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AT PEACE WITH VIETNAM -- "I guarantee, a combat vet goes

back, he's going to come home a better person."

 

 

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At peace with Vietnam

By Tom Groening

As the Vietnam War raged, thousands of American young men escaped the draft by fleeing to Canada. Bill Braniff, a Canadian, reversed that trend, coming to the U.S. to join the Army and fight in Southeast Asia.

Braniff, 62, who has lived in Bucksport the past eight years, now believes that war was a mistake. He carries the emotional and physical scars of his combat experience, which coincided with the bloody Tet Offensive.

Though he suffers with severe post traumatic stress disorder, Braniff has found an unexpected balm for his wounds — returning to the land where he witnessed the horrors of war. Since 1996, Braniff has made 17 trips back there and brings other combat veterans with him.

He and veterans from Skowhegan, Sangerville, Rockwood and Toronto leave May 8 for yet another tour of Vietnam.

Braniff organizes the trips but receives no financial gain, making the effort because he sees the peace it brings.

"I guarantee, a combat vet goes back, he’s going to come home a better person," he said Saturday.

How a young man from Kitchener, Ontario, ended up fighting in the U.S. Army is itself a tale. Braniff’s father and mother, uncles and great-uncles served during World War II.

"I was brought up in a period of great patriotism," he said, and agreed with the "domino theory" of the time that held the spread of communism must be contained.

"We thought [Vietnam] was a Canadian problem" as well as a U.S. problem, he said.

Braniff was already a member of the Canadian militia, akin to the National Guard here.

"I’m not going to lie; it was also a sense of adventure," he said, that prompted him to respond to a call to form a Canadian battalion.

But the Canadian government quashed the initiative, so Braniff got a visa and came to the U.S. to join the Army. He estimates as many as 50,000 Canadians did the same, with 12,000 to 15,000 serving in Vietnam.

In 1966, Braniff was able to join the U.S. Army, and was inducted in Buffalo, N.Y.

"I wanted to get over to Vietnam as soon as possible," he remembers.

Braniff arrived in Vietnam in late January 1968. On Jan. 28, he was taken by bus to his assignment, a supply area. At 2 a.m., "all hell broke loose," he said.

"That was the night of the Tet Offensive," when thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers swarmed into the south, catching U.S. troops unaware.

He and his comrades had no weapons. They barred the windows with mattresses and crafted crude weapons from the metal frames of the beds. Miraculously, no one was killed in the building in which he spent that night.

The next day, officers tore up Braniff’s orders and assigned him to the 25th Infantry Division. A group of soldiers called the Wolf Hounds claimed him, and headed into the bush, looking for the enemy.

"I was with them for five weeks," he said, though Army officials had him listed absent without leave and were about to list him as missing in action when he returned to base, literally and figuratively ragged from the experience.

"The clothes I had rotted away. I literally was using the clothes of guys who had been killed," he said.

Braniff was reassigned again and became an ammunition bearer, an assistant machine gunner and radio operator during a stint with a platoon that patrolled the jungle.

"I walked the point a lot," which suited him well, he said. As a boy, he had been trained by French-Canadian guides in observing and tracking animals in the backwoods of Ontario.

"We saw a lot of action, a lot [of people] killed," he said.

Braniff also became "the company tunnel rat," which meant crawling into tunnels dug by the Viet Cong, armed with a .45 pistol and a few cigarette lighters.

"It was horrible," Braniff said.

Later in the interview, he admitted to editing out much of the worst of his war experiences, though one scene is seared vividly in his mind: a night stakeout near a field, a road, a house and a pagoda.

Braniff awoke to his platoon leader’s hand over this mouth. The officer then gestured to two North Vietnamese soldiers in the darkness. As they approached, Braniff and the officer emptied their weapons on them, killing them. But the gunfire also alerted some 500 other Vietnamese troops nearby.

Braniff’s squad holed up in the pagoda and survived the night.

In the summer of that year, Braniff was diagnosed with ulcers and sent to Japan for surgery, then back to the U.S., where he married and started a family. Like many veterans, he was numb from his combat experience for years, he said.

Back in Canada, he kept quiet about his war experiences, a common approach by those veterans, he said.

"We went into the closet," he said.

Work led him back to the U.S. 25 years ago, and he has been here since.

He later learned that 42 of the nearly 100 troops in his company were killed. And in recent years, Braniff learned that nearly his entire squad was killed one day after he had been taken out of the war. The news exacerbated his survivor guilt.

"It just cracked me up. I just went off the deep end," he said.

Braniff sees a counselor weekly now and is being treated for PTSD.

More than 10 years ago, he met a young man who had come to the U.S. as a child refugee from Vietnam. The man persuaded Braniff to return to the country, an idea that intrigued him.

"I wanted to go back to see where I killed that guy. I wanted to find that pagoda. Finding that pagoda was the biggest thing," he said.

During that first visit, in 1996, he found the pagoda.

"I just felt like a load was lifted off me," he said.

Though he remembers no Vietnamese being in the pagoda that night, a man there claimed to have remembered seeing Braniff and the others there. The man was warm and friendly, a response he found over and over again.

"We had a lot of disdain for them" during the war, Braniff said, but now he is taken by the Vietnamese friendliness and their ambition to build a prosperous country.

"It’s one of the most American-friendly countries in the world," he said.

Teens, many of whom who watch MTV and have Internet access, know about the war only through parents and grandparents. The tunnels which Braniff and other soldiers had to investigate are now a tourist attraction.

"Every combat vet should make an effort to go back," he said with the fervor of a man who has found his healing waters. "I hope I can get hundreds of guys to go."

Vietnam combat veteransinterested in learning more about the Vietnam trips can contact Braniff at billybee68@aol.com.

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Larry Scott  --