Changed men ... more than 50 years later

POST FALLS — When Terry Jaeger speaks of his experiences during and after the Vietnam War, his words are few and they come slowly.

“It was terrible. It was horrible,” the 70-year-old says. “It made me, when I came home, say I would never bring a child up in this world. It was terrible, the way people kill each other. I didn’t want to bring a kid up in this world.”

Jaeger served three years in the U.S. Army, one of those in Vietnam, from 1969 to 1970.

“I got there a week after I turned 19. I came home four days before I turned 20,” the Post Falls man says.

He recalls flying into McChord Field, a U.S. Air Force base near Tacoma, Wash., and taking a bus to Seattle.

Shortly after he got off the bus wearing his uniform, a drunken woman spit on him and called him a baby killer.

Jaeger pauses, then says quietly, “I never killed any babies.”

He adds, again, “It was terrible.”

Jaeger and four other Vietnam War veterans recently met with The Press at the Post Falls VFW Hall to talk about the war, coming home, and its impact on them.

Today, March 29, is National Vietnam War Veterans Day. It is observed each year “to thank and honor Vietnam veterans and their families for their service and sacrifice.”

Emotions range for the men - Jaeger, Ken Thomas, Gary Dagastine, Steve Coombs and Tom Gasper - as they recount the war’s toll. During 35 minutes of conversation, there are tears and laughter. They speak with a matter-of-fact tone at times, and at others, they struggle to get the words out. They express feeling fortunate to be alive.

“It brings back a lot of memories. Some good, some bad, mostly bad,” says Ken Thomas of Post Falls, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps. He enlisted in January 1963 and retired in June 1985. He went to Vietnam for the first time in 1965, landing on March 8.

“We were the first unit, officially,” the 79-year-old says.

They stayed six months before rotating out and then came back again in January 1968. They landed in Da Nang the night the Tet Offensive started, when North Vietnamese forces launched an attack against South Vietnam.

Thomas said he was issued either an M-16 or an AR-15 and stayed 13 months before rotating back out in February 1969, returning in 1970 with the first recon battalion, for six months.

“I’m fortunate, I guess, to be here. A lot of our friends and comrades didn’t make it,” he says.

Steve Coombs, 74, also of Post Falls, joined the Navy in 1967 and was sent to corpsman school. He served at a hospital for a year or two before being sent to Vietnam with a small unit of eight Marines. They were assigned to protect villages.

“We had to keep the (Viet Cong) from coming into the village, which didn’t really work. We had three villages which were under our control and we’d go to one village and the VC would know where we were at and go to another village.

"It was hard to tell who was the enemy," he says.

He spent 13 months there and was wounded.

“Most of the time, guys were allowed to go on R&R after six months. I didn’t go. I just stayed my whole year, laying in the rice paddies,” he says.

Asked what the war means for him, Coombs says, “It means to me that 58,000 people were killed for nothing,” he says in reference to the number of Americans reported to have been killed in the war.

“When you think about it, it was a good thing we went to help somebody out,” Coombs continues. "We won all the battles, but we lost the war.”

“We lost the police action,” added Dagastine.

Dagastine, 74, of Post Falls, joined the Navy at age 17 in 1964.

“I wanted to do something tough,” he said. “I didn’t realize once you get in the Navy you have to be in the fleet two years before you go to dive school.”

Dagastine initially served on destroyers in Vietnam. He speaks of spending 37 days on the gun line and firing thousands of rounds, firing around the clock.

It was tight quarters, with about three square feet per man.

“If you don’t realize how small that is, put three guys on a sheet of plywood - that’s too much space,” he says.

He said what saved them was that the Viet Cong did not have electronics on their guns, “because they have eight-inch guns and we have three and five inches."

The destroyer he was on was often just a few hundred yards off shore during firefights with enemy forces on land.

“We got attacked over there four times, big time,” he says. “The last one was the worst one. They had us bracketed for hours.”

Dagastine rotated in and out of Vietnam several times over a four-year period.

“I had no feelings toward the VC one way or another. It was their government fighting our government. We’re doing our job, they’re doing their job.”

That changed the day they were anchored in the Da Nang harbor and the enemy fired on a U.S. hospital ship.

“Now it was personal. It wasn’t government to government. There was no reason to shoot up a big white ship with red crosses on the side," he says, pausing and adding, “I’m over that now, not then."

He returned home in California to hostility. His car was keyed. He was spit on. Rocks were thrown at him. He was egged. And he, too, was called a baby killer.

Because of how he and his fellow soldiers were treated, Dagastine kept his feelings inside, only opening up about being in the service over the past few years.

Coombs said coming home was like returning to another world.

“It was like the world had just went and did their own thing while you were gone, so you kind of had to fit back into society,” he says. “They didn’t really care about what you did.”

Asked to share his experiences, Tom Gasper, 72, of Coeur d’Alene, says simply, “Listening to these guys, the same thing,” before stopping.

He cries. Quietly at first, then the tears flow.

“As you can tell, I’m not good at speaking,” Gasper says before emotions again take over.

“Go ahead and let it out Tom, don’t hold it in. I think everyone of us has done it,” Dagastine says as he places his hand on Gasper’s shoulder.

Gasper looks up

“I’m good until I try to talk,” he says.

He served 20 months in the Army. His brother was a pilot in the war.

“You couldn’t have two brothers in a military zone, so I got to go home a couple months early," Gasper says.

Coming home, he says, “wasn’t a fun experience.”

The war resurfaces at times for Dagastine. Fireworks didn’t used to brother him, but they do now. The white flares remind him of the war.

“Every time we lit up something, people were dying,” he says.

After fireworks last year, he said, he had to go home and pull the covers over his head.

“I’ve never been hit that hard with it before,” he says.

“How the hell all of us aren’t deaf, I don’t know, especially on a destroyer," he adds. "My God, it’s like putting your head in a 55-gallon drum and beating on it.”

Jaeger speaks of being in firefights that only lasted a couple of minutes, “but seemed like a couple of days.”

All the men laugh as they talk about the giant spiders, snakes, leaches, centipedes, rats, and mosquitoes they faced in Vietnam.

“Beetles as big as your fist,” Jaeger says, chuckling.

As the conversation winds down, the men look around the table at each other. They share the bond of the Vietnam War. While it did not kill them, it haunts them.

“I can probably attest for everybody here, we weren’t the same men coming home as when we went,” Coombs says.