FORMER MARINE CONFRONTS `SCARS OF VIETNAM' WAR

Enlisting new Marines was Harry Spiller's job when he returned from his Vietnam tour of duty in 1967. He was only 21, much, much younger than most other recruiters. An enlistee himself who was raised on the TV show "Combat" and books about World War II valor, he was still gung-ho about the war and did his job well. His office enlisted 8 to 10 young men a month out of the recruiting office in Cape Girardeau.

As the war ground on he sometimes was required to return, solemnly, to homes where, as a recruiter, he'd been welcomed like a godsend.

"Six months later you're standing at their door telling them their son is dead," he said.

Spiller wrote about his own experiences as a Marine and recruiter in his first book, "Death Angel: A Vietnam Memoir of a Bearer of Death Messages to Families." In his new book, "Scars of Vietnam" (McFarland) he returns to his recruiting territory to talk to some of the Marines who returned and to the families of those who didn't.

Spiller, now an associate professor of criminal justice and political science at John A. Logan College in Carterville, Ill., once planned to make the Marine Corps a career. But he quit in 1973, worn down.

"It had become almost like a game," he said. "Are you going to enlist them faster than you're burying them?"

For many years, "I put the Vietnam experience deep inside," he writes. "I didn't talk about it and I didn't want to hear about it."

But a television movie about Vietnam rekindled feelings from his own experiences. The thoughts he began putting on legal pads became his first book. Waiting for its publication, he returned to the towns and cities in his recruiting area and listened to war stories. "Scars of Vietnam" is the result.

---

Twenty years later, the population of Marquand had grown to only 231. Spiller could remember recruiting nine of the town's young men. Three of them died in Vietnam.

"You could see the impact the war can have on such a small town," he says. "It brings it all home."

One of the those killed was Pfc. Clifford D. Combs, who was 19 when he died Feb. 25, 1969, a month and a day after arriving in Vietnam.

Spiller prints some of his letters from the war, in which Combs has nothing much to say except "I love you all and miss you all very much."

His mother, Elizabeth, still cannot read them. She hands Spiller another stack of letters, all still sealed and stamped "Return to Sender."

"He never got a one," she tells Spiller. "They were all lost in the mail."

A little over a month after Combs was buried, Spiller was back in Marquand to attend the funeral of another young man who died in Vietnam. Pfc. Lawrence S. Mills was 18 when he was killed in action April 11, 1969.

"Larry fished in the Castor River, hunted in the St. Francois Mountains, and played sports in the Marquand school system," Spiller writes. "He was a kid who wanted to be something in life."

Spiller recalls meeting the 17-year-old in the midtown parking lot in the summer after Mills graduated from high school in 1968. "His eyes danced with excitement as we filled out the enlistment papers."

Mills mother, Clara, signed them reluctantly.

Elizabeth Combs attended Lawrence Mills' funeral. "We drove out Route V to a country cemetery and gave Larry the full military honors of a fallen Marine," Spiller writes.

"I presented the flag to Clara and quickly walked from the gravesite. When I reached the car, I turned and looked back toward the crowd of people. Clara and Elizabeth were standing in front of the grave, gripping each other like two broken dolls."

---

Spiller would return often to the "gardens of stones," his term for the cemeteries where his recruits were buried. But some of the most affecting stories are those of men who made it back, though with mangled bodies or wounded souls. Sgt. Stephen M. Malley of Mounds, Ill., and Sgt. Michael E. Bauman of Ste. Genevieve are two whose tales are related.

Four of the stories included in the book are about men still living in Cape Girardeau: Ray Fulkerson, a Marine lieutenant; Paul Ebaugh Jr. and William H. Walker, both captains; and Gordon W. Huckstep, a corporal.

All are proud of their service and some have trouble with the idea that America lost the war.

"I never sensed, like some people, that we lost, because I saw too many heroic things happen," Fulkerson tells Spiller.

Ebaugh, a former Cape Central and Southeast football player who set records in track, was assigned to the same company with a lieutenant named Billy Riggs. They didn't know each other but found out their houses were five blocks apart in Cape Girardeau.

Movie and media images that portray Vietnam veterans negatively upset him. He says, "I go to church and believe in God. I love my family just like most of the other vets that went to Vietnam. I would like to think that most of us built on that experience rather than had it tear us down. I got on with it, and all the other vets I know got on with it."

Walker is living proof of "Once a Marine always a Marine," Spiller writes. He enlisted in 1961 and had to fight every step of the way into the cockpit of a helicopter. An enemy round shattered his left leg in 1966. He walked with a cane for awhile but he still flew.

Now an associate professor of finance at the university, Walker contends that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Agent Orange-caused disabilities are largely fabrications of the media. And for a time he felt guilty for retiring from the Marine Corps in 1970.

"Hell, I can walk," he told Spiller. "...If I get out on the dance floor too long I have to sit for awhile, and I pay the price the next day for doing anything strenuous on my feet.

"But I can stay up with the best of 'em."

A 1968 graduate of Central High, Huckstep tells Spiller he joined the Marine Corps because of John Wayne movies. He won the Silver Star for bravery. He also saw his drunken sergeant kill a USO performer by mistake.

The incident that bothered him most, though, was returning home to hear President Nixon tell the nation no U.S. troops were in Laos. Huckstep himself had been part of a reconnaissance team that went into Laos in 1969.

The problem with the Vietnam War was who ran it -- politicians instead of generals, Huckstep tells Spiller. "We have the greatest country in the world. No matter what happened in Vietnam, I still love my country."

Another of the book's 17 chapters is dedicated to Ronald A. Lowes, a Marine Corps photographer from Jackson who says, "I came back from there feeling like I had done the best I could. No hero. Just the best I could."

---

Locally, returning Vietnam veterans met mostly with disinterest, Spiller says. "Nobody wanted to hear about it...but when you've got something bothering you, you need to talk to somebody.

"A lot of people sank a lot of things deep."

The book has provided some of them with a chance to talk about their experiences and Spiller with therapy for feelings he calls guilt.

"I'm aware that probably, in most instances, all of those people who enlisted would have probably enlisted in the Marine Corps anyway," he says. "...But it wasn't somebody else, it was me."

Everyone in Spiller's book seems to have taken his or her own lesson away from the Vietnam War.

"Many of the true casualties of the Vietnam War have never set foot `in country,' have never been on a battlefield, have never received Purple Hearts, and will never have their names chiseled into a monument or a wall," he writes. "They are ordinary Americans who unselfishly answered their country's call."

The time for finger-pointing is over, Spiller says. "This is a time for healing. We need to look at all the things that went wrong and not make the same mistakes we did.

"We sent an entire generation of young people into a war where we didn't know what we were doing," he said.

"The aftermath can be horrid."