30 years later, Vietnam vet asks: `Was it worth it?'
Next week marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam. Rather than talk to a professor, I talked to John Colovos.
He owns the Cambridge House Restaurant where I eat lunch, at Ohio and St. Clair, near the Tribune. He's a few days shy of 60, but wiry and strong, a hunter, still.
One early morning last week, we sat in a booth in the back. John didn't eat. He spiked his coffee with sugar and smoked. It was the first time we'd ever talked about Vietnam.
"I love my country. I fought for my country. I got wounded in Vietnam. But was it worth it? I still think about that."
He received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart. Though born in Europe, the immigrant became an American through loss of blood.
"In the old country, in the village, a Communist guerrilla captain was going to kill my dad because he wouldn't join the Communists. He put the gun to my father's head. The man with the gun was my father's first cousin. He let him live, but that's how bad it was. That civil war was cousin against cousin. I thought Vietnam would have the same dynamic."
They left Greece and settled in Chicago, where his father cut leather in a shoe factory.
"One day one of those presses took his left hand off. I quit school and worked."
He was drafted in June 1965. After boot camp, a sergeant approached: "`Hey, you Greeks did good in Korea. Come here you.' That was it and I was in the 101st Airborne.
"... In Vietnam, we'd capture a hill. Then they'd say, `We're moving out' and you say, `What happens to the hill when we move out?' and they say, `We're here to show our power. This hill doesn't mean anything.' You think to yourself, `Oh,' and you think about friends who died.
"We'd see the Frenchmen in a Michelin plantation. They were protected by us. They lived in style. Every time we cut rubber trees to clear the area, our government paid them something like $1,500 per tree. And we were protecting them?
"And that's when I started asking, why am I here? It was strictly a business war. Real estate and business."
We didn't discuss China and Russia, dominos, gradual escalation, political theory. Theory was so thin so early in the morning, so airy, so light. As John Colovos thought back almost 40 years, his own kids grown, smoking in a booth in his restaurant, his boots were on the ground.
He thought about the deadly village of Cu Chi, at a camp situated above a series of enemy underground tunnels.
"They came at us about 5:30 in the morning. They overran the camp. We beat them back. They overran it again. We beat them back. I'd never seen hand-to-hand before. It lasted more than six hours. I see a personnel carrier. One of the Vietnamese, he didn't even have a weapon anymore, just a little guy with a hatchet. The battle was over, but he ran and attacked the personnel carrier, banging on it with his hatchet.
"One of our guys on top of the carrier looked down at him. He shook his head. He couldn't believe an enemy like this, no gun, had the will to fight. With his hands. With a hatchet. That's how we would be if some country attacked America. But we were over there, thousands of miles away.
"That's when I was thinking, maybe we shouldn't have been in Vietnam. An officer showed up. We saluted. He said that he should be saluting us. Then I looked down at my leg and it was all bloody. Then I passed out. It was a hand grenade."
On June 6, 1967, he flew into O'Hare International Airport. His buddy, Joe, from Michigan, was worse off, having lost his leg below the knee.
"We were all spit and polish, we had our medals on, walking to another gate for Joe to take his flight home," Colovos said. "Then we got the welcome home. There were three guys with long hair. They walked up to us. We stood there. They spit."
Wounded and outnumbered, they brawled on the floor with the other three. John screamed for bystanders to help.
"The bystanders were in a circle, watching. They didn't help. That broke my heart."
John pulled a pistol and the fight stopped. Two police officers calmed things down, let him keep his pistol but took the bullets, then scattered the crowd. After seeing Joe off to Michigan on another flight, the police drove Colovos home to North and Central.
"The older officer, he was a nice man, kept saying, `Settle down, the war's over,' and I said, `Maybe for you, but not for me.' It took me a long time to get back to normal.
"Now the Vietnamese have vacation tours, but I'm not going there. I don't blame the Vietnamese. They did what they did. We did what we did. But I'm not going back. So many kids got killed, and now our country and Vietnam are friends. They have vacations, resorts, and you ask me if it was worth it.
"So many dead. My friends are dead. What did we get out of it? What did we gain?"
Published April 24, 2005
John Kass Chicago Tribune
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