Gary Howard grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, a swimmer in high school and the son of a WWII medical service officer who’d served in the Philippines. By late 1968 he’d finished college, hated every minute of it, and knew the draft was coming. He briefly considered submarine school until he remembered he was claustrophobic, then walked into a recruiter’s office and signed up for Navy OCS. Four and a half months at Newport, a month of gunnery school in Virginia Beach, amphibious training in Coronado where the captain of the USS Pueblo once gave him a hitchhiking ride to base, and then orders for Vietnam. He landed at Tan Son Nhut on the night of Tet 1969 with the whole countryside on fire and an Air Force sergeant warning him that “the indigenous personnel” were dangerous — while Vietnamese baggage handlers calmly loaded his bags onto a truck ten feet away.
What followed was a year in the Mekong Delta as an advisor with the Vietnamese Marines aboard a 40-foot boat with a 13-man crew. Gary’s official job was talking to American helicopter pilots so they’d actually land when his unit needed food, supplies, or a medevac. Unofficially, it was everything else: gunnery, helicopter landings on the deck of a tango boat, MEDCAPs and DENTCAPs that took American doctors and dentists into villages where a hundred kids would mob him like he was Santa Claus, and a stretch where he became the unit’s telephone lineman after his only E-5 climber locked his knees, passed out on top of a pole, and refused to ever go up again. Somewhere in the middle of all this, two of his guys mail-ordered him a Boston Whaler with a Johnson 75. Gary added skis. He waterskied the Mekong.
There were sharper moments, too. A rocket that missed him because his hat had fallen off and he’d ducked to grab it. A mortar attack on his birthday that interrupted a winning poker hand he never got back to. An overturned boat on a canal bank — clearly mined, everyone aboard killed — that he saw once and could never forget. From that night on he slept topside between the gun mounts, under a mosquito net, with his M16 by his head and a flashlight he wasn’t supposed to use because it drew fire. The claustrophobia he’d cited to dodge submarine school turned out to be the real thing after all. He still carries it.
The hardest part wasn’t the year in-country. It was the homecoming. Wheels up out of Tan Son Nhut, the cabin erupted in cheers — “I made it,” Gary says he can still feel the nose come up — and a few hours later he was walking through SFO in his Navy greens when a young blonde woman walked straight up to him and spit. He flew the rest of the way home to Atlanta, went on to run a nuclear weapons rework plant at Yorktown, finished law school at Texas, and tried jury cases in Arizona for forty years. Asked now what Vietnam gave him, he says it’s what made him grow up — the realization that what he did actually mattered to other people’s lives. At 79 he’s still adjusting, he says, to people thanking him for his service. For a lot of years, that wasn’t what anyone said.
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