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The Veterans Breakfast Club lets soldiers share their stories, writes Ed Blank, who embraced the chance to tell his
The Veterans Breakfast Club continues its mission to let soldiers share the stories only they can tell ...
Some break your heart. Some prompt howls of laughter. All make you want to applaud. Maybe cheer.
Listen to the stories of military veterans. Hear of the many deaths, lost limbs and bloodshed. All enhance your pride in being part of the same military team as the folks telling their stories at Todd DePastino’s Veterans Breakfast Club gatherings.
We’re brethren, and we speak the common language of brotherhood. The more you listen, the more your gratitude surges. These were — they are — heroes.
My main hero was my mentor, a captain. For others, it might have been anyone from Gen. George Patton to a grunt met at boot camp. The stories of others have the power to humble you for what seems in retrospect like one’s own all-too-slight contributions.
Here is an account of my service, delivered extemporaneously at the Veterans Breakfast Club and then published in the organization’s March newsletter.
• Just as I had emulated a couple of elder brothers in becoming an altar boy and a Boy Scout, I marched toward college with the notion of taking four years of Reserve Officers Training Corps at Duquesne University, becoming a commissioned officer and spending, in effect, the 17th and 18th grades in the Army, experiencing what no civilian school teaches.
Brother Al was in Army Engineering. Brother Jack was in Army Infantry. My service as a lieutenant (2nd and then 1st) in the Army Signal Corps from mid-1965 to mid-1967 wasn’t a ripple in a wave compared with the great glory of those who stormed the beaches at Normandy, raised the flag at Iwo Jima or conquered the Nazis.
For nearly nine months at Fort Gordon, Ga., mostly as commander of an Advanced Individual Training unit of troops awaiting “permanent” orders, I anticipated the dropping of the shoe. A week after Easter in 1966, I received orders to join the 40th Signal Battalion at Fort Polk, La. And so I moved, knowing the 40th Signal would be heading for Vietnam by late summer.
The challenge most vivid from those Fort Polk weeks: Staring up a tall, bare phone pole and realizing I had to master, like all pole linemen, the scaling of poles identical to the one before me. Like everyone in my platoon, I listened intently to a noncommissioned officer’s climbing instructions late one afternoon. We broke for the day after his outdoor class and his demonstrations, and we headed for the mess hall.
Instead of dining, I doubled back to the training ground, clamped on pole-climbing leg gear, including a waist strap, and gawked upward while I determined to get my mind around the mission at hand or else. With brain and resolve in gear, I scaled the pole like a squirrel, paused at the top triumphantly to exhale with relief and began the somewhat trickier trip downward. That success was accompanied, frankly, by astonishment. Praise the Lord: The task was doable.
Upward of four months later, my first experience of Qui Nhon, Vietnam, occurred on the troop ship on the 18th and final day of the, uh, cruise. I was in the projection booth of the troop’s main screening room running the movie “The Ipcress File” when someone burst into the darkened theater space and exclaimed, “You can see it!”
Seemingly everyone on board dashed to one side of the ship for a first look — still a mile or more away — of the country that would consume us for a year. Our first observation was the stench that emitted from the shore. Within hours, as we disembarked, we saw the countless freely roaming dogs, chickens and cattle … and their attendant feces, to which we adapted.
We settled in, quickly. Our mission was to dig trenches 5 to 6 feet deep and bury the phone cables. Or, more often, we’d erect telephone poles, normally 25 to 40 feet tall, like those on which we’d practiced ascent and descent, and string from one pole to the next the thick, rubbery phone cables … by the yards … by the miles.
For five months, we did so as members of 40th Signal Battalion before about half of us, me included, transferred to other Signal pole line units in country.
We made do with whatever grub was available and adapted … and adapted. To this day I deplore dining in restaurants with people who can’t be pleased and who all too obviously have been spoiled to the core by a life lived entirely outside war-zone military service. In Qui Nhon, the large cockroaches called palmetto bugs bustled everywhere — out of lockers and boots and from under one’s fatigue cap.
At least once a day you’d think, “X number of days left over here, and I will never live this way again.” That was an advantage we in Vietnam had over soldiers in earlier wars. Our days were numbered. They were countable, starting at roughly 365. They were finite. Survive today, tomorrow and the next day, and eventually you’d return to the States.
Most did. Some — my mentor was one — did not.
I’d been assigned to work alongside Capt. John Robert “Bob” Minutoli at Fort Gordon. His wife, Ruth, was a Grace Kelly-like beauty, offthe-chart gracious and charming — a military veteran herself and a helluva hostess for a home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner in 1965. Capt. Bob had it all, it seemed. He scooted around on a motorcycle that suited his go-get-’em demeanor.
But life at Fort Gordon was too sedentary for him. He was eager to get back into the fray of combat life. Ruth understood. She’d married a bona fide tiger.
He had reminded me from our first salute and handshake of the actor Audie Murphy, who had starred in a film about his own military exploits, “To Hell and Back.” Murphy had been the most decorated soldier in World War II. Minutoli had the same right stuff.
Both were short and compact, both conspicuously gung-ho, and both died young in small aircraft accidents — Murphy in the States at age 45 in 1971. Bob Minutoli was in Special Forces. In a way, that made him the perfect mentor for an earnest, green, young second lieutenant fresh from college. He was a career officer, I a short-termer. He was born to it, I a fish out of water.
He understood and somehow appreciated the differences and was available in all circumstances to advise without imposing. He watched as I found my way commanding a unit that included boys barely out of high school and noncommissioned officers, some of whom were twice my age.
I observed him closely, reconciled the huge differences between us and gleaned what I could for personal, practical application. I learned, within my range, how to lead. I couldn’t be John Wayne. Jimmy Stewart was closer to the mark. Each day presented a challenge unlike the last. Each demanded an immediate resolution.
A gang of thugs from my company was torturing fellow soldiers with hot coals in the boiler room. Time to learn about courts-martial. Immediately.
A boy hardly out of high school had to be told his mom had died suddenly, and I was sending him home tonight. He tries to hold it all together for a long moment, but the dam breaks.
When a development confounded, Capt. Bob was nearby.
On April 6, 1967, according to a website tribute by his niece, Suzanne Minutoli, “about 15 miles west of Danang, flying cover for a Special Forces operation,” Bob and a fellow captain “were airborne in an O-1E. Both men died when the Bird Dog was brought down by enemy fire.”
Ruth buried Bob 13 days later in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, “among other men of courage and integrity,” Suzanne wrote.
Courage and integrity. Lost to everyone at age 29.
• Movies and newsreels tell us of homecomings and ticker-tape parades after World War II. It wasn’t like that with Vietnam. If you returned, you slipped back into civilian life inconspicuously.
It was 25 years before a friend’s wife invited me to speak to her college class about Vietnam. It was only then that I realized I’d said nothing about the experience and that neither friends nor relatives had asked what had happened and how it had changed me. No one seemed to want to know. Few of us volunteered anything about it. A messy, misunderstood chapter of American history was too remote and too divisive.
When you’ve returned from such an experience, how do you address the countless thousands of Americans who had dodged the draft, deferred service indefinitely or denounced what we had done? What had we done? It was a war that was put aside quickly and quietly. A significant percentage of the country had been against it and regarded our involvement as some sort of aberration. Is that what it was?
The sense was that the whole thing was best forgotten. And so the memories shriveled unspoken. And thousands, like Capt. Bob Minutoli, were put to rest simply and quietly.
All that changed, at least for those of us who remembered, when Mr. DePastino pulled together the Veterans Breakfast Club and awakened in dozens — then hundreds and thousands — the desire to tell those stories, Now at last we can speak, and we can listen. One way or another, those stories of all the wars from WWII onward, addressed by American warriors, break us up.
Damn! Someone wants to know after all.
Ed Blank (EdwBlank@aol.com.) is the retired film and theater critic for The Pittsburgh Press and TribuneReview. He is happy to share information about other veterans support groups to which he belongs . The Veterans Breakfast Club will host 60some events in 2017 throughout Western Pennsylvania. Todd DePastino, executive director, may be reached at Todd@VeteransBreakfastClub.com.