Vets share experiences during VA panel
PROVIDENCE — The format for the Veterans’ Day observance put together by Donna Russillo, head of volunteer services at the Providence VA Medical Center, and her staff was a simple one, let veterans say what Veterans’ Day means to them and allow their stories to tell what veterans face when they serve their country in a war.
The panelists she selected, Woonsocket’s Michael Harris, a former U.S. Marine surviving the terrorist bombing the Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, on Oct. 23, 1983; U.S. Army Vietnam veteran Carl Hytinen of North Providence; World War II Navy veteran John O’Hara Jr., of North Providence; and Iraqi Freedom veteran and former U.S. Marine Corps corpsman Joshua Chiarini of Coventry all offered looks into why veterans should be remembered on Veterans’ Day.
Carl Hytinen, who grew up in East Providence, told how he followed a family tradition in joining the Army in 1970 but after training was stunned to learn what his fellow countrymen thought of him before he headed off to fight in Vietnam.
“Wearing a uniform in an airport situation was shattering, I was called names, I was pointed at, and people wouldn’t give me the time of day,” Hytinen told the gathering. “So that was my first experience in the military with the public,” he said.
Hytinen ended up initially serving in Quang Tri Province with an infantry unit and then also the 57th transportation battalion in Da Nang defending convoys.
“I’m not going to talk a lot about what happened in Vietnam because I, for one, don’t want to get upset by it,” Hytinen said. “But just to give you my experiences there, I landed in Quang Tri Air Base when a helicopter dropped me off in the middle of field with no one around,” he said of finding himself, an 18-yearold Rhode Islander, all alone in a strange place. “A half hour later, a jeep showed up and took me to my unit,” he said.
Life in Vietnam was very different from back home. The people where he served lived in grass shacks, he said, and even without running water or electricity, “they were content and they were pretty happy.” It was he and his fellow soldiers who were the foreigners in their country, he said.
He faced another round of disrespect when he finished his tour of duty and headed home again. The troops back then did not get a readjustment period to help resume their civilian lives and even the care at the VAwas not as helpful as it could have been then, he said.
“Vietnam was traumatic, but to come home and hear what people had to say about you was tough,” Hytinen said.
But even with the challenges he faced, Hytinen said he has no regrets about his service.
“In spite of all I went through both physically and mentally, I would do it all over again. I grew up with a sense of duty and honor and I’m glad I did what I did and I certainly would do it again,” he said.
John O’Hara, now almost 97, told of his time serving as an amphibian diesel engineer aboard Attack Transport Craft landing troops in North Africa and later serving on other ships including the USS Alabama battleship in the Pacific.
During the North Africa landings, O’Hara’s transport ship was struck by two torpedoes and he was trapped in a flooding compartment for a time before finding his way out and swimming free of the sinking vessel. He also survived strafing by attacking planes and a near miss kamikaze attack on his battleship.
“I belong to the VFW, DAV and American Legion, and I belong to these groups because I found a closeness with veterans, a closeness, I never found in civilian life,” O’Hara told the gathering. “They care about each other, they care about the country,” he said.
O’Hara tells his story today to high school students in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, he noted. “And when I talk to high school kids, I say to them there is nothing wonderful about war. There is nothing glamorous about it. I say war is hell, but, we have to go through it,” he said.
“And I tell them another thing, the difference between a veteran that has seen war and the regular public. I say a lot of regular members of the public worry about `my privacy, me, me, me,” he said. “But I say, not the veteran, the veteran always puts his country first,” O’Hara said.
Joshua Chiarini, told his listeners it was tough to follow O’Hara’s vivid descriptions of his service but added he was pleased to be appearing with all of the veterans on the panel and those in the audience.
“It is truly an honor to be among your ranks as a veteran,” he said.
Chiarini served as a Marine corpsman, a unit’s doc, in the Al Anbar Province of Iraq in 2004, 2005, and 2006, and saw many things during that time.
The toughest day for him came during a patrol in 2005 when a vehicle in his column was damaged by an improvised explosive device, IED, set by the insurgents, many former members of Saddam Hussein’s elite Special Forces.
Usually a device would go off and that would be it, he noted. But on this day, the insurgents had a set a trap for the column that included the detonation of a second blast after the victims had started to exit their Humvee and then an attack with small arms fire.
Chiarini made his way to help the wounded and found that their translator had lost his arm in the blast, a Marine to have been badly burned, another to have lost a chunk of his leg and still another peppered head to toe with shrapnel.
Around them the dirt was being kicked up by the small arms fire and bullets loudly whizzing by their heads, in a way much different than people see in the movies, he noted.
With 30 or more insurgents closing in on them, it did not look good for the 10-member unit’s survival given the number of wounded, he explained.
“But due to the tenacity of the Marine Corps, and Marines being Marines, they got right back into the fight even though they were wounded,” Chiarini said. “And we were able to engage these insurgents as they closed in our position,” he said.
Chiarini himself had started dragging the wounded back to the cover of an undamaged Humvee as the fight continued and the group held off their attackers.