Randy Maggio. Mike Young. John Harden. Gary Price. If you lived in McHenry County during the Vietnam War, you probably knew at least one of these young men. They were among the county’s 35 residents who died in the war and 7,048 who served.
“Although the county has grown a lot in the last few years, it was still rural then,” says exhibits curator Grace Moline, who is assembling a Vietnam War exhibit, “Marching Off, Left Behind,” due to open in May at the McHenry County Historical Museum in Union. “The population of the whole county was only 84,210 in 1960, so everyone knew everyone.”
While hippies taunted police in well-publicized riots in Chicago, Moline says McHenry County had one protest involving seven people at the draft board. “The only person who even mentioned it (to me) was a woman who worked at the board,” says Moline, who interviewed 30 veterans and family members for the project.
Quiet McHenry County was a community of farmers, most of them Republican, conservative, patriotic. “If you were called to serve, you went,” Moline says. The draftees far outnumbered the conscientious objectors.
Through the exhibit, Moline hopes to give McHenry County’s Vietnam War veterans the recognition they didn’t get when they returned and to teach museum visitors about the war’s role in the county’s history.
“Not everyone considered Vietnam a war,” Moline says. “It was called a conflict. But, when you consider the numbers of men and women who served in this `conflict’ — 2.6 million Americans — it’s a huge segment of our population. In McHenry County, it touched everyone’s lives.”
The exhibit will include six vignettes of life in the ’60s, at home and in Vietnam, each with donated artifacts and auditory props:
– A mother reading a letter from her son in Vietnam while a television announces the evening news.
– To illustrate the rebelling counterculture, a teenager in her black-light room, complete with a beaded room divider, beanbag chair and Lava lamp.
– A collage showing young people’s choices during the war — going to Vietnam, fleeing the country, protesting. “Also, we’ll show the shift in attitude that occurred toward the end of the war, when soldiers started questioning orders and, according to some I talked to, the drug problem escalated,” Moline says.
– A basic-training barracks scene, showing a McHenry County boy adjusting to military life.
– An American soldier in the Vietnam jungle, helicopters roaring overhead.
– A veteran coming home and adjusting to civilian life.
The exhibit will also include a Wall of Honor, with pictures, names and occupations of McHenry County veterans who survived the war, and a memorial listing those who didn’t. “A separate portion will be devoted specifically to the nurses who served in war because so many people said they deserve special recognition,” Moline says.
In addition to names and hometowns, the lists will include the veterans’ roles in Vietnam, which ranged from building roads to repairing helicopters to cooking. “I hope to show that not everyone there was in combat, and not everyone who was killed was in combat when they were killed. At the time, it seemed like everyone there was fighting,” Moline says.
So strong are the emotions about this unwar, even decades later, that some of the county’s veterans don’t want their names on the wall, Moline says. “There are some well-respected people in our communities who don’t want anyone to know they are Vietnam vets. Some refused to be interviewed or asked, `Who told you I was in Vietnam?’ ” she says.
One of the veterans who did share his memories and mementos with Moline, lending his uniform and letters home to the exhibit, is Rich Oleszczuk of Crystal Lake, 49. One of six children of a World War II veteran and his European-born wife, he lived in Wonder Lake, which he describes as “not that different than it is today — laid-back, middle-class, blue-collar.” He was 20 in 1970 when he received his draft number, No. 152. “That’s a number I’ll never forget,” says the president of Regal Tool Co. in McHenry.
After training in Kentucky and Louisiana, Oleszczuk was shipped to Saigon as an infantry soldier. Of the 14 months he spent in Vietnam, eight were in the jungle as an Army rifleman on search-and-destroy missions. “Instead of advancing a front, we were inserted into an area, told to find the enemy and kill them,” he recalls. “After we were dropped off, we’d walk in a loop, then get picked up. Three days later, we’d do another loop.”
Compared to the war his father fought, Oleszczuk says Vietnam was a “chaotic war with a genius, crafty enemy. It was surreal — intensely hot, millions of mosquitoes, lots of malaria. We were all wet for weeks on end. Water was rationed. We all got Dear John letters, even the married guys.”
Oleszczuk hopes the exhibit will help dispel some myths about the Vietnam War and its veterans. “The popular image of the Vietnam vet is the loser, the downtrodden,” he says. ” `Platoon’ and `Deer Hunter’ accurately showed the stress, but, overall, movies have focused on the negative. The Vietnam War movies are not feel-good movies. But the vast majority of the vets went over there, did their jobs professionally, stayed off drugs and became productive people after the war. Truth is, a lot of us came home without baggage. We’re not monsters or drug addicts.”
What no exhibit can portray, Oleszczuk says, is the way the war changed the veterans’ lives. “Coming back at age 22, I . . . had grown up intensely,” he says. “I had seen a lot of people killed. While my friends were at fraternity parties, I was hauling dead bodies on stretchers. This gave me a tough edge for a while.”
Unlike WWII veterans, the Vietnam soldiers did not return en masse to bands and fanfare. “One night we were in the jungle, and the next night home in bed,” he recalls. “After being in the jungle, my senses of smell and hearing were so acute. On my way home, flying from San Diego on a civilian flight, I was almost overcome by the smell of perfume and deodorant. At home, when a car backfired, my heart stopped.”
Another McHenry County resident who served in Vietnam, Joan Skiba, 52, of McHenry, found the transition so difficult, she re-enlisted in the service to find camaraderie among fellow veterans at a stateside hospital. After working as a nurse for 16 months in Vietnam emergency rooms, she felt like she was “drop-kicked back onto the planet.”
Skiba says her 1969-70 Vietnam tour gave her a 180-degree change in perspective, from a Army brat eager to serve her country to a follower of politics who questions her government’s every move.
“Watching the protests at Ohio State in 1968, I thought, `What’s wrong with them?’ ” she recalls. “Then I went to Vietnam and found out war isn’t flags and parades. It’s death.” Asked if she would object to her three children leaving the country to avoid a draft, she says, “I’d help them pack.”
Like many of the veterans Moline interviewed, Skiba refers to her trip to “the wall” (the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C.) as a necessary pilgrimage. When she visited it in 1987, she left a copy of a poem she wrote about her memories of a Vietnam emergency room and a dying young man she called Red. “I sat with him and held his hand, so he wouldn’t die alone,” she wrote. “The time did come when this soldier died, and I stood up to leave. But I never left his memory there, and for his loss I grieve.”
Moline says her March 1998 newspaper plea for material for the exhibit struck a nerve because many of the veterans had not yet shared their memories of the war. “There were a lot of tears,” Moline says of her interviews. “One veteran said, `I’m sugarcoating this story for you. I still can’t describe it the way it really was.’ “
Although Moline, 49, lived through the war and remembers men who lost their lives in Vietnam, she says her research taught her it was a complicated war that still triggers raw emotions. “Personally, it’s opened up my heart,” she says.
Moline says the common thread among the veterans she interviewed was a lingering frustration about the way the war was fought and the missing welcome mat when they returned.
“For many of them, there is still resentment that, when they returned, no one wanted to talk about the war,” Moline says. “They were expected to slip back into society.”
His homecoming was awkward, Oleszczuk says, and his parents didn’t understand why some members of the community didn’t appreciate it when they bragged of his Vietnam service. But, overall, McHenry County welcomed its Vietnam vets with open arms.
“Coming home to San Francisco might have been different,” he says. “But coming home to McHenry County, I wasn’t harassed. No one called me a baby killer. People just said, `I’m glad you’re home.’ “
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The two-year exhibit will open May 23. Museum hours through October are 1 to 4 p.m. daily except Mondays and Saturdays. For more information, contact Grace Moline at the museum, 815-923-2267.
