Vietnam vets coming to Cantigny to share memories, new book

Joe Boland never took his boots off at night in Vietnam.

The Army sergeant would just loosen the laces before he tried to sleep.

“I learned that lesson after tripping on some wire in my bare feet on one of my first mortar attacks,” Boland writes in “Dogface Charlie,” a new book illuminating the stories of a company of about 100 soldiers in the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division and published by the First Division Museum at Cantigny Park.

As part of the book's unveiling, the Wheaton museum will sponsor a discussion panel at 1 p.m. Friday, May 4, and a memorial service at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 5.

Most of the personal accounts in each chapter are written by veterans of “Charlie Company,” who explore their experiences in the Vietnam War with simple, disciplined prose and without sentimental clichés.

The soldiers earned their battalion's nickname, “Swamp Rats,” after slushing through Rung Sat swamps, considered a Viet Cong staging area. “Dogface” was the radio code for the battalion.

Boland, one of 32 contributing authors, chose to write about seven near-death “close-calls.” The LaGrange man had never had his memories of the war published.

In fact, the first person who asked Boland about his yearlong tour in Vietnam was his younger sister — and not until nearly two decades after he returned home in 1968.

Now 65, Boland says the culture of the time was “if you had been through it, you don't talk about it.”

There were war protests back then, he says. There were stories of people spitting on returning veterans.

And, Boland says, he didn't want to talk about a “gruesome time.”

He says he and his mates regularly battled red ants, leeches, snakes and malaria in a stifling jungle.

Boland says he saw bodies along highways.

“It was a time you end up building your humanity in the years after,” he says.

His wife, Jean, says Boland still is reluctant to share some of his experiences..

Some of that started to change in 1983 when he saw the names of comrades and high school buddies etched in the black stone of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“I think it is one of the most solemn places in our country,” Boland says. “I've never seen anything like the respect that's there.”

Three years later, he went to the long-overdue “Welcome Home” ticker-tape parade for Vietnam veterans in Chicago.

The first reunion

In 2008, Tom Mercer slowly traced the names of his friends on the “Moving Wall,” a traveling replica of the memorial.

“I just lost it,” says Mercer, 64, an Army sergeant in Vietnam. “It tore me up.”

Driving back to his home in Seymour, Tenn., Mercer devoted himself to recruiting fellow veterans from Charlie Company for a reunion. He flipped on his computer, studied a program to help track them down and made phone calls for hours.

He found 50 of the guys, including Boland. Less than a year after Mercer surveyed the names carved in the wall, the first reunion of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division was in 2009 in Gatlinburg, Tenn.

They exchanged photos from their time in the service. They told each other about their families and jobs.

Rekindling those friendships, Boland says, helped him rediscover his humanity.

“Seeing how people have turned out, that they have had good lives, have raised families … those are things that are important to me,” he says.

Boland became a director of operations at a retail company and earned a master's degree in rehabilitation counseling at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Now retired, he says he counseled veterans at a private practice.

“That is what I had hoped to do, and still do,” Boland says.

‘Our legacy'

After the first reunion, Mercer's wife, Joyce, told him he should write about his service, to create a kind of journal for their children.

But Mercer wasn't a fan of indulging himself with his own stories. He wanted to do something more. He wanted his buddies to contribute their stories, too, and combine them in a book.

So he brought what he had written to the second reunion in 2010 in Fayetteville, N.C., to convince them they should write, too.

“We had to do our own telling about our history,” says Mercer, who compiled the essays that form the new book. “It's going to be our legacy.”

Several of their accounts focus on April 10, 1968, or “Rocket Day.”

Platoons from Charlie Company were sent on patrol to find the launching sites where the Viet Cong had been firing 122 mm rockets — the kind that would leave “a sizable crater on impact,” Boland writes — into the base camp of Lai Khe.

When the soldiers reached the area known as the Rocket Belt, 12 miles northwest of Lai Khe, the Viet Cong started firing again.

“The grass surrounding the rockets was tinder dry and a sizable blaze erupted,” Boland writes.

He started throwing dirt on the knee-high flames. And Mercer? He and Thomas Cone plunged into the fire to grab the rockets before they exploded. They made multiple trips into the blaze.

Mercer says he was just young and fast. Boland says Mercer saved his life.

“I hate to use that word ‘save,'” Mercer says. “I just did what I had to do and everything worked out good.”

2012 reunion

“Dogface Charlie” will debut at Cantigny's First Division Museum during Charlie Company's fourth reunion from Thursday, May 3, to Sunday, May 6.

Boland and his wife, Jean, are heading the reunion committee and are expecting about 50 veterans to attend. He's designed logos on reunion bags, pins and other materials with the words “In Omnia Paratus” — Latin for “Prepared for All Things” on the 18th Infantry Regiment patch.

Veterans can donate photos, dog tags, or war artifacts to the First Division Museum during the reunion.

Boland says he's donated a lighter with the 1st Infantry Division logo. He flew home in brown khakis from Vietnam, turning in his fatigues and boots to the Army. A small box of photos are the only tangible reminders from his service.

Paul Herbert, the museum's executive director, edited the book as part of the Cantigny Military History Series with First Division staff and members of its research center.

“I wasn't too worried about accuracy,” Herbert said. “The overall story, their experience in the war, is very genuine and very detailed. That's what makes it valuable.”

At the reunion, many will still have their physical scars. Boland says he and several others from the company have Type 2 diabetes, recognized by the Department of Veterans Affairs on a list of presumptive diseases associated with exposure to Agent Orange or other herbicides. Agent Orange was part of a U.S. strategy designed to remove foliage in Vietnam.

Boland says he also takes pain medication and muscle relaxants for a host of back problems after having to jump from a helicopter that would not touch down because of felled trees and other debris in a cleared field. He hit the ground with the full weight of his body and his gear.

“Worst case is I can't stand up,” Boland says. “Best case is I can walk five miles. It goes day to day.”

But Boland is itching to show the published book to the veterans, a book filled with recollections by those who were there and the wives and families at home.

“I just want their stories to be heard,” he says.

If you go

What: Unveiling of “Dogface Charlie,” a new book in the Cantigny Military History Series

Details: “Dogface Charlie” discussion panel is at 1 p.m. Friday, May 4; memorial service is at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 5; panel featuring authors of books on Vietnam by Joe Galloway, James Shelton and Joan Kotcher is at 11 a.m. Saturday, May, 5

Where: Cantigny Park's First Division Museum, 1S151 Winfield Road, Wheaton

Info: (630) 260-8185 or http://firstdivisionmuseum.org/