The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Couple finds saving lives fulfilling
Local couple share stheir story on love, war, Vietnam and saving lives as Coast Guard Auxiliary
Joe and Donna Muharsky sit in the dining room of the Mentor home Joe built and reflect back on a journey that spans decades.
It’s a journey they have traveled in part together — but also individually — as they were high school sweethearts separated by the Vietnam War.
After a 29-year separation, the two reunited and worked together assisting in or saving 32 lives as members of Fairport’s Coast Guard Auxiliary.
The two met at a junior high school wrestling match. Joe, who was originally from Willowick, was a high school junior and Donna, an eighth-grade student from Eastlake. According to Joe, once he saw her he knew he had to talk to her. After the match Donna called her mom to get permission for him to drive her home.
But the war in Vietnam was going on at that time and Joe had a decision to make.
“I was either going to Vietnam, Canada or jail because I didn’t want to go to college,” Joe recalled. “I chose the Navy because North Vietnam didn’t have a navy to speak of. All they had was a few torpedo boats and I figured I would be relatively safe off the coast.”
So at the age of 18, he enlisted. At the age of 19 he was on a destroyer off the coastal waters of Vietnam and by the time he turned 20 he found himself on a Patrol Craft Fast boat also known as a swift boat doing combat missions in the canals through that country.
One of the missions in which his unit was ambushed would later end up in a book called “Swift Boats at War in Vietnam.”
According to Donna, she and Joe maintained their relationship through letters but after his return from Vietnam, they separated.
“We just couldn’t talk to each other,” Donna said, attributing Joe’s inability to talk about his war experience as the main reason for their parting.
Donna and Joe would both go on to marry other people. And after 24 years of marriage and raising three boys, Joe and his wife divorced and he decided to reach out to Donna whose marriage also failed.
“After my wife left I was lonely and I knew what a wonderful relationship we (he and Donna) had before I went to Nam,” Joe recalled. “I had been married for 24 years and this was 29 years later and I was a different person. I was thinking about her.”
Donna recalls being very surprised to pick up the phone and hear Joe’s voice. She immediately thought something was wrong and asked him if he was all right. He told her no. She called her cousin to tell her about the call and asked is she thought she should go out with him. Four days later they walked through the park holding hands.
Both agree that they picked up where they had previously left off like the past 29 years hadn’t happened.
They would go on to marry in 1995, leaving the wedding in an ultralight plane piloted by Joe.
They are both are avid boaters and shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened it occurred to Joe that with the skills that he learned in Vietnam he might be helpful with the Coast Guard.
He and Donna had towed boats for the Coast Guard in the past so they approached the organization about joining as auxiliary members.
And since becoming auxiliary members in January of 2002, the pair have assisted in 32 life-saving operations. Two of those resulted in awards for Joe.
Donna’s interest in the Coast Guard Auxiliary is because she enjoys helping people.
“We have had people whose boat was smoking.” Donna said. “It’s not that the boat was on fire, it wasn’t. They didn’t know that. But we are able to come along side them and let them know that we are right there with them and nothing is going to happen, to tell them and reassure them that they’re safe.
“Its just basically about helping people.”
Joe sees his activities with the auxiliary as a way of trying to make up for what happened in the war.
“I really feel like I’m contributing to something, especially with the lives I saved,” Joe said. “Maybe it makes up for the lives I took. It’s no fun to shoot someone or to watch your buddies die.”
Donna plans to accompany Joe to Vietnam in September as they film a documentary called “Return to Vietnam.” He will be returning to the same canal where his unit was ambushed.
Joe is looking forward to the trip, seeing it as a chance to heal and also a chance to see the beauty of the country that was not visible to him previously due to the ravages of war.
“I will be at peace with it. It’s going to be emotional of course, but I am at peace with it. I did what I had to do there,” Joe said. “I am not proud at all of what I did. I find it much more rewarding to save a life than to take one and I have done both. That is what I like about the Coast Guard: we are saving lives.”