The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Fifty years after Vietnam’s bloodiest battles, the ‘lucky ones’ recall their time there
Kathryn Barents got home from work that fall night in 1967 to find somber family members gathered in the living room, and her shaken father, Henry, waiting to speak with her.
She feared this was about her husband, Paul, a Marine Corps lieutenant in Vietnam. They had been married only a few months, and his class had just completed the Basic Officer Course in Quantico, Virginia, in August.
Ten from the class had already been killed, and she figured that Paul, 23, had now been added to the list.
Her father brought her into the kitchen, and they sat down. Paul had been grievously wounded in a friendly-fire incident. His legs had been shattered, and would later be amputated.
But she was lucky. He was alive.
This week, Paul Barents, now 72, and Kathryn Barents, 71, of Easton, Maryland, will join scores of Marine Corps veterans and their spouses outside Washington for a 50-year reunion of Paul’s graduating class from the Marines’ Basic School for officers.
There were 516 of them in class 5-67, most college graduates, like Paul, in their early 20s who trained as infantry platoon leaders and were sent almost directly to the war, which was reaching its height.
Dozens of Americans were being killed every day, and the toll was especially great for officers.
The men of 5-67 were the sons and grandsons of immigrants, and the sons of Marines who had fought in World War II.
There was a college wrestling star, and a baseball player with a shot at the major leagues.
Most of them were single. But a few were married, and some had children. One, 2nd Lt. Morrell Crary, was killed in action five days after his daughter was born back home in Salem, Ore.
Some lasted only a few days in Vietnam - two were killed Oct. 14, 1967, the day after they arrived, according to a classmate who knew them.
Others made it a few months before they were killed or wounded.
One man was spared death when a buddy persuaded him to skip a flight on a transport plane that was shot down, killing everyone on board.
Thirty-nine from the class perished, in battles around well-known places like Khe Sanh, and Con Thien, and at forgotten locales like Thon Tham Ke, “Bastards Bridge” and “Antenna Valley.”
Twelve would receive posthumous medals for courage - four got Navy Crosses, three Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars and one a Distinguished Flying Cross.
One classmate would be missing in action for 36 years, until his body was located in 2004. The remains of two others have never been found.
But many, like Barents, have moved beyond the lifelong physical scars from the war to enjoy successful and productive lives.
They are in their 70s now, with white hair and grandchildren. A few still have mementos of the war - faded telegrams sent to their families, a memorial card from a friend’s funeral, snapshots of themselves in Vietnam.
This year and next year, when most of the men served, mark the 50th anniversaries of some of the bloodiest months of the Vietnam War. The year 1967 saw the deaths of 11,400 Americans, and 1968 claimed 16,900, the worst yearly toll of the war, according to the National Archives.
The two years account for almost half the 58,000 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, which honors those killed by the war.
Since the war, the men of class 5-67 haven’t met often. This is only their fifth gettogether. They went separate ways after the conflict and reunited for the first time in 2008.
Now 50 years have passed. Many survivors from the class have died. Some are too sick to attend the reunion. And while their four days together will be a time of comradeship and remembrance, one of them said, “we might not do this again.” --Second Lt. Paul Barents was setting up a night ambush south of the Vietnamese town Phu Bai when he got a radio call from his captain to be alert for an attack from across a river behind him.
He passed the warning to his front-line Marines, and in a crouch began making his way through the underbrush to warn men he had posted in the rear.
It was Dec. 7, 1967. Barents had been in Vietnam about 10 weeks and had yet to see much action.
He and Kathryn, then 22, had been a married only a short time.
They were both from Massachusetts, she via northern New Jersey. They had met while they were college students, working in the kitchen of a dining hall at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
They had hit it off, and were married June 17 at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in South Orange, New Jersey. He wore his dress white uniform. She was in a white wedding gown.
He had joined the Marine Corps right out of college. He believed it was an outfit with purpose, and he went to Vietnam “thinking we were doing a noble thing,” he said. “I really did.” Doubt emerged mainly in hindsight, he said.
He had been hesitant about marriage because he knew he would be going to the war.
But Kathryn told him: “I’d rather be your wife for three months than not all.”
“Starting in 1965, ‘66, we became more aware of the losses over there,” she said. “So by the time the class of ‘67 went, we knew the fatalities were going to be pretty high.”
“I was prepared for that,” she said.
(Both of Paul’s roommates at the basic school and a fellow who lived across the hall were killed in action.)
The couple had lived in Woodbridge, Va., while he was at Quantico, and three months after their wedding they were saying goodbye at an airport in New York.
She drove their 1963 Pontiac back to her parents’ home in Andover, Mass., to await his return.
In Vietnam, he wrote Kathryn regularly and discussed, among other things, whether she should get her hair cut before they met in Hawaii when he had R&R.
“I wouldn’t mind if you cut your hair for Hawaii,” he wrote her nine days before he was wounded. “The only thing that has to be there is you.”
In another letter, he told her he had cut back on his smoking, and closed with, “Well, beautiful, I guess I better go.”
Now, as he crept back to his men in the darkness, a new Marine in the platoon mistook him for an enemy soldier and opened fire with an M-16 rifle. Barents had always trained his men to aim low at night, so as not to miss high, and the bullets ripped into his legs.
The slugs broke his right thigh bone, both bones in his lower left leg and lacerated critical arteries in both legs.
Barents collapsed, and hollered “Cease fire!” He asked his men to take off his boots, and someone gave him some shots of morphine.
Medevac was called. He was placed on a poncho and hoisted into the helicopter. Before it left, one of his men said, “You were a damn good skipper, sir, a damn good skipper.”
Barents was flown to Phu Bai, where he told a superior not to blame the man who shot him. “It was my fault,” he said. “I should have had some kind of better communications.”
On Dec. 18, his right leg was amputated above the knee, and on Dec. 29, his left leg was amputated below the knee. The left leg failed to heal and was later amputated above the knee.
Barents’s part of the war was over.
He regretted being unable to complete his tour and his service. Plus, he thought: “How the hell am I going to make a living?”
And he wondered how Kathryn would react. “I’m not the guy [she] married,” he said.
Back home, the commandant of the Marines had sent her a telegram reporting that Paul’s condition was “serious with his prognosis fair.”
“OK,” she said she thought. “We knew this going in . . . . Just bring him home. We’ll be fine.”
But her young husband of a few months now had amputated legs.
“It was a game-changer,” she said in a recent interview in their Maryland home. “It changed all our hopes and futures and plans and everything that we dreamed of.”
She wondered whether she would still be attracted to him. He was crippled. There would be no more dancing, no more walks on the beach, she said.
Some people said to her: Wouldn’t it be better if he had just been killed?