Veteran's Day

Welcome Home - 1967

By Don Poss

Millikan High School, Long Beach, California - 1967

My high school called me on the phone and asked if I would address the school's Veterans' Day Assemblies (2,500 students), in uniform (I was already discharged from a four years USAF enlistment). I agreed. A few days later I had parked my car in familiar old-stomping-grounds in one of the high school parking lots. I couldn't believe I had agreed to such an idiotic request, and was grumbling to myself while walking toward the auditorium. I didn't have clue-one what I would say, and this was merely the first-assembly with a second-assembly to go! So basically I planned to respond to the Principal's (WWII vet) questions, and somehow get through it.

We stood at the podium as the Principal quieted the assembly who pointed and stared at him and the guy in a blue Air Force uniform. I listened as he introduced me as a graduate of Millikan High School. Memories of Vietnam were extremely vivid at that time, and, standing at center-stage I looked out at the too-young faces setting in the large auditorium, all quiet and attentive.

The Principal began asking short questions, which I gave clipped answers to. The audience, it seemed to me, was embarrassed that I was not at ease and with my too-quiet and too-brief replies. And they were right, my attention was drifting to recent memories. I then ignored a question, and turned from the Principal to the students directly, and I spoke at length of my friend, James B. Jones, who was killed in action at age 19. The jokes we played on each other . . . the trouble we would have gotten into if only the sergeants had found out "who did that!" . . . the heat . . . the rain and mud and bugs . . . the bodybags . . . and the last night of J.B.'s life at Danang Vietnam. Total silence.

I told of how the next morning, still wearing my flack-jacket and helmet and carrying my M-16 weapon, I entered the dispensary where J.B. was carried only hours earlier. Two medics came out of a back room . . . is that where he is?---"I want to see J.B.'s body." But he was not there, and had already begun his final journey home.

I tried to make eye contact with those in the front rows, as I told of a letter from Jim's mother, and the pain she and his father felt. Was any of what I was saying making sense? I could see that some of the girls were actually crying. The guys were setting on seats' edges and listening intently . . . as I remembered Vietnam.

I asked the "young men" in the auditorium what they would consider important in their lives today, if they "knew their lives could end within a year from today." I told them that Vietnam was "not a place you would want to go," but at the same time was not a place I regretted going to---and yet it was impossible to explain what that meant or convey "what it was really like"---but that Vietnam had a life-changing impact on me, in that I could never go back to those days-of-innocence I knew at Millikan High School.

The bell rang signaling end-of-assembly, and usually the teenagers would charge out of the auditorium, as I had done years before, . . . but they remained seated, and quiet. The Principal, who had sat down on a folding chair stood up, shook my hand and thanked me with a quick embrace and pat on the back. My God . . . did the Principal that used to threatened to skin me alive just hug me? The students had not begun to stir, and I noticed the second-assembly students were peeking in the doors to see why they could not yet enter. I walked from the podium toward the wings, and after a few steps the students began to rise, and applaud . . . then amazingly, cheer and whistle and the cheering became loud as if Millikan's football team had just won the State Championship. I stopped, totally surprise---shocked really, and turned to face them. The noise and shouting tapered off to a ripple. I was too choked up to say anything---and what had I said anyway?---so I just simply popped a salute and walked off stage. The cheering started a new.

After second-assembly, some of my old high school teachers came backstage and shook my hand. Some were worried about "the war getting serious." As I left the building through a side door, several students from first and second assemblies were waiting. Some said they had brothers or fathers in Vietnam. One teary eyed girl said that her brother had died in Vietnam, and wanted to know if I had known him there.

Years later I would occasionally return to Millikan High School, as a police officer, and notice the Memorial Bulletin Board's growing list of alumni killed in action in Vietnam. The war was still roaring along, with years to go, and the stories of Vietnam veterans being spit on and cursed were common knowledge. I would remember my Veterans' Day talk, and recognize it for what it really was . . .
My Welcome Home, 1967.

The students and staff at Millikan High remember and honor their Veterans, and still do to this day with the Alumni Memorial posted at the campus' main entrance.

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