through the most fantastic era in the history of the world.''For too many years, Green said, he had put his experiences in Vietnam "in the closet and left them there. It's only in the last few years that I finally got around to joining.'' He has been a member of the Sammy Davis VVA Chapter 295 at Fort Harrison, Indiana, for five years.Charlie Green first visited The Wall in 1999. He had avoided making the journey because he didn't know how he'd be affected. It was, he said, "emotionally overpowering.''This Memorial Day, when he journeys again to Washington to be at The Wall, Charlie will also visit a belated memorial to his earlier war.Despite the anticipated pomp and ceremony, he is sobered by the "superficial post-9/11 patriotism" of too many Americans. "You can't expect people to understand what they haven't experienced,'' Green said. "But you would hope they can appreciate what somebody else does for them.''David JordanIllinois-born and Missouri-bred David Jordan entered the service when World War II was well under way, joining the Navy in 1943. "I just had it in my head to follow my brother, who had enlisted in 1940,'' he said. Jordan spent 25 months aboard the destroyer USS Stephen Potter (BD538). "We saw a lot," he said in an understatement. When all the bloodletting ended, the crew of the Stephen Potter received 12 battle stars for their exploits.Plying the waters of the Pacific, encountering and engaging a determined enemy, "there was no such thing as easy,'' Jordan said. What was his hardest day? "Hell, there were so many of them,'' he said. "When the aircraft carrier USS Franklin was hit, we had to get people out of the water who were dead, who were mutilated. That was the worst of it."David Jordan was on the gun crew. One time they shot down a Japanese Kamikaze. They were elated. "Only our commanding officer got the Silver Star,'' he said, "but everybody shared equal in the danger.''After the war, he mustered out. Jordan's life as a civilian, though, was short-lived. He went to school and bummed around before reenlisting in 1949, switching from the Navy to the Army. As a sergeant E-6, spent most of his tour in Vietnam with an artillery battery operating near Cu Chi. Comparing this tour with his time in the Navy, he said, "the food was a little better
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