4 min read

PARIS — When Charles E. Benge landed in California, fresh off the plane from Vietnam in 1968, he didn’t receive the welcome veterans before and after him did. The U.S. Army soldier was waiting for his flight home to Maine when a stranger approached.

“This flower child came around and he says, ‘Can I do something for ya?’ I said, ‘Nope, I’m on my way home.’ He said, ‘Where you coming from?’ I said, ‘Vietnam.’ Next thing I know, he hocked a good one and spit right at me,” Benge said from the Maine Veterans’ Home in South Paris recently. “And I was the last person he spit at. I hit him right in the mouth.”

Benge’s story is a familiar one for many Vietnam War veterans. And it’s one of the many reasons administrator Joel Dutton is putting together a Vietnam War memorial at the High Street facility.

“Our Vietnam veterans didn’t come home to ticker-tape parades. They came home to a divided nation and they never really have been given the attention, the honor and the thank-you that they deserve,” he said. “(I want people to) remember that these guys, like their World War II or Korean War brothers and sisters, went where they were sent by the government. … Vietnam veterans are not recognized for their sacrifices but they felt dishonored by the public.”

Dutton’s goal for the memorial, which coincides with the 40th anniversary of the United States withdrawal from Vietnam, is to collect stories, photographs and artifacts that tell the story of Vietnam from the men and women who served overseas during the widely unpopular war.

Robert “Gunny” Poliquin is also a resident of the Veterans’ Home. He was a U.S. Marine who enlisted to fight in Vietnam and served there from 1966-67.

Poliquin that he and his fellow soldiers were regularly surrounded by enemy fire at night.

“Everybody around the perimeter was shooting at us. They loved us so much they didn’t want us to leave,” Poliquin said, laughing. “We’re all up there laughing. … As long as you made it out of there, you’re happy.”

But it wasn’t happy times for Maine Veterans’ Home employee Larry Austin, who served in the Army early on in the war and returned to the states in 1964. He said he lives with the reality every day of those who didn’t come back home.

“I never met any heroes over there, just guys scared out of their ever-loving minds. It was a war that aged you,” Austin said. “What I did, I can’t talk about.”

Even though it’s hard for him to verbalize what he saw and did in Vietnam, Austin has almost finished a book about his time during the war.

For Poliquin, he recruited people to head to Vietnam, including his cousin. One day in 1968, he had to go pick up his cousin’s body, he recalled, while tearing up. And while overseas, he saw black body bags of dead soldiers sitting out in the hot sun every day at Da Nang Air Base.

“That’s the saddest thing I ever saw,” he said.

And it was hard to tell who the enemy was because they didn’t always wear uniforms, Dutton said, who served in the Navy from 1974-78 but never saw any action in Vietnam.

All three men nodded in agreement and Benge said he and his fellow soldiers always had to cast a wary eye at women and children while in Vietnam. Oftentimes, children would approach soldiers and drop a hand grenade wrapped in rubber bands into a Jeep’s gas tank, he said. Dutton knew a Navy Seal who was shot by a woman wielding a gun in a rice paddy.

“It was a state of constant . . . fear. You had to deal with these people. You just didn’t know,” Austin said.

It wasn’t just people that soldiers had to battle. There were giant spiders, one of which was so large that Austin screamed loud enough for his friends to think he was wounded. There were also malaria-carrying mosquitoes and water buffalo.

Despite all the terrible experiences, Poliquin and Benge said they’d do it all over again.

“Yes, without hesitation,” Benge said. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”

As for the memorial, which will be displayed along with the home’s piece of the USS Arizona, people who want to contribute may contact Dutton directly at 743-6300 or 888-684-4668.

“We will be having a ceremony … on Veteran’s Day in November to display what we have collected and welcoming you guys home,” Dutton told the three vets before him.

[email protected]

Comments are no longer available on this story