Bob Riggio meets with David Gates, a Vietnam veteran, who is one of almost 300 veterans being honored with a banner that will be displayed across Rapid City. Here is David’s Story Behind the Banner.
“I was the NCOIC of the Americal Division Casualty Branch. It means that after somebody was killed, we got the call and… The mortuary, Okay? For simplicity’s sake, for everybody. We called it Graves Registration. So then we would get all the information over to Graves Registration, to put it in a little black bag that would go in the body bag with the body to get shipped back to the states to be processed. I went over in May of 1969 and I came back in April of 1970.”
Gates continues by describing when he saw the Vietnam Wall honoring those who served and died in Vietnam.
“I went over to the Vietnam Wall when it was in Keystone, the moving wall. I didn’t want to go and my wife and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law kind of forced me to go and I was out there against the wall and you walk across this gravel parking lot to get over to the wall. I didn’t make it halfway to the wall and I’m on my knees sobbing my eyes out. That wall is so moving. It still moves me. They got them numbered by date of death. So I got there in May of 69. So I said, okay, that’s about here. And then I got over to April, the end of April of 70. I processed about a thousand dead soldiers. I never, never knew a name. My mind will not let me remember. You know, you have a form you fill out, and it’s everything on there. I went through there and I had friends die. I can’t even remember their names. I bottled all this stuff up. You know, when you came back from Vietnam and you know what it was like when we came back. We were pretty much ostracized. We got to a point as veterans that we didn’t tell anybody that we were Vietnam veterans.”
The United States has over time developed an different attitude for Vietnam veterans.
“It started to change after Desert Storm. I’ll tell you a story. My son was two years old. That was ’91 and the war was over and all the soldiers are coming back, you know, getting ticker tape parades and everything. And I’m sitting here watching this on TV. And if I’d had a brick, I would have had to buy a new TV. I was so sick and tired of it. And then Paul Williams, he was singing a song to these Iraqi guys. And he got done with the song. And he says, this song is not just for the Iraqi veterans. This is for the Vietnam veterans and the way that I treated you. He said, I am so sorry the way I treated you. And that just really broke it for me.”
“There’s a story that helped me a lot that I need to tell everybody about, and that is a friend of mine from over in Grand Junction. Afghani sniper on counseling with his counselor, a Vietnam veteran. The guy’s trying to cope, as we all are. And the Vietnam veteran told him says you need to understand you’re in your third life. So then I asked him, I said, ‘What do you mean? Third life?’ He goes, ‘Well, your first life, when before you went into the service.’ Take me. I’m in Mitchell, South Dakota. I’m working in a lumber yard and I’m in a bowling league and I’m out chasing girls and drinking beer and dancing, having a high old time. Come up on the draft and boom, I go and enlist, so I don’t get drafted. Go into the service, I go to war. That’s my second life. I come back from war. In my third life to a country that’s still in their first life. And we’re sitting here trying to as veterans and that really helped me immensely. When I got to the point that I realized that there’s no going back for me, I will never be that Dave Gates ever again. I got the Bronze Star for my job, for what I did. Which, you know, there’s levels of Bronze Star. There was no V for valor on this, which means that I wasn’t in combat. But I still got a Bronze Star for the job. When I came home, I was one angry soldier and took all my medals and threw them away. And my mother said, ‘You can’t throw them away.’ And I said, ‘The hell, I can’t.’ I just threw them all the way and my mother saved my Bronze Star and gave it to me years later. And I am so glad she saved my Bronze Star.”
The lack of support the soldiers felt from the United States still hits hard for many.
“But we were told as soldiers so many times. We listened to the news. Even if you’re over there… “The war is lost.” That’s all we ever heard. And they were getting on our soldiers over there and they get us to the point we started to doubt our mission, our focus, why we’re even here. And a lot of us came back angry, angry at the United States for a long time.”
Gates describes what it was like when he returned home.
“I’m in Mitchell, and I get back and I’m sitting at the bar. There is this gal, and she was a little cutie, a couple of years younger than me, and so she sits up at the bar beside me and we start talking. She was in college at that time. And so we started talking and she said, ‘Are you a Vietnam veteran?’ I said, ‘Yeah…’ She just got up, took a drink and walked away, turned her back. So that started me closing off that situation right there. Then I got shut down to the point that I started to ostracize the Vietnam veterans myself, you know, I really am ashamed of that. But then it’s just what society did to us.
Gates’ best advice for the friends and family of a veteran is:
“I guess, you know, the only thing I could say to everybody is if you’ve got a brother or a dad or someone like this, who is a veteran that saw a lot of stuff and you’re pretty much sure he did and he doesn’t want to talk about it. Don’t push. Let him come to you on his own time. And if he doesn’t, that’s okay, too. But, you know, don’t push to the point that you alienate your relative. It’s more important to keep your dad than it is to understand within yourself what he went through, because you’ll never understand. So, you know, just don’t push.”
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