It took 50 years, but Vietnam veterans attending Victory Week celebrations finally received the "welcome home" they missed when they returned from Southeast Asia.
Saturday's celebrations included a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the "LZ Victor" firebase complete with vintage Army vehicles and a parade whose spectators included thousands of recruits too young to remember the war.
Retired Sgt. 1st Class Leudes "Leu" Arieta served two tours with the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam and had been unable to view the wall in Washington because it brought to many bad memories -- memories so traumatic that they sent him to the hospital.
"I was trembling like a leaf to get close to the wall," said Arieta, a twice-wounded veteran. "It was hard. I was still crying.
"I lost too many friends back then."
Visiting the wall brought Pvt. Chris Walker - in his second week of basic training with Fox Company, 1st Battalion, 13th Infantry Regiment - closer to his grandfather. It also introduced him to the first general he met in the Army.
"It was really cool," he said after Fort Jackson commander Maj. Gen. Bradley Becker helped him find his grandfather's name on the wall. Becker, the son of a Vietnam veteran, used a book listing all 58,000 names and their locations on the wall.
"I didn't know at all what (visiting the wall) was going to be like," Walker said. "It lets people know how much they sacrificed for us."
Retired Maj. Gen. Steve Siegfried, vice chairman of Honor Flight, S.C., and former Fort Jackson commanding general, called the wall gorgeous and applauded Fort Jackson for bringing it to Columbia. Honor Flight, S.C., co-sponsored the appearance of the Moving Wall.
"What makes it gorgeous is the names on it," Siegfried said of the wall. Some might find the wall a somber experience, but Siegfried said it was anything but.
"Going to a graveyard is depressing," he said, "but this place is uplifting."
Frank White, president of the South Carolina Chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America, called the wall a reminder of the scale of the war that stirred memories of those "brothers and sisters" who did not return.
Community members also found the welcome home celebration and wall touching.
Dianne Magee, a volunteer from Clearwater, Florida, was visiting her daughter in Columbia when she heard the Moving Wall was coming to Fort Jackson. As she has before, she volunteered to read aloud the names of the fallen.
"I have read the names in Washington a couple times because one of my friends is on it," Magee said as she helped Initial Entry Soldiers find names on the wall.
If visits to the wall tended to be somber, Saturday's parade leaned more toward the raucous.
As veterans rode Vietnam-era military vehicles to Hilton Field, crowds lining the route joyously and loudly saluted them.
At Hilton Field, Becker personally welcomed them home.
The celebration also included flyovers by F-16s and an AH-1 Cobra helicopter, a parachute demonstration and the replica firebase.
At the firebase, volunteers answered questions from veterans, Soldiers and civilians about period vehicles, lodging and weapons. The mock firebase comprised a guard tower, an ambulance and weapons carriers, and a tent equipped with cots in rows.
Larry Robb, wearing the olive drab of the Vietnam era, helped visitors negotiate the firebase. But Robb, who retired as a master sergeant after 38 years in the Army, didn't crave authenticity enough to spend his nights with the other firebase volunteers.
"I had enough sleeping in a tent," he said wryly.
"It used to be I totally avoided all of this," he said, gesturing to the vehicles surrounding him. "Vietnam was a hundred years ago, and that's the way I liked to keep it.
"I never should have survived," he said, recalling being set down in country just in time for the Tet offensive, a coordinated series of fierce attacks by 70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong on South Vietnam.
But he lasted three years, coming home alive.
Robb paused a moment to listen as a company of basic-training soldiers strode by, calling a cadence that included the exhortation to "kill the enemy."
"The faces change," he said quietly, "but the song stays the same."
Information from staff writers Jennifer Stride and Christine Schweickert was included in this report.
Social Sharing