Talk about the Vietnam vets you've met

One of my bosses had served in Vietnam. He was assigned to the Signal Corps. He said he didn't mind being behind the lines but being sent out into the field could be scary. It only took one sniper to ruin your whole day.

I've known three here in Australia.

- A helicopter pilot who flew Hueys. He took my father and I up for a scenic flight in the late 1980s and we had a problem and forced-landed into a city park among picnickers. We were on the news and everything! The news hyped up the fact his combat experience in Vietnam helped save our lives that day. I kept in touch with him in later years. He went on to fly heavy lift jobs in the Boeing Vertol 234 which is the civilian version of the Chinook military tandem rotor helicopter.

- A good family friend who was drafted to be like a G.I., he told me stories about flying around in the Huey in Vietnam.

- An uncle. He had always had problems dealing with his experience, and would get drunk at family gatherings and start saying all this stuff about 'Charlie' and what they did to his people and what his unit did to them, and every toast to someone would turn into an unrelated story about something which happened to him in Vietnam. He later had a car accident where a horse went through the windscreen and hit his head, resulting in needing a metal plate, which seemed to affect him quite badly.

I knew a coworker who had been in Vietnam. He worked in the signal corps which he found safe enough when on base. Regretfully, he had to go into the field which was not that safe. His greatest fear was that he may have been exposed to agent orange.