On WOOD TV+: Watch “Vietnam Veterans’ Stories: A Lost Generation” at 9 p.m. Friday and 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
KENTWOOD, Mich. (WOOD) — Practically 60 years after the mortars stopped falling, John Kooistra nonetheless carries items of the Vietnam Struggle. Not metaphorical, however actual shrapnel: cooled, metallic shards that after glowed crimson with warmth from enemy rounds exploding close to his base camp within the Central Highlands.
“That would tear you into pieces,” he mentioned, matter-of-factly.
Vietnam veteran John Kooistra holds shrapnel collected whereas he served in Vietnam.
Kooistra, now approaching 80, was 21 when he was drafted and despatched midway across the globe to serve with the U.S. Military’s 551st Mild Upkeep Firm. It was 1966. The warfare was escalating. The federal government wanted troopers. Kooistra, a latest graduate from Grand Rapids Christian Excessive College, grew to become a corporal, a clerk and a reluctant witness to considered one of America’s most contested conflicts.
“They bulldozed an area for us to live,” he recalled. “We lived in 10-man tents. It was a backward country — it was jungle.”
Watch: Vietnam Veterans share their tales 50 years after the autumn of Saigon
He filed the warfare, memo by memo, from a clanking base camp carved out of tropical forest, surrounded by 10,000 different males. His job wasn’t fight. It was paper. Nonetheless, the warfare discovered him.
“The Viet Cong would usually lob a few mortar rounds at the base camp,” he mentioned. “You never knew which direction it came from, never knew how far back. It could be miles away.”
There have been no entrance traces. There have been no clear edges. The warfare seeped into every thing: the air, the soil, the timber — and, later, into the lungs and bloodstreams of the boys who served there.
A courtesy picture of John Kooistra in Vietnam.
For Kooistra, like tens of 1000’s of veterans, the struggle by no means actually ended.
“We didn’t know about Agent Orange until we got back here,” he mentioned. “You find out afterwards.”
Agent Orange was the federal government’s reply to an invisible enemy. Sprayed from planes over dense vegetation, the toxin was meant to strip the jungle naked to reveal the Viet Cong. What it did as an alternative was poison the land — and the troopers.
“Some spots they sprayed more than any other,” Kooistra remembered. “We were in some of those spots.”
It took a long time for the consequences to disclose themselves. In his mid-60s, he started noticing signs. His stability shifted. His palms trembled. Medical doctors ultimately gave it a reputation: Parkinson’s illness. The doubtless trigger, they informed him, was Agent Orange.
“It just gets steadily worse and worse,” he mentioned. “I don’t blame anyone here, but the government is taking responsibility, even now.”
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After the warfare, Kooistra got here dwelling to West Michigan, to the identical woman who had waved him off in 1966. They married, raised a household and constructed a life. She stays by his facet in the present day as his companion, caregiver and witness to his slow-motion battle with an previous, invisible foe.
He doesn’t speak politics. He by no means actually did — not within the jungle, and never now. However he desires individuals to recollect. To not glorify. Simply to recollect.
“You see all the names on the memorial — 50,000 that never came back,” he mentioned quietly. “For what? In the end, we lost it all. Or gave it away.”
