The steamy jungle heat topped 100 degrees, but Patrick Leach was driving a Rome plow — a huge foliage-cutting, bulldozer-like machine — and hot air blowing back from the diesel engine amped up the temperature another 30 degrees.
The roar of the plow filled his ears, as did the helicopter blades chopping the air above. The windows of the plow had only wire coverings, and bugs flew through — malarial mosquitoes, bugs shaped like leaves, 2-inch-long bees whose stings left scars, and when he drove through Vietnam’s 3-foot-tall anthills, which wasn’t uncommon since his mission was often to clear 200 acres of jungle a day, red ants swarmed under his clothes, biting everywhere.
It was too hot to wear a shirt. Mr. Leach just had on his flak vest. Like the other men, his last shower had come days earlier, and everyone stank. An M-16 rifle rested on the seat near his right elbow. He could scarcely see 2 feet ahead as he plowed 15 miles an hour through dense vegetation, green bamboo trees bending under the plow, then springing back and thwacking into his vehicle.
Lurking in that jungle were scorpions, tarantulas, poisonous snakes, orangutans, even elephants, and of course, Charlie — South Vietnamese guerrilla fighters who could blend in with villagers, attack Americans, then melt back into the crowd. The word “Charlie” came from the NATO phonetic alphabet name for the letter C and referred to the VC, short for Viet Cong, or communist Vietnamese.
“You never knew where he was. Everybody was your enemy,” Mr. Leach told the Post-Gazette more than five decades later. “You didn’t trust nobody over there. He’d be smiling at me today and be shooting at me at night.”
An estimated 752 Pittsburghers died in the Vietnam War, which ended 50 years ago, according to Leslie Przybylek, senior curator at the Heinz History Center. Mr. Leach, now 75, of Penn Hills, is one of about 231,500 Vietnam War veterans who lived in Pennsylvania in 2022, according to the nonprofit USAFacts.
Theirs was a war unlike any other in U.S. history to that point.
It was bloody — 58,200 American casualties, 3,147 of whom came from Pennsylvania, according to the U.S. Defense Casualty Analysis System.
Vietnamese casualties, including civilians, topped 3 million, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, with tens of thousands more in neighboring Cambodia and Laos.
The Post-Gazette reached out to a local nonprofit, the Veterans Breakfast Club, to connect with Vietnam War veterans and conducted in-depth interviews with a dozen vets over a three-month period. From a Hill District foster child who ended up as a Marine “tunnel rat” to a third-generation steelworker who got shot in the spine, these men and women have never forgotten Vietnam, but many of them have rarely discussed it. They opened a window into their experiences as the end of the war reached its 50th anniversary.
The powerful U.S. herbicide Agent Orange, used to kill off jungle vegetation, caused deaths as well. The Cleveland Clinic estimated at least 300,000 U.S. veterans and at least 400,000 Vietnamese people died from exposure between 1962 and 1971. An estimated 2.6 million Americans serving in Vietnam were exposed to the herbicide between January 1965 and April 1970, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Veteran Donald “Donn” Nemchick, 74, of Munhall, has hypertension and heart issues from exposure to Agent Orange. William Silver, 75, of Chippewa, Beaver County, said he was exposed by drinking from contaminated wells and rivers.
The war sharply divided American opinion. Unlike after two world wars when the home front held exuberant parades for returning soldiers or the more muted greetings offered after the Korean War (1950-1953), returning Vietnam vets were mainly greeted stateside with silence and stares.
That wasn’t always true in parts of Western Pennsylvania.
“If I had my uniform on in downtown McKeesport, I didn’t pay for a beer for a week,” Mr. Nemchick said.
Vietnam was a French colony up until World War II. Japan took over during the war, but afterward, France wanted to regain control of its lucrative exports of rubber, tea, coffee and rice.
Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh appealed to the United States to support his country’s independence, but his letters went unanswered: President Harry S. Truman and his administration “thought France’s colonial rule could better guarantee the region’s stability,” according to Philip Caputo’s “10,000 Days of Thunder: A History of the Vietnam War.”
Ho and his communist North Vietnamese guerilla forces, with backing from communist Russia and China, launched a war against the French and defeated them in 1954.
By that time, the United States was locked in a tense “cold war” with authoritarian communist nations Russia — then the Soviet Union or the USSR — and China, both of whom professed a goal of bringing all countries under communist control. That seemed like a viable threat during and shortly after World War II, when the Soviets took control of Eastern Europe, including the eastern part of Germany and half of Germany’s capital, Berlin.
In 1950, communist-backed forces in North Korea invaded the U.S.-backed South Korea, launching a war to take over the rest of the peninsula. That action ended in a tense standoff that continues today.
Engaging in full-scale war could have devolved into the use of nuclear weapons, potentially capable of killing billions of people, so conflict between the U.S., the USSR and China took the form of proxy wars and brinksmanship.
Against this backdrop, the United States propped up an unpopular and corrupt non-communist government in South Vietnam against Ho’s communist government in North Vietnam.
In 1962, U.S. concern about the spread of communism surged when agents discovered the USSR was secretly building missile launch sites in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida. The U.S. and USSR nearly came to full-out war, and a jittery American government and public eyed other communist actions abroad.
Their fears seemed fulfilled in 1964 in the “Gulf of Tonkin incident,” when a North Vietnamese torpedo boat attacked a U.S. ship on a spy mission off the coast of Vietnam. Faulty intelligence led to a claim that North Vietnam made a second attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Lyndon B. Johnson used these reports to justify the use of force in Vietnam, and Congress quickly authorized his request. The president sent in troops in 1965.
Americans were not used to the conditions they encountered in Vietnam, where the monsoon season meant heavy rain for months and the dry season brought humidity and sweltering heat. Safe drinking water, sanitary sewer systems and electricity didn’t exist in the countryside. Villagers fertilized fields and rice paddies with human excrement.
“When we got [to Vietnam] and the door opened up, the hot air just hit you in the face and the odor was tremendous,” said Richard “Dickie” Silk, 81, of North Oakland, who served with seven-man Army advisory teams in the Vietnamese countryside in 1966 and 1967.
Ronald Colonna, 78, of Elizabeth Township, remembered gagging when he arrived.
During monsoon season, “The mud would be up to your knees. Soaking wet all the time,” said Penn Hills’ Mr. Leach.
Mr. Nemchick, of Munhall, served aboard a Navy carrier ship in the Tonkin Gulf that had its own discomforts. Jet fuel permeated the air and got into the water supply. When men showered on the ship, the water was oily and the soap wouldn’t lather. Their coffee had an oily film on top.
Lawrence “Larry” Woods, 77, of Scott, patrolled U.S. base perimeters in 1967 and 1968 as part of the Air Force security police. The men patrolled outdoors without shelter in the heaviest rain and worst heat.
He remembered a new group of soldiers arriving during monsoon season. One man raised his hand to ask the sergeant, “Are we going to have to go out in this?”
The sergeant laughed. “Charlie’s not gonna take the night off,” he replied.
Dealing with insects and animals posed risks, too. Once, Mr. Woods was eating his C-ration dinner while guarding a rescue helicopter when an alarm sounded. He put down his vanilla sandwich cookie and ran to his position with his M-16. When the alarm ended, he returned to his seat, picked up his cookie and bit it.
“What I didn’t realize was the red ants had gotten on the cookie,” he said.
The insects began biting the inside of his mouth and throat, and his face swelled up. He had to be rushed to the infirmary for an injection.
Richard “Rick” Weber, 78, of Franklin Park, an Army infantry platoon leader in 1970 and 1971, delayed being sent to the front by taking one training program after another. These included a stint in Officer Candidate School that earned him the rank of lieutenant.
He didn’t know that many soldiers held lieutenants in low regard for their lack of experience.
At last, the military sent him to his first assignment, in Cambodia. His helicopter hovered off the ground. “Get out,” the door gunner said. “We’re not stopping.” Mr. Weber jumped about 4 feet to the ground and the helicopter lifted away.
“There’s nobody. I’m standing out in the middle of nowhere. I heard ‘ding, ding,’ ” he said.
A calm voice from the surrounding jungle remarked, “They’re shootin’ at you.” The dings were the sound of bullets whizzing by. He ducked and ran toward the voice, finding men behind the trees.
“Who are you?” one man said.
“I’m the new lieutenant.”
The men he was now supposed to command laughed at him.
Fighting a guerilla war meant pursuing Vietnamese men dressed in ordinary clothes through the jungle. James “Jim” Puhala, 82, of North Strabane, piloted an Army helicopter in such raids. “We would go out, shoot up the place, refuel, go back,” he said.
Once, after flying all night looking for enemy soldiers, Mr. Puhala and three other men were just over the treetops. Their helicopter had refueled and was heavy.
“We found them and they found us,” he said. “They start shooting at us.”
Bullets were coming through the floor. “They shot out the hydraulic lines. I first noticed it when I couldn’t move the controls.”
He and the copilot together grabbed the stick control trying frantically to move it, but could not.
“As we were coming down, I thought I was dead: ‘This is it. I’m dead.’ ”
The helicopter turned upside down and crashed.
“I was real surprised to find myself strapped into my seat,” he said.
The men quickly took stock. Mr. Puhala and another man were all right, but the copilot had been hit in the face by a gun sight and was “all bloody.” A third man couldn’t walk. They didn’t know it then, but his back was broken.
The engine was still running and the helicopter had a full load of ammunition and rockets.
As quickly as they could, they dragged out the man with the broken vertebrae and went as far as they could. Shortly afterward, the helicopter caught fire and exploded.
Mr. Puhala and his men stood in the forest with no radio and no weapons. Mr. Puhala had left his pistol hanging over the back of his seat and one man had brought a machine gun, but the barrel was bent. In about an hour, another helicopter picked them up. Other helicopters flew around looking for the Viet Cong, but couldn’t find them.
Having barely escaped death, he was exuberant. “Is that all you got?” he felt like yelling.
And yet, “When I climbed off the helicopter at the field hospital, my legs almost gave way.”
After three or four days, he was sent back out into the field.
The North Vietnamese and their southern Viet Cong allies ran supply lines through the neighboring neutral countries of Laos and Cambodia. The United States had an unofficial policy of bombing communist forces in these countries. The Nixon administration ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia in 1970.
U.S. soldiers fought there in primitive conditions. Each man carried a 2½-gallon bag of water and had iodine tablets to treat any water from streams. Given their nonstop movement and fighting, they ran out of water and had no time to treat the water they found.
“If you’re out in the field, you’re going to get sick,” said Mr. Weber, who fought in Cambodia.
The heat reached between 110 and 120 degrees. The men had no change of clothes and many didn’t wear underpants to prevent uncomfortable rubbing.
“There’s no, ‘Time out! I gotta go to the latrine,’ ” Mr. Weber said.
The men defecated while they marched and found a spot on the ground when they were allowed to sleep. “If it was raining, you sat back-to-back with another guy.”
He saw action within two or three days of arriving in Cambodia.
His platoon and others were walking along a road when the platoon ahead unexpectedly ran into a fortified bunker. Within seconds, bullets and mortars began raining down. The radio man in the platoon ahead got hit and was dead or dying while his radio was badly damaged, so no one in that platoon could call in the coordinates of where to hit the enemy.
Mr. Weber had been trained for this task. He got to work.
“Two things I could do well: I could read a map and I learned how to call in artillery,” he said. “... People recognized I wasn’t the best, but I knew what I was doing.”
Rose Gantner, 81, of Aleppo, volunteered with the Red Cross during the war as a “Donut Dolly,” a woman who served refreshments and tried to boost troop morale. A South Sider whose parents ran a confectionery shop and worked two jobs apiece, Ms. Gantner would confront shoplifters back home: “Hey! Put those back! My mother works too hard for that!”
In Vietnam, she and her fellow volunteers played games of homemade “Jeopardy!” with the men and improvised other entertainment.
Then 22, she and the other Donut Dollies lodged in tents on U.S. military bases and came under fire with everyone else. One letter home dated 3:30 a.m. Sept. 11, 1966, said: “Am becoming an expert at running to the bunkers and hiding in the dirt. The Viet Cong are everywhere.”
After the Associated Press published a photo of her looking scared during an attack, she knew she had to do something to raise morale. So she donned fatigues, got in a creek, climbed on a soldier’s back and had “chicken fights” with other soldier-volunteer pairs.
She served two one-year tours, from 1966 to 1967 and from 1969 to 1970. Three of the Dollies died during the war, but from illness, an accident and in one case, murder, rather than enemy attacks.
“We just gave our best every day,” she said. The volunteers wanted “just to see [the soldiers] smile and laugh and temporarily forget about the war.”
Mr. Colonna’s commercial jet to Vietnam in 1967 couldn’t land at first because the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, was under fire. The military lodged him and three other men on cots in a “hooch” — slang for a hut. That night, mortars started coming through the shelter’s tin roof.
Mr. Colonna, who grew up mostly in Clairton, then 20, slid onto the floor and pulled his mattress over himself.
A second man in the hooch “had his arm blown off the first night,” he said. “He’s screaming, ‘Colonna! Help me!”
Yet another was crying over his model airplane. It had been hanging from the ceiling and was destroyed.
The fourth man ran out the back door and was hit on the head by a mortar shell, knocking him unconscious. Luckily, it didn’t detonate.
Afterward, Mr. Colonna found pieces of metal his mattress.
“I was scared the whole time I was there, believe me,” he said.
When he eventually was wounded badly, it didn’t come from the enemy.
“We just got back from a firefight. They tell you to clean your weapons. I got my M-60 machine gun. I got the barrel out and I’m cleaning, and my buddy, he sits down beside me.” His friend had an M-14.
His friend hadn’t realized there was a bullet in the chamber. The gun was cocked and he had to release the trigger to take the gun apart.
“I didn’t know what hit me,” Mr. Colonna said. “I just found myself on the ground and a buzzing in my ears.” Blood vessels had burst, causing the buzzing noise.
The bullet damaged Mr. Colonna’s spinal cord and hip.
“They cut my clothes off me,” he said. “They had a real good neurosurgeon and he put me back together, more or less.”
Mr. Colonna was paralyzed from the chest down.
“It felt like there was a tree across my body. I kept trying to get up. I kept coming to, but I couldn’t make out what’s being said.”
The next day, his hearing started returning.
The doctors didn’t think he’d walk again, but after a long, difficult recovery, he did. He wasn’t able to work for more than a year after leaving the war.
“I wanted to work, but I got tremors. I couldn’t do anything anymore,” he said. “I couldn’t even work my lathe. … So then I got into the hobbies. I built about 75 engines.”
Today, he wears a leg brace and sometimes uses a cane. “I tire easily. It gets harder,” he said.
Clearing jungle in his Rome plow, Mr. Leach faced potential attack at any moment, and not just from people. Sometimes a tree would fall on the cab.
“A couple of guys got crushed, legs amputated,” he said.
Once, a bamboo tree shot through the cab’s front opening toward his throat. He was just able to slide back in his seat and kick the throttle to halt the engine; any farther forward and he’d have been killed.
Wounded four times, he came away without any lasting injuries.
The first time, he had been in Vietnam about a month. “A B40 [Soviet anti-tank] rocket hit one of the [Rome] plows on the roof. It killed the driver and shrapnel came back and hit me. … I have to admit, I was scared. … I just got it in the shoulder. … It stung and burned. It wasn’t severe.”
Within 10 minutes, “they patched me up and threw me back on the track.”
The second time, “All of a sudden, ‘Kaboom!’ … The person in front screamed. I came to help and realized I was hit.”
Helicopters beating the air above him and the Rome plow engine noise filled the air. Medics patched him up right on the track. “ ‘You’re fine,’ ” he paraphrased their saying. He clapped hands once. “ ‘See you later.’ ”
The third time, he pulled his plow over as a truck came down the road. Then the truck hit an anti-tank mine. When the smoke cleared, Mr. Leach’s commander said, “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he replied, “I know I’m all right because if I died, you wouldn’t be here.”
His commander laughed.
“You had to laugh. A sense of humor, over there, you had to have one.”
But shrapnel had hit him in the face, and his plow was destroyed. He was sent to base camp for medical attention. “I don’t know how I walked away from that,” he said.
He was out the next day. “I couldn’t wait to get back.”
Mr. Leach was in Cambodia when he was wounded a fourth time, probably in 1970.
He was on his plow, going down a hill when he heard “Boom, boom, boom, hitting in front of me,” he said. “I started backing up. I forgot about the 500-pound crater behind me and I fell in that.” Then shrapnel hit him in the back of the head.
He was sent by helicopter to base camp. “They patched me up, sewed me up and sent me to Long Binh,” he said. “I had a hard time with that. I didn’t want to stay at the base camp.”
He requested to stay another six months, but he was sent to West Germany instead.
Most of the veterans interviewed for this story spoke of the Viet Cong’s unnerving friendliness one moment, deadliness the next. “You never knew who the enemy was,” Mr. Leach said. “They caught one guy trying to put a satchel charge in our shower.”
Mr. Colonna said Vietnamese children would try to drop hand grenades into American vehicles’ fuel tanks while men were inside. Once, his unit saw a village woman on a cart. When they examined the cart, they found 20 to 30 rifles hidden in it.
The Viet Cong tunnel system allowed guerillas to appear and disappear seemingly in an instant. “They just pop up, shoot, go back in,” Mr. Colonna said. “They might come up behind you. You didn’t know where they’d come up.”
On night patrols, he had to set up Claymore mines pointing away from him. If an American shot the mine, it would explode outward toward the enemy. He had to put reflective tape on the back of the mines, and later check with a penlight whether the tape was still pointing back at him.
The Viet Cong would “come up at night and turn it around,” Mr. Colonna said.
Mr. Woods, the Air Force man from Scott, remembered Viet Cong infiltrating his camp. They blew up two planes and damaged five others before an early-morning firefight that injured four servicemen, one seriously, and killed 15 VC.
“I was on duty,” Mr. Woods said. “We heard the explosion on our radios. … Most of us were put on radio silence” watching to make sure no one else got in and no Viet Cong escaped. “We could see the tracer fire.” Every fifth bullet was a tracer. “It glows red. It looks like just a string of red.”
Mr. Woods later saw the bodies of some of the VC. They were short and thin, wearing loincloths, “maybe a shirt.” They had one pistol, a shoulder-mounted grenade launcher and some plastic explosives. Some had “Ho Chi Minh sandals” made from discarded American rubber tires.
Johnny McCoy, 79, of Garfield, a Marine infantryman, played a perilous military role — going into enemy tunnels. Such men were known as “tunnel rats.”
“They identified the most svelte individual in the platoon and offered us that ‘opportunity,’ ” he said. “In the service, yours is not to wonder why, yours is but to do or die.”
Once, men found a tunnel hole in a rice paddy dike.
“They gave me a flashlight and a .45 [pistol] and I had to go in the hole,” he said. “I’m crawling on my belly” — the flashlight in his left hand, gun in his right. Then the tunnel opened up a little, and he could crawl on his hands and knees.
Then “it opened up into this great big cavern. It was like a hospital room underground. Then I realized what we’re up against. I was impressed. I was impressed.”
The men felt torn. They disliked knowing U.S. troops were interrogating villagers suspected of collaborating with the North Vietnamese. They also knew villagers faced pressure both from U.S. forces and the Viet Cong.
“If [the villagers] didn’t cooperate [with the VC], [the VC] could do really bad things to them. Really bad. [It was] us for the day, and [the VC] for the night,” Mr. Silk said.
William Silver, 75, who grew up in Aliquippa, had an experience so wrenching that he turned to God. A Marine embedded in a rural village, he had just come back from a dawn-to-afternoon patrol in the jungle carrying 85 pounds of gear in smothering heat and was lying down in a three-sided grass hooch.
He noted a boy, maybe 12 years old, walking an ox in circles. The boy would pause near a stack of canned military C-rations, look at the resting Marines, then walk in another circle.
Mr. Silver had his eyes almost shut, but was watching the boy, anger building. Quickly, the boy snatched some C-rations and tossed them under some stalks of rice. Just as fast, Mr. Silver leaped up yelling and grabbed the boy by the neck.
“I was gonna — I don’t know what I would have done,” he said. Maybe, he said, he would have shoved the boy into the two feet of dung in the oxen pen. But two of his fellow Marines seized him and held on.
“I knew: This is wrong,” he said. “This isn’t me.”
He told his men he had to leave for a little while and hitchhiked to a nearby village to go to a club and try to forget about the war. On the way, he stumbled across an evangelical Christian orphanage. The experience of seeing the orphanage and praying there led him to rededicate himself to God. He later earned a doctorate in theology and became a pastor.
“As I look back now, I understand the hunger and the poverty,” he said.
Villagers were eating rats and anything else they could find. “It was like going back to the Stone Age, it was so primitive.”
Black soldiers faced little discrimination under fire, but back home, it was very different.
When he arrived from Vietnam in Miami, Darnell “Jeff” Pope, 85, of Plum said, “I had to get on the back of the train. In a restaurant, I had to go to the back. It was horrible. I was very, very angry. We were fighting next to [white people] and they were treating us” that way.
Mr. McCoy left California for Vietnam, and as the boat departed, he “could see smoke on the horizon” from the 1965 Black riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.
“I left the United States of America with that vision in my mind,” he said.
As people back home began to learn more about the war, public opinion divided sharply. Many young men — eligible to be drafted to serve in the armed forces — turned against the war. Many young people opposed it.
Some anti-war protesters took out their anger on the returning veterans.
When Mr. Colonna, the draftee from Clairton, landed in Vietnam on a commercial airline, one of the flight attendants told him, “We’re going home [to the United States]. I hope you make it, but really, I don’t care.”
Things got worse when soldiers returned to U.S. airports.
Mr. Colonna heard people screaming, “Baby killers! Baby killers!” “I don’t know what they expected. I didn’t want to go” to Vietnam, he said.
“I was spit upon by a young lady,” said Mr. Pope, the Plum resident who served in the Navy. “I saw a flash of anger [in himself] so I backed off. She backed up. I remember that. I’m glad. I was so angry.”
Mr. Woods remembered being on leave, waiting in an airport wearing his uniform and carrying a duffel bag. “I got a lot of stares. Nobody said anything. Everybody stayed away. They didn’t know what to say. People did not look at us like human beings.
“I had a relative who got drunk, was a World War II vet, and he said, ‘You couldn’t win your war. We won our war.’ ”
His father, a veteran, took him to either the local post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars or American Legion. Nobody said anything to him. He and his father drank their beers and left. His father was very disappointed.
“The organization was dead to me then. It’s dead to me now,” Mr. Woods said.
Many veterans interviewed for this story said they didn’t discuss their time in the war after they got home.
“I do not talk about Vietnam,” said Mr. Pope, who served three tours of duty in the Navy. “I lost too many friends over there. … I, to this day, have some of the worst nightmares you have [ever known] in your life.”
His granddaughter is “the one thing in this world that I live for.”
“We don’t hardly talk about any of this stuff. That’s a different part of your life, and you move on from that,” Mr. Silk, of North Oakland, said.
“There are three guys on the [Vietnam Veterans Memorial] wall in D.C. that transitioned [died] right in front of me,” said Mr. McCoy of Garfield, who served in the Marines. “These three individuals are etched” — he said the word slowly — “in my memory.”
“Everything kind of went to hell in ’68 and I kind of went into a shell,” said Mr. Puhala, of North Strabane, who served in the Army. “I didn’t wear my uniform. I never got any overt disrespect, but it was just, people didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Nobody asked and I didn’t offer,” Mr. Woods said.
He saw someone steal his reel-to-reel music tape recorder and player out of the bottom of the Greyhound bus that he had to take to get to a military assignment in Dover, Del., after he left Vietnam.
“Thank you for your service,” he said in a flat, sarcastic tone during a Post-Gazette interview.
Mr. Leach wanted to stay in the military after the war, in spite of being wounded four times. Stationed in West Germany after Vietnam, he struggled to adjust.
“It was too spic and span. All of a sudden, somebody says, ‘This is it. Sit still.’ I couldn’t do it. I had a hard time dealing with authority, put it that way. I had an attitude. Now I think how stupid I was.”
He returned to the U.S. and lived in Wilkinsburg with his parents — “driving my mom up a wall. My dad wanted to kill me.”
He was “bitter, angry, mad at the military, hated everybody. I was drinking and that didn’t help matters. That’s why I don’t drink anymore. I don’t even sip.”
The U.S. began pulling troops out of Vietnam in 1972, and withdrew the rest after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. The war had proven so unpopular that the federal government ended the draft that year. By 1975, only a few staff members and advisers remained.
That year, the North Vietnamese attacked and quickly took over the country. They captured Saigon on April 30, 1975, and the South Vietnamese government collapsed.
Although Vietnam is still under one-party communist rule, it and the U.S. have normalized relations, with embassies and trade since 1995.
Some of the Vietnam War veterans who agreed to speak to the Post-Gazette said they wouldn’t change their past decisions to serve.
“I would probably do it again,” Mr. Woods said. “Once you put your hand up and take the oath, you take it for life.”
Even Mr. Pope, who struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, said, “I would think long and hard, but if it was the same situation, I’d go again. I’m patriotic.”
Others felt differently.
“That 58,000 [number of casualties] is not just someone’s name. That’s someone’s son,” Mr. Weber said. “I would never go back. Never. It just brings back bad memories. It was a war that never should have happened. They lied.”
The deceptions from the U.S. government concerned obfuscation of the underlying causes of the war, the secret bombing of neutral Laos and Cambodia, and misleading claims about victory being close at hand.
“Our era was extremely patriotic and very much into democracy and I believed that with all my heart,” Ms. Gantner said. “The first tour, we were all gung-ho, patriotic. My second tour … I learned the United States doesn’t always tell the truth either.”
Laura Malt Schneiderman, lschneiderman@post-gazette.com
Correction, posted July 7, 2025: The number of Vietnam War veterans in Pennsylvania was misstated in an earlier version of this story. Also, a photo caption has been corrected to note that James Puhala was the grandson of Slovak immigrants.
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