Before he was ever in the Army, Larry Chadwick was living out of Golden Gate Park during the Summer of Love — seventeen years old, bouncing between foster homes, and, by his own account, certain that if he kept living the way he was living, he wasn’t going to make it. So he did what a lot of young men in his position did in 1967: he enlisted. He asked for communications. The Army gave him the 1st Cavalry Division and a war.
Larry became a radio operator, humping a 20-pound PRC-25 for the intelligence section of the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry near the DMZ. His unit took part in the relief of the siege of Khe Sanh and pushed into the A Shau Valley before he was later reassigned south to Tay Ninh, near Black Virgin Mountain. He survived combat, lost close friends, and was hit hard enough by malaria — including a near-fatal case of falciparum — that he spent part of his tour recovering in military hospitals and manning an isolated radio relay post with only a handful of South Vietnamese soldiers for company. Some of what he witnessed in the field, including an interrogation he was ordered to assist with, has stayed with him for more than fifty years.
He came home in May 1969, at the height of the anti-war movement, to a marriage started on a three-day leave, two young children he barely knew, and a country that had no clinical language yet for what he was carrying. There was no diagnosis called PTSD. The Army’s answer was antipsychotic medication. Larry describes the years that followed honestly — addiction, rage, a marriage that eventually couldn’t hold the weight of it — but also the slow, hard-won turn: joining Vietnam Veterans Against the War, getting clean, and taking a job as a janitor at the VA that turned into a 31-year career helping build the outpatient mental health system that didn’t exist when he needed it most.
Today, Larry lives on a half-acre at the end of a street in Salt Lake City, feeds the neighborhood’s feral cats, and has spent years doing volunteer twelve-step recovery work as far away as Moscow and St. Petersburg. He’s buried a son, buried friends, and outlived a version of himself he says he’s not eager to revisit. What he offers instead, more than fifty years later, is a rare kind of clarity: not a war story cleaned up for an audience, but an honest account of what it actually costs to come home — and what it takes to keep going anyway.