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 Jordan Illinois-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 not good, just better and the mail came a little
quicker. But this time, we didn't win anything."
When he left the Army, Jordan found that there was little demand for an
ex-military man. He worked ten years on a riverboat, plying the
Mississippi. He put three children through college. He is a charter
member of VVA Chapter 859 in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, not far from his
home in Doniphan.
David Jordan won't be journeying to Washington this month. He may
follow the ceremonies, he said, but he will be participating in his own
way with barbeque and a beer or two.
Carmelo LaSpada - Carmelo LaSpada, a son of Newark, New Jersey,
enlisted in the Marine Corps on the first day of July 1942. He spent
the next 30 years and nine months in uniform.
After boot camp, LaSpada was sent to the Marine base at Cherry Point.
Although he was supposed to go to Florida for advanced training with an
aviation unit, his superiors found out that he had been a baker in
civilian life and asked if he would help set up a bakery on the base.
They promised he would be sent for aviation training later on. That
"later on" turned out to be never. Because "the needs of the Corps come
first," LaSpada said he was told, his training was cancelled and he
"got stuck" in Cherry Point through 1943. Eventually, though, he
received orders to deploy overseas. He fought at Bougainville. He saw a
lot of death. "We tossed the bodies of dead Japanese into trenches we
had dug, sprinkled them with lime, and covered them with dirt."
Sometimes, though, the bodies would be burned in a pyre.
"Once you get past the shock of seeing your first dead enemy, it doesn't bother you" any more, he said.
Carmelo LaSpada learned to take one day at a time, because, he said,
"every day was just a matter of survival." A lesson that he learned,
one that he would preach to his men a quarter of a century later during
two tours in Vietnam, was that "you can't worry about your girlfriend
or what she's doing back in the States. Worry about what you're doing.
And worry about your buddies."
LaSpada was well past his 40th birthday when he first was sent to
Southeast Asia; he was almost 50 the second time around. What disturbed
him about this new war was the stark realization that he never knew who
was a friendly and who was an enemy.
"We had this 12-year-old who did some cleaning up for us," he said from
his room at the Durham, North Carolina, VAMC extended care facility.
"One night we came under attack. The next morning, we found him, all
tangled in the concertina, with a dozen hand grenades on him."
LaSpada was also struck by the fact that in this war, although there
was a rear, there were no front lines. "We fought over that bloomin'
Khe Sanh five times, and then we abandoned it," he said. "But me being
a professional Marine, it was not for me to question."
In his 1968-69 tour, LaSpada's unit built a big orphanage in Quang Tri
City. His daughter, Linda Routten, said that he "always talked to us
about birds and monkeys and the children, all the displaced children."
Her father also talked about all the body bags.
After he left the Corps, Carmelo LaSpada went to college, earned an
associate degree in business administration, and worked as an
instructor in Carteret County Community College. He retired at 65.
Almost a quarter of a century later, despite the infirmities of age, he
maintains his Marine trim. "I can still wear the uniform I retired in,"
he said. Now 83, he is a member of VVA Chapter 749 in Morehead City,
North Carolina.
Of the new memorial he said: "It's about time. But to try to
memorialize something that happened 60 years ago" is not very timely.
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