Times Chronicle & Public Spirit
A man of service
Despite scars of Vietnam, Willie Richet devotes his life to family, community
In the wake of the Tet Offensive, the Vietnam War would continue to lose support on the home front as more young men were needed to fill the void of consistent casualties.
Among those reinforcements was eventual Norristown legend Willie Gene Richet, who endured his share of physical and emotional pain during his time in Vietnam.
“We replaced a company that had undergone a lot of casualties in the Tet Offensive,” he recalled. “They had lost a lot of men in battle.”
A rare highlight for the embedded troops was a hot meal that was brought in by helicopter, maybe once a week, but that meant clearing a landing zone with machetes for the chopper to land.
It was a day-long task, and it turned into disaster when Richet’s outfit was ambushed by the Vietcong in the Chu Lai Landing Zone in Tin Province.
“When we were getting ready for the helicopter to come in, that’s when we heard all the noise,” said Richet. “It’s a sound you never forget.
“Just when the helicopter was coming in to land, you heard all the explosions and the shooting from the AK-47s. The helicopter just took off.”
The men in his unit took on mass casualties in the attack, including fatalities.
“I was trying to do what I could to help, but I had all this ringing in my ear,” he recalled. “I reached up there, but I couldn’t feel my ear.”
Richet immediately believed he was shot multiple times, with burning sensations all over his body that proved to be shrapnel.
And, when he instinctively reached up to check on the ear injury, his hand was soaked with blood.
As it turned out, his ear was lost. It had been blown off.
Unlike many there that day, his life was spared.
Instead, it was forever changed.
“I was scared, like everybody else,” he said. “My ear was gone. I was trying to feel it, but I had no feeling on the right side of my head at all.”
His young life was flashing before him.
“I was thinking I was gone,” said Richet. “I starting praying. It was just, ‘Lord, get me out of here.’ With the confusion going on, I was just shaking. I started thinking about my family back home. I was just hoping God would save me and get me back home.”
Back in Action
Part of Richet’s prayer was answered. He survived the attack, but he did not get to go home to Norristown.
“They didn’t send me home, no,” he said. “I was in the hospital for a while. They let me out and I went back to my unit.”
Richet actually had to return to the hospital for an infection in his ear that caused swelling on the right side of his face.
“Over there, you know, nothing is really sterilized,” he said, adding that he reported to his superiors that his hearing in his right ear was greatly diminished and he was eventually assigned to another unit in what was known as “the rear” as a result.
He spent the rest of his tour there.
“It was a support unit,” he explained. “When they came back out of the field, we would support them. We would move stuff — food, ration supplies — into warehouses and set up showers and stuff.”
Eerie Feeling
Richet was born in a small town 60 miles east of Tallahassee as the second of three brothers.
The family moved to Norristown when was 2 and he graduated Norristown High, where he was on the football and basketball teams.
Richet’s girlfriend at the time Uncle Sam called his number actually worked in the local draft office.
“It’s ironic,” he said. “She saw my name come up for the draft. She was upset and crying, but they told them they couldn’t tell us. They weren’t allowed to say anything, so she couldn’t even tell me that my name was coming up in the draft. I found out, a long time later, that she had known about it.”
While he knew it was more a question of when than if, it didn’t make it any easier as the reality set in that he was headed into the heat of the battle.
“I could see everything before me,” he recalled. “I talked to my mom and my dad. My older brother was already in the Army and in Vietnam. I sat down and talked with my dad. He said, ‘Well, if you have to go, you have to go.’ What else are you going to do? What are you supposed to do? Defy the government and say you aren’t going? I didn’t want to go to jail, so I did what I had to do. They drafted me and I went.”
After a large family gettogether, Richet was on a train bound to North Broad Street in Philadelphia and then to Fort Bragg, N.C.
He was placed in the infantry, which was a sure sign he was bound for Vietnam. As a squad leader in basic training, Richet enjoyed some little perks, but basic training was still like nothing he had experienced.
“There were times when I wanted to choke my drill sergeant,” he said. “I was so scared of him. I didn’t think those guys were human, but they had to get you ready for it.”
The next top was Fort McClellan in Alabama for two months of advanced infantry training meant to simulate the conditions of the jungles of Vietnam.
“You are never prepared for it, but they trained you for it the best they could,” said Richet.
Once on the ground in Vietnam, with an attack possible at any moment, Richet recalls being in a constant heightened state of awareness with adrenaline working overtime.
“You just have to use your gut feelings,” he said. “We were young kids, just 17 and 18 years old. We couldn’t even drink, although they allowed us to drink beer. It was a really eerie feeling. It’s reality. You have to wake up and be a man. This is for real now. That’s what was going through my head.”
The Adjustment
Richet was heavily decorated, earning a Purple Heart (awarded to service members who have been wounded or killed as a result of enemy action) and the Bronze Star (awarded for heroic achievement, heroic service, meritorious achievement, or meritorious service in a combat zone.)
His other honors included the Good Conduct Medal, Vietnam Service Medal (with a first and second Oak Leaf Cluster) and an Expert Medal for the M-14 and M-16.
He was honorably discharged in September of 1970, and admits it was a major relief to have survived the life-changing ordeal.
“You are counting the days down,” he said of the final three months. “Once you start counting those days down, they start hollering, ‘short, short, short.’ It’s how many days short you are. Once you get to 90 days, that’s when they considered you ‘short’ and tried not to put you in situations where something could happen.”
And, eventually, 90 days become zero days. He was
Norristown-bound, but not without a detour.
On his way home, Richet was detained at Fort Lewis, Washington, because of high blood pressure.
“I was all excited,” he recalled. “They wouldn’t let me come home because they said my blood pressure was too high. I was just excited about going home, but the doctors there wanted to get my blood pressure under control.
“Coming from Vietnam, of course you are going to be all excited. I was just happy to be home and be on American soil. So, you know, I went along with it. I stayed there a couple of days until they got my blood pressure under control.”
While his blood pressure was tamed, his psyche was not.
He remembers a plane ride to Chicago, which then led to the train to Philadelphia, and another solider dropping a bottle of alcohol that produced a sound so loud that most of the shellshocked veterans instantly hit the ground.
While they joked about, it was no laughing matter.
Richet knows this all too well.
“I was still getting therapy, right up until the (COVID-19) pandemic,” he said. “I don’t like being around loud noises. I don’t go to fireworks and all that.”
There were also other issues, such as the way Vietnam veterans were treated upon their return.
“I saw it, right away, at the airport,” he said. “You would come through and they would boo you. It happened everywhere we went. We were called baby killers and everything. We were just doing what we were told to do. I was no baby killer.
“I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I didn’t ask to go to Vietnam. I was told that I had to go. It was a bad feeling, coming back from Vietnam back then.”
Adding that many of his contemporaries were among the most vocal protestors created a cauldron of emotions that Richet is still sorting out on Veterans Day of 2022.
“I was angry and I was sad,” he said. “A lot of stuff runs through your head. It was just an odd feeling. A lot of people acted like it was something we did against them.
“Sometimes, you know, I’d have flashbacks to Vietnam where I saw things like Vietnamese kids eating out of garbage cans. I used to tell my own kids not to ever waste any food. When I saw those kids eating out of garbage cans, it broke my heart. Nobody should live that way. Coming back here, it was different.”
While time heals some wounds, there are still the scars.
“You never get rid of it, you know,” he said. “It never goes away. I still think about how, back in the 60s, how racial things were. You had black people here still not being considered equal.
“That, in and of itself, was another thing eating away at my mind. I went to Vietnam to serve my country, but I’m not good enough to share in other things but good enough to go to Vietnam.”
The math doesn’t lie. Black soldiers like Richet accounted for 31 percent of the ground troops in Vietnam, while the black population on the home front, where Civil Rights were still an issue, was at 12 percent.
“I got along really well with everybody over there,” said Richet. “The white guys, they all treated us like brothers over there. They knew we had each other’s back. I met a lot of white guys from the South, and we got along so well.
“You get back here, and it’s just different.”
Hometown Hero
At the time he was drafted, Richet worked at a factory
in the Black Horse section of Plymouth Township.
When he returned, he resumed working there but he felt like a stranger in a strange land.
“I felt like I was cooped up,” he said. “In Vietnam, I was so used to being outside. I wanted to be out in the open.”
The woman who would soon be his wife, the late Barbara Richet, encouraged him to become a police officer.
That began a career in law enforcement that saw him rise through the ranks of the Norristown Police Department, eventually becoming the interim police chief and the No. 2 man in the county Sheriff’s department.
“I wanted to be an asset to the community,” he said, admitting that he “faked it” as much as he could to avoid being disqualified because of his hearing. “I grew up here in Norristown, and I wanted to help the people here in Norristown.”
Career Partner
Richet firmly believes that having served in the military is vital for police work, and for many reasons.
“In the police department, you can tell the guys that were in the service, just from their demeanor and how they carried themselves and dressed and took orders,” he explained. “When you’re used to taking orders, it’s a matter of life and death, and it’s the same thing in the police department. You have to be able to take orders and carry out those orders. The service prepared me for the police department.”
He began the process in the fall 1972, after passing through the various phases, ranging from written and oral exams to physical testing.
By February of 1973, he was sworn in.
Not long after, he was
partnered up with Russell Bono, the eventual Chief of Police and then county Sheriff. Together, they patrolled the same East End of Norristown where they both grew up.
“He and I worked together, all the way through our careers,” said Richet. “As he moved through the ranks, I moved through the ranks. We ate at each other’s houses. We would go out and have beers together. We did a lot of things together. He was a good friend, and still is.”
Richet said the racial differences mattered less than the commonalities of where they grew up and the fact that Bono also served as a Military Policeman (he was being trained as a specialist on small nuclear devices when then-president Lyndon Johnson decide that nuclear weapons would not be used).
“There were very few black guys on the police force back then,” said Bono. “It was predominately all white males, but it was never a problem with us.”
While Richet says that Bono was always a sounding board as he worked through his Vietnam experience, Bono played it down.
“I think Willie certainly felt more comfortable talking to me about his military experiences, but he really didn’t go into a lot of depth,” said Bono, who also got to understand the brevity of the Vietnam War stateside while serving in an official capacity at countless military funerals. “I knew about it, and about his injuries. I knew he got a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, but he didn’t really talk about it a lot.
“But we did hit it off, with him having been in Vietnam and me being a military police
officer. But, more than that, we were two kids from the East End of Norristown. I was from the Italian section and he was from the black section, but I knew a lot of black guys and he knew a lot of Italian guys. It worked out well in the East End of Norristown.”
Reflections
These days, Richet is now retired and within a year of being a widower (Barbara, to whom he was married for 45 years, was a longtime educator and principal in the Norristown Area School District).
They raised five children and have 13 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
He now spends his days watching two of his grandsons, ages 7 and 17 months, at his own insistence.
“I watch those guys every day,” said Richet. “The 7-year-old, I’ve been watching him since he was 5 months old.
“Right after I retired, I told my daughter, ‘You don’t have to pay a babysitter, me and your mom will take care of him.’ The day after I retired, she brought him around and I’ve been watching him ever since.”
The Richet family is closely-knit, and he sometimes can’t help but look around at family gatherings and realize how close he was to never making it back home.
“That runs through my mind so many times,” he said. “I got wounded over there, and got the Purple Heart. I just thank God I made it back home. I say to myself, many times, ‘What if I hadn’t made it?’ A lot of the guys that I was with that day never made it back home. I think about Vietnam, man, and I almost wouldn’t have been able to enjoy all of this.”