Ray Goulet lifted a tremulous right hand to his service cap, the quiver in his bare forearm telling of the effort his salute required.
The rituals of the Vietnam War Veterans Day at the New Hampshire Veterans Home in Tilton progressed with Goulet standing guard over the reception area by the door, a sentinel minding coffee carafes and creamers.
He raised his voice only in the ceremony’s last minutes, not to draw attention to himself, the president of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 41, but to be the first of anyone gathered there Friday morning to speak aloud the name of a fallen friend: “Winston Taggart, 25th infantry, 1968.”
Taggart’s presence was in the room, his name etched among the list of those killed in action that was on display.
Goulet would later bow his head, as if to pray, and wipe a luminous pearl from his cheek. His memory of his friend again tightened in his throat.
“He died replacing one of the men in his outfit who couldn’t drive the tank that night. He volunteered to go,” he said. “He was there a few months before me, but when I went over to Vietnam, I was almost in the same area as he was. It’s quite a thing, we even ended up going in the same outfit, the 25th infantry.”
Goulet and Taggart grew up together in the Goffe’s Falls neighborhood of Manchester. While his friend drove tanks, Goulet worked as a mechanic repairing them. While his friend lost his life serving his country, Goulet lived to drive the 5,000 miles from his base in Alaska back home to Manchester, to their neighborhood near the regional airport, to his wife and home one-tenth of a mile from where they were raised.
He keeps in contact with Taggart’s siblings, their contacts assigned to compact cells in his black Verizon flip-phone. And when the opportunity to honor his friend’s memory presents itself, he takes it.
Credit: GEOFF FORESTER / For the Monitor
The ceremony offered an occasion for remembrance and for state leaders, among them Gov. Kelly Ayotte, to give veterans the hero’s welcome they did not receive in the early to mid ’70s.
Public opinion soured on the war, widely considered the most unpopular conflict in American history, as the country paid a higher and higher human cost for its involvement. In total, the Vietnam War claimed the lives of approximately 58,000 Americans, a majority of them killed in action, according to the federal Defense Casualty Analysis System.
With institutional trust eroding and the peace movement picking up pace, many veterans felt that they returned home as objects of scorn, scapegoated for political decisions well above their heads.
“As we speak, we have members of our guard who are serving in — with the conflict in Iran, and because of you and your service, we know that we will make sure that they know how much we are grateful for them, that no matter what anyone feels about an underlying conflict, our men and women always have our respect,” Ayotte said to the crowd.
The specter of the Vietnam War’s complicated history still haunts Stephen Sayewich’s memory, for more reasons than veterans’ cold homecoming.
Fifteen men who served with him on his Air Force base died. Seven were pilots. They were sent home unceremoniously, with an air medal and little else. “They were never recognized for their service in Vietnam, because in those days, we weren’t there,” he said.
His reckoning with the contradictions and internal conflicts of his own service has caused anguish, too.
Sayewich served in the Air Force from 1968 to 1974, communicating with pilots as a radar maintenance officer and helping to coordinate aircraft movements during the war in Vietnam. He rose to the rank of captain during his military career, which accorded a top-secret security clearance that set him on a solitary path and required that he conceal many of his sorrows.
The year before his service began, he was assigned during a classroom debate to defend the position that the United States should not have been in Vietnam. He won.
“That opened up Pandora’s box for me, and I had to really think hard about how I would serve my country,” he said. “The truth that I take away is […] I’m all a part of history and ghosts, just like you. I don’t come alone. I come with family, with an idea and an idealism.”
A tall yet unimposing 80-year-old with an awakened, lucid conscience, Sayewich said his experience taught him to tolerate and even entertain opposing viewpoints.
His inviting eyes smiled behind thin-rimmed glasses as he lionized a list of independent journalists whose reporting on conflict zones has become indispensable to his news diet. During his service, his wife would mail him copies of The New York Times featuring reporting on the war he said would never appear in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Now, he and fellow resident Leo Leclerc, who served in the Air Force from 1960 to 1964, read everything from Al Jazeera to The Jerusalem Post.
Service, Leclerc said, did anything but flatten their impression of the world.
“We formed a world view instead of a narrow view,” he said.
Their experiences — the harrowing, the painful, the arduous, the informative, the lonely — still echo from the past.
Leclerc, who went into the military at age 17, deployed to Vietnam as a B52 bomber maintenance administrator specialist for eight months. His job entailed ensuring that aircraft remained mission-ready.
Like many veterans, he came home carrying remnants from his tour. Even so, because of his support role, he counts himself among the lucky ones.
“Some of the stories, if you want to hear them, will turn your head, what they did. They are heroes. The word hero is an overworked word. We did our duty. We raised our hand and said, ‘We will support our country,'” Leclerc said.
The welcome home, decades overdue, the applause that filled the room and sea of guests in red Remember Everyone Deployed t-shirts, struck a special chord with Sayewich.
“It’s all about coming home, and I must confess to you that I still haven’t come home yet. I don’t know why. There’s a deep longing. Maybe nobody was there. By the very nature of my job, I came in after six months and flew back out again. It was all alone. Maybe this is the closest I’ve come to being at home,” he said.